A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.
The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
Here's what I'm planning next:
- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.
- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.
> A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.
> The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
I like the idea, but this could backfire on me =/
app: "it will take you 10 minutes to afford this"
me: "but it took 30 minutes to decide which one! now i need to buy three!"
As someone who has worked from home my whole career - not really. You still have to get your work done because there is no butts in chairs measure of productivity in wfh. You will be judged on your output. In fact you often have to work harder than the people in the office because of this.
Taking time off during work hours usually means making it up in the evening or on the weekend.
As someone who has just started working at home, not really. Instead of sitting at my desk at work browsing the internet while I keep some terminals open to make it look like I’m doing stuff, now I can just explicitly do whatever I want at home.
Small purchases easily eat up way more budget than most people realize. I bet a “you’ve $$$ in the last $TIME” feature would really help with that use case.
Oh I got you, I was just piggybacking for the OP’s eyes if they see it. Because lots of people do end up having budgeting difficulties due to a large number of small, seemingly inconsequential purchases.
It also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe they'll decide to not buy all 3. Not guaranteed to save everyone or anyone.
That's a really nice idea! I like that. What helped me from impulse buying is a simple thing; I always when I encounter something I want to buy I store it in the bookmarks (I have a folder in bookmarks called "To buy"). I only buy after a couple of weeks have passed and I decided I really need that thing. When I have a free time I go through my list and delete things that are obsolete. The second thing is, I have a limit of buying 1 thing per week (this includes also things like basic necessities, for example deodorant, that I need for myself). Needless to say I got the inspiration from my wife, she practices this for a few years already. The best thing about this is that it actually makes me feel good.
I'm not sure how one would word this exactly, but there are many additional costs to each product that we buy.
Plant space, animal lives, tainted ecosystems, busted up terrain, displaced humans are all contained in most of the products we buy, and especially online.
It's one thing when it's a bare necessity, but I shudder when I think about how many animal lives were lost in order to produce just one faux-animal beanie baby with cute oversized eyeballs.
A local group is building FairSharesApp, which is an app that tries to make you aware of the additional costs to a product. And allow you to buy that off.
AFAIK they only do CO2 emissions, yet. But when I spoke to them, they had more planned.
My problem with such products, is that they will reach the people who need it less: people who already care and try their best, will be able to do a little better; but people who don't care, won't install and use it, yet their impact is probably relatively much larger.
If you fly from Rome to Barcelona, you could "offset" the CO2; often directly when buying that ticket.
This works in two ways: 1. they "plant trees" and/or 2. they buy && hold or destroy certificates.
Certificates are limited regulated and deflationary. E.g. the EU buys X certificates from the market every year and destroys them and grants less certs each year.
Every company that emits "significant" CO2 needs to have, buy or be granted certs to do so. The setup makes those certs more expensive, so every year, there's a tradeoff: do I buy certs, or do I invest in lowering my emission.
Apps such as Fairshares allow public to buy (pieces of) such certs.
When agricultural (or similar) lands are transformed back to forests, that has a real and direct effect on the ability of the environment to absorb CO2 emission.
Obviously it needs to be done well, which often is not the case. Quite often there's no tree planted IRL, just some "promise to probably do so in some future" sold instead. And quite often the tree is planted but then abandoned (so that each 2 years everything dies off and the same plot can be re-used to "plant more trees"). But that is not the only modus operandi.
CO2 compensation cannot just be done by planting trees, either. I'm sending a monthly donation to a project that goes into remote villages in Africa where people still cook on open fires and provides portable stoves to them. Since a stove loses much less heat than an open fire, the villagers can cook the same amount of food with only a tenth of the original amount of wood, thereby reducing CO2 emissions.
Curious how much CO2 is emitted by fires in remote African villages compared to, say, power plants in industrialized countries, particularly since all the literature I've seen pins the CO2 issue of late on the industrial revolution.
Still, does sound like a good efficiency gain for those villages.
How much CO2 is emitted in the travel, all the supplies that the travelers have to bring, and the production of the stoves and presumably the refillable fuel containers for them? Meanwhile, the wood has already absorbed CO2 in the process of growing from the air...
My (highly imperfect) solution to that problem is usually to go find the niche internet forum/subreddit for whatever thing I'm looking to buy and try to see what people there are interested in in my price range.
I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs.
Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.
> Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.
Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.
It says a lot that so much of the "genuine" opinions on products are all siloed in Reddit. They call themselves "the front page of the Internet", which speaks of arrogance to me, but it might slowly be starting to come true. But if it works, I don't see it as a completely bad thing, I guess.
Same here. Seems like there's a subreddit for just about everything (for instance, I consulted r/backpacks recently). Good advice, but unreliable in terms of finding an active community.
I subscribe to Consumer Reports and always check there first to see if they have rated items in the category I’m shopping.
In the last year I’ve bought a great garbage disposal, some all weather tires, a pellet grill, and a dishwasher based off their recommendations. Often times instead of getting the very best rates of something I’ll buy the second best which is often 1/2 the price. Sometimes the best of an item is really cheap compared to other brands that are shinier but objectively worse at the core function of the product.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ is an interesting stop for that kind of thing. I'm cheap and usually inclined to pick the cheapest 4-star option on Amazon (with the trick of &sort=review-count-rank). Browsing /r/BuyItForLife usually helps provide some pre-emptive buyer's remorse.
One thing I'll tack onto this in case someone with the right knowledge comes by: anyone know a site for good reviews of charging accessories?
We ask a lot of our chargers these days (e.g. 100w USB-C PD), and the price-quality curve seems to be very jumpy. Have had good experiences with companies like Anker or Aukey, but also seen tear-downs of failed units one price tier down that had zero isolation between mains voltage and what's going to the device. Would love to find some better guidance on buying such things.
I generally agree, but with charging especially it seems to be hard to figure out what exactly "name brand" means. Obviously you've got companies like Anker that've been around for a good while, but, in my opinion at least, it can be tough to distinguish up-and-coming brands pumping out great products from not-so-great brands producing junk.
For instance, I've bought stuff from Aukey and Ravpower that's worked well so far, but I wouldn't necessarily call those name brands yet in the US, unlike Anker.
Wish someone would do teardowns/testing of these cables/chargers on a wide basis (or that I had the skills to do it myself). I've seen a few people doing such things for computer PSUs, multimeters, and the like, but not for charging devices. Too bad.
I mean, at least in the US, you can buy utter crap in the store at crazy prices. Plenty of stuff that just barely hits the regulatory requirements but doesn't do any good engineering work beyond that.
This is an interesting idea. If people know they should not buy a trashy set of knives that they'll throw away in a year that would indeed reduce consumption. I'll think more on this. Thanks for the idea!
They shouldn't buy it, yes, but this is fundamentally a privilege to even consider. That's what I struggle with, that I'm in this privileged position to discern to what degree do I want to be complicit in my presumably negative impact on the sustainability of Earth and Life.
Manufacturing ridiculously cheap shit at scale to where more and more people click a button and have anything they want delivered to their door in a fucking day... is absolutely disgusting to me. But that's me, in my privilege. This machine adds ever more people up to the "consumer" class from out of abject poverty and welp that is a good thing.
I'm just conflicted because I feel like that has to be so doesn't it? We get to pontificate about "post consumerism" and derive meaning and such and such and such. Meanwhile that literally-worth-2-cents-t-shirt actually happens to be a good thing, at history scale, to all the people that have not being able to clothe themselves =/
sigh, I don't know what my point is, your comment just compelled me to share.
Thanks for your response. The extension itself won't solve global overconsumption, poverty or climate change in the same way that any one individual won't. I do believe that by being more mindful of our purchases it can influence other parts of our lives though - we start to consider "the machine", consider more closely our impulses against the negative impacts our choices have and perhaps then we begin to demand something more from "the machine". Maybe if enough people become mindful they will vote for politicians that represent an interest in saving the environment, drastically increase environmental protections and incentivize sustainable manufacturing which I hope in the long run benefits all.
Like some others hear I'm more interested in the carbon cost of purchases. How long it takes to earn the cost is something my brain automatically calculates! (maybe younger folks don't do that).
I recently worked on an idea to try and build a movement to rally people around taking action to benefit the CO2 problem during a specific month of the year: https://march2zero.com
Could it also estimate CO2 output from delivery? I always try to buy local even if it's online when possible. Luckily this is usually possible in the bay area/California :)
That is actually where I was going to start. Tracking the CO2 output for the production of millions of individual items across the internet is hard but I believe there are some services that can estimate CO2 for deliveries based on country + zip.
Haha, I love this - yeah there's lots of incentives available so maybe I allow the user to select which types of metrics are most meaningful to them. This is going on the list for sure!
For a number of bay area devs I suspect this might have the opposite psychological effect. A $50 price tag might put some people off until they realize it's only 15-20 minutes of work.
Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking. I am certainly more put off by $50 than N minutes.
On the other hand I often base my purchases based on "Will this $50 spend save more than N minutes of my time"
For example a top-filling humidifer may cost $50 more than a bottom-filling one but I spend an extra 1 minute fighting with the bottom-filling one and cleaning up water spills so after 15 uses it makes up its price difference.
The extension also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe it won't help everyone, but I hope that it reaches some.
I think a great opportunity could be the FIRE community. I think a lot of them think in terms of "if spend X amount I have to work Y more days before retirement". At least I try to do that. The problem is I don't really know how to calculate Y, if your plugin could translate the dollar amount on the checkout page to the number of days I have to work extra that would be really cool.
This of course depends on my savings rate, current assets and expected return on investments.
It does not except in a single case. All the data is stored locally in the browser extension storage otherwise. As part of the onboarding flow you can choose to anonymously submit your money saved to the online tally at https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/
I realize there have been browser extension authenticity issues recently with some sketchy things being published like The Great Suspender https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1.... I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users, but my intent is to never collect any data beyond the anonymous online tally of the homepage which is opt-in only.
Sorry, I need to replace that email address it is unfortunately a placeholder. Side project has some loose threads. I'll do that tonight.
I think it’d also be useful if there’s a way to render stacks of cash (paper money and possibly coins) to show how much money you’re spending represented visually.
I want this but with a squeeze grip that shocks you for N ms for each dollar that you are about to spend. If you can’t hold down the grip and bear the shock, then you’re not allowed to run the charge.
Super into the CO2 estimate part. I think incorporating shipping is a easy first place. While much harder, future iterations could consider the composition of the product. Is it plastics? Etc
Wow, this is exactly what I need. I've recently been thinking a lot about how much less likely I am to purchase a product if I map its cost back to my hours worked. Thanks for this!
Thanks for trying it! So unfortunately I can't launch an extension popup over top of the checkout, it's just not in the browser extension APIs AFAIK. One alternative was to inject the popup in to the checkout page but I figured if this got any traction it's possible then a checkout page host could read the data (ie, your salary) from that. Thus, I landed on the intrusive redirect. Open to other ideas though!
An aggregator ala reddit/hackernews/twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.
One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:
- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.
- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than "frontpage" content
- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance
- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.
I'm working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction/stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy "downvote shares", which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.
It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.
On reddit, we created a bellwether award. It was basically for the person who was most accurate at upvoting things that got popular and downvoting the things that did not.
The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.
My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you've described your platform, the most "profitable" thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you'll think the most people will upvote. So you'll need to adjust for that.
Exactly. This in turn devolves into a race to the bottom where you are basically speculating on the speculations of others. Content then becomes popular for no other reason than people thought that other people would find it popular. So basically like the real stockmarket. We don't need more things to be like the stockmarket.
One aspect that is often forgotten is that the quality of a social platform is a product of the quality of its constituents.
If you make a platform 100% free and open, it will encourage low quality participants. The network effect often stops paid sites from starting, but the rewards are there if you can somehow otherwise select only for a mature audience.
this isn't how the stock market functions at all however. you described how a nonpro/retail participant on /r/stocks or wsb believes the stock market works.
This is actually a very plausible explanation for the valuations of Bitcoin and Tesla and, to a certain extend, this is exactly how the stock market operates right now.
Maybe it didn't work that way in the past, maybe it won't in the future, but the current environment seems to be very much like how the parent poster described it.
Representative democracies were invented to solve the "junk food policy" (i.e., passing out all of the money in the treasury) problem of direct democracy. Maybe there could be a representative link aggregator where annual elections determined who was allowed to vote on links.
A variation on representative democracy would be to have a recommender system identify demographics, and then to weight each demographic equally. So, for example, the votes from the "blogspam fan" demographic would be normalized to one, to fairly compete for representation with the much smaller "long thinkpiece fan" demographic.
Another solution would be quadratic voting, where you can vote once for free, but the nth vote would cost (n-1)^2 reputation points. That would allow established community members to express their intense dislike of certain content, to balance out the larger population's mild preferences.
It would be pretty cool if there was Reddit, but each subreddit could implement a different voting system. We might see a lot of progress and experimentation.
One of my instructors way back at Cornell was a grad student named Kevin Walsh, now an associate professor at Holy Cross, who had solved this problem in a bit of a radical way. Context was that back then you had Gnutella, LimeWire etc.—peer-to-peer types of networks—and you wanted to be able to enable people to rank media a certain number of "stars" for its quality because otherwise people post not-safe-for-life content with nice endearing names and others mass-download that content and then get grossed out. But you publish this and then people immediately use the anonymity afforded by the Internet to spam the upvote button as they distribute their garbage.
My understanding from Walsh was that the problem was essentially an economics problem—you want to incentivize good behavior and deincentivize bad behavior—and once you understood this you could use the network to correct itself, essentially saying “if you use your upvotes like the typical user does then the typical user will trust you, if you use your upvotes like the typical spammer does then you’ll instead end up in a clique with typical spammers.”
Some googling reveals that the page is still alive on cornell.edu [1].
It seems like they distinguish between "recommendation making" vs "verifying correctness of content" and Credence is meant to solve the latter:
"Since Credence is not a recommendation system, your thumbs-up and thumbs-down decisions should be based on an objective evaluation of whether a file's description matches its contents, not on matters of taste." https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/faq.html
Oh geez, this metaphor between representative democracies and social media sites clicked for me really well, and I very much don't like that because I'm interpreting this as a strong argument in favor of user-sourced moderators (who I think cause more problems than they solve).
You've made me uncomfortable, so... thanks, I guess?
Yeah it's definitely a huge risk. It's really a question of whether the expectation of the Schelling point is around quality of meme-worthiness.
I think the shorting will help with this, but I think the more critical thing is getting the initial community right to set expectations of what's upvoteworthy. Kind of how y'all started reddit around a programming community.
Interesting concept and I think it’s definitely worth the experiment!
If I understand the premise, what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer) becuase traditionally users see messages already curated (e.g. with highest upvotes) and the idea is to replace that with an incentive for discovering new content.
Unless you have a way to define new content, wont you run into the same problem but now with $ tokens? E.g. one of the most upvoted news from HN is “Steve Jobs has died”. I imagine even on your system users would assume this would raise to the top and would buy a lot of “shares”, so it becomes more of a game of “predicting what will be further upvoted / echo chambered”. Am I missing something?
> what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer)
Coincidentally, this is a problem in real markets that the invisible hand does not solve, either. Economic success is to large degree predicated on being fastest to market, as well.
Online, the outcome is attention inequality instead of revenue or wealth inequality. In real markets, that's when government has to step in and regulate. What equivalent is there for a content aggregator? Moderators? Curators?
I would say this is likely a sign that content aggregation sites have - in democratising content curation - finally come full circle with the curated content of old in the form of magazines and the like. Maybe there is something to be said for leaving the curation to the pros after all, or considering the limitations to the wisdom of crowds.
It's definitely a risk. That said, I'd argue that a post announcing "Steve Jobs has died" genuinely should rise to the top - it's a huge piece of news after all.
This model isn't so much about suppressing existing highly upvoted content, but rather finding content that should have been upvoted but was missed.
There's still a threat from meme-worthy content though. Honestly, I think this comes down to the initial community setting expectations that meme-worthy content will be shorted into oblivion, and reinforcing that culture.
I've had a recurring thought where you supplant upvotes with something like an ELO system.
Basically, my thought is that I know I can follow something like the reddiquette, or the HN rules. I'm certainly not perfect, but I don't downvote when I disagree, and I don't upvote when I agree, and I try to not make unsubstantive comments. Reddit and HN maybe used to follow this when they were very small, but as sites grow the rules always fall to the wayside.
The fix would be that you as the founder, and the X amount of friends that you know and trust, serve as a baseline for the ranking system. If someone downvotes a post that the trusted group upvotes, their influence on the site goes down as a result. Likewise, if someone upvotes the posts that you vote, their influence goes up.
You can't actually use the E-L-O system for this, as far as I'm aware, because it's not a zero-sum game. But the basic idea is that you take a known group of good actors and give users voting influence based on how similar they are to the good actors, and if you can't follow the rules (by acting similarly), you basically lose all influence on the site.
- when you upvote an item, everyone else who upvoted the item before you earns some amount of your trust
- the more of your trust someone has earned - the more weight their other upvoted items get for you
- each time they upvote, they put some amount of your trust on that item; so if you stop liking their recommendations the amount of your trust they have will go down over time
- when you downvote an item, you take away your trust from people who upvoted it; they've shown that they are not good curators of content for you, so their upvotes will have less weight for you
In this system you end up paying attention to people who have proven to you to be good curators of content. It optimizes for high signal to noise ratio, where what is signal and what is noise if up to you to decide with your upvotes. We don't have to all agree on what is globally "upvoteworthy".
There is no global reputation system (which can be gamed). Instead, there is a peer-to-peer trust system.
If you are interested in a system like that, then I would like to invite you to my hobby project that works exactly this way. Register with a temporary account (no email required) at https://linklonk.com/register and use code 'hn'.
It is early days and we don't have many users yet. To supplement real users LinkLonk supports RSS feeds as sources of information. Each feed behaves much like a user - the more you upvote content from it, the higher ranked its other entries will be for you. I hope you will find it useful and I'm looking to hear your feedback.
I imagine that this is how social media platforms create "information bubbles". In terms of politics it won't work: people that agree with your political views would get more "trust". Is agreeing with your views an indication of good content? I'm not sure.
I feel like this would have the result of Gell-Mann Amnesia, which is essentially what "influencers" rely on prior to sponsorship. Thing 1 was recommended, and others found the same benefits to Thing 1, so when Thing 2 is recommended it is assumed that the influencer's opinion is valid. Breaks down as soon as there is a disconnect, if people are willing to accept that their chosen influencer can be wrong, but in practice most people just go along with it.
Different people have different interests, so using just one group as etalon, would leave most people unsatisfied. It would be better to let users choose their own groups of "good" actors, either explicitly or based on upvote similarity.
I don’t think this is the same. We’re not increasing influence based on the reputation/amount of upvotes of the user, but rather based on the similarity with known-good actors. The user might never post themselves, and therefore have no karma of their own.
Perhaps I didn't describe it well enough, but I believe you're misunderstanding my intent. The user's "PageRank" is based on how they vote in relation to other users.
You seed the influence system with known good actors. Users who vote similarly to these good actors get an increased influence weight and so on. You can apply the PageRank algorithm to any graph, and this case the graph is the relation between up votes of other users.
This can work better than Elo rating because you can have disjoint seed actors serving sparsely connected (or completely disjoint) regions of your influence graph.
Newsconomy [1] was a website with a pretty similar idea. It never gained much traction afaik, but the developer seemed pretty passionate about it [2]. I believe this [3] is the developer's current page, in case you wish to get in contact with him for this project.
I think gamifying it is the right way to go- I've thought of this idea, but in another context. I don't understand how the "selling shares" would work though.
I could imagine one mechanism is that you make bets on how popular content will be, and get rewarded if it is popular (number of clicks, comments, etc.) ie popularity handicapping.
What do you do with the rewards of your bets? Maybe allow you to bump stuff to the main page? Promote content? I couldn't imagine paying for this, however.
Alternatively, you could use the mechanism to identify people who are good at identifying interesting content, and having a leaderboard of people who find cool shit. That might be monetizeable.
> I don't understand how the "selling shares" would work though
Basically at any point the cost in USD/other of creating an upvote is a function of the existing number of upvotes and downvotes. Eg if a piece of content has 3 upvotes, the cost to create another new upvote might be $0.07, but if the content as 100 upvotes, that cost might be $1.40.
Equally at any point, you can "sell" your upvote at that same cost ($0.07 @ 3, $1.40 @ 100). The way the maths works out means that finances are conserved, so the investment return for selling comes from the market itselm.
In terms of rewards, I was thinking actual money, just in very small amounts. People love speculating on markets so i think it's feasible.
> the investment return for selling comes from the market itselm
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding this, but am I'm selling my shares to other users to recoup my investment? Why would other users be interesting in buying my shares of an article that was on the "front page" 3 days ago?
This is brilliant! I love the idea and would be willing to contribute if possible. I agree we don't need another social network where new content is posted. We need a way to sift through the large amount of existing content out there.
My questions:
1) How do you plan on getting content from reddit/twitter/hackernews? Are there api's for this or do you plan to scrape?
2) Would other social sites have issues with you using their content in your social stock market, and possibly profiting from it?
3) Would it be possible for a social network to cut you off and kill your business? For Example: Reddit realized that they are losing traffic because more people are going to [yourSite].com to view Reddit content so they sue you.
1) most have RSS (the three you mention all do or it's one jump to a site that enables)
2) most other social sites are themselves collections. If you got big enough, yes they'd mind, but not to start. Hopefully by the time they mind people are submitting to you anyway.
3) seems like a stretch, but ianal, given they expose RSS or APIs currently
I agree with the other comment about how this incentivizes just being a good content picker. To simulate and get the efficiencies of the stock market, I think you need a mechanism that is analogous to how a profitable company pays out dividends. Sure the speculation can drive prices but fundamentally there needs to be some intrinsic value to an investment that is actually derived from how useful the content is... how profitable the content is
Just make sure "selling" of shares can be automatic, because nobody wants to go back to a post they already read just to sell their shares or whatever.
This sounds a bit complicated, and I would naively assume that some people would upvote low-quality content that is likely to reach the frontpage (which reinforce the cycle).
How about checking algorithmically how reliable users are, and weighting their votes that way? The manual redemption of correct-upvotes and acquisition of downvote-shares seems a bit much in my view.
I think this is interesting, at least in terms of judging quality of individual posts.
I remember back in the days of kuro5hin there was reputation, you could earn reputation with thoughtful comments and then good reputation would mean more visibility for your posts. Has that proven to be a horrible approach? Are there communities that work this way now?
I think it's a good approach, but it's fundamentally not that different from existing models in that the people who judge a post as "thoughtful" or otherwise have no incentive to think carefully about their judgement.
There's some cryptocurrency communities that use some interesting incentive mechanism in that upvotes have real-world value[0], but the problem is that the content is incredibly cryptocurrency biased rather than anything of general interest
Well the point is that the reputation accrues to the author, not the post. So that a post will get a boost if the author has been rewarded in the past.
I was thinking about this very similar concept few years back. The idea was to prevent only the top 1% content surfacing all the time. My solution was to cap the number of likes/upvotes to some value like 10k.
I build agregators for my personal use. Try this: gather references cited and look for key keywords in those references like those in the citing articles title.
This is the most interesting take on realigning (micro?)blogging incentives I've ever seen. I hope it gets its chance with millions of users, even if it has incorrigible issues like our current standard.
Thanks! I think online content is the obvious place to start for this, but in the long run I think the concept could be applicable to identifying all kinds of things where quality can be hidden by the deluge of information:
- high quality scientific papers, instead of relying on the existing journal gatekeepers. Once again hopefully moving the incentive needle towards quality over volume
- emerging threats or risks that may not be obvious until it’s too late. Eg asbestos, the effect of social media on adolescent development, leaded petrol
- promising pre-investment startups
- Frankly, anything that currently uses crowdsourced rating - restaurants, accomodation, bands, services businesses etc etc
Me and a friend have been working on a game that I describe as "Factorio but for programming". Essentially you're an AI who's mission is to mine every resource from a planet. To keep things efficient you start out small and have limited processing power. You're only able to run an assembly like language that we've developed. As you get more resources you can research new things like functions, variables, type arguments, whatever. We plan for there to be a tech tree so you can choose to build out a language that's not strict similar to JS or you can go the try hard route and build something like Haskell. You build bots that mine, explore, hunt, etc and each bot is a computer running their own script. We plan on there being battles you have to script around and even things like setting up your own network so you can have robots call home when they're out in the field.
I still need to think of a good name for it though.
After playing a bit of Factorio I realised I had messed up the layout a little bit and that it would be good to "refactor" it, but that it would require some planning
Yeah. Factorio is exactly as addicting for our [0] kind of brain as it is claimed to be, and for some reason a lot of Factorio enthusiasts seem to think that is a good thing.
I played the game, and after a while I was miserable playing it, but I just couldn't convince myself to just put it aside and not finish it. Once I launched a single rocket, thus "completing" the game, I closed it, uninstalled it, wrote a negative review on Steam, and never have had any desire to play it again.
It may seem inflammatory, but my honest opinion on what the difference is between me and people who genuinely liked the game is this: those people are complexity fetishists.
[0] the kind of brain that generally ends up doing programming or IT work because it is suited to this kind of problem solving.
__X__ is like factorio for programmers. However, I don't think that properly describes it. It's more like an evolution of AI and an exploration of programming 'topics' rather than just coding in javascript.
Sounds like a really fun project and I hope it works out well for you. The last part reminds me of this PS1 game I used to play, Carnage Heart, where you program AI robots to go into battle.
Also, "import antigravity" would make for a perfect easter egg.
I'll likely tweet it out when we release it. We're only working on it for a few hours a week so we won't have anything shippable for probably a year or more. My twitter handle is @twiclo
I don't have a twitter, but you guys should set up a static page and capture emails for alpha, beta and launch! I'd love to hear about it when you guys launch and I would play this game no matter how 'rough'. My email is Rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com.
I'm working on a language optimized for solving programming challenges as quickly as possible.
That is, I'm not optimizing for execution time, I'm optimizing for time between reading the problem statement and having a working solution. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any existing languages in this space. There are plenty of "code golf" languages, which optimize for shortest finished program, but that's slightly different. Based on the top AoC solvers, the closest thing today is Python -- but we can do so much better!
Currently, the language is very immature, but it can solve a handful of AoC problems. But before long, I'll need to tackle a very big problem: building an IDE around this thing. See, for a language like this, the syntax is only half the battle. Ideally, when I type something like `| map (*2)`, I should have instant visual feedback showing me how the input is affected by this change. Not to mention more traditional IDE features, like suggesting functions based on the type under the cursor.
I don't have anything public to share yet, but if you're interested in collaborating (esp. on the IDE), feel free to shoot me an email.
There is actually a community of ~20000 people using some forms of this: codeforces.com. The most used approach are lots of macros in C++ to completely modify the language. One popular alternative is https://cpeditor.org/.
Oh, another side project I'm working on: a "high touch" music recommendation service. Like Pandora, except your recommendations are chosen by a real person instead of an algorithm. Downside: you get far, far fewer recommendations; upside: you can tell your recommender exactly what you want, exactly what you did or didn't like about a track, etc.
Beta-testing it with some friends and family now; we'll see if it grows into anything real!
This sounds very cool. I recently thought of another approach for song recommendation due to necessity i.e.: based on how a song sounds. There are genres but they're way too generic. Other methods like similar artists, what else people who've likes a song love etc doesn't always work. Not sure how streaming services recommend but I don't think they do what I want.
I know, how something _sounds_ is subjective but I was thinking something along the lines of how Shazam app does. If they can compute a song signature and compare it against a library, it should be possible(?) to find top 10 closest neighbors.
BTW, I'd love to test your app if that's possible.
This is such a cool idea. The gap between the "aha" moment of a programming challenge and the implementation is high for me since I don't get to code very much anymore. Can't wait to check it out!
Yes, agreed. I recently went through AOC2020 and found that much of the actual implementation was actually quite a chore, even though many of the problems seemed quite simple. Granted I was using C++: https://github.com/areading314/adventOfCode2020
> I should have instant visual feedback showing me how the input is affected by this change
Like LightTable? Might want to check that out if you're not already aware of it. I don't know if it's gone anywhere in recent years or has inspired any similar features in other editors.
Ah, I remember when LightTable launched -- my dad (huge Clojure fan) was over the moon. Even today he's still trying to convince me that I should just use Clojure. :P
I've worked on a few similar projects, and in this case I'd recommend trying to write your syntax however you want, but implementing it as a transpiler to Python.
That way you always have access to the Python libraries, for competitions where you need to show your code it'll be easier, and there are already a lot of optimisations.
That said if you're primarily doing this for fun- go wild with the implementation.
You should have a look at q/kdb. Once you get comfortable with the language, you can write some very complex code very quickly - part of the reason is the compactness of the language, but also due to the functional, loop-free style which uses the right primitives.
For the IDE part, you can look into the Language Server Protocol spec and write an implementation for your language. Would then work with most editors like VS code, vim, etc. out of the box and remove the leg-work of making the rest of the editor.
I hope this will in no way be interpreted as discouraging or snobbish, just want to add a little perspective. Please understand that I’m very supportive of your endeavor...
> As far as I'm aware, there aren't any existing languages in this space.
In some form or another, all existing languages (other than joke langs) are in this space. That’s why we have programming languages. Ultimately they all prioritize some subset of “problems” that they optimize solving.
That said, in terms of instant feedback I’d look at LightTable and (believe it or not) Chrome dev tools as prior art.
> In some form or another, all existing languages (other than joke langs) are in this space.
I was hoping there was going to be some insightful critique after that long preamble. This is similar to an "all languages are Turing complete" type nitpick that doesn't add much to the conversation.
If you look downthread, I missed an important bit of context where the goal is solving programming challenges, not general programming problems (which I misperceived). That’s a significantly more narrow focus to which none of my preamble or conclusion is applicable.
I agree with OP, not all languages are optimized for solving programming challenges (to be specific, recreational programming challenges) as they are optimized around different goals.
I tried solving AOC2020 as a means for learning golang. 6 challenges in, I gave up not because the challenges were hard but because it took longer to translate logic to code. It was no fun to write simple for loops, before getting into actual problem logic. Having to write a minInt function is like a distraction when you want to be focusing on the programming challenge. It is much simpler to use a programming language like Python that comes batteries included.
In this regard, I suppose functional programming can be quite expressive. If you can break the problem into functional units, it can be a pleasure to solve programming challenges using FP.
> Ultimately they all prioritize some subset of “problems” that they optimize solving.
Sure...but not solving quickly, at the expense of all else. Rust is optimized for solving certain problems -- but solving them robustly, not quickly. Python comes a bit closer, but Python also wants to be readable; I don't have to worry about that.
I guess one way to frame it is: the core values (https://vimeo.com/230142234) of this language are velocity, and...that's it. Maybe expressiveness (less typing) and transparency (immediate feedback), but really those are just aids to velocity moreso than orthogonal values.
> Sure...but not solving quickly, at the expense of all else.
I really, sincerely, think they do. It’s just that their optimizations focus on the subset of problems. For example:
> Rust is optimized for solving certain problems -- but solving them robustly, not quickly.
This is basically the same thing as saying: when the problem one wants to solve quickly is robustness, Rust may be a good choice.
> Python comes a bit closer, but Python also wants to be readable; I don't have to worry about that.
There are some problems I associate with quickly solving in Python, and others where I find it exceptionally slow. Sure, readability may be a contributing factor. Another is immature/complex tooling that makes static validation or dependency management a slog. Another still is that a lot of its concurrency story is in flux and you have to spend time researching approach and compatibility if your problems are concurrency related.
I’m still not trying to discourage, but I’ve spent most of my career working in scripting languages (those which most prioritize “rapid prototyping” and “repl driven development”), and ultimately when they’re applied to use cases that they’re not designed for their velocity is consumed by tooling.
My advice, intended with kindness and encouragement, is to consider which problems you wish your language to be able to solve rapidly.
To your points about velocity aids, expressiveness and transparency aren’t just velocity amplifiers at the time you write code. They also (can) aid velocity of reading comprehension, editing/refactoring, review. This is a place where Python does very well in terms of velocity: even when I had read less than 100 lines of it, I could generally review work and ask important questions about what it was doing in... well, frankly a shorter time than the JS I was actively working with as a lead at the time.
It’s clear you want a language that enables devs to dev fast. But what are they doing fast?
Solving programming challenges. Maybe this sounds broader than I intended. By "programming challenges" I literally mean Advent of Code, HackerRank, etc. This is by no means a general-purpose language!
I guess in your terms, the "problem one wants to solve quickly" is "outputting the answer that will be accepted as correct by the programming challenge website."
Oh my goodness, I seriously misunderstood your intent! Yes that’s a perfectly reasonable focus. I don’t know why I breezed past AoC. Sorry for the confusion!
FWIW I’m very curious what you’ve come up with. I’m imagining based on your Python commentary it’s not a lisp, but that’s probably where I’d start for something like this.
Currently it's more of a fusion between Haskell and bash. I've played with Lisp a lot, but never anything serious; I can imagine that Lisp syntax, with appropriate hotkeys, would make for some speedy navigation/refactoring, though!
Have you given any thought to this being used in place of pseudocode in white papers? If the language is much easier to translate problem into code, it is probably good at conveying ideas for documentation or teaching. My naive assumption is that would be a more useful focus than IDE tooling.
That's an interesting idea, but I think it wouldn't be a great fit. Reason being that, in the interest of speed, the language will need to include some irregular or unintuitive syntax and idioms. It goes without saying that pseudocode shouldn't require a manual!
SQL anyone? High level language, immediate feedback mostly, does the low level optimisation for you, you can performance tune with indices where needed... :)
As in, visual programming? I don't have a ton of experience with that, but my gut says that once the problems reach a certain degree of complexity, it would hurt more than help.
Or, how about vocal programming? I wonder if, in practice, dictation might be faster than typing? :)
Yes, recently I've been interested in visual programming paradigms like scratch. After all Python was originally supposed to be a teaching language. Maybe in 2030 the newest generations will find text files archaic and not expressive compared to new types of visual, vocal, or even "video" animated languages.
I'm making a video editor that removes silence from videos. After creating a bunch of code screencasts, I've found most of my editing time is spent manually cutting out chunks of silence, and it's always felt like a job the computer should be doing.
So I'm making a native Mac app to do it for me. It's in private beta right now, and feedback has been good so far!
I'm hoping to hoping to get it launched in the next few weeks. Aiming for a minimal useful feature set initially – recording the screen, removing silence, and exporting (either an edited video, or the timeline of cuts, to enable editing in Resolve/Premiere/ScreenFlow), and I'll build up from there.
I would suggest you to support exporting to OpenTimelineIO - opentimeline.io "Open Source API and interchange format for editorial time line information." Most of the softwares you mention already support it, if I am not mistaken.
+1 I'm interested in automatic video editing too. Both automatic jumpcutting, and also using audio cues like "cut!" to control the auto-editor during recording.
I'm on mobile so I cant link it, but carykh on YouTube made a bunch of tools like this that remove silence or edit clips on the fly based on you putting a thumbs up or down along with other things. Definitely worth checking out if you want to see something that already exists.
If you do see their animated videos you'll find out that actually most of the animations are automatically created via a script that works with phonetics and emotions they hint it to show. Pretty cool stuff.
I think I’ve seen that! It was impressive. The jumpcutter python script was one of the first things I stumbled upon, and it looked super useful. Then I wanted the ability to tweak the params and visualize in real time, which led me to start in on this project.
Not trying to be discouraging, but my fear would be that your product is just a feature that other video editing software products will add if it is popular. Have you thought about your endgame? It is a good idea though -- I'm surprised they don't already do that.
Yeah, that's something I've considered. I'm surprised they don't yet too. Even though it might be a short term opportunity, it feels worth pursuing for now because it's a tool that can save me and others a good chunk of time.
My other line of thinking is that this could expand into an editor that's purpose-built for screencasters, with whatever other niche features that might entail.
Great idea. I've been using the command line application from https://github.com/carykh/jumpcutter for my videos to automatically remove silence but it's not as user friendly as yours looks.
I tried out Auto-editor [1] and it works great for what I needed! Although for "removing" silence, I prefer to increase play speed instead of jump cutting.
Very interesting. I'd be interested in an editor that could do a whole host of common mundane tasks in this way while maintaining the non-destructive editing promise. I often have to cut out coughs, umms and urrs as well. That takes up more of my time than anything.
Neat. Does this really need an app? I think it may be able to do with the command line. Something like ffmpeg that performs video operations and something to detect a noise level treshold.
There are some command line tools to do this (see other comments), and I think they use ffmpeg under the hood.
They work, and I built a version of one myself as a proof of concept before I started this, but I quickly realized I wanted visual feedback and ability to preview the edits before exporting. Without that it’s a lot of guess-and-check.
With Recut I can tweak the padding value, hit play, see if it sounds right, and only export once.
Can you elaborate what it means to remove the chunks of silence? Aren't there valid cases where there's no sound but you're actually showing/doing something on the video.
Yep there are! This is a harder problem to solve but I have plans to handle it down the road.
For now, I’m targeting it at folks who make videos in the “egghead style” [0] - short, tightly-edited code screencasts where there’s very little dead air.
i'd think it wouldn't be too hard to use something like opencv to detect frames that don't have any/much change between them and then correlate that with the audio detection to figure out what can be safely culled like in that fashion.
I just launched the marketing site on Monday. I'm 38 with a spouse and two small children. I've been a CTO of two SMBs over the last few years and needed to build something of my own. It's the craziest thing I've ever done.
The industry is end-of-life IT assets. It's a big industry with a lot of steak dinners that you can make a decent living at by grinding. I was introduced by a buddy of mine who's managed to build a good no-tech business in the niche.
My thesis is that there's opportunity around "platforming" the service with integrations and automation. Compliance and convenience are big drivers for customers, so traditional marketplaces have failed to take off.
Looks great. Can I make a small headline suggestion that might boost your conversion?
Consider saying ‘Sell your used computer...’ Using the word ‘your’ in a headline has been shown to improve conversions. I also think it would just read easier in the context of this page.
Love the home page. Instantly tells me what you do and what I need to do to get started. I'm not your target market, but wanted to give you a thumbs up!
This looks great and seems like the unglamorous-but-useful idea that will pay.
Offtopic: I believe that in the UK, you used to be tax advantaged if you threw away old IT hardware and bought new kit. But you had to throw it away - you couldn't sell it on. Imagine the incentives to landfill that created.
Hey thats a sweet landing page, looks very solid from what I see, if you're planning on scaling fast, use an Auto-AB testing toolkit like Quicksand.ai to optimize from the get-go.
At the risk of sounding like I am kidding, I am building a personal productivity application.
While the world is full of "todo" apps, they are essentially list management systems. They vary in aesthetics and mechanics but none of them help you do the hugely valuable work of planning years out and then driving your weekly planning and daily activity off these huge goals.
More so, they profoundly fail to keep you accountable for (a) engaging in the system and (b) keeping the bulk of your activity on your most valuable goals.
There are certainly systems that you can implement on top of the existing applications but they leave it up to your discipline to run the system which - at least for people like me - isn't the best way. I need someone or something to force me to do this high value work: sometimes that's a boss, an admin, or coach who force me to say what my big work is and whether I am sticking to it. In the absence of that, I want the software to do it.
In retrospect it will seem silly that busy executives running multi-billion dollar enterprises are at best using the same tools that others use to, pun intended, "Remember The Milk."
If someone knows of systems that claim to help with the above, let me know. Otherwise, if you think you'll want to use something like this let me know as well.
At the very least I am building this for myself and a couple of like-minded folks. If this doesn't bring in a dollar of direct revenue, it will anyway be a win by helping us to be more focused in our high leverage work. But I am willing to open this up wider so if there's interest here, let me know and I'll let you in on the beta whenever that comes around.
No product can solve the problem of self-discipline. The problems you're describing are an aspect of human nature. At some point, users will become particularly busy with something for days or weeks. After which they will dread seeing an app full of missed reminders and unread items, and they'll avoid it like the plague.
If you come up with a good enough solution, people will use it and you could be quite successful. But the day will always come when you have to declare Productivity App Bankruptcy
The issue that most productivity apps ignore is context.
Lots of them don't account for real life events. Having to go to the doctor, going shopping, cleaning the household, spending time with your loved ones and doing sports aren't necessarily unproductive.
Most productivity happens for me when I have an idea and am able to start working on it immediately while keeping the focus on it without external distractions... It would be amazing if a productivity app out there is able to "juggle around" all the necessities of the day while respecting external dependencies (like an appointment at the doctor) that cannot be rescheduled.
I'm working on something that. It's reactive instead of proactive (it asks what you did instead of what you're planning to do). Just jot something down for now and deal with your todo apps at the end of your day.
It can do Pomodoro sessions, but I'm adding a couple of variant timers (alarms, actually) that are designed to eventually work around your schedule:
if I have to enter something into an app, I will eventually forget to do it. and if I miss entering too many appointments I'll eventually have to declare bankruptcy
not trying to be negative about your idea. but the best app is one that will know automatically what's on my schedule, without me having to enter it explicitly. that way I can't forget. I have no idea how to do this, it doesn't really sound possible. Just trying to convey my experience with projects like you described
You won't have to enter your schedule - there's APIs for Calendars. You'd just have to determine which calendars are considered "busy".
As for upkeep, I found that the app is self-motivating. It's not measuring anything so if you miss an hour or a month it doesn't matter, there's no overwhelming guilt. The only thing you miss is being able to review what you worked on.
This is an important observation. Most productivity apps don't end up "working" because they vastly underestimate the complexity of the problem they are trying to solve.
We need to do a far better job of addressing the psychology of self-improvement, one of the most important aspects being how to deal with the inevitable "falling off the wagon".
As you describe well, a naive approach to productivity tends to work at first, but then, as soon as you disengage for a time, they actively work _against_ re-engagement.
I think there is a lot to be figured out in this area.
One other related point is that although an app can't "solve the problem of self-discipline" it _can_ reduce the amount of energy required to "do the right thing" (e.g. by providing a easy to follow system). Since willpower requires energy which is a limited resource, this leaves more of it to apply towards continuing to work towards a goal instead of figuring out how to configure a goal achievement system.
I did some brainstorming years ago on a similar idea, and the one part of it I would like to see implemented some day is tracking progress towards goals.
Trivial examples would be weight loss (or gain) to a goal weight bracket; or budgeting and building a retirement fund.
More complex one might be a career change, say going from programmer to lawyer, which involves lots of things over several years.
I think I had some decent ideas about measuring fuzzy progress but didn’t get very far with connectedness. For instance you have reading goals and a goal to read before bed (not on screen) and you want to get that law degree, so reading Book X might be working on all three, but each has a different kind of progress.
Anyway I agree it’s worth (someone) doing this and I wish you luck with it!
There are a lot of them out there, some with diehard fans, but they never quite fit everyone’s use-cases. The popular ones now like obsidian.md, roam research, etc. are all leveraging a graph database.
The market is super saturated and I wonder how much of them are fads. Productivity apps are fun to work on because the developer's can actually use the app without any network effects.
I think you've nailed it. There are very few tools that help you connect the long term with the current week and day, at least in a meaningful way.
https://www.habitstack.com/ is geared towards this. You enter your goals for the year and chunk them down to the quarter, month, and week. Then the software prompts you to stay engaged with the system.
As Scott Adams wrote, "Losers have goals, winners have systems." :)
I'm the founder. Happy to dialogue about the future of productivity and goal setting any time!
I am not the author you are replying to but the grandparent. I thought of pricing for my system the same way.
If your productivity isn't worth 45 a month then this isn't the app for you. On the flip side, if this app makes you one percent more efficient then you generate thousands or millions of dollars in additional value, the price is well worth it.
That price, combined with the fact that pricing comes first in the menu is just off-putting. It seems to be more focused on extracting money than on being an actual good product. Signing up and seeing it just confirmed that for me. It's not even optimized for mobile screens.
I'd be fine to pay such amount if the app was polished and had great UX. Not arguing with what you stated.
Seems like this is a common thing people need and I too tried to make an app for this. I gave up on it because the complexity grew fast, but my plan was to release it for free and have some sort of premium. I wanted to have a good product first before asking for money.
HabitStack founder here. Your points are well taken! For some context, for the last few years, we've been a service company with a software product. You're seeing us at an awkward transition point to a product first company. So, sorry for the rough edges in the app! We're excited smooth them out.
What jumped out at you as needing immediate attention?
I think this is much needed, I've spent half a decade switching between solutions, and I agree with the problems you listed. I have recently found two apps with new solutions, Slash and Serene. I have not had the chance to try them out thoroughly yet, but they show some promise. What I would prefer is an app that draws inspiration from Franklin's way of journaling.
people running multi billion dollar enterprises usually just hire people to be their personal productivity app. I mean, personal assistants and secreterial staff.
Even in fairly developed countries it's not too expensive to just hire a low wage person to act as the productivity app between a few executives.
Have you seen WorkFlowy? It doesn’t sound like what you’re looking for exactly, but it’s easy to contextualize small goals with larger goals in that app, by just using nested lists
workflowy.com
Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user
I'm all talk here but this system you've described is an aspect of my dream, which is a personal ERP. Something to not only manage these goals / activities as you've described, but also to contain various aspects of information for your life. A repository for important documents filed in a manner that makes sense, profiles for the various people in your life containing various information (things they like, allergies, gift ideas, etc). Lots more in my head that I will continue dreaming about but certainly not lift a finger about.
This is a good idea. I am a follower of GTD for over a decade and always the annual reviews, tickler file management etc., (long term to TODO) was a challenge. I wrote a python script to keep all my long term ideas in a separate file and transfer to my todo. I open sourced it. You can find it here https://github.com/vivekhub/todo-tickler
I’ve been searching for something just like this and haven’t found ‘the one’ yet.
Something that goes from goals to milestones mapped to specific days and times on those days (I’ve learned that todo lists not mapped to calendars are far less productive).
Amazing Marvin comes close when you customize it a certain way, and their recent ‘Goals’ feature is well implemented, but it’s not ‘purpose driven’ to do what you’re describing.
Would be interested in following your journey on this if there is an email list you’ve created to subscribe to...
One system I've been using recently that does something sort of like you're describing is Futureland (https://futureland.tv). It has a "streak" feature that gamifies making contributions at a daily cadence which is nice. So there's a psychological nag to get in there and check something off the daily list of things to do.
As someone who works on a bunch of projects this is actually a big pain point for me as well. I haven't found anything that I have really liked that lets you roll up from the "todo" level all the way back up to the long term portfolio level and actually just started trying to build my own app for this myself.
If you want to chat on this topic sometime feel free to reach out.
You're saying that you can add your long term goals and you would split it into more and more smaller parts finish could be at the end even daily tasks? Interesting. Would you combine this with daily operational tasks or would you handle them separately?
I agree that this is not a solved problem. I even reviewed all the GTD apps some time ago. None fit perfectly my understanding of GTD. This individual aspect might be a challenge for a product solution, but still worth trying imho.
I had the same realizations as you and have been working on my productivity application for over a year. I've learned a lot about human motivation and decision making. Good luck.
I’m working on a restaurant delivery cooperative: https://radish.coop. It’s basically like the other delivery platforms, except that it is owned by its users (so restaurants, employees and consumers) which vote on its direction and partake in its proceeds. I’m a restaurant owner/programmer who felt that things could be done more equitably and feared that the continued dominance of the current crop of platforms would lead to a quasi-monopolistic/monopsonic situation like for Uber and the taxi industry and Amazon in e-commerce.
Late 2019, some colleagues and I quit our jobs to move onto other endeavours with this as a side-project and since then it’s become a full time gig.
I've seen several of them in Europe. Both in media and IRL. Knowing some people who work at a local one, all I can say, is that this quite certainly is the road to the future.
For one, because unions and govts are pushing down to delivery services that pretend to have "freelancers" working for them, but really just offload costs (social fees, insurance, taxes) to underpayed workers. A model where all the employees are actual entrepeneurs, and not just on paper will work much better here.
And second, because delivery is a rapidly growing niche in itself. So even if coops take only 2%, it is a rapidly growing 2%.
My wife is Chinese, and I've been learning Cantonese and Mandarin off-and-on on my own for years. For many reasons, I recognize it's extremely difficult to make it work to acquire a language with the help of a romantic partner. I even had a friend who's wife was a doctorate in French language education but completely failed to use her as a resource.
I've identified some of the pitfalls and am developing a system to get native speaking partners more involved in language learner's journeys in a fun and encouraging way (not as a teacher).
This is my second startup! Went through YC once on my first one (related to VR). Been using YC Startup School this time around.
At first glance, I thought you meant languages in the metaphorical sense. I actually thought that sounded cool. Sort of like a gamified way of understanding what makes each other feel loved, etc. Just wanted to add this idea in there.
I thought the same. A bit of story telling... My girlfriend and I have switched half of our conversations to internal memes to express how we feel or feel about something, especially with small conflicts that arise from everyday life. I guess most couples do that to an extent, though I think spending so much time together last year (COVID19 working from home ) increased the "meme communication".
Hehe, one of the cool things about learning each other's spoken languages, is you get more memes, in other languages. I have a handful of fun Chinese phrases to whip out like "you're effin' annoying" or ways of calling each other idiots :)
I think I heard this before, haha! That would be a cool to have a raw relationship maintenance tool. In a way, learning their language and culture helps you learn their love language too :)
Hey, looks really cool. I subscribed. Seems that its only made to learn one language, right? I for example have the situation that I need to learn my wifes mother tongue and she needs to learn mine, will that be possible?
A near real-time peer-to-peer piano keyboard visualizer for remote music lessons. Peer 1 plays their keyboard,
and the midi data is sent to Peer 2 where a keyboard animates and sound optionally plays.
Project name is Midishare.
Got the idea after starting piano lessons about 5 months ago. It’s all over zoom, which works surprisingly well for music lessons on its own, but it’s difficult rigging a camera to show the remote person what you’re doing on the keyboard, as well as getting the sound to come through (if you don’t have a nice audio interface). There is still the issue of communicating finger position, not quite sure how to solve that one yet, or if it really even warrants a technical solution (again, you also have zoom to just communicate verbally, works okay for fingering)
The keyboard I use to animate playback is a 3D model which communicates the flow of playback surprisingly well, it’s at least a pretty cool accomplishment on its own!
I’ll launch it with a Show HN one of these days, within a month or two is the goal!
There's an existing shared piano site that does _similar_ to as you've described, but only utilises a 2D model. It might be give you some ideas or some things to consider to include/leave out of yours: https://www.multiplayerpiano.com/
There’s an app on sidequest (for the oculus quest) that can track your piano and finger moves. You can input a midi file and then it sees you playing it and shows your virtual fingers. It might be possible to do hand tracking like that with an iphone.
Have you tried concerting sound from a phone microphone to midi?
Hey thanks for taking the time to chime in (pun fully intended)!
> It might be possible to do hand tracking like that with an iphone
Yeah I’ve been floating ideas like that in my head as well, in fact another commenter just pointed out some promising tech. I’m still on the fence about the value add compared to cost of implementation and accuracy. One reason I like sticking to MIDI only is that it’s much much easier to keep it consistently good (assuming underlying connection logic is sound). The margin for error is so low here, you just can’t have the tech getting in the way of the music is what I am putting my bets on. I’m worried that hand tracking will end up being months of effort for something that ends up being about 75% accurate. Number is completely made up but hopefully my point comes across :)
> Have you tried concerting sound from a phone microphone to midi?
