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Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#781
I have been writing a book about the fundamentals of large-scale distributed systems over the past couple of years.

It’s not a best seller, but thanks to it, I connected with engineers all over the world who I would never have met otherwise.

https://understandingdistributed.systems/

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#782
I run JQBX [1]. I have no plans to monetize it but its cool to just have it out there as a thing I made. I really enjoy the community and its a cool way to help with music discovery. It's also really rewarding to provide a meaning experience for some people out there using the web. A nice counterbalance to boring enterprise software!

https://www.jqbx.fm

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#783

I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it. Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage. If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things. I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a r…

And success can't be completely ruled out. Only childish success, of being a prodigy and a star very young with no failures, a monotonic career after being (this is the secret) being picked to be a winner by the industry, can be ruled out.

> If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.

That's the thing. I think what ruined it was the concept that getting to the top required 10,000 hours of practice. That's prostitution, violin takes twice as much, and becoming the best at a very new skill can take only 1,000. But if you put your whole life into it, that too transforms what you can accomplish.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#784
post #661

I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it. Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage. If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things. I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a r…

You aren't "succesful" because you have a "real" job that you care too much about. (You're a geek, not a musician.) A "real" musician tells the boss, the wife, the son to go "fuck themselves" and plays to an audience of homeless pedos if he has to, because it's in his blood man. It just ain't in your blood.

I mean, I'm sure your joking, but the reality is that I know folks who live that.

From the places I grew up, I can look at Townes or Blaze Foley or any number of folks who drank themselves to death following that line of thought. And those are the "successful" ones.

At some point I realized that the main difference between me and the dudes drinking themselves to death on the Armadillo Farm was that I didn't have to take amid-week $50 gig playing "into the mystic" and "brown eyed girl": we were all still playing the same shitty $150 gigs on Saturday afternoon.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#785
I built a small application that lets you put together travel guides for your friends. Very MVP at the moment, but I got it out the door for once. No landing page, "start your trial" doesn't actually make you pay anything, I just forgot to change the text.

https://tripmix.io

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#786

I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it. Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage. If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things. I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a r…

I'm 31 and just started learning music a year ago. Ever since I started this is probably the only thing I actually enjoy doing everyday. Is it possible to get to a level of proficiency at this point in life where you get to play good enough you can start getting paid for it?

Yeah, it's a side business for me. Pre-covid, I was making $10-15k a year playing on the weekend. Kind of a fun thing to chase too, as if you're playing paying gigs you get to play with better musicians,

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#787

I built a Visual Studio extension that wraps ag (the silver searcher), because I was constantly flipping to the terminal to use it to search the UE4 codebase I work on. The built in MSVC text search is egregiously slow, and even tools like Visual Assist (which search via indexing symbols) take forever to run on the entire engine. It can do a full regex search on the entire UE4 codebase in about ~6s on my SSD. Searchi…

isn't ripgrep (rg) better than ag, performance-wise?

I haven't benchmarked it, but it could probably just be a drop-in replacement as I believe the arguments are compatible. Would be interesting to try!

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7zvt9QZWMUGsQ27NM8XuMd?si=6c7e... Podbean: https://professionaltechnicalintervieweewithtaylordorsett.po...

Oh man, this is an absolute jackpot—exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Hope you enjoy! Let me know if you have any feedback. This is my second year doing the show. Trying to make it better however possible.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#789
A Python library that treats filepaths as objects.

This was made redundant when the standard library introduced the same thing.

I’m still convinced mine is better, and offers a lot functionality the standard lib doesn’t.

It can be extended to add functionality based on file type (it abstracts the blob, not just the path).

It’s also a lot faster.

It also has limitations the standard lib doesn’t. For example, it doesn’t go to great lengths to support every file system under the sun.

So it’s going to lose eventually.

I’m not going to link to it because there are a ton of libraries doing the same thing. They might be even better.

But they’re all in maintenance-only mode.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#790
I'm making large flying buildings out of swarm drones that self-assemble into cellular geodesic structures to form vast kites that use the Magnus effect to move. I've got a half-baked website going now: https://phoenixbureau.github.io/MagnusMotive/

The project includes a simple system for writing provably-correct software, an innovative UI that integrates text and GUI interaction, and a plan to collect and recycle the plastic waste of the various oceanic gyres (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, et. al.)

It probably sounds overly ambitious and even crazy, but all the necessary pieces are there, it's just a matter of putting them together.

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