Cube of M is a startup blog on outsourcing, side projects, sales tricks, and making money online as a small developer.
HN links it for its shotgun approach to small projects, which was criticized as advocating spam, and for its post on programming as procrastination.
$1000 is not hard to beat at all. I used to work on rent a coder back in the day and I made $2000 easily with two weeks of dedicated work.
I would suggest also building some easy web based tools that does something for which there is a clear market - for example making a picture polaroid, or diagnosing some disease. You will make some amount of money every day. See my post about this: http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin
Alternatively, just go for shareware software. It's really really easy to make $500 a day on a piece of software if you are willing to do the manual labour of keeping it updated across the download sites.
The approach he advocates is basically to "shotgun" projects and make a little bit off each one:
http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin
...which was widely criticized as advocating spam:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112043
Just to put him in more context.
I found this post disappointingly short on administrative details, unlike Max Klein's earlier Rentacoder-related post, which is surely the definitive reference on this subject:
http://blog.cubeofm.com/the-subtleties-in-outsourcing-using-rentacode
The post from a litle over a month ago is worth a re-read in light of this:
http://blog.cubeofm.com/programming-is-a-way-to-procrastinate
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124953
http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-convert-email-addresses-into-name-age
maxklein exposed the primary technique these guys are most likely using. It's definitely a TOS violation.
Actually it's not. At least not directly.
I think this is the post you're referring to: http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin