
Ask HN: What are you working on tonight? - dzlobin
What's everybody working on right now? I'll start:<p>I'm putting together a quick custom todo list app to organize my main project, because I'm not happy with the vanilla one in Basecamp.<p>What about you?
======
pg
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.

~~~
Timothee
I feel like upvoting your comment because that sounds interesting and
concerning everyone here, but I don't want to be part of the problem!

~~~
cubicle67
You're not. You're helping him test his improvements

------
DanielBMarkham
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!

~~~
kolosy
ooh... what bug? and are you doing f# for web or just f#?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
kolosy
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

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
kolosy
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.

------
sketerpot
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.)

~~~
recurser
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.

~~~
sketerpot
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.)

------
abi
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.

~~~
dannytatom
I thought you were being sarcastic, but that is indeed gorgeous.

~~~
abi
Thank you! Took a lot of time and work. And the landing page is pure art,
serves no purpose whatsoever. Still a lot of fun.

------
patio11
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.

------
Huppie
I hope to finish the Rails Tutorial (<http://www.railstutorial.org/>) and then
begin reading (and experimenting with) Agile Web Developing with Rails
([http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-
Programmer...](http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-
Programmers/)).

------
benologist
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. : )

This is my game:
[http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701....](http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701.jpg)

11:23pm

~~~
benologist
2:30am and dare I say it .... progress!

------
dwwoelfel
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>

Thanks HN for the great timing on this post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150224>

------
jrockway
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.

[1] <http://github.com/jrockway/jaws>

Entities that think they can censor the Internet amuse me.

------
kolosy
the same thing we do every night, pinky... plotting to take over the world...
this time with a shivaplug.

~~~
pasbesoin
Maybe the upcoming revision will tip the balance. ;-)

------
cookiecaper
The baby my wife had on Tuesday, I guess. We just got home.

~~~
Pistos2
Congratulations. :)

------
frisco
Working on a Clojure client for Facebook:

<http://www.github.com/myfit/clj-facebook/>

------
zweinz
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...

------
midnightmonster
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.)

------
Mc_Big_G
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.

~~~
Mc_Big_G
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

~~~
catch404
I was wondering the same thing

------
plinkplonk
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 :-(.

Enjoying the last few days of peace :-)

------
ohwaitnvm
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.

~~~
amackera
This sounds like real fun! My compilers class was a joke, we made it as far as
generating ASTs, then the semester ended. Laughable.

------
MikeMacMan
Drinking...

~~~
marvin
I'm trying to get laid, actually. And failing thus far :/

------
jcrocholl
My interactive search engine for short available domains:
<http://www.nxdom.com/>

I'm working to bring the advanced weighted sort order back, but optional so
that new users can play with the simple sort order until they understand what
it does. Work in progress is here, and full source code:
<http://master.latest.scoretool.appspot.com/>
<http://github.com/jcrocholl/nxdom>

My 2-year-old son doesn't want to go to sleep yet, so he's climbing around on
me while I write this.

~~~
dzlobin
FWIW, On Ubuntu/Chrome, the 'find available domains, starts with and ends
with' lines are all on top of each other.

~~~
jcrocholl
Thank you, I see what you mean. The headline wraps because the font is too
wide on Ubuntu (in Firefox too), hope to fix it soon.

------
jasongullickson
Submitting our latest film to IMDB: <http://2soc.net/americancafe>

------
Derferman
A Python compiler using Flex, Bison and C++.

~~~
meastham
Is this for CS164 at Berkeley? It sounds like the 164 project.

~~~
Derferman
Yep, Hilfinger is teaching the class this semester.

------
shib71
A website for people to post latin texts, collaboratively annotate them with
grammer information, and read both.

~~~
waterlesscloud
What's the site? I have a couple of latin grad student friends that would
probably enjoy that.

~~~
shib71
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".

------
patrickgzill
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.

------
tdupree
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.

------
pplante
I scratched an itch today while collecting research materials. I had trouble
keeping track of all the pages I was referencing, quotes I liked, etc.

So I made an app and then open sourced it:
<http://github.com/pplante/yourcached.info>

Not totally finished yet. Waiting on DNS to resolve so I can add FBConnect to
it and spread the word.

