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Saving time in sysadmin | agentbleu: I use virtualmin instead |
How do you pull all-nighter+dayers | gaius: BCAAs. Tho' I second st3fan's advice. |
How do you pull all-nighter+dayers | brk: Concentration and motivation from the task at hand. Most of my all-nighters have been unplanned and were reactive to a software upgrade gone bad.A memorable one was a software upgrade to Cascade switches at AADS. Turns out the new firmware consumed more RAM than anticipated and we ended up with 10's of thousands of circuits down throughout their network of ~250 backbone switches. I spent 3.5 days straight with nothing more than a couple of two hours naps and LOTS of pizza, coffee, soda, etc. The magnitude of the situation pretty much prevented me from sleeping. Had a couple of other 36 and 48 hour shifts during that same job. Every time I've done any marathon sessions, it was always unplanned and urgent. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | speek: Flock simulator in either ObjC, some form of lisp/scheme, or Erlang. Haven't decided yet but Erlang really makes me happy.I'll probably start up another company January 2. I have a dream about educating the world's future smart people. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | dangrover: I've got updated versions for all of my products (http://www.wonderwarp.com) in the works.I've got an incremental update to ShoveBox in testing now, but I'm spending most of my resources finalizing the iPhone version of the app and getting it to sync properly with the desktop app. That will probably be 1.8 or 2.0.I'm not sure if I should charge for the iPhone app or not though. I'm worried Windows people will accidentally download it and get pissed. Hmm. But none of my direct competitors (except for maybe Evernote) have this feature, so I'll be psyched to have it out. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | DarkShikari: I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of H.264 in the open source x264 encoder.I'm going to take it and make it committable.Yes, I'm risking my sanity. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | axod: Finish XMPP/Jabber support in Mibbit.It's a ridiculously overcomplicated horrible format designed by committee :( Seems like a good job to pick though... |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | iamdave: Not entirely, no. Some people need input and an unbiased pair of eyes on their startups, and this is a great place to get it, or someone who posts a blog entry they think others might find interesting or beneficial, it's worse not to share your knowledge with others. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | tome: I'm going to be improving metapaw-dip: http://www.metapaw.co.uk/projects/metapaw-dip/At the moment I'm working on automatically generating maps from a small base dataset, and shortly I'll start working on a Django based wrapper to host this for many people's use. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | SwellJoe: I'm not a college student, but I have been taking advantage of a little bit of a slowdown during the holidays (sales always drop off a bit for a couple of weeks).I'm working on a chiptune version of Abbey Road, in order to teach myself a few new trackers that I've never used before (the last trackers I used heavily were OctaMED and ProTracker on the Amiga). I'm mainly tinkering with Renoise, which is an awesome multi-platform modern tracker with VST/LADSPA support. But I'm also playing with a cool sounding SID emulating tracker called Goattracker, and NitroTracker for the Nintendo DS. I probably won't finish all of Abbey Road in two weeks or spare time, since it's quite elaborate, and I'm only about half of the way through one song two days in, but I'm sure I can make three or four nice tracks. And I'll probably get faster as I get more comfortable with the tools. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | rksprst: Working on finishing up two web applications and an iPhone app that compliments one of the web apps.Also some updates to my current iPhone apps (http://www.awaytalk.com). |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | davidw: Why should it be lame to point to my own work? There's nothing wrong with that at all. A lot of things people are linking to are projects or writing that they have invested some serious time or thought in. They ought to be proud to point out what they've done. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | pxlpshr: Going to take a nice week long break away from my home in Austin. For the past 4 months I've been cooped up in my place trying to get everything put together with this mobile app company. It's been many late nights and 7 day work weeks... time to recharge.Spiked egg-nog... here I come! |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | brandnewlow: Making a local politician tracker for Chicago.Basically a Chicago clone of this:http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/ |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | randomwalker: I'm a grad student. I'm working on a way to turn papers written in latex into a form that's readable online, because having to print everything is so 1990s. I start from the output of latex2html and go from there. For instance, if you hover over a citation, I pop up a bubble showing you links to author homepages, the abstract of the cited paper, download links, etc., even though the latex bibliography didn't specify any of those.Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/ If someone knows an easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | ruddzw: For my last winter break, I'll be working on completely re-doing a web-based game I made. I'm thinking I might also work my way through a simple book on NLP (http://www.nltk.org/book). |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | qqq: Gonna read more Feynman and Popper. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | GavinB: Writing my novel!Okay, so I guess I'm not a real hacker. |
