Improving HN's performance. Voting is horribly expensive. That wasn't a problem originally but it's starting to become one now that there are so many users.
11492 accounts, many of them inactive of course. There are more users than that, because many users lurk for a while before creating accounts. We now get around 45k unique visitors on weekdays.
It's still that one. We were starting to spend too much time gcing once everything got lazily loaded, but a few days ago I started throwing stuff out of memory and now it looks like we've got performance back into the tolerable range.
Wow, no kidding. And I'm certain items are missing from the beginning of the list. I know they're still saved somewhere, because I can't upmod those articles.
Got an email from Microsoft -- I discovered a new bug in their F# compiler that breaks my startup app. I'm the first to find this fairly significant bug. I should be so proud.
So now I'm deciding how best to hack up my code to get around the bug.
Can't say I'm very happy about where I am, but I'll get it fixed soon enough.
It's very cool being on the cutting edge, as long as you don't bleed too much!
I was going to blog about it tomorrow (never ruin a good chance to blog)
Basically for some reason F# barfs on large types, say types with 500 fields in them. I think the breaking point is 300 or so. There's also another bug that I'll save for the blog entry.
Microsoft was responsive as hell -- I had an email response within minutes and the engineer and I were emailing back and forth all afternoon. I was very impressed. The F# dev guys rock, even though I'm not happy at all with having a broken app.
yeah - that's been my experience too. the few times i've dealt with them, they've been back at me in hours tops. hopefully that'll continue despite them hitting RC
The odd thing was that the code was working in 2010Beta, but fell completely apart in 2010RC. It was a case of upgrading the IDE and having my app crash and burn. First thing we did was up the stack size, but no matter how big we made the stack, it didn't work.
interesting. well - we had the same problem with ndjango. worked fine with beta, crapped out with rc. that, and the shifty api is getting annoying. their last minute shift away from ocaml naming was pretty annoying.
That's because you are working on their bleeding edge software, if you are working on old platforms, usually they would just mark your bug report as "won't fix".
Winning National Novel Writing Month. I know that NaNoWriMo is in November, but I reserve the right to change February into another November in my personal timeline. I just have 618 words left. I've never written anything longer than about twenty pages before, and no fiction, so this was really a new and exciting experience for me. To my surprise, the book is actually pretty fun to read; I was expecting it to suck. I didn't know that any of this was even possible for me. This really has been an amazing month, and I look forward to doing it again when the official November comes around.
(On a more nerdy note, none of the existing word processors really felt right to me, so I'm using a text format of my own devising, a python script to convert it into TeX with the memoir document class, and emacs. And org-mode to handle the story notes. It's remarkably pleasant, and it was a fun way of procrastinating. Much like writing this post.)
Good for you :) please post it when it's done. I got a chuckle out of the python/Tex thing - I was chatting with a friend recently about how we both want to start writing, but none of the writing apps feel right, if only there was a markdown-simple native mac app that would spit out latex, etc etc. We ended up agreeing we'd probably spend more time on the app than actually writing - kudos on doing both.
I think you're overestimating how long it would take to get something usable put together, if you're only trying to make it usable by you. It took me about one hour to write the python scripts, and another hour to learn the appropriate LaTeX document class, and then I just opened up Aquamacs and started typing.
(A nice advantage of this is that I programmed it to tell me how far I've gotten on my daily word goals. I don't know any word processor that does exactly this, and it's really handy.)
I hear that Scrivener is good, but I don't always use a mac, and I'm a starving college student. I like having something free that I can use over SSH in a pinch.
Working on my awesome blogging software. Here's the gorgeous coming soon page: http://www.heyreverie.com. Email me if you're frustrated with Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. and I'd love to have you test my site before I make it public.
Tonight? Nothing aside from routine email. I need a mental health day.
Saturday? Nothing aside from routine email. 10 hours of day job followed by going out with friends to karaoke.