I only spent 4 hours on this so far. So it wasn't a complete distraction from
what I needed to do...not yet at least!

~~~
pplante
Oooops, forgot the screenshot: <http://grab.by/2GVy>

------
zefhous
Just made a little jQuery plugin:

<http://github.com/zef/jquery_form_toggle>

It makes it easy to show and hide elements based on the state of a checkbox,
radio button, or select menu.

Demo: <http://madebykiwi.com/files/jquery_form_toggle/>

I'd be surprised if there isn't something like this out there already, but I
couldn't find one.

If you have a suggestion for a better name, I'd be happy to hear it.

~~~
cubicle67
chide? It's a real word, but also mix of checkbox and hide.

------
jsonscripter
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 :)

------
jkaljundi
<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.

------
andrewf
I'm going to see if I can make zlib a little faster with some SSE intrinsics.

------
zackham
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.

~~~
windsurfer
This sounds very interesting. Will it be open source?

------
rdj
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.

~~~
Mc_Big_G
Interesting. I had a flash of real violence breaking out over the game.

------
headShrinker
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>

------
phaedrus
Writing a distributed control system in Io for my robot I'll take to the
Sparkfun UAV competition.

------
menomnon
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.

------
natep
This thread looks pretty crowded already, but I'll throw this in anyways.

I'm adding a few screenshots to my part of my team's presentation. We have a
program review tomorrow (today).

My project: <http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet/>

------
stevoo
Working on my online game. Hopefully it will be more in a playable condition
soon enough !

------
dangoldin
Trying to learn Django by coding up a new project and working on an existing
PHP site.

------
boyter
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.

------
lotharbot
Playing Starcraft with my wife, exploring a new tactic, inspired by the
discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150669>

And taking care of my 2-month-old.

~~~
lawrencegs
aw that's awesome. your baby must be asleep now :)

------
cullenking
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.

------
char
Tonight's projects included A/B testing, practicing piano, and making a
delicious sausage pizza.

I'm currently considering jumping on the Feynman diagrams posted by dwwoelfel,
because I kind of miss doing them.

------
amackera
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.

------
ax0n
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.

------
chrisa
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.

~~~
awt
Adobe Fireworks might be a good tool for you.

~~~
sailormoon
If we're going to be using Adobe apps, I would have thought InDesign would be
more suitable.

------
houseabsolute
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.

------
hikari17
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. :)

~~~
icey
Give yourself a 15 minute deadline. Take whatever video is the best when 15
minutes are up.

------
gipsygipsy
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.

------
pmjordan
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.

------
jashmenn
Listening to jazz, hacking on an iPhone game.

------
mgz
Working on multiplayer Minesweeper, web-based: <http://sweepminer.com>

------
vault_
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)

------
aneesh
Just got back from the YC meetup in Seattle!

------
gabea
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.

------
oscardelben
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.

------
rms
Live jazz hip-hop at a local bar, no cover

------
_neil
Just had dinner with my girlfriend. Now finishing up this months pro-bono work
to clear my plate for next month.

------
harisenbon
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. =)

------
akkartik
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 :)

~~~
snitko
You should definitely make a <title> for the page

~~~
akkartik
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.

------
jdoliner
A raytracer as part of a class project.

~~~
NickPollard
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.

------
jdminhbg
Using CouchDB to set up various payment methods for a personal project. The
schemaless stuff is great.

------
egor83
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#.

------
marcamillion
Trying to deal with hotel issues that come up at the 11th hour of negotiations
for my 'Rails 3 on the Beach' event I am hosting in Jamaica in August.

Things never go as planned...I know computers can be difficult to deal with
some times, but people are even more unpredictable.

------
Tichy
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.

------
jasonkester
The Plan: Finish documenting the little i18n library for .NET that I built
last week and release it open source.

The Reality: It's 95 degrees here in Cartagena and my fingers are sweating
onto the keyboard. Cuba Libres sound like a much more viable option.

------
brandon
Playing with bottle.py and Twilio

------
chadaustin
Gutting ADODB from the IMVU website to eliminate pointless data conversions
and several hundred microseconds from each cached query.

I love being able to refactor the database layer, relying on automated tests
to prevent me from taking down the site.

------
psawaya
Playing around with streaming video and Adobe Stratus, and contemplating
making my own Chatroulette-like site.

Let me know how well it (doesn't) work: <http://cam-mash.appspot.com/listen>

~~~
minalecs
working on a similar idea.. :) maybe we should collaborate

~~~
psawaya
Sounds interesting. Shoot me an e-mail with more about what you're working on?

------
jonah
Merging the code I wrote on the road last week with the main tree on the dev
box.

------
Todd
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.

