Databending. Which is applying random noise to a file in order to generate something that still decodes well, but has some weird/cool glitch. I went to a workshop about this in some underground club that no longer operates; still thinking about it and toying around from time to time. This was waaaay before Dall-E et al. were cool ways to generate quasi-crappy images.
Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
41–50 of 316 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#42Disclaimer: 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/
...and Drive Music is a form of art (even if it makes your local data safety person cringe):
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#43I'm fond of any scene that minimizes code:
(gone) https://the5k.org/
http://www.message.sk/web4096/
websites: https://1kb.club/
https://jeremiepat.github.io/svg1k
(256b) http://wildmag.de/compo/
(140 characters) https://www.dwitter.net/
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#44- 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.
It is really strange how this is a niche now (the frameworks); a couple lines of JS to handle button clicks is fine with me (again assuming you're not downloading jQuery for it)
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#45Demoscene on 8-bit machines. People are still creating crazy demos on 40 year old computers like Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, or Sinclair Spectrum. Demoscene on modern PCs are active too, but not as interesting or mind-blowing as people rotating filled cubes at 50fps on a C64. Since those machines have fixed configurations, it's easier to assess the level of technical achievements. Yesterday, I watched a C64 demo on Yo…
Where is the demoscene community active these days?
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#46- 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!
Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts?
Nowhere. Should we start something? :)
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#47https://www.demoscene.info/ (used to be active there, in the demoscene)
https://www.pouet.net/ also for those unfamiliar
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#48Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3. I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy thing…
Great idea for a book. I'll get it.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#49I haven't been part of the scene since about 2011, but I've always been extremely proud and fond of my contributions to the iPod and Mac Customization communities. I was a designer back in those days so my coding contributions were minimal, but those communities were the best around.
I was involved in the iPodWizard project and was one of the people soft-bricking their iPods to discover what substrings of the Hex firmware did what so we could modify them and then build custom themes, change strings, and in a few cases even add new functionality. I also contributed my fair share of custom themes, particularly the themes that would turn the grayscale iPod 4G into something more similar to the iPod Video theme (we had 4 colors to make gradients out of; was more fun than it sounds)
I also contributed design and testing to the iPod Linux and iPod Wiki projects, and testing on the Rockbox project.
On the Mac side of things, I was a mod of MacThemes for a long time, contributed my fair share of themes and icons, and was a beta tester for Candybar for a long time. My biggest contribution was probably tearing apart and documenting how to customize iTunes on Mac. I got it to a point where I was able to restore 90% of the old iTunes after a much-loathed redesign. My documentation also resulted in a spike in interest and new themes being created for the first time in a few years. It was really exciting seeing the frankly stupid amount of work I put into that pay off within the community.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#50Super Smash Bros Melee modding. People have fixed bugs in subtle parts of the logic (e.g. input polling occasionally drops frames). They've also made entirely new training modes and added visualizations for various mechanics.
Oh, and they've added in-game rollback netplay using a Dolphin fork :)