The Fed stalls the creation of a bank with a novel business model - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/09/22/the-fed-stalls-the-creation-of-a-bank-with-a-novel-business-model <comment><USER3> In a competitive market, if the Fed is paying out 1.95% to bank reserves, there is no reason why my savings account shouldn't pay me that figure minus a spread for expenses and a profit spread.

<comment><USER4> Well nothing stops you from investing abroad, For instance Investing in Indian Bank as a depositor will get you a guaranteed 6-7% return per annum depending on the bank. Long term deposits have even higher return rates, some smaller private banks even give as high as 8-9% on deposits.

<comment><USER5> Holds true only if you convert your currency to INR. The dollar denominated deposits (FCNR) have far lower yield around 3.4% still better than what the US banks offer.

[https://www.icicibank.com/nri- banking/RHStemp/rates.page](https://www.icicibank.com/nri- banking/RHStemp/rates.page)

But I think you need to hold an Indian passport to open these deposits. I am not sure though.

<comment><USER4> Actually even i am not sure about that. There should be some route though, Foreign Institutional Investors do invest so there should be some legal route to circumvent this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is the usual misinformation in this article. Banks don't loan out deposits. Originating loans expands their balance sheet. Deposits are useful to satisfy reserve requirements, when they exist[1], but if the loan is profitable the bank can always borrow the reserves at a lower rate on the interbank market.

[1][https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm)

<comment><USER7> Banks have always loaned out deposits, that's just what they do elsewise they'd be money warehousing operations and there'd be no fractional-reserve banking cartel.

<comment><USER8> I think there's a bit of a subtlety in the parent comment that you may be missing, because the "banks don't loan out deposits" is a reference to fractional-reserve banking.

<comment><USER7> That's the whole basis of fractional-reserve banking, banks loan out deposits while keeping a small percentage on hand (last I cared to check it was 10%) to meet their reserve requirements.

Without deposits banks couldn't loan out anything since they couldn't meet their reserve requirements and they'd basically be insolvent.

So, true, banks don't loan out 100% of deposits but they certainly do loan out deposits.

<comment><USER9> Edit: my comment was misleading and confusing and I'm too tired to fix it right now so into the bin it goes :)

<comment><USER8> No, that's not correct at all. It does mean that the back loans out an amount of money equal to 90% of its deposits. In some sense it's not the "same" money because the deposit amount is counted as money in its own right... both the amount of money in the loan and the amount of money in the deposit is counted as "money supply".

The 1000% figure comes from the fact that the money that the bank loans out is in turn held in another deposit account somewhere, and so it has a cascading effect... I deposit $100, my bank loans out $90 to person B, that money gets saved in a bank which can then loan out $81, then $72.9 gets created somewhere else. 1000% is just the limit of the sum 1 + 0.9 + 0.81 + ...

<comment><USER10> And to put that all together, it means the bank is responsible for $1000 in deposits, has $900 owed to it in loans, and has $100 of cash in the vault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article has a surprising misunderstanding of the way banks work for a publication called "The Economist". It is unintuitive, but banks _do not_ and _can not_ lend out deposits. Banks lever their _capital_ (that is, paid up shares and retained profits) to lend, and that lending creates new deposits. Existing deposits and debt funding (money markets etc.) are useful as liquidity so they can settle interbank transfers, but they aren't allowed to lend out of them, both out of regulations like the Basel framework, but also because it would violate accountancy rules (deposits are liabilities, and you can't back a liability with a liability. In reality they create the loan (asset) with a corresponding liability (the deposit).

The Bank of England (basically the UK federal bank) has published a good article on this - [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly- bulletin/2014/q1/m...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly- bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)

<comment><USER12> > In reality they create the loan (asset) with a corresponding liability (the > deposit).

Isn't that just a book-keeping technicality? Fundamentally, the bank is still using deposits to leverage a loan. Or am I misunderstanding your point?

<comment><USER13> So basically I deposit $1000.

Someone else goes to the bank and says 'I want to borrow $1000'

Great the bank says, approved. And they set up a bank account for you that says you have $1000 in it.

Now they've got $1000 in reserves and 2 accounts that claim to have $1000 in it.

Now when you withdraw $500 where does that money come from? I can assure you it's not from the banker's wallet. That's coming out of my deposit. Not from my account because my account still says they have $1000 on hold for me, it comes from the actual cash I deposited. (Which of course isn't actually cash in most cases)

None of that matters in practice because unless everyone tries to withdraw all the money at once there's plenty to cover all the withdrawals, but they are definitely using money from deposits to cover withdrawals.

<comment><USER11> I think part of the problem to understanding is that you're assuming that banks are places that store money. They aren't really, they are places that hold various types of assets and manage IOUs between themselves and other parties (other Banks, the Government/Fed, and customers etc.) in either direction.

Banks don't really store money, you give them money and they give you bank credit, and then later on you exchange that credit back for money or transfer credit to someone at another bank and the two banks settle that with some asset (could be reserves etc.).

I think this is the main confusion, of course the physical cash the bank gives you for a withdraw might have been given to the bank during a deposit transaction, but in terms of the transactions on the balance sheet it did not come from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why banks would give this bank their money. Shouldn't they be getting this same rate from the Fed? Something is left out.

<comment><USER15> I think their target customers are not banks. The article says it would "take deposits from financial institutions" but this could mean insurance companies, pension funds, credit unions, securities exchanges, etc. Anyone who might have substantial cash reserves as an integral part of their business, but who does not actually have a banking license.

Edit: from the Matt Levine piece linked further down the comments, the target customers are "money-market funds and foreign central banks".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unless I'm missing something, why doesn't every bank have an "internal narrow bank" that takes deposits and puts them at the central bank?

Actually, I thought that is exactly how banks have to operate right now... All deposits are settled in the interbank system or ultimately with the central bank. You can't just deposit money in a bank, because "depositing" $100 means telling an upstream bank that your bank now owes you $100.

<comment><USER17> They can do, quite a lot of money is on deposit at the Fed. But they may find it more profitable to lend the money elsewhere. All true government issued money is either in the form of banknotes and coins or deposits held at the central bank.

<comment><USER18> What is gov issued money? The money created by the fed is gov issued too, no? And it sits on the Fed's balance sheet as liability, debt, but not as deposit.

<comment><USER17> For simplicity I'm taking the Fed as part of the government. I know the setup in the USA is a bit strange. A government can create as much money as it likes, debt on a balance sheet is an optional accounting detail.

<comment><USER19> So the federal reserve isn't part of the government?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _... The central bank may worry that narrow banks, which lend to neither companies nor individuals, could hamper the effectiveness of monetary policy. Their business model may also risk unsettling incumbent banks, which could have large economic consequences. ..._

This is almost certainly a big reason for the opposition. The Federal reserve wants to keep people from "hoarding" (saving) money at all costs. Driving down interest rates and causing inflation is one tactic. Preventing the emergence of banks who can out-compete the rest of the market on interest rates is another.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The Narrow Bank would take deposits but not make loans

That can't work, not if you scale it up across the industry. The Fed could not continue to pay interest even on overnight deposits without it directly turning into inflation. The economy could not function without loans. Alternatively the Fed would have to become the one (and only) lender for commercial (and muni, and...) purposes so that it could make the interest income on those with which to service deposits from these "narrow banks". A narrow bank is essentially free-loading, and politically untenable.

<comment><USER22> Matt Levine writes about this in his newsletter: [https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/artic...](https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2018-09-06/fed- rejects-bank-for-being-too-safe)

BTW, it's a really great newsletter, always entertaining and has been teaching me a lot about the world of finance. His take on the Tesla scandal is hilarious.

<comment><USER23> > _His take on the Tesla scandal is hilarious._

If you are curious as I was, here is the link:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-13/funding-f...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-13/funding- for-elon-musk-s-tesla-buyout-wasn-t-so-secure)

<comment><USER22> That's not the one I meant, he's also talking about Tesla in his newsletter. Probably still worth reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is it so crucial to their business model that the customers' deposits are deposited directly with the Fed, rather than lent out to other banks on the overnight Fed Funds market? The Fed Funds rate is typically lower than the IOER rate paid on deposits with the Fed, but only by a small amount:

 _since early 2009 the fed funds rate has generally been 5 to 20 basis points (one basis point is equal to 0.01 percentage points) lower than the IOER_ [1]

For example, money lent out on the Fed Funds market on thursday earned 1.92% [2], while money deposited with the Fed earned 1.95% [3].

The Not-Quite-So-Narrow Bank wouldn't be able to pay as high a rate of interest to depositors as the true Narrow Bank, but it also wouldn't be dependent on the cooperation of the Fed, and Congress's authorization to the Fed, in collecting the IOER rate.

While looking up those numbers, i came across a nice detailed series of posts by George Selgin on IOER [4] and the Narrow Bank in particular [5] [6] - <USER2> worth a read.

