Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#51
An aggregator ala reddit/hackernews/twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.

One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:

- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.

- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than "frontpage" content

- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance

- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.

I'm working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction/stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy "downvote shares", which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.

It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.

Draft paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjj...

EDIT:

Since this is a getting a bit of traction, if you're interested in testing it out when I've got a prototype, I've created a mailing list here

https://forms.gle/EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6

I think initial community is critical for getting these sorts of things right, so would definitely appreciate having some HN folks to test with.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#54
post #32

https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor (including, code, images and tutorial). The installation is basically done. The main draft of the guide is almost done, but quite some polishing to do. https://github.com/maxvfischer/shibusa An automatic Zen Garden drawing infinite patterns in sand. Using stepper motors,…

wow that’s so cool! do you have any videos of this in action?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#55
post #38

I've just hit the three year mark with https://datasette.io/ - my open source tool for exploring, analyzing and publishing data. The project is built on plugins which means it keeps on growing in different directions - I have 51 plugins at https://datasette.io/plugins now and 23 more tools for working with SQLite data at https://datasette.io/tools My goal now is to get Datasette itself to a stable 1.0 release (partly…

Awesome package! I've been thinking about using datasette for some genomics data for a while. The value prop of "make nice visualization on top of SQLite" was very clear to me. Thanks for making an awesome project

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#56
Me and a friend have been working on a game that I describe as "Factorio but for programming". Essentially you're an AI who's mission is to mine every resource from a planet. To keep things efficient you start out small and have limited processing power. You're only able to run an assembly like language that we've developed. As you get more resources you can research new things like functions, variables, type arguments, whatever. We plan for there to be a tech tree so you can choose to build out a language that's not strict similar to JS or you can go the try hard route and build something like Haskell. You build bots that mine, explore, hunt, etc and each bot is a computer running their own script. We plan on there being battles you have to script around and even things like setting up your own network so you can have robots call home when they're out in the field.

I still need to think of a good name for it though.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#57
I've spent the last two weeks making an Arduino-based "air" MIDI controller. Kind of like a theremin but with cheap sonar modules (distance sensors like they use on toy cars).

It's incredibly fun to play. It's not accurate enough to control a pitch with precision but for a controller, to drive filters, modulators, etc. it's perfect.

Also, my kids love to play with it -- not in a "musical" way but to control the music while they dance. It's a way of using it I hadn't anticipated and it's super nice to see them do it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#58
A few months ago I spent a week of my vacation reverse engineering Zelda Classic[1], an awesome tool made by Zelda fans which has many awesome custom-made Zelda-like games made in it.

I'm a web guy, so that's my medium of choice. I called it Quest Maker[2].

The game repo isn't public (haven't figured out what I want to do with this...), but here's the tool I made for converting the binary quest datafiles to JSON[3].

Particularly interesting to me was extracting the sound data from the datafile to recreate a MIDI file, and then using a WASM library to play it in on the web.

There is also a gnarly encoding to the datafile, so I had to compile the Zelda Classic datafile loading code and employ cython so the bytes aren't just gibberish.

[1] https://www.zeldaclassic.com/

[2] https://hoten.cc/quest-maker/play/

[3] https://github.com/connorjclark/zquest-data

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#60
A virtual 80s supercomputing Lisp machine from a parallel universe, including hi res graphics, P2P-based "Z3S5 Net" with its own markup and browser, and a comprehensive help system:

https://z3s5.com/

The machine and its Z3S5 Lisp are working fine, but the page is just a placeholder for now. There is nothing to download yet.

Post reply on HN