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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

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581–590 of 922 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#581

I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the…

On a smaller scale it reminds me of the original concept of Light Table, which let go of the abstraction of individual files in favor of editing your code in a tree like structure. It's a shame this concept seems to have died out, I'd be curious about alternatives to plain file based UX.

I'd forgotten about that. I liked the idea and contributed on KickStarter, but it never matured to the point that I felt comfortable using it.

I see the website is still up, albeit dated 2014!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#582

I live next to a school, so there's a low speed limit (30 km/h). Still, people drive like race drivers and the city hasn't ever responded to the residents' hopes of introducing a speed camera. I wanted to have some data on how many people speed, the max speed recorded, that sort of thing. Things the city should be doing after many complaints of dangerous driving and people being almost killed on zebra crossings. I ha…

The guy at Not Just Bikes will tell you that enforcement will never work nor happen and that the only way to get people to slow down is to design the road so it doesn't feel safe to drive fast. The road next to my house has a speed limit of 20mph but most cars go 45mph because it's a straight road 4 lanes but space for 6. No bumps, no curves, wide. Effectively it feels like you should be driving fast. If I go the spe…

Yeah, unfortunately this is true. A street near my house has a limit of 40mph and people would regularly drive 60 mph+, sometimes someone would pass me doing 65+mph (it's a no-passing residential road).

Eventually someone died, and they added a lot of traffic-calming changes to the road. It's much nicer now, but a shame that someone had to die to change it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#583
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well done, LinkedIn is a cesspool. Ironically the only thing I am using right now is Twitter, since a lot of interesting people are still on there. There's a lot of negative but balance as well. For every MAGA or ESR's comments, I balance it out with Miguel de Icaza's views on Gaza, etc.

You should be able to use Twitter without justifying yourself

No, I would say at this point a lot of people who say they use twitter feel the need to say they aren't a nazi nor do they support nazi's. YOU may not feel that way, but a lot of people do, and they don't want to be associated in any way with endorsing nazi's or musk.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#585

I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the…

Great stuff!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#586

I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the…

Man...If you built this for large mainframe codebases, I think every outsourcing provider would use it. many of these apps have >1 yr parallel runs even when rewritten because there is so much dormant and seasonal code that it is very hard to be confident in the apples:apples functional comparison over any shorter timeline.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#587
A chess site I'm calling 'Chess Derivatives' with modified rules to reinforce best practice. I'm still tweaking the specifics but the basic pitch is this

Augmented Chess: Normal chess with conventional ELO ranking system but you get additional penalties & rewards based on common bad practices, and recovering from bad positions.

> The first person that breaks from the book line loses 10% of the start time (unless book was not an option / the line was exhausted)

> Missing a forced checkmate forces you to wait 5% of the start time before your next move

> Achieving any principled position good grants some time (Passed pawn, connected rooks, rook / queen / bishop battery, etc)

> Doing any principled bad position loses some time (Knight on the rim, blocked bishop, king past the first rank in early game or mid game

----------------------

Continued Position: Chess but you continue a position from a high-level chess championship. There are a couple value-adds here

> Provide lower level players with a way to start a middle or end game positions after a highly skilled player followed all the correct principles. My theory is this will reinforce why those principles exists, how they can benefit you, etc.

> Provide high level players a way to be forced into positions out of their comfort zone / their preferred styles

> Provide differently-skilled players to continue play from unique positions with the desired amount of odds. So a GM might play a 1000 ELO player but starting from a position with -9 evaluation, etc.

If you have any ideas, comments, or feedback LMK.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#588
As part of my spare time hobby, implementing small packages for building games that don't allocate memory post startup (or work when the memory map can be declared statically such as with wasm-4-like targets or an rp2040) and can run in resource constrained environments along with performing well on a steamdeck.

Most of it involves taking advantage of data structure properties (and limits) by using zig comptime to derive functions that either compute offsets relative to existing pointers or use pre-computed offset tables, when relative isn't possible, to reduce function size further without inhibiting the ability to take full advantage of SIMD.

One of the next task for this is statically computing update graphs for archetypes such that a multi-thread runtime can mix strategies (last thread (detected by an atomic counter on nodes that require all dependencies to be complete) to reach a node broadcasts new work it unblocks, starved threads steal work from others, etc) to speed up the world update loop when running on larger targets while also remaining lock-free.

It's fun to explore how far one can go with statically declaring all limits upfront and managing even larger targets (steamdeck, servers) as if they were embedded applications.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

#589
I'm working on a little flat file based blogging tool called Postwave ( https://github.com/dorkrawk/postwave ) and using it to power a blog with career advice for software engineers called Don't Break Prod ( https://dontbreakprod.com/ ). Because the world needs more blogging tools and advice. Or maybe it just scratches my itch and it's fun to build.
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