Sunday: Church, gym, minimum viable achievement system in Rails (was supposed to happen last Sunday but I broke site -- scratch one work day), A/B tests incorporating it, deploy live, blog post about solo founderhood.
I'm localising the latest Flash game I sold, I was fortunate enough to get a good price and a great buyer on it. It's a ton of work setting up their multilingual and branding requirements but I have to get it done tonight, I got bogged down on my little startup (http://www.swfstats.com/) all week and next week I'm off to San Francisco for the Flash Gaming Summit so that really only leaves today and worst case scenario some of tomorrow to get this sorted out. : )
Drawing Feynman diagrams for my Modern Physics class. Here's the link to the assignment if you want to join in the fun: http://phys309.physics.tamu.edu/PA5.pdf
I'm writing a local HTTP proxy that connects to a remote JAWs [1] server, so that users behind a proxy that blocks proxy requests can still get to an unfiltered Internet.
Writing an iPhone app / webapp for givingturtle.org to release before SXSW. For that matter, for anyone looking for something worthwhile to spend a few hours on, let me know...
Documentation. Or if my eyeballs start falling out from that, a mass mailing engine in PHP for use on commodity-type PHP hosting. (For non-evil purposes, I promise.)
Working on a quickie startup using a domain name I've had since '03 which is foreverlist.com. It's a paid classified ads site where, for $5, you can list an ad with unlimited images that never expires and which you can change to anything at any time.
So, as an example, you have a classic car which just sits in your garage collecting dust. You're somewhat interested in selling it, but only for the right price, and definitely don't want to fuss with relisting the ad every 30 or 60 days like ebay, craigslist or kijiji. So, one day you sell the car and then want to sell your snowblower. Just change the listing.
Cheaper than ebay's fees by far, less hassle than CL or kijiji. The $5 keeps out the spammers and scammers. Yeah, I know, it's extremely saturated but like I said, it's a quickie.
I'd love to hear the reasoning behind down-voting this. In a thread with 225 comments, only my post and one making a pun about gays is down-voted to 0. If you have something to say, say it. sheesh
Reviewing the more esoteric Category Theory bits of Haskell.
A (commercial) Haskell + C project kicks off on March 4th.
I am looking forward to my first major project in Haskell but it will be hectic once it starts and I won't have too much time for lazing around or reading :-(.
I finished up a lexical analyzer I was writing in Ruby for a pascal variant we're using throughout the semester in my Compilers class.
Now it's done and submitted, so time to relax and have a cup of tea before I start considering writing the parser.
It's not in any state for public use yet. The UI is very buggy, and the annotation system doesn't support more than the latin equivalent of "See Spot Run".
Starting an artisan-bread "sponge" which is a starter for the bread I hope to bake tomorrow (have started trying to teach myself to cook/bake). With cooking, you can pretty much cover yourself if you don't do something right; baking is much more of a "discipline"...
Hacker wise, thinking about ways to use Twitter and Facebook after listening to the recent Mixergy interview about it (Vanderchuyk? I think). I have a friend with a profitable site but it has stagnated and he has asked me to think about ways to improve it.
Working on a new website for a client to help pay for the bootstrapping of my own startup. Getting to mess around with a custom mootools carousel with some nice UX stuff goin on.
I'm working on a Flash game using Flixel for a contest on Newgrounds. There haven't been many submissions so I'm basically just trying to get it done by the deadline :)
http://emp.ly/ - a job posting and sharing tool for hiring via social networks.
P.S. Don't forget: It's the last few days to apply 4 many startup incubators: http://shrt.st/cs7 (NYC Seedstart, Openfund, i/o ventures, Sproutbox, YC). Great chance to learn from best of the best. Also let me know if I have missed any from the list.
Working on a JSON stream parser in AS3, reading data with flash.net.URLStream, for loading up GPS data progressively. The JSON for a ride like this (http://ridewithgps.com/trips/2000) is about 300k, and I think it will look much cooler if it draws as it downloads.
