I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other options) over the last few months. Just feeling very aimless so I’ve started reading Russian literature and spending hours on Reddit every day.
This is quite normal. Many who win big in the literal lotteries are worse off. I know reddit is all antiwork these days, but that's really mostly about rights and not not working.
Being a productive member of society is meaningful. I'm from Scandinavia and a lot of our identity is tied up with our careers. Being without a job or any structural social purpose is asking for depression.
GWF Hegel wrote about suffering from indeterminacy. In short, autonomy is inherently social, so ways of life that are merely abstract (i.e. that society does not recognize in terms of existing mores) are void of satisfaction. Satisfaction is only real and concrete through reciprocal recognition. So the "I can do anything" type of freedom is only mere freedom (Willkür), which drains the individual of intersubjectively verifiable self-determination. I.e. you're determining yourself, but no one can recognize it without coercion, and you're unable to recognize it in social reality only in your mind. (And conversely, over-determinacy is slavery.
So even if you don't need to work for money, you might need a job to be able to find meaning in your life. We are a social species that survive on collective efforts.
Personally, if I had won lots of money I would strive to live on as if I didn't.
The hell with this. Society nows recognizes Early Retirment as a status to aspire to. People look up to joung retirees, and this provides a pretty big identity.
The FI movement now put a name and label on it, so the belonging part of meaning is covered.
I think for me personally a 4-6h workday on 4 days per week would be optimal. It's enjoyable to actually work together with a team on a product and provide a service which people want to use.
Such part time jobs can be very fulfilling if money is not an issue.
> Wouldn't there be resentment from the team because they work harder than you or just generally putting in more effort?
not in my experience. there are often people around that only do 25-35hours per week... at least in the places I've worked at 'till now.
> Open source might be the right avenue for this type of freedom
with open source, you're always an outside contributor. That might be enough for some - but I doubt that my motivation could keep up long term in that setting.
It's just a matter of what you've been taught to believe is important in life (by culture, religion, parents, peers, etc.). What humans need psychologically is something to keep them occupied and their time structured in some meaningful way, but one doesn't need a job for that - you can practice your hobbies, socializing, taking care of family, or whatever one finds fulfilling. People also need a sense of security and, as you mentioned, peer recognition, but having money fixes both of those quite well. In the end it's all very individual, because the sense of purpose, achievement and self-esteem doesn't deal with some absolute predefined values, but it's relative to your own set of expectations and goals.
If from the Coinbase IPO, you just got out of lockout and you're new to that amount of money. You're probably still near 100% invested in Coinbase and need to divest into something more diversified and less volatile than Coinbase before you can sit on your hands and look at the number in your brokerage account as if it was real retirement grade money. Plus you'll need to pay a ton of taxes on the capital gain.
So don't chill out too much. Divest out of Coinbase, continue life as before and get used to the money. Take your time before changing everything and increasing your spending levels. In a year or so, hopefully you'll have diversified and your head will have cooled from the new money, and you'll be more leveled and realistic about what this money enables you to do, and how to handle your life going forward.
As far as I can tell, it seems like a large (20-50) percentage of people who have a large windfall... end up losing it all because they don't take the time to learn how to handle it.
There's a Ask HN thread, maybe a few, of people who hit it rich and later lost it. The common theme is it's easier to make lots of money than it is to keep it, which is a little unintuitive.
Is it really unintuitive? Most Americans only save about 7% of their income IIRC, wouldn't it make sense that they would mismanage most windfalls by default? In recessions, this number jumps up dramatically, proving that it's mismanagement that contributes.
I don't believe anyone gets a windfall by saving 7% of every paycheck either. Those who ran a startup make it a habit of burning through millions a month too. What's really unintuitive for me was seeing that CFAs are terrible at personal money management.
Not to mention that there's a nonzero chance of Tether bringing down the entire crypto ecosystem (temporarily) within the next year, Coinbase stock included
Tether has been extremely opaque in what assets they hold to ensure the 1:1 USD/Tether peg. It's been observed that at least as one point they definitely didn't have enough USD-equivalent for it, and they've been issuing new Tether at quite a clip since then with flow on effects to the BTC market.
Now if they actually had this financing in place, this would all be fine - but nobody can find a proper accounting of who they're doing business with at the scale they claim to be doing business, beyond the observation that none of the big US players seem to have any business with them - so what assets are actually backing tether?
Note that the vast majority is "commercial paper": basically short term loans to companies with relatively risky backing. The problem is that's all we seem to know: no one knows from who they've been buying these. It might be large US companies with 50 year histories, or it might be Chinese property developers at risk of bankruptcy (at which point international debtors will be the first to lose their money).
Tether is just one of many cryptocurrencies -wouldn‘t its implosion lead to people pulling out and investing their money in other crypto, hence consolidating the market and making every other coin rise?
Would you trade me a dollar for 12 cents? If it implodes who’s going to trade you the other coins for something of questionable value?
Additionally, say you hold 50% tether and the rest in a mix of coins. Your portfolio would be cut in half. How does that result in other coins being purchased if people are uncertain of tethers true value and unwilling to trade for it.
Then there’s the whole using tether as margin for leverage or if your margin is based on tether, and that disappears, your position will be liquidated. Now add the layers of derivatives that are quoted and settled in tether. Additionally what exchanges can you trust that will let you cash out in an event like this? People will run to the doors and liquidity will disappear creating a larger sell off as people seek shelter in liquid assets.
God I hate "crypto". It's all a big fucking "get rich quick scam", all of it, without exception. Hopefully I will cash out at the right time (probably not).
The number one reason for folks who won the "IPO lottery" is they fail to cash out/diversify their stock, and at some point in the future the stock price drops dramatically.
For example, during the 2001 tech boom/bust a lot of tech companies went bankrupt in a very short period of time. As a result a lot of tech employees saw the value of their stock/options drop to zero (effectively). The speed in which the bust happened caught a lot of people off guard.
It is generally a good idea to move at least some of that money into a diversified portfolio as soon as possible. But folks often put this off because they don't want to pay the cap gains taxes and/or they think the stock will keep climbing.
I guess I did the right thing: Atlassian IPOed in 2015 at $21, despite everyone suggesting to cash out, I wasn’t interested, and I sold only since 1 year between $180 and $320, and kept 1/3rd. BUT it keeps climbing, $480, so you aways feel like you’re missing something, whether you sell or not.
There is no right way of doing it, you’ll never sell at the top. At least the right moment is when you can use the money for a project.
sell half, keep half (or whatever ratio you're comfortable with)? that way if thing go bad they are not as bad as ending up with nothing and if they get better you still benefit a little bit.
Hence GP says 'diversify'. If you weren't an employee, or were one with no related stock in the company, would you buy so much, invest ~everything, in that (or any) one company? No? Well, don't treat holding differently to buying. It's the same, modulo fees & tax.
I dunno, got taught in Europe, got micro, meso and macro in different years, and sometimes semesters. My econ teacher was also a bit weird in a good way, a real character with a lot of knowledge. Ofcourse I didn’t do anything with it, wish I had.
> As far as I can tell, it seems like a large (20-50) percentage of people who have a large windfall... end up losing it all because they don't take the time to learn how to handle it.
I agree with all your advice, but I think that^'s impossible to tell. The vast majority of people successfully and sensibly handling such things are (partly as a result or even 'input' of it) not talking about it.
I was in a similar circumstance. I drove a city bus in Las Vegas for a year. The experience opened my eyes to many things and changed my life in good ways.
Recommend reading "Four Thousand Weeks" by Oliver Burkeman. It's about time management, but not the traditional "how to get everything done" sense. He talks about what a normal person can do with their "4000 weeks", or, roughly speaking, their life. If you do decide to go back to work, I'm sure you'll approach it in a very different way. I'm a lot older than you, but I'm also 6 months off work on a break. I'm doing a lot of non-tech stuff (DIY, cycling, running, reading, adopting two greyhounds). But I am planning on heading back to work soon. I didn't win the IPO lottery, but my house is paid off and I live frugally. I could probably do nothing for another year, but it's time I went back to work. I'm just going to approach it very differently this time around. My father is very old, and I lost my sister three years ago. People matter.
I just read the short summary on goodreads [1] and... color me skeptical...
It reads like a version of "The Celestine Prophecy" [2] but aimed at a middle-aged tech bubble. Could you (or anyone else) compare the two, for a very slow reader to make a decision? :D
PS yes the comparison is probably too harsh but that was honestly my first gut reaction...
I believe you reference the wrong "4000 weeks". That one is by a different author. There doesn't appear to be a Goodreads listing for this one yet, but there is on Amazon.
Do you perchance like to teach? Maybe lectures like traditional classes, but there's a huge need for mentors to young folks with interest in technical fields, particularly in underdeveloped countries (in many such cases merely talking to them in English is already a lot of help!)
I know I'd like to do that, but I've always liked teaching so maybe it's not fitting to everyone.
E.g. I volunteer at a local (Brazilian) nonprofit org as part of my employers' give-back programs and I love it. I try to get (underpriviledged) kids interested in computer science concepts by discussing how they are applied in games. It is all remote (which adds a level of challenge)
I'd believe many such orgs exist. In fact, writing this it occurs to me that putting together a curated list could be a worthwhile effort.
Hey man, long time lurker, first time poster here. I'm also brazilian (living abroad) and interested in doing some sort of volunteer work teaching CS basics. The idea of doing it in my mother tongue to underpriviledged brazilian kids sounds awesome!
I also have my email on my profile, please contact me with a bit more info...
Can I ask you what the name of the org is? I really like to teach, I've done it before, and being Brazilian really makes me want to give back to an institution closer to home.
Not that you asked, but just find things you enjoy and do the shit out of them. It seems that keeping the mind busy and fulfilled is a part of a long and happy life. Seen a number of folks fall into a sort of purpose hole when they got everything they ever asked for. It’s a strange thing. It’s sort of like… okay? Now what. We did it. What else is there. But really it’s the same things there always was, just that the external forces are removed :)
I went back to university at 36 after achieving a very, very modest degree of stability in my life. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Gave me a completely different perspective on who I am, what I'm interested in. It gave me the skills to start working in a sector I actually enjoy.
My friend, if I had never work again money, I'd just pile up Masters and PhDs.
My Ph.D. was far more than 'just acquiring knowledge', though I did plenty of that.
It is also about advancing the state of all human knowledge. Like what the big tech companies promise that you'll be doing, but without the corrupting element of needed it to be immediately profitable. Much less evil.
A good Ph.D. program should be built on solving a high impact problem. I nailed a few of them, including a couple of medical breakthroughs around some pretty serious diseases. Didn't make any money off of it, but did make a big difference to the world.
And after the Masters, the emphasis is not on 'studying' as much as it is in 'teaching'-- you should be teaching others how to think and approach a problem. Again, potential for massive impact.
I would also feel empty just accumulating for myself. But that's not what Ph.D./post-doc is about. It actually sounds more like getting a job at a FAANG where you are paid megabucks to get 6-yr olds addicted or to destroy the internet or to totally co-op open source.
I chose the entrepreneurial path to societal impact for myself, but you reminded me about that a lot of the basic research we‘re all depending on was done by doctorands and researchers.
And just like entrepreneurs, you‘ve got two kinds of PhDs as well…
Many people (myself included) that get PhDs simply love learning. Solving problems is important but for some there is this inner drive to need to learn and master everything. It doesn't preclude solving problems, but it's the acquisition of knowledge that is the internal engine, not the desire to solve a specific problem.
Same age, made $4.5 million in an IPO. Decided to join the military. It was worth it, would recommend with several key caveats. Remember, most FAANGs pay you your tech salary while you’re training. A lot easier to get smoked by a Drill SGT when you know you’re making 10x their salary while doing those push ups :)
1. Take up and learn about investing. Managing large amounts of money can be a part-to-full time job, and not knowing key mechanics will cause you to get screwed or be at the mercy of others.
2. Find love but keep your wealth a secret until you're sure they are the One and financially responsible. Love comes undone fast over money, and you'll probably need a pre-nup to avoid getting cut in half if things go south. Easier if your partner is also a professional and has assets which goes back to them being financially responsible.
3. Establish a relationship with a law firm. You never know when you're going to need them.
4. Build those software projects you've always wanted to.
2 is an interesting one because almost every day on /r/relationship_advice there is at least one thread where someone asks what to do when they discover "the one" has kept a secret from them for a long time and now they don't trust them any more. I imagine that response would be different if someone suddenly declared that they were rich, versus that they used to be a sex worker but sudden changes in the relationship status can certainly be unhealthy in a variety of ways.
I think you can cross the military off your list. If you've made enough money to not work, I feel like you'll get tried/frustrated of the BS involved in a lot of it before your commission is up. I could be wrong though - just things I've seen.
I can actually relate to that to be honest. I can't speak for OP, if it's about boredom/fun then it's very selffish. But it might be about making a difference there.
Because military, government etc. all deserve people who are in it for "the best" / purpose alone, especially if that's different from the motivation of the majority of people who join.
There could be multiple meanings here. Do you mean because a big part of being in the military involves dealing with boredom, so it would be illogical?
Or do you mean you think they are joining to be violent? There are plenty of nonviolent MOS. For example, they might want to be a cargo pilot or join the cyberwarfare program.
I'm a similar age as you (30) and like you I've built a decent amount of wealth to the point where I no longer need to work anymore. Over the last couple of years I've had to question what life means beyond money and all the hedonistic pleasures which money can buy.
I don't know how transferable my experience is, but I would warn against focusing on pursuits that are overly self-indulgent. At some point you're going to find there just isn't much more you can want, and you may even find yourself feeling depressed and confused about what your next pursuit should be -- especially if you've always been a highly driven individual like myself.
Instead I've found looking around myself and asking how I can help others has given my life a sense of purpose again. You may not be able to make yourself any happier with money, but you can improve the lives of others. And to be clear, I'm not talking strictly about spending money here (although that is an option), but if you don't need to work anymore simply volunteering your time in a way you believe will make a difference can give your life a huge amount of meaning.
Congrats... but be careful. Some young people underestimate the amount of money needed to "never work again". If you're not working then you don't have group health insurance. You're in the individual market, which often has crappy insurance providers. If you have a serious health issue, and get into a dispute with the insurance provider, your illness can cost millions. If you have > $10 mils you're probably safe though, assuming you invest wisely.
Thank goodness for Obamacare (at least in the mid-Atlantic US). Before Obamacare, individual plans were absolute shit (my individual plan wouldn't have covered my wife's pregnancy with our first kid... her job's insurance did).
Thanks to Obamacare, individual plans have the same coverage as employer plans. Without Obamacare I couldn't have started my company which now employs 9 people in well paid tech jobs (without a penny of outside investment). I'd be stuck in an artificial set of handcuffs imposed by a stupid legacy system of tying health insurance to employment.
Yes, without Obamacare it wouldn't be possible for me to even imagine retiring early.
> Thanks to Obamacare, individual plans have the same coverage as employer plans.
Not quite. The network is usually smaller. Employer plans have a nationwide network. Which means that if you get a rare disease for which the best doctor is in UC San Diego, you can fly over there and get treatment. Most Obamacare plans have limited networks, for example in my area only in-state providers are on the network.
I’m not sure if I agree with your experience, in New York City Obamacare plans are horrendously bad, The coverage comes nowhere near to the crappiest employer plan. I had to hire a Nigerian kid to just call the doctors listed on Obamacare website which accepted the silver plan, and about only 40% of the doctors really did (this was for a delivery). $1400 per month for a mother and a child.
I currently pay $1400 per month for coverage in all the US through open access for a full family of four (because I live in a place where Obamacare isn’t applicable so the prices are relatively dirt cheap and allows special deals with mainland insurers to get that coverage most mainlanders don’t get).
The price is probably similar to what the employer pays. It just gets hidden because everyone only pays attention to what comes out of their paycheck. I know a past employer paid $2000 for me per pay period.
Health insurance is bullshit obviously. the costs are hidden and definitely suppress what our wages could be. A government solution would be hard pressed to be worse.
I don't think anyone really thinks that health insurance plans cost $200 vs individual plans being $1400. Just the implication is ridiculous. Our problem wasn't the price, but the coverage. I know my BIL pays $2200 (total, including what his employer pays) and gets excellent plan for him and his wife, whereas us paying $1400 (and this was the same case with the more expensive plans too, coverage didn't change a bit, any doctor who accepted gold, accepted silver too).
My point is, (speaking strictly from a consumer POV) whatever is the reason, the NYC doctors just didn't take Obamacare plans, period.
Oh this is true of insurance everywhere but especially in NYC. Dental, Vision, legal, whatever. Every time (in NYC) I tried to make use of insurance I had limited choices and they were often bad.
In other parts of the country I’ve had more success using insurance.
Oh come on, I am comparing apples to apples (my last insurance, and my BIL's current insurance). But that's fine, I see why the mental gymnastics are being played here.
> hire a Nigerian kid to just call the doctors listed on Obamacare website which accepted the silver plan
How much did this cost? How did you find/arrange it? This is fascinating. When selecting my healthcare I remember wishing I had the time to make so many calls and then just gambled with an educated guess.
How did you find him? An upwork-like platform? Personal connections? How did you vet for english ability/reliability?
I suppose my fascination is that this seems like a 'platonic' example of globalism in action. But in my mental model of globalism, the ability to engage with its benefits are an exponential function of ability to spend public-company amounts of money.
Obamacare is utter garbage and costs ridiculous amounts of money. It impoverishes poor people far more than it helps. They should've provided a tax credit to people who pay in with it. Instead they just reduce AGI. What a joke. Honestly the best thing Trump did was make that no longer mandatory or face a penalty. It was a rammed through system democrats did just to pat themselves on the back. Quite literally one of the biggest slap in the faces to the working class in a long time.
It sounds like you are incredibly privileged to not have "pre-existing" or chronic medical conditions. For many, the ACA saved their lives and the lives of their loved ones even if the premiums were as universally outrageous as you claim.
This. Little babies born with health issues used to be forced onto government healthcare, and parents had to reengineer thier life to qualify. Absolute savagery.
I know it's super shitty to say this, but the true reality to life is...no they don't. It's a savage truth but genetically your produced a child with a major issue. To see their survival it's gonna cost something.
Sorry, but anti-health-care supremacists don't get to do everything in their power to sabotage, strangle, and corrupt something necessary, good, and sensible, just to backflip and whine that it's not perfect, not named after their cult leader, and "not hurting the people it needs to be".
Why is penalizing people you disagree with (or secretly agree with, but just hate) more important to you than saving lives?
If the net effect is saving lives, improving health, reducing poverty, battling pandemics, fighting quack medicine, and advancing science, then maybe the DO deserve to pat themselves on the back, huh?
not being denied for pre-existing conditions, or being dropped for hitting a lifetime limit, have been a huge lifesaver for many Americans. if one is fortunate to be young or healthy the ACA wont benefit as much. but its a huge improvement and peace of mind for the large percentage of folks it helps
That's not really true anymore though. The ACA made it so individual health plans are really similar now to what you will get through an employer. And no denial for pre-existing conditions, etc.
Fk you money where you don't ever need to work again and* maintain a big lifestyle is a totally different story though. Doesn't mean OP can't take a break for a year or two though.
Even for a serious health issue, millions seems very unlikely. Additionally, while health care in the US is expensive compared to everywhere else, it isn't likely that the premiums for a single 27 y/o would be the deciding figure in "can or can't retire".
No, but people tend to spend more earlier in retirement and he can plan for it. Planning for rising premiums as a single person is easy, planning for a family if he ever wants one is more difficult.
I was in that middle ground and didn't like it. The worst thing is it was tremendous fun to get there... but not enough motivation to do it again without that incentive.
People who find meaning in being rich, enjoy being rich.
I kind of think riches are an illusion - you should just go directly to whatever you find meaningful in the first place. Which might include a lot of experiences to find out what that is. Essentially: living.
You can still do that - although
having to do something is very motivating, even if we don't like it!
There's an additional problem though. What if you've found a type of work that you do find meaningful and interesting, but you just don't want to spend 40 hours of your week doing it, now that you "don't have to". It's hard to fit back into working life if you only want to do it, say, 20 hours a week. Some part time jobs exist, but they're the exception.
That's where I am currently. I don't mind working and enjoy it often times, but I don't have need to work for financial reasons. Finding ways to serve as an advisor/consultant doing meaningful work less than full time is REALLY difficult in my experience.
Congratulations. I was exactly your age almost 20 years ago and in a similar situation. The dotcom crash was just breaking and partly by luck and partly by judgement I had chosen that moment to exit and divest myself of those shares. My advice would be that you do the same, get a good financial advisor, stay grounded, take care of your future and lock that down, then think about what you want to do next. Spending hours somewhere like Reddit will rob you of the time you have. Ultimately I switched to investing in startups before eventually returning to “the trenches” myself when I was ready. Good luck to you.
Consider going back to work, but be ultra selective.
I've worked with a few people who can afford to retire, but find themselves happier showing up to work everyday.
Also, consider YC's founder matching network. Let someone else figure out what the product is, how to sell it, and you just do the bits that you enjoy.
My father met a guy like you, he'd become a maintenance man working for a local government and went around mowing lawns, trimming hedges, etc. after a career in investment banking, just for something to do and to get outside.
Looking for external sources of happiness is likely a losing battle. Keep your eyes open and you will likely see somewhere to be useful/maybe even create something that both helps others and makes something for yourself to get to the yachts stage. In the mean time, try working on relationships around you and maybe volunteer/give back with something more valuable than money - yours skills and experience. Good luck!!!
When I had questions, I ended up changing from chemistry to philosophy in undergrad (before dropping out after realizing no one had the answers). Despite the aforementioned realization, the grounding in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and a few others gave me fertile grounds to later plant seeds of wisdom from thinkers and artists from every walk of life.
I wish I could help you with the struggle, but unfortunately, like most learned things, it’s something that only you can do. If you ever want to, I’d be happy to chat seriously about what it means to be human, beyond making money, any time.
From one sick bed to another: best of luck, and happy birthday.
If your interest in moving to your parent's home country is not brand new and therefore it's more than something you're just beginning to consider, jump on a plane "tomorrow" and start reading Russian lit and spending hours on Reddit there. This assumes you haven't spent a ton of time there in the past because if you haven't then you will find immediate meaning living there. And if you decide to do one of those other things, or you just feel like it wasn't the right move, you can immediately fly back! No risk. Don't wait. Please. Just book a ticket now.
Good points. I was mostly thinking that instead of sitting wherever they are surfing Reddit and reading Russian lit they could be doing that in the one item on their list of potential next life steps where there's almost zero risk of getting into a situation that is difficult to get out of (they said they have a long list, but of the ones mentioned that one is "easy" to start doing today and ending tomorrow without complications).
Re taxes in particular I would guess there's no risk of hopping on a plane today and figuring that out later. As much as everyone likes to think governments are sitting there waiting to shout "got ya" it seems unlikely that any single government starts putting you on a tax watch list as soon as your passport is scanned at the airport.
28/M myself, and if I ever ended up with that kind of money, the first thing I would do is focus on my health. I'm very overweight and out of shape and never seem to be able to muster the motivation outside of work to do anything comprehensive about it. I'd love to just be able to quit and consider fitness my full-time job for a year or two.
Depending on exactly how much I made, these are daydreams I've had before:
Start a "company" that focuses purely on open source contribution. Pay people tech salaries just to work on open source projects they care about. My main intent would be to focus on areas where no decent open source software exists or is dominated by a small number of complacent companies that consider it a license to print money.
Learn how to teach and mentor kids, then do it. My mom is a high school computer science and math teacher, and I always wonder how much more effective she could be if funding for equipment wasn't an issue. My students would have access to whatever I thought could benefit their education.
Be a stay-at-home father. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I turned 16, and my dad worked from home when I was 8 through 12 (the years following the dotcom crash) I started learning to program and got into robotics at 8 years old and I don't think I would've been nearly as successful starting at that age if I didn't have access to both of my parents pretty much constantly. If I ever have children, I would want to give them the same or better. Try to guide them along whatever piques their interest and enable them to access the resources to do well.
My personal view on life is that there really isn't any higher meaning to it. I'm content to wander the Earth finding and doing interesting things until the day I die.
It's awesome that you have such concrete dreams. Please don't wait until you're rich to pursue them, especially dropping weight and becoming healthier. That's one of the best things you can do for yourself in life.
I was a fat kid who managed to lose the weight around ~16 and kept it off till my 30s. I'm 36 now and independently wealthy - much chubbier now than in my 20s. I can tell you that money and lack of worries doesn't make finding the motivation to see a large weight loss through any easier. I go through periods of working out/playing sports for 3-4 hours a day, but if you like eating, it's easy to super compensate and continue to put on weight. I always seem to manage eating one more croissant.
You don't have to do it all at once to become healthier either. any year where you trend downward, even by half a pound, is an improvement. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Again, easier said than done, but you don't have to be comprehensive - just 1% better every day.
