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Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

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151–160 of 192 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second link doesn't seem to work but the first one does, thanks for explaining. Is it just organic growth or do you buy ads or something?

It should be working now? I think it's on Apple, itunes.apple.com has been slow for days. Mac apps == organic. iOS apps == mostly organic, I'm testing some ads for VidCap.

It works now indeed.

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

#152

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/

Hi I see that you are serving your own OSM tiles, can you share how are you generating them? Especially in webp?

I'm using TileMill to generate tiles. I does not support webp. I exported it to png, and then with some one line script converted all png's to webp.

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

#153
post #111

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/

What did you use for ads? Adsense?

Correct. It was passive income. Once running, I didn't touched it almost at all.

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

#154
post #90

This one by user tempsy about /r/wallstreetbets from January 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22186392 This comment made me aware of the whole options market and leverage. I didn’t know a thing before reading it. I made €500k by betting that the Corona virus will have more impact than the market anticipated in February 2020 and got it right. Which of course, was kinda naive and quite lucky. I totally cannot…

How much money did you turn into 500k? Predicting the consequences of a once in a lifetime black swan event is surely very lucky. But fortune favours the brave as they. You will never win a lottery if you dont buy the goddamn ticket!

Initially I put about €65k into put options. The crash came so fast that it turned into a lot more very quickly. If your bet turns green instantly, you don’t see the risk. I couldn’t do the same thing again. I was very naive, but it helped me to hold with conviction.

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

#155

Here's one for you. Buy iBonds from treasury.gov now! Think of it as a risk free savings account that pays almost 10%[0] at the moment since it tracks inflation which is currently high. If you need the money back you just forfeit the last 3 months interest. If you have a business open an account for that entity as well, get one for your spouse, get one for your child, then spread the word. Note the limit is $10k per…

I saw this few months back. I didn't had money to invest. Now I have a bit, but the exchange rate for the EUR/USD pair passed from 1.2 to about 1. Kinda painful to have to invest 1000€ instead of 800€, especially if the rate go back to "normal" again it will wipe out the gains.

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

#156

Hn post pointing to git commit where AMD engineer said that spectre does not apply to AMD: placed an option against Intel.

I later repeated it after hearing (again on hn) a rumor of another spectre-related Intel bug. This one did not make a splash in the markets. As I was ready to give up and pull out my options play, I happened to be delayed due to international travel, Intels's CEO resigned (due to having sex with his wife). The stock tanked even harder, and I made 3x what I made off of spectre. I learned my lesson on market rationalit…

He resigned due to having sex with his wife? In some marriages it may be an unusual occurrence, but I’m not sure why you’d have to resign because of it.

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

#157
post #90

This one by user tempsy about /r/wallstreetbets from January 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22186392 This comment made me aware of the whole options market and leverage. I didn’t know a thing before reading it. I made €500k by betting that the Corona virus will have more impact than the market anticipated in February 2020 and got it right. Which of course, was kinda naive and quite lucky. I totally cannot…

You're probably going to lose it all by betting incorrectly.

No. To be more specific, I made 750k and lost 250k (note: from a German tax perspective, you could subtract the losses instantly from the gains, unlike in the US, where losses are spread over many years).

I learned my lesson already and pulled the plug. At some point I realized that I know nothing and should get back to buy and hold.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I later repeated it after hearing (again on hn) a rumor of another spectre-related Intel bug. This one did not make a splash in the markets. As I was ready to give up and pull out my options play, I happened to be delayed due to international travel, Intels's CEO resigned (due to having sex with his wife). The stock tanked even harder, and I made 3x what I made off of spectre. I learned my lesson on market rationalit…

He resigned due to having sex with his wife? In some marriages it may be an unusual occurrence, but I’m not sure why you’d have to resign because of it.

It was worded to be funny. He had had an affair with his now wife at a time when she was quasi? (Iirc) under him in the chain of command, which was against company policy, so yeah a firable offense, if, uh, a bit late.

I think that it is not unreasonable to speculate that was the reason they gave and not the "real" reason for firing.

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

#159

I started the original "Who wants to be hired?" thread [1], which lead to me landing a gig with Kaggle [2] (a scrappy startup, at the time, 2014), which ultimately got acquired by Google (this was in 2017). I'm still with them to this day, over 8 years later [3]. Have always been grateful for the community picking up that thread, allowing me to get recognized by a great company! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…

Thanks for that great contribution! Hopefully I can also find a good team by posting there. :)

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

#160

A year and a half ago I started building a better personal finance simulator / retirement calculator, mainly for myself and friends/family to use. I was about T-minus one week from halting work on it and starting something else when I posted to Show HN on a whim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173 . I didn't even think to check back on it until during a meeting I noticed my inbox was suddenly filling up :)…

I'm a huge fan of ProjectionLab (good call on the name change)! I had just had a windfall from an old employer's IPO. Not life-changing, but enough that "save as much as I can and hope for the best when I hit retirement age" was no longer the only option. I was looking for tools to help me plot out some scenarios and the only options I could find were:

1. 5-input 'retirement calculators' that various sites had up as lead-gen tools 2. Build a complex and bug-riddled model in a spreadsheet 3. Pay for a financial planner to plug my situation into their spreadsheet

I saw ProjectionLab on HN, though, and it was exactly what I was looking for. The end result I cam up with was good, but even just playing around with the modeling helped me build up a much better intuition than I'd started with. Thanks for your work, and I'm glad you stuck with it!

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