Looking for a Drupal Developer to help on a number of university web projects. Includes custom builds and maintenance. Must know and be comfortable with Drupal internals – i.e. not afraid to write your own hook, preprocessor, or inspect config yamls when needed.
We're a small team with 15+ years of university site builds and overloaded for the next 3 to 4 months. Our team is in multiple timezones (including EU) but can only support US contractors. If interested, please send us an email with a subject of "HN Drupal Contractor" to hello+hn@shadyhillstudios.com
I was hoping the article was going to be about a physical device as well as the software to manage and play songs. A few years ago I wanted to get my 10 year old son an mp3 player – he's really into listening to music but wasn't ready (still isn't) for a phone. I was shocked by the state of the mp3 player options. When Apple discontinued the iPod they created a huge vacuum that no one seems to have filled.
I think the iPos shuffle (usb stick form) is still the best mp3 player I ever had – it was small, pluggable without extra cords, and battery lasted a really long time. It didn't have a screen to browse music but that was part of the idea – just let the shuffle do its thing. Even this relatively simple concept has not been replicated in the hardware market.
People will say it's not a hardware problem but a software/drm issue. I think that's a real shame. I wish there were a good, inexpensive, portable device that would just play my music.
> When Apple discontinued the iPod they created a huge vacuum that no one seems to have filled.
I think the real shift here isn't the iPod vanishing.
I think the existence of Spotify and smartphones is what killed mp3 players. Both of those just filled so much of the air in the room that it smothered everything else out.
Vouching for Fiio. They make really nice stuff! Never tried their audio players but the few Fiio DAC's I have used all felt really premium, especially for the price.
Maybe also an option and an educational little project about electronics and (re-)using "old" devices: There are lots of used iPods around and many of the old hard drive models are pretty easy to retrofit with flash-based storage (there are also lots of options for aesthetic customization as well as more involved modifications such as adding Bluetooth, USB-C and whatnot).
As others have mentioned, the software side also still works well with iTunes on Windows and Finder/Music integration on MacOS.
I think its a demand issue, not a hardware/software one. Chinese manufactures are creating Mini IPhone 16 and Mini S24, devices that look good, can play music, have the functionalities of a smart phone, and sell for $50-$100.
Parents will probably buy similar devices to their children instead of an MP3 Player. You have an unconventional parenting style not to get your son a phone at 14. Don't get me wrong, I respect that, but there isn't a lot like you to warrant a demand beyond what's currently available.
This are just dumbed down phones in a sense: I don't want my mp3 player to be running android. I want a minimal piece of software that lets me quickly navigate to the songs that I want, and physical buttons to do it. I've look long and hard for something like this and cannot for the life of me find it. I'm really sad that I lost my Ipod classic 10 years ago.
The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp) website, in addition to being extremely dated in its design, keeps business hours for accessing things like ID registration or travel agency certificate renewals. At first I thought it was a joke as the message displays something like, "we want to respect a work life balance and therefore only offer online services from X to Y." But for real, you can't access the online services during US based business hours.
It is wrong in so many ways. First of all the site is determining when the appropriate business hours are for its users, not taking into consideration moonlighters or other night owls. And second, it's a service for travel agents!! who are supposedly traveling to other time zones.
I get it if the people behind a service need to set limits on when they are expected to handle requests, but that doesn't mean the service shouldn't be available all the time. Good messaging and setting expectations for when requests will be handled are a much better solution in my opinion.
There was a time when I had to goto the bank in person during business hours and interact with a teller. There was zero chance of getting hacked, the tellers knew me, and I had to live a more intentional life. Perhaps business hours for a website means real people are there actively monitoring its security and activity.
Since that is a airline-related website, and you wouldn't probably believe me, but is this a possible case of very old backend systems running in batch outside of office hours? This is such a serious issue that some legacy government websites, like UK's DVLA, to this day still has an operating hours (https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...)
So glad I'm not the only one. My house has four different two button toilets and I can't for the life of me figure out which does what. My wife says smaller button is for less water, but on one toilet the small button is tiny and integrated into the bigger button which makes me think it can only be there for when you need a power flush and you press the whole thing. I have no idea.
That takes the fun out of it! No in reality there doesn’t even seem to be a material difference in the amount of water used by each button. But I think in the spirit of this thread, why isn’t the interface obvious. At my last house it was a two lever flush where the “eco” flush was a green tab. Much more obvious.
Not OP but working on a project in similar domain (ndaok.com). The technology is definitely making it easier to replace lawyers. The biggest barrier right now is lawyers themselves. In fact our project stopped trying to sell to lawyers because it's almost like they purposefully refuse to adapt new technology. Instead we've had success with customers trying to find a way not to use lawyers when they are not needed.
> trying to find a way not to use lawyers when they are not needed.
Kudos to you guys, the elimination of the need for lawyers is up there with any societal issue you care to name. It may do more for social justice than funding anything else
The last time wikihouse showed up on HN (September '23) I did a deep dive on the process I still haven't come out of. 20 years ago as a grad student getting my masters in architecture, I definitely would have had similar comments to most of what's on this page. But I don't feel that way any more and I'm actually disappointed by the negativity toward this project – not because it's not warranted, but if this were a software project I feel like the criticism would be more constructive rather than so dismissive.
WH is not a perfect system, but the approach is commendable for its comprehensive take on building systems. And building systems are broken. For the past two years I've been trying to build my own house (using a contractor), and even as a trained architect the process is ridiculously opaque, costs are exorbitant, and quality control is difficult to manage.