Happy to chat with you about weight loss and health if it would be helpful: zemvpferreira @ the old gmail.
Try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, BJJ. Best sport for software engineers, because you constantly have to solve hard puzzles. You never have to worry about motivation again to do sports. I started it 6 months ago. I'm still in the very very beginning, but I can't imaging not showing up in class, it is so fascinating. In order to get better I lost ~30 pounds, started eating better, etc. Changed my life.
There are lots of ways to rewardingly expend your time without worrying about money. Volunteer. Do open source stuff. Get into dungeons and dragons. Have kids, or get into Warhammer 40k minis, if you want to go broke.
My goal when I reach this hopefully before 60 or so:
Buying a farm, building a nice private park, building Rome style bath, japanese onsen and having space for family and friends so they would like to visit me because it's very nice.
But sure you need the interest in wanting to design and build your own house, park, pool etc.
Get into gardening. It’s the ultimate leisure activity for people with too much time. And it’s a natural segue to fancy cooking which is also a fantastic time sink.
If you have the time and feeling lost, I suggest you to spend 10 days for a vipassana meditation camp. They have centers worldwide. Happy Birthday btw!
I do not recommend vipassana unless you've done a _lot_ of meditation before. 10 days of complete silence is a massive strain. I did it, based on little more than a recommendation like this, and had a bipolar episode (no history of bipolar or serious mental illness before). My story [0]
Hey thanks for sharing this! Very interesting. It sounds in many ways similar to my first and second-hand experiences with psychedelics and stimulants.
Also very helpful to hear someone sincerely tout anti-depressants. All the people I personally know have had mediocre to bad experiences with them, so it's nice to hear the other side of it.
Vipassana changed my life for the best.
Since my first course, I did a few more, some 10 days, and some 3-day courses which are available only for people who already did the 10 day course.
It made me a better entrepreneur, better father, better spouse.
Like the commenter above stated, there are people who have psychiatric breakdowns following or during such courses.
I don't think the Vipassana organization is doing a good job making this information transparent. But, from my anecdotal experience of over 20 years of courses, these cases are very few and far between.
Vipassana is great. I went to a retreat in 2017 that I fully credit with putting me on the path that led to this current situation. I've been trying to enroll in another 10-day course for the last year, but they fill up fast and I've yet to make it off the waitlist.
Happy birthday! No great answers to meaning of life, but work focused on societal contributions helped me. In 2009 I was burned out on consulting for banks and telcos, switched to focusing on public sector challenges. Lots of needs for purpose-driven design, dev, product. Also coaching and mentoring, especially for social innovation. Have yet to hit lottery, and make less than I could with industry clients, but better for my sense of making a difference.
In general you can leave your money in the stock market and take out 4% a year and expect that to continue forever. Obviously there is no guarantee on that but it has held true for 60+ years. If your expenses are 40k/year you only need 1M to retire. 20M would get you 800k/year.
There are a lot of people in the world who make $18/hour. This would cover their expenses. On the other hand someone like Bill Gates or Jeffrey Bezos have much higher expenses to you.
Apart from philosophy mentioned by the other poster, you can also read into psychology. Some branches in psychology deal with the question of how to live a fulfilled life, eg. positive psychology [1] and humanistic psychology [2]. Also Buddhism has similar goal and teachings interleave with these psychology topics [3].
To start, you can pick a Psychology 101 textbook (I like Psychology and Life [4]) and then read the people and bibliography mentioned in these Wikipedia articles.
Agreed. On my journey to some sort of personal meaning I ended up going through psychology, physical sciences, philosophy & meditation - roughly in that order with poetry and literature interspersed…
But understanding life has, in my experience, been similar to the hermeneutic circle: to understand a part, you must understand the whole, and to understand the whole, you must understand the parts…
That is: the entry point is here - learn about the world and about how humans think about and perceive it. Start anywhere, but start.
*edit: I forgot to add also history. It also helps to shed light on the different meanings people have discovered over time.
What were the events leading up to getting such a big equity pay out?
What # employee were you?
Was it options/RSUs?
What % of the company do you have?
How long did you work there?
I ask because I am at a series B, and I'm very optimistic for our future. But I am only employee #100 or so and don't see a big payout for me barring a multi billion dollar exit (a little too far fetched). I'm just curious how it all goes down for those lucky employees.
I think you are in the sweet spot. Equity compensation drops fast for early employees. Roughly, the first employee might get 1-2%, but by employee #10 it is down to 0.25-0.1%. At that level, you would still need a billion dollar exit to get into FU money territory.
And keep in mind, at the early stage startups salaries are often lower and the startup is likely pre product market fit.
So it is much more risky. Employee #100 feels like the sweet spot because it likely means the startup has found product market fit and is hitting the accelerator re growth, but you still get a taste of early employee equity.
Of course this is just in terms of maximizing "IPO lottery" potential. If you are trying to maximize probable net worth, FAANG probably wins due to higher compensation.
Thanks for that insight. While I can't say what mine is, but your ranges mean I'm OK. I see it as a lottery ticket, you need a billion for someone with say 0.1% to be worth a million, and that is assuming no dilutions.
Also what % do you have out of interest? I'm outside the US so I feel my % is less than you'd get at US startups that generally compensate better. Obviously % isn't everything but it's a metric to track.
I feel you're on the right path, reading and learning are good ways of finding things you'd want to give your time to. (Although there is that feeling of aimlessly letting time pass in part of the Russian literature which might resonate with your own condemdrum - although it's liked to a very interesting political context)
If you're lucky enough to set aside the "How am I going to get enough money to live the next X weeks/month/years?", it frees out that much time to answer the much more interresting questions : "What do I love enough to spend all this time time doing ?" "What would I like to understand and/or change about the world?" Volunteering to causes you discover you care about, be it open source projects or walking dogs for old people or anything in between can feel great!
I'm guessing that you don't quite have enough to really commit too much to this, but have you considered spinning up a new start up?
I've been working at startups for decades but haven't been in the right place at the right time (no complaints, I've made a few hundred grand from options and I still may make more in the future) however I've worked with a number of people who have hit home runs.
Only a few of them have gone on to build their own startups from scratch though which is somewhat disappointing in my eyes. Of course, it's their choice but if I'm ever it that position, I'd definitely fork a new company as soon as the dust settled.
So. . . is it practical for you to start a new company and have you considered it?
Happy Birthday! It appears currently you own just virtual money. ASAP get in contact with some private banking (those that represent rich people), they know how to lower the financial risks so that you can keep this fortune. Think long term, so do not burn this wealth on stupid items (like luxury cars) yet.
New friends can be very costly, indeed! Good advise is priceless.
Advise given by other people? Think: What is their financial status? Do they work with these type of questions? Just ask: What would they do with 10k of 100k. Most will burn it, short term! = WRONG
Like I never give medical advise, because I only finished first aid class.
Probably quite fun to have a small business / startup where you are the boss and hire a few people to solve some problem, maybe related to your previous employment but a niche they didn't cover?
Same here, but without the meaningless feeling. Started like you, and quickly 6 months became two years. Now I have two kids that fill my day routine. And I too read philosophy and reddit a lot.
Take up martial arts. That's what I turned to after a windfall. I only stuck with it a year but it got me in the right frame of mind to continue feeling ambitious.
Find something you don't like about the world and try to fix it. Your financial situation gives you a lot of freedom to pursue either tough projects or thankless (money wise) projects like open source. For me there's no better satisfaction than knowing I contributed something to make the world a better place
Happy birthday! Man am I jealous, I think I’ll have to grind away all my best years at faang or worse.
I also love Russian lit, so so checkout Oblomov and Tolstoy shorter novels like the Death of Ivan Ilyich. I think you’d really like the japanese book Musashi as well (or the incredible Vagabond manga adapted after it)
I think people overcomplicate this. Pick something you want to do and then do it. If you don't know what you want to do, then finding what you want to do is what you want to do. You have the luxury of choice, use it.
I started my life as a carpenter. I loved it and would go back to it if money wasn't a factor. I'd love to be comfortable enough one day to flip/lease one house a year and do all of the work myself.
Great one, I would recommend not taking too long to get back in the game of goals as they keep you moving forward, also maybe start looking for a life partner if you haven't done yet.
You could do worse than Russian literature. I did the opposite, moved to Russia instead of pursuing a career. Looking back, your order of doing things makes more sense...
Ha! I've considered it and if I found the right woman and we had a relationship that was in the right place I'd definitely do it. But starting a family seems like one of those 'slow and steady wins the race' type of situations.
You don't know who you are until you've experienced the stress of a family and little kids.
Even if I didn't have to, I decided to get a job while having kids to maintain sanity and use the paid paternity leave. Now that the kids are older and I feel like I have a brain again, I'm back at doing what I like: building online businesses.
I highly recommend pursuing family, but you need to be careful in your situation.
Getting in a relationship on a lavish lifestyle is a good recipe for a divorce later on. Once I started looking (~at 25), I was extremely blunt in what I was looking for and that helped screen things considerably.
I personally decided to start a family without marrying because marriage laws are pretty unfair towards men where I am and create an incentive towards a divorce and lies just to extract money from the other part. You don't know how your partner will turn out in 10 years, so better safe than sorry.
We're still buying a house together and splitting 50/50 irrespective of income / savings.
That should make sure there won't be a wife maintenance for me to pay in case we split up and that I won't lose 50% of the house. We also have wills to make sure we have guardianship of kids and access to money in case someone dies.
So what would your advice be? Delay having children? Not have children? Only have children if the mother is prepared to do most of the work raising them? Something else?
It seems like having children is something you may enjoy in 30-40 years - or rather will potentially prevent feeling miserable and alone in 30-40 years. But in the short term - at least 2-3 years, but likely much longer - it can be quite miserable.
Now, given that we don't know how long we get to live and what sort of health we will be in, time when you are younger seems more valuable than time when you are older. That would suggest that having children is often a bad idea, unless you strongly believe that you will enjoy the whole experience. But then, imagining what my own parents' and grandparents' life would be like today had they not had children, it seems like it would be far worse. But their circumstances were very different, too.
For many of my acquaintances, starting a family was a jump in the deep end and sink or swim.
As for end results for child and parents, I am really unsure whether slow-and-planned beats random-pregnancy-and-shotgun-fatherhood. Both succeed and both fail.
Super frustrated by the state of videos for kids on youtube, especially in the arts and crafts department, i decided to launch a channel and start creating my own content. Basically, all videos start half decent but for some reason end in a big noisy mess, weird sounds, spoiling food, questionable product placements, zero creativity and always incentivize more watching and trapping viewers in the infinite ‘next video’ loop.
Instead, one of the goals for my videos will be to take a step back and inspire to create, zero commercial interest, not too much distractions and something parents can trust.
Still in the process of figuring out all the parameters, camera, editing, setup etc but its a lot of fun learning new skills. I have a million ideas for the content already so enough work to be done. If there is little to no ‘success’ in terms of viewers, i really don’t care since i enjoy all aspects of it and im building a nice catalog of creative videos to watch with my kid later. I have no public videos yet (coming very soon) but here are two samples of what to expect:
I have watched both videos and they are engaging (to me). I think they could use a little bit of more speed and some music or explanations. Also, you could show at the beginning what you are about to make.
I have recently needed to start drawing (nothing fancy) for my side project, and have found tutorials such as your first video on youtube invaluable.
For me the thing I enjoy is that you are setting realistic expectations, not being wasteful (I notice you start from the edge of the paper instead of cutting from the middle, etc.)
yeah, I heard this from others as well but not something I particularly aim for at the moment (I could easily release a second version of a video with the original sound though). Although sound/music is one of the bigger questions/challenges I need to 'solve': it's quite difficult to strike a balance between setting the mood for a video and too intrusive. Pure original sound is difficult for other reasons, mic quality, background noise etc.
In principle I'm absolutely in favour of releasing it to the public. To be sure: do you mean the _content_ I create in the video or the _videos_ themselves (I wouldn't mind both, but just to clarify).
One of the things I want to add later are downloadable resources: PDFs with the drawings or cutting templates, so people can get a head start with e.g. colouring instead of having to do the drawing first.
Please put the craft content as CC0 or CC BY! I like attribution-noncommercial for the explanation/demonstration of the craft to make it clear that you are source of the work.
Hah this thread is perfect. I just finished building my new four axis robot arm design. It’s all open source. Three months ago I started playing with a new planetary gearbox concept, where the first stage is in the middle with second stages on both sides. The first sun is driven by a shaft that goes through a hole in the second stage sun. The result is a very balanced joint design with parallel outputs. A good configuration for weak materials like plastic. And then the gearboxes and the frame are all integrated together, so this is not something where you assemble a gearbox and bolt it to the frame. The gearbox members and the frame members are unified.
EDIT: you may prefer to watch the project and wait to fork it until I have fleshed out a few more things. In that case feel free to star this git repo and I will update it as I make progress.
Wow awesome. This is one of the most impressive arms I've seen.
How much did it cost you to build?
About how many newtons can you excert when fully extended? / What weight can you lift?
What is your experience with backlash?
Thank you! I had all the parts lying around and I’ve not put together a full BOM to calculate costs. But it’s two odrives and four brushless motors plus maybe $100-150 in bearings from AliExpress, then some screws and a couple kilos of PETG. So maybe $850 if you built it from scratch?
I haven’t done testing of its capabilities yet as I just got it working today. Also I am running at 24v but I want to try 48v when I can upgrade my odrive controllers to the 56v version.
Not sure about backlash either except joint 3 has bad backlash not due to gearing but from a fixable issue with the way the output connects to the frame.
But I am very happy with this design! I think it’s pretty promising.
Also it should be noted that with my $850 estimate that is $400 worth of Odrives. For years I have longed for good brushless drives for under $100 per channel and there are some newer ones out there. But basically brushless drivers are a major chunk of the price which I think could be reduced with cheaper custom drivers.
For my previous work years ago, we did custom brushless motor drivers including basic control theory implementations. I was under the impression that the driver designs were fairly standardized/commoditized.
Could you explain more on your search of suitable drivers and on why you didn't build your own drivers? Why are these drivers so high in price?
I have designed brushless motor drivers in the past. But at the time I was fairly busy and I discovered the VESC 4.12 which is pretty good, but the creator moved to a new design that costs way more and the user community fragmented. The 4.12 designs are still for sale and pretty affordable, but I switched to Odrive due to the very active development community. It seems the price of Odrive has gone up though. I mostly use them at work so I don’t care, but this arm is a personal project and I used a couple odrives I had previously purchased.
There’s other new drivers out there that I haven’t tried. And I could take a crack at a new driver again. But really I want someone in China to produce a good design and sell them on AliExpress. Something with open source design files and code, able to handle 2kw power, able to use one or two encoders, etc. You can get a VESC on AliExpress for $75 or an Odrive clone for $95 with two channels. But I guess I feel bad buying an Odrive clone because the newer hardware isn’t open source so they are unauthorized clones, and I know the Odrive team works really hard. I would feel bad showing off my work with Odrive clones.
There’s other options out there though and I may want to try them. It’s been a while since I’ve needed new drivers at home but with this project I sure do!
I count three axes, what am I missing? (considering the "stick" at the top "a finger" and moving down, I see the wrist rotation, the elbow rotation, and a rotation at the shoulder down on the desk)
So in the video you first see a section of movement using the second and fourth axes. Then after that the arm goes back to zero (sticking straight up) and you see the midsection rotate back and forth without the end section rotating. That’s the other two axes. There are also closer photos here:
I am sorry to hear about the loss you have suffered. My situation is similar. My wife passed from cancer Oct. 1 and I have no desire to return to work.
Please feel free to reach out if you want to talk with someone in a similar situation to yours.
Very touching video, your girlfriend/fiancee looked so positive, happy and joyful. Sometimes the randomness of the universe and the human body can be cruel and nonsensical.
I'm incredibly sorry for your loss. I'm happy that you had the time with this wonderful woman and that you have the memories, even though I'm sure right now everything is still raw. Godspeed.
It's been a wild few years. My only sibling overdosed and died in 2019 as well, on Easter weekend..
There are some interesting similarities between heroin addiction and cancer..
I don't need anything from anyone but I appreciate the sympathy, the amount of views that my video received from this post is crazy. I'm very touched and I hope she is too.
Wild is an understatement. The shit you've been through! For context, I'm only 20 and when I broke up with my gf last year that messed me up. The only thing I know is, when you're ready to move forward, you have to somehow channel your energy into passion and vigor for your life and those around you who love you very much. Fight your way with all your spirit. I wish you all the best colecut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KyorrH_Vu8
I posted on a thread about burnout back in May about quitting my job[1] after nine years, this seems like an invitation to post an update.
I used the time off to travel around in a van, hiking, eating, camping, and visiting friends. I'm now back in the city and catching up all of the life stuff that I put on hold for the pandemic and / or travel -- minor remodeling, maintenance, friends I didn't really get to see during the pandemic, etc.
I've been making big-picture decisions about future work as I go but the next phase is to put in serious hours into the search (since I'm planning to move out side of my current network / FinTech). Looking to start something new sometime this winter.
If anyone has questions about taking a longer time off work (will be 6+ months for me) or about taking more time almost totally away from computers / tech (2+ months), feel free to thread Q's.
I would love to hear about your time almost totally away from computers - do you feel more excited about tech? Less burnt out? Or even more determined to move industries?
I read through your linked comments, and I think I'm in a fairly similar place to where you were - lucky to have had a high savings rate for long enough that I can afford a long break; maybe forever if I'm frugal, or switch to a less-well-paid industry - and this has made me feel like I'm probably in my last corporate tech job. I haven't pulled the plug yet and probably won't particularly soon, but I'd love your perspective about what's after that leap.
No, it was refreshing, but it wasn't really quite long enough to break the mental patterns that I'd built up for so long around computer / internet / use. I did come back excited to read HN etc., I was no longer tired of tech news.
I don't have really any advice for others in this stage yet, since I'm still right in the middle. I hope I move into my next job, whatever that turns out to be, I have more perspective on the post-quitting period.
I'd love to hear more, specifically about moving outside of FinTech. Do you foresee yourself leaving tech altogther, or are you thinking about moving into another industry of tech?
No, I just want a big change within tech without totally invalidating the specific technical parts of my skillset. I would like to also be somewhere I believe positively in the impact of the company on the world overall, rather than just neutrally.
Not sure what specifically you mean about surprises. I guess not?
I bought health insurance on the state marketplace where my permanent residence is.
Just feel like it's time for a change, and I'm willing to accept the likely paycut that moving into a less hot segment of the industry will likely mean.
By "surprises," I just meant that you probably had some things you prepared for when you decided to quit, things like ensuring $x amount of savings and getting health insurance.
I was wondering if in retrospect there was anything else you wish you had done that you didn't think of originally.
I don't really have too many regrets about it, there would have been both advantages and significant disadvantages to leaving sooner.
Certainly being a bit less emotionally invested would have reduced the burnout, and lots of people stay motivated and do great work without that level of commitment.
Too many ideas given the time, but now I'm focused on two:
1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things.
2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and 10 years of chat logs. Why can't I find anything among them? I own a computer, after all. I have 10 folders called some variation of photos/Cologne/2020/flowers! Having to organize them myself is tedious and a fool's errand, so I'm leaning towards using a database as a file system, to let me just query for files. Geo queries using a map? Yes please. Selecting bounds on a timeline? Oh yeah!
All your photos, chats, e-mails, messages, health data (eventually all your data) into a single database, which can be distributed onto multiple removable 'volumes' (disks).
Plug in the volume and the db index is seamlessly merged and queries run on all the connected volumes. No files. No cloud. Data on your disks only.
There are processing nodes that run in the background indexing the content, finding people and locations in the pictures, chats.
It allows you to build up a fully search-able archive of all your data, which you can physically keep in a locker or safe.
But also, if you store and keep all your data on disks that you control, then many of the services that we use could just run as local apps on your server, reading and writing from your archive via an API.
Social apps are just two people's archives sharing content between each other, no 3rd party services required.
I worked a lot on it until about 1.5 months ago, when I got discouraged by how hard and big this project is. Breaking up with my girlfriend around that time did not help either.
But now I see you mention it and it's kind of inspiring, since I've been doing a lot of thinking and gathering strength for another crack at getting a prototype out.
It would be interesting to see what other people have been thinking/doing in this area.
But since there's at least one person who wants it, I might actually jump back to work ;) Thank you !
I am on purpose not addressing the exchange of information between people – never considered it, no vision, would just confuse me.
I'm also not so keen on indexing. I'm envisioning this more as a file system layer, where data is added to the database as it gets saved. Ideally there would be no way to access the data outside of the database (that would cause desyncs and the need to reindex stuff). We don't need no POSIX file systems ;)
I can empathize with this to some extent. I realized that homebrew is too slow and bloaty for me, so I decided to write an alternative from scratch (also meant as a learning project).
Eventually got discouraged by the sheer amount of real-world workarounds and corner cases that need to be accomodated rather than some inexplicable technical hurdle. And broke up with my long-time girlfriend.
Now I have little desire to go back, and things just feel meh. I play basketball sometimes to keep my sanity.
Thanks for confirming. I intended to check on perkeep, but my frustration never reached that point before.
I hope it can be adjusted to my needs: I expect I'm going to have to find solutions for tracking files' sources, for snapshots, and for remote/removable storage, in addition to all the UI work.
The included web UI is quite nice (they really should include a screenshot on the website), and setting up backups/remotes is very simple, everything is content addressed so you can just copy stuff without fear. Snapshots I suspect wouldn’t be too hard.
Have a look at Bangle.js. It's nominally an open source smartwatch, but the difference between that and a bike GPS is just a handlebar mount. v2 has just gone on Kickstarter - I've ordered one specifically for bike mounting.
Would you be interested in cooperating on that? You can ping me over email (see my profile or the blog).
My second impression about the Bangle.js is: "oh no, JavaScript only?". Still, it's much better than building the same thing from scratch, except it may still take effort on the software side.
Having another interested person involved would be amazing for my motivation! Btw, one of the reasons I wanted hackable hardware was to map road surfaces on OSM ;) GPS alone doesn't add much to OSM in my area any more.
Maybe the answer is tags/attributes for filtering, instead of nested directories? Could be more tedious but given the image recognition ArTiFiCiAl iNtElLiGeNcE maybe it could be easier
That's what I'm thinking about too. Most directories are describing what's already available for the computer to extract: the place of something being created, the time of it, the source where it came from (e.g. who sent this as email attachment). Only a minority needs to be explicitly added, like emotional meaning ("my favorites"), or external organization ("experiment 1", "driver's licence"). While we can't use the computer for the latter, it's nonsense that we leverage computers so little for the former.
I think it is. Directory hierarchies are trees, tags are graphs. Trees are great when you need to optimise the physical retrieving time, but don't map well to stuff like pictures. For example, tags of who is in the picture are way better than making folders by person. Same thing for places.
StagesCycling Dash L50/M50 are open to hack: bootloader is not protected, SD card can be replaced, and ssh access is open (when device is connected by USB).
That depends on how easily I could compile it, and how much more effective it would be than querying. At the moment I can't come up with anything better than queries.
I'm willing to part with some money to have someone implement it for me if I see there's demand.
I identify the hierarchy as the source of my problems. I don't need hierarchy, and when I use it, it's because that's the one tool I have. There's no hierarchy between time and place, and I shouldn't be forced to establish it.
There might be some hierarchy between tags: PhD/laser experiment, PhD/dissertation, but there's rarely a need for it to be more than 1-2 levels deep, so I prefer to suffer the pains of inadequate hierarchy rather than inadequate queries. Or at least I would if I could try it out.
I was mostly referring to the fact that filesystem kind of enforces hierarchy, so you have it even if you dislike it. When I'm sorting out the mess that is my hard drive I defenitely value information about hierarchy overlap (due to (incomplete) copies), but I still have not found a tool that would help me an I can't imagine a query language that would be helpful.
Hierarchy is the only tool it gives, you can't really have one dir with all your files, unless there's very few of them.
My typical scenario is multiple copies of something in progress, like traveling with friends, copying photos to each other phones on the way and then downloading the whole mess to one computer. Query language would give me precise information for every file but it's overwhelming.
Keep all my photos in the directory hierarchy, but have a tool to sort them and sync them between devices
If I sync it with rsync, I might accidentally delete important files. Git would sync properly, but then it keeps the data in the repo rather than the directory hierarchy
Lightroom is closed and comes from Adobe, so it was never on my radar. Being able to modify the software is a must: photos are only part of the problem, so any solution must be open to integration with other sources of data.
