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Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#81

Post by davidw »

q_andrew wrote: post #69
davidw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case it's been a gradual process. I made a web site, created a Facebook group, and started collecting emails. It helps a lot to get a few people who are interested in the same things you are. Strong Towns is another one to look into for allies.

Strong Towns is great. My hesitancy of this kind of activism is that I can't track down and show up to every public hearing like grumpy retired homeowners can.

Just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you can't do something!

It's often possible to write in, rather than attending hearings in person. Get a mailing list of people and have them write in.

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#83

Post by jareklupinski »

incanus77 wrote: post #8

I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far…

Give it a small LCD screen, cool keyboard layout, call it a "cyberdeck", and I'm in for one :)

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#84

Post by incanus77 »

jareklupinski wrote: post #83
incanus77 wrote: post #8

I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far…

Give it a small LCD screen, cool keyboard layout, call it a "cyberdeck", and I'm in for one :)

The current approach has a 2" LCD and exposes the normal Pi GPIO on the top in a way that would allow something like the CardKB[1] (or anything similar) in a HAT format.

[1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/cardkb-mini-keyboard

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#86

Post by vinner_roy »

I'm building pagespace.app, a platform to create, publish and sell longer form rich content. The vision is a cross between Substack and Github.

I mention Github because much like code, good content and knowledge should change and improve over time and have lots of commits and pull requests.

I mention Substack as users can subscribe to authors (they can also buy individual books).

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#87

Post by mikewarot »

I'm trying to grok quantum computing, all the way down to the electronics. Watch/read lots of stuff over my head, until some little detail fits with my world view, then go back and watch/read stuff again... slowly figuring it all out.

I have a really good mental model of superposition. I'm pretty sure I understand quantum annealing. I'm working on the bloch sphere and quantum gates.

Once I'm sure I understand things, I'll write up some code to simulate it, and then see if that code matches up with the stuff already out there, result wise.

I'm consciously guarding my ignorance of how it is simulated, lest I fall into the same mode of thinking about it as everyone else.

I think I can simulate quantum annealing with an almost trivial amount of code.

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#88

Post by bwb »

I am working on a project aimed at reinventing book discovery online... my goal is to recreate the feeling of walking around a physical bookstore (but reimagined for the online world).

It is called https://shepherd.com/

I launched about 10 months ago we are slowly getting there :)

How does it work?

I ask authors to recommend five around a topic/theme (so every book on the website is personally recommended by an author who is passionate about it). So you get some great recommendations on things like:

The best books on artificial intelligence that are not full of hype and nonsense https://shepherd.com/best-books/no-hype-and-no-nonsense-arti...

The best books that tell a cautionary tale about world-changing technology https://shepherd.com/best-books/cautionary-tales-about-world...

The best books whose dystopian visions were eerily prescient https://shepherd.com/best-books/dystopian-visions

Then, I build out bookshelves (aka topic pages) using NLP. This is very new and only 30 days old so I am still improving the engine / topics. But, it is all tied to Wikidata so you can search via Wikipedia topic (and some other cool stuff down the road).

Bookshelf on artificial intelligence https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/artificial-intelligence

Bookshelf on neuroscience https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/neuroscience

Right now I am working to roll out a big improvement to the recommendation engine. And, then to integrate book genre data, which is a massive project. I want to be able to go to the World War 2 section and say "show me all historical fiction", or on the AI bookshelf to show me all "science fiction".

Let me know what you think :)

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#89

Post by jacknews »

scottlilly wrote: post #75
rudasn wrote: post #72

I'm on and off spending some time on a (probably) completely useless and really bad idea: a filesystem based document "database" with very basic indexing capabilities, in nodejs. It sounds so horrible, I can't get my mind off it! :P

I've been working on something (probably) similar in C#. The idea is to tag files/documents with attributes like "auto", "insurance", "2022", encrypt the file locally (using your manually entered key), copy it to a network share/cloud storage/etc., and add the tags and document information to a database. Later on, you can search for documents based on the tags and get a decrypted copy of the file.

This doesn't sound horrible at all, in fact tree filesystems look like an anachronism from when disk space was limited, and both the logical layer of naming and metadata of objects, and the management of the data on storage, were conflated into a single data structure.

A DB to contain all the metadata, and blobs or object storage for the content itself (perhaps with backup metadata). The database manages the namespace, object storage manages the storage layer.

You can easily and quickly search file metadata etc, there could be multiple copies of the content, perhaps distributed, etc, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

#90

Post by prakhar897 »

xxxtentachyon wrote: post #26
prakhar897 wrote: post #22

I'm trying to create a ML model which can detect if my dog is in pain just by looking at its face. Maybe, I'll create an app for it too if it works well.

How are you planning on collecting data? Seems hard to be a detached trial aid when your dog is in pain…

Currently, I'm approaching this from another angle. Instead of giving training data, I'm trying to use the same inferences vets use to determine if the dog is in pain. For ex: if the dog has flattened ears or grimacing look.

I'm still reading research papers to figure what's the best way to approach this problem. This is just the first step and I'll see what can be done regarding collecting data later on.

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