

Who else is hacking a project instead of watching the Super Bowl? - bdclimber14

I'm curious to poll the HN community to see who is working instead of watching the Super Bowl?
======
jedberg
Can't I do both? :) I'm on my laptop hacking while sitting in front of the TV.

Also I'm watching my website traffic do this:

<http://www.reddit.com/tb/fgjid>

~~~
yakto
Yup, doing both here, too. Was hoping for another halftime wardrobe
malfunction, and getting close to having invite codes ready: <http://yak.to>

~~~
jedberg
I just looked at your site, but I have no idea if I want an invite code. :)

Perhaps you could put at least some sort of teaser on the homepage as to what
problem you might be solving or at least some clue as to the problem space.

~~~
yakto
Thanks for the feedback. Still trying to figure out the one-liner. The current
meta description tag has the latest tagline: Overshare Anything.

I've been inspired most by Reddit (thanks again jedberg), but Yak is more
playful, flirty, and local.

------
sudonim
What's a superbowl? Im at the office building a desk for a new dev starting
tomorrow, doing some wireframes, and then working on my side project.

~~~
bdclimber14
Rock on, seriously, rock on!

------
NZ_Matt
Oh America are playing their version of rugby today? I did wonder why my
twitter timeline suddenly filled up with tweets about commercials :P

~~~
paylesworth
Yes, sadly our version of "rugby" features lots of standing around, pads, and
helmet-induced concussions. Are you gearing up for the Rugby World cup in your
backyard this year?

~~~
barrydahlberg
It is actually having quite an impact in Auckland. I don't care too much for
the rugby, but I welcome any improvements to our transport system etc.

<http://www.auckland2011.com/Getting-Auckland-ready.aspx>

------
sabj
If by hacking project, you mean, "writing my senior thesis," then yes!

And if by "writing my senior thesis," you mean, going onto HN instead, then
double-yes!

~~~
RK
Not watching the super bowl to write python for my PhD project, but instead
checking HN.

------
jrockway
I didn't even know it was today until all these Super Bowl articles started
showing up.

I was happy that the Bears lost a few weeks ago because it means I have
another year to be able to walk around in my neighborhood without being hit by
drunk drivers. (I live right by soldier field, and it seems they don't let you
drive away from it unless you are utterly tanked. Someone ran a red light and
was inches away from hitting a baby in a stroller. What the fuck.)

~~~
cbo
Sometimes it's hard to cheer for sports teams when you see the havoc their
fans wreak. I used to think Chicago had it bad, but I have since learned that
we're actually pretty tame when it comes to sports riots (at least until the
Cubs finally win).

Reference: Montreal.

------
mindcrime
Count me in; I'm lying in bed with my laptop, hacking (and checking HN every
now and then) right now. ATM, I'm trying to remake myself into a UI person
(well, at least a half-assed UI person) and trying to clean-up the user-
profile form for Quoddy[1]. To hell with football, the Dolphins aren't in the
SB, and there's code to be written...

[1]: <https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy>

~~~
bdclimber14
"there's code to be written..."

So true.

~~~
mindcrime
I should have gone for a way to work in a reference to this quote:

 _There are worlds out there where the skies are burning, where the seas
asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song.
Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice...and somewhere else the
tea is getting cold. Come on Ace...we've got work to do!_

Oh well, maybe next time...

------
rudle
Doing both is certainly not difficult, football games feature a _lot_ of
downtime.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870428120457500...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406.html)

------
xenophanes
I had no idea the super bowl was on today. Or this month...

------
raganwald
Got dynamic class loading working for my Faux framework yesterday. I guess I
really ought to write a blog post about it tonight, but for now this sketchy
overview will have to do:

[https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2011/02/...](https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2011/02/misadventure_part_iv.md#readme)

------
jarin
I'm doing both, since neither team is my team I'm only half paying attention
to it.

I also think it's hilarious how so many techies love to brag about not caring
about football. I'd have thought that hackers would enjoy the complexity of
the game (most of the programmers I know love football, and meeting up for
beers on football Sundays is a ritual for us).

~~~
jedberg
People think that sports and programming are mutually exclusive for some
reason. As if you can't be a good programmer unless you hate sports.

Personally, I like to hack and I hold football season tickets.

