Ask HN: What are you working on today? - <AUTHOR> Or what did you work on this week? Screenshots of your development environment (or the equivalent for your type of work) would be cool. <comment><USER3> Today's my last day as an employee at my job of 6 years. I'll become a consultant starting Monday so if they need me, it'll be hourly billing. I'm just reviewing my emails today and reassigning my regular responsibilities.

<comment><USER4> Mind if I ask where you'll be getting your customers (clients) from as a new consultant?

<comment><USER3> I'll be consulting for my current job itself. Voluntarily going from fixed salary to hourly consulting gig. No daily responsibility, fewer hours, much higher hourly pay. I'm pretty certain I'll end up being significantly more productive because I will get to pick my own projects and not have to deal with meetings, obligations, or personal issues with coworkers. I'm giving up a double-sized corner office at a growing company but I'm getting my time and desire to code back.

<comment><USER5> You are doing it wrong. Clients == meetings^2.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but these will be billable meetings that will result in actual product. Previously, it was meetings that took away time from coding and was instead wasted dealing with typical office conflicts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Telling my girlfriend's parents that she's getting married. :)

<comment><USER7> I'm doing the same in the next week :)

Considering a dowry joke with her father... but maybe not since it could really wrong, really fast.

<comment><USER8> Could be done well. He should write a formal contract asking for 20 goats and 5 cows, then have him sign it. :)

<comment><USER9> Awesome. Congrats to both of you! I just "took the plunge" about a month ago!

One piece of advice: take a second to enjoy the day and eachother. If yours is a surprise like mine was, it's easy to get lost in the nervousness/planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am working on stuffing my face with burgers and chips prior to going back to the land of noodles and raw fish. Plus customer support emails, since birthdays and bridal showers don't stop just because I am on vacation.

<comment><USER11> I would be interested to know how much time you spend doing customer support; or, rather, whether you have tried to automate any of this using existing tools (like getsatisfaction, or even just a faq). Or since - as you have written in the past - your customers are not particularly techno-savvy, are these tools of limited use to you, and emails are the only way to go? This might be of interest to companies with similar customers.

<comment><USER10> I spend between 0 and 20 minutes a day on customer support for BCC, with most days (particularly in the summer) closer to zero.

Previously I used something which macroed responses (20% of the issues are 80% of the time, always) but I forgot to reinstall it, and support these days is fast enough that I don't really care enough to install it again.

My biggest tricks for decreasing the number are a) switching to a web app versus a downloadable app (< 10% the support burden, seriously), b) aggressively rewriting anything I need to on the interface to answer common questions before they arrive in my inbox, and c) optimizing the admin controls for common support queries.

I have a support page ("FAQ? Is that Arabic?") and some self-help support tools, like a password reminder system and a Registration Key lookup. (Support issue #1 for four years running.) My impression is that they help enough to justify creating them, but they're palliatives rather than solutions. I have no desire to use GetSatisfaction or any other third party which will confuse my customers to no positive purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Working on redesigning Notifo's website. I started by nuking all the css from the last design, removing divs I didn't like, reorganizing the site with a page div, some wrappers for header and footer so I could stretch them out 100%. Worked on the logo a bit to get a slicker look that blended in with the background, in addition to a subtle letterpress effect.

I still have lots left to redesign in terms of content pages, in addition to adding a few new sections to the site but I've been tinkering around with some typography recently. I really want to use TypeKit but last night Chad and I found that - possibly related - scrolling on the site is incredibly slow when TypeKit is enabled than when it's not, or when using a Google WebFont instead.

Using lots of CSS3 throughout - combined with Sass it makes it super easy. for example, my box-shadow mixin:

      @mixin box-shadow($ho, $vo, $b, $c)
        -webkit-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
        -moz-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
        box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c
        filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")"
        -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")"

</comment><comment><USER13> My SXSW proposal. I plan to present "Design for the Coder's Mind": [http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders- mind-...](http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-reverse- engineering-visual-design/)

But I'm stuck on the name. Some contenders:

\- Hacking Design: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

\- Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

\- Visual Design, Reverse-Engineered: Design for Coders

Thoughts?

<comment><USER14> I think: \- Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

Sounds like an interesting talk!

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but then they'll all turn up thinking they'll be making a girl, like in Weird Science

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's late evening at the moment, and tomorrow is the birthday party for one of my boys; a Pirate Party, arrrr.

At the moment I'm cutting out eyepatches so we can play pin the eyepatch on the pirate. Next up I've been assigned to draw treasure maps. Should be a fun day

</comment><comment><USER16> Well... I took the entire week off from my day job, so I could work on my startup project.

Some background: My stuff is all open-source, and I'd been working on it under a name that I'd picked out 2+ years ago. But development had kinda stalled out a while back, and I'd never aggressively promoted the project and tried to solicit much outside help. So I started working on it hard again earlier this year, but changed directions fairly substantially. Switched to coding in Groovy/Grails at the same time, and have made tremendous progress.

What I've done this week:

1\. Write a pile of Groovy code, making fixes and tweaks to the actual project.

2\. Renamed the open-source project, and started moving the development from java.net to a combination of Google Code and GitHub.

3\. Spun up two new slices at Slicehost, and started building two new servers: One for infrastructure "stuff" (Bugzilla, Hudson, etc.) and one for a demo site where the public demo will live.

4\. Started working on the "Community" section of my company website, which will contain information about the open-source side of things. I'm setting up something similar to the what JBoss has; with their site divided into "JBoss.com" and "JBoss.org" where the .org site is aimed towards developers and users of the open-source code

5\. Need to rewrite all of the copy on the company website to reflect the new focus. I'm basically reusing a company name and domain I'd setup to use for doing consulting / freelance development... so the website talks about all of that, instead of the product I'm working on.

The goal is to have all of the code moved to Google Code / GitHub, have the public demo up and running, have Bugzilla installed and setup, and have all the new website copy done, before I go back to work on Monday.

Screenshots:

<http://imgur.com/mR50F.png>

<http://imgur.com/kcfL2.png>

<http://imgur.com/dOo8L.png>

</comment><comment><USER17> Creating a PHP application for my employer that will allow us to deploy small 5 page websites for clients quicker than ever. We found we had to turn down a lot of jobs because the money didn't add up to the time required, but this will fix that issue.

</comment><comment><USER18> working on the ui components of the next gen Kindle :P

Other than that, finishing up the ipad/iphone version of a children story I have been working at home. Almost there.... kinda cute actually.

<comment><USER19> What is storyfun.com? It says "coming in June 2010".

<comment><USER18> Something I do for fun. Children's stories. I need to update the site, but yeah I am behind as I have been really busy on my job. It should say "September" or better, "sometime soon..." :P

<http://www.storyfun.com/spacecat/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wrapping up my last day at the office.

<comment><USER21> Same here! Making the jump from large corporation employment to startup life.

<comment><USER22> A startup that I'm positive will be huge :)

<comment><USER21> Thanks. I have a lot of faith in the engineers we got going here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Working on a Silverlight app for my employer. I inherited this app from previous contractors and some of the stuff they did is pretty scary, so last night was the tipping point and I've decided to start ripping out all the bad stuff.

I'm also torn on Silverlight in general and seriously considering rewriting the app from scratch in an HTML framework (debating between Rails and ASP.NET MVC, even if that debate may seem like a silly one to some :) )

<comment><USER24> If you have the flexibility to rewrite the project in Rails, absolutely do it :)

<comment><USER23> I totally have the flexibility in that if I showed up with a Rails version of the app my boss would be all for it. But I don't have the flexibility to do it on company time. I am currently studying Rails 3 and getting a feel for how long I think it'd take to do this. I think a clean, well written Rails version of the app would make my life so much easier in the long run.

