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Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#151

Post by lukehack »

Jugurtha wrote: post #144
lukehack wrote: post #141

It's not monetizable, but I'm playing with reinforcement learning. It's incredible to watch a computer "learn" to play super mario using just input pictures. Neural nets in general are much less complicated than I thought they would be, at least as a practitioner.

Cool. How are you going about this ? Set up, stack, approches, experiments, using the model, etc. What's a typical playing session like ?

The stack is basic. I develop on an old lenovo laptop and test for a few dozen frames(you can learn a lot without a CUDA GPU) before pushing it to a desktop with a cheap nvidia card. It uses pytorch and pyboy, and the model is just a couple Conv2d expansions and compressions before hitting a Linear layer outputting predicted reward for certain keypresses(basically). The model training is based off of deep Q learning. I'm looking at a pytorch tutorial[1] when I get stuck, but I'm trying to fumble around and try it myself as much as possible before looking at it.

I have an idea to have variable Q training propagation based on the amplitude of the reward so that bigger rewards propagate more, but I haven't got there yet.

Here is a great video on reinforcement learning[2].

[1] https://pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/mario_rl_tutorial...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93M1l_nrhpQ&t=3381

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#152

Post by antomeie »

Jugurtha wrote: post #147
antomeie wrote: post #59

Last fall, during covid-19, I started working on an app to use my iPhone as a webcam for my Mac. I had some interest in it, so I recently released it publicly last month. There are similar apps out there, but to my knowledge my app is the only one that is both 100% free and supports 1080p @ 30 FPS. Hope any of you find it useful: https://webcamplus.app

Cool. Are you aware of something similar but Android--> Ubuntu ?

I don't know of any unfortunately, but I have also not looked around for it, so it is possible it exists.

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#153

Post by evjrob »

Jugurtha wrote: post #145
evjrob wrote: post #93

BayesBet: https://bayesbet.everettsprojects.com/ It's a probabilistic programming powered hockey game prediction model. It hasn't been performing too badly this season! https://twitter.com/hockeystatisti1/status/13700659799889797...

How are you going about this ? What's your workflow to build the model, deploy it, make predictions, etc.

The model is implemented in PyMC3 and runs daily as a batch job. The model state and predictions are stored in DynamoDB.

Early each morning this batch job loads the previous day's posterior as priors, fetches the results for the games played that day, and then fits the Bayesian network to the game results to get new posteriors. I make predictions with these posteriors and then write all the results back to DynamoDB.

The frontend is essentially D3, Django, and Zappa.

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#155

Post by evjrob »

evjrob wrote: post #153
Jugurtha wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going about this ? What's your workflow to build the model, deploy it, make predictions, etc.

The model is implemented in PyMC3 and runs daily as a batch job. The model state and predictions are stored in DynamoDB. Early each morning this batch job loads the previous day's posterior as priors, fetches the results for the games played that day, and then fits the Bayesian network to the game results to get new posteriors. I make predictions with these posteriors and then write all the results back to DynamoDB.…

I wrote a bit about it in a blog post over the summer: http://everettsprojects.com/2020/08/18/modeling-the-nhl-bett...

There are other posts on my blog about this project. There are links directly to them in the GitHub README: https://github.com/evjrob/bayes-bet#associated-blog-posts

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#157

Post by FrenchyJiby »

qrxfil: file exfiltration across airgaps using QR codes.

https://github.com/OverkillGuy/qrxfil

Splits files across multiple QR codes for “sending” across air-gapped computer systems. Generates numbered PNG files to scan.

The codes contain metadata about chunk number (e.g. “007 of 078”) to enable out-of-order scanning.

It's a fun way to learn Rust, and a great trick to get terrified looks from security folks.

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#158

Post by nurturelabs »

Building an integrated platform for distributed teams to source, onboard, and hire remote full-time developers from India. Here's the link https://outteam.nurturelabs.co/ It's a Employer On Record(EOR) service - so hiring is 100% legally compliant there no need of registering a separate legal entity or signing separate contract with each employee.

Re: Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?

#160

Post by adamhp »

I'm working on a project I'm calling TripMix. It lets you build travel guides for your friends. Copying my explanation from a recent thread :)

My girlfriend and I really enjoy good food and travel. We spend a lot of our time cooking, eating, and going to breweries and wineries. We have a few favorite cities near us, like Charlottesville and the surrounding wine country in Virginia, and Portland, Maine. We've been there with enough frequency that we've developed a sort of reputation as the go-to experts for those areas, and have sent a long e-mail itinerary and travel guide to our close friends probably 10 or 15 times for each place.

Sometimes our friend requesting recommendations doesn't drink alcohol, so we go through and scrub all the breweries and wineries. Sometimes they're gluten free, so all of the pizza and bagels we love get cut. After doing this several times, we realized it would be cool to have an app to do this. So that is my side project!

It will be part Canva, part Facebook Recommendations, part knowledge-base. Filterable lists, creation of itineraries, notes about each Place (Google Places/Maps integration). Export to a static site with a link you can share.

The neat thing is, as I mentioned above, it has filters. So you can tag places with "winery" or "vegetarian" or something, and when you're building your guide for your friends, you can filter on those tags really easily. You could just click the "winery" tag to instantly create a "Virginia Wine Guide".

I'm not totally sure it has broad appeal, but I'm hoping a few friends and maybe some travel bloggers get some use out of it. V2 will probably have some sort of "export to CMS" feature. V3 will hopefully be more of a social network.

We'll see how it goes :)

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