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

Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 786 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#291

Post by cmyr »

mercuryrising wrote: post #259
cmyr wrote: post #36

I'm moving to zambia for the winter to start an after-school program doing basic computer and internet literacy skills with kids. It has been really fascinating watching all of the tools and projects that have popped up over the past few years attempting to make really high quality educational resources widely available, but these tools remain generally out of reach for those people that would most benefit from them.

Awesome, good luck! Are you doing it with a program or going solo? Do they have access to computers, or are you bringing some in?

kind of realized on review that my OP was pretty dull. :)

I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I will be working with computers at a few existing sites.

Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that are now mostly sitting unused.

I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera.

So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things they can do with computers.

0: http://www.britishcouncil.org/

edit: their/there =[

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#292

Post by wfn »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #100

Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] - a server, client, and various related things. The new Minecraft update released this week and radically changed how networking works, so it's a bit tough to get it all working again. It's cool because it's a totally open source recreation of everything . It's got a server, a client, terrain generation, physics simulation, level editing, classic sup…

> Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft

Nice.

Are you aiming to implement a thread-safe plugin API, perchance? The current problem with bukkit (and with vanilla minecraft server, of course) afaik is that whenever a plugin needs access to global state, it uses an API that does not do any locks of any sort; which means that usually, whenever one needs to e.g. write to global state, one dumps these critical parts onto the main thread. Solving this is nontrivial but rather important, I think.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#293

Post by mercuryrising »

flyinglizard wrote: post #254
mercuryrising wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about doing something similar for a bit :). If I may make a couple of suggestions - I put in 24 ATMEGA328P-PU-ND. It found where they were, it found the lowest price. They're $3.16 PU - total ~$76. If I get one more, 25 of them, I hit the price break, and my order total come to $50. Definitely a better deal. When I'm getting parts, the price breaks always seem to make me spend more, but there's situati…

Hey, thanks for the feedback. As for ATMEGA328P-PU-ND, did you try using the optimization slider? :) Drag it all the way to its "Aggressive" setting, it will bump the quantity up to 25, and the total down to $48 - just like you said. As for package deals - you are right, this is what needs to be done. We're thinking about that.

Awesome, didn't see that before. Maybe turn it on by default, then have the option to back it off? Why is the quantity bump represented as an error with big warning signs? Shouldn't it be a good thing?

Is there any way to represent shipping as well? That seems like the killer - sure something is $2 cheaper on Mouser than Digikey, but if I have to pay $5 for shipping, that breaks the deal.

Something else that would be cool - and this is a huge pain point for me when developing PCBs, is let me tell you rough characteristics I want, you find me the part. I want a 0805 10K resistor +- 10% @ quantity 100. Find me the cheapest one! As long as I can use it as a pull up resistor, I don't really care what it is. It's a huge pain in the ass to go through when I want to make my BOM and have 10 different tabs open looking for a 1K, 5K, 10K, 22uF, 10uF resistor and caps. Make that part easy.

You should increase the part lookup speed as well - it spins for quite a while. Autocomplete after a few characters would be good too (I wouldn't remember PU-ND, had to look it up, but I can get the first part).

Good stuff - do you have a mailing list or anything to get updates?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#294

Post by derwiki »

CameraLends (https://www.cameralends.com) -- AirBnB for cameras, rent cameras and lenses from local photographers. It's cool because:

- sharing feels good

- if you have camera gear, you're probably not using it all the time

- it's a way earn back cash from lending out gear

- it's a side project that I've bootstrapped this year :)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#295

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

wfn wrote: post #292
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #100

Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] - a server, client, and various related things. The new Minecraft update released this week and radically changed how networking works, so it's a bit tough to get it all working again. It's cool because it's a totally open source recreation of everything . It's got a server, a client, terrain generation, physics simulation, level editing, classic sup…

> Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft Nice. Are you aiming to implement a thread-safe plugin API, perchance? The current problem with bukkit (and with vanilla minecraft server, of course) afaik is that whenever a plugin needs access to global state, it uses an API that does not do any locks of any sort; which means that usually, whenever one needs to e.g. write to global state, one dumps t…

It's just a library, so it doesn't handle plugins. However, the library is thread-safe, and the server [1] I wrote on top of the library supports plugins and is also thread safe. For anything dependent on a specific thread, there's generally a queue to push things into.

[1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#296

Post by pla3rhat3r »

Goopplesoft wrote: post #284
pla3rhat3r wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you could create a very simple response and add numbers pretty easily. And at .075 cents per message I gotta think, in the long run, Twilio is a cheaper alternative. I should add that I work for Twilio so I'm a bit biased. However, I love your idea. Just trying to do the math. :)

Twilio is the SMS/Voice provider so the bias doesn't really apply :) Thats why I kept the SMS/Voice rate the same as twilio. Not trying to make money of SMS/Voice just trying to implement a service over it so its easy to use. Have you tried out ezGAuth? Love to know what you think. I'll probably try to seek out someone from twilio soon for some sort of relationship since it helps their sales too. There are also the a…

Nice. Yeah I've heard of ezGAuth. If you ever need a contact at Twilio hit me up. joshua (at) twilio (dot) com

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#299

Post by mindcrime »

martindale wrote: post #283
mindcrime wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazingly cool. I was excited about this from the first time Elliot mentioned it to me, and I'm thrilled to see how far you guys have come. Way to represent the Triangle!

Thanks, Phil! Let's make sure to catch up between now and demo day. :)

Absolutely. I put a "todo" on my list to ping you as soon as I got home from ATO the other day. Look for an email soon...

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#300

Post by filpen »

In my spare time I am working on Seatbelt (http://seatbelt.io), a web app to help developers find pair programming partners.

It's cool because I think we need to bring developers together and share the knowledge, and I am convinced that pair programming is a powerful way to do it. There is much we can learn from working with people from different backgrounds.

Right now there is only a landing page with some copy, I work on the code when I find time. It's taking a while since I use this project to teach myself node.js (I am a .NET backend guy in my day job) but it's a fun side project.

Post reply on HN