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Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

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251–260 of 960 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#251

I’m making a self sobering identity vault / wallet where I can setup a threshold cryptography scheme to share keys with friends and family for recovery.

That sounds super interesting and useful, can describe how you're making it work more and how far along you are? I have plans to build something I think is similar.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#252

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun. A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case. The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then cau…

That is some count of Monte Cristo level shenanigans.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#253
That's... all my projects. I learned a long time ago that I don't want to build anything for anyone other than myself, or if someone has already paid me. I open source them because it doesn't cost me anything and I want to cooperate with others and share as general principle. Is that weird now?

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#254
My project Globemallow.io.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/globemallow/jibhio...

A few years ago I learned about how large of a CO2 pollutant the Internet is, and I became extremely fascinated with that concept because I had never thought about it before. In fact, a lot of people haven't it seems.

I researched sustainable methodologies for internet development, and created the Chrome Extensions listed under Globemallow.io. To help people become more aware.

It shows users a rough estimation of their internet browsing energy usage, and CO2 emissions emitted.

Globemallow Dev view shows sustainable development best practices, and how a page has implemented them.

Check it out, and give any feedback. Thanks in advance!

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#255
I'm working on a programming puzzle game with 2D sprite graphics where every object in the game has an API and can be interacted with programmatically. Every level can be completed either autonomously (i.e. scripting player movement/actions) or non-autonomously (using i.e. WASD to manually move around and perform actions). It's a game where you work smarter, not harder - if a level seems tedious at first blush, it means you haven't thought about how to automate the tedium with programming:

https://www.bryanpg.com/games/pragma_twice

I plan on doing a Kickstarter this year just for fun, but even if it doesn't get funded I'll still continue to work on it.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#256
post #248

I found a psych study about how vulnerable narcissists use more first person pronouns in their writing, and applied that to the Epistles in the New Testament to determine Pauline authorship (Paul has always struck me as a vulnerable narcissist). Amazing result. Very distinct clusters on relative usage between the undisputed non-Pauline letters (John, Peter, etc) and the undisputed Pauline letters. Almost all the disp…

I wouldn't bother with journals unless you really need it on your resume to get a research gig

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#257

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun. A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case. The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then cau…

That is some count of Monte Cristo level shenanigans.

There are many more fun details to the whole story. For example the judge had taken the case files to her house to keep them hidden there, in one panel decision a singular judge voted twice because he could only find one other judge willing to go along, the way I obtained certain info from court staffers was by showing up in person walking in crutches which I actually didn't need, some legal filings had appropriate chess endgame problems for a cover page, and so on.

Nobody expects you to handle your cases like a tech venture, where we only really care for high-variance outcomes and not the simple wins...

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#258
https://feelings.earth/

Visualization of what the people of Twitter are feeling right now across the globe (or at least the ones who have geolocation enabled :)). It's fun to have it up on a monitor in the background to periodically gaze at.

I'm an Engineering Director and can rarely justify finding time to code anything significant during my day job these days, so this was my cut-loose-and-have-fun project over ~a weekend. Had a blast doing it, and then rewriting it half a dozen "cool" frameworks ranging from NextJS to RemixRun.

(It works on mobile, but much nicer on desktop)

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#259
post #113

I have a lot of software written, basically just for me but with a bit of work it could be a thing. The core feature is burning through digital lists one item at a time but with as little interaction with a computer as possible. Data only push notification -> text to speech to bone conduction headphones (or really any headphones). Tells me the current task. Two buttons on my wrist. One is next task, one is "toggle re…

Having a hard time understanding what you're describing. So you use it as a to-do list? There's no way to address the items in a different order?

Well sure there is, alter the original list and load it again. Since I have exactly one customer, me, I've just dogfooded this. Written lists or something in an app or an editor are far more natural than anything I'd cook up / reinventing that wheel.

Most commonly I just get to inbox zero, stack rank what needs to occur in what order, then make a precise step by step list. The process of making a punch list of actions in order I find useful for thinking things through. Then it's just load and execute it based on what's described above. Pull the next task one at a time like a short order cook.

Loading the punch list is usually just some editor plugin or something native that catches shared text / intent recievers. In emacs, vscode, google keep, obsidian I just highlight text and hit a hotkey to load it. Or skip the highlight and just share / load the whole buffer. Rinse, repeat.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#260
I have my own way of indenting Lisp code along with supporting Emacs commands that I have been using for the last 9 years.

Here is an example, which I chose by picking a file of my code at random, then scanning it till (after scanning about 80 lines) I found the first fragment that is clearly indented differently than how a normal Lisp programmer would indent it:

  (while (sit-for 1e-6) (save-excursion
       (while (progn 
            (goto-char (random (- (point-max) (point-min))))
            (not (and (eq ?  (char-after)) 
                 (setq face (get-text-property (point) 'face))
                 (setq bg (plist-get face :background))
                 . nil))))
       (assert (stringp bg))
       (setq bg2 (substring bg -2))
       (put-text-property (point) (1+ (point)) 'face (list :background
            (if (consp prefix) "black" (cat (substring bg 0 5) 
                 (if (string= cc bg2) "ff" cc)))))))
The standard way of indenting Emacs Lisp code has the number of spaces to indent being dependent on the "main operator" of the form being indented. For example, if the "main operation" is `cond` then the cond clauses are indented only once space more than the cond form itself is. Probably the reason Emacs programmers have settled on using only one space to indent the arguments of a cond form is that they have found that they run out of room if they make it larger than 1. I have a different way of avoiding (or rather postponing) running out of room with the result that I am able to adopt a rule that everything gets indented 5 spaces, which makes it easier to use my visual cortex to tell which lines are at the same level of indentation.

This next is not valid lisp (or more precisely you would never actually write it):

  ((((((((((((((((((((((((((foo
       bar
       bash))))))))))))))))))))))))))
But if it were valid, then it would be correctly indented according to my way. The main value I get out my way of indenting is that if `bar` or `bash` were many lines long, then there could be more levels of indentation internal to `bar` or `bash` compared to the usual way of doing indentation. I.e., my way lets me conserve levels of indentation, so I can write larger defuns without any individual line being longer than my self-imposed limit (which happens to be be 80 columns) and without indenting anything by less than 5 spaces.

In exchange for being able to handle multiple open parens with only one level of indentation, I have to impose a rule that when I close one of those open parens, I have to close all of them. (I have Emacs signal an error by making a sound when I attempt to indent a line that disobeys that rule.)

So for example this next is illegal in my indentation method:

  (foo (bar
            xxx)
       yyy)
To make it legal I have to write it like this:

  (foo
       (bar 
            xxx)
       yyy)
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