It has occurred to me that one of the crucial elements of the early internet was the feeling that there was somebody out there, _somewhere_ on the globe, that was actually responding to that particular thing you were putting out there. It was a special feeling, because it was a sense of connection. Just being online and being part of the few select communities that existed back then was a commitment, and I believe that's in part what made it feel special.
With all the world gaining access to the internet, I think we've gained a lot, but lost this sense of wonder: Since online interactions have now become commonplace to the point of para-social meaninglessness, any single post or message doesn't really feel all that _real_.
HN is still the closest thing I know to that primordial kind of internet, and so I'm putting this post out there. It might get buried instantly, or it might survive, and on the off chance that it does:
I encourage you to comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment, however niche it might be. It might let you find some likeminded people and maybe recapture a bit of the best aspects of the internet in those early days.
In any case, I sincerely wish you a great day, from one surprisingly-real-but-currently-text-based being to another :)
I successfully made it through tonight and will hopefully have many more successful nights. Love and strength to anyone else out there in a similar boat.
Have a good day or night or whatever time you're happening to have around.
Sometime during the pandemic, I stopped caring, perhaps fell into a bit of anhedonia. Thankfully, reading HN kept me informed about boreout (the relatively unknown cousin of burnout). Past few months, I made a big decision to move back to my home country and generally be more social, get more involved in the arts, watch movies, listen to music, read books, just take things easy. I think I am doing fine in my new job. The roaring interest in tech is still not back, but I'm confident it will be back eventually.
Until then, I'm happy reading about the good work done by other people. Perhaps one such idea might spark an insight in me and make me go to work. Cheers.
When I say I was close with my dad, that doesnt even scratch the surface. Im 24, and I can think of maybe three weeks worth of days across my entire life where I didnt talk to him (and most of those were solo camping without cell service). Me and that man would do everything together, talk every day, share ideas, the works.
I dont want his death to be the end of my relationship with my dad, so I am currently making changes in myself that he would want to see: less soda, more exercise, more social interactions, keeping up on my health conditions more, etc. As well as doing things that I think honor his idea: trying to catalogue all of the family assets like pictures, audio recordings, letters, stories; making sure that I am not holding on to crap, and then actively protecting the good stuff I am holding on to; living every day in a way that I think is on par with his high but reasonable expectations of me as if he were still here.
I hope that as long as I live I never stop missing him or living as if he is always watching. At the end of the day, I think possibly his greatest wish for me would be to live in a way that would always make him proud, because the things he would be proud of me for are both things that I can be proud of myself for, and things that EVERYONE should be proud of.
Aside from the benefits of being able to produce aesthetically pleasant sounds and the fundamental pleasures of mastery of a skill, I recommend it to anybody who wants to become more aware of and comfortable with their body and/or with expressing their emotions.
I'm sure that there are good free online lessons for singing, and I've used a lot of videos for practice, but I really encourage seeking out a teacher if you can. Covid has been bad for their business, and there's no replacement for face-to-face instruction. (The good news is that, unlike something like the piano, it's absolutely feasible to get useful instruction over a video call!)
EDIT: I want to emphasize one point which might interest people. As I said the speed helps me feel safe as I move with the flow of traffic. I run my bike at 1500 watts. This is twice the legal limit of 750 watts, but this isn’t well enforced. In the UK, the legal limit is just 250 watts. I think policy makers assume that a smaller number is safer, but I’m not convinced this is true. While higher speed means more risk of high speed collisions, lower speed means more risk of being hit from behind. It’s worth looking at raising the legal power limits, and whether this would increase safety for bike riders. I think it might.
The fun part for me is incorporating various mathematical and programming concepts into the storie like functions and boolean logic.
Last night's story involved a subtraction function that would spit out negative M&Ms if too few regular M&Ms were supplied as the input. The characters learned that they had to store their regular M&Ms separately from the negative ones in order to avoid a cancelling-out reaction if they came into contact with each other.
Tonight we will explore what comes out when negative M&Ms go into the subtraction function.
Another popular plot line in these stories involves a baby gate with a filter function that controls who can go through. The functions have gotten more and more complicated as my 5yo gets familiar with the concept, and now I have an idea for a baby gate code injection exploit that I'm excited to tell.
I've posted a few polished versions of these stories to my blog and hope to add more soon.
The only problem was that the game files were proprietary and while the modding community did a very good job reversing them and writing tools, these tools were a bit incomplete and not very suited for such a project. This inspired me to learn how to program (I knew what was possible because when I was 10 a book about QBasic found its way in my hands and I loved it) so I could create tooling for the project, and then also to make a website for the project. Then together with my newly met friends we made a website about Final Fantasy in general. I had to learn PHP to create a simple CMS for the team members to update the site. Then I’ve learned JavaScript to add some interactivity and also to load content without refreshing the page (this was before AJAX was a thing).
Fast forward 18 years and I’m a lead front-end developer, a job that I completely owe to this passion for the game I had as a teen. I never forgot the joy of coding tools for FF7 though and so recently I joined a community that’s still active around this game, and in my spare time I’m working on tools that will be useful for speedrunners. I also recently joined Twitch and I’m streaming the creation process from time to time, which is super fun! To be honest while I do enjoy my day job my secret dream is to work in some kind of gaming related position, because that always was and will hold a very special place in my heart.
Sometimes, like tonight, I do know what I want for myself. It's impossible, but it's my greatest desire for my life.
I want to be "uplifted". I want my brain capacity to be expanded by orders of magnitude. I want to understand, I want to comprehend, I want to see it all and fully understand the shape and implications of all things in my sight. I want to be more than a human mind. I want to be far, far wiser. It's not power I want. It's knowledge. It's understanding.
The first thing is that me, my wife, my mother and my father is building a house from scratch to me and my wife. I’ve never built anything before so a lot of what free time I have goes towards reading up on how to do it. We started building 1,5 years ago and started taking down trees in the small forest where the house was to be located three years ago. Anyone on HN building their own house?
The second thing I’m tinkering with is coding a game in swift playgrounds using only the iPad. It is a fps game built with Metal using only SDFs for rendering and collision.
North Korea has an animation studio, and there's a good chance you've seen some of it's work.
It's called SEK (or Korean April 26 Animation Studio). The things they were outsourced to work on were The Simpsons Movie, and Futurama: Benders Big Score. There's also an episode of Avatar, and Teenage Mutent Ninja Turtles(2003) in there too.
Which is interesting but what's really crazy is the other stuff they make. There's internal NK animation, mostly propaganda and children's works like Boy General.
MondoTV is an Italian animation company that used to import and dub anime but then decided to do original shows. Most are based on something historical (Ulysses, Genghis Khan, Pocahontas), something out of copyright that Disney did before (The Story of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas).
These two entities would collaborate on something of titanic portions. Of course it'd end up sinking into obscurity. The Legend of the Titanic is a 1999 animated movie about the Titanic in the same way Disney's Robin Hood is about medieval politics. That is to say randomly filled with anthropomorphic animals.
This movie is not to be confused with the other animated Italian movie about the titanic that also is full of talking animals, 2000's Titanic: The Legend Goes On.
And this is a concept with legs. Mondo and SEK worked together again on a sequel In Search of the Titanic where they end up defending Atlantis because they're trying to find the wreck of the ship. Spoiler: They save the ship (no one died on it anyway but they still lost the boat).
And because the Titanic was still red hot six years later in a sequel to a sequel of a very strange Titanic movie, a tv series came out. Fantasy Island not to be confused with the other one. This one has the Titanic at it. And talking mice and 26 episodes of misadventures and new friends.
Finding stuff like this reminds me of how absurd the world is. I know it's probably not like... what was expected here but sometimes you just get really weird into specific things because you feel like you're witnessing history created via madlibs.
It was a tightly-packed, intensive course covering everything from lost person psychology and the common behaviors of people in various types of situations based on analysis of past incidents to how to use the latest specialized technology to streamline the strategic planning, deployment, and evaluation of large searches.
I joined my county's SAR team five years ago and it's been an incredibly rewarding (but time-consuming) volunteer avocation. There is so much to know and California has a world-class system of training, certification, and management for our SAR teams.
One fantastic aspect of the CA state government is the OES and our mutual aid system. This system provides a formalized structure for counties to assist each other when they have something going on - like a wildfire, earthquake, missing person, law enforcement issue, etc. that they can't handle with their own internal resources. A county makes a request to the state - a fire example: "we need 5 type-1 wildfire strike teams, 3 fixed-wing water dropping aircraft, and 4 bulldozers tomorrow morning to help fight this fire that just broke out in our county." OES then puts the request out to surrounding counties who if available, mobilize and show up where needed.
Edit: If you're interested in how practically all emergency incidents are handled, reading up on the Incident Command System (ICS) and National Incident Management System (NIMS).
Anyway, that's getting rambling and more something behind-the-scenes that I know about and have experience with. I'm quite honored to be able to participate in these operations which can be directly lifesaving. AMA.
I'm currently working on an old fashioned website editing app, with a UI styled after today's note taking apps. I'm hoping that being able to work on my blog across devices without an internet connection - and without a like button or analytics script - will help me focus on what I want to write, instead of focusing on what will "sell". I'm thinking of putting an old fashioned "address book" page where I can list who I'm following, and manually publishing interesting emails I receive in response to my posts. It probably won't become big or earn me any money, but at least I'm having fun building it.
Thanks for reading, and wishing you all a great day too!
I'm unfortunately not passionate about much nowadays; in treatment for stage 4 cancer, so I'm fairly exhausted all the time. I'm glad I can still maintain my cognitive abilities during chemo so I can still do my job.
Are there any other writers in the house?
On a completely unrelated topic, one of my earliest "internet" memories was wandering into open source communities and trying to figure out this CVS thing and connecting it to GNU Savannah so that I could download some code. Those were some very formative times. The community was a bit more "prickly" than we're used to with Rust and some of our modern open source projects, but they were committed to technical excellence, and the fact that a random kid could show up and be in conversation with these people at so clearly far above my own level was (and still is!) nothing short of astonishing.
Personally, one of my life goals is to read a book by an author from each country. It’s a little fuzzy since countries have come and gone through history, then there are territories, autonomous regions etc, and maybe not a huge selection of books from each that have been translated into English. I just want to gain a worldwide perspective. One I’ve been slowly chipping away at and had put down for a while but recently became very relevant again is Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Also recently finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, The Every by Dave Eggers (not really part of the goal, I just like his work, I‘d recommend that and it’s prequel, The Circle, to this crowd) and am saving the 6th and final volume of Knausgård’s Min Kamp for the long arctic winter ahead.
I split my attention in far too many directions, but I'm writing audio-description for film and television as a hobby; biodiversity and conservation and hiking (we live in a biodiversity hotspot); and tinkering with code (roguelikes!). I also irrationally love HTML as a markup language.
But I am terrified of the increasingly bleak looking future, and despite putting a lot of effort into conservation and living with as small a footprint as possible, I don't see much hope for our broken civilisation, much less our species.
Heed this warning, everybody who reads this: learn finances and contracting and negotiations EXTREMELY EARLY in your life. At 22 you should be an expert. If not you'll be a loser like myself who can achieve literally 90% of what any programming task might require of him but has zero savings and is crippled by a burn-out.
Also... try not to be born in a family where the parents are more busy with physically fighting each other and not with raising the kids. :D It helps.
I am grinding hard at my new job and I'll also try to pursue a side hustle with much more money potential. Even though I'd prefer to go somewhere with my wife and not think of any work for 3 years but alas, and again, this is not the world we live in.
Having strong technical intelligence does not correlate with success. Took me 90% of my conscious life to even realize it. Don't be stupid like me.
Thank you so much! Never would I have expected this to work so well, but it has, and it still blows my mind. Seeing how people have used this thread to share glimpses of their life and how people have connected with others honestly makes me so happy. I posted this thread really late last night before going to bed, then woke up and was floored by the response. The internet can still be beautiful, and it's absolutely made my day.
At this point we are at over 600 comments, so I guess it'll be down to luck whether this response here will still manage to bubble up... but that's a very good problem to have I think :) I also wish I could respond to everyone who took the time to comment and show my appreciation directly, but I think I'd need a transformer-model clone of myself if I wanted to achieve that in any reasonable span of time ;)
Anyway, I'm happy if I could improve your day a bit with this. As someone in the comments here rightfully pointed out, a post like this can only work once in a blue moon, and I'm glad that this apparently was the right time for it.
