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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?

#151

Post by Rodeoclash »

conductor wrote: post #16

Disclaimer: 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/

So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw, exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had uploaded disk images.

My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to share the remaining disks with each other (using ZModem!) overnight. Double our bandwidth!

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

#152

Post by LAC-Tech »

munificent wrote: post #110
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…

> 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…

https://github.com/LAC-Tech/new-wave/blob/master/type.ml

Looks like my last attempt failed when I got bogged down prototyping a type system in Ocaml then trying to port that to Zig.

So in my case - it's not because I use them and they suck, it's because I find stuff like implementing type systems and GC very hard, and usually more practical things start wanting my attention more.

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

#153

Post by mysterymath »

I maintain a LLVM backend for the 6502: https://godbolt.org/z/6EWEb6c5E, https://llvm-mos.org

I love compilers, and I work on LLVM full time at my day job. I love bringing modern tooling and techniques to an older environment where they very much don't belong; the juxtaposition of the two is very satisfying to me.

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

#154

Post by andrewmcwatters »

whateveracct wrote: post #50

Super Smash Bros Melee modding. People have fixed bugs in subtle parts of the logic (e.g. input polling occasionally drops frames). They've also made entirely new training modes and added visualizations for various mechanics. Oh, and they've added in-game rollback netplay using a Dolphin fork :)

> Oh, and they've added in-game rollback netplay using a Dolphin fork :)

Holy smokes!

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

#155

Post by LAC-Tech »

btheshoe wrote: post #111
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.

Well, as reactionaries love to tell us, it's a library and not a framework.

Great, we already have a library for that - it's called the DOM.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reactive programming, and even templated views. But reacts approach of hiding everything under the rug rather than having a clear "here's where the state changes" and "Here's we we render" divide always struck me as the worst of both worlds.

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

#156

Post by johnwheeler »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #151
conductor wrote: post #16

Disclaimer: 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/

So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw, exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had uploaded disk images. My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to share the remaining disks wi…

#cracking4newbies on efnet

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

#157

Post by myself248 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #46
grepLeigh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems enthusiasts? Nowhere. Should we start something? :)

I share this interest!

I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-...

I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not quite what I'm looking for.

I've been playing with Internet-in-a-box, which is precisely wrong about its name; it's an offline repository of content that was developed on the internet.

Someday I'd like to marry that with my Othernet receiver, which is a similar offline-hotspot-of-content but keeps that content updated by receiving a satellite data stream. (One-way only.)

Piratebox seems to be a dead project by that name, but I like the idea. A local file repo and possibly bulletin-board for use by folks within range of the box.

Yes, yes, yes, where do we go to chat?

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

#158

Post by Loughla »

It's not technology, but it is a super niche technical group of people.

Restoring antique and vintage woodworking equipment. Like pre-1920's if possible. There are no manuals, most of the companies are out of business, and there are very few resources available. There are websites like oldwoodworkingmachines and oldwoodworkersforum but, mostly it's trial and error. It requires a super keen eye for detail, and when you're missing parts you have to be really good at deductive reasoning.

One of my proudest moments was when I completely restored a hand-cranked drill press for a family. They had memories of their grandpa using it to build the family home. It was amazing to watch their faces as I showed them the bright brass and walnut it would've originally been decorated with. When I started it was a box of parts that were mostly just scrap cast-iron. I had to learn how to sand cast to re-make pieces!

I've posted about it elsewhere on here, but right now I'm restoring a 24" J.T. Towsley jointer. I'll be done in the next week or two, and can't wait to run some lumber through it. (that being said, I will have to sell it to pay for some medical bills, if anyone is interested in it). I learned on this site that the editor of popular woodworking is actually doing that right now as well. I reached out to him, and was able to provide some technical drawings for a bearing block that his was missing. So that was neat.

That's probably what i like the most about that community - it's an actual community. I was restoring a 60's PowerMatic drill press for a neighbor, and posted about the original column length, since the one I had was converted to a tabletop. One of the guys on the old machines forum actually PM'd me, and drove to my house to give me one! It was amazing.

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

#159

Post by europeanguy »

muxamilian wrote: post #57

Decreasing network latency by tweaking routers/developing new software: https://www.bufferbloat.net

Do you know that weird phenomenon where you just learned a new word (which is weird in itself, how come I've live 20, 30, 40 year sand never saw this word before?!) and immediately after you see the same word again in an entirely different context?

Well that just happened with "bufferbloat". I had just learned about this word on the book "alrogithms to live by". And now, here.

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

#160

Post by myself248 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #107

I'm a big fan of distributed systems (papers and implementations) and alternate networks. Fun projects that are active right now: - Usenet (yes, it's still alive!) - NNCP (friend-to-friend e2e encrypted network, doesn't need IP, can be airgapped) - Yggdrasil (an IPv6 overlay mesh network) - Retroshare (friend-to-friend P2P encrypted network with Chat, Messaging, and filesharing, and more) - Urbit (weird, distributed…

Oh thank you, this dovetails perfectly into the offline/airgapped thread elsewhere on this page. I think of SSB and NNCP as related in that they both work with sporadically-connected nodes.
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