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Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

295 points by ForgotIdAgain ↗ HN
List of scenes that I am particularly fond of:

- Minecrat computer engineering: Culminated with this playable 3d simplified minecraft clone (CPU+GPU) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I

- Shader computing scene: More of a subculture of an already marvelous subculture, people are finding weird ways to compute with shader

https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/ Risc V emulator in a shader https://github.com/SCRN-VRC/SVM-Face-and-Object-Detection-Shader Object detection in a shader

- Cellular automata: people finding awesome patterns, some great project:

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-in-15-gliders/

- TAS/Speedrun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBK1sq1BQ2Q Insane game exploit which uses only player input in order to inject an elaborate rom hack with network functionality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9dTmzRAL_4 Another insane one which work by switching game (!!) during the run

- "Can it run Doom" Scene:

https://twitter.com/sylefeb/status/1258808333265514497 Run a doom map renderer on a FPGA. Not on a classic computer "emulated" by the fpga, the renderer is directly implemented in the fpga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hnQ1RKhbo Yes doom can run doom

So what are your technical gem?

315 comments

[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
kodah
Not really weird anymore as there's a lot of entry level and cloud-based components for people to get into it with. My scene is the localized automation scene; basically home automation but with no cloud connected products.
airbreather
I don't understand why this is not more of a thing.

I really don't like the idea of relying on offsite resources for automation, but it seems to be 99% of what goes on in home automation.

bdittmer
This. Every couple months I disconnect the internet and walk around the house verifying all my "smart" home automation products still work. Sometimes I'll make a second pass with homeassistant (or a service dependency, e.g. zigbee2mqtt) shutdown to make sure I can still physically use things (like a dimmer switch).
coreyp_1
I detest cloud-based components, and have built my entire network on HA/Zigbee devices. I have a few Z-wave (because the devices weren't available in Zigbee), but I hate them because they constantly need to be re-synced.

I wanted to add a Christmas light display this year (I bought all of the necessary individually-addressable LED strips last year), but I just haven't had time to work on it. One day...

stevenally
What’s your favorite home automation? I like the idea but can’t think of / find anything that really excites me.
kodah
Start like you'd tackle any ambiguous problem at work: collect data. Start pulling in data from something as simple as a smart thermostat. Then add sensors to each room to identify hot and cold spots. Balance your HVAC with smart vents next.

I tend to chain my home automation projects.

tenebrisalietum
Making Doom levels, but that's probably more artistic than technical, though knowing your way around the engine and editors is technical.
patorjk
The first book I ever bought in a computer store was Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus. Back in the mid-90's I saw it randomly while walking by the games section and thought it almost too good to be true. I ended up spending countless hours making my own levels. I was never any good though, and I definitely preferred playing what other people came up with. Every couple of years I'll go back and revisit some of those levels and see if there's anything new. It's definitely awesome that people have kept this scene alive.
bckr
I'm in the deep learning music scene, which is due for its stable diffusion moment in the next year or two. The (primarily) timbre transfer system called RAVE is where I'm starting, and my contribution is to optimize the system to improve training time.

[] https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE/tree/master/rave

celim307
I can definitely see Spotify taking something like this and generating songs based on your likes/seeds, especially for edm music.
lucasgonze
I was hunting around for such a scene. Thanks for getting me connected.
kwertyops
Do you know of any online community gathering places for this scene? Subreddit? Discord server?
adzm
This is some really interesting work. Do you happen to have any other good links to see state of the art kind of stuff here? Most of what I happen across seems to be based on MIDI patterns rather than audio.
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CrypticShift
This is what I'm hoping for :

1- A lot of options to influence/edit the generated output. What AUTOMATIC1111 is building for Stable Diffusion is the right direction (open extensions and manoeuvrability). I hope harmonai will get the same treatment.

2- Smaller minimum training requirements and simple retraining workflows. AudioLM is outstanding in this regard (but fails the first point)

3- Prod-level quality for end-user tools : Style/tone transfer and cloning plugins like DDSP-VST, mawf and yours (RAVE) sounds at best like DALLE-1 level quality. do you think we could make a DALLE-2 kind of jump soon?