[1] [https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional- economist/a...](https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional- economist/april-2016/interest-rate-control-is-more-complicated-than-you- thought)

[2] [https://apps.newyorkfed.org/markets/autorates/fed%20funds](https://apps.newyorkfed.org/markets/autorates/fed%20funds)

[3] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reqresbalances...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reqresbalances.htm)

[4] [https://www.alt-m.org/2017/06/01/ioer-and-banks-demand- for-r...](https://www.alt-m.org/2017/06/01/ioer-and-banks-demand-for-reserves- yet-again/)

[5] [https://www.alt-m.org/2018/09/10/the-skinny-on-the-narrow- ba...](https://www.alt-m.org/2018/09/10/the-skinny-on-the-narrow-bank/)

[6] [https://www.alt-m.org/2018/09/14/the-narrow-bank-a-follow- up...](https://www.alt-m.org/2018/09/14/the-narrow-bank-a-follow-up/)

<comment><USER25> Because then you have counterparty risk, which means you then have greater regulatory/compliance costs and have to pay up to 0.4% on assets for FDIC insurance.

<comment><USER24> Counterparty risk on Fed Funds loans, which are for one day only and to solid, highly regulated financial institutions, is negligible - that's why it's treated as the risk-free rate.

Would you need FDIC insurance if you only took deposits from financial institutions?

<comment><USER25> > Why is it so crucial to their business model that the customers' deposits > are deposited directly with the Fed

Note that whether interest was earned via IOER or via the Fed Funds market, the funds would be deposited with the Fed either way (whether in the bank's own Fed account or overnight in the Fed account of the counterparty of a Fed funds loan).

It wouldn't be possible to accept transfers from other banks, to send funds to other banks or to participate in the Fed Funds market unless the bank had an account with the Fed.

On the point of "risk-free", the TED spread was north of 1% for much of the 20 months between August 2007 and April 2009, and peaked at over 4%. So it's not always what I'd call negligible risk. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TEDRATE](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TEDRATE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Fed is probably concerned that, if the idea catches on, trillions in deposits could be vacuumed out of the fractional reserve banking system, leaving less available for lending.

If that were to happen, the Fed would lose considerable influence over liquidity. Its only lever on narrow banks would be to adjust the deposit rate encouraging savers to go elsewhere.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/w316/](https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/w316/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Debt is created not money. You can't pay the ferryman with an IOU from a bank.

<comment><USER28> Actually, that is pretty much exactly how it works. Banknotes (i.e. cash), are explicitly IOUs from a bank. Usually, it is a central bank, such as the Bank of England, but sometimes, it could be another bank. There are three retail banks in Scotland that are authorised to issue banknotes: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_Scotland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_Scotland)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm sure this is an interesting article, but not only is my "article limit" reached, but I even can't login to read it.[0] Which is strange, given the hundreds of dollars per year I give The Economist to support them.

If you want to stop people from stealing your articles, maybe give the paying readers access would be a start.

[0] [https://imgur.com/a/2uo4hnE](https://imgur.com/a/2uo4hnE)

<comment><USER30> I will set you free: [http://archive.is/JYM3P](http://archive.is/JYM3P)

<comment><USER29> That's fine and all, but I am happy to pay for top-notch journalism. But even me, the paying customer, is locked out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A good starting point for those who want to learn something about the FED: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQUhJTxK5mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQUhJTxK5mA)

Just the basics, but I doubt these are obvious to everybody.</comment>


Intel discloses "vector+SIMD" instructions for future processors - <AUTHOR> http://sites.utexas.edu/jdm4372/2016/11/05/intel-discloses-vectorsimd-instructions-for-future-processors/ <comment><USER2> Funny: "It is not clear that any compiler will ever use this instruction — it looks like it is designed for Kazushige Goto's personal use." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazushige_Goto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazushige_Goto)

<comment><USER3> This sounds like exactly the instruction needed for the inner loop of xcorr_kernel(), the function at the heart of a bunch of algorithms used in the Opus codec. This falls under the "convolution kernel" use-case described in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This instruction is surely targeted at deep learning applications. Convolutonal layers take up the majority of the compute time of deep networks.

People seem optimistic that compilers will auto generate such instructions, but even if a compiler could generate the instruction, you would need to carefully organize your data structures to take advantage of it.

Pipelining is as important as SIMD in achieving peak flops on current processors. You can do 16 flops in a single fmadd instruction, in five cycles. But ten consecutive independent fmadds also take 5 cycles, but perform 160 flops. Getting a pipeline going like that requires very careful design of data structures by the programmer.

Does anyone know if AVX512 will support fp16?

<comment><USER5> Current publicly announced AVX512 does not support fp16. Skylake Server (SKX) and Knights Landing (KNL) are at a disadvantage here. They've not publicly said anything about extensions in Knights Hill (the long announced successor to KNL).

That said, Intel have announced the emergency "Knights Mill" processor jammed into the roundmap between KNL and Knights Hill. It's specifically targeted at deep learning workloads and one might expect FP16 support. They had a bullet point suggesting 'variable' precision too. I would guess that means Williamson style variable fixed point. (I also guess that the Nervena "flexpoint" is a trademarked variant of it).

I assume the FPGA inference card supports fp16. And Lake Crest (the first Nervena chip sampling next year) will support flex point of course. I would expect subsequent Xeon / Lake Crest successor integrations to do the same.

Fun times..

Aside on the compiler work -- I think it's not that hard to emit this instruction at least for GEMM style kernels where it's relatively obvious.

<comment><USER4> Yes a compiler can generate the instruction. But if it's alone in a for loop surrounded by random STL classes - which even if inlined - are bodging up the pipeline or (gasp) causing spurious random dram accesses, there's little performance gain. And that's what usually happens in c++ code that wasn't already designed for AVX ("it's using AVX, but it's not running any faster. i guess AVX doesn't make much difference").

Net-net, data and code need to be structured for AVX to achieve the potential performance gains, and that's 80% of the work.

Once you structure the data and code for AVX, yes you can use regular C statements, then experiment with optimization flags until the compiler generates the intended instructions (and hasn't introduced excessive register spills). But its hard to see how that's any easier than using the intrinsics.

<comment><USER5> The problem is less the spurious DRAM accesses etc, as awful as they would be. The compiler problem is really a mix of 1) understanding enough about fixed- bound unit-stride loops to nonoverlapping memory (or transforming access to such) and 2) data layouts that prevent that. E.g. while there are well understood data layouts at each point of the compilation pipeline, it's hard in general for compilers to profitably shift from array of structs to struct of array layouts.

You are correct that, generally speaking, most STL heavy code would be hard to vectorize and unlikely to gain much advantage. (Plus there are the valarray misadventures). You will sometimes see clang and gcc vectorize std::vector if the code is simple enough, and they can assume strict aliasing. Intel's compiler has historically been less aggressive about assuming strict aliasing.

Various proposals are working through the standard committee to add explicit support for SIMD programming. E.g. if something like [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n418...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n4184.pdf) were to be standardized we could write matrix multiply explicitly as:

      using SomeVec = Vector<T>
      for (size_t i=0; i<n; ++i) {
        for (size_t j=0; k<n; j+=SomeVec::size()) {
          SomeVec c_ij = A[i][0] * SomeVec(&B[0],j, Aligned);
          for (size_t k = 1; k < n; ++k) {
            c_ij += A[i][k] * SomeVec(&N[k][j], Aligned);
          }
          c_ij.store(&C[i][j], Aligned);
        }
      }

For my own work on vector languages and compilers I've had an easier time of it since they have been designed to enable simpler SIMD code generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man, when I see this stuff I sure hope there is maturation of auto- vectorization at the compiler level in clang etc.

Even more useful would be compiler-level feedback of how to stay within the constraints needed to auto-vectorize your C/C++ for loop. (I need to make this data access const etc)

As far as I know, the Intel compiler is ahead of MSVC/clang on this front without reverting to OpenMP or other annotations on your code.

<comment><USER7> Intel is abandoning their compiler infrastructure and moving everything to Clang/LLVM. This does mean pushing their autovectorization work into LLVM, although judging from the quality of conversation in the vectorization BoF at the latest developer's meeting, it's not clear how much work they wish to put in to actually making acceptable upstreamable patches.

<comment><USER8> It sure would be nice if MKL could be integrated in clang. It's still the fastest LAPACK implementation. I use it on a relatively powerfull cluster (~11k cores) at university for doing quantum chemical calculations in Dalton, and having more research software as open source would benefit everyone in the end I believe.

<comment><USER6> Here here!

I run into this often, it is amazing the speedup MKL provides for linear algebra heavy scientific computations and it is under this weirdly commercial, but permissively redistrubutable framework which means a lot of folks are using it unkowningly in a gray licensing area.

See the pre-build python Numpy/Scipy packages that use it and are often use by data science types:

[http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy](http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy)

<comment><USER9> Not sure about Chris's licensing of MKL, but Continuum has a redistributable license of MKL packaged into their numpy builds for Anaconda - [https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer- blog/anaconda-25-rel...](https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer- blog/anaconda-25-release-now-mkl-optimizations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> if you're interested in vector-SIMD algorithms check out this paper

Linear-time Matrix Transpose Algorithms Using Vector Register File With Diagonal Registers

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.13....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.13.6964&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

disclaimer: I'm the author.

</comment><comment><USER11> After 3 years of Xeon Phi I'm still waiting for OpenCL on Fortran with vector support so we can finally have a sane and performant programming model for these things. Instructions are neat, but the tooling support is just not there for widespread use IMO. If Intel had taken a more long term strategy oriented with OpenMP years ago, i.e. embracing accelerators of all kinds, instead of trying to hold on tight to it for market protection, I think they'd be in a better position now.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great. Will Intel still disable those features on lower-end chips, thus ensuring that the market share for such features to make sense for developers won't be reached anytime soon after release?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a KNL-only feature to workaround a microarchitectural limitation (max two instruction issued per clock) to speed up a few specific benchmarks^Wworkloads.

