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Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
573 points by JNRowe on Feb 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 935 comments
Last February there was, in my opinion, a really uplifting thread with the same title¹. I'd like to see all the cool new things going on, and I'll steal the intro text from as89 to explain:

One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25992782




I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about working with elixir / phoenix liveview. Definitely a steep learning curve for me (I’d never used a functional language before), but payoff is huge.

https://www.shlinkedin.com


HN hug of death. And well deserved, I had a great time with this one.


I was SO CLOSE to finishing the tale about the Officer Spider who ended up free his former employee of his biggest constraint, TIME, but... then it crashed. I really want to finish that story!


Damn! Sorry about that. I’m upping the servers right now. Can’t wait to hear the end of this inspirational tale :)


Should've built it in elixir, I heard it's webscale


I’d be curious to hear what went wrong and took the server down. Elixir apps usually handle these traffic spikes just fine.


That's sound interesting, I wish the website up soon otherwise I'll just forget and moving on with my day.


Isn't elixir supposed to scale better than this?


Elixir probably isn't the bottleneck. The VPS instance itself, and whatever server they're using there, probably bit the dust.


yeah so I'm seeing a ton of "(Postgrex.Error) FATAL 53300 (too_many_connections) remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections", which I'm guessing means the pool size is too small? Although I've tried upping that, CPU, and memory, and none have seemed to fix it. My devops skills still aren't great so if anyone has any ideas on how to help, let me know!

This might be a good opportunity to change the server to try out fly.io


Pgbouncer is your friend for postgres dB's with lots of client connections.

Larger pool size only helps if they're freed up quicker than they are used.


Would you mind elaborating on the second point? Is this unique to larger pools? My inclination is that this would be true for pools of all sizes


I suspect GP meant: increasing pool size is only prolonging the inevitable

I've also observed on other DBs that you can increase the connection pool but it shifts the problem to other resources.


Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense


BEAM is not fast. You're probably going to get better performance with Node.js. It is however really really low-latency. But that doesn't help with handling load. Anyway, even so I'd guess bandwidth or the database is the issue.


BEAM is not fast when it comes to CPU intensive workloads. "Better performance" has many dimensions, in many (most?) scenarios of web serving the bottleneck is latency to other services (i.e. Postgres) and not the processing of the web server, like you suspect in this case as well.

BEAM/Erlang/Elixir's main advantage IMHO is parallelism and "cheap" concurrency that's easy to wrap one's head around. It reuses multiple cores, and processes (lightweight threads) are both cheap (smaller stack size, per-process GC) and easy to get right (due to immutability of data structures and supervision). Also you'll get less spiky latency even under high load.

Node.js main advantages are the breadth of the library ecosystem, industry familiarity and its JIT compiler (if used correctly). At the cost of more setup one can also run an instance per core if they care for parallelism.

So I'd suggest that with BEAM he'd get quite a good performance both in terms of developer time and in serving many (network bound) requests on a multicore machine.


> BEAM is not fast

> It is however really really low latency

I've been interested in Erlang for a while, and reading this is intriguing. Taken literally the above makes no sense :) but it also kind of... does, sort of, and I would like to understand how this works.


There's often a tradeoff between latency and throughput. Think GC algorithms or IO buffers. The Erlang project has historically chosen the far left end of this spectrum. They also haven't cared about numerical performance at all, delegating that to C code.


Ooooh, burst response as opposed to flat-out super tight hot loops.

That honestly makes a lot of sense. Thanks!


Probably too many queries to the database.


I've seen it before. It's hilarious


I'm also starting to learn elixir/phoenix liveview and seeing shlinkedin's code is a great help for figuring out how you've done certain things, thanks!


Love shlinkedin and I think you have a shoot of making it successful. Not "the next Google" kind of successful, but could be at least a life style business.


Love the hilarious emoji post options: chili, glass of milk, slap


Wi-fi enabled hot sauce. I did not know so much satire could be packed into four words. That's satire-rich semantics, right there. SatiricWeb3.


Thanks, had a blast there for a while. Nice alternative to trolling in LinkedIn, which I've done as well. A crapton of stiffies in the latter one.


Hopefully they'll switch to Node soon so I can help too


So excellent, happy to see you're open to contributions too!


I love it and the people that I have share it with loved too


Shlinkedin is the best. Still yet to use our software tho :(


This is awesome!


Aaaaaaaand you’re sued


I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it.

Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage.

If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.

I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a rehearsal for a string band last night.

Sunday I recorded a new track with my girlfriend, ambient techno (novation circuit, moog, girlfriend's esoteric warblings).

Monday I finished an EDM track.

I have a bunch of aspirational goals. I'd like to DJ at my local ecstatic dance. I'd like to front a Louis Prima style jazz band.

I've been playing trumpet and trombone every day for the last 2 months.

I don't care if I have any professional success. But hard to say all that is a hobby. Maybe I'll eventually be able to retire and just work as a musician, teaching and doing my little gigs and producing the records I engineer for other folks and running sound for the little parties we play out in the desert in Utah.

Don't care. My kids are raised, I've got a reasonable remote day job.

We'll see how it goes.


I’m a musician too, for over 30 of my soon to be 40 years. I too don’t care about its “success” I’ve made a grand total of $11 and two tall boys performing, and easily spent a few thousand on gear/recording software (not to mention the running joke that I’m not allowed to buy more guitars). I play/record inconsistently but I love the hell out of it when I’m in it, and I’m just tickled that other people have enjoyed anything I’ve written too. Good for you!


Similar for me. I turned 50 last week, and have a good remote dev job. ATM finishing off recording a song with the band I've been in since 1987. Also running FB ads for some solo piano stuff. Not quite true to say "I don't care" because when my (tiny) audience grows a little it puts me in a good mood, but I do it because its enjoyable in itself


34 years old, been playing forever, and all that matters to me is that I get to keep listening to music, playing music, collecting music and spinning music.

Started playing the violin in orchestra in elementary school, taught myself the double bass in middle school so I could join jazz band, then taught myself the alto sax so I could help teach my little brother. Ended up shifting my focus to DJ'ing, then picked up the guitar in my 20's and now I'm learning the piano. I own some synths, too, and produce Ambient music occasionally.

Most of it's for myself, but sometimes I'll spin in a club which is always a blast. I love volunteering with local club promoters to help them throw underground shows. I love putting together abstract concept mixes for myself and sharing them with just some family and friends. I love trying to bend some of my favorite piano pieces into some kind of abstract Ambient piece. I thought about pursuing it as a career and took some music production classes in college, but quickly realized that I really didn't want to bring money into the equation.

You could call it a hobby, but I think a better word for it is passion. There's always something new to learn; new methods of playing, new ways to build a set, new instruments to pick up, new records and artists to happen upon. It's exciting to know that I'll always be discovering and learning in an area that I love so much. There's also a strong emphasis on improvisation in most of what I do, and learning how to trust my gut without second-guessing myself is an area that's always up for improvement.

I don't need other people to hear what I do, I don't need to make a single cent doing it. I just need to be able to get lost in it. Aside from my wife and kid, there's no better feeling in the world to me than when I get that itch, that urge, that screams, "Go play RIGHT NOW," because I've learned over the years that, even if I don't know what I'm about to play, I almost always fall into that "flow" so goddamned easily and for such a long period of time whenever that urge hits. I love it so much.


That's quite relatable. I've been doing a whole lot of pro-bono hauling of generators/ sound systems to the middle of nowhere lately.

I will say that as my kids got older and I got better, going out and playing for a little cash made it slightly easier to feel okay leaving the house.

Additionally, I've played with a lot of "Dad" bands, where Thursday night or whatever is how the guys get out and have a couple of drinks and socialize-- as an older guy who has raised kiddos and been through a couple hard relationships, one of the more rewarding things about this practice has been being able to have those social relationships with other guys.

And while I like your term "passion", I think that "practice" might be the better thing. In the same sense that one might be a doctor or a plumber or a lawyer. Or in the sense that we might do yoga or meditate.

I didn't start playing piano until my late 20s, and I don't think I will ever get to where I can play Brahms or anything, but that instrument by itself seems deep enough to explore for a long, long time.

My only point where I am just starting to depart from what you're saying here is that I am finding that, as I get older and find myself more and more invested in this practice I feel like I need to get myself out into the world more. Like, I just bought some genelecs last month, and I have a pair of AKG 414 coming today. Over the last couple of years I've accumulated an octatrack and asome modular synth stuff, a pedal steel guitar setuo, a double bass amp, a PA... all that's paid for itself. But as my kids have left, I also find myself spending about 2-3 hours a day playing trumpet and another couple hours messing around with recordings.

I feel like if I am going to spend that much time on stuff, I ought to at least explore how to share it with other folks.


>Additionally, I've played with a lot of "Dad" bands, where Thursday night or whatever is how the guys get out and have a couple of drinks and socialize-- as an older guy who has raised kiddos and been through a couple hard relationships, one of the more rewarding things about this practice has been being able to have those social relationships with other guys.

I've actually been interested in picking the bass back up precisely for this reason. Finding a couple of other musicians to just jam with on a regular basis sounds fantastic. My kid's only two and I have another arriving soon, so maybe this will have to wait for a couple more years, haha.

Speaking of kids - as an aside, it's been really awesome to watch my kid learn how to listen to music and develop their own musical tastes.

>And while I like your term "passion", I think that "practice" might be the better thing. In the same sense that one might be a doctor or a plumber or a lawyer. Or in the sense that we might do yoga or meditate.

I don't know why, but I was going to strongly disagree with this until you compared it to yoga/meditation, and now I'm onboard! It's definitely a practice that I am continually improving at while simultaneously centering and, perhaps, "resetting" my self.

>... as I get older and find myself more and more invested in this practice I feel like I need to get myself out into the world more.

>I feel like if I am going to spend that much time on stuff, I ought to at least explore how to share it with other folks.

I completely understand this. Most of my peers use Soundcloud to host their work, but I've really been drawn to the idea of building my own bare-bones website to host my work in perpetuity. I really like the thought of a website that presents my art exactly as I want it presented, with fewer copyright restrictions, no trackers, no fluff, just, "Hey, this is who I am musically, check back here from time to time if you like what you hear, or don't, I don't care," lol.

I think one reason I'm drawn to that moreso these days is because I'm a father. Sure, the way I'm doing it now will allow my kids to see me interacting with the art, but there's no place for them to see all of the stuff I've completed that I'm extra proud of. I'd hope that having that kind of a repository would encourage their own creativity as they grow up.


Similar vein - making music with AI. I had never been blessed with "natural" musical talents so I needed "cybernetic" support to get it done... using openAI's Jukebox. Will write a longer post about the experience at some point / guessing HN may like that.

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRpMo19NwYKloFhnw6QzMg soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/songshtr blog: songshtr.github.io


Music is about discipline. "Talent" is more or less a multiplier, but is useless without discipline in the first place. Needing "talent" (to be very good at it) is a myth. You don't have to be the best in the world to be very good at something.

There is no secret. It just takes time and work to get good at an instrument or producing.

edit: clarity


I mostly agree with you, but with some changes (applies not just to music but any other field). Discipline is the multiplier on talent, not the other way round. "Talent" is most definitely not a myth - to take it to an egregious example, no amount of discipline would ever make me play center in the NBA or piano in Carnegie Hall. But... that's ok.


I should specify there's a difference of being in the top percentage of people in a field, and just being very good at that field. With sports, physical attributes are more important but even if you're not gonna be in the NBA you can still be quite good, etc.

I don't see music as really competitive in that sense though because everyone has different tastes. Once you put in the time and work to learn to produce or play an instrument, it then comes down to creativity and networking really.


Again, I mostly do agree with you, especially as you get to more creative fields. I think what I would rephrase as is: given my genetic makeup, discipline is more likely to yield benefits using openAI Jukebox rather than guitar or piano.

On this topic, if you have not already, one of the best movies I have seen in last couple years: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11423784/ (is on netflix in the US).


"think what I would rephrase as is: given my genetic makeup, discipline is more likely to yield benefits using openAI Jukebox rather than guitar or piano."

I don't agree with this sort of sentiment at all. I'm not talking about benefits as in being in the top % of people in a field- I don't care about that. I'm talking about getting very good and playing with people and/or earning income. Anyone can achieve that with time and work.

The best players that I know all study quite diligently and play/make music literally all the time. They're getting their 10,000 hours in and then some. I'm speaking here as a guitar & bass player but this applies to really any instrument.

Unless you physically or mentally cannot play e.g. the guitar, if you studied it diligently for several years, you would be better than a lot of people who haphazardly study it. By 1-2 years you could already be sitting in and doing small gigs (for bass, a lot sooner, since there's a glut of of amateur guitarists). By 3-4 years of again, diligent study, you would be quite decent/respectable. As far as "making it", that comes down to the above + socializing with musicians + interpersonal skills like being on time, etc.

"Genetic makeup" or "talent" have absolutely zero to do with that unless it's literally impacting your ability to play or practice. All that's needed is discipline to study correctly (and motivation, which goes without saying). And a great many people study poorly.


There are amusical people in this world for whom making music (ie keeping pitch, keeping rhythm) is difficult in such a basic way that it’s hard to explain to others who just “get it.” Sort of being dyslexic I suppose. I can tell you from personal experience 2-3 years was not enough for me me on the violin but maybe 4 would have been. Oh well maybe it’s the “diligence” I didn’t have enough of. Anyway- I only disagree with you in the absolutes… generally your formula holds.


I dunno.

I started out playing punk rock and frankly if I listen to the stuff I was doing in the 90s, it sucked. My timing and pitch was pretty bad. Like, as bad as anyone including the people I know who say they are a-musical.

I've gotten measurably better.

I don't believe that this is a genetic thing. Rather, I just like goofing around with music so much that, over the decades, I've developed much better timing and pitch as well as my larger musical vocabulary.

I cannot speak for other people, but it's pretty obvious that while I am a pretty good musician now, I was not born with those abilities... they are the product of many, many hours of joyful exercise. If people can't find joy in sucking really bad at things (which is super helpful) that's probably something that can be overcome.

In the course of decades, unless someone has a severe and measurable impairment, the minor differences in people evens out to the point where I don't feel it makes much sense at all to bring genetics or even personal disposition into the discussion.


Added for clarity: folks should be able to make music however feels fun for them, as far as I am concerned.

I really like self-generating sounds created by modular synths. If coding is fun and feels rewarding for folks, my feeling is that AI or whatever is a wholly legit thing. Have fun and keep at it.


Thanks!


Truth! Im a professional musician and in my experience, "naturally talented" generally means "enjoys practicing". No one produces moving music without practice.


And success can't be completely ruled out. Only childish success, of being a prodigy and a star very young with no failures, a monotonic career after being (this is the secret) being picked to be a winner by the industry, can be ruled out.

> If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.

That's the thing. I think what ruined it was the concept that getting to the top required 10,000 hours of practice. That's prostitution, violin takes twice as much, and becoming the best at a very new skill can take only 1,000. But if you put your whole life into it, that too transforms what you can accomplish.


That sounds like a great life… I like making music for the sake of making music, which is specifically relevant atm with FAWM (February Album Writers Month) happening.

I’m a hobbyist singer/songwriter, and the forced creativity of having to write 14 songs in 28 days really works for me. Shameless plug, 4 songs in so far! https://fawm.org/fawmers/christmascard/


I'm 31 and just started learning music a year ago. Ever since I started this is probably the only thing I actually enjoy doing everyday. Is it possible to get to a level of proficiency at this point in life where you get to play good enough you can start getting paid for it?


Making a living out of music is difficult, but it's not that hard to make pocket money from playing in bar bands. You don't need much in the way of technical proficiency, but probably you'll need to do a lot of playing (esp with other musicians) to learn things like stagecraft and timing before anyone will give you a paid gig.


You can get paid, but it on its own most likely won't cover the costs that go into creating it. But it's often worth that cost anyways


Yeah, it's a side business for me. Pre-covid, I was making $10-15k a year playing on the weekend. Kind of a fun thing to chase too, as if you're playing paying gigs you get to play with better musicians,


Same for me, though I've never made any money off it, or even played in front of someone. About 4 years ago I started playing with synths because I needed some music for a game dev project, and have loved it ever since (at great detriment to my wallet)


That's basically me except I don't even charge for playing. I've been accompanying singers for quite a few years, mostly friends but not requesting any money.

Thanks for mentioning this when I almost thought I did everything for money!


Considering the cost of music gear + lessons, I find it unlikely I'll ever make a profit. I also consider it more than a hobby, but something I can't fully commit to due to having a day job to focus on.


you're an inspiration man, thanks for posting that. :)


You aren't "succesful" because you have a "real" job that you care too much about. (You're a geek, not a musician.) A "real" musician tells the boss, the wife, the son to go "fuck themselves" and plays to an audience of homeless pedos if he has to, because it's in his blood man. It just ain't in your blood.


I mean, I'm sure your joking, but the reality is that I know folks who live that.

From the places I grew up, I can look at Townes or Blaze Foley or any number of folks who drank themselves to death following that line of thought. And those are the "successful" ones.

At some point I realized that the main difference between me and the dudes drinking themselves to death on the Armadillo Farm was that I didn't have to take amid-week $50 gig playing "into the mystic" and "brown eyed girl": we were all still playing the same shitty $150 gigs on Saturday afternoon.


I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convinced, so I've sunk countless hours into the project.

I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.

// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome


This is deeply commendable work and a real public service. Access to public transportation is an issue for a lot of people, and outside of the usual issues of cost, often comes down to people finding the PT systems difficult and hard to use. When people make their own apps and make them freely available with the PT data, those apps are usually lightyears ahead of the official apps to the degree that it is embarrassing.


I too have been working on public transit for my city in the US and several smaller cities that I visit that tend to get ignored by the big apps.

Most of these cities have real time data, but it is from a 3rd party vendor that either tries to lock up the data or has a terrible app.

For example, the one for Steamboat Springs Colorado, a small little ski town, uses a 3rd party vendor for real time tracking information. But the app from that third party vendor is slow and frustrating. On top of that, it is a single app that supports 30+ small cities. If you search for "Steamboat Springs transit or bus" in the app store, that vendor's app doesn't even come up. As a tourist, no one has any idea that an app even exists for their public transit.

I wrote an opensource app that supports multiple real time vendors backends which I can whitelabel for different cities.

https://gotransitapp.com/


Awesome! I'm pretty sure I came across your app when I was looking for open source systems to integrate with. I'm going for the big ones first (transportr (navita), onebusaway, OSM...), but if I do end up needing a standalone app, yours looks like a great base.


Steamboat Springs is an amazing place!

One bit of feedback on your website -- it's agonizingly slow to have to wait for the list of cities to scroll -- a bar or an arrow would be lovely.


Thanks, I'll add some arrows. I guess it isn't intuitive that you can click and drag to scroll left and right through the cities.


This is, naturally, awesome.

If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to

a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different branches (while helping to frame the focal points of the technical discussion, which is critical yet often tricky) would leave a positive impression for starters, may also help with internal communication and efficiency, and will of course help everyone slowly lumber towards modernity overall.

b) Whisper "GTFS" in Google's ear ;)

I would definitely do (a) before (b) - particularly the slow-paced adoption and settlement process (maybe even quietly build the GTFS integration yourself, before making any noise) - to give the city the best fighting chance possible against involuntary infections of Chromebooks/Google Workspace/etc ;P around the time the GTFS people show up. Y'know, just in case. Good to have a position first and all that.

The reason (b) could be particularly interesting, is that - presuming there is currently poor or no integration (this suggestion is irrelevant otherwise) - running interference here successfully may (alongside improving transport info for everyone) wind up netting you an interesting position at the city (consistent, set for life, good opportunity for lateral movement and initiative-taking given your start point, etc) or a decent shot at whatever office/presence Google has in/near Slovenia (could be interesting, could be hit/miss, might not appeal at all).

It's entirely possible you're doing this because you're already in a solid position you're happy with, in which case ignore most of the above :D


The funny part is that several providers do actually have GTFS included in GMaps. Someone with decent lobbying power managed to score a contract to provide "Google Maps integration", so I don't think the providers even have the right to share the GTFS files, even if they have them.

And since the contract is absurdly overpriced and (unofficial info) charges for each conversion instead of simply handing over the conversion software, their GMaps data is often out of date. So currently, for at least one city, the GTFS file my system generates from scraped data is actually more accurate than the one they have and provide to Google.

One of my goals though is quite similar to what you're saying - to have the most accurate data and provide it openly enough that it takes away Google's (and anyone else's) power to come in and offer something like "we'll develop a conversion system for free if you push Chromebooks or GClassroom in your schools". Our municipalities love making deals that are "free", but actually end up costing far more in other ways and it really needs to stop.


I was wondering what the situation was, hah (and hoping my totally presumptuous read of the situation wasn't totally off lol... yay it wasn't).

Ugh, incompetence enforced by policy is the most flat-out frustrating thing ever. One wonders where hard cynicism comes from... :'(

I'm very happy to hear you're (somehow?!?!) succeeding at your goal of building this out, while somehow dodging all of the rent seekers' radars (boggle). It's very cool to see when these sort of wins happen. Fist bump :D

I hadn't quite mentally resolved/connected the sequence of "push XYZ service" -> "free GTFS integration"; it was much vaguer in my head, more just thinking the very presence of Google in a likely-highly-permeable environment (without strongly held technical opinions) would have a reasonably statistically meaningful likelihood of Sales swinging past at least once or twice. I guess my brain immediately noticed the opportunity to show a spine and then be observed for having done that, something something free positive reputation. I... *sigh* I guess that is only satisfying and representative of good opportunity if there is actual competent perception on the other side of the table.

