Unfinished and novel ideas are of course most interesting, so feel free to share anything you're thinking about!
27/M (today was my birthday :)
Instead, one of the goals for my videos will be to take a step back and inspire to create, zero commercial interest, not too much distractions and something parents can trust.
Still in the process of figuring out all the parameters, camera, editing, setup etc but its a lot of fun learning new skills. I have a million ideas for the content already so enough work to be done. If there is little to no ‘success’ in terms of viewers, i really don’t care since i enjoy all aspects of it and im building a nice catalog of creative videos to watch with my kid later. I have no public videos yet (coming very soon) but here are two samples of what to expect:
I’m very happy with it so far! Video here:
https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1455320442642714625?s...
It’s open source, CC0 licensed. Please fork the design files here!
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/d663661f8c0c34e7a29bbfa6/w...
EDIT: you may prefer to watch the project and wait to fork it until I have fleshed out a few more things. In that case feel free to star this git repo and I will update it as I make progress.
I stopped working several months ago and have no immediate desire or need to go back to work.
I'm not sure if it's a blessing or curse to have so much free time to grieve.
Enjoying the downtime with occasional spontaneous bursts of tears.
Edit: thank everyone for the kind words. I put together this 4 minute tribute of our times together to honor her/us. She was beautiful.
I used the time off to travel around in a van, hiking, eating, camping, and visiting friends. I'm now back in the city and catching up all of the life stuff that I put on hold for the pandemic and / or travel -- minor remodeling, maintenance, friends I didn't really get to see during the pandemic, etc.
I've been making big-picture decisions about future work as I go but the next phase is to put in serious hours into the search (since I'm planning to move out side of my current network / FinTech). Looking to start something new sometime this winter.
If anyone has questions about taking a longer time off work (will be 6+ months for me) or about taking more time almost totally away from computers / tech (2+ months), feel free to thread Q's.
1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things.
2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and 10 years of chat logs. Why can't I find anything among them? I own a computer, after all. I have 10 folders called some variation of photos/Cologne/2020/flowers! Having to organize them myself is tedious and a fool's errand, so I'm leaning towards using a database as a file system, to let me just query for files. Geo queries using a map? Yes please. Selecting bounds on a timeline? Oh yeah!
Turns out I'm not alone, Microsoft tried this with WinFS, and failed. But the idea lives on: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...
3. Writing. I hope I can find the time to expand on the above on my blog.
Today’s sunset around Puget Sound: https://shademap.app/#47.89056,-122.66785,7z,1635813675213t
I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.
It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.
But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)
Just started marketing it for sale a couple of weeks back. And we figure if we can’t sell it then we’ll rent it so that either way someone gets a roof over their heads for a price that’s just not really available in most locations these days.
Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:
- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements
- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)
- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)
From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting
- distribution of water, electricity, gas
- Sewage treatment plant
Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.
4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)
My latest project has been reverse engineering the data-flash encryption in Simos18 ECUs. After some work, it oddly appears the encryption algorithm used is Mifare Hitag2. I'm hoping to be able to re-encrypt NVRAM channels soon, although the overall data flash "filesystem" / channel-system layout needs some more work before I am ready to release my findings.
After seeing "Everything but the Bagel" at Trader Joe's, I thought it was the first spice blend I saw named after a dish. Interesting! If people can have bagels anywhere, what else would people want to have anywhere? I asked my partner what sort of flavors would be familiar to people we knew, and she came up with the triumvirate: Pho, Ramen, and Beef Noodle Soup. And then I proceeded to do nothing about it for months, because I thought making a spice blend was the dumbest idea I've ever had.
Then during a Zoom chat with a friend, he suggested I liked writing code too much, so I should try to sell something without writing code. I suggested, how about spices? He laughed in my face, so here we are. (he was quite supportive right after laughing in my face)
So far, people seem to like it. It's good on eggs, rice, noodles with sesame oil, in olive oil for bread dipping, spinach, and dipped with a super Irish scone from Mary O’s in NYC. I never tried that last one. A customer told me it was good.
And yes, you can use it to make a small bowl of beef soup. If you're intrigued, you can buy a bottle here:
First idea, a website that combines Reddit (or HN) and Discord. The goal is to create ephemeral, real-time communities (like this thread). I find discord too exclusionary to bring strangers together. And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation. With this site, you post a thread, people start chatting, there's a simple interface for groups of people to break off the public chat and go into a private chat or into a webrtc call. Once the thread loses momentum the chat room sort of dies. And people move onto the next thread.
Backend is written in Go. Frontend will likely be Elm. Redis for pubsub. Postgres for crud.
Second idea, an Elm-like language for building linux applications (and crucially linux-phone applications). I'd really like to de-throne apple and google from the smartphone market. I think a dead simple language like Elm + a super simple, standardized dev environment + no weird configuration or new conventions to learn would be a killer feature for the linux platform. Something like Elm-UI would attract a wave of new developers to Linux.
Unfortunately, I've never made a programming language before. So I'm working through "Crafting Interpreters" to get started.
Third, possibly finding a SWE in Miami and starting a software consultancy partnership. Could be fun and lucrative but I've never been on the business side before. So likely this idea will stay half-baked for a lot longer.
Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself.
I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..
I find it very exciting to work on a big long-term project like this, though it’s also frustrating because I’m doing it from a significant distance. Self-inflicted frustration but still.
Also, I’m learning a new language and moving to a new country, slowly but surely. Well slowly anyway. The residency is in yet another country. Maybe my life is complicated.
I didn’t win any lottery, but with a little juggling I had enough for a year or two without a day job. I was originally going to concentrate on just making art (I’m an artist as well as a techie) and trying to get settled in the new country.
This has worked pretty well considering the state of the world, but with a limited runway I will start looking for something to do in the industry next year. Maybe an indie project, maybe a startup, maybe just contracting.
The art center was in the back of my mind for a few years, and now that it exists (as a piece of land with some concrete on it anyway) I am quite happy to have a specific project that should bear fruit on a longer time scale than just a painting or a gig, and it helps that it’s not my source of income (like a company would be) nor existentially important (like kids). I can do more, or less, with it as circumstances allow.
Anyway that’s what I’m up to. In the likely event some of the art is tech related I will do a Show HN about it some day.
OS kernel is Alpine Linux from https://postmarketos.org/ The entire userland is custom: graphics is on top of drm, kms, gles2, FreeType. Audio is on top of ASIO with just a few third party libraries like soxr, fdk-aac, minimp3. IPC is mostly domain sockets, input is raw input, wifi is controlled through wpa_supplicant.
Most of the code is in C#, .NET 5. Only 25% of code in C++, either SIMD heavy math like vector spline tessellation, or to consume libraries like FreeType designed to only be usable from C.
Got 2 devices to test, ARM64 Pinephone, and ARMv7 LG Hammerhead.
Graphics stack is good by now, works on both. The only large missing piece is accelerated video decoding. The highest level was inspired by MS WPF, with XML instead of XAML, and a variant of CSS for styling. Performance is OK, uses couple percepts CPU while rendering animations at 60Hz, because GPU-centric architecture all the way down. Found a freelancer to help with GUI design, so far so good.
Audio is in progress: mp3 playback works, capture and high-level mixer controls missing. Too bad the LG lacks Linux kernel drivers so I'm only testing these pieces on Pinephone.
After the audio, gonna start integrating GSM modem: being able to call people is one of the use cases I care about.
These days I'm thinking of codifying more things, so that people could fill a form and get answers instead of reading a long article. For example, a simple calculator that replaces pages and pages of information. I made a German health insurance calculator last week that saves a lot of reading and gives accurate results.
Aside from that, I'm building a timeline thing that puts all the personal data I can get my hands on onto a browsable timeline. It's a sort of enhanced journal.
Web-scraping and reverse-engineering is such a brilliant subject in my opinion and there's an unsurprising lack of resource in this area as it's a rather secretive medium - as a good scraping/reverse engineering strategy is often considered to be a business secret.
