Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
Any side projects from Show HN went big in terms of users, revenue or open source etc...
Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read.
Thank you again
Redis itself is great, but the fact that it keeps getting better is what truly amazes me. There have been features added that I never though I would use, that I find myself building into and on top of later.
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 in that context?
If you need client side storage, try jedis (a redis fork in javascript) or lokijs or pouchdb which are all client-side databases.
We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].
I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be).
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
2: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-yo...
3: http://www.beelinereader.com
4: see https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc
[updated to add press and award links]
In the meantime, our iPad app [1] and browser plugins [2] integrate with the Kindle Cloud Reader.
1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beeline-reader/id938026867?m...
I remember it styled links as well as body text which I found pretty annoying.
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...
I can't remember why it bugged me that links were being styled too, just that I was. So I'll drop something in the forum or whatever after I've had another go! :)
He's at moondownload.com if you want to start talking - it gets an amazing amount of updates for an app I thought feature complete about 4 years ago!
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.
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).
Heh. I started using Dropbox much later than this tagline and the first thing I did after installing was to stop using USB drives.
"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.)
I spend way too much time bashing heads with the rest of the software ecosystem these days.
I'm talking about normal people and not experienced engineers.
Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind.
Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.
Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
Not everyone is going to do that though (anytime soon anyway) so that's not a real concern. It's like asking when gmail first launched "okay but what if EVERYONE uses the full gigabyte?"
> Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows.
FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D)
--
> can google backend really handle that, if so for how long?
YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now.
OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with!
YT reencodes all videos into several formats.
I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see:
- 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB)
- 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.)
- Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB).
So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice.
If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video.
OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :)
In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second.
I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting:
(2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60
Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise.
This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
Just upvoting you doesn't suffice today.
1/2 TB per user (like me)
22PB = 44,000 users.
Google need 1000 times that space in their data centers to handle 44 million users.
Also, I might think those 1/2 TB of data are very valuable, But only a few of them are interesting to a few of my friends, family members. They are probably very hard to monetize. Even for myself, I only browse them may a few times every a few years.
If I am a PM for such product and try to propose to Alphabet to build 1000 new youtube size data center to handle only 44 millions users, I would have hard time to justify it.
As for BackBlaze, also a medium-large business, they're now storing... https://www.backblaze.com/blog/200-petabytes-of-customer-dat...
Both IA and BackBlaze are private/nontraded, which means have they have lower operating capital. Diskspace is simply not that expensive now.
There's a guy on a DC++ filesharing server (find a server list - it's one of the biggest ones) who has been sharing 400TB of data for some time. Speaking of DC++, most newer clients show the total shared data for all users connected to the server you're on, and that number on some of those larger servers is usually 1-2PB.
I also saw a guy on reddit a while back who was in exactly the right place at the right time when his workplace was upgrading, and he now has a nice $200/mo electricity bill in the form of, you guessed it, 400TB of diskspace. I'm not sure if he got it all for free, but I think he may have.
So it's not a money problem; it's a space problem and a power problem. This is why flash storage is so interesting, it generates less heat and can be packed somewhat more densely, and it uses less power too. Once Flash-vs-platter hits the 49%/51% in terms of relative cost things are going to get interesting.
At the moment the major retailers are just doing simple things like firmware customizations to run their disks at lower speeds (for nearline storage) or start up with the disk off and stuff like that. Facebook's cold storage datacenters also use Reed-Solomon encoding instead of RAID/ZFS for redundancy at less used space.
I actually do think Google have actually done the kinds of allocations you speak of, using thin provisioning; after all, literally every new Google account gets 15GB of diskspace! And then there's sync profile data, whatever internal metadata is associated with the account (such as your search history), etc, that needs to be stored too.
I fully believe Google have multiple exabyte-scale datacenters. If they don't I'll be genuinely surprised.
Using thin provisioning (which is ultimately just "how much are they really using, and how can we encourage them not to use more than X") is how they manage it.
So you're right - actually provisioning enough free storage for these users would definitely be an unpleasant task. But they carefully balance what everyone uses with what they have available.
