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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?

#811

Post by bakuninsbart »

bladegash wrote: post #615
danuker wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposing a corrupt judge is among the most noble goals a citizen can have. The more incentive judges have to act fairly, the better. I am not sure you read the story correctly. But I'm pretty sure a judge will get due process - not abusive penalties.

People have been using "the ends justify the means" to justify all sorts of unethical behavior, not the least of which includes torture, genocide, and wars. Let's not go down that ethical reasoning wormhole. As for his story, my read on it must be much different from your own. Because from what I am seeing, this is far more about the judge's husband than anyone else, and it is to right a sense of personal injustice t…

Speaking of genocide, torture and war, since this topic is about german politics, it might be good to remember a certain time in that countries history, when the law was in support of all of these things. Breaking the law cannot be equated with ethical behavior. Social engineering is indeed a method, wether it is morally objectable needs to be argued and not assumed out of the gate.

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

#812

Post by dllthomas »

I'm making a board game based on A Night In The Lonesome October. If we define success as "it's good enough that I try to get the rights to the material and am able to and sell it commercially and it does well", that'd be nice but it's not the point. If we define success as "I have fun with some friends and family" then I definitely care whether it succeeds or not.

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

#813

Post by tsol »

adnanc wrote: post #506

I've been working on https://ayahbyayah.com an iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an. I've been performing intermittent upgrades over the years as I wanted to retain the simplicity, ease of use with a focus on providing the most accurate and clearest Ayat text in any app. The latest update has incorporated word by word audio…

I like this, it's useful to be able to go ayah by ayah especially when some are tougher than others. The hadith on the top of the page is a good one too, never heard it before

Are you going to make an android version?

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

#814

Post by jmmv »

I guess mine right now is EndBASIC (https://www.endbasic.dev/) which I started at the beginning of the pandemic and still have plans for it.

I've pretty good memories of how I learned to program on a computer with a much simpler environment than today's, and I've been trying to recreate that using modern technologies. Part of the motivation was to have something to teach the basics to my kids... but, well, all my time has gone into building and extending this stuff instead of teaching haha.

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

#815

Post by ss108 »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #265
ss108 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use as a word processor?

I use Word. It's the easiest option and everything that you would want to submit to for short stories (and for novels I assume) expect a Word document. I've seen things like Scrivener but honestly I think that would over-complicate things for me. I can use Word anywhere, I pay for Office 365 so I can use the desktop application or edit in the cloud if I want to. _Before_ I get into Word I process the words from my br…

Thanks. Interesting re: typewriter.

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

#816

Post by DustinBrett »

I've spent the last 13 months making a "functional" web desktop environment. To me it's a life long project to push the limits of the browser and to help me learn programming. I enjoy the process of trying to replicate something in every detail. I have no desire for monetary gain from the project, nor employment. It's just for fun and I hope that never changes.

Site: https://dustinbrett.com/

Code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS

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

#817

Post by as89 »

JNRowe wrote: post #443
as89 wrote: post #241

Glad to see this thread come back! I'll share something of my own, though it's not a tech project. I've been working on translating Japji Sahib - which is the foundational prayer of the Sikhs - into English poetry. The original is a poem, but most of the existing translations are in prose and use Western religious terminology that's not really appropriate to the original. I just wrapped up a first draft of the transl…

Thanks for your original thread, obviously it stuck in my mind. It has been great to read all the responses again. I've probably spent a few years worth of upvote budget, assuming I haven't tripped some upvote spam detector ;)

Hah, same here

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

#818

Post by tsol »

jacobriis wrote: post #367
byecancer21 wrote: post #236

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun. A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case. The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then cau…

If your strategy makes as much sense as your writing, you're definitely going to prison.

Weird to assume that when we don't even know which country it is. I don't find blanket cynicism in favor of apathy to be useful.

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

#819

Post by superfamicom »

shmde wrote: post #380
superfamicom wrote: post #325

I made a website to listen to Super Nintendo / Super Famicom music emulated in the browser. It was a great way to learn about Emscripten. Not sure what it would succeed at other than being popular, and I can assure you it is not. https://sfc.fm/

Nintendo lawyers shitting their pants furiously while typing out a cease and desist letter and issuing a takedown notice to your website hosting.

I've been waiting on this for decades. I think the not being popular is helping out on this front. Also that it only ever costs money and never makes any really helps.

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

#820

Post by drbawb »

I have a dream of killing the "hierarchical storage" metaphor. It started as a program to organize my images w/ tags: the images go into content addressable storage, the tags get stored in a relational database, and then you can query the tags, link them into a tree (taxonomy) or graph, etc.

While building this I realized I wanted it to interact w/ other programs in my operating environment: so I made some tools to take queries and spit out hardlinks on the filesystem hosting the content store. This would let me write a quick query in my shell, spit the results to a taxonomy of ephemeral folders, and then access those folders from your usual "naïve" applications.

Then I became addicted to this workflow and realized I wanted to organize all my media this way; which spiraled out of control when I realized I never wanted to deal with paths again for any of my documents.

I'd stress that the idea of content-addressable storage w/ an interface on top is most emphatically not novel, Venti[1] from plan9 was doing it in the early aughts w/ references to prior work from the decades prior, git and many VCS systems are just interfaces into a content-addressable store as well. It's just that hierarchical organization won in popular culture, and as best I can surmise nobody is really interested in replacing it.

The problem one naturally runs into is: hierarchical storage is inextricably linked into our modern operating systems, file systems, shells, protocols, etc. at the most fundamental levels; so the complexity grows enormously w/ every layer I want to subsume. You either deal w/ the friction of the "impedance mismatch" between your storage and operating environment, or you basically resign yourself to building an entire OS where "files" live at one and-only-one path, with a myriad of indexes & manifests to make sense of it all.

Am I likely to succeed in killing the "filing cabinet" metaphor? Probably not. Has the journey been worthwhile? Absolutely.

[1]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/

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