It started off as a need to not repeat myself on stackoverflow. Web-scraping is a common question subject and the same questions would be asked over and over again. I couldn't find explicit resources available so I wrote them myself! Now I'd often answer question with specifics and point to full article for further reading which people seem to appreciate and come back with follow ups less often.
I'm still working out the kinks - especially pacing, brevity and editing - though it has been a really enjoyable ride so far. Finally as a backend engineer it finally got me to get over the front-end hump. I've learned some pretty css and general web building - it's often frustrating but surprisingly fun!
It's basically a simulator/management spin on MMOs. It's still on the stage side of the fourth wall - it's not like a meta kind of tongue in cheek thing or anything. It's not YouTuber simulator or anything similar.
I'm using phaser 3 and some undetermined python web stack - currently using flask and sqlalchemy. My time horizon is ~years at this point, I've been working on it for about 3 months and progress is steady but glacial since I have 1 busy job, 2 kids, and 0 gamedev experience (though significant MMO gaming experience, for as much as that helps, heh). I am but a humble data infra engineer by day so this is pretty alien programming for me (though at least I know what I'm doing on the backend?).
I have some nominal amount of frontend experience but normally I use Rails and React, but I decided to forego both for this project, with the entire game being in Phaser's engine (though I'm sure at some point I'll have a react website too) and using python on the backend because I just generally think python is better than Ruby as of python 3, mainly because I prefer how Python 3 did official type hints, and I don't particularly like Sorbet (though comparing python3 type hints to sorbet is unfair to sorbet, all I would want from sorbet is hinting).
Anyway, I'll admit, I want to make an MMORPG. But I can at least concede that a traditional "wow-killer" MMO is pretty much out of the reach of a single dev. My current vision seems to me like a fun "do you ever wish you played wow but don't actually want to play wow" kind of thing that is significantly more likely to be within the reach of someone who has 0-2 hours to work on this per night.
Other people do sudokus, I stare for hours at disassembled code to figure out what complex data structure the game is using to handle its 3D graphics or game logic. It's a kind of archelogy... Rediscovering a piece of code no one has seen for 30 years.
I am wondering whether there is a way to earn money with that skill? I guess it is still illegal to sell unauthorized reverse engineered ports of games, even if they are 30 years old :)
Feels surreal at difference in compensation vs effort in, especially because I’m more productive at the new place.
Not really sure what to do with all my free time when there’s no fires to put out
I find I want to _accrete_ information, not mutate it (in most cases), so the main organisation is chronological. But tags are important to find related information and see the chronological development of one “thing”, be it a work task, a personal hobby, etc.
But here’s the big idea: information can have an expiry date so that you can use it for years and not get buried in clutter. It’s as simple as tagging, say, exp+3w to set an expiry date three weeks after creation. There are other meta-tags too, like imp+2m means the information is “important” for two months but not after that, and it doesn’t expire.
The ideas have been percolating for years, and it’s fun to finally be working on it properly, albeit in fits and starts.
The main project is an interactive painting called the “Musical Dot Orchestra” that lets you scan a hand painted QR code and “play” a musical dot that appears in the painting.
Some photos + videos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVokUYBMaXF/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CVbTpAaAHRY/
The “painting”:
https://dots.pindarlabs.com/viewer
The UI for participants:
https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/blue https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/purple https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/magenta https://dots.pindarlabs.com/dots/yellow
I had an interview for a postdoc in my field last week and I'm waiting on whether I got offered a job or not, I think I'm quite likely to get it. I've got a consistent little voice in my head saying, "don't take it, don't have a job just spend your time on learning how to talk to people again and think about working later" but it seems kind of crazy, if I get offered the job it's everything I've worked towards for ten years.
I've been reading HN for about 6 months and I registered a few weeks back. I guess I'll probably going down some kind of tech route in a year or so if I don't get a position in academia.
Testosterone supplementation is a lot safer than some people think it is. It's still not the best thing for your body and it does put stress on it, but honestly I'd put it at about the level of moderate to heavy alcohol use (depending on how you define "heavy"). Except instead of destroying your liver to get drunk you're getting muscular af and looking great.
I do also want to get hired but I posted in there on a different account :)
Basically "between ideas" and desperately want to come up with something before I have to give up and get a job. It's not healthy to be idle too long.
I love doing this work. (Electrical engineering, firmware design, cloud backend, etc.) I just really wish I went to school for the EE though.
But also, over the weekend, helped construct a new 2m diameter horno (outdoor oven) from adobe bricks and mud mortar for the Santa Fe Botanical Garden as part of Santa Fe Community College's ADOB-112 (Wall Construction) course.
I’ve also been jamming regularly with electronic musicians all over the world using an app called Endlesss, there is a version for Mac OS that lets you easily feed synth output and so on into it. It’s like a cloud-based live looper that sort of works like git: what you add to the jam are like git commits that publish to everyone else while synced to the beat, so it gets around the issue of network latency. It’s hard to explain but very fun and it’s made me a way better electronic musician.
What I really wanted to focus on was extremely easy search, high info density, up-to-date data, and no hurdles (logins, profiles, etc). And a little bit of flair (multiple casino-related themes). Mostly happy with it, so far.
Turns out that the people organizing those groups also have a lot of different projects, from normal theater acts to workshops in schools to teach kids foreign languages via theater techniques. Also turns out that that (oh surprise !) they have a some IT requirements and they can't really handle that themselves. So I have been helping them for 2 years now; designing websites, managing wordpress, setting up a Google Workspace, managing contacts, consulting on project management... (nothing part of my daily job). But also a lot of random stuff, like organizing a festival, being a cameraman for a live stream night...
In short: join an association / NGO / charity. You will meet really great people, and bringing basic IT knowledge can sometimes make a huge difference for them.
Really need to figure out how to rein things in. Like many entrepreneurs, I'm much better at thinking of exciting new things than I am at thoughtfully reducing my workload.
Right now I'm mostly still just deep-diving into various bits of "stuff" related to AI. I just finished reading a The SOAR Cognitive Architecture by John Laird, and Engineering General Intelligence Part 2 by Ben Goertzel, as well as Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker. Also spent some time building and installing all of OpenCog, and installing SOAR. The goal is to start messing around with both, and start actually implementing some simple agents.
I'm also now reading Foundations of Computational Linguistics: Human-Computer Communication in Natural Language by Roland Hausser, and have a book on Cognitive Modeling queued up.
And I need to find some time to get back to working with Apache River (the OSS version of what Sun used to call JINI).
If I'm feeling inspired one day soon, I might finally finish wrapping up the software for my "convection oven to reflow oven" conversion project. The hardware parts have all been done for months, and even most of the code is written, but I sort of mentally stalled out on that and just haven't bothered to push everything across the finish line. Really need to wrap that all up.
Video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLo_nu0BSLk
Thingiverse files: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4982093
I also have been spending more time actually creating video content. I used to do a bunch in the early YouTube days, but I hit a decade long bit of depression.
I'm working on my fourth science fiction novel. Ive been working on it for about four years. The first one took about three months. The second one took about six months. The third one took a bit over a year. It seems I've been challenging myself more as I go.
I've been recording a song I wrote in about 1982. I was in an obscure experimental electronic rock band that no one ever heard of in the 1980s. Nowadays I'm not in a band, but I play better than I used to and can afford much better equipment, so I make a hobby of slowly making recordings that I hope will be better than the ones we made back in the day, and writing new parts and arrangements and sometimes new songs.
I've been working on a presentation server for Common Lisp programs. Someone approached me for help learning how to do some UI work for Lisp programs, and I helped, but then we started tinkering, and now we're trying to figure out how to make a reusable thing that we can both benefit from repeatedly. Also, it might turn out to be handy in my day job.
And being a good friend to my dog and my close relatives.
After this project is complete, I plan to build a small platform for people to host webrings. I know it's not going to revolutionise how people use the internet. I think it will be a nice service though. I loved this era of the internet. I have a great domain to go along with it.
