Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job? - <AUTHOR> I am a developer and I have a 40 hr/week job. It is a very good job and I put a lot of effort in it. But I have also my own ideas that I would love to develop, but I am struggling to organize time and material to develop something for me.
I read a lot and have a lot of ideas, about little porjects to test new technologies or new patterns, but never find the time.
I would love to learn the experience and techniques used by someone who have been able do to something like this <comment><USER5> A (the left-brain/logical approach):

There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 40 of them (+ 10 hours for inconvenient lunch breaks and commuting) and sleep 56 of them, you have 62 hours left. There you go. Figure out where those 62 hours are and spend them wisely. Organize your schedule so you have enough hours when and where you need them.

B (the right-brain/emotional approach):

Yes, you have ~62 hours from the above example, but you probably want a social life, need to eat and exercise, and it would certainly lead to burnout if you spent every free moment cramming side projects where you can. Instead of (or in addition to) managing time, manage your mental energy. Find a pace and rhythm that work for you to make regular progress on projects you deem worthwhile.

It's very important that you know yourself for this to work. Here's what has worked for me:

* Go to the gym on lunch breaks during the week. I reclaim that pesky break in the day, stay healthy, and generally feel refreshed and energized after a visit.

* It's cliched, but I don't have a cable subscription. (I spend my time on HN instead, so I suppose it's a wash)

* Absolutely make time for guilt-free relaxing. For me relaxing is going on a hike or camping trip, grabbing dinner with friends, or playing an instrument.

* Spend time reading. There is a lot of good material on time management or lifestyle design. What's important is that you read and learn to isolate the signal of what matters to you from the noise (and there is a lot of noise).

* Live by this mantra, "If it matters to you, then you'll find a way. If it doesn't you'll find an excuse."

<comment><USER6> > _Absolutely make time for guilt-free relaxing._

This. If you engage in a guilt-laden form, it's not really relaxation, and thus has little utility—rendering it a waste of time.

<comment><USER7> What might constitute a guilt-laden form?

<comment><USER6> Engaging in a leisure activity while feeling guilt for doing so.

It's probably safe to say there's a large overlap with procrastination.

<comment><USER8> WaitButWhy has a great piece on this idea: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how- to-beat-procrastination.ht...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat- procrastination.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time.

I cut alcohol years ago and tend to go to bed at reasonable hours: the feeling of waking up at 5:30, getting a good workout and two to three hours of work before you even start to get ready for the office is pretty empowering. It feels like you already had a day worth of productivity in.

So, to recap:

1\. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to late nights, difficult mornings and wasted hours on (often) empty discussions/interactions.

2\. Go to bed early. Avoid screens in the bedroom (they keep you awake) and work out in the morning (helps to feel tired at the end of the day).

3\. Wake up early.

Where there's a will, there is a way.

<comment><USER10> "Getting up early" advice definitely doesn't work for all people. I, for example, am more productive at evenings/nights and my brain doesn't work at until 9-10am despite of how much did I sleep a night before. The better advice would be "adjust the routine to your natural rhythm".

<comment><USER11> Has there been any scientific evidence suggesting this is the case?

In college I struggled to wake up in time for 8am classes (that I had no interest in taking). Not surprisingly, a big part of the problem is that I was staying up until 11, or 2, or 4 every night. My typical schedule now (29 years old) is asleep around 9, up at 4:30 and gym 5-6:30 or so. Weekends are only an hour or so later than that, and it's been that way since about 3 years ago.

My point is I think it is as much _why_ you're waking up early as it is a "natural rhythm" or something like that. I would much rather go to the gym at 5:30 than to a liberal arts gen ed class at 8:00. Yes it's possible my circadian clock shifted I suppose, but I think it's as much desire or habit as anything else.

<comment><USER10> I _can_ get up early and do things, but I _feel_ best when going to bed at 2-3am and getting up at 10-11am. By "natural" cycle I meant that if woken up without an alarm clock and go to bed when feeling sleepy (i.e. during lazy holidays) I tent to align to the mentioned hours.

 _Has there been any scientific evidence suggesting this is the case?_

Can't find it after quick googling, but I've read about a study which claims that there are no such things as "night owl persons", but it didn't convince me as it was talking about extreme cases as staying up all night long and sleep during the whole day.

<comment><USER12> But yes, I remember reading in science journals regarding the natural rhythm of averagely around 10-11 o'clock in the morning. As the person mentioned before it was naturally for him to wake up later, or it was harder for him to wake up, until he god used to the unnatural rhythm.

But there was also some evidence regarding the era before modern technology and electricity about the time when people go to sleep naturally. which is actually surprisingly due to instead of spending time on screens they spent it socially or with other activities and still ended up in bed quite a bit later

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm going to assume you don't have a whole bunch of children, an underwater mortgage, or massive amounts of debt to service — or some other very compelling reason the following advice isn't going to be practical for you. But if you can swing it, it's vastly more fun and productive than some of the other suggestions:

Start freelancing, quit your job, and move to a cheaper country where you can survive on something like 22 hours of billable work a month (+ business development). Then spend the rest of your time working on your stuff, or whatever you want to do! No sleep deprivation is required, you can still have a life, and you don't need to rigidly structure your time. It's a decent way to keep stress levels down too which yields more productivity!

It does help if you have some savings as a buffer too!

<comment><USER14> This concept of moving to a different country and living on less hours of work sounds too good to be true. I've heard it proposed before, but I've never known of anyone who has pulled it off. Are there any good examples to read about?

I've met really smart English-speaking developers from other countries (namely Brazil), and I didn't get the impression that they can laze around and work 22 hour weeks to put food on the table and live comfortably.

Perhaps it can work as a temporary thing, like moving around for a year or two, while retaining a home base in your developed country of origin...

<comment><USER13> My suggestion is a form of arbitrage and it's really quite doable.

If you live in a cheap country and earn money in a more affluent one, you don't need to work as many hours. If you choose to earn money in the local market, you'll end up replacing one 40 hour work week for another. Your Brazilian buddies likely work locally which is why they have similar time constraints as someone living and working in NYC would do.

You also don't keep a homebase in your country of origin because that increases your expenses! It really requires getting over the mentality that the country you were born in has to be your home; it doesn't.

I live in the center of Prague right now. I used to live in London. My expenses all tolled come to around 22,000Kč/month, although I could do it on less. That's roughly £600/US$850/€800. The number of billable hours required to maintain this lifestyle isn't much. I'm also vastly happier here than I was in London.

My suggestion is a method of abandoning a full time job if that full time job is getting in the way of more important goals and aspirations. Something has to give, of course, and cutting expenses in a way that isn't detrimental to happiness is one way to do it.

I acknowledge this advice isn't for everyone. It's like going to the gym: some people don't want to do it, some people can't do it, and some people won't do it despite good intentions. Also, not everybody can do it at the same time!

<comment><USER15> Were you born in UK? How's social life in Prague for a foreigner like you? Is language a huge barrier?

<comment><USER13> Indeed I was born in the UK, so in my case living in the Czech Republic indefinitely doesn't come with any visa hurdles and such.

The fact I don't speak Czech is a very rarely a barrier. Sometimes if I'm in the grocery store and I'm not entirely sure what I'm buying I have to use Google Translate. I struggled once in the post office when trying to mail something internationally. I probably should learn conversational Czech, but I'm more interested in learning Spanish.

The nightlife in Prague is awesome and my social life is ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've found having a third space is useful. You have your home and your office, find a third that you can fit easily into your daily routine, and spend 1-2 hours there when you can. My train home goes past a library that's open late, so a couple of times a week I'll go there after work with a laptop.

<comment><USER17> I'll second this. Find a place that is close or convenient. Of course if you're the kind of person that is waiting for the next distraction to avoid stuff, then no solution will work. If you're motivated by what you're doing there's nothing that can stop you from having fun building it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've found that an emphasis on a clear spec, decoupling, testing, and producing quality code significantly reduce the "spin up" time that gets ever more daunting in an infrequently-visited project.

A clear spec means that I know what all has to be programmed. Decoupling my components means that I can make changes to my business-logic/back-end without having to make changes to my display/front-end, as long as the interface remains the same. Testing means that I can make changes without fear that I'm going to unknowingly break existing features. Quality code means that I can more easily understand the code that I've written after an absence. The upshot is that I always feel comfortable making a few quick changes, pushing commits, even after being away from the code for a few days.

A few concrete tools for writing quality code: write it to be open sourced, write it to be viewed and collaborated upon; use code quality tests like pylint, jshint, code-climate, whatever is appropriate for your language; display your code quality metric badges in your repo, badges for coverage, built-status, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> It definitely is difficult. No doubt about it. Here are few things you need to remember (or things that helped me):

1: Break down your ideas into smaller ship-able chunks

2: Once you've something presentable, start getting market feedback to see if it would make sense going all in

3: If you don't see much interest, don't give up hope, sometimes it is better communication sometimes pivoting required. This is where you'd decide where you'd like to go. I found reddit to be tremendously helpful in getting feedback.