So long! <3
I’ve the privilege to invest a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing my life professionally. In the end, the best I could think of was to be an enabler for others - which for me meant ‘to give them time’. I realised that I also needed to use my expertise to try and give this purpose a better chance of success. I have a PhD in static analysis and programming languages and got experience with writing code analysers.
So I’m on this quest to combine these two core ‘ideas’ - use static analysis to help developers save time and hope that they can improve their life with that time.
I managed to start a company around this mission and build a product focused on reducing the time on pull requests. it’s been a very hard journey so far and feels like I’m just getting started still. It makes me sad and sometimes lonely to see that we are ever more connected but that many times it feels that no one really cares. In my early days of using the internet it was much easier to make meaningful connections.
I’m sure this is all old school to any home brewers. But it’s all new to me. Now to build it all…
Software engineering is my job, but I'm 41 years old now, and it isn't as fun as it used to be.
I became a pilot 1.5 years ago, and now I'm selling my first airplane and buying a larger one.
I've also done some woodworking projects recently. What a pleasant way to do something useful for my family.
I recently found out my bone density isn’t great. Never broke a bone in my life but the doctor advises to start an activity that impacts bones.
I’m not a sports person but last Thursday I went to a boulder gym. I was already coming up with excuses not to go, but decided to hop in the car and just do it, which felt like quite the power move.
I’ve never been “in shape” so it was though. But it was also challenging and it felt great to finish a route. It felt like something I could grow passionate about.
I’m telling as many people as possible in an effort to create some pressure to keep it up, do the work, exercise, and to get better at it.
Hoping in a few years my bone density has increased just a little bit.
Whilst up in Hawks Nest I had a prehistoric visitor[0] visit our family and hiked a mountain[1].
[0] https://twitter.com/schappi/status/1588984902048894976?s=46&...
[1] https://twitter.com/schappi/status/1588985786481139713?s=46&...
Thank you, stranger-yet-not-stranger!
I made a discovery today. I
found a computer. Wait a
second, this is
cool. It does what I want it
to. If it makes a mistake,
it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it
doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like
teaching and shouldn't be here..
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day
incompetencies is sought...
a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I remember sending/getting my first emails back in the early 1990s. I had an Amiga 2000 and I was learning C at the time. I would download libs, demos, and shareware from bulletin boards and University FTP servers over 14.4K dialup. y-modem-g protocol for the win, baby! It was great. Thanks for a reminder of the good ol' days.
The pandemic lockdown (and resulting ability to work from home) gave me the impetus I needed to finally make progress on a real-time streaming data processing system I've been mulling over since 2014. It's the opposite of cloud and/or virtualization; I call it "physicalization" because I dedicate nearly every core of a dedicated multicore server I built myself to specific purposes in a pipeline that handles incoming data streams. I'm learning about using shared memory for IPC, SIMD processing, advanced data analytics, and machine learning. From scratch!
This weekend it finally started to feel warm, and I'm ready for summer.
I ran a software development agency for 8 years, sold it at the start of the pandemic, and been travelling with my wife in an RV around Australia thinking about what's next.
One of the issues we faced in our business was around centralising project requirements, and ensuring both our clients and our team could refer to a source of truth. I spent years thinking documentation was bad, but slowly started to realise in an agency setting, when you're working on possibly many a few long-term projects - it's impossible to keep it all in your head.
So my wife and I started building Userdoc (https://userdoc.fyi), and over the last few months have been doing a lot of customer interviews and and demos, along with finalising the product.
This weekend we've finished the last couple of items on our todo list, and rolling it out to our initial users very soon.
Anyways, I picked Next.js and am really liking it so far. It has the right mix of front and backend that is feeling really productive. Server side rendered that gracefully translates into something that can easily be updated client side.
I've got a test site set up pretty quickly, the frontend with react being one way data bound is a super simple data model to understand. TSX gives static typing with html templates which I love. Especially being able to use html in javascript. Components in react are simple to create easy to refactor code into. I've used MUI for controls and my site looks pretty good.
Testing was easy to setup for both the front and back end with jest. I can attach the debugger simultaneously to both the back and frontend code with the same instance of VS Code which is a neat trick. I can share the same TypeScript DTOs with server and client side code super easy. React Query and Axios work great communicating with the server. The hot reloading on save is super nice, I can make a change to front or backend and my site automatically updates while maintaining state.
It is a bit of a house of cards with so many different packages mashed together the chance is high at least one of them is going to be obsoleted. I do like frameworks that are more kitchen sink, that I can rely on for many many years. Part of reason for choosing Next/react is that it seems to be the most active. I really envy code bases in languages that never die - C, SQL, .Net, etc.. I'm definitely one of those people fatigued by the constant churn in our industry and I just want something I can be productive in, build a nice big app on, and won't get the rug pulled out from under me.
Anyways for now I feel like I found it - hopefully it has some good life ahead of it before the next big thing!
Hmm. Last week I got "on the air" for the first time in years. Operating on 20 meters with a well designed but temporary home brew wire antenna. I made contact with people from Italy, the UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Japan in a period of two hours. It went very well.
Right now I'm designing a permanent, high performance antenna system, planning it out and lining up the materials. It's not easy. There are many factors involved; the compromises of engineering. My hat is off to anyone that ever manages to build a low cost, large antenna that can survive the elements and perform well.
Over time, and due to some setbacks in the early part of my career, I lost this passion of mine somewhere while playing catchup with the rest. Things are now becoming more stable on the career side. And I want to channel that inner curious person in me again - who wants to see the world, explore places, learn about different cultures, societies, languages etc. - and share that with people.
I grew up in an environment where travel is regarded as an extreme luxury: my parents have never been abroad. I, on the other hand, truly feel happy when I am in a very different environment - observing, learning, immersing myself in a different place and culture.
Apart from English and Hindi, I self-learned reading/writing Urdu, I can speak fluent Russian, and German/Polish/Ukrainian on a basic level.
In the last 2 years, I did the Trans-Siberian journey across Russia and recently visited South-East Asia. I am in India currently and plan to move to Germany in Q1 2023 and start making YouTube videos. Being based out of Europe should make my traveling abroad easier.
While there're gazillions of YouTube channels in travel/living abroad segment already, I don't want to chase after the fame of a "YouTuber" Nonetheless, I find that videos/photos accompanies by commentary are better ways to share your journey than a blog only.
What is stopping me is that I get into analysis-paralysis a lot and feel shy about sharing my vlogs - I want it look perfect and capture everything but end up sharing barely anything.
I am gradually working on it by being more intentional - making Instagram stories and sharing videos with commentary on my family groups on WhatsApp. I very much hope that I'm able to Germany by Spring and look forward to tips/suggestions on YouTube vlogging, storywriting, travel and just support in general.
Anyway, today I woke up with a small-ish idea on my mind and have been doing some research around it the whole day, it has a new nice spark to it and I feel again refreshed and happy to be working again on something I care a lot. It has to do with building the cheapest possible standalone sensors with sat. comms (I just heard about swarm.space yesterday, here), the idea is to find a way for it to be self-sufficient wrt energy (solar+battery, but how much can one lower the price). I'm not entirely sure if it will work or not but prototyping it will cost me ~$2,000 which is a fair price to pay for 2-3 months of entertainment.
Also, I wish there was something like HN in the physical world, as I enjoy this site a lot and I figure it would be super nice to meet the people here IRL.
Every dollar that was spent would be published publically. All source code would be made free and permissive, open source. Users would always own their own data and could frictionlessly share with each other.
There would be no advertisements. All analytics would require explicit opt in and be visible to the general public.
The app would be localized to all languages, using heuristics and machine learning to perform the bulk of the translations, with human verification.
The app would be an attention focuser, calendar, general search, peer-to-peer connecting, encrypted, public monstrosity. It would be subtle and discrete, running just out of reach of direct human interaction.
u0.vc
During part of the process I realized that I wanted to get feedback on my raw practice sessions - think 30 minutes warming up with C major scales, followed by an hour working on one line of a piece - so I started streaming on Twitch and posting incremental progress videos to YouTube and TikTok (@jcpractices everywhere). That's been an incredible experiment - the "hobbyist classical music practice streamer" space is a niche^5, but my small growing community is so encouraging to keep going.
According to my new teacher (who also streams!), I'm playing at the senior recital level at an average university, or at the 1st year level of a student at conservatory. It feels like such a huge accomplishment as someone who started in the evenings after work at 25. I'll never be a "great player" or make meaningful money from it, but it's one of those hobbies that I plan to pursue for the rest of my life for the sheer enjoyment. I'm looking forward to seeing how far I can get.
Actually, I'm passionate about Lisp dialects, I always been fascinated by languages, when I was a kid, I used to try to learn new languages (Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, ...).
When I was 15, I found out I had a leukemia, a severe form of blood cancer, I had so much free time that I decided to learn programming languages. It was really like a revival, the idea that you can express every ideas into code was mind blowing and a cure for me. I really have a special relationship with programming languages.
Now that I finished my studies at 42 school in Paris and that I have more free times, I can concentrate on what I dreamed to do.
One day, I read the Unicorn Project by Gene Kim and discovered Clojure, which is a dialect of Lisp. I read a lot on the subject, the history of this dialect, the idioms, the functional thinking behind it.
It was mind blowing, the idea that you can express pretty much everything with a little set of atoms ... wow !
So when I find threads on Lisp on HackerNews, I'm always reading it!
Also, I dream about make my own toy programming language, probably a Lisp dialect that will compile to Python bytecode, something like Hy, just to practice.
I take all the advice in my adventure with Lisp !
I'm also passionate about computer science history, last year, I had saved enough money to go to Silicon Valley. For me, it was like a pilgrimage, I visited some historical places, Stanford, the HP house, Palo Alto, Fairchild Semiconductor last place, and of course the Computer History Museum, It was the first time I passed around 6 hours reading every panels.
I'm really thankful to the author of this thread as it was helpful for me to found a place where I can finally express those ideas I had in my mind.
The element of human interaction that you're missing was lost when social media gave up on archiving threads the way forums did, and where followup replies to the thread bumped it to the top of the index.
So at the moment I'm passionate about fixing my daily routine to finally get enough sleep, and get to work early, leave early, and hopefully have energy to do things in the evening.
I've changed all my clocks back one hour so that psychologically it's easier to stomach. I have a light set on a timer to turn on in the morning, and strict bed time.
I can work flexible hours, but somehow showing up at 9:30 I always felt like I was "late" and felt rushed, and then having to keep working until 17:30 felt hard too. Doing the exact same hours but arriving 6:30 to 7:00 means I now feel like I'm ahead of the game each day, and I get to leave early, and there's still daylight when I leave work which is a huge motivator.
Right now on colognes. Kinda just hit me out of nowhere. Learning a ton about different notes, how they change over time, etc. I must have bought 25 in the past couple months. So, I guess that's my current passion.
I write short stories in Turkish. I wanted to become a skilled writer ever since I can remember. So I started to keep a dairy. I have been writing since -give or take- two years, nearly every day. I also post some short stories of mine, when I have some.
Best part of it is when go back in time and actually like some of things you have written a long time ago. It is common for me to dislike my own writing so that rare feeling gives me a lot of strength to continue.
Hope this gives some of you out there some inspiration and I appreciate any advice/ideas you might have!
I used to be passionate about wave surfing. That was all that I could think of. Now, I have not been in the water since my first kid was born six years ago. I need to change that. I need to go surfing again.
Oh. And hello from Sweden, by the way. I’m very much a real person. I am one of those people you met in the early days of Quake, when you thought “there is a real person behind everyone of those!”
This process has taught me a lot about myself and about life - mindset, discipline, ambition, maintaining a good attitude, avoiding burnout (physical and mental), exercise physiology, how to coach and be coachable, be a supportive teammate, and how to sustainably pursue a ~10-year goal. I do think this journey comes at a time and energy cost to pursue tech things (side projects, new langs/tools/frameworks) but at the same time, I think the lessons from pursuing anything really ambitious cross-pollinates to other areas including career.
Would be interested to hear of any other stories of people pursuing other hobbies at a somewhat high level while simultaneously pursuing career ambitions! Thanks for the post.
Quite a knotty problem! Most of my authors hate math, and they all invariably love putting as many choices at the end of a chapter as the system will allow, so if you let them, you'll pretty quickly get to "heat death of the universe" estimates on when the story will be completed. So I have to code in some controls that project how big the stories will be, given what has been written so far. Then introduce some automated controls that communicate things like, "No, Moderator X, you cannot ask for three choices at the end of every chapter anymore, because you already want a desired thread length of 13 and your authors are averaging more than 1100 words per chapter. Only single-choice chapters are allowed for the time being. Merge some threads, that will help. Tell your authors to write shorter chapters."