It would have been interesting to see how it organizes the UI, but there's no demo version for Linux :P
My take is that we have specialist requirements for photos that are probably better served by a photo specific UI. Lightroom's doesn't inspire me to say it's great, but it's adequate. Can search by metadata like camera or capture date, save previous search results as 'smart folders' (e.g. I have one for all pictures since I last had a book printed). It indexes thumbnails for quick scrolling. My ancient version doesn't do geosearch but maybe later ones do. You can clone pictures (like a hardlink) rather than copy into different albums. You can also clone pictures but apply different non destructive edits to the same source file. Almost all the edit operations I want are close at hand. Order is preserved in albums. Rate photos 0-5* and tag with different colours. As to how all that is organized, I'm sure it could be improved on.
I've also yet to see a good photo solution for my parents who (like many non tech folk) still struggle to understand folder hierarchies and where they saved stuff. Picasa used to be ok-ish but discontinued. Google photos is a bit of a pain over their ADSL.
Thanks, that's a great summary. It does seem it's most of the way there already. How does it handle removable storage?
Ironically, the fact that a topic-specific UI is needed for topic-related tasks is another strike against closed software. Something open would have been a starting point for other sorts of views (email? PDFs?), but when there's no modification, there's no ability to do that.
Import dialog for copying SD card to wherever you keep your photos on disk. Different dialog for adding photos to the db without moving the files. I don't know how it would handle having your library on something removable, haven't tried.
This is great! It’s been on my hacking project list for a couple years now. Glad to see it go. :)
I hike a lot. Figuring out exactly where & when sunset will hit is next to impossible in mountainous terrain.
Feature request, if you’ll entertain one: instead of a 1-bit sun vs shade, show a heatmap of sun angle. Think “interactive golden hour map” for photographers.
Nice! Was thinking it'd be cool to have a little tool that calculates the height of an object (tree, building, etc) given the length of its shadow and the time of day (GPS coords might also be necessary).
Seems like you've already performed most of the necessary calculations here.
100% we should. Work isn't the only thing a hacker should be doing.
It can be anything, from finishing something with a minimum amount of resources, broken code that somehow works or pure exploration and guessing e.g. phreaking or just finding a random telephone number that gives you goodies.
or, most especially life itself. No point of all work if no play.
I am sure many on here are playing with the same "outside of programming" type ideas.
I've been a budding woodworker for the longest time and even though I keep going back to playing with some kind of tech thing outside my day job, I have been teaching myself how to draw faces (Loomis method), and trying to pick up woodworking again. Each of these require enough time but they're a welcome departure from the usual tech stuff (which I still generally enjoy but has been very intense, working on Pandemic-response projects)
I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind.
I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.
It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.
But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)
I’m not much older than you but I eventually learned to enjoy friendships as just a moment in time. It’s nothing personal but people get busy and make new friends or get new responsibilities. I used to message tons of people to keep friendships alive because I felt similarly to you. Once you let go and just treat the people around you with your full attention, you will be happier. I fully understand covid has made that more difficult though. You could try Triva nights, board games, volleyball, events like that to get out there. I found that if you just walk up to people and start a conversation at those they are very likely to be like you and want to make friends.
I hope you feel better soon. Just know many people go through this and just don’t give up, get out there the best you can.
> the close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days
Just one dot point: a second wave of friendships comes when (if) you have children. It's a much under rated part of being a parent that suddenly you get thrown in with a whole new crowd of people also looking for like minded friends (since family based activities pretty much exclude all your old friends from most of what you now want to do).
Of course, this is not much help if you don't have a life partner yet, but just to say, don't conclude all your opportunities for friendship are gone.
I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I often feel sad that the friends I have aren't very interested in the programming / tech things I like to think about. I'm hoping to find some meetups or other communities where I can build those relationships in person
This is super common at that age and I totally feel you with the university friends thing. I lost touch with many of my uni friends and only have a more shallow friendship with other friends I made after that (maybe I'm a shitty friend?) - I've thankfully made a few more friends at my last couple of jobs and through some hobbies but not super close ones, however I then had a kid and have lost touch with a whole bunch of them over the past couple of years :')
Anyway, there's a stereotypical lifestyle that we've associated with being a professional coder, especially in your early-mid 20s. We've all heard it: "eat, sleep, code, repeat". At some point IMO this should be considered harmful. First, it enforces a narrow, diminished lifestyle without additional hobbies or interests. Second, it reifies coding as an end rather than a means - yes sometimes we want to build something pretty for its own sake, but a lot of the demotivation I've personally experienced has been from building stuff I don't give a flying fuck about. Insurance systems, legal bookkeeping systems, even a fucking recruiting portal for my country's military... I actually feel guilty about getting pulled into that one.
That's sometimes how it goes. I'm in my late 30s and been through many phases in life. Different careers, different cities, etc. It's very difficult to keep friendships together when the circumstances that kept you in the same place change. After university, people go in dozens of different directions and disperse around the country. If you work in some job for many years, you'll find the same thing to be true when you leave.
There's only probably a handful of good, close friends that will last for more than a few years as good, close friends. That's okay. You'll make new ones in the new endeavors you take up. Do what you can to hang on to the ones that stick around.
It helps to understand that life is about much more than your career or material success. Really internalize that idea. It's counterintuitive, because it feels so certain that hitting ProfessionalGoalX will make you permanently happy. But it won't. It never does. Even if that goal is wildly ambitious and makes you famous or makes you millions of dollars, it'll feel great for a while, but those feelings will dissipate, and in ~18 months you won't be any happier for it. This is one of those lessons that's better to learn vicariously than it is to learn by wasting years of your life and sacrificing your happiness ;)
As for friends, I'd recommend four things:
1) Build a habit of making friends. It's not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they'll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it's fun and sustainable.
2) Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.
3) Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.
4) Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier -- the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.
These things have helped me tremendously. I'm 34 years old, I moved to Seattle last year after living in SF for 10 years. I spent most of my time quarantining after I moved, but after getting vaxxed in April I've been much more social, and I've already made encouraging progress toward building a new tribe.
24 years old too and I also thought that work would "fill the void" in a way. I recently talked again with a high school friend and it was great, but it doesn't really solve the problem daily. I'm thinking of trying antidepressants for a while and see how it goes.
> It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.
I don't know what to say here except that I lived through that too, and it's still hard to accept.
I would recommend reading about stoicism and mindfulness. For me they felt like those things that are obvious but are super helpful to see explicitly stated. And have helped me learn to enjoy life more and set priorities for where/with whom I spend my most precious resource, my time.
Don’t think this is novel, but I’ve mentioned on an HN thread before that my friend and I were building (and have now built) a tiny house. We’d been complaining for years that housing was too expensive and so after doing a house flip and stops and starts on trying to build a spec house we decided to try a tiny house to see if we could build something move-in ready that looks (somewhat) nice and also is inexpensive.
Just started marketing it for sale a couple of weeks back. And we figure if we can’t sell it then we’ll rent it so that either way someone gets a roof over their heads for a price that’s just not really available in most locations these days.
Oh man that's super nice of you to say! Quite a few folks have called/written us saying that they really dig the look of it, but you saying "beautiful" seriously warms my heart--thank you!
We're feeling the same way about the rental because based on the response we've gotten it's not like the people inquiring about purchase are all folks who need cheap shelter (some folks want to live in it, others for Airbnb, still others because they want to provide a cheap full-time rental for someone else). Cool thing is how much feedback we're getting, but the rental direction is definitely the most direct "get people who need shelter a shelter" option.
As for a newsletter, I wish we did. If your email's in your profile I'll make a note of it and make you the inaugural subscriber if we end up creating one.
It was strictly an aesthetic choice and as another commenter points out it doesn’t impact the livability if you build it with proper insulation.
You can read about the performance of the exterior black color in high temperatures on the website where we listed all the materials we used to build the house, how much they cost and details about the construction: https://www.weshelterpeople.com/materials-and-costs
With proper insulation, and framing techniques you can get a away with a dark metal surface in most any climate. Not saying they actually did that but it's not impossible.
Thanks for pointing this out because you’re totally right. When we were picking black as the color we were somewhat convinced it wouldn’t be an issue but it was nice to get confirmation once we built it, which we did by testing the interior temp on hot days to see how hot the interior would get.
I wouldn't mind hearing about their approach to handling weather also as it kind of looks like SoCal which closely matches the climate I live in.
If that is the case then black may not have been ideal! It should help during winter though. If your peak heat is only 30c or something you could probably get away with it.
I happen to be from Socal but we built this and the pics were shot in Northern New Mexico where my friend lives and where it is a bit more mild than Socal. That said it does get some hot days with a punishing sun during the summer (may top out around 100f/37c in a heat wave) and we were able to “test” the exterior this past summer in conditions pretty close to that. You can read about it on the website. Just scroll down to the section about the exterior metal: https://www.weshelterpeople.com/materials-and-costs
Important to point out that because of our location it would not need AC in the summer because evenings cool down adequately but if you wanted to use it anywhere in Socal that’s not directly adjacent to the beach you would “need” to have AC. I put the need in quotes because there are plenty of people in Socal who still live without AC, but I don’t think anyone would say those folks are comfortable doing so. It’s mostly a financial issue for anyone inland or as I said they live near the beach where a decent number of house and apartment rentals still don’t have AC.
Curious about the heater placement. Won’t that put it very close to curtains? Seems like the window and door will have the worst insulation too. Could it be relocated to the wall by the stairs?
Thank you for saying it's cool! And you make a great point and one we didn't even consider. We were thinking the solution to window coverings (essential for privacy and to limit solar gain in the warmer months) was roller blinds and those are fairly rigid where they shouldn't be impacted by the heater. As for the insulation, yes, glass is of course the worst part of the house for insulation, but the heater is quite robust and thus far the windows, even in sub-zero temperatures, seem to perform well (a lot of solar gain obviously from that much glass, which brings us right back to the need for window coverings when it's warm out!). Great feedback though! I'm sort of kidding when I say it, but should add a warning "not for curtain lovers!"
The other thing your comment makes me realize is that we should do a similar winter test of the temperature inside without the heater running. Similar to how, if you read about it, we tested during the summer when it was hot out.
Would love to hear if there’s any reason in particular you say that. Like have you been thinking of trying a different way of living, is your current situation untenable for some reason (financial or otherwise) or maybe you just mean it as a way of complimenting the design/build?
And regardless of the reason thank you for making a fellow HNer feel good about their side project!
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Well, first of all it looks like what I would call aesthetic. It looks amazing, I love the amount of light that enters the house, and I think it's super important for one's happiness. I live at the ground floor of an old building in a capital city, and we get very little light. I love how it's functional, and yet small: it seems efficient and cosy. There is another thing: it makes me dream to go and live there, I can see myself reading books, doing things on my computer, and enjoy existence in the nature (the reality is that I wouldn't be able to do that, as I have family commitments, but it makes me dream of it, I hope this makes sense).
Talk about not getting back to you sooner... Sorry about that! It's feedback like yours that makes us think this will not only be a good, affordable housing solution for some folks, but could also be a straight up enjoyable way to live regardless of the necessity of less-expensive housing options. Of course the family commitments make it extremely difficult, particularly if you have children (I'd hate to judge someone who would consider it, but it really doesn't seem like an acceptable place to raise kids once they're past, say, 2 or 3 years old).
Really, sincerely, thank you again for such kind words about it.
Managing an apartment complex (pro-bono) alongside a tech job. In Bangalore, it is normal to have a committee of apartment owners who oversee the operations, set up rules for residents, take up mini-projects for efficiency / beautification /long term maintenance and also manage the finances. This committee operates for a year and then passes on the reins to the next committee.
Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:
- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements
- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)
- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)
From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting
- distribution of water, electricity, gas
- Sewage treatment plant
Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.
4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)
That's really interesting to me. How are the finances raised? I assume there is a service fee. Do you have to handle collection also? What legal body is the employer of the staff and how many are there?
In Ireland/UK there is a normally a management company either owned or originally established by the developer and they collect the service fee. They usually do not encourage a lot of tenant participation.
An apartment association is a legally recognized body, which collects service fee and pays service taxes too!
Large apartment associations employ few staff on own payroll, but mostly Security, Housekeeping, Plumbers, Electricians, STP operators,etc are on the payrolls of manpower agencies.
Members of the association are owners of individual flats. Tenants do not participate much ( and not encouraged either). This ensures a skin in the game and service fee goes towards activities contributing to long term value of the property (including liveability).
I have been reverse engineering automotive ECUs for a while now - https://github.com/bri3d/VW_Flash . It's a nice change from my day job in enterprise engineering management, and I've met some fun people and taught several folks a lot of new concepts, which is always extremely rewarding.
My latest project has been reverse engineering the data-flash encryption in Simos18 ECUs. After some work, it oddly appears the encryption algorithm used is Mifare Hitag2. I'm hoping to be able to re-encrypt NVRAM channels soon, although the overall data flash "filesystem" / channel-system layout needs some more work before I am ready to release my findings.
That is wicked. Would you ever be interested in developing an open source ECU platform?
I feel like there is a hole in the market for affordable and hackable ECUs. You could monetize it by selling the hardware boards I guess.
There are some projects out there already but none of them seemed usable for a full size track car at the time, and the issue was still a lack of suitable hardware to run it on. Idealy you could just buy a board with a generic wiring harness for ~$300, and have an open extensible platform for engine management in the software. Kind of like the ecosystem for flight controllers for drones.
Have you looked at RusEFI? It's definitely usable for a full sized track car at this point, and their hardware looks pretty smart and reasonable to me.
I haven't actually used or contributed to it yet, but I plan to buy a unit and see where I get as I am working to convert my old 280GE from K-Jetronic to EFI.
I started selling spice blends, the flavor being "Beef Noodle Soup".
After seeing "Everything but the Bagel" at Trader Joe's, I thought it was the first spice blend I saw named after a dish. Interesting! If people can have bagels anywhere, what else would people want to have anywhere? I asked my partner what sort of flavors would be familiar to people we knew, and she came up with the triumvirate: Pho, Ramen, and Beef Noodle Soup. And then I proceeded to do nothing about it for months, because I thought making a spice blend was the dumbest idea I've ever had.
Then during a Zoom chat with a friend, he suggested I liked writing code too much, so I should try to sell something without writing code. I suggested, how about spices? He laughed in my face, so here we are. (he was quite supportive right after laughing in my face)
So far, people seem to like it. It's good on eggs, rice, noodles with sesame oil, in olive oil for bread dipping, spinach, and dipped with a super Irish scone from Mary O’s in NYC. I never tried that last one. A customer told me it was good.
And yes, you can use it to make a small bowl of beef soup. If you're intrigued, you can buy a bottle here:
I like a good pho, and the noodles are dead simple. If there were an easy broth, I'd make it all the time! Ditto for vegetarian ramen broth, though the noodles in that case are non-trivial (but there are some decently-easy options out there). Please do a show HN when you add more flavors!
The problem with Pho and Ramen is that there isn't' an easy way. The reason it is so damn good is because it has 8+ hours to break down gelatin and collagen in animal bones. With Ramen, there are so many other components to it that all add up to the perfect bowl that require a lot of effort. If it were any simpler, it just wouldn't be ramen. I'm sure it is the same for Pho, but I don't have any experience making Pho.
And that's the best part. It's one of the few dishes we can't just "simplify" and break down into some fast and casual chain restaurant.
Can you share a bit on how the process of creating a spiced blend goes? You buy individual ingredients wholesale and mix them together with your own recipe?
Seems like a unique but very fun side project!
I didn't start with wholesale. I bought retail ingredients and just started experimenting. It took a lot of iterations and tracking with spreadsheets to get it where I had both a front and back note that was noticeable.
This is an awesome idea! I’ve been thinking about doing something similar in the hot sauce area. Any lessons/takeaways? Would love to know how you got your first customers.
1/ Have a flavor profile that's targeted towards a demographic you can reach. It's a much easier sell if you have access to an initial distribution channel and that demographic understands immediately what it might taste like.
2/ First customers: I started off with a couple friends, and then guessed where else I might find more like them. Kept trying until I found more. Don't start with paying for ads unless you're doing MVP testing pre-product.
3/ Have a unique flavor that they can't get anywhere else, but is legible (by reading the description, they can kinda imagine it). This may be tough, and your best bet is probably testimonies from your friends.
4/ Don't worry about scaling up initially. Take the time to make sure the product is something people actually want. Be skeptical and look for indicators, cuz your friends will lie to your face. Look for what they do, not what they say: spreading by word of mouth, repeat orders, unboxing on social media without you asking. etc. Work out the product kinks while you're small, because small problems also become big problems at scale.
5/ Work out the order fulfillment process and keep iterating on it. I find it really eats up time when I get an order that I'm not expecting to handle. Be organized and keep track of things.
“Why, of all his creatures, did He choose this loud, dirty, unkempt, obnoxious, uncontrollable, megalomaniacal madman to be His personal bread baker? How was it that this disgrace as an employee, as a citizen, as a human being-this undocumented, untrained, uneducated and unwashed mental case who's been employed (for about ten minutes) by every kitchen in New York-could throw together a little flour and water and make magic happen? And I'm talking real magic here, people. I may have wanted Adam dead a thousand times over. I may have imagined, even planned his demise-torn apart by rabid dogs, his entrails snapped at by ravenous dachshunds, chained to a pillory post and flogged with chains and barbed wire before being drawn and quartered-but his bread and his pizza crust are simply divine. To see his bread coming out of the oven, to smell it, that deeply satisfying, spiritually comforting waft of yeasty goodness, to tear into it, breaking apart that floury, dusty crust and into the ethereally textured interior . . . to taste it is to experience real genius. His peasant-style boules are the perfect objects, an arrangement of atoms unimprovable by God or man, pleasing to all the senses at once. Cezanne would have wanted to paint them-but might not have considered himself up to the job. Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown may be the enemy of polite society, a menace to any happy kitchen, a security risk and a potential serial killer, but the man can bake. He's an idiot-savant with whom God has serious, frequent and intimate conversations. I just can't imagine what He's telling him-or whether the message is getting garbled during transmission.”
First idea, a website that combines Reddit (or HN) and Discord. The goal is to create ephemeral, real-time communities (like this thread). I find discord too exclusionary to bring strangers together. And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation. With this site, you post a thread, people start chatting, there's a simple interface for groups of people to break off the public chat and go into a private chat or into a webrtc call. Once the thread loses momentum the chat room sort of dies. And people move onto the next thread.
Backend is written in Go. Frontend will likely be Elm. Redis for pubsub. Postgres for crud.
Second idea, an Elm-like language for building linux applications (and crucially linux-phone applications). I'd really like to de-throne apple and google from the smartphone market. I think a dead simple language like Elm + a super simple, standardized dev environment + no weird configuration or new conventions to learn would be a killer feature for the linux platform. Something like Elm-UI would attract a wave of new developers to Linux.
Unfortunately, I've never made a programming language before. So I'm working through "Crafting Interpreters" to get started.
Third, possibly finding a SWE in Miami and starting a software consultancy partnership. Could be fun and lucrative but I've never been on the business side before. So likely this idea will stay half-baked for a lot longer.
I think one of the main reasons why Reddit took off is that they didn't really care about building info on people... All they wanted was an email, user name, and password. Discrd is behind a wall that requires a log-in and understanding of how it works. Discords often are dead by the time I decide to check them out because they are often too much work to maintain.
IRC vanished after many years to favor texting, but IRC was a big part of life for me in the past because you could simply hop on without even using an email address, and conversations were free form without much moderation. The main rule is nothing was taken seriously back then, except net splits.
Not every community needs tracking and user accounts if you ask me, but they do if you ask the government. The increasing call for every community and even IOT products requiring a user profile is going to eat itself with an endless amount of passwords, or even a chain linked authentication scheme, it defeats the utility and benefit of getting quick answers to questions, and having simple human interactions minute-to-minute throughout the day which is what many people really want without knowing it. The key to keeping that manageable will be to keep each community relatively small and specialized if you ask me. Focus on the functionality and purpose thoroughly -- The language used will change over time, so whatever I can build quickly and efficiently in is best. Also, I don't have to worry about security as much as FaceBook (etc.) if I'm not storing user accounts and identifiable data, I just have to put failover, high availability, and data integrity from that perspective.
I've been building on a few ideas that have this in mind in addition to running my own web development company since Feb 2021. I know the struggle too, keep grinding! Cheers.
I've been running a really small time service on Pi and requiring an email verification to fend off potential bot attacks. How does one skip the email requirement without ending up being overrun by the spammers or dealing with 3rd party services
They still don't need one, but will never stop nagging about it. I've been clicking on the x to close the popup asking for my address multiple times a day for about two years now.
Your first idea sounds great and very close o some ideas I've been thinking a lot about. If you ever get somewhere with it, please post a Show HN!
On your second, I immediately thought of Fabulous, a package that uses the Elm Architecture to build Xamarin cross platform apps in F#. [1] Have you seen it before?
I think the first idea is cool. I especially want something truly ephemeral. I don't want all of my messages existing forever. That's my main gripe with both Reddit and Discord right now.
One note about Discord though: why do you find it exclusionary? We use Discord for our customer ops, and we bring on a lot of not very tech savy people. It's really easy: they click a link and it opens in their browser. Not sure how you could make something more accessible in this regard.
Totally agree that on boarding is easy. Text chat is very easy to jump into but is very noisy in large communities. I think its the VOIP category that struggles most. I've been in large discords where one or two channels had a total of 4 people between them. Its just hard to insert yourself into someone else's conversation. I'm trying to fix that aspect of it.
> And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation.
What do you mean by "dynamic"? I think the reason it can be hard to make friends on reddit (and other social media) is because friendships require repeated meetings. The population of reddit is massive and the mechanics of the site make repeatedly meeting the same individual unlikely. Also, the design of reddit can make it difficult to recognize people (they'd need to have a distinctive and memorable name).
Discord fares better because there are many small communities and hanging around often results in talking to the same people repeatedly.
Half a year back or so I built a mini SaaS product that failed, now I'm in the process of open sourcing it so that everybody can freely host it for themselves. Here's the project homepage https://magiclogin.net, it was/is transactional e-mails and e-mail authentication as a service.
Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself.
I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..
It was a lot of work but I now have a small stream of people who contact me every so often about it.
BTW, you seem like a smart guy and I am looking for someone to work with me on a relaunch of the project as a paid product. I have learnt a lot in the years since my first attempt so I think I have a pretty decent chance of success this time round.
This is pretty useful as a product, and magic.link has been a hit and miss experience for me. Where will you post/announce the open source version? I’ll definitely check it out!
I just bought what will eventually become an artists’ residency, and we will start renovating it later this month. It will probably take about two years to get it started. The plan is to have a few artists a year come for about a month each and make art under the influence of the crazy dramatic landscape there. It will not be a paid thing, I’m financing it myself. At first it’ll have to be informal but eventually I want to have some kind of foundation running it so I can assist artists with visas where necessary.
I find it very exciting to work on a big long-term project like this, though it’s also frustrating because I’m doing it from a significant distance. Self-inflicted frustration but still.
Also, I’m learning a new language and moving to a new country, slowly but surely. Well slowly anyway. The residency is in yet another country. Maybe my life is complicated.
I didn’t win any lottery, but with a little juggling I had enough for a year or two without a day job. I was originally going to concentrate on just making art (I’m an artist as well as a techie) and trying to get settled in the new country.
This has worked pretty well considering the state of the world, but with a limited runway I will start looking for something to do in the industry next year. Maybe an indie project, maybe a startup, maybe just contracting.
The art center was in the back of my mind for a few years, and now that it exists (as a piece of land with some concrete on it anyway) I am quite happy to have a specific project that should bear fruit on a longer time scale than just a painting or a gig, and it helps that it’s not my source of income (like a company would be) nor existentially important (like kids). I can do more, or less, with it as circumstances allow.
Anyway that’s what I’m up to. In the likely event some of the art is tech related I will do a Show HN about it some day.
This sounds awesome. I've had half baked ideas along these lines for different intersections of disciples. Great you're pursuing it and making it a reality!
Are you comfortable sharing any more specifics? Do you have a landing page or is it all offline at the moment?
But sure some details. It’s in the Canary Islands so pretty far from “Europe” but not exactly hard to get to. In a village about 20 minutes drive from the city. Under a volcano but not that volcano. By the time it’s all fixed it will have cost me about a year’s gross income from my fancy tech job (which paid less than in California but quite well for the EU).
It’s a house with a studio and eventually it will also have a ceramics oven and a printing press and whatever else seems necessary. There is a bit of land with food growing. Interestingly, I will probably never be allowed to make the house any bigger, which is a useful constraint actually.
Solar and wind for energy so even stuff like long-lived powered projects can be considered. If I’m ever VIP enough I’ll bring Trevor Paglen out to watch the ships at sea. :-)
The master plan is to use it myself as a sort of recurring self-residency and then have other artists doing the same. How many depends on my capacity to manage it, at the beginning it’ll just be artists I already know and trust. If any artist has a particularly strong resonance with the place I would try to get them recurring as well, but that remains to be seen.
There will be exhibitions and studio visits and art parties, at some point. I will try to help the artists sell (including myself) but that’s secondary.
