[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2022)
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       Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (August 2022)
        
       What are you working on? Any new ideas you're thinking about?
        
       Author : david927
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-08-01 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
       | mindcrime wrote:
       | I'm really interested in exploring some AI ideas related to
       | emobidment. To that end, I needed a "body" to put an "AI" in. So
       | I started out by gutting out an old boombox, and putting a
       | Raspberry Pi, a USB powerbank, and a USB charger in there. I also
       | built a power supply multiplexer board that can allow switching
       | from the battery to the charger, and back, without causing the Pi
       | to reboot. And that stage is pretty much where I am. Getting that
       | multiplexer thing built proved more challenging that I expected,
       | but that's a story for another day.
       | 
       | Next steps are to start adding sensors to allow the "AI" to
       | experience the physical world. Plans include:
       | 
       | 1. GPS module, so it can experience motion and sense its velocity
       | and location in space, etc. The same board also happens to be a
       | cellular data board that will allow the device to upload data to
       | the cloud.
       | 
       | 2. One or more accelerometers for more localized perception of
       | motion / orientation in space.
       | 
       | 3. One or more cameras for vision. Ideally two so it can do
       | stereo vision and have depth perception, etc.
       | 
       | 4. One or more microphones to receive audio.
       | 
       | 5. Anything beyond that is getting into pretty speculative area,
       | but I can imagine adding sensors for temperature, barometric
       | pressure, and other environmental factors, and even get into
       | "senses" that humans don't really have, like sensing IR,
       | ultraviolet light, electromagnetic radiation, magnetic flux
       | density, etc.
       | 
       | Now obviously a Raspberry Pi doesn't have enough computing power
       | to do a whole lot from an AI perspective, so the basic concept is
       | to have the data being received by the box pushed to a remote
       | server, where complex training and reasoning stuff will happen.
       | Modules can then be pushed back down to the box so that some
       | operations can be executed locally. That's where both Wifi and
       | cellular data come into play. One of my "next steps" right now is
       | to get the cellular data board configured, and figure out how to
       | get NetworkManager to seamlessly switch between that and the
       | various Wifi AP's that will be available depending on where I
       | take this thing.
       | 
       | Anyway... there's a lot of speculation to all of this, and a lot
       | of it is still very fuzzy in my mind. But the basic concept is
       | simply to focus on the idea of how an AI can learn from
       | physically experiencing the world in a way that's loosely
       | analogous to the way a human does. If you've read any of Ben
       | Goertzel's stuff and are familiar with his whole "baby AI"
       | notion, then you may recognize some spiritual kinship in terms of
       | thinking. I've been heavily influenced by Ben's work, and by
       | OpenCog[1]. In fact, OpenCog (or some parts of it) may become
       | part of this project before all is said and done.
       | 
       | [1]: https://opencog.org/
        
         | Sp4mBo7 wrote:
         | This sounds like a really fun project!
         | 
         | rasp pi cluster could add more computing power for cheaper.
        
           | mindcrime wrote:
           | _This sounds like a really fun project!_
           | 
           | Yeah, I'm fairly excited about getting into it.
           | 
           |  _rasp pi cluster could add more computing power for
           | cheaper._
           | 
           | Well, I don't have room in the physical case for more Pi's as
           | it stands, and TBH, I'm not terribly interested in running a
           | cluster at home. It might mean spending some money, but I'd
           | rather just do it all in the cloud. One advantage to that is
           | I can easily scale things up and down dynamically, and I can
           | use a mix of CPU and GPU (or even FPGA) instances without
           | having to go out and buy a lot of expensive hardware.
           | 
           | Not to say that I would _never_ bring part of it  "on prem"
           | and run out of my home, but right now the cloud approach
           | feels more manageable.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | I just finished grinding to meet the submission deadline for a
       | contest Webtoons is running. The chance at 50k and a development
       | deal sure made it worth pretending I had a work ethic for a
       | couple weeks when my Patron campaign was gonna pay me for it
       | regardless.
       | 
       | https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-sins-of-chloe-fran...
       | if you would like to read a story about a witch and her demon
       | girlfriend punching a rich white asshole.
       | 
       | I'm gonna take a break for a few days, maybe draw some self-
       | indulgent porn, then clear out my commission queue and start
       | working on the second half of that story.
        
       | wakahiu wrote:
       | NNextDB - a blazing fast, open source, vector search database for
       | building AI/ML applications.
       | 
       | https://github.com/nnextdb/nnext
        
         | kevinmm wrote:
         | Very cool. How does this compare against Millvus, Weaviate or
         | Qdrant?
        
       | jshawl wrote:
       | Proving identity and authentication with public keys:
       | https://proof.im/jshawl
       | 
       | Signing a session claim to "log in" means I can authenticate
       | users without storing any sensitive information.
        
       | Sp4mBo7 wrote:
       | Custom scraper, crawler, fuzzer, etc. its lame but im enjoying
       | myself.
       | 
       | Found a new (to me at least) directory traversal on a webserver
       | the other day. was pretty jazzed about it.
        