Anyway, I'm writing those controls now. And that doesn't even get into the shape of graphs - how some can have more choices (edges) early in the story (graph), leading to shorter path (thread) lengths, and how so can have more choices later in the graph... and all of this affects the projection of how big the story will end up being, given a probable path length.
Oh and I also had to figure out how to solve for r in the geometric sum formula, which you can't do, so I got to write an approximation algorithm to find it.
Anyway, it's pretty fun. Exponential math can be addictive. It's similar math to projecting covid or the money in your retirement accounts, except more fun and less depressing. Plus, my authors are good, funny writers, and I think this will make the stories better with good plot and good conclusions, as opposed to soap operas that meander along forever. One of the stories is almost done, which means I'm also playing with markdown export, LaTeX, Pandoc, and KDP to get actual printed books.
It's all just for stupid fun, no sane hope of commercialization, just books for our own bookshelves. We've also been surveying our friends to see if we can find more authors.
One of my favorite hobbies is reverse engineering and modding video games, old and new. Zachtronics recently released a bundle of solitaire games collected from all of the wonderful games they released over the last couple years. I built a program that injects code into the game, reads the game's memory to find the board state, and passes that into an automated solver. I also figured out various ways to trick the game into thinking that the board has been solved.
Reverse engineering games is incredibly fun, and you can learn a lot as well!
Find my contact in my profile and ping me if you're interested in seeing it before launch.
Perhaps its philosophy or some sort of self-authoring programme that helps with inaction, tough situations and
The cause is mostly because I felt stuck for too long without not knowing what to do next. I could have gone on the script of changing jobs, cities etc. but it felt like escapism instead. It takes very deep introspection and a lot of writing to come up with reasons and feelings that help that understanding and I am still in the process, however thoroughly enjoying it!
I believe it is one of the most fundamental and important "meta-skills" these days.
Anyways. I'm currently interested in healthcare, specifically medicine. I think that it would be satisfying to treat patients and potentially save their life, and then to realize that the doctor and patient have probably never had contact before, and might never have contact again in the future. Just one stranger caring for another.
I'm not completely set on it, but there's many paths to follow at this point. I'm currently a SWE, and just feel that I want something more. To help people. To make their lives better.
Currently, I'm passionate about nailing pinch harmonics on the guitar. I've been struggling to get the right sound but I'm looking forward to the day I can do that so that I can cover so many amazing songs that use it!
Also, spending some time learning about docker extensions and thinking of some ideas of what kind of extension I can make :)
I’m here for the fall working on flight software for literal internet satellites and having the time of my life. Hope you’re enjoying life as much as I am!
I am interested in large numbers of requests per second for highly performant systems.
I wrote a parallel imaginary assembly interpreter which can send integers and code jumps between threads. This is backed by an actor system that I wrote and integrated with the interpreter that can communicate between threads. The actor system can handle between 19-100 million requests per second depending on variation. The interpreter can handle 674,552 requests per second with method sending and 1703141 without. Some variations generate messages upfront, others in parallel and others as the program works.
I am working on a multithreaded language. I want to avoid data races similar to Rust.
If you are interested in parallelism and programming language design then send me an email. Maybe we can join Multiprocess community on Discord ran by eatonphil. That server has advanced groups for operating system development, programming languages and database internals.
Things I am thinking of lately:
- automatic parallelization of code
- python GIL and threading. I need a method of sending complicated objects between interpreters that doesn't involve marshalling. I think I need to write an custom block allocator.
I also journal my computer software ideas in the open on GitHub
I appreciate this gesture, and also feel nostalgic for the primordial internet. I try to hold on to what felt magical about it to me in the early days.
One of the remaining things left in my life that I feel passionate about is technology and programming. I've had a difficult time dealing with depression and that has cost me my career, but the one thing that keeps me going is learning new stuff and working toward mastery of my craft.
I hope you have a great day, as well :)
I have 2 singles out now that 2 or 3 actual people listen to occasionally, I think.
I’ve been spamming social media trying to find 2 or 3 more people on the planet that might enjoy it.
Social media is an insane place. All the major sites are overflowing with scammers and scumbags. I could only stay on TikTok for 5 minutes before I had to delete it and question the future of humanity.
Anyhoo, I love the process of creating music and am working with amazing professional musicians this time around. All online, which is wild.
Besides the daily trauma of visiting social media dystopia, I’ve found a few really valuable sites that have been immensely helpful, for relatively low cost.
I’m going to get back into blogging and am going to try to document as much of this insane journey to nowhere as I can remember.
I also have a day job in tech.
Thank you for posting! HN feels like the last bastion of humanity left in a burning hellscape of a once glorious world that had such potential.
Eventually our position will be overrun, but don’t fret, the Phoenix will rise again and again. The web is dead, long live the web!
I found, a while back, that things like Lightsaber Fencing, Megagames (board games with 60+ people), dodgeball, Historical Fencing, Ultimate Frisbee, Apenkooi (tag, dodgball, minigames in the Netherlands), etc - I found that those exist. And I finally feel great doing sports - it's great to explore around a bit, do something unusual for once.
The issue is - communities are small, barely known. And it's a wee bit tricky to manage a club as it is, even without doing marketing and outreach.
So I've taken up a project to try and help out. Bundle all the unusuals into one platform, help with club management, help with being seen. In a way, perhaps I can take all of these small activities and form "one big sport" that can grow faster as a result.
Anyway, humble beginnings, but here's the site: https://nogym.co/
We’ve got some beautiful weather here today (Sunday)! I just went for a surf with my beautiful wife while the grandparents walked our 6 month old around the beach.
I wish the world was a peaceful as our time in the water.
Live music jam sessions is currently how I'm creating this in my life. I've found a group of dedicated amateur musicians, we get together and perform for each other. It's a lot of fun. :-D
I've also been playing around with generative art, with mixed results. I find that I can implement some algorithms (e.g. flow fields) but then I run out of ideas for what to do next. I'm inspired by Tyler Hobbs' writings on the topic so I've been trying to recreate some of his pieces to see what I can learn.
I don't know why, as it seems to be an area already hugely dense in expertise. There are numerous famous designers, and designs, and then there's clock history, old clocks, restoration, etc, with many hugely knowledgeable 'greybeards', and then there are the mechanisms either mechanical or electronic, again with incredibly experienced and talented people involved. And then the market is, not exactly some newly opened frontier where anyone can make a fortune. It seems there are a zillion designs, each with a production run of maybe 1000, except for a few 'classics'.
Into all this, for some reason I, an enthusiast, but a complete novice, and not even a designer, believe I might have something to offer, and have come up with a bunch of clock designs both analog and electonic, actually multiple ranges of clocks each based on a concept, an amazing logo which is more a discovery than a creation, and am slowly making progress toward getting things made, etc.
I have some unique insights that I wanted to put into practice. The past month has been the most intellectually stimulating, challenging, and rewarding period my life. Some interesting utility has already appeared. I won’t discuss the details but I will say it does not involve statistical learning.
And don’t worry, I’ve read Bostrom :)
There’s a wonderful app called Drambo which lets you create incredible music using both its own built in modules, and plugins from other developers, but it’s lacking (by choice) a “timeline”, where you can record/draw how the parameters of each sound change over time throughout the song - instead you have to control this live.
I’m into quite hypnotic/evolving electronic music and performing it live can be a bit challenging (e.g. if you make a mistake, you have to start over), and I’d love to be able to make music like this without using my laptop, so after evaluating all the software out there which can “sequence” like this and finding none of it meets my needs, I decided to build it myself as a plugin which I can integrate into Drambo.
Usually when I have these ideas for software I don’t get too far with them, but this one is actually already nearly at a point where it‘s usable, which is exciting! To keep things technically interesting, I’ve built it with a combination of C++ (with the JUCE framework) for the audio, and Flutter for the UI, which works really well in terms of fast iteration.
I’ll probably release it free/OSS when it’s ready as I don’t think there’s much money in this kind of software and it’s just built out of passion… it’s currently the thing I end up thinking about when I fall asleep etc. haha. It’s super satisfying to have got this far with a side project.
Outside of that, I was between jobs last week and spent it going on day trips from London and getting reacquainted with photography. My cameras had been gathering dust in favour of my phone, but I’d forgotten what a “zen” experience properly taking photographs can be. I had a wonderful day on Friday in a forest taking photographs of mushrooms for hours - my technique needs work but just the process of doing it was so relaxing. So I’m going to try to get back into travelling to places and doing more photography in future, it gives a nice focus to a trip.
There's an old site, PeakBagger.com that is already the de facto resource for summit lists, so I looked to see if they had an API - they do, it's a 7132 meter summit in Nepal. https://www.peakbagger.com/peak.aspx?pid=10613
It's fun. I revisit this project every few years, and experiment with different tools. Currently balancing Rails and React, deploying to fly.io. It's a very small hobby project.
In the early days I spent quite some time learning POVRay and making 3D stuff. It was mind blowing, back then. Recently I decided to finally learn Blender properly and it still blows my mind how far we've come.
The past was good, the present is better and I'm excited to see what the future will bring.
For the past year or so I’ve been writing a book of fables. I originally began the effort inspired by the book The Little Prince. Over time, I’ve begun reading book after book of fables. I love finding different ones—from the classics like Aesop to Buddhist koans, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Arabian fables.
The format is just so fun and I think the philosophical lessons can be really powerful. I think of it as different parts of different societies trying to gift us with wisdom…all we have to do is open a little book and give it a look!
That said, many of the books I’m reading are old and out of print, so alongside writing my own I want to share the best fables I find. I have a regular newsletter where I write about creativity, drawing, writing… and once I’m done the book I want to share fables through it.
I've quite enjoyed reading the other responses here - this hit at a great time for me, between the two 1AMs Eastern, when all is quiet and dark outside and I work by lamplight, feeling a bit of that electric connection to everyone here.
I paired it with a 6kw hybrid inverter/charger that I can later add solar panels to and now have a system that should outperform a Tesla Powerwall in both longevity and capacity. My final cost is around $4k including the hybrid inverter and from what I can tell, the comparable Tesla offering costs around $13k.
I have it setup now to do peak power arbitrage so the batteries charge at night during off-peak ($0.20/kwh) and then the batteries run the whole house from 4pm - 9pm when the rate is $0.54/kwh. This saves around $100 a month on our electric bill so it should pay for itself in 3-4 years while also providing backup power in case of outages.
Inter-city Transit is currently not solved: trains suck, cars suck, metros suck. If you combine them in the right way, you are left with the best of each of them: individual pods managed by an automated central planning system. Small enough to fit in sewers inside the city, elevated outside, dynamically forming trains zipping at 100-200kmh inside the city and going exactly where you want them. Because you don't need tbms, the cost of a whole network is probably on part with a metro system, while having similar capacity and being much faster. Optionally you can have dual-mode pods that "downgrade" to normal cars using normal roads while your guideway network is not fully developed. Everyone seems to have given up on PRT, but I don't see where is the catch. If you do, please tell me.
On my day-to-day I apply deep learning to trading to raise money to do an AI-research lab (been going really well so far). This PRT-thing is an idea I'm obsessed about but it doesn't fit anywhere in my trading+research plans (I call it a mistress project). Anyway If you see the flaw in such a PRT idea please let me know, and I'll be able to discard it and be less distracted in my main AI research.
Currently studying for a chemistry and US history test on Monday. Also have an essay and Spanish test on Tuesday so it's going to be tough this weekend.
Wishing the internet a great day!
Created using hours of their archival footage, it’s a story driven by a singular shared passion, amazingly found by two people born only 20km apart.
As I hate heights and know nothing about roofing, so I'm going to have to get a professional in to fix it. This is going to really hurt financially.
Not something I'd bother whinging about here normally but this seems like the place to post it. HN is what's left of the web, HN is home.
I think I'm passionate about making music that I like (the best I can produce with a single MIDI instrument haha) and building (coding) stuff that could help me and others with an overlap in interests.
I've been working mostly on a project (for the past few months). I open-sourced it today, psyched for its future. https://github.com/devclad-inc/devclad
Have a great day!
I'm finally at a place where I can make tacos much better than what I would get here and even back in California. I'm currently working on burritos as the next project.