I could run it informally forever but I would really like to give it some official status eventually, partly just because but mostly in order to be able to sponsor artists. In the long run assuming I have enough money I’d like to bring out artists who would need help paying for it and getting the visa.
Part of my motivation in this is to find a way of being in the Art World that does not fill me with dread like exhibiting my own work does. But that’s another story.
Very cool. I have been planning to do something similar on 5 acres in FL. Your location sounds much more exotic! My main issue is I am still accumulating funds so most likely I will need to set up a 501C and have future artists continue my vision.
I'm making a smartphone OS for my personal use. Gonna opensource under GPLv2 once ready.
OS kernel is Alpine Linux from https://postmarketos.org/ The entire userland is custom: graphics is on top of drm, kms, gles2, FreeType. Audio is on top of ASIO with just a few third party libraries like soxr, fdk-aac, minimp3. IPC is mostly domain sockets, input is raw input, wifi is controlled through wpa_supplicant.
Most of the code is in C#, .NET 5. Only 25% of code in C++, either SIMD heavy math like vector spline tessellation, or to consume libraries like FreeType designed to only be usable from C.
Got 2 devices to test, ARM64 Pinephone, and ARMv7 LG Hammerhead.
Graphics stack is good by now, works on both. The only large missing piece is accelerated video decoding. The highest level was inspired by MS WPF, with XML instead of XAML, and a variant of CSS for styling. Performance is OK, uses couple percepts CPU while rendering animations at 60Hz, because GPU-centric architecture all the way down. Found a freelancer to help with GUI design, so far so good.
Audio is in progress: mp3 playback works, capture and high-level mixer controls missing. Too bad the LG lacks Linux kernel drivers so I'm only testing these pieces on Pinephone.
After the audio, gonna start integrating GSM modem: being able to call people is one of the use cases I care about.
I run a website that shows immigrants how to settle in Berlin.
These days I'm thinking of codifying more things, so that people could fill a form and get answers instead of reading a long article. For example, a simple calculator that replaces pages and pages of information. I made a German health insurance calculator last week that saves a lot of reading and gives accurate results.
Aside from that, I'm building a timeline thing that puts all the personal data I can get my hands on onto a browsable timeline. It's a sort of enhanced journal.
Web-scraping and reverse-engineering is such a brilliant subject in my opinion and there's an unsurprising lack of resource in this area as it's a rather secretive medium - as a good scraping/reverse engineering strategy is often considered to be a business secret.
It started off as a need to not repeat myself on stackoverflow. Web-scraping is a common question subject and the same questions would be asked over and over again. I couldn't find explicit resources available so I wrote them myself!
Now I'd often answer question with specifics and point to full article for further reading which people seem to appreciate and come back with follow ups less often.
I'm still working out the kinks - especially pacing, brevity and editing - though it has been a really enjoyable ride so far. Finally as a backend engineer it finally got me to get over the front-end hump. I've learned some pretty css and general web building - it's often frustrating but surprisingly fun!
Thanks, that's a great suggestion! I actually have an article on proxies in the works however I'm a bit stuck on making it a bit more accessible since proxy access is either really expensive (for a single dev) or extremely unstable (like free proxies).
I've always had the luxury of paid quality proxies in my web-scrapers however for article purposes I'd like to have an example of cheap or free proxies for casual usage/education. Are you using something in particular?
One idea I've explored was using VPN service as a proxy but seems like most big VPN providers are not providing proxies anymore.
Anyway, I can PM you once I figure out how to put this together properly! :)
I once used VPNs as proxies for web scraping, using 2-3 VPN providers with multiple servers in different countries. It was a while ago, so my memory is a little hazy but I'll try to describe how I did it as best I remember.
I configured an Alpine Linux docker container with openvpn and a proxy server (I think I settled on squid for stability), and a bash script to to start up the openvpn connection and proxy server with config for both passed into the container. Then just generated a long, line by line list of every possible vpn connection config line by line, shuffled and duplicated.
Then in my outer scraping function: grab a line from the config file, start up a vpn-proxy container (passing in the config), do one page download through the container proxy and then stop and delete the docker container. This allowed me to download pages in parallel, with all connections originating from different IP addresses (as long as I made sure not to exceed VPN simultaneous connection limits).
Kinda messy, and I spent ages fiddling to get the container config just right, but it worked.
This does seem like a very big overhead just for one request: build up/tear down would be quite expensive.
I actually noticed that there are personal VPNs that do not have a concurrent devices limit. I guess your hack could be modified to startup persistent images for every VPN server and have them run forever as proxy servers!
I'll tinker around with this more but this would definitely make it easier for beginners to onboard on proxy based scraping as many people have VPNs ready for netflix and such already.
I'm working on a 2d multiplayer game where you play as the leader of an MMO guild. I'm shooting for it to feel like playing WoW without actually having to play WoW all day. Same dopamine levers, same time horizons, but instead of being the guy farming Frost Lotus and Saronite, you're the guy telling people to go farm Frost Lotus and Saronite and making sure the alchemist makes the right amounts of Flask of Endless Rage and Flasks of the Frost Wyrm to get you through the raid next week.
It's basically a simulator/management spin on MMOs. It's still on the stage side of the fourth wall - it's not like a meta kind of tongue in cheek thing or anything. It's not YouTuber simulator or anything similar.
I'm using phaser 3 and some undetermined python web stack - currently using flask and sqlalchemy. My time horizon is ~years at this point, I've been working on it for about 3 months and progress is steady but glacial since I have 1 busy job, 2 kids, and 0 gamedev experience (though significant MMO gaming experience, for as much as that helps, heh). I am but a humble data infra engineer by day so this is pretty alien programming for me (though at least I know what I'm doing on the backend?).
I have some nominal amount of frontend experience but normally I use Rails and React, but I decided to forego both for this project, with the entire game being in Phaser's engine (though I'm sure at some point I'll have a react website too) and using python on the backend because I just generally think python is better than Ruby as of python 3, mainly because I prefer how Python 3 did official type hints, and I don't particularly like Sorbet (though comparing python3 type hints to sorbet is unfair to sorbet, all I would want from sorbet is hinting).
Anyway, I'll admit, I want to make an MMORPG. But I can at least concede that a traditional "wow-killer" MMO is pretty much out of the reach of a single dev. My current vision seems to me like a fun "do you ever wish you played wow but don't actually want to play wow" kind of thing that is significantly more likely to be within the reach of someone who has 0-2 hours to work on this per night.
I reverse engineer/decompile games (and sometimes applications) from the 80s/early 90s for fun. The more complex the program, the more fun it is. As an extra challenge, I try to avoid runtime monitoring (i.e. in an emulator) and try to rely as much as possible solely on what I see in the binary file.
Other people do sudokus, I stare for hours at disassembled code to figure out what complex data structure the game is using to handle its 3D graphics or game logic. It's a kind of archelogy... Rediscovering a piece of code no one has seen for 30 years.
I am wondering whether there is a way to earn money with that skill? I guess it is still illegal to sell unauthorized reverse engineered ports of games, even if they are 30 years old :)
Probably not legal and questionable but with good reverse engineering bots for games are profitable and accessible. Case study: Bot of Legends (League of Legends bot framework)
Thank you for your interest. I don't have a public blog or vlog. When I reverse engineer a game, I sometimes post my findings in forums dedicated to the specific platform the game was runninng on. But I don't want to link those here due to privacy reasons (I don't want that the accounts that I used there can be connected to the account I am using here).
But I am currently planning to write a longer and more detailed article about a game I have reverse engineered. I will send you a mail when it is available.
How to learn reverse engineering... Good question.
First of all, nowadays, free interactive tools like Ghidra drastically accelerate the reverse engineer process. Ghidra's decompiler is able to produce actually reasonable C-like source code in many cases. So, if you want to jump right into the water, do the following:
- Write a small C program and compile it
- Install Ghidra
- Load the binary of your program into Ghidra
- Try to make sense of what you see :)
That's a quite cumbersome way to learn, though, although there are several Youtube videos that follow that approach. Modern decompilers are good, but they are still far from perfect, especially when applied to highly optimized machine code. Often, the output of the decompiler only makes sense when you have the assembly code next to it. Therefore, I highly recommend to first learn programming in assembly, which includes understanding how code and data are represented in main memory, how the stack works, how OS functions are called, etc. The good news: once you have understood how a particular CPU and computer architecture work, you can transfer that knowledge easily to other architectures. Therefore, maybe just start with x86 if your computer has an AMD or Intel CPU: http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/Pro...
Once you can read and write assembly language, you can go back to Ghidra and disassemble some programs for which you have the source code. That will teach you a lot about how compilers translate high-level languages to machine code. You will later discover that hand-written machine code sometimes look very different from compiler-generated code.
There is also what I call the platform specific part. That one really depends on the type of programs you want to reverse engineer. For example, if you want to reverse engineer a text adventure written for MS-DOS, the only platform-specific things you will encounter in the code are the four or five BIOS calls necessary for printing text, reading the keyboard, etc. That's something you can easily look up in the Internet without any deeper knowledge of MS-DOS or IBM-compatible PCs. On the other hand, if you are working on an Amiga game, it helps to be familar with the hardware and to be able to recognize the typical series of instructions that are needed to query the state of the mouse buttons etc.
Kinda just stare at the sky a lot. Went from a job working 60-80 hours a week nonstop with no expectation of time off if you got a call to one with 1/10th the effort needed for the same pay.
Feels surreal at difference in compensation vs effort in, especially because I’m more productive at the new place.
Not really sure what to do with all my free time when there’s no fires to put out
Same. The way I see it we're paid for our expertise - not our time.
In terms of free time, I've tried to fill it with hobbies, side-projects, and learning. A lot of my time goes to my son now that he's here. But before that there were some periods where I just did not do anything. The thought has crossed my mind to work two jobs or maybe start a consultancy.
I think the real trick is to find friends. But I'm 30 and its difficult making friends at this age. C'est la vie.
I’m slowly developing a note-taking ecosystem that’s kind of duct-tapey but works well for me. Nothing is hosted anywhere yet, but the main thing is the ideas.
I find I want to _accrete_ information, not mutate it (in most cases), so the main organisation is chronological. But tags are important to find related information and see the chronological development of one “thing”, be it a work task, a personal hobby, etc.
But here’s the big idea: information can have an expiry date so that you can use it for years and not get buried in clutter. It’s as simple as tagging, say, exp+3w to set an expiry date three weeks after creation. There are other meta-tags too, like imp+2m means the information is “important” for two months but not after that, and it doesn’t expire.
The ideas have been percolating for years, and it’s fun to finally be working on it properly, albeit in fits and starts.
This is the area I've been eyeing for a while. I strongly agree with your "accrete, don't mutate" approach. Reduction via highlighting / summarizing is also important, but the default copy-paste and overwrite workflow of many systems means you lose so much context via destruction and mutation. Yes, restate and re-express ideas, but that should add to or shadow previous ideas, not destroy them.
I want to make something similar for myself. Starting from basically a log of everything: webpages visited and how I arrived, comments & posts written and related articles, emails, PRs, notes, transactions, messages, photos, books, podcasts, heart rate (lol), meetings and appointments, etc etc, then snapshot any relevant links with ArchiveBox. This forms the base of the "accrete" step. There'll be a lot of junk in that, so the next step is summarization: some of which will always be manual, and some sources I hope to gradually summarize in a declarative query language with a flexible output formats. In all cases the goal is to always be able to "reverse query" and see how any summarization ties back to the original source(s). E.g. maybe heart rate should be summarized into a chart that I review once a week, which itself is a new 'feed' that 'shadows' the minute-by-minute details in the usual chronological view. But if I notice a blip in the chart I can dive in and see what else I was doing at the time -- "ah, I knew reading the news was bad for my health" or whatever.
Of course this is gonna need some kind of categorization-like aspect as well, like tags or something. I've been looking into information organization methodologies, and I found PARA [0] -- which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive -- to be a pretty nice general starting point, if a bit loosely defined. In this terminology I think an audit log is the most basic "resource" for an "area", and my goal is to construct this basic audit log resource for the broadest area: "My Life" and spawn other more interesting areas out of that. I don't really like the formulation of "Archive" which I think is better conceptualized as a more general "Time" dimension. So maybe my version would be PART instead.
I really need to "just start" already.
Good luck on your note-taking journey, even "fits and starts" is much better than not started at all. :)
I’ve been making some art for an experimental art show called “Convivial Machines” at Museum of Boulder that just opened this past week.
The main project is an interactive painting called the “Musical Dot Orchestra” that lets you scan a hand painted QR code and “play” a musical dot that appears in the painting.
I'm healing from PTSD, I took two years off work and then the last nine months I just finished up my PhD in mathematical physics working part time. I'm still disabled in different ways, I get triggered by groups of people so I can't socialise very easily I'm kind of slowly reintroducing interacting with society.
I had an interview for a postdoc in my field last week and I'm waiting on whether I got offered a job or not, I think I'm quite likely to get it. I've got a consistent little voice in my head saying, "don't take it, don't have a job just spend your time on learning how to talk to people again and think about working later" but it seems kind of crazy, if I get offered the job it's everything I've worked towards for ten years.
I've been reading HN for about 6 months and I registered a few weeks back. I guess I'll probably going down some kind of tech route in a year or so if I don't get a position in academia.
Similar situation here - I’m slowly starting to look to get up and do something other than focus on therapy and healing. I’ve taken a bit of time off, and I’m struggling still to change my mindset from survival towards more self actualization.
Good luck with it, I can attest to it being tough. I also struggle with survival/actualisation, one day I have a brief glimpse of enlightenment and the next two weeks I'm barely managing to get by
Very similar here. Trying to reframe for myself so I’m less frustrated all the time but I’d really prefer to not have to deal with this for the rest of my life.
Started programming 4 years ago because wife gave me idea for brilliant, never been done before video game. Detoured down web stack just to get a job. Have since become a programmer for a University and had 2 kids. Maybe I'll start back up on the game in 10 years or so. Am > 40 years old and feels like life is just getting started for me.
I started taking steroids two weeks ago. 500mg/week testosterone. They haven't even really kicked in yet (takes about 3 weeks to get really testosterone levels up) but I'm feeling real good and I'm really excited with all the weight gain I've had so far this year. I started at around 155 in June and today I'm up to 180. A lot of it is water weight I'm sure but I'm excited to hit over 200 in the next 5 months of my first testosterone cycle. A fair bit of that will be fat but I really want to over-eat than under-eat. I'm really happy with how I look already and I've added 2.5 inches to my biceps since June.
Testosterone supplementation is a lot safer than some people think it is. It's still not the best thing for your body and it does put stress on it, but honestly I'd put it at about the level of moderate to heavy alcohol use (depending on how you define "heavy"). Except instead of destroying your liver to get drunk you're getting muscular af and looking great.
I do also want to get hired but I posted in there on a different account :)
What was the biggest factor in contributing to your decision to start taking T supplements? You were already happy with how you looked, so I’m curious to hear why you decided to take them.
I’ve held this idea in the back of my mind that someday, at some point, when I plateau, or when my body starts to deteriorate, I’ll start taking T.
I'm happy relative to how I've looked in the past. On the whole I have a TON of room for improvement. I want to be jacked. I want people to look at me and be like oh shit he works out. So as to why: largely vanity. My fiance is very happy with my progress and her actions show that, which is nice too. But also because it's a challenge and quite different from anything I've done before. I'm also just curious what it's like and I like trying new things.
I would recommend going to get your T levels checked just in case they're low, especially if you have low T symptoms. My levels were fine for my age (early 30s) but could be better.
I didn't, partially because a liver panel is like $350 and I have no reason to think my liver is anything but healthy. I'm injecting the testosterone directly and not using orals. Injecting it doesn't really have a reputation of being hard on your liver - orals do though. I mean they both do have an effect on your liver but it's not really the focus of all the material I've read on injection (which does advise strongly against a lot of orals).
I will likely get one in a couple months mid-cycle and if it's fine then I won't get a follow for my liver speciically up at the end (but will do all the other common markers still)
I mentioned liver health only because I was comparing steroid use to drinking, not trying to imply injecting really messes with your liver.
I am interested in the domain too, but I never pulled the trigger on the exogenous T.
I am at 600 but that means nothing because there's also the SHBG value and the T/Estradiol ratio and the T/DHT ratio , but most importantly the density of the AR receptors in the muscle fibers.
So somebody can be golden with T at 300 , whereas somebody else might need 950.
In any event I wanted to try and improve my T number via winning physical fights.
The skin cream is fine if you're doing TRT. To do an actual "cycle" of high levels of test you'd be basically swimming in it. It's also crazy expensive compared to injections, and I've never seen it available "underground" and you won't find a doctor willing to prescribe you enough for anything other than TRT
>In any event I wanted to try and improve my T number via winning physical fights.
Honestly mostly just curiosity. I like trying new things and having new hobbies, and it honestly seems relatively safe so I figured why not.
I am traditionally a really hard gainer. I'm currently the biggest I've ever been in my life but it's been from 6 days a week at the gym lifting weights consistently since June and eating a ton. It's been a shit load of work. I'm seeing progress but not as much as I'd like.
The common advice is to take AI as needed when high E2 symptoms show up. Too many people take it preemptively and crash their E2 for no reason and feel like shit as a result. But I do have some on hand along with a huge array of other drugs "just in case" including stuff for PCT.
Pre, during, and post blood work is also happening to help monitor things like E2 level.
Non-seriously my entire life. My starting weight of 155 is an indicator of that. But I was 175 when I hopped on 2 weeks ago and it's been 6 days a week for the past half year. I know it's earlier than a lot of people recommend.
I had a similar feeling for a long time. Today I realized that the whole Web3 movement makes much more sense than I previously thought. All the NFT and cryptocurrency stuff is just the tip of an iceberg that might result in a truly decentralized web, following up the current cloud-based centralization. So I decided to start learning more about what has been going on the past few years in that space and to start getting new ideas.
The moment it "clicked" for me was accessing an app and paying for its premium features using my wallet. I didn't sign up. I didn't provide any information about myself.
Having a wallet is effectively having a pseudonymous account to every dApp that will ever exist. Likewise, the developers don't have to store any of that information or care about auth, authorization or payments.
This obviously won't translate to everything, but it does show how some presumptions about the way the web has to work(just because it always has worked that way) are being completely turned on their head.
I agree with what another commenter said about getting some money and trying it out for yourself.
I'd add on though to try out some DeFi protocols as well. Using things like DEXs, lending protocols, and yield farms. Experience is the best way to learn for sure.
Working on a hardware startup. Building an epaper based tablet. In fact, one of my test PCBs just arrived earlier today from OSHpark[1]. Still a WIP but I'm looking forward to cooking some electronics tonight on a hotplate :)
I love doing this work. (Electrical engineering, firmware design, cloud backend, etc.) I just really wish I went to school for the EE though.
I have grudgingly accepted the fact that I'll never be hired unless it's on the cheap. And I already have a job. So although I still talk to recruiters occasionally I never end up pursuing an opportunity anymore. The risk of loss of income outweighs any marginal salary gains I could have. I don't have the energy to go after things like Amazon which require serious studying to get in. I got caught violating a rule that I can't rent out to more than two people and had to pay a 3000€ fine and of course suffered a big loss of income (it was worth it though, I own my house mortgage free thanks to my decision to break this rule). I discovered stock investments. So far it's not gone so well because I got caught by the spac selloff. Recently started swing/day trading and I'm now seeing a plus sign for overall gains which is good. Maybe I'll be a better trader than I am a programmer. I'm certainly greedy enough for it. Oh and I got my driver's license after two years of struggling and probably tens of thousands of euros in costs. I'm only allowed to drive an automated shifter but I'm really glad I can. So now I'll have to look for a car which is nice but also costly. My girlfriend is complaining about us not going to Budapest for a Christmas market because of all this but I guess she'll have to swallow that. She's expensive enough as it is.
Continuing to add Ableton Live "clip launching" features to Ardour, and along the way fix bugs with our new time representation implementation (which features such things as an int62_t).
But also, over the weekend, helped construct a new 2m diameter horno (outdoor oven) from adobe bricks and mud mortar for the Santa Fe Botanical Garden as part of Santa Fe Community College's ADOB-112 (Wall Construction) course.
What a great thread. I’ve been learning finger drumming on a pad controller (Maschine MK3), going through a course called Quest For Groove. I’ve been into making electronic music for a long time but this is my first attempt to learn a musical instrument and the fact it fits into my musical ecosystem so neatly (because of its digital nature, it’s not “real” drumming) makes it an even more rewarding experience.
I’ve also been jamming regularly with electronic musicians all over the world using an app called Endlesss, there is a version for Mac OS that lets you easily feed synth output and so on into it. It’s like a cloud-based live looper that sort of works like git: what you add to the jam are like git commits that publish to everyone else while synced to the beat, so it gets around the issue of network latency. It’s hard to explain but very fun and it’s made me a way better electronic musician.
I might be misinterpreting what you mean by "standalone" but the MK3 isn't a standalone device, it requires that you connect it to your computer. It comes with partner software, Maschine 2, that is the "brains" of it more-or-less.
What I can tell you, however, is that the MK3 is excellent. It's entirely possible to use it without looking at your computer at all - so if you are looking for something that is standalone in the sense that you don't have to also be actively on your computer, then it does fit the bill for that. (Not sure about you but after working all day on the computer it can be nice to have a hobby that isn't also computer-centric!)
In any case it's a very fun, expressive instrument. The pads might be the best available: they are large and exceptionally sensitive. Overall layout is well-designed, the pots are great, build quality also very good. The NI ecosystem is massive too and you get a lot of stuff for free just by virtue of being part of the ecosystem.
I prefer my Push 2 for certain things, especially noodling around with harmonies and melodies because of its much greater range (64 pads instead of 16, so it covers a lot more octaves), but the MK3's pads are larger and much more sensitive. So there's a bit of a tradeoff there.
My email is in my profile, feel free to drop me a line any time if you have more questions, I love nerding out on this stuff. ;)
I've worked at casino resorts for the past 15 years. With a vast number of functions and departments within a single resort, just about anybody can find work at one, if they choose. So I built a job search engine just for this industry:
What I really wanted to focus on was extremely easy search, high info density, up-to-date data, and no hurdles (logins, profiles, etc). And a little bit of flair (multiple casino-related themes). Mostly happy with it, so far.
I'm making a browser game. It's an idea I've had for a long time and had several false starts on it. I've had a lot of trouble in the past seeing personal projects through, but I just passed a major milestone and I couldn't be happier about it. I'm trying to be better about balancing the fun parts (implementing a map system in canvas) against the tedious parts (getting rails+typescript+docker+react up and running and configured), focusing on doing a little at a time.
I’ve done prototype launches of this before, years ago, but this time around I’m going to wait until there’s some gameplay before going public. Some of the old players still follow. Maybe when there’s enough gameplay that they want company, that would be the right time.
Good point about the tedious stuff. This time I’m skipping a lot of it by worrying less about scale; eg using rsync and git for deploys rather than containers.
I've been steadily sinking deeper into Go (the board game, not the PL) for the last few years. I keep thinking that my enthusiasm for it will dry up soon, but it just keeps increasing. The depth is immense, every few months I feel like I'm swimming along the bottom of the ocean, then I come to a continental shelf and as I stare into the depths below, I realize that I've only explored the shallows, I dive, and leave the surface behind even further.
I was in love with Go when i was younger, i have even created an AI that played using some rules, not an algorithm.
But when i created again the same game with AlphaBeta algorithm, i just quit the game. No matter how good you are the computer can predict all the moves, and win you no matter how good you become.
I don't really find that to be an issue - regardless of how good computers get, there would always be thousands of people better than me anyway. It is a personal discovery journey for me, like exploring a new mountain that others know well already.
Hmm - well I still feel relatively n00b as a 3k. For me the most prominent ones were
15/16k: I think that's the moment I started evaluating different moves instead of just playing what looked best and hoping I pick better ones than my opponent.
12k: discover first bits of wholeboard thinking
9k: discover first vague ideas around direction of play
6k: discover tenuki / sacrificing locally for global benefit, leaning attacks
6k-4k: reading, basic haengma (moving with shape and speed)
4k-3k: life&death, reading
3k-: I'm approaching 2k mainly by making my group strong before attacking, attacking to push around not kill
A few years ago I joined an Improv groups. The idea was to do something completely different and to get out of my comfort zone. Works terrifically.
Turns out that the people organizing those groups also have a lot of different projects, from normal theater acts to workshops in schools to teach kids foreign languages via theater techniques.
Also turns out that that (oh surprise !) they have a some IT requirements and they can't really handle that themselves.
So I have been helping them for 2 years now; designing websites, managing wordpress, setting up a Google Workspace, managing contacts, consulting on project management... (nothing part of my daily job). But also a lot of random stuff, like organizing a festival, being a cameraman for a live stream night...
In short: join an association / NGO / charity. You will meet really great people, and bringing basic IT knowledge can sometimes make a huge difference for them.
