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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?

#111

Post by btheshoe »

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…

> My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.

Why do you think this? Would be interested to hear the reasoning behind the take.

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

#113

Post by jw_cook »

spoils19 wrote: post #18

- 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.

Are there any particular communities or groups for this you can recommend?

Here are a few I've discovered that I've really been enjoying lately:

https://tildeverse.org (EDIT: apparently they don't like being linked to from HN; copy and paste the link instead of clicking it)

https://indieweb.org

https://neocities.org

I think the main focus of those communities is recapturing the spirit of the (arguably more fun) internet of the 90s to early 2000s. They're not specifically dedicated to static site minimalism, but there's definitely a large overlap.

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

#115

Post by bdittmer »

kodah wrote: post #2

Not really weird anymore as there's a lot of entry level and cloud-based components for people to get into it with. My scene is the localized automation scene; basically home automation but with no cloud connected products.

This. Every couple months I disconnect the internet and walk around the house verifying all my "smart" home automation products still work. Sometimes I'll make a second pass with homeassistant (or a service dependency, e.g. zigbee2mqtt) shutdown to make sure I can still physically use things (like a dimmer switch).

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

#116

Post by dewey »

andruby wrote: post #63
pocket_cheese wrote: post #33

Web scraping. I love figuring out how to reverse engineer websites and defeat systems designed against web scrapers. It's also super interesting (concerning?) how much data websites leak. 4 out of the 5 bug bounties I've discovered have been while poking around in my scraping efforts.

What's a good tool/language to write scrapers in these days? A decade ago I was using ruby with mechanize and hpricot. I hope tools have improved since then, especially for scraping sites that use javascript.

Really depends on how big your scraping operation is going to be. These days there's a lot of "managed" providers that give you headless browsers / proxy rotators through an easy API so it's relatively easy to plug them into your code. Examples of these would be https://www.browserless.io or https://www.scrapingbee.com for headless browsers to render JS.

From my work experience of working on a large scraping stack with thousands of integrations, I can say that we are very happy with our own custom framework, written in Go (https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery for HTML parsing) and using headless Chrome for JS rendering.

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

#117

Post by louhike »

I love retro gaming on CRT. People tend to misjudge how retro games are supposed to look (visible pixels or mismatch between 2d backgrounds and 3d models). I'm not opposed to people playing on LCD screens, I just think it's important to remember how those games were supposed to look.

Some people are dedicated to show that, which is great: CRTpixels: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels Standard Definition Gaming: https://www.tumblr.com/sdg480 or https://twitter.com/DefStan480

And taking a picture or video of a CRT can be quite tricky, you have to be very careful of your parameters, your angle, etc.

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

#118

Post by kevstev »

theCrowing wrote: post #31

I am still phreaking and active in the demoscene.

what really exists in phreaking? I used to be interested in the mid-late 90s, but it seems it was all but dead by 2000 or so. Asterix seemed to keep things interesting for a bit, but I haven't heard about that in years.

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

#119

Post by Karrot_Kream »

grepLeigh wrote: post #15
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!

The NNCP Matrix/IRC rooms have folks interested in offline / air-gapped systems.

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

#120

Post by CM30 »

Definitely various video game ROM hacking scenes. My personal expertise is in the one for Super Mario World, where I've been teaching myself 65c816 to code custom enemies and objects for my current project, but I've also been monitoring the goings on in the communities for:

- Super Mario 64 - Super Mario 64 DS - Super Mario Sunshine - New Super Mario Bros 2 - Luigi's Mansion - Mario Kart Double Dash - Wario Land 4

And a fair few other games too.

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