> I have a couple of WiFi-enabled bulbs near me, wouldn't it be nice to be able to control them using Minecraft?
I mean nothing against the author and like-minded individuals and I have the utmost respect for people with such a "tinkerer" mindset, but often reading things like this on Hacker News makes me feel like a bit of a fraud, because my internal answer to the question above is basically "No, not really". I'm wondering if others feel the same way. Does it make me less of a "hacker"? I enjoy programming, sometimes I wonder how things work, but oftentimes I don't mind that it is abstracted from me and "just works", and I rarely if ever have the urge to integrate two seemingly unrelated things to create a unique hack.
I completely agree with your statement. I too have very little interest in hooking light bulbs up to Minecraft, or anything but a socket already there. I enjoy my job and find solving programming problems challenging and rewarding.
My own feeling is that there is no better or worse, and feeling bad questioning if we're good enough is ridiculous. If one wants to hack on light bulbs that's great! If they'd rather go for a bike ride, that's great too! There's a quote from Winnie the Pooh that speaks to this equivalency.
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.”
That doesn't make you a fraud. That just means you have different interests. I personally thought this was mildly amusing. I'm not sure that the author intended much more than that either.
There's a pattern in your comment that is a little more troubling though. Did you mean to imply that you feel like you should be a "hacker"? If so, I'd question the intrinsic value of being a "hacker" as opposed to a generally curious person who has his own interests and disinterests.
Controlling a lamp isn't very useful on it's own, but it's a good simple proof of concept for tying in-game mechanisms to internet-connected resources. Step 2 is getting an external event to have an effect in-game. Once you have that, you can start building VR interfaces to the real world.
The epitome of the fad of integrating two seemingly unrelated things that somebody else made in order to create a unique hack was the ProgrammableWeb: Mashup Matrix [1].
It had all known web services along each edge, so people without any original ideas or will to write their own code could check if "It's like X for Y" had been taken yet, in order to impress their investors that their unique snowflake of an gimmick to effortlessly combine two other company's hard work together was a viable unicorn seed.
Eventually there were so many web services that it became like checking the Million Dollar Home Page [2] to see if one particular pixel was already taken.
<s>But we've moved far beyond that, fortunately.</s> Why stop at two dimensional matrices? Are there actually any practical mashups left that limit themselves to using only two other web services, these days?
Web 2.0 is to "It's like X for Y!" as Web 3.0 is to "It's like X for Y with Z!"
Don't worry about it! I figure most of us only have the time and attention to work on a few things. If you don't happen to be fascinated by integrating lightbulbs and Minecraft, that doesn't make you a boring/uncreative/dumb/whatever person.
Nothing wrong with it, but it does allow people to stretch their brains a bit, and sometimes you get new novel things that start out with "Dude, you know what would be cool?"
All I can say is when you work at your passion you don't work a day of your life.
I love hacking tech even on the weekends and after hours. If you don't then you might want to consider a new career.
I think a big part of why 30 years into my career I'm still learning is because to me this is my "fun". I don't want to watch 30 hours of reality TV. I'd rather build a cat feeder that uses OpenCV to identify which cat is eating and when the cat's feeding bowl is empty.
Recently my job shifted yet again to more management and my wife suggested I "take vacation and work on that iPhone app you were playing with a couple months ago". She knows I'm a much more enjoyable guy to be around when I have had a couple really nice zoned out hours pounding a keyboard to beg a computer to do something stupid I've come up with.
PS: When my wife saw this first thing she asked was if I could interface something like that to the cat feeder. :-)
Something like this I put into the category of technology art. Not something I want to invest my own time on, but like seeing. Doesn't mean it's for everyone though.
As for whether this makes you less of a hacker. I doubt it. We all hack in different ways. For me, my hacking today consisted of writing a scheduled payment simulator in JavaScript to help explain to the tech guys how it is expected to behave (fed up of writing documents).
