Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

My hacker news comment notifier lol

https://hacknotescenter.com/

I need to do an about building blog post

but I basically just made it to get better at kubernetes design doc writing, and play around with hasura, next.js, vercel and a bunch of other tech toys.

Hi Peter, do you have any other recommendations for learning Mandarin. I've just started taking lessons a few weeks ago.

I have been working for years now on Exomind[1], a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have an iOS and a web/electron client at the moment, and a simple Chrome extension for bookmarking. I plan to eventually add files (blobs), definitions and support extensibility via WASM applications.

Its backend (Exocore[2]) is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.

It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years (it was on another tech stack before).

[1]: https://github.com/appaquet/exomind [2]: https://github.com/appaquet/exocore

I’m working on restoring a couple of old H.320 ISDN terminals and integrating them with something more modern. As part of this I’m building basically an entire ISDN stack including a software switch and H.320 multiplexer. Everything except the hardware (well, DAHDI is pissing me off rn, so I’m praying the non-Sangoma hardware I purchased is easier to set up). I have no idea how far I’ll get given the terminals are odd and mysterious in their own right and all the stuff is legacy and not really supported much anymore. Impossible to really monetize these days, but I plan on doing an extensive write up both of my analysis of the terminals hardware/firmware as well as releasing my stack/utilities under and open source license. I plan on it being extensive, but one step at a time. It’s starting to get difficult/expensive to find some of the hardware I need and as I mentioned earlier these terminals are kinda odd and I’ve kinda sat on them for months with just a little reversing.

In the meantime since DAHDI is giving me so many issues and I’m waiting to receive some alternative hardware, I’ve been working on a very, very rough software simulation of a.DS0/DS1 interface so I can at least start developing the ISDN stack on something.

There's a lot more to Pigntype than just the front page - check out the links along the top. Particularly the blog, with the link to ways I've tried and failed to learn. [0]

Speaking, listening, reading, writing, and typing are all different parts of "learning Mandarin". All of them are hard.

Pingtype (translator) can help with reading. Pingtype (keyboard, at the bottom of the page) can help with typing traditional characters. Listening can be done with music, check out the Lyrics for some bilingual Christian songs (audio is on YouTube). Singing is kind of like speaking, and can be done in church without other people looking at you weirdly when you pronounce tones wrong. Writing will make your hand hurt, and many native speakers don't know how to write their own language [1]. Speaking is pretty much impossible without a tutor, and I'm still not conversational after ~4 years. I can understand some of what other people say, but talking is hard.

[0] https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHskrqMqII