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and-not-drewon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Posted this before, but Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) and Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/)

The Odds Assist tool started out as a way for me to quickly QA the data from the API. It then turned into its own product as an odds scanner and sports book advantage finder (mainly arbitrage, +EV, middles, etc). Over the past few months it's really pivoted toward prediction markets and collecting and displaying data to get an edge on markets that are soft.

The pivot to focus on PMs has been pretty fun from a development perspective since there's so many niche markets to look explore. I've always liked math, I'm a bit of a digital hoarder, and I've got ADHD so finding random things to collect a bunch of data for just to test a hypothesis just hits my brain in all the right ways. It's also given me an excuse to learn more about ML what has been great.

and-not-drewon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.

Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks

Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.

API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.

and-not-drewon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

I typed out half of a real long message and then realized this could probably explain it better than I can

https://www.techopedia.com/gambling-guides/what-does-ev-mean...

and-not-drewon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

I've posted before, but https://beatyourbookie.app/ is what I've been working on for a while.

The website is for tracking betting lines and finding arbitrage and +EV bets across sports betting sites. I've been hooked on the idea that there are inefficiencies in sports betting markets that can be taken advantage of, especially in betting on live events and so this started as me just collecting minute by minute odds data from different sites and going from there.

I'm currently collecting all the data myself so my next step is creating a public API to allow other users to access the same sportsbook data that I'm currently using (https://sportsbookapi.com).

and-not-drewon Ask HN: What Are You Building?

Posted in a different post last week:

https://beatyourbookie.app/

Website for tracking betting lines and finding arbitrage between betting sites. I'm currently collecting all the data myself so my next step is creating a public API to allow other users to access the same sportsbook data that I'm currently using (https://sportsbookapi.com).

and-not-drewon Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

Oh, nice! I'll take a look. Ty!

and-not-drewon Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

https://beatyourbookie.app/

Website for tracking betting lines and finding arbitrage between betting sites. I'm currently collecting all the data myself and am working to build a public API to allow others to access that data.

It's currently costing me ~$150 a month between DB, servers, and telemetry.

Even if it never makes a dime I'm really enjoying building it though. At work I switch to a role where I no longer write code, so having a side project where I can still do that is really nice.

and-not-drewon Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead

Parkinson's Law - "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

and-not-drewon Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

True, but going back to the original argument, if hackers did manage to steal data, that makes the idea of spending time trying to prevent all the taxis from being sent to one place even stupider. In the world where YandexTaxi had extra time to spend on something, they should have spent it on securing their data better.

and-not-drewon Someone hacked YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to the same location

That's got nothing to do with what we're talking about.

The first comment didn't say they should have spent more time on security, it said they should have spent time creating a system to detect if too many taxis were in one spot.

I think we can all agree that security is valuable and should be prioritized, but spending time worrying about how to stop who is already in your system from sending all the cabs to the wrong place seems like a waste of time.

Hell, IF (big if) the worst thing a hacker could do once they had access YandexTaxi's servers is send a bunch of cabs to the wrong place, you could almost spin that in a positive light. "We spent so much time protecting customer data that all they could do is send our divers to the wrong place".

and-not-drewon Researcher finds a new method for recycling polystyrene

Not disagreeing, but do you have a source? I'd like to know more about this.

and-not-drewon Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

While casino is probably the best comparison, I've always thought of social media as kind of the high fructose corn syrup for this generation. We took something that in small doses isn't really an issue and over optimized without thinking of the human cost. We've figured out the most addictive part and have turned that up to 11 and are now realizing, "oh shit, maybe that was too much".

and-not-drewon Twitter follower counts over the past 24-48 hours

Maybe I'm naive, but the implication that this is Musk favoring conservative accounts just seems stupid to me. I'm not saying Musk wouldn't do that, but I just think it's all too fast.

I have no insight into the inner workings of Twitter, but I'm almost certain they don't have a big bias dial that they can turn from "liberal" to "conservative" as they see fit. Based on the decade I've spent working in tech, I'd be shocked if just the development part of a change like that that could be done in a day or two. When you factor in existing priorities, coordinating with stakeholder, design document reviews, code review, QA testing, deployment time, and all the other non coding things it takes to get code from idea to production, it feels like this type of thing would take weeks or even months.

Beyond that though, let's say you could just ignore all that and we could get the code from idea to production in a single day. It's not like Elon is just going to whip out his laptop and start making commits on his own. There would probably be multiple levels of management as well as one or more product teams in the loop on this. Word would travel fast inside the company and I'm sure at least some people at the company would disagree with the decision. We would almost certainly have a "anonymous source from inside the company" leak details.

and-not-drewon Principles of Engineering Management

> It's not unlike the military priority of 1) mission accomplishment and 2) troop welfare.

I hear what you're saying, but I would be careful taking a military type model and applying it to a team of software US engineers mainly because I think the power balance is so different.

If I'm in the military and I tell one of my subordinates that they need to dig trenches in the rain all weekend for the next 6 weeks, they may bitch and moan, but they've signed a contract so they're just kind of stuck. If I tell one of the engineers on my team that they need to work weekends for the next 6 weeks, they can probably have 3 interviews with other companies lined up by Monday.

I agree that achieving results is still priority #1, but the distance between that and #2 is very different.

and-not-drewon Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

Yeah, that was their whole point. Stock splits don't cause better returns, but the stocks with the best returns are more likely to split.

and-not-drewon Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

I think it still is. I'm going to try to find a source, but I saw an analysis where they measured from a year before the split, the day the split was announced, and the day the split was executed all until one year after the split was executed and the returns on all of them beat the market as a whole.

That being said, holding before the announcement performed the best.

and-not-drewon Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

> The market has been so weird recently that stock splits - which according to previous theoretical belief do not create shareholder value - have in fact increased the share price for extended periods

You're right that theoretically, they shouldn't create value, but I think even back to the 80s and 90s it's been shown that companies that go through a split tend to out perform the market for years after the split. The main reason isn't that the split creates value, but rather that companies who go though a stock split are usually successful and already on a trajectory to beat the market, split or not.