4: This probably is special case for me but I was giving up on software and getting little depressed / overwhelmed with my current stage in life. I like to do artsy stuff once in a while and so I started getsatvik.com, no-one has bought anything yet but this helps me learn marketing, copywriting and understanding how to sell. So think what you'd like to do as a hobby maybe combining that with your ideas could keep you going.

5: I find teaching people is also a great motivator. I now run a regular meetup in my city, learn some new concepts every month, teach them to other people. I don't get paid for any of this but helps to keep me sane.

6: Sometimes having virtual buddies also help. I now have a 'friend' on reddit who helps me with quick feedback / writing critique (as English isn't my first language) and I help him with doing some programming / teaching.

7: Nothing new or revolutionary here but sometimes connecting with like-minded individuals and organizing an accountability group also helps. If you'd like to connect, I'm happy to be your virtual-buddy!

</comment><comment><USER20> Another question: How do you develop a side project when your employer insists that it owns all intellectual property you produce?

Edit: As far as I know this is a very standard clause in tech company employment contracts, and is perhaps the legal default even in the absence of such a clause. For example, see "Employed to invent" under [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-invention- assignm...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-invention-assignment- agreements.html) .

California is an exception to the above: here employees may retain the rights to IP they create on their own time, not using resources of their employer (including company laptop), and, importantly, not in the same line of business as their employer. In the tech field, the "same line of business" caveat can be killer.

<comment><USER21> In which country is he legally able to do so? He shouldn't be able to control everything you do... I've experienced attempts for that, but not all clauses are enforceable.

<comment><USER20> In the United States, for example.

[http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-patent- right...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-patent-rights- employer-inventor.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are a few ways . . . typically I'm so excited about a side project I'll skip watching TV and spend an hour or two on it at the end of the night.

Time outside the typical 40 hour work week:

Getting up an hour or two earlier than usual.

Spending an hour or two at the end of the night on it.

Same on the weekends, early or late, maybe schedule a 4 hour time on Sat or Sunday afternoon.

Those are really the only three areas to find more time with a 40 hour gig.

Obviously make your main job your priority. Be careful of any IP clauses in your contract if this is building something you want to profit from.

One other possibility, depending on where you work. You could probably use your lunch hour to learn new things, do tutorials. You should probably bring in your own laptop and use your phone's hotspot for this to keep things completely off work hardware/bandwidth.

If it's something you enjoy doing it won't feel like work or like you're missing something.

Make sure you balance this with spending time with family and friends.

I was working full time as an engineer in another field, started doing websites for family and friends, then moved on to developing web applications for clients along with my own side projects during the time slots listed above. It can get tiring along with a 40 hour job. Now I'm consulting full time remote so I work on client work 40 hours a week and use any extra time for my own side projects.

The holidays is a good time to kick off a side project as you'll typically be taking vacation days so you'll have some extra time that you would normally spend commuting, eating lunch, working that you can use for a side project.

Good luck hacking away on your side projects.

</comment><comment><USER23> A little at a time.

Force yourself to do something every day, even if it's only 15 minutes of work. Write a blog post, research a technology, test some code, etc. Just do _something_ to move your project forward. Progress is made in little steps.

As an aside, I've found that with kids, this is the way to get _anything_ done. I just don't have large blocks of time I can spend working on stuff anymore. I've found that although it's inefficient to work in small increments of time, sometimes it's either make zero progress or make a tiny amount of progress.

<comment><USER24> Second this.

I have young kids and am trying to build a side project.

I have found that an hour or two at night and maybe a block of 2-3 hours when my wife can take the kids to friends' place is the best i can hope for.

Its hard to get into any flow in these timeframes however its forced me to organise and prioritise my side project work more than i otherwise would have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a junior college student doing some side projects[0] while taking 21 credits, jogging daily, going to mandatory club events, etc. Those except side projects take more than 40 hrs/week so I guess I have even less time for side projects than you.

I highly recommend you to read this talk script by Chris Wanstrath[1], one of GitHub's founders. Two of his suggestions:

\- Turn off (or lower the frequency of) reading news/RSS/Twitter.

\- Do a bit contribution to side project every day and get a streak. I feel John Resig's GitHub profile illustrates the point best[2].

I'm following these two suggestions on and off for a while, but I want to really do them for the whole year 2016.

And my suggestion is to go to some hackathons. You'll be amazed at how much you can get done during a weekend without distractions. Plus you meet a lot of awesome people, sharpen your skills and win prizes.

[0]: [http://pwu.me/projects/](http://pwu.me/projects/)

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/defunkt/6443](https://gist.github.com/defunkt/6443)

[2]: [https://github.com/jeresig](https://github.com/jeresig)

<comment><USER20> >>I'm a junior college student doing some side projects[0] while taking 21 credits, jogging daily, going to mandatory club events, etc. Those except side projects take more than 40 hrs/week so I guess I have even less time for side projects than you.<<

You're assuming that the OP doesn't have a family or other responsibilities. I suspect that you'll look back on junior college, even with 21 credits and mandatory club events, as a time of carefree existence and plentiful free time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One way (though perhaps not the best and certainly not the only) to look at it is that the forty hour job is a filter. Ideas that don't get worked on are things that deep down don't seem worth working on after hours (never mind quitting the forty hour gig for).

Derek Sivers says a bit about the general problem in this recent interview: [http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/14/creativity- an...](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/14/creativity-and- engineering-with-derek-sivers/)

<comment><USER27> Definitely agree. Who says you have to find time for the side project? I believe if it's an idea you're truly interested in, you'll find time somehow. In the meantime, go spend that time with friends/family, a hobby, or a new TV show (I recommend Fargo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The better question might be to ask what are you doing instead and why. It may be that those things are more important to you, or it may be that you are avoiding other issues.

For me, the challenge in understanding my own choices, is understanding the root of those choices. It can help if you have a neutral third party to talk to about why you choose to do X rather than Y, but barring that there are other techniques you can use.

One is to make an appointment to spend 1 hr a week on some project. When I do this I start with a fresh notebook and pick a time either before I go, or after I get home, from the office to spend on this project. Then when the time comes the first hour is dedicated to writing down in the notebook the goal of what I'm trying to do, why I'm trying to do it, and the things that will have to be true before I can achieve that goal. After an hour I close the notebook and go about my life. The only rule is that during that hour I work on the project and nothing else, and if unavoidedly interrupted I make up the time lost that same day.

The things that make that possible are; It is only an hour, same as watching a TV show or reading through the front page, the notebook retains my mental state between sessions so I don't start out wondering what the heck I was doing last week and what needed to be done.

I found that for me what I really hated was spending an hour coming up to speed on a project and then only having a few minutes to work on it. Very unproductive and very demotivating. But with a process to stop and restart a project in hand, it takes away the restart lag and so I can be productive nearly right away (perhaps 10 minutes reviewing my closing notes from the previous session). Also if my check list is good then I have a good idea of how close I am to the goal.

Time is a finite resource, and learning to budget it will serve you well throughout your career.

<comment><USER29> Are you saying that you work only 1 hour on a project? If so were you able to complete any project? Just wondering how this could be possible?

<comment><USER28> 1 hour a week, 52 hours a year.

The goal though isn't just 52 hours, its a way of testing your desire to work on something against the call of other things.

People, like the author, feel they have no time to do anything else. But they also generally feel that they can spend an hour doing something like watch a TV show or attend some event. So you commit to 1 hour to work on your project a week. And if you are really interested in it and motivated you will find you spend more than that on it. However if you find you can't keep a commitment even to just a single hour, then that is a good indication that it isn't a priority and you should probably accept that and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't think anyone has said this yet: Use your lack of time as a motivator to distill your side project down to the simplest thing that could possibly work (MVP). This is your opportunity to get really good at that. If you can't test out an idea in a weekend, you need more practice at this not more time.

</comment><comment><USER31> Small amounts of time, scheduled regularly, add up quickly.

A few years ago I spent my lunch hour ~3 days a week or so building up a little app for Mac as well as Windows. 3 hours a week is ~150 hours a year. You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish.

The other thing that I think helped was I kept a running list of specific tasks that needed to be accomplished. So instead of spending my hour browsing the web or just doing random stuff, it was an hour of focused time spent towards building the next specific part of the app.

</comment><comment> jon-wood Most of the responses here seem to be from the perspective of people in their twenties without any major commitments other than work, so for the sake of balance I'll throw my two cents in.

I'm in my thirties, married with a two year old son, and working 40-50 hour weeks for a startup, and spend all day Saturdays looking after our son so my wife has time to work on her PhD. Between that lot there's not a lot of spare time, but I'm also in the process of starting a side project I hope to grow into a business.

Recently I've finally managed to get a bit of momentum behind that. The key was to book a week of holiday from work, with the intention of building an MVP during that time. I didn't quite get to something I feel I could sell in that time, but I did make enough progress that I feel like its worth continuing.

