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

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741–750 of 960 posts

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

#741

I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it. Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage. If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things. I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a r…

Considering the cost of music gear + lessons, I find it unlikely I'll ever make a profit. I also consider it more than a hobby, but something I can't fully commit to due to having a day job to focus on.

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

#742
post #170

https://bytebucket.co I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to bench…

Very similar, but for servers, https://labgopher.com/ . It originated from the Reddit r/homelab sub

Thank you! I've used this website before, but I had trouble remembering its name last week, I was searching "lab gator" "gator lab"...

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

#743

I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convi…

This is, naturally, awesome.

If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to

a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different branches (while helping to frame the focal points of the technical discussion, which is critical yet often tricky) would leave a positive impression for starters, may also help with internal communication and efficiency, and will of course help everyone slowly lumber towards modernity overall.

b) Whisper "GTFS" in Google's ear ;)

I would definitely do (a) before (b) - particularly the slow-paced adoption and settlement process (maybe even quietly build the GTFS integration yourself, before making any noise) - to give the city the best fighting chance possible against involuntary infections of Chromebooks/Google Workspace/etc ;P around the time the GTFS people show up. Y'know, just in case. Good to have a position first and all that.

The reason (b) could be particularly interesting, is that - presuming there is currently poor or no integration (this suggestion is irrelevant otherwise) - running interference here successfully may (alongside improving transport info for everyone) wind up netting you an interesting position at the city (consistent, set for life, good opportunity for lateral movement and initiative-taking given your start point, etc) or a decent shot at whatever office/presence Google has in/near Slovenia (could be interesting, could be hit/miss, might not appeal at all).

It's entirely possible you're doing this because you're already in a solid position you're happy with, in which case ignore most of the above :D

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

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar vein - making music with AI. I had never been blessed with "natural" musical talents so I needed "cybernetic" support to get it done... using openAI's Jukebox. Will write a longer post about the experience at some point / guessing HN may like that. youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRpMo19NwYKloFhnw6QzMg soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/songshtr blog: songshtr.github.io

Music is about discipline. "Talent" is more or less a multiplier, but is useless without discipline in the first place. Needing "talent" (to be very good at it) is a myth. You don't have to be the best in the world to be very good at something. There is no secret. It just takes time and work to get good at an instrument or producing. edit: clarity

I mostly agree with you, but with some changes (applies not just to music but any other field). Discipline is the multiplier on talent, not the other way round. "Talent" is most definitely not a myth - to take it to an egregious example, no amount of discipline would ever make me play center in the NBA or piano in Carnegie Hall. But... that's ok.

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

#745

I’m 53,000 words into a Harry Potter fanfic that fixed some issues I had with the seventh book. Basically, I object to how little the main characters ‘play to win.’ Example: Team Voldemort taboos his name, so that if you say it, his goons show up to arrest you. So everyone tries to stop saying his name. But here’s another idea. One person says his name while another hides nearby. After saying the name, the first pers…

Mind linking this fanfic? Sounds interesting.

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

#746
https://leftwrite.io/

I’m working on a project to focus on reading things and writing more. I found that it helps quite a bit and ill continue working on it as I personally find it rewarding.

The project is in the space of stuff like second brains, and zettlekasten note taking but I think something with a really good ui is needed to make this stuff popular. I went the other way and made it as simple as possible.

I’m using this project to focus on limiting the amount of code I write as I want this working for a long time and I believe that having less code probably helps that goal.

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

#747
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't elixir supposed to scale better than this?

yeah so I'm seeing a ton of "(Postgrex.Error) FATAL 53300 (too_many_connections) remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections", which I'm guessing means the pool size is too small? Although I've tried upping that, CPU, and memory, and none have seemed to fix it. My devops skills still aren't great so if anyone has any ideas on how to help, let me know! This might be a good opportu…

No post body was provided.

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

#748
post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BEAM is not fast > It is however really really low latency I've been interested in Erlang for a while, and reading this is intriguing. Taken literally the above makes no sense :) but it also kind of... does, sort of, and I would like to understand how this works.

There's often a tradeoff between latency and throughput. Think GC algorithms or IO buffers. The Erlang project has historically chosen the far left end of this spectrum. They also haven't cared about numerical performance at all, delegating that to C code.

Ooooh, burst response as opposed to flat-out super tight hot loops.

That honestly makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

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

#749
I love this thread idea - I'm much more excited by people's passion projects than their money making ones.

I seem to collect passion projects like nobody's business - honestly I think I get excited by concepts then bogged down in the details, but I'm starting to overcome this and get deeper into projects now so let's give this a whirl:

- civarium, a game AI desk-toy where little villagers go about their lives and expand the village themselves (think Banished but zero-player) - pretty early days but good fun to occasionally tinker on: https://github.com/ajeffrey/civarium

- my main fun project at the moment is a private branch off of the above - I'm trying to make a really systemic game where you're a mage apprentice trying to solve quests without violence. Not public yet but will be if I get to the point where the first demo quest is fully playable. The idea is that the world is data driven and by being one of the first magic users you can push various systems out of their attractor/equilibrium states.

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

#750

I’m 53,000 words into a Harry Potter fanfic that fixed some issues I had with the seventh book. Basically, I object to how little the main characters ‘play to win.’ Example: Team Voldemort taboos his name, so that if you say it, his goons show up to arrest you. So everyone tries to stop saying his name. But here’s another idea. One person says his name while another hides nearby. After saying the name, the first pers…

Mind linking this fanfic? Sounds interesting.

Edited OP to include it :)
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