Ask HN: What are you hacking these holidays? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you hacking these holidays?

26 pointszakshay46 comments

To be honest, the very last thing I want to do when I'm on vacation is to code...

I'm a professional software engineer, I do it enough day to day.

Yes.

I got tired of building side projects that never get used by anyone, so I'm taking a market first approach.

If anyone is interested in reading about Nutritional density to find out what foods have the highest nutrient count per calorie, check out: https://kale.world

I read it top to bottom and found it super interesting. I appreciate the normalization factor!

I'm chuckling a bit though. "Nutrients per calorie" is a fantastic metric, but then I got to wondering... "How much spinach is necessary to reach 200 cal?" http://www.caloriegallery.com/foods/calories-in-spinach.htm suggests that it'd be 870g! Almost 2lb! That's a lot of spinach to eat.

So is the ultimate goal to be able to put together daily meal plans that ensure you hit all your micro requirements?

Yup, that's exactly right. I'd like to build a tool that puts together meal plans that help people meet their nutrition goals. But, I thought I'd build up an audience first, to see if there's interest.

Yes 2 LBS of spinach is a lot. At costco they sell those 2.5 lb bags and their pretty big. But, keep in mind, if you boil it down in a big pot, 1 lb of spinach isn't so insurmountable, as the spinach becomes really small: best of all it only takes a minute of cooking.

Nothing new for me. Just trying to decouple some components from my side project from a year ago.

For those interested, this is a JS/React project.

The app is an open-source version of Alfred built on top of Electron/React -- https://github.com/vutran/dext

While it's very difficult at the moment to work on the app itself, I decided to just extract the search component to be reused elsewhere so I've started building Omnibar (https://github.com/vutran/omnibar).

Can't wait for Windows/Linux support!

I'll be working on finishing off a small practice project for viewing cryptocurrency mentions vs price on reddit. http://bitreddit.com

Even though I know I should focus on my simple projects, what I can't wait to get back to is this on demand/ peer to peer "micro consulting" marketplace. I want to be able to get help in home maintenance, car repair, or any other real world query and get someone to show up and guide me through it via a video call. Even though we now have great diy websites and YouTube videos about just about everything, it's one directional. If you have a specific question or if your situation is slightly different, then you're in for hours of digging around, or giving up.

It's also fun to make use of new technologies I don't get to play with at work like webrtc,react native, node etc

I am working on a web based successor to the Kid Pix painting program that I loved as a kid. I hope today's kids love it just as much!

I've been thinking about prototyping a Firebase clone that uses a relational database and SQL syntax. Instead of subscribing to "nodes" you would subscribe to queries. Anyone know if this exists already?

How would you (as the DB author) know when a query has updated results?

Something like this:

  subscribe ('SELECT * FROM tableA', callback)

On the initial subscription, 'callback' would be called once for each row in 'tableA', then again when a row is inserted or updated. It would be the same as Firebase in this respect.

No, you as the person writing this new database, not you as the user of the API.

Not OP but I would watch for mutations in the subscribed columns, then test the changed rows on the query's constraints and fire an event if it satisfies them.

I'm sure there is a more clever/efficient way of doing this though, and I can't wait to see how he/she implements it.

Related in a limited fashion:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/data/adone...

Then there's this write-up of someone replacing rethinkdb with postgres for live queries - (including a link to some code)

http://blog.sagemath.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.ht...

Have you any plans already of how you will go about this?

Not sure if it counts. I'm working on making public several hundreds (if not thousands) of photos of cell sites from around the world (but mostly in my home country of New Zealand). Using Caddy as a webserver. Pages will be in plain Markdown (which Caddy will render into HTML along with a reference to my homegrown CSS). Not sure yet where I'll host it but perhaps in a Hyper.io container or in a VPS I already have running for other sites. Photos will be hosted on Backblaze B2. Nice simple project that I've been putting off for years.

Finally getting some time to dedicate to my 5 minute word game:

https://www.pcmaffey.com/01100111011000010110110101100101

That's a really great game! I've definitely played a game a lot like this before (same hexagon concept too) but this is executed so well. The end-game poetry is brilliant!

Porting FlatNote, my text/md based OneNote/ evernote alternative to mac.

Notes are stored in dropbox as plain text files. The app itself is basically just a markdown editor with a file tree, autosave and a list of recent files.

