Ask HN: I was made redundant yesterday, and I want some coding ideas

How does one become redundant?

Were you in a position that wasn't a developer and that got automated?

Fun.... ok...

Make an asmjs implementation of https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/projects/13-4-bit-processor/134-v...

Complete with an old skool disasambler to code up the typed array in.

Also think up some method to populate the webpage with text using canvas and some way to call the mothership using Victors amazing.

Here's something that could be relatively easy (there may be a good library out there already, I haven't looked to hard for it though). Create a node.js module that takes as input the results of an SQL one-to-many join, along with a description of the key fields in each level, and outputs the results in a nested JSON object. So for an example, an output of a customer <= invoices <= invoice_detail would have an array of objects containing customer info, each which has an array of child objects one for each invoice, and the invoice objects have a child object array for each line item.

Would be nice if it was abstracted enough to work with any database driver, and also have bindings for the node Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL drivers.

Make a program that converts Prolog queries into CSS selectors. Then add a nice syntax so it can be used as a preprocessor.

Resurrect a beloved thing that was shut down. Google Reader, perhaps.

You know javascript and live in London, I wouldn't worry about it - you can get a new job easily.

Webauthn is pretty popular these days, and there’s little built in terms of ecosystem.

I’m sure there’s plenty of opporunities for modules. One silly example: I bet everyone in the world has uint64 for user ids... webauthn wants a byte array... good luck with that.

If you end up doing anything in the space please lmk, we want to highlight it!

Here's something I think ought to be more or less straightforward but don't yet know any of the relevant machine learning theory for and so I've been putting it off. I could find a variety of handy uses for it if implemented the way I'm imagining. If it exists already, I don't know how to search for it.

It should ideally be a simple/minimal-dependencies CLI program that can take a command and arguments for that command, go ahead and run the command with given arguments, and record those arguments in relation to each other. When called with any of the command arguments missing, it will run the command filling in the blanks with a prediction for the best values for the missing arguments, based on the historical usage patterns.

My example use case is that I currently manually run a terminal command to adjust my external monitor brightness to a comfortable level at various times of day, and I would love to have a simple cron task scheduled to have it auto adjust throughout the day based on time of day and possibly other variables I can retrieve such as ambient brightness or whatever else. The dumb version would just be a predefined lighting schedule hardcoded in cron, but I specifically want to continue making adjustments as needed based on comfort and have the automation trend towards optimum over time, minimizing the frequency that I need to adjust without replacing my option to do so temporarily. The ML part I don't have the education for yet and I've been putting it off, but I can imagine a lot of other use cases for something like this implemented in a very generic way. The way I first imagined this working, I'm not entirely sure any sophisticated algorithm is even necessary, it might be doable with some high school level math run against the stored data. I presume that with such a generic approach it won't perform impressively well right out of the gate but with an accumulation of training data can be coerced into remembering what the user wants/expects gradually. As I said, I'm not educated in machine learning but I suspect this should be straightforward to do at least a crude version of given some of the libraries available.

Somewhat off topic, though perhaps something for consideration...

Whichever job I had, I always considered it my prime objective to make my own position obsolete. In other words, I measured my personal success to whether or not I had made myself redundant.

At first glance, one might think it contradictory that - save one exception - I was never laid off, found it easy to navigate to (more) interesting projects, etc.

Have you considered looking for a freelance project? You'll get given the idea and get paid for it. Try messaging friends and people you've worked with for leads along with your story.

there is a failed kickstarter from five years ago[1] which imagined an alternative to the traditional spreadsheet software. I imagine it would be fun to work on building such a thing, and I already know it would be more usable than Excel etc for many situations.

e.g. the company I work for give me a credit card to use to buy fuel for my car, with a soft limit (i.e. nothing technical to stop me spending more, but they may revoke this privilege if I abuse it), and there is an additional discount which is not displayed at the pump or on the receipt. I track how many litres I purchase, along with the pump price at the time, and currently use Excel for this. But it's not really designed to show me how many litres I can still spend before the end of the month, based on recent fuel prices etc. I believe such a solution could help with this, but the dev that had this idea only wrote a UWP app, nothing cross platform or super fleshed out...

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/395431036/threads-a-mod...