Lately, I have been giving in more time to my exploratory side. I am reading books on philosophy and religion. If you want book recommendations, I would suggest books of Herman Hesse. Also, after being raised in a rational and atheistic surrounding, I have realized that ancient philosophers and sages philosophized more 'higher questions' about life, it's meaning, death and what comes after, etc than I thought. They passed on their knowledge to the next generations through religious texts. If you want suggestions on religious books, I would suggest starting with the Bhagavad Geeta.
Because of this I decided to start tracking the prices of Disney World hotels, tickets and flights. I wanted to see how the prices rise with inflation and how they differ at different times of the year.
So I built a website which scrapes prices from the Disney websites (and Google Flights): https://mousetrack.co.uk.
There is already a lot of functionality there, including a Google Flights-like search as well as min/max prices of each hotel plus graphs showing how prices change. Both have helped me find some interesting deals and hacks to get low hotel prices, for example it's possible to save many thousands by creating separate hotel bookings (the disadvantage is that you will need to move rooms, but for some that might be a perk, though I don't know yet how Disney will take this).
I want create a digital clone of myself. Last month, I scanned decades of journals and recorded music. Next up: organize a personal corpora and apply some ML. Hopefully, the clone will be more interesting than the original.
This is inspired by a conversation I had with Rudy Rucker, who suggested a "headstone". More recently, I read a Wired article where someone used "pullstring" to create an interactive version of his Father, who passed [1]. And then there is Margareta Magnussen's concept of saving your loved ones the chore of slogging through your clutter [2].
I think that I have way too much digital content. Am not famous, so who cares? And yet, my life might make a good toy: worth a few minutes of entertainment. Pull string, indeed.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-fa... immortality/
[2] https://www.thespruce.com/swedish-death-cleaning-4801461
This morning I wrote a post for the company blog about the work we're doing on a project that was Kickstarted in 2013 but never fulfilled (SGG closed its doors in 2019, but we resurrected it a few weeks ago), and another related project.
I'm determined to fulfill that Kickstarter, even if it ends up being a decade late.
been thinking about 'refill stations' a lot lately (avoid using single-use plastics / materials) - based on the idea that actual recycling in america is not really a thing.
not so passionate about it - just give it 30 min of thought a day, then move onto the next thing.
but now thinking, maybe other countries actually do do recyling, so maybe it's just a matter of doing more education / legislation activism?
Mostly visual art in the "fine art" and "Art World" sense, but also any and all creativity that channels the human spirit to create things (even just ideas) that never existed before in the world.
Yesterday I organized a group of 23 people to see a hotel art fair named Hotel Art Fair[0]. Some were art nerds like me, some rarely look at pictures with intent. The day before, I listened to a musician I like talk about the need to give to your creativity.[1]
Knowing that most people never engage with the world of visual arts, I wish to suggest that if you happened to read this comment, please consider taking a moment to go look at art. Online, or offline if you can. Any style, any medium. Artsy (no affiliation) is a decent starting point and most of the art there doesn't require any special knowledge to appreciate.[2]
The controversial German art-shaman Joseph Beuys[3] said Jeder Mensch ein Künstler, every human is an artist, and I agree. Find your creativity, it's out there looking for you!
[1]: https://youtu.be/SzKFyW9xRnQ
[2]: https://www.artsy.net/collection/trove-editors-picks
[3]: https://www.artnews.com/feature/joseph-beuys-who-is-he-why-i...
These last few years have been such a strange time for me. I feel very passionate about learning and experiencing new things but at the same time I find myself feeling not too passionate about anything. I typically find something that grabs my interest, holds it for anywhere from a few days to a few months where it sucks me in and I learn everything about it. Then one day I no longer find myself interested in it and I’m on to the next thing. Most recently I’d say photogrammetry, and smoking meat have been the two things that have grabbed my attention though I’ve kind of moved on from the photogrammetry at this point.
I’m currently looking for work but I’ve been trying to force myself to find something I’m passionate about as I’ve jumped from job to job just taking what comes along until I found myself too unhappy to continue doing it. I took a lot of programming in high school before joining the military as a linguist as I never did well in school despite loving to learn. Eventually as time went on I found out I was bipolar and evidently you can’t be in the military if you’re bipolar. Since then I’ve been trying to get a grasp on the whole bipolar thing and just kind of floated along from job to job (mainly in sales as it’s something I’ve always had a background in) and have just kind of found myself existing as life passes me by. I figure that maybe something will stick one of these days and I’ll finally figure it all out. If not, I guess I’ll just keep finding new passions.
What are you passionate about OP?
Edit: I guess I probably should’ve added in gaming as something I’m passionate about as it’s not something I always do but it’s one of the few things (along with reading) that I’ve never lost interest for though I do occasionally wonder if I would’ve been better off had I never discovered it.
I'm passionate about data and am excited about what's happening in the space with DBT, DuckDB and Apache Iceberg! I contribute to [PRQL](prq-lang.org) to make working with data even easier wherever SQL is spoken. I would love to make this my full-time gig and am keen to chat to co-founders, VCs or existing startups. snth@github
I am posting this from NixOS. I am so passionate about it I became a NixOS maintainer, working on packages that bypass Internet censorship so they are available from nixpkgs.
The killer features for me are rollbacks, insulated packages, declarative configuration. I will most likely never worry about breaking my system and being greeted with a black screen with a blinking cursor again.
Honestly, I'm passionate about all those fun little niche coding projects I have written in my notebook and want to work on. But I don't really have the time to develop my beginner-skills to the extent I would like to, for me being able to build them.
If anyone is in a situation where he has uniquely more than average free time. Please use this time to develop a skill, you'll be grateful for it, I can guarantee.
Since then, I’ve been getting so excited about people just writing their own solutions for things that might already be doable on existing platforms. Like there are plenty of sophisticated, full-featured blog platforms out there, but I love seeing somebody write and host their own because they can and want to.
I’m excited by people writing their own stuff, and the possibility to do so myself as well. Reinventing the wheel can probably go too far in a professional context, but if it’s your free time and something you want to make and learn about and curate to your own specifications and the simplicity of your individual situation, that’s awesome.
Be well, stranger!
I am trying to sort this out right now. I am 71 and still work (remotely) very much part time as an advisor to a South Korean AI company. I am at the point where I don't think that I am helping them much anymore and for the last week I have been thinking hard about what to do. I also feel that I am now too old to do professional software development; I would rather just work on small personal open source projects.
I did just start a book project, and I reverted to using TeX/LaTex (I have been using Markdown on Leanpub.com for the last decade for writing). I love TeX because it allows me to write different editions of a book easily for different programming languages, nicely factoring out non-programming background material.
I have also fetched my old train set from the attic and I am considering starting to fly again: both remote control model airplanes and flying lessons (I too about 10 lessons 25 years ago).
I just have finished playing A Plague Tale: Requiem[1] a few days ago, and I spent the last two days with this strange feeling of sadness, almost grieving. It is such a masterpiece of emotions, the story of the bond of a sister and brother who went through hell to save the boy.
I remember the first game had the same effect when I played it the first time. For days I felt the with a mix of sadness and happiness. The developers have been successful creating such a strong bond to the characters that I felt I am practically there next to them, experiencing the pain and happy moments alike.
I really suggest everyone who has the smallest intention to play games to experience these two masterpieces[2][3]. (You definitely need to play the first game to be able to experience the second to its fullest.)
Since we are on HN, one technical detail that impress me so much the number of unique animations they created to give life to the word around us and to show the bond between the two of them. Like how Amicia waits for Hugo to get down from the ladder every time or how Amicia picks Hugo up multiple times during the storyline to carry him.
Thanks for letting me share this, I hope all of you have a nice day!
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoEwC2TxiMA [2]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/752590/A_Plague_Tale_Inno... [3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1182900/A_Plague_Tale_Req...
I'm tinkering with my homemade Raspberry pi powered NFC Sonos jukebox. Uploaded code, rough design instructions, and a demo video here for anyone else to build: https://github.com/zacharycohn/jukebox
Much like literature and art, quality cinema gradually makes you a better person, and has a profound effect on acquiring good taste, and having a love affair with beauty - you see something, and you immediately know if it's special.
If you don't know where to start, open Wikipedia pages for past film festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, etc.), and e.g. select randomly a decade, then a year, then a film from one of the winning positions. In time, you will develop your own taste and opinion about the filmmakers, and the actors, and the countries of origin, and the themes, and the genres, etc.
French, Italian, Swedish, Taiwanese, Japanese, American, or so many other places - there are great filmmakers nearly everywhere around the world, and you can enjoy it.
This field is not something I've even thought about before, but it's been a very interesting challenge. Part of my job is to just straight up invent new technology, which is something I've always secretly dreamed of.
I'm dreaming up ways to generate physical textures on the fly and present it to your finger in a way that convinces your brain it's real. How fucking cool is that??
I am very passionate about journaling/collecting one’s thoughts. In a typical HN fashion, I decided to make a tool that scratches my itch [1].
Having spent majority of my life with portable computers around, I feel we as humans are losing the joy of writing one’s thoughts out. Sometimes the best thing is to write your thought and establish this one way temporal connection to your future self. This is so beautiful because it crosses the barriers of time, culture and location. An alien human descendant billions of years in future might be able to connect with me by reading my thoughts. Writing is an intellectual marvel that has no other equivalent
Martial arts a big passion of mine,currently I'm trying to internalise a weekend of training (the new things you learn slip away so fast) and thinking about the next step on my M.A journey.
I finished a coaching certification program recently and I've come to realize that this personal development work is basically a form of "self-coaching". Now I'm passionate about helping other people with their personal development, through teaching self-coaching skills and partnering one-on-one with people who are ready for that kind of thing.
I've managed to keep my passion side project at top of mind for almost 2 years now. Not only is it a desktop environment in the browser, but it's also my attempt to bring back all the nostalgia moments I remembered from my last 20 years on the internet. It's my personal website and I like to think it will be something I am still working on in the year 2050. Getting feedback does indeed give me that feeling of connection.
The Code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS The Site: https://dustinbrett.com/
Great post, thanks for asking!
In a crowded rink, you have to put everything else out of your mind, lest you damage yourself or others. When I've had tough weeks at work, which I've had plenty of this year, rollerskating at a rink running a popular roller disco on a Friday night has provided a clean-room level of buffer between my stressed-out work state-of-mind and my happy-go-lucky-parent weekend state of mind.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but if you need it, and you're yet to find a satisfactory "thing", give it a go. Seriously, you need to have all of your faculties applied to the job at hand, there's no room for the rest of the world, and so it melts away.
However, as Facebook has proven, online connections are quick and fleeting (and largely meaningless).
Good intentions and well wishes are still appreciated though.
It feels so liberating to shoot 10-12 frames and that's usually enough compared to our big memory cards that can swallow hundreds or thousand photos. It forces me to plan more in advance and not iterating between every shutter click.
It's fun that nowadays we have 60 megapixel mirrorless cameras with ML-optimized super AF-systems, dynamic range of 14-15 stops, ability to make moonlight look almost like sunlight (those crazy high ISOs of models like Sony A7sIII etc), but in the same time you can make good photos with some film era 35mm SLR or Medium Format Mamiya or Hasselblad. With a little of practice and bunch of film one can learn to shoot photos without all that automation.
The electronic-less cameras are surprisingly easy to use: select ISO and the look by selecting film and it's ISO rating, measure or guestimate the amount of light, set shutter speed and aperture and then focus. That's it. No need for deep menus and buttons.
Also the chemical development of the film and developing paper photos from the negatives feels more fun than Lightroom + Photoshop workflow. And accidents are more fun.
Failing is more concrete as well. Once I probably shot my best cityscape photos (or so I want believe) but fumbled the development totally, but that's okay. At least I didn't get some mediocre photos I anticipated to be awesome.
Also the film cameras have quite a long history compared to the digital gear as nowadays all the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are mostly the same.
The film cameras have a lot more of variety and different mechnical and usage differences and feel. Compare old MF folders to TLRs or to SLRs or compare Japanese cameras to German or to Swedish cameras and you'll see the differences. I guess the Soviet cameras would be ... interesting ... addition to the comparison as well but I'm trying to avoid them.
I'm finally ditching the Javascript/Typescript ecosystem and giving a Flutter/Dart (client-side) & Swift (server-side using SwiftWASM on Cloudflare Workers / Fastly C@E) stack a try.
I'm doing this experiment with a project I've been working on to build a connections/communities app that has a few tricks up its sleeve to try to solve the problems of online dating (Tinder/Bumble/Hinge).
