The "mail is hard" myth - <AUTHOR> https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/ <comment><USER3> A mail server is hard.

Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard.

But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: [https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix](https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix)), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running.

Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienced person with simple initial requirements.

But what is hard is keeping it running with more and more users, more requirements and evolving tech and less time to maintain it. Never mind forgotten skills and less priority.

Mail servers have a special knack for running out of disc space or going down for some reason only when you are on holiday and can not get online easily. And you usually only find out after a day or more as you start not receiving messages but don't really notice it for a while.

Or you friends, family or colleagues using it start complaining that some random person they are emailing is not receiving their email and you need to look into it... (Ps. Use DKIM and then DMARC reporting)

If you just want a reliable mail service, just use [https://fastmail.com](https://fastmail.com). If you want even more freedom and configurations, do try to set up a mail server. But it is hard. A bit hard.

<comment><USER4> > If you just want a reliable mail service, just use...

non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.

<comment><USER5> > and provide more, like Posteo

Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".

<comment><USER6> Hasty generalization. Many of those in that list support custom domains. Only checking the first and applying that to all is just lazy.

<comment><USER5> Where did I apply it to everything? To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. I'm happy with all the alternatives (as mentioned before), but I'm not happy with a claim that can be falsified with the first example.

<comment><USER6> > To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample.

If you want to apply logic like that, you have to apply it correctly. To falsify a universal claim you only need one counterexample, but the original poster never used a universal term (all, never, etc). If it wasn't a universal claim then you can't apply the rules for universal quantification to it.

More to the point, my comment wasn't attacking your logic, but that you seemed to dismiss the entire list based on the one example. I didn't see where you mentioned you were happy with the alternatives and only critical of the one, if that was the case then I just missed the larger context and I apologize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the biggest pain in hosting your own mail server is getting your outbound mail delivered into the mailboxes of the large providers without being marked as spam. Especially if you don't actually send a lot of mail, so you can never really build up a good IP reputation.

That's why I generally recommend a hybrid setup: Host inbound mail completely by yourself so that you have full control, but ship off outbound mail to a trusted relay of a privacy oriented provider. For example [https://posteo.de/en](https://posteo.de/en) doesn't filter any outgoing messages by sender, so you can send mail from your own domains. Your local Postfix can DKIM sign your mail before sending them to Posteo and if you add include:posteo.de to your SPF record all your mail will be DKIM signed, SPF authenticated _and_ coming from a reputable IP, so all your deliverability issues will be gone.

<comment><USER8> > I think the biggest pain in hosting your own mail server is getting your > outbound mail delivered into the mailboxes of the large providers without > being marked as spam

Why do you think that? The article mention exactly this could just be a myth that perpetuates because people repeat it without actually trying it.

In fact, I used to think exactly like you when I originally set up my personal mail server and opted for the hybrid setup you suggest. However, when the third party service I used to send mail shut down a couple of years ago, I quiclky set up outbound mail on my own server. None of my emails are considered as spam, and I haven't touched the mail configuration since.

<comment><USER9> > None of my emails are considered as spam, and I haven't touched the mail > configuration since.

Sounds like you never actually tried to measure the delivery rates of your outgoing email. No email server is actually able to get 100% of its outgoing mail past spam filters.

I've ran my own email server for a few years and I can confirm that the article is making false claims. It's incredibly difficult to deliver email as a low volume sender. The article falsely claims that it's not difficult and that people simply haven't tried it. Well guess what, I did try it - for years - with countless hours sank into it.

I wrote a blog post documenting my numerous, unsuccessful efforts to get my email delivered. I wish people would stop spreading these baseless falsehoods.

[https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own- ser...](https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/)

<comment><USER10> Gmail occasionally classifies the random email from YouTube as spam.

Given that, 100% delivery rate seems like a dream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Email is hard across time. Meaning yes, I can setup a mail server, and yes I can configure DKIM+SPF, and yes I can initially get good delivery to all the major providers. But that's just the beginning. Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility. And problems with mail delivery are almost always an emergency for yourself or your clients.

Nothing quite matches the gut punch of being on time for a deadline then having to push it back to troubleshoot mail problems. Or losing a weekend because while you know enough to get started your experience isn't deep enough to fix deliverability problems in a timely manner.

> I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary > solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next > year.

Translation:

"I am an intelligent guy who works hard. My entire professional career is devoted to designing and maintaining mail systems. I work full time to achieve mastery of my craft. Yet I can't understand why people outside my specialization might find it difficult to do my job."

Email _is_ hard. That's why I'm very happy to outsource mail to experts like OP.

<comment><USER12> >Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility.

True, but it is generally fairly minimal.

<comment><USER13> > True, but it is generally fairly minimal.

That's actually kind of the problem. It's the same thing with phone systems. Any IT person worth a shit can follow a decent tutorial and end up with a system that works. Until it doesn't.

What happens when it doesn't is the issue. For a lot of businesses this will be an immediate critical problem. This is not a great time to be learning by experimentation.

If these services are not critical then go nuts, but if your business depends on these services you really want to have someone whose full time job it is to run them. If your business is not large enough to support having a person's primary role be administering these systems you should really have a third party vendor do it for you.

The article is right, you don't have to use one of the big names, but most of the time it's not a good idea to run your own if you consider email to be a critical service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Let's see... Postfix, Dovecot, SPF and OpenDKIM on the server-side, each of them with their own config.

Then you've got to set up your domain, and domain headers on your domain host. Oh, DMARC is also another thing.

Then, most ISPs will outright refuse to accept incoming mail from your IP address, since they've basically changed from blacklisting to whitelisting. So you've also got to relay your outgoing mail via your domain host.

And then spam rules. I took the recommended rules from the Debian/Postfix/something-something-sorbs.net website, and I rarely receive email from e.g. eBay, because they've been marked as sending spam. Often happens with gmail addresses, too.

Despite all this... I still run my own mail server, but hotdamn, you're calling this _not_ hard?

EDIT: Oh, and nowdays you've also got to entangle your TLS certificates into the whole process somehow. I managed it, but don't ask me how, I'd need to read up on that.

<comment><USER15> And if you try to host it on Digital Ocean, they actually block port 25 out, so you're out of luck...

And you have to manage diskspace, backups, firewall/fail2ban, OS updates etc etc etc

I'm in the same boat as you. Managed to grind my teeth and pull through something like this for my own use and family, but it was painful.

<comment><USER16> I run my primary mailserver on DigitalOcean. It seems to work fine. I think you have to have either your account, or the Droplet, active for 30+ days before they'll let you have port 25 open.

<comment><USER15> Last time I asked they categorically said they won't open port 25.

I think really old droplets might have had them open though. I guess they grandfathered these in

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Managed mail server clusters for years with an ISP. Agreed, too many things that can break and cause PITA.

However, 'Hard' is a subjective term. The deeper you are in a trade or the longer you have done it, the easier it comes to feel. I visited a family farm and found it very very hard to squeeze milk outta buffalo. My great uncle however has dealt with that buffalo that for years and didn't sweat it one bit.

In a similar vein, do I really want to tend a buffalo in my backyard, when I can get the milk I need from a supermarket?

<comment><USER18> This is a great analogy. Why do more work when you can get the same result with less effort?

<comment><USER19> Because it is _not_ the same result.

Yes, it is a similar result, but not the same. You give up a lot of control even using a smaller email service provider -- not the least of which is direct control of your own email data. Obviously, since it is email, there is nothing you can do about what others do with emails once they are received on their end, but it is still nice to have direct control of your side.

The counterpoint, however, remains valid. There is some work involved in maintaining your own mail server. If you use a provider, you don't have to deal with any of that -- it's always about tradeoffs. As the article says, however, maintaining your own mail server isn't as hard as a lot of people make it out to be. It takes a little of your time, but once you know the few things you need to do, I find it to not be a big deal at all.

<comment><USER20> Setting up offlineimap to backup your mail is easy. I run daily backups of my protonmail account so in the even they decide to do something nasty to my account, I wouldn't loose more than a day of mail.

<comment><USER19> True, and I use offlineimap for a different scenario where I do not have control of the mail server. However, it is still not the same level of control as managing the mail server yourself. I understand why some people don't want to do that, but again, I don't find it to be much trouble at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero.

Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero.

There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just _one_ incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider wrt email. That prior could change if there is a privacy related incident with these providers, but so far their track record has been good.

<comment><USER22> It's true, but it is only half the story. I've used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it).

I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then.

Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google.

You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.

<comment><USER21> My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working.

In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.)

Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The "host-your-own-email-server" being "hard" vs "not hard" is an unresolvable discussion because everybody has a different mental threshold of "hard".

