Ask HN: What are you hacking these holidays?

26 points by zakshay ↗ HN

49 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread
Zynq MiniZed http://zedboard.org/product/minized

My plan is to implement my own version of a neopixel driver to learn VHDL.

Ref:

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 37: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 8 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 36: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 7 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 35: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 6 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 34: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with MicroZed Part 5 https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 33: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays with the Zynq SoC https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 32: Driving Adafruit RGB NeoPixel LED arrays https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 31: Systems of Modules, Driving RGB NeoPixel LED arrays https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Adam-Taylor-s-...

Did you buy the Zync ZedBoard yourself? How much did it cost? What are the specs?
You can buy it via Avnet (US distributor) for $88.99 + $8 (or so) S/H. They sent me a promotion code THXNN6W for free shipping. It is an entry level Zynq processor (single ARM core, pretty decent FPGA capabilities). It runs linux well. Remarkable learning potential for $100!

https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k...

You can download the Xilinx IDE Vivado WebPack for free.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado-w...

Both Avnet and Xilinx require creating a (free) account.

Nothing new for me. Just trying to decouple some components from my side project from a year ago.

For those interested, this is a JS/React project.

The app is an open-source version of Alfred built on top of Electron/React -- https://github.com/vutran/dext

While it's very difficult at the moment to work on the app itself, I decided to just extract the search component to be reused elsewhere so I've started building Omnibar (https://github.com/vutran/omnibar).

Can't wait for Windows/Linux support!
To be honest, the very last thing I want to do when I'm on vacation is to code...

I'm a professional software engineer, I do it enough day to day.

I’m playing with some weird ideas I’ve had for Q-Learning, not sure they will work, but it’s time to play. I’m finihing up some satellite imagery stuff to go into my product https://hydrachain.io/ and I bought Id spend a bit more time reading Quantum Computing since Democratis because I’m finding it quite a challenging book and I love it
Adding rule-based sticky routing to the Traefik reverse proxy. The idea is to write rules to route all requests matching a certain URL, query string, or HTTP header to the same backend server.

This would allow for caching or synchronization in a distributed application to happen in memory on an app server instead of always going back to the database or Redis.

https://github.com/containous/traefik/pull/2613

Building a new programming language, Jaspr: https://github.com/ar-nelson/jaspr

It's not nearly done enough for its own HN post yet, but it's coming together slowly. Still working on the standard library and documentation.

I got tired of building side projects that never get used by anyone, so I'm taking a market first approach.

If anyone is interested in reading about Nutritional density to find out what foods have the highest nutrient count per calorie, check out: https://kale.world

I read it top to bottom and found it super interesting. I appreciate the normalization factor!

I'm chuckling a bit though. "Nutrients per calorie" is a fantastic metric, but then I got to wondering... "How much spinach is necessary to reach 200 cal?" http://www.caloriegallery.com/foods/calories-in-spinach.htm suggests that it'd be 870g! Almost 2lb! That's a lot of spinach to eat.

So is the ultimate goal to be able to put together daily meal plans that ensure you hit all your micro requirements?

Yup, that's exactly right. I'd like to build a tool that puts together meal plans that help people meet their nutrition goals. But, I thought I'd build up an audience first, to see if there's interest.

Yes 2 LBS of spinach is a lot. At costco they sell those 2.5 lb bags and their pretty big. But, keep in mind, if you boil it down in a big pot, 1 lb of spinach isn't so insurmountable, as the spinach becomes really small: best of all it only takes a minute of cooking.

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I am working on a web based successor to the Kid Pix painting program that I loved as a kid. I hope today's kids love it just as much!
This is a non-answer but in reality - not a damn thing.

Been working really hard lately so it’s time to recharge and read a couple books.

Trying to figure out how to market my side project. https://www.printpost.co

Any suggestions welcome.

Nice idea. I was thinking of doing the same before and calling it "Printstagram".
Maybe a Show HN post at least?
You could buy some Instagram ads or run some promotions (e.g. "post a picture with the hashtag #printpost for a chance to get it printed").
I'll be working on finishing off a small practice project for viewing cryptocurrency mentions vs price on reddit. http://bitreddit.com
Trying to see if there is a sports betting opportunity in NHL with the new rules generating more goals... newer bet on a sports event in my life until a week ago, so it looks fun...
I'll be launching my phishing simulation SaaS in a week or so: www.phishero.com
Not sure if it counts. I'm working on making public several hundreds (if not thousands) of photos of cell sites from around the world (but mostly in my home country of New Zealand). Using Caddy as a webserver. Pages will be in plain Markdown (which Caddy will render into HTML along with a reference to my homegrown CSS). Not sure yet where I'll host it but perhaps in a Hyper.io container or in a VPS I already have running for other sites. Photos will be hosted on Backblaze B2. Nice simple project that I've been putting off for years.
Picking away at Symfony 4, Ionic 3 and finishing up some Quickbooks integrations with my time tracking SaaS.
Our website promoting local short-term small businesses like popup shops and food trucks and "summer businesses" launches January 1.

Our first feature story is an article and podcast interview about the Christmas tree store popup business.

We are working on several feature stories about "summer businesses" that people like school teachers start and run during summer holiday months before going back to their "real" job in September.

I've been thinking about prototyping a Firebase clone that uses a relational database and SQL syntax. Instead of subscribing to "nodes" you would subscribe to queries. Anyone know if this exists already?
How would you (as the DB author) know when a query has updated results?
Something like this:

  subscribe ('SELECT * FROM tableA', callback)
On the initial subscription, 'callback' would be called once for each row in 'tableA', then again when a row is inserted or updated. It would be the same as Firebase in this respect.
No, you as the person writing this new database, not you as the user of the API.
Not OP but I would watch for mutations in the subscribed columns, then test the changed rows on the query's constraints and fire an event if it satisfies them.

I'm sure there is a more clever/efficient way of doing this though, and I can't wait to see how he/she implements it.

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Playing with C, flite 2.0 API (really easy) and Frotz. Hope I can create a TTS enabled z-code interpreter soon.
I'll be working on my Test Case automation service. It'll make play/record web testing a breeze.

https://swif.club/?s=hw

that landing page is pretty sparse on information, and the only next page is a sign up page. Spend the holidays organising your landing page(s)
Thanks for the actionable feedback!
Set up an ETH node. Maybe write a smart contract. Research mining altcoins, see if it would be profitable.