But it shouldn't be on the first of the month, colliding with Who Is Hiring threads. How about, hmm, the third Saturday of each month? or maybe Friday?
I would say Saturday. California Saturdays are someone else's Sundays. Weekends have that chill creativity vibe contrasting with the more serious Who Is Hiring vibes you get on a Monday.
I appreciate that you've been making the case for these threads for a long time!
The problem is that they get flagged and downweighted because unofficial monthly regular threads are (informally) not allowed here. Otherwise people try to start too many of them, and it's one of those things that only works well within limits.
The solution we hit on with whoishiring (a long time ago) was to make it official, give it basically a system account, and take it out of the realm of individual submissions.
If you want to champion the cause, send me an email at hn@ycombinator.com. I don't have a lot of cycles right now but I do think it would be good to add a monthly thread for this!
I'm working within a small team on an open-source alternative to Salesforce Platform.
Our big dream is to enable companies of any size to build faster and smarter high-quality software with a solid enterprise foundation (think: security, scalability, traceability) and still retain the rights to the product they pay for.
Spent a bit of time last month on multilingual scrabble: what set of ~100, or 150 tiles will allow us to play a good scrabble game in language $X?
There's plenty of word lists on the net to give a sense of "what is a language", and a scrabble simulator script was fun to come up with. So now i have a script that can take a proposed tile set and play a bunch of scrabble games with it in a given language (or group of them) to help judge the viability of the set.
I took it that far because my wife is learning Czech and wanted a tile set as a study aid. Our ~128 tile English set is providing fun on our refrigerator for the whole family as a "walk by crossword game", and the 150 tile czech set seems to be working for the wife. 98 wouldn't be enough for czech; simulator said, and it was right.
I was excited at first about the possibility of sharing the results of my work, but "crossword / scrabble game" is apparently a very narrow niche. Most of the world I can talk to doesn't appear to need a better scrabble set.
- I'm working on LLM-based detection of media bias for English and German (later perhaps other languages), which is more detailed (27 bias sub-types), fine-grained (sentence level instead of document-level) and accurate than the state of the art. The result is be a Web browser plug-in. I'm also thinking about that project's governance and how to deploy this technology to benefit the general public free of charge for end users.
- I'm thinking of knowledge management processes and tools (both for personal and organizational use) and ways to stimulate adoption because management seems to not see the sad state of affairs (everything is broken) and the value of this working.
My R&D work aims to cut across the traditional divide between "basic science - applied science - industry applications" in that I like to discover & play with pretty fundamental concepts that can be tried in practical (software) prototypes and then pushed into production use.
My wife trapped him and another cat a few months ago, the other cat escaped but "Bob B" stayed.
I set up a "cat room" in our other house which is under renovation and go over there to read books, watch TV, and things like that. When I was there he would always hide on a high shelf in the closet but I had a breakthrough a little more than a week ago when he started coming down to eat his meals and I was able to feed him cat treats, sometimes a few inches from my fingers so he would bump into me with his nose. One time he bit me accidentally when he was trying to bite into a kibble and he immediately seemed contrite and got a lot more careful.
I got him back from the vet Tuesday afternoon to get him neutered, vaccinated and all that, when he saw me for the first time from his shelf he was stressed and his pupils expanded to the point where I could not see his irises. The next day though he did come down to eat his dinner although I could only get him to do a short play session... I'm happy though that I didn't lose all my progress.
In a week or two I think we can get the rest of the house safe for him and let him have the run of the house. Right now he's obviously depressed and anxious from having too small of a space because every little thing like noises from the hard drive on my Xbox bothers him, so I think he'll blossom in a bigger environment. I'm not worried about a kitten bomb if he escapes now because I do want him to stick around because this changed from "a project I'm doing to learning more about cats" to feeling really attached to him.
There's also a concern about what we'll do when we rent the other house and we'll probably have to move him to our house (with two cats) or into the barn (with one cat) but I'm hoping he'll be much much easier to handle by then. (He chomped on me twice when I was packing him into a crate to see the vet, it's a good thing I was wearing heavy gloves)
I like the graphs. Is the map radar data or a forecast? I'm on mobile in case there a title somewhere that I'm not seeing.
If it's radar data. Where do you get it? I wanted to try radar data for my area to help a group of people trying to have a network of weather stations online and making sure everything was working fine.
The Rain Viewer API provides 2 hours of past radar data and 30 minutes of radar forecast data. If you donate on Patreon you get 60 minutes of radar forecast data[1].
We are gonna try it, we have a a script to extract radar data from the images on the local weather agency but it has a lot of problems with compression artifacts.
Just a hobbyist, but always wanted a programming job; not a socialite though as everyone expects nowadays. Currently screwing around with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS to build a zero dependency simple code editor using VSCode as inspiration. Parsing and highlighting is working well, including nested tokens, but folding is kicking my teeth in. Took a break from that to work on Shift/Tab indent/outdent, and that has went about as well. So, bouncing between those and treading water.
We're looking for more contributions - it's a React / Redux app that tries to replace the current site and mobile app with one codebase, and then go from there - join us if you fancy!
