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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#241
post #35

Nothing of any importance. Managed to screw myself up to the point of having constant generalized anxiety, so yeah, things are really working out here.

I'm with you. I look at what I've done with all my "free time" and I can't help but think - maybe I can't cure cancer, but I could have helped the person that would?

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#242

I came up with a bad way to share files. It's a website that takes a file, encodes it into a series of URL parameters, and then allows you to put them back together again. (it's really only practical for small text files) https://podje.li/ https://github.com/willcipriano/Podje.li

This is really cool! How did you do the encoding though?

Thank you! Most of the heavy lifting is done by the lz-string library[0], the compression works well for small text files, sometimes the URL out will be shorter than the input in that case. Things like images work out to be hundreds of URLs unfortunately.

[0]https://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#243
Lots of loose ends still and nothing noteworthy to the extend that others are posting on here.

But I finally got around to reading up on a topic I've been curious about (causality modelling, causal inference, causal discovery) and started writing a little about it. The couple of interactions I gleaned from doing so have been very refreshing and are a great driver to continue down this path.

https://georg.io/the_causality-driven_company

https://twitter.com/GeorgRWalther/status/1271796549157339136

https://twitter.com/GeorgRWalther/status/1272193903639375872

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#244
post #236

I created a new open chat web app called sqwok: https://sqwok.im The goal is to enable everyone to have their own high-quality, accessible, and shareable chat page on the internet, with features we expect in enterprise chat apps like slack, but geared towards general discussion. As an example I just created a post with this HN url and we can all talk in live right now, discussing this thread, by joining at the link:…

Pretty clean design. I like the simplicity, who's your target demo?

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#245
I've began learning NES development in 6502 assembly, thanks to an online book called Famicom Party [1] and later the Nesdev wiki [2]. Since then I'm trying to make one NES game per month [3]. I don't think it counts as a "product", at least for now.

[1] https://book.famicom.party/

[2] http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Nesdev_Wiki

[3] https://wendelscardua.itch.io/

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#246
I made a web version [0] of the Counter-insurgency board game Andean Abyss [1]. It uses webGL to present a 3D space that holds the board, cards and pieces. Think Tabletop simulator on the web. It encodes the game state into the url so you can send urls to the current board state.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/1274763015129313280

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91080/andean-abyss

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#247
post #225

I recently built a online text editor which lets you generate shareable documents with complex charts, graphs, mathematics, and more using the simplicity of Markdown. https://quickviz.app/ It's built on top of the Pandoc, Graphviz, and MathJax

Great work. That will be very useful!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#248
I built an app for peer to peer lending boardgames between users.

I'm more of a backend/data engineer so this was my first attempt at front end dev with react native. Was pretty fun to build and see whole app come together to an MVP, but I don't know whether I'll launch it for real. Shipping costs from lender to borrower and back drive the price too high to make it feasible I think.

Lesson here is fully assess costs and price points before you start to build!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#250
post #63

Haven't decided whether to open source or not ($$$) but I've been working on a thermomechanical tyre model.

a what?

Vehicle dynamics is a fairly simple science except for modelling tyres. By which I mean (in steady state conditions) a mapping (Force, Slip Angle, Slip Ratio) -> (Lateral Force, Long. Force, Moments etc)

It's fairly complicated because Tyre's are made of rubber, so you either use finite element analysis which is slow, or some kind of (FD) approximation which can be fairly crap. Modelling the transient properties properly is doable, modelling the thermal properties efficiently is genuine "If we told you we'd have to kill you" black magic

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