Ask HN: What Are You Up To? (April 2022)
What are you working on? Any new ideas you're thinking about?
I keep coming back to emacs every few months so I figured it has to mean something. I tried setting up a react development environment. Got some stuff like auto-complete, but missing other stuff. I essentially want it to mirror VS code to start. I know it's possible but there's definitely a learning curve. I also tried setting up a python environment, and had similar results.
It's one of those technologies that seems life changing. Not necessarily in productivity (who cares right?), but just empowering. The closest thing you can get to being a hacker in a movie, setting up an environment where you can easily program macros to do any arbitrary tasks or alter the environment. It really seems like an incredible piece of software that, on the surface level, looks like it could serve as as the framework for so many things, kind of like the web browser is today, but more flexible and programmable. Maybe it's just been around too long. I think if it was invented just today it would have a lot of hype. But because it's been around so long, it's just meh.
I don't know, maybe I'm just being romantic about it and will never get over the learning curve. It's really hard to leave VS Code for development.
The killer app in emacs for me is org-mode above anything to do with coding.
I'm also planning to start working on a "Linux CLI Guide for beginners" next week.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTv2U3HnAL4NN2tK-59Zi...
1. Work toward v3.0 of my z-machine (Infocom and Inform games) interpreter for the Pico-8, called Status Line.
2. Start sampling new programming languages, because I'm getting a bit frustrated with some of Pico-8's arbitrary limitations and would like a little more breathing room. Since this is all for fun, I have carte blanche to use whatever I want. I've started examining Odin (since Jai isn't available yet), as I appreciate the core values that drive its development and I'm super interested in understanding data-oriented programming better.
A few months ago I made a good enough solution for my problem https://github.com/alexadam/reactive-doc - it saves ~ 10 minutes/day when I have to run complex devops scripts. And I can quickly share the ‘docs’ because they are just plain html files / or markdown.
Now I just finished the next iteration - better ‘syntax’ for input widgets, runnable @shell commands and a web based terminal https://github.com/alexadam/shell-driver with custom filters and selection actions (useful for me)
Next steps: add more features to the web based terminal -> convert history to scripts, autocomplete with parameters, command palette & context aware menus, multiple terminals (with tabs or panels). I also want to add support for React components in the MD editor.
The tricky and interesting bit is figuring out actual emissions (vs applying a rule that 1 visit == x grams of CO2). Work in progress:
we've committed to making our search engine site at breezethat.com as minimal as possible -- hand-coded HTML, etc. and even now it's still too big -- one big next step is creating a boostrap & fontawesome subset package which should reduce our total asset size by 50% or more
we haven't and probably won't minify for a while mostly cuz wholly bootstrapped and it's one layer of potential debugging for which we don't have spare bandwidth
we'll likely switch to images off by default for similar reasons + speed
the most striking thing is when going to regular sites and running into all the bloat; working on a separate extension people can use to mitigate that and also better set options-per-site in general.
- rebooting a parked domain as a private imgur of sorts to streamline creating content across channels that has a much simpler copy / paste mechanism similar to what github lets you do when adding images to comments in nmarkdown, where it automatically hosts and inserts the ~[](link) of pasted file
Mostly just because I thought it be fun and because pretty much all the desktop apps I've done over the years, were built with someone else's tools and for a single platform, so wanted to do something new to me at least. This one is cross platform between Windows and Linux, though Linux is the primary platform because Windows development is more annoying IMO, and with custom UI.
All in C++ too because that's what I know, none of this Electron silliness, and with minimal dependencies. Uses Skia for graphics, and I've got a WASM interpreter library I'm looking to experiment with for doing an extension API when I get to that point.
Still a long way to go before you can truly assembly all types of UI like static, static data, dynamic, realtime and reactive UI, but the test pages which I have started building seems to show that this is possible, but still require more research
Anyway this helps in my freelance projects where I have build a VCard Management System,Warehouse Management System, Sales Order Management System and Print Label Management System all using backend as Microsoft Business Central to validate the abstractions.