Silverlight is an interesting beast. All in all I am finding it feels like writing a webapp in C# and a very strange "version" of HTML :) Especially when you use the Navigation Framework, the app becomes so website like it's ridiculous. I hate to think Microsoft wasted all that money, but I'm having a hard time coming up with Silverlight's strengths. Especially considering we are having issues with the Mac plugin, the promise of "write once" seems to not be met either. Granted it's two plugins versus half a dozen browsers (we don't support Moonlight at all), but still, if I'm going to be fighting how different platforms render my app, I might as well take advantage of the most ubiquitous and open platform there is.

I can admit XAML was well conceived for layout flexibility and visual effects. But at the end of the day, that benefit is so small it's hardly worth considering.

<comment><USER25> _... if I showed up with a Rails version of the app my boss would be all for it. But I don't have the flexibility to do it on company time._

That's a long and tiring road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fixing my son's newly bought second-hand bike. This is probably his last intermediate bike until I can buy him a brand new adult-size bike that will accompany him after that.

The rear wheel seems to be quite badly out of alignment. Part of it is bent to one side for about 1 cm and after fixing that down to 1 mm or less by trimming the spokes, there's still considerable vertical misalignment left.

Due to the horizontal misalignment the spokes and nipples don't have equally distributed configuration reserve, so it's pretty difficult to compensate against the slightly oval shape of the rim. While it's fun to fix things, I think I'll just go for a new wheel.

Other than that, the bike was a good find. The power transmission was in good shape (chains and gears ok, the derailleur and the gear changer work ok, ball bearings are ok) and it worked out of the box. I only replaced one braking cable and repainted one section of the body, and I think I'll go with that. Oh, I paid 15€ for it, and the good old ones are of a ten-fold better make than the cheapest bikes you can buy new.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hand-rolled SSE optimised version of a domain transform and coefficient re- order for a video encoder. 3x speedup over the C++ version, yay!

(My development environment just looks like Visual Studio, and that's because it is.)

</comment><comment><USER28> No one is doing something more mind-numbing than me.

Waiting for I.T Support to give me Admin rights on my PC to get something/anything working.

<comment><USER29> That was last week for me. You have my utmost sympathy, but at least you can browse HN in the meantime. I was once stuck doing that without anything to read and no browsing capabilities. It was mindnumbing, but I was at least being paid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Learning OpenGL ES (and computer graphics concepts in general for that matter) while trying to make a 3D iPhone game for my graphics class this summer.

<comment><USER31> Some good references for learning OpenGL/computer graphics math from yesterday's Ask HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497383>

<comment><USER30> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Trying to figure out how to get my mom out of these cash advance schemes and chronic overdrafts due to her lack of understanding of how banking works. Then reworking her finances into something manageable so she can manage to buy groceries.

Got some google maps integration going for one of my web app ideas this morning while on the train. Hoping to knock out the remaining stuff on the way home.

What am I not working on? Anything related to my day job, even though I'm at the office while I type this.

</comment><comment><USER33> Working on a few things:

Starting to get the word out for GISQuery.com, a Q&A site for GIS professionals using OSQA. Having an interesting time getting the word out on this one since I need participation for the site to grow.

Learning CodeIngniter as a PHP framework to help get a few other ideas off the ground (a revamped 140Pl.us and a new beer website). I am getting tired of trying to build highly functioning sites from scratch so I thought I'd try a framework.

<comment><USER34> I'd be curious to hear what you think of CodeIgniter, I have heard good things. We've been using CakePHP for about 3 years now, and would highly recommend it as a general purpose PHP framework.

<comment><USER33> I am not going to lie, I chose CodeIgniter over CakePHP because I found some cool video tutorials on CodeIgniter the day I was most interested and went from there. So far, I like it; but, that might just be liking the MVC model.

<comment><USER35> The CI videos are great. I got a better (basic, admittedly) grip on MVC in 20 minutes than I did in a year of essays, forum posts and lectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Reverse engineering the communication protocol for a Thorlabs stepper motor and writing a Linux driver for it.

Planning my road trip to CERN from Scotland next week and getting to know a Monte Carlo simulation for physics reactions for when I arrive!

Deciding where to go for dinner...

</comment><comment><USER37> PowerPoint presentation.

Who's happier than me? No one.

</comment><comment><USER38> Today I released my three-day project "I Write Like". You paste some text, it analyzes it and tells you what famous writer you write like. Link: <http://iwl.me>

<comment><USER39> I just spent about 15 minutes messing around with this. Very neat. I then made the unfortunate decision to show it to my girlfriend, who is now angry at me that it said she writes like Dan Brown.

I'd be curious to know how large the pool of authors is.

<comment><USER38> :-) Currently 29 authors. Will feed it with more.

<comment><USER38> Now 40.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The same thing I do every day, try to take over the world---okay, not really, currently work on SWIX, working on updating some payments stuff, and setting up redis to prototype some new features.

<comment><USER30> Pinky? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Trying to get an avionics subsystem to display a particular error message, in order to demonstrate completeness in testing. Part of this effort:

[http://www.eurocontrol.int/link2000/public/subsite_homepage/...](http://www.eurocontrol.int/link2000/public/subsite_homepage/homepage.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Drew my first webcomic on the interaction between programmers and recruiters yesterday: <http://bit.ly/bx1vi5>

Thinking about a follow-up.

<comment><USER22> Some feedback: the stick figures are slightly confusing. It took me 10 seconds before I figured out they weren't talking on the phone while hunched over on a seat.

<comment><USER42> Thanks for the feedback!

My dad thought one of them was a tablelamp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The REPL and debugger for GNU Guile, an implementation of Scheme. I'm trying to integrate the two, so when you get an error, you're just dropped into a new recursive REPL that happens to have a debugger too, so you can inspect the stack from there.

</comment><comment><USER44> Stayed up all night chatting politics with a friend in SF to preempt jetlag from flying to Poland, proceeded to fly to Poland, slept on plane 1/2, fixed niggly bug on plane 2/2, touched down in Warsaw, went to the Chopin museum, had some vegan pierogis. Now shipping three updates and heading to bed lamely early on a Friday night as said preemptive jetlag strike was only marginally successful.

</comment><comment><USER45> An Android app that turns the phone into a simple SMS gateway, allowing you to deploy SMS apps anywhere in the world the phone works (without having to install complex hardware/software, deal with service providers etc)

<http://wiki.github.com/niryariv/txtgate/>

Work environment: Java / Eclipse / Android (new to all of these, varying degrees of pain ;))

<comment><USER46> just checked it out. Is it for people with phones who can sms but aren't able to get on the internet?

What are the use cases?

<comment><USER45> >Is it for people with phones who can sms but aren't able to get on the internet?

That's correct. There are millions, perhaps billions of these, especially in developing regions. They don't own computers or modern phones, but they do have simple cellphones with SMS capability.

From the developer's side, deploying an SMS based service - esp in places with no TextMarks etc support - is significantly harder than just launching a website. You need to either get access to the cell provider's SMS gateway (often requires money/connections) or set up your own cell modem/phone connected to a server running SMS gateway software (non trivial - <USER2> sometimes fly devs in just to set it up).

This project allows you to replace all this with just an Android phone with this app installed.

Well, hopefully. Haven't been field tested yet... If anyone wants to beta test this on some non-mission critical SMS app I'd love to work with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Today I am recovering from my first actual mixed martial arts class. My wife and I (recently reconciled, if you're following my posts) went, and she learned her first jab, (vicious) right cross, uppercut, left hook, front kick, body kick, armbar, rear naked choke and a kimura that's still got my arm a little weak.

