It's kinda amazing that OP already made money with 3k unique visitors from HN. I am glad you received what you wished for. Making it to the front page of HN is

It's kinda amazing that OP already made money with 3k unique visitors from HN. I am glad you received what you wished for. Making it to the front page of HN is amazing. I am fortunate to have several entries and projects making the front page of HN in the last couple of months. My little story that has nothing to do with money. I am an international grad student. Recently I moved to a new city with very few friends, the girl I was seeing for 4 years in grad school stopped talking to me, my grad school thesis was tougher than I thought, I needed to find a job while waiting for my EAD card being stuck in the queue, my driver's license was expiring and I couldn't renew it because of the darn EAD card didn't come, it was just too much to handle. I was feeling lonely, demotivated, confused. I became numb, I loved computers all my life yet didn't have the passion to program, so I tried to do a lot of things to escape reality. I wrote a lot both programs and blogging. One of my "fun" programming projects that I did in 1 day waiting for it to compile has recently been on HN front page, then it made its way to /r/raspberry_pi, hackaday, /r/android, androidpolice, zdnet among many others. I got hit by 60k unique visitors in the last 10 days and I made exactly 0 cents from it (and I made a stance to not ask people for money). I have people sending me emails and tweets thanking me every day since. I guess to me at this point, passion is worth more than anything in this world. When I was answering questions from HN and reddit, sometimes my eyes got really wet because I was really feeling hopeless, but then the optimism and kindness of people I don't know were something I could feel. I can't be more thankful for what I received from the HN community. I couldn't ask for more. I'm just telling you all this about my life because I figured I can't be the anonymous jimmies like I was before anymore. I have a real story, not very pretty and successful, but I guess a story worth telling because there might be other jimmies who are desperate and sad in this world reading this: don't ever give up hope, keep creating cool shit, you'll be alright. I have another blog post that made HN front page 5 months after I published it. No one ever mentioned it being cool to me: it has 0 people reading it before someone submitted and made HN front page. You thought the world doesn't care about you, but you never know when your honest efforts will pay off. (If you're curious, it's called getcrankshaft.com - a GNU/Linux distro for the Pi that makes it a makeshift android auto)