> I have started assuming that most of the people here have some kind of side project that makes them money.

I haven't paid attention to it, but probably the people who mention "my side projects" aren't regulars, and it's probably a Baader-Meinhof thing for you.

If you want to be methodical (or me, since I'm just guessing with no data), you could go through the top 10k commenters here: https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-... (it was mentioned on HN a few days ago) and see if they wrote "my side project" or something along those lines...