Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on?

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project Name: Symbiants

GitHub: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

Languages: Rust (Bevy), WebGPU, WASM, JS

Project Description:

Symbiants is a digital ant farm with a mental health twist. The goal is to make a cute, real-time ant colony sim (think SimAnt + Tamagotchi), get players to form a daily routine around feeding and caring for their ants, and incorporate basic mental health activities (guided breathing, positivity journaling, etc.) into the gameplay.

The player gets a comfy, cozy, digital environment and a pet that grows in real-time. Each morning, the user gets online, check on their ants as part of their "what's changed on the Internet" routine, do a quick self-check-in, and get a visual reminder of how their consistency is affecting their pet's growth.

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This is my first attempt at building a video game. It's been a lot of fun so far, but, unsurprisingly, is a lot of work. I had some cash saved up and took the last year off of work. In this time, I built a prototype in React, then taught myself Rust/Bevy and began chipping away. I've made some progress, but I don't feel this vision is anywhere near complete. I would love to have more people to work with, discuss ideas, agree upon architectural designs with, and to learn the finer points of Rust/WebGPU development.

To me, this is an especially important project because I see a lot of people who love to be terminally online, work from home, play video games to zone out after work, and sometimes fall into a rut where days fly by without sufficient self-care. How to reach those people? It can be difficult to broach the subject because mental health is a bit taboo. I am curious to see if a video game can be an effective means of starting a conversation.

I've tried out this game, and so far, I'd say that it's pretty well made. I would definitely try contributing to this in my spare time.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project name: FreeLanguageTools / VocabSieve

Github: https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

Languages: Python for the main project, one of the Android languages for a potential mobile app.

We are developing a free software language learning tool for an immersion-based approach. We work with other free software solutions (Anki, mpv, asbplayer, KOReader) to protect user freedom from SaaS corporations that hold your data hostage.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS:

Project: Bank Rank

Description: Crowdsourcing templates to monitor deposit account rates and fees across the 8500+ banks and credit unions in the U.S.

Tech Stack: Vanilla Javascript (Playwright/Puppeteer)

Github: https://github.com/project-bankrank/bankrank

I was going to make a separate post about this in a few days once I finished up the documentation, but I'll post it early even though the Github repo is not in a completed state. The general idea is to build a tool that can scrape bank account information whenever it is executed, to enable more transparency when shopping for financial products like savings accounts. I've started working on the engine and templates, and currently have the logic built out for several hundred products at ~70 financial institutions.

The best way you can help is by creating "templates" of various product information by recording or manually writing puppeteer/playwright scripts to extract specific information about various bank products. This is a simple task, but due to each bank having multiple product offerings (checking, savings, money market, certificate of deposit) and multiple tiers of each product, the actual market for a "savings accounts" is in the tens of thousands. Banks change rates and fees a lot more frequently than they change their websites, so even though this is a brute-force method of aggregating data, it will be sufficient for most consumers.

If you're interested in learning more, shoot me an email: project.bankrank@gmail.com

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS https://github.com/zzo38/scorpion Scorpion Protocol/File-Format -- can be implemented in any programming languages, but mostly C programming language

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS https://github.com/zzo38/freeheromesh Free Hero Mesh puzzle game engine (e.g. Hero Hearts, Sokoban, etc) -- written in C programming language, some parts are SQL

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Bionic-GPT

https://github.com/bionic-gpt/bionic-gpt

Rust, LLM's, RAG, Kubernetes. Generative AI.

Ideally for the over 50's but younger people also considered.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS:

Project name : Exabase

Github: https://github.com/Uiedbook/Exabase

Exabase is a database DBMS for the future.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project names:

- Free Law Project

- RECAP Extension

- CourtListener.com

- Bots.law

Repos:

- https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener

- https://github.com/freelawproject/recap-chrome

- https://github.com/freelawproject/bigcases2/

Languages: Python, Django, JavaScript, Browser extensions

Free Law Project is a small non-profit that uses technology to make the legal sector better. We operate at a big scale (about 300M items in our DB and a lot of traffic), and need help scaling, operating, expanding, fixing, modernizing, and maintaining our stack.

One high priority project is adding a CDN to our site due to the crush we just got on the latest Epstein docs:

Background: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/04/epstein-document-crash-docu...

Issue: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/issues/917

If you have experience in rolling out a CDN, that's great.

If not, we also have a volunteer backlog where we are always looking for help with our website, browser extensions, etc: https://github.com/orgs/freelawproject/projects/31/views/1

At this point, if you are a Python/Django/Browser extension dev, we could probably use your help!

Get in touch: info at free dot law

What's a git forge URL?

something similar to github.com/project-name/repo-name or https://git.sr.ht/~user/project

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project Name: Parture

Website: https://parture.org/

Git: (still private until tokenomics have been validated)

Languages: Rust, WASM, Elm/React/*, Js, Avalance, Colony.io, TerminusDB

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

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Parture is a decentralized protocol that aims to collect/generate digital sheet music for all music that was ever recorded, and make it available to all musicians for free, by aligning financial and social incentives. The total collection of structured sheet music is made queryable through a decentralized blockchain network allowing a myriad of applications to be built. The query fees are divided over the transcription contributors.

A problem for many musicians is that most sheet music simply doesn't exist, and there are no proper incentivizes on the internet for doing the work and sharing home-grown transcriptions. The compositional copyright issue also hinders the ability for centralized sites to stay online.

Parture keeps an index of all known music (like MusicBrainz), and tracks the progress of transcribing everything per artist, album, genre in a very project-management oriented way. Transcribers build up reputation (per artist and genre) and validation/moderation priviliges on Colony.io by transcribing music ("proof of work"). Transcribers earn tokens whenever their transcriptions are accepted into the main index and included in query results. Transcribers can create a profile for themselves highlighting their reputation earned per domain (the link to actual contributed data is unlinked using ZKproofs for privacy). Transcribers can organize themselves in groups/guilds to have little communities where the earned stakes are assigned to the guild (Colony.io sub-DAO).

Copyright's are managed by enabling blacklists in nodes in response to DMCA requests, reserving payments to rightholders, and have the Parture DAO buy up or license the composition rights of works available on the platform (analog to UltimateGuitar).

# Example applications that can be built on the platform include:

* mathematically correct genre definitions, based on the actual structure of music

* generation of a perfect genealogy tree of music based on "who was the first to do that chord/x ever in music?"

* calculate the structural/musical similarity between songs (useful in copyright litigation)

* conversion of all sheet music into any fringe format, i.e. Klavarskribo, Synthesia, Braille or any weird custom notation

* generating arrangements of any song to fit for use by a particular instrument with particular key requirements, like "generate 'Highway to Hell' to be played by violins"

* automatic generation of instructional music video's, where an AI character shows hand positions and guitar grips

Parture creates a (to be) open source stack of a blockchain node that hosts a customizeable (WASM core + whatever frontend) collaborative sheet music editor that works like Git, where transcriptions can be worked on in multiplayer (using CRDT's), branched, merged, versioned. The node can be used to create your own sheet-music based community like UltimateGuitar, Songsterr, MySongBook, Flat.io, SoundSlice, etc for free.

Whitepaper available on request.

Love to get in touch: https://forms.gle/5C5PRJpNx1QGx3a89 or https://discord.gg/PD3dw2vH