~~~
tejaswiy
My attention span is way too low for something like Football. I love soccer
because most of the time, people are actually playing instead of standing
around.

~~~
jff
I find that in soccer they're usually rolling around on the ground peeking out
from behind their hands.

Also, maybe if anybody ever scored in soccer it would be a little more
interesting. At least hockey has better fights and the players don't fall down
so much.

------
danenania
The only competition going on that I'm aware of is a three-way match-up
between python, javascript, and my brain.

------
consultutah
That's what I'm talking about. I'm sure that the super bowl is awesome, but
now that I have my weekend project (<http://goo.gl/JdBqR>) out of the way, I
am working on the backend.

------
vito
I'm putting together the release notes for the most substantial update for any
project I've ever done. Probably shouldn't release yet if everyone's watching
the Superbowl. Tomorrow it is?

<http://atomo-lang.org/notes/0.4>

------
shaunxcode
I've been working on finally beating zelda 2 on virtual console, catching up
on client work and thinking about my next move with the TryAPL
(<https://github.com/shaunxcode/TryAPL>) project I've been hacking on.

------
gsivil
Count me in! I am in a bookstore checking HN and putting together some physics
related data in Lisp (if this can be considered hacking of course).

------
developingJim
Just got done with a 2-3 week binge of programming, taking time to regroup and
refocus.

Just got done reorganizing all of my research in one note, loaded up on
skydrive (impressive how far live has come since I last looked).

Ran across this device which I must own:
[http://www.wirelessgoodness.com/2011/02/04/noteslate-
the-100...](http://www.wirelessgoodness.com/2011/02/04/noteslate-
the-100-single-color-tablet-that-will-replace-your-legal-pad-forever/)

Toying with the idea of dumping all of my research out of one note and into
the interwebs, raw. Haven't decided one way or another yet.

------
pdenya
...is that today?

I've been busy hacking for weeks, didn't even notice.

------
coderdude
I'm working on my startup. I figured if I can be watching the game I can be
working just as well. Work won. :)

------
bluecobalt
Working on my startup, getting ready to launch this month, although I think
its wonderful that the rest of my nation is really into a Superb Owl.

------
PureSin
Multi-tasking! Programming isnt really something you can multi task, but I'm
only watching forthe commercials and half time show.

------
DarrenLehane
There are two types of people:

Those who watch the Super Bowl, and those who run ads during the Super Bowl.

------
cgranade
I am. Playing around with Google App Engine and Honeycomb at the same time,
making some tools for tabletop gaming. Just uploaded first revision ( _very_
feature incomplete) at <https://github.com/cgranade/ProjectUmbra/>.

------
cperciva
I was playing music from Borodin's Prince Igor at an orchestra concert this
afternoon; does that count?

(We had a good audience, too -- I have a feeling that the set of people who
attend classical music concerts doesn't overlap very much with the set of
people who watch football.)

------
michaels0620
Why choose? :)

I am watching the game (Packers just scored) while working on a hobby game
project.

------
37prime
Define "hacking" and "project" please. Well, I'm doing something with PHP and
CSS. Does it count?

------
pbreynolds
I'm in the home office with a hot cup of Casi Cielo working in the bowels of
CoreText and Quartz for a huge feature update to my iPhone/iPad app. When I
need an eyeball break, I walk into the living room to see if I can catch a
cool commercial)

------
zinssmeister
Totally! Hacking away since 24h on my project:
<http://www.virtualrockstars.com>

My wife across the room is also hacking on something for SXSWi. Love being
married to another coder!

~~~
mbm
That's _awesome._

------
peregrine
In Wisconsin it is sacrilegious to not watch a Packer game; that said I am
still on HN.

------
snguyen
I'm tutoring a compsci student. Does that count?

------
mcantelon
Yup... added support for ignore files to my CLI util (written in node.js) for
managing dotfiles using git: <https://github.com/mcantelon/node-deja>

------
paylesworth
I'm hacking my pantry. Right now, making chicken stock by using leftover
carcasses from whole chickens that I cut-up myself in the last few months.
Will freeze the stock to keep it up to 3 - 4 months and during that time can
cut-up some more chickens to use in the next cycle. The stock is very simple
to make and involves mostly inactive cook time (3-4 hrs simmering) and it
teaches you to work with whole chicken rather than cut-up parts, making it
more economical. And, it makes your house smell wonderfully delicious :)

~~~
sgallant
Hah, I'm doing the same thing. But I'm using my stock for fresh chicken soup.
It's a good break from hacking.

Super bowl (of soup).

------
andywood
Sort of. I'm finally getting around to making a bandcamp page for my
unreleased music:

<http://cubit.bandcamp.com/>

This is a direct reaction to seeing this excellent chart from the "Knack for
Getting Money" thread, and wanting to move as much finished work as I can from
the middle category to the right-hand category:

<http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/>

------
reneherse
Working on my site so i can launch my freelance web design & UX business!

Time to get back to wrestling with the CSS, which isn't always easy for us
right-brained types :)

------
pjscott
I noticed that there seems to be no easy way for Haskell programmers to use
bcrypt, so I made something similar, with the goal of making good security
trivial. It's just a slick API around PBKDF1, with painless support for
increasing the number of iterations:

<http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pwstore-fast>

Now I've just got to persuade a few people to switch away from insecure
methods.

------
joe6pack
I'm not naturally a sports fan, but I always find it good for social purposes
to stay at least marginally aware of them (at least the major events). So,
hacking in front of the TV for a change.

That said, football brings to mind a great PG quote: "Kids are sent off to
spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of
giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural
thing in the world."

------
blhack
I'm working on setting a new layout for thingist (the current one
[<http://thingist.com>] looks _terrible_ ).

The new layout is here: <http://dev.thingist.com/index.html> nothing here will
work properly, though, and it will probably blip in and out of actually
working (it's a staging server [well, a virtual one]).