<comment><USER13> 1) Saying that it's for benchmarks only seems a little harsh, since once it's in a few BLAS-like libraries it will probably be widely used.

2) I'm pretty sure this won't be in KNL. It's a proposed future extension, and I don't think there has been indication of where or when it might land.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right on both counts.

From the article, it will supposedly end up on some furure knight variant (as mainstream Xeons have lesa of a need for the "hack").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >"vector" instructions (multiple consecutive operations)

I thought "vector" in the context of CPU instructions just meant more than one.

Is there a definition where vector implies consecutive?

<comment><AUTHOR> Historically vector processors had vector registers but scalar ALU execution units (although possibly more than one). Vector instructions were "just" a way to make sure that the ALU was fed a new operation every cycle without instruction fetch and loop overhead. It also made it easier to pipeline reading from main memory (main memory latency wasn't so high a that time, so the large vector operations made it possible to pipeline reads with processing without stalling the CPU). None of those issues has been a bottleneck for a while and the memory subsystem of a modern computer is significantly different, so classic vector processors have fallen out of favour.

In contrast more modern SIMD machines normally have the vector execution units as wide as the register themselves and the advantage, in addition to 1 N-vector ALU being more power and area efficient than N scalar ones, is that, in an OoO machine, less in-flight instructions need to be tracked. It is also easier to take advantage of wider memory/cache busses.

Because classic vectors machines processed elements one at a time, it was possible to have efficient accumulating operations, which is significantly harder on proper SIMD processors (so called horizontal operations).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In addition to vector SIMD, I would love Intel adding some VLIW stuff to the x86 (mixed like SIMD is mixed with x86, i.e. not another "Itanium").</comment>


The day I crashed production 4 times - <AUTHOR> https://swizec.com/blog/the-day-i-crashed-production-4-times/swizec/9159 <comment><USER2> This post was a fun & great read -- kudos the author! By describing our failures & misadventures hopefully will help newbies will learn more (or at least require less antacids when making big prod changes).

Did wanna question / add commentary around this though:

      You can't build partitions on null fields.
      That throws a database error.
      That database error says "Yo you can't write this log"
      That error throws an exception
      That exception bubbles up
      Your API request fails
      Every API request fails
      ... continues till later ...
      Why was a failure in logging able to crash the system it
      was observing? No excuse. The move to AWS Lambda
      automatically solves the problem but damn

Lambda alone will definitely help with scale-related downtime but the switch to queueing looks like what was the big difference maker. Which is true! Queues help a lot and AWS hosted queues have great uptime at that. But depending on what this system is doing & how important the data is -- a lot of log/metrics systems fire&forget over UDP to prevent problems like this. Your entire metrics backend could go poof, and yeah metrics data could go into the ether -- but you would not take down prod through it.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: no tests.</comment>


More Americans killed in gun deaths than in terrorist attacks - <AUTHOR> http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/

<comment><USER2> Just wanted to point out that banning guns will increase the number of gun deaths, and legalizing guns will decrease the number of gun deaths.

[http://orlingrabbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wpid- Ayj53...](http://orlingrabbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wpid-Ayj53JB.jpg)

<comment><USER3> what if we legalize terrorism then? ;)</comment></comment>


Breaking Through Limits on Spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/opinion/breaking-through-limits-on-spying.html?hp

<comment><USER2> _Despite President Obama's claim this week that "there is no spying on Americans," the evidence shows that such spying is greater than the public ever knew._

Is this the NYT's way of calling Obama a liar? If so I wish they had used clearer words. But at least it seems that they are slowly waking up.

<comment><USER3> The NYT editorial board was extremely fast in condemning the Obama administration, saying it had lost all credibility on the issues of transparency and accountability in an op-ed piece on June 6th.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president- obamas-d...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas- dragnet.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER4> Funny enough, they actually edited that article. I believe the quote was originally something along the administration losing all credibility without the specification on the issues of transparency and accountability.

[http://gawker.com/the-new-york-times-quietly-softened-its- sc...](http://gawker.com/the-new-york-times-quietly-softened-its-scathing- obama-511791553)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The NYT really is a bunch. They come up with their own exclusive story by some "anonymous government official" (who even goes on record to to defend the program, as is SOP for any anonymous goverment source ever featured in the NYT), and suddenly you get big editorials.</comment>


Ask HN: What's a day in your life look like? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER11> Thanks for asking! For context, I live in Southern California.

I wake up some time in between 10 and 2.

The majority of my day is spent alternating between playing guitar, playing Super Smash Bros., programming (work), learning (physics lately), and cooking. Besides on occasion, I don't have the best ability to sit down and do one thing for more than an hour at a time.

On most days, I walk downtown (about 40 minutes of walking daily) to eat, shop, or just relax. Lately I've been packing lunch, getting high, and walking to the park a few blocks away. It has a really awesome man-made pond that is home to plenty of critters.

On some days, I lift weights or bodyweight train at home.

I work freelance (iOS/web dev) so I can pay rent.

I'm building a B2B web app with two other people who live across the country. We have an hour long Skype call once a week.

I quit my bullshit 10am to 8pm startup job 10 months ago. I'm not making much money yet, but as a 23-year-old with no kids I don't care. I'm healthy.

That was therapeutic!

<comment><USER12> If you don't mind me asking, how do you go about acquiring clients for the web dev, and what rates do you charge? Thanks!

<comment><USER11> I don't mind you asking! I wish I could be of more help. I've had the same "freelance boss" for the past 6 years. I've worked on a dozen different projects with him; some were his own ideas, but most were for his various clients. I met him through a friend who also worked freelance at the time. This was back when iOS development was in huge demand, everyone thought they had the killer app idea.

He was more than happy to hire a 17-year-old programmer for about $25/hr. I now charge about $120/hr.

I have no clue how he gets most of his clients. I suppose I'm in a privileged position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wake up at an unknown point in the day or night, somewhere in the continental United States or Central America.

Assess the situations my wife might have gotten into while I was sleeping and do triage, or wake up gracefully.

Determine which emails and phone calls need a response and reply as briefly as possible.

If we're going somewhere else, prepare the mobile lab for departure and get under way. Otherwise enjoy wherever it is we are.

Connect with business partners and make any outstanding decisions required for that time.

Connect with F/OSS collaborators and audit any outstanding bug reports or feature requests.

Scout around the area with my wife, figuring out what about where we're currently staying is worth coming back for.

Eat something in the local area or come back to the mobile base and make something.

Assess situation of deliverables and code on most mission critical pieces due soonest.

Unravel some visionary pieces coming in the mid/long term and discuss future scenarios with advisors and agents.

Take on a large piece of code that needs to be written, or a large bug that needs to be weeded out.

Make a campfire, have a beer... maybe cook something on the fire.

Watch a few episodes of something on Netflix with my wife... assuming 4G access or WiFi in the location is stable enough.

Either turn in for the night/day or continue with more of whatever large coding project I took on.

Periodically communicate with partners, collaborators, or clients passed to me by agents managing contacts.

<comment><USER14> Is this like your dream day or your real day?

<comment><USER13> I forgot to add Obsessively track HackerNews, GitHub, and StackOverflow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 9-11 maybe wake up, sex, or not 10-11 check the internets 11-3 frantically work on tasks that I should have started at 9a 2 or so : fry some potatoes and eggs and eat them with avocados, cheese, and tortillas after lunch till 5 or 6 frantically work on tasks 11-sleep - check social media and write messages to folks who might need what I do 6-8 goof off with my kids 6 maybe exercise 9-12 play a gig if one has been booked (usually only on Friday or Saturday) 12-5 play a gig (usually only on Sunday) 7-9 practice playing jazz with old people (typically only one or two days a week) 9-12 drink some beer and practice new programming techniques 2 or so go to sleep with my beautiful and talented wife, sex, or not

<comment><USER16> Is this satire?

<comment><USER15> Naw, that's me writing in the 12-2 time frame when I get blitzed drunk with my violinist wife and her pianist. Before going to bed. It will probably tip over someday but I can say that it has been working for the last 5 years.

<comment><USER17> What.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Location: Kuwait

05:30 Wake up. Followed by an hour of coding / reading / follow-up of what I left last night.

06:30 Shower, freshen up for work.

07:15 Cook breakfast, browse HN, pocket some articles for the ride to work.

07:45 Leave for office.

08:15 Arrive at office. Begin the day by checking emails.

08:30 Shuffle between meetings & coding. On a good day, I'm able to avoid meetings until lunch.

12:00 Lunch time and hanging out at the proverbial water-cooler with colleagues.

13:15 Meetings and hopefully some productive coding

17:15 Prepare to leave. Check email one last time and send off replies to anything pending.

17:45 Leave for home.

18:30 Reach home. Order dinner, call parents.

19:30 Finish dinner while watching some TV show / talk on Youtube. Head out for a walk / run

20:15 Get back from walk / run. Relax by listening to some music, IMing with friends, watching few videos.

21:00 Start work on side-project or coursera course or blog post. Try to get a couple of hours of productive work done.

