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Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

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121–130 of 874 posts

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#121
post #12

I run a website that shows immigrants how to settle in Berlin. These days I'm thinking of codifying more things, so that people could fill a form and get answers instead of reading a long article. For example, a simple calculator that replaces pages and pages of information. I made a German health insurance calculator last week that saves a lot of reading and gives accurate results. Aside from that, I'm building a ti…

What's the website?

All About Berlin (https://allaboutberlin.com/).

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#123
post #69

Kinda just stare at the sky a lot. Went from a job working 60-80 hours a week nonstop with no expectation of time off if you got a call to one with 1/10th the effort needed for the same pay. Feels surreal at difference in compensation vs effort in, especially because I’m more productive at the new place. Not really sure what to do with all my free time when there’s no fires to put out

Same. The way I see it we're paid for our expertise - not our time. In terms of free time, I've tried to fill it with hobbies, side-projects, and learning. A lot of my time goes to my son now that he's here. But before that there were some periods where I just did not do anything. The thought has crossed my mind to work two jobs or maybe start a consultancy. I think the real trick is to find friends. But I'm 30 and i…

That might be it? I actually live in a decently sized place with a handful of friends.

I think I’m feeling content for the first time in my life and US culture growing up in the 90s, did not prepare me for this

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#124
Hah this thread is perfect. I just finished building my new four axis robot arm design. It’s all open source. Three months ago I started playing with a new planetary gearbox concept, where the first stage is in the middle with second stages on both sides. The first sun is driven by a shaft that goes through a hole in the second stage sun. The result is a very balanced joint design with parallel outputs. A good configuration for weak materials like plastic. And then the gearboxes and the frame are all integrated together, so this is not something where you assemble a gearbox and bolt it to the frame. The gearbox members and the frame members are unified.

I’m very happy with it so far! Video here:

https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1455320442642714625?s...

It’s open source, CC0 licensed. Please fork the design files here!

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/d663661f8c0c34e7a29bbfa6/w...

EDIT: you may prefer to watch the project and wait to fork it until I have fleshed out a few more things. In that case feel free to star this git repo and I will update it as I make progress.

https://github.com/tlalexander/brushless_robot_arm/

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#125
post #91

Thinking of working on something related to AR/VR but the target device will be low-cost such as google cardboard.

Have you decided on a specific idea or are you interested in the space generally?

I've been following the space pretty closely for few years now (tried most of the HW, doing development, etc). Right now the greatest number of users and app sales seems to be at the low-ish end but not absolute low end ($300 Quest), and I'd strongly recommend most developers wanting to jump into the space target that as a baseline.

Most Cardboard/GearVR/Daydream devices aren't actively used so the unit sales paint a misleading picture, and due to those devices' limited input mechanisms apps targeting that segment basically require a totally different UI design than apps targeting the slightly higher-end segment with the larger (and growing) number of active users.

Of course I could imagine exceptions here, so apologies in advance if you have some specific application in mind where the above factors aren't important.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#126
Over the past few months, I've been trying to contribute to the rust ecosystem to enable devs to make webapps comfortably.

The latest challenge I've been addressing is auto generating react hooks to use Rust API endpoints. I'm just about ready to publish it soon. These kinds of things are much easier to do in rust rather than other languages.

If you'd like to explore web development in rust:

https://github.com/wulf/create-rust-app

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#127
I'm working on a 2d multiplayer game where you play as the leader of an MMO guild. I'm shooting for it to feel like playing WoW without actually having to play WoW all day. Same dopamine levers, same time horizons, but instead of being the guy farming Frost Lotus and Saronite, you're the guy telling people to go farm Frost Lotus and Saronite and making sure the alchemist makes the right amounts of Flask of Endless Rage and Flasks of the Frost Wyrm to get you through the raid next week.

It's basically a simulator/management spin on MMOs. It's still on the stage side of the fourth wall - it's not like a meta kind of tongue in cheek thing or anything. It's not YouTuber simulator or anything similar.