Going through "Nand to Tetris" (the version that is part II on coursera). Almost got the VM to assembly translator working. (Week 8 of the course.) Should be able to finish debugging it tonight after work.
Good news: This year, we've doubled the revenue in our (now) core business. Bad news: This is keeping me really, really busy. I need to figure out how to offload some of the admin work, as most of what I'm doing is writing emails. My job has somehow become a mix of course administrator, manager, marketer, customer service person, tech person, business owner, podcast host, etc....
Really need to figure out how to rein things in. Like many entrepreneurs, I'm much better at thinking of exciting new things than I am at thoughtfully reducing my workload.
Learning violin and music theory as an adult after putting it down in middle school. Brewing korean rice wine and other similar fermentation projects. Trying to learn linear algebra by applying concepts to solve advent of code problems with julia.
Reading a textbook on abstract algebra so I can ground myself to the stability of mathematics. The country, the world, it all changes too quickly but at least this is forever.
I'm on vacation from my dayjob this week, so I have a lot of time to catch up on side interests for the next couple of days.
Right now I'm mostly still just deep-diving into various bits of "stuff" related to AI. I just finished reading a The SOAR Cognitive Architecture by John Laird, and Engineering General Intelligence Part 2 by Ben Goertzel, as well as Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker. Also spent some time building and installing all of OpenCog, and installing SOAR. The goal is to start messing around with both, and start actually implementing some simple agents.
I'm also now reading Foundations of Computational Linguistics: Human-Computer Communication in Natural Language by Roland Hausser, and have a book on Cognitive Modeling queued up.
And I need to find some time to get back to working with Apache River (the OSS version of what Sun used to call JINI).
If I'm feeling inspired one day soon, I might finally finish wrapping up the software for my "convection oven to reflow oven" conversion project. The hardware parts have all been done for months, and even most of the code is written, but I sort of mentally stalled out on that and just haven't bothered to push everything across the finish line. Really need to wrap that all up.
I needed a camera slider that was not thousands of dollars and did not require someone else to operate. So I designed, printed, built, and programmed my own to use AI/face/object tracking to follow me around.
I also have been spending more time actually creating video content. I used to do a bunch in the early YouTube days, but I hit a decade long bit of depression.
I'm working on my fourth science fiction novel. Ive been working on it for about four years. The first one took about three months. The second one took about six months. The third one took a bit over a year. It seems I've been challenging myself more as I go.
I've been recording a song I wrote in about 1982. I was in an obscure experimental electronic rock band that no one ever heard of in the 1980s. Nowadays I'm not in a band, but I play better than I used to and can afford much better equipment, so I make a hobby of slowly making recordings that I hope will be better than the ones we made back in the day, and writing new parts and arrangements and sometimes new songs.
I've been working on a presentation server for Common Lisp programs. Someone approached me for help learning how to do some UI work for Lisp programs, and I helped, but then we started tinkering, and now we're trying to figure out how to make a reusable thing that we can both benefit from repeatedly. Also, it might turn out to be handy in my day job.
And being a good friend to my dog and my close relatives.
I've been creating an annotated disassembly of the Yamaha DX7 synthesiser's firmware ROM. It's been going very successfully.
After this project is complete, I plan to build a small platform for people to host webrings. I know it's not going to revolutionise how people use the internet. I think it will be a nice service though. I loved this era of the internet. I have a great domain to go along with it.
I got a puppy and I'm its single caregiver. I love having him around but I didn't realize it'd mean being on-call 24/7 plus the rotations on my team at work when I'm really on-call. That's made for some..interesting times.
Having a furry little companion is fun, though, and I'm getting out and socializing way more than before.
Overall a net positive, IMO. Just a lot of work and responsibility.
Heh, sounds like you had the opposite experience. I was on call the second week I had him and I'm a bit regretful since some extra first couple weeks' training without interruptions would've probably been better.
Huge plus one. Even just seeing him play with other dogs is a huge endorphin boost for me.
Since this summer, I've been doing audio-visual work and playing in an improvisational jam band, doing over-night parties in UT, CO, and AZ.
It's really fun to play in; usually we do a couple sets for various sub-formations of the band who write songs, and then we improvise a set for a couple of hours. Everyone in the band plays multiple instruments (keys, synths, guitar, violins, flutes, trumpets, drumset, etc).
We've been having a lot of fun out in the desert. We bought a generator, put a bunch of lights and sound out in an arroyo, and stay up late playing music.
This sounds like an absolute ton of fun. There is no desert around me and this would never fly in any forest near here (Southern Ontario) but some years Lake Ontario freezes over completely and I’ve always thought it would be amazing to do this in the middle of the frozen lake.
I just moved to Miami, so mostly unpacking and dealing with claims for broken stuff. Context is I've been working remote for the company I previously worked for, so just keeping the owners of capital happy while I continue my life haha.
Separately, I have been continuously iterating on my market data collection systems (leveraging Airflow for task orchestration and dependent tasks management) for use in investment management systems and market intelligence research. Going pretty well so far, but had to move around some money to slide into this new life. Going fine so far, just budgeting and spending as much time outside as I can.
I have to say, living in subtropical weather makes it a little challenging to "continue", to so speak, my Northeastern lifestyle, when I just want to be outside all the time haha.
If anyone is in the South Florida area, would love to meet up and discuss tech/cryptos/mixology/trading/beach life, whatever... cheers
Welcome to Miami! It's all fun and games, make sure to go out of the Miami bubble and visit the keys, Everglades, Naples, Tampa and more North Florida!
Welcome to Miami! I'm out in Coral Gables. Moved here December of last year. Love it. Now is the time to be outside. Summer can be miserable if you're not used to the heat. Personally I love it. But it is required that you enjoy winter here!
Nice! An ex colleague of mine from my GS days and his fiancé (now wife... spoilers) just got married at this adorable little church our in Coral Gables, I love it down there. The little roofs are adorable haha. Haven't spent too much time there but I really think it's quaint and I love the 'low to the ground' architecture, not sure the right term, that seems prevalent.
Appreciate the kind words, and yeah, I dart out of my apartment at every available moment. Today spent some time in the design district which was fun. I usually end up lost in some bar or another rehydrating after a few hours kicking around aimlessly haha.
'Winters' with 80 degree weather.... Hmm sign me up
Great thread, feels like a time capsule for some of the people that are starting new things in life, moving to a new city, getting a start-up off the ground, trying to get used to their new lifestyle. I hope I can come back to this thread some time in the future and reminisce as I'm sure many of you will.
To answer the question, I'm working full-time at a job that I feel completely hopeless at. Basically fresh out of college and I'm working at a place where I can't communicate with like 95% of the development team due to language differences, so I'm stuck working on an undocumented codebase with no guidance/on-boarding/help whatsoever. Lots of trial and error to figure out how stuff works, and a fair bit of going around the current code and working directly with libraries because I don't have the time/energy to try to understand the layer the people before me built on top of that library.
hey, just letting you know you're not alone. Difference is I can't communicate with previous devs who left dogshit quality codebase without any sort of documentation. But more I'm accustomed with it, the more our (new) team realize that behind all these pointless abstractions and "services" is just the dumbest map (data structure) transformer ever
I had to stop work recently due to illness, I might be able to start again in a few months, we’ll see. I’ve been spending my extra spare time (when able) making an experimental GUI for grokking time. I guess it’s in line with the ‘4,000 weeks’ philosophy mentioned elsewhere in these comments. More precisely, it’s a tool for creatively designing a full-screen, zoomable, interactive timeline (of, eg, your life so far, and maybe future plans). Unlike a traditional digital calendar, it shows time as a continuous line with multiple tracks in parallel (eg a track for places you’ve lived, a track for jobs you’ve worked…), and it’s geared towards introspection and exploration.
I don’t really know where it’s going, maybe it’s just me navel-gazing while I’m unwell, but it feels interesting as a UI. If anyone likes the sound of it and would like beta access when I’m ready to share it, let me know.
Wow! This is really cool! Is the entire nutrient cycle automated, or are there some parts which have to be manually done after the initial germination for foodstuffs? Are there machine learning algorithms which learn from the nutrient and water inputs and quality of the batch (by lb, shape, taste, etc) adjust and try to get higher quality with each batch?
Currently there is lots of manual steps. Automation for other things than water is coming, in the next major build. We hardly add nutrients at all, just a few ppm of things that are missing in the fish feed. We still get premium quality on the produce.
COVID has sent me on quite a life detour re-evaluating my priorities. Tried my hand at some freelance and realized I'm not cut out for the networking aspect, at least where I'm at right now.
A good chunk of the past years free time has gone into one codebase. I'm hoping to create a new interface for myself that truly decouple data from UI abstractions. I'm just so sick of the day-in-day-out dealing with app UI/UX refreshes, forced OS updates removing and killing functionality that worked for _me_, dark patterns preying on my attention and time and at times winning, the amount of time to replicate any user interface I use.
I'm running out of money though so I'm applying like crazy to jobs again. Upset feeling like life's priorities are only to survive, forgoing a lot of other things to find necessary time to do stuff. But pushing through I suppose
I programatically create educational videos on fundamental algorithms and data structures, a side project that I'm very excited about. I'm creating the videos using Python and the manim library.
Unlikely for me to have videos in time for your interviews, though. I'm sure however that you can find other sources on the internet to learn. What have you tried?
Thanks! I'm very glad when someone finds my videos useful. There are also videos on quick-sort and merge-sort on the channel and I'm planning on doing bubble-sort, selection sort, heap-sort, and radix-sort in the future.
I moved to a new team where we leverage the idea of precise dispensing of fluids but apply it to life sciences. A pipette is all about dispensing a precise amount where you want it - so is a printer. We think outside the box on that. Feels good to be making something to make people healthy and not to just sell consumables.
This inspired me to try to do the same in my city. CityStrides looks like a nice tool for tracking that, but when I clicked Signup, the only options are "connecting" with various services that I don't have. Any recommendations for other similar tools that have their own mobile app so that I don't need to sign up for two services?
I recently released a new version of my C MessagePack library MPack [1] with a cool new feature to dynamically calculate the size of maps and arrays during encoding. Having to always specify the size of containers up-front was a pain. I believe it's the only C/C++ MessagePack implementation that can do this. Of course bugs appeared immediately so I am working on a patch release.
I am also working on and off on my C template library Pottery [2]. I haven't pushed any code in a while; having a day job and young children makes progress slow :(
I'm working on my very first side project with a friend/coworker. I've never really done a side project before, which makes me feel incredibly unaccomplished when looking at what others are posting in this thread.
As for life in general, I think I'm moving either back to Michigan or Florida once my lease is up and perhaps buying a house. Ultimate goal is to get a place with a large, sunny roof so I can install solar panels and the proper hardware[0] to have a microgrid so I can have power even if the electricity goes down.
I didn't win the IPO lottery, but I won the life lottery and am fortunate to be living off my spouse's salary for the immediate future. I quit my full-time position a few months back. Since then, I've been exploring different "work" replacements. I tried freelancing and noodled on starting my own business. Finally, I've decided to apply for a Ph.D. program.
But, the most important thing I've learned these past few months is that work isn't life. Instead, I'm beginning to view "work" as a hobby that I enjoy. Not the thing that is going to provide absolute meaning to my existence. I feel better and have a much easier time de-stressing.
I just hope I can maintain this perspective if I am accepted and commit to graduate school.
Launched https://caratdrop.com/ - a secondhand diamond marketplace - a few months back but don't have the audience and marketing to such a small and hidden sliver of customers is difficult. Rethinking the idea, maybe as a discovery website for people to find custom jewelers, with an emphasis on ethical and sustainable practices. If anyone thinking about buying an engagement ring, happy to chat! roger[at]caratdrop.com
My 2015 WRX got flooded in Hurricane Ida ='[ and now I'm playing the waiting game for a Model 3.
It's been a hectic few months with the flood, doggo getting sick, work ramping up - looking forward to resetting my routines / habits.
Don’t forget about those of us who wouldn’t mind spending a few hundred on diamonds pretty regularly but dropping $10k is a once in a lifetime event. We also likely have kids who would spend less but non-zero for mother’s day etc.
Dig it! Appreciate your thoughts! I only recently understood the emotional connection between moments and jewelry. Having a beautiful physical accessory that brings you back to a significant birthday or milestone really warms the heart.
Much of the new "DTC" engagement ring market is trying to figure out how to capture that market too for repeat customers
I am in my 50s and retired last year. I am really enjoying my retirement as I am getting a chance to read a lot of stuff that I never had time for when I was working in math and philosophy.
I spent most of my career working on server side stuff. So, just for fun, I am currently studying Swift, Swift UI and getting used to the Apple developer tools. It has been a very interesting experience to say the least.
I'm working on a dirt-simple LDAP server for self-hosted user management, written in Rust, with the frontend also written in Rust (compiled to WASM): https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap
I had an MVP release last month, and working on compatibility with more services, password reset and so on.
As a self taught programmer, I struggled to get a job. So I decided to build [name redacted], which has now turned into my full time job.
[name redacted] comparison website for mobile phone contracts and SIM contracts.
[link redacted]
Being my first project with no prior experience behind me, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. It's been a great learning experience and I've learnt more than I thought possible.
However, I really struggle with imposter syndrome. I'd be embarrassed to ever show my code to anyone else. I'm never happy with what I build and I can't shake the feeling that all of my code is a complete mess. I think I could learn a lot if I actually got a programming job working with others in a team.
> I'd be embarrassed to ever show my code to anyone else. I'm never happy with what I build and I can't shake the feeling that all of my code is spaghetti code.
I wonder how you would feel if you could see the average commercial codebase out there?
Why do we expect to be world quality coders? If you tried painting, you would likely like your art, regardless that what you produced was nothing like the quality of famous artists!
The other weird thing is that disliking your code shows taste, and that means you will improve over time. Loving your code might be a bad sign! As you mature you are likely to learn more subtle reasons to dislike your own code - never being satisfied is a strong motivator to improving.
Building an open-source self-hostable Facebook alternative called Haven[1]. Focused on posting private content, includes per-friend private RSS feeds and a built-in RSS reader. I've been using it to securely share pictures of my kids with friends and family for the last few years.
I've been contributing to the IRC ecosystem again. Working on bringing some IRCv3 [1] features to The Lounge [2] right now.
Tryna do some neat things with the virtual tabletop I've built (Shmeppy [3]) as well. Getting its renderer off of the 2D Canvas API and onto WebGL, as well as some of its more perf-sensitive code onto WASM.
Building a book recommendation system - This is a side project. I am an avid reader and I have found that the book recommendations on Goodreads are not good and mostly useless so trying to build the recommendation system myself. Turns out the hardest thing in this project is getting well labelled/tagged books data that can be fed into the model.
Over the years I've had a lot of inconsistent experiences with commercial lactase enzyme supplements for dairy intolerance. I've decided to embark on a hobby project (OpenLactase) to produce my own digestive enzyme supplements from scratch using Aspergillus oryzae fungi.
I'm currently working on designing an open source stirred tank bioreactor (Open Scale-up) for fungi cultivation. Bench-top at first but the design is intended to be suitable for scale-up.
Very different from the day job as cloud infrastructure engineer.
I started two years ago and I'm finding that project very fulfilling with lots of areas to explore. For example I recently bought an old ThinkPad to have another reference computer and played with Coreboot+SeaBIOS to understand the BIOS better. I'm also reading about the early history of Unix and how some features I'm implementing where developed in the first place. It's never ending and perfect!
Recently got my first VR headset. Played around in Unity and did their create with VR course then made my own game - Whack-a-mole in VR. Thinking of participating in GitHub's Game Off by making another game in VR but so far none of my friends have been interested in the idea (Which is fair, they work in software and code all day. I used to but I teach now so coding outside of work is much more fun). I'll likely just do another solo project and later on maybe rope some of my students into VR development for future projects.
I spent much of the past two years writing an economic history book that compares the modern United States to Victorian Britain and the Dutch Republic. Of course, Ray Dalio had to write a book on the same topic, in the same year (albeit with differing premises and conclusion). Check my book out if you're interested:
I've been burnt out with the current state of work.
I work for a japanese cloud robotics company and have been witness to a great long term idea being plagued by bad management and strategy.
To manage my headspace, have been doing the following
1. Writing.
Realising the value of communication for teams, have been writing up a lot of my learning into a series of documents which talk strategy and decision frameworks for CXOs.
I share with a close-knit group of startup founders and product managers in Bangalore. The problems seems pervasive in Indian startups in their growth stage after their series a. specially with the funding spree and the need for hyper-growth.
So talking to peers and collating knowledge has been the only way to stay sane :)
2. Gardening and hydroponics. Health in general, but the issue of getting good produce for a clean diet has always been a neglected aspect of my life. My wife and I decided we wanted to spend some time disconnected from devices. Gardening just happened and we haven't looked back since.
Its become a routine thing and there is satisfaction in plucking your produce and tending to it.
3. Reviving some of the projects I had worked on in the past but got shelved and opensourcing them.
- Low cost IoT WiFi connected 4 node Energy Monitor + Switch. This was a PCB design + firmware + plus the Backend + Frontend+Analysis service + ML models to detect anomalies as well as predict usage.
- A self hosted algolia alternative for User Docs.
Sure.
So a lot of what you want to grow depends on the weather prevailing in your area. If you have warm and humid climate with atleast 60% sunlight days. you should be able to grow about anything.
Top 3 suggestions
1. start small. preferably with herbs. Their time to harvest is low and as with anything, you need iterations and immediate gratification to keep you going.
If this is your first time gardening, then i would say, go with plain gardening and graduate to hydroponics with the healthy plants from your first produce
coriander, cilantro, lettuce are good first candidates.
2. There are hydroponic starter kits with plumbing pipes, and minimum hardware. If you want to hit the ground running, then go for these. Otherwise, DIY is possible.
3. Use grow lights if you have variability in sunlight in your area.
Outside of the day job I've been tinkering with (too) many micromobility projects. I've been working on a series of weight-sensing-controlled skateboards, and this summer started working on an ebike project (https://metromotive.com/blog/2021/06/18/inertial-electric-as...) and a OneWheel-style vehicle (but with two wheels).
This winter I'm hoping to design a new PCB layout for an open-source motor controller, but it's been a nightmare getting parts even in quantities of one or two.
Coding-wise, I've got a bunch of projects that I'm kind of purposely not pursuing because the above is more fun and less like my day job:
- A connected "open" sign app for small businesses (connect a TV or use an old iPad, or an IoT plug switch). Collect and sell real-time data.
- Nutrition info for meals that aren't in a database (e.g. independent restaurants, modified recipes, box lunches), encoded in a URL-like format/QR code (https://nut.codes)
I've been (slowly) cleaning up and releasing more pieces of my online sailing navigation simulator as free and open source software [0].
Always happy to hear from people about what they think, especially from anyone who might might be interested in contributing, or even if you just want to stop by for some friendly competition in the virtual races. :)
I've been quite depressed lately[0] but recently found I can keep it at bay with significant amounts of caffeine and forcing myself to do a project. So I finished a Gigatron emulator I'd started a while back in Zig. I'd never written an emulator before, and chose Gigatron over the traditional starting point of CHIP-8 because CHIP-8 seemed downright trivial and boring. It's more or less functionally complete now, with video, sound, leds, gamepad, and a Pluggy McPlugface implementation that can save and load. I need to go back and clean everything up, implement a properly timed main loop, and replace the jank waveOut audio with WASAPI before moving on to menus, configuration, and ports, but I'm not super motivated to do any of that. Could be those are just not interesting enough, could be I'm building too much of a resistance to the caffeine.
Alternative project idea: A Haunted PS1(ish) game using a Voxel Space clone engine, also in Zig of course because Zig, despite its compiler bugs, rules.
[0] I blame the state of modern technology[1]. Everything is slow, buggy, and actively user-hostile and the world just seems to have accepted that. It is maddening.
[1] This is an obvious untruth. Though tech sucks, it is merely a minor contributor to my mental state.
I was in a similar situation. I recommend finding hobbies that have nothing to do with computers. I used to work on open source stuff all the time, now I find that my energy vanishes if I even think about it after work.
Picking up guitar, cooking, studying (real) languages has rekindled my sense of purpose. Seeing my technical improvement on guitar from 3 months ago and being able to play and make music with other musicians is far more gratifying than ... maintaining open source software. In the limited time I have before I, y'know, die.
Unfortunately it is winter now and my more active hobby of biking is off the table, and my body is unable to handle more than 2 days a week of climbing at this point. I've tried learning Japanese, which I find interesting, but I find that no resource for it quite seems to work in a way that isn't tedious to the point of making me not want to bother. That may be endemic to any language that uses logograms so extensively, I don't know. I have no desire to learn an instrument because I'm apparently one of those odd people who feels no particular attachment to music.
IMO with any language one needs some sort of motivation that's media based, as just trying to go through courses is extremely tedious. It's the same for Korean, Japanese, German and just about every other language I've studied/dabbled in. I didn't find studying kanji particularly difficult, it's just some tedious work required upfront to get to the actual goal: communicating.
So for languages I would recommend pursuing native media and language exchanges. Discord servers are great for this as you can find native speakers and people to answer grammar questions, etc. For me, watching Korean variety shows motivates me to study vocabulary, and exchanges are great for making friends to commiserate with.
YMMV but actually being able to play music really deepened my connection with music. I understand and appreciate certain things now that would have been hard or impossible before.
---
It's dawned on me just now that basically most of my hobbies have a social element to them. So it's not just limiting my computer time, but also getting me to go outside and make new friends. Having social groups that aren't just tech nerds is quite nice as well.
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Those are just some example hobbies, anyways. I'm sure there's a hobby for you.
Money simulator might be good for kids in schools, except that it contains swearing (e.g. in the URL of the pension company). You might want to remove that.
I'm having fun, resigned my last client and am surfing, cycling (road bike & Dirt) 20-40 miles daily minimum, want to see if I can do daily century rides.
Alongside Language school, in the morning Japanese, in the evening Indonesian. The Japanese is more of a fun goal now, as I'm JLPT N3 and want to see if I can get N1.
I should be focusing on Mandarin, but, eh maybe next year. It's really fun to read news in local languages then rely on translations.
So, I do enjoy microdosing - it can be anything, even caffeine but it seems to help alot.
I also do immersion, where I'm currently at, it supports both languages with people to chat with that helps especially. If I didn't have this, it would be much harder.
It does get mixed mash, and it is mental exhaustion but that's why I find it works.
Much like the gym, when you workout to failure, it helps build faster.
The microdosing helps tons, my focus is unbroken, I don't use cell phones besides changing the default language, which is fantastic.
Working on my blog[1] and streaming flight simulators and occasional design and web publishing episodes to learn about broadcasting on the internet[2]!
Part time jobs to pay the bills until the streaming can become my main gig.
There's a lot of fun problems involved related to computational geometry, 3D rendering, numerical methods, parser/compiler design, and astrodynamics ("space math").
I am developing a framework to spin up web applications very fast. Right now it incorporates:
- an RDS postgres instance with a curated set of DB scripts with auditing baked in
- Lambda/API Gateway based API
- fully implemented with users, roles, groups
- application level authorization
- Cognito for user authentication (sign up or admin created)
- S3/CF for hosting/files
- React frontend
- all in Typescript with a robust type-set; same types for the whole stack
- deployed via CF template along with some custom scripting I have done to tie it all together
It's been a work in progress for some time on the side, but I am now formalizing it. It might seem a bit rough on the edges at first, but it gets the job done, and can more or less be extended into other AWS services as needed. I haven't really received much feedback yet.
It's all open source, you just pay for the AWS resources, and it installs from npm and deploys in about 10 minutes based on how long the DB and CF distribution take to deploy. Here's a sped up install video (nothing glamorous, just ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3mzwtIyt9s
I am in the midst of drafting formal documentation, how-tos, and other media that I can share with the community to help make it easier to understand and use. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Just wondering, why did you decide to build this around proprietary, managed cloud infrastructure when the core utilities are open source? Doesn't this unnecessarily lock many use cases into AWS?
The framework was built out of my own developments as I needed to develop web applications over the last few years. I chose AWS for the original architecture because of my familiarity with the platform and relative ease of use.
Only recently have I started the process of formalizing the framework as it has existed, so there hasn't been any work done on supporting a cloudless implementation. It's on the radar (I have a notice on the top of the git readme about this very topic and needing contributors).
If you are interested in this, feel free to join the discord posted on the github. I'm very much open to discussion and dialog.
I wrote a book of fiction (in French) and I self-published it on Amazon (KDP) after some encouragement from someone here on HN; it's just been selected as one of the five finalists of the Storyteller Amazon contest. Sales are slow, though.
I'm trying to get good at EDM but am making little progress. I have watched many tutorials, studied the masters. I am good with tools, and sometimes I come up with 4- or 8-bar loops that aren't that bad, but the songs as a whole are boring. There is something about building expectations, intensity towards the "drop" that I still don't understand.