If you mean converting audio data to midi, I’ve thought about it and ran away quickly after haha. Whoever solves this problem to a high enough degree of accuracy to be useful will be sitting on something quite valuable. I have my goal posts set a bit lower at first, on things I am confident I can deliver to the public, but I plan to revisit this in the future :)
For non midi keyboards complemented with a webcam, hand tracking could do the trick, maybe paired with basic audio analysis to get the timing right. Some off the shelf tools are available [1] and pretty decent. It does go against your plan to start small though, but if you're interested feel free to shoot me an email (in profile)
Hey! That looks interesting I’ll check it out and add it to the list of topics to revisit.
Summarized in another comment but I am a bit worried about hand tracking for a couple reasons. Also mentioned in reply to another comment, but will summarize here for convenience as well!
1. While I know there is promising tech in this area (and I am very interested in it!) the tolerance for error while playing/performing music is slim to none. Will a solution end up being 75% accurate? 90%? Both are two low IMO. Pure MIDI keeps things in a relatively more controllable realm
2. Camera rigging. There are just so many variables here for things to go wrong/right. Quality of the camera, position, lighting. It’s challenging just finding a good method of positioning a camera even if you have the right equipment to locate it.
All that said, I’ll still reinvestigate this zone of ideas in the future and your insight is much appreciated! First, need to prove that I can make the simple case work as well as I think I can :)
You're right to be wary, I re-read your use case and hand tracking alone won't cut it. However I still think that hand tracking _combined_ with audio input can be precise enough (above 99%).
Regardless of the feasibility, it won't be as reliable as direct midi input, that's for sure! I think your goal of getting things working for a simpler case first is right, and wish you best luck :)
I encountered a keyboard with a very primitive, single player version of that feature and I was playing interesting tunes in a weekend having repeatedly made zero progress in traditional lessons.
It's so helpful to just get into the flow of playing, then the things that teachers tell you make sense.
Most lessons we cover concepts that don’t immediately click until I next sit down on my own and just focus on playing. After getting past the familiarity building, and into the flow state, all the things my teacher said start to make more sense haha. Some of the time at least, but that’s what weekly checkins are for :)
It’s a slow process learning to read music in my thirties, but it’s just as possible as learning anything else, don’t listen to people who say you can’t learn music as an adult :)
Do you have a plan for showing dynamics? Would be fascinating to get a live piano roll of a performance that used (say) a color scale for the loudness.
I've just hit the three year mark with https://datasette.io/ - my open source tool for exploring, analyzing and publishing data.
The project is built on plugins which means it keeps on growing in different directions - I have 51 plugins at https://datasette.io/plugins now and 23 more tools for working with SQLite data at https://datasette.io/tools
My goal now is to get Datasette itself to a stable 1.0 release (partly to encourage more plugin development by other people) and to get the SaaS hosted version of the project to a point where it can accept paying customers (it's been in beta for quite a while now).
Awesome package! I've been thinking about using datasette for some genomics data for a while. The value prop of "make nice visualization on top of SQLite" was very clear to me. Thanks for making an awesome project
I work on these three projects to launch them soon:
* https://onthesamepage.online/ - a minimalist private whiteboard with no registration; already used in German schools, but working on scaling it and prepare for a more general market.
* https://lalatabs.com - a tiny tabulature website for amateur musicians who can't read notes; need to add a few hundred songs and open it to the public. This won't be monitized, and will remain my little hobby.
* https://nullitics.com/stats/ - a zero-effort web analytics, easy to embed or self-host; much lighter and smaller than the alternatives, and as a result - much cheaper (I plan to charge 1€/month and that would still be profitable).
On the Same Page is brilliantly simple - thanks for sharing.
One minor improvement: the auto-selection of items by hovering the cursor could be a bit more visible - the dark grey is quite subtle (and not too different from black). May I suggest using a lighter color (or a classy red / orange)?
Regarding the pricing of the analytics, please reconsider. 1€ sends the signal “I’m the cheap option” and will attract cheap customers. In fact, everything below 19€/mo or 199€ sends that message.
It has been a tough decision, and I still have doubts to be honest. However, I personally would never pay for analytics more than what I pay for domain+hosting. Also, the niche of mid-priced analytics is already rather full - SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Plausible etc. But there is nothing for casual bloggers/developers, who a) value their users privacy enough to pay for it b) do not have a budget to pay 200€ annually.
I think the similar problem exists in many areas and that's what stops people from moving away from Google and such - abscence of really cheap, simplified alternatives. For example, I wouldn't pay too much for the email, no matter how good it is. But I would pay 1€/month without a doubt. It's how we perceive the value of the product. No way the number of visitors of my humble blog is worth more than my cellphone data plan or my gym. But I realise that there are people who could say that analytics should cost more than a cup of coffee.
I think this is me, I've been looking for some cheap solution to get basic data, without the need of a cookie. I would self-host any of the open source but I couldn't find any using sqlite. I was even thinking about building something myself.
If may I ask, how long have you been working on these projects? do you have a full time job?
Thanks for the feedback! OnTheSamePage is the oldest one, I made it more than a year ago, but then got distracted with my relocation to Germany and all the related fun. Lalatabs was a very fun challenge - I made it during 24 days in December. Now it's time to turn it into a proper product from a quick PoC. Nullitics is what I started last week, but plan to launch in February. Somehow I manage to combine it all with a full-time job and occasional consulting. But I definitely need to slow down, I guess.
The reason I would advise against it is it severely limits the possible profitable cost of customer acquisition which makes sense in turn strictly limiting how you can market it. If you can create all your own content and want to pursue a 100% organic strategy then this will be less of a concern.
In case you didn't already know: using the same whiteboard on a 27" screen vs a mobile screen hides a big portion of it on mobile. It seems like the whiteboard isn't scaled according to the screen size.
Love the concept though!
EDIT: Never mind looks like if you just dezoom it works, my bad!
Just discovered that the random token generation still needs work for https://onthesamepage.online/. You can easily guess or create (short) board ids, and see what was drawn there by others.
That was deliberate. There are password-protected boards, password can be set from the menu. But the default page IDs were meant to be short, pronouncible and easy to type. Also you may enter your own page ID manually, just open https://onthesamepage.online/hello-hacker-news
Cleave is an application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.
Started because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources.
Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.
I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
Nice. My solution to this (on arch linux) was to maintain a script that would open the stuff I need on specific workspaces. I'd always need the following to get work done:
1. Browser on workspace 1
2. Pycharm/IDE on workspace 2
3. Terminals ssh-ed into the compute server on workspace 3
4. Workspace 4 is empty - I use this as my scratch workspace
5. Workspace 5 contains slack and spotify
i3 provides you a way to map each application to each workspace. So it was pretty easy to get ^ this setup at the press of a button.
Yeah; in most cases it depends on how the specific apps use OS-features, but I've also implemented a way to make app-specific extensions (i.e. define which files are involved in handling a specific app's state), so that users can customize and potentially extend the functionality and share these definitions (maybe even contribute upstream).
A few months ago I spent a week of my vacation reverse engineering Zelda Classic[1], an awesome tool made by Zelda fans which has many awesome custom-made Zelda-like games made in it.
I'm a web guy, so that's my medium of choice. I called it Quest Maker[2].
The game repo isn't public (haven't figured out what I want to do with this...), but here's the tool I made for converting the binary quest datafiles to JSON[3].
Particularly interesting to me was extracting the sound data from the datafile to recreate a MIDI file, and then using a WASM library to play it in on the web.
There is also a gnarly encoding to the datafile, so I had to compile the Zelda Classic datafile loading code and employ cython so the bytes aren't just gibberish.
I'm working on a utility to archive and organize old data that I want to keep forever, but I don't want cluttering up my local hard drives and Dropbox account. The initial goals of the project are:
* Design for cold data only. Stuff that is done changing and won't be accessed regularly if at all: completed projects, annual financial records, RAW image files organized by month, etc.
* Store items in flat collections, not in folder hierarchies. Store directories as compressed archives. I'm not a librarian and I find folder hierarchies difficult maintain.
* Store everything such that the data will still easily accessible even if the index is lost or the software stops working. Use well-known formats and human-readable file names.
* Automatically store data in multiple locations, including S3-compatible services, Amazon Glacier, file servers or locally. Allow each collection of items to have its own mix of storage locations.
* Organize within collections using tags and metadata.
* Provide a simple checkout system to download items when needed.
I have the core features working and I am now building the desktop application, which I intend to be cross-platform. However, I've never written a desktop application before, let alone a cross-platform one, so development has slowed while I learn and experiment.
The underlying JavaScript code in that app started getting messy because I was working on several other projects simultaneously, but you might find it useful to play with as you consider your desktop app.
The archival community uses a simple text-based packaging format from the Library of Congress called BagIt, which allows you to include metadata and checksums with your archived materials so you can ensure their integrity and make sense of them when you get them back.
Anyway, you're working on an interesting problem. I'd be interested to see how it goes.
For anyone interested in these features today, check out Git Annex. Fits all these requirements except for tagging. Add files just like with git, then git annex copy file --to some-remote. Intended for large files, you can Zip directories too if you like. I personally like directory organization but that's optional.
FWIW I've often thought of building a cold storage cloud for this type of stuff. Basically the same functionality of [api, web gui, etc] that everyone has except, files need to be requested and may take some time to become hot/available to the user. It's really just because I think it's silly that the only reason I pay $100+/year to my provider is because I have some archived videos/photos that put me over their free limit. I never touch those files but don't want get rid of them either (I realize I could store myself but them I'm the one responsible if they get lost :))
How do you find an item then? I've read numerous research studies that prove people still prefer navigation over search. Ofer Bergman has done a lot of work.
The thought is that collections should be homogeneous so that for most use cases,
* The number of items would be so small that search would not be necessary, e.g. a collection personal projects
* The items would fall naturally into a timeline so you can search trivially by scrolling, e.g. RAW photos grouped together by month
* The items would be easily identified by name, e.g. MP3 files grouped by album (why am I still holding onto these?)
The intention is not to upload 1000s of individual files in a jumble, but instead, a much smaller number of archives. E.g. If you are archiving the previous semester's homework assignments, instead of uploading a bunch of random documents, each item would be an archive of the assignments from a particular class. You could tag each item with 'Fall 2020' if you want to improve the organization. I'm intending to make that an easy process, where you point the program at a directory and it packages, tags and uploads each subfolder.
Really nice, any plans on showing this on a 3D map? You might be interested in my project, Procedural GL JS: a mobile-first 3D mapping engine with emphasis on user experience. Live demo here: https://felixpalmer.github.io/procedural-gl-js/ (I've also posted separately in this thread).
Wow! This is beautiful and fast. You should be proud of yourself.
There is another project (https://shadowmap.org) that casts shadows in 3D. You might want to reach out to them. For me, I use ray-tracing per pixel because I want more control/information on a per-pixel basis. For example, when will the sun hit the particular location.
I love this.
For years I had been thinking about creating a map where you can spot first and last sun in an area. Now that I’m actually tackling bigger and complexer projects I forgot all about that idea.
Great job!
I've been trying to figure out a smart home automated system to determine if shades should be open or closed to optimize for energy efficiency, accounting for sun intensity, time of day, and orientation of the window. I suppose I could throw something like this on rather than relying on generic sunrise and sunset times.
Did you have a lot of wrangling with coordinate systems and the location of the sun changing throughout the year?
Suncalc [1] is the library I use to calculate the position of the sun. Mapzen [2] host public elevation tile data. This blog post [3] is a good overview of the calculations involved.
Thank you. Curious: is it of any practical value to you or just art?
I was thinking maybe using it to give actual sunrise/sunset times for any position on earth. For example, Denver sunset time is 5PM but the mountains will cast shadow on Denver at 4:40PM [2]
Actual sunrise sunset timings, yes. And then : might be useful for non-commercial planning of solar panels. I am assuming your shadow tracking takes into account the buildings' heights , sun angle over the months, etc factors also.
#2 is fantastic. I would love for it to be even slower. Something like a brief overview of last week, or last month. I can't news I've read yesterday, which means most it was pointless.
I didn't find any links to the original page on HN. And second: may be the timezone accounting would be great. There is friday morning at may location now, but I still see only thursday.
I've spent the last two weeks making an Arduino-based "air" MIDI controller. Kind of like a theremin but with cheap sonar modules (distance sensors like they use on toy cars).
It's incredibly fun to play. It's not accurate enough to control a pitch with precision but for a controller, to drive filters, modulators, etc. it's perfect.
Also, my kids love to play with it -- not in a "musical" way but to control the music while they dance. It's a way of using it I hadn't anticipated and it's super nice to see them do it.
that makes me want to put a sonar sensor into my eurorack modular synthesizer. I actually installed a real theremin module today. Eurorack is simpler than midi, each aspect of a sound is a separate DC voltage, the standard for pitch is “1 volt per octive”
Lucky you! I haven't taken the plunge of modular yet (I'm afraid it's a hole I would never get out of) but I play around with VCV and love it.
I also have a Volca Modular which doesn't have a MIDI input, only CV/Gate and was thinking about adding a CV output to the thing.
A real theremin module is probably much more precise than sonar sensors; I use HC-SR04 because they are so cheap but they are really unstable, the values they return tend to jump around a lot. I try to compensate for this in software but it's not perfect yet.
I too would love to see this! Also- perhaps you could have it modulate in steps rather than just arbitrary frequencies so that it can be played in tune with other things.
- A vertical BI tool for courts. Every court is its own animal and something as simple as closing a case can be stored and managed in different ways, and the complexity is so high that it's hard to visualize the data. This solves those problems in a clear, understandable way.
- A national hearing reminder service. Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses and arrest warrants are issued. This paper was just released, showing text message reminders, in part, reduced NYC failure to appear by 13-21% and led to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/07/scie...
We're starting to roll this out at a national level with https://HearingReminder.com
It's not exactly the same as what most people are posting about, but I actually restarted my bachelor's degree, hopefully to finish it up this year.
While I'm not super-popular on HN, I've gotten enough karma here to where people probably at least a small percentage of people here recognize my username, and know that I never finished my bachelor's degree. I've done ok as a software engineer, and I'm proud of the progress I've made in my career, but I have always had a bit of an inferiority complex about it, especially as I've wanted to transition to more research-oriented job opportunities.
I finished my bachelors this year, nearly twenty years after I started. I likewise suffered a bit of inferiority anxiety related to not having one. After I shared my accomplishment I learned quite a few people in my organization didn’t hold such a degree (much to my surprise).
Congrats on pursuing it. It’s a worthy goal. I wish you luck.
I had a few goals behind completing my degree. The first was that I felt like I was missing some CS theory that would help me in my programming. Second, It was important to me that I finish this difficult thing that I'd started a long time ago. And yes, there was some amount of anxiety that I didn't measure up to my peers.
The first did come true as I moved through some of my coursework. Especially in my digital logic and final project courses where I was working very low level. The anxiety thing started to go away somewhere in the middle as I realized that no amount of signaling was going to make me feel better, because there's always something more to learn and the pool of knowledge is both wide and deep.
These days I keep tinkering with min (https://min-lang.org). It is a small but fairly batteries-included concatenative programming language I've been working on for years.
Not many people use it of course, and it's not going to ever become mainstream, but I am using it everyday to perform small tasks and also more recently even to build small APIs for other personal projects. Plus I find that working on your own programming language is a very rewarding experience, and it stimulates creative thinking.
I actually go through phases... I have a few open source projects I keep coming back to every few months to fix issues, add small (or big) features, tweaks etc. the most notable ones are listed on my personal page (https://cevasco.org) -- it almost feels like I have my own very quirky and opinionated software ecosystem :)
min is actually mainly an interpreted language, BUT it can actually as of recently be transpiled to Nim (which in turns generates C code which can be compiled), so you can actually create executable files from min, which is pretty cool.
Adding this form of compilation was actually really easy because in a stack-based language there's essentially one instruction: push an item on the stack... the only things I had to add was wrapping external files in functions to delay their evaluation to when they are required.
Combinators like linrec etc are no different from ordinary operators, they are pushed on the stack and they rearrange it...
Consider the following program that takes an integer as input and prints its factorial:
args
(compiled?)
(0)
(1)
if get int
(dup 0 ==) (1 +)
(dup 1 -) (*) linrec
puts
Note how I am getting the first or second argument from the command line depending if I am running the program through the interpreter (min factorial.min 5) or as a stand-alone executable (./factorial 5).
When running the min "compiler":
min -c factorial.min
...the following Nim code gets generated. As you can see, it's mostly just pushing items on the stack :)
> min is actually mainly an interpreted language, BUT it can actually as of recently be transpiled to Nim (which in turns generates C code which can be compiled), so you can actually create executable files from min, which is pretty cool.
That is pretty cool. I just started learning Nim and I really like it so far.
> ...the following Nim code gets generated. As you can see, it's mostly just pushing items on the stack :)
It looks like you're sort of compiling the interpretation?
The last couple of days I've circled back and got some work done on compiling Joy code. (I'm using Python as the target language. I'd like to use Nim, but I don't want to learn that at the same time as I'm trying to write a compiler; with Python I have a lot of experience and the surprise factor is low. I know where I'm at with it.) I've just now got it to the point where I can compile (integer) math, binary Boolean logic, and loops and branches.
