Back in 2007, I got laid off from my job, and the following year I launched typeracer.com - the first online multiplayer typing game, which became an instant sensation on the web (it's been mentioned on HN several times over the years).Over time, TypeRacer grew into a pretty good lifestyle business for me and I haven't had a "real" job in the past 10 years. Now I have an offer from another...
Any comments?
I feel that this discovery is too important not to have a discussion here. (I submitted my blog post yesterday during peak NH hours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412122 - but it fell through the cracks, so I'm reposting).Summary: You can take advantage of more than 4GB of physical RAM on a 32-bit OS (WinXP in my case) by putting your paging (swap) file on a RAMdisk.I feel that this...
I'll just say that it's a very simple skill-based, text-based multiplayer race-against-others game (something like a multiplayer speed Scrabble). It has almost no graphics and uses AJAX.
how is it not earning a livable wage with 2 million users?
It's livable if you have very low expenses, but in my limited experience, 2 million users just aren't enough for a free website to make good money. Maybe I'm hugely under-monetizing the site somehow, but I don't really see a good source of revenue other than from ads.
1) building a prototype (which, knowing Mark, I'd say took him at most 2 days)
and
2) sticking with it for several years and making it profitable, through the thick and thin, the emotional roller coaster, and all that.
It took me a year to complete stage (1) and I'm still on stage (2), three years later.
My web app (a casual MMO game) had the same wave of organic growth in the beginning that Mark's had, was mentioned on top blogs in the game industry, played by news anchors on live local TV news half a country away, etc., (this list goes on and on). Yet my site never got drooled over on Hacker News or Tech Crunch (possibly because I never submitted it to either), and I never had all these people telling me how great I am, how awesome my idea was, and sounding so sure that it will make me rich.
My site has 10x more users than threewords.me, been cloned by many developers in various countries around the globe, and still retains the top spot among those competitors. In fact, it seems that I actually invented a new genre of games with my idea (how many people get to say they invented Tetris, FPS, RTS, RPG, or MMO?)
All this, and yet I'm still barely making more from the site than I could be making from working at McDonald's. Yet I persist. It's been my full-time job for the past 3 years (the web app, not McDonalds :)), ever since I parted ways with my well-salaried software engineering job.
If anyone is tempted to call me stupid or lazy for not making millions from my idea, I'll be the first to admit that maybe I am. I didn't do any marketing or emailing Arrington, or any of the like. Instead I've been focused on building what my users want, developing features, fighting fires, and talking to users (many of whom constantly criticize me for not pushing out new feature fast enough).
Not a single real user ever said to me "Wow, this will make you rich," it's always more like "Wow, I LOVE your game! Please add features X, Y, and Z. They are super important! Hope to see X, Y, and Z working soon!"
Therefore, I sometimes think the startup community needs a dose of sanity. Not every tiny app is going to make millions. The web economy seems like a gold rush for many. If threewords.me makes any real money from this sale, it will be due to the exposure it's received to people participating in that gold rush.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that my comments are not intended just for criticism. If any of you think you know how you could make tons of money from threewords.me or from a casual MMO game (that doesn't have any virtual goods to sell), then I hope you can tell us how you would do it, rather than making assumptions that somehow anyone can get rich by building a free app and getting several hundred thousand people to sign up for it.
(P.S. Mark, I think you're a great guy and your app is very nice, so please don't take my comments the wrong way - I'm just trying to add some perspective to this discussion.)
Lemma: most users are subscribed to Google Groups with their Gmail addresses.
Algorithm: GG should broadcast a new message to the Gmail accounts first and wait. If Gmail flags it as spam for p% of the receiving accounts, it should notify GG. GG should then send the message to spam (e.g. hold it for moderation), and not broadcast it to the rest of the subscribers. If Gmail gives it a green light, let it through.
In the 2 years I only experienced 20 minutes of downtime recently due to a one-time network hardware upgrade (1 week's advance notice was given - a bit short but forgivable) and another 20 minutes due to a DDoS on their network about 6 months ago (which most likely prompted this recent hardware upgrade :).
I really hope people don't jump to conclusions from a single data point (aaronsw). I would recommend RimuHosting to everyone I know without hesitation.
To me the Holocaust is even more certain than evolution because I grew up with the stories of it from my grandparents. But if you don't have those stories in your family, you can also look at books, museums, photographs, eyewitness accounts. The sources for facts are endless.
Being concerned about revisionism, I would have thought the OP is worried about losing such facts, but then this thread turned into an outlet for your unwillingness to accept the holocaust.
If you weren't German, I'd simply call you an asshole, but one can imagine it being hard to believe that peers of your grandparents were responsible for killing millions of people for no reason other than race. Although coming from Germany, you should be much better informed than the average holocaust denier, from say, Iran.
Half of my grandmother's family was machine-gunned into a pit outside of Kiev called Babiy Yar with about 30 thousand other Jews by German SS during the first weeks of German occupation. The bodies, bullets, and cartridges are all still there. The executions at Babiy Yar went on for months until no more Jews could be found in the region, at which point the site was used to execute gypsies, prisoners, etc. These events were witnessed by thousands of residents of Kiev during the occupation by German forces, and you can read one such account in the book called Babiy Yar by Anatoliy Kuznecov.
Google image results:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=babi+yar&sou...
When you look at hundreds of individual mass execution events like this one, you get a more complete picture of the Holocaust.
/**
* Executes the task the given number of times in the given number of threads
* @return All the unchecked exceptions thrown by the task during execution, or
* an empty collection; never null.
*/
public Collection<Throwable> run(Runnable task, int nThreads, final int iterationsPerThread) throws BrokenBarrierException, InterruptedException {
// each thread will await upon the start barrier, then run the task, then await at the finish barrier (where the main thread will be waiting)
final CyclicBarrier startBarrier = new CyclicBarrier(nThreads);
final CyclicBarrier finishBarrier = new CyclicBarrier(nThreads + 1); // +1 for the main thread
// exceptions raised by threads will be logged and returned
final Collection<Throwable> exceptions = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Throwable>();
for (int i = 0; i < nThreads; i++) {
new Thread("Thread " + i) {
public void run() {
awaitOnBarrier(startBarrier, 5);
try {
for (int j = 0; j < iterationsPerThread; j++) {
task.run();
}
}
catch (Throwable e) {
e.printStackTrace();
exceptions.add(e);
}
finally {
awaitOnBarrier(finishBarrier, 60);
}
}
}.start();
}
finishBarrier.await();
return exceptions;
}
/** Calls barrier.await and supresses all its checked exceptions */
private void awaitOnBarrier(CyclicBarrier barrier, int timeoutSeconds) {
try {
barrier.await(timeoutSeconds, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
catch (BrokenBarrierException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
catch (TimeoutException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}I find that I spend at least 50% of my hacking time not writing code but figuring out how to get the desired results from 3rd party software. Things like configuring web servers, using frameworks, using web APIs, etc. In this realm, things often don't work as you'd expect them to, and documentation is often lacking. There is a lot of trial and error, and I absolutely hate endless trial and...
I too have seen ad revenues decrease 3-5x on my site. Are websites that don't sell a product no longer viable?
The same is true for any model of computation.
Despite this equivalence, it's orders of magnitude harder to program a TM than the ugliest assembly language you've ever seen. This is one architecture that desperately needs a compiler :)
http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/off/950623758.html
I'm a single-person startup founder. Looking for other hackers to share an office with. There is room for 2-8 people here.This is a really awesome neigborhood - perfect for hackers. Boston doesn't have many places where you can enjoy walking around outside - this is one of the few. Three coffee houses at the same intersection - reminiscent of San Francisco!