       | necmttn wrote:
       | Gumroadable.com a tool to turn everyday used apps content to
       | gumroad.com products. Starting with notion MVP
       | 
       | Later on planning to add figma plugin & github repo support for
       | paid software or source code.
       | 
       | The reason is I want to be able to sell ebook while I'm writing
       | and collect feedback from the audience who's bought on presale.
        
       | Cyph0n wrote:
       | I've been working on needle[1], a CLI tool (and associated
       | library) that can detect openings/intros and endings/credits
       | across TV or anime episodes. It decodes audio, fingerprints it in
       | chunks, and then compares chunks across files to find common
       | sequences.
       | 
       | The end goal is to use the library to build a Jellyfin plugin
       | (C#) that handles skipping intros. I think I've figured how to
       | call a C library from C#, but there is a lot of work to do to
       | actually get a functional plugin.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/aksiksi/needle
        
         | chenshuiluke wrote:
         | This is an amazing idea
        
       | Genbox wrote:
       | At the moment I'm working on FastHash[1], a pet project of mine
       | to port a few high-performance non-cryptographic hash functions
       | to C#.
       | 
       | I'm also trying to build FastLinq, a value-by-reference Language
       | Integrated Query (LINQ) optimized for high-performance scenarios.
       | It is kind of a weird mix as LINQ in .NET is known for its high
       | overhead.
       | 
       | Finally, I'm working on an Office setting synchronization
       | application. I heard a podcast with Paul Thurrott complaining
       | about the lack of sync solutions, so I thought I would do one for
       | fun.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/Genbox/FastHash
        
       | frozencell wrote:
       | If I say, a few people will copy?
        
         | gregorymichael wrote:
         | That's not the greatest risk to your project.
        
       | nocommandline wrote:
       | A GUI for Google App Engine - https://nocommandline.com
       | 
       | Also currently thinking about building a Python 3 search library
       | to be used against Google App Engine. Google deprecated the one
       | from Python 2 and recommends using Elastic Search (which means
       | you're no longer dealing with a Serverless solution)
        
       | mdcds wrote:
       | I'm working on my competitive programming skills.
       | 
       | Looking to get back into doing TopCoder after a 10 year break.
        
       | dcx_fndr wrote:
       | Marketing tech app -- https://datacx.ai/ It's still early days
       | but after being away from the marketing space for a few years,
       | I'm so surprised at how little has changed. I want to help
       | promote a better way to collaborate on analytics, starting with
       | ecommerce and moving to broader CDPs.
        
       | username_exists wrote:
       | There are always plenty of ideas, the hard part is figuring out
       | which ones are worth any of my time. Right now I'm working on a
       | spreadsheet that turns everyday spreadsheet users into
       | programmers. The absurdity of the ambition is not lost on me.
        
       | linkdd wrote:
       | Currently working on https://kubirds.com , a Cloud-Native
       | Supervision Engine. Think alerting similar to
       | Nagios/Icinga/Centreon but as a Kubernetes Operator which can run
       | almost any Docker image.
       | 
       | We are also building on top of this a trading bot with a FinTech
       | company, and a SaaS website monitoring service for non-tech
       | people.
       | 
       | We are also considering building, still on top of Kubirds, a No-
       | Code notification automation/aggregation platform ->
       | https://1-click-notify.carrd.co/
        
       | thirtywatt wrote:
       | I'm working on Cling, a training community for rock climbers.
       | 
       | Rock climbing is a complex, metric-driven, and growing sport that
       | doesn't have good-enough tooling in tech. Outdoor vs indoor is
       | very different, so we're focused on significantly improving the
       | climbing gym experience for now.
       | 
       | https://www.cling-app.com/
        
         | heliodor wrote:
         | What made you choose to build an iPhone app before an Android
         | app? I'm curious where that debate stands in the last few years
         | as I haven't seen the arguments for a long time.
        
       | csomar wrote:
       | A general purpose profiler: https://github.com/pyroscope-
       | io/pyroscope-rs
       | 
       | If someone is interested in this space, feel free to reach me!
        
       | david_allison wrote:
       | * I was part of a team organising the International Linguistics
       | Olympiad. Got some post-event business to sort out
       | 
       | * Fixing AnkiDroid to migrate to Google's Scoped Storage model
       | without trashing user data:
       | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
       | 
       | * Improving the largest bilingual Manx <-> English Corpus +
       | Search Engine. It's recently become the #1 point on the Isle of
       | Man's 10 year language plan, and will probably end up informing a
       | new dictionary for the language
       | 
       | * Generating a machine-translation system using the above,
       | probably also adding Manx to FLORES-200
       | 
       | * (maybe) Generating a Text to Speech engine for another language
       | 
       | * Moving my book over to my new laptop, and grinding it out to
       | completion
       | 
       | * Scraping websockets to improve the accuracy of bus timetabling.
       | Eventual aim to improve the experience of using the bus to reduce
       | the number of cars on the road. Probably some F# webservice
       | handling most of it, with React Native (web)app, distributed via
       | NFC tags/QR code.
        
