[mathgeek]

> If they're "labour-intensive" that's pretty much the definition of not passive.

Generally it's understood that "passive income" on HN refers to income resulting from an initial investment of labor that continues to generate revenue with little to no additional labor input.

By the wider definition, yes, you are correct.

[astura]

An initial investment - that investment can be labor or it can be capital or it can be both.

In the same way you can say "work at Starbucks part time for a year and then invest 100% of that extra income into an index fund for passive income" rather than "work on a book for a year and collect book sales as passive income."

[ghaff]

That's fair enough. That said, it's generally hard to generate purely passive income by just investing labor. Software is somewhat the exception for this group but if you just write something and stop working on it, any income is probably going to decline fairly quickly.