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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?

#251

Post by mikewarot »

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…

I'm convinced that Forth is the inverse of Lisp, and could be equally expressive, but because there are no parens to force matching of parameters, it's way too easy to lose things on the forth stack.

I believe that adding types and data structures to Forth, as is done in STOIC, combined with an IDE that allows you to SEE what parameters get eaten where, could make Forth viable for larger programs.

I tried to do this with MSTOICAL, which you all helped me to get to compile... but then I couldn't disentangle it from the build system, and my retina blew out... causing me to lose the ability to focus on the project.

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

#252

Post by idk1 »

Well I would have answered TAS/Speedrun, where the reprogram games just with player inputs, but you have already posted that. So I encourage everyone to watch those videos. I'm just in love with the ludicrous lengths people go to with speedrunning and hacking these older games.

Side note - I'm sure you heard about this, but I love someones speedrun (SM64 Tick Tock Clock Red Coins) was affected by a bitflip from outer space. So much I love about this scene.

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

#253

Post by nuc »

guyrap wrote: post #41

Databending. Which is applying random noise to a file in order to generate something that still decodes well, but has some weird/cool glitch. I went to a workshop about this in some underground club that no longer operates; still thinking about it and toying around from time to time. This was waaaay before Dall-E et al. were cool ways to generate quasi-crappy images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databending

Thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole. Here's a nice small intro I just found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oIHwIItiPs

Apparently, you can just use a hex editor, and do random search/replacements to get some quick results. Awesome!

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

#254

Post by themoonisachees »

3np wrote: post #198
muhammadusman wrote: post #11

Ok 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…

I've been building from a couple of kits and realizing the next step is to make my own design - what I'm looking for is just not on the market. The one thing I find daunting is find and decide on a shop to handle PCB printing (non-US/EU). Especially since I assume my first couple of designs might need a few tweaks, I'd prefer something with short lead-times and able to handle low volume at reasonable price...

Seconding the other comment, i previously got boards for my Plaid/tht for relatively cheap and fast from jlcpcb.

Of course, if you want fastest you could cook your own pcbs, it's a bit involved but it gets you 3d-print times on pcbs.

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

#255

Post by conductr »

Loughla wrote: post #148
sircastor wrote: post #90

I don’t know that I’d describe it as “weird”, but for me it’s sequenced Christmas Lights. My setup is relatively small, but yes, I’m that guy with the big Christmas light display. This year I’m at about 1500 RGB LEDs this year (again, still pretty small) it’s fun hobby. The weirdest part for me still is custom ordering hundreds of dollars of lights from Chinese companies directly.

HEY. I'm looking for dependable, C9 lights. Would you know where to look? I love the look of the old-timey large bulbs, but so far the lights I've found have been; a) overly expensive and b) not able to withstand more than one winter in the upper-Midwest. Any recommendations?

I have had good luck with several products here; https://www.1000bulbs.com/product/204208/CMS-C9SWW.html

They have an array of temperatures and has an old look. I bought 1000' feet of their spool and bulbs and have been using for about 7 years with zero issues. Only bulb to go out was because I dropped it on some concrete. I also did this after a couple years of what turned out to be single use lights from big box store.

It's not cheap but not sure what your budget is. At least you can get some mileage out of them.

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

#256

Post by n3t »

fy20 wrote: post #237

Not something I'm part of, but something I respect is the car tuning scene. I'm not talking about engine swapping or adding a bigger turbo, but tuning the original hardware electronically through the ECU. Where I am in Europe diesels are king, and usually people import 2nd or 3rd hand cars from Germany. I'm from the UK originally, but it's kind of funny that I see a couple of magnitudes more BMWs here, which is much…

Wow, this is great. Do you have any good links to learn more about this?

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

#257

Post by eternityforest »

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 love offline systems. IoT is everywhere, garage doors should not need the internet. SyncThing is one of my biggest inspirations in software. They are one of the only projects I consider truly getting P2P right, ever, and there's a nice ecosystem of stuff people have been doing with just that one primitive of a folder that syncs.

A lot of the time it seems like you really don't need advanced conflict resolution, if you change your actual UI model to be inherently parallel, which you often can.

A collaborative document editor is hard. A forum that lets you post offline is easy. At worst a conflict will get a few out of order posts, which is not an issue if people use @references, reddit style trees of comments, or there's low enough volume that it's unlikely to be confusing. Post race conditions already exist in forums anyway.

There's a lot of low hanging fruit in P2P and offline first, and everyone seems to be mostly doing the hard stuff like cryptocurrency instead.

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

#258

Post by eternityforest »

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #249
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…

Check out Holochain[0] and the some of the projects in that space. They have some horrendous marketing and, unfortunately, the word "chain" in the title but they are also making some funky/radical P2P stuff. Basically, according to my understanding, every "agent" gets their own immutable blockchain (a la solid[1] pod) that's stored on a DHT and hApps (an assemblage of personal smart-contract like functions) running i…

I would prefer no immutable chains whatsoever, but this is a lot better than a public shared chain.

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

#259

Post by sph »

dreadnaut wrote: post #54

I run a 22yo online competition for a 32yo DOS racing game: Stunts, or 4D Sports Driving in some countries. The competition has spawned a long-lived community which includes reverse engineering, game patches, new cars, alternative engines, a few world meetings, and multiple other competitions. - https://zak.stunts.hu - https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Custom_cars - https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?board=90.0&label=stunts…

Are you the Péter Ács referenced in the article, aka Zak Mckraken?

Because both Stunts and "Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders" were my favourite games as a kid, and they're pretty much unknown to this day. The Mars face, the aliens with the long head at the telco, the kazoo, all etched deeply in my memory.

I love the fact that there is someone that has played and loved the two same niche DOS games as myself :)

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

#260

Post by eternityforest »

api wrote: post #142

Digital Artificial Life -- as in evolving program ecosystems, artificial chemistries or cellular automata that can manifest life-like phenomena, etc. Haven't done much with it in a while but was very into it in college. It's both a minor scientific field (would probably be grouped under both theoretical biology and AI research) and a hobbyist field with some really interesting projects.

It would be cool to see a distributed artificial life game. No security needed, if a node doesn't play by the rules it just simulates a dangerous environment that kills creatures. Being able to make a robot and send it out to show up on other people's screens would be pretty fun.
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