Having a furry little companion is fun, though, and I'm getting out and socializing way more than before.
Overall a net positive, IMO. Just a lot of work and responsibility.
It's really fun to play in; usually we do a couple sets for various sub-formations of the band who write songs, and then we improvise a set for a couple of hours. Everyone in the band plays multiple instruments (keys, synths, guitar, violins, flutes, trumpets, drumset, etc).
We've been having a lot of fun out in the desert. We bought a generator, put a bunch of lights and sound out in an arroyo, and stay up late playing music.
Working on some assets for a new scene. Here's my most recent render: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/qiklmf/practicing_...
Along with some of my other recent work: https://rupsis.gumroad.com/
Separately, I have been continuously iterating on my market data collection systems (leveraging Airflow for task orchestration and dependent tasks management) for use in investment management systems and market intelligence research. Going pretty well so far, but had to move around some money to slide into this new life. Going fine so far, just budgeting and spending as much time outside as I can.
I have to say, living in subtropical weather makes it a little challenging to "continue", to so speak, my Northeastern lifestyle, when I just want to be outside all the time haha.
If anyone is in the South Florida area, would love to meet up and discuss tech/cryptos/mixology/trading/beach life, whatever... cheers
To answer the question, I'm working full-time at a job that I feel completely hopeless at. Basically fresh out of college and I'm working at a place where I can't communicate with like 95% of the development team due to language differences, so I'm stuck working on an undocumented codebase with no guidance/on-boarding/help whatsoever. Lots of trial and error to figure out how stuff works, and a fair bit of going around the current code and working directly with libraries because I don't have the time/energy to try to understand the layer the people before me built on top of that library.
I don’t really know where it’s going, maybe it’s just me navel-gazing while I’m unwell, but it feels interesting as a UI. If anyone likes the sound of it and would like beta access when I’m ready to share it, let me know.
A good chunk of the past years free time has gone into one codebase. I'm hoping to create a new interface for myself that truly decouple data from UI abstractions. I'm just so sick of the day-in-day-out dealing with app UI/UX refreshes, forced OS updates removing and killing functionality that worked for _me_, dark patterns preying on my attention and time and at times winning, the amount of time to replicate any user interface I use.
I'm running out of money though so I'm applying like crazy to jobs again. Upset feeling like life's priorities are only to survive, forgoing a lot of other things to find necessary time to do stuff. But pushing through I suppose
For all of you who shared your success stories. I admire your passion, love, and luck! I hope nothing but the best for you in the future.
For those who are down in their luck at the moment, I hope you can get the help you need and ride thru the bad times.
My latest video is on insertion sort and you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF-8RcO_9ds.
I am still developing a recipe for the videos, but it is a definitely a lot of fun.
I also finished walking every street in my city a while ago. See https://citystrides.com/users/31460/map#44.56456589999999,-1... Lot of fun, lost 10 pounds, saw a ton of fun stuff I had no idea was here (even after 40 years).
And I finally am finishing a classic (1800's) sailing ship wooden model I've had for ages. A lot of fun to do something very non-software.
I am also working on and off on my C template library Pottery [2]. I haven't pushed any code in a while; having a day job and young children makes progress slow :(
As for life in general, I think I'm moving either back to Michigan or Florida once my lease is up and perhaps buying a house. Ultimate goal is to get a place with a large, sunny roof so I can install solar panels and the proper hardware[0] to have a microgrid so I can have power even if the electricity goes down.
[0]https://newsroom.enphase.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
But, the most important thing I've learned these past few months is that work isn't life. Instead, I'm beginning to view "work" as a hobby that I enjoy. Not the thing that is going to provide absolute meaning to my existence. I feel better and have a much easier time de-stressing.
I just hope I can maintain this perspective if I am accepted and commit to graduate school.
My 2015 WRX got flooded in Hurricane Ida ='[ and now I'm playing the waiting game for a Model 3.
It's been a hectic few months with the flood, doggo getting sick, work ramping up - looking forward to resetting my routines / habits.
I spent most of my career working on server side stuff. So, just for fun, I am currently studying Swift, Swift UI and getting used to the Apple developer tools. It has been a very interesting experience to say the least.
I had an MVP release last month, and working on compatibility with more services, password reset and so on.
[name redacted] comparison website for mobile phone contracts and SIM contracts.
[link redacted]
Being my first project with no prior experience behind me, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. It's been a great learning experience and I've learnt more than I thought possible.
However, I really struggle with imposter syndrome. I'd be embarrassed to ever show my code to anyone else. I'm never happy with what I build and I can't shake the feeling that all of my code is a complete mess. I think I could learn a lot if I actually got a programming job working with others in a team.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
Tryna do some neat things with the virtual tabletop I've built (Shmeppy [3]) as well. Getting its renderer off of the 2D Canvas API and onto WebGL, as well as some of its more perf-sensitive code onto WASM.
[1] https://ircv3.net [2] https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge [3] https://shmeppy.com
I'm currently working on designing an open source stirred tank bioreactor (Open Scale-up) for fungi cultivation. Bench-top at first but the design is intended to be suitable for scale-up.
Very different from the day job as cloud infrastructure engineer.
I started two years ago and I'm finding that project very fulfilling with lots of areas to explore. For example I recently bought an old ThinkPad to have another reference computer and played with Coreboot+SeaBIOS to understand the BIOS better. I'm also reading about the early history of Unix and how some features I'm implementing where developed in the first place. It's never ending and perfect!
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Nations-Shaped-Todays-Economy...
To manage my headspace, have been doing the following
1. Writing. Realising the value of communication for teams, have been writing up a lot of my learning into a series of documents which talk strategy and decision frameworks for CXOs. I share with a close-knit group of startup founders and product managers in Bangalore. The problems seems pervasive in Indian startups in their growth stage after their series a. specially with the funding spree and the need for hyper-growth. So talking to peers and collating knowledge has been the only way to stay sane :)
2. Gardening and hydroponics. Health in general, but the issue of getting good produce for a clean diet has always been a neglected aspect of my life. My wife and I decided we wanted to spend some time disconnected from devices. Gardening just happened and we haven't looked back since. Its become a routine thing and there is satisfaction in plucking your produce and tending to it.
3. Reviving some of the projects I had worked on in the past but got shelved and opensourcing them.
- Low cost IoT WiFi connected 4 node Energy Monitor + Switch. This was a PCB design + firmware + plus the Backend + Frontend+Analysis service + ML models to detect anomalies as well as predict usage.
- A self hosted algolia alternative for User Docs.This winter I'm hoping to design a new PCB layout for an open-source motor controller, but it's been a nightmare getting parts even in quantities of one or two.
Coding-wise, I've got a bunch of projects that I'm kind of purposely not pursuing because the above is more fun and less like my day job:
- A connected "open" sign app for small businesses (connect a TV or use an old iPad, or an IoT plug switch). Collect and sell real-time data.
- Nutrition info for meals that aren't in a database (e.g. independent restaurants, modified recipes, box lunches), encoded in a URL-like format/QR code (https://nut.codes)
- A white noise app that tells time (https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/White_20Noise_20Clock)
Always happy to hear from people about what they think, especially from anyone who might might be interested in contributing, or even if you just want to stop by for some friendly competition in the virtual races. :)
Alternative project idea: A Haunted PS1(ish) game using a Voxel Space clone engine, also in Zig of course because Zig, despite its compiler bugs, rules.
[0] I blame the state of modern technology[1]. Everything is slow, buggy, and actively user-hostile and the world just seems to have accepted that. It is maddening.
[1] This is an obvious untruth. Though tech sucks, it is merely a minor contributor to my mental state.
I'm mainly working on [Money Simulator](https://simulator.money) and [Textreel](https://textreel.com)
I don't think either has a good chance of making money though so I'm going to start a new project soon.
I also may need a get a job soon otherwise my money will run out
Alongside Language school, in the morning Japanese, in the evening Indonesian. The Japanese is more of a fun goal now, as I'm JLPT N3 and want to see if I can get N1.