I used to train in a number of martial arts like, 20 years ago, but now I'm 33, about 25-30 pounds overweight, and VERY out of shape, and decided to jump back in 100%.

Joined a Team Lloyd Irvin dojo (Ivey League MMA) and did the MMA basics course, which nearly killed me during the warm up, but I and my wife kept going through the entire class.

We'll be going back Saturday, and my 8 year old daughter is enrolled as well after watching the other kids enjoy kicking the snot out of the instructors.

As for a picture of the development environment... I suppose this'll do? [http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr41/iveyleaguepics/grand...](http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr41/iveyleaguepics/grand%20opening/go1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER48> Now: drinking coffee and laying in bed reading HN.

In an hour: Building an iPhone app in tandem with its Rails backend for a client.

<comment><USER49> You are living the life Aaron

<comment><USER48> Thanks! Moving into contracting has been sort of a revelation for me. I'm working where I want to, when I want to, and—as long as I can respond to my clients in a reasonable timeframe—when I want to.

The only 'downside' is that I don't know if I could ever go back into a traditional corporate environment at this point.

<comment><USER50> I had a really similar experience after I quit my corporate job. As a lot of people here have noted before, it's a lot easier to get into the startup mentality if you've left the corporate world and contracting works for you.

Anyway, congratulations!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Things I did today:

1\. Improved my stock trading environment. I moved into active trading of leveraged ETFs recently(FAS and FAZ regularly move 4% or more in a day, opening the possibility of a living income even on a modest portfolio), and I was using the E*Trade web interface, but it had some nasty limitations and glitches, so I finally bit the bullet and moved up to their $100/mo "Pro" system, which has the arsenal of charting tools I was looking for.

2\. Worked on the lexer for my scripting language project. It's all hand- rolled because that's how I've always done it - and I stick to simple syntax anyway. I'm actually doing this because I'm stalling a bit on the runtime model. I've established most of the core ideas for that, but not having done something so complex before, it's easier to nibble away at the edges that I understand first.

</comment><comment><USER52> Working on polishing a new WordPress theme. I am not a designer per se, but it is very difficult to come across simple and neat themes for websites. So I designed one for myself and now I am giving it away as a free theme.

</comment><comment><USER53> Writing a book on human rationality.

</comment><comment><USER54> Today I'm taking a two hour trip with my grandad (born 1917) up to our log cabin at Vassfaret, Norway. Kinda looks like this: [http://image54.webshots.com/154/2/36/38/451523638WCSqPv_fs.j...](http://image54.webshots.com/154/2/36/38/451523638WCSqPv_fs.jpg)

I always wanted to do more things with him. He thought he'd never would see the cabin again, but this will be his final trip up there. I'm going to spend some days, breathing in mountain air and doing some thinking.

</comment><comment><USER55> Porting _why's park place to ruby 1.9/sinatra/mongodb.

</comment><comment><USER56> Porting my molecule viewer from 2d canvas to WebGL:

<http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/canvasmol-webgl-chrome.png>

Here is my development environment (just SciTE and tons of browsers):

<http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/dev.png>

</comment><comment><USER57> Same project I've been working on for the better part of 3 months, unfortunately: a web based chat using GWT to replace a flash based one. The primary reasons are: we wanted to control the source code and remove dependecy on third-party products and becase we want the chat to work on iPad so flash is out.

Running into tons of stumbling blocks primarily around keeping the app near realtime and stable. It's GWT on the front-end, but .NET webservices on the backend. The existing flash based system has a custom server service and periodically dumps logs into SQL Server. We started off trying to write directly to SQL with our version but it wasn't fast enough and we were running into too many contention issues. Now we're throwing Memcached in the middle and it's much faster, but we're not entirely out of the woods.

I'm thoroughly convinced HTTP just shouldn't be used for chat applications.

<comment><USER58> The client interface is up to you, but no need to re-invent the serverside part:

From <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html> This specification defines a transport protocol that emulates the semantics of a long-lived, bidirectional TCP connection between two entities (such as a client and a server) by efficiently using multiple synchronous HTTP request/response pairs without requiring the use of frequent polling or chunked responses.

Drop in an existing XMPP chat server (or write your own if you must) and you should be good to go. A lot of high-volume sites are using this implementation for their web-based chat services.

<comment><USER58> As an aside: If you're not willing to make that substantial kind of change to your system at this point, I would at least recommend basing your messaging system on something that's designed to do it (i.e. a message queue) as opposed to a relational database. RabbitMQ has had quite good reviews from what I've seen, with clustering and persistence available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Client side image resizing for an image uploader, part of a larger web app build. Saves a ton of time/bandwidth/CPU. So far its turned really well.

Its pretty easy actually, thanks to the most recent beta of SWFUpload. If you want to implement yourself, make sure to grab the patched .swf or you may have trouble queueing uploads.

SWFUpload 2.5 Beta: [http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=SWF...](http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=SWFUpload_v250_beta_3_core.zip&can=2&q=)

Patched SWF: [http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=swf...](http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=swfupload.swf.v2.5.0.beta3.2.zip&can=2&q=)

Demo: <http://demo.swfupload.org/v250beta3/resizedemo/index.php>

<comment><USER59> I looked into this but does it degrade well for non-flash users?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> building an A.I. that has something at least marginally interesting and more- or-less correct about any subject

<comment><USER50> ...but nothing to say? (kind of left out a key word there, couldn't help myself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Answering support mails, thinking how to scale app to at least 1000 simultaneous connections, preparing presentation to brief Forrester, contacted some more bloggers, watched Mixergy interview on how to sell to Fortune 500 companies, finalizing on new feature: test result segmentation.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm implementing our PCI compliance by putting the entire credit card transaction handling offsite.

</comment><comment><USER63> I am working on an open source automated testing framework called aost tellurium....trying to figure how to record the structure of a popup window. A link to the project: <http://code.google.com/p/aost/>

</comment><comment><USER64> a hacker news rss filter written in haskell that uses redis to store feed information.

i've found a few filters that are like "only show feeditems which have 10+ votes" etc. I'm going for something a little more complicated - most popular n posts by hour, day, week and month.

<comment><USER65> I've been thinking about something like this.

Basically, seeing the Top 'N' posts for a given time period. Like a digest of the Top 20 posts for the previous 24 hours delivered by email or RSS. I want an option to retrieve some/all of the comments for these stories as well.

Does something like this exist already? RSS is not an optimal delivery method for crowd sourced news sites like HN, Reddit, etc.

<comment><USER64> I already use something like this on a weekly basis for reddit.

<http://weeklyreddit.appspot.com/>

yeah basically you want some sort of digest, unfortunately weekly is often too slow to contribute, so dayly is pretty good. I personally don't mind if its done via rss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Writing COBOL on an IBM mainframe:-) Updating a system for managing credit card portfolios.

</comment><comment><USER67> Just received a Sugru.com kit yesterday, and I've been prototyping a mirror to make photos in front of my macbook:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/alx/tags/sugru>

30min of fun, rest of the day for usual work :)

<comment><USER68> Cool. I did something similar a few years ago with one mirror: [http://www.instructables.com/id/Per-i-Sight:-MacBook- iSight-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Per-i-Sight:-MacBook-iSight- Periscope/) Cool application of Sugru.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Today I am trying to crunch 3 years of failed maintenance on a lab of 24 machines into a single day.

None of which were even registered on the domain!

Updating group policy information, pointing the machines to the WSUS server, installing updated antivirus, installing new DeepFreeze client-- tedious work that should have been done by previous techs/admins-- so I'm cleaning up a mess.

This will be my summer. Get this school ironed out before the students come back.

