Ask HN: What are you working on this year? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#431

Post by t0bia_s » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

madscphoto wrote: post #183

I am working on actually beginning doing something with my photography. It has been a hobby/passion of mine for 7+ years, but so far I do not really do much with the final images. I put them on my private Flickr as a backup and upload the highlights to Instagram, but that's it. I feel like Instagram is a hard medium because the photos that are trending are mostly the same overdone and oversaturated landscape or trave…

If you mean it seriously with photography, make a personal portfolio with top notch pictures.

Abandon posting on instagram as soon as possible.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#432

Post by ivansavz » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

I'm continuing work on the No Bullshit Guide to Statistics, which is an introductory book on statistics that includes all necessary prerequisites (practical data analysis using Pandas and probability theory math using the computer models from scipy.stats). It's been a many-year project (because STATS IS TOUGH!), but I've had very good progress in the last couple of months of 2022 (finished first few chapters) and now keeping the momentum going into 2023.

It's really hard to explain statistical concepts without bullshit... there are all kinds of formulas and rules of thumb, so it sometimes takes me 2x or 3x rewrites before I find an explanation that is simple enough and free of unnecessary historical baggage. One thing that I have going for me is the ability to use computer simulations to check all the equations, and generate nice visualizations. Seeing the equations + graphs + code in parallel makes stats concepts finally click... at least for the author, I hope for the readers too ;)

If you're interested in checking this out, I maintain a continuously-updated book outline here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwep23-95U-w1QMPU31nOvUn... I also have a mailing list where I send chapter preview PDFs as they become ready (see the end of the gdoc).

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#433

Post by comte7092 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #256

I'll be working on refining my pitch about how bad everything is and why the system needs to change... And posting that into the void where nobody will ever read it due to big tech algorithm censorship... While working a day job which allows me to profit from the root of all system flaws which I keep complaining about because it's the only one I could find which pays the bills... A kind of forced hypocrisy. Happy new…

I think a lot of people recognize that there needs to be change, they just don’t know how to bring it about.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#434

Post by donadigo » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

I got quite frustrated by how much native C++ programs are slow/closed to any kind of introspection/debugging so this year I will be attempting to build a live object inspector/debugger for C++ programs/games, independent of the game engine you are using. I have currently lots of ideas on features I want to build but at least for me it's an interesting challenge to tackle. The basic idea right now is to allow to add small changes to your code live without recompiling the whole thing and I aim for instantaneous compilation times, so adding a print() does not take >=5 seconds to compile. Currently I achieve this by using a scripting language that is exposed to classes/functions/variables in your codebase but I may change the approach later if I find a better solution.

I currently have a prototype but nothing that could be used in production yet: https://donadigo.com/d0/

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#435

Post by Msurrow » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

jhoelzel wrote: post #345

Msurrow wrote: post #64

I’m building a hostingplatform for fully managed Wordpress sites. By managed I mean both the WP install, but also plugins, themes and other customizations. I have a customer who does marketing, SoMe, SEO and all that (as a small business for other small to medium businesses) but it turns out she spends a lot of time dealing with tech issues from WP sites (plugin update errors, other tech issues the hosting provider d…

i have been beating around this bush for eons and so far my best release strategy is custom build wordpress container where plugins and themes are built in. The problem i was facing was mostly that almost all of the plugins used in "general", do not come with a testing architecture in any way. How are you going to handle a "rouge" plugin not closing its tag correctly? I used to have "hidden" control pages where i wou…

Great question! Its one of the things where Im very curious to see if my plans hold up when they meet reality.

I plan to solve it my a mix of process and multiple environments:

0) Base assumption is that Im starting from a working site and everything that may break it is going to be a change to the working site.

1) Every live/prod site will have a test environment. Like test.example.com

2) (process) The customer that wants to change something will work in Test. Or me, if Im the one indtaling the plugins. Plugin(s) are installed/php changed and then verified to be working as intended in Test (manuals testing basically)

3) (process) Customer never works in prod.

4) (process) When the changes made in Test are working as expected, Ill then update the docker images used for prod with the (verified) working changes.

5) Deploy new images to prod in-actice site.

6) Switch active / in-active.

7) Verify updated live site works as intended. If not, switch back to previous active bringing the live site back online without errors and go back to step 2.