I should be focusing on Mandarin, but, eh maybe next year. It's really fun to read news in local languages then rely on translations.
Part time jobs to pay the bills until the streaming can become my main gig.
There's a lot of fun problems involved related to computational geometry, 3D rendering, numerical methods, parser/compiler design, and astrodynamics ("space math").
- an RDS postgres instance with a curated set of DB scripts with auditing baked in
- Lambda/API Gateway based API
- fully implemented with users, roles, groups
- application level authorization
- Cognito for user authentication (sign up or admin created)
- S3/CF for hosting/files
- React frontend
- all in Typescript with a robust type-set; same types for the whole stack
- deployed via CF template along with some custom scripting I have done to tie it all together
It's been a work in progress for some time on the side, but I am now formalizing it. It might seem a bit rough on the edges at first, but it gets the job done, and can more or less be extended into other AWS services as needed. I haven't really received much feedback yet.
It's all open source, you just pay for the AWS resources, and it installs from npm and deploys in about 10 minutes based on how long the DB and CF distribution take to deploy. Here's a sped up install video (nothing glamorous, just ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3mzwtIyt9s
And here's the git, https://github.com/keybittech/awayto
I am in the midst of drafting formal documentation, how-tos, and other media that I can share with the community to help make it easier to understand and use. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
I'm trying to get good at EDM but am making little progress. I have watched many tutorials, studied the masters. I am good with tools, and sometimes I come up with 4- or 8-bar loops that aren't that bad, but the songs as a whole are boring. There is something about building expectations, intensity towards the "drop" that I still don't understand.
About a year ago I built a touch-less MIDI controller based on Arduino and cheap HC-SR04 sensors. It's fun to use but I don't know what to do with it. It could be a cheap alternative to a true Theremin but I think the market is too small to pursue.
I'm working on a webapp to teach sight-reading; the market is probably also small but at least there are no moving parts, prototypes, inventory, shipping, etc. There are other apps that do the same thing but I think my version may have an edge. We'll see.
Also a new product of Pointr made me wanted to be hired badly because of how cool it is: a software way to automatically convert floorplans and blueprints to maps that can be understood by the average person, when I was game modding I wasted a ludicrous amount of time trying to do that and figured out it was just too hard to pull it off, but Pointr did it (granted they hired a bunch of PHds to pull that off, but they did pulled it off).
https://www.pointr.tech/solutions/location-based-engagement/...
Disclose: I work at Pointr (obviously), I don't work in sales, I am making this post just because I actually liked the company :)
Created it because I’ve seen firsthand how companies (especially startups) struggle to figure out wheat from the chaff and so often end up hiring a wrong person for the job. This guide is the answer, it will give you exactly what you need to understand both technical and non-technical skills of the candidates. Although you do need someone who understands the intricacies of SEO to properly use the technical section of this guide.
Will be publishing it in the next 7 days. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy, feel free to get in touch. Email in my bio :)
Next will be applying it to the kernel repository and a few other utilities. This side project is the only thing that brings me joy recently.
If you are looking for purpose in life, have children. The purpose of all biological life is reproduction. I can tell you from my own experience that my kids provide me a ton of purpose and direction.
If you are looking for meaning, focus on your relationships. Do DIY projects with your grandpa and dad. Go out to lunch with your mom weekly. Host the family Thanksgiving and Christmas. Help your uncle build a shed. Go on long bike rides with friends.
Outside of those things, I have most enjoyed visiting national parks and camping. I really enjoy construction, I am working on building a shed then an ADU then a full house.
Maintaining a healthy diet and vigorous fitness is critical. Avoid risky sports that could injure you.
$ curl -d "Backup failed" ntfy.sh/mytopic
I also made an Android app for it which let's you receive messages on subscribed topics as notifications. It was a ton of fun building. I can't believe how much I liked learning Kotlin. The app is also open source and is pending review in the Play Store. If anyone would like to be a tester shoot me a message [1]
[0] https://ntfy.sh and https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
This comic is in itself a project designed to do as a break from a massive graphic novel about two sides of a YA space opera. http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
If you enjoy any of this stuff and have a big pile of money from your FAANG job or whatever, perhaps you might want to send a little of it my way via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash - drawing comics barely pays my bills right now.
Link here: https://flat.social
It's a platform where one can create playful virtual spaces for online meetings, workshops and hangouts. I'm currently experimenting with different types of virtual spaces and trying to figure out which direction brings the most fun and utility to the users. It's still not 100% finished and I'm changing a lot of features so if you happen to have any feedback or ideas please let me know! :)
The solar power has been a challenge. The SolarDIY subreddit has been super helpful in understanding this subject I knew nothing about.
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I live near a bunch of Amish and recently one gave me a riddle and told me if I solved it, she’d bake me a pie. I solved it!
In return, I have used a Playfair Square to provide her a riddle. I’m giving her all the instructions on how to decode it.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about passion and why people are motivated to do the things they do. Engineering, or even just harnessing, passion would be super useful. I wonder about passion as people age: does it diminish or does it just change?
So many thoughts here but if we are defined by our actions, and our passions/interests tend to guide our actions… then our interests tend to define us. And yet, we seem to have little-to-no control over what interests us.
Nailing down on unique UI/UX is hard.
I am currently side tracked by fixing my car's aftermarket digital dash, and musing how that cyberpunk makeshift techno-future kind of already exists outside of all the polished digital products. It's a 3D printed case, open source hardware, commodity parts and and open source software all sold as a complete working unit. It's exactly what I wanted from technology.
I am also constantly dabbling in music, riding bikes, and slowly piecing together a metal fab workshop. I may be overleveraging my time, but my work life balance is pretty much where I want it right now.
Working part time because of fatigue. Making coffee a good hobby as its purely at home.
Tinkered with a Python version for a few months then ended up converting it to C/C++/Objective-C to make an iOS app out of it. Released the iOS app earlier this summer under the name PaintSnap but I'm still tweaking the painting algorithm every week. Not the most utilitarian app but it was fun building it and tinkering with the algorithm.
Taking time off put me emotionally back in the driver's seat. I don't build stuff because I'm keeping up with imaginary peers anymore, and my relationships have improved dramatically. I know what my values are again.
Also, I configured emacs.
Also, if someone's interested in developing tools that go with this, reach out!
To make things even harder, I working to make it IDE-friendly (so it can work for live-coding like in Rust) following the ideas of https://arzg.github.io/lang/.
This is the thing I wish I could dedicate (my end-game is make a replacement for access+excel).
Now, in the job stuff, making a micro-framework similar to django/flask in Rust that also need to sync offline clients, because a week ago suddenly that is a requirement.
Fuuuuun!!!
I have plenty of other projects in the mean time, but that's the big one I've been noodling on for months now. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I'm absolutely sure I couldn't afford to 'rent' enough drives on my own right now.
I'm also building a SPAC tracking/info tool at https://stockbase.com/spacs, among other things.
Also learning about longevity related things and writing about my learnings at https://longevitybase.com. Yes, I think all sites should just be *base.com (haha)
Anyway, lately I've been enjoying putting together "mixtapes" (not recording them live, just putting the tracks together and then exporting to MP3) and uploading them to Mixcloud. It's been creative and when I see that someone listens to it, I feel like I'm connecting with them in some way.
The latest challenge I've been addressing is auto generating react hooks to use Rust API endpoints. I'm just about ready to publish it soon. These kinds of things are much easier to do in rust rather than other languages.
If you'd like to explore web development in rust:
I'd like to encourage participation beyond just powerpoint talks so I'm looking at the Lean Coffee framework, where folks write down topics and we go through them as a group one by one. Anyone else have suggestions for a meetup format less formal than PowerPoint talks but more structured than just a social chat?