Oh, and I'm learning Python in-between-- it's that _structured procrastination_ thing. :)

What possessed me to try and tackle this on a per-machine basis? Why did I not just image one and roll it out? I wouldn't have time for HN and coding! :)

</comment><comment><USER70> Work: Tuesday, international flight to a customer to gather requirements for new product version - enough work for a year. Thursday, try to integrate WordPress and Facebook Connect and curse loudly - the architects who return either a userID or a WP_Error object and the plugin writers who just (int) $result without checking if it's an error.

Free time: reverse engineering a C++ game and extending it. <http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/9215/devenv.png> \- IDA to rev/eng it, Eclipse C++ with a custom build tool to compile, Rose Tyler background just because.

</comment><comment><USER71> Working on a variant of Etsy's Deployinator, with a bunch of extra things we need at work.

[http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of- deployment...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment/)

</comment><comment><USER72> Last night, I set up IMAP, TLS/SSL, and webmail on a server for myself, to liberate myself from third parties (i.e. GMail) having a searchable corpus of my email history.

In addition to that, I recently adjusted my fork of RVM[1] to work with Gentoo again (installed and managed systemwide as root, with users read-only).

Also, for the past week or two, I've been helping with RDBI[2], a new project aiming to be to database access what Rack is to web servers and web frameworks.

[1]: <http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/>

[2]: <http://github.com/RDBI>

</comment><comment><USER73> Today I am working on my strategic procrastination project - an Android game. I got bored with my regular project, a Data Deduplication file system, and decided to have some fun with learning Android development.

</comment><comment><USER74> I had a bit of inspiration a couple nights ago and decided to rework an old abandoned project and turn it into a service.

It's an automated crash logging thing that will collect info from your webapp every time it throws, ball it up and send it off to an API at our site. Then, on a schedule, we'll hit your site with the exact HTTP Request that broke it the first time.

So yeah, I'm hoping to get it "Show HN"-able inside of a week. The collection API is working, as is the regression piece. All it needs is some pretty reports and a bunch of documentation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Work: Finished some batch jobs and starting a new semi-interesting web project. It'll be a welcome change from the boring admin/infrastructure stuff I've been doing :)

Home: Android notes tutorial. Also fun :)

</comment><comment><USER75> Working on Twitterrific for iPhone/iPad.

</comment><comment><USER76> It's 33 degrees C in my room, I'm afraid nothing is getting done today.

</comment><comment><USER77> Today I'm going to convert these two designs into xhtml/css templates. phew.

Design 1: <http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/Indispensable> Design 2: <http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/tad/design-review>

And much of this week was spent on research on what e-commerce platform and payment gateway to use on my client's online florist

</comment><comment><USER78> I was working on this till 2am San Francisco time, so I guess technically it was today.

I started writing a Node.js client to consume the EVE-online api. They have no json support, so it means eating XML. I was able to plug in node- xml(<http://github.com/robrighter/node-xml>) and start getting usable data from the xml right before bedtime, so I consider that a short-term goal accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER79> Trying several approaches to get a screenshot of a known rect on the screen that has a flash video in it (that is loaded from an external site) with the click of a button and then save/stream the resulting image to a PHP script to be saved to the server. The end users are not very technically savvy so teaching them Jing or even image cropping is out of the question. Currently experimenting with Flash and Java appplet solutions.

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm working on automating slang term variant creation on OnlineSlangDictionary.com . For example, making the main entry "blow (one) away" also available under

        blow him away
        blow her away
        blow them away

etc.

It's an unfortunate tax I have to pay to search engines. Luckily it'll pay off additionally when I switch from Google Custom Search to a real custom search solution, and it'll be useful for a few upcoming special projects.

<comment><USER81> Are you using any parsing tools? Like the stanford NLP?

I am currently developing an API for the stanford NLP so that other web apps can easily use that parsing and word tagging tool.

Cool website. I like the idea of the "where is this slang used" feature.

<comment><USER80> _Are you using any parsing tools? Like the stanford NLP?_

Not yet. Right now it's just boring search-and-replace ("(one)" => "me", "you", "him", "her", ...) complicated by the fact that the site has a lot of moving parts. (I started it in 1996.)

I'll be looking into Stanford NLP, Python NLTK, etc. in the near future for the aforementioned "special projects".

 _I am currently developing an API for the stanford NLP so that other web apps can easily use that parsing and word tagging tool._

I'd be quite interested in that! Do you have a website / blog / some way we can keep up with your progress?

 _Cool website. I like the idea of the "where is this slang used" feature._

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> So my customer has a critical production database that was hit by excessive locking issue on a table that slowed everything to a halt. It looks like an abuse of existing feature, so I worked on collecting enough information to help the developers find the broken feature and abusing users.

This also seems to be impacting parts of the app that shouldn't be touching that table, and I'm trying to figure out why that is happening.

Life is exciting at operations :)

</comment><comment><USER83> Trying to figure out some core animation tricks in order to be able to create fully customizable buttons/shapes on iPhone/iPad without the need to use PNGs.

</comment><comment><USER84> I'm the biz cofounder at Timetric, so I've spent quite a bit of time on local and transatlantic phonecalls and taking meetings.

We're a _really_ technical company, though; the three of us who founded it met as postdoc researchers doing materials simulation. That means we all can code, though my cofounders are way stronger than I am, but today I've got the chance to do some programming. Internal editorial-awareness tools, mostly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Today I'm working on fleshing out some ideas for some business models for my startup, Syphir. Here's a pic of the desk in my bedroom, aka my development environment: [http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9176/developmentenvironme...](http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9176/developmentenvironment.jpg). A lot of screen real estate, but today most of my work will be done with a pen and a pad :)

<comment><USER85> Geeze, your setup looks unusually similar to mine (that looks like an ASUS).

(I have an ASUS laptop w/ a 21" monitor and an old Macbook for iPhone dev.)

<comment><USER4> Toshiba Satellite w/ a 21" monitor and a Macbook for iPhone dev as well :)

<comment><USER5> love the speaker stand. but that's too much glare to stay sane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Working on a new iteration of Forrst's Rangers algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER87> Porting all the JavaScript in our main web application (written years ago) over to jQuery so we can use some nifty plugins. Been working on it all week.

</comment><comment><USER88> Spent the day chipping away at log analysis, but using it as an excuse to get my hands dirty with freebase and mongodb. Now it's evening. I'm sitting alone in the office, becoming more alert as the temperature drops, thinking about the open data movement. Drafting something that might become a blog-post or an article, but mainly just as a framework to get my head around it all, and figure out where I fit in.

</comment><comment><USER89> I'm building an immutable filesystem of sorts on top of a distributed key- value store, and am about to benchmark Riak to see how it might fare (as the underlying key-value store). I'm also looking to do some visualization for execution tracing of a product using Simile Timeline, but I'm wrestling with incomplete documentation (the default DateTime resolution of 1 millisecond is not sufficient).

</comment><comment><USER90> Producing a predictive model for student retention: aiming to assign a score to a student on whether or not a newly admitted student will complete their first semester through final semester (graduate).

Using SAS Enterprise Miner's various tools to compare a few different methods for producing the model.

Also fighting off some reporter who is desperate for open records data but unable to pay the $45 fee required for data access.

</comment><comment><USER91> When did HN become twitter? Using Clojure to sanify and convert doctor's notes from a giant Oracle instance on a EMR to a simple CouchDB instance.

</comment><comment><USER92> Finishing up my first iPhone app, which I've made with Appcelerator Titanium so I can code in Javascript instead of Objective-C. Exciting! :-)

</comment><comment><USER93> Got bored with real work so I'm working on a thing that prints Python tracebacks: 1) in colour 2) in colums, function | line num | file name 3) stripping file name directories 4) Only printing code line on the top N frames (because the rest is just noise).