Look at Sir Berners-Lee: smart guy, but he put "trust" as a component box in his vision of the so-called Semantic Web as if it was an API that you could just call. Trust is of course an emergent property of a well-designed, reliable, transparent, safe and secure system, and as such it is a relation between a system and its human users.
Will do. Origin story; planned to write a short series of very tiny
booklets on cybersecurity for some students. Question arose; what is
the most atomic concept in cybersec from which to build? Networks?
Crytptography? Identity? Risk? Quality? After about two months I
decided it was Trust. Totally sucked me in to reading everything from
tribal anthropology to cold-war game theory. It feels like a great
invisible dark mass holding a galaxy of other things together.
I'd be interested in reading what you can share on this topic too. What was the most enlighting / interesting read for you so far? Can you point to a single book or two?
I'm involved in developing x-cmd. We've been focused on developing new features and optimizing user experience. We occasionally promote it on social media and Hack News, but the results have been poor, which is frustrating.
Writing assistant for your second language(s). Right now it’s a web/mobile app but we’re getting ready to launch our browser extension so hopefully that will be more convenient for our users.
Also since the backend is in rust I’ve been contributing to a bunch of the libraries I’m using. There’s definitely been a cost to using rust since a lot of the web dev packages are on the younger side, but the reliability has been huge for a side project. Other than one time I set the wrong send grid API key I don’t think we’ve had a single 500.
At work we take a month or two in a summer to do code cleanup work, we just got up to JDK 21 and I rebuilt the build system for a Javascript project.
In terms of my side projects recent developments are:
(1) made a fork of my "second brain" (third brain?) and loaded in a friend's notes from evernotes. I started putting tags on about 400 items one at a time assuming an ontology would emerge (it has in many projects I've done) but I got stuck. I am probably going to add some reports/visualizations and a simple comment facility and move forward.
(2) I made friends with someone who designs clothing who is interested in collaborating on print-on-demand fabrics. Turns out almost all printed fabric is silkscreened which is great in some respects but doesn't let you render the full range of colors that is possible in print-on-demand which is often inkjet. PoD fabric is about twice as expensive as silkscreen printed fabric so I'm feeling the need to make designs that are unlike anyone's ever seen before: photography-based images that don't make people feel they are "wearing a photograph".
It's a crazy competitive market with many different vendors that specialize in different kinds of fabrics, I am running 8x8 sample prints, ordering sample books as well as sets of color swatches so I can get a handle on color management.
I'm probably going to produce the first fabric based on an image I already have which I took of a flower field with a very wide aperture lens but I am thinking for this purpose I don't want to have any trouble making images that tile so I'm planning on photographing 20-50 flowers and cutting them out from the background and then procedurally generating infinite flower fields with the exact properties I want. I got into flower photography last year because I found the photos did really well on social but I was kinda bored doing it last year and would feel even more bored if I kept doing what I was doing last year without adding something to my technique and this is it.
If you look up YOShInOn in the search box for Hacker News you will hear a lot about the last version of the product which is an RSS reader that is written in Python, uses HTMX for the front end and SBERT embeddings and scikit-learn for classification and clustering and does it all with asyncio. (I was about to call it "version 1" but it has predecessors that go back about 20 years)
I've also developed Fraxinus, which I was earlier calling an "image sorter" which adds a bookmark manager and webcrawler. It started out asyncio but I was having trouble w/ the web server blocking so I rewrote it as sync and it now runs under gunicorn and has a celery server running. The first version would let me import image galleries with a bookmarklet and it has a tagging and query system which is designed for machine learning systems. (e.g. you can put on a negative tag which says "this is not a member of class C" and also an indeterminate tag which means "we're looking for your opinion if this is a member of class") Believe it or not I am thinking about going to a React or similar GUI, at least for some things, because this query system is capable of answering complex queries that take complements and intersections of a large number of tags and attributes which is more than the "Union of N tags and attributes" which is easy to do in HTMX.
I am thinking about merging the code bases which would be basically implementing YOShInOn inside of Fraxinus. I'm not in such a hurry because the system works well, but the one problem I have with it now is that it runs in a batch mode where it picks about 300 articles to show me, I look at them, then it classifies another batch. Earlier I was reading more articles and it turned around in about 1.5 days but I haven't been using it as much lately and sometimes a cycle goes 7+ days and when you add up all the queues involved an article can go a long time between when it is published, my system picks it up, I favorite it, then schedule it to get posted on HN or Mastodon. For most of the topics I cover it is not so bad because many "news" items are still interesting after two weeks but it's a disaster for sports news stories which often are only of interest until the next game.
So I am thinking of how to make it run in an incremental mode that can tag certain topics for fast processing and also make it more compatible with ActivityPub so it can be a "Mastodon reader that doesn't suck".
Sort of like a new Flash, but open source, compiles to WASM or LLVM instead of requiring a plugin, and driven by language all the way down.
The language piece is a declarative UI language tailored to vector design; the vector design tool reads & writes this declarative language and you can go back and forth between visual edits and code edits. All of this attaches to and is driven by existing programming languages, starting with Rust and following soon with JavaScript.
