Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet.

I recently spoke with a Lemmy developer who gave me some advice on making it easy for anyone to host. I was struggling with the mess of supporting both docker and VM hosting. He told me that Lemmy uses ansible provisioning to install docker compose on the target VM so that the effort can be focused on docker support, so that's what I've been homing in on for the last few weeks.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2

Parser combinators are a bit hard to get into, the most helpful resource for me was `nom`'s "Choosing a Combinator" document [1], which is dense but gives you an overview of all the Lego bricks which you can then start imagining how to fit together.

I've not really read it, but there's also the original paper on the subject [2] (as linked to by the `parsec` documentation [3]) which describes the nuts and bolts theory behind it.

> [Can] you not just rescan the string for the escape sequences, after grabbing the full string?

Absolutely, this is just a convenience around that pattern that allows you to express that like:

    let string = quoted_string.then(escaped(json_string_escapes)).parse(&input)?;

And also more generally for any parsers `foo`, `bar`, and `baz` as:

    let quux = (foo, bar, baz).map().parse(&input)?;

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140528151730/http://legacy.cs....

[3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/parsec

It’s a curated directory of personal blogs and a blog search engine. I started to build a simple RSS-reader for myself, just wanted a HN-like list of links. Slowly it grew, and now it has full-text search across tens of thousands of blog posts from 700+ blogs (adding new ones every day), related blogs and posts recommendations, lists, link blogs. Now I’m working on adding email newsletters, curated collections, and text-to-speech generation.

Historically, UPSes had various proprietary communication protocols over serial ports. Nowadays they usually have a USB port, but I have a bunch of very old APC UPSes with just the serial port and/or the expansion card slot (which is usually just another serial link plus power on a edge connector).

A normal person would just use NUT or apcupsd over serial and call it a day. A bored person would write a USB HID power device stack and serial protocol acquisitors to give these UPSes USB ports. An insane person would add projectors from the USB HID power device stack to serial protocols so that they could use whatever communication card they want on any UPS they have (for example, a CyberPower RM205 card plugged into an APC Smart-UPS).

Why? Because apparently I'm insane and I needed a break from working on delinking executables back into object files, another heretical project I've worked on for the past couple years.

I've just started and I don't know if I'll finish that, but it's something I need to work on to exorcise that particular nagging thought out of my head.