The other thing that's working to my advantage is having moved house to be closer to our families. That means I now have 10 hours of train journeys a week over the two days I need to be in the office rather than working from home. Its not an ideal situation to work in, the internet connection is intermittent while traveling through the countryside, and sometimes I'll lose 30-40 minutes waiting for their to be a seat, but it does have the advantage of being a block of time that I can dedicate to it. You can get a surprising amount done in two hours when you focus on it. I'd go so far as to say if you can't make time outside of work, move two hours away from the office, and buy yourself an annual train ticket. Maybe I'll turn it into some sort of coworking movement, bringing together commute hackers.

The other key thing has been to try and notice when I'm wasting time, and to back out fast. There's no leeway for yakk shaving away four hours when that's half the time you have to work on something this week. I will say I have mixed success on that front, having recently lost a week to the decision I should stop using Bootstrap. Eventually I killed that branch, and got back to focusing on what matters, but it was super painful.

Finally, and the critical thing for me at least, is having a side project you truly care about. If you just feel like you should be working on a side project for appearance sake you'll never find the motivation to stick at it. My Github profile can attest to that, with a steady stream of things I spent a few hours on and then got bored of.

I'd love to hear from anyone in a similar situation, and maybe start a mailing list of people who want to support each other. If that's something that interests you, my email address is in my profile.

<comment><USER10> "a mailing list of people who want to support each other"

What a great idea! I have lots of ideas, even start working on them from time to time, but then always got distracted in one way or another and leave these projects unfinished. Some support and the feeling of responsibility should really help. If you are serious about it, please add me too (my email can be found on profile page).

<comment> jon-wood I couldn't see your address on your profile page - I'm not quite sure this warrants a mailing list, but drop me an email, I'd love to chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Dedicate time to doing. I took at least one day that was me time, where I went to Starbucks after work and spent a few hours every week cranking out code. The disconnection from your home life, whether that be your significant other, or the mountain of TODOs around the house helped me to focus massively.

Don't beat yourself up over it taking a long time to get something together. Its going to take a lot longer to get a side project off the ground whilst working. I found that the first few weeks were the hardest, mainly because you'll be looking at a project that looks like nothing. As it evolves over time, it'll start to look like _something_ and as such this in itself is motivation to find the time to work on it.

Stupid as it sounds. I also didn't buy a domain. You might think that 'oh I have an idea I'll buy a domain and go do it' but the inverse was true for me. The amount of domains I have that I have done nothing with is testament to that. The risk of someone else buying the domain I wanted was motivation, anyway, domains don't matter in the general grand scheme of things. If your product isn't shipped, domains aren't worth shit.

Focus on small wins. Create a Trello board with a few columns. TODO, DOING, DONE. Keep the tasks small, and when you have them done, move them over. Whilst not directly an answer on "where to find the time" it will help to keep you motivated to have a big column of "DONE" with stuff in it. Especially when you are going to have nothing visual at the start.

I have an extremely understanding partner, but I also set aside time when I put the laptop down. Stupid as it sounds, actually working on a laptop rather than a desktop worked for me as when everyone else was watching tv, I could code, and you can take your work with you so when you have some free time you can work.

</comment><comment><USER33> I personally would suggest thinking about the project in your spare time first. I find that it's so much easier to context switch if my objective is only to think about a problem I want to solve. This way I can do this a lot more frequently throughout the week with little to no effort.

And only once I've thought enough about it, and am comfortable I have a solid plan and have carved out a precise scope / objective for my coding session, will I open an editor and start coding.

The trick I think is once you can visualize exactly what you want to do you can knock it out relatively quickly. I think it can become stressful if you're always sitting down to code in your spare time, when you're not prepared with a specific plan. You can waste a lot of time spinning your wheels when you do that, which in turn can make you feel like you're wasting a lot of time and have nothing to show for it.

</comment><comment><USER34> In bursts!

I try to do something meaningful for my side project about once a week. If it's side-project night, I put my phone on airplane-mode and tell the lady- friend I'm booked up so I can concentrate for a solid ~5 hours without interruptions.

Obviously you can't do this super often while balancing the rest of life, but it's reasonable to get it in about once a week.

The tricky part is to let ideas for it simmer on the back-burner of your mind, but not to let the flame go out completely. It's nice to walk into your session with a full agenda and a general grasp of how you're going to implement it with caveats in mind, which you can fill in during the downtime of the week. However, it's also easy to completely forget about your project.

You can counter that part by getting friends involved!

</comment><comment><USER35> The theory is simple, practise is difficult. Aim for the absolute most bare bones side project you can, and throw a few weekends (or other time to spare) at it, and get it going. From there, improve when you can. Given time, your dream project emerges.

</comment><comment><USER36> Stop reading, start doing.

Imagine someone asks how do I train to run a marathon?

Start by running 1 minute a day and add a minute every few days, after 2-3 years you'll be running long enough to run a marathon.

There is no substitute for doing, there are no shortcuts, there is no miracle pill (well, ADHD meds may help...)

You must actively decide that your sideprojects are more important than whatever else you are doing, speaking of which now that my two kids are asleep, and my fiance is reading, it's time for me to stop commenting on HN and start working on my side project.

Time is not something that is lost or found, you have a fixed finite amount of it, and it is continually decreasing the only thing you can do is choose what you do with it.

<comment><USER37> By that logic, The day before the full Marathon you ran a Marothon-1 minute, and the day before a Marathon-2 minutes...

Even if you are capable of keeping that up, it might be better to increase distance, otherwise you might be just slowing down, making no progress...

<comment><USER36> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory)

<comment><USER37> Yeah, all my poor analogies are allegorical too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I work 40hr/week yet I have plenty of time to work on my stuff. Of course it would be much better if I could fully commit to my project but hey i still need money to sustain myself and need to compromise with reality. Anyway, sometimes when I really get into it I can even work more hours than my day job. In extreme cases, I would leave work at 6pm, get home by 6:30, take a shower and start working at 7pm. Work on my project for 11 hours until 6am, and go to sleep and wake up at 9am to get to work by 10am. I take nap during lunchtime (45 minutes to 1 hour). Of course I can't keep this up forever so I only do this when I am super motivated and can probably do it for a couple of weeks to a month at a time. But even when I'm not in this crazy mode there's plenty of time to work. Just doing half of what I described will give you 5 hours * 5 days = 25 hours per week, plus if you're really committed you can work all weekend 12 hour * 2 = 24 hours (for saturday and sunday), which adds up to around 50 hour/week. "Not having time" just means you're not motivated enough. Before you say "yeah right you can do that because you're some abnormal crazy guy, no sane person can do that and it's not even healthy" I want to tell you that motivation is not something people are born with. Instead of trying to wait till motivation finds you, actually start "doing" something and you will gain momentum and next thing you know you will be super motivated and don't have to worry about these things.

<comment><USER39> Only do this if you want to be totally turned off by programming within a few months/years. Working 40 hours a week at a computer and then coming home for more is bad enough for your body. But beyond that, any single activity reaches a point of diminishing returns when engaged in to the exclusion of all others. It might not happen right away, but at some point there will likely be regret that you didn't spend more time with people you cared about or that you didn't take more time off to enjoy life's other activities.

<comment><USER29> > Working 40 hours a week at a computer and then coming home for more is bad > enough for your body.

If this is the case then how to get financial independence? Are you suggesting that it is good to work forever?

<comment><USER38> Most people live their lives just fine without financial independence, because they put higher priority in other activities in their lives. Entrepreneurs are different types of people, they put higher priority on being able to control their own destiny and because of that they can push through the comfort zone. If you're not motivated enough, of course it would be hard to do this. If entrepreneurship was that easy and rewarding for everyone, everyone would be doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just pick something you really enjoy and it should be feasible.

I started SocketCluster ([http://socketcluster.io/](http://socketcluster.io/)) on the side about 2 years ago while working 45+ hours a week for a startup.

I still spend about 10 to 20 hours a week on it. It's been a great learning experience - The kind of experience that's impossible to get from just being a full-time developer.

</comment><comment><USER41> If you be honest, almost every suggestion won't work. When you feel the need to really finish a project, you just cannot hold back and start to code in the night or during your normal work day.

What I can suggest (for your sanity and social life): \- Pick the weekends (one or two days) where you code for 5-6 hours. \- Do it during your work day. If you want something out of your side project, just don't work hard enough at work so you have ressources left for yourself \- Ask your boss for a 25 hours working week or try to get one day off without salary reductation to see if you be as productive as before. If not, ask for 10% less.

Divide your side project in learning and developing.

Get a book which you can read during your commune, or even an ebook which you can read during work.And then, at home, take a weekend/one day off/two nights off to develop and code.

I also suggest the Lean StartUp method, which is not only helpful for StartUps, but also for side projects. The key is to develop in small iteration to always have a finish product you can test.

So, don't do everything, pick one little feature, develop it and see where it goes from there.