~~~
sfphotoarts
agreed on the current, and the new one seems broken.

~~~
blhack
Yeah, I'm still working on getting the new one into the code.

Unfortunately, it's more than just a simple css file rewrite.

edit: new layout is pretty much applied (to the staging [virtual] server).

------
jff
Oh that superbowl thing? Yeah I just found out they played one last February,
I guess that's cool, does it happen every year? I wouldn't know, I'm not one
of those proletariat mouth-breathing football fans, it's not even real
football anyway. Instead I've been hacking a RESTful Ruby on Rails application
that combines social media, blogging, and Markov chaining, all in 200 lines.

------
jc123
Watched a little and spent time debugging why Facebook invites with fb:multi-
friend-selector were not working (serverfbml leading to 404). I solved it and
Facebook's new https feature, if enabled by the user, is the cause :( Filed
bug: <http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=15066>

------
RiderOfGiraffes
There's a poll: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2186782>

~~~
bdclimber14
Do you know how much Karma you need to create a poll? I don't believe I have
enough, or don't know how to.

~~~
tgriesser
I think it's pretty low... <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll>

~~~
dreur
20 - At least that what it says when not logged in.

------
jenn
I've been taking a break from working on <http://101in365.com> to watch the
commercials sometimes, but yeah... hacking on a project is way more fun!
Managed to get a lot done today too! Good that my friends have all be pre-
occupied by the game so I can concentrate!

------
gourneau
I was able to get shoehorn jquery-facebook-multi-friend-selector
([https://github.com/mbrevoort/jquery-facebook-multi-friend-
se...](https://github.com/mbrevoort/jquery-facebook-multi-friend-selector)) To
work for a beautiful mobile app I am working on, that I hope to show off soon.

------
GiraffeNecktie
Some of us just weren't born with the sports-watching gene. You'd have to pay
me, and pay me well, to watch the SuperBowl or any other TV sports (they're
all equally tedious, in my eyes). And, in answer to your probable question, no
I'm not female or gay.

------
bdclimber14
My bowl game happens to be between Postgre and MySQL. My development
environment MySQL instance and Heroku's Postgre are very different with
aggregate functions.

i.e. How can I possibly select parent rows where ALL children match a certain
criteria.

------
Breefield
I'm working on an AM/PM taskmanager circle-clock.
<http://breefield.com/lab/days/> Japanese characters are via Google translate,
probably horribly wrong, but mostly for aesthetic.

------
atgm
I am. I come up with a dumb little site idea and decided to implement it using
PHP and the 960.gs system, both things I want more practice with. Also tried
out some new (to me) Photoshop techniques to try to modernize my design style.

------
lewq
Building a query cache for the distributed proxying layer in
<http://www.hybrid-sites.com/tech/> \- much better than this "football" of
which you speak ;-)

------
oxtopus
I plotted the week's hourly average Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) as
reported by ERCOT, looking into the "rolling blackouts" in Texas.

<http://bit.ly/f1lXqk>

------
Pyrodogg
Working on personal projects tonight. Nothing that'll make me money directly
but it's enhancing my skill set.

Don't have the game on in the background even, no tv reception. It simplifies
life quite a bit.

------
girlvinyl
I've been working on my project non-stop this weekend and yesterday was my
birthday. Took a dinner and cake break and got back to it. When you're really
into something, it's all you can think about!

------
tony_landis
SuperBowl?

<http://github.com/tony-landis/PonyExpress>

It needs a few more hours of for docs and testing before it is ready.

------
emartin24
I'm doing a bit of both ;) Hacking a WordPress theme for
<http://beyondthefocus.com> while watching bits of the game & commercials.

------
eswat
Ever since I left my old job (heavy football culture) I haven’t really gave a
damn for handegg. Working on my local city bus webapp instead.