I'm also experimenting with a project that's a mix between podcasting and replying to other people.
Very interested in alternate/niche takes on social networking (very different from "alt social networks")
A _fantastic_ video. Look at how well all the leads communicate to their follows what to do without any verbal directions. They use their movements to direct the dance. I'm not this good but I saw this recently and I'm feeling inspired.
It started because I wanted to be able to share a diagram on a whiteboard drawing site (whiteboardfox.com, nice service). I thought it would be cool if I could have a bookmarklet that saved the current diagram's URL in a file on my web server and made it available at an easy URL that my friends could bookmark.
I now have just such a thing.
Click a bookmarklet and it hits my server and redirects back to the page I'm seeing. On another browser, I (or a friend) can hit my 'blah.com/mirror' and it shows the same page.
It is quick, clean and lovely. Took about ninety minutes. A perfect Saturday night.
Background... I am originally from Africa. As much as the internet has progressed and penetrated the continent, doing business online is still very limited. One of the major reasons in most countries (other than South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria) is identity. The identity providers that exist today mostly just accept passports and not local IDs. Unfortunately less than 10% of people have passports because they don't need one or it is nearly impossible to get.
So even though my cousins and friends back home have plenty of access to the internet now, their usage is mostly limited just social media and consumerism. They can't sign up for Airbnb, Upwork, banking and all that other good stuff that we can do. It is super frustrating really because they could really be more productive if their was inclusive identity verification.
By inclusive identity i mean verification that accommodates local IDs.
Which brings me to my second concern... disparity of local documents in these countries. Only a few nations have national IDs. Huge chunks of the populations use alternative IDs such as registration cards, provincial IDs etc. Because of this lack of a standard, online identity verification services do not bother integrating each of these.
So i have put in a lot of time to try and find a workaround solution for this that still meets KYC requirements.
Right now, it seems the opportunity lies with the mobile money operators. They already have KYC requirements standardized for all the local IDs because the laws require them to do so for each account. More than that, they already have a wide network of agents to verify these documents. They also have penetration rates of more than 90% in these countries as compared to passports.
I have had discussion with some of their executives and am still brainstorming how to leverage this reality. There are already some options i am considering, nothing solid yet.
But yes, it is taking up all my free time looking into this.
I am even contemplating taking some time off next summer to fully commit to this.
Something has got to change.
I'm currently working on trying to get my first customer. Sales doesn't come naturally to me, so I am trying to figure it out. The great thing is that I have a product that I am really passionate about (I fell into that trap, but I think there's a market) - a cloud-based true random number generator that can replace a quantum RNG.
I also just recently got back from the piano where I played a Bach Partita. I think playing Bach is a bit of a quasi-religious experience for me - I just shared an experience of sublime beauty with 337 years worth of people.
Have a good night or day.
There is so little available for blind people, yes they have books and podcasts and an iPhone, which is endlessly better than 20 years ago. But they have no idea of the shape of a Falcon rocket, or a cow, or the parks around our city.
More than half of my free time goes to creating 3D printed stuff for them.
I grew up in Alberta and my favorite childhood memories are of camping trips in the mountains. I always dreamed of climbing peaks. I never had the opportunity financially to pursue that as my family was poor, and once done university I got a job and raised my own family.
Now that my kids are a little older I have the opportunity to chase that dream before I get too old to do so.
I'm obese and almost 40, and this gives me motivation to transform myself. My goal is to lose weight to be able to take a mountaineering course next August.
My Ph.D. thesis puts this passion to practical use, by developing a scientific application which uses every ooze of performance it can get from a system.
The end result is "You shouldn't be able to compute with this accuracy at this speed. What have you done?", which is extremely satisfying for me.
Also, I'm learning Go in these days.
Yet despite this, I just don't feel like I could do this for next 10 years. There's just something missing - maybe it's challenge, a sense of impact or perhaps passion, can't place it. Somehow, the small-pay startup internship whose job I passed up on, seemed more fun. Everyone seems to have it all figured out with their plans to do MBA, MS etc or continue in the industry and here I am all confused.
So, here I am, trying things .... I guess. I got on the Rust hype by building a terminal application that taught me much. I'm planning to build a homelab to hack around and learn a bit of DevOps and security. I'll be buying a guitar with my first income soon. I've also been enjoying playing football, as I mistakenly missed out on sports in college. Another thing I've recently gotten into is quantitative finance - something I think might be interesting as a career since I also enjoy mathematics, but it seems to be too difficult a career to break in. Anyways, I've got Hull's Options, Trading and Other Derivative and some stochastic calculus books I'm planning to finish this year.
Sorry, it's all messy and over-ambitious but hopefully I'll figure something out :)
A consuming passion of mine the past few years is ethics in digital technology, and an attempt to write a half-decent book on it.
It's been a bewildering deep dive into philosophy, psychology, criminology and law, social sciences, economics and politics. Quite an off-piste mission for a technical person coming from an EE&CS background.
HN is a helpful way for me to connect with current issues, to ask informal research questions and test ideas, and hear intelligent, critical voices that are hard to find anywhere else. Thank you all.
First is trying to move from my third world country, which is pretty involved. There's a lot to prepare financially, culturally, and you basically have to have a job arranged to pull it off. Reading this on HN, you would think about getting a job as a software engineer and then just moving, but as an electronics/firmware engineer, it is hard to both get a remote job and also make that little career jump.
Second is thinking about connecting more with people online, I recently realized I've been on the internet for over 10 years and I haven't really made any friends. I'd say I'm much fonder of the older forum style communities than the more fleeting and instant chat based ones of today, but even when they were the norm I didn't really make friends either, so there's something about my approach that needs work for sure.
A third one is stable diffusion and other current AI developments. I didn't really pay AI much thought, but since stable diffusion came out I've been pretty obsessively watching it as it develops. I even bought a new GPU just to try it out (currently waiting for it to arrive). I find drawing fascinating despite never nurturing my skills very well, so being able to "draw" properly, even if just by conducting a big black box of matrix computation instead of my hands, feels pretty great.
Right now I'm passionate about and proud of a recent invention which is a type of cycloid robot gear with less friction, less parts and simpler manufacturing. High ratio gearing has been a passion area for almost a decade now, and it's a very mature and opaque field, so it's quite difficult to make meaningful contributions. Several prototypes and some dyno testing show I have finally created something of value! Thanks to the efficiency and low noise it's looking like it will be a great fit in the eBike motor gearing space too.
For those interested in further reading, here is the basic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloidal_drive
and here is a more typical industrial robot style implementation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_tcLx9nmoI
and a recent cycloidal type gear used the eBike space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLh5U3Ril94
Mine is not published yet, but I'm looking forward to sharing it with the world. I would love to hear from anyone familiar with the space (it's a pretty lonely niche at the professional level).
As a EdTech teacher and educational experiences creator I am always trying to find new ways to engage students and other teachers with tech learning… and these epic & cute robots have mean a great source of inspiration!
I am currently developing some software tools to interact with robots based on Arduino and ESP boards. And never lost the opportunity to make some nice photos and/or videos of these robots doing something nice to show on social media. :)
A couple weeks ago, I started exploring Pu Erh. I ordered a few different teas from white2tea and got a little gong fu set. So far my favorites have been 2018 "Flapjacks" and and the 2022 "Pretty Girls". I just ordered a few others from Yunnan Sourcing which should be arriving any day. This is after years of only drinking matcha. I still start my day with a good sized matcha ~3-4g which seems to smooth out the effects of the Pu Erh nicely.
Somehow a late-night Amazon shopping session led to me buying an Ocarina. It's been a lot of fun leaning a new instrument, particularly one that's melodic and super-portable. The first one I picked up is a "Night by Noble", which is great for the money (~$35) but only hits its higher notes when played pretty loudly. So, I just ordered a Polygon from STL Ocarina which from what I've read has a mellower high-end that can be played more softly. I make up different melodies when I'm out and about, and then record loops and hooks on my Akai Force in my studio at home.
I'm currently trying to come up with the cheapest, but still safe, design for a Li-Ion battery charger. This is for my work and saving on the component cost translates to decent $$$. It's a kind of a journey back in time for me as I no longer do much of low level hardware design otherwise. I'm happy now that I got it down to about $5 for the PCB, without using any unobtainium parts. It's really hard with the ongoing semiconductor supply chain crisis.
Outside of work, I'm way too much into fishing. Moved to a new coastal city a few years ago and got into it via my work mates. It's mostly rock fishing for me. It's really addictive to me. I have always been fascinated by marine life. I think some deep part of our brain craves the fishing/hunting aspect with the random reward. If we'd be able to get a good fish whenever we wanted, it would not be nearly as addictive. I've had some good successes because I put way too much time and money into this hobby. But, my family loves seafood as well and they support me in this. The trick is to find "liminal time" in between family, work, etc, and get up very early to drive to my fishing spot, get my few hours of fishing, then drive back and work from home. So no one is feeling like I'm stealing too much time.
I am a web developer (former desktop apps developer, game developer and mobile apps developer). I know C, C++, C#, Javascript. I am mainly developing for backend using microservices, .NET, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch.
I am learning Vue for work (I joined a company where I have to do full stack ) - which fits my mental model and I enjoy better than Angular and React.
But I also want to learn another language. I enjoy Nim a lot but I wouldn't invest more time in it because almost no one is using it. I've learned a bit of F# and I enjoy it, but there are no F# jobs.
Python is ok, but I am not sure what to do with Python as a web developer. It isn't the best tool for large web applications and I don't plan to transition to ML, data science or DevOps where Python has most use cases.
Next in line are Go and Rust. Go has more jobs and Rust is beginning to pick up steam. However I don't see how using Go or Rust for web is going to be better than sticking to .NET.
So I am asking what language can help me the most as a web developer. Help me means that there are some jobs, usage is on the rise and the language and the ecosystem has some advantages like performance, speed of development, better code maintenance or whatever.
Music is set to have its GPT-3 / Stable Diffusion moment within a couple years.
I believe in 10 years the venn diagram of music made with computers and music made with neural nets will be a circle, and that now is a great time to jump in.
Would LOVE to swap notes with anyone else here into this. Email in bio.
In a way I'm disappointed that I didn't do this sooner BUT I'm also really happy that I'm learning something new AND it is something so practical to me.
P.s, if you have some great Docker learning resources please pass them along!
Feel that more people should do this. Grow indie web :)
You made me think "what the fuck am I passionate about?" Turns out, I'm passionate about lots of things!
At the moment, I am passionate about
- lawn care
- making a clean cup of coffee in my French Press and AeroPress
- this thing I'm writing that will allow me to set my status for multiple online platforms in one place. I wish I had more time for this :(
- I'm also very fortunate to be writing software for my employer that I really want to ship, so that's been living rent-free inside my head for a while.
- Also passionate about learning more about sales!
I used to be more passionate about cycling but work consuming more of my time and moving to a city that is a literal opposite of being bike friendly did me in. I also bought a new bike over ten years ago that never fit properly, so doing long rides in it would create rashes and hurt my lower back.
That said, I want to buy me a really nice and really properly fitting bike so I can get back on the saddle and accumulate those miles. We're also moving to a more bike-friendly part of town, which I'm looking forward to. I'm thinking of getting an S-Works carbon everything with nice wheels. Expensive, but I can finally afford this.
My little corner of the Internet now contains a streaming music site: Now Wave Radio. I realized I was relying more and more on algorithms and “cold” connections to music and discovery. So reaching back into bands and sounds of some of my ‘80s New Wave favorites, started on a journey of new band discovery and connection via music blogs, Bandcamp, Allmusic, and yes - even iTunes/Music.
Some months, frission experiences, band connections, and even close friend contributions later, we’re having a blast running the station, developing a web presence, exploring app development, discovering music, and making friends. I found sites like Soma FM with a similar mission, met band members while recently visiting a music festival and going back out to local performances and even left my 25+ year corporate world employment to join a local art collective/radio station in my hometown of Seattle to learn about broadcasting technology and IT in a completely different and supportive environment.
I encourage you to find your passion and hobbies and make a place for them. Great things can and will follow!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon
Think a 1960s version of a linking table, all printed out, and all about the 'ideas' in the Western canon.
A randomly selected sample of the categorization looks like:
Chapter 82: Same and Other: Sub Idea 3: The modes of sameness and otherness or diversity: Sub Idea 3a: Essential sameness or difference and accidental sameness or difference:
Book 7: Plato Republic, BK V, 358 360
Book 8: Aristotle Topics, BK 1 CH 5, 144 - 145
etc. for ~1/4th of a page.
