51–60 of 192 posts
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.
"Do things that don't scale". That led me to creating a massively unscalable but useful web application that people pay for.
Interesting stories, I read the one about HSBC statement, what a mess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've experienced the same thing. Blog posts I wrote almost 10 years ago are still getting traffic to this day. Sure, it's only 4-10 views per day (which is still thousands of views per year!) but sometimes it'll get referred by someone else's blog and there will be thousands of views over the course of a week or so. It's been fascinating watching this process over the years.
This is the part of evergreen content that is often lost in the hustle and bustle of "latest posts" - I have a very crappy blog I mainly used as notes to myself on certain things, but posts still get hits and comments literally decades later. And that's with nearly no effort!
Drop the link mate
Seven years ago, I started a blog called The Pragmatic Engineer. For three months, I wrote a post every two-three weeks. But no one really read them. So I took a short break, which break turned into a month, then another, another… and I did not have motivation to write. Barely anyone read it, after all. A few months after starting the blog, I saw a small traffic spike - maybe 30 visitors - from this site called Hacke…
I'm in the middle of a security and antifraud series now, motivated entirely by Brian Krebs [1] retweeting me after the Experian breach. The articles have gotten essentially zero traction on HN, but I'm having fun writing them and seeing them get attention on other avenues.
I've been writing off an on for years now, thanks largely to the motivation that getting on the HN front page [2] gave me back in 2014.
At some point, I think I would like to attempt to monetize my writing but I get enough enjoyment from doing it that I haven't ever bothered.
[1] https://www.brightball.com/articles/automatically-reversing-...
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.
If you hadn't made well over $1M over years just off the "Who's Hiring"/"Who's Freelancing" threads (let's say you made $0), would HN still be one of the best communities in your 25 years? If so, why?
And honestly, it's awesome to be apart of a community that spawns some of the biggest tech people in the world.
It's insane to be able to tell people outside of my world about things in my world and the ridiculous stuff that happens and be able to say "I was there", for example the infamous HN comment to Drew Houston when he Show HN'd Dropbox.
HN is a unique and special community that most industries don't get to experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the part of evergreen content that is often lost in the hustle and bustle of "latest posts" - I have a very crappy blog I mainly used as notes to myself on certain things, but posts still get hits and comments literally decades later. And that's with nearly no effort!
> I have a very crappy blog Drop the link mate
Man it's been 12 years since I bothered posting, I probably should follow my own advice lol
If you look at my submission history, you’ll see that none of my submissions have really broke a few upvotes, so yeah - wasn’t expecting it all but it was fun talking shop with everyone in the comments. That’s what is neat about this site, you can be a star for a day and people are happy and genuinely interested about why you are.
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 obscurity. Hacker News managed to find it every once in a while, and it was generally well received, but nothing came out of this. Until April 2019, when that post made the HN front page again, except this time it caught the attention of an editor in No Starch Press.
Long story short, my materials are now a book, Computer Graphics from Scratch, sold by No Starch Press [0], and also available for free on my website [1].
This genuinely wouldn’t have happened without your support. THANK YOU, HN community :)
[0] https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch
[1] http://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch
From the ashes, I can pick out lasting tech to build on. That makes me money.