I'm still amused that back in October 2017, a commenter (lucb1e) argued[1] that I was exaggerating the difficulties of _reliably_ sending email but a year later in 2019, he confirmed the same difficulties![2]

The discussions in that thread (May 2019) and today's HN thread (September 2019) contradicts author's claim that mail stopped being "hard" 10+ years ago:

 _> Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. [...], citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago,_

Hosting your own email is certainly not impossible and lots of people are successfully doing it. (Or they they're actually not successful because their outgoing emails are sometimes getting silently spamholed without them realizing it.) In my case, I'd rather expend mental energy on other pursuits (machine learning, learning Swift language, etc) than constantly worrying about a personal email server's "reputation health" and then debugging whatever goes wrong.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607)

<comment><USER24> There are also different sets of features people want, some are actually pretty difficult to set up.

<comment><USER23> _> There are also different sets of features people want, some are actually pretty difficult to set up._

That's true but I think if we analyze discussions (see this thread and old threads I cited) of one group of HN experts (email is "not hard") debating other HN experts (email is "hard"), the most contested issue isn't the difficulty of advanced SMTP features and enhancements -- it's about _outgoing sent emails being reliably accepted_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for.

Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem, it's knowing which commands to execute, and the pain of having to figure out the new commands to execute 4 months later when for some reason something broke and now 20 people are twiddling their thumbs until you fix it. Screw that, running email servers is a horrible tedious pain in the ass you should almost never do yourself unless it's the sort of thing you enjoy (I've run Postfix, Qmail and Exchange servers from the mid 1990's until mid 2000's).

<comment><USER26> There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.

<comment><USER27> Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

<comment><USER28> Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.

<comment><USER29> Except it doesn't work to send an email to someone who I assume is important to you - "it's a great experience".

Isn't that an argument for why you shouldn't run your own mail server?

<comment><USER28> Well I just have to do the one more step of forwarding the SMTP to sendgrid or whatever and then it will be top notch. It hasn't been enough of a pain for me yet to do that next step. I just signal her instead of email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In addition to the other comments about what is meant by "hard", there is a crucial omission in this article: the failure mode of e-mail deliverability can be both hard to detect, and extremely costly. I wouldn't mind hosting a blog, because worst case scenario I'm offline for a few minutes, pingdom alerts me, and we're back. Total cost: some lost blog readers.

If I fail my outbound email setup, it can be months before I realise that most of my emails have been getting dropped. Total cost: I depend on email for work and family, so _very_ high.

I used to host my own email. Tested with gmail: delivery was fine. Half a year later it turns out Hotmail was silently dropping my mails. I felt betrayed, and learned my lesson: _email is hard._

</comment><comment><USER31> Which user demographic is running one's own email server ideal for?

My consultancy handles "all things technology" for multiple small businesses (sized 1-50 people, located mostly in South Asia). Anecdotally:

A lot of these folks are happily using email@example.com and so-on, but decide to get their own domain for the added veneer of "professionalism".

Many are happy to use Yandex (1000 users with your own domain for free @10GB/inbox. Probably not appealing for some Americans given US-Russia political issues).

Startups/sole entrepreneurs typically come to us after they've purchased a GoDaddy domain and selected the "Business Email" option upon checkout, so they just continue using it.

There's a small sample of companies who are willing to pay for Google Apps because they like Gmail's web UI, and they want the rest of the Apps Suite too.

We also deal with a lot of local big corporations for project work. They're almost always using some kind of in-house corporate email system running Microsoft Exchange Server with a number of different rules like no attachments over 5 MB and other such silliness.

For us to invest time in setting up a mail server for a customer there would have to be a very rare confluence of:

a) I don't want Yandex

b) I don't want to pay for Google Apps / Zoho / other

c) (Optionally) I want to send 500000 marketing/transactional emails per day but I don't want to pay Sendgrid/Mailgun/Mailchimp/SES

To set it up we'd have to establish pricing and SLA. Would I agree that we do it for less than $5/user/month? Nope!

I can't really see a compelling case to do it unless you're a hobbyist with strong philosophical perspectives on this topic. Maybe my point of view is different because of Geography but I doubt things are very different elsewhere in the world as far as cost/effort is concerned.

<comment><USER32> Lots of businesses run their own email server. It's not that complicated.

The easiest way to do it is to buy an email server, you can use Exchange or you can use something like iMail or Kerio.

Install that on a server, get a static IP from your ISP, put the server behind a firewall, and point your DNS servers for your domain to it. Then generate an SPF record, and you should be good.

That's how many people do it. As a bonus, you don't need to pay $10/user per month for hosted mail, or deal with Exchange licenses, but you will probably want to back the server up from time to time. You even get webmail with it!

The advantage/disadvantage of this setup is that it's now up to you get to get yourself off spam blacklists and such. When BIG_EMAIL_HOST is having problems, there's nothing you can do but wait. But with your own servers, you are the one who gets to email the spam department of BIG_ISP to request removal, and then there's nothing you can do but wait.

If you know Linux, you can setup Postfix, but I did say 'the easy way'.

<comment><USER33> Setting these things up is not the hard thing. Building reputation, not getting refused because your subnet neighbour decided to start spamming, having to deal with BIG_EMAIL_HOST not accepting your emails, bla bla bla.

Setting things up is actually the fun, easy part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have run my own mail server for years. It absolutely was _complicated_ for me to set up but I loved the process of learning and got it going without too much trouble. Now I can get mail delivered to nearly everyone, except Charter. It's been NBD from a maintenance point of view. Spam is all tuned nicely and I generally don't have to think of it.

E-mail servers are complicated. People with skills and interest can do them, no problem. It's not overly hard. I agree with that.

But I sure don't go recommending it to my friends who wouldn't appreciate spending a few days learning and setting all that up.

What I can do, however, is offer them e-mail accounts! So I guess as long as every group of 50-100 friends has one person willing to run an e-mail server, then we're all good. Of course, it'd probably be a pain to switch when that person dies or loses interest.

Maybe we just need to make it really easy to have a email@example.com that is portable and easy to move around.

</comment><comment><USER34> To this day none of the mail servers I've setup can send to verizon.net.

It's not "hard", but there are servers who will not accept a single message from you, rDNS, DKIM/SPF be damned. And there's fuck-all you can do about it.

<comment> J-Kuhn Tell their users "I'm sorry, but there is nothing we can do to send you the mail - please complain to Verizon."

If enough users complain, they might change their policies. Ehh, wait, we talk about Verizon here.

Don't bother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Been there, self-hosted my email for more than half a decade, gave up on it a few years ago for a couple for reasons:

If you are self-hosting the most important authentication fallback for your online identity, an ill-timed downtime or deliverability problem really hurts.

Your reputation can be affected by neighboring bad actors you have no control over. For example, SpamRATS punishes full subnets without an actual appeals process.

From the point of view of a major provider, the same email from your tiny server is going to have a lower score than one from their system. Encountered this a lot against Gmail.

And it's a commitment. If you go the self-hosted route, you will need need to keep up on new security and filtering practices, even if you use a turnkey solution. You might get bored with this after a while.

</comment><comment><USER36> This tool needs more attention: [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

(tagline: "Take back control of your email with this easy-to-deploy mail server in a box.")

I haven't uses it for a while, but last time I wanted to setup a self-hosted server for a domain, this came out the best. (I've handed over the task to somebody else, so no idea how it went.)

<comment><USER37> Long-term vise I think this is a dubious solution to "set up and forget", or advise people with few resources or limited Linux skills to use.

Mail in a Box makes it seem passably easy to someone with basic skills to get everything up and running, but then don't support in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system. This might be fine, but I really hope people realize what they're getting themselves into. [https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box- version-v...](https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box- version-v0-40-and-moving-to-ubuntu-18-04/4289)

This critique is somewhat shallow, if the backup/restore option is easy enough. But I just have a hunch there's going to be a lot of non-upgraded boxes running fullstack-EOL everything.

Of course, a system that does in-place upgrades and then fails is going to leave no-one any happier either.

I guess that my point really is that appliances requiring "complicated" upgrades by moving to a new OS install aren't all that mature. But I acknowledge I have a hard time determining who this product really is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Last time I installed a mail server was a couple of month ago. I consider mysql a pro, I feel pretty familiar on command line, working in this busines as a SysOp and Developer for a couple of decades. But one not just "set up a mail server". Saying "mail is not hard" sounds kind of cynical to me. You need to handle more than one setup, you need to consider compatibilities, you need to make it right, if you want to have a secure and reliable solution.

If your not in the busines of setting up mail servers every day: Mail is hard. As long as there is no download-and-run-solution for a mail-server: Mail is hard.

</comment><comment><USER39> Fun thought experiment. Let's rephrase hard. If you have to hire a team to manage your email for you, how much would it cost you?

The author of the post just explained how most of his friends think this is hard. I don't think email is very hard. But the ROI of doing this in-house is insanely terrible.

<comment><USER19> "But the ROI of doing this in-house is insanely terrible."

^ this is far too much of a blanket statement. I've done it, in house, for both personal and work purposes. The cost in my time was not very high, and the ROI was very good.

