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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?

#291

Post by trh0awayman »

chc4 wrote: post #134
trh0awayman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just to update my comment so that readers don't get the wrong idea: I went back and tested it again today. It's a lot faster than when I tried it. I still have things like "Fetching user count..." for groups that never seems to update, though.

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

#292

Post by dreadnaut »

sph wrote: post #259
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 :)

Péter/Zak originally started the competition in 2001. I started helping out in 2012, and took over the main duties a few years later.

But indeed, that's Zak from the game! The favicon for the website is also a tiny version of the character's sprite.

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

#293

Post by humanizersequel »

trh0awayman wrote: post #291
chc4 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just to update my comment so that readers don't get the wrong idea: I went back and tested it again today. It's a lot faster than when I tried it. I still have things like "Fetching user count..." for groups that never seems to update, though.

That almost certainly has to do with the user who hosts the group not having their Urbit running when you tried to join.

Also, just to have it in this thread, most of the slowness when using Urbit has to do with poor frontend optimization. The network itself is actually quite snappy.

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

#294

Post by q-base »

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…

As others have mentioned and requested; it could be interesting to learn more about this space?

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

#296

Post by alfnor »

zulban wrote: post #182

My wife recently went back to school for civil engineering. They must take one programming course, in matlab. So we have this community of academic go-getter students who've never programmed before, suddenly working hard to learn about for-loops and structs and functions in Matlab. As a computer scientist it has been fun teaching them a bit. The assignments are easy enough that I can help a ton without knowing any sy…

What a coincidence! I'm in my first year of civil engineering taking a MATLAB course right now. I do have some previous coding experience, though. For me, it's all the math stuff that drives me insane.

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

#297

Post by rhelsing »

bckr wrote: post #4

I'm in the deep learning music scene, which is due for its stable diffusion moment in the next year or two. The (primarily) timbre transfer system called RAVE is where I'm starting, and my contribution is to optimize the system to improve training time. [] https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE/tree/master/rave

I'd love to get connected. I've been working on an online DAW interface to make trying out these models more approachable. It also currently contains many useful heuristic based generative models. https://neptunely.com -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T93tfPgKhhA for a recent demo of the generative radio station.

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

#298

Post by kinow »

spoils19 wrote: post #18

- 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.

>- 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.

I kept the colors I used before, but dropped JavaScript and tried to use CSS that is compatible with multiple browsers. It has been a learning experience, but very interesting to see how far I can get to with just HTML and CSS.

Now I've started focusing on semantic web tags, and accessibility testing. Much easier without JavaScript.

- Site: https://kinoshita.eti.br/

- Source: https://github.com/kinow/kinoshita.eti.br/

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

#299

Post by _hcuq »

kodah wrote: post #2

Not really weird anymore as there's a lot of entry level and cloud-based components for people to get into it with. My scene is the localized automation scene; basically home automation but with no cloud connected products.

What’s your favorite home automation? I like the idea but can’t think of / find anything that really excites me.

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

#300

Post by _carbyau_ »

jw_cook wrote: post #113
spoils19 wrote: post #18

- 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…

TIL from the tilde quotes site: 16:00 butter is just a loaf of milk

...ok.

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