HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are you working on tonight?

75 points by dzlobin ↗ HN
What's everybody working on right now? I'll start:

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.

What about you?

241 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] thread
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.
dzlobin
how many users are we up to?
pg
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.
dzlobin
awesome, out of curiosity, what kind of server is HN running on? edit: guy below me who maxed out the thread, server not language
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idoh
It's a server written in arc.
jaydub
as of ~a year ago: "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1"

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516118

pg
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.

http://hnstatus.net/

rms
One day, I will be able to load my saved items...
Herring
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.
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.
nsoonhui
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".
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.
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 :)
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.
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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.
kbob
Me too. Writing code to minimize DFAs. Personal project, though. Not a student any more.
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.
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.
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.

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

tcarnell
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...
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. ;-)
oomkiller
Trying to figure out how to query the UMLS metathesaurus's WebService (Soap 1.2) API using Ruby. Not having much luck :(
thaumaturgy
Sleeping, I hope. I haven't slept a full night for a while.

G'night.

icey
Alternately learning twisted and writing software
awt
ZumoDrive.
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.