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Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

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Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#181

Post by btkthrowaway1 »

ggambetta wrote: post #58

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19584921 And it wasn't even my post! A long time ago I found myself teaching Computer Graphics at my alma mater. Over the following years my approach to the subject evolved, and I really got the hang of it. After I stopped teaching, I took my notes, handouts and slides, and made them into a series of articles that I put on my website, where they remained in relative obsc…

There's an intro bit you have on color and how it behaves in additive vs subtractive mediums. To this day, I feel like it was one of the most concise and well explained overviews I've ever read.

I still plan on working through your book "eventually", but I just wanted to thank you for that first bit.

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#182

Post by mathverse »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #166

The infamous top comment from the HN Launch of Dropbox [1] which has been widely discussed and dismissed over the years. This is the comment that got me onto thinking: "how awesome would it be to have a software capable of decoupling the UI from the actual storage" so you wouldn't be tied to one vendor and do so by implementing a simple programming interface [2] I did open source my solution [3] and have refined it o…

This is awesome. Can you share with me financials for this?

Roughly …is this a sustainable business for you?

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#183

Post by drivers99 »

ggambetta wrote: post #58

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19584921 And it wasn't even my post! A long time ago I found myself teaching Computer Graphics at my alma mater. Over the following years my approach to the subject evolved, and I really got the hang of it. After I stopped teaching, I took my notes, handouts and slides, and made them into a series of articles that I put on my website, where they remained in relative obsc…

I ran out to Barnes & Noble and bought your book right after seeing your post and seeing one nearby that had it in stock. (Amazon was going to take a couple weeks to send it. Actually some other company was the sender. Weird. Also I didn’t notice you had it online but I like having the book and paying you anyway. :) )

So I picked up the book Thursday and finished the basic ray tracer Friday :) Not counting chapter 5 of course so there’s a lot more that I can add from here but it’s made me interested in multi-processing to make it faster, (mine is in unoptimized Python currently, using pygame to have a canvas/window and calling it for each pixel), maybe using GPU shaders to do it (never used those before), and learning about techniques other people are using[1][2] (from YouTube etc), and going down the rabbit hole of old CGI animations from the last 50 years[3].

Looking forward to the second half of the book this weekend. I have written a basic renderer before. I did an independent study class in college and I wrote a stereoscopic one for the iGlasses VR headset[4] in the 90s (you just have to draw using two cameras and interlace the images).

[1] https://youtu.be/A61S_2swwAc “NamePointer - I made a better ray-tracing engine”

[2] https://excamera.com/sphinx/article-ray.html “A reasonably speedy Python ray-tracer”

[3] https://youtu.be/WV4qXzM641o “The Compleat Angler (1978)” Ray tracing animation with refraction, rippling water, etc. from 1978!

[4] https://youtu.be/NoVMIVY5tPA “Virtual I/O iGlasses”

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#184

Post by mickael-kerjean »

mathverse wrote: post #182
mickael-kerjean wrote: post #166

The infamous top comment from the HN Launch of Dropbox [1] which has been widely discussed and dismissed over the years. This is the comment that got me onto thinking: "how awesome would it be to have a software capable of decoupling the UI from the actual storage" so you wouldn't be tied to one vendor and do so by implementing a simple programming interface [2] I did open source my solution [3] and have refined it o…

This is awesome. Can you share with me financials for this? Roughly …is this a sustainable business for you?

On a per hour basis, I would have got better money flipping burgers but as of today, it's close to ramen profitable. On the better side, it brought me contacts with places I would have never dreamt to engage with like NASA and MIT

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#185

Post by drivers99 »

drivers99 wrote: post #183
ggambetta wrote: post #58

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19584921 And it wasn't even my post! A long time ago I found myself teaching Computer Graphics at my alma mater. Over the following years my approach to the subject evolved, and I really got the hang of it. After I stopped teaching, I took my notes, handouts and slides, and made them into a series of articles that I put on my website, where they remained in relative obsc…

I ran out to Barnes & Noble and bought your book right after seeing your post and seeing one nearby that had it in stock. (Amazon was going to take a couple weeks to send it. Actually some other company was the sender. Weird. Also I didn’t notice you had it online but I like having the book and paying you anyway. :) ) So I picked up the book Thursday and finished the basic ray tracer Friday :) Not counting chapter 5…

By the way the vertices of the cube on page 109 ("Projecting our first 3D Object") appear to be wrong. I checked your example code online and got the correct vertices. Didn't see that listed as an errata so thought I'd let you know, if you see this.

Basically the cube just needed to be manually moved back and to the left to look like the example screenshot. As it is in the book, it's too close to the viewport and so it's not visible.

(BTW, for fun, I also animated it flying left and right and forward and back on a sine/cosine wave. Pretty fun!)

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#186

Post by ggambetta »

drivers99 wrote: post #185
drivers99 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran out to Barnes & Noble and bought your book right after seeing your post and seeing one nearby that had it in stock. (Amazon was going to take a couple weeks to send it. Actually some other company was the sender. Weird. Also I didn’t notice you had it online but I like having the book and paying you anyway. :) ) So I picked up the book Thursday and finished the basic ray tracer Friday :) Not counting chapter 5…

By the way the vertices of the cube on page 109 ("Projecting our first 3D Object") appear to be wrong. I checked your example code online and got the correct vertices. Didn't see that listed as an errata so thought I'd let you know, if you see this. Basically the cube just needed to be manually moved back and to the left to look like the example screenshot. As it is in the book, it's too close to the viewport and so…

Thanks for bringing this up. I had fixed this on the website version [0] as well as the code, as you mention. I thought I had reported this to NSP, but can't find an email, so I'll let them know so they can add it to the errata.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/0...

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#187

Post by sheikheddy »

ayewo wrote: post #177
joshmanders wrote: post #34

I've made well over $1M over the years just off the "Who's Hiring"/"Who's Freelancing" threads. People give this place a lot of flack and some of the users can be pretty verbose and pedantic, but overall this community has been one of the best in my 25 years.

How does anyone make $1M+ off a hiring thread?

$100k job for 10 years, or $200k for 5 years.

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#188

Post by xuding »

cercatrova wrote: post #164
tjchear wrote: post #71

Couple years back I built a service called SheetUI that turns your google spreadsheet into a beautiful webpage, and posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760846 It slowly started racking up votes and made its way to the front page, and that's when it really exploded! A few good outcomes came out of it: a famous online Japanese publication wrote about it, it got featured on Stackshare top five new tre…

Reminds me of Sheet2Site, which the creator later sold.

And we built a similar service at https://sitefast.live/ :)

Re: Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

#189

Post by cercatrova »

xuding wrote: post #188
cercatrova wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Sheet2Site, which the creator later sold.

And we built a similar service at https://sitefast.live/ :)

I kind of love that your service starts at $1 a month. It's just enough friction to keep spammers away over freemium, and it validates demand through people paying money, however slight.
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