Obviously there is a much broader range of experiences with managing your own mail server than many on this thread think there is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've done this a couple times, and I think it's sufficiently difficult that if in the future I were hiring for a Linux sysadmin, I'd have them set up a mail server (that doesn't get spamfiltered) in less than 24 hours.

I never got spam filtered once DKIM/SPF/rDNS/DMARC were properly configured. I think _this_ is the myth that Big Email spreads. Linux mail servers are hard, but getting past filters is actually not hard. Spam filters are really good today not just in their true positive rate but also their true negative rate.

Given that a lot of services use your email as a 2FA mechanism, I wouldn't want to use a self-hosted mail server as my _only_ personal mail. You have to have a good reason[1] to make the time and maintenance commitment.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Domain_names_and_email_server)

<comment><USER41> Getting past the filters isn't hard. It's impossible.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945846)

That's a super high value domain (facebookmail.com) with perfect config getting filtered as SPAM by Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> While the email experts are in this thread, can I get a guide on how to setup a simple email address @ my own domain?

If you google, most of the top hits are for free mail forwarding using your domain registrar. I tried this and it was pretty terrible with a ton of caveats. For example using namecheap you can only receive but not send from that domain, can't receive attachments, and can't even send an email to yourself for testing purposes.

I think the easiest way is to pay GSuite $6/month?

<comment><USER43> Don't have experience with gSuite, but I use fastmail and very happy with them. The idea is you go to your registrar or DNS provider and change MX records to the Fastmail servers (they provide the host names and comprehensive setup help in their documentation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> OT:

Thunderbird org should create/sponsor its own email server software.

That's the way to spur email development by causing development on both sides of the chain. Sometimes in unison.

And they should also initiate an email service to put their development in action.

Imagine the innovation that could happen then.

\- Email encryption standards for key acquisitions

\- folders/labels stored as imap keywords

\- large file sending protocol using third party services

\- msg retrieval when email severs experience outages

\- development in mail list servers.

<comment><USER45> I disagree. There is next to no code sharing between the server and client side of email--implementing the server side of the protocol is vastly different than the client side, and even the server-server versus server- client sides of SMTP and NNTP are practically different protocols. Furthermore, Thunderbird already struggles to get enough developers to avoid compounding on its technical debt; such a large undertaking is simply not possible with the current manpower.

I'll also point out:

> \- Email encryption standards for key acquisitions

This is basically a standardization problem. I've been involved in at least one failed attempt at standardization here.

> \- folders/labels stored as imap keywords

The difficulty here is knowing when you can opt-in to this functionality, which is again basically a standardization process.

> \- large file sending protocol using third party services

Thunderbird already supports this, and has for... 7 years or so?

> \- msg retrieval when email severs experience outages

If I understand this right, this is basically having your MUA duplicate emails locally... which is what most MUAs do these days (at least on desktop).

> \- development in mail list servers.

What development are you talking about? Mailman is pretty actively developed, they even had a GSoC project a few years back to add encrypted mailing list support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I would venture a guess that even the most technically savvy users who _could_ set up their own mailsever now, still flock to "Big Mailer Corps" for the easy to use mail client filled with useful AI features, etc. and that even in the presence of an easy alternative to set up their own, will end up forwarding to their "Big Mailer Corp" of choice that offers them the most efficient user experience for their workflow.

IMHO, the most important thing missing right now to promote more decentralzied mail is a cometivtive open source mail (web) app, with a simple UI and a vibrant plugin system for every use case.

<comment><USER47> > a cometivtive open source mail (web) app

Yes, this is a big deal. So many web applications provided by companies as "cloud services" are orders of magnitude better than equivalent web applications you can run on your own damn servers.

<comment><USER48> Which is hardly shocking since they pay a bunch of people to work on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The thing I've always worried about is that to my knowledge there's no ACK for outbound mail.

The potential impact of one email I send not being received is absolutely enormous to the extent that certain mails I'd pay a decent amount of money to ensure delivery, probably more than an actual postage stamp.

<comment><USER45> Do you want read receipts or delivery receipts? Both versions exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> No mention of RBL? Thats what makes running a mailserver cumbersome - <USER2> put on an RBL because of bad neighbours in your subnet and your emails silently failing to deliver because of said RBL.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think I more understood the ethos of where the author was coming from at the end:

"And by all means, we must not push everyone to use Big Mailer Corps"

which is totally fair. For the rest of the article though, it's pretty clear that the author does admit caveats where any business would have to spend time & money figuring stuff out. And the fact is there is no real cabal of Big Email, it is such a commoditized industry. As a business you pay a pittance to protect downside risks, it's a no-brainer.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't understand why it has to be so difficult to run a mail server on Linux, BSD, etc. So many different pieces to set up and configure.

I've been running SmarterMail on a Windows VPS for years and it's been rock solid. It's just a single Windows service and all the configuration is done via its web interface.

Why no one has come up with a simple solution like this for Linux/BSD yet?

</comment><comment><USER53> Email infrastructure is very important for an open and interoperable Internet, way too important for us (techies) to abdicate it to gmail. That alone is a good motivator to run your own email services. Of course, there are other benefits.

"It's way too hard" is a HN meme I've noticed regularly. It's really not, if you have any tech skills or the willingness to learn.

I set up my email server in two days between jobs in 2011 and it's been running with minimal attention ever since. I don't have precise numbers, but to try to give some context I'd say about 2-4 hours a year worth of maintenance.

Over the years I've expanded it to handle a few more domains (consulting companies for self and family members). No issues.

To anyone even slightly interested or curious in the technology, just do it. You'll gain some freedom, gain some experience and help (even if just a grain of sand) decentralize the Internet. Don't fear the naysayers.

</comment><comment><USER54> Work at a email provider. Mail is not "hard", definitely tricky. Deliverability is a problem, spam is a problem. How do I know? We spend a lot of time working to improve on our services because of these issues.

In general : computers don't solve the issue of trust. End of story.

</comment><comment><USER55> This whole post is hard. It's a perfect example of what it is trying to disprove...

</comment><comment><USER56> To all the folks answering basically "yes it's hard" I think the headline is a bit clickbaity but there are some interesting takeaways... To summarize, (a) yes it's harder than setting up Big Corp Mail, but (b) a lot of the horror stories are either old or secondhand, and (c) it's a lot less hard to set up than it used to be.

If the suggestion is, why not give it a try, one thing I feel is missed is, how hard is it not just to set up but to run over the long run, when the technology evolves and you have to keep up, and why would any IT manager or CIO want to gamble their careers on this?

<comment><USER14> What exactly changed in the last ...5? 10? years that has simplified the process?

<comment><USER15> Exactly. I'm curious too. It seems like the author has something up their sleeves -- OpenSMTPD, apparently. But when I look at the homepage[0], I see a very typical linux-y man-page-style homepage... A far cry from what I would consider simple.

There are a bunch of guides floating online for Postfix, Dovecot etc, and some of them are pretty decent. But they go out of date quickly, or if you want to do something _slightly_ different, you're on your own... And even if you end up with a running system, maintaining or enhancing it is a different kettle of fish. You can't just follow the guide again, you're back to man pages and usenet mailing lists with some info inside a thread 23 levels deep.

[0] [https://www.opensmtpd.org/](https://www.opensmtpd.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> > _but my mails will not reach my users at Big Mailer Corps_

Unfortunately this is not a myth. rDNS/DKIM/SPF/not in any greylists, but mail from you goes to Junk folder on GMail®, experienced that myself.

<comment><USER58> It _is_ a myth.

The bigger mail providers (such as Gmail) are pretty strict on checking, and feedback is fairly limited. Thus, figuring out why you were flagged as spam is often difficult and frustrating.

There are so many subtle misconfigurations you can make with the way you have your DNS records set up, but really you need DMARC reports to figure out why your email is getting flagged.

It inspired me to build my startup :) We have successfully fixed dozens of email deliverability issues for our customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> My experience with running my own mailservers for the last 20 years: it's definitely not hard. It's not painless, you need to spend a little bit of time now and then, and you need to know a little bit more about email than how to hit "send" in your mail client.

It's annoying that the default settings of almost all mail server software are suboptimal, but once I set it up correctly (yes, that took some time but nowadays there are plenty of tutorials) I had to do almost no maintenance at all. Apart from power failures that were unavoidable, the biggest issue has been spam blocker lists becoming outdated or going out of service. After that, the occasional hickup after a dist-upgrade or moving to a different country. But on average, my mail server is working perfectly fine 364 out of 365.2425 days. And, this is considerably better than the mail servers at the universities and companies I've worked at. Your Gmail might have given _you_ no problems, but it is not working 100% of the time for everyone either.

So I'd say maintaining your own mailserver is as hard as painting rooms yourself, or changing the battery or light bulbs of a car. Not everyone wants to do that, and that's fine. If you're not afraid of it, it's a rewarding experience.

</comment><comment><USER60> _" Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it"_

Actually I repeat it because I ran mail servers for years, for personal use, for small businesses, for large businesses.

