Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
Instead of talking jobs, what is everyone up to otherwise? Any interesting going on in life or with your hobby project?
Unfinished and novel ideas are of course most interesting, so feel free to share anything you're thinking about!
874 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadBasically "between ideas" and desperately want to come up with something before I have to give up and get a job. It's not healthy to be idle too long.
Buy $500 worth of ether. Download metamask. Login to opensea. Buy a cheap NFT.
Look at it as an education budget.
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.
https://web3.foundation/
https://dci.mit.edu/decentralizedweb
https://berkeley-defi.github.io/f21
Find a DAO aligned with something you like. Join their discord and get engaged. It's really the wild west right now.
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.
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)
Dang deletes posts just for saying something simple like "yes" -- b/c apparently an upvote is supposed to serve that purpose.
but i suppose such rules are selectively enforced (and probably entails some bias, such as political view, etc.)
Nailing down on unique UI/UX is hard.
I love doing this work. (Electrical engineering, firmware design, cloud backend, etc.) I just really wish I went to school for the EE though.
[1] https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/FBeESNgs
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.
The next step is allaboutgermany.something, where you can have a template and change just some details regarding the city or land.
The simplest and "obvious" guides are often the most helpful, and hard to find.
I wish every city has a similar website with the most basic instructions.
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. :)
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.
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).
Avoiding dynamic memory allocation... in Go?
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.
Also really well documented.
Today’s sunset around Puget Sound: https://shademap.app/#47.89056,-122.66785,7z,1635813675213t
Seems like you've already performed most of the necessary calculations here.
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.
[0] https://github.com/rezich/Entity_Framework
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.
Really neat project by the way. It looks great! c:
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).