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Ask HN: Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?
Did you leave your day job? How long have you worked on them? Share your story!
- eulerphi 13y agoThis is going to be a long one. I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against. I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.) I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..
- xSwag 13y agoI've been wanting to do something similar to this in the future after my education. If you don't mind me asking, did you major in Math?
- eulerphi 13y agoI can't mention the specific degree because it would probably let the firm know who I am but I did not major in math, most of my knowledge of statistics, calculus, number theory, was self-learned out of curiosity.
- telephonetemp 13y agoAre there uses for number theory in trading?
- BSousa 13y agoThis is something I'm very interested in. Can you recommend some books/courses that focus more on the financial/HTF side of things? Cheers
- mallin 13y agoCan you recommend any books or other resources from which someone mathematically inclined could learn the theory behind this?
- cjbarber 13y agoI'd love for you to shoot me an email. username@stanford.edu
- agibsonccc 13y ago9 months of engineering for a core piece of tech. Wrote the first commercial application for it within a month or so. Doing great so far.
- mapmeld 13y agoI created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service. So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape. A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.
- sidcool 13y agoNo
- AtTheLast 13y agoThe startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.
- hansgru 13y ago> Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013? No. My side projects are just my main source of expenditures so far :).
- anderspetersson 13y agoI've gone from §50 per week to §300 pw this year. Still long way to go before I can quit my job, but slowly getting closer to it every month.