It was hard because spam was difficult to deal with, I don't know if that's gotten easier. It was hard because managing mailboxes, spam boxes, whitelists, webmail, etc for users was non-trivial. It was hard because occasionally you would be blacklisted and it took days to un-blacklist you, either from a spam list, or from a "big provider" because for whatever reason they just didn't want to take your mail. It was hard because you couldn't just run an open relay on most ISPs, you usually had to use your ISP's relay, and thus suffer their own issues; if you used commercial IP space that was less of an issue. It was hard because it had to be secure, and follow standards. It was hard because as your own hosting provider, you had to do all the things providers do: have a stable connection, manage your DNS, do backups, manage configuration, upgrades, patches.

We're not trying to bullshit you. We did it, and it was hard. Maybe it won't be for you, or maybe the "hardness" is just fun for you. But it's not a myth.

</comment><comment><USER61> In the late 90's I worked for an email server software company. Since then, almost 20 years now, I've been running my own mail server. I wouldn't say it is hard so much as a PITA and very time consuming. I spend quite a bit of time reviewing logs making sure that my server has not gotten hacked or compromised in some new way.

Over the years, a new exploit type comes along, like backscatter, that I then have to figure out how to secure my server against. And I'm also very proactive at reviewing logs and banning IP's against the constant barrage of probing. I must spend a few hours a week dealing with the mail server.

And then there are periodic "someone isn't getting my mail" problems that I have to track down, where Yahoo or pacbell.net or some other large mail system decides that my server is insecure for some reason, despite not being on any DNS RBLs (which are also sometimes a problem for no good reason).

If it weren't for the fact that I have so much more flexibility and ease-of- use on my own mail server for setting up many domains and multiple email addresses, I would move everything to a provider and not manage it myself.

</comment><comment><USER62> > Let me tell you a secret: Big Mailer Corps are not worried about you but are > worried about big senders harassing their users. They do not care about your > personal server sending a few mails, even if its in the thousands per > months. What they care about is the infected computers or compromised > servers flooding their users. What they care about are the marketing > companies that are literally shitting over them, sending individually > millions of commercial mails per day, trying to work-around spam filters, > and that sometimes manage to go for a while without being rejected. Unless > you are sending hundreds of thousands of mails to them on a daily basis, > quite frankly and without trying to hurt your feelings, you fall > waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay below the radars.

This is absolutely not true. A server I had mailed out daily run outputs to local users, and was also configured to send an email to one of the users' gmail accounts. I also used that server for personal email, but eventually had to stop because the daily run outputs got us blocked by gmail.

<comment><USER63> _the daily run outputs got us blocked by gmail_

Are you sure? How many tens of thousands of daily run outputs were you mailing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> For me mail is hard because software is convoluted. I need to install for a minimal usable personal mail server: SMTP server (postfix), IMAP server (dovecot), DKIM software (OpenDKIM), Spam filter (Spam Assassin). Also I would likely need to install Procmail for some basic mail sorting. So that's 3 huge projects and 2 small projects. They need to hook up with each other. I need to learn configuration files for every of those projects. Add to that dozen of different DNS things (and, recently, HTTPS thing), that you need to configure. Also TLS certificates. Well, that's a daunting task for me. Some kind of simple personal web server software which does it all (may be not for 100k users scale), runs on low end VPS server (10 MB RAM consumption) and requires zero configuration for typical use-cases would help a lot.

And, yeah, don't tell me that delivering is easy. I did everything right, DKIM, SPF, PTR, all those things. No black lists. Gmail still does not deliver my mails sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER65> A tale of caution for those would-be self hosters: a friend of mine had a Linux system running mail operations and somehow got ransomwared (theory is via supermicro IPMI). All the filesystems were encrypted and the console login banner was changed to an attacker controlled advertisement to a TOR address for getting the system unlocked. He didn't pay. Logs show there was no data ex-filtration. But as usual, his backups were a couple months old so he lost a significant chunk of his email (he used web interface/imap and I don't think he cached his email locally).

I felt vindicated, giving up self-hosting of email and pushing it towards a third party provider because I was concerned about backup/disaster recovery scenarios. When something fundamentally shakes up your life - you might not have the ability to function well and managing a mail server is a stress you could live without.

</comment><comment><USER66> His assessment on how "Big Mail Corps" accept mail is plain wrong from my experience. When I ran my own mail server, I had SPF, DKIM, rDNS and strict DMARC setup correctly, and got 10/10's on mail-tester.com.

Admittedly my main problems were with people on Microsoft hosted emails. They seem to run some kind of IP address based blacklist-by-default operation. My emails to Hotmail/Outlook.com users would randomly get either rejected or go straight to spam.

I went through countless online forms, Twitter conversations with clueless CSR's who kept asking me what Outlook client settings I was using, and finding random people on LinkedIn I could message.

In the end the solution that seemed to work was to reach out separately to everyone I was sending an email to on Hotmail/Outlook.com and getting them to explicitly mark my email as not spam. After a while it seemed to take and stop rejecting/marking my emails.

<comment><USER67> I run my own, but from time to time large blocks of IP space on Digital Ocean seems to get put into some blacklist. My solution was to use a fallback delivery through SendGrid and their free tier (happens rare enough, and my volume is low). Postfix handles this nicely for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The only "hard" part I find with running my own mail server for the last 25 years is switching platforms.

Deriving a large part of my income by supporting Microsoft software in small business environments, I have been running Exchange versions all that time. I have enjoyed Outlook as a primary business tool, and looking at the conversion strategies to move over to a *nix mail server that will support that client and the 25 years of horded emails I now store (don't mess with my jokes folder, dude) has been the most daunting part of it.

Even though I have been on Debian releases as my primary workstation OS for over 12 years now, I still have virtual Windows sessions to keep using Outlook. And granted, that also lets me simulate what my clients "see" when I am assisting.

</comment><comment><USER69> TFA is so wrong on so many levels, I do not even know where to begin with. It surely does not make me want to rush to test the author's MTA.

Unless he's talking of a one mailbox server, accepting outgoing only from localhost and somehow endowed with a non residential ip (or good luck with rdns, rbls, etc.). But that was always trivial, post UUCP era.

Background: I've been running mail servers from 1996, several different MTAs, for my company and for customers. Getting the thing up and running is not (very) hard -for a primary MX net facing machine. That's where work begins though.

My primary MTA is still sendmail, and sendmail.cf was never one of my problems - I do not have a degree in compilers, whatever that is, and surely I never read sendmail.cf

</comment><comment><USER70> I remember a story where a guy had the DNS of his custom mail domain changed after a malicious actor social engineered his domain name provider. The story was coupled with the recommendation to use a mail provider for the added protection that it would in theory be way less likely for their domain used by many accounts to be hijacked in this way. The guy got really screwed because once they got his domain and thus his email they could change passwords all over.

I finally ditched gmail once I realized how politically motivated Google was, and I also realized that I'd rather have a company owe me the service rather than using a free one where they could technically disable my email at any time.

<comment><USER48> I mean for the last part, you can pay for it. Gmail yes but there are others that are still a product but not Gmail. Fastmail comes to mind.

<comment><USER70> That's exactly who I went with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Another voice saying: I've done my own mail, and it is hard. When my messages don't get through to the recipient due to my unusual choice of running my own mail, from their perspective it's as if I never sent the messages.

</comment><comment><USER72> And when you finally have a well-running setup, use: [https://mxtoolbox.com/](https://mxtoolbox.com/) (No affiliation) To verify you have everything set up properly.

</comment><comment><USER73> Just like to offer an alternative view to the "if I move to G. Suite all my problems will go away" myth. Ive had quite a few clients over the years that have faced deliverability issues on G.Suite with sending IP's being on blocklists. Google isnt immune to this people. e.g. [http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/184.108.40.206.html](http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/18.104.22.168.html)

</comment><comment><USER74> > We can't let that happen: allowing e-mail to be fully controlled by a small > set of cooperating multi-million users hosts is just accepting to be > screwed.

I agree but don't say it isn't hard. It's hard and it's not for everyone but if you can the benefits are worth it.

Now I don't think having more small mail servers will stop big mail servers abusing their power but without a significant number not small servers better just give up.

For the record I do have my mail server on a vps

</comment><comment><USER75> Had been running my own mail server for the last 10 years, doing mail forwarding for a few friends domain names. Finally just moved all those domains to mailgun, and it's been great. 10,000 forwarded emails a day, for free.

To be honest it wasn't that hard doing it myself, but it broke 2-3 times over that number of years when providers changed their delivery requirements (see DKIM, DMARC etc). It was never something I enjoyed troubleshooting.

</comment><comment><USER76> From a few days ago:

* CVE-2019-11500 : Critical Dovecot and Pigeonhole vulnerability ([https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3](https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3))

I still run my own mail server, but I hate having to keep up with these security vulnerabilities which can come up at the most inconvenient time.