As you can see, the generated Python good is not good. (E.g., it calculates "v2 % v1" twice for no good reason.) But it has the qualities of being correct and I-didn't-have-to-write-it! :)
(The compiler code is written in Prolog. It turns out that Prolog is so good for writing compilers that it's faster and easier to learn Prolog and then write a compiler in it than to try to write a compiler in some language you already know!)
This is messy work-in-progress code at this point, but if you're interested...
ANyway, still to do includes: better connections from step to step so the Python code isn't packing and unpacking the stack variable like crazy. Reuse "free" variable names (right now it just generates new vars as-needed, which is fine, but it keeps the values around until the end of the function call. Maybe they could be GC'd earlier, I dunno.)
That's all pretty straightforward, the tricky bit is handling all the meta-programming: as you no doubt know, a lot of Joy functions work by combining args with function fragments to make new functions which are then evaluated. For example, consider this (kinda silly) function:
[dup] cons i
It's silly because it's equivalent to just "dup", but it illustrates the problem: how do you compile this function (or less-silly ones that work with the same meta-programming style)?
I suspect that you just have to include the interpreter and make "dynamic" calls to it from the compiled function (or include the compiler and JIT compile.) What do you think?
I developed a VST plugin that allows users to collaborate remotely using any DAW, it's called BeatConnect. The main value of this is that everyone can use their own setup and instruments and still participate in the creative process together. I've been working on this for a year and have been doing open beta for about a month, people seem really into it which is awesome!
4+ people can make music at the same time, the projects are saved and loaded in the cloud, people can load them on their own time if they want and do their parts so not everyone needs to be online at the same time. Tons of extra stuff, I'm quite proud of how it's turned out.
I built this mainly because all my friends who make music live in different cities and I really just want to jam all the time and nothing out there was letting me do it, so the idea was born a while ago but it was an adventure to get it to work properly.
Looks great, I was thinking about building the same thing earlier this year but couldn't find the time, so I'm glad this exists. Will you allow users to collaborate with strangers?
You can add anyone you want, for now you'll need to pass through our discord/reddit if you're looking to meet new people but the plan is to turn it into a collaboration hub so that you can find people based on their genre and skill (Hiphop + drummer, metal + singer, etc.) and just start playing.
A mobile app for free running gait analysis for reducing injury risk and improving running efficiency.
The app uses a user provided video, estimates the runner's position in 3D space, and analyzes the gait over the video duration to identify potential gait abnormalities and areas for improvement.
Motivation: I used to run competitively, but didn't have access to a regular running coach. So I felt like I missed out on developing proper technique. I've been looking for free running gait analysis but I haven't found anything meeting my needs (free, privacy friendly, convenient).
It's still pretty rough, but I'm hoping to release an Android prototype in the next few months. If you have time, I'd love some community feedback/suggestions on my anonymous Google form. Thanks!
Have you considered enriching your dataset with what’s also being collected by an iPhone or Apple Watch? (walking speed, step length, walking asymmetry, and double support time in the Health app)
Add a feature to blur someones face immediately. You'll get better traction if there are no faces in your dataset. You can use the code from what was done to the summer riots pictures.
I didn't mention it earlier, but I'm processing the video locally on the user's device. The video and derived data are also stored locally and I'm not using any user data to construct a dataset.
So far, the only time data leaves the user's phone is to allow them to share the video and data to others (ex. for social media or to coaches).
I'll definitely look into face blurring if I try to build a dataset in the future.
I need a location tracking system for my office robot. Our carpet happens to have a pseudo random grid pattern of four colors. I'm creating a map of this pattern, then at runtime I fuse odometry with carpet colour (detected via camera) in a particle filter to determine and track robot location.
Yeah nearest neighbour was my first thought, but I noticed that the clusters were more spread out in some directions than other. For instance the black cluster is elongated in the saturation dimension but quite tight in H and V. I wanted to capture these directions of variance and I think the GMM does this.
Put differently, I think the clusters are better approximated by ellipsoids than spheres.
But yep nearest neighbour probably would have worked fine too.
I contribute to a neat platform called https://pol.is/home. It's used to shape legislation in Taiwan. It's basically a techno-social exoskeleton that gives laypersons the superpower to see the whole forest (10,000s of ppl) via dimensional reduction over a chaotic matrix of agree/disagree statements. Or rather: To "listen at scale".
It has some emergent properties that are a bit of a mindfuck. You can use it to help ppl see a more neutral landscape of complex opinion groups. Less us-vs-them, and more us's-and-thems. And you can incentivize participants to do the hard work of finding consensus statements, by dropping statement "between groups" in the visualization.
So if you tell ppl you'll reward them for thinking up and submitting "consensus statements" that straddle groups (e.g. like "finders get their item onto agenda of big meeting"), then the most passionate participants (who might otherwise shake apart consensus) will scour the tool to build up a working model of other groups, so they can "trick" them into agreeing with the statements this passionate user submit.
But surprise -- in selfishly trying to achieve that, they've now accidentally built their own stories about the groups, and laid the foundations for empathy :) And they're a changed participant going forward. Perhaps more likely to hold a middle position...
Further, the tools definitely opens up questions about how a system could elevate the voices of moderate particpnts (from the liminal spaces between groups) who might guide the discourse. What if we elevated these boundary folks, plucked from the math, to hold power? To decide? To represent?
Odd. Sorry about that :/ It's working for me on desktop. Roam is a highly-used service, so I'm really surprised it doesn't work on FF mobile. It may be that it just take a little bit to load? (as Roam always seems to)
An app called EtymologyExplorer that allows exploration of word origins.
It shows word family trees in a visual layout. I made this because I'm really interested in how words relate to one another. For example "magnanimous" can be understood through its relatives "magnificent" and "unanimous"
Working on it has been both a blast and a slog (~6 years on & off). I used DL NLP (thanks fast.ai!) to convert written etymology paragraphs into a database of words and connections. The accuracy is roughly 99%. There are about 1.4M words and 1.3M word-pair-connections across 13k languages. The most interesting thing has been finding Proto-Indo-European roots, like "h₂enh₁", which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning "breath", that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from "nose" to "anemone".
I'm just started making some revenue from sales of premium (to removes ads), which I'd like to grow. I'm also thinking of adding more visualizations to show interesting connections.
Very cool, thanks for sharing. Are there any plans for an Android app? Regardless, I have a lot of friends interested in linguistics while also being English speakers, and this looks super nifty.
I recently started the process of digitizing some old 8mm home movies from my late grandfather. I lament not knowing most of the stories and people shown in the films. It's gotten me thinking about the best way to preserve details of my life for future generations--like what I think my great great great grand kids might be interested in knowing about me if they were doing genealogy research. They probably won't care to dig through a hundred photos of each vacation I've ever been on but would like to know some of the highlights.
I haven't yet built anything, and it might not even be a solvable business problem. Hopefully though I'll at least figure out good ways to organize data I want to pass on to my children.
Great point, something I think about often as well. In theory, your great great great great grandkids or nieces/nephews will be able to see 4K video of your kids doing keg stands in college... definitely think there could be a market for people pruning or selectively showing parts of their life, both their more personal and professional/outward sides, for future generations.
I've spent the last ~5 years working on a cross platform $SHELL and scripting language that sits somewhere between Bash, Fish and Windows Powershell.
The idea being it has UX improvements and sane defaults like fish (eg man page parsing for better auto completions), it supports structured data types like Powershell but yet still works fine with traditional POSIX byte streams like Bash.
I've also worked hard on the syntax to try and keep it as familiar with POSIX as I can for ease of use, but throwing out POSIX where it's counter-intuitive. And likewise, the syntax tries to balance terseness (since REPL is a write many read once environment) with readability (to make shell scripts less cryptic).
Target audience is basically myself but I think this fits anyone who spends a lot of time in the terminal using sysadmin or developer tools. Particularly DevOps tooling which are often JSON / YAML / etc heavy.
This is a personal project but I'm very much open to feedback, suggestions, feature requests, pull requests, etc...
There's a library available at https://github.com/uber/h3 that lets you partition the earth into hexagons (minus the required 12 pentagons) at various resolutions. It's spiffy. I had the hardest (read impossible) time when I first took a look at it getting it to compile into a mobile game. It worked fine in desktop, but not on mobile.
So I punted and converted the whole thing into C#. It's a hot mess currently, but it works.
However, the folks who created H3 added functionality and some optimizations that I want, so I'm rebuilding it, partly with dealing with some of the issues that have come up with my game during development. It's coming along smoothly, though the unit tests are what's slowing me down at this moment.
Once that's done, I'm going back to my game. Covering the world in brightly colored hexagons as reality starts to crumble around you.
So, still... Hexagons. That's what I'm working on.
And if you don't know who CGP Grey is and are wondering how this comment fits into HN, I can only offer that he's cashing in on his reputation a bit with the fun tone, but IMO the video is also interesting informationally.
A platform consisting of a plant database, marketplace and (soon) a garden planner and log to research, grow, harvest, trade surplus and share knowledge.
If you are into growing plants for food and other human use and doing this in a regenerative way (for example with Permaculture principles) then you should check it out.
Currently working on a concept for the MVP for the garden planner.
This is cool. Seems like it could become a thing I've long wanted: a site where I can enter my geographic location/hardiness zone, indoor/outdoor, light level, and get a list of plants that will survive, ranked by effort. EG "I'm in seattle, and get a lot of indoor sun. What can I grow that will happily survive my ignoring it for 2 weeks?"
Not really a product (yet), but I'm researching and trying to create an accessible natural language understanding algorithm without the use of deep neural networks (or at least, not in any significant way). In my opinion, neural networks are used in the wrong way when it comes to natural language processing such that they make the whole understanding process too opaque. Instead, I'm trying to consider the NLU pipeline as a graph problem for which I can use any model to speed up the search but where it can work without it as well.
It's a long shot and a big topic, but I've managed to enjoy it along the way so far by coding different NLP algorithms (CYK parser, dependency parsers, tokenizer, etc.) and trying to publish some of the code (C#) I made as NuGet libraries for others to use.
The team behind it is part of a group of computational linguistics researchers in Chalmers university in Gothenburg. It's a very non-machine learning approach but I think they've had some ambition of trying a ml/rule based hybrid approach at some point. Personally I think some hybrid approach should allow the best possible flexibility.
It's my first small software business idea that I'm seriously pursuing. My goal with it is to earn enough passive income that I can return to work on more ambitious exploratory projects, e.g.: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd
If you can add in the ability to identify the likeness of whole folders (i.e. folders who's contents have been whole/partial copied elsewhere by %/# duplicated content) - I'd want it!
It's a file mgmt coding project that's been on my todo list for a while.
I hadn't seen that—looks perfect for my use case. Electron has certainly had its downsides (app size, of course), including the difficulty of integrating with Rust (via Neon).
I'll keep an eye on it though I'd be concerned about reliability of continued support at this point (in comparison to Electron).
Not OP, but I’ve paid for tools like this in the past, such as DaisyDisk. I know the commands as well, but doing investigations into why I suddenly only gave 2 gigs of space left are often much easier for me when I can instantly see it laid out visually. I think I’m just a strongly visual person.
I'm building a autolayout algorithm specifically [0] for software diagrams.
The autolayout algorithm will be used for generating pretty software architecture diagrams from text that get you 90% of the way there, and then you can tweek it to perfection via a UI.
I have an alpha out of the algorithm on https://terrastruct.com and it's by far the hardest thing I've worked on, and it mostly works, though I'm constantly finding ways to improve it.
[0] It needs to handle containers and clusters, its connections should be mostly orthogonally routed (the tree structure with curved routing in default graphviz is mostly unsuitable), prefer symmetrical structures while reducing total edge distance, etc.
Very cool. I'm trying to do something similar for VR, for live system diagrams- ie parse all the config files for the large company I work for, generate tron-like buildings for the systems by size of compute/memory, and then connect all the dataflows together like pipes. Super hard though!
EDIT: My goal is more for real time dataflow visualization, especially understanding how large systems work, and replaying data in outages to see how cascading failures work.
I'm working on an anonymous bookmark sharing web app. The key to the app is that anyone can keep a bookmark with just the url and the password, without signing up.
The main use case is for multiple people. Think of it like Pocket / Instapaper but with the ability to share your collection of bookmarks with password protection for individual collections. One of the reasons for this website is to replace GitHub's "awesome-something" repos. Instead of having a GitHub repo which requires Git abilities (it is trivial to tech workers to use command line but not to others), I provide a simple interface for them to share bookmarks.
One of the use cases is for course resources - the professor can simple provide a link to a collection and update course readings / other resources there, and students will be able to access the most updated information. (The anonymous part is actually inspired by sharing of protest resources)
If I’m understanding you it something I need. Friend of mine and I always share links with one another across various platforms and can’t ever find and old link or comment specifically on a link. Especially on different timezones.
Just looked it up and it is actually very similar, along with Pinboard. I even planned to have an opt-in "popular" page for my app before hearing Pinboard does this. They are surely examples to refer to.
1. The documentation toolchain, process, and content for a Silicon Valley startup.
2. A neurosymbolic-processing system (in other words, a symbolic knowledge-based AI system that coordinates a raft of neural-network and machine-learning systems) for machine control for several U.S. federally-funded projects.
3. Version 0.7 of Bard, a small Lisp with a few novel properties that I've been working on for, oh, about 18 years or so.
4. With my (grown) children helping out, a new web-based extension of my Mac list-management app, Delectus, with some new features and plans for using them in new ways.
5. My fourth science fiction novel. It's tougher going than the first three; it's taking a long time.
6. A few musical recordings. One entirely new composition, and two or three new arrangements of some older material.
7. An illustration for the album cover of my older offspring's latest record.
8. Various essays that are likely to wind up on my blog sooner or later.
Sure; I'm working with a Silicon Valley startup in the server-security space to build and publish developer and user documentation for their product. Besides writing and editing the technical content, I've helped them to choose and set up a publishing toolchain that works with their software-development process, and am working on a development and review process to go with it.
Attempting to escape traditional rendering pipelines with a pure compute not-rasterizer/not-quite-raytracer. It can't use any of the rasterizer or raytracing hardware on modern GPUs, but in return it gets a lot of flexibility.
Some early benefits:
1. Being free of linear transforms for projection allows it to use other projections for free, like stereographic fisheye. (You can also design the projection to map onto a VR headset's view without needing a warp shader, giving a better sampling distribution.)
2. Global acceleration structures with fast traversals and flexible intersection routines can make full resolution noise free soft shadows cheap.
I'm still trying out some permutations for the traversals (mostly different kinds of sharing traversal work) but all the prototypes are looking pretty promising.
In the long run, the plan is to push beyond hardware rasterizer limitations with high geometric density and avoid the zoo of problems associated with screenspace. Things like analytic approximations for antialiasing, transparency without endless pain, and eventually fully decoupling shading from screenspace and moving into other dynamically prefilterable spaces to open up some forms of supercheap global illumination. The end goal is high framerates, extremely high geometric density, extremely low latency, and very high image clarity (no screenspace temporal antialiasing!).
Going to be an on and off project for a least a couple of years more, but so far so good.
I finally got sick of using Activity Monitor on macOS since it uses too much resources and am making good on a promise I made earlier to rewrite it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25401791. It just needs some XPC refactoring but other than that it's at the point where I just never use Activity Monitor at all anymore, so I'll probably put the source up soon. I have a bunch of things in mind in the future that fit in with the goal of answering the question of "why is my Mac slow" that has so far either existed in scattered tools or not been easy to gather data on at all.
- https://getworkrecognized.com — A platform to keep a work journal/brag document/work diary and create self-reviews or promotion writeups based on your notes // Currently trying to find motivation to make onboarding nicer incl. free trial instead of paid to get more users and initial feedback; I guess partly because of that tool i got promoted to senior level recently soo wohooo
- https://caseconverter.pro/app — A simple case converter on the web, guesses the type you want to convert into with a neural net (i know i could have used just statistical approaches lol) // Open sourced some components: https://github.com/igeligel/react-in-out-textarea and the text conversion soon™ - will launch on Product Hunt soon
- https://linkedium.com [Neither landing page nor app is ready yet] — A LinkedIn post scheduling app, planning to make it a bigger growth tool with insights on what kind of content performs well. Kind of like some analytics + social media scheduler for personal profiles but also company pages
If you have any questions about the projects, feel free to ask me :)
I am digging the design on your first project, thought the exampe self-review is a little too dense for me -- I'd like to see some more padding around things -- or maybe the black and white colour scheme is making things appear that way?
I actually like the idea itself, but personally I wouldn't pay for it. I can only see this as an enterprise/teams offering.
Hey thanks for the feedback, created a ticket regarding the UI improvements on the self-review. Bright mode should come at some point.
> but personally I wouldn't pay for
That's what most people say. But I also do not want to diverge into enterprise/teams offering yet since there are countless solutions and I want the product to work for the employee but not necessarily for the company. But maybe I have to pivot :/
Spleeter Web, a self-hostable web app for music source separation. It lets you isolate the vocal, accompaniment, bass, and/or drums of any piece of music using deep learning-based source separation models. It's like moises.ai/ezstems.com but open-source.
I learned lots about building a full-stack web app ground-up as well as how to containerize the whole thing with Docker.
