

Ask HN: New Year resolutions and programming/coding projects - arithmetic

It's New Year again. I'm trying to come up with a list of programming-related projects for the next year as a part of my list of things-to-do-for-next-year. Do you have any programming/hacking ideas (even something like "Learn Haskell") that you want to pursue for next year? Please share!
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markerdmann
Learn Haskell! I've been using learnyouahaskell.com,
book.realworldhaskell.org, and haskell.org/haskellwiki. If you get stuck, the
people who hang out on #haskell (freenode) are both helpful and brilliant.

Learning Python and Scheme was fun. Learning Haskell feels like being in an
80s training montage. One day you're a nobody, the next day you're an FP-
wielding superhero.

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications> is good for inspiration.

~~~
johngunderman
A friend and I recently just started learning Haskell, and as our first
project we are going to implement the kademlia DHT algorithm (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia> ). If anyone wants to learn some
Haskell and work on a dht algorithm, feel free to shoot me an email or message
me on github. The repo for the project is at
<http://github.com/johngunderman/buckets-dht> .

On a side note, I'm learning Haskell through the book Real World Haskell, and
it is the best resource I've found so far (I've looked through "Write yourself
a scheme", "learn you a haskell for great good", and "Yet another Haskell
Tutorial"). Of course, it is the first one I've actually had in printed form,
and that probably made a huge difference.

As you mentioned, #haskell has been a tremendous resource. I would highly
recommend anyone interested in learning haskell to lurk on that channel.

------
ghotli
Flightcaster's Clojure => Cascading => Hadoop infrastructure has been tempting
me. Starting with Clojure I'm working my way down the stack in hopes that I'll
garner insight as to how we can use this infrastructure or something similar
on our own datasets.

Statistics with Incanter is another piece of this pie that seems interesting
and valuable. Hopefully I'll have written something useful with these
technologies by this time next year.

------
arithmetic
I'll start with my own. One of the projects that I'd like to work on, is to
build a site with PHP,MySQL and JQuery. It's a really simple idea, but I want
to learn JQuery properly and there's no better way to learn a library than to
build something that uses it.

------
yannis
Create a 'Django' for Lisp!

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cmars232
Learn Scheme. I've been coding along with "The Little Schemer" over the break.

I feel like I need a fresh perspective before I can approach Clojure -- otw
I'll just end up writing a bunch of Java with parens.

~~~
Ixiaus
I learned a little bit of Common Lisp early in the summer and dabbled a bit
with Scheme the last few months; my resolution has been to learn Scheme,
honestly, alongside _The Little Schemer_ and _The Seasoned Schemer_. So, kudos
and good luck!

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Hexstream
Stop trying to tackle very difficult problems and launch my damn site at last!

~~~
arithmetic
What kind of site are you building?

For me, it's about "stop spending all my time on that one boundary condition
that 0.1% of the users will hit" :)

~~~
Hexstream
I'm building a utility site for players of a very niche MMORPG.

It will let players of that game analyze their current situation and
environment better and let them communicate with allies more effectively.

I've been "working on" that project for the last 3+ years but in fact I've
been mostly "screwing around" learning Common Lisp and learning/implementing
some advanced algorithms like rete and implementing some advanced web
framework that I'll release as open-source in a few years but not before I
implement some of the crazy ideas I have that will enable a completely
revolutionary way of developing web apps.

------
barmstrong
Get some more traction for <http://BuyersVote.com>

It's stackoverflow but for product reviews, critical mass is getting there but
not quite. I have some other features I want to add like "awards" which show
off the best and worst rated products of the year, month, etc. It would be fun
to publicly shame bad products/companies.

~~~
cubicle67
As someone who bases a number of purchasing decisions on online reviews
(mainly amazon.com and productreview.com.au) , may I offer some feedback

It looks like you're trying to make things as simple as possible, but I feel
you really need some way for people to rate things other than good/bad
(up/down in your case). You need a way for someone like me to be able to see
that product A is considered better than product B, and no, number of up votes
doesn't do that. All it tells me is that more people purchased item A and
thought is was not rubbish. This may mean the product has been on the market
longer, or just has better marketing. Seeing that 50 people gave product A 3
stars, but 10 people gave 5 stars to product B carries more information

Being able to see the distribution of votes is also important. Some products
are divisive, with some people loving them (5 stars) and others hating them (1
star), and other products are just uniformly considered average (3 stars).
Showing this distribution also tells me more about the product than just
showing me products C and D both average 3 stars

Reviews. No idea how you'll do this, but you absolutely need a means of
encouraging people to write good informative reviews. Allowing users to rate
reviews seems to work for some places, and productreview has some sort of
rewards scheme based around reviews. Given that no product is perfect, it's a
well written review that allows me to see what the faults are and figure out
if they're likely to be an issue given the way I intend to use it. It's the
reviews that flesh out _why_ some users gave a product 2 stars and others gave
it 5. If, for example, I wanted to buy a mobile phone and I could see that the
people who rated it 1 star did so because the sole carrier in that country has
lousy coverage I'd know that didn't affect me as I have (being in Aus) 5
different carriers from which I can purchase said phone.

Oh, I like the clean layout of the site. looks good.