23:00 Prepare to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER19> 7:00 AM - Alarm goes off. get self out of bed, take phone, snooze alarm, go back to sleep.

7:15 AM - Alarm goes off. turn on lights. squint until eyes acclimated to light.

7:30 AM - Put on running clothes. Leave residence, embark on run.

8:00AM - Reenter apartment after ~3 mile run, take shower and get ready.

8:30AM - leave apartment again for work

9:00AM - arrive at work, get coffee & light breakfast

9:10-12:00 - most productive programming hours of the day

12:00 - 12:45 - lunch, either onsite or off depending on day

12:45 - 3PM - usually when I have meetings, if not in meetings then programming

3-3:30 PM - afternoon break, have a snack, leave office for a bit and walk around

3:30-6PM - more programming & meetings

6-7PM - leave office, go home, cook & eat dinner if I don't have dinner plans.

7-11PM - social life (dates, friends, etc.)

11PM-12AM - read a chapter of current book I am reading

12AM - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER20> 6:30 wake up

7:00 drive to BART in walnut creek

7:15 park at Walnut Creek Bart

8:00 get off BART at Montgomery

8:05 arrive at office

8:05 - 9:00 grab breakfast, informally sync with Product Managers

9:00-10:40 code alone

10:40 standup meeting

11:00 - 12:00 informal design discussions with team mates, lots of white boarding

12:00 - 1:00 grab lunch, play super smash brothers with colleagues

1:00 - 4:30 push changes to prod, review code, pair program

4:30 head to BART

4:35 head upstream on BART to civic center

4:45 catch BART from civic center (get a seat)

5:35 get off at Walnut creek

5:40 drive home

6:00 arrive home, eat, play with kids

7:00 kids bedtime, free time for parents (generally try to spend this together)

9:00 go running

10:00 wife goes to bed, I'm less of a sleeper so I usual stay up another hour or two working on side projects or sometimes just playing video games.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was on Co-op in Boston at a late stage start up my usual schedule looked like

8am - 9:30am - Wake up and Skype long distance fiance as she gets ready for class. Check emails, hipchat and social media. Push some bug fixes / product updates and deploy.

9:30 am - Shower and get ready to head to work.

10 am - 10:15 am - Walk a mile to T (JFK/UMass)

10:15 am - 10:45 am - Take red line to MIT/Kendall

10:45 am - 11am - Walk 1 mile to the office (Could also take the green line and walk a few steps but I enjoy the walk)

11am - 12:30pm - Email, push some more code, go over pull requests

12:30pm - 1pm - Lunch with co workers maybe longer if its a team lunch

1 pm - 2:30pm - code code code

2:30pm - 3:00pm - Meeting with tech lead if its a Monday

3pm - 7pm - code code code

7pm - 7:15pm - walk back to the T

7:15pm - 7:45pm - Red line

7:45pm - 8pm - Walk back to apartment

8pm - 10pm Dinner, Skype, Stream something from my Plex server

10pm - 12/1/2/3am - Work on a personal project or more work stuff. Push some changes and deploy them

??? - 8am - <USER10>

I would also play lacrosse on Wednesdays which changes the whole end of my day.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wake up at some time X.

Check Slack, and my google calendar for the day.

Open up asana, check our priority queue and ensure my in progress/upcoming are set accurately (remote team, so this is very important)

I work mostly with data scientists. So, some days it's pure cowboy coding. Experimental and research stuff. Lots of image processing, NLP, and API design stuff.

After I finish the first task of the day, contact the Chief Scientist/senior data scientists. Review, consult, plan if we can do more to it or if its worth 'graduating' to a larger product.

Or, if its a larger, production project consult with product and VP of eng as well. Ensure all delivery needs are met.

At the end of the day we have an informal chat of no specified amount of time. The 'end' of the day is often midnight-1am-ish for us because we have people in 5 time zones. We try to be as flexible as possible especially with a guy in South Korea.

<comment><USER23> I understand your company has lots of remote data scientists... Are you hiring? I'd be interested to have a go if it's the case. How can I contact you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lots of great responses here, I can chime in! I'm from Minneapolis.

I usually wake up between 9-11, and always without an alarm. I'll get up, take a 5-hour energy, go have some breakfast while I watch Reddit.tv. Breakfast is usually toast and Honey Bunches of Oats, sometimes eggs and toast, sometimes a toaster strudel (no toast). I'll then pop my Vyvanse (adderall) and head to my office.

Once I'm in my office I'll hop on Slack, Ventrilo (we <3 it), and check my emails. I'll check in with everyone to let them know I'm alive and I'll excuse myself while I spend 15-minutes max replying to emails.

Lunch is usually around 1, but no later than 2. It's a bit smaller than my breakfast is, but enough to ensure that I don't get hungry before dinner.

I'll then spend the next five hours as close to a 100% productivity level as I can.

Figure it's about 7, I start to unwind. I'll put on a sports game or head out for a drink with colleagues or clients.

Around 9 is when I'm usually doing my own thing. I'll spend some time on my piano or working on a side project.

It's now about 11 where I settle into bed, no laptop allowed on my bed. I'll put on a documentary, close out emails, and prepare for the next day.

I'm 23, self-employed. I quit my bullshit "100+ hour work week let's call you at 1am saying somethings not working on my daughter's iPhone with the app" a few months ago. I'm not going back.

<comment><USER24> What's the start-up?

<comment><USER17> I'm actually running a little development agency while I work on some side projects. My goal is to use my income from developing other people's ideas to develop my own. Sooner or later, though, I hope the agency is on autopilot so I can devote full-time to one of my own ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From Ottawa, Canada. Before I had a very loose daily structure but was noticing my output and general health was suffering, so trying to stick to this structure on weekdays:

6:30 - Alarm on gym days, otherwise I just naturally wake up around 7-8

7:30 - work with my PT on gym days and refresh myself after, or on non-gym days I catch up on the Internets and prepare for the day

8:30 - hit a coffeeshop and motor through client work (mornings are where I find it best for me to work on this stuff)

12:30 - lunch break, where most of the time I just grab something from the same vegetarian restaurant and bring it home and usually couple with reading a book during this time

13:30 - nap if I'm tired, otherwise continue with client work, though my energy levels are usually sapped by now so I work on low-hanging fruit items

16:30 - wind down, catch up on the Internets

The rest of the evening is more loose, either hanging out with friends, playing some board or video games, figure out if I need to restructure possessions or other things in life, or continue my indie game dev hobby (recently started). I go to sleep anywhere between 22:00-2:00. I also try to make a todo list for the next day so I do less planning on the fly, but that habit hasn't sunk in yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll describe the best and worse daily routine I ever had during my working life.

 _Best (I was truly happy with this routine):_

08:00 - Waking up with somebody that makes you happy. (When there is urgent "homework", getting up at 06:00). Tasty and elaborated breakfast.

08:40 - 20 minutes walking to work, independently of the weather (sun, rain, snow). Good time to contemplate and meditate.

09:00 - Work that I really like, feeling that I'm making something that makes a difference, with people I respect and being reasonably well paid for that.

12:15 - Lunch. 2 options: a) Buying something in the shop and walking around or going to the park to eat it. b) Going to a restaurant with colleagues/friends.

13:00 - Work that I really like, feeling that I'm making something that makes a difference, with people I respect and being reasonably well paid for that. Anyway I prefer to work mornings.

17:00 - Walking every day to a different gym in the city. Normally meeting friends there.

18:30 - Arriving home in the city and having a girl/woman with a great smile on her face waiting for you. Making/having a tasty and elaborated dinner together.

20:00 - Time for novelty: movies at home, meeting friends/new people, going somewhere. No TV. Unpredictability is great here.

24:00 - Sleep with a girl/woman with a smile in the face.

 _Worse (my unhappy times):_

08:00 - Waking up alone.

08:30 - Long commute(1.5h) during rush hour to work, changing transportation 3 times.

10:00 - Work that I really hate, feeling that I'm making bullshit, with people I don't respect and being very bad paid for that.

13:00 - Lunch. Taking food from home to compensate long commute costs and low wage.

14:00 - Work that I really hate, feeling that I'm making bullshit, with people I don't respect and being very bad paid for that. Afternoons are even worse.

19:00 - Long commute home.

20:30 - Arriving home in suburbs. Too late and far way for gym. Eating something.

21:30 - Too late and far away to meet somebody. Crappy TV/internet till sleeping time.

24:00 - Sleep alone.

</comment><comment><USER27> This made me realize how messed up my day is.

California:

Wake up at 1 - 2 pm

Wash brush

3 pm go out and get breakfast and listen to podcast

3:30 pm I record podcast

5 pm I play with the kids (niece and nephew)

6 pm fire up laptop edit the podcast write a blog post - if the stars are aligned I may publish.

8 pm I waste time on the web

10 pm watch a movie and dinner.

12 am I open blender and work on my 3d project

3 am I code and experiment new tech.

4 am I listen to another podcast while playing clash of clans

5 am I am consumed by sleep.

Context: I quit my job 6 months ago after 3 and a half year. I am trying a bunch of new things to see what sticks.