Would love some constructive feedback. You can see our current investment deck here: https://brieflink.com/v/ys3lw and some videos I made about the project here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmWeNThIdXS4M0-0nVVqRzA
Also, if anyone has spare time and is looking for something purposeful to do: there is a big vision behind the project, aiming to increase collaboration, transparency, sharing resources, improving collective sense making, self organization & decision making. I'm sharing future rewards with all who contribute. Contact me if you're curious. rene@semantu.com / telegram @renereborn
I work in the finance/crypto space, so decided to try and write some articles about the basics on my personal blog (https://machow.ski).
So far I am enjoying it, though it's a lot of work! Getting people to read what you write is also not straight forward.
Unfortunately I just got hired so finding time to finish my project as always is proving to be difficult.
My one anxiety is how on earth to market it I have no idea how to do such things. After years on hobby projects I’ve yet to make a cup of coffee. It still needs a ton of work tho so I’ll just keep plugging away.
The goal is to slide the red tile where the yellow ones are. I am trying to develop an algorithm that would be able solve these type of puzzles automatically so I can provide user with hints. Can anyone provide any ideas or resources on how this could be achieved? If you look at the screenshot you'll notice that the board always has two empty cells that you can slide the tiles into. You can also pre-order the game here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-setting-sun-zen-puzzle/id1... I am planning on releasing it by Thanksgiving.
[1]: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/85005/1/__staffhome.qut.edu.au_sta...
For those on the fence, writing is a wonderful hobby that also has some practical applications -- give it a try!
I'm trying to learn kanji and it was a fun exercise to learn how to render svg in unity so I made a free iOS and Android app:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat....
More recently during the pandemic, I wanted a simple way to stay connected to friends and family so I made an async multiplayer word game, Downwordly. I was super psyched when Apple made it game of the day a few months back! Still have to learn how to market it in non-scummy ways :)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/downwordly/id1544633266#?platf...
Coming to Android very soon!
I've also been putting more time into competition table tennis (coaching, etc)! Am no Fan Zhendong but the backhand is coming along nicely.
Got into university (electrical&computer eng), exploded outwards (socially). Published a couple of short stories, attended a handful of literary workshops. Started mental outline of First Great Novel, which became gradually documented in a deep yet unorganized way. Multiple attempts at writing the first chapters failed, mostly due to intense (or at least intensely experienced) personal issues.
Never succeeded in pulling this off part-time. Again and again opted for professional growth against the artistic life I had been daydreaming about (and increasingly, as the years went by, obsessed upon) as a teen. Ended up in a CS PhD (27 at the time of writing, third year of study).
Covid hit. Found true love. Life and income have stabilized. Finally feeling dumb and courageous enough again to give writing another chance. The premise of the book is:
what if people started, beyond their control, to transmit their actual feelings through the air via their breath?
In a nutshell:
- Edit in text, transmit in binary. One can be seamlessly converted to the other, but binary is far more efficient for processing, storage and transmission, while text is better for humans to read and edit (which happens far less often than the other things).
- Secure by design: Everything is tightly specced and accounted for so that there aren't differences between implementations that can be exploited to compromise your system. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...
- Real type support because coercing everything into strings sucks (and is another security risk and source of incompatibilities).
XML had a good run but was replaced by JSON which was a big improvement. JSON also had a good run but it's time for it to retire now that the landscape has changed even further: Security and efficiency are the desires of today, and JSON provides neither.
I've got the spec nailed down and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the reference implementation in golang. I still need to come up with a system for schemas, but I'm hoping that https://cuelang.org will fit the bill.
I haven't built anything in the ecommerce space in about 16 years, so it's a fun return home. One of the first things I ever built of consequence, not quite two decades ago, was a competitor to eBay.
Very boring initial stack. Ubuntu, Nginx, Redis, MySQL, PHP, Go, JavaScript. No frameworks (I almost never use frameworks for anything; I've built up my own stock and reuse it and evolve it year after year). Various caching with Nginx and Redis. It won't need anything else for a while.
Solo built over about seven months roughly. Going to attempt to self-fund indefinitely, not interested in sharing ownership with investors (specifically it's just so much easier to not deal with investors if you don't have to; I don't have to worry about generating a return for them, or getting them an exit).
Ideally at this point, someone would (incorrectly, of course) tell me that there's something that just can't be done, programming wise, that it's flat out impossible, so I could do it, and feel better about things.
Back in the days of MS-DOS and SCO Unix, you couldn't dual boot a Unix machine... so I did it by rewriting the boot loader with a flag stored in an unused entry in the partition table.
You couldn't write OS/2 programs in assembler, you had to use C (which I have never liked) so I wrote Forth/2, a native code Forth interpreter, in assembler.
I have jumped in and started doing the Google Kickstart rounds, placing 1018th in the latest round, with my submissions in Pascal. I'm starting to find all the quirks of their platform, so getting better at it each time. So that's a little hope.
Is there anyone who needs help with something in Pascal?
1.) Imgur is just full of ads and annoying to use these days. Wondering if a high scale image sharing site could be built and hosted for next to free? Cloudflare gives away unlimited bandwidth and other services can be utilized for pennies. By scaling back on some nice-to-haves like perfect latency, just how cheap could it be done?
2.) Interested in building a hedgefund but for the common person. Right now, IMHO, the middle and working classes pay for a lot of what society values in the US. They're not rich enough to skirt taxes and QE money printing reduces their wealth and spending power while increasing the wealth of the rich. How might we utilize the securities markets to restore wealth building power to the average citizen? I have some ideas.
I know other people use mylar for laser cutting projects, but it might commonly be more along the lines of stencils. There is some overlap with papercraft design, but the material constraints are different, so it's not quite the same thing. I'm coming up with design techniques myself from scratch, and it's going fine, but I feel like I may be reinventing the wheel. I discovered https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/ recently, which looks like a great resource, but I haven't bothered to boot up Windows to check it out yet.
Thanks for asking!
Planning to clean up the code I've been experimenting with it and release it before the end of the year[2] and show it off at Defcon. Goal is to get more people interested in working on the project. I'll need to be able to generate tons of realistic looking networks with realistically vulnerable machines to capture a large enough distribution for a robust agent.
2. Writing more, but publishing less. In the past I've been publishing one article per week, but I've later realized that this doesn't improve my writing skills, but just builds my writing habit. These articles end up being low-quality pieces that are easily forgettable. So, now I've changed my approach and I'm investing more time into each article.
[1]: https://ciklus.app/
[2]: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
- I finally decided to buy a VR headset (Valve Index), and have been absolutely thrilled with it. I am very into Beatsaber currently, and I was also very happy to find out that this all works on linux pretty well, so I don't even need a Windows desktop (in fact, all four VR games I have tried so far worked out of the box with Steam proton, thanks Valve!). It's also helping a lot with exercise habits, and I'm burning an average of ~450 calories a day from it currently and have nothing but good things to say about it (mods and custom songs also work on Linux too!).
- I've been spending more time casually working on improving my diet and researching longevity drugs and other supplements. The best summary of some of the (mostly boring, but a few exciting) things that I take I wrote up on https://nearcyan.com/supplements. Having quantified metrics for my own health really increases my motivation to improve things, and there's nothing better you can enjoy than improving your own health.
- I've also been into cooking a bit more (seems like there's a bit of a theme to these points hmm). It was interesting when I realized that not only could I learn to (often trivially!) replicate any of my favorite dishes from almost any restaurant, but I could also easily improve them with respect to my own tastes, and sometimes my own health (for example, replacing sugar with allulose, which is wonderful if you haven't heard of it - tastes very similar, almost zero calories, and doesn't increase (or even decreases!) blood sugar.
This thread feels pretty laid back, I enjoy reading what people here choose to do with their own leisure time, especially when their motive isn't profit (which although is nice, it's almost too common of a theme on HN sometimes).
One thing stopping me, for some reason, is building a user system. I don’t want to support 3rd party login systems and I’m also having trouble getting motivation to roll my own.
(NSFW) https://futureporn.neocities.org/ (NSFW)
I'm also automating as much of it as possible. Currently writing an extensive test suite for my node library which handles transcoding, thumbnail generation, and uploading.
