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Comment by jaennaet | Hacker News Reader

Heh, I follow a Bluesky bot that posts HN stories that have gone over 50 points and unexpectedly saw a very familiar Github link. I'd made a Show HN story about this ~5 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42464454) and I was like "huh, how'd that suddenly get more traction" but turns out it wasn't even my post!

I'm so delighted that this is easily my most popular OSS project over the past 15 or so years (I have my "serious" stuff elsewhere), and I'm not being sarcastic here.

I'll happily answer any questions folks have (expect some reply lag because holiday season). I figure the most popular question is probably going to be "… but why?" though, and the honest-to-the-gods answer is "because I thought it was funny"; I was trying to come up with a nice and simple 1st project to do with Swift (holy crap that language's concurrency story is confusing), and once I ran into iss-mimic I knew what I had to do.

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Are you planning to add AI and monetize this?

Absolutely! Realtime data will require a subscription, which will also include an LLM analysis of the past week's data. I think one of the VCs funding my upcoming disruptive space station piss tank telemetry platform requested that.

I'm pretty sure I can also shove a blockchain in there somewhere too even though they're a bit passé.

More agile

You don't really want an agile toilet interface. This is more a waterfall project.

Make sure there's plenty of space to output those logs.

Boooo :)

Waterfall in a zero-g environment? I don't think so sir, Agile all the way.

Why not kanban? Stuff floats in the air on its own anyway.

Finally a real 3D kanban.

I regret to inform you that waterfall planning is often considered a fail state in the toilet development world (and a messy one to clean up).

I can however recommend the Spiral Model [1] as a lesser known Waterfall variation, which carries a heavier focus on risk management. It resembles a conch shell, and may require up to three attempts [2] to get your toilet development process correct.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)

Thank you, this response made my day:)

Thank you for this holiday gift of laughter <3

Will you release the piss dataset for commercial use?

or will you consider a piss left license?

Will it be called the piss+ or the piss-pro?

Piss+ ofcourse. It sets up the zero-G defecation market for the much more profitable piss+poop product.

But the real money is in piss+poop enterprise which comes with SSO (single shit to orbit).

Can you elaborate on where quantum computing can fit in? We want this thing future-proofed.

pISSStream is already a quantum application as I wrote it while in a box with a poison gas system that can be triggered by the decay of a radionuclide, allowing me to be in a superposition of being alive and dead – technically the app both exists and doesn't exist.

I'm 100% certain this is how quantum computation works and am available for department chair positions and speaking engagements for conferences.

Sentient cat programmer: Confirmed.

That makes sense, but what if your service goes down and we can't get a hold of all the valid data? Before I invest in the $0/year fee, I'd like you to confirm that you're using the Blockchain somehow?

Hah! This is great!

I’ve done something like this, but also used the location of ISS to figure out which country was “getting pissed on the most” by the astronauts.

I’m fairly sure I got a working script somewhere for the data, but unfortunately never got around to create a leaderboard website for it :/

Now I'm thinking doing it for constellations, which zodiac is the most celestially pissy.

The sky’s the limi.. no wait :D

Knowing which star sign 'causes' people to pee would be invaluable information to astrologists!

I would like to remind everyone that the "New pull request" button is like right there on https://github.com/jaennaet/piSSStream/pulls

It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed on in the menu bar item.

Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though, but I could be wrong – frankly I haven't paid that close attention to the value. Could also be something like microgravity causing a bit of… uh… slosh making the sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those lines?

This has nerd-sniped me waaaay too much. Now I need to know the capacity of the ISS urine tank since an average adult urination is between 200 and 350ml.

For some reason I assumed they ejected the piss out into space so I was imagining using pee volume drop plus station location to determine trajectory of the pee and effectively track each load as it ventures out into space.

Oh well

Have you considered making this a library? I think every Swift application needs this important metric on the about panel.

It actually started life as a Swift library package + cli tool without any sort of Xcode project, but somehow when I tried to add it to an Xcode GUI project I just kept getting weird-ass linker errors and gave up after a while (nobody ask what those errors were, it's been a week and I can barely remember what happened yesterday)

I suspect I need to combine that datasource with this indicator that I made: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/electronics/shart-o-meter/

I know they're working on ways to recycle the urine into water. Can you add a display of water levels and somehow show when it transfers between the two?

There is a metric or code already that shows when the recycling happens - if I recall correctly it’s at least a couple of times per day, but I’ll check my notes tomorrow…

link the bluesky bot?

Not OP, but maybe this?

https://bsky.app/profile/hnews.southla.social

https://bsky.app/profile/betterhn50.bsky.social

No AI woo-woo which I consider a huge plus

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