I finally started to take the time to develop the parser and data types for "stutter" [1], a spoken programming language idea I had for a while now.
The underlying idea is that this language is absolutely syntax clutter free and uses grammar similar to how sentences are built, so that it can be predicted and recognized much easier in noisy environments whilst being a programming language that is made for dictation (instead of typing).
I don't want this to be an esoteric idea, so I'm also experimenting a bit with the use case of embedding it into my browser stealth [2] in order to automate and schedule web scraping tasks.
Do you work with blind developers on building this at all? I know that HN has had a few big threads discussing the workflow for blind programmers, I would feel like this could potentially be a part of it? Assuming stutter could be interpreted to another language?
Currently I'm the only one working on the project. I know there are probably a lot of potential applications for the language, but I still haven't written a specification and neither a parser nor interpreter that works.
My plan so far is to make it embeddable with a voice recording demo, so that it can be used inside a Web Browser with their respective voice recognition APIs.
The idea behind the language is that it will also embed native data types and tries to make the grammar as predictable as possible, so that the recognition can get more failsafe.
A professional social network, on the fediverse. AKA a "decentralised" alternative or addition to- LinkedIn. https://flockingbird.social
With some friends, I've been on this for months now, doing all the "less fun stuff" such as interviews, market-research, businessmodel, designing, aligning needs[3], concepts etc. And the more fun stuff, such as proof of concepts and lately some actual programming (yay).
"The fediverse" is providing invaluable feedback and ideas, as did interviews. If HN has some ideas (even if it is: it will fail, here's why) please tell me! (alternatively leave an issue on github[1] or a toot on mastodon[2]).
Most important question: would you put your profile/resume/CV on a decentralised professional network and why (not)?
Secondly: Would you be interested in running a small social network just for your co-workingspace, colleagues, company, alumni, startup-hub, businessnetwork, etc?
would you put your profile/resume/CV on a decentralised professional network and why (not)?
Probably not, but only for the same reason that I won't post it in the "Who Wants a Job" threads here -- privacy/anonymity online. But if I was someone who had it posted on my website, I would have no problem posting it to a decentralized network as well. IMO just further surface area for potentially finding your next job!
Secondly: Would you be interested in running a small social network just for your co-workingspace, colleagues, company, alumni, startup-hub, businessnetwork, etc?
Maybe, depends on how much work it is to get set up and running, and how helpful it is (how much social/professional capital I would gain for doing so).
I've been on HN for a number of years but have always been a passive observer and have never commented before. From the below project you can probably tell why;
I’ve recently dropped out of school and have been working on making the government acquisition process better.
There is a mountain of regulation, registrations and little tid bits required and takes an inordinatant amount of time to learn how to properly do business with the federal government vs. the commercial market. I was a contracting specialist for the Air Force for an enlistment and did a year and a half 'Internship' on the Supply Chain, CapEx team at Tesla. The differences in acquisition strategies and time it takes to get shit done are palpable. My link is below [0] but the website and content doesn't tell the story at all.
I faced a problem, How do you go about fixing the Government acquisition system? What I’ve come up with is that the problem is unsolvable. You can’t fix the mountain of regulation but you can automate it. I’m a two man shop but looking at the linkedin pages of my competitors it seems like there isn’t a programmer among them outside of web dev's. Paul graham once told me that that's a competitive advantage. (I think he was discussing lisp but I digress) However, to be fair I have zero background in programming at first look of my linkedin but I’ve been coding since I was young and is a reason why I thrived at Tesla on an inherently business and engineering team.
GSAContractpros.com (Just launched the site on Monday, would love any feedback)
Site looks great! Keep up the hard work I believe you will succeed.
Feedback:
"We help you sell to government contracts so" should this say sell to government contractors instead? Or maybe "we help you land government contracts"? Selling to a government contract is something that I don't understand, in terms of phrasing. A contract can't buy something
I've been slowly re-writing all the copywrite on the website to make it better for SEO, Branding and communication. I'll add this to the list of corrections!
A browser extension for creating unions/campaigns, that can collectively decide whether to e.g. boycott a website. If they so decide, all members of that union will, when visiting the page during the time-period of the boycott, see a message explaining the reasons for the boycott instead of the site.
(Or the union can decide to display a banner with a message at the bottom of the page, if a full boycott is too strong.)
Eventually the idea is to allow for a more integrated discussion about websites _on the website itself_ (i.e., forums with threads for pages/sites, accessible from that page via the extension, so that starting or participating in the discussion becomes easy).
I think a lot of the difficulties we have in collective organization in the realm of the internet can be ameliorated with a tool of this nature. Think of what it would take to effectively signal something to facebook. How would you find people who might have similar demands as you to organize a boycott? How would they find you? How would you remember about the boycott? How would Facebook know what the "canonical" set of demands are?
After 7 years of working on closed source products in this space, I open-sourced the library last December. People have already started building cool projects with it, like air quality sensor visualizations or enhanced travel blogs.
Some key features
- Novel GPU powered level-of-detail system gives butter-smooth rendering, including on mobile
- Stream in standard raster imagery tiles. Supports map tiles from a variety of providers
- Easily include elevation data. Global 3D data integration via nasadem.XYZ
- Powerful overlay capabilities. Draw crisp markers and lines
- Well-thought-out API, complex applications can be built without needing to deal with 3D concepts
- Great UX and intuitive controls, mouse-based on desktop & touch-based on mobile
- Tiny filesize means library is parsed fast. Package size is less than THREE.js thanks to code stripping
Very cool work. A minor feedback, when pressing on the compass I expect the heading to reset to north. If it's supposed to be so already, that might be a bug on Firefox for Android
Started out as sort of an experiment in 'can you do multiple levels with godot's high level multiplayer API' and the answer turned out to be yes. On the way I ended up finding that loading data via CSV was a pain point so I spun out a project to load CSV rows into classes... All the work I did at work with a Python ETL framework is probably showing through there.
A social media website for music enthusiasts. Not the first to build this, but we (1 software dev and 1 graphic designer) hope to bring something new to the table that other sites like Last.fm, RYM and Reddit don't. We have 3,500 users and gaining about a dozen per day. ~300 DAU and ~1500 MAU.
Right now you can sign up and connect your Spotify account. It will automatically record your listening history to build a music profile, which we'll expand on in the future. You can add people as friends, comment on other people's profiles. We're working on supporting other streaming services and building a reliable revenue model.
Hey all! Built out a passion project app to help podcasters find new listeners.
Each podcaster is given a channel with a public facing website for their podcast. To give prospective listeners a taste of an episode, post an audio clip with a key moment (has to be less than 5 minutes long). We take these clips and serve them in a feed of posts for listeners.
I'm working on an online tool for preparing algorithmic problems.
In my country there is quite large community of so-called "sport programmers" who master solving math/algorithmic puzzles to win competitions or gain rating on platforms like Codeforces. It's a fun way of learning coding, especially if you are into rivalry.
There is also a growing need of creating new tasks. Actual approach is using a command line tools to work with solutions, generating tests and checking correctness. It works but I feel like every time I need to reinvent those methods and repeat same mistakes. It's a tedious process.
I aim to create an SPA with elegant interface which will simplify this process as much as possible. Templates of LaTex statements, input generators, verification pipeline, user accounts, everything in one place! Additionally, I want to put there many guidelines for educational purposes.
I'm really excited about this project, working on it with my younger brother and we already learned a lot. My dream is to finally share this tool with a community ;)
My main focus this year has been – and continues to be – working ways to ensure the space survives the pandemic.
We started making PPE earlier in the pandemic, which resulted in a lot of donations from the community. This came in clutch, and helped us build awareness of the space locally.
We also have another grant-funded project, in collaboration with several other non-profits, to build a network of low-cost air quality monitors in disadvantaged communities across the San Joaquin Valley.
We were hoping to use the funds from SJVAir to build up the space, get some new equipment, and run some cool events, but so far it's all gone to paying rent on a building we haven't been able to use since March.
Current main side project is a website, "Theory of Predictable Software". I want to try and pull together a lot of threads of thought I've had piling up over the past few years: engineering psychology, microeconomics with specific focus on public goods, collective action problems and institutional economics generally, statistical process and quality control, systems dynamics and bunch of other buzzwords worthy of tweet-bragging.
A superoptimizer that allows you to just put in the inputs and outputs of a function that want and that finds the shortest sequence of instructions that works the same way as the function.
Currently works only on branch-free AVX2 sequences where each SIMD lane is doing the same thing, and can calculate arbitrary graphs of 4 instructions for 8/16/32/64-bit SIMD.
I plan to add both more aggressive models of what can be represented (e.g. normal x86 or ARM programming as well as general SIMD), as well as working on synthesizing iterative and recursive sequences. It's already semi-useful in a niche.
In case anyone is curious, this is literally the future of programming (I realized it 20 years ago after reading Genetic Programming III by John Koza). The fact that we don't already do this just blows my mind.
For small-scale examples of this, I highly recommend reading up on basic stuff like Karnaugh map simplification and compiler optimization. Once you realize that all computation is just mapping inputs to outputs, and that the main task is actually pruning the search space (not working the problem), everything changes.
Of course, knowing all that, setting up the initial conditions, figuring out the types/ranges/valid values of input, and what the output should be, is half the battle. And it turns out that these are just exactly the tasks you have to do for stuff like training neural nets. It's all going to be machine learning in 10 years is what I'm saying.
Oh and also for anyone interested, today's processors are almost perfectly wrong for this sort of work. Since we're just piping data around (like video games), the cache is borderline useless. Data locality is important though, so just about every core needs its own memory.
My feeling is that AI hasn't improved appreciably in our lifetimes because we're so focused on serial computation that we completely missed the fact that parallel is the way to go. Our brains are 100 billion neurons running at 1 kHz. Kinda hilarious/sad to think about IMHO, but I digress.
You may in fact be right, but I'm keeping away from neural network and AI/ML approaches for now. Part of my motivation here is as a crutch to human understanding - I want the system to be able to fail conclusively (i.e. "no such program at this size and with these assumptions exists" as opposed to "I couldn't find anything"). It's a lot easier to search for a 5-instruction sequence mentally if a computer has told you there _really_ is no 4-instruction sequence.
This is a lot of compiler-type stuff, some bespoke optimizations and - like you say - tons of effort in pruning the search space. The backend to this is a SMT solver, but I have done a great deal of stuff to not get taken hostage by the mysteries of SMT solving (lots of tiny solves rather than handing huge parts of the problem to the solver). SMT solvers are great, and I encourage people to learn to use them, but they often need lots of domain-specific help.
I do think that once I start bootstrapping our way up from short sequences to putting together bigger programs, there will be some AI-ish stuff happening. There are common patterns to how we put together programs that feel like they could be "learned" (after a fashion).
The other big white whale here is to generate a program from a specification rather than from a black box. At the moment the superoptimizer can only make a better version of something that already exists. I do have a few ideas here, too, but there's a stretch goal.
-Alzheimer's caregiving is exhausting even with many times more informal caregivers than persons with dementia.
-It's difficult to track where everything stands, what needs to be done, and how a family member or friend can help.
I'm working on an app that helps families delegate tasks, message, and take notes in a single place with customizable permissions for what is and isn't shared.
I don't want to muddy the water or interfere with your strategy but I would love something like that for non-dementia care where the person cared for can give input.
Either way really I think this is a beautiful idea.
You're too kind. My Dementia focus comes from personal experience with my late grandfather. But there's no reason something like this couldn't work for general care.
I should throw together quick video of what half baked functionality I have thus far.
A couple of retired family members are caring for my grandmother (who thankfully does not have dementia but is very old), and I always wish there was a way I could cut in to drive her to a doctor's appointment or do a load of laundry without creating more overhead for them than I save in work.
I know a lot of working people in the same boat, they want to help but can't make a full time commitment.
I think this could really be something useful for that particular situation.
Thank you so much for elaborating, I think this may be useful for that exact use case. If you wouldn't mind I'd love any feedback or thoughts on what I've put together thus far: https://youtu.be/uzm5d15QS_M It's missing quite a bit still, but it is where I'm at right now.
(Still working on vis, sky condition, and present weather.)
As you can see by some missing data on the graphs, it’s not always available. But the sensors are carefully selected to perform to FAA standards. It’s been really fun putting together a high-precision, distributed system (packet radio data links) that can withstand the outdoors.
Thanks! The controller (box that runs the network and all the algos) keeps a day’s worth of raw sensor data, intermediate calculations, and final user-ready observations. The data behind the web interface is just observations and never gets pruned. In both cases, data is in SQLite.
Sounds exciting! related, I've been building a open-source platform for hardware telemetry data called TelemetryJet (https://www.telemetryjet.com/). It provides a toolkit for data collection, analysis, and visualization. The aim is to make it easy to build a long-term time series database, share it with collaborators, and actually gain insight from the data you collect.
I've been mostly focused on data from experimental electric vehicles, but I am also really interested in hearing your experience building a sensor network. I'd really love to hear what kinds of challenges you encountered building a distributed sensor system like this, particularly with collecting and sharing the sensor data. If you're willing, please reach out to me at the email in my bio!
This looks fantastic, and is precisely the sort of thing I’ve wished I had for this system. As it is, the data collection is very much “MVP.” I’ll definitely get in touch!
Realized I didn't actually have it in the profile and there's some sort of filtering on emails or the profile isn't updating. My email is my profile username @ gmail!
I finally sent out the first 3 issues of a weekly(ish) newsletter I've been mulling over in the back of my mind for the past few years.
I'm calling it "The Weekend Nerdiary" and it's basically a best-of-the-internet-this-week aimed at hackers/makers like, well, me. Mix of code stuff + general tech + gaming + design. Goal is to be a fun, light read on a Sunday morning over coffee.
The idea, which is by no means original, is that I already spend several hours a day browsing HN, reddit, reading others' newsletters, twitter, etc., and I figured I ought to channel that into something productive. I'm doing it anyway, so wy not, right? Might as well curate the stuff that I'd normally forward a few friends when I chuckle.
It's been hard to remember that not everyone reads the same stuff that I do. So I'll curate a bunch of things and worry that "everyone's already seen this stuff", but no, actually, that's not true at all.
So far everyone I've sent it to loves it and has asked for more (and sent in suggestions), so I guess I've got that going for me.
(If anyone is interested, feel free to sign up at https://nlh.me. This is early and I haven't put the archive / sample issues up yet, but I will in due time. No offense taken if you sign up and change your mind ;)
It's reasonably unexciting but I am writing an article about "What I wish I had known before starting my custom software development agency"...
I know, I know - those titles are kinda lame - but it captures it pretty well, as the piece is about a younger me (8 years ago) being visited by an older, wider, and slightly fatter me, and imparting some key learnings about the world of client services, and more generally running a custom software business.
It's for my new blog/newsletter/website Dev to Agency (https://www.devtoagency.com) where I am trying to help full-stack developers that may wish the start a software agency get started, and hopefully teach them a few things.
The main differentiator between existing boards and our site is the transparency: each company has to provide details like: salary, tech stack, all dev methodologies that they use (are they doing CI/CD, writing integration tests, etc) and so on.
Presently we are polishing the code base, trying to get some attention from the local market, grinding through social media and talking with various companies.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, complaints and insights, feel free to drop some comments down below :)
I'm working on my side project, a Google My Maps alternative using OpenStreetMap data: https://maphub.net/
Just today I did my biggest feature launch so far, adding real-time collaboration, which might even be a first for map platforms: [1]
Originally I launched MapHub here in 2016 as a Show HN. Ever since I've been running it without any kind of monetization. I'm planning to launch it out-of-beta next month and add freemium packages. Feedback welcome!
Really nice, any plans on showing this on integrating 3D maps? You might be interested in my project, Procedural GL JS: a mobile-first 3D mapping engine with emphasis on user experience. Live demo here: https://felixpalmer.github.io/procedural-gl-js/ (I've also posted separately in this thread).
I'm building a quadruped robot a-la Boston Dynamics/MIT Cheetah. I'm not really happy with the state of legged robots in terms of affordability and performance. I've found there are two classes of robots; robots in the first sacrifice mobility for the sake of driving cost down, either limiting the legs to move in a single plane, or using lower cost, but extremely slow servo motors [1][2][3][4]. Robots in the second class don't compromise the performance of the robot, but cost at the very least $6000 [5][6][7]. I'm working on using an underactuated leg (3 degrees of freedom, but only 2 actuators instead of the typically used 3) to bring the cost down, as actuators are the largest cost center for these robots. It should also (hypothetically) have better performance than other robots which use 2 actuators per leg but constrain them to a single plane.
Hola! I've got some work on this that I'd like to collaborate with you on, how can I reach out to you? Can you please attach an email or something here?
I have an open source snapshot backup system (https://www.snebu.com) that I've been improving over the years, and after adding public key encryption support I posted to HN and I actually made the front page for once (this was on a Sunday afternoon however).
Got some feedback, a couple more contributors sent in pull requests, and based on other feedback I decided to submit a package to Fedora (currently working through their review process). Will try for Debian next.
What I'd like to do after getting more traction is put together a cloud based service for either sending backups directly or replicating a local repository to the cloud. I think the best way to go here is to partner with an existing provider instead of starting from scratch.