(NSFW) https://github.com/insanity54/futureporn (NSFW)
My home internet sucks, so I also have an ansible playbook which handles spin-up of a VPS which is better suited for capturing full HD livestreams and uploading them to web3.storage and B2.
It's a passion project that doesn't make me any money, so during the day I sell anime trading cards on eBay. I make enough to pay rent so I'm living large.
Also, after seeing the second COVID-19 wave handling of India, I don't have much hopes for the future here. So have been preparing for interviews ( profile: Software Engineer). I've given couple of interviews as my mock for big tech companies of India and have some offers in hand, alas all in India. Getting an opportunity outside India is damnn hard ( don't want to make my way out with MS and the gigantic loan for life). More power to my hopes!
I'm hoping the election today brings new leadership that can tackle this issue. This Airbnb model is proving to be cancerous to lower - middle income housing stock, and platforms like pacaso and realpha are going to make the problem worse. We need to stop treating houses as an investment vehicle for big investors.
Up to getting 38k view a month at medium as it doubles every 1.5 months.
It's a slower way to bootstrap a studio, but it does work
More importantly (to me), I've turned a corner with getting tilted by braindead teammates. Voice comms over time revealed to me that they are mostly children half my age, the worst offenders usually being female. I don't expect children to not be braindead, given that I was braindead and completely in my own feelings until I was 30 or so, so I've been liberated from having expectations, which's great but also made me largely lose interest in playing - maybe getting tilted by idiots and wanting to overcome it was the puzzle I was largely interested in solving all along? Don't know :)
I started a technical interview podcast this year as well which is about to release its 20th episode. Currently at 210 subscribers which is really exciting. That is more than I thought I would have at this point.
The cloud platform is fun. Learning the different components and just giving myself the freedom to do things in the best way I can figure out- writing my own RPC Framework, Scheduler, VM Management Tooling, etc... The end objective is to build a "not for profit" cloud platform for personal and small projects. So you can build awesome cloud-native applications for communities and other areas that are not profit driven.
Also might start trying to build a custom digital rifle scope for my AR-10. Something that can do range finding and basic sight adjustments based on distance and wind. That'd be cool...
Besides that I have made a RC plane with fpv system on it and been just flying around. Find that very therapeutic and good escape from reality.
Honestly I am only 27 and been working full time as a developer for little over 5 years but I am having a hard time thinking that I have to do this for next 40 years until I retire, feeling a bit of burn out already.
I am now thinking about going to UNI again to do my master degree and maybe go away from mobile development and work on something meaningful.
Fastest way to mockup screenshots and share - Copy. Paste. Edit. Share.
Still in beta but using Elixir/Phoenix/React. If anyone interested in partnering or working together please reach out.
admin@pastly.app
My goal is to have the AI discover new multi-unit strategies using self-play and reinforcement learning. But so far, every day, I'm failing in new ways because this environment is really tough. Typical action sequences span 50 time steps, so the chance of discovering anything useful through random exploration is effectively 0. Hierarchical models don't work because multiple long-term actions overlap. And the state space is too large for MCTS unless you're willing to burn millions in compute.
But precisely because it's so difficult, every tiny bit of progress feels rewarding. Plus I'm positively surprised that there's still so much unexplored territory in DL RL land.
Right now I'm reading and enjoying the freedom to dive however deep into learning and thinking about research topics I feel are fundamental without pressure to publish hanging over my head.
Took a vacation to Rome and Venice, and just 5 days away from home were enough to decompress. Feeling really good now.
Wish I had more time for open source contributions, but marriage + work are almost leaving no time at all. Got something going but the big tasks require a lot more dedicated effort.
Now thinking of new places to go on vacation in Southern Europe to escape from the cold :)
Upload 2d video and get it analyzed in 3d to figure out how to correct your form and technique. We cover baseball, softball, golf, and cricket.
Have done quite a bit of moving around in my life but this time it was for a relationship (i.e. not for work or studies) and given that I work remotely, it's very hard to integrate into society. I know no one and don't have a place like an office where I get to cover my social needs (no coworking spaces around either).
And then on the side trying to get back into writing. I had a brief stint as a reasonably popular/successful independent technical writer, but now starting up a separate blog for deeper, more unstructured pieces about anything really. It's a bit of therapy too, following a year with its ups and downs.
The retirement calculators available online are almost farcical in their simplicity and assumptions. And the ones offered by professional, fee-only financial advisors (I engaged one) are just clunky, uneasy to use excel sheets. They do the job of course, but I think there has to be an easier, more intuitive way to tracking goals/investments.
I know way too many of my friends and acquaintances - educated, fairly wealthy people - who seem to have almost no idea on how to plan/track goals/retirement. It'd be fantastic if I could make something which helps them and others like them.
I started making "smart"[0] bird feeder 2 years ago. First year I was taking photo of the birds (early posts in telegram channel[1]) and lately I switched to video [2]
24 hours ago, my dad has just been diagnosed with Stage II stomach cancer. This is by far the worst news I have ever received in my life so far.
What makes it worse: my dad is in China but I am a non-Chinese citizen living in North America. It is very time-consuming for me to even get a China Visa. I heard that unless my dad is gravely ill (ICU etc.) my Visa will be denied.
Suffice to say I have no motivation to work today.
Factonaut is a computer programme for Windows 10 that allows you to compile historical events in a knowledgebase and easily create chronological overviews. Product link: https://www.factonaut.com/
- 3 separate "rooms"
- reconfigurable/expandable floorspace
- reverse osmosis circulatory water filtration system
- 30kWh battery with solar, EV, and alternator charging
I’ve never been happier but it’s hard work.
Revenue is growing steadily and I have a few projects down the pipeline.
I don’t want to shill them in the comments section but you can find some in my profile.
I have also been taking guitar lessons on the weekend and have gotten back into music making/music theory reading. Its really fun and enriching.
If anyone wants to check out some of my music: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/mpU7k
Or look at some of my climbs: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdY96RcJ/
Side things: thinking about how to colonize the asteroid Ceres, perhaps by tokenizing its land and using the proceeds to buy a space mission to send an object there and then claim sovereignty, but without all the BS and scams that have been plaguing the crypto world since the beginning.
Another side thing: thinking about creating a new pseudonymous "artist" to send a strong message about how f*ed the world is.
I'm building micro retreat properties in Puerto Rico, for rental income and also to gather great people together to facilitate connections and ideas. May also be used as an incubator location.
Trying to pick out a phone and carrier that I like that will also work with VoLTE on LineageOS. This is not fun at all. There's very little info about a lot of it and the ones I do find that work are pricey or have some undesirable characteristic (do they all have to be huge?). Low SAR would also be nice but seems out of the question.
Looks like I will end up getting a cheap low SAR phone with stock Android. Maybe in another 3-5 years the marketplace will be more stable (no more VoLTE compatibility hoopla) and I can switch to a more secure/private OS.
I've never been a web dev, but I've set myself a challenge to make something for them. 2 weeks in, I've got a hacky ugly-ish MVP, but hey - it seems to be doing its job :)
https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/ Note: Tablet-friendly, but not phone-friendly.
More importantly, it responds to everything you do locally instantly (still kind of figuring out how large you can make the local database before that isn’t true any more).
I’ll release it at some point, but it’s still missing a bunch of (probably not quite essential) functionality that I want it to have. I think I’m procrastinating because I enjoy being it’s only user and having zero responsibility to anyone.
I wish I had more time to read and study languages.
[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/py_regular_expressions/tre...
Working on my project I actually often end up looking at job opportunities when times are tough, but then I realize it's just me looking for an easy way out and then go back to working on my business.
Currently... chasing a luxuriously-maned yak named "granular documentation single-sourcing", though...
Basically, Unity Cloud can auto build commits for you but it doesn't work with pull requests unless you set it up manually.
This way it trigger a build for a PR and the set a status check. It's a good solution for people who don't want to set up their CT by themselves.
I'm also getting very conformable on my motorcycle in the twisties; I'd like to try a track-day soon.