<comment><USER28> I tried blender once, it was taking too much time so I gave up. I wanted to make animation movie. Would you mind sharing your stuff with blender?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In Belgium working for a startup which I just gave my notice to so I can start my own business:

06:00 Alarm goes off and get up

06:15 Leave for work, listen to podcasts or music depending on mood

07:00 arrive at work, check up on email and monitoring tools

07:30 pick a task from Jira and start coding

11:30 daily scrum standup to see what my colleagues are doing and how we can help out each other

12:00 lunch, usually I buy something from the local supermarket and we eat in the office kitchen

12:45 resume work, mostly coding and avoiding meetings

15:30 start commute home, podcasts or music depending on mood

16:15 do freelance work or work on one of my own projects

18:00 pick up my daughter from daycare, have dinner and play with her until she goes to bed

20:15 more freelance/own project work or watch TV shows with my wife

23:00 sleep

The last few weeks I tried moving those 2 hours of freelance work from late in the afternoon to right after I wake up (and move my day job 2 hours later), and this seems to massively improve the quality of the work I get done for my own company while not impacting my day job code quality that much. I suspect this is because otherwise the long commute home is draining a lot of energy.

</comment><comment><USER30> Location: Kharkov, Ukraine

7:30-8:15 Wake up, get out of bed, shower, coffee

8:30-8:45 Walk to work, open up the office for the rest of the staff

9:00-14:00 Work work work work. Since we have an 'open office' there are no set meetings but as the manager I will be usually having sit-downs with each of my reports and figuring out what's going on. Also will engage in Skype- chats with my other reports/colleagues (we have remote developers in Europe and Africa)

14:00-17:30 Wind down with a long lunch or work on extra projects if there is a tight deadline (usually the case)

17:30-18:00 Close up the office and walk home

18:00-18:20 Standup with the USA office (there are ten hours' difference between CA and UA), get updates on what is going on and get latest assignments

18:30-19:30 Dinner break

20:00-22:00 Skype calls with the USA for work, usually with PMs and clients based in the USA. Can also include answering emails, answering forums, or running demos/presentations over the GoToMeeting

22:00-midnight or 1am - cycle down, watch some streaming shows, goof around on a tablet, go to sleep

</comment><comment><USER31> Pomodoros = a productivity technique I use when I'm working. Currently I'm learning algorithms as I apply for programming jobs.

09:00 - wake up via alarm and hit snooze

09:40 - actually wake up -> check internet stuff

10:00 - get out of bed and start doing pomodoros

11:00 - make smoothie and drink it while continuing pomodoros

11:30 - do pushups -> continue pomodoros

12:30 - <USER4>

01:30 - pomodoros (usually get interrupted with something)

05:00 - <USER5>

06:30 - shower, surf web

07:00 - dinner, watch a little tv

08:30 - more pomodoros, or watch move/socialize

12:00 - lights out, listen to podcast/watch tv until I'm sleepy

01:00 - <USER6>

Really, this is the best case scenario.

* In practice, I often sleep later. And I often try to go to be earlier but end up lying in bed for too long trying to go to sleep.

* And somehow my meals end up taking forever. I'm a really slow eater, and apparently a slow cooker also. Plus I like to relax and watch a little TV after I finish.

* Often times I'm interrupted with stuff. Today I had to shovel the driveway. Tomorrow I have to go to the doctor.

</comment><comment><USER32> Would be really interesting if people could add their location. Seems like those in US have really long journeys to work?

<comment><USER33> That's a very good point. I'm going to upvote this to make it more visible. I would encourage others to do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wake up at 6:40 and make my way to work by 7:00.

I work at GoPro so the work is usually pretty relaxed. I spend most of the day working on software issues, browsing HN/PH/Quora, and studying programming languages (Java and Python are my flavors of the month).

I leave for school around 1:30 to make it to 2 o'clock classes. I'm there until 5-7pm.

Make my way home to my beautiful wife and baby girl. Eat, exercise, and hit the books. I try to pull the plug sometime around 9 but I'm usually too interested in whatever I'm studying.

My wife is good about keeping me balanced though so I try to spend as much time as possible with her.

Luckily, I sleep like a champ so I'm always out as soon as my head hits the pillow.

My life is crazy busy right now (I also do some freelance work with SumoMe and am trying to get a side business off the ground) but I totally love it. I just wish I were getting paid more!

<comment><USER35> Out of curiosity, what does PH stand for?

<comment><USER18> ProductHunt [http://producthunt.com/](http://producthunt.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I live in Fukuoka, Japan. Here's my antidote to the Tokyo rush:

8-10am Wake up, lounge a little, read. If I'm feeling very energetic I'll wake up at 7am and hop in the pool for a bit.

10-1pm Work on software projects, research papers, lesson plans.

1pm Quick snack. Cup of tea.

1.30-3.30pm More programming. My co-founder is probably up and useful by now, maybe run some by things, maybe not. Almost always via slack.

3.30pm Quick blast in the gym, usually weights.

4.00pm Biiig meal. I only eat twice a day.

4.30pm Get my things together for going to my teaching jobs.

5-9pm Teach English, Science, Math, all sorts to keep my rent paid.

10 or 11pm go to bed.

For a while I did a full time programming job at a company while doing the teaching in the evening. Definitely too many ours. If there's anything missing I thing I could do with a bit more outside time. What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER37> I wake up at 7. Then take a shower and create 2 sachets of microwavable porridge, read something on reddit or hn / watch youtube scishow during breakfast. Around 8:15-30-(45) go through the door and take 20 minutes bus and 35 minutes of tube then walk 5 minutes. Usually listening to music or some podcasts but the tube is so loud I can't hear anything.

At work from 9:30-10, try code something, review pull requests, tickets. Trying to concentrate. Lunch from around 13 until 14. Repeat previous coding part. Go home around 17:30 - 18.

Usually just reading and watching videos/ IM-ing. Sometimes coding if I have a good idea for my side project. Or creating content to my site project. But this is not longer than 1 hour, and usually not even exists. At 23:00 I go to sleep.

I posted mine because everyone else's was like my dream, hehe.

</comment><comment><USER38> Most days I turn the music on and start programming 0830 or 0900. I'll probably check new music releases while programming. Take short breaks to faff around on Internet.

1100 is probably dogs's first walk for 20 minutes.

Stop programming for an hour at 1300 for lunch - probably watch something.

Might listen to a podcast while I continue programming until about 1800; at this point take dogs out again but for a longer walk.

Might do more programming, work on a set, study something technical - <USER7> sound orientated these days - or make dinner if it's my turn.

Eat dinner 2100 and go to bed at 2200.

Unless this is the Monday after our monthly sunday electronica evening; in which case I'm probably annihilated for the rest of the day.

Edit: In the UK

</comment><comment><USER39> In SF (pretty typical weekday M-Th, Friday's are different)

6:30 wake up, stretch, pull-ups, handstands, meditate (don't eat breakfast, intermittent fasting has changed my mornings and I haven't looked back)

7:30ish catch bus to work, read industry news on bus

8:30 arrive at work, make tea, review tasks for day, set up pomodoros, take care of personal errands (once or twice a week meet a good friend to catch up)

9:00 begin work

12:30ish post lunch walk (about 20 min)

5-5:30pm leave work

6:30 get home, maybe workout (2-3 times a week), prepare/eat dinner with wife, maybe go for a walk together

8:30ish or 9:00- work on personal projects (python, watch repair, blogging, etc.), or watch TV with wife

10:30ish get in bed, read

Midnight, sleep.

</comment><comment><USER33> During the work week...

04:30 - Alarm, followed by shaving, showering, etc.

06:00 - begin walking to bus stop

07:10 - arrive at bus stop

07:15 - board the bus

08:15 - bus arrives downtown; walk to office

08:30 until 17:00 - <USER8>

17:45 - board bus

19:00 - arrive at bus stop

20:00ish - arrive home

When I'm lucky, I can make the 17:15 bus home and shave 10-20 minutes (because Orlando traffic is _the worst_ ) off.

</comment><comment><USER40> San Diego County, California.

M-F: 06:30 stock market alarm rings. I sleep in.

06:30-07:15 twitter alerts inform me of stocks to trade.

07:30 I get out of bed

08:00 showered, i head downstairs to read more twitter

08:30 leave for work

09:30 arrive at work (yea, suck)... do work all day, non-stop, no lunch, no break.

17:00 leave for home

18:05 arrive at home, turn on oven, crack beer, clean up

18:15 pizza in oven, read twitter, ebook, or other reading

18:45 eat dinner

19:00 watch video lectures, set stock alerts

20:00 write notes, draw pictures, prepare for tomorrow's code session

21:00 tea and quiet time, screens avoided.

21:30 prepare for bed

21:45 in bed, lights out

S-S: 08:30 get out of bed... naturally

08:35 coffee, cold water, email

09:00 notes for items to do today

09:30 eat oatmeal, clean kitchen/house/bathrooms... whatever

10:30 computer time

11:00 programming time (or venture outside for a change)

17:00 make rice

17:45 prepare dinner

18:00 eat

18:30 dishes, tv

20:30 twitter/news/world events

21:30 prepare for bed

22:00 in bed... (possibly read a book)

22:30 lights out

</comment><comment><USER41> Wake up at 06:00

Work in the last CS project until 07:00

Shower, breakfast, clean up after myself, leaving home at 08:15

Get to work at 09:00, go into jungle mode until 14:00

Drive to father's place, eat in under 5 minutes, go back to work to be there at 15:00

Work until 18:00, pick up the girlfriend, get home at 19:00

Do house maintenance, cook, eat, watch something over popcorn time.

