Speed running Mario Kart 64.
I'm not great. I enjoy it though. It's also been a place to play around with small a programming project to make it easier to update my streaming UI. https://github.com/Forge36/Speed-Run-Sidebar
Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
131–140 of 316 posts
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#132Ok maybe not too weird but I've been a keyboard enthusiast for almost a decade now and earlier this year I started on a quest to collect as many keyboards in one place as possible to make it easier for newcomers to the hobby to easily find a keyboard (very much in progress still but making steady progress as a hobby project). I created a website called BoardSearch ( https://boardsearch.io ). So far, I've learned a lo…
http://www.tifaq.org/keyboards.html has done this for alternative keyboards (see the Contents sections on the left) for contoured, split, ergonomic, chording, and so on. Bit dated now, but still interesting.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#133Disclaimer: 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 keygen music
The channel Ahoy on YouTube dove into Tracker music, and has a few callouts on how this materialized in the Warez scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#134- 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
I do use it. I'm in a few different chatrooms with friends that have decent traffic, including the general "hoon programming help" groups that have higher traffic.
It is pretty slow, both because it's a decentralized chat and thus things are hosted on normal peoples' home connections across the world, and also just because Urbit the actual binary isn't very well optimized. It's good enough for me, and I don't really expect it to be as good as Discord. I haven't actually hit any bugs in quite a while, actually.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#135I 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 relativel…
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#136- 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!
I've made a few "games" that go a step further, including images as SVG or base64 encoded binary.
I use them mainly for learning / testing new (to me) concepts.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#137Gopher, 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.
> writing new services that can be accessed via it
This sounds cool. Care to link some examples? And is there a particular Gopher browser you'd recommend?
Also, how do you feel about Gemini?[1] I only learned about it recently, but it appears to be similar in purpose to Gopher (minimal sites with only text and links), but with a different document format based on a subset of Markdown.
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#138- 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) inter…
That tildeverse URL is not going where you think it is...(Currently set to Rickroll.)
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#139Amateur radio
Re: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
#140I 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 relativel…
Can I run programs built in this SDK on an original PS1? Like the one I have from when I was a kid? I'm interested, I'm gonna check it out.
* Works on real hardware and most popular emulators.