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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?

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destructuring assignment, arrow functions, shorthand variable syntax in object literals are some examples of good Coffee Script features that made it into ES6

To approach it from a slightly less tongue-in-cheek angle, my main point was that pre-compilation was never strictly necessary. I'm currently using Typescript as it seems to add significant enough value for me to warrant the extra complexity of pre-compilation, but I do think that's quite a big ask. Coffeescript has always seemed very much about conforming to developer syntax preferences, rather than adding functiona…

Destructuring is nice when used with Promises:

    Promise.all([
      getSettings(),
      getData(),
    ]).then(([settings, data]) => {
      // do whatever
    });

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

#162
post #43
post #25

Earlier 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.

Every time this topic comes up, which is reasonably often, I like to link to this: http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-...

Which is funny because 'a folder, that syncs' is what the Windows 95 briefcase was for.

It was nice. And they ditched it for Offline Folders, which was "a folder that syncs, until it breaks all the time".

And in the meantime, here's Joel Spolsky in 2008:

“Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” And what is this Windows Live Mesh? It’s a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not. Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven’t exactly noticed a stampede to that. I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of it. [..] this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

And now Microsoft is ditching Offline Folders which break a lot, for Work Folders - folders that sync over HTTPS, without a local hidden cache.

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

#163
post #12

Earlier 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.)

The Slashdot takedown wasn't naivety, it was CmdrTaco's honest opinion of the iPod. It's absurd the way he's portrayed to be making some sort of market prediction.

Thanks!

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

#164
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this topic comes up, which is reasonably often, I like to link to this: http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-...

Which is funny because 'a folder, that syncs' is what the Windows 95 briefcase was for. It was nice. And they ditched it for Offline Folders, which was "a folder that syncs, until it breaks all the time". And in the meantime, here's Joel Spolsky in 2008: “Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” And what is this Wind…

Also, I don't remember names, but there were similar 3rd party paid services in late 90s - and they also had virtual disks integrated in Windows.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why didn't you just log into his account on the web and click on photos?

I did. I got a couple of random low-res thumbnails (they were just generic enough that I wasn't sure if they were actually original photos, or Google samples), and that was it – the rest were mysteriously missing.

They were clearly there on the server somewhere, but something was causing them not to be shown on the web, or the latest version of the Google Photos app.

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

#166
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but I've read a story like this about about pretty much every company. In our house we have our photos in 3 places: the device, remote backup, and local offline backup (external hard drive). 2 is easy, 3 takes a little bit of a routine.

Right, it's why I don't trust these services myself. To be fair, while I say that Google Photos almost wiped his photo collection out, we didn't actually realise that sync had been enabled in the first place. I guess in a funny kind of way it saved his photo collection (otherwise it would have been toast when we reset the device to get past the lock), even if it did make it painstakingly frustrating to retrieve them again.

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

#167
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, yeah of course.

For example Celery supports a large number of message brokers, and a lot of people inexperienced with message passing etc. will use Redis as a broker because they already are familiar with it and running it in production. I myself made that mistake, and have since gotten much better results with the aforementioned change. So while it should seem obvious, theirs a lot of places where it is still accidentally done.

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

#168

I launched SideProjectBook.com on HN. It ended up netting ~$15K that month, not sure if that is considered "big."

I do like how SideProjectBook.com uses gumroad.com (which is 3 posts above this one at the time of writing) to sell the book. It's like a family in here.

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

#169
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.

Redis is awesome, thanks and now seeing all this praise I'm going to have to go and check out the source code!
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