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Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

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Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#11

Post by muhammadusman »

Ok maybe not too weird but I've been a keyboard enthusiast for almost a decade now and earlier this year I started on a quest to collect as many keyboards in one place as possible to make it easier for newcomers to the hobby to easily find a keyboard (very much in progress still but making steady progress as a hobby project). I created a website called BoardSearch (https://boardsearch.io).

So far, I've learned a lot about just how varying keyboarding building/collecting can be, and this makes building the data models for what a keyboard is/can include pretty complex. Some people go deep into the hobby building a keyboard by soldering the switches and others a little higher level like putting together keycaps and switches on a hotswap PCB. It's definitely a hobby that you can waste/spend a lot of money on but keyboards are fun!

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#12

Post by meadhbh-hamrick »

I sometimes write COBOL programs for fun. Seriously... one of the things COBOL used to require and still strongly encourages is to declare record types before procedures (the Data Division is before the Procedure Division). There's a Fred Brooks quote that goes:

  "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue
   to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your
   flowcharts; they'll be obvious."
And Peter Naur (of (E)BNF fame) suggests using the term "Dataology" instead of "Computer Science."

But COBOL isn't a great systems programming language. It's made for applications. So I sometimes re-write simple C or C++ routines / structs in COBOL to see if they're more understandable and where the dividing line between app-focused languages and system-focused languages exists.

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#13

Post by patorjk »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #3

Making Doom levels, but that's probably more artistic than technical, though knowing your way around the engine and editors is technical.

The first book I ever bought in a computer store was Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus. Back in the mid-90's I saw it randomly while walking by the games section and thought it almost too good to be true. I ended up spending countless hours making my own levels. I was never any good though, and I definitely preferred playing what other people came up with. Every couple of years I'll go back and revisit some of those levels and see if there's anything new. It's definitely awesome that people have kept this scene alive.

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#14

Post by meadhbh-hamrick »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #10

- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and no…

I'm a fan of FORTH, but absolutely second your motion that Joy is worth investigating. It has a FORTH "feel" but feels like you can more easily do more advanced things with it.

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#15

Post by grepLeigh »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #10

- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and no…

Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts?

I've been obsessed with machine learning for embedded systems for years! So many practices around ML assume constant network connection and/or that your service runs in a data-center. I'm an ex-SRE and love building reliable offline computer vision things!

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#16

Post by conductor »

Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.

The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the protected software.

https://scenelist.org/

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#18

Post by spoils19 »

- Pure HTML / CSS / vanilla JS sites. It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene, but I'm always a fan of inspecting sites that don't bloat themselves with unnecessary frameworks.

- Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first, it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the world wide web (WWW) as we know it.

Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

#19

Post by jcpst »

elihu wrote: post #8

Modular synthesizers. Electric vehicle conversions. The intersection of musical instrument construction with just intonation and other alternative tuning systems.

Woah- I am not alone on this. I have a dotcom modular system, did JI tuning research in college, and dream of buying a patina vehicle from the fuel crisis era and converting it to EV.
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