A few years ago, on my birthday, I quickly checked the visitor stats for a little side project I had started (r-exercises.com). Instead of the usual 2 or 3 live visitors, there were hundreds. It looked odd to me—more like a glitch—so I quickly returned to the party, serving food and drinks to my guests.

Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811

For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.

Thank you HN for this wonderful birthday gift!

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justinclift 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> it felt like validation for my little side project

Yep, that can be useful motivation to get a side project past "works for me" through to "works for others".

The pgautoupgrade project (https://github.com/pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade) was one of those. It seems to be going ok too, as others have come along and picked up the majority of development (I'm ~outta time). :)

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guzik 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gee, today is my birthday (36). I've never managed to get anything I've built to the HN front page. Always wondered if that means my ideas just weren’t that interesting, or if it's just the luck of the draw.

*edited my original comment without mentioning my project*

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ljf 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961660 - Interesting project - how did you get into the wearables field? What was your background before setting up this start-up?

	▲	guzik 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ha, thank you for that! I actually didn't have prior experience in wearables. My background was in mobile app development. I co-founded a company during the app boom, and we built a lot of iOS and Android apps. The transition into health sensors happened pretty organically and I also felt there was nothing that let me measure my own data and make use of it, so I decided to create a wearabke + free SDK for that. There is a quite nice article of how it all started here: https://howtoware.com/aidlab (good reading for anyone wondering what the struggles are when running a wearable startup).

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F0UKYOU-HN 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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tomhow 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

We (and you) can never be sure why people downvote things, and whilst I think the parent commenter was well-intentioned, I think perhaps the downvotes were due to the perception of intruding on someone else's comment/subthread with promotion of one's own project.

As for your own comments, you seem to have a campaign against HN going on. Yes the HN audience can be hard to understand sometimes, but on the whole it seems easy enough to do well here if you bring a generosity of spirit, and not so well if you bring combativeness and hostility.

The guidelines [1] make it clear what we're expecting, and the first two words of the "In Comments" section are "Be kind". If you start with that then you'll be on solid ground.

Regarding your username, we can't have usernames like this, because it effectively trolls the community every time you comment. So I've banned the account for now. You're welcome to register a new account with a normal username, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com ) asking us to change the username. We'd certainly be very happy to have you post interesting comments from your experience as a retired aerospace engineer or any other life experience you no doubt have.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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QuantumGood 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In recent years it seems we're getting more people who have been banned elsewhere looking for more outlets for their rage.

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guzik 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

glad there are a few supporting comments including yours (I thought I was the only one who felt the criticism was excessive)

	▲	F0UKYOU-HN 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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Pooge 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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IAmBroom 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	seanhunter 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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