</comment><comment><USER77> Setting up and maintaining a mail server is not hard for the initiated, but I fear is archaic and endangered to be irrelevant as basis for interpersonal communication beyond a work context. It has its place as identity provider, able to receive invoices, but this can be subject to change too - and only newsletters and mailing lists will remain.

</comment><comment><USER78> "The configuration reads almost as plain english and a usable configuration file can actually fit … in a tweet."

That tweet is way too hard for me.

</comment><comment><USER79> Lately I've been having issues sending mail to Linux kernel mailing list, mail was just rejected and not sent through Gmail SMTP server.

After countless attempts to fix that or to understand why Google think I'm spamming I set up my own mail server on DigitalOcean Droplet. I used mailinabox and the setup was a piece of cake. it works flawlessly now.

</comment><comment><USER80> I've run my own mailserver since the late 2000s. I've never had much trouble with deliverability. Spam hasn't been a real issue either --- I run with deliberately light spam filtering because I find the occasional ridiculous spam email hilarious. (My favorite spam of all time begins "Yes, I am Bernie Madoff".)

</comment><comment><USER81> Here's the difference:

* setting up gitlab ce is easy

* setting up LE certificate is easy

* setting up wordpress is easy

* setting up mail is easy

If at some point in the future any of the first three stop being easy in an obvious way, there's a whole team of developers who will work hard to restore easiness.

That's quite different from a blog author shrugging because their configuration-in-a-tweet is obsolete in three years.

</comment><comment><USER82> [https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos- mailserver](https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver)

I invested 3 hours of time setting it up, $4/month in hosting, and now I have email@example.com as my main email and have never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER83> The only issue I had setting up a mail server was sending mail to servers using some service which blocks my domain. Places like my university and my work using Proofpoint, for example, seem to only allow mail from large, easily verifiable domains.

</comment><comment><USER84> This person keeps saying "Big Mailer Corps" which is extremely annoying. That's a really easy way to blame someone without actually calling out either specific entities or behaviors. I work for what they probably consider a "big mailer corp" and I wholeheartedly and deeply doubt there is some weird conspiracy against people running mailservers, it just actually is difficult and yes some of us really have tried. It's kind of unfortunate that it's hard because I don't think, for example, you can use a personal gmail with custom domains, unless you have a separate Google Apps account. Fastmail and Protonmail do support this, and probably at least a couple other providers. It's probably worth the paltry $5/mo that Fastmail charges for the saved time and effort debugging, updating servers, and fighting spam filters over years.

Disclosure: Google employee. (I do not work on anything related to mail.)

</comment><comment><USER85> Is there any reason you can't forward all outgoing mail through AWS SES with a custom MAIL FROM domain so it looks like it's coming from you? That way you would have a high reputation IP pool at nominal cost for a low volume.

</comment><comment><USER86> I thought the pain of setting up your email server was doing all the IT stuff to make sure that it's always working and you're not going to end up losing all your mail and all that.

</comment><comment><USER87> Why would I WANT to run a mail server, regardless if it's hard or not? I don't gain a lot of value, and now I'm on the hook for everything not fun.

</comment><comment><USER88> How hard is it to do your email yourself and make it secure?

For example, adding 2FA to your users, monitoring access, spam detection, etc...?

</comment><comment><USER89> I remember that I had to set up sendmail via m4 scripts to use mutt on a local machine. Those were fun days.

</comment><comment><USER90> Running your own mail server is like having a pet dog. You have to keep it in good shape, exercise it, feed it well .. chain it up when necessary, clean up after it and so on. Keep the neighbours kids from stealing it and using it to deliver drugs, etc.

If you treat it like a pet, it makes it a lot easier to manager. "Oh, did I forget to check the mail logs this week", and so on..

<comment><USER91> I don't see self-hosting email as being any different than any other self- hosting service. I mean, take "mail server" out of our your analogy above, and replace it with "web server," and everything still applies.

<comment><USER69> No, it does not. Read the thread to know why.

<comment><USER91> I've been a sysadmin for 20 years, so I suppose I just see things differently than you.

<comment><USER69> Been a sysadmin for 25 years myself.

<comment><USER90> 30 years here. Still got my old dogs, through thick and thin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Everything is easy to folks that have the time to grok the tech.

I like to write software. I don't like running a Linux server, although I know that i could learn to be an excellent admin. It's just that every second I spend learning Linux admin, is a second I'm not spending learning Swift.

So I just use shared hosting for my sites; even though I'm perfectly capable of running a VPS.

<comment><USER29> To add to your point, I like writing software, I know how to set up networks, load balancers, VMs, databases, messaging servers, etc. I have no interest in doing it or being on call. I mercilessly recommend managed alternatives anytime I can. I have a manager who was glad to kill our SFTP server and pay more money for AWS's managed solution.

He would much rather hand his boss - the founder - a bill than have to explain why our server went down.

<comment><USER19> That's all great until interruptions in the service you are depending on interferes with your business getting done (and you can't fix or mitigate the problem yourself).

Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised.

I totally get why people don't want to do such things themselves. I just think it is important for people to realize that doing so has its own set of consequences and risks that they should be aware of. I suspect most of the folks on HN are aware of this, but there does seem to be an awful lot of "it would be dumb to do that yourself" sentiment here.

<comment><USER29> _Don 't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised._

AWS is a lot more reliable than almost any in house solution. As far as being responsive, if you have a business support plan with AWS, you can always reach live, helpful support. Trust me, being on the Dev side, when I need resources on AWS, it's just a click, script, or CloudFormation template away. Getting resources provisioned through the infrastructure gatekeepers can literally take weeks.

And just from the CYA standpoint and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". If your colo goes down everyone looks at you crazy and you have a lot of questions to answer. If AWS goes down and you took the appropriate steps at least making your infrastructure AZ redundant if not multi region redundant, it's going to make news and no one is going to question why you chose AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Making your own electric car is easier. But still I wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER19> I realize you are likely using hyperbole, but in my experience managing my own mail server is trivial compared to the complexity of building your own electric car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Completey ignores any economic argument for making it someone else's problem.

<comment><USER91> What argument is that, exactly?

<comment><USER94> opportunity cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py this article doesn't have the word 'security' in it

<comment><USER91> And why does that matter, please?

<comment> awinter-py I think one of the hard things about operating any server is securing it.

If the author is arguing that 'mail is easy now' you can't make that argument without addressing the security aspect. I _hate_ google and I still use gmail because their project zero team is so good.

Big consumer tech companies are finding their own ways to make this argument: apple with privacy, google with security research, even facebook with providing better privacy controls, although this isn't in their DNA and they'll fail. More products are supporting MFA/FIDO now.

If 'mail in a box' etc are going to convince me to self host (which I would love to do), security is the missing piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Lasting long against HN-mainpage-level load. That's what's hard.

<comment><USER96> It looks to be a static site generator. It's surprisingly easy to weather that storm with a simple web server + static sites, it's dynamic sites using Wordpress etc. that have the most trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Heres the point though: I want to be _writing_ email, not configuring email servers.

And if I need a Google/Apple email for usage on my phone, I'd rather just use that one instead of hosting my own email solution.

This is without even considering the fact that configuring email is not as trivial as say, setting up a website. And you're never going to get spam filtering as good as the Big Email corps.

</comment><comment><USER97> People do not run their own mail server for the same reason people ( including the author of that guide ) do not host jquery and bootstrap on their own servers -- it is not that it is hard, it is that not running their own mail server or not hosting their own jquery and bootstrap code is easier.

<comment><USER98> Most people drop jquery locally on the server in a js folder. It's probably the easiest part of the project.

<comment><USER97> Yet the author of the blog post did not do it, which is a point. It is not about what is 'hard' or what is 'easy'. Rather it is about what is easiest.</comment></comment></comment>


Questions for Co-Founders (Gabor Cselle) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/11/questions-for-cofounders.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a strong set of questions. The only one that didn't ring true was #8, ownership. For a two-founder company, I strongly believe that 50/50 is the correct structure. Anything less breeds long-term ill will.

What if, as Gabor notes, contributions are unequal? For early stage startups and minor disparities, I'd say skip it and still go with 50/50. The amount of future contribution (and potential for conflict) by both parties will be huge compared to than what's already been done. If someone really is coming to the table with a vastly larger contribution to the company, and intends to bring on a co-founder, I'd challenge the pair to very carefully consider whether the second person is a founder or a highly compensated key employee.

<comment><USER3> I think 50/50 is the worst structure.

Someone must have the last word, and that's actually less stressful.

<comment><AUTHOR> If two founders can't agree on a critical decision, is the situation any better if they're 70/30 rather than 50/50? The person who "loses" will not feel good about it, and I think that feeling is compounded by the inequality in ownership. 50/50 drives you engage your partner in hard decisions and get to a solution you can both live with.

<comment><USER3> But what if you can't agree on a decision, but you could live with one partner having the last word?

Say we agree on you taking the 51% side, then I have to think up front if I can live with you winning every time we can't agree.