</comment><comment><USER42> I hope your job is easygoing, not stressful, and <= 40h/week. If not, find one that is. Next, wake up early, work for an hour or two before the job, get home at 6 and work until dinner, and after. Work on weekends. But most importantly, find a co-founder/partner to work on your ideas with you. It will keep you going. And make time for relaxation as well, you will need it to keep going.

</comment><comment><USER43> I work 50+ hours a week already but I still manage to put in three to four hours of side-work every day (on weekdays that's usually 9pm to 1am), in my experience so far:

\- The less correlated your side-project is to your day job, the better. Brain craves novelty, even after I am completely worn out by day work, by the time I've cycled back home I am ready to go again, but at something completely different.

\- Move, I commute by bike and I have seen it make a big difference when you're sitting at a screen 14 hours per day.

\- Make it a routine, at home I have two backpacks always ready, one for work and one for cowork, after dinner I just grab the second one and leave with barely having to think about whether I am staying in or going for another half day of work.

\- Have a dedicated space, I am lucky to have a 24/7 co-working space literally around the corner from where I live or I would not be able to do this, it really helps your brain to physically switch context depending on what you do.

\- It goes without saying, but you ought to really love what you are doing in order to forgo almost everything else...

</comment><comment><USER44> Here's how I'd do it:

My basic advice would be "set up a sustainable business that doesn't take up all your time and takes care of your basic income requirements, then develop an idea once you're financially independent enough to do so".

Maxing out your time now, while you're working, is the most stressful way to do anything. Developing something based on your own idea is the most risky way of doing anything.

Rather that focusing on your own ideas, focus on other people's problems, then figure out how to get paid to solve them.

Reduce your bottom line agressively to maximise the chances you can sustain yourself without taking up all your time.

Solve problems and get paid to do it, then systemise that and get other people to do the work. Now you have a business that doesn't take up all your time, but which takes care of your basic income requirements.

You can choose to spin a product off based on that, ie. by automating that business and selling it as a product, or you could use a product extension of that business to increase revenue, or you could just work on something completely tangential.

</comment><comment><USER45> Assuming that you have the energy to do coding after work, it seems like this is really a question about time management rather than about motivation.

One thing I'm trying right now and that seems like a good first step is to track what you spend time on every day. I'll give you an example. Right now I'm home for Thanksgiving, which is sort of a vacation, but I also want to be productive. Here's what I did today:

11:50-12:45 - Wake up, internet

12:45-1:00 - <USER4>

1:00-8:30 - NFL, hang out with friends

8:30-9:00 - Quick work out, shower

9:00-10:45 - Dinner + work

10:45-11:25 - Break, clean up, shave, wash up

11:25-11:50 - <USER4>

11:50-12:00 - Pats-Broncos OT

12:00-2:00 - <USER4>

2:00+ - Relax, sleep

I don't know if that was the most helpful example given that I'm on vacation, but whatever. I've found that I spend a lot more time on little things like eating and cleaning than I'd think/hope (I'm a very slow eater).

Anyway, I think that having good data on where you spend your time is very useful. Both from a logical planning perspective, and from an emotional/motivational perspective.

Prioritization, motivation and efficiency are topics that are too big and too well covered for a comment of mine here to be useful.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have a full time software engineer job, and I work on a side project which is a HN Android app.

If your side project is a freelance one, you're probably in for a tough time, due to external pressure.

If your side project is a hobby one, my advice is to start small, and plan subsequent iterations small as well, so you can usually finish in say within a weekend. Anything bigger will make you feel overwhelmed. Also be prepared to sacrifice some personal time for your project, it's a hobby anyway.

I'm assuming that your side project has little in common with your main job, otherwise there is no fun in doing it. If that's the case, I find it especially useful if the side project can, in a way, contribute to the main project. E.g. you experiment things you want to learn with side project, and apply it into your main project some time in the future. This way you have a good cycle and motivation to keep innovating/experimenting. Making your code/project public so others can use/contribute is also a good motivation to keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER47> I know I'm coming late here, I really hope I'm not too late for you to read this.

I have two children - a four month old and a 5 year old. I tried working around the time they were up and I always felt guilty. I also work full time, loose an hour a day commuting (or there abouts), etc. The point I'm making is that I'm lucky to find a few hours free each day as it is.

Here's what I'm doing now and it's working well. Mentally, I'm in a good space, not feeling burnt out, feel like I'm seeing the kids enough, etc.

* I get up early. I have found going to bed early gives much better sleep. I am naturally an evening person so this was hard but getting up early (around 6am) I've found makes the days feel longer. This negates an anxious behaviour of mine feeling "there isn't enough time to do anything". Sometimes when I get up early I'll do an hour or so of work, othertimes I'll head in to my day job early so I can get out early.

* Learn about the pomodoro technique; it's invaluable and you can get a lot done. Break your work into Pomodoro slots (I use 25 minutes) and plan before you start. This way when you have a spare block or so you can just do that.

* Try to find 2-3 hours a day uninterrupted to work.

* Never forget you need time to yourself to unwind and relax. Make this a priority.

* Don't neglect your family. You will be far happier and productive when they're happy, at least that's what I've found.

* Never, ever work on weekends. You need time to yourself and do things you want to do.

* Get a good nights sleep

* Eat healthy. Make sure you get your 5 / 2 a day.

* Exercise during lunch. I go for a walk every day and love it.

Good luck! You'll get there with perseverance.

</comment><comment> d--b Working 1 hour every morning before breakfast worked out well for me. Important things to consider: 1. your life is more important than your side project, so don't prevent yourself from going out at night just to work on your side project, it's ok to skip days. 2. Don't screw around over thinking what you need to implement. Just make a list of small tasks and do them. It's incredible what you can get out of 1 hour with a clear goal and no distraction.

Edit: my work week was 60hr per week. There was no chance I could do anything at night as I was completely drained. Weekends were off bound too. I found that when you do as little as 1 hour a day, if you don't believe in the project you'll just drop it. If you really think you can get something out of it, you'll keep going and you'll get to some place good reasonably fast.

</comment><comment><USER48> Weekends have plenty of time.

But any good side hack will just make the time for itself. It's that stuff you can't not do so you stay up slightly late and will be slightly more tired at work but hey, so what, you'll feel so good about it that you can't wait till the work day is over and you can continue again. Then it'll fade away and you'll get more interested in work again until one night you figure out where you left with the side project and hey, there you go again.

Personally, I've never been in such a good job that I _would always have_ interesting things to do. So, I've observed that my home-hacking is strictly proportional to the amount of boring stuff at work. I need my dose of programming and if I can't get it at work, I'll get it at home. This kind of takes care of side projects on its own.

</comment><comment><USER49> I do a lot of side projects. I feel like I am lazy but my friends always ask how I manage to find time for it. Which feels weird because it doesn't feel like a lot of time.

Basically, I work 1-2 hours in the mornings, not every day but a few times a week, either after I drop my daughter off at school, or before they wake up. Some nights I work after they go to bed (I am working on a side project right now, it's 10:20pm on a Sunday). Sometimes I stay up late if I can deal with being a little tired the next day. I'd say I get on average about 5 hrs a week out of this. Then, sometimes I carve out weekend days where I get 8-10hrs of work. Other days I'll watch the kids and let my wife go out to a movie or out with her friends to make up for it.

Slow and steady progress. Have realistic expectations. Just chip away at it.

</comment><comment><USER50> An interesting observation.

If someone here asked "How do I have time to work 60h a week at my day job, 40h already feels like a lot" \- You would get a lot of responses telling you about work life balance, and that 40h is plenty of work - heck in Europe they work 36.

On the other hand after coding a full day, most people here suggest going home and coding side projects.

I think each person is different, but this is HARD to do. If you are working and thinking real hard at your day job, I don't think you can really go home and do something useful on a side project. I have had periods where I spent 3 weeks going to meetings and writing tech docs - in those it would be easy to go home and code. But if I already put in a solid 40h of code? Forget about it, my brain can only code so much good code a week.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have been doing this for a couple years now. I am about to make some big changes, as a result of the side work taking off.

I work early/late, so that side work wouldn't conflict with my day job. I worked Saturdays.

I'm a systems guy, not a dev as much as I _really_ want to be. I'm getting into automation stuff, and learning enough programming to help me be a better sysadmin (Ruby, for Chef).

I'm always reading, and working to improve my skills (technical, and otherwise)

I took every opportunity to do side work, for some extra money. It's paid off well, and now the scales are tipping to where I've easily replaced my day job income.

I have an email address listed in my profile. I'd be happy to talk more, if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER52> So what are you doing when not working? Maintaining a house? Watching TV? Stuck in a commute? Taking care of elder parents? Volunteering at the red cross? Raising a family?

Give up something you value less than development. Move closer to remove commute. Let someone else volunteer. Give the family involuntary free space.

How about: Find or make an alone space. Set aside 12pm to 10pm every Sunday for your project. You disappear from the world, and only do the project. No maintenance/family/commute/charity/TV is allowed to interrupt.

This gives you 10 hours per week, or 25% of full time. If you spend half of your working time in unproductive meetings, it's more like 50%.

