Firefox phone was a great way to make simple JS/HTML/CSS mobile apps, while it lasted. I loved it & made many.
Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
51–60 of 316 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#52Disclaimer: 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/
growing up in the 80s with a Commodore 64, my friends and I never bought any games. They were all "cracked by $some_cracker"
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#53EVM optimization challenges posted on Twitter (Ethereum Virtual Machine)
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#54I run a 22yo online competition for a 32yo DOS racing game: Stunts, or 4D Sports Driving in some countries. The competition has spawned a long-lived community which includes reverse engineering, game patches, new cars, alternative engines, a few world meetings, and multiple other competitions.
- https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Custom_cars
- https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?board=90.0&label=stunts-re...
- https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-remarkable-community-ar...
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#55Browser 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…
The book looks great. I want to build an ad-blocker. Could you recommend a good open source projects to learn from? Previous extension I made: www.fuckoff.yt
The best mv2 repository would of course be ublock origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
The best mv3 repository would be AdGuard's https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardMV3
For a generalized ad blocker, importing and updating filter lists is probably the most challenging bit. https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters AdGuard has an amazing blog, their content is impressively broad and deep https://adguard.com/en/blog/how-ad-blocking-is-done.html
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#56While not that interested anymore, I used to be really into the iOS jailbreaking scene, more specifically writing and testing tweaks/tools used post-jailbreak. This was back around iOS 5 (2012-ish), when names like Cydia, Saurik, Redsn0w and unc0ver were commonplace. I guess they are not anymore. Back then, Jailbreaking was not commercial in the same way it is now, no money prices, large teams, etc. It was just a few dedicated, talented individuals working in small groups, backed by a community very eager to jailbreak. I remember I showed off dark mode on iOS around 6-7 years before it became an official feature.
The main point of jailbreaking for me was actually to "fix" a lot of broken shit in iOS, and significantly improve usability. After a while, that I kind off became less and less relevant, as important (to me) features like dark mode got native, change the lockscreen, and similar things. Also, performance on iphones and iOS got so good there was no longer any point to disable animations and other things I used to tamper with to give the illusion of increasing performance.
They were good days! I remember hard refreshing /r/jailbreak hundred times a day because "a jailbreak for iOS 1x is 'right around the corner'".
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#57Decreasing network latency by tweaking routers/developing new software:
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#58Designing mechanical keyboards and making mostly from scratch.
Algorithmic and AI art
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#59Demoscene 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?
Pouet or Demozoo are probably your best bet.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#60- 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.
For tiny very specific problems that can be done under 2 k lines, I love a single self contained page that includes the necessary html/ja/CSS!