Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

121–130 of 224 posts

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

#121
post #84

Somehow on dating apps my most successful profile line has been “Message me if you want to learn an interesting fact about toast.” This led to me “researching” a lot of facts about toast and getting deeper and deeper into the bit. Long story short I now run toastfacts.com. I only have about 7 facts on there right now, but I “discovered” some more good facts last night which I plan to add to the site when I get home.

I just learned a whole lot about toast.

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

#122
I made a webapp with a button on it. When first visiting the site the user was prompted with "What's your name". The second prompt was "Who are you thinking of". Next, a link appeared that the user would share with the person they were thinking of. When cliking the button, nothing would happen unless the other party also clicked within a certain timeframe. The idea was to see wether if A thought about B, would B also be thinking about A. I built it in the beginning of my relationship with a very special girl, and we have used it a lot since then. We also used to the watch Netflix shows at the same time, clicking the button to mark the moment when to press play. Later I also enabled realtime drawing on the webapp, with each person having a different color. It all worked with a simple jquery frontend and a nodejs websocket server.

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

#123
I did this as part of my wedding proposal.

I wrote up a simple web app that accepted two different secrets to "login" (one for each person). Once logged in, you were presented with a photo and asked for a comment (first thing that comes to mind or a reaction).

If only one comment was submitted, it would tell you to remind your partner to leave a comment. Once both parties submitted a comment, the photo displayed with both comments and a countdown to the next photo. The countdown varied from 12-48 hours randomly - to give me time to figure out when to actually propose. This ran for several weeks total.

It was fun to see our comments - sometimes they would nearly match. Or reveal something we didn't remember about a historical date/event we shared.

I eventually used the site to pop the question, and then made the whole thing into a photo book, including a word cloud built from each of our comments. Was really fun to see each of our most common words.

It was an incredibly simple, fun project using flask/sqlite on an ec2 instance.

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

#125
Every day that I do programming for a living, it's coding for love.

Not sappy honeymoon-period love (eros), but the long-term-commitment version of love that requires sacrificing my personal preferences in exchange for providing for my wife's and children's material needs (storge / agape).

Obviously I'm not unique in my willingness to do this. But looking back on my own life, the honeymoon-period love is bush-league.

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

#127
Recently, my fiancée is into Christmas a lot, so I set out to build an advent calendar.

She likes jigsaw so I printed a photo of us from back when we met on a generated multiple-of-24 piece jigsaw pattern to cut.

But that was a bit too simple. She enjoyed playing Human Resource Machine which was the closest she ever got to programming.

So on the back, I printed IOCCC-style Ruby code shaped in the form of a Christmas tree. With the pieces cut out and jumbled, you’d have no idea what the code would look like without solving the front side.

Once solved, when typed and run, it would reveal an URL to a XKCD-style drawing I made for the occasion.

It was tough to make code not too short nor too long, not too complex nor obvious, and able to survive the jigsaw cutting! Anyway, she enjoyed it through and through.

A quick extra en passant, a bash one liner I quickly banged out some years ago: https://github.com/lloeki/toolbelt/blob/master/hearts

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

#128
I’m a quirky person and wanted to propose to my girlfriend in an unconventional way. I’m also a coder with a long history of making weird websites for good causes. So I turned my proposal into a gamified art piece/website: https://helpmepropose.live

It hasn’t gotten as much traction as I’d hoped, but I still had fun making it and spending way too much time on that pixel art that perhaps no one will ever see...

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

#130
In college (uk meaning not US), smart attractive girl on the course, she could just not get her head around the programming part at all so I taught her enough to pass (and in truth more than half the code in her final project was mine but typed by her) and in spending time together we realised we where attracted to each other.

We dated for a while, was a lot of fun.

We could either pick the set project or any other project that would demonstrate what they didn't specify was the language (assuming people would use the one taught in class) so I did a VT100 emulator in Object Pascal and she did the set assignment in the taught language (sadly VB6).

Post reply on HN