Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?
The more I advance in my career, the more frequent are the phases when all novelty and excitement about software development, and tech in general, starts to fade away.
I'm looking for inspiration, so what's something really exciting that you're working on? (day job, hobby project, whatever...)
103 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadSo far, the switch from jQuery, thrills me.
I have already implemented the garden lights and the heat on off. I get temp and humidity data from the garden and i want to add some security features and implement a morning routine (warmup the espresso machine, start the heat, open the curtain)
The form factor was intended to allow for portability (it has a handle and I can carry it around with ease, and the Pi can run off of the battery when then AC supply is disconnected) and to have enough space to allow for positioning multiple cameras for binocular vision and multiple microphones for stereo "hearing", as well as room for the other random sensors. Oh, and I'm re-using the existing speakers for the audio out so I can work on integrating speech synthesis into the whole kit and kaboodle.
For the software, I'm looking at starting with a super-simple BDI interpreter for the basic "cognitive loop", using an RDF triplestore for semantic knowledge, neural network models where appropriate (object recognition for example), and then start trying to build up from there. Also looking at systems like SOAR, ACT-R, OpenCog, etc. for inspiration.
Of course most of the "heavy lifting" from a computational viewpoint will need to happen on a server somewhere, since a single Raspberry Pi can only do so much. So there's a corresponding server backend piece that will work in conjunction with the remote portion. For now it'll be a fairly low-end server that's physically here at home, but if/when I start needing to scale things up I'll probably switch to using cloud resources on AWS as needed.
All in all, the basic idea is to have an "AI bot" that is alert, observing, and (hopefully) learning all the time and that will learn more like a child learns, compared to the way we train ML models today. That's not to say that there might not be some batch mode training as part of this but I'm hoping to experiment mainly with learning modalities than can happen in real-time. There's no fully fleshed out theory that I'm working off of, but I plan to tinker with a variety of things - Hebbian Learning, Reinforcement Learning, etc. Maybe I'll learn something interesting, maybe not. But it should be fun in either case.
Creative writing releases psychic energy that activates machines / opens doors and all sorts of other things. It also exports .txt files.
Depending on what you write, you'll learn different sigils you can arrange into a circle that will activate when you're in danger. Writing a romance novel gets you different powers than a horror or sci-fi short story, for instance.
https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1459527876118814728
It's pretty weird, but I'm really proud of all that I've done myself this last year. Solo indie gamedev is a perilous, extremely stressful, maybe stupid career choice but I'm realizing a lifelong dream.
I also think I might be inventing/innovating a new genre of game so it's fun to maybe leave a mark that way too. I hope it'll squeeze some creative writing out of people they never would have written otherwise.
Because at this stage the startup has too much going on, this PaaS is very low overhead - so no Kubernetes complexity.
Think EC2/EBS/ELB at flat predictable rates.
It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.
"Radically freeing" is exactly how I'd imagine it too.
If you need any help at all on the non-technical aspects (logistics, fundraising, manufacturing/stock-keeping), please shoot us a message (email in bio). Not asking for anything in return, would just love to see something like this come to market.
So many creators overlook these aspects, and they're arguably more important than the technical specifics.
I'm sure it would reach the front page very quickly, and I'd love to buy one if only to support you!
[1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/cardkb-mini-keyboard
I'm currently exploring how AI/Natural Language Processing can automatically organize personal knowledge and notes by tagging and linking ideas / content together [0], removing the friction of organization to help you find new connections and ideas.
If you're interested in this domain, I'd love to talk to you!
[0]: https://github.com/Uzay-G/espial
I made a discord server in response (we mostly idle) to discuss knowledge management tooling
Awesome Knowledge Management https://discord.gg/XPNeDSQE2j
Would love to continue to chat about existing tools and new ideas in this space!
Then I’m building that into a platform where people can fork any query, modify, and publish with their own analysis in order to build a portfolio.
My first market is sports data. There are many aspiring analysts, and I want to 10x the number of people who do this work. And I think the best way to learn Analysis is SQL, and the best way to learn SQL is by building off other peoples queries (learn by example / exploration).
This is what OLAP-like engines are built for.
When you have these types of queries, the relational model ends up degenerating in a star schema with queries issuing a join for each data column on the first projection, and then a pass on that projection for aggregation, typically working on a time range that's relatively recent.
For these, native columnar stores are usually a better option. Things like Apache Pinot https://pinot.apache.org/ might be a better fit.
If you add a real-time requirement, it gets even more challenging, going into the realm of custom built query engines, such as those that back products as those built by Medallia or other customer experience companies.
It's a really interesting niche.
Since I have you here, what do you think about MADlib from Apache? Basic ML in SQL is really appealing - one of my objectives is to teach people analysis using SQL, and it'd be great to only need to develop that one skill (rather than "learn SQL and python"). https://madlib.apache.org/
https://youtube.com/channel/UCmoHCPYZviZ0iQ_t_j8cfaw
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
https://cuetorials.com
Live streaming their development has been super fun too https://twitch.tv/dr_verm
https://polygonjs.com/particles-music
And it's done with a visual node-based editor I'm working g on. Here is a tutorial of it in action.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2WfjN_pVGgj32-ZJc_VNaZ...
But ideas are cheap, a minimally viable product would be more impressive.
Think rss, but for my personal feeds.
Still mvp, lotsa bugs, but if anyone has similar problems -> https://fetcher.page
I'm still reading research papers to figure what's the best way to approach this problem. This is just the first step and I'll see what can be done regarding collecting data later on.
Reference: my dog has problems with his hips and likes to jump... Suddenly the pain kicks in.
Hope it helps
It’s been fun to work on, plus it’s a challenging technical problem: in order to scrape job posts for many companies, you need to make a very generic scraper since they all have different formats and you can’t rely on HTML structure.
[0] https://www.coolstartupjobs.com
Also got into 3D printing, using OpenScad for creating the models. It is almost magical when you can think of something that you want, but they don't make, yet you can make it yourself (different brackets for holding accessories on a bicycle, clips that holds a plexiglass screen in front of the TV to protect it, etc, things like that).
These are a couple of ideas of things that a technical mind can work on (woodworking and 3d printing both require some amount of precision and design). Keeps things interesting.
[1] https://www.webase.com
[0] - https://derw-lang.github.io/
Github - https://github.com/eeue56/derw
Announcement post - https://derw.substack.com/p/why-derw-an-elm-like-language-th...
It's pretty wild that it's possible to make an open source 3D MMORPG where everything is procedurally generated and combat is in real time. That's a combination of words that shouldn't work.