491–500 of 633 posts
Robots that build large-scale solar farms! My friend and I started working on this last year and ended up starting a company. We moved to the bay area and did YC last summer. We've been spending a lot of time on solar construction sites and did our first demo (part of the material handling system) on a site in March. Now we're working on a robotic factory + our team is up to 5 folks.
A project idea that I've been daydreaming about for a while (but haven't moved past research) is a cleanroom implementation of the online game Space Station 13. SS13 is built on the BYOND game engine, an ancient, closed-source client/server platform with a clunky, proprietary programming language. There have been a few attempts to rewrite SS13 in Unity or custom 3D game engines, but they've all suffered from second-s…
I think rebuilding SS13 in unity would overall be a great idea, but there is the problem of how complex SS13 is that would need to be worked. But I think with the right baby steps and SOLID design, it could be done.
But I do feel like any effort to rebuild would not be a huge success. SS13 is fun, but comparatively niche. Though as a mobile game there's a huge market.
I'm currently working on tools for better latent space exploration in generative models. The latent space of Stable Diffusion for example, is incredibly rich, and the traditional txt2img and img2img pipelines for accessing it are only scratching the surface of what's possible. We're talking about billions of images compressed (lossily) into 4 GB — yet we're still using very basic interfaces for interacting with this…
Working on building a much simplified personal budgeting application. Been done to death, but usually not very well. What I'm making will put the simple and most straightforward aspects of budgeting front and center, and not try to boil the ocean with features. Mint is so convoluted now with all their credit and loan features that it no longer is useful for its actual purpose of budgeting.
A simple spreadsheet has been the perfect solution for me past few years.
Writing automated tests for video games. Why is it interesting to me? I started to teach myself unity in December 2021. I've personally experienced benefits to writing automated tests and using CICD; therefore, I thought it would be fun to learn about writing tests for a 3D based software. It will be different from the web/CLI based stuff I usually write. So, it turns out that the video game community (or at least th…
But I'm not dismissing testing in unity. I think there are some simple approaches to testing automation that could be done. It would be nice if unit testing made more sense but in reflection i've often found it's the integration of components that breaks or changes, less than the behavior itself.
Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into…
Like if a major paper is withdrawn, or a theory disproven, could you get a list of significantly impacted papers?
I'm going back to basics and learning to write a compiler in the dumbest way possible. I'm starting with a basic assignment (a = 3) and reverse engineering what it would take to turn that into a working executable. Then I'll add more features, lather, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping to eventually turn it into a series of blog posts so everyone can see just how little I remember from college.
I am not a computer science graduate and have always been fascinated by programming languages and how they work. i am currently reading a book called crafting interpreters ( https://craftinginterpreters.com ) which i think is a very good introduction to the topic plus it's very practical without getting too deep into theory.
Working on building a much simplified personal budgeting application. Been done to death, but usually not very well. What I'm making will put the simple and most straightforward aspects of budgeting front and center, and not try to boil the ocean with features. Mint is so convoluted now with all their credit and loan features that it no longer is useful for its actual purpose of budgeting.
I hear you. Are there parts of existing budgeting applications that you feel are done well? What are they?
The dirty secret about the restaurant industry is that most independent restaurants are very close to bankruptcy and the people running it often do not know that until it's too late.
There was a thread a few days ago about the true cost of making hardware devices often being less than 30% of the retail price. From a business perspective, the same should apply to every item on your menu as well. Except more often than not, the person running the restaurant often has no idea how much a meal costs to serve.
The real issue is that people start restaurants not because they want to run a business, but because they like food. In a way it is a good thing that they don't approach it with a capitalist mindset, as I don't thing we'd have the same variety of food if everyone did, but more often than not they are running blind and just hoping for the best. They put in long hours and a lot of their own capital, and if they are lucky they can survive a few years by being able to pay their staff, suppliers and rent, and finally being able to afford to pay themselves enough to personally survive on.