My naive guess is that Google does GTFS integration (and long-term maintenance) for free worldwide (likely with small internal teams in charge of resolving locale-specific spec violations and creative interpretations) to make Maps' moat bigger and further entrench their guarantee of establishing and retaining their captive audience. I always got the impression GTFS as a whole (which I understood was a Google initiative) was predominantly a broad sweep towards getting everyone mostly on the same chapter (as opposed to the same page) to strategically solve for the "last mile" of fixup work and viably keep up with the incoming firehose of transport updates at global scale.

I can only agree that it's incredibly frustrating that sales, municipality manglement, and wasteful solutions/implementations combine with exponentially negative and infuriating effect.

As a footnote (I'm not sure if it's helpful), the state I live in (NSW Australia) has a functional/sprawling GTFS (incl. realtime) implementation that covers the (inhabited parts of the) whole state (800,000km²) with the vast majority of the transport chaos :) disproportionately centered around the greater Sydney area (vaguely around 12,000km²). It's kind of far away :) so headscratching about the data would probably have the occasional semblance to poking at a distant server in the cloud, but it could be useful as a high-level reference. (I'm unfortunately not sure what it does especially well and what it gets especially wrong.) https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/


In the Netherlands we have https://9292.nl/. It is awesome, I can plan a trip and it will show me how long I have to walk, whats buses/trains I have to take, and I can also buy tickets for all the different providers. Almost everyone here in NL uses it when they plan a trip, its even useful when you do this trip daily because it shows delays, maintenance and other important information.


Is 9292's data open? The parent commenters' project sounds more similar to http://www.openov.nl/.


This is a real public service and _I_ hope it does take off.


maybe not being in closed beta could help?


Of course :) That is the goal, but I don't want to "launch" it until the issues are ironed out - the last thing we need is to get a lots of users and then a bunch of them miss their trains/buses because our data wasn't accurate (this has happened once or twice to our testers).


Maybe not. Right now the traffic is manageable and manual rate limiting, blocking etc is feasible.


https://bytebucket.co

I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks.

True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.


I have a small maybe-bug report for you. I thought, hey I don't want anything with a HDD, only SSD. So I set HDD to 0-0, and it just filters out everything. Even systems with no HDD disappear.


Very similar, but for servers, https://labgopher.com/. It originated from the Reddit r/homelab sub


Sadly the Australia section redirects to ebay.co.au as opposed to .com.au, welp. Noticed this about a year or so ago, maybe more.

Set and forget APIs that just work are kind of cool... maybe that's the moral of the story there lol


Thank you! I've used this website before, but I had trouble remembering its name last week, I was searching "lab gator" "gator lab"...


great! unfortunately the pound/TB sorting doesn't work.


That is a seriously good concept. Your metric works too good though, compared to the refresh rate of the listings so all the good stuff is sold out. If you had a mailing list I would definitely subscribe.


Thanks. Yeah I thought about a mailing list, but couldn't think of a way to make it not spam you every single day for the 1 or 2 best listings. But obviously can't aggregate them unless it's a digest of "here's what you missed," which would be slightly amusing.


Another bug report:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5320...

4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, and an i5-1035G is misparsed as 64GB RAM and 1035 GB SSD.


This is great, except it's showing me listings for laptops with 8GB of SSD storage and 935GB of RAM.

A flag button may be the most useful practical reaction to this problem. That way you can outsource the problem of faulty reports - and best case scenario even build up a following of trigger-happy users who are helpfully inclined to click the flag button in the future when the occasional glitch sneaks through.

Publishing the parser may also honestly be a good idea as well. Not the whole site, just the parser specifically - maybe with instructions on how feed in the results of small-scale scrapes (~100 pages) - so people can understand exactly what it's doing and provide feedback.

This is a very community-oriented sort of project IMHO, so by definition you'll wind up with a small following of stragglers if you hang in there; by the same token, it's possible (gain, best case scenario) that leveraging the spare cycles the community might be able to bring to the table may make it viable to maintain a level of quality that would otherwise be very hard to sustain long term.


Scraping projects looking for relative deals is fun. Did that way back in the day with Craigslist motorcycles.


THX a lot great idea. Table alignment is a miss on firefox :) https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png


Ah, yes looks like my hacky double sliders don't look great either. css was probably my least favorite part of this project


I’m the project leader for Homebrew and have been maintaining it for 12 years. I have no planned dramatic changes for it or expectations I’ll radically improve it in any way. I just try to keep all parts of the project ticking along and I still enjoy doing so, despite feeling no real obligation to continue.


Can you invert a binary tree on a whiteboard though?


For context: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768


Possibly dumb question, but have you considered looking for a successor to take over the project?

Homebrew has basically reached the point where it's "critical infrastructure" for macOS devs, and it would really be a damn shame to see it slowly fade away just because the creator has moved onto other things.


I think you may be misunderstanding GP's clarity around the intended scope of the project with a lack of enthusiasm about maintaining the project.

Homebrew is critical infrastructure, which is exactly why it shouldn't change dramatically.

Now, if GP has lost interest in the project, or doesn't have the time to keep it running satisfactorily, I'd definitely agree with you - but I didn't get that impression from his post.


If I understand correctly, it's not about losing interest but ensuring there is a successor for when GP wishes to step back or is forced to do so. The community should acknowledge this and fund training and possibly salary for who's next.


I’ve been working on finding a successor and ensuring the project has a bus factor of more than one for at least. The latter has been solved but the prior won’t until I step down, despite my best efforts otherwise.


Many times. I haven’t found one yet whom I felt would take over everything I do. Given I still enjoy it, it feels like there’s no need to reduce the number of humans working on the project in the hope that it’ll encourage someone else to step up and do more.


It's not critical infrastructure.

There are better alternatives, even, that are a quick and painless install process away. For example, nixpkgs is competitive with it, and does not include the Google phone-home supercookie tracking spyware that is on by default without consent in every Homebrew installation, and works great on macOS.

Homebrew could disappear tomorrow and nothing extremely bad would happen. That can't be said for the power grid or water system. Tossing around the term "critical infrastructure" for things that are important but very sub-critical is hyperbole that waters down the (important) term to meaninglessness.


I bumped into a lion in the forest the other day that was aghast and somehow offended and told me the same thing when I mentioned that power grids and water systems were critical infrastructure.


If you don't make money off of it, you really should. I'll definitely try to make my employer pay for it. Homebrew is quite important piece of tooling. Thank you for making it.


You have done a great job, and helped innumerable developers along the way. Thanks


So casual :-)

I use Homebrew every day. Thank you for the the incredible work in keeping things ticking along. And congrats on still enjoying it!


Homebrew has made a difference to me and dozens of other developers I personally know, and probably hundreds of thousands world wide. Thanks for your efforts.


You’ve done an unbelievable job, Mike!


You do great work. Can I buy you a $DRINK for your dedication?


I've been using homebrew for almost 10 years and I just wanted to say thank you for your amazing work!


Is there a donation link or something for homebrew? I can't believe such a popular tool is not making you guys money.


https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations


This is like meeting a celebrity. Awesome work on homebrew!


If there's anyone at Apple reading, pay this guy.


They provide help and CI hardware. I have no desire to be either employed by Apple or work on Homebrew for a living (currently, at least).


Glad you are being supported in the manner to which you have become accustomed! When you retire maybe ask for a donation. I doubt they'd say no.


https://siftrss.com/

I've been running siftrss for about five years now. It lets you enter an RSS feed, add a filter, and get a new RSS feed excluding the stuff you specify. I made it to scratch my own itch.

Originally it wasn't going to be public but I thought, "eh what the heck, it's only a bit more effort to put a simple interface on it." Since then more than 100k feeds have been created and donations have paid for the minimal hosting costs.

I do get feature requests from time to time,and I would like to fulfill them eventually, but for the most part I rarely work on it. I'd love to have richer, more powerful filters with boolean logic along with feed combining, rewriting of tags, proxies, all sorts of things... but I've been a software engineer long enough to know that the greater complexity would mean more people emailing me their demands and blaming me for their (mis)use of the tool. It just wouldn't be fun anymore. It'd be another chore.

I've thought about trying to monetize it but 1) it seems unlikely that it'd ever amount to anything substantial, 2) probably wouldn't be worth the effort, and 3) kind of feels against the spirit of RSS.

I guess in some sense it has succeeded, but in reality it succeeded on day one when I was able to use it myself.


Do you know https://linklonk.com from @lonk11? It feels like RSS is slowly regaining traction with all those small projects that add missing functionalities.


Indeed, RSS is a great minimal API and we need more tools that can create and consume feeds. For example, you can create a feed in siftrss.com and submit it to LinkLonk so it could rank content from feeds you follow based on their signal-to-noise ratio.

Regarding the OP, I'm building LinkLonk to test out a different mechanism for cultivating trust among strangers and for discovering interesting stuff along the way. I wouldn't say I don't care whether it gets attention. That's the whole point of the experiment - to find out if it is a viable alternative to the AI driven feed. I am prepared though to maintain it for years and not looking to "fail fast".


Ooh, this is something I have contemplated making for a while. I think a really good way to get sophisticated filtering is to allow filters to be specified in snippets of JS (or LUA) that are then executed by a sandboxed interpreter that presents the filter with a very restricted “DOM” representing the post+feed metadata. Include things like author and title and body and links, and let the user do whatever filtering logic they want. And if you really wanted to make it user friendly, instead of having them edit the code, give them a blockly UI for the filter editor. You have to limit the CPU time given to a filter to avoid runaways but that isn’t hard.


I've been making a proper survival strategy game. I made a few games before but they were only about a week's worth of work each, so I don't count them as "proper".

This time I wanted to make a full-on project with professionally-done models, art, music etc. It's a reverse of the 4X formula - rather than starting as a small country and becoming a vast empire over the course of the game you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.

I've never run a project with this kind of scope - I've been on them but when you're actually making the decisions it's a real change in perspective.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830290/Fall_of_an_Empire...


> you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.

Neat. Reminds me of some of the scenarios in the old Simcity where you became mayor of a big city with _issues_ and had to turn the ship around.


I like the terrain rendering. Is that a prepackaged thing or did you write it yourself?


It's a custom material (since I'm using UE4) - there's small detail (grass, snow, sand etc) with their own normal maps, and that's all filtered to break up tiling and applied to the terrain.

The other part is the macro-level stuff that you see more of when you're zoomed out. I did the landscape using Quadspinner Gaea to simulate erosion based on a heightmap I drew with the basic shapes I wanted. Gaea lets me do a colour map based on terrain features, which I added on top of the small detail, and an 8K normal map which I blend with the detail normals based on the distance to the camera. The normal map adds a lot of little hills and valleys that are normally invisible since they're only small variations in the height map.


The title image is so reminiscent of Age of Empires ;). No harm there. Is it safe to assume that AoE series was an influence?

As it appears to be targeted only for Windows, I will not be able to try it (on Mac). But the premise sounds good and pretty unique!

Best of luck with it.


Thank you! Yeah absolutely it was influenced by AoE, more in a thematic sense rather than the gameplay which is more influenced by grand strategies and Total War.

Come to think of it, there's really no reason I can't release it on Mac since it's Unreal Engine, apart from me not owning a new model that can run it. If the game's a success (hopefully!) it would definitely be worth getting one so I can build for it.


>If the game's a success (hopefully!)

Title of the thread: "I don't care if this succeeds"

;) Anyway, best of luck, the idea sounds awesome! I've added the game to my steam list.


Based on the spec requirements listed in the Steam store, I think you should be able to target 8 or 16GB M1 Macbook Airs. Everything else is above that. And targeting Intel Macs is pointless.

An M1 Air is $1200ish. So it shouldn't be a burden assuming you have outside income and desire :).

Good luck!


$1200 isn't bad! You've convinced me, I'm releasing it for Mac.


Thank you! Can’t wait to try it


I really like the idea and the art looks good.

You have set the release date to Nov, 2022 - when did you start working on it i.e. how much time is needed for a game like this?

Also, how much expirience have you had with UE or any other game engine before starting this project?

Do you do everything by yourself (art, music etc.) or do you buy / use free stuff from someone else?


Thank you! I started in July of 2020 with just the map and no mechanics, and worked on it intermittently until about 6 months ago when I decided to put some actual work into it.

November is the release date because if I don't set one I'll be more likely to get sidetracked, so I wanted to be concrete about it.

I didn't have that much experience with UE, I'd played around a bit in school and uni but I didn't make anything substantial with it, and I did the same in Unity. Everything is custom-made for the game except for a save game system, since UE's save game stuff works well for smaller-scale projects but kind of breaks down when you've got to save hundreds of cities, armies, etc.

I did the environment and static assets by myself, but I'm no good at illustration or music and I got some great artists to do that instead of me.


Wow, the premise of the game sounds really cool! Do you plan on adding a multiplayer mode to the game? Me and some friends have been on the hunt for a new fun mp strategy game for a while


Multiplayer is something I'd probably add post release, I think it would be hard to implement for the strategic world map since the factions are so asymmetrical. If I was going to add it in, it would probably have to be just the tactical battle map.


What is the tech stack behind a strategy game like this ?


It's all done in Unreal Engine 4, which is great because you don't need to worry so much about all the cross-platform stuff. The assets are done in Gaea for terrain, Blender for models, Illustrator for icons and Photoshop for some more texture work


Wait, can you win/expand or is the demise inevitable?


You can't expand or capture any new cities, but you can still win since the win condition is based around completing the storyline and surviving longer is how you progress in the story.


I'm building wooden benches for bus and light rail stops in my neighborhood.

Lots of riders are elderly and find themselves sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, as they wait for transit. Studies suggest that perceived wait time increases by 30%+ when riders are forced to stand while they wait. There's no cheaper way to shave several minutes off of perceived trip time, for every trip.

Inspired by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam....


I have such a hard time relating to this. In Denmark I feel like 95% of bus stops have some sort of bench, and a lot of them has like a small shed, to get out of the rain in bad weather. It's wild to think that citizens should be adding those themselves. But I guess there's no profit in adding benches to each stop as a bus company.


> It's wild to think that citizens should be adding those themselves.

Antipathy towards the homeless ends up harming other citizens: "If we add a bench there, the homeless could sit/sleep there, and we'd have to look at them". The result is lack of benches, or ones that are incredibly user-hostile.


I used to live in Southern California. Many bus stops have no bench and no weather protection. It can get brutally hot without shade, and since it's a drought area, lots of people get caught without clothing for inclement weather. I think it almost criminal that there's at least no covering for these stops, much less a bench to help wait out such conditions.


I love this.

I've been through so many places where it's nearly impossible to find a place to sit for free. You just walk and walk and walk, until you're ready to spend 4-6$ to sit inside a business.

Benches have no economic value. You just sit there for free - you loiter - for as long as you want with no expectation of buying anything. Yet they provide undeniable value to their users.

I've made a habit of mapping benches on Open Street Map. Have you considered adding yours there, or updating the bus stops accordingly? StreetComplete lets you do it easily.


I really shouldn't ask and then pick favourites, but between you and me I love this.

Now that you've made me think about this, I can only place one bus stop with a half covered "perch" within a few kilometres of my house. All of the others are just a sign in the grass verge, or a wind exposed perspex cover in a couple of cases. Sadly, it hadn't even occurred to me how unhelpful that it is for many of the people that rely on busses.


I'm just curious about the logistics-- so are you allowed to just put a bench down at bus stops, legally? No one removes them?


IMHO you succeeded the moment you installed the first bench.


Good to know there are decent and kind people out there :-)


I posted this as a show HN a few weeks ago, I maintain a small, completely free html/js game. There's no chance of it ever making money in its current form, it's just a fun waste of time with a few hundred players[0].

[0] https://wallsmash.com


A while ago, I found this incredible website: https://wilderness.land/

It's basically somebody's web adventures as a map. It's inspired me to make my own version with hex tiles. I'm adding this to my list of sites :)


Can I see yours, I want to do it too!


This is an interesting mechanic, and I like the Arkanoid+Tetris kind of feel, but I have NFI what's going on. Why are there lasers? What determines how much lasers there is? What determines where the start point will be on the next go? A bit of explanation and polish could really make something great here.


The ball shaped powerups add more bullets, the rectangle shaped powerups increase laser strength. Starting point is wherever your first bullet returns.


What is the wall-destroying ray that shoots before the balls fly out? It's really fun, but that prefire isn't obvious to me :(


> it's just a fun waste of time with a few hundred players

Few hundred and one. Damn, I should be working instead.


Wow, thanks! This is an incredible rethinking of breakout, and well balanced mechanics :).

My only suggestion would be a button to speed up time in later levels (or to do it automatically), it gets a bit tedious watching the last 5 balls bouncing around for 15 seconds.


Loved it! The fun parts of breakout (getting shots trapped behind blocks) without the stressful controls!

It's really hard, though. I only survive like 5 shots. If theres a wall of 5s coming at me, what can I do?

Still, really cool.


There are ‘laser’ powerups and bullet powerups. You can use the laser to blast through big columns of blocks, and or at least weaken them until your shots kill them with bounces. It introduces an interesting tension between wanting nice horizontal bounces versus wanting to hit as many blocks as possible with the laser. Fun stuff.


Is this mentioned somewhere on the page? I was wondering what they do.

I commented yesterday but I'll say it again, this is awesome.

This entire thread is great and a true inspiration.


I just vaguely worked it out after getting addicted.


Haha, I had an addiction phase as well. It drives me crazy how the beginning is hard, then it gets very easy, and suddenly, you lose.


I think you have to accept that some starts are better than others. If you get no powerups on the first screen you're going to struggle. I think you're right that the middle game is quite easy (i.e. you can just bounce off a wall and clear the screen pretty easily). At higher levels you have to plan a bit more, and get really good at hitting corners to achieve horizontal bounces, which is hard to do reliably. It was certainly worth a weekend of my life, anyway. :)


Fuck, this is hard.


It's fun!


This is a lot of fun; spent way more time than I should have on this just now.


This is awesome. Bricks on steriods.


Ooh, like Holedown in a browser.


Super fun!


so so good, but yea maybe a bit too hard.. or too hard to get good at


Awesome game


I bought some land over 10 years ago, it's about 2 hectares, water runs through it and I wanted to make a garden, so I started digging, would sleep on site for a couple of weeks then return to civilization... eventually I planted it with fruit trees and comfrey and stuff and just left it to it's own devices... there's an inverted swastika like you see on some churches in india, an @, and a bunch of other motifs.. at one point I thought of selling it as land art, but no idea how to go about it... I'll give a cut to anyone who helps me though :-) :-) https://imgz.org/iRe6wg3Z/ https://imgz.org/i9UEvZca/ https://imgz.org/i8zESSAw/


Wow! Can you post some non-satellite pictures? Is willow the primary plant making all those shapes? Or have you done significant earth moving too?


I dug it all by hand :-) :-) except for the inverted swastika and a small "pond on the extreme left part of the land... I think the willows will have exacerbated the forms, but mostly I just laid down wood, grass, dug trenches and put the earth on them (a bit like hugelkultur) and slowly widened, deepened the trenches.. there's a river running paralell and I dug a wide trench paralel to this hoping to use the river to irrigate occasionally... it's very meditative "work" perfect for mulling a book over :-) :-) if you use the link provided by a poster below and go on streetview, you'll even be able to see I carved out the word UBUNTU :-) :-)


what is your goal for this land? You are looking for help but in what? Creating more art?


Help in ...selling it as land art, the goal was to make a garden in the style of permaculture, pfaf.org , plants for a future is a good example of stuff I wanted to plant, it's transformed pasture land into an "ecotopia"... ultimately it was a productive use of my time as while digging it manually I processed a lot of reading material in my head and had a healthy lifestyle. I think creating such gardens could be a matrix for (young) people as you create ongoing wealth that can be increasingly harvested over the years (there are more than 10kinds of willow planted on it, raspberries, mint spreading more each year ...


https://goo.gl/maps/hpuj9X7srT46NN3o8


Wow that was fast, did you find it using "la blaisance" and the D949 as references? I should have scrubbed those :-) or did you use other more esoterical methods... could I ask you to kindly take down your link and let hackers be hackers? Cheers


FYI - the lat/lon coords are in your screenshots


IMHO I think it's very good that you don't seem overly eager to just get it sold all at once, because I can't help but cautiously suspect that a lot of buyers would say all the right things then either just let it rot, or go build on top of it (it seems to be located in a rural area, but near some other houses, suggesting low to moderate demand).


Creating paper nautical maps. NOAA has stopped updating 15% of all their nautical charts and will discontinue the rest by Jan. 2025.

The proposed replacement for the beautiful maps they produce now is "print electronic maps yourself". Unfortunately the electronic charts are only usable with an interactive interface which paper is not, to say nothing about their aesthetic qualities.

There are data errors too in the new "custom charts" that are being offered for printing, one such error is that virtually all US water lots a foot of water according to the maps! I investigated this and it is due to rounding down when converting to meters and then rounding down again when converting back to feet.

Let me know if you care, or want to help.


How are the British Admiralty charts for the US? Those have been the ones I've tended to use when going international in Europe at least.


Love to know more. I want to print them, and I'm sure others have similar needs:

1. I want a paper backup chart on my boat when I'm in the ocean. The one I have is deteriorating.

2. I want a large-scale print or collection of them so I can plan and track journeys with my family. I have them pinned in my stairway wall on foam board, and have been considering a different approach.