I'm using phaser 3 and some undetermined python web stack - currently using flask and sqlalchemy. My time horizon is ~years at this point, I've been working on it for about 3 months and progress is steady but glacial since I have 1 busy job, 2 kids, and 0 gamedev experience (though significant MMO gaming experience, for as much as that helps, heh). I am but a humble data infra engineer by day so this is pretty alien programming for me (though at least I know what I'm doing on the backend?).

I have some nominal amount of frontend experience but normally I use Rails and React, but I decided to forego both for this project, with the entire game being in Phaser's engine (though I'm sure at some point I'll have a react website too) and using python on the backend because I just generally think python is better than Ruby as of python 3, mainly because I prefer how Python 3 did official type hints, and I don't particularly like Sorbet (though comparing python3 type hints to sorbet is unfair to sorbet, all I would want from sorbet is hinting).

Anyway, I'll admit, I want to make an MMORPG. But I can at least concede that a traditional "wow-killer" MMO is pretty much out of the reach of a single dev. My current vision seems to me like a fun "do you ever wish you played wow but don't actually want to play wow" kind of thing that is significantly more likely to be within the reach of someone who has 0-2 hours to work on this per night.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#128

A couple of things. All unfinished (of course). First idea, a website that combines Reddit (or HN) and Discord. The goal is to create ephemeral, real-time communities (like this thread). I find discord too exclusionary to bring strangers together. And reddit is not dynamic enough to encourage relationship formation. With this site, you post a thread, people start chatting, there's a simple interface for groups of peo…

I think one of the main reasons why Reddit took off is that they didn't really care about building info on people... All they wanted was an email, user name, and password. Discrd is behind a wall that requires a log-in and understanding of how it works. Discords often are dead by the time I decide to check them out because they are often too much work to maintain.

IRC vanished after many years to favor texting, but IRC was a big part of life for me in the past because you could simply hop on without even using an email address, and conversations were free form without much moderation. The main rule is nothing was taken seriously back then, except net splits.

Not every community needs tracking and user accounts if you ask me, but they do if you ask the government. The increasing call for every community and even IOT products requiring a user profile is going to eat itself with an endless amount of passwords, or even a chain linked authentication scheme, it defeats the utility and benefit of getting quick answers to questions, and having simple human interactions minute-to-minute throughout the day which is what many people really want without knowing it. The key to keeping that manageable will be to keep each community relatively small and specialized if you ask me. Focus on the functionality and purpose thoroughly -- The language used will change over time, so whatever I can build quickly and efficiently in is best. Also, I don't have to worry about security as much as FaceBook (etc.) if I'm not storing user accounts and identifiable data, I just have to put failover, high availability, and data integrity from that perspective.

I've been building on a few ideas that have this in mind in addition to running my own web development company since Feb 2021. I know the struggle too, keep grinding! Cheers.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#129

Building a puzzle board video game (inspired by a physical wooden board puzzle) using bits to represent the board (Bitboard game design [1]). Here is a screenshot for one of the levels: https://imgur.com/a/cLIsYII The goal is to slide the red tile where the yellow ones are. I am trying to develop an algorithm that would be able solve these type of puzzles automatically so I can provide user with hints. Can anyone pro…

An A* search might work for the automatic solver. The nodes in the graph are board states, and states one move apart are connected by an edge. One heuristic would be the number of moves required to get to a solution if tiles can move over each other. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#130
Building a plaid / pattern designer. Someone I closely know is a much sought-after fabric designer, but tends to use primitive tools. I swear, I've seen them make pictures and catalogues in Excel.

I've never been a web dev, but I've set myself a challenge to make something for them. 2 weeks in, I've got a hacky ugly-ish MVP, but hey - it seems to be doing its job :)

https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/ Note: Tablet-friendly, but not phone-friendly.

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