Ask HN: What are you working on? – March 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you working on? – March 2019

It's been a while since someone asked whearabouts of the community and what's new in the space. Jobs/projects/sideprojects/startups/research etc. Anything that occupies your time.

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I've been doing some stuff around Literature Based Discovery[1] lately. See: https://github.com/fogbeam/Valmont-F

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature-based_discovery

This is interesting. Do I have to compile it myself or do you make it available somewhere?

You'd have to run it locally right now. I'll try to get a demo server set up somewhere soon. Also a top TODO is to create a Docker image and push it to Docker Hub so anybody using Docker can spin it up very quickly.

Wow that's interesting.

Thanks for bringing this concept to my attention.

During my master's three years ago I did something similar to literature based discovery, but manually and obviously in a much limited scale.

Glad to know that there are people working to systematize the process and automate it.

During my master's three years ago I did something similar to literature based discovery, but manually and obviously in a much limited scale.

Hmmm... well, this is all open source, and I'd be glad to collaborate if you would like to get involved at all. :-)

Glad to know that there are people working to systematize the process and automate it.

Glad to know there are other people who are interested in this kind of thing at all!

Update for anybody who's interested in this... I just pushed a Docker image to Docker Hub that you can use to run an instance of the application, without needing to fiddle with installing Java/Grails and compiling yourself, etc.

See: https://hub.docker.com/r/fogbeam/valmont-f

I'm polishing up a (mostly) headless API-first user management system to release into the wild as a paid product.

Over the years I've written 5 different user management systems for various companies I've worked for, using 5 different languages. "We've got this terrific online product we need you to work on. By the way, we'll need a user management system. Can you throw one together quickly then get back to working on the core product?" That kind of thing. Each was used to manage hundreds of thousands of user accounts in production.

Finally I wrote one for my own projects and have been using it for a couple of years. Designed from the ground up for modern Kubernetes/Docker deploys, handles all your CRUD and random user data storage needs, scales to infinity (and beyond!), and requires minimal admin/maintenance (because I'm lazy - I like services you can launch and forget about). Scratching my own itch so I don't ever need to write another one ever again - and neither should you.

I'm working on productizing it, writing more docs, adding licensing, distribution, payment infrastructure, that kind of thing. I'll announce it on HN when I'm ready to sell.

If anybody's interested shoot me an email (in my profile).

After some months of research and some trial and error I finally managed to create videos programatically using libav.

Nothing innovative, and I don't know how to write about it to make it feel exciting. Although I feel excited for working on this.

It was an important step towards some more noble goals, like creating animated content for visualization of time series and "procedural videos" -- I'm not a native english speaker and I don't know if this is the correct translation. I mean "procedural" in the same sense of "procedural games", but with videos instead of games. Googling for "procedural videos" returns a lot of medical-related stuff, this is not what I have in mind.

I'm pretty sure there are many companies doing this already and there is probably a common name for this, which I'm not aware of. But I want to have such capability in my company.

I never actually tried to implement anything like that, but the idea has occurred to me before, and I - for one - find this wildly fascinating. If you make anything open source or anything, or have any write-ups on your work, I'd love to see it.

Right now I divide my time into the following areas:

1. Robotics consulting, mainly working on mobile industrial and agricultural wheeled robots

2. Weekly Robotics - my side project that brings me up to speed on current state of robotics and hopefully is also useful for the community (https://weeklyrobotics.com/)

3. I'm currently eyeing making my own mobile robot and open sourcing it. It sounds like a win-win-win - I'm having fun, others can learn something from it and I would imagine it could lead to some projects for 1.

Building a better interface for using Wikipedia & Youtube:

https://wikischool.org/explore

The larger goal is to make self-study more effective and enjoyable. Mobile needs some more improvements.

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