This sounds like a perfect intersection of a few interests of mine so would be super interested in learning more. What type of help are you looking for?


Believe it or not, I sell the following on Fiverr as radiantxp21: "I will special stocks and option picks lose all your money fast and intelligently"

I know, it sounds a bit, non-English, but in my defense: it was my first time using Fiverr and I had no clue how to use it. The ad is up for a few months already, and I had many laughs creating it, but yesterday I had my first client! I panicked, I realized that I am as bad at picking bad stocks as good ones. I felt like a fraud! And I was laughing so hard that I felt like a fraud.

I genuinely have impostor syndrome telling people how to pick the worst stocks of their lives that will lead them into financial ruin :') I feel there's something funny about the whole aspect of: you ask for a service where you lose your stuff, now you gained more stuff, you're happy as a person but probably not too happy with my service.

Writing the order was a ton of fun! I just get so many questions. Why would one want to lose money? Why listen to me? Would he want to adopt me? What are they really expecting? How does one pick a horrible horrible stock? Should I inverse my own trades, or should I lose the money to feel a sense of comradery? How serious should I be?

The result is: I set up this persona that I feel is funny as hell, yet I try to analyze things as intelligently as possible and really show my real side as well.

Thinking the question through: how can I deliver the worst possible stock (that is not something synthetic, or an index)? Really having the same strong drive that I normally have when I want to buy a winning stock.

I can't put my words on it, but I feel it's splendidly beautiful if done in moderation.

And I am proud to now say at parties: I am a professional financial advisor, I make sure people lose all their money. I am so good at it, I need a place to crash, can I stay at your place tonight?


Are you licensed? Maybe the first candidate just intends to take your financial advice and then sue you into the ground afterwards.


I hope original comments see this. Advising investment vehicles for money, without proper disclaimers and a licence is a very bad idea.


I feel like licensing could be an issue, but if you're advertising that you will lose someone's money, either you succeed (hard to argue that the customer didn't get exactly what they asked for), or you fail (hard to prove damages).


Advising on losing stocks is definitely an investment advice, it just means client will short them. This will be obvious to a court especially if the advice is for money. They will not bite for the absurd argument of paying for losing money.


Rational interpretation, meet law. Law, meet rational interpretation.

we already know how this ends.


> I know, it sounds a bit...non-English

Should one in 18th century verse himself be passingly versed

your crier's cry rings out artfully.

One fraud's earnest scheme to a knowing fraud's great mirth does bring

a wild-cat's prey; loss an LLC's bounty.

edit: s/knowing fraud/knowing fraud's/g; sorry for the typo


> edit: s/knowing fraud/knowing fraud's/g; sorry for the typo

Wait, that was the typo in this post?


Begun this clone war has!


> I panicked, I realized that I am as bad at picking bad stocks as good ones. I felt like a fraud! And I was laughing so hard that I felt like a fraud.

Seems easy enough. Just tell them to give the money to you to buy them "special" stocks and options, keep the money, and make them do the New York Times crossword puzzle or something. You've then just "special stocks and option picks lose all [their] money fast and intelligently" and kept your end of the bargain. The original task is in such broken English anyways I doubt your legally liable for anything.


This is pretty funny, but in functioning financial markets, it's just as hard to pick losers as winners.

The beliefs of professional traders about whether a stock will go up or down is already baked into the price. If you believe a stock is going to go down, and you are right, you can make money by shorting it.


Exactly, the only sure way to lose money is to trade so much that it all goes away in commissions.


Maybe they mean to counter trade you, i.e. short the terrible stocks you recommend and become immensily rich.


Yeah, logically someone who can see a bad trade can see a good trade. Anyone who is able to reliably underperform the market would be a valuable trader.


Traditional finance theory says that the world's worst stock picker is just as valuable as the word's best stock picker.


My day job. Personal projects get a little more heart, but "success" to me is usually intrinsic, not extrinsic. I'm probably a little weird when it comes to motivating factors, but not alone.


Oof. This is probably most people, too.

There need to be more jobs where the interest alignment in work is 100%. Disney animators, Nintendo programmers, audio programming, SpaceX engineers, ML/AI, bioinformatics, ... Rockets, chemicals, machines, visual toys, solving moonshot things, ...

Less plumbing and glue code. Less adtech. Less studying and optimizing trivial human interactions that nobody will remember.


> There need to be more jobs where the interest alignment in work is 100%. Disney animators, Nintendo programmers, audio programming, SpaceX engineers, ML/AI, bioinformatics, ...

Some of these jobs can involve crunch time, low pay, and other forms of employee abuse, since people are willing to suffer for the sake of their passion. Sometimes boring work is the healthier option.


^^ this

Would add: prestige law and government jobs; trying to be an actor; working at Amazon; working as a chef/cook at most restaurants, esp fancy ones--the list is quite long of "passion jobs" that pay poorly and involve all sorts of abuse people wouldn't put up with at other jobs.


working at Amazon is a passion job?


I think people would generally describe "software at FAANG" as a high quality job. Amazon is being called out here because it is notoriously stressful compared to the rest.


Yeah I guess that label isn't accurate for Amazon (and a lot of other bigtech jobs) and prestige law, which are more about social status, etc.


I think more prestige. But yeah, for some people.


FWIW, I find glue code and integration to be quite rewarding sometimes. You take other good, useful things and connect them, resulting in a new/bigger/better useful thing... without "doing anything"! :)

Seriously, for some of the things you mentioned, I suspect the key is to NOT be highly focused on the career path which pays the most. I kind of doubt that audio programmers are paid as much as Sharepoint developers, but I would hope they have more fun.


I work in audio machine learning, and it's pretty great. :)

Sometimes people call it a niche field, but I think they are typically just over focused on imagenet.


there's a lot of jobs like this out there -- and a lot of people working in them -- but you pay a premium for it. I think economists even have a term for it. employers don't have to charge as much when people are willing to take a pay cut to do the work.

be careful what you wish for, though. in the entertainment industry, for people like actors and directors, the pay cut is only at the early stages, and unions limit how deep it goes even then. for video games, though, it's an absolute nightmare. interest alignment in work, in that case, can turn into a recipe for suffering.


The haskell tax.


I like my job. I mean, it's not necessarily my _passion_, but I care about the cause and believe I contribute directly and significantly to it. And while there is a lot of plumbing to do, I also have freedom to explore news ideas and learn new things.

But "anything I do for work" was my first thought when I saw this post.

What it comes down to is that there's only so much I can do to help my work's projects succeed. There's just too much out of my control. Decisions have already been made; contracts are already being signed; the clients believe they've done enough testing.

I can pick up the slack, go above and beyond, and do other people's job. But the project can still fail to get user buy-in, fail to make any notable impact, fail to make or save money, or just outright fail for reasons I can do nothing about.

That doesn't mean I don't try. I just don't care if these projects succeed. If we did what we could and learned things we can carry forward, I'm satisfied.


I work in data and ML and it’s mostly plumbing and glue code lol


People seriously underrate how important data cleaning and massaging is in ML though.


Unless you're constantly changing jobs, it doesn't last.


Have you considered using "will the skills I hone here help me with my side projects?" as a way to decide which job to apply for?

I don't have enough data to say it's a good idea, but so far I'm liking it.


For me at least, its not the work tasks itself, its the dealing with the company and the amount of inefficiency that gets in the way of being able to do my tasks. When I do them, I enjoy them. Waiting a week for information and not being allowed to work on other tasks in the mean time will make anyone a little demotivated.


I'm doing/have done this!

I took my current job (in communications) in order to get better at outreach, marketing, etc. for when I work for myself since that's what I was the weakest at as a freelancer. I'm also interested in tech ethics so I took a job in politics so I could become more familiar with how the sausage is made.

Now I'm looking for a swe job so I can get more experience working in teams of devs since most of the tech work I've done has been solo work.

I'll let you know how it worked out in 10 years?


It's always been the reverse for me - side projects have tended to give fresh input that my day job doesn't provide.


Useful metric!

Among the other factors, which are:

"Does this job allow me to have time to do side projects?"

"Does this job provide the funds for my hobby?"


I feel this way too. Success is measured in just "is my employer happy with what I do?"


I built a Visual Studio extension that wraps ag (the silver searcher), because I was constantly flipping to the terminal to use it to search the UE4 codebase I work on. The built in MSVC text search is egregiously slow, and even tools like Visual Assist (which search via indexing symbols) take forever to run on the entire engine.

It can do a full regex search on the entire UE4 codebase in about ~6s on my SSD. Searching just the game's codebase takes ~200ms, enough to feel instant. The speed is all credit to the developers of ag, I just put a convenient interface on it.

I use it essentially as a navigation tool and it's a core part of my workflow, but haven't gotten any paying customers. I initially had hoped to sell a few copies, but since it has completely solved my own problem and probably saved me hundreds of hours of waiting for slow searches, I'm happy.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBan...


isn't ripgrep (rg) better than ag, performance-wise?


it is, but a) they don't care if it succeeds or not, b) there's a new faster grep-alike every couple of years, and c) there are diminishing returns from these performance enhancements. so if you're enjoying ag, more power to you.

btw my own "idc if it succeeds or not" is forkfreshness.com, a system to surface active downstream forks of otherwise dormant projects. if you've got a project you want to use, but it seems like abandonware, you can find out if other forks are keeping it alive.


oh this is brilliant, I've often had to really dig into github to find out this information!


thanks!


I haven't benchmarked it, but it could probably just be a drop-in replacement as I believe the arguments are compatible. Would be interesting to try!


Likely. The dude who developed ripgrep spent like 2 man-years on it full-time, apparently. Interesting (long, detailed) blog post about it: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/


I don't think it took that much time. If you count the time involved in the regex engine though, you might get a bit closer. :-)


LOL. I thought I read that somewhere in your blog post about it (which was amazingly detailed and interesting), but human minds are poo. Thanks so much for this sweet tool! Is there a ripgrep lib that other software can build on this, btw?


Technically yes, and this is the best I can offer: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/1009

In practice, there's no real high level documentation. And there is still a considerable amount of "glue" code in ripgrep's main executable. So the library layer exists at a lower level of abstraction, which may or may not be okay for your use case.


Thanks for all your hardwork! I've been dabbling in Rust and doing toy projects, but have years of experience in other languages. Are there any rust projects you recommend contributing to that have a good community?


Rust itself for sure. And rust-analyzer. I'm sure there are more. :-)


Honestly everything I do. I used to have such high expectations of every side project I built, blogs I wrote, videos I made.

At the end of the day, I realized that the very fact of caring too much prevented me from creating more. The more I created, the more people would engage and those projects would succeed. Weird how that works.


Glad to see this thread come back! I'll share something of my own, though it's not a tech project.

I've been working on translating Japji Sahib - which is the foundational prayer of the Sikhs - into English poetry. The original is a poem, but most of the existing translations are in prose and use Western religious terminology that's not really appropriate to the original.

I just wrapped up a first draft of the translation itself. Also working on putting together an essay on why I felt another translation was necessary and why preserving the form of the poem is important to understanding its contents. Planning on getting it published one way or another.

Been sharing snippets from my translation here, if you're interested in following along: https://twitter.com/verseofpunjab


Thanks for your original thread, obviously it stuck in my mind.

It has been great to read all the responses again. I've probably spent a few years worth of upvote budget, assuming I haven't tripped some upvote spam detector ;)


Hah, same here


Very nice!


Thanks!


I built a website to help me track my Apple Fitness+ workouts. Specifically, I needed several features that Apple doesn't offer today:

- A chronological history of the workouts I've completed.

- Notes and like/dislike tracking on the workouts I've completed.

- Real search capabilities to let me find particular types of workouts (e.g. filter to yoga workouts and search for "pigeon")

And, if people actually use it, then that'll be a big win, because I'd love to be able to see others' thoughts on workouts, find out what's popular in a category, etc.

I have an 'invitation only' system in place on the site today to help mitigate the risk of spam, but I've been sending out invitations to people who sign up pretty much immediately.

https://myworkouts.xyz

p.s. in case anyone's curious about the tech stack: it's a completely boring Rails 7 website with a Tailwind-based UI, backed by Postgres, and running on Render (https://www.render.com).


Wodscribe is a danish startup doing something similiar.

They use AI to determine what workouts you do, with logging and other features.

https://wodscribe.com/


Hey, this looks really cool. Saved!


thanks!


https://getgumball.com

My wife and I started an online/offline shop last year. When our very first orders came in, it was the best feeling ever! I wanted some kind of celebration device that would turn on and play some celebrating music each time this happened. So I started learning IoT / hardware and build a cool retro-looking police light that I can plug into our WooCommerce/Shopify/Zapier accounts (or really anything else with webhooks). This was such a fun project and people wanted to get some for their own. So I'm working on making it a "real" product. I don't care if it becomes a "success" or not, I'm already so happy to use it for my own and my friends.


Cute project. Minor typo in this sentence:

"We’e going to produce 100 of them."


Nice catch, thanks! Just fixed it. I'm still working on that website, a lot of the copy is still kind of temporary.


This is so awesome!

Any recommendations on how to get started learning IoT and hardware?


Thanks! I knew absolutely nothing about IoT and hardware before this, but quickly realized how big and welcoming the community is. This made things very motivating and enjoyable to get started (but still quite overwhelming!). I personally started by diving into the Arduino ecosystem and the world of micro controllers, particularly the esp8266 and esp32. It's all open-sourced and there are tones of tutorials to help you get started. The most challenging part for me so far has been to go from a "DIY prototype" for personal use to a "certified, safe commercial product". It's been a LOT more challenging than I thought, and took way longer to get there. But very fun to say the least.


After you get the "certified" product up and running maybe look at selling it as a kit for the DIYer.


My favourite website is Adafruit! They have stuff to buy, lots of learning resources and CircuitPython (a MicroPython fork with lots of libraries).


Will you support Amazon sales?


Yes, at least via websites like Zapier, integromat etc. I haven't looked at it yet, but I'm sure it's very possible to do it natively from Amazon via webhooks too. So I'd say 95% yes!


I’ve been making mint-tin tabletop games. I’m aiming for a new game every other month. Being a web person for like 20 years now, everything I make disappears in months-to-years. As someone I worked with once described it, we’re digital ice sculptors.

So as a change of pace, physical games! I’ve released 2 so far, next one coming in March.

One is a set-collection competition called Come to Call where players are royal PR people. You’re trying to win the favor of rich patrons without seeming too desperate. Your goal is to send the least interest delegate that will still steal the show. It’s a game of kings, queens, fools, and way too many butlers.

The second game is a push-your-luck dice-rolling egg hunt called Egg Roll! You’ve only got time to make 6 stops to find eggs. Roll the dice to find eggs. If you find some, you can move those to safety or roll to find more. Find nothing and score nothing for the round instead. Works well with kids and adults alike! And comes with 6 variants to change the game up.

You can see both at my little corner of the web, https://fredandfun.com

If you use the coupon codes on my site, I make less than 50¢ per game sold. I’ll never recover what I spent on art. But I dob’t care. As long as someone anywhere has fun with either of them, it’s all worthwhile.


I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun.

A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case.

The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then caused the husband to panic with a morning fax sent to his law firm making fun of his felonious wife and mentioning the case. Without thinking, he used his close connections to the court, trying to save his wife I suppose. Apparently unaware I had caused this in a provable way, the top court decided the very same day to not take the case and gave no reason whatsoever. Such decisions are supposed to be scheduled ten days ahead by law, which did not occur here. The case was also objectively valid since one of the appeals court judges had refused to be on the panel, so the assignments were wrong, a severe procedural error. The judge assigned to fact-finding in the case was the President of this court, the number five in the diplomatic ranking of this nation.

My intent is to end his judicial career and thus alter the course of his nation a little bit.

I am only doing this for fun and don't care if this succeeds.

E-Mail in profile if you are a lawyer or journalist and want to see something interesting happen. There is already a public website with all case materials that caused further drama within the judiciary.

A tech connection: a false claim of immediate threat to the life of the felonious judge had been made to obtain an IP address from Cloudflare, bypassing due process.

Another tech connection: The legal entity operating the website is a DAO on Ethereum, the (minimal) costs are paid with funds originated from a tech billionaire...


If your strategy makes as much sense as your writing, you're definitely going to prison.


Had ended up in hospital with a potentially lethal complication in connection. It won't be me going to prison.

None of the stuff published so far is writing targeted at the general public, it is directed at people involved who are aware of the details.


What is the illegal part?


what does "illegal" have to do with "going to prison" when fighting top players in a known corrupt system?

prison might be the nice outcome.

Note I'm making a lot of assumptions here on the validity/veracity of the story.


I did consider this and protected myself by letting the judges know in a side letter about some background.

Obviously would not have pursued this matter if I wasn't a fairly well-connected person and Covid-19 restrictions made available the time to do so.

The veracity of the case can be trivially verified as I filed nearly everything electronically thus have receipts with digital signatures. A singular court decision was also served digitally because an enraged judge wanted it served instantly right after an ex-parte phone call didn't go the way he had thought.


Will be created^Wfound later on /s


Ahh, sorry. Hadn't had enough coffee to spot the sarcasm. Indeed, dangerous games to play against people without scruples.

I, too, have wanted to undertake projects that would fight against corruption, but I guess I shouldn't have any attachment to my family or friends if I were to go ahead.


Weird to assume that when we don't even know which country it is. I don't find blanket cynicism in favor of apathy to be useful.


Have you checked the carbon monoxide levels in your home lately for a leak? Genuinely concerned…


That is some count of Monte Cristo level shenanigans.


There are many more fun details to the whole story. For example the judge had taken the case files to her house to keep them hidden there, in one panel decision a singular judge voted twice because he could only find one other judge willing to go along, the way I obtained certain info from court staffers was by showing up in person walking in crutches which I actually didn't need, some legal filings had appropriate chess endgame problems for a cover page, and so on.

Nobody expects you to handle your cases like a tech venture, where we only really care for high-variance outcomes and not the simple wins...


Chess endgames?!


https://de.wickepedia.org/File:20210328-rittweger.cover.reda...

The resolution some months later:

https://de.wickepedia.org/File:20211014-lsg-wicke-cover.pdf

The court was unable to print pages due to a css media selector preventing this, so the - presumably bribed - judge had them printed at the nearby law offices of the influential husband. This showed up in log files with his IP address, and can likely be proven as the color printouts of screenshots have forensic features connecting them with his printer.

Since this leaves little doubt about an inappropriate connection to the case and possible bribery, which the prosecutor's office has a legal duty to investigate, this was considered the game over moment.

Somewhat bizarrely, the judge then claimed she felt threatened by this chess game. However, the queen actually remains standing at the end of the game.


The wiki appears to be down. Cloudflare returns an Error 521: Web server is down.


Sorry, this is unexpectedly blowing up. Had wrongly assumed few people would care about the matter.

Should be back up soon with Cloudflare caching.


There's already a website and you tease with this? Why keep the website private?


It's in German language and legal stuff, although one may enjoy the renderings of numerous corruption-involved public officials. These were made using AnimeGANv2.

https://de.wickepedia.org/Wickepedia:About

The felonious judge is named Wicke so this was thought to be the most hilarious domain name.

It has been kept low-profile on purpose because analytics enabled amazing observability about who talks to whom, and who is particularly nervous about the matter. The caching gets bypassed currently due to tracking cookies, which may explain slowness.

Also should point out the (excellent) criminal evidence has thus far not been made public. The state attorney has zero interest in touching a politically highly sensitive matter obviously, so his hand needs to be forced by means other than simply handing over the evidence....


> It has been kept low-profile on purpose because analytics enabled amazing observability about who talks to whom, and who is particularly nervous about the matter.

You are aware that this goes against the DSGVO? I think you are posting way too much information in this thread. I wish you the best of luck.


I am not the publisher. Correlating times and locations with a sequence of events is no data privacy violation.

Further, this is a research project into how corruption works in practice.


Das liest sich wie ein Krimi!

So do you want this to go public yet, or are waiting for further actions by some of the involved courts?


I expect all cases are going to be retried.

As a criminal defense strategy the judge made a claim she "felt threatened" for an extremely long duration including all of her decisions. I have thus filed for nullification, since her claim implies judicial bias.

This matter is currently pending.

I wanted to complete legal proceedings first. A late-night post in a half-day old thread on HN is getting orders of magnitudes more visits than I had thought.


Well this involves the German Supreme Court, any kind of corruption there would be Europe wide, if not World news.


Honestly not so sure. This appears to be a fairly corrupt nation as a baseline so many may find this matter not all that surprising. His appointment a few years ago was controversial within legal circles.

Unlike SCOTUS, Constitutional Court here is by law not entirely at liberty whether to take a case but who gets to interpret the statute. Of course it will be claimed this court can do however it wishes.

To fully convince the public the course of this case was far outside the norm certain data from this court will be helpful, which of course they refused to release voluntarily and the federal data protection authority, meant to enforce something similar to FOIA, claimed to have dropped a matter due to clerical error. This might suggest the matter is already a known political problem at the federal level, but one can only guess. Strangely enough, getting the info will ultimately involve suing the top court (administration) in a lower court.

One thing to keep in mind is that this nation is one without genuine separation of powers. Any matter ends up being citizen versus the state, not citizen invoking one part of the state to check on the power of another part.


Holy mother of a server this is glorious. Bruh/sis you are legendary.


Your wiki's JavaScript hijacks the navigation controls on Firefox for Android.

