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Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

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Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#141

Post by ben_jones »

ch4s3 wrote: post #120
Kluny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read the about page. Could you help me understand a little more about how it works? It seems like a tool that could replace sessions and cookies, and possibly a browser-based database? My current project is a tournament-scoring app where I'm using cookies to hold match scores, so that the score won't be lost if the page is refreshed before the match is over and saved to the database. Would redis be appropriate…

I'm not associated with redis, but I do use it daily. It's basically just a really good in memory db. You can use it for almost anything, from job queues, to message brokering, to session storage. Check out the different language clients, find you language of choice and read about how to fire it up and try it out https://redis.io/clients .

I love redis but I would recommend message brokering be done by something built specifically for the task, like rabbit-mq.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#142

Post by antirez »

saosebastiao wrote: post #133
antirez wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I like your POV about things. Ok seriously, thanks a lot, it's great to do something that can be useful. Thanks for using it.

Just to pile on the praise, I've learned more about the C language reading Redis' source code than I've learned from two books, a university course, and dozens of blog posts combined. Keep doing what you're doing, it is an inspiration.

OMG that's awesome. And a bit surprising since Redis internals could be much much better, if we only could care a bit less about memory / CPU / copy-on-write issues, and... a bit more time :-)

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#143

Post by pcarmichael »

rosstex wrote: post #138
pcarmichael wrote: post #112

I posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago. Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded and without taking investment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123

Thanks for building this fantastic site, I use it all the time! What's your business model?

Glad you like it! We make money through affiliate deals with the retailers we list.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#144

Post by anexprogrammer »

gnicholas wrote: post #92

I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time. We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our li…

Tried this and it looked really interesting, but I didn't keep it because there was no Android support. Do you have an android version yet?

I remember it styled links as well as body text which I found pretty annoying.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#145

Post by hrez »

pcarmichael wrote: post #112

I posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago. Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded and without taking investment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123

That's by far the most useful site I could find to compare, choose and find where to buy "bang for the buck" PC parts. Many thanks for the site.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#146

Post by hussfelt »

gnicholas wrote: post #92

I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time. We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our li…

1. Took the test. 2. Was impressed 3. Thought to test for a while 4. Installed Chrome plugin 5. Opened facebook for some random reason 6. Page flickering!? Facebook bug? 7. Scrolled 2 times 8. Got smashed in the face by a full-page ad from Beelinereader 9. Removed plugin and will probably never install again

You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a while. Do yourself a favour for christmas and investigate if there is any other way than smashing just recently onboarded users with an ad to raise the awareness of the fact that this is not free.

Thanks though, really, impressive tech.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#147

Post by owenversteeg »

malux85 wrote: post #73
antirez wrote: post #15

I did not put "Show HN" in the title when I posted Redis here, but an HN post was the first announcement I did.

You probably get this a lot, but I'm going to say it anyway - Thank you for redis, it's an amazing bit of software and I use it in virtually every project. Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read. Thank you again

As someone who created & maintains an open source project (not nearly as important or popular as redis), thank you for your comment. You'd be surprised how few compliments people get on OSS projects (it seems to be roughly one heartfelt, sincere comment per 20,000 users in my case) and they just make you feel amazing. Seriously, the last one I had made my week.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#148

Post by gnicholas »

hussfelt wrote: post #146
gnicholas wrote: post #92

I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time. We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our li…

1. Took the test. 2. Was impressed 3. Thought to test for a while 4. Installed Chrome plugin 5. Opened facebook for some random reason 6. Page flickering!? Facebook bug? 7. Scrolled 2 times 8. Got smashed in the face by a full-page ad from Beelinereader 9. Removed plugin and will probably never install again You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a while. Do yourself a favour for…

We're in the middle of completely replacing our UI/UX. Last month we finally got our preferences in the right place (within the B icon instead of in a gear that floats on top of every page), and we're re-doing the onboarding. Now that we've figured out how to get things popping down from the B icon, we won't be taking up the full page anymore.

And just FYI, we don't bombard users with messages all the time—you saw the instructions and upgrade option, and there is only one other message we show this way, which is after the 30-day free trial expires. We know our UI sucks on this, which is why we don't use it to send messages or upsell all the time. Appreciate the feedback, and hope you'll try us again on Chrome, iOS, or Android (which is free, BTW).

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#149

Post by laumars »

jlgaddis wrote: post #119
laumars wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

... and yet billions (?) of dollars are moved around every day using this technology "from a bygone era" (transferring CSV files for ACH transfers, etc.). I'm not a big fan of FTP and hardly ever use it any more, but it does what it was designed to do and still manages to work pretty well considering how much everything else around it has changed.

Have you seen the list of requirements used for FTPing ACH transfers? It uses TLS (something that isn't part of the original FTP specification - what little of one there was) to transfer PGP encrypted files (something that wasn't even invented when the FTP specification was written) and even with all these extra steps put in there's still a lot of ways the process can easily fall apart. I've spent enough time building systems that interact with these kinds of banking systems to know that using FTP isn't doing themselves any favours. In fact the whole process of working with ACH files is a complete mess and saying ACH still uses FTP doesn't really improve the validity of FTP - it just demonstrates more technology that really should have been depreciated before now.

I'm not the sort of person who advocates new technology for the sake of new technology. I normally get annoyed at the constant reinvention of wheel however some older tech is just bad and FTP is one of those. It got the job done when it was first written but it made a bunch of mistakes along the way. Mistakes we've learned from and have since written a thousand better transfer protocols. So it's about time people laid FTP to rest.

Re: Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?

#150

Post by gnicholas »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #144
gnicholas wrote: post #92

I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time. We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our li…

Tried this and it looked really interesting, but I didn't keep it because there was no Android support. Do you have an android version yet? I remember it styled links as well as body text which I found pretty annoying.

We do! Our Firefox/Fennec plugin is now available [1] and is free. It's not quite as polished as iOS, since it's our first version.

There's also an epub reader that has integrated BeeLine into their app. It's called ReadMe! [2] and it works with any DRM-free epubs. It's available on Android/iOS.

We do color all body text, including links. To make it clear what is a link, we always underline them. If we reverted links to a fixed color, it would be very distracting—if you've got another idea (or if I'm misunderstanding the question) let me know!

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/beeline-reade...

2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.readmei.re...

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