And we do indeed lack public gathering places for this scene ! (or do we ?)

Here is a personal list I made of some AI Music creation tools: https://rentry.co/Music-Creation-AI-Tools

Merci IRCAM !

chc4
- Programming Language dev: I think compilers and VM runtimes are neat, and like talking to people in the space on twitter or reading new papers that come out about it. The /r/ProgrammingLanguage discord server is a great place to hang out, with lots of interesting and competent people working on sideprojects simply because they like the topic.

- Urbit: I got into Urbit years ago, and still think it's really interesting as a Lisp-machine-alt-timeline-esque project. The goal is basically trying to think how the world would look if your entire OS was built on a runtime that uses cons cells and bignums everywhere for values, with a single transparently persistent state a la KeyKOS, and everything has typed RPC and P2P apps were the default.

trh0awayman
Do you actually use Urbit? I just tried it recently and found it insanely buggy and slow (the most basic things didn't work, attempting to join certain chatrooms hung forever, etc.) Wondering what I did wrong or if it's that way for everyone
Karrot_Kream
Hm I just started playing around with it recently and had no trouble joining groups and downloading apps. I'm only running a comet and not a planet.
chc4
I do use it. I'm in a few different chatrooms with friends that have decent traffic, including the general "hoon programming help" groups that have higher traffic.

It is pretty slow, both because it's a decentralized chat and thus things are hosted on normal peoples' home connections across the world, and also just because Urbit the actual binary isn't very well optimized. It's good enough for me, and I don't really expect it to be as good as Discord. I haven't actually hit any bugs in quite a while, actually.

trh0awayman
Just to update my comment so that readers don't get the wrong idea: I went back and tested it again today. It's a lot faster than when I tried it. I still have things like "Fetching user count..." for groups that never seems to update, though.
humanizersequel
That almost certainly has to do with the user who hosts the group not having their Urbit running when you tried to join.

Also, just to have it in this thread, most of the slowness when using Urbit has to do with poor frontend optimization. The network itself is actually quite snappy.

meadhbh-hamrick
Meh. Urbit. That's not a weird technical scene, that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"]
dcow
No, really, it’s not political. But haters love to make it about politics because they can’t rebut it technically.

Technically it’s a very interesting and valuable project. And there are many normal well adjusted humans beings working on it. It’s a shame people want it smeared out of existence because a Berkeley grad who no longer has anything to do with the project has weird political fantasies that some people don’t like. People really seem to struggle to separate the two. Makes it feel deliberate.

boole1854
> that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"]

I'm out of the loop but intrigued.

Can you explain what the controversy is? In what way are Bergson / Popper and Mill said to disagreed and what does it have to do with (Urbit?) conference codes of conduct?

sph
There's a nice search feature at the bottom of the main page. There are dozen of Urbit threads that go the same direction.
sph
> that's a lightning-rod for argument

Then you must be the lightning itself, creating an account to ionise and electrically charge the thread I guess.

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meadhbh-hamrick
You're suggesting I created an account an hour before urbit was mentioned in this thread just knowing someone would mention it? And I made the comment with my IRL name to hide my tracks?

Sometimes the world doesn't revolve around you.

tluyben2
Programming languages here as well. I am working on 2 at the same time currently (and I made many before); one of them I am trying to have done befor 1 dec to do AoC22 with. I believe I can make that.
zh3
Laser galvo's. Fast flicking mirrors drawing patterns on the walls and ceiling. Use a UV laser and draw crazy glowing shapes on luminous paint (ever shone a UV laser at something luminous?)
phkahler
I've wanted in for a long time. I think it would be cool to add export to synfig studio or even blender to make animations.
elihu
Modular synthesizers. Electric vehicle conversions. The intersection of musical instrument construction with just intonation and other alternative tuning systems.
jcpst
Woah- I am not alone on this. I have a dotcom modular system, did JI tuning research in college, and dream of buying a patina vehicle from the fuel crisis era and converting it to EV.
elihu
I'm working on converting a Mazda RX-8.
LAC-Tech
- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and not enough people to take it seriously. (Friendly request - if it's been a problem for you in your industry, drop me a line. I sometimes think I should niche down in it, but wonder if it's too obscure).

- Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.

- Concatenative langauges. Less Forth and more Joy[0]. I just feel like there's something here, and the idea will not die until it catches on. The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing.

[0] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html

meadhbh-hamrick
I'm a fan of FORTH, but absolutely second your motion that Joy is worth investigating. It has a FORTH "feel" but feels like you can more easily do more advanced things with it.
wrycoder
Joy appears even more “write-only” than Forth.

Half the skill in the art of programming is choosing good names, but Joy lacks names for arguments and locals.

Otherwise, it looks interesting. But, I think I’ll stick to lisp.

grepLeigh
Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts?

I've been obsessed with machine learning for embedded systems for years! So many practices around ML assume constant network connection and/or that your service runs in a data-center. I'm an ex-SRE and love building reliable offline computer vision things!

LAC-Tech
Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts?

Nowhere. Should we start something? :)

grepLeigh
I'm in! I run a small Discord server for 3D printer enthusiasts (I'm building a a closed-loop monitoring system for 3D printers). A section for offline systems in general would be easy for me to add. Invite link: https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr

I'm open to wherever people naturally gather though. IRC, maybe?

Another community you might like: https://www.tinyml.org/

myself248
I share this interest!

I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-...

I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not quite what I'm looking for.

I've been playing with Internet-in-a-box, which is precisely wrong about its name; it's an offline repository of content that was developed on the internet.

Someday I'd like to marry that with my Othernet receiver, which is a similar offline-hotspot-of-content but keeps that content updated by receiving a satellite data stream. (One-way only.)

Piratebox seems to be a dead project by that name, but I like the idea. A local file repo and possibly bulletin-board for use by folks within range of the box.

Yes, yes, yes, where do we go to chat?

csben
I've joined the discord server advertised by grepLeigh in another comment.
wwilim
> Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts?

Presumably not online

Karrot_Kream
The NNCP Matrix/IRC rooms have folks interested in offline / air-gapped systems.
rengler33
I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space. What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil health.
LAC-Tech
Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I know there's quite a few companies doing that.

I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).

Karrot_Kream
Interesting. Having some friends who write software/hardware for factories, always-on connectivity is definitely not an assumption. I had assumed it would be the same for AgTech but sounds like I'm wrong. What are some of the biggest pain points you've encountered?
tonyarkles
Not the poster you’re replying to but I’m also in AgTech. We were at a demo a couple of years ago at a farm. Not a competitor but sort of was doing a demo half a mile north of us. We’d designed for “no connectivity” from day one, including power. Our control station ran on a generator but also had a backup battery to keep the radios alive if the genny dies.

Half way through their demo, there was a power outage at the farm (as happens from time to time). As it turns out, their [insert product] relied on a connection to either AWS or Azure for some key functionality. Power goes out, turns out they had been using the farm internet for that connectivity (LTE service was miserable in the region), so their huge machine just stops and sits there idling in the field. Can’t even command it to return back to the crowd. Meanwhile our drone is still running back and forth on our field area and we didn’t even notice that anything went wrong.

is_true
"only the paranoid survive"
munificent
> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing.

Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as if soon as the implementers actually tried to use the thing they created, they gave up.

So your experience isn't unique. I've also written a couple of concatenative languages and quickly abandoned them after trying to write more than toy programs and realizing I wasn't smart enough to reason about the stack in my head.

harryvederci
> I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages.

Do you have a source of this video?

LAC-Tech
https://github.com/LAC-Tech/new-wave/blob/master/type.ml

Looks like my last attempt failed when I got bogged down prototyping a type system in Ocaml then trying to port that to Zig.

So in my case - it's not because I use them and they suck, it's because I find stuff like implementing type systems and GC very hard, and usually more practical things start wanting my attention more.

mikewarot
I'm convinced that Forth is the inverse of Lisp, and could be equally expressive, but because there are no parens to force matching of parameters, it's way too easy to lose things on the forth stack.

I believe that adding types and data structures to Forth, as is done in STOIC, combined with an IDE that allows you to SEE what parameters get eaten where, could make Forth viable for larger programs.