Of course, they presumably need to duplicate it for redundancy too, so maybe a full 2/3s of one!
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 reset the lockscreen password via your Google account) I assumed that the photos were lost. However upon opening the app we rejoiced when they started appearing. Shortly afterwards, the Google Photos app popped up a message stating that an upgrade was required, after which all of the photos had disappeared again.
The workaround was to reset the tablet, open up Google Photos, wait until the photos had synced and then disconnect from the internet as soon as possible to prevent Google Photos from trying to update itself (the message couldn't be dismissed). My hunch was that the version of Google Photos that shipped with the tablet was very old and they have long-since updated the format for storing photos, hence why they wouldn't show up online?
Product support may well actually do what it's supposed to do...
Alternatively, keep the tablet on cotton wool until you see someone mention in here they're from Google, check their profile for contact info and email them directly. Keep doing this until you get a reply back, and get them to poke your issue over to the right department. :P
Ha!
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.
Anyway, Dropbox wins on the OS-level integration, which also doubles as a bullshit- and hassle-free way to transfer files between your devices.
But well, at this point I'm a paying customer of both Dropbox and Google because I run out of free-tier storage on both :).
- Dropbox aggressively suggests to create a new account to recipients,
- She's unknowledgable, so when a popup appears, she assumes it's mandatory. Hence she installed Dropbox without wanting it on her phone and PC and couldn't understand why so many steps are required to download a few photos. Also, "why does it try to upload all my folders ?!?" hence the spammy/virus impression.
- Dropbox sends an Android notification for every upload, which is both annoying and worrying to her, because she doesn't want her private life to go online.
I always assumed the mass went with Dropbox. Turns out the first example I see from that audience thinks it's a virus. Big lesson of user experience here.
It seems that any good business, in its quest to grow, will eventually start making annoying and user-hostile things. Dropbox definitely was cleaner and better in the past than it is now. It's a story I repeated by company after company - they reach peak quality, and instead of leaving things as they are, they have to "innovate" in more and more crap.
I'm one of the earlier users of Dropbox, so I still have a "Public" folder with an ability to create direct links to uploaded files. They've turned this feature off for new accounts some time ago - I guess because people started using Dropbox as a CDN. Still, it's one of its most useful features for me. I use the "Public" folder almost every time I want to transfer some files people - it lets the recipient avoid all that popups and captive forms bullshit.
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.
Thankfully we have SFTP which natively supports chroot (not all FTP servers do), key-based logins (more secure) as well as passwords, compression, and no fuzzy callback ports like in FTP. Also sshfs is pretty handy too.
If one needs "anonymous FTP" then you can also throw HTTPS into the list of better solutions: TLS encryption, compression, smarter handling of MIME types, and again no stupid fuzzy callback ports.
I don't often say things this strongly, but FTP should die.
> no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS)
Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below are inherently peer-peer -- the net should not treat endpoints differently (i.e. should not privilege some over others). That simply encourages a "client" or "consumer" mentality in both the technical and social senses.
I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along. Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high %age of them.
NAT totally stopped this.
Are you defending NAT? It sounds like a Vietnam era construction: you had to destroy the Internet in order to save it.
We now have a seemingly entrenched tree-structured (i.e. centralized) network again, the very 1960s architecture we tried so hard to get away from.
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.
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.
Having files on all of my devices without the effort is why I pay them whatever their monthly fee is.
Dropbox is a success because millions of people don't know the meaning of the words you just wrote. This is even hinted at int he application itself: "Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team."
What power users need to always remember is how important usability by the uninitiated is when adopting solutions. This is why the market for security products is such a problem - they nearly always necessarily either put a barrier in front of common operations, or expose the user to the risk of losing their data by error, or hand all the difficult bits over to a commercial third party.
So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014.
5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN. Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed my life.
I wouldn't expect them to actually do that. Between the girlfriend and myself, we get a lot of packages. They usually leave them by the garage door because it's easier / closer. We've told them before they can leave them inside the (unlocked) garage but the general response is "we can't".
