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Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

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111–120 of 224 posts

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#112
I made a pink heart with an FPGA for my girlfriend who had a VGA/VHDL assignment. Having only limited knowledge as a CS 2nd year student, I wrote hundreds of ifs to generate it but at least I generated those ifs by Java, wasting a lot of computing units (or something?). She liked it though.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#114
I set up my VPS to ping the router of my long-distance girlfriend every second 24/7; it made me feel nice to know I was flipping bits in her router's memory every second and having some tiny impact on the space she was living in despite being hundreds of miles away.

I also encoded a love note into the Bitcoin blockchain but I prefer not to dwell on that one.

Oh and for a while I added a HTTP header to all responses from my websites professing my love.

And I'm just now remembering the secret chat command I added to my chatbot that would tell her good night + I love you but only to her username.

This is all coming back to me after seeing this post, lol.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#115

When I proposed to my now wife, I built a reverse geocache box. It had a one way mirror on the top and button on the top. It showed you how far you were and what direction you needed to move towards. It took us to various locations where we had gone on notable dates. Once we got to a particularly scenic hill side, it unlocked and the ring was inside with some roommates hiding in the bushes with a DSLR. There was just…

my girl would think the button is a bomb...which it is in a sense

Yeah- I remember when I first gave it to her with no explanation, she was quite confused. One of the key features is that you were allowed a limited number of presses (I think only 40 or so). She wasted five or six pressed before I stepped in a gave a few pointers.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#116
My wife was a teacher for a long time. She was technologically advanced, so she used spreadsheets to track all her grades. Apparently this wasn't a thing most people did.

She was required by the district to do report cards in this very crappy Mac app, which then synced with a central server when you were done. The Mac app had no import utility nor any keyboard navigation, so I had to help her manually transfer the grades from the spreadsheets to the grading program, and each kid required about 90 mouse clicks (times 32 kids).

After the first time, I decided I was going to figure out a better way.

I ended up reverse-engineering the save file format, which was sort-of-but-not-really XML. I wrote a python program that could take CSV exports from her spreadsheet and recreate the save files for the app, so I would run that, load the app up, and then just spot check a few of the grades.

The first time I did the grades that way it took twice as long as just manually entering it, but after that, doing report cards was a breeze.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#117

I downloaded my WhatsApp chat history with my then long-distance fiancee (now my wife), and created a bunch of graphs and analysis. Everything from word clouds to regression to anomalies (eg when she visited or I visited, chat frequency dropped dramatically, etc).

Same thing but I did with R I think iirc. I tried with my old crush. Sadly or gladly we did't end up dating for longer.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#118
I knew I would spend some time without an internet device and beyond reliable communication. I wrote us a private chat website that was something like 2kb so that I could load it up on stranger's phones over 2G and still get messages from, and out to my partner.

Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?

#120

I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart but challenging guy. Definitely the sort of father who didn’t think any guy was good enough for his daughter. Remember the first time she took me home to meet her parents in South Carolina for Thanksgiving he was, literally, cleaning his gun on the front porch. He prima…

One more that’s fun, though maybe doesn’t really count as “programming.” I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the…

So... a friend just sent me this as I'm known as "the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads [1]." I'm also getting married on 11/11. This is absolutely brilliant. My partner and I [2] thank you for this. PM me, we'd love to invite you and your partner to our (digital) wedding.

[1] http://ghostinfluence.com/prank

[2] http://partnersinpresence.com

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