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

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471–480 of 960 posts

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

#471
Creating paper nautical maps. NOAA has stopped updating 15% of all their nautical charts and will discontinue the rest by Jan. 2025.

The proposed replacement for the beautiful maps they produce now is "print electronic maps yourself". Unfortunately the electronic charts are only usable with an interactive interface which paper is not, to say nothing about their aesthetic qualities.

There are data errors too in the new "custom charts" that are being offered for printing, one such error is that virtually all US water lots a foot of water according to the maps! I investigated this and it is due to rounding down when converting to meters and then rounding down again when converting back to feet.

Let me know if you care, or want to help.

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

#472
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a serious case of delusions of grandeur. Get some help.

If you read the website, it's apparently because an off-label medicine wasn't approved. But it looks like Patient F has survived though, which is good.

The medical reviewer, a public employee, had ruled on a matter she was not professionally qualified for.

The court asked the patient's doctor for facts as they routinely do, which left no room for denial. The judge dropped this document from one file, then in another file claimed the same matter had already been decided and passed over all evidence while at the same time knowingly making a false assertion of facts.

Access to these files was denied for months, beyond the constitutional court case even.

Without the ability review the files, had to guess what she had done and this did turn out to be factual later. From judicial instructions found on the back side of a page at the appeals level it is clear these judges had been aware. The judge assigned to fact-finding had refused to handle the matter, a procedural violation.

Had asked the medical board for proof as one way to have these decisions nullified. No response for months. In a hearing that was recorded I mentioned the medical board and, carelessly, two days later they sent a letter refusing me the information. It is clear a judge is behind this. This matter is now pending in administrative court.

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

#474

I am building https://learnawesome.org It's an attempt to organize world's knowledge. Right now, it looks like GoodReads-like social network for learning resources organized by topics, formats, difficulty levels etc. But there's a knowledge-graph that separates ideas and the medium those ideas are expressed in. For eg: "Sapiens - the book" and "TED Talk given by Yuval Harari" are connected to the same node. This idea…

Nice ideas and good work.

I’ve put down various ideas and links about constructing and testing knowledge graphs here https://wiki.secretgeek.net/dependency-graph-for-knowledge

Good luck with what you’re doing.

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

#475

I built a Visual Studio extension that wraps ag (the silver searcher), because I was constantly flipping to the terminal to use it to search the UE4 codebase I work on. The built in MSVC text search is egregiously slow, and even tools like Visual Assist (which search via indexing symbols) take forever to run on the entire engine. It can do a full regex search on the entire UE4 codebase in about ~6s on my SSD. Searchi…

isn't ripgrep (rg) better than ag, performance-wise?

it is, but a) they don't care if it succeeds or not, b) there's a new faster grep-alike every couple of years, and c) there are diminishing returns from these performance enhancements. so if you're enjoying ag, more power to you.

btw my own "idc if it succeeds or not" is forkfreshness.com, a system to surface active downstream forks of otherwise dormant projects. if you've got a project you want to use, but it seems like abandonware, you can find out if other forks are keeping it alive.

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

#476

taking care of google ;-) I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines. The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags. I think that specialised searc…

This looks good. I expect their main page https://duckduckgo.com/bang will feel overwhelming for most users if displayed this way, but this is much better for serendipitous findings - both have their place. Is there a mobile equivalent to the hovering, to get the short description you mention?

Thanks for the suggestion, i didn't think about it yet. The whole page isn't quite optimized for a mobile user experience. I think that i would have to add a link that brings up the help text; maybe the link should be in the form of a question mark icon, similar to what they have at https://m.xkcd.com/ what do you think? I am not much of an expert in matters if web UI/frontend, so that any advice is very much appreciated!

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

#477
Hello World,

My mom's a textile designer, contracting with large companies, but somehow not getting to use any fancy tools they. She says design software existd, but it's pretty expensive.

At the core, she's making plaids - a black-and-white pattern (2d grid) corresponding to vertical and horizontal threads being above one another, and color schemes (2 arrays) for the vertical / horizontal strings (in most cases, does not match the size of the grid).

So she made her own monstrocity of a pipeline, with Photoshop, Plaid Maker (a rather old web app, https://www.plaidmaker.com/), screenshots, Excel (for designing stuff - yes!), and an old Soviet-era MS-DOS designer program (in Russian, of course).

Throughout uni, I was jokingly saying I'd build a better Plaid Maker for her, even if the web is not my area of work. After The Great Resignation I figured, why not?

Lots and lots of back-and-forth later, here's the outcome: https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/

Note: not for mobile, but should work on a tablet. Privacy: no analytics are used, but it does rely on Google Firebase for authentication and auto-saving of your designs. Log in to keep them permanently; otherwise, they're saved on an anonymous account, cleared up once a week or so

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

#478

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun. A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case. The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then cau…

What did I just read?

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

#479

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun. A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case. The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then cau…

This really sounds like one of them projects you should care if it succeeds if you’re doing it.

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

#480

I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about work…

I love it and the people that I have share it with loved too
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