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Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

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Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#411

Post by minhmeoke »

kstenerud wrote: post #389
minhmeoke wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative approach might be to use an existing popular serialization format such as Protocol Buffers, Apache Thrift, or Cap'N'Proto and create or improve tools that convert to/from human-readable text formats to the serialized binary format. For example: - Protocol buffers have a text format mode: https://medium.com/@nathantnorth/protocol-buffers-text-forma... - Thrift has readable-thrift which is a human-friend…

Yes, I had a look at these formats before embarking on my venture. I listed the things I found important in the comparison matrix: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding#-compared-to-o... To your points: - Protobufs is not an ad-hoc format, which is a big reason why low-friction formats like JSON are popular. There are many use cases where formats like protobufs are clearly the superior choice, but CE doesn't…

Thank you for the clarification! Perhaps a better example would have been Apache Avro (still has a schema, though): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Avro

This looks like a very ambitious project, and I can see that you've put a lot of thought, time, and effort into it! You clearly have a lot of interesting ideas (the graph idea is really cool) and significant experience with data formats.

If this is a security-oriented application, then with cyclic data structures there is the risk of blowing out your server's memory using something like a fork bomb when processing untrusted user input (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb).

There are some systems like DHall that guarantee termination by putting upper bounds on computation: https://dhall-lang.org/

I'm also a bit concerned with how the different features can interact, for example it's not super clear how to distinguish between UTC offset (-130, or do these always have to be 4 digits?) and global coordinates (-130/-172). An attacker could specify a comment inside the media type (eg: application/* which would require special logic to filter out).

My concern is that the parser will become extremely complicated and require a lot of special-case logic and validation (eg: there must be at least one digit on each side of a radix point) which is more prone to errors and unexpected behaviors.

Rather than using slash delimiters, I'd recommend splitting the time formats into subfields, eg: { date: "2022-01-01" time: "21:14:10" offset_is_negative: true offset: "10:30" }

This does make the text format more verbose, but it reduces ambiguity and makes the parsing faster as well since you don't need to descend into branches and backtrack when they don't match, and also might permit more code/logic reuse.

It's also not clear how easy it is to add new data types to the grammar. Based on the project description, it seems like you're using ANTLDR parser.

Since you seem to be quite interested in parsing, you might also be interested in parser combinators which are a somewhat different approach with different tradeoffs: - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3386... - https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/understanding-parser...

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#412

Post by asicsp »

eternityforest wrote: post #392

I am looking for more work at the moment, so I might not have unlimited free time in the future but: I know embedded hardware and software, Python, and some web dev. My FOSS projects worth mentioning are KaithemAutomation, an IoT automation system focusing on more low level control for commercial installs, and HardlineP2P, a protocol for P2P remote acess(think DuckDNS replacement). I'm also working on an open source…

Since you mention both Python and webdev, check out https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder (100% free and interactive Python course for beginners)

From an interview (https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2021/12/13/pydev-of-the-w...) with Alex Hall:

>A challenge I'm struggling with is making the site look good...I'm struggling to find people to help me build futurecoder further

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#413

Post by caseyslaught »

k8sToGo wrote: post #132
caseyslaught wrote: post #12

I work for a national park in the Democratic Republic on the Congo as a tech lead. Some of the things we are doing: LoRaWAN for tracking and emergency response, ML to identify gorillas by their unique nose prints, and long-range drones for mapping and surveillance, and a management web app. If you’re interested in conservation / sustainable development and associated technologies let me know! Always looking to collab…

Is LoRaWAN tracking the gorillas?

LoRaWAN is used for an alert system in an area where local communities are threatened by an armed group called the ADF (aka ISIS-DRC). In the future we hope to roll out a large-scale LoRaWAN to monitor wildlife (elephants, lions) as well as vehicles and rangers on patrol.

Gorilla tracking devices are likely to be intrusive and cumbersome for them. They are also known to help each other out and remove devices. For now, gorillas are tracked on foot by a team of rangers.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#414

Post by caseyslaught »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #294
caseyslaught wrote: post #12

I work for a national park in the Democratic Republic on the Congo as a tech lead. Some of the things we are doing: LoRaWAN for tracking and emergency response, ML to identify gorillas by their unique nose prints, and long-range drones for mapping and surveillance, and a management web app. If you’re interested in conservation / sustainable development and associated technologies let me know! Always looking to collab…

How likely would it be to opensource projects like this? I think many programmers want to do something good ( preferably by learning) and are willing to spend time on projects like this.

Quite likely! I'm planning on making the gorillas identification project open source as there's actually quite a lot to it (the core AI functionality, management of lots of images and gorillas data, making sure it all works fine on a crappy connection with old Androids).

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#415

Post by erezsh »

tdekok wrote: post #172
erezsh wrote: post #162

I'm building Total Recall ( https://github.com/erezsh/TotalRecall/ ), a keyboard-first browser extension for bookmarks that's fast and useful. It lets you search through your bookmarks using a local full-text search, with support for tags and extra notes. I'm doing it in my spare time, which is scarce, so I'd love another pair of hands to help me make it super duper great. (it's already great but it's just normal gre…

This looks great! I'll give the extension a try. I have been dying to find a reasonable bookmarking tool, but everything I've tried doesn't stick in my habit pattern. What are the types of improvements that you are looking to add?