I tried to do this with MSTOICAL, which you all helped me to get to compile... but then I couldn't disentangle it from the build system, and my retina blew out... causing me to lose the ability to focus on the project.

ihatepython
I'm probably wrong, but my intuition tells me (in terms of Theory of Computation) that Forth is a programming language for Push-Down-Automata, and not a full-blown Turing Machine.
t-3
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine :

  "a Turing machine is also equivalent to a two-stack PDA with standard LIFO semantics, by using one stack to model the tape left of the head and the other stack for the tape to the right."
Forth is essentially a two-stack PDA as described.
btheshoe
> My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.

Why do you think this? Would be interested to hear the reasoning behind the take.

LAC-Tech
Well, as reactionaries love to tell us, it's a library and not a framework.

Great, we already have a library for that - it's called the DOM.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reactive programming, and even templated views. But reacts approach of hiding everything under the rug rather than having a clear "here's where the state changes" and "Here's we we render" divide always struck me as the worst of both worlds.

mind-blight
I both love React and love frontend minimalism. I'm curious what you mean by "React is parallel to the DOM"
d-us-vb
Mentioning concatenative programming gets an instant like from me.
x-complexity
> - Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.

Been going down this path recently via Svelte & SvelteKit: It's been really fun seeing the network responses of the first load being full HTML for any page (SSR), with JS responses handling transitions in between pages (CSR).

I've even managed to get my SVG image generator to run server-side first before passing over, with any changes handled client-side & with URL changes. Refreshing with the changed parameters renders the newer SVG. :)

eternityforest
I love offline systems. IoT is everywhere, garage doors should not need the internet. SyncThing is one of my biggest inspirations in software. They are one of the only projects I consider truly getting P2P right, ever, and there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs.

A lot of the time it seems like you really don't need advanced conflict resolution, if you change your actual UI model to be inherently parallel, which you often can.

A collaborative document editor is hard. A forum that lets you post offline is easy. At worst a conflict will get a few out of order posts, which is not an issue if people use @references, reddit style trees of comments, or there's low enough volume that it's unlikely to be confusing. Post race conditions already exist in forums anyway.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit in P2P and offline first, and everyone seems to be mostly doing the hard stuff like cryptocurrency instead.

myself248
> there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs.

Ooooo, got links?

Out of curiosity, how heavyweight is Syncthing, computationally? Could it run in an ESP32? I've used that same "folder that syncs" concept in some of my own designs which I would love to push down to smaller hardware...

eternityforest
Most of the stuff is notetaking, people will use markdown based tools and sync them. That's what I do with Obsidian, but it seems like pretty much every flat file app on Android has a lot of SyncThing users.

I haven't looked into the internals of ST all that deeply, partly because IIRC it's written in Go(Like so many P2P apps) and I'm not familiar with it.

From what I know of it, you could probably port it, just because the ESP32 is really powerful, but it would be a big rewrite. IIRC ST uses some kind of embedded database, not SQLite but similar-ish, I think it might be NoSQL.

I looked into it at one point because I wanted to add some features, but abandoned that when I found out how committed the devs are to sticking to the core functionality only.

I think if I were going to push it to ESP32(Which seems like an amazing idea) I might look into a custom embedded-first protocol.

It would be amazing if SyncThing could add support for a lite version of the protocol, but I doubt they would. The community seems to not mind forks though, maybe someone can make a "SyncThing for IoT" fork?

muhammadusman
Ok maybe not too weird but I've been a keyboard enthusiast for almost a decade now and earlier this year I started on a quest to collect as many keyboards in one place as possible to make it easier for newcomers to the hobby to easily find a keyboard (very much in progress still but making steady progress as a hobby project). I created a website called BoardSearch (https://boardsearch.io).

So far, I've learned a lot about just how varying keyboarding building/collecting can be, and this makes building the data models for what a keyboard is/can include pretty complex. Some people go deep into the hobby building a keyboard by soldering the switches and others a little higher level like putting together keycaps and switches on a hotswap PCB. It's definitely a hobby that you can waste/spend a lot of money on but keyboards are fun!

jodrellblank
http://www.tifaq.org/keyboards.html has done this for alternative keyboards (see the Contents sections on the left) for contoured, split, ergonomic, chording, and so on. Bit dated now, but still interesting.
indrora
Very dated.