~~~
wendroid
Here's something you might find interesting Gamma error in picture scaling
<http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html>

------
rmanocha
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).

~~~
gtani
\- ask on freenode #clojure, the guy who wrote vimClojure hangs out pretty
frequently

\- the suggested "least stress" alternatives are netBeans/enclojure or emacs
via ELPA/swank-clojure

------
waterlesscloud
Packing to drive from Los Angeles to San Jose tomorrow. Spending the weekend
watching friends' movies at Cinequest film festival.

Also meeting with a friend in SJ about a facebook app idea we've been kicking
around forever.

------
trevorturk
Working on my web based jukebox project: <http://github.com/trevorturk/kzak>

I'm dropping Bundler support right now because it's still broken in so many
ways ;(

------
lambdom
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).

------
dimarco
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.

~~~
xnxn
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.

Best of luck to you.

------
abyssknight
This Friday night, I'll be working on getting the Orlando Defcon Group
together at Stardust Coffee and Video @ 7pm.

This will be the first time the group has convened since it was marked
inactive in 2006.

------
chronomex
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.

------
njl
Putting the finishing touches on the app I wrote this week, a co-founder
finder.

I also got a Droid this afternoon, so I've been having a hard time avoiding
the distracting shiny, shiny new toy.

~~~
vsync
Make sure you test the voice quality when you speak into the microphone:
[https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630...](https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/16215?start=630&tstart=0#115129)

------
krikor
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.

------
spoonyg
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.

------
lindelof
A building thermal performance model written in Octave/MATLAB.

------
wglb
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.

------
jparicka
Looking into memcache <http://bit.ly/ceIa49> Beepl's (django) eating up 400MB
of mem/apache process. :-(

~~~
jparicka
Btw, it worked - beepl's now fast like a rocketship!

------
snikolov
Signals and Systems problem set
<http://mit.edu/6.003/S10/www/handouts/hw3.pdf>

------
rozim
MVP on GAE. Minimum Viable Product on Google App Engine.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
That's so GAE.

~~~
megaduck
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?

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Civility has nothing to do with it. It was a not-so-clever pun. I wasn't
actually using it as a pejorative. That should be _painfully_ obvious.

~~~
Semiapies
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".

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
EXCEPT THAT I WASN'T USING IT AS A PEJORATIVE. Jesus fucking christ, this
isn't "PC" this is just _stupid_.

~~~
rms
You weren't using it as a pejorative, but your pun was based on its use as a
pejorative.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
And? Some guy posted using the word "nigger". He may not be calling people
"nigger", but he used a word that is racially insensitive! Booga booga!

Jesus.

~~~
rms
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.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Yes, it was funny to no one. This is why the comment has +5.

------
Semiapies
A designer friend and I will likely play with a redesign of some mutual
friends' university club's website.

EDIT: And then I notice that this was posted yesterday. :)

------
dylanz
Was running database migrations. I'm now rolling back.

------
papa
Filling out paperwork to commit to more bandwidth from our colocation facility
as the monthly overages are getting high.

Guess you gotta spend money to make money :-|

------
jcmarquezh
I am fixing JMathPlot exception so that we can use it for my graduation
project (brazos.cs.tcu.edu) Those 3D graphics will look really good !!!

------
nfnaaron
I'm working on initialization scripts for my VPS: automatically taking it from
newborn to installed infrastructure and security settings.

And a glass of bourbon.

~~~
techiferous
Linode StackScripts?

~~~
nfnaaron
simpler, just # do this # do this # do this. On slice. May do something like
StackScripts later.

------
siculars
building riak on a couple ubuntu 9.10 virtual servers. checking mem usage n
32bit vs 64bit for a new project. riak > node.js > jquery.

------
robdor
Hacking on a GitHub client for Palm's webOS.

<http://robmerrell.github.com/gitopotamus/>

------
ashleyw
Building a barebones game framework for HTML5 Canvas. Or at least, decoupling
the reusable pieces of code from a game I've been building.

------
devink
I'm writing a Bit Error Rate simulator

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_error_rate>

------
thaumaturgy
Sleeping, I hope. I haven't slept a full night for a while.

G'night.

------
tcarnell
NOW: Working to pay rent

TONIGHT: Adding graphical reporting into Femtoo.com (to view graphs of change
history of trackers)...and then getting drunk.

------
sumeeta
Beer.

