Top all-time · #9140
Ian Webster
Personal blog · ianww.com/blog · on HN as typpoprogrammingstartups
Ian Webster's personal blog at ianww.com covers programming and startups. Since 2012, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Show HN: Call your senators & representatives with one number (1-844-USA-0234)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ian Webster's site for his side projects, such as the Asterank asteroid database and AdDetector, and for his post on getting a side project acquired. Most comments only point to the site.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-12
- Show HN: Call your senators & representatives with one number (1-844-USA-0234)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-15
- Asterank Discover, Crowdsourced Asteroid Discovery, Reviews Its 100,000th Image2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-11-26
- What I learned from getting my side project acquired2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-09
- Show HN: Detect articles with corporate sponsors2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-14
What Hacker News says?
Sounds like not at the same time, though. He said the site was acquired in May 2013 [1], while this post says he is starting there in November, and his front page still says he works at room77.com [2]. Makes me curious. 1. http://www.asterank.com/about 2. http://www.ianww.com
Comment linking /
on “What I learned from getting my side project acquired”Submitted What I learned from getting my side project acquired as a story · 396 points
HN discussionThis post reminded me of pg's advice for how to get startup ideas. Compare: "I have 5+ side projects. I’d like to make businesses out of them, but I often lose interest after a couple weeks. Asterank was the only project that I’ve stuck with for over a year, and it paid off even though there wasn’t a clear path to monetization... It’s hard to predict what will be valuable as a side project. For hobbies, working on w…
Comment linking /blog/2013/10/08/lessons-from-getting-my-side-project-acquired/
on “What I learned from getting my side project acquired”Submitted Show HN: Detect articles with corporate sponsors as a story · 204 points
HN discussionOP is an engineer at Google: http://www.ianww.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?”Submitted Show HN: Perseids meteor shower from space as a story · 136 points
HN discussionAdDetector ( http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/ ) - Browser extension that flags news articles with corporate sponsors. My best Show HN with 200+ upvotes. About 16,000 installs. Asked by my company to discontinue it a few days later, so I stopped working on it. Crowdsourced asteroid discovery ( http://www.asterank.com/discover ) - only 5 upvotes on HN, but nearly half a million survey images reviewed, with 17,000 pot…
Comment linking /meteor-showers/
on “Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?”Submitted This year in side projects as a story · 136 points
HN discussionGood seeing Ian's work here! http://www.ianww.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ancient Earth Globe”Submitted How a Programmer Can Discover an Asteroid as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThis site was built as a side project by one guy who got it acquired by Planetary Resources. He's got some other fun projects: http://www.ianww.com/
Comment linking /
on “Asteroid Database and Mining Rankings”Submitted Better Code Navigation on GitHub as a story · 47 points
HN discussionAs the creator of several popular Chrome extensions, once you reach about 10,000 installs people will start contacting you to acquire the extension. In particular, I created a native ad detector that was briefly popular[1]. In my experience, acquirers will go after extensions that have permissions to modify any page. My extensions were open source and had no clear path to monetization, so I can only speculate on how…
Comment linking /ad-detector/
on “Breaking Down the Chrome Web Store”Submitted Sending a potato to near-space as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI noticed a recent increase in the amount of native advertising, especially poorly labeled "sponsored content," and built a chrome/firefox extension to flag these articles [1]. It includes rules for the sites mentioned - Buzzfeed, Mashable, Quartz, and Vice - as well as about 100 others. Reactions from publishers and native ad companies were surprisingly positive - some even reached out asking to me add their sites.…
Comment linking /ad-detector
on “The invasion of corporate news”Submitted Show HN: My year in side projects as a story · 27 points
HN discussionNeat projects! A lot of useful things for developers in there. My projects for this year are less developer oriented, just random things I thought were interesting at the time: Six Degrees of Bowie - http://www.sixdegreesofbowie.com/ - simple musical influencers graph web-workers-fallback - https://github.com/typpo/web-workers-fallback - webworker compatibility layer Github Participation Graph - https://github.com/t…
Comment linking /fb-unsee/
on “All of my side-projects from 2012”Submitted Mint is misleading users about Heartbleed (and may still be vulnerable) as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThe last year's page link is throwing a 404 error. http://www.ianww.com/blog/blog/2013/12/31/my-year-in-side-pr... Great side projects btw, if you don't mind me asking, how to do choose to allocate time amongst side projects and keep yourself focused? It seems that with side projects, one challenge is to avoid the trap of too many interesting ones to start working on.
Comment linking /blog/blog/2013/12/31/my-year-in-side-projects/
on “This year in side projects”Submitted This year in side projects as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThere's AdDetector: http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/
Comment linking /ad-detector/
on “Show HN: Let's encourage ad blocking”Submitted 80,000 Visitors on Christmas Morning: A Post-mortem as a story · 14 points
HN discussionLong ago I built a simple open-source app that emails every morning asking about your dreams[1]. Because I check email when I wake up, I always record my dreams (there are about 100 other users who do the same). After about a year I ran some basic text analysis on my dreams to see if I could extract anything meaningful[2]. My conclusion was no, not really, but it's still interesting how dreams can reflect subconscio…
Comment linking /2013/04/14/an-analysis-of-my-dreams-over-the-past-year/
on “A Sleep Researcher's Attempt to Build a Bank for Dreams”Submitted Show HN: Call your senators & representatives with one number (1-844-USA-0234) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionCan anyone reproduce this? I am trying to command my phone via Chrome's web speech API but it doesn't pick up "OK Google." http://www.ianww.com/voice_assistant_abuse.html Seems like this attack could be trivially prevented by disabling speech recognition while speech synthesis is running. It looks like this may already be the case for the web speech api (or the synthetic voice is just too different from mine).
Comment linking /voice_assistant_abuse.html
on “Google Voice Search Attack on Android [pdf]”Submitted Asterank Discover, Crowdsourced Asteroid Discovery, Reviews Its 100,000th Image as a story · 6 points
HN discussion"... This approach will discover new asteroids and improve our model of the solar system. It also opens opportunities for interesting algorithmic challenges, and the chance for a normal person to discover an asteroid. "As a programmer, I’m particularly interested in how we’ll improve algorithms to spot asteroids. I am sure that there are conventional ML techniques and even simpler image processing approaches that ar…
Comment linking /blog/2013/11/26/asterank-discover-reviews-100000th-image/
on “NASA launches $35,000 bounty for improved asteroid detection algorithms”Submitted Show HN: CodeNav – token highlighting and click-to-find usages on GitHub as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf anyone's interested in seeing the orbits of Comet Swift-Tuttle and its debris that forms the Perseid meteor shower, I made a webgl visualization here showing all the moving parts: http://www.ianww.com/meteor-showers/
Comment linking /meteor-showers/
on “The People Behind the Perseid Meteor Showers”Submitted An Analysis of My Dreams Over the Past Year as a story · 5 points
HN discussion