No way to escape the page except closing the browser


Thank you for letting me know, this will be fixed soon. I should point out this is, for legal reasons, not "my" wiki.


This really sounds like one of them projects you should care if it succeeds if you’re doing it.


This has realistically no more than a 10-15% chance of succeeding, not dissimilar to a startup. For either, it is perhaps better to not get attached too much to a specific outcome.


To quote one of the most formative phrases for me politically (and, come to think of it, in tech and in a bunch of other endeavors): “be realistic, demand the impossible”. Caring about the outcome isn’t the same as being attached to it.


I have nothing personally against the guy, responding to personal asks for a favor is inappropriate but simply how such things work.

This is simply a means to achieve the strictly necessary: to have two criminal offenders amongst judges removed from their appointments. Realistically this only happens if the prosecutors, which are directed by state politicians and are not independent, look bad to the public unless they handle the matter properly.

And that I do care very much about.


A lot of judges are somewhat corrupt, the difference is how much.

But make no mistake, the power/influence they yield is enormous and i would certainly restrain myself for ever doing this.

A judge ( in Belgium) stopped a documentary about his criminal doings, pledged psychological issues ( and his brother is a shrink) and is now happily drinking beers and enjoying ( forced) early retirement.

He accepted briberies from anyone to influence cases fyi. Some cases are pretty nuts too.

Oh yeah, "there was no proof of any briberies" was the result of many cases. But people who live nearby know a thing or two and there is exactly 0,0% chance that he was "clean".


Well aware of the politics. The play here was to predict the ways corruption works and use their own moves against the other side.

Obstruction of justice can already be shown to have occurred within the prosecutor's office, in a case against the judge related to her faking of a crime. Police had concluded there was no threat. That page went missing from her file but I have it from another source.

A number of my friends and acquaintances are, in fact, high-level judges. This court had no way of knowing this.


You sound insane. Generally concerned for your mental health


I appreciate your concern.

Her own staffer did ask me some time ago, unprompted, if she too must fear criminal charges. There exists proof of this.

I do feel bad for her and even the judge's superior, the court president, who I believe failed to take action not because she couldn't recognize the problem but because this judge wields more power than her boss.

Finally, some documents have been designated a state secret because public knowledge would be disadvantageous to the state, something I can agree with. These were circulated before I could interpret the acronyms thus outside my control now.


What did I just read?


I'm not qualified to say this, so this isn't a diagnosis, but the post strikes me as similar in tone to the postings of a paranoid schizophrenic who regularly used to post on a forum I visited.

Completely convinced they're on the verge of uncovering something that will "change history" yet very difficult to follow the detail of what they're saying.


I don't believe or have claimed this will "change history".

Had in fact offered to let the whole matter slide if and only if two judges ruling on health insurance matters hand in their resignations, as I consider them a danger to the general public.


Is that really a decision for you to single handedly make? People make mistakes, but it doesn’t mean they are evil. Pushing them to admit their wrong doing, give up their livelihood/careers, etc. is just stupid. Especially if “doing it for fun”. That’s not admirable, it’s disturbing.


> Especially if “doing it for fun”. That’s not admirable, it’s disturbing.

I see you are attempting to take away the "hacker" in "hacker news".

I see this as social engineering, for a good cause.


Good cause according to who? The OP? You? How about the other people that have received and live with judgements from this official?

And sorry, but social engineering is pretty unethical if you ask me, and has nothing to do with the name of the site.


Exposing a corrupt judge is among the most noble goals a citizen can have. The more incentive judges have to act fairly, the better.

I am not sure you read the story correctly. But I'm pretty sure a judge will get due process - not abusive penalties.


People have been using "the ends justify the means" to justify all sorts of unethical behavior, not the least of which includes torture, genocide, and wars. Let's not go down that ethical reasoning wormhole.

As for his story, my read on it must be much different from your own. Because from what I am seeing, this is far more about the judge's husband than anyone else, and it is to right a sense of personal injustice than a (still misguided) aim of doing what's best for everyone else. Oh, and he's doing it for fun (his words).


The judge felt safe to commit an overt serious crime due to her husband. He is the conditio sine qua non without which this the entire matter had not happened.

He could make a choice. Either talk to me or influence the court. The choice he ended up making is quite clear. Of course I could not point out his options, as that no doubt would have been misconstrued.

There is some evidence suggesting the cases at the court don't get assigned randomly, as per the rules, and she might ask for off-label use cases to get preferentially assigned to herself.

Upon an inquiry the court did not deny this is true. To find the truth one would have to verify the sequence of other case assignments, which should be possible from incoming filing times and such. Here a second case got assigned to her but with a sequence number oddly enough belonging to a different chamber. Per the law there was supposed to be a singular number, and for some reason she split the case without a required decision.

She is also the only judge at this court who ever wrote anything public on the topic.

Due to an adventurous recent personal medical history I became well-aware what problems unlawful denials do cause for patients.


Speaking of genocide, torture and war, since this topic is about german politics, it might be good to remember a certain time in that countries history, when the law was in support of all of these things. Breaking the law cannot be equated with ethical behavior. Social engineering is indeed a method, wether it is morally objectable needs to be argued and not assumed out of the gate.


I don’t think I made that argument, in fact, my comment was made specifically without the qualifier of it being legal vs. illegal. Manipulation (which let’s face it, social engineering is a fancy way of saying) is a pretty solid example of an unethical behavior depending on your ethical world view. Utilitarian? Great, you must also think torture is acceptable so long as it saves lives. Deontological ethical world views might have something different to say, speaking of Germans (e.g., Kant).

Regardless, I think contriving scenarios where you think someone may act corruptly just to catch them doing so is equally as unethical as a police officer encouraging someone to commit a terrorist act then arresting them once they do.

It is manipulative, may not have happened otherwise if not for the original actor, and is akin to saying “I hope you don’t behave like I’d expect a human to instinctually behave if put in a corner”.


Note I did nothing to manipulate the top court. The application was phrased politely and only hinted at a crime background.

Severe procedural errors including denial of access to court files alone justified a reversal, besides the blatant misinterpretation of the law. There was no need to argue beyond this point or label anyone an offender at the time.

(Ordinarily one would have filed to have the decision voided locally instead of applying to the top court, but that court had unlawfully denied access to the assignment rules and does to this day.)


Nice use of words specifying your actions regarding the high court instead of the judges in question, who were specifically being referred to.

You do realize that just because other people act like jerks, it does not give you license to do the same, right? I don’t know why you believe what you are doing is going to have a positive outcome for anyone, including yourself, but I think you have some serious growing up to do.

I’m sorry you had to go through what you did, I really am. It doesn’t sound like a positive experience and I have my own chronic health issues that have been a battle and I can understand being angry.

I just don’t believe it is yours or anyone’s place to take matters into their own hands, nor do I think their actions justify yours. In this situation, you all suck.


Consider I had just survived a rare cancer that kills nearly everyone who gets it quickly, then when addressing a serious side effect from treatment this happens.

Not claiming any moral high ground here. Many would descend into anger and despair or feelings of victimhood, I simply made a choice to play this like a game instead.


Hey, if nothing else, at least you’re owning it at this point in the conversation.

Separate: I sincerely hope you feel/get better my friend and are able to get the medical treatment you were seeking (if you haven’t already). Best wishes to you!


Thank you for your wishes. For future needs I was able to return to private health insurance which suffers from no such problem. However this cannot cover claims arisen prior to policy issue, so the subject matter remains open.

No judge ruling in this court actually has public health insurance.


Well, for what it’s worth and I sincerely mean this, if there is anything I can do to help you out (medically, not legally) please let me know.


I appreciate the offer. Otherwise I did have a superb experience with the medical system, that is real doctors not state workers with lapsed qualification.


Different standards apply for judges within proceedings, especially those making decisions at the very top.

I did offer each offender a second chance, as I thought they might have learned from this. They chose not to take it.

The first instance judge had been given four chances even.


Why do you believe it is your position to give any official ultimatums just to meet your own perceived sense of Justice? The way your are speaking about this is to right your own feelings of injustice, not anyone else’s, yet you do it under the auspices of doing what’s best for everyone else. Do they get a say in this as well?


You interpret this as an ultimatum, I see offering them a way out as being nice. At the same time one has to assert seeing through obvious b-s.

What is appropriate gets decided by lawmakers not judges.

Once judges willfully violate the code they have stepped outside their assigned role. This quickly became more of a political problem than a legal one, and what is right is ultimately for voters to decide.

Whether I am able to interpret the code and precedent correctly we will see. I did score close to the very top when taking the LSAT however.


To clarify, the "way out" was simply a new filing for an interim order based on the novel fact that a potentially lethal complication had just occurred in connection with the case. I substantiated this with medical and research evidence.

This was a very simple thing for her to grant, and in my view she was required to do so based on constitutional principles.

I would more likely than not have let the previous incident slide. Why she did not take this opportunity I have no idea.


You can try to wordsmith and twist the logic all you want. Telling someone “resign and do what I want, or else” is an ultimatum and bordering on blackmail. It is an ultimatum that is directly counter to your stated goal as well, which to “allow the voters to decide”. That’s you deciding for them.


Providing someone a nasty choice isnt neccesarily blackmail or wrong.

Imagine you work as a prosecutor. Someone submits fairly strong, and actionable evidence, that your wife has commited a crime your office is required to prosecute. You are legally compelled to excuse yourself, and let someone prosecute, preferably someone not independent of you. If you do, you know your wife will go to prison, and in the process of the procecution, your every dirty secret will be exposed, and even if you are entirely righteous, and was entierly unaware, and willing to believe the worst of your wife, your reputation will be in tatters. Its also possible that you know that the other prosecutor wont prosecute, but instead attempt to blackmail you, or your wife, using the evidence.

You now have a nasty choice.

Lets say you chose to hand the evidence over to a righteous collegue. Your reputation will be damaged regardless, but if you resign the damage will be light, and as you are no longer with the prosecutors office, you are not expected to approve requests for eg your personal banking information by default. Making it much easier to hide any missdeeds. But if you keep working, everyone who wants your job will spread the information, and your opponents in court will bring it up repeatedly. Both with insentive to lie, or exaggerate. Further, prosecutors are often required, or at least expected, to cooperate with legal investigations in ways regular people are not.

Lets say you chose to hand the evidence to a non-righeous collegue. Your reputation is intact, but he will keep requesting favors, it looks better, but there are no guarantees it goes away.

You can also immideately resign, knowing that it will take a year or two for a replacement to get up to speed, and all you need to do is put the specific case on the bottom of the priority pile, pretend you never read it, and techically have commited no crime, while getting years to prepare, stuff to get lost, or just jump countries.

Or you can chose dismiss it for lack of evidence, toss the evidence in the bin, and pretend like it never happened. Its a boring procedural thing anyways, and odds are good it was just someone temporarily pissed off, who wont care. After all, they didnt even know they submitted it to your office, what idiot does that...

Its not blackmail. Its just that resigning is the better option for you.


I think the flaw in your logic is the assumption it was an either/or situation. There are a whole lot of options between “resign or face the consequences”, and let’s face it, is destroying someone’s career one way or the other (via by choice or otherwise) really a choice at all?

If you think it is, I’d be curious what your choice would be given the same scenario and whether you felt a bit coerced into your position.


Blackmail to me implies that the blackmailer requires something of the blackmailed, in exchange for the blackmailer to not take a specific action. In my example, the sender has already taken their action and given no indication that they are willing to accept a bribe to retract it. If they had required payment to retract it, it would have been blackmail. Meaning no blackmail. The ops story is confusing, so I wont say anything about it. Not sure what you mean about choice there?

In my case? If I was roleplaying the example as the judge, probably call a press conference and loudly condemn my wife for her heinous actions, and promise to vindictively prosecute her to the full extent of the law. Then I would start doing that, knowing full well that her lawyer will argue I committed a procedural errors in managing the evidence(as people cannot prosecute their close relatives, or manage evidence thereof) which then precludes its use in court, letting her go free by technicality... While I win the next election for being the righteous crusader against corruption no matter how much it hurts... Well assuming I actually love her, if I didn't, or wanted to upgrade to a younger model, now is a perfect opportunity to get out of that pesky prenup...

I would not feel coerced, but I would feel threatened. I would like to think that I would chose my wife over my career any day, I hope I never need to find out.


Being forced to make a choice under threat is kind of the definition of coercion, but I think we are getting hung up on semantics (e.g., the word blackmail) and you certainly raise a mature perspective and valid points. I think your interpretation of blackmail is much more akin to extortion, but we can at least agree they felt threatened.

The choice I was referring to was one of resignation and giving into the threat, or fighting the base of OP’s claim(s). Both lead to the loss of their job, except with one option they at least have a chance of keeping their job (fighting it).

Just to clarify, I said it was bordering on blackmail, which I think we can probably agree with each other that this was skirting pretty close to that line.

However, my contention was that it was an ultimatum, while he stated it was not. You don’t seem to be arguing that it was not an ultimatum, just that it was not in your opinion blackmail, which is fair and I won’t beat a dead horse.

Thank you for also sharing your perspective on what you would do in the same situation. I wish I could so confidently say the same, especially when you involve kids, personal attachment, biased storytelling (e.g., him hearing a different story from her than what is/isn’t the truth, which no one knows here), among other factors.

It’s a complicated situation to say the least and based on what OP said, I think there were some serious mistakes made that had a negative impact on him. However, I still do not think his actions are justified, for much other purpose than to be vindictive/take out his anger, and is super risky for everyone involved.

We know nothing about these personalities and outside OP’s own experiences, neither does he. It’s also impossible to predict the future and whether his actions are going to somehow help society writ large, or do more damage than good.

That is my issue with the ultimatum, no matter what you want to call it.


I did not ask her or any judge to resign. This was a proposal to the prosecutor's office prior to filing any of the serious charges and triggering certain events then required from them by law.

Unlike public officials I was fully within my rights to first seek a more politically tenable solution.

There is no doubt everyone involved is fully aware of the situation, although people won't admit to it.


Ugh, your story literally changes and is moving the goal posts. So now it was the prosecutors who made the decision? Not that an indirect threat is any better, but here's your previous description: "I did offer each offender a second chance, as I thought they might have learned from this. They chose not to take it."

To each their own, do what you gotta do - but I stand by my original opinion on your actions.


It does sound insane, but sometimes these things are founded.

Just a few months ago, a local government body finally awards as millions to someone their formed chief executive had been persecuting for two decades. During that time, the random member of the public was imprisoned. This case involved multiple corrupt people.

If it wasn't for the happy conclusion, I'd have said this was the tale of a lunatic.

The podcast is at https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/68


Well, if you're not qualified for it, why do you still do it?


Who knows. They used to say people who think the government is saying on people are tin foil loonies, now everyone is worried about privacy. Don't see the reason to assume this most be crazy. Journalists as a whole have that "when I break this story everything is gonna change" mood regularly


For clarification, evidence for the bribery claim is only circumstantial at this point, which is also made clear in the record. The other claims however are substantiated with strong evidence encompassing intent.


You have a serious case of delusions of grandeur. Get some help.


It is sad that you would rather believe the parent has mental health issues, rather than entertain the possibility that yes, someone is actually doing something effective against powerful corrupt people, and that requires creative thinking.

To me, it echoes "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by La Boétie. Powerful people are just people. They are powerful because we are collectively granting them that power. This is not a case of delusion of grandeur, but a case of saying no to learned helplessness.

So thank you byecancer21 for what you're doing against corruption, from a stranger on the internet.


One of the documents shared on the page is a letter to the constitutional court of Germany where the plaintiff explains how not taking his case constitutes a mortal sin for which the president of the court will go to hell and lectures him that he cannot visit church services anymore. It is very hard to take the rest seriously if the same person is claiming the corruption.


This was a fun thing sent three days before the election, which his party was expected to lose. The same judge was vice-leader of this party until his appointment and is known to be ultra-catholic.

Such writing is obviously not directed at him but rather at his staffers. At the lower courts the same tactic actually worked to change staff willingness to make themselves an accessory to crimes. An interesting consequence is later decision were not served correctly because no staffer wanted to put any identifying information on there anymore – this is however a legal requirement for certified copies.

Note I am not actually accusing the top judge of a crime but merely of inappropriate bias.

I am well aware it is important to convey the events in manner understandable to the general public. This has not occurred yet as I had no immediate plan to go public. Before HN the site was only known to a small circle of lawyers.


Was that sent by the poster or someone they are targeting?


It’s fairly obvious to infer that OP is experiencing some type of psychosis or schizotypical behavior


Well, adding "obviously" to an argument does not add anything to the argument.

I can see how you _might_ think this some type of mental health issue, but seeing a behavior that is weird from your point of view does not make it a medical behavior automatically. It might, it might not, and you can't tell for sure.

To push another armchair diagnosis with exactly the same value, I'd say it looks someone who plays the game of life at a high level, which can sometimes looks like lunacy from the outside. But that's just like, my opinion, man.


My inference is that you've never felt strongly about a topic like this, and live a fairly normal life. That's fine, but you shouldn't drag others down.


Not being able to tell if the facts are true I see why one might be inclined to think as much. I did discuss the matter with friends throughout the course of events to assure my own sanity however, also because certain aspects are in our view rather entertaining.

A future matter is the health data protection violation the judge's family committed by hiring problem solving consultants first and giving them my personal info, prior to escalating to a false threat claim.

Interestingly the law assigns such cases to her branch of the judiciary.

So this judge might soon become a witness or even defendant at her very own court, in a matter directed against her actions.

I will grant you this sounds crazy on the face of it. It is the law however (SGB X).


It's fairly obvious that actual psychiatrists make that diagnosis on a lot more than a HN post


If you read the website, it's apparently because an off-label medicine wasn't approved.

But it looks like Patient F has survived though, which is good.


The medical reviewer, a public employee, had ruled on a matter she was not professionally qualified for.

The court asked the patient's doctor for facts as they routinely do, which left no room for denial. The judge dropped this document from one file, then in another file claimed the same matter had already been decided and passed over all evidence while at the same time knowingly making a false assertion of facts.

Access to these files was denied for months, beyond the constitutional court case even.

Without the ability review the files, had to guess what she had done and this did turn out to be factual later. From judicial instructions found on the back side of a page at the appeals level it is clear these judges had been aware. The judge assigned to fact-finding had refused to handle the matter, a procedural violation.

Had asked the medical board for proof as one way to have these decisions nullified. No response for months. In a hearing that was recorded I mentioned the medical board and, carelessly, two days later they sent a letter refusing me the information. It is clear a judge is behind this. This matter is now pending in administrative court.


I found a psych study about how vulnerable narcissists use more first person pronouns in their writing, and applied that to the Epistles in the New Testament to determine Pauline authorship (Paul has always struck me as a vulnerable narcissist).

Amazing result. Very distinct clusters on relative usage between the undisputed non-Pauline letters (John, Peter, etc) and the undisputed Pauline letters.

Almost all the disputed letters fall in the non-Pauline cluster. Only 2 Timothy falls within the Pauline cluster, and does so smack dab in the middle of it.

Currently debating formatting the results for peer review (which probably won't publish for a year at least) or just creating a post with pretty graphs.

As an aside, the whole "can't have published preprint elsewhere and can't submit to multiple journals" submission policies at academic journals is dumb.


I wouldn't bother with journals unless you really need it on your resume to get a research gig


I vote graphs, this sounds really interesting!


I have a podcast where me and a guest talk about technical interviewing then they give me a live technical interview.

Video podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/TaylorDorsett/

It's fun because I get talk with smart people about a topic with no real solution, then sometimes I do well or sometimes I get destroyed in the interviews. I'd love to have more subscribers but I don't think its ever going to make me any money.


Do you have an audio version? I’ve been looking for something exactly like this for walks.


Yup!

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7zvt9QZWMUGsQ27NM8XuMd?si=6c7e...

Podbean: https://professionaltechnicalintervieweewithtaylordorsett.po...


Oh man, this is an absolute jackpot—exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!


Hope you enjoy! Let me know if you have any feedback. This is my second year doing the show. Trying to make it better however possible.


I tried to use a SAT solver to take strings like "I am Lord Voldemort" and generate human pronounceable permutations such as "Tom Marvolo Riddle".

I thought that if I could express permutation generation in language that the SAT solver could understand I'd end up with something faster than simply generating every permutation and checking to see if it is pronounceable.

I can't be sure if I was wrong, or if my implementation sucks, but it's halting-problem grade slow (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/tomriddle), an utter failure.

Despite this, I sent a link to it in an interviewer with the message "here's some code I've written, in case you're curious". Instead of a coding challenge he just had me give him a tour of the code. I got the job (which is a good thing, because I become a much worse coder when people are watching me, I'd probably have bombed the coding challenge).


There is a company registered that commits the following mobile ads fraud:

* The buy targeted ads from Google, served on YouTube targeting small children and clients of a particular carrier

* When you click on the ad (even if by mistake) you find that you are subscribed to a game service and immediately charged a small fee (5 euros) via your carrier (DCB). You may or may not see a chrome window open and close.

* If you extract the link from your chrome history and visit it again on your computer it looks like a benign form, with terms of use and you need to click at least twice to subscribe.

Now these guys will actually return you the money if you bother to find them and ask it back. They will appear really legitimate as the fraud is difficult to reproduce, and the bet is that they steal a relatively small amount of money and it's possible not everyone notices it on time. Worse I'm sure many parents will blame their kids.