Long term it isn't clear how to initiate a relationship with the largest shippers. It's possible I'll spend years calling into those accounts with nothing to show for it.
Someone posted it on the front page soon after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843
Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)
Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
It's interesting that you found the attention the HN post brought helped you focus and finish the book.
Lately, I've been trying to pay more attention to the Show HN section of the site, giving upvotes to interesting projects and commenting or asking questions where I can.
I think that lots of us here could improve the HN community by giving more attention to Show HN posts, even for projects that seem easy or mundane to those of us who have been developers for a while.
The simpler projects might be the ones where encouragement helps the most. Without that kind of encouragement from more experienced developers 7 years ago, I probably wouldn't have a software career right now at all.
I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college.
We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863
We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...
Hadn't heard of your site so far. Cannot believe it. Thank you so much!
Go for it. It's such fun.
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
We've changed the product quite a bit in response to the huge projects that our users create on our design platform. Nevertheless, we've also faced quite a few engineering issues in respect to browser performance and real time backend data synchronization.
Oh wait ...
What if you would choose to work with something like React or Ember ?
ES6 arrow-functions add some behavioral change (this assignment) and make some callback patterns more readable ([].map, etc.) but are definitely overused and making a lot of recent code less readable as a result.
Whether destructuring makes code more or less readable is highly contextual and debatable. It does seem to fall well on the wrong end of the "Enabling" side of the "Software Dev Attitude"[0] to me insofar as it definitely allows developers to create very "clever" code at the cost of readability.
Shorthand is shorthand.
Generally speaking - like pre-compilation - these syntactical sugars may be a net positive for some, but they're far from groundbreaking in terms of adding value.
[0] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwareDevelopmentAttitude.ht...
Promise.all([
getSettings(),
getData(),
]).then(([settings, data]) => {
// do whatever
});Here is the original Show HN.
In my industry (reselling) a lot of people use gumroad to sell information, anything from product leads to guides to bulk lists for scanning (for online arbitrage) to chrome extensions. I did it myself briefly and made around $250, but I'm sure people are making a lot more than that.
It's just an incredibly useful tool even for technical people who could set up a store, still saves time.
Edit: the SSL cert on https://help.gumroad.com is expired for 3 months. You should fix that.
Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
You can hear Peter talk about it with Aaron Harris here: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) has raised a Series B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters.
It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
Anything >0 is better than 0... :-)
- Typed in a URL to get a free scan
- Needed to create an account
- Needed to confirm my email
- Needed to verify my site ownership
- Got a mail that my site is "borderline insecure". When I click on the link, I'm redirected to the "create an account view"
- Created a new account that opened in a half cropped Iframe displaying some error message I can't read.
This is where I finally gave up.
Better yet, it probably does that for any URL – see c8g's comment about Google, i've tried HN and a few of my own sites, all with the same results. Even tried to give it it's own address, but it "is not permitted".
So I thought that maybe it just displays that message after some timeout without doing any actual checks, bit like these sketchy fake antivirus sites. But nope – when i point it to a subdomain with access_log enabled, i see it actually makes a bunch of requests. So maybe they just have such high standards that the entire web is "borderline unsafe" from their point of view.
Even with no conflicts of interest at all, it's obvious that they would have higher security standards than anybody else out there.
You shouldn't have had to make a second account - that's the odd part. You do have to confirm your email, and we can't show you results until you've verified ownership, for legal reasons.
If you shoot me an email, I can definitely take a look at what happened with the account creation issues and fix it for you.
I'll definitely test that.
Also, please don't scan sites that aren't your own - you won't be able to see results anyway.
You might want to put a warning on there saying that it will submit any forms it can find a LOT.
Also, on the waiting screen, while it's running tests, I filled in the form and it's had an iframe drama.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rofi17cjormgav/Screenshot%202016-...
And thanks for the info on the iFrame - I'll look into that as well.
Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date.
Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
I don't know where the big cutoff is, but it's been going strong for the past 3.5 years. There are just under 50k games on it now https://itch.io
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 For our Open Source Firebase: http://gun.js.org/ !