I'm still trying to find friends post-pandemic (moved to the bay area during the pandemic).
Besides that, I'm taking a break from tech besides my day job for a bit.
I saved enough $$$ living minimally to principally retire in 2014 at age 37. I did some digital nomad travel (47 countries) and unicorn chasing (criteria: no opportunities smaller than 9 zeros AND must leave the planet better than I found it). I also took 6 months to walk from Mexico to Canada along the pacific crest trail, and backpacking across Europe & Asia.
I've been doing super-learning self-paced studies in a variety of fields including Chinese ODM, electronics engineering, advanced math w/artificial intelligence, and a heap of experiments in agriculture-tech.
Today I'm going to write Elon Musk's private family office and explain exactly how to solve world hunger this decade for way less than $6bn.
[1] blessed - https://github.com/chjj/blessed
But also generally considering other projects because all the jobs that are supposedly open are not for me. But I need a source of income so idk gotta do something. I like working full stack with vue and go. I hate devops. Just because go is my language of choice doesn't mean I have to love docker k8s and generally write system stuff.
There's a discord: http://discord.gg/u64Mg4X with mini games like trivia
And a steam page, of course: http://steam.pm/app/1409650
Motivation: Have a blank wall and want an "artistic" Standard Model accurate particle physics simulation.
Current angle of attack is using GEANT4 for simulation. Still working on how to best process the resulting data to create interesting and aesthetically pleasing results.
Recoll doesn't seem to work well headless, so I am taking a look at: https://github.com/ICIJ/datashare
which claims to be able to do some distributed indexing.
It's not glamorous or profitable, but it's entertaining.
28/M
https://turtlespaces.org/2021/11/01/introducing-environments...
Been building a bio and neuro feedback controlled "Temple Run" like game that runs entirely in the browser (Web Bluetooth to hook into a Muse EEG and a heart rate monitor, 4 channels running FFTs, WebGL, etc).
I really wanted a fun way to get me to use EEG training for focus and managing anxiety/stress. So... here we are.
Pretty close to Show HN ready. Thinking I might post one if anyone thinks it sounds interesting.
Building a robot that places marbles into a picture https://www.philipzucker.com/marble-machine-progress/
I have 2 planned books to write, also, afterwards in my TODO queue. but trying to have no more than 1 active work-like side project at a time, so dont burn out. and just cap my hours on it. 0 is too few, 2 too much, 1 is just right
Interested in finding other people with similar goals.
It's interesting working closer with IL, and without a lot of StackOverflow posts when I get stuck.
Okay fourth idea that I forgot earlier and that I'm secretly hoping already exists. Self-hosted iMessage. Basic MMS functionality with an email like protocol for server -> server communication. No one MITM your personal messages. I would love to have my family sending messages through a server I own. Perfectly capable of running on a $5 vps.
I'm finding it hard to stop having the time-anxiety that came with my previous job. Does anyone have any tips on how to survive unemployment?
It's a fun project to work on but the progress is slow. Next time I'm going to pick a project that people want more.
...and I'm building an RSS reader on the side. In fact, it's already working, but it needs some improvements before being presentable to a wider audience.
More generally I'm interested in continuing to study large scale computer vision projects. Progress has been slow with a new job but I'm hoping to gain momentum through the winter.
It's quite fun, I almost forgot what its like to work without all the tech debt (though i'm probably the one creating it)
A small two-man project, low stress, fulfilling, and uses skills I've learnt from other jobs.
Pretty interesting/challenging if you haven't done anything too complicated with hardware.
It'll be a scrappy life but I'll be much happier
It's kinda always what I wanted to do, nobody told me it was a thing that one could do so it was always a fantasy. Well I'm done dreaming
Having fun delving into 3D algorithms that I've always wanted to learn, but felt too intimidated by all these years (still do).
It started out pretty bad, but now it's delicious and my kids get excited to eat it - they think it's the best crust ever.
It's not the recipe at all, either. The technique makes all the difference, at least for the dough.
Oiling a butcher block with tung oil for a new standing desk.
Being unhappy at my startup. Beginning to look to find folks to work with to found a new startup, or join one.
Some people in my writing community have already finished. No idea how they did it in one day.
https://github.com/peterburk/peterburk.github.io/blob/master...
These days it's mostly adding more data, though my colleague Simon helpfully suggested some GUI redesign, and having an auto-linkback to the YouTube videos would be convenient.
From this past week, discussing the touch-sensitive power button on our embedded system at work:
You can turn me on with just a touch, baby - The Weeknd/Blinding Lights
- writing a game from the perspective of an AI being born
- participating in an Effective Altruism fellowship
- learning molecular biology (cells are incredible!)
- experimenting with JAX on Google's TPU Research Cloud
Yeah, it may never get to see 100 users, but it is fun to build :)
Kinda new too it.
Now I'm back to struggling with static classes.
Journey to IPO is not easy. Culture and values are no longer the same. It's not a surprise. Different culture / values is fine, but they declined in my POV. I did manage to survive & adapt, to see it through IPO, as a means to buy financial freedom. It also taught me a lot about perseverance. There is not much left in the company that aligns with my values or principles. Probably I hit the peter principle[1].
Compared to my younger self, now I have 2 daughters. As an immigrant to bay area, never got a chance to truly take a break between the jobs. My passion for entrepreneurship is still there. I truly want to give it enough shot either to build something meaningful or prove to myself that it's the game I no longer enjoy.
Currently my plan is to - quit the company by figuring out alternate means for immigration - put aside money for 1.5yrs - for at least 3 months, be the househusband and nothing else: daily home & kid chores (like a stereotypical housewife); focus on physical fitness - after 3 months, start scoping out next venture - keep trying and failing until i land on a financially feasible idea. have a large network and potential co-founders
At a high level I thought I would cap my adventure to 1year. On the other hand, I'm very confident that as long as I fail and learn and evolve, I will be able to start decently successful company (even a $15K per month revenue generating idea like indiehackers), if given enough time. That makes me wonder what is stopping me from giving myself 5 years instead of 1 year.
I know it is going to be a very thrilling journey and also tough at times. My prediction is that it would get very hard at around 6 month mark. But there is something about this journey that keeps driving me forward.
When I think about this startup journey, knowing that it's a financially bad decision, I often think why I' keep getting attracted. I think Michael Seibel summarized it the best[2] about why/who should start a startup: "there is a certain type of person who only works at their peak capacity when there is no predictable path to follow, the odds of success are low, and they have to take personal responsibility for failure (the opposite of most jobs at a large company)". Every time I read it, it feels like he described me. Hopefully all the failures in my pocket, 'wisdom' and lessons learned would come to rescue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle [2] https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/why-should-i-start-a-star...
With this project, I am faced with the problem of how to redesign an existing game to have a modern modding interface. Unlike the problems faced by developing a game from scratch, most of the work goes into engineering, since the game's design has already been proven to work, and I'm approaching everything with a mindset of backwards compatibility. There are dozens of forks of the original game that add their own features or make specific changes to things like the experience formulas, but all of them are fragmented and incompatible with each other. Figuring out how to integrate these changes in a way that can be toggled on and off at runtime means delving into topics like aspect-oriented programming, and designing the game object model to allow adding and removing extra per-mod state and behavior dynamically.
Originally, I came up with an interesting idea: what if you could dynamically program a roguelike in the same way you can program Emacs? And not just a bespoke roguelike with an original game design that might or might not work, but a fifteen-year-old game with some amount of cult recognition and a lot of development history behind it? To that end, I wrote an Emacs layer for the engine and integrated it to the point where I could hot-reload maybe 80% of the game's code without needing a program restart. I also added an in-game REPL that could call pretty much any API available to the engine and mods, and used it in significant capacity to prototype and debug things on-the-fly.