It can be done. Is it what you want to do?

</comment><comment><USER53> (never only) 40hr/week job (project manager), a wife and a year old child

I am just about to launch my second big(ish) side project.

When outside my "real job", the priorities are with my child and my wife. So the time for anything else is scarce and the most is done after both of them go to bed.

\- limit your TV

\- limit your distractions on the computer (I use RescueTime)

\- learn to differentiate between motion and action ([http://jamesclear.com/taking-action](http://jamesclear.com/taking-action))

\- automate everything you can

\- motivation, motivation, motivation (when sitting on the toilet you aren't thinking about your side project, you don't want it bad enough)

<comment><USER54> \- outsource

<comment><USER53> I build so I can learn new skills. So until now outsourcing wasn't a part of the master plan. But you are correct, delegating the right way is also an option to boost development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Wake up one hour early, and immediately start working on your project. Remove all distraction: don't open email, don't log into social media - just start work on the idea. When you have five minutes left, leave yourself notes on what the next day's work should be.

When you devote one solid hour of absolute focus to a project, you get an incredible amount done. When I use this process for side projects, that first hour of side project work is by far the most productive hour of the day.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe a bit late to the party but id recommend reading How to live life on 24 hours a day by Arnold Bennett ([http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274)).

It's helped me a lot with the same issue. The main idea is to ensure that you don't overreach but start small and focus on improving or researching one thing at the time and only on weekdays.

</comment><comment><USER57> I worked on my first app next to a 40hr/week job. It wasn't really hard, since I liked my side project. My schedule from Mo-Fri looked like something like this:

7AM: Get up, shower, cook breakfast

8AM: Take the bus to work

5PM: Come home, buy groceries, cook dinner, etc.

7PM: Work on side project

1AM: Go to bed

This worked well since I lived alone during the week (on the weekends I travelled to my home town and stayed with my girlfriend)

I got plenty of stuff done in that year.

The most surprising thing was that I wasn't really more productive when I quit my day job.

<comment><USER58> You are lucky, you need only 6 hours of sleep.

<comment><USER57> After a few days of sleeping only 6 hours I get irritable and slow though, and then I'll fall asleep on the couch in the afternoon. It's not sustainable, and probably not healthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Projects to test technologies/patterns - try to find ways to incorporate those in your current job so you can do the learning at work.

Other side projects - work together with a friend or perhaps hire someone so you can split the workload for something you want to build?

Organise your free time in a way you have time for extra projects - ie skip TV, cut down on social media etc. But you have to really love the side project to be able to pull it through

</comment><comment><USER60> Use your paycheck to directly pay a braindead coder with zero creativity or ambition who does nothing more than meet requirements, like you're fucking dictating to them. for added oomph they can be in a low-income country, but people with no creativity or initiative or ability to translate requirements into code aren't worth much anywhere.

So rather than code anything yourself, just give htem requirements that read like a to-do list for yourself, after you've already doen all the theoretical leg-work:

#1.1 to-do: when this form is submitted, pop up this confirmation form:

#1.1.1 Confirmation asking if user wants to leave page? #22.214.171.124 if user clicks yes, redirect them to the link clicked #184.108.40.206 if user clicks no, keep them on page.

#1.1.2 Form submission: when user submits form, run valdation

#126.96.36.199 if the name is not betwene 2 and 30 characters show an error "Name must be between 2 and 30 characters"

#220.127.116.11 if the email address is not in the format (one or more characters or numbers) @-sign (one or more characters or numbers) and contain at least one period after hte @-sign, then error message reads "Please input a valid email address."

and so on and so forth. stuff that makes your eye water regarding how incredibly, uselessly boring it is, like you're an executive and can't even tell your business manager to accept a bid, you must fucking dictate the letter itself.

However, as incredibly annoying as this process is, it takes you approximately half an hour to do a day's worth of work with it. You can review progress every day in half an hour over breakfast.

So, there is your answer regarding how to build a side project while you're working full-time: manage dirt-cheap disposible developers on Odesk or Elance who get off on adding absolutely zero benefit whatsoever of any kind to a project, besides doing exactly what they are told in painstaking detail.

This is being made from a throwaway because I haven't heard this idea expressed and people might not realize that this is the answer. As for my tone/style, I think it's completely wrong for any developer to agree to be in such a role, and the REAL correct solution would be to manage a creative, contributing developer who gets equity in the result and has more free time than you. But what do I know.

<comment><USER61> Serious question: has any product or service of lasting value and success ever come out of an approach like this? It runs counter to most commonly-held beliefs on how great ideas turn into great products.

<comment><USER60> absolutely, but nobody talks about this. This is simply handing off requirements, contracting them out. Your question can be rephrased as "has any product or service of lasting value and success ever had any part of it contracted out" and clearly the answer is yes. Not everything is built in- house. People don't usually mention it however.

(it's not accepting my edits on the original comment, I am trying to change "aren't worth much anywhere" (which sounds like a value judgment) to "don't command a high rate anywhere.")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Stop. Watching. TV.

Or, at the very least, prune it back to one or two current shows you follow. TV is by far the most significant time sink in most people's lives.

</comment><comment><USER63> I tend to work on my side projects for fun whenever I feel like it. Fortunately I'm really into my side project, so when I come home I often feel like doing some work on it no matter how tired I am after my day job. I don't really have dedicated times for it and do as much as I feel like or have time for that day, whether it's 10 minutes or 2 hours.

</comment><comment><USER64> Start small, work up to bigger projects. By small, I mean 300-1kloc. Or whatever you can bang out in a single sitting. It needs to be cool enough that you feel motivated to finish it too.

Accept that you can probably only get ~8-12hrs of good work on side projects done a week (except when you're really inspired, or when you can spend a weekend on it).

</comment><comment><USER65> Waking up early helps. Also, I've picked up on this small but very effective time saver - always leaving the computer in exact same state from where to continue the next day. This really helps me jump right into context when I leave something in between and open it the next day. I always hibernate, never shutdown my computer !

</comment><comment><USER66> I think that if you love something you will find time to spend. I have a 40hr/week full time job (i am not a developer) but development is my hobby and i start my challenge to take the chance and find a job as a developer. You also need a lot of support if you have family. I am blessed because my wife give me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER67> When I am done working on something, I jot down what I got done and any notes to help me get started quickly next time. This lets me juggle multiple things a little easier.

I actually created an iOS app this summer to handle this. [http://getbalanceapp.com](http://getbalanceapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER68> A masochist approach: I live in a Paris suburb and have a full time job in Paris. I use my 3 hours of daily train home<>work travel for side projects (web dev & co). There you have it: move further away from your job and take the train (away enough to take a non crowded train and not the subway :-)

</comment><comment><USER69> I couldn't do it. I live with my girlfriend and at the time when I had 40hr/week job it was just terrible to work on a side project.

I was feeling tired and/or guilty in the same time. Then I decided to find a part-time job and finally became a freelancer. Much better on that matter.

</comment><comment><USER70> Post some contact information and I'll be happy to discuss in more detail. Meanwhile, do you have family or anything else that takes up time outside of your 40 hours? If not, you should easily be able to find 16 hours on the weekends by "working" a 7 day week.

</comment><comment><USER71> There's 168 hours in a week. Get up earlier. Stay up later. Sleep less. Put in time on weekends.

<comment><USER13> Sleeping less is not really a sustainable or good idea. Nobody's productive or happy if they're sleep deprived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> A masochist approach: I live in the subdurbs of Paris and have a full time job in Paris. I use my 3 hours of daily train for side projects (web & co). There you have it: move away and take the train (away enough to take the train not the subway :-)

</comment><comment><USER72> The real question is what you are doing the rest of the time you are not at work. If you have a family, that might take up another 32 hours a week. If you sleep 8 hours, there goes another 56 hours. Hmmm, you still have 40 hours left...

</comment><comment><USER73> At my previous work place I managed to reduce my work to part time so I worked 60% there, that meant I had 40% time to develop my own company.

Search for Einstein and the patent office for someone for an idea that you can copy.

</comment><comment><USER74> i am commuting to work by train (50 minutes each direction); that gives me some time to tinker and to read - these commutes are of great value to me.

</comment><comment><USER75> Weekday: Wake 9am, Work & Lunch 10-6, Dinner 7-8, Side Project 8-11, Sleep 12-9, Repeat.

Weekends are for chores and socialising.

</comment><comment><USER76> I purposely take a train instead of driving. I use that time to work on a my side project.</comment>


Thinky 1.0 – Light Node.js ORM for RethinkDB - <AUTHOR> http://thinky.io/documentation/introduction/

<comment><USER2> Is ORM the correct term? I understand RethinkDB to be a non-relational database.