My project: a "Foursquare meets Mafia Wars" game. You claim a real location, name it and defend it. Generate virtual currency over time and spend it on weapons. The code is complete and the family will be running some tests this weekend. Next, we will invite a few friends, get some feedback and figure out the next steps.
There is a merge lane right out my window in NY. Horns honk all day, due to narrowly missed disasters, and occationally theres some contact. Soooooo, I pointed a webcam out my window and created the http://WorstMergeLaneEver.com
As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.
The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.
Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape.
Right now... adding some features to an internal application at work in C# (im at work).
Later tonight though, I should be preparing for my hiking trip tomorrow, and possibly working on some RSS indexing that someone I know wants for their website.
Finishing up final negotiations on a licensing deal for some of the mapping functionality on ridewithgps.com -- original lawyerspeak in the agreement had too stiff of a non-compete.
Also, put up an issues page for users to publicly register feature requests and bugs, and then comment and vote on them. The idea is that we get alot of duplicate feature requests and reports of errata that take alot of time to personally respond to. By letting users see something is already registered, they can just upvote it and we have one less person to directly contact.
Studying for a Computer Architecture mid-term on Tuesday. I got to program a little bit of a RESTful API for a big school project earlier today though, so the day isn't a total loss.
I'm actually poring over the list of projects that I'd like to get done one of these days, seeing if there's anything I can get some traction on with just an hour or two of work. I should be sleeping. I have a job interview in 8 hours. Well, by "job interview" I mean I'm talking to yet another headhunter. Mostly to satisfy the unemployment benefit requirement that I meet with at least 3 companies per week. I really don't feel like doing mid-term contract work without benefits.
Creating marketing brochures with html, so that I can use css to create a consistent feel across all of them. There's probably a much better way to do this, but I need them for next week.
To do it, I'm using webkit2png to make a png from the html page, and prawn to automatically put the png into a pdf. The whole thing is 6 lines of ruby (which uses python, then prawn), and it's working well so far, but I've had to fuss with the scaling so that it prints without pixelating.
Trying to find a vt100 emulator for lisp . . . not working out so great. Or is it? I just remembered emacs had one . . . reading the source code now . . . god help me.
Trying to get the video done for our YC app. We're seriously bad at saying anything cool or interesting on camera... all we can do so far is laugh at each other. :)
Deployed a small app to appengine , to send voice messages via IM using twilio. Mainly to send my wife important messages without having to dial from work phone.
I was sleeping when this was posted, but now I'm working on a consulting project (embedding an existing game into OpenSocial and Facebook apps). Once I finish with that for the week, I'll carry on building the prototype for our SSD-based I/O caching driver. I'm hoping we can finally make that do something useful over the weekend.
Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect), it's pretty crappy currently)
I am working on a fantasy sports business. To be specific, this evening of work had to do not with building features but with actually mending relationships busted up by good ole email miscommunication. My advice is to say what you have to say on the phone or in person. Leave emotional discussions off of paper/email.
It's 6.16 am now, and yesterday night I went to bed early so I could work on my projects this morning. So far I've written a guest post for my blog (since 5 am) and I'll now work on the backend of a bog engine I wrote myself in rails. I'll probably do many other things before 9 am where I'll start my day-work.
Not yet night here, but I'm just finishing writing up a heat-mapping multi-user system for work.
I should also be working on 10 other programming projects that are due by april 1st, and 2 other personal projects as well, but don't seem to have the time nor inclination.
I think I want to go with MikeMacMan's suggestion and drink. =)
Copy for my current project: http://readwarp.com. I'm trying to come up with three short sentences for the front page to describe a) What it is, b) What it can do for you, c) What you should do next.
If you can figure out what it does, you tell me :)
Absolutely. I just added a title that updates with the stories. I've also added a (ugly) favicon so it's easy to distinguish from other tabs. Thanks for the suggestion.