I applaud the fact that WH has tried to tackle the entire structure (and for that matter the entire building process – their parent organization has additional projects [0] for design, local building codes, and innovative financing structures). Yes, in the US 2x framing is cheap and relatively inexpensive, but is still complex in its own ways. Floor systems are different from wall systems are different from roof systems. I like that WH has tried to make one unit type (plywood boxes) work for the different systems. Is it the most efficient way? Probably not, but it affords other opportunities.
From an ideological perspective I also like that they prioritize sustainability, low energy use, and accessibility of design information to laypeople. On top of that, they've organized their building information like a programmer – they use GitHub to track versions and even have the start of a components database. They are an API short of making this really something the HN community could easily play with.
That said they have a long way to go. Framing a house is the easy part. I think if they could standardize the interface for cladding and interior finishes they would be in a better position to disrupt the building industry, but for now contractors will still be a requirement – so there goes your budget and quality.
I'm dismissive because I get tired of seeing shiny new projects that claim to solve issues when they don't seem to actually see what the problems are.
If the goal is to create opensource plans / design framework then doing that where the industry is (framing in the USA, maybe brick in the UK from other comments, etc.) is the way to benefit people, not trying to push them towards a unique "block" system that no builder has ever used.
If the goal is sustainability then a focus on locally sourced materials, energy efficiency, building longevity, or numerous other parameters would make sense. If I have a main criticism it's that their system seems to be based on the idea that using a block based design is a good starting point and not as a consequence of aiming to find a system that maximizes the aforementioned parameters.
Having worked in the industry I feel your pain and would agree that so much is broken. Here in the USA it is hard to find good contractors and harder to find ones familiar with building highly energy efficient buildings that normally require a very high level of attention to detail. Often the only projects I see that are highly energy efficient and/or green/sustainable are for very high end clients that are paying far more than a normal person could afford.
To offset that wall of negativity, if anyone wants to read about some (imo) good stuff check out the Pretty Good House (PGH) standard and Building Science Corporation (BSC).
That's really interesting about Github-based versioning. My company (bldrs.ai) makes a webapp that views IFC (soon STEP) and has github integration, so any *.ifc path on GH can be pasted into our search for viz.
I'm not seeing any IFC files on Wikihouse repos, but they look old (https://github.com/wikihouse). Do you know where they're hosting?
Oh wow, you just sent me down a really intriguing path. I was not familiar with IFC, but looking more into that now. No, it does not look like their repo [0] has IFC files, but I don't imagine it would be that difficult to export the additional needed file information.
Their site does have IFC for that project tho and I've loaded it in Bldrs, so seems fine there.
Yeah, IFC is neat. It's actually a dialect of STEP, so able to carry the geometry and tons of BIM metadata. We've estimated the spec is ~7k pages printed. It's like an abstract toolkit for working with building codes
Happy to chat more too. We have our project Discord and DMs on Twitter
Agreed. Ben, although he doesn't know it, is one of my biggest inspirations for what I do. Back in 2005 or so he did a presentation to my class at the GSD on his genome visualizations. I was blown away, but even more so when I asked him what language he works in and he said Processing. I said I was unfamiliar with Processing and he said, "Oh, I wrote it." Mind. Blown.
On days I'm looking for inspiration I revisit that day in mind or visit benfry.com to see what other cool projects he's been working on. Thank you Ben for your amazing contributions to data visualization programming and for being an inspiration to an aspirational hacker.
One common query on HN is "what's the equivalent of the Conmodore 64 in this day and age? how will the next generation of hackers learn?" For me, it was largely Processing and Arduino.
I learned to program in Python but at the time (around 2005 say) it wasn't easy to create python gui apps that didn't involve a fair bit of boilerplate. When I first downloaded Processing I was immediately hooked. It was amazingly interactive, with top notch documentation and examples. It contributed a lot to me becoming a programmer.
Also shout outs to Fluxus which is pretty sweet too,
Same here. One of the things that made me a loyal Linode customer was that often they would have a resource upgrade (i.e. "we've doubled your RAM!") without a price increase. Not pairing this with some kind of resource upgrade feel anti-Linode. Thanks Akamai...
Interesting, I have a similar goal but in the Drupal space. My partner and I have been building Drupal sites for clients for almost 15 years and we keep running into hosting issues for our clients at scale. Most of the "managed" options get extremely expensive very quickly, but they're also not managed from a content/modules perspective.
We're trying to do the best of both worlds and provide a managed (albeit opinionated) install that leverages our experience on the development side with performance and ease of use on the hosting side. Would be happy to compare notes as it comes together. Our website is in my profile and our email is hello@ the domain listed there.
Interesting. I have zero experience with Drupal, but I assume its similar to WP in its architecture since you bring it up :)
I think any good solution to working with these 50/50 code and configuration mgmt technologies have to start with a solid analysis and understanding of what the actual business needs are(?). And then (re)evaluate how things are done.
And then perhaps also pricing models when it comes to the ‘“managed”’ part you mention. I think, for what Im building, there will end up needing to be a “managed hosting” offering which is more restricted and a custom development/T&M work which will be hourly.
Could be interesting to compare notes when get more of the setup up and running
Intermediate Drupal PHP Developer
Looking for a Drupal Developer to help on a number of university web projects. Includes custom builds and maintenance. Must know and be comfortable with Drupal internals – i.e. not afraid to write your own hook, preprocessor, or inspect config yamls when needed.
We're a small team with 15+ years of university site builds and overloaded for the next 3 to 4 months. Our team is in multiple timezones (including EU) but can only support US contractors. If interested, please send us an email with a subject of "HN Drupal Contractor" to hello+hn@shadyhillstudios.com