There may be something like this already, but it's a good excuse to learn more about Python tracebacks.

</comment><comment><USER94> I've just finished these 2 blogposts [http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/new- version-is-coming-up.ht...](http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/new-version-is- coming-up.html)

[http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/facebook-style-business- sof...](http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/facebook-style-business-software- should.html)

</comment><comment><USER95> Trying to convert some gnarly test fixtures into a Machinist file in JRuby on Rails. After that, 10% time, but probably still on test-related topics. If I don't think of anything that needs it more, installing Cucumber and getting it hooked up to our build server, so we can use it for testing.

This is all in JRuby, and my editor of choice is emacs.

</comment><comment><USER96> Validation of a wiring diagram extracted from a cluster of physiologically characterized cells in mammalian visual cortex.

</comment><comment><USER97> Building a simple DB using json files as storage system.

The goal is to provide a schemaless (and serverless) database for simple websites.

</comment><comment><USER98> Continuing work on my summer research project. I'm building a high-precision 3D scanner for meshing out dissected rat eyes in transgenic opthalmology studies. We've nearly got all the components talking and controlled and I'm also close to finishing the first parts of the de-noising and data analysis programs.

</comment><comment><USER99> Trying to get Sign Inventory location data (stop signs, traffic lights, etc) from the city of Rockville, MD. So far it's a losing battle. Integrating TIGER data into my GIS the rest of the time (Geodjango is fun).

The view from my home office: <http://twitpic.com/23rg8a>

</comment><comment><USER100> Today I resisted the urge to walk out of the office and never go back.

One day I hope to be able to say 'failed to resist' instead.

</comment><comment><USER101> 1) At a coffee shop revising mockups and finishing new design work for a client's business site. Adobe Fireworks or pure HTML\CSS, I hate Photoshop for web stuff.

2) Researching apartments\courses\requirements for Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Decided to go back to school for a CS degree, previously studied cog psych)

</comment><comment><USER102> this is kinda cool, it's like a scrum for hackernews

\- co-founder dating in mountain view

\- sf city parking pass

\- "identity and the browser" blog post

\- develop business idea docs

</comment><comment><USER103> Negotiating the purchase of phone numbers for <http://www.hellofax.com>.

Telecom companies are great at hiding their cost structure. With just one company, I had a preliminary call, plus a conference call and I'm still waiting for their price sheet.

</comment><comment><USER104> Writing software that generates music.

</comment><comment><USER105> As far as my work is concerned, I'm doing quasi-issue-tracking that's tightly integrated with our IT platform. In Delphi, I shall add.

My side project is still in the conceptual phase, so I'll tell ypu this: I hope to add my entire town to OpenStreetMap by this summer. I've just started.

</comment><comment><USER106> I'm working on methods for automatically identifying tokens that act as noise in a non-statistical text-classification system. I suspect the noise filter will end up looking a bit like a Bayesian classifier.

No screenshots today, but it's easy enough to find screenshots of Emacs+Slime.

</comment><comment><USER107> I'm working on promoting/marketing my cheatsheet site - <http://devcheatsheet.com/>

I'm also just starting development on a new site - a directory of tech events and conferences. Hope to have a very basic alpha version by next week.

</comment><comment><USER108> Finishing touches (I hope!) to an automated aggregation & report system written in Perl which produces multiple excel files (group level) & PDF reports (sub-group level) using clients customer insight data which are sent to relevant stakeholders each week.

</comment><comment><USER109> Today is my last day at work in Connecticut -- in two weeks I'll be moving to San Francisco and seeking a new position. (Anybody looking for a solid, well- rounded front-end guy who wants to dive into more stuff? I'm huge on detail and a quick learner.)

<comment><USER110> Trulia is one that's looking: [http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qzZ9Vfwm&...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qzZ9Vfwm&page=Jobs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Http://Like.fm, a social music site I've been working on since being on hiatus from college.

</comment><comment><USER112> Working on a MUD engine written in PHP, an open sourced pet project of mine for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER113> Working on improvements for <http://dddone.com>

<comment><USER114> With a domain name like that, you won't be getting a lot of fans from stutterers like myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Writing btree_balance_split. If I manage to get that finished today, I'll move on to btree_balance_merge. I hope to have btree_balance finished by the end of the weekend, at which point I'll write btree_mutate and finally have a key- value store.

</comment><comment><USER116> Finalizing a budget, Creating job postings, Ordering company signage, Helping plan a company trip, Fixing exceptions in a Ruby/Rails application, Mapping out an asynchronous cache proxy solution that speaks JMS, Riding on Amtrak for 3 hours

</comment><comment><USER117> Building .NET client and server components to transfer disk images over HTTP as fast as the I/O system can handle.

This gives me an idea: when will Mattel give us "Asynchrony is hard" Barbie?

My development environment is Visual Studio 2010 with R# and the zenburn theme.

</comment><comment><USER118> \-- making coming soon pages for 3 iphone apps and 3 physical products in development (see my profile)

\-- working on iphone app to manage/coordinate your medical care: <http://twitpic.com/23sew2>

</comment><comment><USER119> Building a live auction application for an auction house, in Tornado/memcache/jQuery.

<comment><USER120> This sounds cool. Real-time auctions on the web should be a lot of fun. Post a link whenever you're done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Genuinely curious: how is eBay not a real-time auction?

<comment><USER121> I assume they mean like an in-person auction. People increasingly bid until their max and when there are no more bids, the auction ends.

<comment><USER119> Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, this is for a more classic auction house.

It's called "open outcry", I think. The kind with an auctioneer, a room full of people with paddles and the object (or a photo of it) up front.

It's an English auction with a pre-defined bid ladder, and people can also pre-register with a maximum (hidden) bid, according to which the clerk will bid for them.

We are streaming their auctions online, and now they want people to be able to bid at home as well. Christie's (in England) already does this.

We think it might become a big deal when smaller auction houses in small towns can have this - today, the prices are not as high as they "should", since the market is local. If we can open it up, more people, and more knowledgeable people, will bid and more of the money will flow to the original seller (or so I think).

It's a fairly simple server on Tornado, which receives the bids etc and passes messages with long-polling, with a memcache backend for scaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> Optimizing the map tile rendering stack for our mapping platform (<http://www.cellmaps.com>). Finding the right streets to render in the whole world. Needs to be faster.

</comment><comment><USER123> At work, setting up CouchDB to store annotated genomic data. Currently replacing a few CouchDB temporary view functions with Lucene search functions.

At home, using Django to write a social photo guide-sharing web app for tinkerers.

</comment><comment><USER124> Just fixed a semi-critical bug that allowed an invalid email address to be entered in and "try" to send (without any try/catch) thus crashing the application. The application has been live for several years. Doh!

</comment><comment><USER125> Working on PyQt development for my employer, and when I get home, a bit of Django for a webapp I'm building with a friend.

Edit: my dev environment <http://imgur.com/IEPWO.png>

</comment><comment><USER126> I've been working on improving keytweet.com's algorithm. I develop our python code in idle on windows. The goal is increase the number of relevant results that are related to the popular topics in your feed.

</comment><comment><USER127> I'm working on implementing theme-support for a new travel journal app.

I'll also attempt to integrate FusionCharts in <http://www.cashbasehq.com>, a personal finances app.

<comment><USER103> Nice. Cash base is pretty cool. I really like the simplicity of the interface. Would be cool if it were tied to your credit card, so expenses get automatically displayed.