Go to sleep between 22:00 and 23:00

Repeat until I get fired or I finish the CS project.

</comment><comment><USER42> 5:20 - Wake up - Take a shower

5:45 - Leave for the office (to avoid MAD traffic)

6:15 - 7:15 - Read a book

7:15 - 7:30 - Breakfast (office), catch-up local news

7:45 - 8:10 - Hacker news/Reddit/Techcrunch et al ...

8:30 - 11:15 - Office work / side projects

11:15 - 11:45 - Tea break (office)

12:00 - 12:50 - Office work/ Side projects

13:00 - 14:30 - <USER9>

14:45 - 16:00 - Office work/side Projects

16:30 - 17:00 - Tea break

17:30 - 19:45 - Office work/side projects/hacker news et al ...

20:00 - 21:00 - Drive back home

21:00 - 22:45 - Read a book

22:45 - 05:20 - <USER10>

... a tight loop of trying to define life...

<comment><USER43> This is an average day? That seems to me like an awfully long time at work. I'd like to ask a few sincere questions. Do you really enjoy being in the office? Do you feel compelled to be there? Do you choose not to have outside activities, or is it a side effect of this schedule? Thanks for the reply, if you choose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Location: Manhattan, NYC

8:45am Alarm goes off

9:00am Wake up

9:40am Leave apartment and head to the subway

10:00am Arrive at work. Check HN, email, my stock portfolio, maybe get some breakfast, etc.

10:30am Start coding

11:30am Morning standup

12:00pm Get lunch

3:00 Grab snack from the kitchen

5:30pm Go home

6:00pm Work on side project or read stuff on the internet. Get dinner

12:00pm Tell myself that it's time to go to bed

1:00pm If I'm tired, go to bed. Otherwise keep doing whatever I'm doing. But hopefully I'm asleep by now

</comment><comment><USER45> I live in Hong Kong, but work primarily with clients in the west so my schedule is shifted to compensate. All times are GMT+8.

12pm - 2p: Wake up (no alarm unless I have an early appointment)

2p - 6p: Run errands, exercise, meetings/calls with any APAC clients

6p - 10p: Hang out with my wife (who works a traditional 9-5 schedule), go out to dinner, meet friends, etc.

10p - 5am: Work.

5a - 6a: Read to wind down for bed

6a-ish: Sleep.

<comment><USER46> Do you keep to the same sleep schedule on weekends?

<comment><USER45> Yep. This isn't massively different from what I did when living in the states; I've always found myself far more productive at night when there are fewer distractions. Now I just get more sleep since I don't have to report to an office in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wake up between 11:00 and 12:30, arrive at work (Google NYC) by 1:30 or so, leave by 8:30ish (later when I have a good reason), get home, have dinner with my wife if I made it home by 8:00, kiss her goodnight, and take over watching my three-month-old twins until 4-5 AM, at which point I wake up my wife and go to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER48> Location: Vilnius, Lithuania

5:50 wake up: breakfast, preparing to work. 6:50 leaving home 7:30 arrive to the office by feat, during time audio books, podcasts, birds 8:15 starting working 11:00 walking across the forest by something for lunch 12:00 back to work 1) 16:45 leaving for gym 19:45 back from gym 20:00 light dinner 2) 17:15 leaving for home 18:00 dinner 19:00 hose hold stuff/coding/socialising/etc. \-- 22:00 trying go to bed 23:00 sleeping \---- Typical developer day?

</comment><comment><USER49> Sg

Here is my colleague's:

6.00 Am wakeup brush and shower 6.30 catch a train 7.45 eat breakfast 8.15 reach office 8.15 - 9 reply email 9-12.30 work 12.30-1 lunch 1-1.15 read news 1.15 -7 work/meeting 7-9pm reply email/work on crunching stuff 10pm reach home 10 - 11pm plays dota/Diablo3 11pm replies boss email after his boss finished taking care of boss's kids Between 1.15am - 2am sleep

Mine's almost like his, got to reply his emails at all times after he got bombarded by boss's, but I generally get home by 8-10pm and wakes up at 7am to catch the company's shuttle bus.

</comment><comment><USER50> Loved reading these stories! Inspired me to create this in the last 2 hours, I love hearing about the nitty gritty details of how other peoples' lives go [http://whatdyoudoyesterday.com/](http://whatdyoudoyesterday.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Based on my more recent schedule:

7:30 Wake up

7:50 Get on my bike and ride to school (or bus if I had a rough night)

8:00 Go to class (occasionally an hr break b/w class which I use to enjoy a book)

11:00 Finish class; walk/ride home

12:30 Make lunch

1:00 Start doing problems for Systems Programming class

< Many hours of frustration, confusion, 30 min. breaks, and cries of success ensue >

12:00 Go to bed.

</comment><comment><USER52> "A life in a day of a startup CEO": [http://doublestealth.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-life-in-day- of...](http://doublestealth.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-life-in-day-of-startup- ceo.html)

<comment><USER33> Are you the author of that blog post?

Totally off topic, I didn't really expect to see you up on HN at midnight on a Friday. Hopefully no fires in CloudFlareLand to put out.

<comment><USER52> Yes. I wrote the whole "Double Stealth" parody blog. Someday I'll get back to it.

It's perhaps midnight on Friday in SF, but it's 0813 in London :-)

<comment><USER33> Oh, my mistake. I assumed you were in SF for some reason.

<comment><USER52> Sometimes I am :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Thanks a lot OP. This is exactly something I wanted to ask. Of late I have been feeling like wasting lot of time. I was looking for some kind of inspiration to bring some order to my life.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is a fun concept.

07.30 am → Alarm goes off.

08.00 am → Wake up.

08.15 am → Summon energy to make eggs, shower, etc.

08.45 am → Listen to hypem and read personal emails/HN.

09.00 am → Walk to work.

09.15 am → Arrive at work. Check to see if someone brought in Top Pot.

09.16 am → Brush donut crumbs off shirt. Grab coffee; check metrics dashboards, ticket queue, and internal news.

09.30 am → Grab more coffee. Go through work emails and code reviews.

10.30 am → Morning stand-up meeting.

10.45 am → Code and achieve some pedestrian level of zen.

11.30 am → Check to see if Tacos el Tajin (taco truck) is here and if the line is short.

11.35 am → Head somewhere else for lunch because the line for Tacos el Tajin is _never_ short.

11.45 am → Eat lunch at desk, watching an internal presentation or Coursera video.

12.15 pm → Resume pedestrian level of zen.

02.00 pm → Roll a d6. If >3, continue programming. Otherwise, attending meetings for the next ninety minutes.

02.19 pm → Grab more coffee.

03.30 pm → Roll a d6. If >4, continue programming. Otherwise, attend meetings for the next ninety minutes.

05.00 pm → Wrap up for the day; make sure I didn't miss any emails while I only had one cup of coffee in my system; check to see if there are any new CRs; follow up with anyone who I told myself I should follow up with.

05.10 pm → Head home.

05.18 pm → Pass by Chipotle and have a meaningful and slightly existential struggle about whether or not I want a burrito bowl.

05.25 pm → Arrive home. Make dinner or eat aforementioned burrito bowl.

06.00 pm → Engage in requisite amount of physical exertion; I try and run and lift twice a week each.

06.45 pm → Watch an unhealthy amount of television (right now: The Wire) while doing something else similarly mindless (likely Threes or Desert Golfing.)

08.45 pm → Take a bath. Seriously, if you have access to a bathtub and you're not taking a regular bath, you're missing out.

09.15 pm → Head to Uptown Espresso and do something vaguely intellectual: this is generally either OSS, writing a blog post, or reading (right now: Big Sur).

10.00 pm → Head home. Clean up my apartment and finish up vaguely intellectual activity.

11.00 pm → Make a Manhattan (or have a Dogfish Brown Ale) and listen to jazz.

11.30 pm → Nightly ritual jank; brush teeth, wash face, wear sweatpants. Set alarm for 7.30am.

12.00 am → Go to bed.

12.02 am → Guiltily browse Twitter on my phone for what seems like hours.

12.15 am → Drift to sleep.

All in all: I get to walk to work, spent eight hours doing something I care about, and generally enjoy myself (as long as I don't look at how much I spend at Chipotle each month.) Life isn't too complicated.

<comment><USER18> This made me chuckle :D Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Let's say today is Monday, because Fridays and Saturdays are boring.

Wake up at 9:00am.

Go in the shower, if I didn't shower the night before

Grudgingly go to the EVK dining hall and eat a doughnut, some sort of potato, and maybe something with protein in it.

Walk through campus to class. If I'm feeling in the right mood I'll listen to music on the way. Maybe something by The Strokes.

10:00: Use my RFID-enabled ID to enter my classroom. My first class of the day on Mondays is "Case Studies in Innovation." As the name implies, we study innovative companies. It's only the second week, but I love this class. It's interactive and discussion based.

11:40: After class is over, I quickly grab a bite to eat. I'll either get Panda Express from the cafeteria downstairs, an Acai bowl from Nektor in the arts school, or eat at the Parkside dining hall with my classmates.

I don't have much time to eat, because my next class, EE566 (Fourier Optics) starts at 12:30. This is my most challenging class, because its a much more advanced level than I _should_ be taking. Today we're reviewing how to do two dimensional Fourier transforms.

