Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 316 posts

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

#161

Post by madmax108 »

Coming from a country where "legally" procuring movies/music/software has always been harder than it should be (though things are better now), the scene I enjoyed was the piracy scene.

Be it the warez scene mentioned elsewhere in the thread, or simply the pirated movies/games scene, it formed such an integral part of my childhood. The whole aXXo/KlaXXoN debacle, the sheer respect for SkidRow for being able to deliver awesome games in a playable crack within days of their release, and purely the sense of community around, of all things, pirating content, was incredible. It sounds weird to say, but in many ways, it felt like a global movement to "stick it to the man" and keep control of the internet.

TBH I'm still a bit upset that mininova closed down because compared to TPB/RarBGe etc, I always felt like mininova was a much tighter knit community (and let's not even get into the whole eMule/Demonoid/Napster community).

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

#162

Post by cpsns »

jw_cook wrote: post #137
cpsns wrote: post #89

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.

> 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. [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.…

A new one I started is gopher://gophernews.net:70, but the best place to find stuff is on Floodgap: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

Lynx is probably the best that most people already have, but Gophie is a nice, modern client written in Java.

I think Gemini is nice, but I have no interest personally due to the TLS requirement. That makes it a nonstarter for my older computers.

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

#164

Post by ilaksh »

A few years back I spent quite a long time (like two years off and on) trying to kind of create my own scene with a Lua-programmable 3D libretro front-end https://vintagesimulator.com/media.html

Then I tried to post it on reddit in r/lua and they called it Malware and tried to insist that the whole thing had to be open source. I think what really screwed me there was Microsoft and their GD message identifying everything as Malware by default unless you have paid them off. I did eventually get the code signing certificate and stuff but no one ever really seemed to care.

I assume there may be something like this for VR somewhere that I haven't heard of yet that is actually somewhat popular.

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

#165

Post by shaunxcode »

It’s called lisp-machine-punk and it’s similar to solar or steam punk except we imagine a world where the lisp machine became the dominant paradigm for all forms of computing. The difference between lisp-machine-punk and other *-punks is there is a tangible path forward eg revive and build lisp machines!

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

#166

Post by csben »

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've joined the discord server advertised by grepLeigh in another comment.

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

#167

Post by LAC-Tech »

rengler33 wrote: post #23
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…

I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space. What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil health.

Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I know there's quite a few companies doing that.

I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).

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

#168

Post by nailer »

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/

First piece of dance music i ever heard was the Razor1911 Terminator demo

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

#169

Post by louhike »

overthemoon wrote: post #128
louhike wrote: post #117

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://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.

CRT-like shaders made a lot of progress recently, we re getting closer! And it’s great as not everyone can have a CRT and the existing ones won’t last forever.

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

#170

Post by julianeon »

butz wrote: post #121
julianeon wrote: post #51

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?

That's a good idea. I'll look into this.
Post reply on HN