Ask HN: What do you do on weekends?

15 points by pwaai ↗ HN

15 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 41.9 ms ] thread
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, hiking, lots of reading
Spend extra time with family, study for a couple of hours, turn off phone and computer on Sundays and try to get bored. Practice my instrument.
Depends.

Depends on the weather; time of year; any freelance work to get done; etc...

Right now in Winter? Usually just try to relax and spend some time with the wife. If we go out with friends, ok. If there is some freelance work to be done - ok. I'll usually clean the house before she get's home from work mid-day Saturday. One of the few days we cook dinner together.

Summer is different; bike rides, yard work, beach if it's hot enough, dinner / drinks out with friends, etc... I like to consider myself a intermediate to pro car detailer so I'll spend 4-6 hours on a weekend day detailing our 2 cars (1 suv, 1 convertible). That's relaxing to me - blast some music and wax, vacuum, multiple glazes, waxes, etc...

Or whatever. Concert, go down to the water front - usually anything but sit in front of a laptop...

Spend time with the kids and wife.. do chores.. and that is pretty much it.
Try to get out as I spend enough time in front of a screen during week. We're lucky to live 2min walk from Atlantic beach with great surfing.

Enjoy taking the family shopping, although I rarely buy much. I like the hustle and bustle and going for a coffee / meal etc.

During the summer I spend time taking photograph for my web site, half hobby half income generating but certainly my passion.

Now my kids are older and can be left I spend an hour or so at the gym, sometimes they come along and go swimming.

My wife works Saturday nights so I spend this time on whatever my current project happens to be.

Sunday nights my wife and I always watch a film together at home.

Play is important to keep me interested in programming - experimenting with new deep learning ideas, playing with webgl, writing pathfinding algorithms in unity, or increasing my scraping infra to more interesting datasets.

I leave weekends for whimsical ideas and intellectual chase the shiny-thing, it stimulates my creative side and gives me things to think about during the boring parts of the week

What do you scrape?
- Weather data (tabular) - Satellite imagery (lots of providers, lots of different bands) - Forex currency pairs (70 pairs) - Cryptocurrency pairs - Crime data - Macroeconomic indicators - Fuel prices - Bitcoin trades - P2P downloads - Twitter feeds

those are just off the top of my head...

Why?
Because having large datasets allows me to merge the data with proprietary sets, or increase my own predictive models.

I have real estate models, Energy Trading models, cryptocurrency models, mechanical failure predictive models, insurance models, sentiment models and clustering models

Everything is monetised

That is the interesting part! "Everything is monetised"

But it's also your secret so I won't ask more

Ride my bike, do yoga, cook meals, work on OSS... or whatever else.
I cook and run trails
Hang out with friends, record music, play video games, home improvement stuff, and pet project coding.