<comment><USER127> Thanks! Unfortunately, services like Mint work only in _some_ countries, not in all. I live in Romania and I built CashBase for my personal needs, initially, since there aren't any Mint-like services available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> I've been hanging out with my friend who now lives in NYC (I'm in Denver).

Relationships FTW.

</comment><comment><USER129> Looks like my morning is going to be figuring out the status of a few clients we have, afternoon is going to be hacking on one or more of them. Murphy willing I can work on GSOC this evening in peace.

<comment><USER71> What's your GSoC project?

<comment><USER129> Refactoring the internals of the Django ORM with an eye towards supporting non-relational databases, with a prototype backend for MongoDB.

<comment><USER130> Awesome. How will this relate with the current django-nonrel project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> I'm three weeks into an internship on the Google Maps tile-rendering team.

</comment><comment><USER132> A business proposal, a report on fisheries in France, a marketing plan, part of a grant proposal, some reviews for Amazon, a few blogs - and I'm going crazy ready to shoot a partridge in a pear tree.

</comment><comment><USER133> Mostly front-end dev:

Putting the finishing touches on a client's online store. Starting a larger WordPress project. Finishing up a personal design project.

I do most of my work in E Text Editor (Textmate clone for Windows).

</comment><comment><USER134> A web app for setting up group buys for Steam games (ties into Valve's OpenID implementation).

But has to take a detour to pick up a free book on cognition my psychology professor had. What a nice lady.

</comment><comment><USER135> Being a business guy by day and teaching myself PHP by night using this tutorial: <http://devzone.zend.com/article/627>

<comment><USER71> I applaud your efforts, but those tutorials are old and crusty. Please get a good book or two.

[http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step- Step/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step- Step/dp/0596157134/ref=pd_sim_b_1)

[http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web- Development-4th/dp/06723...](http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web- Development-4th/dp/0672329166/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278706790&sr=1-1-catcorr)

Don't buy both, too much overlap. Just pick the one you like. The latter is long, but worth it. I've got more recommendations if you're interested.

<comment><USER136> I also recommend the second one.

Not to hijack, but setting up a local server (MAMP or XAMP) and building/breaking things has helped me in learning a few languages. Its worth a night to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> Configuring more cell phones for an open and cheap GPS bus-tracking project. And messing with the UI too -- <http://dutrack.com> .

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm readying up a Lisp to PHP compiler for release of the next version. Ideally it'll be done soon today while I add finishing touches to the website and do some final testing.

</comment><comment><USER138> Finishing my dating app. Planning to launch for testing early next week. I know dating is a saturated market, but I'm trying to approach it on a different angle. Wish me luck!

</comment><comment><USER139> Working on a custom AMI I put together for Amazon's EC2 that is designed specifically to power a rails framework I built. Having some fun with their EBS volumes, very useful.

</comment><comment><USER140> Making user controls work in a MOSS 2007 Document library. So now front end people can just edit the control without re-building parts and re-deploying. It's actually fun :)

</comment><comment><USER141> Automating AMI creation across all four Amazon regions so it can be part of continuous integration. Goal is to integrate continuous deployment with EC2 auto scaling groups.

</comment><comment><USER142> Finishing first week (of eight) doing some fairly boring contract C# work (aggregating logs over low bandwidth to a webservice) to earn some money between university terms.

</comment><comment><USER143> On vacation, during which time I usually refactor my timetables/strategies for the upcoming year (which I usually have to re-do after summer ends and I get serious again).

</comment><comment><USER144> Learning how to make a driver to OpenSolaris. Yeah, OpenSolaris.

Since I've never done anything close to that (I'm mostly a Rails guy), it's being kind of cool. College stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER145> Creating config files for a universal report loader. Then hopefully deprecating the over 100 scripts which exist to do the same thing as the universal loader.

</comment><comment><USER146> Finishing up a milestone build of an iPhone game for a client, and if I have any time in the day after that I'm going to keep digging into CouchDB/Couchrest.

</comment><comment><USER147> Specializer which propagates argument types through a dynamically typed function and gives me back a statically typed one. Polyvariant type inference ftw.

</comment><comment><USER148> Pistol Slut, my Javascript 2D platformer: pistolslut.com

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm creating a log parser for yellowpages.ca with Redis.

<comment><USER88> oh, interesting. I wanted to use redis for log-parsing, but was scared by the prospect of keeping everything in ram. Ended up using mongodb instead, but I'd be interested to hear how you get on with redis.

<comment><USER25> If you know what stats you want to collect before parsing, the memory usage is very low. The most resource intensive part in this application is loading the filtered logs for all machines into a sorted set (which is necessary to get all the events in chronological order). That key is only temporary though.

That said, Redis 2.x supports virtual memory so it's less of a problem for a longer-term data-store.

<comment><USER88> That's useful information; thanks for answering!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bsnss-mn-cdr Continuing to improve the technology that is powering my newest business. Almost daily it seems to get better, make more money and provide new ideas.

</comment><comment><USER149> Writing ADA code; It's about as exciting as it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER150> Two things:

a) A module to load and execute arbitrary ELF files, to be used for post- exploitation in penetration tests.

b) A PoC method to detect SSL stripping attacks, client-side.

</comment><comment><USER151> Just finished and launched the website for my freelance business, and did some IE testing for a portfolio site I built for a graphic designer.

</comment><comment><USER152> A performance tool to pull raw data out of a process without slowing it down very much. Today, that means reading through the gdb sources.

</comment><comment><USER153> Updating our abstraction for a particular 3rd party camera, since we found ANOTHER edge case not mentioned in the documentation >.<

</comment><comment><USER154> Building a digital signature tool with SVG and Batik to replace a paid tool (Pronto from AlphaTrust) that costs about $1 per signature.

</comment><comment><USER59> Backing up my entire hard disk so I can shift to Ubuntu from Windows, all necessary because virtualenv doesn't play nice with Windows.

<comment><USER155> I am using cygwin on windows, and so far virtualenv running just fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER156> my finances, however I wish I hadnt as its depressed me considerably. So im going to go work on a few pints at my local after work.

</comment><comment><USER157> The most mind numbing bugs that probably don't matter. At night and in the early mornings I work on personal projects that matter.

</comment><comment><USER158> Geo-search backend for a mobile social network on App Engine. It's a project for someone else's startup and has been a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER159> Polishing my web app <http://prettygraph.com> to Ask HN for a review on Monday.

</comment><comment><USER160> Tweaked my desktop theme (emerald aquatweak) Continued work on a rails/sqlite app port to Sinatra/datamapper (jruby app engine)

</comment><comment><USER161> Working on creating a web front end for a very old C++ app (no .net support) using java/jsp because that's what I know.

</comment><comment><USER162> I'm digging into jQuery and jQuery-UI to make the look-and-feel of my current project easier to build and maintain.

</comment><comment><USER163> \- solving Facebook algorithm/career puzzles \- waiting for my wife to get out of surgery \- enjoying the warm weather

</comment><comment><USER164> Importing all of the actors/roles from IMDb into mongoDB for a little proof of concept. 12m documents and counting!

</comment><comment><USER165> A CSV parser in Javascript with support for embedded commas/quotes/newlines that can yield rows as they are parsed.

</comment><comment><USER166> Getting security/QA audited (& drug tested).

Yes, on a Friday. Apparently men with clipboards have no idea what POETS day means!

</comment><comment><USER167> Migrating from my old mac book pro to my new mac book pro! Maybe some work if there's time after lunch. :)

</comment><comment><USER168> I migrated <http://wasitup.com> from Tokyo Tyrant to Redis.

<comment><USER71> Why?

<comment><USER168> Tokyo Tyrant is poorly documented, virtually unmaintained, and has a small community. In addition I've seen strange replication errors and locking when doing expensive operations.

