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Ask HN: What are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#101
Problem: notes app are increasingly complex and usually unencrypted. With all thats going on in on the privacy front, there needs to be a universal notes app that focuses on privacy, simplicity, and longevity.

Project: Standard Notes. Focuses on being as simple as can be, but gives power to extensions and privacy. All notes are end-to-end encrypted. It's available on all major platforms, and just works.

https://standardnotes.org

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#102
Problem: Track players on an ARK: Survival Evolved (Steam) server, to better manage inter-tribe aggression. (When does another tribe have more players online - at what hours should we be diplomatic, and when can we be aggressive?)

Project: ARKData has been an ongoing project since mid-2015, when it began as copying player names from the arkservers.net page into an Excel spreadsheet. Having transformed this into a static site generator has taught (and retaught) me a great deal about front-end technologies and application architecture - from data ingestion to browser rendering.

I'm currently working on 2 upgrades - first, porting the SteamQuery application from PHP to Powershell, to natively use it instead of having to depend on another data source. Steam servers reply with a blob of information, when given the correct command over UDP. Arkservers.net just runs a PHP application called SteamQuery that queries a server with UDP and parses that into JSON. I rewrote my port yesterday - output is only missing a few data items - player play times, & server name/map/filename since these are not delineated. It's a series of pre-parsers, parsers, and post-parsers - Valve, why do your servers not speak JSON directly?

Second, using SQLExpress as a back-end. I'm currently using numerous CSVs and JSON flat files as a data store. Hopefully, this will improve application performance somewhat, and allow for better statistical analysis. With flat files, it takes several seconds to build a list of players seen in the past 24h.

The application isn't currently running - I only run it when I'm playing, against the server I'm playing on, and I'm not currently playing on any servers. There's a demo site still up, from the last time the application was operational: http://gilgamech.com/ARKData/_Wiped_2_4__NoobFriendly_8xT_3x...

Github (Slightly out of date): https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#103
post #39

I have a project to get to know something about ML in computer vision. The project I'm doing that with is OCR of a noisy, low-resolution image (~32x16) Main problems: * Since the resolution is very low, I found it hard to use traditional CV approaches to segment individual characters and classify those (for example: is this rectangular blob a few pixels diagonal a dash symbol or just noise) * End to end CNN approach…

What is the use case? Why can't you 'enhance the resolution' CSI style?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#106
Problem: the Metaverse should fundamentally be a web application: open to everyone, based on open standards, uncensored. But tools like Unity and Unreal don't play nicely with the web. Their emphasis on proprietary editors causes vendor lockin for anyone who puts in the time to learn them, and presents a barrier to entry for anyone who isn't interested in learning yet-another-platform-when-the-ones-we-have-are-just-fine-thanks. And their compile-to-webgl stories are a joke. A "metaverse" of siloed applications living as gigantocorp platform exclusives is not a metaverse at all.

Project: https://www.primrosevr.com is a web-oriented, immersive environment for building applications. In Primrose, you write idiomatic ES2015 JavaScript code to define interactive objects and let the framework manage the VR-ness for you.

I've been a web developer for 20 years, and I've been building VR and AR apps in browsers for almost a decade now. Primrose started as a collection of my habits for building browser-based VR apps to become the first WebVR framework in the world.

I've built a few apps using the framework, including this one for a client (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/goldman-s...). Y-Combinator was interested in us, but I most emphatically do not want to leave DC (y'know, cuz the metaverse isn't just one city).

Definitely open to taking on collaborators. I'm open to taking on motivated beginners, even open to mentoring people, so long as I don't need to constantly chase you down to see how you're doing or spoon-feed you answers.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#107
Two things:

First, my torrent tracker, "Notorious" (https://github.com/GrappigPanda/notorious). This has been a constant project of mine for at least 7 months now. There's still a lot of improvements which can be done, but this brings up the second project I'm working on: "Olivia" (https://github.com/GrappigPanda/Olivia), a distributed KV store. I'm currently reading through Paxos papers and geearing up to implement Paxos, Raft, Epaxos, or something (by myself because I like difficult things) so that the KV store has consensus.

I plan to have a horizontally scalable torrent tracker, for no other purpose than to have said I did it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#108

I'm working on an automatic chicken coop door. Using a linear actuator and ESP8266. A mix of Arduino c and HTML/JS for the interface. Playing with flexbox, svelte, webpack, and fontello.

Is it just going to open/shut at predetermined times? Or is there some "smarter" behavior?

Going to release it anywhere? There's other hackers out there with chickens (me!)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#110
post #32

I, along with my co-founder, are working on a shopping platform for furniture and decor seen on the set of movies and TV shows: https://www.seenonset.com Startups definitely like to deck out their offices with some of the nicer high-end designs. Even Y Combinator's home page image carousel has the likes of the Bertoia Diamond Chair and the Nelson Saucer Pendant Lamp on show! Though a lot of startups go for the replic…

This is beautifully thorough. I can't say I'd purchase items based on their appearance in TV shows. But, the idea of a catalogue of the items and the time it must take to create this is beautiful in an artistic way to me.
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