What is your blog? | shuleatt: http://leveragingideas.com |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | clearlytired: Brand-jacking: http://twitter.com/clearlytiredExit strategy: get rid of crappy service without having to pay for the 'privilege' of doing so. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | leftnode: Working more and more on my PHP framework, it's starting to get some traction as I will release 0.2 before new years. Check it out, http://artisansystem.com |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | leftnode: No, I don't think so, especially if it's something you've worked long an hard on, or if its a piece of open source software that you want to share.Or, you never know, you may find something that you really need from an Ask HN submission. |
What are your favorite talks/videos? | shuleatt: We've been working to assemble lots of great talks and videos both from entrepreneurs and investors on StartupTweet. We're working on a prettier interface as well...http://startuptweet.com |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | nirmal: I have posted a few scripts that I have created and found useful. These weren't to show off but just because I thought others might find them useful. I don't even care if they get voted up to the front page I just want other people to point out flaws. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | Darmani: I'm working on a way to play the card game Mao online, except that, as Mao is a game that lets you make your own rules, in order to be capable of playing a substantial subset, it'll have to be capable of playing any card game.(Yes, I've thought about turning this into a startup.)And that reminds me, I really should be working on that right now, if I'm going to have time to do my college apps... |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | abstractbill: Hoping to get a bit further with the robotic xylophone I'm building: http://prehacked.com/tag/xylophone |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | bjclark: Working on some super awesome blog software. Just like, uh, everyone else in the world. |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | bkbleikamp: This has been discussed before. I think the consensus was if your own writing is good, submit it, if other think it's good, they'll vote for it.As long as people aren't gaming the system, who cares? |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | akeefer: Writing a Java bytecode emitter for my company's language (currently called GScript, hopefully open-sourced under a different name some time in the not-too-distant future). It's currently executed off the parsed AST. |
Point thresholds? | vaksel: you can make polls at around 200 or so(I think) |
Point thresholds? | Shamiq: You can find some here:
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html |
Point thresholds? | DenisM: After 20,000 you gain skills to host your own copy of HN. So far that's only two people - pg himself and nickb. nickb's site is here: http://www.newmogul.com/Sometimes I wonder how did pg get his 20,000 points before there even was HN. It's kind of recursive, right? I think some sort of leveraged borrowing was involved. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | bkrausz: Research into web crawlers for a startup idea, some consulting work, and bartending classes.Also writing up an article about the soda machine card reader I built, as well as some other blog posts. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | jasonlbaptiste: We'll be releasing a new project to hacker news on Tuesday. It's perfectly timed for the holidays. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | wastedbrains: My goal over the holidays is to become much better with my editor (emacs). I am also trying to contribute a bit to open source and release some Merb and DataMapper code onto github. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | tialys: I've been playing through the games I haven't had time to, and also learning how to write apps for my Mac and by extension for the iPhone. I've had a bunch of ideas for things I thought would be great for the iPhone, so I made a class next semester with a friend of mine and we're going to start a business. (And before someone says it, we checked and we own the code ^_^) |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | ideamonk: I'm gona finish http://www.bestdealaz.com soon, and then begin to expand portfolio at http://www.madetokill.com
Also, have a nice web app {secret} me and my friend have been working on :) |
Point thresholds? | zack: At 50 points you can downvote. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | HeyLaughingBoy: 1) I promised someone I'd build him a remote-controlled swivel for a pole mounted movie camera and I have yet to finish it, that's project #1. Gonna be spending a couple hours in the machine shop!