Yep, I feel the same way. I don't really like tinkering, though. I don't like the mindset of tinkerers, either. Every tinkerer I've come across has never finished anything of substantial size, and every one I've met had terrible programming habits, or such strongly opinionated views, you couldn't work with them or discuss something you liked because it wasn't inline with their holy views of writing god-awful code.
When I pursue a project, I work on it in terms of 10s of thousands of lines of code over a 2-4+ year span of time. When I take up small projects, I make sure they're useful for production purposes.
I often think about the portfolios of people like this, a large number of repositories to show for, and nothing ever particularly useful. Everything is a gimmick, and nothing ever took serious architectural decision making on a grand scale.
I have a raspberry pi controlled cat feeder I built and have been playing around with the last couple of weeks as a side project. I showed this to my wife and she said "Oh so can you make it so I can feed that cats while playing minecraft?" LOL
Now the next step is to build a replica of his house and this specific room down to the details so he can turn the lamp on in game which turns on the lamp in the real world.
This is what Code Hero, which I helped develop [1] tries to be. I hope this will have some success as well! With the right spark, there is a ton of creative fuel that can be channeled from excited kids into computer programming.
Poking around the website it looks like an awesome project. I'm going to give it a try! But, the site needs a marketing person or someone gifted with visuals + words. Also, codehero.org has a redirect loop and most of the pages are access denied.
This seems like it'd be awesome for Minetest [1]. Minetest has a lot of (very) rough edges, but basically it's a Minecraft-like engine where most functionality beyond the very basic is added through mods written in Lua. I'd be fun to be able to live-code the mods on an in-game computer..
Finally, 'Hackers' the movie style 3D interfaces for managing networking infrastructure.
In all seriousness. As networking structures become more modular, it might not be a bad idea to have systems where the architecture can be modeled and monitored visually.
I have come across presentations of some custom/proprietary systems that provide interesting visualizations of networking interactions. It would be awesome to see a generalized platform implementation.
So cool. Reminded of Gibson's The Peripheral - even if there's nothing so existentially twisted in what the author actually did. I suppose the interesting part is just that the author is controlling a light IRL from the center of a russian-doll of emulated environments, but it sure feels profound given that one of those environments emulates an environment you can walk around in.
Redstone has no means of communication to the outside, so even if you created an entire computer with redstone(very unlikely) you would have no means of communication outside of minecraft.
Open Computers is very powerful. I once knew a modded Mincecraft server admin who used Open Computers to receive and send text message updates about his base and the state of server when he was away from his computer.
kohanz|10 years ago
I mean nothing against the author and like-minded individuals and I have the utmost respect for people with such a "tinkerer" mindset, but often reading things like this on Hacker News makes me feel like a bit of a fraud, because my internal answer to the question above is basically "No, not really". I'm wondering if others feel the same way. Does it make me less of a "hacker"? I enjoy programming, sometimes I wonder how things work, but oftentimes I don't mind that it is abstracted from me and "just works", and I rarely if ever have the urge to integrate two seemingly unrelated things to create a unique hack.
terrn|10 years ago
My own feeling is that there is no better or worse, and feeling bad questioning if we're good enough is ridiculous. If one wants to hack on light bulbs that's great! If they'd rather go for a bike ride, that's great too! There's a quote from Winnie the Pooh that speaks to this equivalency.
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.”
munchbunny|10 years ago
There's a pattern in your comment that is a little more troubling though. Did you mean to imply that you feel like you should be a "hacker"? If so, I'd question the intrinsic value of being a "hacker" as opposed to a generally curious person who has his own interests and disinterests.
DougWebb|10 years ago
nkrisc|10 years ago
phirschybar|10 years ago
DonHopkins|10 years ago
It had all known web services along each edge, so people without any original ideas or will to write their own code could check if "It's like X for Y" had been taken yet, in order to impress their investors that their unique snowflake of an gimmick to effortlessly combine two other company's hard work together was a viable unicorn seed.