I'm currently playing around with various display modes for content, so if it sees a list it will render checkboxes which can be tapped to mark an item as ~complete~

My philosophy is that everything should be 100% open on the platform so you can just walk away with your data with minimal effort. FlatNote files will always be readable as markdown by any other app with no 'export' required

I'll be working on my Test Case automation service. It'll make play/record web testing a breeze.

https://swif.club/?s=hw

that landing page is pretty sparse on information, and the only next page is a sign up page. Spend the holidays organising your landing page(s)

Thanks for the actionable feedback!

Adding rule-based sticky routing to the Traefik reverse proxy. The idea is to write rules to route all requests matching a certain URL, query string, or HTTP header to the same backend server.

This would allow for caching or synchronization in a distributed application to happen in memory on an app server instead of always going back to the database or Redis.

https://github.com/containous/traefik/pull/2613

I'm working on better automation and alerts for my newsletter, Daily Coding Problem (https://dailycodingproblem.com/). Specifically, I set up a bot on Slack and now I want it to message each day's stats (emails sent, open rate, click rate) as well as notify on events (subscribe/unsubscribe, email).

I'm also working on a new landing page!

Our website promoting local short-term small businesses like popup shops and food trucks and "summer businesses" launches January 1.

Our first feature story is an article and podcast interview about the Christmas tree store popup business.

We are working on several feature stories about "summer businesses" that people like school teachers start and run during summer holiday months before going back to their "real" job in September.

Trying to figure out how to market my side project. https://www.printpost.co

Any suggestions welcome.

Nice idea. I was thinking of doing the same before and calling it "Printstagram".

Maybe a Show HN post at least?

You could buy some Instagram ads or run some promotions (e.g. "post a picture with the hashtag #printpost for a chance to get it printed").

I’m playing with some weird ideas I’ve had for Q-Learning, not sure they will work, but it’s time to play. I’m finihing up some satellite imagery stuff to go into my product https://hydrachain.io/ and I bought Id spend a bit more time reading Quantum Computing since Democratis because I’m finding it quite a challenging book and I love it

Not sure if this counts as hacking, but I am targeting to learn Elm. Starting with the Elm: Getting Started [11] pluralsight course by Mike Van Sickle.

[1] https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/elm-getting-started

Building a new programming language, Jaspr: https://github.com/ar-nelson/jaspr

It's not nearly done enough for its own HN post yet, but it's coming together slowly. Still working on the standard library and documentation.

Working on an in-app PDF viewer in a react side project. I am working with PDF.js and experimenting with tracking page views, per page views, and total time interacted with a document. Once I have that initial data I would like to use some nice charts from ReCharts to really make the data look pretty.

Version number 3 of this project with a new name and new organization of info based on a clearer conceptualization. I am fairly pleased with this take on it:

http://worldwidewebworks.blogspot.com

This isn’t holiday-specific, but over the next week I’ll be knocking out more features that are currently missing from my VR web browser app for iOS and Android: https://www.viewport.org

Trying to see if there is a sports betting opportunity in NHL with the new rules generating more goals... newer bet on a sports event in my life until a week ago, so it looks fun...

I have a laptop coming after Christmas. I've got plans to pick up Elm, practice some of my core fundamentals and help my sister's e-commerce business.

This is a non-answer but in reality - not a damn thing.

Been working really hard lately so it’s time to recharge and read a couple books.

Playing with C, flite 2.0 API (really easy) and Frotz. Hope I can create a TTS enabled z-code interpreter soon.

Picking away at Symfony 4, Ionic 3 and finishing up some Quickbooks integrations with my time tracking SaaS.

I'll be launching my phishing simulation SaaS in a week or so: www.phishero.com

Zynq MiniZed http://zedboard.org/product/minized

My plan is to implement my own version of a neopixel driver to learn VHDL.

Ref:

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 37: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 8 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 36: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 7 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 35: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 6 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 34: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 5 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 33: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with the Zynq SoC https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 32: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 31: Systems of Modules, Driving RGB NeoPixel LED arrays https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Did you buy the Zync ZedBoard yourself? How much did it cost? What are the specs?

You can buy it via Avnet (US distributor) for $88.99 + $8 (or so) S/H. They sent me a promotion code THXNN6W for free shipping. It is an entry level Zynq processor (single ARM core, pretty decent FPGA capabilities). It runs linux well. Remarkable learning potential for $100!

https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k...

You can download the Xilinx IDE Vivado WebPack for free.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado-w...

Both Avnet and Xilinx require creating a (free) account.

virtual keyboard for amazon fire tv on mac

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