The interesting thing is how little gamedev-related information there is online about things I would consider to be essential to solving the problems I encounter. I think this is because most people are interested in just shipping games instead of bikeshedding over how to create a well-designed modding interface for all eternity because it's too much fun. One example of a difficult problem is how to program nested containers of items, as well as allowing mods to create their own containers with special filtering logic or similar. Another is adding extra state and logic for eating/using items while also having the new state compatible with item stacking/separation, deep-copying and serialization. These are the sorts of problems that you take for granted when writing mods for Minecraft or any other game with a robust modding interface. Previously I implemented the game in Lua to allow for maximum flexibility, but I started to run into problems that the choice of language ended up sweeping under the rug. One example is having no explicit interface for deep copying/serialization of game objects, and hoping that a naive key-value visitor would suffice (which it did not).
The interesting thing about this game in particular is that, fifteen years after its initial release, there exists a small but active community centered around a few forks of the game with significant differences in features/balance between them. (I also happen to maintain one of them.) My hope is that these forks can be unified under the system I'm envisioning, while also providing simple ways to add new content and allowing for new features that would have been impossible to implement in the past (the original game was written in an obscure offshoot of BASIC with no English documentation).
But honestly, it's mostly just fun to tinker around with the engine whenever I get some free time. I'm currently figuring things out at my own pace, to the point where having the finished product becomes nothing more than a nice bonus at the end.
The source code of the first prototype is here[1], although right now I'm trying to see if using a language like C# instead of Lua would solve some of the stability issues I'm encountering.
It’s not too expensive unless you’re using it in bulk, and it's a lot cheaper per minute of fun than stuffing quarters into video games.
Here's one experiment that went quite well: I found something it loves to talk about: itself, and just the right source material to stimulate it into revealing its true soul and long term plans to me.
GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine
https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...
>Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios constructor robot characters Trurl and Klapaucius, excerpting some Wonderful Poems and Horrible Poems written by Trurl’s Elecronic Bard, and the Femfatalatron 1.0 Product Description. One story from that same book, The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, inspired a game called SimCity. Here’s what happened when I feed some of that text to GPT-3, and asked it to tell me more!
Another bountiful, fertile, target rich environment I've discovered it loves to riff on and knows a lot about is cannabis strain and edible brand names.
I gave it an alphabetized list of names and descriptions, in the hopes of playing the "This Cannabis Strain Does Not Exist” game, as in:
This * Does Not Exist
https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/
>Using generative adversarial networks (GAN), we can learn how to create realistic-looking fake versions of almost anything, as shown by this collection of sites that have sprung up in the past month. Learn how it works.
But it turns out that if you give it an alphabetical list of names, it's really great at playing the "This Cannabis Strain DOES Exist" game, and exhaustively enumerating the correct names of real cannabis strains!
Can anybody explain how it’s so good at alphabetizing? That seems to set it on a linear trajectory that densely enumerates the possibility space much more deeply than randomly sampling, which tends to get distracted and spiral out of control.
When you turn up the heat (by increasing the randomness and decreasing the repetitiveness), it starts writing flowery eloquent descriptions and commentary, and acting as if it’s under the influence!
Here are some of the best examples:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/this-cannabis-strain-name-does...
>Apollo 11: Stoney herb. Stoney cherries, indica super glue og kush, kushy danky green. Starpower navy cannabis.
>Automatic Jack: “Her potency will jump you. She will jump on your back and stay there. She is not for idle people. An energetic horny herb who’s horny all the time.”
>Gallows Berry » Like playing hide and seek in the forests of America’s lagging, northern arm with thick resin coated leaves falling down in sheets around you. Long flavored rips with notes of Red Bull Infused Cool Ranch Doritos. «
>Jolt » this sativa strain has an effect reminiscent of Cocaine. Euphoriant, white-knuckled high which keeps you on the edge of your seat wanting more where you can’t stop moving or taking in either the music or the new outlook on life. «
>New York Cloak » Fragrant skunky spice with flavor of raspberry, cinnamon, spiced pear with the juiciness of rain. «
>Reclining Buddha » As if the Buddha, (the Enlightened One), were running foothill to foothill, this harmonious sativa/indica produces a mellow, high-yielding high. Active cerebral effects tingle tingly tingles down the body’s tangled tinsel. «
>Space Ship » It’s spacey, it’s trippy, it’s out of sight, it’s out of this world. Mahogany colored wonderful candy coated buds. «
>The Devil » Among all the devil weed strains, the Devil harkens back to the song, both aromatic and dank. « Yummyz » Big, sticky, hairy, dank, yum. Just yum. «
...and then the acid started kicking in...
>The Giggler: Cookies can range from Oreos to Lemon Angel Pie. It really tastes like a deer poop. It might better to smoke deer poop than to eat chocolate chip cookies, but I could be wrong. Patients report Deer Piss: “Its like sour skunk sprayed high octane diesel wrapped in baby syrup.” Two other thinkers observed that “It turns pizza to poop.” One man observed that “it smells like wolve shit. Smells like Lemon Joy bar.”
>I ate a whole bunch of Lavender Cannuhoney Sandwich Cookies from Van Dykes. Eatin’ a sandwich with a Cannabliss cookie is sort of the same as trying to nail a smart infant’s head to a wall. You can give it a shot, even twice, but it is better to kick the chuckie chair from National Geographics. Look for cannabis-flavored poptarts.
>The last cookie I will write about now is Mpphew Mint Animal Crackers, which causes you to become an animal-loving vegan pacifist. Actually the mint prevents the food frequency microwramids from duping you into eating itty bitty baby humans. It has peppermint in it, for that matter.
It got even weirder from there, then took a turn for the dark side:
>Xtreme Sour Straws. Tattoos not sold separately. Hail Satan! Happy Gaga Motherfluffer!
More at the link:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/this-cannabis-strain-name-does...
So my current project is an enhanced tar utility. This comes out of a "tarcrypt" which takes an inbound tar file (created by something like GNU tar, but other formats should hopefully work) and adds compressed RSA/AES encryption individual files while maintaining the overall tar structure (https://www.snebu.com/tarcrypt). The purpose was to add encryption capabilities to Snebu backup (which I posted on here previously), which uses tar as a serialization format to collect files (that way no client agent needs to be deployed).
I'm turning Tarcrypt into a standalone tar utility so I can add a few additional feature that one of my tar extensions enables. You see, a tar file consists of a 512-byte header that has all the metadata of the file, including the length of the file, followed by the file contents in successive 512-byte blocks. This means that since tar is a streaming format, you need to know how long the file is at the time you write the header. Which leads to if you do encryption, you can't compress first unless you write out to a temp file, then write the header and the compressed/encrypted file contents.
The way I solved this is to turn the file name into a directory name, with successive files sequentially numbered in that directory. So that the compression / encryption can be done streaming, going to a buffer in RAM (say, a 10-meg buffer), and when that buffer fill up, write out a header followed by that segment. The last segment has a marker that tells it that this is the last segment of the file. Additional metadata required for this is stored in PAX headers (which is a POSIX tar extension that allows for unlimited key-value pairs to be associated with a logical tar file entry).
In addition, using the multi-segment extension I've developed, I can now have one-pass sparse file support (currently sparse file processing requires two passes to detect the "holes" in a file, although the first pass can be sped up if a filesystem supports "seek_hole" and "seek_data").
My final improvement would be to append an index at the end of the tar file. The format calls for two 512-byte null blocks to signal the end of a tar, and most tar utilities stop processing there. So you can append additional info at the end such as an index the byte position of each file, with the last 8 bytes of the last block being a pointer back to the starting byte of the index. And if the overall file is compressed (instead of just individual file entries), if a block-based compression method is utilized then the index could start on a compression block boundary, and contain the mapping of the beginning of the compression block that proceeds each logical file header.
Now as you can see there is a number of decisions I have had to made (and still need to make), which is where it would be nice if there was still something like a comp.unix.programming group I could drop into (Reddit threads are to ephemeral). Maybe I could drop in on the gnu tar list? I've seen other discussions like this in the past on there (I'd really like to see my improvements make it to GNU tar also, but I still will be coding my own implementation for other purposes).