One thing I need to do is work on my elevator pitch, as Snebu often gets compared to smaller single-host backup tools such as rsync-snapshot based ones, or Borg or Restic. Whereas it is more comparable to tools that are intended to back up multiple hosts (Amanda, Bacula), with granular access controls, per-host encryption keys (optional) with site-wide skeleton keys (again optional), and a robust data catalog.
Using SQLite seems like a good way to get around some of the limitations that Restic has. Do you have any benchmarks against Borg and Restic?
I'm looking for smaller single-host backup tools. I have approximately a ~1Tb Postgres database I need to backup once a month (that's how often genomic data is released) and I'm a little worried about Restic RAM usage, since I have hit it when backing up a few other files. I'm trying to figure out if snebu would be a good fit for my low-ram machines.
In the one case I'm backing up about 60 development / testing VMs (they are based on a handful of RHEL / CentOS versions). The backup speed runs at the speed of my network connection (or the disk that I'm pulling from). For each snapshot, it takes about 2 - 3 minutes to transfer the full file manifest from the client to the Snebu server, and typically my backups are only a few minutes of transferring the modified files.
I have noticed that if I backup to a low-performance 2.5" USB drive, then if the SQLite DB is on that drive the SQL queries can be time consuming (slow seek times on the drive). But in the case of using my Raspberry Pi 4, I keep the SQLite on the internal SD card and dump a copy of it to the external hard drive after backups, and it is much faster.
Compared to Borg, Snebu can handle dozens of servers going to the same repository, and does file-level dedplication across clients (since many are based on the same base build, there is a lot of space saving there). However, compression is a bit less because I'm using LZO, and not doing block-level deduplication -- on my test setup I see Snebu taking about 5 - 10% more space than Borg on an initial backup (haven't tested Borg on much more than that, but will at some point).
Also, compared to Borg and Restic, if you are backing up something with large databases or VM image files, Snebu may not be suitable as it is file-level deduplication instead of block level. However I typically back up VMs from inside the VM (not from the bare metal host), and for databases I do a full hot backup once a week and just do archived redo logs daily.
There's documentation on how to create plugin scripts for DB's and the like (with a template script in the docs) -- I'm putting together more examples that handle Oracle, Postgresql, and maybe LVM snapshots specifically.
An E2E encrypted link/bookmark management app, which will be called StackMarks. The idea is to be able to ‘talk’ to yourself and send text messages, images or files, organised into topics and be able to receive them on any device you own. I don’t know if anyone would actually find this useful but I definitely feel the need for something like this, since I find the idea of having a FIFO ‘stack’ of short-lived links or notes much more practical than all the alternatives I tried.
The challenge mostly comes from having everything encrypted. Some problems I have found so far:
- How to manage schema upgrades of encrypted JSON object data? This would be a simple migration if the data wasn’t encrypted. So far I’ve thought of adding a version field to each encrypted object and add migration steps to upgrade from each version to the newest so old messages would be migrated as they are fetched and then updated with the new schema.
- How to handle synchronization between devices and make it fast and reliable? I’ve thought of adding an endpoint that accepts a cursor and returns the list of changes made to the user’s data since then, such as messages added, updated or deleted which would trigger a API fetch or state update on the app. This could be sent over websockets and a regular endpoint for when it’s down. This is modelled nicely as a queue of changes to the DB for each user from the beginning, where the DB only contains the final state after all changes.
- How to handle conflicting changes made simultaneously so as to not delete user data? This is still mostly unsolved for me.
- There’s probably more as I keep implementing.
This idea has been brewing in me for at least a year now :). Glad I finally got started on it. I would love to hear your thoughts.
You can customize your ring with any engraved image (inside or out) and then I use 3D printing on the backend to produce the ring in gold or silver. My most popular customization is a fingerprint ring. You can see some pictures of my website.
I spent a decent amount of time on the design software which uses fabric.js and three.js for design and visualization. The website is most a static site and uses google cloud run for the api.
No I can print on the outside as well. You can select “Engrave: outside” in the editor and see the result in the 3D model. I need to put pictures of rings with the fingerprint on the outside up in the top image rotation.
The editor is pretty spiffy. It would be nice to have a rotation method that snaps to common angles, like in most drawing tools when you hold something like shift. Now you have to be quite precise with the mouse.
I will have to bookmark this for future gift giving ideas. :)
I'm a CS major that does broadcast engineering for my university's athletics program. Sports are not a major focus at my school, so our TV budget is relatively small. That makes most good graphics playout software out of our reach ($5-10k+).
I found a framework called NodeCG [0] that let us build graphics that are essentially just web pages with transparent background (sent over the network to our video switcher). The problem is that is rather bloated in my opinion. What I want is to essentially have a WebSocket server that acts as a key-value store, that accepts connections from data-collecting scripts (scoreboard, stats XML, etc) and forwards that to my graphics pages. Then, using Alpine (we use Vue right now), all I have to do is define which data goes where, rather than needing a callback for each k/v pair.
Hopefully, on top of that, I can build a WYSIWYG builder for the non-technical folks in our studio. Given that all of our pages have a fixed 1080p size, does anyone know of a good way to build this sort of thing?
I'm working on a PC game, isometric roguelite or something like that.
I'm also battling depression and tbh it's taking its toll quite efficiently. Last month was nice and I worked on the game nearly every day, this month I haven't touched it at all. :D I just sleep.
I'm working on improving how companies screen and hire engineers. My experience over 10 years as an engineer is that Leetcode and whiteboard coding aren't good indicators of future performance of candidates.
I'm building a system that will automatically sin up a github project with a pull-request to review, or an issue to fix. Further test-types are planned but I will launch with these two. No matter the skill level of an IC engineer, they will need to carry out effective code reviews and fix bugs. I think that the PR test will be good for senior candidates while the bug fix test will be good for junior - mid-level engineers.
I have a basic landing page where interested people can sign up to be notified when it's ready: https://devscreen.io/
Let me know what you think! The goal of this is to improve the candidate experience and make better hiring decisions.
Edit: quick thanks to u/dvt for starting this thread. It was a fun read!
I've been working for the past few years on an online card game (think Hearthstone or Magic: the Gathering but with a tactical board component as well) where players can design their own cards in a WYSIWYG editor, and the rules text of each card (things like "Whenever this object moves, draw a card", etc.) is translated into JS by a semantic parser.
It's a hobby project that's still in the alpha stage, but I'm hoping to finally put out a beta version this year. The core functionality is all there, but there are still some key questions that need to be answered around ease-of-use and game balance (not an easy proposition when players get to create their own cards!)
Cutting my first dovetails. After years of trying to find time I’ve committed to getting into the shop for at least a few minutes every day.
I’m starting with a simple single dovetail box. No lid.
Bought some quarter inch thins that are ready to go so I didn’t have to worry about surfacing the stock beforehand.
I spent 25 minutes in the shop tonight cutting the second pin. So far both are a bit loose, and I went past a line but they don’t look like a rabid beaver went after them so I’m happy!
Hopefully I can string together a couple easy wins and build some more complex things later in the year.
This gets better with time for sure. I started woodworking mostly by hand (due to space constraints really), and while I do a lot more power tool stuff these days, I still try to spend time practicing my dovetails and other precision joints. I still do most of my mortises and tenons by hand, unless they're large, in which case I route the initial hole in the mortise and finish it by chisel. Good luck, dovetails are fantastic!
This time I decided to go with an IT-unrelated project and I started writing a SF novel in English.
Not being a native speaker, I expected the language to be my main difficulty, but turns out it isn't. I am learning a lot about how to write an interesting story, enrich my writing and making it more pleasant (notably the famous "show, don't tell").
I'm working for a browser-based app for electronic musicians to jam together online (not real-time, I think I found a compromise)
Funny how I didn't anticipate that the biggest obstacles to launching it will be my own mind, in the form of imposter syndrome and insecurity. That, and the lockdowns have been a bit rough. Almost there though, and a lot of lessons learned. I assume there's probably some more lessons in actually getting the first users coming up next, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there I guess :)
Yes you can! :)
I just put my email up on my profile, ping me and I'll let you know when the private beta is online! I'm aiming to get an MVP and a landing page online in the coming month.
I'm working on an app that turns brokerage accounts into a fully customizable robo-advisor. Create a target portfolio made up of stocks/ETFs, and our app will keep everything balanced and fully invested.
We're starting with this simple use case of keeping a balanced portfolio, but really we see brokerage accounts as a financial operating system that's lacking good software.
We're already on TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers, check it out!
I've been thinking about doing something in this space. What are the regulatory requirements (if any) for something like this (i.e. offering investing advice, but without direct management of a user's assets)?
The trick is to not give advice. Structure the software so that it's entirely self-directed and you don't push users towards a specific investment.
You'll probably still attract attention from regulatory bodies (we did!), but it's fine if you can show that you're not telling people what to do with their money. It's okay to help them do the things they want to do, but they have to be in control.
In our case, we showed how our software is functionally equivalent to a rebalancing spreadsheet, just with a wicked UX and flexible feature set.
Fun fact: the dollar cost averaging feature was a direct outcome of the market crash in early 2020. A whole bunch of users were rebalancing out of necessity, but they wanted to dollar cost average their way back into the market. So we had to scramble and build it quick.
If you have any feature requests, please reach out!
This is true. For those that would like to learn more, I'd highly recommend listening to the Rational Reminder Podcast Episode 101. Ben Felix does a great job dissecting the facts on dollar cost averaging.
Open source Android, iOS and Web app for learning about and managing digital and physical security.
From how to send a secure message to dealing with a kidnap. Umbrella has best practice guides in over 40 topics in multiple languages. Used daily by people working in high risk countries - journalists, activists, diplomats, business travelers etc.
I am working on building a free / open source tax filing website focused on filling the Federal 1040 form https://ustaxes.org/w2employerinfo
I am building the site to be client-side only using React, Redux-persist, and Netlify to respect user privacy, make the site a little faster, and save on hosting costs. I am filling the federal 1040 form using pdf-lib, which is the only javascript pdf filling npm package that I could find that even remotely works.
The site is still very much a work in progress but if there are others who want to work on this with me or suggest improvements that would be appreciated! The GitHub repo for the website is
I'm working on bringing the "pay as you go" model to game server hosting, starting with Factorio.
Most game server hosts require you to pre-commit to 1/3/5/etc days of hosting and limit the number of "slots" for people to play. I think these are completely arbitrary limitations as a result of them needing to justify the cost of the server in the rack.
If you pre-pay for 72 hours straight, plausibly you're going to be asleep and working/learning for 2/3rd of that time, which is all wasted time that you paid for.
My aim is to enable a player to buy X credits and pay by the hour. Parent gamer who only gets an hour of play in the evenings and a few in the weekend? Price conscious student who still wants a high quality MP server to play with friends? You get a lot more value for your €$5 this way.
My email is in my profile if anyone is interested in trying it out once I release the alpha version.
I'm developing a retro video game called Tiny Thor.
I'm working on it on and off since 2012, but now working fulltime on it since last year.
The game has art by Henk Nieborg and music by Chris Hülsbeck. They are two heroes of my youth, so this is really an absolute dream come true for me.
The player’s main weapon is Mjölnir – a magic hammer – that bounces off enemies and walls. So the player has to carefully aim and use the environment to do bouncy trick shots to defeat enemies or solve physic-based puzzles. This leads to all kinds of crazy and funny situations.
A peer-to-peer data sync library for native apps, based on UDP discovery and CRDTs. It's nowhere near done, but the GitHub README describes it thoroughly:
I'm writing a open book / blog series. Working title is "Building an OS on an FPGA: First Gate to Self-Hosted Compiler". I'm very early in, but realized I had all this knowledge from these different architecture levels and haven't tied it altogether to see what I'm missing... So I started to try and find out by doing it.
Been documenting my process and the evolutions of complexity and considerations in a way to put together a book like http://craftinginterpreters.com/. Kinda hoping I can it to a point where you could implement the second section byte code machine entirely in a compiler you built... for the OS you built... for the CPU SoC you built... on a FPGA.
This sounds awesome. Do you have a place somewhere where I could put in my email to receive updates? I'm sure you'll be posting it to HN but I sometimes go several months at a time avoiding all social media/news sites, and am worried I might miss this.
I've forked a dead open source project and am working on modernizing it and adding features.
Pockethotline is software for creating a hotline: callers call in and get connected to an available operator. It's anonymous in that the caller and operator don't see each other's numbers.
The original project was based on Rails 3 and Ruby 2.2; I've updated it to modern versions of both, and updated Bootstrap from 2 to 5. Currently working on adding a number of features including call logging, categorization, tagging, reporting, operator "teams" and more.
Progress has been slow around the holidays but I'm picking it back up!
Building an e-commerce platform after having an e-commerce for years.
The first one in action is https://belgianbrewed.com and sold to my supplier (also a friend) and he has one of the bigger warehouses here for Belgian beers.
I'm now building a couple of b2b's on it and continuing to add features ( eg. partial products, using ML.Net for related products, integration with other software, ...)
I'm also trying to migrate my own shop from Woocommerce to it, but haven't had the time yet ( no blog functionality for now).
Splitting up the code to DDD has slowed down adding new functionality for now ( a lot is migrated, but not everything). But it should improve development complexity in a later stage.
Thanks to these, one can go from unzipping the source to automated live deployments in less than 15 mins, including fully functioning payments. I aim to improve it further with more functionality out of the box, as well as additional API endpoints.
After asking for this feature for so long (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7), I realized that it is easy to implement this in user space. I'm quite happy with the result. This was intended for Linux, but it actually also works on MacOSX.
I don't really have a lot to report right now, I only just started and have my first lesson on Sunday, but I've gone through most of an online ground school and I'm pumped. I'll be going for my Sport Pilot for now (the FAA medical is a gigantic pain in the ass if you have any chronic illnesses) and I'll hopefully be taught in an early 1940s Aeronca Champ.
Since night clubs and festivals are a no go there's a lot more live streaming going on by DJs. I'm always on the look out for great music, and it's always a struggle when a DJ misses your ID request in the chat. Or of-course, when you're the one DJing and you just don't have time to type it out :)
Technically the software covers a _lot_ of the stack
* Reverse engineered Pioneer DJ gear's proprietary low-level network protocol to masquerade as one and receive state updates from the physical DJ gear on the network. The implementation is a typescript library [0].
* Implements a NFS client in typescript to download the music metadata database off of the USB drives DJs plug into the DJ gear.
* Uses kaitai-struct [01 to generate parsing code for the (very old) DeviceSQL database files that the music database use.
* The application is built as an electron app, react + emotion (styled-components) + framer-motion (animated components), and mobx with serializr to handle IPC between the main thread and renderer.
* Uses websockets with the same serialization driver to communicate updates to the overlay browser window which is rendered in OBS (or another livestreaming studio software)
I've just started working on an API backend for it as well, where the same serialization backend is used to publish users app store to a central server which will be useful for features like "Live user track voting", where you pick a playlist on your gear to expose to users, and they can vote on tracks.
A way to find books by different categories (by prizes their authors have won).
I gave up on the site after a month or two (and a lot of work), but I'm putting some more effort into it again. It's the first website I've ever built, so any feedback is appreciated!
For example, browsing through the books by "people" and by "books", the format is inconsistent and I'm not sure which is considered better design (hovering over the card vs the name to activate). Also apologies ahead for it loading all of the images and having no pagination.. Like I said, first website!
I'm finally getting things down on paper (writing code) to flesh out my ideas of visual programming. I'm currently using Racket to prototype things, learning its Graphical Interface Toolkit. There's a long road ahead though, with a lot of technical challenges to appropriately realize the virtues of the paradigm, which I feel has a much higher ceiling than text-based languages. What is frustrating is that I have had the ideas for the past 4-8 years, but I am finally just getting things going.
I observe that developers usually ignore Sentry bugs. If not, they have to switch context to fix them, even a small bug. Sentry bugs are notified in Slack, Github issues, Jira card... are not a good way to get devs jump in. I'm working a Github bot, it will show bugs related to file in every Pull Request. So devs don't need to switch context to fix. They are touching these files, know the business logics and fixing bugs are easier.
https://phantomcop.com/
I finished the development, Just waiting for Github, Sentry approve my bot.
https://redditbests.com - A site that aggregates reddit reviews and displays the most popular products from a variety of categories using sentiment analysis
I requested my full listening history from Spotify in an attempt to make my own version of wrapped. The repo isn't public yet, but I have scripts for reformatting the json they give you, adding timezone data from IP lookups, as well as graphing and summarizing at any timeframe granularity. It's mainly written in R, and I'm debating about adding a Shiny front end or trying to port it to a clientside web app.
I've also been working on a generative art library in common lisp (also private repo'd though :/).
If there's any interest or similar work I'd be more than happy to chat about it (hey.hn@mws.is).
It's built in Flutter which I am loving. We recognised that there were a lot of Meditation apps that had very expensive monthly fees, profiting from people's suffering and a practice that has been around for thousands of years. We've been around only for about a year and we've had around 400,000 downloads and are quite often to top search result for 'meditation' on the Play Store. Very exciting!
The resulting format has simple compression parameters and will be optimized for time-stretching/pitch-shifting. The format is really nothing special; it is based on a sinusoids + noise model. The novelty is in the analysis algorithm, which I think identifies sinusoids particularly well, avoiding common difficulties like the Gibbs phenomenon [0], which leads to "smearing" of transients when time-stretching.