The awful thing is that this scheme wouldn't be possible without Google and the mobile carrier. I actually had DCB disabled because I knew the problem exists, but the carrier had reenabled it without my knowledge. I clicked a link by mistake when I was choosing a video for my kid and got charged.

My project is to research a possible way to reliably reproduce their fraud so I can report it to the authorities. I know for sure they don't have the means to properly investigate it..


I have a somewhat related experience with DCB/premium SMS-es. I run a relatively small-but-not-trivial amount of IoT devices that communicate over GSM/2G. For that end I'm using a local GSM carriers "IoT SIM" cards/packages. A year or so ago we started noticing DCB/premium SMS charges on our account and that was super weird, as we know what our devices are capable and what not. First month it was a device or two, so there was a possibility someone stole our SIMs and is using them in regular phones or what. But next month, a lot more SIMs had these charges. We compiled our case, sent it to our contact at the carrier and the fees/charges were quickly dropped/refunded. All is well, it happens - weird but ok.

But a month or so ago we were tracking down some other issues and requested detailed connection logs for 2 of our SIM cards. And what do we find there? DCB/premium SMS charges. It looks like they are just filtering them out from our invoice and not charging them to us, but some backend system somewhere is still processing those fees.

So it seems like this whole DCB thingy is way more unregulated as one would think. Now I'm really interested how the charges even started appearing on our SIMs, why they did not resolve them at the source and how many people get their money stolen that way and they don't notice a few EUR here and there (fees were around 1eur in our case).

Interesting stuff.


The number of times that anti patterns have morphed into this (literal fraud) seems to be increasing lately. For example, after paying extra for a refundable ticket from JetBlue, it was impossible to cancel. Their "cancel ticket" button threw an error saying "This part of our website isn't working, please call this number" for which there was obviously a 6+ hour wait.

I'm really keen on finding a systematic way of preventing these types of scams.


The systematic problem is the carriers who are processing such payments and don't ban abusive merchants, even when getting tons of complaints from users.

Here I don't think there is a legitimate mainstream use for DCB beside connecting to Google Play and Apple Store. The carriers can and should be able to tell me where my charges where coming from. Instead they call centre told me "its probably something you got from Google Play" even thought I've disabled the DCB payment method there. I found the vendor by inspecting my history as clicking an ad leaves a trace. Most consumers probably are not savvy enough to do that and give up at that point.

Edit: Even worse, this carrier offers a "safety online" package.. that is almost extortion since its safety they fail to ensure if you don't buy the package.


This happened to me, in France, through the Orange mobile carrier, around 2018. They've reimbursed me without issue.

I consider myself savvy, use an adblocker and don't click on obvious frauds. Yet it happened.


That's what hurt my pride, not gonna lie. Plus its angering they are targeting children with this.


I wish you good luck! Perhaps TLSNotary might be of service: https://tlsnotary.org/


Interesting! I bet you do care if this succeeds though.


Well, I'm not betting anything on it..


Need any help with this? You've piqued my interest.


Sure! I don't really know where to start, I got the link.. I wonder how I can increase the odds of getting one of their ads so I can record what happens.

my email is duzunov@fastmail.com


You might be able to run a virtual instance of Android (on a PC), and use wireshark to capture the traffic, and maybe burpsuite if you want to get spicey. I think, I am no expert.

I wish you luck.


Already did that, however the link no longer works the way it did originally. Its either "expired" or they also detect the carrier, DCB enabled. Don't know how they could do that thought.


Wait, how is this technically possible?


I think this is the question. I think they either probably generate links that change once clicked once.


The link is not the problem, but how do you charge someone money without their knowledge?


I described how this works in the original post. They do send an SMS with a link to unsubscribe, but that only cancels future charges, not the original one. And it's possible that a lot of the scammed people don't see it on time or confuse it for another purchase they made. Especially since the presumed targets are children. Then even if you unsubscribe, you still get a bill from your carrier. I had to pester both this firm and the carrier to remove the charge.


That doesn't answer my question. I'm asking: how is it possible to make it so that if someone clicks some random link, their money will be immediately transferred to your account, without needing any confirmation? And if it's possible, why do scammers bother tricking people into voluntarily sending them money when they could just do this?


Thank you


I've been working on https://ayahbyayah.com an iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an.

I've been performing intermittent upgrades over the years as I wanted to retain the simplicity, ease of use with a focus on providing the most accurate and clearest Ayat text in any app.

The latest update has incorporated word by word audio timings and advanced play back controls for a completely hands-free operation, even serves as a teleprompter for the Qur'an.


I like this, it's useful to be able to go ayah by ayah especially when some are tougher than others. The hadith on the top of the page is a good one too, never heard it before

Are you going to make an android version?


Over a year ago I became hugely frustrated with the narratives that were being presented to us. Every 'social media' platform as well as 'news' platform presents us with an undifferentiated feed of news. The problem with an undifferentiated feed is that we, as consumers, can never get a solid view on what's happened or is happening on a single event.

Moreover, the existing platforms encourage doom-scrolling and keep our attention focused on one page for advertising clicks. As far as I'm concerned this is one of the most socially harmful and divisive anti-patterns created.

So, I started developing a site which presents a chronoglogical list of events each of which has, in chronological order, all the news articles, tweets and youtube videos I can find which are related to that particular event reliable sources where possible. Not exactly curated, but not clickbait either.

Looking at the site quickly I've got 317 articles for 'Partygate: The Sue Grey Report'. The 'Guinea Bisseau Coup D'etat attempt'? Around 30 articles in arabic, english, spanish, french and portuguese. The Kazakh protests? probably around 300 in more than ten languages. And there are currently 977 events. This grows every day as I find more sources.

To my mind this is an unbelievably valuable resource, and I want everyone to have access to it. I have plans to expand this much further and the only dev is me.

There's still a ton of features I want to add before I put it out there including internationalisation, accessibility support (The difficulty in finding a chronology of news for an event which people with screen readers experience boggles the mind)

If I were to share it here today it would most likely get hugged to death. But rest assured that this audience is the first I will introduce it to.

Edit: I should also add that I am also looking for investment to increase the 'dev' team. But I'm more the idea / prototype guy. How does one start and yet protect the idea?


I think you're right; there's immense potential value in news aggregation that goes beyond "this got the most eyeballs / articles".

What do you think of the possibility of ranking articles by some metric? If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).


I've given this a lot of thought. Even to the extent of trying to understand what an alternative twitter would look like were it possible to somhow classify a tweet based on its legality in a region and thus giving the user the option to see only tweets which are 'legal' in their jurisdiction. This is a tough nut to crack.

> If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).

It is one thing to have to trawl through 30 articles and figure out which one has the content which is both most accurate at describing the truth and is covering all aspects of the situtation. And it is another thing to filter articles out for having certain attributes.

The first is more difficult. The second is easier and a good feature to add. As the articles are added to the database it's possible to obtain the content and parse it for references to those particular attributes. I'm actually starting work on one at the moment, adverts.

We know that the current model on the internet is to get eyes on an adverts. Not articles. Adverts. And, when we see an outrageous headline "Billie Eilish shaves off own hair in outburst!", we're going to open that page to see what's going on. And surprise surprise. Ads all over the place. I'll be using the number of ads as a metric and in order to provide the user with a warning as to the reliability of the information on the page "This page has more than X adverts. Please be aware that the page may have been designed to obtain your attention and the information within may not be accurate".

As I said in the original comment, I'm going to expand this in such a way that it is beneficial to users to identify "healthy" articles where "healthy" means: few ads, representative of reality (true) and with multiple aspects of the news event.

I have high hopes.


There's probably something to be said for human editorial in ranking sources. There are a finite number of actual news sources with actual reporting, and it occurs to me that your once your automated filter detects possible crap quality, it could kick it up to a human for review and subsequent permanent deranking.

This is one of Google's problems: they are monomaniacal about algorithmic ranking. And that's got them very far on the open web, where the number of sources is too wide and varied for human review. But while news has the appearance of being a wide domain, the majority of what's out there is regurgitated content on sites that could safely be branded with a permanent mark of distrust.

Meanwhile metrics like # of ads could incorrectly derank sites that are just run under a poor business model, but do employ good journalists / analysts / whatever.

Good luck!


I launched a stupid game last week: Let It Slide. (if you like Altf4/getting over it/painful games)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/

It was my first entirely finished project: gameplay, 2d elements, sounds, musics (but not 3d). I'm just proud I finished this project, having a tendency to get bored extremely easily and only motivated by new stuffs (oh a bird!)


The aesthetic is very reminiscent of Lovely Planet. Looks fun!


Thanks! Oh yes it's cute, this is the kind of aesthetic I aimed for, to counterbalance the pain of playing with cuteness. When I read this, I realize I'm a monster.


are you a NL fan? kind of game that he likes. Only have a mac right now but the game looks great!


NL? Sorry I'm uneducated :)

Yeah no Mac version because I don't have a Mac to compile and try it.. :'( (maybe a Linux version coming later)


I believe they're referring to the streamer/youtuber Northernlion


Ooh yes, Northern lion could definitely rage on this. I should shoot him an email..


I’m 53,000 words into a Harry Potter fanfic that fixed some issues I had with the seventh book. Basically, I object to how little the main characters ‘play to win.’

Example: Team Voldemort taboos his name, so that if you say it, his goons show up to arrest you. So everyone tries to stop saying his name. But here’s another idea. One person says his name while another hides nearby. After saying the name, the first person disappears, and then whoever shows up, the second person shoots them. Like, with a gun — a magical gun, if you want! Do that as many times as it takes until there are no more Death Eaters.

You get a very different book with characters who think like that, and it’s been a lot of fun to write.

EDIT: link, in case this is your thing: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8180098 caveat that I have very uneven abilities as a fiction writer


One thing that bothered me a lot in that book was the trio hiding out in the wilderness scrounging for food. They could do magic! How hard was it to sneak into a muggle supermarket and steal some food?! Or lie low at some pre-arranged safe houses? Could have had Dobby bring supplies.

I don't know how effective Taboo ambush tactics would be in the long run but not finishing off death eaters and letting them respawn was definitely a bad move tactically. Should have atleast dumped them all in a fidelius charmed warehouse or something in a Stunned state.


Yeah, so basically the joy of writing the book was imagining the cycle of tactics/counter-tactics that my stratagems would engender.


Whenever anyone mentions Harry Potter I always think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8shqjr6O8

Stewart Lee is not everyones cup of tea however.


Mind linking this fanfic? Sounds interesting.


Edited OP to include it :)


Thanks!


I have a blog that I write hshidara.com that I don't care about doing well. My mind tends to wander and I have a hard time articulating and forming abstract ideas verbally, usually I need to write it out in a journal, but this helps me get my thoughts even more in order because of the public nature of the content creating more social pressure to get it right.

I have a tools section where I make small edge-case tools for myself, I host it on Render and use django admin so I can get away without having tons of core functionality in my tools. Technically they're MVPs that I launch on PH, but they never do well, but they're still useful to me and the problems it solves in my own life.

But to answer you more seriously, I'm my own "I don't care if this succeeds" project. I don't think that I'm particularly smart or talented but I'm still young and excitable and exploring my own nature through software. Hopefully I'll make something that's really valuable to the world one day, but for now I learn, build, meet new people, fail, and grow. And that makes me happy.


At this point I absolutely don't want my personal blog to "succeed." I don't want attention, or fame, or any of the shenanigans that come along with a large following. If it ever achieved these things I'd probably delete it.

Building stuff just for yourself is underrated.


It would be ironic if you followed that comment with a link to the blog :D


Yes but if I did that I'd need to perfect the absurdity by adding an aggressive "sign up for my newsletter" lightbox, and that's a line I can't cross.


> I'm my own "I don't care if this succeeds" project.

It is like you are me. I came to a similar conclusion independently. Whatever I do doesn't need to "succeed".

The only think I push myself is to build and build. Meet new people and hope it opens new doors.


For the past ~6 years, I've been building and maintaining a website for a text-free visual programming language called BlockStudio at:

https://www.blockstud.io

The site has < 10 monthly active users on average, but they're middle-school (or younger) kids, and some of them have been using it for years now! It brings me great joy to work on it in the evenings whenever I can make time for it.

[Edited to add an example]

Here's one of the regulars:

https://blockstud.io/profile/15572


I'm building https://www.taaalk.co/, it's a social network for conversations.

The site went down a few months ago, but now it's back up. The first new Taaalk I'm having is with another engineer, and we're trying to publicly solve a technical chanllenge - how to repopulate the Taaalk database from archive.org download.

https://www.taaalk.co/t/repopulating-the-taaalk-database-fro...

I love Taaalk so much. I love all the little design features. I love tinkering with it. I love the conversations I have had with people on it; you can check them out on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210316214650/https://taaalk.co....

I don't mind if it fails but I do have high hopes for it!


This is really cool! Love the minimal design. Also I'm a fan of this as a form of article / content generation. Where an article is created by a team, as a collaborative effort, organized and started by an editor of some sort.

Think of how many interesting conversations happen in walled gardens like slack, telegram, discord. Very thoughtful and in-depth sharing from users that would most likely be valuable for others to read. And valuable for these people themselves to re-read in the future at a specific easily accessible / shareable url.

The reason these people share in the walled gardens is because it's a conversational / social atmosphere, not necessarily because it's a private discord server (IMO). And it's just that the walled gardens have become the popular place for discussing things. So it's more natural. This is to say I don't think people would be against having their conversations being in public, searchable, like taaalk is trying to do. I think a lot of people would prefer it, professional types. People who use these communities to learn and develop. Rather than the anonymous s*#@ posters who don't really leave a trail or anything valuable either.


Thank you so much for the kind words. I couldn't agree more.

I really think some of the best features happen when you start a conversation - so if you are inclined, please try: https://taaalk.co/start-conversation

Additionally, is it clear from the UI that if you follow a Taaalk you will get email updates for every added conversation "blob"?


"Oh By"[1]

It's a "universal shortener" which means it doesn't just shorten URLs - it shortens anything and turns it into a short, recognizable code.

Or, what would be a recognizable code if anyone used it :)

Here's an example: https://0x.co/examples.html ... and for some reason I am still enamored with the "send a text to someone in the future" use-case.

[1] https://0x.co


Sorry, maybe I don't understand: from the comparison with QR codes I thought this was encoding the information in some way (like tio.run and many other places do), but it looks like the code is just a handle for your internal lookup? How is this different from the many pastebins out there? One could as well write on the shoe paste.ee/p/t7lCK and put the information there - or just the p/t7lCK part if paste.ee was seen as a universally recognised data store the way you seem to think of 0x becoming.

Maybe the difference is on the social side, not at a technical level: having the code be recognised with the 0x, and encouraging people to converge on this as a standard. That would be perfectly legitimate, I'm just trying to make sure I've understood this correctly.


I work in abuse (prevention), and you might want to change the name of that website since it is very similar (edit distance 1) from some really bad stuff - unfortunately i can't share more details for obvious reasons :)


By the way, your website access is already blocked by certain ISPs and marked as "dangerous".


I have learned that this is common with a URL shortener - they immediately get used by all kinds of scammers.

I learned a bit and played the cat-and-mouse game for a bit but for now ... we're marked as "dangerous".


The lost and found example is horrible LOL. If I came across that glove, I guess I might be tempted to Google the code, but that's because I'm a nerd. At best you still need to write "IF FOUND PLEASE GO TO 0x.co". And bear in mind that 0 and O are very similar.


If I found that I would think "how weird, someone wrote a hex code on this," and best-case might try to translate it to ASCII or google "hex code graffito" or the like, which I doubt would bring up this site because it doesn't use the term "hex code" anywhere.


hmmm... Oh By codes are random so they may or may not have >F characters in them.

If I have some time I will make it such that all Oh By codes have at least one >F character in them so they cannot be confused with hex codes ...


Every other url shortener has the massive advantage over yours of providing urls that can actually be used to retrieve the information, whereas your codes are meaningless unless someone is already aware of the service. Furthermore, I would argue they are not "recognizable" because the format you've chosen already has a well-known unrelated meaning for hex notation.


Just to clarify: if you use 0x.co as just a plain old URL shortener then it will work just like you expect it to.

The odd use-case - codes out in the real world - is a chicken-and-egg problem that will probably never resolve itself.


I made a website to listen to Super Nintendo / Super Famicom music emulated in the browser. It was a great way to learn about Emscripten. Not sure what it would succeed at other than being popular, and I can assure you it is not.

https://sfc.fm/


This is great!

Some fans of Super Mario World also created a playlist of remastered soundtracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKTbcs1t7M&list=PLD-vbw8Jmu...

More info here: https://twitter.com/lebrickster/status/1356013269513863171

Super Guitar Bros. also have some excellent covers of classic console music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE89o33fqz4&list=OLAK5uy_nL7...

I discovered these while creating visualizations of music transformed into the frequency domain using Fourier transform which you can watch here:

Frequency Visualization: Super Guitar Bros. cover of Athletic (Super Mario World theme song) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJUxzOP2fzs&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Frequency Visualization: Super Guitar Bros. cover of the Gerudo Valley song (from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVbDfj4lzY&list=PLn67ccdhCs...


Nintendo lawyers shitting their pants furiously while typing out a cease and desist letter and issuing a takedown notice to your website hosting.


I've been waiting on this for decades. I think the not being popular is helping out on this front. Also that it only ever costs money and never makes any really helps.


That's awesome! SPC is an impressive music format, and music artists on the SNES pushed it to its limits.

Also, props for the great Twitter handle.


I love this! Wonder if it would be possible to make something similar for other consoles (I'm thinking Game Boy?)


https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js/

try that one.

edit: oof no game boy, but I'll leave this in case anyone doesn't know about it.


This is so amazing. Thank you.


When you plug a Macbook in with the included two-prong power adapter, sometimes it buzzes slightly when you stroke it gently (ground loop). Im working with a factory to make a grounded duckhead adapter to fix this.

https://ibb.co/P4Bjstg


Wow. I had never experienced this until I moved from US to NL. It sometimes really bothers (scares?) me. If you have two Macbooks side by side, and you touch them both at the same time, you can get an even bigger sensation.

Now since you're in this area of expertise, do you think it's possible that on rare occasions I could lightly stroke another human (let's say in a bed, on a waterbed (water filled rubber container)) and feel the same sensation as I feel sometimes when I stroke the computer? Could be that both turn me on, but I'm pretty sure this was not imagined. It was also rare and strong when it happened.


The sensation comes from the Macbook case voltage differing from that of ground, and finding a path to ground through your body. Sometimes, when you feel the sensation coming from the computer, if you lift your feet off the ground the sensation stops. This is because you are no longer a path to ground.

It's totally possible for this path to ground to go through two humans, making it feel like their skin is buzzing! For example, if your friend is in bed using a Macbook, they're insulated from ground and thus at Macbook case voltage. If you stand on the ground beside them and touch them, the current now finds a path to ground through both your bodies!


> until I moved from US to NL

So, my guess is you're using the 2 pronged brick (US) plug with a US->EU plug adaptor.


It also happens with EU spec machines and their respective EU power supplies. Could be that some of these older homes aren't properly grounding some outlets, so regardless of what you stick in there, maybe you're not getting a ground.

Despite how dangerous it sounds, I've never heard of anyone having a real shock... so I guess it's fine.


Hi, could you explain why this happens normally? Isn't the output neutral line of the DC charger supposed to be pretty much 0/ground anyway? Or is it that the neutral is a few volts off the ground?


I wish I could, but I honestly don't know. All I know for sure is that using the ground pin 100% fixes it. If anybody on here could explain it, I'd be super grateful!


There are filtering capacitors between mains and ground, see https://www.edaboard.com/threads/capacitors-between-power-an...


This happens to me when I use my MacBook on a bed with an electric blanket


I think this actually will succeed


I was looking for it for ages. Please make a British version as well! This is neat!


Glad you like it! But I thought the UK duckhead already has a ground pin?

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MKU63B/A/67w-usb-c-pow...


At least on my older mag safe charger, only 2 pins are connected. You can pull off the UK plug and plug in the US or EU one, or even just a regular figure 8 lead (not sure of the correct name for these!)

Had a few times where I've had to disconnect the charger as I could feel an effect like static electricity on the metal case of the MacBook.


Oh wow! Sure enough, the UK adapter _has_ the ground pin, but it's not connected to anything .

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17575/how-to-prope...

Alright if I sell any of this North American grounded version, I'll make one for y'all across the pond!


That's right, but the short version isn't connected to the ground. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8594979


I just found this too. So strange to have a useless prong--maybe it's just for mechanical support? IMO if thats the case they should make the whole prong plastic to indicate its lack of electrical function.


That's actually useful.


I have a small game that I made to experiment with some tech.

https://donotplaythisgame.click/

In short, you accrue points while you aren't playing it, but you have to log into actually get the points (similar to "the game", which you just lost). You get your global ranking only after logging in though.


There's a concept here to refine... I've thought about something that's perhaps related.

One problem with a lot of modern (online/shared) games is the sense of missing out when you're not playing, or the sense of competition which demands focused attention. Both of those tend to upset life balance.

I have pondered influence based games, somewhat like turn-based, where you aren't able to micromanage play but instead strategize and occasionally provide instructions or goals. Then the game does the playing, and you can observe if you wish. But importantly, for lengthy periods you cannot make changes or influences; so frequent observation wouldn't be rewarding or useful, and you could feel content to go away for a day or two. Then when you return, there's a bit of excitement to discover how things turned out and to plan what goals to modify or add.


