Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by sph » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

boole1854 wrote: post #71

meadhbh-hamrick wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. Urbit. That's not a weird technical scene, that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"]

> that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"] I'm out of the loop but intrigued. Can you explain what the controversy is? In what way are Bergson / Popper and Mill said to disagreed and what does it have to d…

There's a nice search feature at the bottom of the main page. There are dozen of Urbit threads that go the same direction.

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

#82

Post by mrguyorama » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

Microsoft flight simulator scene, pre-"flight sim 2020" was super interesting. FSX was well documented and built to be extensible through data, and I wanted to replace the terrible quality terrain of my local area with modern geo-data and ground textures.

There was an entire scene around this, that built, sold and supported third party programs to help you build custom airports, paid tools for importing google earth ground textures, tools to help autogenerate tree cover for a ground texture based on machine learning of "this group of pixels look like a forest so place a forest here", plus all the tooling in the GIS space which is incredible and lovely.

I was a month into stealing google earth images with homebrew code using techniques borrowed from a different open source tool, hand labeling a hundred square miles of ground textures, including thousands of polygons to tell FSX where to place houses, a revamped local airport with new structures and signage, and autogenerating a winter version of the ground textures through writing some java code (because python is stupidly slow) to sample a "snow" texture and place it onto a green ground texture, which worked surprisingly well, writing code to overlay publicly available house polygon data and water polygon data to place rivers and lakes, before I go to hand labeling forests and trying to learn the machine learning tool before I gave up, and then MSFS2020 was announced about a year later.

This field is also related to turning google earth terrain and texture data into Assetto Corsa tracks, which has a similar community including paid tools (that mostly suck though)

I learned a lot of GIS and it was pretty great, and I got to play with a bunch of publicly available large datasets of different formats, and wrote code to generate 3D models from hightmaps, even though it was a terrible implementation.

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

#83

Post by phkahler » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

Arcade game emulators. I quit years ago, but reverse engineered the Cinematronics processor used in their vector games. It was built from TTL chips and a few proms. 5 MIPS max, 12 bit accumulator, supported multiplication in hardware. Crazy stuff.

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

#84

Post by sirbranedamuj » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

I run a website (https://mustad.io) that keeps track of the stats for matches on Final Fantasy Tactics Battleground (https://twitch.tv/fftbattleground). We have a channel on the stream's discord dedicated to development of various other tools for viewers. I am not super active now but I have been paying to keep my website afloat for a couple years now. I don't know exactly how many users I have but people tell me if it goes down so I know it's at least a few.

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

#85

Post by wrycoder » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #82

Microsoft flight simulator scene, pre-"flight sim 2020" was super interesting. FSX was well documented and built to be extensible through data, and I wanted to replace the terrible quality terrain of my local area with modern geo-data and ground textures. There was an entire scene around this, that built, sold and supported third party programs to help you build custom airports, paid tools for importing google earth…

Will the community reform around MSFS2020?

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

#86

Post by spicyjpeg » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

I have been working on PlayStation 1 homebrew SDKs [1] and tools over the last year. Unlike other retro consoles - especially Nintendo consoles - the PS1 gets almost no attention at all; "PS1-style" games made using Unity or Unreal Engine seem to be decently popular, but nobody wants to bother with the real hardware anymore. Which is a shame, as the PS1 is a relatively simple platform which can be found for relatively cheap and offers a bare metal development experience reminiscent of modern 32-bit microcontrollers, with some interesting graphics and audio hardware thrown in. It is a platform unencumbered by the tile/sprite and storage limitations of the 8- and 16-bit eras, yet still limited enough to be a breeding ground for creativity and at the same time easily expandable with custom hardware through its integrated serial port and ISA-like parallel bus.

[1] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK

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

#87

Post by vax425 » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

mfrisbie wrote: post #21

Browser 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…

Welcome to the club! I’m working on a browser extension right now.

HTTPS://headlamptest.com

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

#88

Post by jcims » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:38 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #36

Locksport!

Locksport and tying knots are two skills I would love to develop but I don't get enough opportunity to use them to use the application of the skill as the driver. Probably need to find a community for each to see if that helps.

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

#89

Post by cpsns » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:39 PM UTC

Gopher, not many of us use it anymore, but a handful of people including myself are keeping it alive and writing new services that can be accessed via it. It’s a nice group of technical, slightly eccentric computer users.

The vintage Mac community is excellent and is full of extremely smart people. Lots of people writing new software, designing new hardware, and doing really complex repair and preservation work.

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

#90

Post by sircastor » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 8:39 PM UTC

I don’t know that I’d describe it as “weird”, but for me it’s sequenced Christmas Lights. My setup is relatively small, but yes, I’m that guy with the big Christmas light display. This year I’m at about 1500 RGB LEDs this year (again, still pretty small) it’s fun hobby.

The weirdest part for me still is custom ordering hundreds of dollars of lights from Chinese companies directly.