We'll be agreeing most of the time and if I'm an adult I can live with the occasion when we disagree but you have the last word.

The worst case scenario here is that over time I can't take it and refuse to participate.

That's pretty bad, but the worst case scenario with a 50/50 split, is paralysis thus guaranteed failure.

I am not saying 51/49 is fair, I am saying its wort case failure mode is just a bit better then the 50/50 split worst case failure mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 9.) What would each cofounder rather be doing, if they could do anything at all in the world?

This was an issue with my last startup. We started with 5 founders, but for 3 of them, the answer was "my day job", and we had to get rid of them at an early stage. My other cofounder was very upfront with me from the beginning - he was all in with this particular startup, _unless_ he got into Stanford or Harvard Business School. Well, he got into Harvard, and that was the end of that partnership. For me - I probably would not have abandoned my partner, but once he'd already left, I folded the startup when I had the chance to work with a YC startup, even though I didn't end up taking the cofounder position with them.

10.) What're your expectations regarding the amount of pressure you'll be putting on yourselves?

This is more than just working hours - it's also how seriously you beat yourselves up when you miss a deadline or things don't go your way. It's really important to find someone who's compatible with you on this; a laid- back person and a neurotic one working together tends to lead to a lot of conflict.

Windows auto-update is kicking me off now, but I may think of more in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER5> The whole concept of interviewing someone and deciding to be an active co- founder with them seems odd to me. Almost like asking a girl to marry you after dating for a month.

I guess it can work out if you cover the right bases. From my experience, my co-founder relationship is great because we've been friends since high-school and we complement each other well.

The only time we took on a 3rd co-founder/partner turned out bad. So, maybe I'm just gun-shy.

<comment><USER6> You also have to address these questions with people you've known for a long time. They're just easier to address with people you've known for a long time :-)

<comment><USER5> Totally agree–most people I've known for a long time would still make bad co- founders.

I guess I just feel like some things can't be known quickly, including possibly #6 on his list and other things he didn't list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I really hate is "co-founder." I like "founders" better. Because before you know it, there's a "founder" and then there's "co-founders", and its all kind of bullshit over nothing (except money, and the sudden appearance of unwritten liquidation preferences, and the long slow road to self- destruction that those things breed). I don't really have a problem with equity being split asymmetrically, but I think everything else should be fair and proportional.

<comment><USER8> So what the deal with "founder" vs "co-founder"? English is not my first language, and I am not sure I understand the difference correctly.

Founder / founders came up with the original idea? There can be many, right?

Co-founder is the next person/persons that came in at a really early stage?

Only semantics? Or a big deal?

<comment><USER9> I think it's the ambiguity and uncertainty that bugs people.

I think of founders as the people who decide to do the startup. If they decide and then bring people on before they have gotten very far, I would consider those cofounders. There's a little bit of seniority difference but each person would be just as critical.

For instance, I've got a one-man startup GeekStack (<http://geekstack.com>). I'm the founder. I don't have much done, just organizing, planning, and a marketing website. I'm talking to some of my college friends about joining me, and at this point, they would be cofounders. If they outwork me or turn the project in a direction I hadn't thought of, I'd probably consider them equal founders. If they join me in 4 months when I have printed my first set of cards, they would be early employees. Does that help?

BTW, anyone with graphic design skills interested in making trading cards of CS heroes, my email's in my profile :)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, yes that helped. Mostly what I thought already, just wasn't sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's slightly irritating when a name is put beside a post, and I don't see any reason why this person is supposed to be famous. And the site is very focused on whoever that is.

If you write good content, let it stand for itself, and don't try to sell yourself together with your content. Sooner or later, people will turn against you.

<comment><USER11> It's branding. And it's entirely relevant who's dispensing the advice.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. For instance:

"How to build a company with a market cap of $180 billion" - <USER2>

vs.

"How to build a company with a market cap of $180 billion" - Bill Gates

Also, having gone through the very same process Gabor is, I can say the content does stand on its own merit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> equity should also be split to reward risk taken. if the downside for one founder is much higher than for the other, he should be rewarded more. e.g. one co-founder can easily go back to college or consulting whereas the other really has to make the startup work or else. all with appropriate vesting, of course.

</comment><comment><USER14> My favorite question:

Under what circumstances would you do a spontaneous "happy dance" without even realizing it?

My personal answer:

1\. When something really cool that I wrote runs for the first time.

2\. When the Pittsburgh Steelers score a touchdown.

Knowing what _really turns someone on_ tells you a lot about them.</comment>


An anecdote on switching from the QWERTY layout to Dvorak - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/117604851036691794693/posts/AGTostN6VCF

<comment><USER2> Check out <http://colemak.com> (Description copied from website)

 _The QWERTY layout was designed in the 19th century to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" and to prevent typebars from sticking. We've been stuck with QWERTY ever since. Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English. Learning Colemak is a one-time investment that will allow you to enjoy faster and pain-free typing for the rest of your life. Colemak is now the 3rd most popular keyboard layout for touch typing in English, after QWERTY and Dvorak._

The promise of typing faster is not true, at least not for me. I type exactly as fast in colemak as in qwerty (110 wpm). However, colemak does feel more comfortable. Colemak is much easier to learn than dvorak (I reached the same typing speed as I have in qwerty in about a month). I stopped using qwerty that first month to really acquire colemak, but I have since been able to type in colemak and qwerty interchangeably without any problems.

<comment><USER3> 'to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" and to prevent typebars from sticking'

Is that actually true?

<comment><USER4> I was deeply skeptical, too.

Wikipedia calls the "typewriter" unsubstantiated: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY>. It's repeated a lot, though! There's a link to a paper which discusses it in more detail: [http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQ...](http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html).

Anyway, Wikipedia spends some time discussing jams and so on, so perhaps that's legit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something that gets to me with Dvorak and its kin are how its designed for two handed typing all the time.

I have three typing use cases: left handed lazy mode, two handed code / essay mode, and mixed if I'm using a mouse capable text editor or something.

Dvorak / Colemak both take away some of the qwerty advantage of having quite a large chunk of the words I write on the left side of the keyboard.

That gave me an idea. I wonder if we are evolving modern English to cope with qwerty? That people favor words they can use off the left hand since the two modes of typing are either left + mouse or two handed? That would subconsciously make people favor typing things left handed only, maybe. I have no idea, I write code, I don't mess with silly brains and neurons. That sounds hard.

<comment><USER6> You might be interested in a project of mine. One-handed touch typing using your _existing_ muscle memory.

If you're using your left hand, every time you want to type "K", type "D" instead. If you need to type "O", type "W". Type the key on the same row, using the same finger... just with the other hand. The app then runs predictive text on this and figures out which word you _meant_ to type. So "tges" -> "this" as you are typing.

Your muscle memory already _knows_ how to do this due to the ways our brains are wired. Thus very easy to learn. Use Caps Lock to switch back/forth to normal keyboard.

Mac Demo: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard- practice/id...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard- practice/id501185004?mt=12)

Windows Demo: <http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/download/>

<comment><USER7> I just downloaded your demo and am very impressed. I forced myself to type with just one hand and it was much easier than expected (typing this comment using it now).

Do you plan to have a mechanism for allowing the user to change the auto- corrected result on the fly? (Other than tapping caps lock to correct then switching back to 1-hand mode). I did get a bit flustered trying to type "world" during a test run.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! It is pretty amazing how easy it is to 'learn'.

If you press tab while in an active prediction you can flip through the available word options.

The Mac version also has a nice little pop-up window that shows those options as you are typing. Tab or up/down arrow swaps the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of the comments on the original post suggest that keyboard shortcuts are an impediment to adoption. I type in Dvorak, use Vim with hjkl (actually, jkhl, which I find easier because vertical movement is on my left hand and horizontal on my right), and I make copious use of other shortcuts.

The answer is: you just start using them in their new locations. It doesn't take long for your muscle memory to adjust, and today (~2 years after switching) I can't remember the last time I had to think twice about j,k,h,l, ctl-p, ctl-n, ctl-a, ctl-e, cmd-c, cmd-x, cmd-v, or any other common shortcut.

Don't use a variant that reverts to QWERTY when you hold the command key or something silly like that---you'll just confuse yourself and slow down your adoption.

<comment><USER9> A lot of people are annoyed that many one-handed shortcuts become two-handed on Dvorak. I switched before I knew about OS X's Dvorak-Qwerty ⌘ mode, but I almost went back to Qwerty because of the shortcuts.

<comment><USER8> That's interesting. I actually appreciate that certain shortcuts become two- handed. The proximity (on QWERTY) of X, C, and V to the left ⌘ key promotes a cramped, claw-like chording that is antithetical to the purpose of Dvorak (ergonomics). I find myself wishing that the X key were on the right hand for this reason.

Of course---neither layout dictates a 1 or 2 hand maneuver because there are two ⌘ keys, but I think it's common for users to want to use one or the other (for me, the left, unless I'm using it with the + and - keys, for some reason).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been typing on QWERTY forever and see no reason to change. It's infinitely compatible (I don't have to worry about making DVORAK work on my phone or tablet) and speed is never an issue.

