kaesve | 3 months ago | on: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
kaesve's comments
kaesve | 10 months ago | on: WebGL Water (2010)
I like https://thebookofshaders.com/ . It’s unfinished and I don’t think it’s been updated in years, but what’s there is pretty good
kaesve | 1 year ago | on: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
I'd use this on linux as soon as it's available
kaesve | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
https://github.com/jonas/tig is one of the first things I install on a new dev machine. It's a really nice UI for staging files or hunks. Since it's just a companion to the git CLI, it feels much more focused than full-blown git GUIs, and doesn't do anything magical.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study
Don't forget Knuth wrote the paper on complexity of song lyrics https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Large Language Models Are Neurosymbolic Reasoners
There's https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00166, which uses an LLM for intrinsic rewards for a RL agent. They use it on nethack. It was discussed on the TalkRL podcast: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/pierluca-doro-and-martin-kli...
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: The classic Minesweeper on an irregular grid
neat! I've wanted to add irregular grids to my infinite minesweeper. Playing your version, it definitely adds something. How do you generate your grid? Is it voronoi cells on top of blue noise?
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2023)
Location: Philadelphia/New York
Remote: Possible
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, JS/TS, NodeJS, Angular/React/Vue
Résumé/CV: https://hireken.at/hacker-news/
Email: [email protected]
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer (by Kathy Kleiman)
I enjoy reading up on computer history, and this is a pretty good retelling of an important story. However, the parts that really struck me are the personal accounts of the author in trying to recover this history. The ENIAC 6 played an important role in the history of the first computer and of programming as a vocation, but their story was almost forgotten. To the point that these women were not even invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC. That's shameful, and I'm happy that they finally have started to get the recognition they deserve.
If you're interested in this history, Jean Jennings Bartik also wrote an autobiography, that tells the story from her perspective.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)
Location: New York/Philadelphia
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Tensorflow/Torch, Javascript/Typescript, Node, Angular/React/Vue, Docker, SQL
Résumé/CV: (working on it)
Email: [email protected]
I'm from the Netherlands, but moving to the US (Princeton) soon, and should have my green card by the end of the year, so I'm looking for something new.
I'd love to find a new challenge in the ML field, but I'm open to other opportunities.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants [pdf]
There is also "The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges and Corals" (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-04339-4), and, my personal favorite in the series, "The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea shells" (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-92142-4).
I really enjoyed reading the latter last year, because it does a great job slowly building up. By the end, I felt like I didn't just understand the models, but also how the author found them. I can recognize these patterns in nature, and figure out how they were generated.
I spent some time last year implementing all the models described in the book in JS: https://kaesve.nl/projects/shells .
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: Workout.lol – a web app to easily create a workout routine
Not the OP, but I still start most of my projects without TypeScript, especially if I'm working on it by myself. I do appreciate TypeScript, and I will happily use it in any bigger project or when I have collaborators. But there's just something that I really enjoy about being able to start a project without any build steps or installing stuff. I love to be able to just jam out some code and open a file in a browser to run it, or rsync it to my server and share it with my friends.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries
There's a ton of value in building stuff without tools. It's somewhat similar to learning two frameworks; seeing React's philosophy makes me a better Vue programmer. In a similar vain, building stuff without tools teaches me a lot about what those tools actually offer me. What stuff is really hard? What stuff is really easy to abstract out? How do Vue/React/Whatever do these things?
It also teaches you more about your platform. In the end, all these web tools and frameworks are running in that same browser. I find especially with newer web developers, it's hard to solve something in React/Vue/.. because they don't know how to break up the problem. If you'd roughly know how to solve the problem without those frameworks, it becomes much easier to figure out how to solve it with them too.
