manmanic
Joined 18 years ago
Karma
181
Submissions
31
Member since
Mar 9
Internet entrepreneur behind 3 profitable online hits. PhD in Computer Science.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Been using Hetzner Cloud for 18 months now, for various servers. Has proven incredibly reliable. Together with a very clear and straightforward management panel and unbeatable (AFAIK) performance/pricing, I haven't found a downside. A good alternative to their dedicated servers (which are also great) if you need more flexibility or less capacity.
Comment · 3 years ago
After many years of using Hetzner dedicated servers, I recently started using their US cloud for a project. So far, extremely happy, and it's very cost effective. Even cheaper than Digital Ocean (which I also use extensively).
Comment · 4 years ago
This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together:
Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/
Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/
Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.
Comment · 5 years ago
You’ve got to really find your niche. I make around $1.5M profit per year from an independent website that takes an hour of two of work per week, me only. It’s been running for 15 years. The whole thing was a freaky case of perfect product and timing and there was definitely luck involved.
Comment · 7 years ago
Am I the only one who thinks they want to push the market into applying strategies that they can then trade against? This is classic Wall Street, persuading the masses to take the wrong side of bets.
Comment · 8 years ago
I'm sorry but this does not always apply in the real world. Someone getting everyone onto a blockchain is a one-time project, perhaps with an annual maintenance fee. Running an industry organization is an order of magnitude (or two) more expensive. Trusting someone to build an (open source) application is not the same as trusting them to centrally host it.
Comment · 8 years ago
There are a variety of formal consensus algorithms uses for enterprise blockchains, but they are all some variant of voting schemes based on validator signatures. Nothing like proof-of-work is needed to ensure that one bad actor, or a small number of bad actors, cannot break the network's consensus. If you have just one validator, like QLDB, then you're back to a centralized scenario.
Comment · 8 years ago
Yes, that's true. But in some cases an industry mutual doesn't exist, and the regulator doesn't want to manage the database. Then what? It can be cheaper and easier to deploy a blockchain than to build the necessary organizational structure to run a central database. Like I said, it's niche but it happens.
Comment · 8 years ago
I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation. This is fairly niche, perhaps 1% of all interorganizational database applications, but there are certainly cases where it is the right solution. The majority of blockchain projects undertaken still do not make sense, but this is gradually getting better over time.
Comment · 14 years ago
It's a nice idea in theory, but the problem is that only one side has actual control/ownership of the domain at any one time.
If the startup owner gets control, they can decide to stop paying, and the original domain owner has to sue for their money.
If the original domain owner keeps control, and the startup does well, they can be held to ransom by the domain owner threatening to redirect the domain.
Of course in theory all of this can be prevented through contracts, but the prospect of having to use the (international) court system to enforce one's rights is not an attractive one for either side. Startups often run out of money, and domainers like to spot an opportunity, so there's just too much risk.
As an aside, names aren't actually that important, so long as you can own your namespace. Flickr? Facebook? Craigslist? These are all pretty bad names, but it didn't seem to matter.
Comment · 15 years ago
I've seen the best results with Tribal Fusion and Casale Media. Unless you're in a high-premium field, don't expect more than $2 EPM for a 300x250 (or equivalent area) spot.
Comment · 15 years ago
2=x^x^x^x... cannot be solved, since x^x^x^x... will only converge to 0 (if x=0) or 1 (0<x<=1) or -1 (x=-1), ignoring complex numbers. So the original equation is false.
Comment · 16 years ago
I think about this all the time.
I didn't make "FU money" from an exit, but rather from the ongoing success of a couple of online businesses, which have been earning me far more than I know how to spend. When this started happening, my initial reaction was to be perplexed, because I no longer had a financial motivation to get up in the morning and work. Money had been the most salient part of my motivation for as long as I could remember.
But I found that I still wanted to work, and it took me a while to understand why. It turns out there are lots of other good reasons to create useful things that people will pay for, like self expression, connecting to others, a sense of achievement, and a feeling of contributing to the world. The money was still nice but became secondary. Still, it allows me the luxury of working on interesting things that I think people will like, even if I doubt I'll ever make much money from them.
I found that the main challenge of being rich is finding a way to spend the money in a way which contributes to my happiness, rather than detracts from it. This is harder than it sounds. The most obvious way to spend money is to buy an oversized home. But this is a really bad idea. First of all you have to spend a lot of time maintaining that home. But most importantly it will likely alienate your (presumably not so rich) real old friends who are still working daily to pay off the mortgage. How will they feel about inviting you over to their condo when you live in a palace?
The solution I found to the "friend alienation" problem is to spend money on personal experiences rather than visible possessions. You can eat out at fancy restaurants, travel the world and enjoy the best shows without your friends knowing what you're up to, at least not in detail. It really helps if you have a spouse and/or children that you can do this with, since they can make these experiences all the more fun.
BTW this also neatly dovetails with recent research on happiness:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/happiness.possessio...
The one rich guy possession I'm allowing myself to buy is a second home in a foreign country that I like to visit often. This will (hopefully) make those visits less hassle and more enjoyable, and again, none of my close friends need to know.
And yes, I worry about losing the money a little, and have taken a self-propelled crash course in personal wealth management. But luckily I find the subject quite interesting anyway, and I don't let myself lose any sleep over a couple of percentage points in yield. In the long run, we all die anyway.
To summarize, getting "FU money" been a net benefit in my life, but it took a lot of careful thought and planning to ensure it worked out that way.
Finally if anyone out there who's suddenly landed FU money is feeling a little disorientated by their new situation, I highly recommend reading "Escape from Freedom" by Erich Fromm, which is a wonderful book about the psychological and existential challenges that freedom brings.
Comment · 16 years ago
7.8% is incredible. Based on my experience, I think 1-2% is benchmark.
But really it depends on how widely your service is known, and to what extent it appeals to the mass market. Make either of those variables higher, and you'll get a ton more free users, and quite a few more paying users, but your %age will be worse.
Bottom line: looking at your traffic, I'd focus on getting yourself better known and getting more users, rather than converting the people already coming to your site.