Raytracers are fun. Tonight I'm hopefully going to start threading my (slow) real-time raytracer. I've never done threading before, and I'm very interested in seeing how the performance plays out, what strategy I should use to optimize cache usage and generally getting stuck in with what has always been an interesting topic to me.
Working on my word-learning application.
Partly to learn Dutch (though the program can be reused for any pair of languages, with some features (irregular verb forms) making it more suitable for Germanic languages - Dutch, English, German etc), partly to get experience with C#.
Finishing touches on porting my chinese checkers game to Android. It is mostly an exercise in writing a HTML 5 app for Android, as I don't expect many people to be interested in chinese checkers. Then, start working on the next Android app.
Working on photo upload in a new web app I'm working on. It spawns ImageMagick to do the conversion into multiple photos of different sizes. I had doubts about this until I read that it's the technique Flickr uses.
Learning Clojure (by reading Programming Clojure) - oh and trying to setup VimClojure and failing miserably (file detection is working, but everything else including syntax highlighting & indentation isn't).
Studying IA for my exam tomorrow. Fortunately, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition)" is a great book. (I said fortunately because I need to read half of it tonight - I`m half done).
I'm in the process of leaving my job to start my first company, so my time tonight is split between writing wiki articles for my soon-to-be-ex coworkers and creating a minimally viable product.
Hey, me too. It's my last day. It's way out of my comfort zone, but I realized if I don't take these risks now, I never will. I'm oscillating between excited and horrified.
I'm setting up a development environment to work on writing a FTP search engine tomorrow afternoon. It's a new laptop (new to me, Thinkpad T30), so it's not all perl'd up yet.
cool - I bought the domain 'FounderStar.com' with the intention of building a site like this. but at the moment I'm too busy with other sites. If you're interested in the domain let me know - either way, I'd be happy to give input or try out anything you deploy...
Finishing up a few homework assignments then keep on teaching myself Lisp. I probably should learn a bit more LaTeX at the rate i'm inserting equations in Google docs though.
trying to make my way to Brussels, stuck overnight in Chicago due to a maintenance issue followed by a domestic dispute followed by over the maximum time for the crew.
Working through pickaxe ruby, tinkering with lisp program to decode pcap files and explain packets/protocols, keeping an eye on the Cluster, figuring out xen.
I know you meant it as a joke, and it is indeed clever. However, usage of 'gay' as a pejorative is kind of offensive to some of us. Please be careful with your puns.
Edit: Seriously, guys, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here. What's with the downvotes?
It was a pun on a pejorative use of the word - if you disagree, look up "pejorative".
At the risk of seeming "PC" to oversensitive folks, using social identities as pejoratives is inherently insulting; you're associating their racial/sexual/etc. identity with something undesirable, even if you don't think of it as a slur. "Gay" to mean stupid or annoying is of a piece with terms like "gyp", "indian-giver", or "nigger-rig".
This has less to do with political correctness, and more the idea that posts like yours are just kind of annoying. The tone makes the site seem a lot less civil. It didn't add anything to the thread. Now all we have is you acting very annoyed that we didn't like your joke.
Humor is encouraged on Hacker News, but only when it is actually funny. Your joke wasn't funny.
Working on our backup path. I run some Limbo[1] code using Windows Scheduled Tasks. This copies the contents of My Documents and Desktop (or wherever) to a Venti[2] server running on Linux on the LAN. The storage arenas of that server are extracted in 500Mb chunks and encrypted, along with the scores for accessing them, using GPG[3]. These are then copied offsite, via the internet and bundled into DVD sized groups and burned to optical when appropriate. As Venti arenas are append only this is minimum transfer, secure backup.
That's obviously just the Windows machiens that use Limbo. Unix likes have native clients. Our Venti store also contains data from other soruces such as the website and imap servers. Though it might make sense to separate them out, that's the decisions I'm working on as I go along.
I would also like to find an encryption method that uses fixed size chunks so I can upload only the appended data. That's something I need to look more into. I know they are around somewhere.