Should finish up in ~2035 or so if I can keep pace.
If you ever have to write on nearly any topic, the Syntopicon is absolute pure 100% gold. You can look up just about any idea you've got and find just oodles of references going back to Homer. Its amazing.
I wish we could make a wiki based on the structure of a syntopicon instead of the structure of an encyclopedia. It'd be a lot of effort, but just an amazing undertaking to relate all of the internet via ideas instead of subjects.
And what was really nice for me was this comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344110
Yes, someone, somewhere, enjoyed using it :-)
For several years I've been working as an evenings-and-weekends indie game developer. I love it -- it's such a joyful mix of technical and creative tasks. It's stimulating and challenging and expressive, and makes my heart feel so full when I've finally finished something that another person can play. If I could ever reach a point where I could properly fund it, I could spend every day for the rest of my life making games. I launched my first game in 2018, a challenging puzzle game called Omnicube [0], and am having a blast working on a few new projects now.
On the writing side of things, I've been writing stories since I was a kid in one capacity or another. I think it scratches the same creative itch as game development, just though a different medium. I'm actually in the final stages of publishing my first book -- a memoir about my experiences playing competitive chess [1].
[0] trykon.itch.io/omnicube
[1] mychessmemoir.com
Lately I'm passionate about prototyping tools and mash-up of different tools to facilitate OSINT work.
I have spent the last 8 months putting together a system to DeepL translate Russian and Ukrainian telegram ecosystem back in the open web. (osintukraine.com) it has been a crazy ride to work with existing open source code to produce something that works but now I want to polish it and learn how to create a new front-end from the content and terabytes of war videos I'v been collecting.
I'm not a developer, just a wanna be devops but this project has helped me to consolidate knowledge and keep learning new parts that I'm less confident or comfortable with and this is the way I like to learn, by doing! Hope someone find it useful and maybe join?
I got to use my math skills (estimating when some scheme would make the number reach a certain level. I got to use my research skills (searching the game wiki for schemes to make the number reach a certain level). I got to use my puzzle-solving on some of the minigames. I got to be patient while waiting for schemes to pay off. I got to be persistent when grinding through some minigames to make the number go up. I had something to look forward to whenever I was bored throughout the day.
Thanks to the dev, aniwey, and thanks to the HN poster who started the thread about Universal Paperclips on which I found a reference to Candy Box 2.
1) I really want go pull of a rope mechanic in VR. I cannot forget the experience I had after encountering rope in Last Of Us Part 1. Now I want to replicate it in VR. I have dabbled with Unity but haven't really put time and effort into it 2) Build a mini, local service to cater to local Town/city instead of depending on big tech. Say a restruant uses your resturant ordering system. My analogy is that we set up a small stall in the world of internet, just like there are shops in the real world. You'd go to your trusty mechanic instead of a mega dealership. 3) Self host an kind of service to be used by folks on the internet. Be it a simple hosted test editor or a to do app.
In my prior life--I was a public policy wonk and advocate/lobbyist--I had folks around who challenged and taught me. With quilting, not so much. It's been an interesting couple of years getting beyond "Let's sew and open and Etsy shop". . . It really has been in the past few months that my view has changed quite dramatically.
I'm not a joiner, so not really interested in joining a quilt guild, but have found some folks who, in time, I hope can help me be better and do better creatively.
I recently took some small-craft sailing lessons. The balance and flow of wind in the sail, tension on the sheet, sitting on the thwart, with one hand on the tiller, and gliding over the water with the setting sun turning the sky golden, was an amazing experience.
So now I'm looking to combine the two interests, and have plans to build and sail my own small wooden boat.
While I know how to generate relevant traffic, one of the top challenges that I've been tackling over the last couple of months is monetising the traffic. I've tried selling courses, ebooks, SaaS products through my content but I'm getting unpredictable sales once in a while. It's not been an easy journey, but it's so full-filling when I get a sale through my content. Highest of highs as well as lowest of lows. Right now, I'm just grinding with faith - this will work. 3 articles/week, non-negotiable.
Perhaps one day I will have a revenue-generating blog that surpasses my monthly salary when I was a Head of Marketing :)
Green beans can easily be found on the Internet and applying heat can be done with an inexpensive air popcorn machine. Put the beans in the machine, turn it on, wait for the beans to crack and voila you have roasted coffee.
Obviously with a kitchen appliance not made for that, there is not much control over the heat profile applied to the beans. This is where the interesting part happens: people have been hacking their pop corn machines for decades to better roast coffee, for example:
- Drilling a hole in the machine to put a temperature sensor in contact with the beans.
- Putting a relay on the heating element to control it electronically.
- Using an Arduino/Raspberry Pi to make the machine follow a predefined temperature profile.
Lots of fun ways to turn a machine into something completely different.
What I am pondering, as my passion fires burn low, is the scant tech or evidence of it that slipped past all the human wreckers and natural catastrophes of past ages. The zodiac, the 12-hour clock face, ancient cartographic maps, Codex Oera Linda, pyramids on every continent, submerged pre-historic coastal towns. I dream about the ancient mariners who carried some of that tech to us; their adventures and world would make a fun videogame. Does anything manmade remain preserved under the ice in Antarctica?
Huge, laser and drill-cut stones, some quarried hundreds of miles away, and also man-made (poured?) ultra-hard stones. SO MUCH STONE REMAINS, yet I know almost nothing.
All the achievements of our forebears mostly now wiped away, not even accessible in myth. Understanding my cosmic role today: "to keep it going" as it were and not to be remembered or memorable - although I strive to be - because that's a worthwhile goal. And then Jesus saves and sustains the rest of me so that I do not fall into despair.
Understanding now how close we are to wiping the slate clean again - asking why particularly the political left are suddenly warmongers and legislating poverty by turning the energy spigot off worldwide at a frantic pace. What in hell are tptb racing to get ahead of?? Do they fear something manmade or natural (or other?!)
Regretting how much slavery there is in this fallen world and knowing how much I have thrived as a result of it. Has one whole human life been taken to make mine comfortable? More? Regretting that now, and now selfishly, especially if a crash is looming.
Enough pondering! Gotta make hay while the sun shines.
If anyone is passionate about backcountry skiing let me know! I'm getting ready to split a lot of time in the Tahoe area this winter, and always love hearing about new routes/getting beta.
I am happily working on my startup/side-gig this weekend:
What’s New Zealand like? Imagine if you gave hobbits computers and then travelled 200 years into the future!
If anyone here is in Auckland and would like to geek out sometime hit me up.
Currently renovating my small abode (off-grid solar latest project) as a mental recovery from too many years in tech (and life), and yet my hobby/passion is currently Zig/WASM UI onto tiny-go back-end for some of these Raspberry Pies (plural?) stacked in a corner, since I feel that it captures some of the simplicity we lost along the way from dial-up BBS, and my early days of z80, 68000, C and before the modern chaos that has gradually pushed me away from I.T., and the world in general. I quit all social and news media circus a couple years ago. So HN is pretty much my only 'sense of connection' you mentioned, but what a great find it has been!! I take this opportunity to offer a sincere thank you to everyone here!
Last week , I made 2 posts here got no response .
I attended an offline conference after more than 3+ years yesterday. It was a welcome change after all the online interactions ;)
I loved the "real but currently text based (human) being", made me smile, while I type my answer in this little text box!
I am a software/tech guy, but I've been always super passionate about the future of cities, and have spent too much time thinking and making projects related to how the "city of the future" would and should look like - of course, made in a way that would allow us to be more environmentally friendly. Now it seems a given, but ~30 years ago no one gave a shit, and I was already super interested in the environment.
At some point I founded a company to try to build something along these lines; my efforts failed, the company survived but I left after ~2 years.
Maybe one day I'll stop working on what I'm doing now (VC) and give it another try :)
We already have a business and would like to expand a bit more on electronic side of things like IoT/hardware stuffs.
Love the idea of this post! Miss the good old days of IRC or early Twitter etc.
I guess I'm passionate at the moment about the future, in a world that seems to be bogged down in the past. I'm trying to also figure out what my other passions are and trying to figure out what makes a good life.
There must be something like the steam engine of the internet. Like the Romans, we most likely already know the ingredients of the next industrial revolution, but we don't apply them because we have other means to solve our problems.
My best guess is that a social network could be the missing part. The printing press brought cheap paper for scientists to have space for notes which brought mechanization and thus the need for power. Currently, we go directly for automated thoughts, but we don't have significantly more or different thinking space than the generations before us, just faster mail.
Yes I'm trying to directly compete with emacs for the title.
I love the idea of lisp, hypercard, SmallTalk, Self Referentiality, Tools for Thought, make-your-own-software.
I was inspired by many different ideas in software. Immediate feedback(Bret Victor-Inventing on Principle), Reactivity, meta-programming etc.
If someone made a plugin, you should ... in principle be able to edit it, so you learn by "thinkering". Editability, learnining via example.
All of this is done with HTML. To check it: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook
I guess right now I'm "passionate" about learning Common Lisp. I put it in quotes because there are so many areas of computer science/programming I'm interested in that I'm not sure I'd call it a passion.
Anyways, I spend anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours a day learning CL. It's fun and a completely different than any other language I've worked with before. I work as a programmer so some days I don't have the cognitive load to do much with CL. I try to do it first thing in the morning but sometimes HN and regular news sites grab my limited attention. I really wish I could be hyper focused.
Hope everyone has a great day and, well, life! Stay safe!
(If only I could've spent my attention working on my actual “passion” projects :')
Already grabbed a psx/OG Xbox and massively enjoying replaying stuff as I collect the games, too.
Picked up a GBC/GBA and rebuilt them to use modern OLED screens as well. Enjoying those a lot as I forgot just how dark the original screens are on them (memories abound of using the little streetlight available in dark car-rides home).
Still need to pick up a DS/PSP and eventually a 360 I think. After my 360 got stolen in uni I threw my toys & went PC-only.
I'm passionate about building the best (technology-based) products I can imagine, using all of the tools I've learned in my life so far, to the max, mainly intuition ("gut" over "brain", perhaps) (love making amazing decisions that hold for a really long time!) and imagination. Steve Jobs and Elon are probably the two biggest inspirations, and so are the respective companies they've built.
At the same time I'm also passionate about being kind, being myself as fully as I know, keep growing and enhancing that. I'd love to get the chance to build these things fully into new companies I imagine creating.
I'm also way into "woo-woo" (some might call it, especially on tech-/regular science-focused sites like HN) stuff like channeling. And all kinds of personal expansion-related things that are less "out there" but still quite on the edge, like conscious sexuality as a tool for human growth and blossoming, exploring the meaning and use of emotions, even and especially also in professional & business contexts, etc...
Basically I want to be as fully what I see as a fully human being as I can, and practice and bring that into what I want to accomplish in tech, create environments for others to explore the same, if they wish. Current companies and orgs are boring and outdated in many ways, and I have a desire to build and offer something new, that's much more aligned with who we really are.
I'd also be super eager to connect with folks raising their children in new and better ways. I still believe, as I did before I had kids, that "it takes a village to raise a child". So far I haven't found that village, or (most of) the people who would make up that village. I'd so love to start meeting those! (Kids are <= 10yo, we're living a somewhat nomadic life, between Austria, Germany, Croatia, Canary Islands, ... and I used to have a strong calling to come to California as well, which has been coming back recently to some degree...).
No idea who might read this and resonate, but there it is. Thanks again for posting, made me feel a little connected at least :) I usually only read 99.99% of the time on here, but this got me out of my shell for a few minutes at least :) Very much agree, current internet needs a lot more of this particular vibe that we used to have back in the day, e.g. with actual old-fashioned forums inhabited by basically only those folks who really cared about some topic or idea that then realllly connected with each other!
I've been working on building out a community, and if reading any of this has resonated with you, we have a home here to join if you're longing for that sense of community as well: https://discord.gg/enUkwSZABU
Also passionate about stargazing, but dark skies and good weather are hard to come by where I live. An 8" airline portable scope is in the works.
Other vices include the usual - music of many kinds, books (of the paper kind), good food of all kinds, coffee, tea, beer, and well-made cocktails - especially martinis. Lastly, reading elegant code -- especially low-level code.
I don't have a formal biology background, so there is a lot of things to learn. But I can't sit down on the sidelines without attempting to do something about it. That's what's driving this passion.