After EE566 ends at 1:50, I have three hours of free time that I'll use to either work on homework, work on a group project, browse Hacker News, or do my laundry. I usually spend this time in the "Garage," which is the special private workspace for academy students. The Garage has five 3D printers, two classrooms, a woodshop, and a laser printer.

My next class, Innovator's Forum, starts at 5:00. To enter the class, I use a special attendance card that I had to pick up on the other side of campus. I wonder why they can't just take attendance by scanning our ID's. Today's guest speaker is Craig Hanna, who designs amusement parks for a living. If you aren't familiar with his work, he designed the Harry Potter World at Universal Studios. [I can't really tell you what happens in this class, because it hasn't actually happened yet]

After Innovator's Forum, the Academy kids (31 out of the 100 kids in the Innovator's Forum lecture) go to The Garage for Innovator's Roundtable. In this class, the tables are flipped (no pun intended). Instead of the guest speaker presenting to us, we present to the guest speaker. This week, we are presenting our observations of an experience. My group was assigned the DMV, and we have an interactive skit where classmates have to go through the process as if they were going to apply for a California driver's license.

After each group presents and we get feedback from the guest speaker, most of us will head to the Parkside Dining Hall for a group dinner. I don't love the food at Parkside, but it's a great opportunity to socialize with my classmates. Depending on how interesting the guest speaker is, we may or may not discuss the presentation during this dinner.

What happens next depends on how much work I have. If I'm really busy, I'll go back to my dorm to complete my assignments. If I don't have any work, I may head over to one of my classmate's/friend's house to party.

If I'm smart, I'll go to bed by 1:00, so I'm nice and rested for my 11:00am Excel class on Tuesday. Else, I'll stay up late reading a David Foster Wallace novel or watching Twin Peaks.</comment>


Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire? - <AUTHOR> A year ago I co-founded a company with a classmate (both non-CS students). I knew the basics of building rails web applications from teaching myself during the evenings and weekends and could somewhat navigate myself around a basic stack (AWS, Rails, SASS, Salesforce etc.).
We're launching our beta in several weeks and are about to close our seed round. I've relied heavily on SO, tutorials and  gems to get our application to where it is today. I've never had anyone review my code. I've taught myself how to use a continuous deployment flow, write tests, design and integrate REST APIs like Salesforce and Docusign.
With our funding, I need to begin building a technical team. One thing I'm concerned with is bringing on a developer (senior, full stack, or backend) that won't respect me as a programmer. The work I've done to this point has had the aim of reducing the time to goto market and cost- quality has taken a hit to meet those two goals.
As a CTO with no computer science background and no previous experience programming at another company, what role should I hire for first? And when I do, how do I "manage" that individual if they don't respect the work I've done as a programmer? <comment><USER2> In my opinion you shouldn't be a CTO but a founder. I don't think any serious tech team can respect a technically inexperienced or poor CTO for long and this will cause problems later.

It might be a better idea for you to go for a Chief Product Officer or just Founder and hire someone experienced to do the CTO role.

If you think you can lead from the front without being competent in a subject - you have another thing coming.

<comment><USER3> +1 hire an experienced CTO/Sr. Tech Leader first and then all your problems will be solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hire a Lead Dev before you hire engineers/programmers. You'll save SO much time and headaches.

I summarize here what I expect from Lead Devs:

\- A lead knows how to architect solutions. Not just code them.

\- A lead talks higher level than programmers/engineers. You don't want to hear code, you want to hear solutions/implications + pros/cons.

\- A lead is interested in the interconnections with other systems, and doesn't overlook them.

\- A lead has experienced a range of advanced problems (optimization, weirdest bugs, scale)

\- A lead is able to recognise and be interested in the problems he hasn't come across yet, and has the will to tackle them asap if they are a priority for business.

\- A lead has a quite deep understanding about the full range of solutions available to solve a problem on his platform. And he spends time on this daily, ideally because he's passionate about it (never seen it other way)

\- When you ask a lead how to solve a fairly open engineering problem he'll come up with 1) A good range of approaches 2) Pros/Cons for each of them 3) For each pro/con advise based on his experience.

\- A lead has confidence when taking a decision on architecture, he investigates the impacts beforehand. If he's wrong he recognises it.

\- Ultimately a lead should be able to come up with a plan to help you refactor any mess with the lowest impact possible in the product. Ideally building the new on new refactored structure, and re-factoring the old by bits when maintenance is needed on those sections (low-budget approach..)

A lead will help you spot other good devs, including other platforms leads. From there, hire engineers who follow the Lead!

<comment><USER5> These are all things any engineer should be able to/ does do. The title "lead dev" sounds like marketing.

<comment><USER4> Based in London, where Lead Dev corresponds to those attitudes/skills. Personally: I'm afraid in a world with current growth of almost-free online programming courses/degrees, high demand, high rates and low competition, we're going to have to accept raising the "Engineer" skills to "Lead Developer / Architect" title.

If you compare with companies with big budget, yes those attitudes are what you find on the average engineer. In the London start-up world where budget is tight and VC's think short term that's normally not the case. It's hard to find solid architectural thinkers with experience who don't call themselves Leads, Architects and so on.

Are these skills and attitudes found in your area as just "engineers"?

<comment><USER5> Self taught people with low/no experience should be called 'programmers' at best. In almost all industries, people who specialize in one or two things would be called a technician or programmer, i.e. Angular programmer or web tech. Software Engineer implies someone with a degree that does far more and involves all aspects including project management and financial work. Lead developer is a title for managers to use when they want to designate someone as a developer that gets final say in decisions. The startup world is ridiculous and half the people in startups should not even be called programmers. Startups are just hiring people to look like they have lots of talent for investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best mix I've ever seen in practice had a non technical CTO who hired an uber bright coder as Technical Authority. The Technical Authority had a written mandate, signed off by the CTO and CEO, that his technical suggestions were to be given the same authority as a board level member of staff.

The reason why it was successful is that the CTO is no longer a developer, but a board director, and as such should focus on enabling the business through its use of technology, and enabling the techology department by cheerleading its needs to the business - you'll need to learn enough of the other business functions so that you can do that job properly, and you'll need to be able to give business cases of why you need those extra servers etc.

In addition, the Technical Authority wasn't disrupted by board level meetings and politics, and could spend more time evaluating technologies, practices, processes, setting standards etc. and they were not really suited to dealing with the non technical stuff a CTO has to.

Another big benefit was that it enabled the Technical Authority to keep coding because they loved doing it, and they were very good at it too. The team liked this.

The team had a lot of respect for the CTO because they realised that he was pragmatic and knew when to hire to cover his weakness, and when to take a step back and accept that the Technical Authority and the team had collectively made a decision, and that they were in a better position than him to do so.

As a general rule though, if you hire someone who disrespects you then you get rid of them. There are very few domains where you'd have to put up with assholery like that because there are no alternatives. Chances are that if they've got the balls to disrespect the CTO then they're likely to be unbearable to the people below and to the side of them.

</comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like you don't actually think that someone ought to respect the work you did as a programmer; you had little training, little time, and weren't following good coding practices.

I think it would be healthy to approach it from an attitude of communicating that you did what you needed to to get traction, but now you're ready to learn about how to write code that scales while meeting deadlines, and you need their help and experience to do that. It is possible.

Respecting you as a person is a prerequisite, and that'll come from your sincerity to improve as a programmer and build a team that trusts each other and keeps getting better. Respecting your code isn't a prerequisite. Your code is bad. It's okay. It would happen to anyone in your situation. Rewriting a startup's codebase from scratch after a seed round is not uncommon!

Hope that helps and isn't condescending; I'm writing this comment quickly.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is actually a good thing. You've got something working, it doesn't matter if it's pretty. I've seen a lot of successful things that started out as ugly code. The ones that start out pretty and "architected" always collapse under their own weight before they ship.

We've all written crufty legacy code, at least if anyone is any good they've written bales of it. I would respect that ugly code, because it shipped. What I don't respect is someone who claims code is great and doesn't need fixing.

Now you need someone who can come in and turn it into something beautiful and scalable and whatever. So when you interview them, just lay out the situation. "How would you turn a terrible codebase into something great?" "Give me some examples of legacy code that you cleaned up 'in-flight', without starting over or disrupting operations or putting things on hold for six months". "What are some difficult bugs you had to deal with in a messy pipeline, and how did you fix them"? Ask about how they would improve real pain points in your current pipeline.

If their answers are broad, ask them to be specific. You don't have to know what they are talking about, but if they can talk about specific steps and strategies, it will be clear they've done this kind of work before. If they are hand-waving about best practices and generalizations, and can't drill down any further, move on. Make sure they can actually write code, too, there's plenty of people out there who can talk about code but don't sit down and write it every day. If it's going well, take them out to lunch, tell them about this post. You need someone who you can trust and be honest with, someone who will give you honest feedback on technical decisions. You don't want someone who resents that you have less technical experience and are in a more senior role.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hire someone way more talented than yourself. Be upfront, that you want them to write good code where that is consistent with the goals of the business and that they will have to live with the pain of the existing code base until there is a good business case for radically changing the code base. The hope is that the good business case will be such strong growth that it all has to be thrown away to make room for the wheel barrows full of money coming through the front door.

