Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2024)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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 think it works to tie it to the month, and it's strange to say the month name when you run it on the 21st.
I'll move it to the 3rd of each month unless it's the weekend, and then I'll push it to that Monday.
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.
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.
https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda
Short demo of our insurance application template: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtPOZEERMQo
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 had fun with it, and that's reward enough.
- 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.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112824600179209599
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)
Thought is that you can build compelling demos with your real app.
No need for "fake web app" demos anymore :)
https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/
https://shi-yan.github.io/WebGPUUnleashed/code/code.html#5_0...
Major updates in the past month:
- Added AQI
- Adjusted map colors to make precipitation radar more visible
- Tweaked UI/styling
If I find some time to work on it:
- One hour minutely precipitation forecast
- Allow toggling of all data in plots.
- Settings UI + persist to cookie.
- Minor bug fixes.
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.
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.
A lot of bioinformatics tools have been recompiled to wasm, and I'm working on integrating them these vizualizations.
https://storybook.nitro.bio/?path=/story/ariadne-ariadne--ki...
https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-web
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.
Please write up what you find out and share!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
- Financial credit building for children via parent
- a better Siri (but many companies in this space is demotivating)
- a Capitol Hill Club, kind of like a country club for people, parents, kids to relax after work and which is not a restaurant
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)
- 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 corpusesWe 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
The future of news is data
It’s more or less an API development platform focusing on implementing and automating business logic.
Playground: https://app.january.ah
Website: https://january.sh
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.
The advice I got was to talk to customers, because this could be something nobody wants.
i don't spend a lot of time on it every day, just trying to accumulative in hopes that it'll add up over time