If you're in a similar boat, or have experience in building healthcare products/companies, please reach out! I've been wanting to meet likeminded individuals for quite some time.
Another new and exciting thing for me is the Gemini protocol. The simple, low-tech internet. I started porting all my texts/websites to my own capsule at gemini://floppy.p1x.in (server from real 3.5" floppy!)
Right now I'm procrastinating on building a backyard sauna. Each of the plausible next steps has considerable activation energy to get started. I'm thinking about that resistance and what it means.
Another project is trying to connect economics to Shannon’s information theory. Economists talk about information all the time but never quantify it.
Rather than policies that prioritize equal outcomes, I think we should be encouraging every child to explore their full potential. I've begun working on a startup so I can be part of the solution. It's too early to say if our plan will work, but I'm excited to be trying!
So 20+ years later me and my friend I met at college are building two houses next to each other (friendship), we are both immigrants who started at the bottom (adventure), and we try to do some side small project to help people investing (dragon).
Our classes are unfortunately both tanks. We can work a lot, but produce little damage.
We also both have healers in our team (girlfriends/wives), who provide additional support.
We are broke as any other mercenary, but we try our best to find that good loot.
Not a tech guy, just curious. I'm in finance, suggesting ideas to people. Tech has been an escape. It feels so structured somehow.
Reading "Pride and Prejudice" for fun. Just want to connect with people across ages. I'm 36, friends are getting cancer, the image of death has been rendering itself in ever higher resolution.
What I create will perish for sure. I hope my daughter feels like the world is huge and hers to discover.
Peace to you all.
It’s amazing how life can sometimes have other plans for us and take us off course for a while. After an 8 year hiatus from paid programming I’ve started work on re-honing my skills so I can start doing interviews in the new year.
One thing that I’ve been doing away from programming is repairing stuff. From house hold items to my car. There is something satisfying about using your own hands to produce something physical. From reworking an intake manifold on a car, to fixing a dishwasher, solving physical problems can be as satisfying as coding.
With the debatable demise of organic community platforms and the rise of curated social-media recommendation by algorithms it is always nice to facilitate interaction between two vaguely-human entities. :-)
Take care!
Quantitative Finance. I have a math background and relish the chance to explore some applications of probability theory. Most of my readings have been about options pricing since there is a lot of mathematics to explore there
My second recent passion is synthesizer. I got a hardware semi-modular synth last year and I've had a ton of fun patching with real wires, twisting knobs and tinkering with loops. As a bonus, it feels like programming but I'm able to be away from the screen while doing it
I have been feeling kinna the same about the internet for a while now too, there's so much noise on the internet now its hard to tell if you are talking to a real person with a real interest or someone trying to market something. But luckily, there are a few corners of the internet where you can discover new things.
For example, small reddit communities are still a lot like the old internet, you get to have really different perspective on things you care about in smaller communities. If you can ignore the bad, 4chan's /biz /g and /fit are interesting communities to lurk in.
When I was younger, mmorpg's were the best place to meet REALLY interesting people at, but these days there's not enough time to grind and hang out with people and other people my age don't have enough time to grind. Kinna sad though, but MMORPGS were one of the best things about the internet for me, it helped me learn a lot about making friends from all over the world, helped me meet people with really different interests than me. Trading, organizing/planning and archiving things together with a group of people who started off as total strangers and ended up being like family was a really wonderful experience. ESPECIALLY as an introvert this was one of the best ways I met people when I was younger, and some of them still remain my friends to this day. It was actually mmos that got me in to software development.
As for now, I am passionate about blockchains, I don't really care about how much BTC is right now, or what the price is going to be 10 years from now. But I like the promise of decentralized networks. To me, I find being able to put something up on a system and having the guarantee that it would be there many years later without anyone being able to take it down is a pretty powerful freedom. Yes there are people using this ability for bad/evil but its a technology that's here to stay no matter what anyone feels or thinks about it, and so if I can be atleast one of the people who build something that would help someone in a positive way I can go to sleep happy. Thanks to this passion of my I have met and had the pleasure to work with folks who genuinely care about making systems that benefit others.
Wow, this was long, if you are still here thanks for reading!
I have come to a stage in my career where I am more valuable in finding projects for my team, than in delivering projects myself.
So as somewhat of a prerequisite, I need to learn about personal / team branding, relationship building, marketing, and consulting sales.
While this is definitely out of my comfort zone, and I'm still figuring out how to actually be competent at this, I believe it will be a valuable skill to one day start my own company.
PS: If anyone has good resources, do share !
Speaking to young people regularly too is great. They have new ideas, new perspectives and are brimming with enthusiasm. Sure, they have new words, new ways to hang out with their friends, new music and fashion but we're all more the same than different.
That came into my life as a way to spend time away from my computer.
Practicing it has several aspects that caught my attention:
- You get more aware of your body. Every movement matters for consistence (or lack of)
- It is you against your mind
- It is relaxing (for me at least)
- It is physical activity for my sedentary self
- You don't need anyone else to practice it (although having someone can be more fun)
That's being my passion for the past 3 years. It survived COVID. It survived injuries. It's been surviving me still being bad at it :)
It's a never-ending improvement pursuit.
Maybe finding those random strangers to talk about it with is part of the spirit of the internet of old.
Cheers!
This has taught me a lot about new technologies, and although I haven't been able to launch it, it feels like the biggest thing I've worked on.
My current problem is I don't know how to simplify it in order to launch something quicker. I'll be working slowly on it, chipping away at it, line by line.
I'm here for 9 months, normally live in the bay area. So trying to improve my Spanish from bad to decent.
Also wrote a script to help me work on my slow 6 year old laptop here, and stream the changes to my workstation stashed in a friend's crawlspace in San Francisco, so I can run builds/tests/etc there: https://github.com/nolanl/rp
Might be useful for other folks in similar situations.
Since I strted, I also started collecting game design thoughts. Now I'm messing around with voxels, with the goal to create a sandbox in which you can reshape procedurally generated towns (including via explosive means).
I try to stay up to date with best (or at least good) practices to pass on to my students. I'm currently teaching Python, JavaScript and C++, while learning Rust and Quarto (which I hope can replace C++ and LaTeX).
I've recently started reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" after the many recommendations here on HN. It's indeed a very good book.
On the longer term, this year I finally accepted that I do not care about research and even though I tried loving it for the past 8 years I'm only ruining my life. I love teaching. My contract ends in 8 months and I'm looking around for all the ways I could find a job that I really care about, a teaching-oriented role in a university or school. And I'm so excited about this next step.
I recently started a website that combines StreetView scenes with part of it generated by DALL-E - thisstreetviewdoesnotexist.com - also forced myself to learn a little Svelte for that… React had been my previous go-to when dabbling in front-end.
My side-project of the moment is to turn these amazing videos on how to setup a proper bitcoin node: https://www.ministryofnodes.com.au/ubuntu-node-box-guide-202... into an Ansible script so that anyone can do all the steps shown in the videos in a matter of minutes.
For the last 2 years I have been running an free intense online bootcamp (12+ hours a day/ 7 days a week) where I help people study leetcode and system design for free. With my students, I am basically a human pomodoro and helicopter parent that you love to hate.
I had bands in high school and college. Made records, toured a bit. Worked as a recording engineer. I got into software development after I started having kids.
But now that they are older, and I’m no longer studying like crazy to push my career, there’s a bit more space for making music.
But this time, I plan on marketing it. I’ve been studying email/digital marketing, and I’m excited to actually try to sell some albums.
I've been learning and playing with Common Lisp. I've been involved in Java for more than a decade and wanted to try something new. I wanted to try something outside of OOP and more functional. I went from Scala -> Clojure -> Common Lisp. I've also switched to Emacs for almost all of my common tasks. That hurt as a long time Vim user :) but I'm enjoying it so far
https://ganguli-gang.stanford.edu/pdf/20.Pruning.pdf
I thought it tackles a very important problem and really got me into the topic of pruning.
Nothing like getting away from the computer to play in the dirt once a week :)
I share your sentiment about the earlier stages of the internet. Even though there already were several million users worldwide when I came of the age to explore technology, it still had the feeling of a close-knit community of enthusiasts and experts.
Good times :-)
So my big passion now is learning how to do contractor type stuff, drywall, sweating cooper, tile, electrical work.
Almost done demoing the kids’ bathroom with my wife. About to put it all back together again :)
Really appreciate the spirit of this post! Keep up the good work y’all!
Currently passionate about rock climbing, I wonder if there are any other climbers on HN? I’m looking to take a class on lead belaying soon and start sport climbing!
Working towards pushing the boundaries of minimally invasive ophthalmic surgery at the moment. A lot of potential for innovation in this field.
Getting outside to do STUFF, canoeing, surfing, cycling
Seeing people in the real life and chatting
Listening to and playing music, especially with other humans
* Collaborative (real time) song creation * Always solvable Yukon Solitaire * Port Quake3 to the web manually * Create a Single Player Aliens FPS game.
this activity also cure my backpain & shoulder pain, sitting down on my surfboard in the ocean also somehow calm me, it makes me think clearly when i'm struggling with my work (bug fixing), often i'm be able to solve a bug not in front of laptop but at the ocean (solutions popped out randomly from my head while i stared at the sea)
Thank you for reminding us we're all just humans doing our best to live this human experience.
Had to try to pick swimming back up for the first time in 10 years ;)
Thank you!!
I am passionate about low (no) resource NLP and currently doing a couple projects in the space. Please feel to reach out!
None of the tech.
It is outrageous that we make young students debt-laden even before they have any income source. This is not only unethical, it also sets a wrong example for the younger generation.
What's the goal of this post? Yeah we know comments on this site have decent quality (if you don't express opinion against HN hive, which is usually aligned with The Current Thing, but they try to be less extreme about promoting it, but anonymously they will kill you with downvotes), but even if you find 2-3 people who share your interests what you gonna do with that information? You can't build some distaste section here and it won't be enough to move elsewhere and if you tried already you would have find forum on your favorite topic.
Yes, on one hand I liked when most of the internet felt like echo chamber of IT guys (basically still preserved on HN), on the other hand I welcome diversity, it's just shame especially in recent years people became extremely polarized, which is not that big of an deal, if one side wasn't heavily promoted by Big Tech which has no problem to keep opinions wishing death to opponents up, while order side was straight up banned under blanket term misinformation.
I have no problem with opponents with completely opposite opinions, what I don't like and see it even here it's despect, calling me or opinion idiotic often without concrete argument, basically just lazy trolling.
edit added: FWIW I miss discussing movies on IMDb, it had huge user base which was dispersed all over internet and r/movies is bad or full of trolls, order subs or sites have way too low user base, while IMDb had people from all fields willing to discuss aspects of movies, now I occasionally check old movies at moviechat or check TMDB discussions, which are pretty dead. Btw I was online already in times of BBS/Fidonet, nice thing about Fido was lack of anonymity so people really couldn't be jerks (obviously it has cons other you can't discuss NDA stuff).
In a way, these tools have brought back the fun of making personal websites or even those silly posters in MS Word that maybe some of you did back in your school days. For the past 15 years or so, "websites" and "blogs" were largely interchangeable, and web design suffered as a result. We are still largely living in a highly templated, single-column, mobile first world.
It shouldn't have to be this way.
The infinite canvas really helps visualize my thoughts as you can draw connecting lines between related ideas, add images, and not have to worry about some grid system preventing you from putting things next to/on top/below each other.
Spending an idle Sunday with fellow hackers in HN!
I'm currently really into listening to old school sci fi audio books as I hoof it up the local trails on an emtb (electronic mountain bike.)
For primordial internet, I recommend Tildes. It's very quiet. Much like the internet was back in the early 90's.
(a) How do India's classical views of reality that mainly stem from its contemplative traditions relate to the modern view of reality that we know from modern science? Are the former just "spiritual" modalities - i.e., "mere" religions - that must give up their claims on having anything useful to say about the nature of reality in the face of superior and more effective theories, or is there something useful that they have to add to the story?
I would like to see it investigated by someone who is not dismissive of these traditions, but also bring a rigorous spirit of skeptical enquiry to their investigations.
I suspect that this might take a unique kind of investigator: someone (a) who is technically trained in several modern scientific disciplines (since India's metaphysical traditions such as sAmkhya or vedAnta simultaneously straddle psychological, physiological and physical aspects), (b) who has undergone a training in the scriptural traditions that deal with these topics (which will involve a close familiarity with Sanskrit, and possibly the major Buddhist classical languages such as Pali or classical Tibetan), and (c) who undergoes the contemplative training which will systematically induce in the practitioner the first hand experiences of altered states of consciousness without which you cannot make sense of these claims.