I help maintain on occasion the /r/mechanicalkeyboard wiki entry for Ergonomic keyboard buying suggestions. After using an Ergodox for five years now, I can hands down say that this is one of the best choices I made for myself, but not that anyone should make based only on my recommendations.

houtanb
For anyone else who's potentially interested in this, I found https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/ to be really useful in my foray into building keyboards. We spend so much time with keyboards, they might as well be customized to our needs :)

I bought a kit for my first build https://choc.brianlow.com/ and still think that was the right way to go, but some may prefer to start out with pre-built keyboards.

3np
I've been building from a couple of kits and realizing the next step is to make my own design - what I'm looking for is just not on the market.

The one thing I find daunting is find and decide on a shop to handle PCB printing (non-US/EU). Especially since I assume my first couple of designs might need a few tweaks, I'd prefer something with short lead-times and able to handle low volume at reasonable price...

themoonisachees
Seconding the other comment, i previously got boards for my Plaid/tht for relatively cheap and fast from jlcpcb.

Of course, if you want fastest you could cook your own pcbs, it's a bit involved but it gets you 3d-print times on pcbs.

wrigby
I use JLC PCB for small projects at work, when we‘re doing prototype runs or just making a few units and don’t want to spin up our main PCB supplier.

The process is quick and mostly painless. They even have screenshots and a guide to exporting fab files from KiCad.

meadhbh-hamrick
I sometimes write COBOL programs for fun. Seriously... one of the things COBOL used to require and still strongly encourages is to declare record types before procedures (the Data Division is before the Procedure Division). There's a Fred Brooks quote that goes:

  "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue
   to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your
   flowcharts; they'll be obvious."
And Peter Naur (of (E)BNF fame) suggests using the term "Dataology" instead of "Computer Science."

But COBOL isn't a great systems programming language. It's made for applications. So I sometimes re-write simple C or C++ routines / structs in COBOL to see if they're more understandable and where the dividing line between app-focused languages and system-focused languages exists.

pharmakom
Sounds like functional domain driven design
conductor
Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.

The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the protected software.

https://scenelist.org/

pfoof
and keygen music
accrual
I listened to keygen music a great deal at one point. I'd run them through Winamp to produce something I could burn to a CD and listen to in the car. Pretty funny seeing Photoshop, Easy DVD Creator, Power ISO, and whatever else streaming across my car's track display.
theonething
growing up in the 80s with a Commodore 64, my friends and I never bought any games. They were all "cracked by $some_cracker"
jamiek88
Yeah we literally had a club we’d go to and just copy each others floppies!

As a poor 12 year old they weren’t losing money. I had none!

rufus_foreman
Grew up around the same time, we would typically change $some_cracker to our nicknames before trading them to the next person.
npteljes
Me neither, whatever little money we had, it went towards hardware.
ihusasmiiu
> I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.

I am.

mdp2021
I do advocate for the importance of backward engineering - with its companion, competence and awareness over the lower-level.
Rodeoclash
So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw, exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had uploaded disk images.

My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to share the remaining disks with each other (using ZModem!) overnight. Double our bandwidth!

nailer
First piece of dance music i ever heard was the Razor1911 Terminator demo
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accrual
> I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art

I still install DAMN NFO Viewer on my main PC just so I can appreciate some of the .nfo files I still have.

tracker1
I have VSCode set to use CP437 as my codepage and show control characters for "plain text" files, which works surprisingly well as it's only older art/projects/bbs stuff, generally anything else is a specific file type that will use utf8 by default.

    "files.associations": {
      "*.msg": "plaintext",
      "*.ans": "plaintext",
      "*.asc": "plaintext",
      "*.rip": "plaintext",
      "*.nfo": "plaintext",
      ...
    },
    ...
    "[plaintext]": {
      "files.encoding": "cp437",
      "files.eol": "\r\n",
      "editor.renderControlCharacters": true
    },
enos_feedler
Yessss, this was so fun. I still have backups of all my own nfo files that I was credited for cracks in ;) razor, pdm, myth.
npteljes
>I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art

As a teenage boy, I had them printed with my father's dot matrix printer, and put them on my wall as decoration. Fascinating stuff.

spoils19
- Pure HTML / CSS / vanilla JS sites. It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene, but I'm always a fan of inspecting sites that don't bloat themselves with unnecessary frameworks.

- Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first, it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the world wide web (WWW) as we know it.

jcpst
As a recovering former SPA enthusiast, coming back to the simplicity of HTML/CSS/JS over the past few years has been a breath of fresh air.
mNovak
It is really strange how this is a niche now (the frameworks); a couple lines of JS to handle button clicks is fine with me (again assuming you're not downloading jQuery for it)
dorfsmay
For tiny very specific problems that can be done under 2 k lines, I love a single self contained page that includes the necessary html/ja/CSS!
WhyCause
I've made a few "games" that go a step further, including images as SVG or base64 encoded binary.

I use them mainly for learning / testing new (to me) concepts.

jw_cook
Are there any particular communities or groups for this you can recommend?

Here are a few I've discovered that I've really been enjoying lately:

https://tildeverse.org (EDIT: apparently they don't like being linked to from HN; copy and paste the link instead of clicking it)

https://indieweb.org

https://neocities.org

I think the main focus of those communities is recapturing the spirit of the (arguably more fun) internet of the 90s to early 2000s. They're not specifically dedicated to static site minimalism, but there's definitely a large overlap.

halfcat
I’ve found the HTMX community to fit this, and not in a nostalgic way. It’s a very useful and functional option if you’re wanting to build a reactive site while shipping less JavaScript.
_carbyau_
TIL from the tilde quotes site: 16:00 <acdw> butter is just a loaf of milk

...ok.

culi
Don't forget gossipsweb.net

See also: html.energy

bob1029
> It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene

Not sure about niche. Maybe more... understated, proprietary and confidential.

We've been doing totally vanilla HTML/JS/CSS web apps for our B2B customers for the last 3-4 years. In fact, we can't use your typical web frameworks because our contracts are measured in half-decades and due diligence against our vendors makes it infeasible to participate in that kind of ecosystem. Banking is a great industry to get into if you want to get frameworks out of your life. You have the perfect bat to use. "Oh.. I don't know about that... is Angular 12 still going to be around and supported halfway through this client's seven-figure contract?".

Doing pure web in 2022 is hard. It's mostly a human/courage thing. The technology is easier than its ever been. But, you have to stand your ground day after day against this onslaught of cargo cult web dev. The outcome is worth whatever salty arguments you get into.

>the toxicity of JavaScript

I understand the sentiment. I'd probably use similar diction if I had to screw around with NPM-style projects for a living. That said, javascript itself can be an answer to this vendor bloat if used very carefully.

divbzero
> Pure HTML / CSS / vanilla JS sites. It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene, but I'm always a fan of inspecting sites that don't bloat themselves with unnecessary frameworks.

To expand on this, I like thinking about how standard browser APIs can act as the framework without using third-party libraries. An early example was document.querySelectorAll obviating the need for jQuery’s wonderful $. More recently, I’ve waited eagerly for Web Components to come into their prime, which has been just a year or two away for a decade now.

kinow
>- Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first, it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the world wide web (WWW) as we know it.

I kept the colors I used before, but dropped JavaScript and tried to use CSS that is compatible with multiple browsers. It has been a learning experience, but very interesting to see how far I can get to with just HTML and CSS.

Now I've started focusing on semantic web tags, and accessibility testing. Much easier without JavaScript.

- Site: https://kinoshita.eti.br/

- Source: https://github.com/kinow/kinoshita.eti.br/

culi
Just made my brother a website[0] for his elderly care business and it was a joy to finally make a site that got perfect lighthouse scores. The only JS used is for a slideshow-modal. I didn't even minify the css or js because I've had some good memories of inspecting certain websites to find totally readable code behind them

[0] https://a1elderly.care/

etrautmann
Algorithmic art and pen plotters - super fun and wonderful community.
nealeratzlaff
I also try to be part of the algorithmic/generative art community. It seems really scattered but the variety of techniques and ideas flowing around is really inspiring :)

After stable diffusion/midjourney, the community is a little leery of deep learning I've noticed. But I'm trying to carve out a space using neural networks in a different way) anyway.

myself248
Ooooooo, any good links to share? I picked up a Draftmaster II at auction and someday I'll get it working I promise...
flopsamjetsam
I'd also love to know this.