       | lawgimenez wrote:
       | I'm currently migrating our app to SwiftUI which I target for
       | next year's release. And then after that migrate our Android app
       | to Jetpack Compose.
        
       | bobblywobbles wrote:
       | A lots of fun things, feel free to connect with me on Github if
       | anyone would like to chip in and help:
       | 
       | - An Electron template with built-in secure features. I regularly
       | maintain and update the template so it's supported with newer
       | versions of packages. - A collection of free, public-domain
       | recipes. I've wanted to do some version of this for _years_, but
       | am finally getting around to do it again. This time, I'm paying
       | chefs to create recipes for me that will be licensed as public
       | domain.
       | 
       | [0] - https://github.com/reZach/secure-electron-template [1] -
       | https://github.com/reZach/open-recipe-project
        
       | mguerville wrote:
       | Harvard CS50, I was coding a bit as a kid in the late 90's in
       | BASIC, and have been in tech most of the past decade, but never
       | went beyond HTML, CSS and grabbing a basic script off Stack
       | Overflow since then, so now I'm trying to learn the foundations
       | of CS and eventually teach myself a language or two so I can
       | evolve from building mini projects in no-code tool to making more
       | meaningful things and more powerful apps.
        
       | onurgenes wrote:
       | Currently working on adding email sending capabilities and of
       | course reply checking too for https://nureply.com
       | 
       | Aim is making it an email drip campaign tool with best UX.
        
       | deivid wrote:
       | A handheld, esp32-based implementation of the pico-8[0] console.
       | Basics work already, sidetracked into writing a terrible Lua to
       | C++ compiler to squeeze some extra performance out of some
       | pathological-case games.
       | 
       | Lives at https://github.com/davidventura/picopico
       | 
       | [0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
        
       | readonthegoapp wrote:
       | I put together a landing page for this idea i've been thinking
       | about:
       | 
       | https://MyApartmentFamily.com/
       | 
       | The idea is to make apartment living less lonely, and generally
       | increase goodwill between apartment neighbors.
       | 
       | Non-apartment people are not being excluded, but I think
       | apartment living has lots of unique issues that homeowners -
       | even, say, townhome and condo owners - do not have. And,
       | realistically, you have to start with a focus on something --
       | some one thing -- in our case, it's apartment-living.
        
       | mikewarot wrote:
       | I just restored some backups from 1995, and am digging through
       | that archive to see if I can pull out the multi-tasking libraries
       | I wrote for Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS. No practical use, mostly
       | nostalgia.
       | 
       | I didn't document things as well is I should have, of course I
       | was the only user, and had no thought that future me would be
       | looking at it 27 years later.
        
         | adamrmcd wrote:
         | Coincidentally, I was just looking at backups from my BBS from
         | the same era.
         | 
         | I wish I had a way to retrieve the data, assuming it's even
         | still good.
         | 
         | I remember using a parallel port driven magnetic tape drive to
         | record them. Probably a device that tar(1) was originally
         | designed for :)
         | 
         | What medium did you use?
        
       | thepra wrote:
       | I'm still working on collAnon[1], a private discussions
       | platform(behind a PWA) with bias avoiding intent through
       | temporary anonymity of the answers(which also means that
       | discussions have an end date).
       | 
       | In the latest development I decided to change route and make it
       | freemium, with all the previous premium features now available to
       | everyone.
       | 
       | This is to make it more appealing to try this kind of discussions
       | that are not your usual way and give ample breath to use all the
       | features until this platform finds its audience I hope
       | -\\_(tsu)_/-
       | 
       | [1] https://collanon.com
        
       | Insalgo wrote:
       | On wearable for developers and researchers: https://aidlab.com
       | 
       | It's not a new idea but we've done one huge pivot this year
       | focusing more on a b2b/healthcare market
        
       | allenu wrote:
       | I'm still working on Fresh Cards[1], a flashcard app I've written
       | for iOS and Mac.
       | 
       | I'll admit that it started out as "yet another spaced repetition
       | flashcard app" but over the past few months, with constant UX
       | refinement, I've forged a unique approach (IMHO) to how you
       | review your cards and browse your deck. I've received a lot of
       | good feedback from users in my Discord, so I'm constantly
       | changing things up to improve it.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/
        
         | guytv wrote:
         | Looks nice, but could not find a way to import my anki deck?
        
           | allenu wrote:
           | I have some documentation how to do that here:
           | https://www.freshcardsapp.com/help/sharing.html#import
           | 
           | I will say that the Anki import isn't 100% at the moment, but
           | works reasonably well for simpler decks (ones that don't use
           | HTML or javascript). I'd like to get to 100% Anki
           | compatibility, but it will require some additional features
           | to be implemented first, like a templating system.
        
       | adamnemecek wrote:
       | I've been working on an IDE for music composition
       | 
       | https://ngrid.io
       | 
       | Launching soon.
       | 
       | Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
        
       | vladstudio wrote:
       | thinking about converting my new tab extension -- https://new-
       | tab.vlad.studio/ -- into a real website, accessible from any
       | browser, not just Chrome. As always, it is harder than it seems.
        
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       (page generated 2022-08-01 23:02 UTC)