------
meastham
The serial interface for the MIPS microprocessor that I am going to be
spending the rest of the semester implementing on an FPGA.

------
cosmok
Adding more polls into my photo poll page @ <http://i-am-bored.in/polls/>

------
farnsworth
Writing a Python photomosaic generator, and an iPhone app for my university
bus system (iPhone apps seem to be popular tonight).

------
epi0Bauqu
Editing a new interview I did earlier in the evening with Steve Welch on
getting traction. Hoping to upload and post it today.

------
iamwil
Working on getting data to be more easily imported for <http://graphbug.com>

------
damovisa
Continuing to hack away at my Footy Tipping site... the start of the season is
casting demonic shadows over my shoulder...

------
nose
Watching some cloudera videos. <http://www.cloudera.com/videos>

------
oomkiller
Trying to figure out how to query the UMLS metathesaurus's WebService (Soap
1.2) API using Ruby. Not having much luck :(

------
paraschopra
Working to get one step closer to nirvana :)

------
dazzla
Debating adding the deals from my iDealyzer iPhone/Android apps to the
supporting website hoping it will help SEO.

------
jbm
Building a hotel site. Fixing some irritating join statements when searching
by station name (it's for Tokyo).

------
DCoder
Reverse engineering a C++ game and patching it. The usual thing fans do to fix
their favourite broken games :)

------
dangrossman
Writing copy for webpages of a service that helps ecommerce sites with high
chargeback rates reduce fraud.

------
cperciva
Just spent 2 hours rehearsing the Verdi Requiem. Next up is probably looking
at a FreeBSD Errata Notice.

------
splat
Writing a lab report for my lab class. I'm using electron diffraction to
measure the Planck constant.

------
JeffJenkins
Making my current project -- a hierarchical outliner -- support multiple
documents and user accounts

------
odajay
Working on the new financial reporting requirements and preparing my financial
courses startup.

------
X-Istence
Working on my Google AppEngine based website. I hope to launch by the end of
this month.

------
jbyers
Aggregating http log data (request timing, custom fields) in redis. To be
open-sourced.

------
dacort
Backing out the latest changes we spent the week building because it "wasn't
right".

------
thenduks
Been working on a new bug/ticket tracker for a while... Continuing to do so :)

------
kogir
Real C# support for Thrift, consisting of WCF metadata providers and channels.

------
mcxx
A web interface for MongoDB.

------
ApolloRising
Working on chapter two of a book I am writing on how to increase conversion

------
ElllisD
Searching my email / Paypal accounts for orphaned / unlogged receipts.

------
ConceptDog
Finishing up a presentation for code show and tell at work tomorrow.

------
acl
Creating fixture data for an old project with no test coverage.

------
pantsd
I'm working on my "day" job. Ask this again on the weekend :p

------
savant
Fixing stupidity, tagging plugins for the cakephp framework.

~~~
dzlobin
Seriosuly using cakephp? .......why?!

------
mahmud
SOAP, WS-BPEL, and supply-chain modeling in Common Lisp :-/

------
gradschool
trying a programming puzzle on rosettacode
<http://rosettacode.org/wiki/24_game/Solve>

------
Gertm
Trying to get the hang of the Furnace webframework.

------
alanthonyc
Deploying a tiny, tiny app onto a public server...

~~~
lawrencegs
not a virus, I hope

------
noodle
getting over some kind of sickness (generic cold, perhaps, but it hit hard)
and working on setting up my new 55g saltwater reef aquarium.

hooray hobbies

------
icey
Alternately learning twisted and writing software

------
bch
Just finished plugging memory leaks.

------
Lazlo_Nibble
Coverscans, coverscans, coverscans.

------
dawson
Preparing for admissions interview.

------
techiferous
Helping a friend start a business.

------
marze
Patent office action response.

------
dca
TronBot

------
marltod
MW2

------
awt
ZumoDrive.

------
RevRal
Learning to use Joomla.

------
lawrencegs
working on my future...

------
kylebragger
I'm working on Forrst.

------
sulistyo
starring at my phone

------
david927
A better database.

------
samratjp
writing a SGML parser for a search engine :-P

------
aboodman
chrome extensions.... still.

------
s3b
playing around with android

------
brianr
bug fixin'

------
wendroid
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.

[1] <http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/> [2]
<http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html> [3] <http://www.gnupg.org/>

------
mrfish
Trying to catch up on way too much Elance work while watching the Olympics...
oh and watching Lost that I missed the other day.

