Cloudcraft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942
Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
I get that many techies can live without Dropbox and it's ilk (myself included), but NOBODY should ever be advocating FTP. It's insure (no encryption - unless you're talking about FTP(E)S, but that introduces it's own issues), it's broken by design (no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS), output specs depend on the host OS (eg directory l…
FTP needs no defending -- it was really useful in 1979, but times have changed (e.g. I suspect every machine on the Internet uses an 8-bit byte). One point you wrote surprised me though:
> no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS)
Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below are inherently peer-peer -- the net should not treat endpoints differently (i.e. should not privilege some over others). That simply encourages a "client" or "consumer" mentality in both the technical and social senses.
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#53Moqups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the iPod. "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. " (Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
Maybe you can't, and that's fine. For me, being able to work on stuff on one machine, then jump over to another one of my machines and it's just there is hugely valuable. The backup element is kinda secondary but nice to have.
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is using CoffeeScripts these days apart from github ? I like CoffeeScript but I am sad it did not get the momentum.
I am a backend developer working in Ruby. As a senior programmer I sometimes have to help juniors on the frontend side. When I need to write frontend JS, I still often write Coffeescript, compile it and copy paste the resulting JS as "my code". I haven't had the time to look in ES6 and newer JS technologies, but at least I know that the JS I provide follows most good practices.
I'd like to reply to both of you. I like CoffeeScript mainly because it's so similar to Ruby and convenient to use. I have not thought about using the "raw generated js". How does it work for you ?
What if you would choose to work with something like React or Ember ?
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google photos is better for that.
I have 1/2 TB of pictures kids pic, videos from cell phone, SLR etc backup to multiple HDD. If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
I'll answer in reverse order:
> Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows.
FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D) -- > can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now. OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with! YT reencodes all videos into several formats. I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see: - 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB) - 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.) - Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB). So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice. If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video. OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :) In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second. I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting: (2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60 Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise. This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that my friend. :) Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind. Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.
Google photos is better for that.
I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos.
After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to reset the lockscreen password via your Google account) I assumed that the photos were lost. However upon opening the app we rejoiced when they started appearing. Shortly afterwards, the Google Photos app popped up a message stating that an upgrade was required, after which all of the photos had disappeared again.
The workaround was to reset the tablet, open up Google Photos, wait until the photos had synced and then disconnect from the internet as soon as possible to prevent Google Photos from trying to update itself (the message couldn't be dismissed). My hunch was that the version of Google Photos that shipped with the tablet was very old and they have long-since updated the format for storing photos, hence why they wouldn't show up online?
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google photos is better for that.
I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos. After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to rese…
Methinks you could definitely get in touch with Google about this.
Product support may well actually do what it's supposed to do...
Alternatively, keep the tablet on cotton wool until you see someone mention in here they're from Google, check their profile for contact info and email them directly. Keep doing this until you get a reply back, and get them to poke your issue over to the right department. :P
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#59Virwire: https://virwire.com
Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date.
Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that my friend. :) Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind. Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.
Google photos is better for that.
But one has to make sure they subscribe to the paid plan, because Google offers free unlimited storage only if you let them resize/compress the photos. Which is something I refuse.
Anyway, Dropbox wins on the OS-level integration, which also doubles as a bullshit- and hassle-free way to transfer files between your devices.
But well, at this point I'm a paying customer of both Dropbox and Google because I run out of free-tier storage on both :).