The new FUEL PHP framework is great, BTW.

------
brennannovak
Yup! Hacking happily away on <http://social-igniter.com> couldn't care less
about the Super Bowl- I don't even know who's playing.

------
LeachyPeachy
I am working. I am the CTO for Alliance Acquisitions (<http://www.alliance-
acquisitions.com>) Much left to get done.

------
pinchyfingers
Visiting my girlfriend's dad at the cancer center. He is a lifelong Steelers
fan. I am a lifelong coder. The game is on, but I am sitting here working on a
Django app.

------
FirstHopSystems
The super bowl isn't going to code my start-up project for me!

------
peter_l_downs
I am! I've been fixing up my side project, www.bookshrink.com, which I
recently submitted here and got a bunch of feedback on. What project are _you_
working on?

------
burgerbrain
Does brewing beer count? -dashes off as his wort boils over-

------
covati
For sure, I'm hacking away on some utilities ArgyleSocial.com, while the wife
watches a Masterpiece Theatre movie.

The Super...what is on tonight? :)

------
espeed
Yeah, just started it two days ago --
<http://developers.propagandaproject.org>

------
mgkimsal
Doing project work (not my own though) but definitely not watching the super
bowl. Had a nice dinner with my wife, now back to hacking.

------
efnx
I am! I'm working on a modular synthesizer. But I've taken a couple breaks to
get food and catch up with friends partying downstairs...

------
johnnyjung
Starting a project for my cs class...due tomorrow.

------
kgutteridge
Well actually just given up as its late UK time, always get a lot done in the
quiet time on Sunday evenings when no one else is about!

------
bdclimber14
Just for the record, I am multi-tasking as well.

------
jdp23
me -- social hacking rather than code, but still ...

<http://bit.ly/no2hr514>

------
ericmsimons
Watch a few dozen guys play with balls for a few hours or work on an
unbelievably cool project...I'll stick with the latter :)

------
AdamTReineke
I'm watching Murder! by Hitchcock as homework for my film studies class. First
time in years that I haven't watched the game.

------
Vivtek
Super What now?

Oh, you mean that new-commercial showcase everybody talks about? Most of them
were on YouTube yesterday.

------
Mmccue
I'm drawing sketches for next ver of Flipboard while watching superbowl on
twitter on flight to SFO. Does that count?

------
adnam
I'm watching my first ever super bowl, and I'm full of chilli dogs. It's 2.30
am and I'm at work in 5 hours :-/

------
zmitri
Wow, I didn't even think of it, but yes, I am hacking on a new rails project
instead of watching the superbowl.

------
ronaktal
I've been working on Datkey.com for a white and it's way more fun than
superbowl...that's just me though

------
h3xdump
Oh. Wait, the Superbowl was this weekend? Oops. All I knew was that Pittsburgh
was playing Green Bay.

------
ajray
Doing circuit board layout and ordering samples online for my next embedded
electronics project.

------
Mmccue
I'm drawing sketches for new version of Flipboard while watching game via
twitter (on flt).

------
ylem
Does running an experiment count?

------
thascales
I'm chipping away at rewriting my uni's timetabling system. I am very full of
caffeine.

------
keithba
Too true - I've been leanring Ruby on Rails 3 + Koala + omniauth today. Lots
of fun...

------
arjn
I have zero interest in football (and its not really football anyways ;)

~~~
mediaslave
I call it American Tackleball...

------
manus
My bowl is business casual, wearing glasses, raised in Kansas.

------
irae
Not realy hacking, bug I'm bugfixing as webOS app =)

------
sim0n
Yep! Working on my startup: www.interstateapp.com :)

------
sigzero
I am in a Python class getting to take a quiz.

------
cmeiklejohn
Definitely. Startup work in full effect.

------
jasongullickson
Working on my new smartphone project.

------
olalonde
Mostly watching the commercials...

------
jamesmiller5
Definitely working on my blog.

------
hydrazine
Pacman AI > Superbowl!

------
derrida
What is the "Super Bowl"?

------
keithburgun
Oh crap, was that today?

------
daspecster
...Are you stalking me?

------
apperoid
What is Super Bowl?

------
anigbrowl
I'm doing both...

------
Skywing
if i'm doing both, does that count?

~~~
tbeseda
That's how I'm rolling... <http://cl.ly/4RRV>

------
ajaimk
Amen to that

------
digiru
The super bowl is today? I'm hacking Spork!

------
flipdeadshot
Did anyone else have the misfortune of seeing the halftime show? The biggest
stage in the world, and they get the black eyed peas to perform?

------
d3fun
there are bugs to fix..