As an alternative I needed something simple, resource efficient, well maintained (antirez is an excellent maintainer), documented, easily deployed, easily configured, and seemingly stable. It also needed to scale down to small virtual machines. Cassandra and MongoDB was evaluated, but drew the short straw.

My only complaint with Redis is its lack of features for high availability out of the box. Thankfully this is going to be addressed in the next release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER169> Sniffing out a buffer overflow issue on an AT32UC3B. Very new to the lower level c, so it's a process.

</comment><comment><USER170> Just lost job today, possibly due to HN. Pondering whether to start job search or startup my business.

</comment><comment><USER171> Trying to finish up some client work, so I can work on my mechanical turk api and watch more vimcasts.

</comment><comment><USER172> Big deployment to Production last night that deleted 100K+ rows. Trying to figure out what caused it.

<comment><USER71> Ouch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER173> Today I am working on my presentation for the MobileBeat conference. 4 minutes to pitch. No sweat.

</comment><comment><USER174> Got 7 clients competing for my time, right now. If you're considering making the switch, do it.

</comment><comment><USER175> Writing some systems integration stuff to allow US ecommerce companies to sell to Latin America.

<comment><USER176> would love to hear more about that...

<comment><USER175> Http://BorderJump.com

We are already helping companies sell to Latin America. I am working to make it easier for us to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER177> Working on an iPad app for Barilla for a couple of hours and the rest of the day on FancyDocs.

</comment><comment><USER178> I'm building a machine learning system in .NET to attempt to predict the outcome of NBA games.

<comment><USER179> I would save your time. The heat are going to win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER180> Reading python and django docs while considering a possible port of a Rails app to Django.

</comment><comment><USER181> Today's goal is to squash some bugs from a popular utility iPhone app I recently released.

</comment><comment><USER182> I've been reading the entire archive of sequences on LessWrong.

I'm paid by the hour and it's been slow.

</comment><comment><USER183> Writing my first programming language... And VM, and lexer, and parser, and compiler!

Good clean fun!

</comment><comment><USER184> Right now, procrastination. Later, getting my las exposition as an undergrad ready.

</comment><comment><USER185> a 500K government RFP...ugh..

</comment><comment><USER186> Writing an extension to do remote authentication between Zendesk and Joomla.

</comment><comment><USER187> Putting some enhancements on a dieting application for my employer. C#/MVC

</comment><comment><USER188> Customizing Fogbugz. Surfing Hacker News. Setting up my new Android Phone.

</comment><comment><USER189> trying to fix few issues and add some features to my web app (<http://onlineqrlab.com>); also looking for a PHP script to decode Qrcodes, any idea?

<comment><USER119> Doesn't seem like it. Here is a workaround:

<http://www.andrewmkane.com/blog/2009/04/16/parsing-qr-codes/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER190> Developing a statistics system for the football premier league in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER191> Using Ruby to create a better way to specify CSV exports from our system.

</comment><comment><USER192> I am working on an API for moviesnowapp.com. Figuring out the structure.

</comment><comment> w-ll Two games, 3 apps, and finding a new house to rent for me and my DJ

</comment><comment><USER193> UXEP spec doc for a major mobile provider's next hot phone.

</comment><comment><USER194> Fixing one last firmware bug so a major customer can ship!

</comment><comment><USER195> Working on AduanaCol.com, uploading data to DB

</comment><comment><USER196> building an oracle query that pivots data based on a selection of columns (user selected) in 10g (no pivot function)

</comment><comment><USER197> Trying to make your search results not suck.

</comment><comment><USER198> A new form of database, new query language.

</comment><comment><USER199> Tornado, MongoDB and using Emacs to do it.

</comment><comment><USER200> working on the curation of datas on <http://www.gmbhnews.com>

</comment><comment><USER201> Icefaces front end work. Java baby!

</comment><comment><USER202> Getting JOSSO to work with Hudson.

</comment><comment><USER203> Thinking of something to start...

</comment><comment><USER204> Getting over a week-long illness

</comment><comment><USER205> Packing for a backpacking trip.

<comment><USER144> where are you backpacking to, if I may ask? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER206> implementing HTML5 offline web storage for an inventory management system. C# MVC

</comment><comment><USER207> au contraire, it would appear most of you are wasting time reading HN like me :)

</comment><comment><USER208> GE Smallworld GIS Magik code.

</comment><comment><USER209> Writing a device driver

</comment><comment><USER210> chemistry laboratory write ups.

</comment><comment><USER211> bugfixes.

</comment><comment><USER212> android games and Libraries..

[http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4776883837_ff1ed211e1_b....](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4776883837_ff1ed211e1_b.jpg)

blog <http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com>

I start dev a 3d game next week using a game engine in C++

</comment><comment><USER213> Finished up a web app/program (PHP and Python cron jobs) that will notify you if a course that you want at Virginia Tech opens up.

<http://hokienotify.me/></comment>


J.J. Abrams tried to pull a Wrath of Khan and failed - <AUTHOR> http://thetarpit.org/posts/y00/011-star-trek-into-darkness.html <comment><USER2> It's sad to see that Star Trek is being turned into an Action/Adventure themed franchise (also just seeing the 2015 trailer of the new movie as well). It doesn't suit Star Trek which should be more about Science and Exploration in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> You obviously are not a trek fan because TOS was always and will be a space western. If you go back and watch TOS, almost every episode is kirk beating up some aliens and getting the girl. What part of action/adventure do you not get out of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It wasn't a good movie because it wasn't a good movie, not because it was not Trek. All these people that say this need to go back and watch TOS and the animated series. This guy also wants say bad things about Enterprise, when arguably season 4 could be considered one of the top seasons of Trek ever, but just like everything else... everyone has an opinion.</comment>


LAX ranked worst airport in world by Fodors - <AUTHOR> https://abc7.com/travel/lax-ranked-worst-airport-in-world-while-burbank-airport-ranked-best/5345894/ <comment><USER2> The airport is "LAX", not "Lax".</comment>


Mercurial 1.6 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-July/033445.html

<comment><USER2> Biggest feature I miss from Mercurial is shallow cloning. Not for speed but purely disk space reasons.

If you have a lot of nodes in your build farm like we do you start hitting a point where you can't put any more cheap disks into your servers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had really hoped that the subrepo things would be more integrated into the hole process.</comment>


Simple continuous integration server written with NodeJS and CoffeeScript - robert-boehnke https://github.com/ryankee/concrete <comment><AUTHOR> Little suggestion, from my humble perspective: when submitting a link to a project, include the project name in the title (eg: "Concrete: a simple continuous integration server in Node.JS and CoffeeScript"). Should be more memorable, and easier to find for future searches. +1 for sharing this one though

<comment> robert-boehnke Good point, my bad. It's too late to change it now for me, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This looks perfect for a "one man continous integration server"</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of side projects have you used AI/ML for? - <AUTHOR> I've been seeing a lot of TensorFlow and deep learning articles on HN lately. I'd like to jump in at some point, but I want to get an idea of what kind of stuff you guys have been using it for. <comment><USER2> Not much discussion here so I'll jump in.

I've been working on a private Telegram bot that I converse with about my daily habits, how I feel (mentally/physically), what I've eaten, etc., and in theory it will use machine learning to help me uncover some patterns to my various wild mood swings.

Since it's open ended/conversational, all private, and run on my your own machine (at least the analysis part), I'm hoping I can get a more accurate overall picture of my life.

I confess that I haven't quite figured out how to get the output together in a way that is useful, but I'm feeding content to it and experimenting in Mathematica to see what is possible.

