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

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

#691

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

I've been quite depressed lately[0] but recently found I can keep it at bay with significant amounts of caffeine and forcing myself to do a project. So I finished a Gigatron emulator I'd started a while back in Zig. I'd never written an emulator before, and chose Gigatron over the traditional starting point of CHIP-8 because CHIP-8 seemed downright trivial and boring. It's more or less functionally complete now, with video, sound, leds, gamepad, and a Pluggy McPlugface implementation that can save and load. I need to go back and clean everything up, implement a properly timed main loop, and replace the jank waveOut audio with WASAPI before moving on to menus, configuration, and ports, but I'm not super motivated to do any of that. Could be those are just not interesting enough, could be I'm building too much of a resistance to the caffeine.

Alternative project idea: A Haunted PS1(ish) game using a Voxel Space clone engine, also in Zig of course because Zig, despite its compiler bugs, rules.

[0] I blame the state of modern technology[1]. Everything is slow, buggy, and actively user-hostile and the world just seems to have accepted that. It is maddening.

[1] This is an obvious untruth. Though tech sucks, it is merely a minor contributor to my mental state.

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

#692

Post by bri3d »

ehnto wrote: post #348
bri3d wrote: post #201

I have been reverse engineering automotive ECUs for a while now - https://github.com/bri3d/VW_Flash . It's a nice change from my day job in enterprise engineering management, and I've met some fun people and taught several folks a lot of new concepts, which is always extremely rewarding. My latest project has been reverse engineering the data-flash encryption in Simos18 ECUs. After some work, it oddly appears the enc…

That is wicked. Would you ever be interested in developing an open source ECU platform? I feel like there is a hole in the market for affordable and hackable ECUs. You could monetize it by selling the hardware boards I guess. There are some projects out there already but none of them seemed usable for a full size track car at the time, and the issue was still a lack of suitable hardware to run it on. Idealy you could…

Have you looked at RusEFI? It's definitely usable for a full sized track car at this point, and their hardware looks pretty smart and reasonable to me.

I haven't actually used or contributed to it yet, but I plan to buy a unit and see where I get as I am working to convert my old 280GE from K-Jetronic to EFI.

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

#693

Post by akg_67 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #160

Trying to find a storage company to sponsor my project to build a 1 petabyte Storage array to be connected to a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 through a SAS card and expanders. It is kinda dumb from a practicality standpoint, but i think it would be fun, especially to see if the tiny Pi could handle all that and still get any meaningful throughput. I have plenty of other projects in the mean time, but that's the big o…

Do you know /r/DataHoarder community on Reddit? They might have some ideas on how to acquire large storage on the cheap.

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

#695

Post by dcz_self »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #686
dcz_self wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, thanks! Now I need to reconsider. My goals were to have 180+ days battery life and wired connectors, but maybe no one really wants those.

If you do go for Bangle.js, ping me if you get to the stage of putting any code up on github - I'd be very interested.

Would you be interested in cooperating on that? You can ping me over email (see my profile or the blog).

My second impression about the Bangle.js is: "oh no, JavaScript only?". Still, it's much better than building the same thing from scratch, except it may still take effort on the software side.

Having another interested person involved would be amazing for my motivation! Btw, one of the reasons I wanted hackable hardware was to map road surfaces on OSM ;) GPS alone doesn't add much to OSM in my area any more.

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

#696

Post by dcz_self »

chalcolithic wrote: post #676
dcz_self wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I identify the hierarchy as the source of my problems. I don't need hierarchy, and when I use it, it's because that's the one tool I have. There's no hierarchy between time and place, and I shouldn't be forced to establish it. There might be some hierarchy between tags: PhD/laser experiment, PhD/dissertation, but there's rarely a need for it to be more than 1-2 levels deep, so I prefer to suffer the pains of inadequa…

I was mostly referring to the fact that filesystem kind of enforces hierarchy, so you have it even if you dislike it. When I'm sorting out the mess that is my hard drive I defenitely value information about hierarchy overlap (due to (incomplete) copies), but I still have not found a tool that would help me an I can't imagine a query language that would be helpful.

I'm not sure about a file system enforcing hierarchy. Historically, they didn't even support directories at first.

Which use cases would a query language fail to help with?

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

#697

Post by benibela »

dcz_self wrote: post #474

Too many ideas given the time, but now I'm focused on two: 1. Building an open source bicycle computer. It's been over 20 years since they arrived at the scene, and there still isn't one that you could hack! An outrage! No published sources yet, I'm getting stuck on not having much experience building physical things. 2. Getting rid of the directory hierarchy. I have 10K photos, 30K emails, 10000km of GPS tracks, and…

I want the opposite for 2.

Keep all my photos in the directory hierarchy, but have a tool to sort them and sync them between devices

If I sync it with rsync, I might accidentally delete important files. Git would sync properly, but then it keeps the data in the repo rather than the directory hierarchy

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

#698

Post by probotect0r »

Pretty boring outside of work life, but I built out some basic cabinets for my parents' walk-in closet this past 2 weekends. And now I am looking to get into more proper woodworking by building my first work bench. Very excited about that and working with some nice hand tools. My long term goal is to buy some land in northern Ontario and build my own tiny house/cabin in the wilderness.

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

#699

Post by miki_tyler »

I'm caught with the ups and downs of launching a new product. Our launch in PH went very well - a lot of temporary exposure, like A LOT, but once you drop out of the top positions of the front page, you are back to square one, that traffic does not stick (you get a lot of other positive effects out of a NH lunch though, don't get me wrong).

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

#700

Post by barrenko »

truly wrote: post #537
barrenko wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do bitwise stuff pretty please?

Hi! It is in my plans for the future. I'm currently concentrating on sorting and searching algorithms. What exactly in bitwise operations would you find interesting?

Well I'm mostly concerned because I am planning to interview soon, and I struggle with them.
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