<comment><USER11> I'm a Dvoraker, and the difference between typing on an actual keyboard and on a touchscreen is enough that I can happily go between the two.

The issue isn't about speed, it's about comfort. Two years later and I can't type any faster than I could before, but typing is a lot more comfortable. The analogy I use is headphones - when you switch from iPod headphones to an audiophile pair, you notice the difference the most when you switch back. When I type Qwerty, I can't help but notice "wow, my hands are moving all over the place".

Edit: I should mention that I accomplish switching by using two-finger hunt- and-peck with Qwerty and touch-typing on Dvorak, which maybe lessens it a bit.

<comment><USER8> This:

> The issue isn't about speed, it's about comfort.

That's an important point. Sure, (I think I read somewhere that) the touch- typing champion uses Dvorak. However, I don't think that I type any faster after 2 years of Dvorak---I just type more effortlessly. Going back to QWERTY feels like a game of Twister.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I switched many years back now. One good thing is that I never got past hunt- and-peck with QWERTY, despite being quite fast. As I started learning Dvorak by doing touch-typing, an inevitability given a physical QWERTY layout, it now resides in a different area of my brain.

That means that I can touch-type Dvorak, hunt-and-peck QWERTY , and can easily switch between them at any time.

But it still doesn't mean that typing on QWERTY doesn't feel like someone took pliers to my hands. Typing on QWERTY feels like I'm purposely trying to hurt my hands. That keyboard layout should be outlawed or its use at least strongly discouraged, I'm not kidding, for being:

a) Pointlessly wrong and

b) Doing actual physical damage to its users, more so than any other layout

Sure, it may take some weeks of learning Dvorak to realise how utterly painful QWERTY can be, but QWERTY is god-awful.

Even Cmd-X/C/V now feel wrong, because you're engaged in a clawing motion that leaves either one's middle or pointing digit in a very bizarre position. With Dvorak, the combined movement in the left and right hands is probably about the same as the movement needed in the left hand alone even in the sub-optimal Cmd-V or Cmd-Z - with QWERTY Cmd-X/C/V means that the entire left hand has to move, while with Dvorak the hand can stay mostly on the home row.

</comment><comment><USER13> I switched to Dvorak about twelve years ago, in an attempt to solve a nasty bout of RSI (tendinitis in my wrists).

I printed out a copy of the Dvorak keyboard layout and taped it above my keyboard. From what I recall, it took about a week to be even barely functional. I was already a very fast QWERTY typist, so it caused anguish to put up with such slow typing. On the occasion that someone needed something from me in a reasonable timeframe, I would switch back to QWERTY, finish the task, then go back to fumbling along in Dvorak. Never switch keyboard layouts in the middle of a project. :-)

I would say it took about a year to really reach my full Dvorak potential. Even so, over a decade later, I'm pretty sure that I'm still not as fast as I was on QWERTY. I just don't think you can match the muscle memory developed when you're young.

As for the RSI, I would say that you're better served by getting a high- quality keyboard that suits you than you are by switching keyboard layouts. Microsoft Natural keyboards are _awful_ (sadly, I didn't know this when I was young and switched to one, which no doubt greatly exacerbated my pain). Get a keyboard with nice, light, consistent mechanical switches. An old IBM Model M will do, or a Das. My favorite is the Kinesis Classic, which takes an extra few weeks to adapt to, but IMO it's nearly ideal for programmers due to the excellent arrow key position (also, this help with Vim + Dvorak).

<comment><USER14> I had a opposite experience with MS Natural: I used them with great success for 12 years - I would quickly develop wrist pain on regular keyboard. I only switched to Kinesis because I decided it doesn't make sense not to use the best tool available. Kinesis is great too - btw, if you are in the Seattle area, you can stop by their office and buy directly from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone have suggestions about the best way to learn? I first heard about, and tried, Dvorak layout about 17 years ago. I've tried it two or three times since then, but since its so easy to switch the keyboard back, each time I'd get frustrated (because I needed to get real work done) and decide to do it later when I didn't need to get real work done.

Nowadays, I think that the solution might be a Dvorak keyboard cover for the macbook. This way I can hunt and peck in Dvorak while learning, or at least find the key and not be completely stymied.

Here's the first keyboard cover I found in Dvorak format: <http://www.kbcovers.com/servlet/Categories?category=Dvorak>

<comment><USER8> I would strongly advise against hunting and pecking. Print out the Dvorak layout and place it next to your computer, put your fingers on the home row, and type. Doesn't matter how slowly---it's important to make the correct finger press the correct key. Don't switch back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak, you'll learn best if you do it in an immersive way.

Personally I think that a print out next to your screen is a better idea than any cover, because you want to break the habit of looking where you are typing.</comment></comment>


Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-4-2010/tech-talch---chatroulette

<comment><USER2> "ChatRoulette is like regular roulette, but five of the chambers are filled with cock."

Strangely profound statement. As always, he does a magnificent job of making the mainstream media look like morons.

<comment><USER3> Not wanting to be a pedant, but I think the exact quote is "ChatRoulette is like _Russian_ roulette, but five of the chambers are filled with cock."

Regular roulette doesn't involve a gun and chambers... unless you run up gambling debts to shady people, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "we're slipping guys. we're bleeding viewers. people just don't care about the news anymore. we need something that grabs people. steve, who's our main demographic these days?"

"uh...well according to nielsen it looks like...scared old people."

"I have an idea."

</comment><comment><USER5> I posted it on Twitter as well. Here is the Canadian link - [http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon- ste...](http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/full- episodes/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart---march-4-2010/#clip270998)

</comment><comment><USER6> Brian Williams really has some phenomenal comedy cameos. I'm thinking of 30 Rock, and it seems like he keeps popping up all over the place.

<comment><USER7> He's a genius. Read his Soprano's recaps for Slate from a few years back: <http://www.slate.com/id/2163797/entry/2163798/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What amazes me about this short is not that they satirically covered the news, but the amount of clips and actual people they were able to put together to make the segment really work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Jon & the Daily Show crew have a satirical way of covering certain topics without actually _covering_ them, which I appreciate.

It's the same reason that most of my news comes from the Daily Show and news.bbc.co.uk

</comment><comment><USER10> Friends don't send friends links to geo-locked video clips.

<comment><USER11> Geo-locked? That's strange. Where? I can watch here in Germany. Despite having to endure ads which are in no way relevant for me.

I thought only Hulu was geo-locked. People might simply not know that something is geo-locked if it's only unavailable in a few places. The sites (regrettably) don't come with a warning.

<comment><USER12> Unavailable in the UK.

<comment><USER11> That's both mean and strange.

What possible gain could there be from excluding the UK and (seemingly) allowing access in continental Europe?

<comment><USER13> IIRC, (a version of) The Daily Show is broadcast on UK television. We wouldn't want competition now, would we?

<comment><USER14> Indeed. It's shown on the digital terrestrial channel More4 the day after broadcast, as well as available online via 4OD. Sadly, The Colbert Report is also blocked and that's not shown in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, you think the Mainstream Media would realize that viewers are not as afraid of the internets as they were back in the 90s. There is a reason why more people watch the Daily Show for their news these days.

On a side note, I would have loved a cameo appearance from Chris Hansen and the To Catch A Predator crew.

<comment><USER16> I was waiting for Chris to pop out.

"Sit down. Have a seat, Jon. So what are you doing here?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's Jon. Sorry.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why you're sorry? Yes, I'm not American so may be there is something that I don't know? Just plain curious ;)

<comment><USER19> I suspect the original submission said "John" and not the correct "Jon".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Linus Torvalds called the bsd-people for a bunch 'masturbating monkeys' and the digg-crowd for a bunch of 'wanking walruses'. I wonder if there was a more appropriate term for chatroulettes users..

But lets be honest guys - we all thought "err.. why did I not think of that".

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know wtf is wrong with these newspeople. Not that many people know about ChatRoulette -- for instance, no one in my family knows about it, and with all the time I spend online on sites like this, I've only heard it mentioned a few times.

But when you get on TV to "warn parents" about this "frightening new trend" of seeing penises, you tell a lot of "normal" people about it and only make things worse.

The mainstream media is desperate to look like they know what's happening with kids and the internet, but they really just constantly misreport and their own reporting skews numbers. See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter.

<comment><USER3> um, are you aware that Daily Show is satire and not really 'newspeople'. Just saying.

"See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter."

<sigh>

<comment><USER22> Yes, but the Daily Show also showed clips from actual news programs, and they are certainly clueless.

<comment><USER23> No, they're not. They have staff reading reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc. in order to find interesting news leads to sensationalize. It's THEIR JOB.

<comment><USER24> [citation needed]

<comment><USER25> [http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/15/colorado.boy.world.watching...](http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/15/colorado.boy.world.watching/index.html?eref=rss_us)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The mainstream media does not understand the internet? Incomprehensible!