The core issue that I can surmise so far is fundamentally a divergence in investigation techniques: one uses a first-person, subjective, inward-looking ("antarmukhi") stance at looking our experience, and the other uses a third-person, objective, outward-looking ("bahiurmukhi") stance. One is reality as it is felt at a subtle level, and the other as it is seen at a gross level. Of course, the third-person perspective by now has a vast array of verifiable results in its favor; I can't see many for the first-person perspective.
It may seem like a tall order, but it's actually only the equivalent of doing a few post-doctorate level courses over the period of some 20 odd years. Don't expect anyone to pay you for it though; you pretty much have to write off your life. The trick is to both attack and defend by taking opposing poles of views, until you reach the goal. A "manthana" if you will, for those who are familiar with the idea.
(b) How would one naturalize the modern scientific and rational tradition in India in an authentic manner?
Modernity didn't arise through an organic process of gradual discourse with the classical views in India; it was pretty much imposed on India by its colonial conquerors and later co-opted unreflectingly by an elite class, as a result of which it has a "bolted on" feel.
If you look at everything from India's legal system, commercial space, to education and scientific establishments, they use ideas and themes whose origin lay in post-enlightenment Europe. But they don't feel natural enough; vast sections of the society are still trapped in classical ways of thinking.
I feel especially tortured when I see teachers cargo-culting scientific and technical education in India. I despair even more when I see a tendency in India to reject some of these ideas - many of which are obviously essential to India's wellbeing - as simply un-Indian.
This issue I think is closely tied to issue (a) - Indians must do the legwork of painstakingly resolving the dissonance that exists between classical Indian and modern traditions. We must accept that (just as the west did) if the classical views are wrong, they are wrong, and that's the end of it, but we must also unearth what may be of relevance in them.
Simply dismissing them through brute force (ala China's cultural revolution) won't do, since Indians are deeply attached to their classical traditions, and this section will revolt violently. I also don't think that dismissing them outright would be doing justice to our ancestors.
I am especially dismayed (and also thrilled!) by the awe inspiring fecundity of the West in the fields of science and technology. What is India's answer to it? Will we forever remain mere consumers of innovation? What will it take to transplant some of that cultural genome into the Indian society so that it takes root?
In short, what makes the West tick, and how can India also, tick, perhaps even better?
(c) What is a good, rational, and yet authentic "model" for Hinduism that a practicing Hindu should have?
A modern day ordinary Hindu is exposed to two different takes on what Hinduism is: a sacred one, and a secular one. For those who are familiar with the issue, I don't need to go into how one's tribalistic affiliations dictate one's bias towards their chosen take on the religion. And yet it seems to me that there is no attempt to find a tasteful resolution between these two acerbic poles.
I could go on and on, and my reading isn't as expansive as perhaps it should have been, but all these three areas are from my personal perspective very intertwined, and I wish more Indians would work on it. Most of our issues will be solved if we can make some sort of progress in these.
1) I made a Slack app in my spare time to help with a thing at work. Jumped through the hoops in the Slack marketplace, and then it was live (Dibs On Stuff). A few people at work used it and that was great! Solved the problem.
Blinked and then about 100 organizations had installed it. Xmas 2022 came and I used my free time to add (a ton of) extra features, and a paid mode to access them.
I feel like I have made quite a few side projects in the last 20 years - eg I spent 8 years on ONE of them (do you know how many commits you can make in 8 years?) Anyway this weekend Slack project that ate up one little Xmas has some legs!
I get an email every time someone uses the thing. There's new mail every day and honestly it is just - imagine this next bit uppercase and uncensored, possibly ending in 1 or 2 exclamation marks: f-ing awesome.
2) The private message app Signal has had to make some difficult decisions around continuing to support sms. It's fair enough sms is problematic. But there's also an aspect of "sorry but bad luck" to all the people that not only are stuck still using sms, but who acted as evangelists for Signal - helping our family members help themselves etc.
So I wrote an exporter for Signal: extract sms, mms and all Signal messages, into an xml file that can be re-imported into the stock Android message store. So at least you can choose to move them somewhere else.
I don't actually feel great about this, and more generally I do think Signal are saying all the right things, but it's still definitely a walled garden, eg:
You are free to fork Signal - it's open source - but you're not going to be able to message anyone on "original" Signal from your fork. They own the servers, and that's fair enough. Data tx/rx isn't cheap when you multiply it by hundreds of millions.
I am aware of Moxie's article from ages ago, touting the benefits of being able to upgrade people overnight to encrypted end to end protocols. But wow, the walled garden aspect is actually - STILL - after all these years and learnings - just terrible. I can pick up any phone and call anyone on any phone network. I can send an email to someone on goddamn hotmail or yahoo for example (if only it were encrypted by default). But Signal, Whatsapp - private networks, walled gardens, selfish, un-open, and disappointing considering what we're capable of.
Anyway, wrote an exporter (alexlance/signal-message-exporter) so you can get your stuff out of Signal. If you want to. (Their built-in exporter doesn't export Signal messages)
3) Before I realized Iran had really seized control of the country's internet - I spent time trying to migrate the Signal proxy to AWS lambda. I think it's still a decent idea. Lambda would let you spin up extremely cheap Signal proxies, regionally located all over the world. I got it working in nginx and also haproxy via docker image and deployed to Lambda, but unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the lambda https endpoints don't support SNI.
If anyone can convince AWS to permit SNI in their lambda https endpoints then it could still be a goer. It may be the case that other people are wrecking this idea (illicit data over proxies via SNI). But yeah, super-cheap reverse proxy, yes ok with a 15 minute timeout, but it'd do brilliantly in times of need.
Apart from my family and some minor health issues, I currently am focused on 2 things: learning Luxembourgish/Luxembourgian and develop a deep understanding of functional programming.
About the former one: that should help me find a job in some Luxembourgish administration (I really wish I'll be able to find one soon).Luxembourg might be a small country, but I think it's managed well, CTIE (Luxembourgish administration that manages most of the IT infrastructure and software used by the state) has quite smart and competent people (also some dumb ones, but where's that not the case?), and I think I like the culture, which is almost my own, as I grew up close to Luxembourg and even went to a german-speaking school, while speaking family-native French (I'm as fluent speaking German as French, no accent).
Regarding the latter one, I started applying functional programming principles early this year, almost as obstinately as I can (and as much as possible using Java 8 then now 17) (I've got more than 16 years of professional experience using Java, both as a developer and software architect).
This was just the beginning of a more insightful journey into new coding practices, which result from one principle I discovered this year: source code should never lie. This became an evidence once I implemented and started to use my self-made "Maybe" type (a better Optional - Optional is quite weak if you want to avoid procedural programming). While using Maybe, it struck me that what I did was just explicitly forcing my code to say the truth. So I started to dig into types and have types represent various states (this may be seen as a better use of object orientation - this is not relevant, what's relevant is the improvement in the quality of my code). Using the multiple types (usually sub-classes) and combining with "fold" methods make a lot of if-else unnecessary and force the developer to handle each case: one can't just forget one case. What one may do is not handle a case, but it remains explicitly visible in the source code, with as much importance as the other cases. Then, the removal of the if-else usually means that the logic is much simpler to read and reason about. Using adequate types also means that only functions of the actual type are available, so we also reap the benefits of OO design. Also, while it is stated that Optional was not made to be serialized, I made my Maybe type so that it may be used in serialized objects and thus accurately reflect the state of affairs.
I'm still discovering FP patterns (for example, I still have to read about how to properly manage IO/side-effects/state. Once I've learned FP patterns, I'll focus on the synthesis of my knowledge of Java, DDD and FP in order to find out how to best apply FP and DDD principles to professional Java projectes, given the constraints of the language, it's modularity (Java 9 modules, Maven modules) and the JVM. I already have the intuition that the Spring framework (which is the de facto standard in Luxembourg businesses) might not be a good fit to serious FP programming - at least not without appropriate abstractions on top of it. This probably already starts with the dependency injection/inversion of control, which, I think (to be confirmed, though), does not make sense if a purely functional approach.
Regarding a Maybe type (I'm picky about naming - remember, code shouldn't lie): I firmly believe that Optional and Option are bad names for this type. As the user of an API/function that may return something or nothing, I don't get a choice about what I receive. Maybe I receive something, maybe I receive nothing. It's not like I receive some option from which to choose. As the one who implements the API, I have indeed the choice to provide something or nothing, so yes, I have some option, but what I'll return may be something or may be null. Thus I strongly recommend to stick with the name Maybe. Option/Optional is just lying to the user of the API/function.
It might just be an anecdote, my own, but I think that using lambdas and a few other FP principles with Java >= 8 for more than 9 months really opened doors in my mind about functional programming and types (way more than following Martin Oderski's FP courses on Coursera), to the point that I now really feel comfortable reading and understanding more advanced literature about FP, even stuff in Haskell. I'm not saying it's easy/simple. But if I focus, I think I'm now able to understand, which might not have been the case just last year. So Java provides, I think, a good enough environment to learn more than the rudiments of FP.
The most important lesson learned this year about programming is: source code must not lie. Replace nullable stuff with Maybe, when a Boolean may be null, don't just use a Boolean, but (for example) reimplement a NullableBool interface that has three types: TrueBool, FalseBool and UndefinedBool/NullBool. To represent two-valued booleans, I have Bool with subclasses TrueBool and FalseBool. Don't hesitate to use multi-valued booleans in cases where you have to represent probabilities (I, for example, have used a TetraValuedBool, which has the types False-Improbable-Probable-True). All these Bool types come with various static functions ('of()' to get/construct an instance) and non-static functions ('fold()'). To allow functions to return results that may represent anomalies, don't hesitate to use a Result type, which has two sub-types, one wrapping anomalies and one wrapping the actual legit result, and, again work with a "fold" function to handle both cases explicitly. Use strong types whenever possible, even if it's just some wrap around a String. Nothing is just a String.
This takes some time to implement, but once you have, it just makes your code easy to read and understand, nothing is hidden anymore: no implicit consequences. Once your code does not lie anymore, it becomes self-documenting, especially given FP is rather declarative (one does rather state what one wants than how to do it). This is rather cool, as you won't have to maintain separate documentation (at least not for developers).
Now, I'm not sure I recommend you do the same: my client will stop my contract by the end of this year because they don't understand the benefits of this higher code quality. They'd have preferred 'simple' procedural code, with which they believe I would have been able to deliver more features faster. Even my developer colleagues don't recognize the beauty of it. This, of course, is utter BS, because their problem is scope creep and they need to designate some responsible for being late. They just decided it's me. I'll be sacrificed on the altar of bad project management. I'm still making up my mind about defending myself and telling my point of view to their superiors: Luxembourg is small, it's not a place where one wants open conflicts, but at the same time, do I have to allow being made responsible for bad PM choices?
The intellectual challenge of combining FP, DDD and Java is absolutely great and quite huge. I couldn't do it just after-work (my wife and I are raising two little boys), because the deeper understanding of these needs regular, almost daily practice and reading about these topics. Doing this at work clearly made me vulnerable in a way I didn't see coming when I began this path, so I definitely can't recommend it to everyone. But I can't wait reaping the results of my deeper understanding of these topics, and I'm really happy to still be a programmer instead of doing some management (that is also an option - I have both experience and university degrees in engineering and in management), it's been a long time since I've had so many interesting intellectual opportunities.
Some references I used this year to improve my programming skills or just enjoyed reading (I consider these to be a good intro into FP and DDD):
- [0] Pragmatic Functional Java: https://dzone.com/articles/introduction-to-pragmatic-functio... ...
- [1] ...and it's related source code (cf. the "core" module), which I used as a reference (no direct dependency), in order to be able to make some changes: https://github.com/siy/pragmatica
- [2] Functional programming made easier: https://leanpub.com/fp-made-easier (that one is quite easy to ready)
- [3] https://dusted.codes/the-type-system-is-a-programmers-best-f... (posted a few days ago on HN)
- [4] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ (I'd really like to do some project in F#)
- [5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/purely-functional-data-...
- [6] https://www.amazon.fr/Implementing-Domain-Driven-Design-Vaug...
- [7] https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Java-Harnessin...
Banging my head for whole day because of somehow nodejs does not behave like I wanted to. Maybe I need to take a break, clearing my mind. Thanks for this post.