<comment><AUTHOR> RethinkDB actually has Joins -- [http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/table- joins/](http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/table-joins/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used Thinky on a few little side projects and loved it! Definitely check it out if you are using Node and RethinkDB.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. I've been using Mongoose with MongoDB with my latest Node project, but I've really wanted to take a closer look at RethinkDB. Thinky reaching 1.0 might just be the catalyst to do so.</comment>


Ask HN: Are taglines on websites obsolete? - <AUTHOR>

Was wondering if anyone knew of well designed headers with taglines or if this type of branding in headers is dead. <comment><USER2> If they're marked up well in a page they can be beneficial for SEO, or used as a short summary of the expected content of the website/purpose of the business.

A lot of website use them in the page title as well as being displayed in the header: Page name | Site: Tagline

Some examples:

\- Smashing Magazine — For Professional Web Designers and Developers

\- The Next Web - International technology news, business & culture

Some interesting articles:

\- [http://www.onextrapixel.com/2013/01/14/effective-website- tag...](http://www.onextrapixel.com/2013/01/14/effective-website-taglines- getting-the-message-across/)

\- <http://www.simplewebsiteservice.com/how-to-write-a-tagline/>

\- <http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/07/blog-taglines/>

\- <http://intuitivewebsites.com/articles/website-taglines/></comment>


Why software engineers will be obsolete by 2060 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/software-engineers-obsolete-by-2060/ <comment><USER2> I find the article confusing. The title claims software engineers will be "obsolete". The text claims that what will happen is that their role will "shrink". Then it concludes by saying that "there will still be specialized software engineers and plenty of computer science-minded humans in the future".

Looks very similar to what I used to hear in the 80s, about CASE tools.</comment>


Show HN: Simple algorithmic trading in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloud9trader.com

<comment><USER2> There was a company last week that showed off their bitcoin algos and I wrote a comment that basically said don't use them and I felt bad about it for the rest of the week. I'll try to just be positive here:)

To weigh in on the mention of using doubles for finance....

Using double for finance, perfectly fine. All trading systems I've seen use double, from HFT systems to deep learning AI systems that open and close potions over months. Double is fine for most algo trading, heck the exchanges and dark pools I've talked with use double.

What you can possibly do with this.

1) Learn how to write the logic of an trading algorithm.

2) learn the basics of technical trading, with MACD, Keltner channels, vortex and Bollinger band indicators. They've definitely put the time in to getting the indicators that FX traders like to use.

What you can't do with this system.

1) React to currency fluctuations on a tick by tick basis. FX is just so fast and precise, there is a reason that professional FX traders mix FX spot quotes from multiple sources, we use 4 at the fund I work at and some use up to 10 sources. There is also a reason why FX is quoted to 4 decimal places while equities are to 2, sometimes 3 for penny stocks.

2) Use this in a real world setting. I can't see any privacy policy or contract indicating what happens when shit goes wrong. We are talking about money here, you can't just half ass this kind of thing.

Plus they use FXCM which had this new out about them:

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230425560...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304255604579406640141660638)

> LONDON—Foreign-exchange trading firm FXCM Inc. FXCM +0.08% agreed to pay > fines and refunds totaling almost £10 million ($16.7 million) to settle > allegations by a U.K. financial regulator that the company withheld profits > from clients and failed to inform British authorities that it was under > investigation in the U.S.

> The Financial Conduct Authority said that U.K. units of FXCM withheld £6 > million from customers on foreign-exchange transactions between August 2006 > and December 2010. The regulator said the broker pocketed profits when > exchange rates moved in its customers' favor while a trade was in process, > but it passed on losses that occurred on other trades.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lean algorithm will comfortably execute every tick even in a busy market. Of course if it can't be processed before the next tick comes in, subsequent executions will run late, though we leave this up to the trader and hope to just provide the most performant execution environment we can.

We find no issues running scripts of reasonably high complexity. Of course if you have a particularly heavy algorithm it may be better suited to running at interval close.

With regard to legal position, you're absolutely right. While we're in beta you can connect to live broker accounts, though we are blocking order requests from actually being sent. We want to be water tight both technically and legally before we full launch with regulatory authorization, lifting this restriction and allowing real money to be risked.

As with brokers, we just want to support as many as we can. FXCM were a natural first choice for integration as they have excellent support for API solutions and have the most fully featured FIX implementation we've come across. Of course it's up to the trader to establish if any conflict of interest scenario exists between themselves and the broker.

<comment><USER3> If the algo falls behind, it's usually better to throw away intermediate data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > We believe algorithmic trading is simple

Trading might be simple but being profitable definitely is not.

<comment><USER5> I'm in the "professional automated trading" space. This is by far the most common vendor mistake. "We make trading simple!" is pretty much a surefire way to mediocrity at best.

"We make tax law simple!"

"We make heart surgery simple!"

^^ similar silly things, only you don't ever see them

The thing is, no one actually DOES make anything simpler. They just restrict the toolset with which you can solve problems to things that work for the 80% cases.

<comment><USER6> Would you mind giving any examples?

<comment><USER7> Quick example, I want to build a dynamic portfolio based on a subset of S&P 500, with no sectors exposure, no market exposure (delta and beta flat), no capitalisation exposure, and I want to avoid trading a stock from one week before until one week after their earning announcements. This is a very simple example of a common portfolio universe but tools like quantopian and cloud9trader (even though the latter doesn't support stocks yet so they're out of scope here) just don't provide the required data. I can't find an index historical composition, security data doesn't include its market cap, its sector, the next earnings announcement date. I can't even start working on my signals since I'm unable to select my stocks.

<comment><USER8> I don't think this platform is for equities (yet?). They only support FXCM, which is a spot FX outfit. Based on the pricing, it seems to me these guys are targeting, mainly, retail FX traders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks cool! Another: [https://www.quantopian.com](https://www.quantopian.com)

<comment><USER10> This is actually interesting if you combine it with the other HN thread currently on the FP. Its about pyrasite.com, which allows you to read/write into another python process. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8160149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8160149)

Im wondering how they do this.

<comment><USER11> You linked to the wrong thread. I believe you meant this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161586)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Writing critical code in JavaScript? That's interesting.

<comment><USER13> Hey, well, if you're going to engage in a practice that potentially destabilizes the entire global economy, why _not_ do it in javascript?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope to not come off as too critical, but there's a ridiculously wide margin between this and what trading firms in the low latency space do.

I don't know of a single firm that's successful in the time horizon that a lot of pseudo-HFT systems operate in. (The 10ms-3s range) And that's assuming an ideal fee situation...

Most of the people ignoring the LL arms race target RV opportunities on the 30s+ range. This involves taking a pretty big step back from microsctructure/toxicity models.

<comment><USER15> > Most of the people ignoring the LL arms race target RV opportunities on the > 30s+ range. This involves taking a pretty big step back from > microsctructure/toxicity models.

Would you mind explaining more about this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Type safety lets you avoid all sorts of wonderful JS bugs :) [https://www.quantconnect.com](https://www.quantconnect.com)

<comment><USER17> who needs type safety when you have all the web scale of javascript?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great concept, looking forward to checking it out. Just curious, is this the same team that did Cloud9IDE? (c9.io) or just a naming coincidence?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, purely naming coincidence... at the moment only aspiring to provide as excellent a development workspace as Cloud9IDE does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So there is a reason you don't see much financial stuff written in JavaScript, doubles plus financial really don't mix.

<comment><USER6> A double can store every integer from -2^53 to 2^53, which seems sufficient to do financial work.

2^53 is 9,007,199,254,740,992

If you want to denote that the last three digits are for fractional dollars (i.e. each integer represents 1/10th of a penny) then you can store any monetary value from -$9 trillion to $9 trillion.

EDIT: Note that it's tempting to think that you can skip converting decimal currency to integer as long as you only use <= 3 digits after the decimal and you're storing values of less than 9 trillion, i.e. it's tempting to think you're safe storing a value like $1,283.212 directly in a double without converting to integer. But I'm pretty sure that's mistaken. You always need to convert to integer so that you're storing 1,283,282 in a double, not $1,283.212

The reason is because certain decimal values which can be represented in base 10 can't be represented in base 2. For example, $0.1 can't be stored into a double as-is; if you try to store 0.1 into a double, you'll get:

      0.1000000000000000055511...

which is where the inaccuracies can start to come into play. Whereas if you convert $0.1 to integer, you'll be storing the value 100 into a double, which comes out to exactly 100 without any error.

Of course, the error may be so small as to be insignificant, but the point is, I'm absolutely certain that integers between -2^53 and 2^53 can be perfectly represented by doubles, but I'm not certain that <= 3 digits of decimal precision can always be accurately represented by doubles for values of less than 9 trillion.

EDIT2: You have to be careful when converting between currencies, too. For example, right now $2 = 204 yen. If you're storing yen, 2^53 yen is different from 2^53 one-tenth-pennies, so the max value that you can store is specific to each currency. This seems like potentially a tricky problem, and may be what the parent commenter was referring to when saying doubles aren't so good for financial work. Still, though, 2^53 integers of precision may be sufficient regardless of which currency you're using.

<comment><USER20> You're right, that's why some languages have built in data types that take care of this issue for you (i.e. decimal in C# or BigDecimal in Java)[1].

