One of my favorite games of all time. It's so simple yet can be so complex. You can legit spend 8+ hours playing the first couple levels easily.
Readit Newswtf242 commented on The year of peak might and magic filfre.net/2025/07/the-ye... · Posted by u/cybersoyuz
I failed out of college my senior year because I discovered EQ. So many fond memories. I created a guild on a new server and it ended up one of the most famous and best guilds on any of the servers. The amount of planning and management it took to lead a large guild was just ridiculous. It was a full time job. I even created one of the first "loot" web apps in php 3 and mysql just to keep track of player participation and make loot more fair.
Most of the team who created World of Warcraft were members in the guild.
some of my fondest memories:
- getting pretty far in the Plane of Air, which was an incomplete end game zone with almost impossible to beat bosses. - defeating the Avatar of War, which was not supposed to be killable. We figured out we could charm his guards by having a huge number of enchanters and use the guards to tank him. We managed to beat him and they patched/fixed the guards and made them uncharmable shortly afterwards
The death penalty in the end game zones was originally very tough to work around. You needed a key to reach the zone, but if you died the key required to get into the zone was on your corpse inside the zone. So if everyone wiped/died getting everyone's corpse back was a multi hour event.
Nice! I've been looking for a reliable book ranking site. The main rankings skew to the "classics" that don't always hold up (looking at you Moby Dick) but the books in the genre filters look more interesting.
A couple questions:
* Is this primarily intended for discovering new reads, or for people who've already read the books to debate which is greatest? I found the book descriptions sometimes give away too much, to the point where I stopped reading them for any book I might be interested in reading for pleasure. Examples include The Great Gatsby and Madame Bovary. Perhaps you could have a concise description that stays far away from plot points, and a more expanded description behind a "more" link.
* What dictates whether a series has one place on the list or separate places? Narnia has one for the whole series but Harry Potter has individual listings per book.
* Are ratings and reviews from your own site taken into account in the rankings?
I think it's most useful for discovering new reads, especially with the advanced search and recommendations functionality. I do agree i could do a better job of non spoiler summaries. good idea
- Series have always been a problem. Some book lists will include the entire series, and then some will have individual books. If the series is sold as a single book I'll often just include that. Like Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I will include only the first book in the series on a list, to prevent always adding every single book in a series when a list mentions "harry potter series".
basically I don't have a perfect way of handling series'
for the last point, kind of. If you add a book to the default "My Favorite Books" user list, it gets aggregated and used for this book list which is included in the rankings. https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/463
Still working on my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org that I started in 2008. It's been a 1 man team the entire time. I recently made some major algorithm changes that I think greatly improves the rankings. My algorithm code is open source https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank
I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)
This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.
Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.
recently launched book recommendations feature for my books side project that I put a LOT of work into. I might be biased but I think it works well as long as you give it your favorite books.
https://thegreatestbooks.org/recommendations?demo=tgb2025
warning: account required, and the full featured version where you can specify book length, include/exclude genres/subjects, etc requires a membership. if you would like to test it though just e-mail me at contact@thegreatestbooks.org and I'll mark your account as paid.
wtf242 commented on Side projects I've built since 2009 naeemnur.com/side-project... · Posted by u/naeemnur
that's awesome! I've had many many side projects launched in the past 2 decades, but the only one still going is my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org
I created it 17~ years ago mostly as just a tool for myself and now it gets roughly 8 million views a month.
The hardest part of any side project is actually launching it and making it somewhat production ready. I always spend the vast majority of my time dealing with devops/deployment issues/tasks
wtf242 commented on RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI github.com/crmne/ruby_llm... · Posted by u/ksec
Wow. So thoughtful.
Ruby: late to the party, brought a keg.
been using https://github.com/alexrudall/ruby-openai for years with no issues which is a fine gem and works great.
wtf242 commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox
Thank you for replying. I am (on and off) building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores. I do want to build a more fairer and honest monthly/yearly list something like yours and the price comparison as the main USP but more so I really like reading and enjoy exploring books even if I don't read all of the ones I wan to.
Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more ideas to explore. Thank you for sharing your ranking algorithm, very fascinating (and still understanding the intricacies of it).
I asked you about Amazon API because I noticed some of your prices are stale which is against their Pricing Display guidelines.
Its been a challenge for me to work with Amazon as their API is not easy to get access to, I mean I have an affiliate tag for A website but from what I've read as per their TOS I am only allowed to use it for A website and not for B. And for B I have to apply again for a new tag with a new website (which is still under development!)
I will end up working on a scraper or a few workers anyway as most online bookstores do not have an API, none have replied back to my emails inquiring the same.
yeah the amazon product API has some severe limitations. I have 25,000~ books on my site, and I just don't have enough API calls in a day to keep the prices 100% updated. It's on my todo list to revisit this, but it's low on my priority list. I don't make that much from amazon refs(couple hundred a month)
I will say that I don't think they really defend their TOS too much from my experience. I used to have a cookbooks site for years that used the same affiliate tag i use for my greatest books site, and never had any issues.
wtf242 commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox
Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase?
Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low!
I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices or its scraped data. If its scraped/stale data, I would look into the pricing display guidelines for affiliates.
And why is it just Amazon and not other online bookstores too?
I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it.
I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it.
Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices.
I am working on bookshop.org integration. I used to also do barnes & noble. The problem is neither of them have APIs to programmatically search for books, so i have to do complicated scraping. example: https://github.com/ssherman/bookshop-search
wtf242 commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox
The Greatest Books https://thegreatestbooks.org
I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books.
It's built with Rails and Postgresql and hosted on 3 linode servers. I get around 250k page visits a day.