Ask HN: What are you working on?

Forgot, something I sometimes do on the side is work on my fake Sean Hannity fan-site @ http://www.fannity.com. This is a intentionally ignorant joke that attempts to fool people, both liberals and conservatives, with sometimes hilarious results. A story of mine was posted on blackplanet.com and it led to some hilarious comments left by a few thousand visitors from that site over a weekend.

Also, at one point the fake news site 23/6 thought my fake news site was real (and actually advocated that Sikhs put flag pins on turbans). This is perhaps the most hilarious thing that happened on the site: http://fannity.com/?p=553&cpage=1 . The users "backdoorman" & "gacracker" were in on the joke and pretending to be Hannity fans.

If I tell anyone, I'll lose my motivation. Scientific fact!

Speaking as a college dropout, who dropped out due to lack of money and immediately got a programming job, I would like to stress the importance of college. As far as the social experiences go, you will rarely ever be in an environment that is anywhere near the social level of college. As programmers we tend to get jobs where we are locked in on the computer all day off in our own world. I have definitely made social connections from working, but no where near the level that you get with college.

I agree with some of the other posts that you will not likely learn things in college that you don't already know or couldn't easily learn, about _computers_, but my recommendation is to ignore the computer curriculum in college (unless the program is outstanding) and pick a completely unrelated topic that you enjoy. Your college degree will be a piece of paper that no one cares about, so make college about you, not about getting a degree to impress someone else. This also has the advantage of keeping programming fun, a lot of programming classes and homework take topics that are very interesting and make them tedious and unenjoyable.

If I was to go back to college and start over right now, I would double major in physics and linguistics, and minor in greek/roman history and in philosophy. You can still take programming classes, but ignore the earlier classes, figure out the materials, teach yourself anything you need to know, and test out of those classes so you can just take the classes you are interested. There is also a lot of interesting math classes you can take.

(EDIT: typo)

I'm reading them now. Thanks for the link.

The Lula software he wrote looks interesting, though it's theater-oriented and not directly applicable to what I'm doing in a UI sense. The source isn't available, though it's old enough (runs on PLT Scheme 103) that I suspect he's largely abandoned the project and might be persuaded to release it.

Many of the underlying mechanisms are probably very similar to what I'm working on. I'm glad to see that someone else has had good results in a research context.

Heh. I'm probably standing with you, further down the food chain in this thread. That said, everybody started out somewhere, and you're learning.

The only advice I can give is to work on an actual project, however small, while learning a new language. It helps me learn ALL of a language, instead of just the tricky bits, and I feel more accomplished when, instead of having just read a book, I actually BUILT something. Chances are the something you built will suck, or at least not be leveraging all the cool stuff you learned later in the book, but it's something. You can either keep playing with it or do nothing else, but if you're in a job interview, and somebody asks if you know "x", you can point them at some code to show exactly how well you do (or don't).