Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, writes about startups, shutting down his company, anonymity, and web performance.
HN commenters cite his posts on his startup's failure, 4chan's cookieless domain move, and anonymity in discussions of startups and online identity.
Looked at your site and it looks nice and your games look good. Hard to say why you failed exactly. But what I can say is that just because you start a business does not necessarily mean it will be successful, even if you have a great product and proven team (see http://chrishateswriting.com/post/74083032842/today-my-startup-failed as an example). You might have answered part of your problem in your own statement when you say you did not do any marketing.
My suggestion, is to keep working at it (it appears you have a good talent at developing games), and start working to get the word out via forums, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc... Start building a fan base around your individual products.
In moot's own words: http://chrishateswriting.com/post/74083032842/today-my-startup-failed
I'm really sad to see this, because I saw myself that DrawQuest was gaining traction.
That said, I really appreciate what Everpix did, and I'm glad that moot seems to value that transparency as well.
Failure is a really important part of the startup process - it happens over 90% of the time - and yet it accounts for less than 10% of the dialogue.
When startups and founders share post-mortem data like Everpix did, it's an incredible gift to the community. A startup may failed, but let it not have died in vain.
I know moot reads HN, so hopefully he sees this. Thanks for giving back to the community.
Likely it is just a throwaway.
If nothing else, this might remind those who see it that you can leak private keys / passwords if you put then in source control.
Chris Poole described having this exact problem, in his recent post about 4Chan being hacked - AWS keys in the commit history. (http://chrishateswriting.com/post/84931829578/when-a-bad-day-gets-worse-getting-hacked-twice-in-one)
4chan? They've only started to serve static content from a cookie less domain about a year ago http://chrishateswriting.com/post/68794699432/small-things-add-up. When it's a known web performance technique for quite some time. Jeff Atwood did this at Stack Overflow in 2009 http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/a-few-speed-improvements/
Per meowface's comment, this code is ~4 years old. It's in a much better place now, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
The vulnerability wasn't in the main application. I'll write more about it on my personal blog in the coming days (http://chrishateswriting.com).
Good point. But isn't Craigslist's lack of vetting a good thing (1)? They're already giving out plenty of safety advice (2).
1. http://chrishateswriting.com/post/76431353368/the-anonymity-i-know
2. http://craigslist.org/about/safety