Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?

I’m learning Vue. For both professional and hobby usage.

So far, the switch from jQuery, thrills me.

I'm building a little platform to experiment with embodied / real-time multi-modal learning. Basically I have an old boom box that I gutted, stuck a USB power bank and a USB charger in there, along with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi will connect to one or more cameras, one or more microphones, and a handful of other sensors to let it sense its environment to various degrees. The main ones I want to work with are accelerometers so it can sense motion, temperature, and possibly GPS.

The form factor was intended to allow for portability (it has a handle and I can carry it around with ease, and the Pi can run off of the battery when then AC supply is disconnected) and to have enough space to allow for positioning multiple cameras for binocular vision and multiple microphones for stereo "hearing", as well as room for the other random sensors. Oh, and I'm re-using the existing speakers for the audio out so I can work on integrating speech synthesis into the whole kit and kaboodle.

For the software, I'm looking at starting with a super-simple BDI interpreter for the basic "cognitive loop", using an RDF triplestore for semantic knowledge, neural network models where appropriate (object recognition for example), and then start trying to build up from there. Also looking at systems like SOAR, ACT-R, OpenCog, etc. for inspiration.

Of course most of the "heavy lifting" from a computational viewpoint will need to happen on a server somewhere, since a single Raspberry Pi can only do so much. So there's a corresponding server backend piece that will work in conjunction with the remote portion. For now it'll be a fairly low-end server that's physically here at home, but if/when I start needing to scale things up I'll probably switch to using cloud resources on AWS as needed.

All in all, the basic idea is to have an "AI bot" that is alert, observing, and (hopefully) learning all the time and that will learn more like a child learns, compared to the way we train ML models today. That's not to say that there might not be some batch mode training as part of this but I'm hoping to experiment mainly with learning modalities than can happen in real-time. There's no fully fleshed out theory that I'm working off of, but I plan to tinker with a variety of things - Hebbian Learning, Reinforcement Learning, etc. Maybe I'll learn something interesting, maybe not. But it should be fun in either case.

Setting up a platform/cloud agnostic PaaS that a scrappy preproduct/early stage/pre-revenue startup can use without incurring large, spiky, unpredictable costs.

Because at this stage the startup has too much going on, this PaaS is very low overhead - so no Kubernetes complexity.

Think EC2/EBS/ELB at flat predictable rates.

I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far as building an SBC-based custom hardware with HDMI and keyboard that also works as a handheld portable with onboard display & speaker. You can also do inline ARM64 assembly and memory peeking/disassembly as well as instruction-level step debugging. Polyphonic audio, direct I2C/SPI/GPIO/etc. access (i.e. at the byte level), and more.

It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.

I’m building a hosted data warehouse for different verticals. My goal is to target people interested in doing analysis, but acquiring data and setting up even datasette is too complex, especially if the data needs transformations to be easier to comprehend.

Then I’m building that into a platform where people can fork any query, modify, and publish with their own analysis in order to build a portfolio.

My first market is sports data. There are many aspiring analysts, and I want to 10x the number of people who do this work. And I think the best way to learn Analysis is SQL, and the best way to learn SQL is by building off other peoples queries (learn by example / exploration).