I have been pondering the same concept for years. The problem seems to be: A) Making AI that is able to plan for goals set by players and achieve them is not just "not mainstream", its actually unique when its used. Even the algorithms like GOAP (Goal Oriented Action Planning) is very limited (eg cant really chain goals, one goal at a time,...), and while better algorithms have been proposed (UDGOAP - Utility Driven GOAP), they havent been implemented in any game yet. B) This type of game is not proven, so noone is gonna invest big bucks. And implementing completely new and untested mechanics and core loops will likely burn more cash as you iterate for usable outcome.

Theres a wishing for games of the future, tho


>similar to "the game", which you just lost

FUCK.

I had a good streak going.


Random idea, affiliate style code that you share to friends to invite them to this game that you don't play. Then you receive points when someone in your tree "loses" the game by checking their score.


Do you want a high global ranking? Or low? I was ranked 5 after logging in for my first time.


It's newly up so you were tied fifth!also go for the best ranking which is closest to 1


The only way to win is to not play.


Hacker News is part of my daily life. I try to follow the top stories every day when I have the opportunity. In order not to miss important stories on my busy days, I prepared a notification service. It was a very simple, ~40-line PHP script that sends me notifications for stories with over 200 points. I have been using this service for 7 months and I no longer worry about missing important stories.

Finally, I made this service available to everyone so that it can be useful to others. I have also obtained the necessary permissions from the HN moderators to share such a service with you. So, I hope you will not miss important stories from this awesome platform with the help of this service. Also when I share this service with HN, I hope I will receive this story as a notification.

And this is my "I don't care if this succeeds" project because I am already using and I just shared with everyone.

Also I just received this post via this service and just came here to share this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153116

https://hnn.avci.me


A lot, I don't list them in my resume or attach a title (founder, etc.), I just did it for the fun of it or to teach my son.

active & hiatus projects (published in Google Play & Apple App Store)

https://ABCDutch.app - Various Dutch learning apps I made for my son

https://ChronoBook.app - Muji Chronotebook for iPad

https://CloudArchitect.app (see wayback) - AWS/Kubernetes/Google/Azure Cloud Whiteboard Magnets for iPad

https://SketchDesigner.app - UI/UX design tool for iPad

PencilPuzzle - Over 25k+ puzzles, pictionaries, sudoku for iPad

sunsetted projects

https://PrintableFaceMask.com (see wayback) - last option printable origami Facemask to fight COVID-19

Various auto-generative NFTs (anon. around ~6k ERC-721 NFTs minted)

Too many. https://jjuliano.github.io/jjuliano/stuff-i-did.html


I'd say doing it "for the fun of it" or "to teach my son" are both forms of "succeed" :)


I am building https://learnawesome.org

It's an attempt to organize world's knowledge. Right now, it looks like GoodReads-like social network for learning resources organized by topics, formats, difficulty levels etc. But there's a knowledge-graph that separates ideas and the medium those ideas are expressed in. For eg: "Sapiens - the book" and "TED Talk given by Yuval Harari" are connected to the same node.

This idea isn't anything new. Here is Danny Hillis talking about it at OSCON 2012: https://youtu.be/wKcZ8ozCah0

The code is open-source on github: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/


Nice ideas and good work.

I’ve put down various ideas and links about constructing and testing knowledge graphs here https://wiki.secretgeek.net/dependency-graph-for-knowledge

Good luck with what you’re doing.


I created https://plaintweet.com/ primarily for myself. I posted it on HN sometime back and many people visited it. It is completely free and doesn't use any analytics so I don't know how many people use it (if any).

It runs on a $5 VM along with some other small projects, so it doesn't cost me much and hence the outcome doesn't matter.


Fantasic idea and implementation. My timeline on here compared to twitter.com looks more sane and inteligent without those recommendations of 'X liked this tweet', and all the news topics. I assume that's because it's getting the raw feed.

I also love low-fi websites like this. I think websites shouldn't be a large drain on resources, and should embrace standard HTML as much as possible.

This has the opportunity to curve timewasting scrolling by making it more a periodical read. As such, I'd like the return of the timestamps and to implement hourly pagination, so that there's an 'end' point and a easy bookmark to start where you left off.


Thank you for the feedback. Glad you like this. Yes, I was spending way too much time because of the endless feed and scroll. I was seeing more things I didn't subscribe to (follow) than what I subscribed to. So I created this app.

The timestamp idea is great. I will look into implementing it next. It's always nice to have a start and an end. Maybe I will add a setting where the user can specify how frequently they want to fetch new items.


An alert for you: the donate link leads to a “404 Not Found” page on buymeacoffee.


Ah thanks. It should be fixed now.


https://github.com/martindbp/merkl

A ML pipelining/build library. Think like make but for ML models, but written in Python code and invalidating results based on data and code changes using Merkle DAGs. Similar to DVC, but again using pure Python instead of YAML files, and (arguably) more powerful caching. I use it myself and find it very useful, but don't have the energy to polish and promote it :) Maybe that will change in the future though!


I have a lot of software written, basically just for me but with a bit of work it could be a thing. The core feature is burning through digital lists one item at a time but with as little interaction with a computer as possible.

Data only push notification -> text to speech to bone conduction headphones (or really any headphones). Tells me the current task. Two buttons on my wrist. One is next task, one is "toggle repeat mode". I have voice actions that load specific lists or any of the other things I want it to do. Basically all manner of software exists in varying forms for working on basically every native user interface I interact with. Global hotkeys, system tray icons, background services, etc etc.

The cli, custom launcher, watch software, and the chrome / firefox new tab extension get the most use. Small feature set makes "software for everything" realistic. "See/hear current list item", "Next task", "toggle repeat" -- I treat it as a way to learn things, but I also use it absolutely every day. I like to act like when I inevitably develop cognitive issues in my old age that this will be a useful utility to have.

When I make a very detailed list for the day and burn it all down by just listening to what I'm supposed to do and tapping a button on my wrist for the next thing, I feel far far more productive than my baseline just due to not context switching. Put up the blinders, get in the zone, stay in the zone. :)


Wow, this sounds really cool!

What is the main way you create/edit the list items? Is it manual, automated, etc?

Could you describe the way you use it to learn new things?

I really like the philosophy behind this--seems quite elegant


Thanks! Most of the "how" is shared in another reply. Really it's just an array of strings that keeps a cursor (and technically a stack for interruptions that pop off before returning to the cursor in the list). So posting a fresh list to the service that runs it is a common use case. Loading saved lists, routines, some things have state machines that inform task creation but that complexity I wax and wane finding all that useful.

The book "the checklist manifesto" informed some of this philosophy behind the tool(s). To learn new things specifically is spaced repetition and keeping a backlog of things to dig into. One practice that has stuck is a list of reminders / active ongoing things that I burn through when making a hotlist. If I'm good I'll actually do what I load, if I'm not I'll load it with good intentions and skip things or take it out as the day gets hectic. Nothing really more than you'd do without the one item at a time system.

It's all a work in progress and malleable since it's exclusively mine. If I come up with a better way then maybe that's what it will morph into.


Actually, there's the other aspect of "learning things" which is if I want software to do something I just build it and usually I've never done it before. The elisp emacs functions, the Android launcher, the swift taskbar menu thing, global hotkeys on windows in c++, data only push notifications, background services on all the things. Just a good excuse to roll up my sleeves and get some code written for something I otherwise have no business digging into. It's fun and keeps me well rounded.


Having a hard time understanding what you're describing. So you use it as a to-do list? There's no way to address the items in a different order?


Well sure there is, alter the original list and load it again. Since I have exactly one customer, me, I've just dogfooded this. Written lists or something in an app or an editor are far more natural than anything I'd cook up / reinventing that wheel.

Most commonly I just get to inbox zero, stack rank what needs to occur in what order, then make a precise step by step list. The process of making a punch list of actions in order I find useful for thinking things through. Then it's just load and execute it based on what's described above. Pull the next task one at a time like a short order cook.

Loading the punch list is usually just some editor plugin or something native that catches shared text / intent recievers. In emacs, vscode, google keep, obsidian I just highlight text and hit a hotkey to load it. Or skip the highlight and just share / load the whole buffer. Rinse, repeat.


Wordo Dictionary.

It's a complete faillure by any standard, lol. But it has a handful of power users who have begged me to keep it online. I built it years ago because I was fed up with the other dictionary websites, they have clutter and ads. And the definition text is so small. Wordo is very simple: https://wor.do/love.

Users also have profiles, and can follow other users. They will be notified if one of them 'likes' a new word ("@pg likes the word 'cap table', 14 min ago"), like this: https://wor.do/@aminozuur


https://github.com/ScottLilly/MogriChess

It's a variation of chess where the capturing piece acquires the movement capabilities of the piece it captured.

I originally wrote a version seven years ago, but never got far in building a good AI for the bot player. As much as I like the idea behind the game, the program is really a testbench for me to work on memory and speed optimization techniques and probably eventually learn some AI/ML.


My partner and I created https://retrogram.app for iOS/watchOS

We started designing it at the end of 2020 and released it in Jan 2022. We met over word games, and love playing them together so we wanted to make one with all the polish we could put into it

It's inspired by the 1970s, old Atari game packaging, VHS tapes, Beach Boys albums, etc. We spend time making the puzzle together each day and put quite a lot into it in terms of stories for the different words, themes, and curating words based on upcoming events. You can see what I mean from our Twitter[1] or Instagram[2]

Our goal was to have it cover its own costs, to earn about $500/year (Apple Dev expenses, font licensing, hosting, Firebase). This would allow us to justify working on it. It has earned $1000 in January so far (probably because Apple featured it) so we consider it a success for this year and next year

[1] https://twitter.com/RetrogramApp

[2] https://instagram.com/retrogram.app


I am currently building a suite of software that'll allow users to easily design and run Monte Carlo simulations to solve problems in statistical physics. I am in no rush, mostly because there are probably only a few thousand people who will ever need such capabilities and it's fair to say that most of them will have enough knowledge to build their own Monte Carlo simulations from scratch.

Honestly, I'm only doing it because it's a nice way of wasting time whilst convincing myself that I'm not wasting time!


that's awesome! I tried to do the very same thing: https://github.com/simulatedphysics

do you have a website by any chance where I can follow progress?


This sounds cool! Is it open source? Or some way for us to follow or see a release?


I'm making a proof of concept UI library that runs in WebAssembly!

Pros:

- Rendering for multiple platforms

- Much efficient server side rendering with all the goodies of SPA (no need to scale nodejs servers)

Cons: It's just a proof of concept and I don't have enough bandwidth to take it to a full blown framework


I care if this succeeds, because I want it.


I'm not sure if this counts compared to the other posts here, but for me, for many years, r/wallstreetbets.

I think this actually falls in line with most subreddits. You build or support a community because you want to discuss something and there isn't anywhere else to do it.

This is kind of a loose interpretation of the "gets a lot of attention" requirement though.


I’ve run a community for 10 years now, I’m extremely burned out. You have to make so many compromises and babysit so many idiots it really saps the fun out of everything. I’m tired of being Literally Hitler because I have to ban someone or mediate other histrionic meltdowns.

Also after awhile it grows so much you don’t even know everyone anymore, and you pretty much don’t care. My discord has 11k members and I don’t even read 80% of the channels anymore lol

I always wanted to be the big webmaster guy when I was young, but the reality can be a bitter pill.


1. Circa 2014 I've created Mapless [1], a Smalltalk persistence framework to remove the Object Relational Impedance Mismatch problem by design so I can quickly prototype or (modify) maintain the persisted objects without caring about mapping. After being abandoned, it suddenly became a life saver. Now it's going for production with humongous load.

2. I'm discretely working in Lobster [2] because I don't like current Smalltalk IDEs and I want one with a native look and feel. So far I have implemented Transcript, Workspace, Inspector, REPL and partially a Class Hierarchy Browser.

[1] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/Mapless [2] https://github.com/sebastianconcept/lobster


Do you have some instructions, screenshots, or video about the lobster project?


Not yet. I wonder if I should make a proof of concept demo at this stage or later when the UI gets more love (now is the style needs more love as padding margins and details of that sort are at the bare minimum to continue focusing on functionality).


I built a fun project to help build a morning journal habit. It works for me because I stay on top of my email inbox. The service emails me a journal prompt every morning and I save my entries by replying to the message, filling out the questions in line. If this sounds interesting there's a free trial available at https://mymomentjournal.com.

I had a lot of fun building this and thinking through the user-flows while I was out on long runs. That alone was satisfying enough, but it would be fun for more people to use it!


I use it!


oh that's cool man


https://gen.go350.com/login

https://github.com/62726164/ed25519-login

I built a website that uses public Ed25519 keys for user authentication (rather than passwords). Users sign the current Unix Epoch time (with the private Ed25519 key) and paste that base64 encoded signature into the login form.

I don't care if the idea succeeds or not, I use it for myself. I like simple, secure things and I feel webauthn is too complex.


Cool! I have implemented a similar workflow (certificate signatures as authentication) for some backend processes. No public write up currently. Certificate based authentication usage will only increase with time, imho


For extra security, the website should generate an extra nonce to go with the current time, otherwise there's a window where the signature could be reused to login again (maybe to another site).


A signature cannot be reused. It's only good for 60 seconds and once used may never be re-used because I do not allow that. Register for an account and try to submit the same signature more than once.

I understand replay attacks. I don't allow that to happen.


Is that supported by any password managers? :)


No, but it would be trivial to implement that into existing ones. But since it's not a password, it doesn't seem like a good fit.


I have a dream of killing the "hierarchical storage" metaphor. It started as a program to organize my images w/ tags: the images go into content addressable storage, the tags get stored in a relational database, and then you can query the tags, link them into a tree (taxonomy) or graph, etc.

While building this I realized I wanted it to interact w/ other programs in my operating environment: so I made some tools to take queries and spit out hardlinks on the filesystem hosting the content store. This would let me write a quick query in my shell, spit the results to a taxonomy of ephemeral folders, and then access those folders from your usual "naïve" applications.

Then I became addicted to this workflow and realized I wanted to organize all my media this way; which spiraled out of control when I realized I never wanted to deal with paths again for any of my documents.

I'd stress that the idea of content-addressable storage w/ an interface on top is most emphatically not novel, Venti[1] from plan9 was doing it in the early aughts w/ references to prior work from the decades prior, git and many VCS systems are just interfaces into a content-addressable store as well. It's just that hierarchical organization won in popular culture, and as best I can surmise nobody is really interested in replacing it.

The problem one naturally runs into is: hierarchical storage is inextricably linked into our modern operating systems, file systems, shells, protocols, etc. at the most fundamental levels; so the complexity grows enormously w/ every layer I want to subsume. You either deal w/ the friction of the "impedance mismatch" between your storage and operating environment, or you basically resign yourself to building an entire OS where "files" live at one and-only-one path, with a myriad of indexes & manifests to make sense of it all.

Am I likely to succeed in killing the "filing cabinet" metaphor? Probably not. Has the journey been worthwhile? Absolutely.

[1]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/


I would definitely be interested this! Got any links or public repos anywhere?


I have two, one more ambitious than the other.

First is a site that has existed for around 25 years now, although it was shut off for several years. It came back to life when the pandemic started, and is behind private auth now. Basically, it lets me and other creative writers collaborate on branching fiction novels together. I write a chapter and put a couple of choices at the end, which serve as writing prompts. A reader comes along, clicks a choice, and is faced with the need to write that chapter, and so on. Our favorite story is currently 288 chapters, and is projected to reach about 1000 pages when it's done, which will probably happen in the next few months. We're all good enough writers to pay attention to characterization, dialogue, and theme, so all the threads tend to reach natural narrative conclusions, and I'm even able to export it to a printed "branching fiction" format and publish the books through Amazon KDP. Someday I'll find a lawyer and figure out how to open it to the public (it supports multiple in-progress stories) but for now I'm quite enjoying having weekly Discord meetings with my writer friends, writing a handful of chapters per week. As for the tech side, probably the most fun recently was writing a react component that lets you graph out the animated chapter map in all sorts of fun ways.

Second actually has some technology in common with the above. I'm enamored with using propositional logic (not predicate logic) to make and verify argument graphs. Meaning, you create some nodes with sentences and truth values, and build up actual visual graphs with sentences in bubbles that you can derive from other premises, and then collaboratively judge whether the truth value is propagating throughout the graph. It would enable people to browse to someone's conclusion, and then explore down through their entire argument down to their facts (which should have the same truth value for all people) and values (which should have truth values that can differ from person to person), and then people could pick points in the argument to disagree with or challenge. Kind of my own attempt to turn the current age's destructive argument habit on its head, into something constructive and collaborative, in a journey to discover shared truths, and opposing perspectives that we can respect. Like I said, ambitious.


I'm really interested in this. Closest thing we've got is https://www.kialo.com/do-aliens-exist-1258


Mine is https://sumi.news. I use it, others use it, and I consider that a success.


Looks fantastic, thanks for sharing. Love how you include news sources from other nations.


Looks great, thanks for sharing - will definitely use it moving forward!


This is AMAZING


Thank you. I'm always looking for ways to improve it.


I am making a series of books on commutative algebra. The first one is available at https://www.ams.org/open-math-notes/omn-view-listing?listing...

There is a sequel on homological methods, which is not online, and I am currently trying to publish both. When I have time, I would like to write a third volume on homotopical methods (essentially all the stuff needed for André-Quillen cohomology and the cotangent complex).


I was a bit annoyed I couldn't use keyboard shortcuts in most online json formatters so I build my own mostly for my personal use. After a while I got the idea to ask the guy who owns jsonformatter.com if he wants to host it and after a while he got on board. So there you go : https://jsonformatter.com/


Amazing! I like it.


A hobby project from about 5 years ago https://cmdchallenge.com . There is zero monetization and the only reason I keep it running is that it has been pretty low maintenance and doesnt cost anything to run (one small $5 vm). There seems to be some small groups who use it as a learning tool. I don't think it is a great way to learn shell fundamentals by any stretch but the low barrier makes it a bit more accessible than other tutorials.


Very cool! I'll recommend to my friends.


I'm building a method to use Twitter (via API) as a configuration management repository, storing encrypted configuration files in twitter, then using API calls from new network clients to grab the role-appropriate configuration files for a given service. So, "puppet, but with Twitter as the storage component".

It initially grew out of a test to build a shell-based encrypted method for posting and reading tweets, compounded by an underlying desire to figure out how to make twitter "useful" for me somehow. Discovering that stego data does not get stripped was an eye opener on the size of data chunks that could then be stored as tweets, which allowed me to push larger configuration files, while still having them be largely useless to random viewers.


I'm working on a programming puzzle game with 2D sprite graphics where every object in the game has an API and can be interacted with programmatically. Every level can be completed either autonomously (i.e. scripting player movement/actions) or non-autonomously (using i.e. WASD to manually move around and perform actions). It's a game where you work smarter, not harder - if a level seems tedious at first blush, it means you haven't thought about how to automate the tedium with programming:

https://www.bryanpg.com/games/pragma_twice

I plan on doing a Kickstarter this year just for fun, but even if it doesn't get funded I'll still continue to work on it.


I built a few utilities that help PeopleSoft developers do their job. It's a pretty niche market and it's all MIT licensed. I work on it when I need it to do something, or someone requests a feature. They have stayed pretty low on radars since they were released (the oldest was 6 years ago). I don't work on them for them to be popular. I work on them because the few times I've needed them, they were indispensable.

Trace Wizard [0] - Peoplesoft App Server trace file analyzer. Shows execution paths, sql statements, exceptions and a bunch of stars.

DMS-Viewer [1] - Peoplesoft uses a program called Data Mover to migration data between databases. It exports the data into an undocumented file format. This utility allows you to inspect and alter the data before importing to a new database.

Pivet [2] - command line utility that dumps various Peoplesoft definitions/code to disk and leverages git for tracking the changes. Intended to be run as a scheduled process.

[0] - https://github.com/tslater2006/Trace-Wizard

[1] - https://github.com/tslater2006/DMS-Viewer

[2] - https://github.com/tslater2006/Pivet


I'm working on a replacement for PHP, just for my own use. I don't really care if anyone else besides me will ever find it useful.

Right now it's just a Git repo: https://github.com/ThingamaNet/uce

My project goals:

  - minimal but stable FastCGI runtime that recompiles server pages as needed
  - minimal dependencies
  - web apps written for it should still run in 10+ years without change
  - combine the advantages of C++ with those of PHP
  - equal-or-better performance in most scenarios
  - implement an additional WebSockets broker so I can use the same runtime for live apps
Currently it's very early in development and very clunky still.


I have been writing a book about the fundamentals of large-scale distributed systems over the past couple of years.

It’s not a best seller, but thanks to it, I connected with engineers all over the world who I would never have met otherwise.

https://understandingdistributed.systems/


No Nonsense Recipes - https://nononsense.recipes

I built it mainly to scratch my own itch out of frustration with recipe blogs and their endless stories and photo collages before they get to the point where they actually tell you how to make the recipe.

It seems a pretty common complaint, so I thought other people might be interested. I added a subscription because I don't like ads and tracking and everything that goes with that. A few people have signed up but, so far they all cancelled before the end of the free trial. I get a lot of use out of it though, so I'm pretty happy with that. It's cheap to run and gives me something to tinker with now and again.


Nice — in a similar realm I made kcal[0] to scratch a very specific itch for myself and my spouse. Our diet is mostly plant based but we both also do a lot of weight training and running so we needed something for close tracking of macros. It’s maybe 75% finished but takes care of all our needs with some quirks so it’s slightly neglected now.