Thanks! I'm planning to make a short youtube video that shows how to use it. The user interface is open-ended, which I consider a strength, but it means not all the uses are immediately obvious.

Things I'm thinking of adding:

- Allow to sync to dropbox/drive/etc. (currently sync is only to couchdbs)

- Improve full-text search

- "Save session" shortcut, to tag all open tabs in the window at once. (so you can later recall all the tabs at once by finding the tag)

- Automatically extract meta keywords from a url to suggest tags. (that's already written, I just need to test it and smooth it)

- Maybe save content of the page too? Maybe allow to also store pages that aren't bookmarked? (Currently I don't do it because it takes too much space and affects search speed)

- Automatically publish your bookmarks to a webpage (with filtering the tags you want to display). Maybe even add a social element to it, a little like delicious was.

I can probably think of more ideas. In most of my projects, I usually have more ideas than time :)

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#416

Post by tomcam »

onassar wrote: post #113

I run a side (open source) project called Iconduck ( https://iconduck.com ). It collects and makes open source icons, illustrations and graphics available to download in various formats. The goal is to collect sets from across the web (atm, mainly Gumroad and GitHub) that have open source licenses that allow for them to be available on a central site. I then use a service called Typesense ( https://typesense.org/ ) t…

1. Thanks for a wonderful site. It's the best of its kind

2. I hope you're not paying for hosting, since places like Cloudflare and Netlify host static sites for free, and I think yours probably qualifies

3. It's free--what would you need marketing help for?

4. Have plans to monetize somehow? I can imagine a couple of ways you could do so.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#417

Post by tomcam »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #322
MWil wrote: post #314

Seeking motivated cofounder(s) interested in legaltech/edtech/govtech. I am a domain expert in Veterans Disability law, 1.7mil in revenue (me and 3 paralegals) in 2020, formed Veteran Disability boutique firm in 2021. Looking to build the "Clio for Veterans Disability Claims." Although this is a single, niche area of administrative law, there are more than enough customers on an individual (veterans with claims, accr…

I can tell you from my own experience that one of the biggest hurdles was obtaining accurate medical records from hospitals and clinics outside of the DoD (for those times when on-base providers were insufficient). Every VSO I tried to work with seemed overly burdened and unfamiliar with how to communicate with systems outside of the state they lived in, and definitely useless in trying to get info from private hospi…

That's one of the most helpful HN comments ever posted by someone whose user name sounds like a Sopranos character

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#418

Post by tomcam »

LoveMe2Times wrote: post #378

A lot of these projects are very serious, make the world a better place kind of thing, which is awesome, so I apologize if my project is more of just a fun thing. With Flash now being EOL, a lot of Flash games are disappearing from the net. While there are existing projects to create an open source Flash player which is good for legacy compatibility, nobody will build new Flash games. So my vision is to create a mode…

I may misunderstand your intention, but isn't this well handled by projects such as https://phaser.io/ and https://pixijs.com?

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#419

Post by kukabynd »

outside1234 wrote: post #180
kukabynd wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I’m a potential user. What do you have in mind that would make it a “simple reality”? I totally agree that it’s a mess right now. The hardest part for me was/is the sync and data consistency between syncs and modifications in-between sessions. I’ve used both OT and CRDT and the tooling isn’t simple.

I am thinking from a development perspective something like an easy set of React Hooks that essentially allow you to utilize CRDTs etc. without having to know much more about them than the operations available (add, delete, etc.) From a user perspective, I am thinking that getting support for a local first approach is as simple as installing a Dropbox style service locally that enables storage and syncing across your…

Ok, now I understand more. I think local-first and single-user mode is easy enough with the tooling we have right now (there are hooks, FS adapters that are almost plug-n-play). The trickiest part is still resolving conflicts/modifications across many sessions that multiple users have across time and lost sync periods.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

#420

Post by continuational »

mikewarot wrote: post #368
continuational wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System wide capabilities is an interesting concept - I'd love to see it implemented. I'm not sure if it meaningfully fits into a programming language though - it seems like an operating system concept. But I might be mistaken? Firefly currently only uses capabilities for security within a single program, which I think is also a big issue in software development today, the Log4j fiasco being a recent example.

Since you're in the mindset of capabilities, what do you think is a reasonable way to pipe them through the internet, or between cooperating programs on a given machine?

Well, the main challenge is that you can take a capability and limit it before passing it on. For example, take the FileSystem capability and wrap it in a new object that only allows access to a specific directory.

Otherwise, you could probably use OAuth!

Now, Firefly makes it possible to limit capabilities with arbitrary code. But suppose you instead had a declarative format for limiting capabilities.

Then you could probably represent capabilities like this:

    {
        "system": "FileSystem",
        "publicKey": "...",
        "parent": "...",
        "limitation": {
            "path": "/foo/bar"
        }
    }
The publicKey is the public key of the system in question. The system should probably be a URI.

The parent is the capability that was limited, encrypted with the public key, so that only the system in question can decrypt it. This allows the system to verify the capability, while not leaking the parent capability to anybody else.

The limitation is a system-specific declarative limitation, and must be at least as strict as the parent capability.

How does that sound?

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