Posted by david927 3/30/2025
Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
At the moment, I've been doing very little. I had been hyperfixated on going "above and beyond" at work, doing close to 60 hours per week when I was only getting paid for 40 since January. I had been hoping that if I had been putting in an excessive amount of effort in terms of productivity, I would get some recognition for it, and more importantly: be given the opportunity to work on professional development things, in terms of, say, classes or training so I could learn more about automated testing. I really want to move towards something more intellectually stimulating the grinding manual process we have - I see so much room to improve. I really just want to learn more things, so I can become a better asset to the my employer, and so I don't feel like I'm just "treading water" in terms of industry knowledge.
Instead of things going that way, I was basically told that doing what I had been doing is... appreciated... but doesn't really change anything, because no one had asked or expected me to do it.
It was demoralizing to get the brush off in that way, but I've decided the best course of action then, is to forge my own way. Do the hours I'm required to do (and do them sincerely well), but put that creative hunger into building a website, building some repos, and finding my own way forward.
At this point, I've already bought a domain. Now I just need to figure out how to build one, and start making some cool stuff.
Its hard to set tone through text... I'm not bitter about what happened, everything they said was technically true. Heck, I'm not even angry about it. It was naive of me to get my hopes up thinking I would get my way, if I put in the effort up front. It just feels... bad to not really feel any kind of positive reinforcement for professional development, or even for working as hard as I’ve been working for the past 3-ish months. In fairness, what they said isn't unreasonable, but it sucks they don't want to invest into me, the way I invested into them.
Also hoping to find some time to add a feature or two to my Video Hub App
https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
As part of that, I made an ADIF (ham radio logs) parser to learn go. It's more than 2x faster than parsing the same data in json format with the go standard library.
Using `midiex` for Elixir I’ve written a fully fledged driver for Ableton Push, letting me use it as essentially a 4-deck version of Pioneer’s DDJ-XP2 sub controller with Rekordbox.
It implements basic statefulness so that the rotary encoders can be used, as well as a paging system so the 64 performance pads can be mapped to different functions. It also supports track browsing and loading, which is helpful if you want to use say DVS with an external mixer and don’t want to be hunched over a laptop dragging tracks around.
It’s also got some additional capabilities which I’ve not seen on other hardware like dedicated faders for stem separation levels.
It’s been a great exercise in combing two hobbies, learning about MIDI as well as being able to personalise my setup for my own use. I haven’t open sourced any of it just yet whilst I’m still tweaking things but I’d be interested in collaborating with anyone who also has one of these devices and has programmed it. I’m looking to use the display on it next, whose protocol Ableton have some (albeit scant) documentation for.
A long time ago I played around with neural net stuff and had some fun making tiny little things. To give an idea of time frame, this was before people were using ReLU.
Going back to it after the recent advances was incredible seeing how much has happened. So many times I'd see something and wondered how I could have missed it the first time only to realise it hadn't been invented yet when I did things last time.
It feels like there is a much higher focus on statistical mathematics now in a way that it permeates everything. That in itself requires a whole lot of new learning to get to grips with, but I also feel like there might be some value in looking at a lot of these things from a different perspective. I think I tend to look at things from a more geometric point of view.
In that vein I have been looking at some transformers using unit n-sphere embeddings with V values as geodesics, just to see what happens.
As I learn new things, I keep finding fun new ideas to muck around with, I'm just an amateur, so I'm not really restricted by areas I look at. Today I'm wondering about whether Wasserstein distance could be quickly approximated by a learnable method (especially if the inputs had access to parts of the ml components that generated the things being Wasserstein compared).
I'm almost certainly treading ground well explored by others, but my way of learning seems to be to rapidly jump between many different things picking up a small understanding of each as I go until I just seem to know things that I didn't before. Focusing on a topic and pushing in that direction never seemed to work for me so much. This is probably why I am an amateur :-)
This is a good thing. One requires smoothed pathways to run!
I think it's doable by dynamically creating lambdas based on test cases I define in one way or another, perhaps like mocked integration services, that does nothing but validate if the event from SFN matches a schema, and that the mocked response also matches a schema.
My concern is that I can't find prior projects doing this. My use case is mostly (exclusively at the moment) calling out to lambdas, so perhaps I can get away with this kind of type checking. But it's just weird that something like this doesn't already exist! Past experiences have taught me that if no one have tried it before, my idea is usually not that good.
Let me know what you think!
(Would have liked to use durable execution which totally solves the typing issue, but can't in this case)
It goes beyond just plotting notes there are options to show scales using intervals, roots, note names, etc., plus a chord mode that highlights triads, voicings, and inversions. I’ve found it useful for routine practice start the built-in metronome, pick a voicing or scale pattern, and run through it in time.
There are also pages covering theory topics like modes and progressions, but the fretboard’s the main draw. It’s something I built for myself and figured others might get some use out of too. I plan to keep adding to it as I think of more things I want to reference probably adding support for additional strings or tunings next?
The other solves a very specific problem (mostly out of laziness) I do most of my playing using the standalone Neural DSP application on Windows, but I don’t really want to do any mixing in it. So I built a dead simple recording application [2] that doesn’t require firing up a DAW, but still offers a decent UX. It lets me quickly capture riffs and ideas, and later I can just send them to my Mac for mixing if anything seems promising. Haven’t shipped it yet, but I’ve been using it daily and having some friends try it out.
I was surprised that such a feature was not available on any existing calculators and so I wrote my own. Runs on macOS, iPhone, and iPad.
BVCalc Lite (free version, no ads): https://apps.apple.com/app/bvcalc-lite/id6544784034
BVCalc (paid version): https://apps.apple.com/app/bvcalc/id6560108221