Eager for ideas if anyone has any!</comment>


Show HN: Moya, a web framework and integrated language - <AUTHOR> https://www.moyaproject.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

This is something I've been working on since 2011. It's a hard project to sell to people. People have tended to associate it with things like coldfusion, but it's origins are more from MVC Python frameworks.

The use of XML has discouraged some developers. One commenter said it would be like 'a free colonoscopy'.

Be gentle.

<comment><USER2> I kinda liked XML the way it is presented on the home page. But I'm not sure about when and where would I use Moya.

I'll dig into it more later, probably.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully you would use it anywhere you needed a db driven website... Let me know if you have any questions about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey man this is actually pretty cool.

Congrats for having built a fairly complete tool with a unique approach to it, that I kinda dig. Also, good work on putting together the example apps, they're extremely useful to understand how the platform works.

I was a big fan of XSLT myself and I know how much shit talking people do about XML.

And I think that's the big shortcoming of this platform, people wouldn't even consider it for a split of a second after seeing the first <tag />. To be honest, while this looks very promising, I think it's a few years late.

I'll give it a serious try when I get the chance!

</comment><comment><USER4> OK. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking "XML based syntax? Get out of here..."

Given the widespread distaste for "XML overreach" (XLST, SOAP and other 'enterprise-isms') can someone sell this to me?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not alone.

XML can be a huge syntactical burden, I'll grant you. I read an article about an IBM standard for representing JSON in XML. Madness.

What XML does excel at is representing complex hierarchical data. The way Moya does forms ([https://github.com/moyaproject/sociallinks/blob/master/socia...](https://github.com/moyaproject/sociallinks/blob/master/sociallinks/logic/forms.xml)) and models ([https://github.com/moyaproject/sociallinks/blob/master/socia...](https://github.com/moyaproject/sociallinks/blob/master/sociallinks/logic/models.xml)) is actually quite terse, IMO. Especially if you consider the amount of encapsulation in those declarations. Forms for instance, _know_ how to render, validate, and apply themselves.

Slightly more contentious is Moya Code which is a high level language expressed in XML. But it does mean that code and data can be mixed in a fairly effortless way. As a language, Moya Code is actually quite similar to Python. Not surprising since I'm a Python guy.

Here is a loop to print the numbers 1 to 10 in Python and Moya Code:

        for i in range(1,11):
            print(i)

        <for src="1...10" dst="i">
            <echo>${i}</echo>
        </for>

More characters to type in XML, but it is quite familiar.

The extra characters are offset somewhat by the fact that moya tags are very high-level. Imagine if your code to render a page was factored out so that at the top level was barely a dozen function calls and conditions. That's what views in Moya Code tend towards.

Moya's expressions also cut down on lines of code. The following gets the current price of Bitcoin from a web service:

        <let btc="(fromjson:get:'https://www.bitstamp.net/api/ticker/')['ask']"/>

Less contentious is the template language, which straightforward to use, and uses the same expressions as Moya Code. There's no need to use a different syntax there. The most complex template for the Moya builtins is probably the threaded comments ([https://github.com/moyaproject/moya/blob/master/moya/libs/co...](https://github.com/moyaproject/moya/blob/master/moya/libs/comments/templates/moya.comments/widgets/comments.html)). I don't think that's too bad.

I could go on, at great length. I've only waited 4 years to talk about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Whoa. I don't understand it, but it seems powerful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I use that on the testimonials page?

<comment><USER2> Of course! Please, use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. I need to build a simple web-application. If I were into Python I sure as hell use your project to do it.

Looks heavily influenced by rails, which is a good thing! Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You might want to give it a try. There's no Python used for [https://www.moyaproject.com](https://www.moyaproject.com) or [http://notes.moyaproject.com](http://notes.moyaproject.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing you could do is to essentially hide the XML with a UI, the corresponding XML would be generated behind the scene.</comment>


What I learned after 8 weeks as a YouTuber - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aidobreen/what-i-learned-in-8-weeks-of-youtube-896612cdbc1 <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea, and I do like how you've wrote about every aspect of your experience on the site. Yeah, Reddit doesn't take very well to self promotion. Post more than one of your works every so often, and they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Not surprised your last video struggled there.

For progress... well, from what I've heard on the grapevine (read, Twitter), becoming super popular on YouTube tends to happen a lot quicker if you can find other popular channels and work with them as soon as possible. Boundary Break got super popular when Aurum (a popular video game glitch posting YouTube) featured him on his channel home page. Slopes Game Room has done well in part thanks to Guru Larry (an ex Channel Awesome personality with over 200,000 subscribers) mirroring his videos on his channel with a link in the description (with permission).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m18TU62nW_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m18TU62nW_c)

That seems to be the quick way to get popular now. Be featured on a popular YouTuber's channel as a 'friend's channel', or appear in their videos as a special guest. Or as someone they're interviewing.

And yes, making videos is hard. It's like anything really. Running a website with daily updates is hard. Running a startup is hard. Life will always try and throw you for a loop, and the mark of a skilled creator is overcoming that wherever possible.

Good luck with your future YouTube career, if you keep going with this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm the author. I'd love to discuss the project with Hacker News.

I know a lot of prominent entrepreneurs hang out here, so I'd like to ask if anybody is interested in having a chat with me for the channel?

Thanks!</comment>


Show HN: Rewind – Your bookmarks, by date, with thumbnails and instant search - <AUTHOR> Rewind is a Google Chrome extension that displays the bookmarks you saved today, yesterday, last week (or at any date) on one page, with thumbnails and instant search.
It's totally free and it relies on your local bookmarks, you don't have to create an account on a website.
It's ideal if you use your bookmarks as reminders for cool links (articles, blog posts, websites) that you want to read later, but never really do.
If you synchronize your bookmarks with your Google account, you can add a bookmark when you're at work and check it out when you're home, or add a bookmark on your phone and check it out later from your desktop computer.
Also, if you have 100 tabs open, just add them to your bookmarks and you'll check them one by one later. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the clickable URL: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rewind/oghafdocdml...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rewind/oghafdocdmlkkjipdmnikdcgekjpiapf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I made a landing page too: [https://rewind.netlify.com/](https://rewind.netlify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat, also wasn't that a basic feature of web browsers (sometimes including history) something like 10 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just curious, how do you make the bookmarks and such locally?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use the Google Chrome API to loop through the user's bookmarks, so you just have to use Chrome's native system to add bookmarks.

Is that what you meant?

<comment><USER3> Sure! Thanks for your answer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Firefox

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use the old version on Firefox, which was called "Bookmark Time Machine": [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark- time...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-time- machine/)

If you like it, I can port the new version too, I just need to know there's some demand because it requires a few hours of work.</comment></comment>


Re: Quibi. What's Mobile Native? - <AUTHOR> https://seyitaylor.com/quibi-whats-mobile-native/ <comment><USER2> There's stuff I'd like to watch on Quibi, but I gave up watching on the phone. I'd continue subscribing if I could watch on my Apple TV or Roku. Not supporting those options seems to be a very stupid business decision, I'd think you'd want to be across as many platforms as possible (or economical).</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deploy code from master to prod? - <AUTHOR> Curious what other people do? I know there are a lot of options for CI/CD these days and I'm curious what's popular. <comment><USER2> At Airbnb, we built an internal tool called Deployboard which made it easy for engineers to promote deployments across environments. Then we transitioned over to Spinnaker in order to codify deployment processes and help automate the analysis of canary metrics.</comment>


SEO Growth Hack: Piggy-Back For Fast Rankings - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2012/10/29/seo-growth-hack-piggy-back-for-fast-rankings/

<comment><USER2> I was about to submit this too. Wonder how it went for those that tried this hack. Can someone share experience?</comment>