Working on a project that uses Chrome Puppeteer - a Node.js API that uses Chrome DevTools Protocol to control a (possibly headless) Chrome. Its very cool because now the phenomenal power of DevTools is accessible programmatically and can be run on CI systems and stuff!
Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
31–40 of 111 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#32I’m working on a skin for developer laptops so that you can apply those sweet conference and startup stickers. No more risking your resale value, or even physically risking damage to your expensive MacBook. I want the skins to be identical to the original laptop material so that they are practically invisible. So for the MacBooks, a silver aluminium sticker (or space grey etc.) I’ve done a proof of concept and it wor…
I'm interested! How did the proof of concept turn out? Any chance you could make to order...
I personally really liked how the PoC went – I plan on doing a full write up in the next couple of days, which will outline what I did, start to finish.
Here is an example of the sticker/skin and the finish. Excuse the slightly 'off' cut on the corner – I'm looking to produce a highly accurate template for each of the various models. https://imgur.com/FfQ3XQs
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#33I am working on a podcast called Would You Like to Restart[1], it's essentially a single player DnD (Player and GM).
It's cool because unlike all my other failed projects it's for fun rather than an attempt at profit. Even if nobody listens we're doing it because it's a laugh - and people seem to be listening to it, so bonus!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#34I'm working on a personal organization app - basically integrating a to do list, habit tracker, and notes app into one. I think it's cool because it's useful to me and a "scratch your own itch" app. If you're curious it's at https://www.nominal.net
I find it amusing how this seems to be a very common response to this sort of Ask HN question. If you want something right, you gotta do it yourself! Here's mine: https://github.com/upvalue/meditations It also supports habits and notes, but in mine the tasks and habits are combined. I'd like to go further like you have in combining the notes and task interfaces (right now it's basically two separate apps that happen…
I like it. I use both approaches, so there's individual task/habit/notes modules like you have that let you dive deeper and edit and tweak things, and then the general dashboard which is more of an overview that combines them into one and lets you get common tasks done quickly. The dashboard is date based (defaulting to today) while the modules aren't.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#35Working on my multiprocessing library, ZProc
https://github.com/pycampers/zproc
It's cool because it tries to bring some creativity into the rather standstill multitasking world :)
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#36I’m tinkering with combining liquid cooling with waste heat electricity generation as a way to cut down on datacenter energy use. I think it’s cool because datacenters consume 1-2% of all electricity generated worldwide, and roughly half of that goes to air conditioning. If it’s viable, it might make a measurable dent in CO2 emissions.
That's amazing. I had no idea data centers used so much!
Here’s some more info if you’re interested.
https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-e...
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#37I'm working on an experimental tool to simplify React Redux app development. Inspired by the simplicity of Turbolinks, and powered by Rails. You can develop React and Redux SPAs without any APIs.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#38In my freetime I have been working on learning React, and more generally modern javascript. After dragging my feet for so long because of bias, I took the plunge a few weeks ago and I love it! It's very cool, in my opinion, because the web ecosystem really has grown a lot as an app platform, and honestly I like it. The "old" web and an app web can exist side by side, I see now.
At work, still just connecting API to API, test to test, pipe to pipe. I feel like a plumber, but I guess that's "backend".
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#39A toy 24-bit virtual machine and assembler. It has 16MB of addressable memory split into 256 64KB banks. 8 specialized and 8 general purpose 16 bit registers. An address stack and a register state stack and memory mapped I/O.
Most of the opcodes have been written, apart from interrupts. It has built in function calls, near and far jumps, a bunch of different branching operations and basic looping based on flag States. Comparisons, unsigned and signed addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. Most opcodes support direct, indirect and relative addressing.
I tried to keep the assembly language fairly simple and straightforward. So far I have a two pass assembler that supports labels, named variables, subroutines, 8 and 16 bit numbers in decimal or hexadecimal format, 24 bit addresses in hexidecimal, character literals and zero terminated strings.
At this point the next steps are to finish doing interrupts and work on input and ouput. Right now, it will read an assembled binary and spit out a new binary with any modified memory addresses and a register dump so there's still a bit of work yet to making something interactive.
I'm thinking of using bearlibterminal(though I wouldn't mind keeping it dependency free...i'm just not sure if I can) and making it pseudo text/graphical terminal based I was thinking of maybe having different modes that could be switched so data stored in vram memory would be treated and displayed differently depending. I'd also like to keep the display and input fairly separate so it would be possible to write a different display frontend if people wanted. My hope is to eventually have keyboard, mouse and maybe other inputs, graphics and basic audio all as separate modules.
I'd like to eventually release it all open source with full documentation. I dunno I was inspired after trying to learn assembly and finding it was either fairly complex and more for compilers in the case of modern processors or you had to deal with weird hardware limitations and strangeness with old processors. So I tried my hand at making something similar to an older processor without having to deal with the frustrations of old hardware. My goal was to make it as fun to program in as possible while still giving the feeling of working directly with memory and registers.
Personally, i've learned tons from working on this and I figure if I was looking something like this, there's probably others that could benefit.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
#40I am working on Primer. Basically a bot that makes it much easier to learn "difficult things" on your own. Here is a screenshot : https://imgur.com/a/E5Kw54P
The screenshot has changed a lot by now though.
I have been working on this, alone, for last almost two year. I have iterated more than 15 times. One time, I was trying to do non-linear twine[0] based interface. Was pretty complicated. Right now, this is the version I am most satisfied and excited for. Also, it took some while to create a CMS from scratch for this one.
Here is why it is cool.
0. Primer teaches you in a conversational way. I understand video based MOOCs are new norms, but conversational way makes user better focused towards learning. It also makes it easier to revise, recall and resume from where you last left.
1. Primer will provide you notes in form of Tufte-Latex Books[1]. The way it works is that there is already a template for each course and when the user completes the course, his/her response accounts generates tex Code along with the previous templates and results in personalized books. The books authors name is the username.
2. Primer enforces spaced repetition. Not only it teaches you something, it also reminds you to revise after certain intervals. Although Anki export is a desirable feature, I did not have the energy to look into it now, but it is definitely in the roadmap. Primer takes responsibility of your learning.
3. Primer tracks time spent on your courses. Good tool for homeschoolers.
4. Primer courses are versioned. Primer courses improve based on feedback. If you get stuck at a course, it is improved so that, next time it feels easier to understand. And often times, we will screw up, so it is there for that too. But importantly, courses should have pretty iteration times. This is a major advantage of text based courses.
5. Primer based courses take a fraction of time to complete than Video-based courses.
6. Last, my favorite. It makes difficult things easier to learn. Although, achieving this feature to a practical extent will take another year or so, but still feels good to have the potential. Suppose, you want to learn how to build a spaceship. There is a ton of things you need to learn before you can even begin to learn about spaceships and rockets. Primer ensures that you have understood the prerequisites before you start doing something. All these courses are present on Primer itself.
I am not good with deadlines. But I can assure that I am pretty close to completion.
These are the initial courses to be offered by Mid 2019.
Tentative Tracks: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Fantastic ML Papers and how to implement them, Teach yourself Computer Science, Fantastic CS Papers and how to understand them, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.
To follow updates: https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/
[0]: http://twinery.org/ [1]: https://github.com/Tufte-LaTeX/tufte-latex