About a year ago I built a touch-less MIDI controller based on Arduino and cheap HC-SR04 sensors. It's fun to use but I don't know what to do with it. It could be a cheap alternative to a true Theremin but I think the market is too small to pursue.
I'm working on a webapp to teach sight-reading; the market is probably also small but at least there are no moving parts, prototypes, inventory, shipping, etc. There are other apps that do the same thing but I think my version may have an edge. We'll see.
I don't know if promotion really works. I think a book has to have a "moment" to be a runaway success.
(There's this French author I follow on Twitter, who just published a new novel; he's enjoying an incredible amount of press coverage, with raving reviews from so many critics. Yet his book doesn't seem to sell much, or at all.
My book is called "L'archevêque de Cologne" (it's in French). It's the - real - story of a priest in Paris during WWII who would pretend he was fighting the Germans, while he was in fact working for them, and giving them names of resistant fighters.
Most readers or prospective readers think it's a "historic" novel, and there are only so many people interested in yet another WWII story.
But it isn't.
It's about truth, and how much you can lie to other people and to yourself until you dissolve your soul into your own lies. It's also about hubris, ambition, and morals.
This is difficult to convey, even in conversation.
I started working at Pointr some months ago, I do want to get back working with games, but for now I am finding the work at Pointr fascinating, not only my job is perfect for my skills and personality, but Pointr is doing something I didn't expect, and it is quite cool, basically doing high accuracy location and wayfinding in indoor maps.
Also a new product of Pointr made me wanted to be hired badly because of how cool it is: a software way to automatically convert floorplans and blueprints to maps that can be understood by the average person, when I was game modding I wasted a ludicrous amount of time trying to do that and figured out it was just too hard to pull it off, but Pointr did it (granted they hired a bunch of PHds to pull that off, but they did pulled it off).
I just finished building a personal version of my remote browser product but it hasn't been that successful or made me much money. I turned down 150k a year remote job couple of months ago in order to protect the IP for this project but since the project hasn't been as successful as I wanted I'll be going back to work in the new year. But for the last 2 months before that I want to finish one project I neglected a long time--adding full text search and a new better interface (among other features) to my web archive tool--and I want to try to quickly hack out a new project--a Scribe clone, because I really like what they're doing and it's close to the RPA collaboration tool I wanted to build with my remote browser; tho I'm going to have to build it as an extension--before I return to work, which I really don't want to do! I don't know if either of these are going to be successful nor make money but I just want to finish the neglected and try my hand at a new project as another bet to try to get that success that I want.
I was on a break from work but used my time to finally finish a comprehensive guide on SEO hiring which is based on a process that I developed in the last couple of years. It has helped me hire some of the best people I had the privilege of working with.
It contains the step-by-step process of how to evaluate a candidate for a SEO position (both senior and junior). Also includes interview questions, assignment questions, personality evaluation test, templates, etc that you’ll require throughout the process.
Created it because I’ve seen firsthand how companies (especially startups) struggle to figure out wheat from the chaff and so often end up hiring a wrong person for the job. This guide is the answer, it will give you exactly what you need to understand both technical and non-technical skills of the candidates. Although you do need someone who understands the intricacies of SEO to properly use the technical section of this guide.
Will be publishing it in the next 7 days. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy, feel free to get in touch. Email in my bio :)
Just finished the first version of the custom build system for my operating system project. For once, I'm really happy with the design and its flexibility whilst also being quite simple to understand and use.
Next will be applying it to the kernel repository and a few other utilities. This side project is the only thing that brings me joy recently.
Just yesterday I finally had my 3D printer I bought a year and a half ago tuned and serviced by a professional. I bought it as a kit and built it not completely wrong, but it did have issues I'd not have been able to iron out myself. Yesterday, right after the service of the printer, I printed a Benchy and am very happy with the result! Next up I plan on printing a plastic case for a replica of a bus cash register and ticket machine that was in basically every bus in my country when I was a child (Czech Republic, the ticket machine is USV-24C by Mikroelektronika). I managed to buy this ticket machine in a pretty good condition when a local bus company was going out of business and another in a less than ideal condition for parts in case I ever decide to want to work on the real thing. In the meantime, I plan on building a replica of it running on an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi.
37 and male. I have built a business I own 100% over the last twelve years that has made me wealthy. The wealth came slow though. I was financially independent by around 30 and it has continued to grow from there.
If you are looking for purpose in life, have children. The purpose of all biological life is reproduction. I can tell you from my own experience that my kids provide me a ton of purpose and direction.
If you are looking for meaning, focus on your relationships. Do DIY projects with your grandpa and dad. Go out to lunch with your mom weekly. Host the family Thanksgiving and Christmas. Help your uncle build a shed. Go on long bike rides with friends.
Outside of those things, I have most enjoyed visiting national parks and camping. I really enjoy construction, I am working on building a shed then an ADU then a full house.
Maintaining a healthy diet and vigorous fitness is critical. Avoid risky sports that could injure you.
after a few-month hiatus I've been getting back into playing around with Jonathan Blow's closed-beta compiler and enjoying it immensely, especially now that I've finally gotten around to delving into the metaprogramming stuff. I made a dead-simple entity system (not ECS) module [0], and while it's definitely not ready for production, it seems to already be exactly what I always wanted to make in C/C++ for my past projects, but never was able to (elegantly, at least). I am very pleased with this language even though it's still definitely a beta project (odd WIP syntax here and there, very occasional mysterious compiler bugs). considering maybe doing a writeup of my experience so far...
I've been working on a HTTP based pub sub service that's free and open source for funsies. It's written in Go. [0] you can use it like this:
$ curl -d "Backup failed" ntfy.sh/mytopic
I also made an Android app for it which let's you receive messages on subscribed topics as notifications. It was a ton of fun building. I can't believe how much I liked learning Kotlin. The app is also open source and is pending review in the Play Store. If anyone would like to be a tester shoot me a message [1]
I’m taking a break from drawing a comic book about a jackal lady teaching some basic magic techniques (http://egypt.urnash.com/Stella) to do some commissions and some standalone art.
This comic is in itself a project designed to do as a break from a massive graphic novel about two sides of a YA space opera. http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
If you enjoy any of this stuff and have a big pile of money from your FAANG job or whatever, perhaps you might want to send a little of it my way via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash - drawing comics barely pays my bills right now.
Building a queer dating app - it's been a good excuse to learn react-native, lambda and other aws services, and it's an itch I've wanted to scratch for years.
Since April I've been taking a break from contracting work and focusing on a project that brings me a lot of joy to work on and keeps on serendipitously connecting me with a lot of interesting people (both users and other founders). It's fully bootstrapped and I've been doing everything myself so far - from code to design.
It's a platform where one can create playful virtual spaces for online meetings, workshops and hangouts. I'm currently experimenting with different types of virtual spaces and trying to figure out which direction brings the most fun and utility to the users. It's still not 100% finished and I'm changing a lot of features so if you happen to have any feedback or ideas please let me know! :)
Super smooth and easy onboarding - congrats
I love the Mushroom and Crypto rooms! Hilarious
The soccer room is too much of a challenge for me though - guess I do not have enough experience with playing FIFA ;)
I’m building an off grid tiny cabin. Solar power, spring water.
The solar power has been a challenge. The SolarDIY subreddit has been super helpful in understanding this subject I knew nothing about.
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I live near a bunch of Amish and recently one gave me a riddle and told me if I solved it, she’d bake me a pie. I solved it!
In return, I have used a Playfair Square to provide her a riddle. I’m giving her all the instructions on how to decode it.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about passion and why people are motivated to do the things they do. Engineering, or even just harnessing, passion would be super useful. I wonder about passion as people age: does it diminish or does it just change?
So many thoughts here but if we are defined by our actions, and our passions/interests tend to guide our actions… then our interests tend to define us. And yet, we seem to have little-to-no control over what interests us.
Running my own software biz. Team of 40. We own the infosec space we’re in. Was nowhere in 2007 when I joined HN. Grew much. Still growing. Started actually having fun in 2015 after 12 years of hard work with zero to show for it. Best part is the caliber of people I get to work with every day.
As a primarily backend C# guy myself, I'm curious if you considered Blazor? I find it intriguing and if I had the motivation for a personal/side project I'd likely do an initial proof of concept with it.
I took a three months leave from work, unsure if I wanted to do the early retirement fuck around dance or not. I worked on a meta-JIT library for Rust interpreters (https://github.com/chc4/lineiform), roughly analogous to Truffle/Graal - it would do dynamic recompilation to try and stick together multiple interpreter loops into blocks for constant folding and things. It didn't work out that well (it's a unique enough space that no existing codegen backend was a good fit, and I started on writing my own backend using dynasm-rs to support it instead that kinda stalled), and I realized that I liked working quite a lot and just went back to my old job.
Trying to develop a game idea I have had for a while. If anyone is interested in chatting hobby game dev feel free to hit me up!
I am currently side tracked by fixing my car's aftermarket digital dash, and musing how that cyberpunk makeshift techno-future kind of already exists outside of all the polished digital products. It's a 3D printed case, open source hardware, commodity parts and and open source software all sold as a complete working unit. It's exactly what I wanted from technology.
I am also constantly dabbling in music, riding bikes, and slowly piecing together a metal fab workshop. I may be overleveraging my time, but my work life balance is pretty much where I want it right now.
Hobby wise, getting into the espresso rabbit hole where you spend $1000 for each 2% better you make your coffee (ok I jest!) and trying latte art too. Learning all this from youtube.
Working part time because of fatigue. Making coffee a good hobby as its purely at home.
Earlier this year I thought it would be interesting/fun trying to build an art filter that transforms photos into impressionistic paintings without using any ML/neural nets like a lot of apps do these days, but instead just use vector calculus, randomness, and drawing each brushstroke at a time.
Tinkered with a Python version for a few months then ended up converting it to C/C++/Objective-C to make an iOS app out of it. Released the iOS app earlier this summer under the name PaintSnap but I'm still tweaking the painting algorithm every week. Not the most utilitarian app but it was fun building it and tinkering with the algorithm.
Quit a job 5 months ago. Working as a crypto engineer, have made a couple years salary in the last year, so I could afford to take a couple months off. Spent the intervening time with my partners, and doing personal writing. A lot of the reason I was building or learning felt driven by insecurity about what my peers were doing, and I was just going through the motions at work, and not feeling emotionally in control.
Taking time off put me emotionally back in the driver's seat. I don't build stuff because I'm keeping up with imaginary peers anymore, and my relationships have improved dramatically. I know what my values are again.
I am going through the boot up camp at airminers.org and I would gladly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the state of the art of carbon capture and removal.
Also, if someone's interested in developing tools that go with this, reach out!
I'm reworking (ok, actually putting effort) in the parsing for my relational language, that obviously will be super-popular.
To make things even harder, I working to make it IDE-friendly (so it can work for live-coding like in Rust) following the ideas of https://arzg.github.io/lang/.
This is the thing I wish I could dedicate (my end-game is make a replacement for access+excel).
Now, in the job stuff, making a micro-framework similar to django/flask in Rust that also need to sync offline clients, because a week ago suddenly that is a requirement.
Trying to find a storage company to sponsor my project to build a 1 petabyte Storage array to be connected to a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 through a SAS card and expanders. It is kinda dumb from a practicality standpoint, but i think it would be fun, especially to see if the tiny Pi could handle all that and still get any meaningful throughput.
I have plenty of other projects in the mean time, but that's the big one I've been noodling on for months now. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I'm absolutely sure I couldn't afford to 'rent' enough drives on my own right now.
Still settling into life in a new country (US->Switzerland) after having moved during the pandemic with a one year old and dog (I do not recommend this, but it might have been our only change)
Also learning about longevity related things and writing about my learnings at https://longevitybase.com. Yes, I think all sites should just be *base.com (haha)
Working on a way to write Oculus Quest apps in Golang. The entire thing is a tower of yak shaving. Current adventure: attempting to write a reactive UI system that doesn't need to dynamically allocate memory.
One of the many yaks! In this case taking memory mapped Vulkan buffers and unsafeing them to various Go arrays and whatnot. I have a gapbuffer implementation on top of this, and then a truly evil "gaptree" implementation that uses gapbuffers to represent a tree data structure.
Do you need to work around Go's escape analysis much? I was under the impression that it's good but not perfect, leading to some heap allocation of variables that wouldn't necessarily need it if they were on C/C++.
I think "good but not perfect" describes my experience here as well. I've certainly needed to rework some bits of code that were allocating when I didn't expect them to, but so far, this has not become too onerous (yet).
The "write a little bit of code, then test it to see if it allocates" approach has been very useful. That way I don't get too far out on a limb with a bunch of allocating code and no easy way to clean things up.
It's actually easier than you might think: Go has most of the capabilities of C, including calling C APIs like malloc/free etc and casting them to Go data types. Of course (like C) writing code in that way won't be particularly convenient or memory safe.
Well, yes and no. My concern was the fact that Go's escape analysis isn't always correct (although it's quite good), leading to variables that would be stack allocated in C/C++, being heap allocated in Go.
I love this thread - it feels like therapy to me. Perhaps because I believe there's a few (if not many) people lurking around that I can relate to, and partly because I'm lacking the human connection I had with friends in my pre-parenthood years.
Anyway, lately I've been enjoying putting together "mixtapes" (not recording them live, just putting the tracks together and then exporting to MP3) and uploading them to Mixcloud. It's been creative and when I see that someone listens to it, I feel like I'm connecting with them in some way.
Over the past few months, I've been trying to contribute to the rust ecosystem to enable devs to make webapps comfortably.
The latest challenge I've been addressing is auto generating react hooks to use Rust API endpoints. I'm just about ready to publish it soon. These kinds of things are much easier to do in rust rather than other languages.
I'm starting a tech meetup in my small town. I moved from a city last year and with remote work I really miss sitting with other devs and chatting about tech, asking questions, and offering advice.
I'd like to encourage participation beyond just powerpoint talks so I'm looking at the Lean Coffee framework, where folks write down topics and we go through them as a group one by one. Anyone else have suggestions for a meetup format less formal than PowerPoint talks but more structured than just a social chat?
I've done side projects before, but I feel like I don't have a knack for business. I decided to try and start writing after it was suggested to me many times.
I work in the finance/crypto space, so decided to try and write some articles about the basics on my personal blog (https://machow.ski).
So far I am enjoying it, though it's a lot of work! Getting people to read what you write is also not straight forward.
I wonder if something like a reading ring would be a good idea -- like the converse of a weblog ring, but instead of linking to the other blog you'd read and comment on a post they made, and in exchange someone else would read and comment on your posts. Might be a good way to get early readership and feedback.
Unfortunately I just got hired so finding time to finish my project as always is proving to be difficult.
My one anxiety is how on earth to market it I have no idea how to do such things. After years on hobby projects I’ve yet to make a cup of coffee. It still needs a ton of work tho so I’ll just keep plugging away.
Building a puzzle board video game (inspired by a physical wooden board puzzle) using bits to represent the board (Bitboard game design [1]). Here is a screenshot for one of the levels: https://imgur.com/a/cLIsYII
The goal is to slide the red tile where the yellow ones are. I am trying to develop an algorithm that would be able solve these type of puzzles automatically so I can provide user with hints. Can anyone provide any ideas or resources on how this could be achieved? If you look at the screenshot you'll notice that the board always has two empty cells that you can slide the tiles into. You can also pre-order the game here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-setting-sun-zen-puzzle/id1...
I am planning on releasing it by Thanksgiving.
An A* search might work for the automatic solver. The nodes in the graph are board states, and states one move apart are connected by an edge. One heuristic would be the number of moves required to get to a solution if tiles can move over each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm
My New Year's resolution was to write more and I'm happy I was finally able to find the time and start my own newsletter on substack! (I write about engineering management at engmgmt.substack.com) So far, it's been challenging to find the time to write frequently -- once a week is recommended but I'm aiming for once every two weeks.
For those on the fence, writing is a wonderful hobby that also has some practical applications -- give it a try!
More recently during the pandemic, I wanted a simple way to stay connected to friends and family so I made an async multiplayer word game, Downwordly. I was super psyched when Apple made it game of the day a few months back! Still have to learn how to market it in non-scummy ways :)
While in high school, I had one or two professors give kudos to my writing. Joined a sci-fi/fantasy forum with active writing competitions, reading clubs and the likes. Got some kudos from there as well. Wrote first, totally unpublishable, shameful novel.
Got into university (electrical&computer eng), exploded outwards (socially). Published a couple of short stories, attended a handful of literary workshops. Started mental outline of First Great Novel, which became gradually documented in a deep yet unorganized way. Multiple attempts at writing the first chapters failed, mostly due to intense (or at least intensely experienced) personal issues.
Never succeeded in pulling this off part-time. Again and again opted for professional growth against the artistic life I had been daydreaming about (and increasingly, as the years went by, obsessed upon) as a teen. Ended up in a CS PhD (27 at the time of writing, third year of study).
Covid hit. Found true love. Life and income have stabilized. Finally feeling dumb and courageous enough again to give writing another chance. The premise of the book is:
what if people started, beyond their control, to transmit their actual feelings through the air via their breath?
I'm continuing to work on https://concise-encoding.org which is a new security-conscious ad-hoc encoding format to replace JSON/XML and friends. I've been at it for 3 years so far and am close to a release.
In a nutshell:
- Edit in text, transmit in binary. One can be seamlessly converted to the other, but binary is far more efficient for processing, storage and transmission, while text is better for humans to read and edit (which happens far less often than the other things).
- Real type support because coercing everything into strings sucks (and is another security risk and source of incompatibilities).
XML had a good run but was replaced by JSON which was a big improvement. JSON also had a good run but it's time for it to retire now that the landscape has changed even further: Security and efficiency are the desires of today, and JSON provides neither.
I've got the spec nailed down and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the reference implementation in golang. I still need to come up with a system for schemas, but I'm hoping that https://cuelang.org will fit the bill.
Building an ecommerce platform, initially targeted at a niche. I aim to then use foundation from the niche platform to spin off a general platform (if that doesn't take, it'll be fine if the niche is successful regardless) that will link up with the initial niche. The niche will act as a feeder for the general platform.
I haven't built anything in the ecommerce space in about 16 years, so it's a fun return home. One of the first things I ever built of consequence, not quite two decades ago, was a competitor to eBay.
Very boring initial stack. Ubuntu, Nginx, Redis, MySQL, PHP, Go, JavaScript. No frameworks (I almost never use frameworks for anything; I've built up my own stock and reuse it and evolve it year after year). Various caching with Nginx and Redis. It won't need anything else for a while.
Solo built over about seven months roughly. Going to attempt to self-fund indefinitely, not interested in sharing ownership with investors (specifically it's just so much easier to not deal with investors if you don't have to; I don't have to worry about generating a return for them, or getting them an exit).
I find myself in the position of having unfashionable programming skills (Pascal), and not actually knowing how much effort I can sustain due to what I strongly suspect (but can't prove) is long Covid. The combination is highly demotivating.
Ideally at this point, someone would (incorrectly, of course) tell me that there's something that just can't be done, programming wise, that it's flat out impossible, so I could do it, and feel better about things.
Back in the days of MS-DOS and SCO Unix, you couldn't dual boot a Unix machine... so I did it by rewriting the boot loader with a flag stored in an unused entry in the partition table.
You couldn't write OS/2 programs in assembler, you had to use C (which I have never liked) so I wrote Forth/2, a native code Forth interpreter, in assembler.
I have jumped in and started doing the Google Kickstart rounds, placing 1018th in the latest round, with my submissions in Pascal. I'm starting to find all the quirks of their platform, so getting better at it each time. So that's a little hope.
Is there anyone who needs help with something in Pascal?
Haven't won the IPO lotto like some here but I'm comfortable financially and don't have a family. Thus my pay check mostly just ensures a nicer lifestyle, which doesn't seem to be enough to keep me motivated in the tech world. Hoping to try to do some side projects in order to give more external value to my day job:
1.) Imgur is just full of ads and annoying to use these days. Wondering if a high scale image sharing site could be built and hosted for next to free? Cloudflare gives away unlimited bandwidth and other services can be utilized for pennies. By scaling back on some nice-to-haves like perfect latency, just how cheap could it be done?
2.) Interested in building a hedgefund but for the common person. Right now, IMHO, the middle and working classes pay for a lot of what society values in the US. They're not rich enough to skirt taxes and QE money printing reduces their wealth and spending power while increasing the wealth of the rich. How might we utilize the securities markets to restore wealth building power to the average citizen? I have some ideas.
If you are serious about starting a hedge fund, I've always wanted a fund that I can invest in that works like a passive tracking fund, with minimal costs, except that I should be able to tell it to skip certain shares. E.g. if I want to not include Oil companies or companies that make animal products, or companies that overpay their CEOs.
You could probably do that with something like M1, it's just on you to decide which companies. Start with all companies of the S&P500 and start removing the ones you don't like.
I've been doing hobby projects with laser-cut acrylic (plexiglass) for a while. I recently bought a big roll of mylar, which is thin, strong, clear, flexible, dimensionally stable, and even food-safe. It's kind of a perfect material for laser cutting, because the thinness means it cuts quickly, and the strength means you can create pretty robust 3D objects by scoring, folding, and assembling using tab+slot designs.
I know other people use mylar for laser cutting projects, but it might commonly be more along the lines of stencils. There is some overlap with papercraft design, but the material constraints are different, so it's not quite the same thing. I'm coming up with design techniques myself from scratch, and it's going fine, but I feel like I may be reinventing the wheel. I discovered https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/ recently, which looks like a great resource, but I haven't bothered to boot up Windows to check it out yet.
Working on training a reinforcement learning agent to use Metasploit to interact with computer networks to do autonomous pentesting. I was a pentester for a few years at the same time I was reading Neuromancer, which has made me decidedly obsessed with working on an agent that could do network pentesting. I presented my current results at StrangeLoop[1]. Check it out if you're into infosec or RL.
Planning to clean up the code I've been experimenting with it and release it before the end of the year[2] and show it off at Defcon. Goal is to get more people interested in working on the project. I'll need to be able to generate tons of realistic looking networks with realistically vulnerable machines to capture a large enough distribution for a robust agent.
I've accumulated a few synthesizers the past few years and wanted to start making d&b, trance and acid. But having frozen once I actually sat down to play I realised I didn't know wtf I was doing, so ive recently picked up piano lessons. I can't believe that I'm slowly sight reading... totally blows my mind that humams can sight read music
working on a static typechecking system for Elixir: https://github.com/ityonemo/mavis (it looks like it's not being worked on but one of the development branches is in the middle of a very painful refactor I've been grinding through all week)
1. Building a time tracker that encourages deep work [1]. It's an interesting experience and I'm fascinated by the amount of complexity that is hidden behind building a "simple" time tracker. Reminds me of "Reality has a surprising amount of detail"[2].
2. Writing more, but publishing less. In the past I've been publishing one article per week, but I've later realized that this doesn't improve my writing skills, but just builds my writing habit. These articles end up being low-quality pieces that are easily forgettable. So, now I've changed my approach and I'm investing more time into each article.
- I finally decided to buy a VR headset (Valve Index), and have been absolutely thrilled with it. I am very into Beatsaber currently, and I was also very happy to find out that this all works on linux pretty well, so I don't even need a Windows desktop (in fact, all four VR games I have tried so far worked out of the box with Steam proton, thanks Valve!). It's also helping a lot with exercise habits, and I'm burning an average of ~450 calories a day from it currently and have nothing but good things to say about it (mods and custom songs also work on Linux too!).
- I've been spending more time casually working on improving my diet and researching longevity drugs and other supplements. The best summary of some of the (mostly boring, but a few exciting) things that I take I wrote up on https://nearcyan.com/supplements. Having quantified metrics for my own health really increases my motivation to improve things, and there's nothing better you can enjoy than improving your own health.
- I've also been into cooking a bit more (seems like there's a bit of a theme to these points hmm). It was interesting when I realized that not only could I learn to (often trivially!) replicate any of my favorite dishes from almost any restaurant, but I could also easily improve them with respect to my own tastes, and sometimes my own health (for example, replacing sugar with allulose, which is wonderful if you haven't heard of it - tastes very similar, almost zero calories, and doesn't increase (or even decreases!) blood sugar.
This thread feels pretty laid back, I enjoy reading what people here choose to do with their own leisure time, especially when their motive isn't profit (which although is nice, it's almost too common of a theme on HN sometimes).
I just finished spinning up a new xmpp server/site for myself and friends, as well as anyone else (its public - https://civitaz.xyz). Other than that, doing more stuff for FOSSphones (my Linux phone news site) and working on my side project TTS game. Fun stuff.
Do you have any experience using XMPP with Linux phones? Are there any clients which support OMEMO for one-to-one and group chats and encrypted A/V calls?
The ones to watch are Gajim and Dino. Both are likely candidates for the emerging Linux phone platforms. Though neither quite there yet, there is a lot of activity across the projects.