[0] https://github.com/kcal-app/kcal


I love the idea but it needs pictures really bad. I’m not gonna be able to pick a recipe based on a text description, the photo is what reels me in.


Working on adding it! I want users to be able to upload pictures, but that creates a host of problems with moderation and everything.

Recipes you can copy, because they’re not copyrightable, but images are, so just scraping them from other sites is really not ok. Cooking 18000 recipes and taking pictures myself is also not going to work. So, yeah. I totally get the desire for pictures though.


Somebody should write the extension to snatch the pics from recipe blogs. /jk


Built a daily word game in two dimensions, with a 5x5 wordsquare to uncover using valid word guesses.

https://squareword.org

It's been such a joy to work on it and add features and improvements. No way of making money, but seeing the game evolve and getting positive feedback from players has made it worth it already. :) I love small projects like that where there are no expectations or real targets, just the pure fun of creating.


This is so awesome! thank you! It's a lot more challenging and fun than Wordle.


really enjoyable, clever take and I like that you have a target goal set.


Great game


I'm late to the party, but I'll add mine:

1. A scripting language, designed to be embedded in other programs, emphasis on web templating. C++20, Flex, Bison, Unicode, Unit Tests, Doxygen, Github, Docker compilation, and a YouTube series over its development and explaining how everything fits together. I'm almost done with my 1st draft of the language (6k lines of code, 3k lines of comments), after which I'll begin recording.

2. I record hymns in congregational style, as the traditional pianists used to play for church services. I'm focusing on public-domain hymns, re-typesetting them using Lilypond, and including the choral music as an overlay with an overhead shot of my hands playing. I don't care if I make money. I believe that this playing technique (improvisation based on 4-part vocal music) must be preserved, and I'm trying to do so.

3. I am planning on recording an instructional course (available for free) to teach how to play in the evangelistic church pianist style. Using my approach, I have had adult students go from "never touched a piano or read music" to "can play a hymn for church with the big, full sound of the evangelistic style" in 3 months. Again, I believe that this style needs to be preserved, and I've seen a lot of the existing materials (and even bought them myself to evaluate, to the tune of thousands of $$$ spent), and I'm greatly disappointed in what is available. I teach technique and theory (I have a BMus in piano performance from a state university), and I really don't care to teach classical piano. I would rather teach church musicians.


taking care of google ;-) I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines. The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags.

I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the 'low end'.

The projects source is here: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang

Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...


This looks good. I expect their main page https://duckduckgo.com/bang will feel overwhelming for most users if displayed this way, but this is much better for serendipitous findings - both have their place.

Is there a mobile equivalent to the hovering, to get the short description you mention?


Thanks for the suggestion, i didn't think about it yet. The whole page isn't quite optimized for a mobile user experience. I think that i would have to add a link that brings up the help text; maybe the link should be in the form of a question mark icon, similar to what they have at https://m.xkcd.com/ what do you think? I am not much of an expert in matters if web UI/frontend, so that any advice is very much appreciated!


> maybe the link should be in the form of a question mark icon, similar to what they have at https://m.xkcd.com/

If the help text will be displayed in a little floating window like a tooltip, this makes sense, as the expected UI. I had in mind a short description box opening up underneath the entry and showing the info (as part of the page flow, not floating), and for that case I had the expander arrows [1] in mind.

In either case, the important thing IMO is to have enough interaction area to comfortably click on it without having to precisely hit the arrow/question mark itself.

[1] like mentioned here: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/5736/138


Me and my wife made https://sortesalearum.com , a web emulator for an ancient roman fortune telling system.

In SEO terms it's one of my most successful projects though -- not a lot of competition :)


Oh, this is great. Simple, and I liked the historical background.

It could really do with a re-roll button though. Now my refresh button fills the same need.


This was fun and gave me wise advice!


https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

It backs up personal data and puts it on a timeline. It's cool to pick a random day and see what I was up to. It also serves as a backup tool.

Somehow, people find out about it and star it. One person even contributed a pull request. However I strictly built it for myself, with no intention to make a product out of it.


I built a Chrome extension that makes Twitch chat messages easier to read.

It allows you to:

• Focus on a user, keyword, or conversation

• Highlight users or keywords

• Filter/Mute users or keywords

It also has an Unlimited Message Buffer feature that prevents messages from expiring from chat.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/electric-chat-for-...


A few years back YouTube didn't support the sharing of playlists. In-fact creating playlists took far too many clicks. Fortunately, their API support was good and I built a 3rd party playlist builder, which worked brilliantly. I built it for myself and didn't care if anyone else used it. Turned out people did use it, but I didn't find out until YouTube changed their APIs and I no longer had time to work on it.

A few years later, I learned that most Craigslist ads sucked. So, I created a simple "make your craigslist ads better" tool. You'd go to the site, fill out a much better form than the one Craigslist provided, and it'd spit out a much better ad that you could copy and paste. Then, whenever I saw a car ad that was crappy, I'd message them with a link to my tool and ask them to update the ad. People did it and it was growing organically. I was glad that people found it useful.. it was free and going to stay that way forever. Then I got a Cease and Desist from Craigslist.. for using their name, I think. They've made similar boneheaded decisions.. no wonder they're declining.


I run JQBX [1]. I have no plans to monetize it but its cool to just have it out there as a thing I made. I really enjoy the community and its a cool way to help with music discovery. It's also really rewarding to provide a meaning experience for some people out there using the web. A nice counterbalance to boring enterprise software!

https://www.jqbx.fm


I’ve been using JQBX with a small group of friends and we love it! It works pretty flawlessly except for the occasional song just refusing to play.


Oh, all of them. https://imgz.org, say. I make them for me, usually I make them available because other people might want to use them. Yesterday I made Dia[1], a small cli utility that helps you keep a work journal.

[1] https://pypi.org/project/dia/


The imgz FAQ is hilarious, thank you for that.


Thanks, I'm glad you like it!


I’m building a databank for Cyanobacteria specific information. Like a genbank but for Cyanobacteria. I’m not even a biologist so I don’t know what the impact will be, but my girlfriend is and I saw her struggle with some things and I decided to jump on it.

Right now I’m just building the basic forms and such, but I plan on implementing fasta file parsing and an algorithm to locate the conserved regions


I mean, actual genbank has cyanobacteria in it[0]. Not to be discouraging, but you're just duplicating a lot of work there. And I assume that's where you'd have to go get your sequences from anyway. So are you actually just building the file parsing and analysis tools?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=cyanobacteria


My project would focus on the ITS region motifs. Which I think are not in genbank. Genbank has the whole sequence but the motifs are not identified.

The way the bio people I talked to explained it to me, when they want to compare ITS structures they need to find the motifs themselves and compare it that way. Is this incorrect?

I’d love to chat if you are in the world.


I've written one fiction novel and I'm working on another one, and have ideas for the early stages of two others. While I would like to be published one day I don't think it would hurt me too badly if I wasn't. I love writing and the process of breathing life into a story and characters from nothing. I've got my manuscripts listed here in case anyone is interested https://writing.martin-brennan.com/works/#manuscripts


Another amateur Australian fiction writer here. I started last year around the time of the lockdowns.

I'm in the same boat as you just writing for fun and enjoying the process. I'll probably look at the self-publishing route once I've finished my current WIP. I've learned a huge amount about various topics, including empathy for the characters I write about, and it has given me more appreciation for the skill of the writers I love.

Also I hacked together an E-Ink "typewriter" for writing https://i.postimg.cc/2S53Pt7J/foto-no-exif-1.jpg


That typewriter is really cool! Any more details on the setup? Here is a photo of my typewriter https://imgur.com/a/5I7xNjI

> I've learned a huge amount about various topics, including empathy for the characters I write about, and it has given me more appreciation for the skill of the writers I love.

I've learned tons about this kind of thing over time, and as I've gotten more experience I've drawn on my interactions with others IRL and thinking more about human experiences, how characters would react realistically, and such. There is so much to learn. It really does make you appreciate the great fiction that you love, and it gives you something to work towards, a greatness to emulate.

LMK if you ever want to exchange writing with someone, it can be a lonely road sometimes.


What do you use as a word processor?


I use Word. It's the easiest option and everything that you would want to submit to for short stories (and for novels I assume) expect a Word document. I've seen things like Scrivener but honestly I think that would over-complicate things for me. I can use Word anywhere, I pay for Office 365 so I can use the desktop application or edit in the cloud if I want to.

_Before_ I get into Word I process the words from my brain either by writing in longhand, or by using my typewriter. I use the step from these analogue methods to digital as an initial cleanup phase.


Thanks. Interesting re: typewriter.


I built tomsplanner.com in 2007/2008 without really knowing if there was a need for it. It was just something I would have liked to have in my project manager days.

My wife thought it was an excellent idea. I wasn't convinced. But I really liked the challenge of building it. It took me two and a half years and I reasoned that if it would fail as a business at least I would have had some really fun years. I supported the thing by occasionally doing some freelance work and living frugally.

After launching it in 2009, it turned out lots of people liked it. Now 14 years later, it's still a very viable business.

So to all you stubborn and freewheeling people out there, go get them! It's great!

Today, in a way, my motivation is still the same. I should focus all my attention on marketing, SEO, and promotion. That's where more growth, money, and 'success' are to be found, but I just want go over the top with the quality of product and customer support. Financially probably not the wisest course but "I (still) don't care".


Building https://bruzu.com

Currently at 100+ MRR but I don't care much about it.

I ll keep working on it even no-one would buy, because I love this project so much.


This is awesome. I will likely never use it but, I can definitely appreciate the effort that went into this. Great example of a side gig/hustle/project!


Thanks


Automatic streaming from rpi camera to twitch and local storage https://github.com/For-The-Birds. Currently pointed to a bird feeder https://t.me/moscow_birds

Latest weekend project: 32 bit clone of PDP-1 Minskytron https://github.com/yekm/mtronpp


I am posting adverts from old tech Magazines such as Byte, Computer, IEEE Spectrum etc onto Twitter. I look at magazines from 90s, 80s, 70s and beyond..

https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts

Certainly uplifting and interesting reliving the old retro technology back in the day.


I built VMSave a number of years ago to fulfill a request from some family members. My definition of "success" for it is that it helps people, that it's relatively maintenance free and that it sustains itself via donations. Especially since recently moving it to hosting with a more reliable internet connection it's been wildly successful according to those metrics.

https://vmsave.petekeen.net


Here's a word game I'm still tweaking you can play in the browser for people that like time-based challenges (top score I've seen is about 3000 points!):

https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid

Working on games without thinking about how you might monitise them is a fun way to spend some time. :) It's a nice feeling to know some other people got some fun out of something you made too.


I'm building a golf course wiki: https://golfcourse.wiki/

It's stupid that there is no centralized database of detailed golf course information. People love their local munis, but they never get enough attention because there is no marketing dept for a municipal golf course. Jr golfers shouldn't have to pay hundreds of dollars for yardage books to compete on the same level. On top of that, the number of golf courses that even exist is shockingly low.

Using SVGs, now supported in all browsers, the course maps/yardage maps can be easily be editable (especially once I build an in browser editor).

This is a website that should obviously exist and i will keep building it and adding courses i've played, alone, by myself, until the day i die.


I'm building a spiritual successor of the dBase/FoxPro family of languages with modern ideas, what I hope become a better alternative to Access/Excel (so, not just the base lang, but the UI builder + Data engine. Just asking little things, you know):

https://tablam.org

Is both true that I wish to have the means to work on it full/half-time and doing for pure enjoyment when I have time.


I'm working on a programming language. It's a slow and tedious route and I still have so much to do, but I'm making it for myself. If others take it up, I'll be flattered. If not, I still got my worth.

ananke.dev


I'm writing an "Introduction to programming" book (with Swift, but the language isn't very important based on the content).

I'll likely host the web version for free, and then allow folks to choose their price if they want a digital version (that includes packaged code samples). I don't really mind if ten people read it or ten thousand, I just genuinely enjoy working on it and hope it will help someone.


I'm working on an alternative to Twitter/Reddit/Discord called Sqwok (https://sqwok.im)

The idea sprouted some years ago when I had used Slack for the first time and wondered why there wasn't a non-enterprise/gaming open chat app for news discussion.

It's the most ambitious thing I've built and the most joyful part has been meeting and building friendships with complete strangers across distant continents all through this silly website I built!

I won't say "I don't care" if it succeeds because I believe one must give it their all and not worry about the outcome, but regardless it's been an invaluable learning experience and at the end of the day I have no regrets.


https://myhikes.org

It's my own personal hiking journal that I've made public so that other folks can document their own adventures too. It'll always be there as a way to explore something new or challenge myself - either to hike more miles, more vertical feet, adding new trails, or by building new features and working with contributors. There will always be new trails to explore, map, and write about over the course of my life. When I'm old and can't get out, it'll be nice to poke through the data, revisit the places I explored, and relive memories I had with friends, family, or loved ones while out exploring the woods.


Hug of death? I just get a "forbidden" error message.


I've made a Dutch podcast about my first five years being a professional programmer at a web agency: clients were blatantly lied to, colleagues were pressured into doing all kinds of unethical stuff, I considered quitting programming altogether after a couple of years — it was a wild ride

I made it into a podcast because I wanted to practice my editing skills, but it was also kind of therapeutic being able to talk about all this. So I don't care whether there's a huge audience. Creating the podcast was a goal in itself, which I achieved :)

If you're Dutch and want to give it a listen, here you go: https://stitcher.io/de-job


https://usdc.cool - I wanted to track the supply of the stablecoin USDC, and check against their audits. Another benefit was trying to see what happens to the USDC supply during certain crypto events, like crashes or pumps.

Turns out it's quite interesting. When crypto goes down, many folks sell into USDC, which causes more USDC buying by the exchanges. But when crypto goes up, people often get in with USDC.

So basically: USDC goes up. And since this money is sitting in Circle's bank accounts, imagine what happens when the Feds raise interest rates. $CND is the SPAC supposedly taking Circle public, if it ever goes through.


I'm currently the lead maintainer of Solvespace (CAD): https://solvespace.com/index.pl

It's a very fun to use CAD program, but is somewhat limited in capability. When I came across it I loved it but quickly ran into its limitations, so I joined the effort. Long term I don't see it growing into full-fledged CAD, but I'm happy to see it progress and help it along. Some day, someone might undertake the major refactoring of the internals to enable it to go beyond, but in some sense I don't really care. It's just a fun project to work on and I like to watch it grow.


Thank you! For several years I'd been looking to get back into CAD modeling but after >10y away (took a few courses in HS) I was feeling intimidated by the size and scope of many popular CAD programs. I really appreciate how approachable it was to me, and how well it runs on my older computer. I've yet to get very far with actual modeling but I've at least got a program to start with.


I found an old mix-tape (cassette) that I had bought from a thrift shop a long time ago. I needed (mentally) to shift focus from other projects so I decided to see if I could put together a site over a weekend to highlight the mixtape and let people share their own compilation albums.

Fun story: I tried building social-media share buttons (just links, no creepware SDKs or JS imports) and was so confused why my icons disappeared as soon as I added links. That's what happens when you've been using an ad-blocker for so long you forget it's there. :)

https://bethsluxmix.com/


For the last couple weeks I'm working on my HTML5-based game that I eventually plan to release on steam (it will be my 1st commercial gaming project and one of very few games on steam that are web-based, without using actual <canvas> element) - I don't really care about the sales as it's my side gig that I've just wanted to create because of lack "Into the Breach" or "Mech Commander" related games available these days.

Here's the link to the actual demo: https://lukaszkups.itch.io/monolith-wars


https://feelings.earth/

Visualization of what the people of Twitter are feeling right now across the globe (or at least the ones who have geolocation enabled :)). It's fun to have it up on a monitor in the background to periodically gaze at.

I'm an Engineering Director and can rarely justify finding time to code anything significant during my day job these days, so this was my cut-loose-and-have-fun project over ~a weekend. Had a blast doing it, and then rewriting it half a dozen "cool" frameworks ranging from NextJS to RemixRun.

(It works on mobile, but much nicer on desktop)


This is really cool actually!


I wrote a book about a historical figure, a (very) bad guy during WWII in France. The main character did actually exist but the book is a work of fiction, it's a first-person narrative.

Self-published on Amazon this year. It was one of the five finalists of the French Amazon Storyteller contest. It currently has a rating of 4.3 with 90 reviews. It makes very little money but it's exciting to have people read your book.

Tonya Harding, Patrizia Gucci, Anna Delvey (Sorokin)... Bad guys (and gals!) are having a moment right now in popular culture. I wonder if I should pitch the story to Netflix, but have zero idea how. (Also, the book is in French).


Can you share the link? Would love to find out more :-)


Sure, here it is: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/295155933X/

(It's in French though ;-)


I can't stand most http libraries (full of mutable state!) and I spend a lot of time making http calls. So I built a functional/immutable http request library which has been dramatically improving my personal quality of life for about 7 years now. No idea if anyone else uses it, but it doesn't really matter.

Java version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery

Typescript version: https://github.com/stickfigure/hatteryjs


For the last few years, I've been building Live Music Archive for iOS (https://livemusicarchive.app), a player for the giant collection of free live music on archive.org because the other apps out there didn't provide the experience I wanted.

I love working on it and wish I could make a living on it, but the nature of the app means I can't pursue commercial gains from it. It's the only side project of mine that I actually use all the time and it has gained a small fanbase, but really, I'm building it for me.


https://flat.social - a fun video conferencing app where meeting attendees can fly around and speak with others around them.

While I do care about the outcome, I work on it regardless. It's a lot of fun from a technical point of view and I keep meeting amazing people through it.


This is very cool. How is progress going? What is usage like?


Thanks! I've been on it solo since last year. Progress from the product side is going pretty well but still a lot to do and optimise! Usage wise, it's in experimentation phase so the pattern is rather spiky ranging from silent days to sudden influxes of traffic.


I'm working on a gif making website: https://gifmemes.io. My plans for the future are implementation of wasm ffmpeg and supporting videos also. I wouldn't say i don't care about the success, but my friends and I use it enough to keep me motivated.


I was thinking about something similar.

Use wasm ffmepg to convert video into avi format (most size efficient). Since it's done on client side, you don't exhaust all server resources.


I have created a poc of that and it works. I did not include it because at the time, I've had user accounts through firebase and it did not work with a header required for ffmpeg. Quite an odd issue. :D It was something like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69179866/firebase-auth-i...


I remeber this being posted on HN but I could never find it again, so that's for posting it! Are you planning on enabling exports in webp/mp4?


It was a top comment on a submission of someone making 5000 USD/month with a gif making app.


Not tech related, other than using tech to promote it, but music. I tried a go at making a name for myself 10 years ago and failed. Now, I'm finally ready to write and record an album but I don't care if anyone listens to it. Just want to leave a tiny little piece of something to show I was here and made something.


Same here, at least IT paid for a kickass studio to play around in...


I have a YouTube channel of videos I make with my family at our cabin. Some of it is renovation, some of it is just enjoying the outdoors. Folks message us from time to time and say they enjoyed this or that. If it takes off and becomes something, that's cool, but only to the extent that it means it made someone's day brighter. Otherwise, I'm content to just enjoy the videos myself.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh0YKCZZHcfAIJgX9WwiTmA


http://genewarrior.com

It's a DNA sequence manipulation tool to quickly get alignments, translations etc. for DNA sequences. It's already a couple of years old, never got any traction, but I'm using it for myself on a very regular basis.


I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far as building an SBC-based custom hardware with HDMI and keyboard that also works as a handheld portable with onboard display & speaker. You can also do inline ARM64 assembly and memory peeking/disassembly as well as instruction-level step debugging. Polyphonic audio, direct I2C/SPI/GPIO/etc. access, and more.

It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.


Pretty much any of the books or board games or video games I'm working on. It'd be great if they did succeed, but I'm not doing a whole lot in marketing or promotion to try to make them succeed, especially right now.

At some point (hopefully soon) I plan to make a new personal homepage for my projects, get back into streaming on Twitch, and make more Youtube videos about my games (I only have like 7 overview videos of my board game designs on Youtube when I've made like, 40+ over the years, the ones with videos are only the ones I submitted to competitions), but in the meantime I'm just hacking away on them in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/user/cableshaft/videos

Like a new version of my Proximity video game I've made a decent amount of progress on this past year but my only update video is still from October 2020. I had intended to make that update weekly, and stream every time I worked on it but then I got busy at work and worn out and my office became a mess and I stopped doing it. Been telling myself each weekend for the past like three months that I need to make a new update video and still haven't yet. Maybe this weekend I'll finally do it: https://youtu.be/0IAx9fsBuus


https://triviaroyale.io

I created the current version in around 2017 and finally gave a real name to the project about a month before a very similarly named game launched to big fanfare.

My trivia game is a multiplayer live quiz aimed at the nostalgia of the IRC quiz bot days. I have started several rewrites from scratch over the years but only now do I finally have a version that seems ready for public release soon with more friendly features. (I'm targetting Feb 22nd!)


Hello World,

My mom's a textile designer, contracting with large companies, but somehow not getting to use any fancy tools they. She says design software existd, but it's pretty expensive.

At the core, she's making plaids - a black-and-white pattern (2d grid) corresponding to vertical and horizontal threads being above one another, and color schemes (2 arrays) for the vertical / horizontal strings (in most cases, does not match the size of the grid).

So she made her own monstrocity of a pipeline, with Photoshop, Plaid Maker (a rather old web app, https://www.plaidmaker.com/), screenshots, Excel (for designing stuff - yes!), and an old Soviet-era MS-DOS designer program (in Russian, of course).