I had a fascination with the (to me) gigantic plotter at my Dad's workplace (they did a lot of architectural and engineering drawings on it). I had completely forgotten about this until these comments came along, and now I'm trying to work out where I can put one at home :)

myself248
As for hardware, consider picking up a cheap vinyl cutter. Most of them are knockoffs of the Roland CAMM series, which itself is a beefed-up knockoff of the early HP pen plotters. As a result, they all speak HPGL, and most of the blade holders are basically modified pen holders. You can put a pen in a vinyl cutter, and most of them include a pen holder by default, as a way of testing the machine without wasting vinyl.

Vinyl cutters are optimized for slower motion with more stiffness and torque, whereas pen plotters expect nearly zero force on the tip and are optimized for speed and acceleration, but if you're not running production, speed won't matter so much. Vinyl cutters also have controllable downforce (by regulating the current in a solenoid), which can be neat.

My local makerspace has a USCutter MH-series, which is available in a cute little desktop size, or with a sensible stand for the larger models. Contrast with most of the genuine-vintage plotters that are weirdly bulky and awkward, not built to come apart for transport, and have 40-year-old power supplies lurking inside just waiting to blow up.

flopsamjetsam
Thanks for all that info, you've given me a good amount to go on with.
mfrisbie
Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3.

I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy things they can do, and I put the best ones into a demo extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browser-extension-....

galuggus
The book looks great.

I want to build an ad-blocker.

Could you recommend a good open source projects to learn from?

Previous extension I made: www.fuckoff.yt

mfrisbie
The best mv2 repository would of course be ublock origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock The best mv3 repository would be AdGuard's https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardMV3

For a generalized ad blocker, importing and updating filter lists is probably the most challenging bit. https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters AdGuard has an amazing blog, their content is impressively broad and deep https://adguard.com/en/blog/how-ad-blocking-is-done.html

julianeon
Great idea for a book. I'll get it.
mfrisbie
Thanks! It should be available sometime next week.
vax425
Welcome to the club! I’m working on a browser extension right now.

HTTPS://headlamptest.com

RheingoldRiver
That's awesome! I preordered. I've written one tiny browser extension once, which was really just for my own use, and I was a bit surprised at how hard it was to find anything that taught how to do it from beginning to end. The APIs were all well-documented, and there was a tutorial extension I could clone, but after that I was really left to searching through random blog posts and StackOverflow for help, since even with good documentation "what is possible in the first place" is hard to figure out. It took me a full day to write an extension to mute all tabs whose name matched a regex pattern. That's it, that's the entire extension, and I wasn't even interested in making it cross-browser. (The use case is that you pair its hotkey with an autohotkey script and then it's actually quite useful.)

Since then, I've on occasion had interest in making some other browser extensions, but I always look back to that experience & the lack of resources and just think ehhhhhh do I really want to? I'm sure I could but just how much do I care about this, and the answer has never been enough.

mdp2021
> how incredibly powerful

To the best of the updates to my knowledge, they are much less powerful now than when we could use XUL many years ago...

I am not aware that the lackings forced around the time of the deprecation of XUL got fixed.

I still use browser forks to keep on using those vital extensions of yore (Scrapbook etc).

delaaxe
What are the biggest differences with manifest v3?
mfrisbie
The change that gets the most attention is the shift away from blocking webRequest to declarativeNetRequest, but other important changes are moving from background pages to service workers, and disallowing third party JS.

Service workers are particularly problematic for some extensions, as the background script cannot execute indefinitely. I included an entire chapter on mv2->mv3 since there was so much to cover.

mindcrime
Oh, that is perfect timing. After finally starting to use Mastodon and the Fediverse a lot more in the past couple of weeks, I had an idea recently for a browser extension I'd like to take a stab at writing (if it doesn't already exist, to be honest I haven't gone looking yet). Still, even if it does already exist, I might write my own anyway just to finally get around to learning more about how to write browser extensions.
gfd
Competitive programming!