Eventually there were so many web services that it became like checking the Million Dollar Home Page [2] to see if one particular pixel was already taken.
<s>But we've moved far beyond that, fortunately.</s> Why stop at two dimensional matrices? Are there actually any practical mashups left that limit themselves to using only two other web services, these days?
Web 2.0 is to "It's like X for Y!" as Web 3.0 is to "It's like X for Y with Z!"
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100829232918/http://www.progra...
[2] http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
irremediable|10 years ago
StavrosK|10 years ago
oh my god how can you not find this the coolest thing ever
> Does it make me less of a "hacker"?
Probably not.
MisterBastahrd|10 years ago
kator|10 years ago
I love hacking tech even on the weekends and after hours. If you don't then you might want to consider a new career.
I think a big part of why 30 years into my career I'm still learning is because to me this is my "fun". I don't want to watch 30 hours of reality TV. I'd rather build a cat feeder that uses OpenCV to identify which cat is eating and when the cat's feeding bowl is empty.
Recently my job shifted yet again to more management and my wife suggested I "take vacation and work on that iPhone app you were playing with a couple months ago". She knows I'm a much more enjoyable guy to be around when I have had a couple really nice zoned out hours pounding a keyboard to beg a computer to do something stupid I've come up with.
PS: When my wife saw this first thing she asked was if I could interface something like that to the cat feeder. :-)
CaptSpify|10 years ago
> I have a couple of WiFi-enabled bulbs near me, wouldn't it be an interesting experiment to be able to control them using Minecraft?
martin-adams|10 years ago
As for whether this makes you less of a hacker. I doubt it. We all hack in different ways. For me, my hacking today consisted of writing a scheduled payment simulator in JavaScript to help explain to the tech guys how it is expected to behave (fed up of writing documents).
unknown|10 years ago
[deleted]
oldpond|10 years ago
andrewmcwatters|10 years ago
When I pursue a project, I work on it in terms of 10s of thousands of lines of code over a 2-4+ year span of time. When I take up small projects, I make sure they're useful for production purposes.
I often think about the portfolios of people like this, a large number of repositories to show for, and nothing ever particularly useful. Everything is a gimmick, and nothing ever took serious architectural decision making on a grand scale.
kator|10 years ago
I have a raspberry pi controlled cat feeder I built and have been playing around with the last couple of weeks as a side project. I showed this to my wife and she said "Oh so can you make it so I can feed that cats while playing minecraft?" LOL
lucaspiller|10 years ago
ashark|10 years ago
[1] http://psdoom.sourceforge.net
nkrisc|10 years ago
StavrosK|10 years ago
http://www.dx.com/p/e27-7w-550lm-rgbw-15-led-smart-phone-wi-...
StavrosK|10 years ago
abolish_karma|10 years ago
easytiger|10 years ago
tty7|10 years ago
Tepix|10 years ago
Somewhat unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2012 and lacks a lot of features of the Pocket or PC version.
NovaS1X|10 years ago
soared|10 years ago
ccvannorman|10 years ago
[1] http://primerlabs.com/codehero
soared|10 years ago
vidarh|10 years ago
[1] http://www.minetest.net/
EvanPlaice|10 years ago
In all seriousness. As networking structures become more modular, it might not be a bad idea to have systems where the architecture can be modeled and monitored visually.
I have come across presentations of some custom/proprietary systems that provide interesting visualizations of networking interactions. It would be awesome to see a generalized platform implementation.
nonword|10 years ago
accommodavid|10 years ago
DuckyC|10 years ago
seccess|10 years ago
dataminded|10 years ago
stabs|10 years ago
worldsayshi|10 years ago
... sort of.
tlrobinson|10 years ago
intrasight|10 years ago
tgb|10 years ago
Yahivin|10 years ago
unknown|10 years ago
[deleted]
TerryADavis|10 years ago
[deleted]