Currently implement Git Integration and Importing of Data (Html/Json/Css/Js) Components using different CSS Framework like Tailwind, Bootstrap from Git Repositories to validate Parallel Assembly. Also spending time on extracting the assembler runtime to open source the Html/Json assembler.
My hypothesis which I want to test using my tool/abstraction are More Assembly Less Building for Creating Software Apps, More Declarative Less Imperative for Creating Software Apps, More Prototype UI vs Less Requirements Documentation. Portable vs Centralised/Decentralised Software, Multi-Platform with Common Abstraction vs Cross Platform, Design for the Forest (System) vs Design for the Trees (Individual Components).
All these things are research without any concrete end goal but in the hope something good and useful can be created for myself and in the future for others.I want to make it more dev / b2b focused, e.g. with dev tool integrations. Currently brainstorming. Borne from my own struggle with link management
If you'd like to try it out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dailylauncher-cust...
Or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dailylauncher...
Among the most interesting things has been the parallels to desktop OS design patterns, such as leveraging spatial awareness as a means of organization.
And if it actually clicks with people (still working on the demo), i'm going to make it social; in a github way, not an instagram way.
Currently it's not easy to play back all the viewpoints of your team members in a game at once in synchronisation with each other so I've built a tool (Electron for now while I prototype how it works, GStreamer + GTK when I've figured it out) that aims to make it easy to synchronise the videos and provides the ability to instantly switch between them.
We are helping to promote interest in science and technology by funding sci-fi writing contests. The winning stories are published under a Creative Commons license, which makes them easy to share and read.
Our first contest is about moon colonization and has $250 in Bitcoin as a prize.
I know HN is fairly skeptical of crypto, but I think there is a huge opportunity to channel these new resources into cultural creation and other positive public goods.
Thinking deeply about what the 2.0 version of some of our features look like.
In personal and company culture land things are getting back to pre-covid with company meet-ups scheduled and personal vacations booked.
Its a crypto Coin screener. Could not find what i wanted so building it myself.
The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] denied my petition for extraordinary writ [0] on February 22. This asked SCOTUS to order the district court to abide by the case law requiring an evidentiary hearing (tl/dr: I filed for habeas corpus in the US District Court in January 2018. My friend's legal mail was intercepted by her $9,000/month treatment center. The owner of the facility was formerly a criminal defense attorney, and wrote a crafty letter which was docketed as a 'motion to dismiss'. I now have videos proving this is fraudulent. The District Court and the Court of Appeals would rather not deal with me, because I'm asking them to deal with our make-work mental health industry.)
I sent SCOTUS a petition for rehearing [1] last month. This time I told them about how the Soviets' preferred medication for dissident re-education was haloperidol, My petition for rehearing specifically asks the supreme court to end the medical torture of U.S. citizens [pdf pg 3]. This has been distributed for the April 14 2022 conference.
My friend is 'stabilized' with haloperidol when she gets out of sorts [1, pg 4]. All she actually needs is an adequate diet and a low-stress environment.
The Mad in America [MIA] foundation posted my essay about how I got to file at SCOTUS: Malignant Do-Gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry - https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/
If SCOTUS denies my petition for rehearing, I next get to file a proper petition for writ of certiorari. My application for extension of time [2] was granted last month. (Something interesting: 21A512 has a 'received' stamp, whereas [1] does not. The difference is that I had the post office stamp the date on the outside of the envelope on [1], whereas I just sent 21A512 with stamps, and it presumably was not dated. SCOTUS pro-tip: have your mailings date-stamped by the post office.)
A few people have reached out to me on Twitter after reading my MIA essay. One of them has a very good 'false claims act' suit. She escaped from Arizona's involuntary mental health industry after 3 years of harmful treatment, with the assistance of her family. Can't share the details, because 'false claims' cannot be presented for swindles that are covered in the media (for example). I remember also witnessing the class of medical abuse that this woman was subjected to.
[0] SCOTUS Docket: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...
[1] Petition for Rehearing: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-6444/219300/202...
[2] Extension of Time: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...