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Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

634 points david927 | 8 comments | 24 Aug 24 22:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source | bottom

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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nlh ◴[24 Aug 24 23:16 UTC] No.41342681[source]▶
I’m a tech nerd rare coin & currency dealer! I took my two hobbies and combined them into a real business and I’m having the time of my life. Just launched a proper retail site here:

https://www.rarity7.com/

About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.

The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.

I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).

Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:

https://github.com/noahlh/celestite

I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.

Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.

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1. reassess_blind ◴[25 Aug 24 01:52 UTC] No.41343659[source]▶
I have a question - I've seen TikToks of people who buy rolls of coins from the bank and sort through them for rare imperfections then sell them on eBay. I've always wondered whether it would be possible to develop an automated system where a camera takes high res photos of the coins on a conveyor belt, compares to a DB of known imperfections and sets them aside?

Is anyone doing this? It's an interesting business model as the product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss.

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2. ◴[25 Aug 24 03:04 UTC] No.41344013[source]▶
3. ◴[25 Aug 24 03:10 UTC] No.41344031[source]▶
4. nlh ◴[25 Aug 24 04:12 UTC] No.41344326[source]▶
Nobody that I know of is doing this, and see no reason why it wouldn't be possible from a technical standpoint. I think the only reason I can imagine NOT to do is that the ROI probably isn't that high in reality. Now, granted, I don't watch the coin TikToks because 95% of it is clickbait, exaggerate, etc. But my actual impression is that there simply isn't that much actually-valuable material out there hiding in bank rolls (despite what TikTok says).

Most of the people I know who do bank roll hunting and doing it because it's just kinda fun and there's a thrill when you find a silver quarter from 1964 (worth about $5) hiding in a roll of otherwise-normal quarters. But so much of the good stuff has already been plucked from circulation.

Having said that, nothing should stop a good hacker from doing something just for the hell of it :)

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5. fsckboy ◴[25 Aug 24 04:37 UTC] No.41344423[source]▶
do you know why vendors take credit cards, square and applepay, even though those services charge several percent fees? part of it is for convenience for the customer, but another part is that shuttling cash around to the bank and back is time consuming, risky, and takes you away from running your business (let's say you are a breakfast place, you don't make your own cups and napkins or farm your own eggs and coffee either)

>product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss

you're grabbing the expense part of the business that everybody else is trying to shed. Let's talk also about time value of money. All the money that you've invested in cash is not making money passively as other investments do. Compared to putting the money in the stock market, you're losing 7% a year on this scheme, plus the expenses of running your business, and opportunity cost of not doing something else that generates income.

6. bluGill ◴[25 Aug 24 13:11 UTC] No.41347047[source]▶
If there was a good ROI the banks would do it. It might be enough ROI living but it will be a lot of labor for a small income.
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7. s0rce ◴[25 Aug 24 17:51 UTC] No.41349477[source]▶
I did this for personal collections a while back and went through a lot of Canadian quarters to get one from each year and never even found the 1991 I was looking for which is somewhat rare. I guess if you do it full time or automate a bunch maybe you could make money, seems hard though.
8. lamroger ◴[25 Aug 24 23:56 UTC] No.41352636{3}[source]▶
Tellers get first dibs