2) Hopefully finish up the software for my wireless temperature monitor, build a page for it and start getting some sales :-) |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | joshsharp: Thinking of hacking together a twitter archiver, for those who want to keep a record of their tweets past the limit Twitter itself currently offers. Will allow export in csv etc., and possibly printing off your tweets as a diary-style book, if there's enough interest. |
Point thresholds? | qqq: 250 to change top bar color |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | epi0Bauqu: Clearing out some of my bug list. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | youngnh: A compiler that takes Sed programs and produces Parrot interpreter code. It was a project in a college Compilers class that I didn't take seriously enough, so I'm revisiting it to see if I've actually grown better at this programming thing since I've graduated. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | jcapote: I'll finishing my sinatra/sparrow web app that ensures a set amount of EC2 instances are up and running at all times by automatically running other instances among failure. I'd like to launch early next year, http://www.ec2mon.com |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | sgrove: Upgrading our webapp to the latest version of the symfony framework, then spinning off the open source version to attack another vertical. Makes for interesting and exciting work. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | akkartik: Trying to understand a reimplementation of a famous AI program from the 70s that I've had lying around for 9 years:
http://github.com/akkartik/am-utexas/tree/masterAnd oh, learning prolog as I go. |
How do you pull all-nighter+dayers | agentcoops: I find coffee to be terrible for all-nighters. I find the best method to be a combination of 15-20 minute naps and either lots of strong black tea or small sips of sugar-free energy drinks.Of course, as most posters point out, actually sleeping is always best, but sometimes it just has to be done. |
How do you pull all-nighter+dayers | rms: Can't speak from personal experience, but from I'm read this is near ideal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil Don't get the Indian generic, it is reportedly not equivalent.And don't pull all-nighters, you're much better off getting some sleep if not a full 6-7 hours. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | laktek: I created Ruby Advent (http://advent2008.hackruby.com), which was inspired by 24ways(httpL//24ways.org).
It was actually turned out to be a great experience. I got the opportunity to connect with many renowned Ruby Hackers and learn bunch of awesome stuff myself.
Also, I sincerely hope other Rubyists too enjoyed the series. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | bemmu: I'm a full-time small project maniac. I've been working by myself for over a year now, my model being to work on a lot of small things for a few days, trying if anything catches on. Worked great so far. I've done about 40 different things, some released and abandoned, some abandoned due to lack of interest, but a few I've released and they've succeeded well enough to cover the time spent on all the others. Christmas will be the only time I'm NOT working on some small project, but I'm sure I can't avoid thinking about them. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | streblo: I'm making a mod for Half-Life 2 with a friend. At this point we're both fooling around with the SDK to see what we can do, but I think we have a solid plan for a pretty good mod. |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | PStamatiou: interesting concept and this might actually be useful to me as I "follow" something like 700 or 800 ppl.on the other hand, i will not be able to use it. my twitter password is for me and me only:http://blog.dave.org.uk/2008/12/twitter-and-passwords.htmlisn't there a way to use this with the user's currently logged in twitter cookie/session or some such like http://twitpay.me does? |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | PStamatiou: i graduated from undergrad last week so i'm just starting to devote more time to my startup for the last year or so. http://skribit.com |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | mcxx: A Lisp library for the Twitter API. And then, use it for some reasonably small entertaining side project. |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | teej: My first reaction was "what the f...", but I got quickly sucked in to reading about it. I think your value proposition is clear, though it isn't something I would use.And the monseter is growing on me :-) |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | critke: I like it - not sure if I'd use it, I get too many links through feeds and regular twitter use... but the biggest problem for me is that I hate putting my password into 3rd party apps. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | tjr: I'm no longer in college, but my employer does give a lengthy winter break. I plan to finish some iPhone applications (hopefully providing some extra income), work on some music recording, read, and do a bit of volunteer work for Project GNU.Basically, what I do on free evening/weekend hours, but I'll get to focus on it for longer blocks of time. :-) |