Throughout uni, I was jokingly saying I'd build a better Plaid Maker for her, even if the web is not my area of work. After The Great Resignation I figured, why not?

Lots and lots of back-and-forth later, here's the outcome: https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/

Note: not for mobile, but should work on a tablet. Privacy: no analytics are used, but it does rely on Google Firebase for authentication and auto-saving of your designs. Log in to keep them permanently; otherwise, they're saved on an anonymous account, cleared up once a week or so


I love this. I don't know much about plaids but I really really really enjoy hearing stories of people replacing DIY, hacky, inefficient or simply long and painful pipelines and workflows with custom well designed software.

It's always nice to hear how much it helped people and removed the problems the previous version had - bonus points if it's for a small business or a single person rather than some giant enterprise org. I hope one day to actually be able to produce software that can benefit people that way. All I seem to do recently is write software that gets killed off because politics all while dealing with poor quality code from other teams and it's really demoralising.

I would love to know if anyone has a site or something where these stories are documented!


My 8 y.o. wanted to be a youtuber/gamer... So, I'm learning how to use OBS and Shotcut, and we've started his channel. It's fun for him and I'm learning something new, but we're filming faster than I can edit the videos, there's only one online for now. ...and it's in french. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwbFHc_n6sVERqI2kotiWw


Micro Mysteries. Tiny short stories with a hidden puzzle that the reader has to figure out.

(Inspired by Two Minute Mysteries by Donald J Sobol)

https://lauriegriffiths.github.io/micro-mysteries/


loving them!


Not the answer you're looking for, maybe...

Life. Whether it "succeeds" or not (ignoring the biological succession pun) is in the eye of the beholder, but choosing whether to care or not is a fairly continuous active choice for the individual. At some point in life some of us may reach a state of not caring whether personally or societally important individual life goals are reached. Not caring can offer some nice freedom, although it might be unsettling for some people (akin to being disassociated from reality).

Non-commercial endeavors, aka hobbies or passions. Dancing, playing music, woodworking, etc. For me it's music, dance, massage, and building things. All of these can be shared, directly/physically or at least in ways other people see and experience.

Massage is my most practical example. I have some training, but I don't do it for money or profession. With friends, family, and lovers, there are many opportunities. And when traveling in places where massage is common, I occasionally offer to trade places with the therapist in the latter part of the time. Many therapists who work for a living are in great need of massage and therefore most appreciative. It is very rewarding. (I still pay the full price for my massage I received.)

People who blog (not me) are very admirable. Most of them earn nothing, and often what they write is of value to others. This is very true for tech people who write solutions to bugs or problems or who build tutorials just to share. These latter cases often result in financial gain for their readers!


This is actually the answer I came here looking for-- with some unexpected flavorful details! Sad to see it so far down in the thread.

Letting go of whether I 'succeed at life' has been a difficult and ongoing process. I also think it's one of the most important and freeing personal psychological developments one can experience.


I built a python library warhammer-stats for the Warhammer 40k tabletop game because all the other tools sucked. It is still the only 40k stats tool that can deterministically calculate the entire probability mass function for attack damage.

I then wrote an iOS app, Stats Hammer, because I wanted to use it on my phone and wanted to learn some swift.

Both are free for anybody to use and it warms my heart to see people using them, but I don't really care if either succeeds because I got what I wanted out of them


I run a free to play browser game called Money Simulator

https://simulator.money

The aim is to help you with financial planning. I don't think it will ever make money but it's growing so I'll just see where it goes.


Why am I still paying rent to Mum and rent for student accomodation?!?!?! Outrageous :)


This is fun!


Most of the projects I do are because they are useful to myself. I'm happy if other people find them useful, but I don't depend on them becoming successful.

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https://github.com/darekkay/dashboard

Customizable personal dashboard and startpage. I have a pinned Firefox tab that I check daily to get a quick overview of some areas I find important.

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https://github.com/darekkay/static-marks

Shareable bookmarks. I have first built it to maintain a list of bookmarks for me and my work colleages. Later I have migrated all my personal bookmarks as well. Now I can type "sm" (for static marks) in any of my browsers followed by a search term to open Static Marks and get to all my bookmarks, filtered by the search term.

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https://github.com/darekkay/evaluatory

Web page evaluation with a focus on accessibility. My motivation was that my blog previously had a small accessibility issue. I didn't catch it, as I've tested only the desktop breakpoint. Evaluatory runs axe-core at multiple breakpoints at the same time and generates an HTML report.


Created https://flexlists.com 15 years ago to scratch an itch. For me it already succeeded; many happy users for over a decade but it is not a success by any going standard of money or attention and I do not care.

Create a programming language with a friend currently; again to scratch an itch. It will be launched somewhere 2022 hopefully but if we are the only users, it is fine. If not, so much the better.


I just started building a "terraform simulator" to teach fundamental concepts of terraform with no overhead of real services.

Learn the tool behavior in a safe way very quickly. Thats my goal. I'll at least force it on my teammates for a small workshop.


Where do I sign up?


I spent a year building a website to host real-time, competitive turn-based web games.

https://acos.games

The idea is similar to Roblox, where it's all user-generated games. If it gets attention, I'll continue evolving it, if it falls flat, I will still sleep like a baby at night.

You can learn more in our docs: https://docs.acos.games


International Space Station Photo Explorer: I made 2 versions - a 3D one https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer/ind... and a "flat" one - https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...

I feel like there is a vast untapped potential for exploring the amazing photos that are there now and appear every day as well as new functionality - for example, I think there is probably a good way to tag the start/end of a sequence of photos you come across and use them to generate a movie clip which would be neat.

I still haven't found the right UI/UX and my web skills are sorely lacking so it all feels a bit clunky. It's fun to experiment with though and lots of eye candy to see - my daughter (8, now 10) and I worked on the first version which was nice too.

All open source if anyone wants to fork and play.


I built a chrome extension that removes duplicate tabs silently and automagically. No complex interactions required. It's removed over 9000 tabs for me personally over the course of a year and a half.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singletab/hjohicao...


Speaking of duplicate removal:

An extension to remove duplicate snippets in GitHub Code Search results.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-code-search...


How do you know about those metrics? Does the app share them with you or is it per user?


The extension has a counter that'll tell you how many were removed.


Windward, my first book of photographs:

https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/windward/

I’m glad I can finally point to a book and say “I made this” with no excuses. Don’t care if it sells. Just happy it is finished!

Back in the mid 2000s I was invited to come to Boston in the first Y-Combinator batch. Because of border and money issues I could not go and I regretted it as I had a project related to visual art and photographs that I wanted to make.

But in a way it was a blessing because instead I concentrated on photography and visual work which is more compatible with the way my brain works and which I later came to understand makes me happier.

I am thankful for this website and community of kind people interested in technology living on a [light blue dust dot][1] in the universe. I have learned so much here and continue to do so, and maybe I will make that project eventually, crappy code and all :)

As Hawking says in the Pink Floyd song, all we need to do is to make sure we keep talking.

Peace.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot


My hurricane modeling project. It tends to go on hiatus after every hurricane season, and has gone through several iterations and languages, but I always end up back working on it. The last push got an actual website I'll put in public and automated model generation (though we'll see how well it holds up in June)

https://www.odinseye.cloud/


I am building Miasma (https://miasma.app); a little toolbar app for macOS that shows air quality readings based on either public sensors nearby or you can choose your own from PurpleAir or SmartCitizen. Also shows some metrics of potential pollution sources like traffic, aviations, power generation, and lately I added some global warming stats and calcs.

I am far from being able to program competently, so this was a stretch goal for me (using up all that lovely creative energy people had early in the pandemic) on a topic I care about. Code is horrible (with my minimal knowledge now even I can see that) but there wasn’t anything reliable enough in the App Store at the time. There’s no way I can monetise it (albeit on the even worse iOS app I did I show ads, as much to learn how to integrate them rather than derive any income) so it is purely a passion project. There have been over 1000 downloads, and based on the numbers using one of the data feeds I can see there are regularly 20 people using it throughout the day when their devices are on. Small wins.


I love this thread idea - I'm much more excited by people's passion projects than their money making ones.

I seem to collect passion projects like nobody's business - honestly I think I get excited by concepts then bogged down in the details, but I'm starting to overcome this and get deeper into projects now so let's give this a whirl:

- civarium, a game AI desk-toy where little villagers go about their lives and expand the village themselves (think Banished but zero-player) - pretty early days but good fun to occasionally tinker on: https://github.com/ajeffrey/civarium

- my main fun project at the moment is a private branch off of the above - I'm trying to make a really systemic game where you're a mage apprentice trying to solve quests without violence. Not public yet but will be if I get to the point where the first demo quest is fully playable. The idea is that the world is data driven and by being one of the first magic users you can push various systems out of their attractor/equilibrium states.


I made a little dungeon crawler game that I needed to make to prove to myself I could actually ship a complete game, which has been a struggle for me.

https://smoldungeon.com


This is really great, good job! Google did a good job with auto-creating your preview text, but you should definitely add a meta description to that landing page :) https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsmoldun...


Oh thanks! I'll do that, I do not know anything about SEO.


One’s knowledge of SEO is inversely correlated to the quality of their life

Keep the meta description at around 120 characters and you’re golden. The HTML is clean and semantic so Google has treated the results quite well!


https://0bin.net

There is no analytics. No ads. It just sits there, costing a few $ in hosting and doing it's thing. It's been running for years, just for the sake of it.


Either I am doing some very wrong, or very right. Individually, I don't care about any of the projects.

- Hub20: self-hosted, open source payment gateway for crypto [0]

- Communick: XMPP/Matrix/ActivityPub-provider-as-a-Service [1]

- An e-book for people that want to get into crypto but are (rightfully) weary of all the scams, the baseless hype and all the get-rich-quick schemes.

- A yet-to-reach MVP website to help curate, fund and collaborate with open source projects

The idea for me is always to keep making the things that are interesting/rewarding on their own, and expect that on aggregate these become bigger than whatever single "obsession" could end. It is what Daniel Vassalo calls "a portfolio of small bets". Done right, there is always something to learn from these projects.

[0]: https://hub20.io

[1]: https://communick.com

[2]: https://areyouinterested.co/site/rational-investors-guide-to...


I've gotten quite interested in music lately and decided to try some experiments where I visualize various sounds and music in the frequency domain using algorithms like Fourier transform and variants such as Welch's method for spectral density estimation.

This works best on a device like a computer which is capable of 60 frames per second or higher refresh rate. Please also change the resolution in YouTube settings to 720p60 for best results.

Warning: these videos contain lots of visual movement (basically lines moving around like on an oscilloscope), please avoid viewing if you are prone to seizures. But it should be fine for normal people (the level of visual intensity is comparable to watching an action movie).

A few examples:

1. Dialtone using dual-tone multi-frequency signaling and 56K dial-up modem connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

2. Deluxe Multitone Car Alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

3. Composition using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

4. Piano Music (Ballade Pour Adeline): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

5. Electronic Music Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

6. Super Guitar Bros. cover of the Gerudo Valley song (from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVbDfj4lzY&list=PLn67ccdhCs...


Group of us are working on an FPS channel for fun (currently apex legends), been a blast breaking off the rust for my editing skils.

I'm someone who struggles to enjoy a game without some kind of purpose or goal, this helps provide one for me whilst playing competitive games with friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTSceMt5EJ4


A programmer's text editor for a language called DataFlex, written in DataFlex (well some parts are in C++ for performance reasons)

https://projects.vdf-guidance.com/projects/hammer

It's only 21 years in the making :)

Oh and I should mention that it is my main programmers editor for a variety of languages (not just DataFlex)


This is only the second time in fifteen years of professional development I've seen someone say they work with DataFlex. What makes the language attractive to you compared to all the other languages that are around and see significantly higher adoption?


Thanks for the question :)

You are correct that there's not that many of us around.

DataFlex is attractive for writing business software on windows (desktop and/or web).

The framework is crazy effective in regards to how fast and efficient you can build an application. I have not seen anything that comes close and I do look around and try other things every now and then.

A text editor isn't exactly the main target. I guess it is important to point out that the first release of that editor was in 2001. Not that it took 21 years to get something working :D.


I have a couple of projects I enjoy working on:

Nanosite[0] Static site generator using Pug as a template language, and supporting translations. I have a couple of sites in production on Netlify and Cloudflare Pages, and it's a breeze to use.

Spatium[1] Time tracking tool for my freelance business. I use it in a Git repo and have CI hooked up to generate artificates, timesheets for the customers in html, csv, pdf, excel and json. The data is stored in a rather simple json based database[2] I created, you should really don't do that, but it had to be easy to handle merge conflicts in the data.

[0] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/nanosite [1] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/spatium/spatium-cli [2] https://gitlab.com/lvq-consult/spatium/spatium-db


This is quite a limited effort, but I occasionally write code and accompanying blog posts about subjects in the intersection of algebraic number theory and low-level computing: https://kevinventullo.com/

I’d like to think one day this stuff could end up in a compiler optimization or something, but I’m not too worried about it.


https://cleave.app

Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading all open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level; Alternatively as "tab-groups", but encompassing multiple apps.

I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.

I find it interesting (particularly from an HCI-perspective) that there hasn't been more research into the concept on an OS-level, as I can think of many times maintaining a set of application states for continued or re-use makes sense.


https://www.eyedex.org/ It's an open directory search engine I have been slowly cooking on the side for past one and a half year. Basically an open directory is a webpage on the internet with autoindex set to on - it lists files and directories on server with some metadata. The real reason why I built it was to learn PostgreSQL together with some text searching functionality, so far it has been really fun experience. Another reason was that there haven't been sites like this, most of them are shameless redirects to google dorks or just straight up amateur jobs. What mine does differently is take care of file metadata and allows to order/filter by it, which narrows down searches quickly. I really don't care if it succeeds or no, there is no money in it, I don't really care anyways. It kinda scratches the itch about what great services can be build on good old internet and if it's useful for a few people out there, even better.


For me it's a feature flag service I built over a weekend: https://deploywithflags.com

Uses Cloudflare Workers to globally distribute the API, and I intend to keep it free for individual developers.

I might monetize it for teams eventually, but I just like having a simple, performant way to disable/enable features for my other projects.


Kubernetes cluster on a bunch of old smartphones.

Weird idea, but I can't stop thinking about it work on a project from time to time.

Eventually, I want a random person be able to "lease" their old phone compute to my cluster for reward.


I've been working on an WebAssembly Ultima Online browser client. It's a heavily modified port of https://github.com/ClassicUO/ClassicUO (an open-source UO client written in C#).

You can play the test version using Chrome, however beware as it needs to download over 2GB of game resources, and still has a few glitches with audio. That said it runs at a stable 60fps on most systems I've tested so far. We have two test servers, one in AU and EU. Auto-account creation is on so just type in a username/password to get started.

https://play.zhmodern.com/

The server the client connects to is another project myself and a few others are working on. It's a ground-up rewrite of an early 2000s custom server for UO called Zuluhotel.

https://github.com/ZuluHotelAustralia/zuluhotel


I ginned up some python to generate an SVG file for a bevel setting gauge[0]. The code is ugly, and the SVG file doesn't render correctly except in a browser and Corel Draw, and that's ok, because that's all I need it to do to drive the laser cutter.

I'll throw it up on GitHub under WTFPL if I ever get an afternoon to comment it and write a readme.md for the benefit of anybody misfortunate enough to stumble across it in the future.

I might also add the option to do a lefty or righty gauge. It's identical in outcome, but I could see it being more ergonomic.

[0] Just like this one: https://lostartpress.com/collections/tools/products/bevel-mo.... I'd have probably bought one if they hadn't mentioned lasering them. Since I have access to a laser, I figured why not brush off the old programming skills. For the record, I'd have come out ahead buying one.


My other "I don't care if it succeeds project" is an uptime checker I've been building extremely iteratively: https://onlineornot.com/

Mainly started building it because I wanted to learn more about running a business, marketing, and SEO (all the technical parts of the business are relatively easy in comparison).

I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.

I launched it into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still managed to get customers.

Mainly from working two hours a day, every weekday, for almost a year now. Each feature I ship has to be shipped within a two hour block and iterated upon later (so I use feature flags - the other service I built), and I only build features actual customers ask for and can explain how that new feature would fit into their business processes.


I've been working on something that helps me track my investments. It was to scratch my own itch since everything I've used was terrible. It's now grown to have a social angle and I hope to keep working on this for the rest of my life since investing is a life long journey for me.

https://wealthly.com


Wow! This is great, I've done something similar but more focused on options trading -- did you do your own design?


I have been very casually working on a service/website that allows users to vote on issues, but using some of the more unusual voting methods; specifically Delegate Democracy and its variations.


https://savingtool.co.uk

It's specific to a UK audience but I made a tool that, at least in my mind, is better than the existing tax calculators for UK workers, and goes a bit further with letting the user forecast potential wealth building, using a very popular approach (index funds using ISA wrappers).


This looks very useful, I'm looking forward to playing around with it. Do you have any plans to add support for Plan 4 (Scottish) student loan repayments?


> You are probably in a position to retire earlier than age 86!

Woohoo!


I run a clone of hacker news with a small but dedicated group of users. I implemented support for basically every public feature in HN, with the exception of the “past” link and getting rid of dynamic links. It implements HN search via Algolia, HN’s api via Firebase, HN’s javascript and css. People have submitted a total of 2700 items over two years, which is frankly incredible to me. It’s also scooped HN three or four times, where stories that appear there end up on HN a day or weeks later. I find that amusing.

It costs $12/mo, runs on FreeBSD just like HN originally did, and requires almost no moderation. It succeeded in replicating the feeling of HN’s early days, in terms of a sense of wonder when you stumble across it. But almost no one comments, much to my surprise.

I should probably do a writeup someday. But mainly I wanted w high quality HN implementation. pg’s original code vs this took two months of dedicated work. Figuring out firebase and algolia bindings for Arc took some (enjoyable) doing.


I'm working on a real-time gpu accelerated 3d visualizer for high frequency market Exchange data.

There's no practical use case for it except that it looks cool. I don't plan on making it useful either, instead I'm gonna implement all kinds of awesome looking but useless eye candy stuff. But it's a good excuse for a quant to get into graphics programming.


dude, I want that! is it open source? i can haz it?


I'll most likely open source it once it's refactored properly and I have a chance to show it off :)

Right now it's not looking as fancy as it could, i've been focusing more on optimizing the render engine for speed and not much yet on fancy shaders and such.

But I want to move away from OpenGL towards vulkan at which point I'll most likely publish the code.


After reading Parsing Techniques by Grune and Jacobs, I wanted to write a parser in Rust... I got it working in the end, but took me at least 6 months.

Nobody uses it, not even me... but damn was I happy when all the tests passed for the first time

https://github.com/alfiedotwtf/gallop


I'm creating a video game. I am being way to ambitious, and I am sure to fail or give up along the way, but honestly working on it has been so much fun, that I don't really care. Programming it and seeing progress, as well as the occasional funny bug has made the entire progress so far really fun and motivating.

I've also immersed myself in game dev blogs and podcasts and similar, which is giving me new things to discover and learn about, so I no longer have that problem of "what am I going to watch on netflix tonight", since its a new world for me to discover. It's opened up the things I watch because I have never immersed myself in things like what makes a game engaging or similar, so its all new and interesting to me.

There's a chance I'll get tired of it eventually, but right now I don't see it happening. I'm not worried about not finishing because I've had fun along the way. It was worth it in that sense already.


I'm working on my first animation piece: a full length stop motion movie of characters building Marble Track 3, a working rolling ball track made of wood and glue. (popsicle sticks, chopsticks, toothpicks, etc.)

I've been working about 2 hours per week since 2017. 10,000+ frames taken so far. At 12 frames per second, the video runs about 14 minutes.

It all started after I uploaded a video of Marble Track 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlUqu6QE7bw (nsfw language) and some people asked me how I made the marble track.

This URL will show (a playlist of the snippets showing) in great detail exactly how to create a marble track.

https://mt3s.marbletrack3.com/

The snippets are still silent, given that filming isn't even close to completion.

On the same channel, there are behind the scenes videos of me creating the track. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHiQhB8J_KI2LYQ7dsexfLw

I have done some livestreams and recently some "summary" videos, done in a timelapse style.

Because work on the track takes a lot of time, almost every piece has its own name, and the site https://www.marbletrack3.com/ aspires to document all the pieces, and show which characters made which parts of the track.

While I am hoping the project organically gains visibility and financial support, I am not pushing for that so I retain creative freedom. In any case, I will keep making the movie of characters making Marble Track 3.


Built a stock market scanner for my own needs and it has been a culmination of all my skills. Market is pretty saturated, however huge sense of pride which nobody can take from me.

On top of that it's what I use to trade. Hearing the feedback from my subscribers is my gold. https://mometic.com


just fyi firefox give a SSL error if I click the link, though oddly not if I open in a new tab.

"Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for mometic.com. The certificate is only valid for *.mometic.com."


I'm working on an rsync app for iOS that will allow me to sync files from my laptop or server over ssh.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who feels that all existing file transfer and cloud apps suck. They are either too slow, or don't allow syncing everything for offline use.

Even if I end up the only user, I'll be happy and my time would be well spent.


I built a free service that sends you email prompts to think about gratitude. If you reply to the emails, it collects your responses into a gratitude journal.

https://emailnotebook.com

Its primary purpose is to get me to build the habit, and so far it's working for that :)