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use- doubl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-double-or- float-to-represent-currency)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sorry if I missed it - I couldn't see on your site which brokers you intend to connect with for live trading. Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently support live connections to FXCM. The welcome page gives you the option of choosing a demo account or sticking in FXCM details.

We will be adding a wide selection of brokers to that list and will prioritize on basis of demand.

Please let us know if there are any particular brokers you'd like us to support.

<comment><USER22> Integration with Oanda would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oanda offer FIX connectivity, so very doable - we've already built FIX adapters in NodeJS. Will get the ball rolling.

<comment><USER23> Having worked with FIX, I feel for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It looks like this is only for currency trading at the moment. Do they allow other assets to be traded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently FXCM (the first broker we've integrated with - more to come) offer forex in the US and also CFDs on indices, treasury and metals elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Could anyone find a list of what markets this supports?

</comment><comment><USER26> Your login, register and demo links are not functioning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Can't see any issues our side and getting plenty of successful registrations. Which browser please?

<comment><USER26> Chrome 36. Refresh solved the problem (seems the buttons silently fail if there are network issues). Now having trouble connecting to the broker servers. Network on my end is now fine, though.

I was waiting to see the thing in action before commenting, but here goes anyway. What are your latencies like (market data and orders)? Do your algo's have to depend entirely on current indicators/market data, or is there a way to use historical data? I'm a former HFT/algorithmic trading systems dev myself and the performance requirements in that particular domain was pretty high. At one point, even C++ and close-packed binary data transfer wasn't enough. I was wondering how you're managing with Javascript?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please let me know if you're continuing to have issues. All seems fine my end.

You can stick the following in your browser console to log server latency stamps on incoming market data:

require(["registry"], function (registry) { var instrument = registry.get("instruments").get("EUR/USD"); instrument.on("tick", function (data) { console.log("Server latency (ms):", data.get("serverLatency")); }); });

Of course replace "EUR/USD" for whichever instrument you want to monitor. 10-20ms is typical for comms between our instances and the brokers (we get similar results for outgoing trade execution requests, factoring in the round trip).

Our stack is largely JavaScript. We've found NodeJS to be blisteringly fast and lending itself perfectly for this kind of application (low memory, high throughput, heavy processing).

We have a backesting framework for running against historical data. Do you have a requirement for pulling historical data into an algorithm during live trading? We haven't included this in out API, though it would be fairly trivial to implement. It's key though that algos run with as little in memory data as possible. We also include a framework for writing your own custom technical indicators. These are naturally set up to pull historical data so may be what you're after. These and the built in indicators can be used in your script by just calling e.g. sma(10)

<comment><USER26> Works after a re-login. Very nice!! Two final questions:

1\. Does the API allow writing an algorithm that deals with more than one instrument?

2\. Thought about including Bitcoin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Currently the API doesn't support multiple instruments though an individual trading session already pulls in whatever currency pairs are required to convert from term currency to your account currency to calculate unrealized profit and to allow you to set quantity in as a risk percentage of account balance... basically not much work involved in supporting. Will get it prioritised.

Definitely would like to include Bitcoin and are looking into our options at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good job Kafton :) Glad you released it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! thanks buddy!</comment></comment>


Panel @ MIT: Talking to Angel Investors [video] - <AUTHOR> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/371/ <comment><USER2> I think the URL was supposed to be: <http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/371/>

Just a guess though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! Thank you, sorry. IF that doesn't work, there is also:

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/371/></comment></comment>


Strings are not the type you are looking for - <AUTHOR> https://pedrorijo.com/blog/strings-as-types/ <comment><USER2> actually the author re-discovered a pattern called ValueObject[1]

[1] - [https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ValueObject.html](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ValueObject.html)</comment>


Piketty's 'errors' aren't mistakes: They're questions, and he answered them - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/30/pikettys-errors-arent-mistakes-theyre-questions-and-he-answered-them/

<comment><USER2> _My initial take is that Piketty's response contains much verbiage and a bit of fist-shaking, but surprisingly little additional information that would rectify some of the criticisms that have been made._

[http://philmagness.com/?p=890](http://philmagness.com/?p=890)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, this hoo-hah can't be doing sales of his book much harm. His response seems pretty robust to me, and I want to know what inspired the Financial Times to launch such a concerted attack on his book, so I'll get a copy asap.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great. You love the idea of massive global taxes. Stop posting it on HN

</comment><comment><USER5> The trash heap of history awaits.

</comment><comment><USER6> Piketty's economic is rickety. Sorry had to do it ;)

<comment><USER7> Any more rickety than other economics?</comment></comment>


Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jhuangtw-dev/xg2xg <comment><USER2> I had never thought about this before but from this repo I can see all these smart engineers at the big tech firms live within their own walled garden (or prison?).

If it weren't for such a vibrant open source world then they'd really be stuck if they tried to apply their knowledge outside of their companies.

Thanks for sharing the repo!

<comment><USER3> They don't, and if you've got the G-factor, pun intended, to get an offer at Google you can get an offer anywhere. Which, honestly, makes this repository all the more confusing to me.

I'm sure there are some people that have lived only within this ecosystem, but that's the possibly the height of privilege.

<comment><USER4> Eh you'd be surprised, I couldn't even get an interview with some places, got denied from others, but now work at Google doing full stack. Every technology I use though is Google internal, and I don't have much knowledge of full stack development outside of Google. Some companies just test your algo / ds / system design knowledge, and sure I do fine there, but any specific knowledge I'm useless. TBH I think I'm not very good at any one language either because I often have to switch

<comment><USER3> That's what I'm saying, you've proven to be smart enough to figure it out.

Besides it's a moot point since no company that competes with Google for talent asks exclusively domain specific questions in their interview loops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is... optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other large companies' products with open source. For example protobuf is open source, but this makes it look like it isn't.

<comment><USER6> If you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general- purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?

<comment><USER7> Ceph. Although it's slightly upside down with it's block / objects semantics (and as such, you don't exactly get the namespaced append-only semantics of Colossus), and doesn't depend on an excellent separate BigTable-like and Chubby-like layer underneath, instead rolling their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sourcegraph CEO here. Cool to see we are listed as a CodeSearch alternative. We assembled some links to Google internal docs and studies about how they use their Google internal CodeSearch tool. See the links at the top of [https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search](https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search) if interested.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how many of the we-left-Facebook-and-miss-it sorts of services don't have an obvious Google corollary (I'm thinking of Scuba/Honeycomb)

</comment><comment><USER10> What does Google (or others) use for an intranet or team documentation? We're using Quip and it is just a black hole where documents go to die, never be seen again no matter how badly you want to find it.

<comment><USER11> Within Google there are several tools, but the most common (and IMO best) is markdown. (Docs is a close second.)

Pros: Get's checked in like code, gets reviewed, and leaves a nice paper trial of edits.

Cons: Doesn't invite comments/discussions as well as Docs does.

<comment><USER12> For many years there was also a wiki that just didn't refuse to die. I think that when I left there was yet another attempt going on to migrate the content away from it. Surprisingly, one of the main appeals was that its availability was independent of Google's production environment (Borg, GFS and co.). If Docs or Sites were down, which was slightly more likely inside Google because most employees were on dogfood builds, it was going to be a fun day...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really wish they would add memegen to G Suite.

<comment><USER14> Dory is probably more realistic.

<comment><USER13> Dory is available now! If you go into presenter view in slides there is an option to launch it. It will put a short URL at the top of your presentation.

<comment><USER14> It's not the same thing. Slides Q&A is a very poor implementation, and isn't persistent. Doesn't work while someone is not presenting. Not to mention, you don't always need Slides to have people ask questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to see this for other large tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft

<comment><USER16> An equivalent of this for Microsoft is pretty much impossible because there isn't one single way of doing any of these things at the company. Different departments/orgs/teams use different tools, some self-built and some off-the- shelf (including most of the stuff on this list).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great list, and interesting for non-Googlers too. I'd replace, though:

Google -> Real World

free food -> :(

With:

free food -> free time

<comment><USER18> Not sure why you think free food is traded for free time. Free food helps me use my time at work _more_ effectively. I usually have breakfast and lunch with teammates, and it's a mix of socialization and work-related conversations. Half an hour in the free cafe > 45-90 minutes going someplace to buy food.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the purpose of the free food to make you spend more time at work? Seems logical that the alternative is more time at home.

<comment><USER5> Free food is what you make of it.

If your income as a Google engineer is so tight that you have to make sure you get the most out of breakfast and dinner, go for it (but also maybe have a long hard think). The culture may well vary between sites, but this idea that Google (and others) exclusively employ fresh college grads and try to embrace then 24x7 just isn't true. We have families just like anyone else, and they matter to us every bit as much as everyone else's families matter to them.

I for my part am happy that I get a healthy, hot meal for lunch so dinner can be a quick snack when I get home, so I have more time with the kids. The alternative is more time spent on chores.