Isn't it a little lame to submit your own work to HN? | siong1987: "the community find "interesting"."You already got the answer yourself. You can actually submit whatever you want in HN.The community will decide which is the best. |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | mattdennewitz: best mascot ever. very seriously. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | dmpayton: I'm not a student, but I do have most of a week off and I'll be working on a way to help diabetics better manage their disease (my wife is Type I and I'm pre-pre-Type II). |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | symptic: My partner and I are going to remake http://jobzor.com. We were originally looking to make a job board and internship recruiter as a Facebook App, but it's just not our thing and there is enough competition in the market already for that.Instead, since we both rely heavily on freelance work, we're positioning it as a directory of approved designer (with specific specialties), copywriter, and developer freelancers so clients looking for work or partners can find them easily.Given my focus on delivering great designs within my focus-time of 24 hours, this should be a good help in finding clients, as well as any revenue we scrape together through the site if we choose to monetize it.Any HN members interested in being listed? |
IDE versus Text Editor? | TheBosch: I know I'm on the outside with this, but I don't even think I'd want to program without an IDE anymore. Not only do they save time, but I find they also save MISTAKES which one of the most valuable things out there. For example, how many times have you had that one variable or reserved word misspelled by one character and it took you how long to find it? |
Why do the stories on HN right now suck? | vaksel: its the weekend, not many companies release news worth talking about on Saturday night |
Why do the stories on HN right now suck? | symptic: Because you want them to. |
Why do the stories on HN right now suck? | jacobscott: Why did you make a sock puppet account to complain about the stories on HN? Why not just read the FAQ? |
What to read during the holidays? | mwinters58: The Da Vinci Code (haha remember when that was huge) |
Why do the stories on HN right now suck? | Zev: Why not submit some interesting stories/links instead of complaining about how much the current ones suck? |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | djb: SICP and learning calculus. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | rahulgarg: Python to C compiler. |
What to read during the holidays? | villageidiot: Non-fiction but a great read:Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynmanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fey...! |
website for viewing hackernews on weekly mode | nreece: You can have a look at the Lists: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists, and Ask YC Archive (weekly): http://ask.searchyc.com/, for a recap. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | sdurkin: Just playing around with iPhone development. |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | eisokant: Hi Jackowayed,This is almost exactly like my web app http://tweetlinks.org which I created and posted here several weeks ago.Eiso |
website for viewing hackernews on weekly mode | siong1987: How to define good submission?I just created a web app that actually track every number one story from HN in the database - http://hn.siong1987.com .It has only one top story right now because I just created it. So, hopefully, it will record down every number one story from HN from now on if there is no bug in the web app. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | nailer: Continung work on 'perf' my top replacement:* Load average based on the amount of CPU cores in the machine, so that 100% is busy anywhere you run it.* Figures for memory unused by apps, more apparent usage of page cache* Figures for IO alas IOtop* IO nicing* Not doing silly thing like opening and closing a file
handle every loop.* Zebra striping, other niceties.Also making a working, simple, stable dock for Linux - a GNOME panel applet to replace the window list. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | meqif: I'm working on a lightweight shell. It was originally an assignment for university, but I thought it was interesting to work on it.I'm also trying to start a project with my Arduino, though I'm not sure what I'll create. Maybe a simple robot. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | sammcd: I have a large project I am working on, and will be spending my entire summer on. However, over Christmas break I have a very small website which is basically a product specific blog. Hopefully I will make a little amazon affiliate money. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | josefresco: Not for my startup, but I've managed affiliate programs for clients, and am an affiliate of several products myself. |
website for viewing hackernews on weekly mode | epi0Bauqu: For a feed of all the #1 HN stories, use http://feeds.feedburner.com/HNWatrcoolrFor more top stories from hacker feeds, use http://hacker.watrcoolr.us/ (feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerWatrCoolr) |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | mapleoin: I'm gonna work on my Jekyll-in-python project I started a few weeks ago: http://github.com/mapleoin/pyblee/tree/master . And while I'm at it, I'll also be improving my blogging. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | theycallmepost: refactoring the 9 year old PHP code i've been recently assigned to maintain at work |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | st3fan: Eat turkey. Drink eggnog. Spend time with the family. Stay away from the computer and work. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | truebosko: Nothing spectacular but I'm going to try my first go at using PyGTK as I finish up a very simple command-line ftp uploader. The api is almost done, then I'll just wrap the GUI around it. I've only worked on it for a few hours but have learned a lot about Python in terms of file/directory scanning, ftp, and threading.Apart from that, I'm just taking the time to get a simple portfolio/resume site up. Working full time during the year makes it hard to get time for these things. |
