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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#481

Post by acid303 »

amaurymartiny wrote: post #424
jtokoph wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t Tor exit nodes mostly blocked already?

> mostly Using Tor, I can verify around ~60% of emails. Notably, the exit nodes can connect to Gmail/GSuite servers. So it's not that bad. If Tor's exit nodes are blocked by a server, I fallback to Heroku, where I have right now 3 fixed-IP instances. And if I see that one of these also gets blacklisted, I would have it self-destruct and relaunch, Heroku assigns a new IP on each new instance.

Does Heroku reuse these IP addresses? Can someone get them after you?

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#482

Post by tunesmith »

chris_engel wrote: post #285
tunesmith wrote: post #180

I resuscitated a 20-year-old-website that was somewhat popular back in the day called storysprawl.com. It's private now, but I have friends join me on Sunday nights to write chapters together - we join Zoom, we write, we read them to each other. It's kind of like choose-your-own-adventure combined with round-robin fiction: Read chapter one, there are choices at the bottom, make a choice. If the next chapter is writte…

This sounds interesting :) My wife is doing something along the lines (ba-dum tss) with a friend of her: i am keeping a REALLY old version of "legend of the green dragon" online for them and they write a huge fantasy story together on a daily basis. They should get that printed in a book some day :)

That's one of the things that drives me about the site. I just think it would be so fun to have some of the stories eventually "completed", and then I could get them printed. Even if they don't "sell" and are just vanity projects, it'd be fun to have a series of StorySprawl books on my shelf. I actually do have two of the stories completed so far, but they are both pretty lousy. :) But if I ever get some serious time off, I could see myself diving into a markdown/pandoc/latex/docbook thing to start auto-printing them.

It is really fun to make books - I've also read some lengthy popular fan-fiction works, and when they get popular enough, people pop up to make underground books out of them. My wife printed out the six-book "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" series for me from a github repo for Christmas. Looks nice on my shelf!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#483

Post by asdev »

cowtongue wrote: post #442
asdev wrote: post #263

A Chrome Extension to add how long ago a Reddit post was made, the number of comments and the number of upvotes to Google search results. Reddit seems to be updating their old posts to rank higher on search engines, so if you search by time frame on Google, it shows a date that is way more recent than when the post was created. I decided to create this extension so that I could see the correct data about Reddit posts…

This is awesome. I search by time frame all the time and it was infuriating when that stopped working with Reddit. Do you have any plans on putting it up as a Firefox extension as well?

thanks! no plans for that yet, but may tackle that when I have time

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#484

Post by etimberg »

gdubs wrote: post #131

I learned the basics of Houdini to turn Lidar data into visualizations [1], as well as take a point cloud scan of my wife to drive a particle animation [2]. On the non-tech side of things, our garden has been a real source of happiness. We planted everything from seeds with the kids and grew pollinator flowers, vegetables, etc. [3] One of my favorite projects was finally making a sourdough starter and taking my pizza…

Amazing work! How did you do the 3d scanning?

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#485

Post by etimberg »

Primarily found new energy to put into my open source projects. Dusted off one of my old charting projects and modernized the build & documentation. https://www.chartjs.org/chartjs-chart-smith/examples

Just before everything got locked down I wrote an implementation of the circuit breaker pattern in python. The new concept I added was the ability to customize how the breaker resets. Rather than simply resetting the breaker as soon as a request succeeds, I provide a way to have the breaker in a fast-fail mode until the net error count (errors - successes) reaches down to 0. https://github.com/etimberg/pycircuitbreaker

I also did some Ham radio stuff, but my apartment doesn't have a balcony so I have no where to safely solder anything.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#486

Post by ciarannolan »

DAllison wrote: post #459
DAllison wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks!! No official roadmap (such is Open Source), but: * Rust Conversion (got a proof of concept, need to productionise it) - Anki Desktop has moved to Rust. We can unify all of the platform, and remove most of our backend code and maintenance burden. * Android 11 has made significant changes to how applications store files on the device (Scoped Storage). I expect this will be a nightmare to deal with: https://deve…

Missed the edit window formatted: Thanks!! No official roadmap (such is Open Source), but: * Rust Conversion (got a proof of concept, need to productionise it) - Anki Desktop has moved to Rust. We can unify all of the platform, and remove most of our backend code and maintenance burden. * Android 11 has made significant changes to how applications store files on the device (Scoped Storage). I expect this will be a ni…

Awesome, thank you for the info. Anki is a tool I use and love but I know very little about the behind the scenes work.

>* User onboarding & UX - We get tons of bad reviews: "All my cards have been deleted" - this is because we fail to explain how Anki/Spaced Repetition works and that we take control of scheduling. People download AnkiDroid expecting flashcards, and we can do much better in this area.

Somewhat related, but I would like a way to "cram" cards (ie. temporarily review all cards in a deck, in random order, without affecting anything about their spaced repetition timing). I feel like this must exist but I haven't found it. Do you know how to do this?

Also, how does Anki support the costs of Ankiweb? Is there a way I can contribute? It's not immediately obvious to me from clicking around on Ankiweb.

Finally, is this just a rip-off of Anki or is it legit? https://www.ankiapp.com/

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#487

Post by bilater »

memexy wrote: post #357
bilater wrote: post #91

I built NeumNotes - A Simple Neumorphic Styled Privacy First Notes App: https://neumnotes.com/ And GitRelevant - Search The Latest AND Greatest Github Repos by using multiple filters: https://gitrelevant.netlify.app/

Design for NeumNotes is really nice.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#488

Post by acs4u »

jstanley wrote: post #318
julianeon wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered Kickstarting this? Your pitch could be: "like Regium, except it's not vaporware and actually works." I mean that company had nothing and they were well on their way to raising 50k, before they were stopped. You have a real product. That $50,000 should've been yours. https://thehustle.co/03092020-chess-kickstarter-regium/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/fcfcpi/the_regium_eb... https://www.k…

Thanks, but it's really not a consumer-quality product, and I don't think I have the engineering chops to turn it into one. The frame is made by hand out of plywood. A lot of the wires inside are just taped in place. The Raspberry Pi takes several minutes to boot up to the game screen, during which time you can't interact with the board in any way, and you just get a load of Linux nonsense on the touchscreen. It's al…

Working with a contract manufacturer should be able to alleviate those issues you're mentioning. Feel free to DM me if you have more questions. Awesome project!!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#489

Post by megalan247 »

https://browserbase.io/

I got frustrated with the existing options for running automated QA tests (they are all super expensive) and decided to build my own for a fraction of the cost. It was super interesting as I am not really a developer so it taught me a lot about various programming languages (the frontend is written in Node and the backend is in Go), and so much about infrastructure. It was super rewarding as this is the first side-project that I didn't stop half way through :D

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#490

Post by xfan009 »

elihu wrote: post #471
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #74

I managed to plant vegetables and keep them alive and growing well in to June. I make the same attempt every year, so this is a record for me. On a more serious note, I had plans when the lockdown began. I wanted to build some kind of a "robot" as an educational venture. Do some redecorating, learn Unity and figure out how to use the TIG welder I bough one night when I was drunk. In reality what has happened is that…

TIG is fun. I've been learning to weld aluminum recently, with no prior welding experience. Mostly from watching YouTube, but I've gotten a bit of advice from random people I know who know how to weld.

Aluminium welding is somewhat hazardous to my understanding. If I remember from talking with a metal smith in my family, it can give off some pretty noxious fumes. Apparently it can even yield Arsenic and Florine fumes (CDC website mentioned those, among others). Again, if I recall correctly, something like a full-face P100 acid-gas mask is usually enough.
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