Its not going to be absolutely error free, nothing ever is, but the intention is to (a) minimize the number of errors by enforcing some process designed to promote quality[1], and (b) when something breaks it should be very fast to switch back to a working site, so error fixing dont need to be done in a rush because the (live) site is down.

1: Yes the process is old school compared to todays CI/CD pipelines and multiple deployments to prod each day, but that is not the goal nor the business needs. A stable working site is.

Edit: not sure I actually answered your question. A broken plugin (missing ) would never make it past step 2.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#436

Post by ilrwbwrkhv » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #373

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have multiple businesses. All online, some in the B2B space and some in the B2C space. My biggest tip would be: focus on the supply chain. Supply chains are the secret to business. It took me a decade of failures to get this fact. If you ever played factorio, therein lies the secret to business. The rest of it is just funnel optimization.

What do you mean by supply chain in relation to a software company (assuming you're talking about software and not trading / eCommerce)?

Yup every company has a supply chain. In software the supply chain is new designs, new code, new customers, new support tickets. Arrange them on a board and optimize the flows. If you do not have flow on a certain track, focus on building that track up but make sure that it fits into the big picture and zoom out like in factorio.

e.g. If you have raw materials, i.e. designers, they should always be creating design assets of some sort. No raw materials should be sitting around on building huge deliverables. They need to be bite sized, and then it is up to you where you direct that flow.

When starting out you need a constant flow of customers. Right now tiktok is the best faucet by far. Even 3 videos can get you 100s of visitors to your landing page. Now the game begins. Do they just go away. That means your offer on the landing page is not good enough. Now increase the offer. Outrageous example: "We pay you $100 for signing up and trying our software". Now you have customer flow. And then it is back to optimization.

Hope that makes sense. I struggled so long because I didn't understand supply chains, faucets, flow etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#437

Post by bundie » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

yawboakye wrote: post #401

working on a few things focused on africa. i have a fundamental belief that much, if not all, of africa’s problems stem from the people not knowing better. you could say i’m firmly in the school of ‘reasonable people act reasonably’ and you don’t be so wrong. not completely right, but not completely wrong either. i’m african myself (ghanaian to be precise) with all my family still residing in my country, and i worry…

How far guy, hw you dey?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#438

Post by indymike » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #390

indymike wrote: post #207

I'm finally getting around to writing a couple of games. I started my career because I wanted to make games when I was a kid, but took a wrong turn into embedded medical devices, databases, the web... so I figure this will be the year I have time to make some fun software and worry about FPS instead of TPS.

Interesting! What games are you working on?

One procedural dungeon crawl and one RTS.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#439

Post by azinman2 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

reactive001 wrote: post #225

azinman2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you running a CNN on an ESP32? Is that even possible with so little stack and heap? PRRAM is slow

The ESP32-S3 introduces vector instructions which are supported by TFLite already. See here - https://github.com/espressif/esp-nn#performance S3 also supports Octal PSRAM vs the single lane SPI PSRAM found on the older ESP32-CAM style boards, should be 8x the bandwidth with all else equal. So far I've only seen the octal PSRAM's available on WROOM modules and it looks likes there only support for Espressif branded Oc…

Wow nice! Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on this year?

#440

Post by Msurrow » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

ivyirwin wrote: post #346

Msurrow wrote: post #64

I’m building a hostingplatform for fully managed Wordpress sites. By managed I mean both the WP install, but also plugins, themes and other customizations. I have a customer who does marketing, SoMe, SEO and all that (as a small business for other small to medium businesses) but it turns out she spends a lot of time dealing with tech issues from WP sites (plugin update errors, other tech issues the hosting provider d…

Interesting, I have a similar goal but in the Drupal space. My partner and I have been building Drupal sites for clients for almost 15 years and we keep running into hosting issues for our clients at scale. Most of the "managed" options get extremely expensive very quickly, but they're also not managed from a content/modules perspective. We're trying to do the best of both worlds and provide a managed (albeit opinion…

Interesting. I have zero experience with Drupal, but I assume its similar to WP in its architecture since you bring it up :)

I think any good solution to working with these 50/50 code and configuration mgmt technologies have to start with a solid analysis and understanding of what the actual business needs are(?). And then (re)evaluate how things are done.

And then perhaps also pricing models when it comes to the ‘“managed”’ part you mention. I think, for what Im building, there will end up needing to be a “managed hosting” offering which is more restricted and a custom development/T&M work which will be hourly.

Could be interesting to compare notes when get more of the setup up and running