Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
131–140 of 224 posts
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#132They are thankfully no longer in existence, but I actually cut most of my mid 90s web dev chops building tribute pages to my girlfriends, replete with image carousels, autoplaying songs, marquees ... Their chief effect was to make me indirectly desirable to a lot of other girls because they wanted their own vanity URL .. It was a strange and glorious time.
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#133I helped set them up with an SSH tunnel, and appropriate browser settings, for bypassing the Great Firewall.
I wanted to teach them how to play Magic: The Gathering, and MTGO at the time did not seem like a good option. I built a very basic 2-player game which allowed for specifying a decklist as a set of image URLs, and had the basic motion primitives of shuffling a deck, drawing, tapping cards, and such.
One particularly nice UI thing it had, which I wish I'd see more often, is that it showed you each others cursor positions in real time, so you could virtually "point" as part of discussion or communication. [The source for this has likely been lost to the bitrot of time, but it might be buried somewhere in a backup]
Finally, we liked to watch TV shows or movies together. This was initially done as "download the same file, get on VOIP, and count-down to start", but this was fiddly, especially if someone had to pause or rewind. I built a very simple utility to synchronize playback of the file between two VLC instances. It looks like this is actually my oldest github repo! https://github.com/YenTheFirst/VLCSync
More than a decade later, they're no longer in China and thus don't need to bypass the firewall, and we lost interest in M:tG, but we married, and the video synchronization problem became remarkably simpler. :)
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#134The audio[1] is not autoplaying anymore except on Edge / IE.
[0] https://rickynotaro.com/ma/eeveeGood.html [1] https://rickynotaro.com/ma/ma/eevee/pokemon.mp3
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#135I made a game for our wedding-website. The player has to control her and me simultaneously. It's pretty short, though. I did everything myself, graphics, music, gameplay. https://10-5.de/game/ A funny anecdote: Some years ago, a person asked me if it would be ok to modify the game for the wedding for his friend. They wanted to play it at their wedding as a joke. At first I didn't know what to say, but then he told me…
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#136For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables. Of course,…
I did find https://www.improbable.com/news/2012/Optimal-seating-chart.p... as part of that process. It documents the formulation of the problem well
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#137It's been one of the most gratifying, intimate and occasionally frustrating things I've ever done.
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#138For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables. Of course,…
Organizing the seating arrangements at our wedding was such a pain. I remember we suggested doing "self seating" where everyone could just eat wherever they chose, and it was like I suggested inviting Satan himself to host the ceremony. My mom and Aunts shot that down SO FAST.
Later I learned that decades earlier two brothers had stopped speaking forever over a misinterpretation of the searing arrangement at a family event - it was meant to be a table of "close family", but the attendee assigned there thought it was "the kids' table".
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#139I once coded my smart speaker so you could ask it who the most beautiful woman is and it would answer with the name of my then girlfriend, now wife.
Re: Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
#140I bought a domain name, willyougooutwith.me and put it behind a tinyurl link. On her birthday I gave a gift to her with a piece of paper of that tinyurl.
If she visits that url, there will be a 3D envelope that she can click. If she clicks that 3D envelope, a 3 page letter will come out, with her photo on the first page that I stalk from Facebook (yeah I know I'm creepy lol), and then on the second page a sentence or two asking if she's willing to go out with me, and a list of restaurants. On the third page a form in which if she fills it out I will get a text message saying that she fills the form out.
Obviously she didn't fill the form lol, but I asked her several days later whether she saw the website, and she said yes.
My friends whom I told my attempt were all like "are you crazy? that's creepy as hell, no way she's going to respond", but hey, I just learned how to code (this was 7 years ago), and making the website was fun, so I went along with it.
Now that I think about it, it was indeed creepy. And it didn't help that I was just a FOB that didn't know how to be savvy around people. If I were to do it again now, maybe I'll do it differently lol.
After that one, I did a few other attempts, but in the end she was never interested in me at all. I am now happily married with another person.