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

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

#181

Post by coreyp_1 »

kodah wrote: post #2

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.

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...

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

#182

Post by zulban »

My wife recently went back to school for civil engineering. They must take one programming course, in matlab. So we have this community of academic go-getter students who've never programmed before, suddenly working hard to learn about for-loops and structs and functions in Matlab. As a computer scientist it has been fun teaching them a bit. The assignments are easy enough that I can help a ton without knowing any syntax and just learn language features on the fly.

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

#183

Post by indrora »

jodrellblank wrote: post #132
muhammadusman wrote: post #11

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 lo…

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.

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.

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

#184

Post by houtanb »

muhammadusman wrote: post #11

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 lo…

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.

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

#185

Post by m463 »

louhike wrote: post #117

I love retro gaming on CRT. People tend to misjudge how retro games are supposed to look (visible pixels or mismatch between 2d backgrounds and 3d models). I'm not opposed to people playing on LCD screens, I just think it's important to remember how those games were supposed to look. Some people are dedicated to show that, which is great: CRTpixels: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels Standard Definition Gaming: https://ww…

I always loved old vector graphics games. I loved tempest.

I don't know, maybe resolutions and refresh rates are high enough now to give a simulation a shot.

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

#186

Post by flafla2 »

zulban wrote: post #182

My wife recently went back to school for civil engineering. They must take one programming course, in matlab. So we have this community of academic go-getter students who've never programmed before, suddenly working hard to learn about for-loops and structs and functions in Matlab. As a computer scientist it has been fun teaching them a bit. The assignments are easy enough that I can help a ton without knowing any sy…

Matlab is awesome. I had to learn it for a class in Computational Photography back in school. The matrix-centric language design is an interesting change from traditional languages and the amazing linear solvers available give you a shocking amount of power sometimes. For example, the language has really good SIMD/parallelism support out of the box, because you are steered towards making all of your variables into vectors and performing batch processing. Backslash is also an incredibly powerful tool in the right hands, and lends itself to some beautiful oneliners (it’s sort of like a shell language in that way).

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

#187

Post by bob1029 »

spoils19 wrote: post #18

- 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.

> 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.

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

#188

Post by kwertyops »

bckr wrote: post #4

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

Do you know of any online community gathering places for this scene? Subreddit? Discord server?

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

#189

Post by elihu »

jcpst wrote: post #19
elihu wrote: post #8

Modular synthesizers. Electric vehicle conversions. The intersection of musical instrument construction with just intonation and other alternative tuning systems.

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.

I'm working on converting a Mazda RX-8.

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

#190

Post by Karrot_Kream »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #167
rengler33 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 st…

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?
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