20k+ contestants per contest, around 1-2 times per week: https://codeforces.com/contests

In terms of "scene", there are exclusive discord channels that you can only join if you have above a certain rating (usually candidate masters and above). Probably the highest average IQ community that I'm part of and they discuss stuff beyond competitive programming.

sedatk
Demoscene on 8-bit machines. People are still creating crazy demos on 40 year old computers like Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, or Sinclair Spectrum. Demoscene on modern PCs are active too, but not as interesting or mind-blowing as people rotating filled cubes at 50fps on a C64.

Since those machines have fixed configurations, it's easier to assess the level of technical achievements.

Yesterday, I watched a C64 demo on Youtube that featured Donald Trump's face[1]. It's such a fantastic cross-over of 40 year old tech with memes of 2020's. I find it fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsXB7F0lQwY

itsamy
Where is the demoscene community active these days?
vitaflo
Pouet or Demozoo are probably your best bet.
theCrowing
I am still phreaking and active in the demoscene.
kevstev
what really exists in phreaking? I used to be interested in the mid-late 90s, but it seems it was all but dead by 2000 or so. Asterix seemed to keep things interesting for a bit, but I haven't heard about that in years.
theCrowing
In the last years it shifted mostly to tinkering with radio communication of all sorts. IoT etc. it's amazing what you can find out about factories and your general environment if you have a look at everything that's buzzing around... with mostly default passwords. :) but there are still interesting systems around just last week I found a 170 line isdn system still in use by a printing company... roughly 1mbit :D
agent008t
Any entry points / tutorials to get started?
pfoof
I used to have entire Keygen Jukebox on my iPod. And speaking of iPods: iPodLinux and Rockbox. So satisfying when you are 14, just change colors of the blocks in "copter" and it compiles and runs on your nano.

Oh and I also loved to show off with Tiny C Compiler on my jailbroken Kindle 3rd gen

pocket_cheese
Web scraping. I love figuring out how to reverse engineer websites and defeat systems designed against web scrapers. It's also super interesting (concerning?) how much data websites leak. 4 out of the 5 bug bounties I've discovered have been while poking around in my scraping efforts.
andruby
What's a good tool/language to write scrapers in these days? A decade ago I was using ruby with mechanize and hpricot. I hope tools have improved since then, especially for scraping sites that use javascript.
dewey
Really depends on how big your scraping operation is going to be. These days there's a lot of "managed" providers that give you headless browsers / proxy rotators through an easy API so it's relatively easy to plug them into your code. Examples of these would be https://www.browserless.io or https://www.scrapingbee.com for headless browsers to render JS.

From my work experience of working on a large scraping stack with thousands of integrations, I can say that we are very happy with our own custom framework, written in Go (https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery for HTML parsing) and using headless Chrome for JS rendering.

spfzero
A fun way, though maybe there are much more productive ways, is to learn Scheme and/or Lisp, and, with a language that has a library for it, convert the html to a big s-expression. Then you have it in a form that is the form of the language itself, where you can literally do anything with it.
tluyben2
I like webscraping and made a lot of money making farms 15 or so years ago; I started disliking it somehow when Python kind of took over. What are you using? I am also interested in doing it as cheap as I can which is a lot of fun for tech reasons.
fortran77
Locksport!
jcims
Locksport and tying knots are two skills I would love to develop but I don't get enough opportunity to use them to use the application of the skill as the driver. Probably need to find a community for each to see if that helps.
wetmore
Climbing is a great way to learn knots in an applied way.
jcims
oh wow, I have no idea why I didn't think of that. thank you!
accrual
I've got a click out of one, two is binding...
unixhero
I watch silly review videos of old games ok the YouTube channel Accursed Farms https://youtube.com/@chilledsanity

I used to be partnof the comment field on Joe Rogan videos. The comments were hilarious, great community.

jl6
The intersection of people who understand computer* puns and English Football League** team names:

https://lab6.com/1#page=10

Warning: gratuitous 16MB PDF which will not benefit you.

* Not strictly just computing

** Some international clubs too.