Getting very close to our first launch! Have been quietly developing in the open for a while.
I'm working on a small website for finding restaurants and breweries when you're traveling. It currently has 4 year of Great American Beer Fest winners and 3 years of James Beard nominees and winners.
It's very alpha at this point with no styling. I'm also working on getting addresses, websites, and instagram links gathered and added. Plus collapsing down the entries, so a place with multiple awards only shows up once, with all of its awards. Right now it's just 1 results per award.
Moving Stratum's (my RSS reader) backend from Firebase to PocketBase. It worked pretty well, even made an offline caching system that works about as good as Firestore's. However I recently found a bug: if the app thinks you're online and you're actually offline it'll try to fetch from the server and it will take forever. I have to add a timeout somewhere.
The backend is coded in Go which I originally didn't like but now I love. It's so much easier to work with than TypeScript and Firebase Cloud Functions. It allowed me to easily add quite a few features like the one that allows me to summarize Hacker News comment sections .
As it is summer in my hemisphere of the world, I've been focusing on more fun projects, namely diving into Bevy and game development in order to hopefully one day be able to publish a PC game of my own.
Currently focusing on reading up on everything I can regarding NPC AI, and 80% done with a library for Bevy that allows one to program NPC AI via GOAP (Goal-Oriented Action Planning, probably made most famous by the AI in F.E.A.R), which has been a lot of fun. Although Rust is basically the opposite of my favorite language, so still taking some time to wrangle the code to my needs, but I'm sure it'll be fine in the end.
I am working on a ebook reader which uses AI to make reading easier and has a built in book club to talk about the book as you read it and once you are done.
Basically I am building it for myself as some books are hard to read, and if I can substitute a paragraph or some sections with an ELI5 version that would get me through a lot more books and may it so much fun.
And I love chatting about books and that is half of the fun for me, so I am building it in the app itself.
Using Tauri and Rust for all of this because I don't like slow apps.
Will also build mobile apps next once I am done with the desktop versions as I like syncing where I read etc.
I’ve been working on a tool for managing AWS Organizations, SCPs, and IAM policies. At the moment it’s more a collection of scratch-my-own-itch features (interactive tree view for accounts, access denied debugger, and a few tools related to seeing how SCPs are inherited through the OU structure). Hosting it at wut.dev if this sounds interesting to you.
One neat thing (although makes it more challenging to build) is that I’m using the AWS JS SDK to do everything client side. So the whole app is basically a single HTML/JS page with no API, creds are only stored locally, etc.
I just made Little Riddle, a word game for my mom. I took a list of popular nouns, verbs, and adjectives and found words that rhyme with each word. Cleaned up that list, removing obscure words and words that didn't really rhyme together. I then asked ChatGPT to come up with a clue for each rhyming pair. I just gave it to my mom for her birthday and she loves it. It's based on a analog word game people refer to as "Road Toad".
> - a better Siri (but many companies in this space is demotivating)
Don't be discouraged, there is so much room for improvement, and we had a better system than Siri (regarding general ability to answer open domain questions) back in 2004 (SMS-based, with a view to eventually incorporate speech recognition).
I have not seen a player that does this really well, and the need is unquestionable (despite the VCs that told me in 2004 that the mobile Internet won't be a thing because "if it will be possible, it will be so expensive that no-one uses it").
I'm working on a journal that incorporates Bayesian learning on how aspects of my life affect my mental, physical and social well-being. Having used it for nearly 500 days I plan to turn it into a life accounting and auditing tool.
- Firmware for high-power EV chargers (Rust)
- CI/build systems on Raspberry Pi's (NixOS)
- Documentation for zk-STARK compiler (Rust)
- Software for insurance back-office (Elixir)
Personal:
- Turtle graphics with HTML Canvas via WebAssembly (web-sys crate)
- NixOS configuration for my laptops and Raspberry Pi's at home
- SSH AuthorizedKeys management for distributing SSH keys
- A pinyin editor for creating flashcards based on corpuses
I’m building a platform that helps elementary and middle schools raise money. Students answer as many math problems as they can over a week or two and ask friends and family to support them by making a donation to their school. The math problems are dynamite created and generally follow the math curriculum that most schools follow. https://www.forourschool.org
We're building a platform that gathers all GPS outages globally every day and packs it into a searchable database
We also map how close these outages are to oil and gas pipelines
We will also be incorporating ocean fiber outages, Starlink outages, and whatever else we can find that helps us make sense of the world in near real-time
I love MoneyManager by Realbyte, but having to manually input transactions became tiring after a while.
So I decided to build one that works specifically for my country. It parses MPESA smss and, with enough data, we'll be able to automatically categorize almost any transaction.
Outside of work I'm learning about buildroot and building a tiny Linux systems. When I get stuck with that, I'm working through Crafting Interpreters. If I'm lucky I'll be able to take what I've learned and make a unit aware calculator.
But it shouldn't be on the first of the month, colliding with Who Is Hiring threads. How about, hmm, the third Saturday of each month? or maybe Friday?