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Ask HN: What are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#301

1. API to extract and store metadata about an uploaded PDF (images, relevant field locations, signature boxes, etc.) 2. Tool that shows an image of each field to the user and allows them to enter human readable prompts (title, description, input style). 3. A PWA that uses the prompts to help an end user complete the form, collects signatures, etc. 4. Add the ability to link/upload some tabular data and tie fields fro…

That's cool. I was working on something similar, extracting tabular data from PDF for the last 2 weeks.

Curious about your method, as the process (e.g. to detect the coordinate of the header/footer fields, etc) is very manual and specific for each PDF template. Do you happen to encounter the same challenge? If yes, how do solve it, use machine learning? heuristics? etc?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#302
Developing the first completely new class of wind instrument mouthpiece introduced in recorded history. For wind instruments there are reed mouthpieces, double reed, jet reed, lip reed, etc. These have all existed in various forms for millenia. My design, based on over 15 years of research uses optical sensing to very precisely measure multiple dimensions of the embouchure.

It will be available in the form of a hands-free music controller supported on what we call the "neck unit" or on a variety of hand-held units of different fingering styles that we call "finger units".

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#304

My family. Got a two year old and 7 month old. Bought our first and hopefully only house a month ago. Work remotely doing some really interesting programming. I reflected early this week during Canada Day fireworks that I have literally everything I wanted out of life. Now I just have to learn how to live in the moment and enjoy it all. That's proving to be a small struggle.

Good on you. I have a family as well and prior to it spent much of my free time coding side projects. Now, it's been tough to find the energy to do that in my limited time.

Of course, one can prioritize the projects, but find joy in other aspects of life once the little ones asleep.

Trying to get back into a side project though, mainly because I'm feeling the itch.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#305

Loop Thesis ( https://loop-thesis.com ), a multiplayer time traveling puzzle/arena shooter that allows players to simultaneously travel to different points on the timeline. In co-op/multiplayer this allows you to do things like send someone back in time to open a door for another player in the future, or pull objects outside of time to effect someone in the past. There's a big focus on experimentation and discovery.…

This is god send for my Autistic son who singularly obsessed about space-time continuum these days. He was even looking for games along the same theme. Do you have a patreon or planning to have one? Perhaps we can have a side conversation on ways to support your effort. Last question, any definitive resource you can point to for a 11 year old to grok the concept of space-time mechanics and other fundamentals concepts…

You're maybe the second or third person to mention to me now that this might be something that Autistic kids might be into.

I'm not super-familiar with the Autistic community, so I haven't been consciously pushing in that direction, but I am definitely interested in making sure that the game is accessible for Autistic players, in no small part because the few Autistic kids I've playtested with have so far been really good at latching onto the emotional core of the game -- which is to try and build this puzzle-box of a world that just feels very safe and contained, where the more you learn about it and the more that you dissect it, the more the disparate systems start to fit together and make sense as a cohesive whole.

On the resource side of things, take both of these with a grain of salt because I'm not an expert here, but I do have two recommendations. The first is that there are a few child-friendly movie-adaptations of Flatland out there, and my niece watched one of them in first grade and was really into it. Flatland indirectly inspired some of the mechanics in Loop-Thesis -- particularly this idea of time being a spacial dimension that you can hop around in and move objects into and out of, rather than the strict line of cause-and-effect that's more common in other games.

Flatland was also partially the inspiration for meta-meta-time, which is how I reconcile the player being able to insert themselves into the game. The physical player exists in meta-meta-time, and is projected via their computer into meta-time, which is the actual game engine running on their computer. Then the game engine projects their avatar into the regular level timeline.

The other recommendation I'll make is the game "Baba is You", which is not related at all to space-time, but is probably the closest example of the kind of mechanical consistency that I'm trying to hit with Loop Thesis, and it might scratch some similar itches.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#306

I'm writing a GitHub CI bot specifically for Go. There are so many ways you can improve on existing CI if you integrate deeply with a specific language. You can cache test results for packages whose source code hasn't changed; you can run a specific test n times; you can run a benchmark and block a merge if the geomean regressed; you can run a linter and suggest it's fixes in GitHub comments; etc. It's a little bizar…

Some thoughts I've had along these lines (but for Rust)

- Open issues in the review for compiler / lint / format errors - Gather coverage per test and use that to determine which tests are needed for a given change

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#307
Been happily hacking away on zlog [0] a distributed shared-log that runs on top of software-defined storage like Ceph. I've been working on it for a couple years, steadily getting closer to something stable. It's a lot of fun working through all the many supporting aspects of a project like this: ci/jenkins/cloud-hosting, marketing/promotion, packaging for distributions, learning about tools for communities, etc...

[0]: https://github.com/cruzdb/zlog

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#308

I'm working on a travel agency website that integrates with global booking systems, something like expedia but less complex. So far along the process I've learned a lot specially about a wide range of Azure services. I just learned Azure Search and wow, it works great!

I work in this space. Curious of you to elaborate!
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