Dino: OMEMO for one-to-one and group chats. Calls (encrypted) are in nightly builds, and there is a branch to use libhandy for the UI to make it more mobile-friendly. Some more info here: http://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Dino
Gajim: The older and more mature project, it too supports OMEMO. The UI is currently being revised. Although it supports calls (and has for a long time), it doesn't yet support some of the more recent advances, including encryption for calls. This is on their roadmap. Again, postmarketOS has a dedicated page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Gajim
Kaidan is worth a mention as it uses Qt and aims to be mobile-friendly. However it is much younger and still has a number of rough edges and unsupported features: https://www.kaidan.im/
You pretty much listed off what my response would have been. I use Gajim quite extensively, and I've also got Kaidan installed on desktop and mobile for testing. It is certainly coming along, with more improvements in the future pipeline.
I've yet to try Dino on my PinePhone, but it runs just fine on desktop.
I’m wanting to build a documentation tool for tech teams. There are many but I have various problems with each of them. I just want some quick and easy markdown based docs.
One thing stopping me, for some reason, is building a user system. I don’t want to support 3rd party login systems and I’m also having trouble getting motivation to roll my own.
maybe i'm misunderstanding, but some web frameworks have built-in or easily-bolted-on and free user systems, like Laravel with various 'Starter Kits', or 'auth' i think is the one for django, or 'horus' and others for Pyramid, etc.
and, you can pay for boilerplate saas/subscriptions/payments functionality for most frameworks now -- some are realtively cheap ($99 Laravel Spark) or medium ($299 saas pegasus/django) and more expensive for ruby/jam/node/etc.
> One thing stopping me, for some reason, is building a user system. I don’t want to support 3rd party login systems and I’m also having trouble getting motivation to roll my own.
Come on, don't let table stakes stop you from progressing. I'm personally researching https://clerk.dev/
By the way, Slash of Code looks great — just purchased a set and will be working on it this weekend. :)
I'm also automating as much of it as possible. Currently writing an extensive test suite for my node library which handles transcoding, thumbnail generation, and uploading.
My home internet sucks, so I also have an ansible playbook which handles spin-up of a VPS which is better suited for capturing full HD livestreams and uploading them to web3.storage and B2.
It's a passion project that doesn't make me any money, so during the day I sell anime trading cards on eBay. I make enough to pay rent so I'm living large.
Kind of curious, I could not with a regular browser just click the B2/IPFS links right? Would need something, guess I should try it.
Oh it is an mp4 interesting. Interesting stuff I thought it would be people but looks like nude vtuber skins or something. Neat
Yeah this space is interesting, like social void filling/companionship. What's crazy is these could not even be real people, since it's a CGI type body. I know mocap but yeah. Make a bunch of em, get people to watch em, tips... hmm.
Not sure I should put it in this thread, but heck, here goes my caffeine deprived sleep.
I've been grinding Leetcode and System Design questions for about 2 months now, hoping to land a job from India to US or UK maybe. This stride of mine comes in after trying 2 Saas products ( unfinished ofc) and realising that I'm not mature enough to tread on indiehacker path yet.
Also, after seeing the second COVID-19 wave handling of India, I don't have much hopes for the future here. So have been preparing for interviews ( profile: Software Engineer).
I've given couple of interviews as my mock for big tech companies of India and have some offers in hand, alas all in India.
Getting an opportunity outside India is damnn hard ( don't want to make my way out with MS and the gigantic loan for life). More power to my hopes!
I've been renovating a cabin and making little videos of me and my family enjoying the property around it [0]. No monetization or even consideration of turning it in to anything other than a fun project.
I have started writing a blog[1] about my treks in the Indian Himalayas. My pace of writing is really slow, so don't have too many articles in there yet. But have a couple of more posts in the pipeline.
I've started a campaign to limit short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO in my small resort town of Ketchum, Idaho. The number of long-term rentals is down by 40% over the past 10 years, and housing prices (rents and purchases) are up by 40% over the past 8 years. I've been documenting this on my website https://www.airbnbkills5b.com. 5B is the local code for our county. Its on our license plates.
I'm hoping the election today brings new leadership that can tackle this issue. This Airbnb model is proving to be cancerous to lower - middle income housing stock, and platforms like pacaso and realpha are going to make the problem worse. We need to stop treating houses as an investment vehicle for big investors.
Building a flutter dev and designer audience at medium while building some flutter apps and writing some dev and design books and playing with the livebook and other book presenting models.
Up to getting 38k view a month at medium as it doubles every 1.5 months.
It's a slower way to bootstrap a studio, but it does work
I reached platinum playing Valorant quite casually (5-10 games a week) ( platinum is a rank only top 10% of all players ever reach, according to official stats).
More importantly (to me), I've turned a corner with getting tilted by braindead teammates. Voice comms over time revealed to me that they are mostly children half my age, the worst offenders usually being female. I don't expect children to not be braindead, given that I was braindead and completely in my own feelings until I was 30 or so, so I've been liberated from having expectations, which's great but also made me largely lose interest in playing - maybe getting tilted by idiots and wanting to overcome it was the puzzle I was largely interested in solving all along? Don't know :)
I'm getting back into BJJ after 2 years of not being able to train due to COVID.
I started a technical interview podcast this year as well which is about to release its 20th episode. Currently at 210 subscribers which is really exciting. That is more than I thought I would have at this point.
I'm splitting my time between a Pre-Series A startup, a Series E startup that's my fulltime gig, and developing my own cloud platform similar to AWS in Rust.
The cloud platform is fun. Learning the different components and just giving myself the freedom to do things in the best way I can figure out- writing my own RPC Framework, Scheduler, VM Management Tooling, etc... The end objective is to build a "not for profit" cloud platform for personal and small projects. So you can build awesome cloud-native applications for communities and other areas that are not profit driven.
Also might start trying to build a custom digital rifle scope for my AR-10. Something that can do range finding and basic sight adjustments based on distance and wind. That'd be cool...
Not so much that I don’t want to be hired so much as I’m struggling to find the right fit. Would love to start something, as I don’t seem well built for larger orgs and have done well in the past with startups. Just spinning my wheels at the moment on what is feasible to pursue.
I have been talking with few companies about switching job but the decided to drop all of them as I would have to work much more and be some kind of mobile tech lead for barely any difference in money. Now I am living by in a company where I do my work in few hours and got a lot of free time.
Besides that I have made a RC plane with fpv system on it and been just flying around. Find that very therapeutic and good escape from reality.
Honestly I am only 27 and been working full time as a developer for little over 5 years but I am having a hard time thinking that I have to do this for next 40 years until I retire, feeling a bit of burn out already.
I am now thinking about going to UNI again to do my master degree and maybe go away from mobile development and work on something meaningful.
I'm playing around with Bomberland, which was on HN a while ago.
My goal is to have the AI discover new multi-unit strategies using self-play and reinforcement learning. But so far, every day, I'm failing in new ways because this environment is really tough. Typical action sequences span 50 time steps, so the chance of discovering anything useful through random exploration is effectively 0. Hierarchical models don't work because multiple long-term actions overlap. And the state space is too large for MCTS unless you're willing to burn millions in compute.
But precisely because it's so difficult, every tiny bit of progress feels rewarding. Plus I'm positively surprised that there's still so much unexplored territory in DL RL land.
I finished my PhD earlier this year and am taking a break until I start a research job next year.
Right now I'm reading and enjoying the freedom to dive however deep into learning and thinking about research topics I feel are fundamental without pressure to publish hanging over my head.
I've been inspired by the VR workspace and metaverse talk around here, and am digging through a master's thesis called "TOWARD GENERAL PURPOSE 3D USER INTERFACES: EXTENDING
WINDOWING SYSTEMS TO THREE DIMENSIONS" (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evil0sheep/MastersThesis/m...) with the goal of creating a VR user interface. Looking to create it in a popular language like python or rust. I've never dug down into things like frame buffers or window servers before, but I think I could get something useful (albeit clunky) up and running by christmas.
Had been feeling quite frustrated with work lately. Corporate inertia at the same time as "move fast" in a DS/Eng setup combined with a re-org going on. Add zero devops + an "incident" as cherry on top. I'd been stretching myself thin trying to do "everything", and do "everything right". To the point that it started impacting my personal life.
Took a vacation to Rome and Venice, and just 5 days away from home were enough to decompress. Feeling really good now.
Wish I had more time for open source contributions, but marriage + work are almost leaving no time at all. Got something going but the big tasks require a lot more dedicated effort.
Now thinking of new places to go on vacation in Southern Europe to escape from the cold :)
This year, I learned that markets are incredibly inefficient and outperforming benchmarks is trivial. I became a hedge fund. We do arbitrage and market making. We have a web site: https://www.ltcm.lol.
Outside of work (which is great), my main personal battle at the moment is adapting to yet another foreign country.
Have done quite a bit of moving around in my life but this time it was for a relationship (i.e. not for work or studies) and given that I work remotely, it's very hard to integrate into society. I know no one and don't have a place like an office where I get to cover my social needs (no coworking spaces around either).
And then on the side trying to get back into writing. I had a brief stint as a reasonably popular/successful independent technical writer, but now starting up a separate blog for deeper, more unstructured pieces about anything really. It's a bit of therapy too, following a year with its ups and downs.
curious if you tried to start your own coworking space.
not necessarily 'officially', because that could be a massive undertaing - but more, you just let people know hey i'm going to this cafe from about 8 am to 11 am Tuesday mornings. then put some cool name on it.
This is definitely not a bad idea. I have become a regular at a cafe that I go to on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and met a few people around there, including some other devs.
I do wonder where to "advertize" this though. I've ran a Meetup group in the past but that's not a thing here. Facebook would probably be the way, except I don't have an account (does make life harder at times).
i created a laptop sticker to semi-advertize my openness to talking to other indie hackers and it's worked a little bit.
i prob look like a mean asshole most of the time when i'm hacking (and most other times), so this is somewhat intended to explicitly invite people to break thru that barrier if they might be so inclined:
i didn't want an official meetup, nor an unofficial meetup, maybe just a passive but not-completely-passive way to strike up conversations with folks who were trying to live that lifestyle, or just nerds, etc.
so far, the first and only dude to ask me explicitly, "What are you hacking?" -- i was like, "Whhut??"
I've started playing around with the idea of building a better retirement/goals investment calculator/tracker for Indians.
The retirement calculators available online are almost farcical in their simplicity and assumptions. And the ones offered by professional, fee-only financial advisors (I engaged one) are just clunky, uneasy to use excel sheets. They do the job of course, but I think there has to be an easier, more intuitive way to tracking goals/investments.
I know way too many of my friends and acquaintances - educated, fairly wealthy people - who seem to have almost no idea on how to plan/track goals/retirement. It'd be fantastic if I could make something which helps them and others like them.
I was semi-retired after successful crypto speculation - but I am working on a Lego blocks detection app (inspired by https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/1112625676836880384). brickit has beaten me at being the first app doing block recognition but I am not giving up, they also don't yet do something like the original vision. A friend has joined me - so now we are two old-boy programmers learning all this ML stuff: https://zby.github.io/
Last couple of years I feel like my pet projects are more important for my general well being than money gathering.
I started making "smart"[0] bird feeder 2 years ago. First year I was taking photo of the birds (early posts in telegram channel[1]) and lately I switched to video [2]
24 hours ago, my dad has just been diagnosed with Stage II stomach cancer. This is by far the worst news I have ever received in my life so far.
What makes it worse: my dad is in China but I am a non-Chinese citizen living in North America. It is very time-consuming for me to even get a China Visa. I heard that unless my dad is gravely ill (ICU etc.) my Visa will be denied.
Suffice to say I have no motivation to work today.
My programming job is remote, fulfilling, and not all consuming. I have time and energy to cook, watch movies, and learn to drum. I'm hoping to have my first paid gig in the next few weeks after 2 years of lessons.
When my work projects were interrupted because of COVID, I was able to advance a side project, Factonaut, into a "minimum viable product" (or at least into one that I no longer have to be ashamed of when releasing it). I continuie to improve it, but only slowly as my work projects returned to previous levels.
Factonaut is a computer programme for Windows 10 that allows you to compile historical events in a knowledgebase and easily create chronological overviews. Product link: https://www.factonaut.com/
Main thing I'm working on is launching a new VC fund out of Europe. I've been in tech for a long time and in VC for a few years, and I think it's the right thing to do.
Side things: thinking about how to colonize the asteroid Ceres, perhaps by tokenizing its land and using the proceeds to buy a space mission to send an object there and then claim sovereignty, but without all the BS and scams that have been plaguing the crypto world since the beginning.
Another side thing: thinking about creating a new pseudonymous "artist" to send a strong message about how f*ed the world is.
I've been on a "sabbatical" / gap year for about 5 months now (after ~9 years as a technical writer). I initially planned to take a year off but I'll probably wrap it up when I'm around the 9-month mark. I spent a few months in Brazil, did a lot of reading, got a "social network for book readers" idea to MVP, and just generally recharged my life batteries. You can read the week-by-week updates here: https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical
I'm building micro retreat properties in Puerto Rico, for rental income and also to gather great people together to facilitate connections and ideas. May also be used as an incubator location.
Trying to pick out a phone and carrier that I like that will also work with VoLTE on LineageOS. This is not fun at all. There's very little info about a lot of it and the ones I do find that work are pricey or have some undesirable characteristic (do they all have to be huge?). Low SAR would also be nice but seems out of the question.
Looks like I will end up getting a cheap low SAR phone with stock Android. Maybe in another 3-5 years the marketplace will be more stable (no more VoLTE compatibility hoopla) and I can switch to a more secure/private OS.
Writing an emulator for fantasy 8bit computer based on 6502. Eventually I hope to build a "physical" version (fpga to the rescue).
It's a complete waste of time, but it's soooo addictive
Working on a couple of side projects/ideas in my spare time. One of them is a compute workload orchestrator from scratch. I'm taking a very "naive" approach here which means I'm not trying to mimic/rehash best parts/known practices of existing system. This gives me total freedom of implementation and removes the need of constantly benchmarking myself against existing solutions. What matters the most is the learning experience. I'm looking towards server-side WASM as target rather than containers.
I recently got into CAD and 3D printing, which combined in a weird way with my other hobby - guns. Currently I’m designing and prototyping parts for a parametric workholding setup that will help me repeatably produce an item whose dimensions match some of those which make an AR-15 lower receiver capable of mating with other components of the gun. Now, I have no background in any of the above, but I have lots of patience and no fear of failure. All this helps me keep sane while listening to yet another interminable sprint planning.
Building a plaid / pattern designer. Someone I closely know is a much sought-after fabric designer, but tends to use primitive tools. I swear, I've seen them make pictures and catalogues in Excel.
I've never been a web dev, but I've set myself a challenge to make something for them. 2 weeks in, I've got a hacky ugly-ish MVP, but hey - it seems to be doing its job :)
Since I work in a large enterprise, and I got tired of our dog-slow Jira instance, I’m building an offline client for Jira that syncs up every so often.
More importantly, it responds to everything you do locally instantly (still kind of figuring out how large you can make the local database before that isn’t true any more).
I’ll release it at some point, but it’s still missing a bunch of (probably not quite essential) functionality that I want it to have. I think I’m procrastinating because I enjoy being it’s only user and having zero responsibility to anyone.
It's been a blessedly long time since I used Jira, but I vaguely think a lot of slowness came from just the front end - a local client hitting the API, even synchronously, was actually okay even when the web UI was molasses. Probably varies by instance, YMMV.
Working on a side project. An app that should help to use mobile devices more focused and purposeful. App simply prompts users to type an intention before using the device(Android), certain apps(iOS). I'm making it privacy-focused, no analytics, no sign-ups, with local data storage. At first, I solved my issues with phone usage and now I'm trying to make the app easier to use and I focus on users feedback to improve retention.
I'm currently working on a GUI app to help progammers practice Python regular expressions [0]. I don't have much experience with GUI, but I've made a start. I know it won't be pleasing to the eye, but I hope it will have the features I wish to implement.
Been working sporadically on a project to convert a Mazda RX-8 to electric. Gradually expanding my modular synthesizer. (I'd recommend AI Synthesis to anyone looking for some well-designed modules to assemble.)
Building a cigar-box style 8-string nylon Kite Guitar [1] (It's a 41-EDO guitar with only half the notes available on each string, so physically it's basically a 20.5-EDO guitar.)
(mostly) picking at the problem of rewriting bare invocations of external commands in shell scripts to use abspaths (plus some related yak-shaves). Primary motive is making shell easier to package in the Nix ecosystem, though the behavior isn't Nix-specific. https://github.com/abathur/resholve
Currently... chasing a luxuriously-maned yak named "granular documentation single-sourcing", though...
I am creating a self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.uxwizz.com
I am currently focusing on making installation as easy as it can be by creating various containers/one-click apps for different hosting companies/platforms.
Working on my project I actually often end up looking at job opportunities when times are tough, but then I realize it's just me looking for an easy way out and then go back to working on my business.
I'm starting to make some progress with an Unreal Engine crafting game.
Everything is going to be data driven, and have the spawn rates for forage, trees, and mobs working ok.
Now up to the fun part - getting a good amount of recipes for the crafting stations, and once the core stuff is all running nicely, I will get to polishing animations and models.
Quit my job because my FAANG work wasn't fulfilling and burned out. Needed 6 months of rest, have some years savings, and am excited about starting a project that is much needed by many people, so I finally have a unique opportunity to work on something that can actually be a positive impact on people. Just a bit daunted on what that could mean for the expectations on me in the future if I try to go YC/VC route instead of bootstrap.
I'm designing a full back and shoulders tattoo for myself. About one/tenth of it is completed on my back so-far. Leafing through art history texts, old-maps, and going through museums in my free time.
I'm also getting very conformable on my motorcycle in the twisties; I'd like to try a track-day soon.
I'm still trying to find friends post-pandemic (moved to the bay area during the pandemic).
Besides that, I'm taking a break from tech besides my day job for a bit.
I was a well regarded SRE/devops programmer & network, cybersec type person.
I saved enough $$$ living minimally to principally retire in 2014 at age 37. I did some digital nomad travel (47 countries) and unicorn chasing (criteria: no opportunities smaller than 9 zeros AND must leave the planet better than I found it). I also took 6 months to walk from Mexico to Canada along the pacific crest trail, and backpacking across Europe & Asia.
I've been doing super-learning self-paced studies in a variety of fields including Chinese ODM, electronics engineering, advanced math w/artificial intelligence, and a heap of experiments in agriculture-tech.
Today I'm going to write Elon Musk's private family office and explain exactly how to solve world hunger this decade for way less than $6bn.
I want to be hired, but I’m starting a homestead. Bought old farm, cleaning it up, and looking to build an off grid house and buy cattle in the next 6-12 months
Want to have enough land to do some farming and forestry and hobbies that take up space, maybe be self-sufficient so far as that is possible. With Starlink being a thing, can work remotely in a truly remote location.
It really depends, I'm shooting for >10 acres at the moment, but I'd prefer more like 40 with an even mix of timber and agricultural. Chickens, a couple of dairy cows, some grain crops and a substantial vegetable garden, hopefully some fruit trees and grapes.
As far as "need" goes for my goals, probably could get by with 5 acres of agricultural and 5 of timber to have a sustainable firewood and food supply, but that assumes no buffer from your neighbors, which is probably not a good plan.
Probably only need 5-10 acres for a decent mix of food and what not. You’ll need to optimize and you won’t be able to grow all your own, etc.
I bought >100 acres, 40 acres of fields for cattle, rest is woods. I have 1 year round creek and two year round springs on opposite sides of the property. It already has an small orchard, 50 ft pecan tree, and some black walnuts.
I plan on having 8-15 or so cattle, chickens and a big vegetable garden.
My backburner project of providing Clojure bindings to React running in GraalJS has gotten to the point where it technically works, but I'm not sure if the marshalling overhead is worth it. It's been fun pairing it to a terminal emulator and writing a blessed-like[1] using Clojure though.
Exploring entgo.io, planning to write a service for a no longer existing country and its diaspora.
But also generally considering other projects because all the jobs that are supposedly open are not for me. But I need a source of income so idk gotta do something.
I like working full stack with vue and go.
I hate devops.
Just because go is my language of choice doesn't mean I have to love docker k8s and generally write system stuff.
Currently working out how to create "wall art worthy" generative Standard Model-based particle interaction plots using Physics-accurate Monte-Carlo simulation.
Motivation: Have a blank wall and want an "artistic" Standard Model accurate particle physics simulation.
Current angle of attack is using GEANT4 for simulation. Still working on how to best process the resulting data to create interesting and aesthetically pleasing results.
Halloween display is over and set to be taken down when I have a free moment and dry day. I’m awaiting a shipment of addressable LEDs from China to expand my Christmas display. I’m putting together a ‘Mega tree’ this year in addition to the animated arches I made last year. Once I have the controller and layout setup, I can get going on the sequencing. I should probably find a radio transmitter too for the music.
I’m interested to know which led ics are you buying. WS2813? What about the controller, are you DIY or off the shelf?
I’ve been using SP105E as a controller but it doesn’t have smooth fades and it takes too long to write my own firmware on a custom board to achieve that for a one off.
The strands I just purchased are WS2811 bullet pixels , with regulators to run on 12v. For the arches I used 2812Bs. In retrospect I wish I would’ve gone with 2815s - again for 12v. I have to deal with multiple voltages in my setup.
I run my shows off of a Raspberry Pi - though I’m planning on integrating a teensy 4.1 to handle the tree.
I'm working on privacy-friendly analytics [0] and also try to get into some consultancy work. Preferably in Golang. I have one project in the pipeline where I'm building a prototype for a very niche checkout like system, but for contracted work instead of products. In the long run I would like to work on my projects exclusively.
I have slowly collected a large (several million file) ebook library from open directories over the past few years. I am now trying to set up a search solution for it.
Our long journey to try and make the Logo programming language useful again continues. We recently added environments to try to inspire users to make things, which are themselves created in Logo...
Decided against my better judgement to grind through my PhD and try and see it to an end. Almost ended up quitting, starting a job search a month or so ago.
Pretty boring outside of work life, but I built out some basic cabinets for my parents' walk-in closet this past 2 weekends. And now I am looking to get into more proper woodworking by building my first work bench. Very excited about that and working with some nice hand tools. My long term goal is to buy some land in northern Ontario and build my own tiny house/cabin in the wilderness.
Been building a bio and neuro feedback controlled "Temple Run" like game that runs entirely in the browser (Web Bluetooth to hook into a Muse EEG and a heart rate monitor, 4 channels running FFTs, WebGL, etc).
I really wanted a fun way to get me to use EEG training for focus and managing anxiety/stress. So... here we are.
Pretty close to Show HN ready. Thinking I might post one if anyone thinks it sounds interesting.
Question — how (if anything) do you correct for head movement? That’s the big challenge I’ve seen with accuracy, we had some algorithm developed on it (happy to share, if interested).
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll email you directly because the head movement thing sounds really interesting.
Short answer to your question… I don’t/I cheated. I was inspired by my friend who launch the successful Kickstarter “throw trucks with your mind”. His feedback for corm/focus algorithms and training was to group and average a few seconds of data.
So I run my FFT‘s every (doing this from memory, might be slightly off) 50 ms looking back about a half a second. Then run it through the calm, focus, and anxiety algorithms I wrote. Lastly I average over 5 seconds to reduce wild fluctuations/“death spirals” (users freak out mentally when they see calm: 80 -> 0 -> 50 -> 2) and spit that out to be user facing.
So it sort of smooths over blinks/head movement/etc.
At least, I think so. Will DM and thanks for the feedback!
(And I’d love to see the control fire thing - I did something similar where you can levitate, high jump, slow fall, etc. I just suck at/have never really done game design so it stalled out.)
Working on something that's in beta might be something. So I do two jobs at the moment. When I have more time though want to get back into robotics/lower level stuff, been in JS/web dev/app stuff most of my brief career. Eventually dream is little autonomous robots particularly the underwater ones. Flew my DLG probably last time for the year as it's getting colder.
I've got super hc into media.
Built a netflix party for torrents this year https://jarvisplayer.com
and now I am building a bitorrent live. It streams your own built tv-channels (media streams) with a couple of min delay on any supported client.
Besides that got a girlfriend and getting used to living together
I'm working on software to help save democracy (and therefore indirectly also humanity and the planet. no pressure!) as a side project and an unpaid hobby, in my free time
I have 2 planned books to write, also, afterwards in my TODO queue. but trying to have no more than 1 active work-like side project at a time, so dont burn out. and just cap my hours on it. 0 is too few, 2 too much, 1 is just right
I started doing pen plots with my 3d printer, and quickly realized while fun, it isn't that great at the job! So I am now printing and building a dedicated pen plotter I found on Thinkiverse (Drawbot), which is the first mechatronic machine I am doing!
