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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?

#71

Post by tjchear »

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 trending tools, and tons of backlinks because a lot of people used it (when I still had the free version available). It now generates a small amount of passive income for me.

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

#72

Post by t0mislav »

It was topic about showing your side projects, or something similar.

I had small website just like [1] but with ads (I sold it later). It gave me lot of traffic, more visibility, eventually better Google rank and more money from ads.

Such small/fun sites can get you real money!

1: https://randomcountrygenerator.com/

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

#73

Post by wenbin »

These two -

1) The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 (Not posted by myself :)

2) Podcast API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25139833

I've been on Hacker News for over a decade. It's hacker news that made me decide to go down the join-a-startup path & later the start-my-own-company path, rather than the work-for-FAANG path (like what most of my graduate school classmates did back in 2010~2012).

I was inspired by posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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

#74

Post by giantg2 »

joshmanders wrote: post #66
giantg2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is posting anecdotes. My anecdote is that it hasn't made me any money. The number of commenters on this post is much less than the overall number of users on HN. I see no evidence against my statements either. "HN posts have made people money directly AND indirectly." This doesn't negate my claim. Some people do make money on here. I feel that number is very low.

This thread was made 2 hours ago, it's 745AM in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at... Don't expect it to explode so fast with people sharing. The difference between your anecdotes and everyone else's is they aren't saying "Well only 6 people replied to this thread in the first hour and a half, therefore I claim nobody has made money from HN"

"in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at"

Do you have a source? I find it hard to believe that even 51% are in SV.

The second paragraph is a gross misrepresention of my position. And it seems you're implying that as more people wake up, this will somehow prove that the majority of HN users have made money on posts here... which isn't any different the (misrepresented) argument that you were just complaining about.

I'll wait for you to provide some actual evidence that 51% of users have directly or indirectly made money on posts here.

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

#75

Post by jader201 »

giantg2 wrote: post #16

"Is there a HN post that made you money?" Nope. I assume very few people made any money from an HN post, directly or indirectly. Edit: Why disagree without reply? Most of us (even on HN) are just normal devs and nothing we do on here will make us money.

> Edit: Why disagree without reply? Most of us (even on HN) are just normal devs and nothing we do on here will make us money.

Because your personal anecdote of "Nope." doesn't really add much value to the thread, and the second sentence is an assumption (so it may not even be correct), and either way, it also doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

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

#76

Post by markozivanovic »

One directly, one indirectly. :)

The article "Screw it, I'll host it myself" was on the first page for some time, and the traffic was crazy. Some people used my referral link for Vultr, earning me enough hosting credits to last me for a year for my little websites and development projects. [0]

Later that year, I posted a collection of my favorite hacking/coding movies and literature[1], and several people bought a book I wrote[2]. I did put a disclaimer for both, being a good netizen I am. :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725185

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29501157

[2] https://codeofwar.xyz/

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

#77

Post by fermentation »

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 just wanted to say that I LOVE this book. It did a much better job of explaining how to render things than my graphics class back in college did, and in a much shorter timeframe.

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

#80

Post by joshmanders »

giantg2 wrote: post #74
joshmanders wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread was made 2 hours ago, it's 745AM in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at... Don't expect it to explode so fast with people sharing. The difference between your anecdotes and everyone else's is they aren't saying "Well only 6 people replied to this thread in the first hour and a half, therefore I claim nobody has made money from HN"

"in silicon valley, where majority of people on this site are at" Do you have a source? I find it hard to believe that even 51% are in SV. The second paragraph is a gross misrepresention of my position. And it seems you're implying that as more people wake up, this will somehow prove that the majority of HN users have made money on posts here... which isn't any different the (misrepresented) argument that you were ju…

> I'll wait for you to provide some actual evidence that 51% of users have directly or indirectly made money on posts here.

I'll provide that when you provide evidence that nobody has.

Interesting how you can make claims without facts to back them up, but demand me to back up my claims against yours.

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