Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

It would be cool if we had an Update HN section where the only things that could be posted were things that were posted months ago in Show HN

AdDetector (http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/) - Browser extension that flags news articles with corporate sponsors. My best Show HN with 200+ upvotes. About 16,000 installs. Asked by my company to discontinue it a few days later, so I stopped working on it.

Crowdsourced asteroid discovery (http://www.asterank.com/discover) - only 5 upvotes on HN, but nearly half a million survey images reviewed, with 17,000 potential asteroids marked. Not really working on it anymore.

Free outgoing SMS API (http://textbelt.com/) - not much interest on HN, but about 3M texts sent over the past few years, almost 1000 stars on Github. Requires an hour or two a month for maintenance, responding to issues, etc.

Call Congress (1-884-USA-0234) - single phone number that dials all your representatives one after another. 8 upvotes on HN, but did very well on Reddit and sent over 300 hours of phone calls to Congress in a few days after the Orlando shooting.

Conspiracy theory generator (http://www.verifiedfacts.org/) - Did well on HN with 181 points. About 1M conspiracies generated. On autopilot but still gets organic traffic for ridiculous queries like "snooki illuminati".

Dream logs (http://keepdream.me) - posted 4 years ago but it's a niche tool. 62 subscribers, 2.5k dreams recorded, on autopilot.

Asterank (http://www.asterank.com/) - I submitted parts of this site to Show HN as I added new features. Sold it to Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company for a small amount.

Meteor showers visualization (http://www.ianww.com/meteor-showers/) - did well on HN, finalist in some Popular Science viz contest.

Dinosaur Pictures database (http://dinosaurpictures.org/) - a few upvotes on HN, about 8k uniques/mo a year later mostly from SEO. This is one of my favorite projects to spend time on.

I posted a simple Dynamic DNS service, http://dhcp.io, based upon Amazon Route53. I received about 5,000 users in the first month, most of whom were using their dynamic hostnames in SPAM mail.

I gradually started killing more and more accounts. The admin overhead was a pain, so I polled a few users and said "Hey this is crippling, would you pay?" Many said yes. I knocked up stripe integration and received zero paying clients.

Closed registrations to new users, and setup a git-based DNS host instead, https://dns-api.com . Users pay for that from the first week, and it slowly ticks over. I've been using the service myself for all my new domain registrations and I'm constantly impressed at how smooth it is.

I posted Open Exchange Rates[0] as a Show HN 1,534 days ago. It had just moved away from publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository, to its own website. In fact, they had just asked me politely to take it down due to the high traffic.

Open Exchange Rates was initially a portfolio piece (a labour of love that I hoped would land me a job at Stripe!) I launched it as an adjunct to money.js[1], a minimal JavaScript currency conversion library. The latter is still popular, but Open Exchange Rates has since organically grown on its own merits into a community of over 50,000 developers, with hundreds of tutorials and open source integrations. It's my full-time job, and there are seven of us on board.

We've since grown to be the industry-leader in our niche, loved and relied upon by Booking.com, SkyScanner, Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress.com, BrainTree, Coursera, Fab.com, Wego, Lonely Planet, Stripe, SoundHound, Vice.com - and thousands more of the world's most trafficked websites and brands.

This week, over four years later, I've just returned to Hong Kong - the project's birthplace - to work with our team here. We're about to switch on a platform that will open up true real-time data for our clients in high-risk financial environments, and allow us to scale to the next 500,000 clients and beyond.

I never liked where the industry is heading - towards competitive, closed, stingy business - so we've chosen to move further towards transparency, sharing and collaboration. The next steps in our journey are where we open more and more to our community and marketplace, meanwhile tailoring our higher-ticket service to those who need it.

(Thanks for posting this Ask HN!)

[0] https://openexchangerates.org

[1] https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js

I hit the front page with "Where is who is hiring hiring?" [0]

I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you" emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really good feeling (:

[0] http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me