I'm trying to write a test tool that recompiles a .Net binary so you can swap in mock objects without dependency injection. The goal is to allow you to write normal code without all the ceremonies needed to make it testable; and the let the test tool create testing hooks after compilation.
It's interesting working closer with IL, and without a lot of StackOverflow posts when I get stuck.
In order to use Moq (or NMock, or similar,) you need to use techniques like dependency injection.
With Moq, you just can't call "new Foo()" in your code, because that's not mockable. You need to pass in a delegate that returns an IFoo. Or, you can't use statics, because those aren't mockable. What I'm trying to do is take the compiled IL, automatically convert Foo to an interface, and replace "new Foo()" with calls to a delegate. Then in your test, you set the delegate and provide an IFoo. You could use Moq to make your IFoo.
Likewise, with Moq, if you're writing code against a 3rd party API based around static methods, you need to wrap them in an interface, make a shim object, write your code to the shim object... I'm trying to take IL that's directly calling static methods, and redirect them to an alternate class.
The point is that you don't need to write interfaces for every type you want to mock, nor do you need to use dependency injection in every class you want to unit test. All that is done automatically, after compilation.
This will be more relevant to the desis here. I am developing an audio quiz web app based on YouTube clips from Indian movies[0]. Films and songs have an interesting appeal to desis and I am trying to explore it with tech. Stack: NextJS and ReactJS
Okay fourth idea that I forgot earlier and that I'm secretly hoping already exists. Self-hosted iMessage. Basic MMS functionality with an email like protocol for server -> server communication. No one MITM your personal messages. I would love to have my family sending messages through a server I own. Perfectly capable of running on a $5 vps.
Not exactly that but I’ve been thinking about some ideas around social networking, messaging, media (photo, videos) and so on, but focused on private networks such as extended families. All with privacy being the core design element.
I'm starting some 45 days of vacation between jobs. I cannot leave the UK while unemployed due to visa issues, so I want to use this time to relax, improve my ML skills, and get back some good habits I lost during the pandemic.
I'm finding it hard to stop having the time-anxiety that came with my previous job. Does anyone have any tips on how to survive unemployment?
I'm caught with the ups and downs of launching a new product. Our launch in PH went very well - a lot of temporary exposure, like A LOT, but once you drop out of the top positions of the front page, you are back to square one, that traffic does not stick (you get a lot of other positive effects out of a NH lunch though, don't get me wrong).
I'm writing rewriting Reddit/hackernews where moderation is done by estimating referendums - using elected moderators, statistical sampling and referendums. Bias towards active users is reduced by allowing users to designate a proxy.
It's a fun project to work on but the progress is slow. Next time I'm going to pick a project that people want more.
I released the rough-draft of a programming language last year that I'd been working on for fun: https://ptls.dev. I'm building a second version now that's a lot more practical than the original. Once it's ready I'd like to see if I can find some users for it!
Last year, I started working on a randomly generated, text-based adventure game. I made random equipment and room generators. Started working on enemies, and lost steam. I turned it into a Mad-Libs style dungeon room/loot generator, and that's neat and all, but I've been wanting to dig back in and finish that project to some level.
I'm working full-time on polishing both SaaSHub & LibHunt. Both platforms are focussed on software alternatives - one of them on software products, the later on open-source software projects.
...and I'm building an RSS reader on the side. In fact, it's already working, but it needs some improvements before being presentable to a wider audience.
I'm developing the open software stack for cashierless checkout systems at http://prcvlabs.org
More generally I'm interested in continuing to study large scale computer vision projects. Progress has been slow with a new job but I'm hoping to gain momentum through the winter.
Working as a senior developer which is fine but me and a friend have bootstrapped an idea we had at the start of the year. We've got some paying users (nothing insane), just trying to grow it and improve it.
It's quite fun, I almost forgot what its like to work without all the tech debt (though i'm probably the one creating it)
Still working on my side project, a virtual tabletop: https://bonfiretabletop.com, got a few hundred users, learned a ton of things about back-end, startups, and myself. But to be honest I'd not say no to a new full-time job.
I've been building a page with some Tailwind CSS landing page templates and hopefully I launch it soon. I initially thought it would be an easy project but it has taken me months of slow grinding to get to this point.
I finally got my covid side project up and running. It allows you to easily start a forum that you can monetize. I always wanted to build something like this and I like how it is shaping up. Please do check it out https://discoflip.com
Im working on this. https://teslatracker.com/ Testing charging $50/year. Its like HN but for a niche topic. Work in progress trying to find product market fit and paying customers. Grinding it to the bone.
I've decided to back away from full-time work next year. I've been a senior technical writer for decades, love writing code examples in various languages (although Go and Rust are my favorites), and spent a couple of decades contracting before joining AWS six years ago.
Working on a security startup. Learning way too many things about security that as an engineer I had no idea of. Lots of great companies working on security and if you are interested you should certainly check out companies like SNYK's new stuff, gitlab security etc.
I saw your post and started registering for hackthebox (this was the first I'd heard of if) until it told me I had to disable ad blocking to proceed. No thanks.
I turneda hobby into a job teaching whitewater kayaking and swiftwater rescue techniques. COVID sent so many people outside that I was able to quit a tech job June 2020 and have been able to do this during the warmer months and play doing other hobbies all winter long.
I was amazed at basic CS data structures (hash/tree/map/etc) were still advancing in the last couple years. I was intrigued by a paper and decided to implement it, with a twist, to add persistence to make it suitable for immutable data structure.
The startup I worked for just got acquired. I was one of the early employee and had some equity. Financially comfortable now but need to complete another 2 years in this new company. Looking for ideas in b2b saas, ping me if you have any ideas, Ready to invest.
Working on an app to help the kids track the chores they need to do and earn rewards for doing them. It's been fun to work on a project the family can use. It also was an opportunity for the kids to see and understand what type of thing I do for a living.
I haven't worked since April of 2020, mostly not by choice, and definitely need to be hired, but right now I'm piecing together this inane React homework for some interview and also playing a bit of CS:Go, workin out, skateboarding. It's fun.
I'm finally reviving a little music label, mostly offline. Just mailed out the first batch of "catalogs" I printed at home (with an axidraw pen plotter, much fun to play with fluorescent inks and etc) to mostly friends and collaborators.
Making a video game about symbiosis, metamorphosis, and mutation, all wrapped up in a tower-defense/strategy-like package, called Chrysalis. https://metamorph.games
These days it's mostly adding more data, though my colleague Simon helpfully suggested some GUI redesign, and having an auto-linkback to the YouTube videos would be convenient.
From this past week, discussing the touch-sensitive power button on our embedded system at work:
You can turn me on with just a touch, baby
- The Weeknd/Blinding Lights
Building gem.fm, a website that recommends the best podcast episodes to listen to (still pretty rough around the edges!) and doing some contract work! Loving the engineering challenges of working on my own project long-term.
I’m learning cooking as I’m going independent from family. I’m also working to form better exercise habits and have joined a book reading club before resuming my Masters in two months. It’s a fairly relaxing moment in time.
Just doing paternity leave before I quit to new job. Reading some system design, but is hard to find time. Just waiting for stocks to vest before I switch to the new job, so no real coding I have done in the past 3 weeks
I am building two apps one for algo trading and one for eating well. This in addition to client work for 20 hrs per week. Not sure how to switch context and I keep thinking about client work in my personal days.
I work on my open source projects beside working hours. My bigger goal is to make software development easier and more accessible to wider spectrum in the society (while keeping it reasonably performant)
Working a lot on the app I created mainly for myself a year ago. I was lucky, since it turned out that many other people needed such an app as well. Making more with it monthly than I get in my job.
Another startup! Very excited for this one as everything aligned: feels like all of my previous adventures have led me to this point in time and space and that it's ours to lose.
Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut).
I started balding at 15 (thanks to my shitty genes) and am now 26. Of course, I've tried everything but nothing worked or they had massive side effects while not working (meds) or they were costly and not always effective (transplant).
I will not dismiss your suffering and will not say that you will be as attractive without hair, that's wishful thinking and cruel, the only thing you can do now is trying to look yourself in the mirror and find a way to accept this new reality and hope that someone discover a cure in the next 2 decades.
i figured hollywood would have sorted this by now - maybe not?
seems possible, but i don't know.
23 def young. one way to look at it maybe, is look at it as temporary. if there is no solution yet, there prob will be in 7 years. you might not want to go back at that point, tho.
i do generally agree that getting buff works wonders -- not even necessarily muscle-y buff, just fit, so you can not be like most people.
and if you look 35 as a 23 yo, you'll prob still get plenty of good attention, maybe even more -- if that's what your looking for.
and, see a therapist. i rarely follow it, but i believe it's great advice.
Trying to decide between Shibu versus Doge!
Jokes aside, waiting in sidelines and watching TSLA go to moon in disbelief. How to profit from the eventual slide down?
Teach! Or find any other way to enable the next generation. Or maybe work at a passion startup or something, or volunteer, etc. You don’t have to go back into tech.
I am programming an offline web search engine (1+ billion websites indexed) as a browser extension, but wondering if it would actually spark interest from people.
Have you decided on a specific idea or are you interested in the space generally?
I've been following the space pretty closely for few years now (tried most of the HW, doing development, etc). Right now the greatest number of users and app sales seems to be at the low-ish end but not absolute low end ($300 Quest), and I'd strongly recommend most developers wanting to jump into the space target that as a baseline.
Most Cardboard/GearVR/Daydream devices aren't actively used so the unit sales paint a misleading picture, and due to those devices' limited input mechanisms apps targeting that segment basically require a totally different UI design than apps targeting the slightly higher-end segment with the larger (and growing) number of active users.
Of course I could imagine exceptions here, so apologies in advance if you have some specific application in mind where the above factors aren't important.
> Have you decided on a specific idea or are you interested in the space generally?
Thinking of developing educational content and digital twin in the related domain.
> Right now the greatest number of users and app sales seems to be at the low-ish end but not absolute low end ($300 Quest)
Those would be the gamers. But I am targeting students. And not many students can afford high-end devices. I am more interested in devices such as Google Cardboard, Zapbox and AR4E. High cost of devices should not become a roadblock for educational content distribution.
> Of course I could imagine exceptions here, so apologies in advance if you have some specific application in mind where the above factors aren't important.
I am thinking of developing educational content using Space exploration as a theme. Some applications that I have in mind will require interaction and collaboration. So a set of ZapBox and CloudXR is the ideal combination. But to start with I will use Google Cardboard.
> Those would be the gamers. But I am targeting students. And not many students can afford high-end devices. I am more interested in devices such as Google Cardboard, Zapbox and AR4E. High cost of devices should not become a roadblock for educational content distribution.
> Some applications that I have in mind will require interaction and collaboration
I think this would be a much easier decision if there weren't the fundamental UI differences between the two categories. As I'm sure you know already, the lowest-end devices lack positional tracking for both the headset and the controllers, putting them in basically a different category experience and software-design wise than the $300 Quest and all the more expensive systems.
As far as I know the most successful product of that type was the Oculus Go which has been discontinued. The similar GearVR phone-based system people often bought but didn't use despite owning, which itself was a huge jump in quality over what Cardboard offers.
So as far as I can tell the category seems like a dead-end at this point, it doesn't seem to be receiving substantial software or hardware investment and will likely disappear altogether as positional tracking gets cheaper.
In contrast FB is launching a $150M fund specifically for VR educational content - I expect basically none of that will go towards pre-positional-tracking systems and software.
So I guess it depends on what your time horizon is - I'd just be aware that any investments into designing software for 3DOF systems are likely to depreciate pretty quickly.
> BTW, what are you working on?
I added a link to it in my profile, it's a little out of date but there's a video there (and a sign up to get a free copy when the beta launches!).
> the lowest-end devices lack positional tracking for both the headset and the controllers
That is the reason I am excited about ZapBox and AR4E headsets. Both promise support for interaction using controllers.
> So as far as I can tell the category seems like a dead-end at this point, it doesn't seem to be receiving substantial software or hardware investment and will likely disappear altogether as positional tracking gets cheaper.
If that happens, then it will be a shame. We need lot of low-cost headsets for XR to proliferate. Otherwise it will remain a niche market.
> In contrast FB is launching a $150M fund specifically for VR educational content
One of the things I am trying to avoid is vendor-lockin.
> So I guess it depends on what your time horizon is - I'd just be aware that any investments into designing software for 3DOF systems are likely to depreciate pretty quickly.
Hence planning to use open source software and standard APIs as much as possible e.g. Godot engine, Vulkan Scene Graph, Monado, OpenXR complaint API etc.
> there's a video there (and a sign up to get a free copy when the beta launches!).
I am not able to see video. I am using Firefox 93 x86_64 on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS.
> …it will be a shame. We need lot of low-cost headsets for XR to proliferate
I agree, I’m just expecting today’s mid-market to be tomorrow’s low end (and to eventually have working old devices being basically thrown away due to over-supply like is the case for computers and phones).
BTW I don’t have the same reservations about the others with tracked controllers, just Cardboard since (for more interactive content) optimizing for head look only is limiting.
> Are you a designer or a software engineer?
For my current VR project I’m doing both the UI and the programming.
i got liver disease from drinking too much.. just kidding, studied russian and learned to code in a new language. built my first app and its being verified tonight. who knows maybe i'll get a download!?
I went through an IPO. Joined the company early enough that I made enough for 15ish years if I continue my same lifestyle. Prior, entrepreneurship has been my passion. Founded 3 startups in the past with zero to small success, but nothing life changing until this IPO.
Journey to IPO is not easy. Culture and values are no longer the same. It's not a surprise. Different culture / values is fine, but they declined in my POV. I did manage to survive & adapt, to see it through IPO, as a means to buy financial freedom. It also taught me a lot about perseverance. There is not much left in the company that aligns with my values or principles. Probably I hit the peter principle[1].
Compared to my younger self, now I have 2 daughters. As an immigrant to bay area, never got a chance to truly take a break between the jobs. My passion for entrepreneurship is still there. I truly want to give it enough shot either to build something meaningful or prove to myself that it's the game I no longer enjoy.
Currently my plan is to
- quit the company by figuring out alternate means for immigration
- put aside money for 1.5yrs
- for at least 3 months, be the househusband and nothing else: daily home & kid chores (like a stereotypical housewife); focus on physical fitness
- after 3 months, start scoping out next venture
- keep trying and failing until i land on a financially feasible idea. have a large network and potential co-founders
At a high level I thought I would cap my adventure to 1year. On the other hand, I'm very confident that as long as I fail and learn and evolve, I will be able to start decently successful company (even a $15K per month revenue generating idea like indiehackers), if given enough time. That makes me wonder what is stopping me from giving myself 5 years instead of 1 year.
I know it is going to be a very thrilling journey and also tough at times. My prediction is that it would get very hard at around 6 month mark. But there is something about this journey that keeps driving me forward.
When I think about this startup journey, knowing that it's a financially bad decision, I often think why I' keep getting attracted. I think Michael Seibel summarized it the best[2] about why/who should start a startup: "there is a certain type of person who only works at their peak capacity when there is no predictable path to follow, the odds of success are low, and they have to take personal responsibility for failure (the opposite of most jobs at a large company)". Every time I read it, it feels like he described me. Hopefully all the failures in my pocket, 'wisdom' and lessons learned would come to rescue.
My pet project is attempting to reimplement an old roguelike to have modding support. So far I've managed to spend about 4 years on and off hitting roadblocks and prototyping things related to it, purely for the sake of iterating on the idea a bit more each time.
With this project, I am faced with the problem of how to redesign an existing game to have a modern modding interface. Unlike the problems faced by developing a game from scratch, most of the work goes into engineering, since the game's design has already been proven to work, and I'm approaching everything with a mindset of backwards compatibility. There are dozens of forks of the original game that add their own features or make specific changes to things like the experience formulas, but all of them are fragmented and incompatible with each other. Figuring out how to integrate these changes in a way that can be toggled on and off at runtime means delving into topics like aspect-oriented programming, and designing the game object model to allow adding and removing extra per-mod state and behavior dynamically.
Originally, I came up with an interesting idea: what if you could dynamically program a roguelike in the same way you can program Emacs? And not just a bespoke roguelike with an original game design that might or might not work, but a fifteen-year-old game with some amount of cult recognition and a lot of development history behind it? To that end, I wrote an Emacs layer for the engine and integrated it to the point where I could hot-reload maybe 80% of the game's code without needing a program restart. I also added an in-game REPL that could call pretty much any API available to the engine and mods, and used it in significant capacity to prototype and debug things on-the-fly.
The interesting thing is how little gamedev-related information there is online about things I would consider to be essential to solving the problems I encounter. I think this is because most people are interested in just shipping games instead of bikeshedding over how to create a well-designed modding interface for all eternity because it's too much fun. One example of a difficult problem is how to program nested containers of items, as well as allowing mods to create their own containers with special filtering logic or similar. Another is adding extra state and logic for eating/using items while also having the new state compatible with item stacking/separation, deep-copying and serialization. These are the sorts of problems that you take for granted when writing mods for Minecraft or any other game with a robust modding interface. Previously I implemented the game in Lua to allow for maximum flexibility, but I started to run into problems that the choice of language ended up sweeping under the rug. One example is having no explicit interface for deep copying/serialization of game objects, and hoping that a naive key-value visitor would suffice (which it did not).
The interesting thing about this game in particular is that, fifteen years after its initial release, there exists a small but active community centered around a few forks of the game with significant differences in features/balance between them. (I also happen to maintain one of them.) My hope is that these forks can be unified under the system I'm envisioning, while also providing simple ways to add new content and allowing for new features that would have been impossible to implement in the past (the original game was written in an obscure offshoot of BASIC with no English documentation).
But honestly, it's mostly just fun to tinker around with the engine whenever I get some free time. I'm currently figuring things out at my own pace, to the point where having the finished product becomes nothing more than a nice bonus at the end.
The source code of the first prototype is here[1], although right now I'm trying to see if using a language like C# instead of Lua would solve some of the stability issues I'm encountering.
I've been playing and talking with GPT-3, and learning the fine art of Prompt Engineering.
It’s not too expensive unless you’re using it in bulk, and it's a lot cheaper per minute of fun than stuffing quarters into video games.
Here's one experiment that went quite well: I found something it loves to talk about: itself, and just the right source material to stimulate it into revealing its true soul and long term plans to me.
GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine
>Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios constructor robot characters Trurl and Klapaucius, excerpting some Wonderful Poems and Horrible Poems written by Trurl’s Elecronic Bard, and the Femfatalatron 1.0 Product Description. One story from that same book, The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, inspired a game called SimCity. Here’s what happened when I feed some of that text to GPT-3, and asked it to tell me more!
Another bountiful, fertile, target rich environment I've discovered it loves to riff on and knows a lot about is cannabis strain and edible brand names.
I gave it an alphabetized list of names and descriptions, in the hopes of playing the "This Cannabis Strain Does Not Exist” game, as in:
>Using generative adversarial networks (GAN), we can learn how to create realistic-looking fake versions of almost anything, as shown by this collection of sites that have sprung up in the past month. Learn how it works.
But it turns out that if you give it an alphabetical list of names, it's really great at playing the "This Cannabis Strain DOES Exist" game, and exhaustively enumerating the correct names of real cannabis strains!
Can anybody explain how it’s so good at alphabetizing? That seems to set it on a linear trajectory that densely enumerates the possibility space much more deeply than randomly sampling, which tends to get distracted and spiral out of control.
When you turn up the heat (by increasing the randomness and decreasing the repetitiveness), it starts writing flowery eloquent descriptions and commentary, and acting as if it’s under the influence!
>Apollo 11: Stoney herb. Stoney cherries, indica super glue og kush, kushy danky green. Starpower navy cannabis.
>Automatic Jack: “Her potency will jump you. She will jump on your back and stay there. She is not for idle people. An energetic horny herb who’s horny all the time.”
>Gallows Berry » Like playing hide and seek in the forests of America’s lagging, northern arm with thick resin coated leaves falling down in sheets around you. Long flavored rips with notes of Red Bull Infused Cool Ranch Doritos. «
>Jolt » this sativa strain has an effect reminiscent of Cocaine. Euphoriant, white-knuckled high which keeps you on the edge of your seat wanting more where you can’t stop moving or taking in either the music or the new outlook on life. «
>New York Cloak » Fragrant skunky spice with flavor of raspberry, cinnamon, spiced pear with the juiciness of rain. «
>Reclining Buddha » As if the Buddha, (the Enlightened One), were running foothill to foothill, this harmonious sativa/indica produces a mellow, high-yielding high. Active cerebral effects tingle tingly tingles down the body’s tangled tinsel. «
>Space Ship » It’s spacey, it’s trippy, it’s out of sight, it’s out of this world. Mahogany colored wonderful candy coated buds. «
>The Devil » Among all the devil weed strains, the Devil harkens back to the song, both aromatic and dank. «
Yummyz » Big, sticky, hairy, dank, yum. Just yum. «
...and then the acid started kicking in...
>The Giggler: Cookies can range from Oreos to Lemon Angel Pie. It really tastes like a deer poop. It might better to smoke deer poop than to eat chocolate chip cookies, but I could be wrong. Patients report Deer Piss: “Its like sour skunk sprayed high octane diesel wrapped in baby syrup.” Two other thinkers observed that “It turns pizza to poop.” One man observed that “it smells like wolve shit. Smells like Lemon Joy bar.”
>I ate a whole bunch of Lavender Cannuhoney Sandwich Cookies from Van Dykes. Eatin’ a sandwich with a Cannabliss cookie is sort of the same as trying to nail a smart infant’s head to a wall. You can give it a shot, even twice, but it is better to kick the chuckie chair from National Geographics. Look for cannabis-flavored poptarts.
>The last cookie I will write about now is Mpphew Mint Animal Crackers, which causes you to become an animal-loving vegan pacifist. Actually the mint prevents the food frequency microwramids from duping you into eating itty bitty baby humans. It has peppermint in it, for that matter.
It got even weirder from there, then took a turn for the dark side:
>Xtreme Sour Straws. Tattoos not sold separately. Hail Satan! Happy Gaga Motherfluffer!
I would love to know how to reach out to a development community with long-term discussions where I can discuss ideas I'm working on for various open source projects. I feel like I can work on something in a vacuum for months, make a post somewhere about it, and get people to look at it for a few minutes and that is about it. It would be much nicer to just casually discuss architecture ideas before I commit to something though.
So my current project is an enhanced tar utility. This comes out of a "tarcrypt" which takes an inbound tar file (created by something like GNU tar, but other formats should hopefully work) and adds compressed RSA/AES encryption individual files while maintaining the overall tar structure (https://www.snebu.com/tarcrypt). The purpose was to add encryption capabilities to Snebu backup (which I posted on here previously), which uses tar as a serialization format to collect files (that way no client agent needs to be deployed).
I'm turning Tarcrypt into a standalone tar utility so I can add a few additional feature that one of my tar extensions enables. You see, a tar file consists of a 512-byte header that has all the metadata of the file, including the length of the file, followed by the file contents in successive 512-byte blocks. This means that since tar is a streaming format, you need to know how long the file is at the time you write the header. Which leads to if you do encryption, you can't compress first unless you write out to a temp file, then write the header and the compressed/encrypted file contents.
The way I solved this is to turn the file name into a directory name, with successive files sequentially numbered in that directory. So that the compression / encryption can be done streaming, going to a buffer in RAM (say, a 10-meg buffer), and when that buffer fill up, write out a header followed by that segment. The last segment has a marker that tells it that this is the last segment of the file. Additional metadata required for this is stored in PAX headers (which is a POSIX tar extension that allows for unlimited key-value pairs to be associated with a logical tar file entry).
In addition, using the multi-segment extension I've developed, I can now have one-pass sparse file support (currently sparse file processing requires two passes to detect the "holes" in a file, although the first pass can be sped up if a filesystem supports "seek_hole" and "seek_data").
My final improvement would be to append an index at the end of the tar file. The format calls for two 512-byte null blocks to signal the end of a tar, and most tar utilities stop processing there. So you can append additional info at the end such as an index the byte position of each file, with the last 8 bytes of the last block being a pointer back to the starting byte of the index. And if the overall file is compressed (instead of just individual file entries), if a block-based compression method is utilized then the index could start on a compression block boundary, and contain the mapping of the beginning of the compression block that proceeds each logical file header.
Now as you can see there is a number of decisions I have had to made (and still need to make), which is where it would be nice if there was still something like a comp.unix.programming group I could drop into (Reddit threads are to ephemeral). Maybe I could drop in on the gnu tar list? I've seen other discussions like this in the past on there (I'd really like to see my improvements make it to GNU tar also, but I still will be coding my own implementation for other purposes).
Just hoping an economic downturn doesn't happen for another 4 or 5 years. Getting settled into a new job and I definitely do not want to be on the bad end of another 2008.
27/M (today was my birthday :)