<comment><USER27> On the contrary, I think they understand exactly what this site is about and are happy to demonize it, possibly to the extent that they can get the powers that be to introduce restrictions on online video so that we can all go back to getting our spoon-fed media.

<comment><USER28> No, I think they're morons. That seems more consistent.

<comment><USER29> I see no reason why they can't be both, evil and morons. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So how can I watch this in the UK?

<comment><USER31>
      ssh -D 8080 -C -N your-non-UK-based-ssh-server-name

Then use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy from a spare Web browser (Firefox is particularly easy for this).

Or get a cheap VPN account. Lots of providers. I pay $5 a month for this (mostly because my ISP frequently blocks access to Google). Hit connect, watch video, hit disconnect.. bob's your uncle, etc.

<comment><USER32> Which ISP is that?

<comment><USER31> I signed up with Pipex (a good business ISP), but they became Tiscali, then they became TalkTalk (a trashy - IMHO - consumer ISP). They seem to not-so- transparently proxy HTTP so badly that large swathes of the Web wobble in and out of working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> ROFL love his joke on how it's russian roulette with 5 _____

<comment><USER34> Interesting, looks like whatever you typed after the "5" tickled a HN bug - there's an unclosed <i> tag that causes the reply link on your comment to be rendered in italics.

<comment><USER35> The asterisk is used for italics. If you leave one at the end of your comment it does this, it seems. _

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You're not allowed to submit links like this to HN, because HN is too serious and important for humor. Cue the censorious "we're becoming just like reddit" comments...

<comment><USER36> Thanks folks, I'm trying to get to 0, -4 at a time. I'm here all week.</comment></comment>


How did you get over your gaming addiction to focus more on side projects? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> One method is to take the approach of just uninstalling the games and then trying to live with the withdrawal symptoms until you're over it (while working towards new projects). The other method is to do it over a period of time, while also slowly getting rid of all the distractions that get you to play games in the first place.

I find the second method easier to work with, although some are able to just flick an internal switch and stop one fine day. At the same time it's good to start working on your side projects by starting small (extremely small, whatever you're willing to agree with), and then increasing it over a period of time. I've found this method to help. You could start with something as small as just 5 mins of work per day, or a really small task for that day. Once you feel like you're making progress (no matter how small), you'll automatically find the incentive to focus on it more, and spend more time on it.

<comment><USER3> Sidenote: An important thing to remember in all of this is that most peolple will probably fail a few times and for instance get into the habit of gaming again. But failing is only good because the next time you would try you'd probably last a bit longer and it would take less of an effort. The important part is recognising this, not beating yourself up over it and to keep trying even after failing many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd say you're best of examining what role gaming is serving for you. If you're mentally drained from work, it's likely with or without games you're not going to progress much on more coding. If you're using games as a social outlet retreating into code (even if it's something you're passionate about) could be harmful in the long run.

Addressing why you turn to games will help lay the foundation to feel like you have more choice in how you spend your free time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I uninstalled them, and started reading instead. When I got the urge, I would use that energy to read or focus on the side-project. Must have discipline and hold yourself accountable or have someone hold you accountable.

It's difficult, but figure out the 'why' you should stop playing games and that will give you a reason to stop so you focus on your why instead. I.E I want to stop playing games so I can spend that time with my kids and be more part of their life's etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop watching videos or reading about games. Recognize when the game developer has engineered the game to get you stuck into a feedback loop of repeating the same activities for changing some numbers (level, gear, loot, etc.) A hint is games where top players talk about 'endgame' content. In pre-internet gaming days the game would be done at that point. Check if you are actually having fun and getting enjoyment out of it or are just doing things to "keep up with the Joneses".

Break your side project down into much smaller tasks so you can get those quick dopamine hits like you do with gaming. Keep breaking the larger efforts into much smaller tasks. If something has a barrier to it, create a task which eliminates the barrier. Always be thinking "what is the next step to make progress?" The tasks should be trivial to get progress going. It should feel good to make progress, build upon that with more small tasks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe do nothing. I mean as in sit or lay down and stare at the wall or the window or the ceiling or something. Just stay like that for a while until you lose whatever urges you have. Keep your mind blank. Be comfortable doing nothing.

I find that doing nothing helps me to reset myself and allow me to chose what activity I'm going to put my attention to.

Once you're free of your urges, chose your side project, and just do it. Get moving.

While you're working, you have to resist the urge to play games or do some other activity like watching TV or mindlessly browsing the web. You might give yourself the excuse that you're only doing it to resist the temptation to play games, but you're just replacing one addiction with another.

Also, focus is an ability you need to exercise, so the better you resist those urges, the better you'll be able to focus with time.

If you get stuck in your project, I refer you to:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19955830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19955830)

Just continue by working on smaller problems at a time. When you slow down, look to accelerate. You can't go from 0 to 60 mph suddenly, but you can accelerate. It's better to move slowly than to not move at all.

If you suddenly find yourself back to playing games or otherwise wasting your own time, repeat from the start, and do nothing once more.

If the above doesn't work (probably if your gaming addiction doesn't come from procrastinating on your project), realize that gaming is a form of escapism. We use escapism to avoid facing something (or multiple things) in our lives. Something that, for lack of a better word, scares us. Everything that scares is so because we lack knowledge of it, especially how to deal with it. You need to figure out what that is and face it as best you can. By facing it, you learn about it, and by learning about it, it ceases to be scary. You don't need to deal with it perfectly, but often not dealing with it is worse than doing a poor job of doing so. Once you've done your best at dealing with it, realize that "your best" means you couldn't have done better. By definition, you gave it your all, so there's nothing to regret in how you dealt with it. By your ability when you dealt with the problem, it was impossible to do better. You can now move on from that problem and, hopefully, your need for escapism.

</comment><comment><USER8> I haven't been really addicted to gaming since university. But now I largely look for ways to add gaming systems to my everyday life, such as travel hacking (optimize the points, miles and credits I earn for air and train travel) or adding incentives to new habits I want to adopt (minor cheat days if I've gone to the gym a certain amount of days in a row).

</comment><comment><USER9> I personally was never addicted, but once tried to instill interest for game programming in kids who were beginning to show signs of addictive behaviour. I still believe it's a good approach, though it didn't work too well in my case.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is only addiction if you feel withdrawal effects and you can't live without it. If you have a full-time job, family and the complexities of life, and after you are done with your duties, you play games instead of writing a side project... you are fine.

Now, between you and me. Are you side projects VERY GOOD? Is it your main passion and mission in life? Are they ideas which if enough time, got a lot of potential or are they just something you work with the _hopes_ of it making it big?

If they aren't, you will play games or do something else. And that's fine. Most ideas and projects suck. Instead of worrying about this, play the game... and look around, when you find something truly exciting, you will do it.

Also, let you play as much games as you want, given that you do your duties, and set aside like 30-1h for self-development as part of your duty. Do programming exercises, read programming books, or things that are important on your field of expertise. Also go to meetups with other cofounders and keep looking around.

That way you are good for the job market, you chill playing your games and you keep looking for a great opportunity.

I'm also without any very good ideas atm, I browse around, checking for ideas and exploring markets. That's normal.

Don't listen to PG or people that say that you should just build something. This is only good for an Angel investor or incubator due to 0.0001% of the people that do it and find a good market BY LUCK, they go big and incubators and angel investors take their cut.

You only live once, 1 life. Enjoy it! And if you end up seeing a problem that you can fix or find something worth dedicating your life to, then I believe your brain and your body will want to do it instead of playing games(or anything that gives you pleasure/fun/challenges). Also, send me a message if you find that, because I'm doing practically the same as you.

</comment><comment><USER11> I still play games, after 8 hours of work I like to take my mind off everything and just focus on something else. In the weekend I manage to find more time and to motivate myself many of my side projects are actually game- related.

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't, I focused on my forum discussion/social media addiction instead.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. I uninstalled Steam to prevent myself from playing video games but now I find myself wasting time on instagram/reddit/youtube/twitch instead

:(

<comment><USER14> And HN :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can make a side project that is related to your favorite game, in fact I recommend it.</comment>


Galaxy without any dark matter baffles astronomers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/28/galaxy-without-any-dark-matter-baffles-astronomers <comment><AUTHOR> There is an older submission with comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701248)</comment>


Bill Gates says robots that steal human jobs should pay taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/2/17/14652880/bill-gates-robots-steal-human-jobs-pay-taxes <comment><USER2> Why should we trust that the government will give back to people ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The question here may be: Do you believe that it is more likely that the government will pass a certain amount back to the people or are the companies going to do this volunteerly. I think for the 2nd part the answer is no with a high confidence. Which makes the 1st option the better choice?

<comment><USER3> The question will be: What happens when the government discovers that it no longer needs people to continue running?

<comment><AUTHOR> At least in my country we have democracy. No people, no government...</comment></comment></comment></comment>