NoraSector: https://app.norasector.com/ -- real-time police/fire/EMS scanner for the Seattle area. Uses custom SDR software that can capture entire radio systems and streams with sub-second latency to clients, along with recordings.
For all sorts of reasons I decided not to monetize it. I've had some inquiries to use it for newsrooms and in certain states that have laws that require radio traffic be published online. I explored some of that but could never come to agreement on a price that would be worth my time to support. I also considered monetizing with ads and having a premium membership, but it's a little too niche and expanding to more regions requires more investment than I'm willing to make.
King County is migrating to a new digital system in the near future, and if they encrypt everything then it's dead in the water anyway.
Costs me about $200/mo in hosting fees to run, plus about $1400 for the machine/SDR that captures the radio traffic. I use it myself and don't mind sharing it with the handful of people who listen to it. If/when the access is cut off, I'll shut it down.
Fusion360 is the only thing I run a VM for. There’s a repo out there that sets up wine and installs it but it just doesn’t work very well at all. I’m using VMWare Player and set up the virtual disk to boot from the Windows drive and run it that way. It works really well. Other 3D printing stuff like PrusaSlicer works great on Linux. I’d love to have a native version of Fusion though. Maybe someday.
Extremely wealthy people (i.e. 9-digit+ net worth) have teams of lawyers and accountants that figure out the optimal way to allocate the client's cash to achieve their goals. That may or may not include incurring debt, etc. Rich people borrow money too (not because they need to, but because it ultimately can make more financial sense to do so).
(there are of course exceptions to this, there are rich people bad with money or who want to look like they're richer than they actually are, but in general rich people stay rich by being smart about their money)
Planes are extremely expensive pieces of machinery and you don't make money if you're not flying passengers with them. I'd be more surprised if they weren't in the air as many hours as possible.
Amazon Flex does this as well. I signed up to do deliveries last year to see how it worked, and on a couple occasions gamed it such that I was able to deliver an order I placed to myself (which is really just ordering from a nearby restaurant and hoping you get the offer). The advertised pay I would get for the delivery before accepting it was $7-12 (the range is supposed to account for tips, and across all deliveries, when everything settled it was almost always the low end of that range). With Amazon Restaurants, you had to tip when you ordered, and couldn't change afterwards, and my tip was $3. When everything cleared, I got $7, and I knew $3 of that was my own tip to myself. Had I tipped $0, I would still have gotten $7. I always felt it was a crummy thing to do to people -- your tip was just making Amazon give the driver less money. Not being able to change the tip also sucked, as I don't like tipping when I haven't received anything yet. That's more of a "name your price" service fee.
Amazon has dropped out of the restaurant game, but they still probably do this for Prime Now and Whole Foods (package deliveries aren't eligible for tips). The funny thing with restaurants was during peak times, when they didn't have enough drivers, they'd send out guaranteed $22 offers to delivery maybe $20 worth of food, which I always pounced on as it was incredibly easy money. It's no wonder they couldn't keep that business going.
Tips sometimes worked out well, though -- on some Prime Now routes where it was maybe $20-30 guaranteed, I'd get over $60 after tips. So they weren't always keeping everything to themselves. I could never figure out the rhyme or reason behind any of it.
Would you please follow the site guidelines? They ask you not to go on about downvotes. Yes, they're annoying, but everyone gets them, and it's not a good reason to add noise to HN.
We use ES heavily. Most of our queries are basic document filtering plus some geospatial stuff. We could probably have done it with Postgres/PostGIS, but with AWS manages ES, it's all "good enough" -- we can do geospatial searches on millions of documents with response times around 100ms. The other part I like about ES is how it's easy to scale out across machines, which lets us handle quite a bit of load and tolerate failures easily. We have a cluster of 5 m4.large instances and it only runs us about $600/mo. Like others have said, tuning AWS ES sucks, but it's always been good enough for us.
We've run into some pain points like trying to index very large shapes into a geospatial index, but have workarounds for basically everything now. We also had a problem where when AWS had the outage around autoscaling groups a few months ago, we lost 3/5 of our instances and had to reindex some data from backups. That was the worst thing that's happened.
I'm sure there would be better/faster/cheaper ways of doing what we do, but for what we get out of the box for the price, it's going to take a lot for us to move away from it for now.
Mostly home automation.
1x homebridge server, ffmpeg transcoder for security cameras,
1x for controlling an electric fireplace using an IR shield and power monitoring outlet,
1x for controlling model train switches and bridging that into HomeKit
There's a pretty simple optimization in the labels you can do, but it doesn't really help that much. The first block of letters is XORing with one set of primes that follow a common pattern, but the second one is stumping me. I let it run overnight and basically made no progress once it hit the second block.
This seems like a waste of money on the surface. The concerns over privacy seem a little silly given the hundreds of CCTV cameras that monitor the stores already, though.
For all sorts of reasons I decided not to monetize it. I've had some inquiries to use it for newsrooms and in certain states that have laws that require radio traffic be published online. I explored some of that but could never come to agreement on a price that would be worth my time to support. I also considered monetizing with ads and having a premium membership, but it's a little too niche and expanding to more regions requires more investment than I'm willing to make.
King County is migrating to a new digital system in the near future, and if they encrypt everything then it's dead in the water anyway.
Costs me about $200/mo in hosting fees to run, plus about $1400 for the machine/SDR that captures the radio traffic. I use it myself and don't mind sharing it with the handful of people who listen to it. If/when the access is cut off, I'll shut it down.