Finally, I also just get toolchain fatigue. If I want to build a simple landing page, I don't want to learn new stuff, I don't want to read what changed in the latest versions, what the correct way of the day is to set up a project. Honestly, I don't even want to have a build pipeline and module swapping dev server, that inevitably needs to be configured. Just some static html/css/js is often good enough. And as I said, you also learn which problems frameworks solve well, so you'll know when some static files isn't the right choice.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
I'm like this. I have started literal hundreds of projects, most of them game ideas. Projects are never _really_ finished, but through the years I have become better at leaving them at a satisfying point, even making some of my projects public. For me, this was a journey. Here's a few lessons I learned for me:
- Figure out why you are doing this in the first place. Usually, my core desire behind a project idea is not at all "to make money" or "help people", but something more simple. It's to figure out how to do something, or to quench my own curiosity. - I realized I have a near-unending pool of ideas, but I can just do one at a time. Which one to pick? For a while, I chose them based on project size; how easily could I gratify that core desire? How quickly could I be happy with this project? Almost any project that I'd think would take more than a weekend would be sent back to the pile. Sometimes it took a while to distill the core desire behind a project idea, to really see why it was interesting to me. - Doing this also taught me a lot about how to make projects smaller. This was extremely freeing. I don't have to worry about losing work -- I'll lose maybe up to a day of typing, and the real value was working on the project anyway, not necessarily the produced artifact. I also realized I can do many projects with nothing but a browser and a text editor, and the more I used this small tool set, the deeper my understanding got and the more I could do in a weekend project.
Over time, I've 'finished' many of these projects, and I've also started to learn that finishing really is a skill in itself -- something that takes practice. More of my projects nowadays are at least somewhat ready for public consumption, and I'm still getting better at this. I still start projects that I don't finish. If an idea is cool enough, I'll still give it a try. Some project ideas were so cool/fun to work on that they would just be able to capture my attention for the weeks or sometimes even months they asked for to get them somewhere (most recently, that's https://kaesve.nl/projects/shells/). Some projects can't capture all that attention at once, but are still fun enough to revisit. They take years, but slowly move forward. And if I abandon a project, that's okay too; it usually means I found a new, shorter-term project, or that I realize that that core desire behind that project idea wasn't so satisfying after all.
kaesve | 2 years ago | on: Unrelated Words Puzzle
How is relatedness measured? Using some embedding space? I often disagree with the measurements, the worst one being "punch" and "bowl" only relating 12%.
The concept is very fun though. I might try to make my own version, as it also seems like a fun side project and a way to explore different word embedding spaces. Could be fun to maybe also have a visualization of the embedding space.
kaesve | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Side projects that generate $0 / month
https://neonarcade.games
Just silly games I make in my free time. Ever wanted to play wordle and snake at the same time? I got you. That connect-the-pipe game, but also tetris? Sure!
They are mostly novelty games, with a focus on fun-to-make instead of fun-to-play.
kaesve | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
I make small web games, usually by twisting up one or two existing games. Like wordle, but also snake? Why not play both at the same time! Remember that pipe game? What if it was also tetris?
A lot of these projects make for terrible games, but really fun side projects. I've been putting up the more playable ones on https://neonarcade.games
kaesve | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are the best programming tricks you know?
A 'trick' that I've grown fond of is for iterating over a circular list where the current and previous items form an edge, with a special case for the first edge, that is composed of the first and last items of the list (making it circular).
The 'normal' way to write a loop over this is something like:
for (let i = 0; i < ls.length; i++) {
const j = i > 0 ? i - 1 : ls.length - 1;
...A trick I got from sean barretts website (https://nothings.org/), is to use the for-loop initialization clause for the special case:
for (let i = 0, j = ls.length - 1; i < ls.length; j = i++) {
...
The work I do usually does not care about the performance improvement if there is any, but it feels good to avoid that per-iteration check.
kaesve | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which book are you reading, since when?
I'm working through "The algorithmic beauty of seashells" by Hans Meinhardt and it's fantastic. It's been on my list for quite a while, but I only got around to it about 2 months ago. I'm through the first 90%, which means I got through the seashell pattern modeling. I'm reading the last part more slowly, both because it's not building up the model and because I'm building an interactive implementation of the models.
I'm also reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Started less than a month ago, am at p256/867. It's not my 'priority book', but I've been enjoying it when my brain needed a break from the seashells.
kaesve | 3 years ago | on: User friendly web games
I recently put up https://neonarcade.games where I put my own hobby project games; an astroid-like game, infinite hexagonal minesweeper, and a game where you have to play two arcade classics at the same time. There are a few more games in the pipeline that should be added soon.
They are not of the highest quality, but I continue to work on them. They are all built from scratch with only a (my own) math library that I reuse. If something's broken and you bug me about it, I should fix it soon. Same story for adding mobile support where it's not there yet.
I decided I am not going to do ads or tracking. I have fun making these, so I just hope someone else can have fun playing. There might still be some google font references, but I'm planning to take those out too. The same should go for https://masterpieces.app, where you can do jigsaws with the Rijksmuseum collection.
page 1
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)