What to read during the holidays? | vinutheraj: if you liked the Fountain Head you can read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ( insight into evolution ) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | dhimes: Finishing my second app; boosting the marketing to improve conversion rates on my site (which are abysmal....) |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | charlesju: Just graduated from college 2 weeks ago, working full-time on my iPhone gaming startup now. This last week has been the best in my life, I love startups! |
What to read during the holidays? | jaydub: If you enjoy history you may want to read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (historical fiction). I loved it. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | goodkarma: I've been an affiliate, and am getting ready to launch our own in-house affiliate program (using iDevAffiliate) to promote our own products and services.Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat in more detail. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | rokhayakebe: Yes I use affiliate marketing at my day time job. Nearly 40% of our sales come from affiliates. I am also readying to setup the same for my startup. I am planning to offer 50% of our sales because we don't have any operating costs, but in most cases the payout is around 30%. Note that to make your AM successful you will need to constantaly come up with new offers, incentives, banner ads etc... and communicate with your top earners. Make them happy. |
What to read during the holidays? | Jem: Anything by Terry Pratchett. |
Writing DSL in Python | jgalvez: http://github.com/galvez/gae-rest/tree/master/xmlbuilder.py |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | peregrine: I've done it but its really hit or miss. You need to be constantly updating your offers, trying new niches, and pushing hard to keep a good relationship with you affiliate manager. Their are times when you will feel scummy but your wallet will be fat. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | tocomment: Some of you guys commenting here should make a few detailed blog posts about this topic. You sound like you know a lot about it.For my own question. Any thoughts if I could make any money with affiliate marketing on this site: www.justoneclubcard.comIt only gets about 100 unique vistors per day but I figure it's pretty specific. |
Rate my webapp, Tweet Link Monster | hardik: I think the idea is very cool. Although I don't use twitter from phone I many times use it only for links.
I am sure there must be others like me out there too.. great concept! |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | symptic: There's a lot to learn about affiliate marketing at http://wickedfire.com. There are tons of affiliates to converse with and also several affiliate network CEO's who post there. It's not uncommon for many affiliates here to make more than $2,000 a day from AM, so it'd be valuable to pick their brains. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | iron_ball: Writing a simple Missile Command clone with separate game logic and graphics modules; after using simple 2D graphics to test the gameplay, I'm writing a 3D artillery-style graphic representation. The whole thing is mostly an exercise to learn the Actionscript 3D library Papervision3D better -- there's a ton of work there in the future as the Flash Player keeps improving its core 3D transformations. |
Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? | gaius: I would like to really sink my teeth into OCaml or Haskell. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | auston: I have... Commission Junction, LinkShare, Share-a-sale. They work well - but it's very important to create a good offer, 30-45% is good.Also, good banners are important.Each network has a different reach & size. Shareasale is small and Linkshare is extra large while Commission Junction is right in the middle - but has the highest quality members (in my opinion).All in all - Affiliate Programs are only as effective as you make them, I suggest you spend money on landing page optimization, retargeting & click tracking in conjunction with Affiliate Marketing. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | omarchowdhury: Your best bet would be to partner with an existing affiliate network who already have thousands of affiliates ready to promote your product. This is a better approach because if you create an in-house affiliate program, you are going to have to market that too.Message me (AIM: ofchowdhury) and I can point you in the right direction. |
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | spolsky: We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. Biggest waste of time in Fog Creek history. All that time would have been better spent adding features to make our products better to get more customers. |
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