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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?

#921

Post by howLongHowLong »

andrewzah wrote: post #739
songeater wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar vein - making music with AI. I had never been blessed with "natural" musical talents so I needed "cybernetic" support to get it done... using openAI's Jukebox. Will write a longer post about the experience at some point / guessing HN may like that. youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRpMo19NwYKloFhnw6QzMg soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/songshtr blog: songshtr.github.io

Music is about discipline. "Talent" is more or less a multiplier, but is useless without discipline in the first place. Needing "talent" (to be very good at it) is a myth. You don't have to be the best in the world to be very good at something. There is no secret. It just takes time and work to get good at an instrument or producing. edit: clarity

Truth! Im a professional musician and in my experience, "naturally talented" generally means "enjoys practicing". No one produces moving music without practice.

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

#922

Post by jawmes9 »

Charlieholtz wrote: post #112

I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about work…

So excellent, happy to see you're open to contributions too!

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

#924

Post by exikyut »

franga2000 wrote: post #773
exikyut wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, naturally, awesome. If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different…

The funny part is that several providers do actually have GTFS included in GMaps. Someone with decent lobbying power managed to score a contract to provide "Google Maps integration", so I don't think the providers even have the right to share the GTFS files, even if they have them. And since the contract is absurdly overpriced and (unofficial info) charges for each conversion instead of simply handing over the conver…

I was wondering what the situation was, hah (and hoping my totally presumptuous read of the situation wasn't totally off lol... yay it wasn't).

Ugh, incompetence enforced by policy is the most flat-out frustrating thing ever. One wonders where hard cynicism comes from... :'(

I'm very happy to hear you're (somehow?!?!) succeeding at your goal of building this out, while somehow dodging all of the rent seekers' radars (boggle). It's very cool to see when these sort of wins happen. Fist bump :D

I hadn't quite mentally resolved/connected the sequence of "push XYZ service" -> "free GTFS integration"; it was much vaguer in my head, more just thinking the very presence of Google in a likely-highly-permeable environment (without strongly held technical opinions) would have a reasonably statistically meaningful likelihood of Sales swinging past at least once or twice. I guess my brain immediately noticed the opportunity to show a spine and then be observed for having done that, something something free positive reputation. I... *sigh* I guess that is only satisfying and representative of good opportunity if there is actual competent perception on the other side of the table.

My naive guess is that Google does GTFS integration (and long-term maintenance) for free worldwide (likely with small internal teams in charge of resolving locale-specific spec violations and creative interpretations) to make Maps' moat bigger and further entrench their guarantee of establishing and retaining their captive audience. I always got the impression GTFS as a whole (which I understood was a Google initiative) was predominantly a broad sweep towards getting everyone mostly on the same chapter (as opposed to the same page) to strategically solve for the "last mile" of fixup work and viably keep up with the incoming firehose of transport updates at global scale.

I can only agree that it's incredibly frustrating that sales, municipality manglement, and wasteful solutions/implementations combine with exponentially negative and infuriating effect.

As a footnote (I'm not sure if it's helpful), the state I live in (NSW Australia) has a functional/sprawling GTFS (incl. realtime) implementation that covers the (inhabited parts of the) whole state (800,000km²) with the vast majority of the transport chaos :) disproportionately centered around the greater Sydney area (vaguely around 12,000km²). It's kind of far away :) so headscratching about the data would probably have the occasional semblance to poking at a distant server in the cloud, but it could be useful as a high-level reference. (I'm unfortunately not sure what it does especially well and what it gets especially wrong.) https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/

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

#925

Post by mikemcquaid »

contingencies wrote: post #874
mikemcquaid wrote: post #638

I’m the project leader for Homebrew and have been maintaining it for 12 years. I have no planned dramatic changes for it or expectations I’ll radically improve it in any way. I just try to keep all parts of the project ticking along and I still enjoy doing so, despite feeling no real obligation to continue.

If there's anyone at Apple reading, pay this guy.

They provide help and CI hardware. I have no desire to be either employed by Apple or work on Homebrew for a living (currently, at least).

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

#926

Post by mikemcquaid »

telesilla wrote: post #689
Centigonal wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be misunderstanding GP's clarity around the intended scope of the project with a lack of enthusiasm about maintaining the project. Homebrew is critical infrastructure, which is exactly why it shouldn't change dramatically. Now, if GP has lost interest in the project, or doesn't have the time to keep it running satisfactorily, I'd definitely agree with you - but I didn't get that impression from his po…

If I understand correctly, it's not about losing interest but ensuring there is a successor for when GP wishes to step back or is forced to do so. The community should acknowledge this and fund training and possibly salary for who's next.

I’ve been working on finding a successor and ensuring the project has a bus factor of more than one for at least. The latter has been solved but the prior won’t until I step down, despite my best efforts otherwise.

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

#927

Post by mikemcquaid »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #653
mikemcquaid wrote: post #638

I’m the project leader for Homebrew and have been maintaining it for 12 years. I have no planned dramatic changes for it or expectations I’ll radically improve it in any way. I just try to keep all parts of the project ticking along and I still enjoy doing so, despite feeling no real obligation to continue.

Possibly dumb question, but have you considered looking for a successor to take over the project? Homebrew has basically reached the point where it's "critical infrastructure" for macOS devs, and it would really be a damn shame to see it slowly fade away just because the creator has moved onto other things.

Many times. I haven’t found one yet whom I felt would take over everything I do. Given I still enjoy it, it feels like there’s no need to reduce the number of humans working on the project in the hope that it’ll encourage someone else to step up and do more.

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

#928

Post by mcabral »

Working on a ground up design for a mechanical keyboard while I get my cancer treatment. There’s lots of projects that make this easier but I wanted a challenge and wanted to go from the ground up specifically.

Originally I picked a SiFive microcontroller but found that all of the ICs which mediate USB/JTAG/etc are hopelessly sold out. I switched over to a microchip based ARM chipset with built in USB. I’ll probably need to pick up a JTAG probe to do some debugging but that’s fine.

It’s been fun and very educational. I hope I get to finish it.

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

#929

Post by telchior »

TheMightyLlama wrote: post #902

Over a year ago I became hugely frustrated with the narratives that were being presented to us. Every 'social media' platform as well as 'news' platform presents us with an undifferentiated feed of news. The problem with an undifferentiated feed is that we, as consumers, can never get a solid view on what's happened or is happening on a single event. Moreover, the existing platforms encourage doom-scrolling and keep…

I think you're right; there's immense potential value in news aggregation that goes beyond "this got the most eyeballs / articles".

What do you think of the possibility of ranking articles by some metric? If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).

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

#930

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #849
AussieWog93 wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly dumb question, but have you considered looking for a successor to take over the project? Homebrew has basically reached the point where it's "critical infrastructure" for macOS devs, and it would really be a damn shame to see it slowly fade away just because the creator has moved onto other things.

It's not critical infrastructure. There are better alternatives, even, that are a quick and painless install process away. For example, nixpkgs is competitive with it, and does not include the Google phone-home supercookie tracking spyware that is on by default without consent in every Homebrew installation, and works great on macOS. Homebrew could disappear tomorrow and nothing extremely bad would happen. That can't…

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