Be an example for your hire. Don't own the code. Emphasize that the hire should not own the code either. Emphasize the business goals are the goals and code is only a means of pursuing those goals. The code is not an end in itself.

It will be tough to hire. It will be tough to deal with the existing code for the person who is hired. The goal is that the right person will get it and the wrong candidates will filter themselves out.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a CTO you will hopefully ALWAYS have better developers than you working for you, that's the point, the CTO role is not to be the best tech guy in the room. Its the guy that sets the vision, talks to investors, sets high level tech strategy (with a lot of team involvement), hires, fires, keep sales guys away from dev's etc

Eg. sort out everything that would distract your developers from building.

<comment><USER10> I'd Hire the full stack guys first, but spend a lot of time talking with them, the first hire is always the hardest but the most important. Its also hard not to hire people like yourself so take it slow, some of the best guys I have ever worked with are mid 30 with wife and kids that just know how to get stuff done.

<comment><USER7> The programmers-are-male assumptions in your comments are disturbing.

<comment><USER11> That's absurd.

Most programers are male? You can actually make that assumption factually.

How do you feel about the phrase "MIDWIFE's are in demand"? Is it appropriate or do you feel that people should have to say "Midwifes, both the females that practice midwifery and the males in in this profession, are in demand"? Can we just assume that the majority of midwifes are women and the majority of programmers are men without that being offensive?

<comment><USER12> > How do you feel about the phrase "MIDWIFE's are in demand"?

Well, for me, bad, but mostly for reasons unrelated to the main issue in the discussion -- because it uses an apostrophe improperly for "look out, here comes an 's'", and because the plural of "midwife" is "midwives". ("midwifes", without the gratuitous apostrophe, is a word, but its the third person present of the verb "midwife", not the plural of the noun "midwife".)

<comment><USER11> Funny

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What you achieved is actually pretty impressive. Teaching yourself programming and build a product with traction and worth of investment. Use this at your advantage, the kind of developer that you want to hire first will respect that.

Hire a Senior full-stack developer and communicate very well that the state of the platform (and the code) is at "junior" level. Use this argument to motivate him, many developers like the challenge to set standards and lead technical decisions early on in a project.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, I'd ask for a portfolio, and if you do have some programmer friends that do have the experience, I'd ask them if they can sit in an interview with you. If a portfolio is not possible, I'd ask for some technologies that they've worked with, and try to find a project which uses those technologies. I'd ask for a work sample using whatever they are comfortable with, such as the 'TodoMVC' implementation, something small that can be finished in 4 hours that shows their skill. This isn't like you are hiring just a programmer, this is going to be one of the first programmers you hire, the one likely to set the standards. Yes, he may not respect your programming skill, but that's to be expected, programmers are prideful of their work. However they can be respectful of you while giving you the rundown of why what you wrote was wrong. You want to hire someone who is better than you at programming. At the same time you don't want someone who is an ass, that should be pretty easy to figure out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Get out of the business of being a CTO if you don't know technology. A CTO knows what the tech does and how to code, they are super technical. You could be a CEO or a CMO instead without being technical. CTO with no technical experience is a train wreck in progress.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would hire the absolute best most experienced developer you can. Hire someone with startup experience that can do the hands on work needed now, but also manage and scale the development quickly.

I would say use the title VP of Engineering for the new hire. IF they are a rockstar, then you can promote them to CTO. If not, you could hire a CTO.

I would move yourself into another C-level title such as Chief Product Officer. CTO really means deep experience with tech which you don't have.....and that's ok because you are a founder that kicked ass on the initial version. Now you can bring in the talent to really scale the tech side of the company.

</comment><comment><USER17> It can be hard to let go of the work you have done to let someone else pick up the torch.

And It will be tough because this is your first experience being a programmer and your code confidence will be easily shattered. But the best thing you can do to improve your product, code, and knowledge is to hire someone with more experience than you. A good CTO hires knowledgeable programmers and listens to their opinions so he can make informed decisions. If you try to protect the code you have written by hiring less experienced programmers, your product will ultimately suffer and you will eventually be let go.

</comment><comment><USER18> You're not the CTO of your company, so give yourself a different title.

 _how do I "manage" that individual if they don't respect the work I've done as a programmer?_

By giving yourself a position that you can live up to.

Do you need a board-level technical person? If you do, you've already said you're not qualified to be it. Do you NOT need a board-level technical person? Have the them report to whatever your not-CTO role is.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll agree with most folks here that you aren't a CTO.

You don't NEED a CTO, today, and at this point it might even be counter productive. Your either going to hire what you can afford, or pay a lot of money for little code return.

Do you need an architect/director/VP/tech-lead? Probably.

What you have already done in "reducing the time to goto market and cost- quality has taken a hit" is make a sound business decision. Without knowing what your road map, funding level, growth projections and anything about the existing codebase we are being asked to give advice in a vacuum.

Your real issue (and why I would say you ARENT a CTO, or VP or any of those other titles) is that you lack a network. If I need advice, a sounding board, an outside opinion or a shoulder to cry on, I have a list of folks I can call 24/7 who I trust and have worked with in the past. Sometimes it isn't wise or possible to get this kind of support within your current company, and as a manager outsiders who understand may be your ONLY outlet.

Your a founder, you just got some cash, set aside 2-3 hours every day to just TALK to new people. You want to buy me lunch and pick my brain for 2 hours, thats a fair deal, and its easier for me to be objective about YOUR issues, and YOUR drama (its going to happen). If we got along and started to get together regularly, I'm going to get insight and continuity that you just can't create in a form post. If I'm willing to listen to you for lunch (and I have do so for others) I'm sure a lot of other folks are as well. There was a story a while back that there were folks willing to give up their passwords for a snickers bar, just imagine what you can get from sandwiches, cheeseburgers and the occasional beer.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm in the same position with similar circumstances. You did what you had to do - instead of going back to school and learning the theory, you decided to focus on the problem and build practical solutions in the form of prototypes/mvps. There's no shame in that.

My approach will be to stay humble and eager to learn. I want to hire people smarter than me so that I can grow by working with them.

</comment><comment><USER21> With regards to your concern, it's important for any leader to know their own weaknesses. Given that you know you're not a superstar developer so if you'll be hiring one as part of the technical team, make sure you pay attention to what he/she says. Listening to others will help you gain respect. The CTO's role will be enable the technology to fuel the business. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be the best developer but it means that you have to help your technical team to achieve it. Give them the tools, ask for their expertise, let them make it happen and communicate the business strategy to them.

At such an early stage, you'll probably need someone who is a self-starter who can play multiple roles rather than someone you will have to "manage". However, given that you don't have a solid technical background, it will be tough to make a lot of decisions without consulting your technical team. Find someone who is a technical expert but is also willing to help you, not overtake you.

</comment><comment><USER22> > As a CTO with no computer science background and no previous experience > programming at another company

Why are you the CTO?

<comment><AUTHOR> I programmed in my spare time because I was curious. After a few months I started building little applications to make my life easier. My co-founder and I then had an idea and we wanted to bring it to market. I continued teaching myself until we got to our beta complete.

I figured we're a two person startup and I'm writing code and building the beta, I guess that makes me the CTO?

<comment><USER23> Note: you can't say you have no experience, because you demonstrably have some!

One thing to decide is if you want to continue down the technical path. In that case, you might want to hire a CTO (I agree with those that say you should move to "founder") who has as one of his explicit missions helping you to gain more experience. As part of finding such a person, you might ask for book recommendations in interviews.

But as others have noted, you'll have to check your ego at the door; back in 1971 Jerry Weinberg formulated the concept in his still excellent _The Psychology of Computer Programming_. If you can't do that, or completely turn it over to the technical people you hire, your venture is in serious jeopardy.

That said, you do need to find someone who doesn't gratuitously insult you or your work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hire a CTO to replace yourself. Be a founder.

</comment><comment><USER25> The only other thing I would add other than hire someone more talented than yourself is to ask a friend you really really trust who has good tech skills to help vet the candidate. You can do the behavioral questions, but you should have at least one representative who can ask the right questions.

</comment><comment><USER26> Do yourself a favor and don't call yourself a CTO. It makes you sound silly in front of your customers. Call yourself a Founder.</comment>


ES2018 changes everything - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-G_RZ4RJLU <comment><USER2> Worst part of the year!</comment>


Ask HN: How to make the world a better place with code and design? - <AUTHOR> My boss just announced, that we're launching a charity. We're a digital agency based in Switzerland. We want to make the world a better place with our knowledge and skills in Web/App Development and Design. I love this. Any Ideas are appreciated! :) Thanks. <comment><USER2> In Switzerland you can get in touch with the Open Knowledge Foundation [https://make.opendata.ch/](https://make.opendata.ch/) If it's anything like the German chapter there'll be lots of projects, often with PR (besides the charity) value

[http://make.opendata.ch/wiki/needs:design?do=showtag&tag=nee...](http://make.opendata.ch/wiki/needs:design?do=showtag&tag=needs%3Adesign)

</comment><comment><USER3> I participate in my local Code for Ft. Lauderdale meetup. Here's a link to an article about a small project I did for them: [https://medium.com/@CodeforFTL/the-story-of-oh-snap- civictec...](https://medium.com/@CodeforFTL/the-story-of-oh-snap- civictech-99b73b243156)</comment>