Please stop spreading these tired tropes.

<comment><USER20> The fact that I don't have to exert ANY energy to decide on where to go for lunch vs. working downtown and having to decide between the same 5 places or spending 20 minutes pulling out and back into parking garages is very nice, and I'm nowhere near a recent college grad. Dinners also nice for those of us without anyone to go home to eat with.

I absolutely hate the "Whats for lunch today?" shuffle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Came to find critique. Left disappointed :(

<comment><USER8> We (Sourcegraph) are interested in building an alternative to Critique at some point in the future, or at least enhancing existing code review tools to offer many of the favorite features of Critique.

What are your favorite/must-have Critique features?

(Also would love to jump on a video chat if you or anyone else is interested, and we could live-stream/share it on YouTube for others interested. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if interested.)

<comment><USER22> I left Google about a month ago and use Github now. Things I miss:

\- the ability to batch all comments in a single send. GitHub has the problem where replies are immediate and don't necessarily represent the PR state.

\- built-in fixes and lints that show up as comments

\- the ability to diff between snapshots instead of losing all previous context every force push to a Github PR.

\- Github's diff is really bad for code moving or changing indentation.

\- auto submit if tests pass and you have an lgtm. It's frustrating having to wait for tests that will probably pass.

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

GitHub actually does some of these things already. Do these solutions help/suffice?

\- Batching all comments in a single send: This is a core GitHub code review feature. You can send immediately by pressing the "Add single comment" button, but if you "Start a review", your comments are batched.

\- Built-in fixes and lints on the PR "Files changed" tab: GitHub Checks offer this, although not many teams have adopted it (that I'm aware of).

\- Changing indentation: The "Diff settings" menu has a "Hide whitespace changes" option, although it's not (afaik) possible to persist this.

\- Auto-submit if tests pass: The Refined GitHub browser extension offers this ([https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined- github](https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github)), kind of. You need to keep the page open in your browser while it finishes.

Also, have you seen [https://reviewable.io/](https://reviewable.io/) (made by an Xoogler) and does that appeal to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there something comparable to the web-based IDE called Cider?

Now that Amazon took cloud9 (c9.io) out of the market, it seems like there is a sizeable void.

I want web-based Spacemacs or Evil! Or even just intelli-j.

<comment><USER24> You should check out Gitpod ([https://www.gitpod.io](https://www.gitpod.io)). It was launched recently and provides disposable, ready-to-code development environments for GitHub projects: [https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing- gitpod-frictionless-...](https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing-gitpod- frictionless-coding-on-github-397g)

IDE is based on Theia ([https://theia-ide.org](https://theia-ide.org)), i.e. VS Code with cloud-first mindset.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, I was looking at Gitpod's pricing page and I do not at all like that clicking on the "Gitpod for teams" link takes me immediately to github to auth my account, uh no thanks.

<comment><USER26> Hi Josh, very sorry about the unfortunate surprise, we're aware of this and agree it's not nice.

We couldn't address it in time for the launch, so basically all the website's pricing options currently point directly to where you can buy them in the app, which implies a GitHub sign-in (where only a valid email is requested, NB).

We're planning to add un-authed pages with more info about each plan, but we also prefer spending our time on improving the developer experience rather than on payment options, so it may take a bit of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Where AWS/GitHub is mentioned, there should be the equivalent Azure stuff, especially for bug tracking, CI/CD, repo subfolder "owners", code review, there's a ton of stuff equivalent or better to buganizer, OWNERS file, etc .

In services there should be vitess since it's both a YouTube and an open source project.

It seem to have a new transactional messaging feature with message sending and Ack: [https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/](https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/), which seem to fill a slightly different niche than rabbitmq/pubsub/etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is no listed equivalent of RecordIO. What do people use for high- reliability journals?

When I needed something like RecordIO to store market data, I couldn't find anything. So I implemented [https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO](https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO). I later learned of [https://github.com/google/riegeli](https://github.com/google/riegeli) (work in progress), which could've saved me a lot of time if only I found it earlier. I think my ChunkIO is a better though.

<comment><USER29> That appears to be exactly RecordIO. It even has transposition. Is there a reason that doesn't meet your requirements?

Edit: it even includes an open source implementation of Cord, which they've renamed to Chain for some reason.

<comment><USER28> > That appears to be exactly RecordIO.

I suppose you mean "exactly" in a figurative way. Riegeli is definitely inspired by RecordIO and is meant as a successor to it but it's not RecordIO.

> Is there a reason that doesn't meet your requirements?

I need to store timeseries with fast lookup by timestamp. Riegeli doesn't support this out of the box. If I had discovered it before I built ChunkIO, I probably would've pulled the low-level code out of it and added timeseries support on top. Or maybe not. Reliability is very important to me and it's risky to use work-in-progress software that may or may not have any production footprint (I'm no longer with Google so I don't know if they use it internally.)

<comment><USER29> I don't understand. RecordIO doesn't support lookup of any kind; it is a linear format. The interface of Riegeli looks to me exactly like the interface to RecordIO. All they've done is removed support for Google's abstract File* storage interface so it can be used by the public.

What you are describing sounds like SSTable. Perhaps you could benefit from LevelDB.

[https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log- structured...](https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured- storage-leveldb/)

<comment><USER28> RecordIO supports a form of random access lookup, although it's rarely used. Riegeli supports random access lookups as a first-class operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anything for Amazon tooling?

For example, I see Pipelines could be replaced by CodeDeploy. I hear nix is similar to the brazil build system. Any other similar mapping by others?

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there an alternative to BigTable which written in C or Go ?

<comment><USER32> [http://www.hypertable.org/](http://www.hypertable.org/) comes to mind. It's a BigTable implementation written in C++, it's fairly mature as well.

<comment><USER31> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> maybe piper|citc -> VFSForGit

</comment><comment><USER34> Hate to be that guy, but why is this even in the front page, let alone #1?

<comment><USER35> Well I guess I'm "that guy" who finds it highly interesting as an outsider with a very high interest in search. Never knew what tools Google's using (never bothered to look it up either) and this list is a feast of "Aha!"'s for me :)

Hopefully that answers your question ;-) Same as with a discussion about patents the other day. It's fascinating to learn / read / understand how big businesses work as someone who's never worked at one nor aspires to work at one, but does want to build one ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> We literally talked about this this week

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092)

Are people really still jerking about a company that's been around for like a 1/4 of a century?

<comment><USER37> How it's the age relevant? I'd guess that the number of engineers and the size of the infrastructure used are far more relevant to just guess how interesting things are.</comment></comment>


Funding Open Source with Marketing Money - <AUTHOR> http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've also been thinking a lot about sustainable open source software, mostly with respect to my own project, rinohtype.

I hate ads and block them whenever possible, and I believe most people hate them as well. I also have this feeling that the concept of advertising somehow doesn't rhyme with open source. It just doesn't feel right. Open source is about freedom and advertising is about being in-your-face. I don't know how to word this in a better way.

People turn to ads because it seems to be the only way to make some money from their work. There must be a better way! But how? The best I can come up with is some sort of automated royalty payment system. Commercial users of the software need to pay a license fee, which is divided among the contributors relative to their contributions. This last part is the hard part. I don't think lines of code is a good measure of the value of a contribution.</comment>


You Should Be Using OpenDNS - <AUTHOR> http://thegeekscompanion.com/home/you-should-be-using-opendns.html <comment><USER2> I used it for a while early on but eventually got fed up with occasional false positives where they limited access to a legitimate site (which in each case, after switching to my ISP's DNS, were fine). I switched to Google's DNS and never had a problem after that.

I believe they've added customizable filtering, etc, in the interim, but the idea of a DNS provider restricting access to _anything_ just didn't sit right with me in the end because of the risk of false positives (systems like SURBL have a similar problem).

<comment><USER3> Customizable filtering has always been their revenue source. I really don't know how they're going to operate when DNSSEC gets rolled out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone who hijacks NXDOMAIN for ad clicks deserves to lose.

</comment><comment><USER5> No way. They redirect all non-existing domains to their advertisement pages, thus screwing DNS queries that should return NXDOMAIN responses.</comment>


Entrepreneur Jacqui Rosshandler Markets Kissable Breath - <AUTHOR> http://www.asmallworld.net/posts/2090849

<comment><USER2> Here, take my gimicky "organic gel" crap and a breath mint and we'll market the hell out of it and sell it for $10.

I'm actually surprised it's so cheap. I'm sure she could crank up the price a bit and people would still go crazy for this.</comment>


Show HN: Just starting... a new CMS called Barley - <AUTHOR> http://getbarley.com

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone has any questions about Barley I'll answer any of them that I can here.

<comment><USER2> Is it a hosted service? Or something I run on my server? What server technology does it use?

<comment><USER3> Currently it is hosted with an API that we are planning to open up at a later date. Right now we want to control the experience until we work out any bugs that may arise.

More options will be available after that which could include a variety of things from installing on your server to just using the API to sync data.</comment></comment></comment>