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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?

#161

Post by scubakid »

fishtoaster wrote: post #160
scubakid wrote: post #15

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…

Thanks for sharing your experience! I agonized over that name change for so long that I even built a custom name generator and availability checker to run through all the permutations of relevant words, themes, prefixes, suffixes, etc... all to end up coming back to one of the first ideas from my initial brainstorming session XD

You touch on something I've noticed as well; that if you play around with models like this long enough, your intuitions start to become noticeably more refined. I can tell the way I think about finance has definitely evolved throughout the course of building the tool.

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

#162

Post by richarlidad »

A month ago I made a post on Show HN that showed my early attempts to make a supplement transparency database - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32029625

Currently, i'm attempting to improve the database by adding product specific data however I am undecided on how/if to generate further revenue.

The direct link - https://shop.nootritious.com/

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

#163

Post by junar »

WA wrote: post #157
keepquestioning wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you could subtract the losses instantly from the gains, unlike in the US

I'm not sure what you're saying about the US. If you have a capital loss, you can and must offset capital gains in the same year when computing your gross income. The nuance is this:

* Capital losses can offset an unlimited amount of capital gains, but only a total of $3,000 of other income per year.

* Unused capital losses can only be carried forward into future years. You cannot apply them to income in past years.

So if you realize a large gain in year N, then a large loss in year N+1, you still owe the full tax bill from year N. The solution is to set aside cash to pay the IRS instead of risking it all.

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

#164

Post by cercatrova »

tjchear wrote: post #71

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 tre…

Reminds me of Sheet2Site, which the creator later sold.

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

#165

Post by raphar »

biotinker wrote: post #115

I got my current robotics job, in a field I at the time had no experience in, because of this blog post I wrote: https://biotinker.dev/posts/seismograph.html It didn't get a ton of traction when I posted it on HN at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138014 But something only needs to be seen by the one correct person to make a difference, and in my case it was.

Loved your original article. I'm happy for you and your employer!

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

#166

Post by mickael-kerjean »

The infamous top comment from the HN Launch of Dropbox [1] which has been widely discussed and dismissed over the years.

This is the comment that got me onto thinking: "how awesome would it be to have a software capable of decoupling the UI from the actual storage" so you wouldn't be tied to one vendor and do so by implementing a simple programming interface [2]

I did open source my solution [3] and have refined it over the year with plugins that implement storage for any storage you could think of like SFTP, S3, Samba, WebDAV and many more. Most of the money is coming from enterprise who need help to join authentication, authorisation and storage in 1 complete solution to do things like SAML based SSO on S3, 2FA layer on a samba server, audit capabilities, ....

The part i'm super proud of is it feel faster to browse Dropbox from my app than it is from Dropbox itself [4]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/a91df1637d...

[3] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[4] the technic that's used consist in caching the list of files/folder in indexDB and render the content of a folder with the data coming from indexDB first then refresh it with the new data essentially making a visit to an folder you've seen before be instant without any loading whatsoever. It's very simple but it seems nobody else is doing it

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

#167

Post by WA »

junar wrote: post #163
WA wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you could subtract the losses instantly from the gains, unlike in the US I'm not sure what you're saying about the US. If you have a capital loss, you can and must offset capital gains in the same year when computing your gross income. The nuance is this: * Capital losses can offset an unlimited amount of capital gains, but only a total of $3,000 of other income per year. * Unused capital losses can only be carried…

Thanks for clarifying. I mixed up the offset rule and the unused capital losses rule. I’m not very deep into US tax laws ;)

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

#168

Post by ggambetta »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #110
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…

Wow this is so cool - I haven't read your book but I probably will after seeing this comment. Keep making cool stuff!

Thanks! Let me know what you think :)

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

#169

Post by kebsup »

Made 5k USD by selling source code to a random HN guy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31509702

Long story short: I run gifmemes.io and posted a comment about it. He read the comment, saw the website and had some idea for pivot. First, he wanted to buy the whole site for 10k, which I've refused. Then he offered 5k for just the source code which I accepted.

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