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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?

#301

Post by eternityforest »

myself248 wrote: post #290
eternityforest wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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...

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?

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

#303

Post by t-3 »

ihatepython wrote: post #283
mikewarot wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#304

Post by snvzz »

dreadnaut wrote: post #54

I run a 22yo online competition for a 32yo DOS racing game: Stunts, or 4D Sports Driving in some countries. The competition has spawned a long-lived community which includes reverse engineering, game patches, new cars, alternative engines, a few world meetings, and multiple other competitions. - https://zak.stunts.hu - https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Custom_cars - https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?board=90.0&label=stunts…

Wow. I loved that game during my childhood. Had no clue it had an active community today!

Much thanks for letting us know.

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

#305

Post by snvzz »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #107

I'm a big fan of distributed systems (papers and implementations) and alternate networks. Fun projects that are active right now: - Usenet (yes, it's still alive!) - NNCP (friend-to-friend e2e encrypted network, doesn't need IP, can be airgapped) - Yggdrasil (an IPv6 overlay mesh network) - Retroshare (friend-to-friend P2P encrypted network with Chat, Messaging, and filesharing, and more) - Urbit (weird, distributed…

Why not Gopher?

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

#306

Post by snvzz »

mysterymath wrote: post #153

I maintain a LLVM backend for the 6502: https://godbolt.org/z/6EWEb6c5E , https://llvm-mos.org I love compilers, and I work on LLVM full time at my day job. I love bringing modern tooling and techniques to an older environment where they very much don't belong; the juxtaposition of the two is very satisfying to me.

Did you consider attempting to upstream your work?

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

#307

Post by flopsamjetsam »

myself248 wrote: post #287
flopsamjetsam wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

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…

Thanks for all that info, you've given me a good amount to go on with.

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

#308

Post by culi »

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.

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/

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

#309

Post by culi »

jw_cook wrote: post #113
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.

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) inter…

Don't forget gossipsweb.net

See also: html.energy

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

#310

Post by culi »

adamredwoods wrote: post #43

I'm fond of any scene that minimizes code: https://js13kgames.com/ https://js10k.com/ (gone) https://the5k.org/ http://www.message.sk/web4096/ https://js1024.fun/ https://js1k.com/2019-x/ websites: https://1kb.club/ https://aem1k.com/world/ https://jeremiepat.github.io/svg1k (256b) http://wildmag.de/compo/ (140 characters) https://www.dwitter.net/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tinycode/

My own lists

- 1mb.club, 512kb.club, 250kb.club, 10kbclub.com, 1kb.club

- no-js.club, js1k.com, js1024.fun

- nocss.club

See also:

- gossipsweb.net

- html.energy

- yesterweb.org

- handmade.network

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