Firefox phone was a great way to make simple JS/HTML/CSS mobile apps, while it lasted. I loved it & made many.
Why not continue this with PWA apps for current devices?
Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
121–130 of 316 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#122Not a weird one, but I like contributing to OpenStreetMap.org once in a while.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#123Microsoft 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?
MSFS2020 is straight up infinitely more friendly to novice development. Instead of having to read enterprise documentation for a custom product that is entirely based on binary file types that is very very mid 2000s microsoft, you literally import a standard 3D model file into the engine itself, and manage it with built in dev tools that are only getting better and more powerful, and the vast majority of plumbing to make things work is done in human readable xml and cfg text files, though there was some of that in FSX
Adding visual things to FS2020 is infinitely easier than any version before it. Meanwhile for ground texturing, turns out replacing that with google satelite data is as easy as proxying the web calls to google servers instead of bing. Theoretically, you could add in your own tileserver that also responds to those calls if you have your own ground textures, though I think you can also manage those in the dev tools in the sim.
Meanwhile, the api for moving data and programming into and out of the sim is super similar to how it was done in FSX, meaning it's almost backwards compatible, and supplemental apps that interact with your flight data were out within months.
Another fun thing about FS2020 over the previous version is that the 3D cockpit is much easier to program, because the instruments and even TV screen style flight displays can be programmed in javascript and WASM, giving you multiple different ways to build powerful and impressive cockpits. For FSX, things that wanted smart and powerful cockpit displays, like a modern boeing, basically required pulling data out of the sim, rendering it yourself, and smuggling that data back into the sim, meaning updating the displays at 15 fps put a large overhead on an already struggling single process executable.
MSFS2020 is so popular, and so easy to access, and so inspiring, that it has infinitely more amateurs trying to build planes in it than FSX had over it's entire life.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#124- Programming Language dev: I think compilers and VM runtimes are neat, and like talking to people in the space on twitter or reading new papers that come out about it. The /r/ProgrammingLanguage discord server is a great place to hang out, with lots of interesting and competent people working on sideprojects simply because they like the topic. - Urbit: I got into Urbit years ago, and still think it's really interest…
Do you actually use Urbit? I just tried it recently and found it insanely buggy and slow (the most basic things didn't work, attempting to join certain chatrooms hung forever, etc.) Wondering what I did wrong or if it's that way for everyone
Hm I just started playing around with it recently and had no trouble joining groups and downloading apps. I'm only running a comet and not a planet.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#125Demoscene, especially Amiga
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#126Browser 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…
What are the biggest differences with manifest v3?
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#127Information security incidence response, blue team mostly... It's been a stressful past decade or so getting phone calls when they know we're going to be dealing with stuff the next day (Such as last night at around 10pm right as I was getting to bed), but on the flipside I've kind of developed a very thick skin for these types of things and it's kind of the most multidisciplinary thing I could imagine doing in anything in information technology as you have to know such a broad range of things (Networking, programming, sysadmin, scripting for windows and *nix, huge gamut of knowledge breadth for mastery in this field). Was just discussing with my partners how you just have to kind of enter a zen mode of realizing someone's trying to mess with you personally and get into the fight on a level where they don't get the upper hand, it's very much as close as you can get to properly fighting people on the internet, and I like being good at that.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#128I 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://ww…
This is a phenomenon I only learned about recently. A few indie games I've played recently have CRT options, like Loop Hero. I don't know how close it gets to the IRL effect but it's really cool.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#129- 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…
> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I've abandoned is a bit embarassing. Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as i…
> I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages.
Do you have a source of this video?
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#130Browser 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…
What are the biggest differences with manifest v3?
The change that gets the most attention is the shift away from blocking webRequest to declarativeNetRequest, but other important changes are moving from background pages to service workers, and disallowing third party JS.
Service workers are particularly problematic for some extensions, as the background script cannot execute indefinitely. I included an entire chapter on mv2->mv3 since there was so much to cover.