I’m working on a market validation web app to help founders and small business owners identify emerging trends and common DIY solutions/business ideas using Reddit data - and once the ideas are put into play, to identify, save and act on mentions and feedback to help iterate around their customers faster.
HyperTag helps humans intuitively express how they think about their files using tags and machine learning. Represent how you think using tags. Find what you look for using semantic search for your text documents (yes, even PDF's) and images. Instead of introducing proprietary file formats like other existing file organization tools, HyperTag just smoothly layers on top of your existing files without any fuss.
I am working on a hex-tile game in which multiple players spawn on a map of some radius. Each tile has a value and a growth function. Each player can select a tile and make a move and accumulate the value of tiles they own, or split the difference with an opponent to try and claim a tile. To knock a player out, claim their home tile and be rewarded with ownership of all their assets. To win, be the last player standing.
I played a square-tile version of this game somewhere and can't find it anymore, so I figured I'd build it for myself.
I am working on https://hackerspad.net which finds leading alternatives to softwares,reviews and comparisions for your favourite app or software. I have been working on it since April last year learning PHP, MYSQL, Nginx, Wordpress, Redis and so on. I am a salesperson by trade.
The main difference between hackerspad and other alternative sites it that it is devoid of ads and the idea is to charge businesses for listing. It makes just enough to pay hosting cost.
I’m currently work on a “leaping fountain” using laminar flow fountain nozzles. I’ve got a first attempt nozzle I’ve 3D printed, and now I’m making a second, larger version. My eventual plan is to have four nozzles that create “leaping” water spurts into a single basin timed to music.
I'm working on a mobile version of a card game my friend's dad made! In between shifts at the hospital, it's been a great way to take my mind off of everything going on in the world.
It's funny, for someone with a formal computer science education I've never tried making a mobile app before! We don't really expect to make a lot of money off of the app, but we've had a blast going through the whole process.
I am very excited about upcoming discord integrations (the discord is really interesting to see. There's stuff like trivia, creating teams already in) and bot AI for turn based combat (it's almost like FF12's gambit system)
I'm building a platform to program robots. The twist is that I'm the robot.
For the past 2 years, I've been collecting all of the data I could about myself. My system connects to about 50 different data sources, trackers, and environmental sensors. Think of it as 100% automated activity tracking.
Now that I have the data, I'm working on goal setting. It's both about implicit goals (physiological goals, local laws, contracts) and explicit goals ("I want to lose 20 pounds"). Future visualization/projection + direct manipulation seems like good formal approach to goal setting. Natural language also seems promising, and could be integrated to smart speakers and journaling apps to ease adoption.
The following challenge will be to automatically break down goals into a series of steps. I suspect that Control Theory will be useful, but I haven't seriously researched the subject yet. It's my biggest unknown.
Lastly, the system will need to give me instructions. I've been giving myself instructions for the past year using time blocking and Google Calendar. It's extremely powerful. My calendar will ontinue to be my main source of instructions, except that the system will populate it automatically. Eventually, AR, environmental cues (changing scene, glowing LEDs, subtle chimes), and wearables will become more ergonomic and seamless sources of instructions. I am already experimenting with the PineTime.
By the end of the decade, you'll be able to program yourself.
I'm working on a 3rd person adventure game. Went through a personal crisis in 2018/19 and started to write and paint again. Then one day on a flight to Berlin I managed to outline a story for what I was going through and I've been working on that since that moment.
A minimalistic web app host that supports serverless functions. Just create an account and you have an entire sub domain to work freely in. No projects, no deployments, no git, no cli, just create files, folders / routes and functions and away you go, all from the browser.
I am working on creating an app for people with type2 diabetes.
They only need to take the picture of the food they are about to eat and the app will tell approximate range of how many points their blood sugar can rise. For example, if you take a picture of an apple, it can tell that eating a full apple will increase blood sugar by 5-15 points. Its a range because it depends on the quantity and the individual insulin resistance level. Its better than being blind to numbers and poking with needle every day.
Sounds great - but maybe a simpler first step would be just estimating the carb content. This way you'd get type 1s interested too. It would be the first step before insulin/carb ratios and glycemic index become factors.
I’ve been working on-and-off on Ask.Moe, a European non-profit, free and open-source software, privacy-focused search engine.
The general-purpose search engine (which is built on top of Bing) is however not ready for daily use, because I haven’t figured out how to cover the costs of Bing’s API.. so after a certain amount of monthly searches then it will redirect all queries to Google. DDG and Ecosia appear to be relying on Microsoft Advertising, but not sure how to join that, especially when the website has a very limited user-base. Perhaps requiring a paid subscription for the general-purpose search is the best option for now.
The initial plan is to launch different categories, such as Podcast, Food, News, Job, Shop, Flight, Code, Sport, etc. since this will allow us to provide superior search results compared to any general-purpose search engine.
So far we have implemented support for the categories Search, Math, Currency, as well as the recently launched Domain name finder (https://ask.moe/domain).
If anyone is interested in working together to obtain and maintain high quality data for these categories then feel free to reach out (but I’m quite busy these days so expect a slow reply) :)
I’m also working on a gaming/esports website (but not ready for launch), as well as the occasional weekend projects.
Every story on Storylocks is a serial; chapters are crowdsourced and the top-rated gets inducted into the larger story. I wanted to create a platform that lets creative writers / hobbyists contribute to larger communal & ongoing stories, but without the pressure of having to write an entire novel on their shoulders.
I have a theory that people will enjoy watching media in a shared space that can be completely customized.
The shares and synchronized component is important - it’s (often) more fun to watch with your friends and exchange links, stories, factoids etc. as the media plays.
A big feature is being able to customize your environment - lots of minefields here of course but for example, creating a Star Wars themed room with appropriate 3D models, images, animations etc. while you were watching The Mandalorian seems like it would be fun.
Support for embedded media via web (YouTube, Netflix, and all the other steaming services) via my own Chromium Embedded Framework wrapper. This will of course also support any regular web content that the latest version of Chrome does too.
Support for playback of other video/audio URLs via ffmpeg.
Also considering adding a local screen sharing component so you can share your screen with your friends and maybe play games together.
I initially wanted to make this work in JavaScript so it could be used anywhere and had a shot at working on my Quest2. Not sure that’s possible so for the moment it’s all in C++11 and non-VR.
I have a family and a full time job so I’m only able to work on this evenings and weekends, my 9 year old princess permitting but it’s been fun so far. Haven’t decided how to release it yet but all my other stuff is open source so it probably will be too.
I've just started a browser app that allows you to create and restore layouts of windows with websites, with minimal graphical UI and which remembers zoom levels and scroll positions as well as has an auto-refresh functionality.
The goal is to have a dense information display system that can persist between restarts and after the window is interacted with, all of the overlapping windows are correctly restored to their positions.
I will use it to display trading data, but it would also probably be useful for showing service and build statuses if they are distributed across different services or pages.
I've looked for exising solutions for this on Windows, and they look all very rudimentary. Window layout savers have very little recognition logic when restoring window placements, and of course they don't restore internal state like auto-refresh and scroll position. Chrome by default doesn't restore pop-up windows, while non-popup windows have too much of a GUI visible and I wasn't able to find an add-on that can do this.
I would probably be better off writing a browser extension, but I'm not that proficient in that, so for now am going with making a browser by integrating Microsoft's new embedded Chromium-based browser.
Cool idea! The Mac OS dashboard used to have a feature where you could save a cropped view of a web page as a widget, which would automatically refresh whenever the dashboard was opened. I used to use it to show a couple of weather radar and forecast maps. Sadly it was taken out in more recent versions.
The friendly data format for human and machine. Think JSON, but with 1:1 compatible twin binary and text formats and rich type support.
* Edit text, transmit binary. Humans love text. Machines love binary. With Concise Encoding, conversion is 1:1 and seamless.
* Rich type support. Boolean, integer, float, string, bytes, time, URI, UUID, list, map, markup, metadata, comments, etc.
* Plug and play. No schema needed. No special syntax files. No code generation. Just import and go.
The specifications are pretty much ready for version 1.0 release now, but I'm holding off until I have the reference implementation done (about 90% complete at https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding). After that I'll start on the schema specification. Once that's done, I have a low-level communication protocol that will use this format under the hood.
I could use help in the following areas:
* Looking over the specifications and pointing out anything that looks weird or off or might cause problems.
I’m building a VS Code extension, that provides a CodePen-like playground experience, but integrated into the editor. I wanted a way to easily create and share runnable code snippets/samples (like a “visual repl”), but using local files, and leveraging my existing IDE color theme, keybindings, and extensions.
I'm building a job platform focusing on the quality of job listings and the fine details of the application process.
Basically, I got fed up with the meaningless cliches rampant in job ads, the unclear technical details and the randomly thrown in cultural values and I'm going to be offering a consulting service meant to improve these factors + a job board to showcase the result of these processes + an ATS-like tools for teams to work together on selecting the best candidates and help them during onboarding.
The product is built on the belief that a working relationship is just as much an "opportunity" for both sides involved and that keeping that in mind changes how you approach the process.
I've spent the last 14 months building this tool and the first live version went online on 21/1/12 21:1:12. Most of the modules (meaning Rails models coupled with Vuex modules) are turned off with feature flags, meaning that currently only the home page, the pricing page and the legal pages are available. The rest will be gradually turned on over the next week or so.
This is the first time I'm talking about it publicly except for my personal Facebook.
Carbon Interface is an API to generate carbon emissions estimates. Right now my API can calculate emissions for flights, driving, shipping and electricity generation.
In addition to making the estimates more robust, I am working on having the algorithms behind the estimates certified by international bodies to increase the trust of my API.
This is really cool, but limiting to the US for electricity is obviously not great. What plans do you have to expand outside the us/let us provide our own mixes? It would be interesting for example to show savings that could be achieved by switching from your current providers "mix" to self provided solar
Adding more regions electricity is on the priority list after certifying my flights and shipping estimates with their related emissions government bodies!
A friend and I are working on a low-code programmable kind of HTTP proxy. It let's users generate unique endpoints in our service, which they can use to receive, modify and optionally send HTTP requests to upstream services:
- the request modification + custom forwarding to upstreams happens im Javascript using an embedded v8 engine (using deno_core)
- we plan to support typescript compilation, too
- we plan to offer WASM execution, too if it suits our needs (research still has to be made)
- we also think of supporting protocols other than HTTP later on
This can be used to receieve and modify traffic input/output formats in a generic way. Since everything is written in rust, we focus on robustness and fastness. We could imagine running the thing on CDN edges, too for request modification (e.g. adding http headers, doing authentication etc.)
The state of the project is: under "heavy development", not even alpha, yet ;) If you are interested, have a look at: https://github.com/flow-heater/fh-core (the name is just the working title). Enjoy!
I'm working on a (not so instant) messaging app to help friends stay connected.
Most of us use some form of instant messaging apps like whatsapp, FaceTime, snapchat to be in touch with our close friends/family inner circle. But it's hard to keep in touch with the ones whom we lost touch with. like your best friend from school, ex colleague.
My goal is to create an app that will randomly connect them out of the blue.
I would love a personal CRM where I can assign my contacts to a certain frequency of communication -- and then after that amount of time has elapsed without any calls or texts, it will prompt me to reach out to them. Is that anything along the lines of what your app does?
honest question, but isn't that one of the main value propositiona of Facebook die to its sheer number of accounts? how do you track people without a complementary size?
I am continuing to play around with genetic programming in Rust. Specifically, I am working towards building my own implementation of a recent team-based hierarchical algorithm called Tangled Program Graphs. http://stephenkelly.ca/research_files/open-kelly17a.pdf
The scope is small and well defined and so is a welcome break from having to divine murky business requirements, slow iteration speed with microservices, and other every day fatigue.
A virtual 80s supercomputing Lisp machine from a parallel universe, including hi res graphics, P2P-based "Z3S5 Net" with its own markup and browser, and a comprehensive help system:
An alternative to Nix that uses Starlark (python syntax) instead of a purely functional programming language: https://github.com/maxmcd/bramble
I struggled to climb the steep learning curve of Nix/NixOS and wondered what it would be like with a more familiar (to me) syntax.
It's been very rewarding to write. I was able to implement some ideas from the initial Nix paper that aren't present in Nix. Nix is also quite dependent on the use of the /nix/store path, but I was able to allow a user to use almost any path for their build store without sacrificing on the potential for a shared build cache. I also want to have
- better native support for things like building docker images
- better dependency management
- no build daemon
- etc...
I'm currently implementing sandboxing and finalizing some of the build structure, but hoping it'll be usable sometime soon.
Making a resume sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Standard Resume you can import your LinkedIn in one click, pick from 12 templates, and share it as a PDF, or web resume (great for casual applications and referrals).
It's a lightweight tech stack that I maintain myself. It's Firebase+React+Next, combined with a custom written PDF layout engine.
Mirage - simple, rules-light, novice-friendly, lighthearted, low-combat, improv/storytelling focused roleplaying game. Designed to facilitate what's basically a long-form improv game, freeform roleplay. Think DnD but without the tedious number crunching and hundreds of pages of intricate rules, for people who like storytelling but don't care all that much about the wargaming-side of DnD.
Adventure Writer's Room - a community of GMs who meet in the discord voice chat, and challenge ourselves to improvise a one-shot adventure in 2 hours. Our goal is to brainstorm fun ideas and improvise stories together in a chill, lighthearted, no-pressure environment. It works, it really helps with creating adventures, and it is super fun.
(also we have published a bunch of short and fun adventures)
Imagine a blueprint editor similar to one found in UE4 or Unity, but for chat bots. You can place a node a connect it to other nodes to express the logic of a given bot command, we have support for Variables to persist data across invocations and also have Parameters so if you just want to import something from the marketplace without editing the nodes you get a simple form view.
It's still very Alpha, not all the nodes are implemented, variables are currently bugged, the editor can be a little buggy, but it's something I'm actively developing and plan to monetize eventually.
Historical price graphing for HomeDepot.com. Does any one know if something like camel camel camel exists for HD? I just want to buy tools on sale... Any interest? Would people use this?
After trying[1] multiple[2] alternatives[3][4], I built this to keep track of who speaks when and for how long at a daily standup. The question of "who's next?" is no longer asked.
Team members are saved to local storage so you can re-use for the next standup.
There’s an abstract and not well defined problem of: “how do we design our life”? There are many tools which intend to help us with planning, executing, reflecting.. however none of them solve this problem holistically. They’re often specialized in 1 area (i.e. todo) and offer painful user interfaces which forces many of us to go back to pen & paper.
https://acreom.com/ is a powerful text editor for life organization. We are building an intelligent all-in-one tool with lightweight design that will tackle the problem of how do we "design" our life holistically.
The landing page is in progress, so we're currently aggregating sign-ups here: https://forms.gle/HMTw4xa5ppABzCFRA and would be happy to share when it’s ready :)
Running static blog is east nowadays but adding comments, likes and subscribe form is not easy. That's why I'm creating blogstreak to host those components. Easy web components that will add those features with minimal coding.
The name "blogstreak" made me expect an app/site that gamifies "blogging": if you blog every day, you'll have a streak.
I've been running a blog for, almos 20 years now, first 9 years on Drupal, then as static first with all comments migrated to disqus then dropped disqus.
For me, not having comments, like buttons, newsletter subscription etc, is not a technical limitation, but a choice. They add too little to warrant the effort (moderation, attention, spam etc). So i'm probably not your user.
Having bootstrapped a WordPress hosting corp, I can only advise you to seek that demography too. I'm certain many WP-blogs would gladly switch to static site (WP maintainance and performance is terrible) if their interaction features remain intact.
Maybe consider "wordpress migration" as a feature. For example.
Just for fun, I built an app for magicians to reveal a playing card to a spectator. The spectator is asked to think of a card and then place their finger on the magician's screen - after a few seconds, their selected card magically materializes into view. So far I've been trying it on family and friends and it's been getting great reactions. Disclaimer: you probably would want to have a little bit of card trick experience for the app to be useful.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/Arthur An AI art installation I built from scratch using a GAN network, Samsung The Frame, a button and a PIR-sensor (including, code, images and tutorial). The installation is basically done. The main draft of the guide is almost done, but quite some polishing to do.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/shibusa An automatic Zen Garden drawing infinite patterns in sand. Using stepper motors, inverse kinematics and a Raspberry Pi Zero W (including, code, images and tutorial). I'm almost done building the robot, but still have quite some implementation to do. Also, the guide is far from done, I've mostly uploaded images so far.
Thanks! If I'm able to comment tomorrow when I wake up, I'll take a video of the AI art installation in action.
Regarding the Zen Garden, it's to early to show it draw anything yet. I've got the SCARA robot to move, but it's not really following the coordinates properly. Still some progress to be made ;)
But I have documented a previous project where I built a full-size arcade machine. If you scroll down to the end, you'll find some images and videos :) https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade
A better site to play Magic the Gathering over the web with. Current options are not great.
The interface is straightforward enough to implement but syncing game state across multiple clients is something I've never even remotely ever worked on before, being mostly a frontend dev, and I'm having a pretty hard time.
Trying to write a IRCv3 client in Go and Vue that's backed by Electron. It's quite early on and doesn't even work yet, but I plug away at it in my spare time. I could use some help doing the Vue portion, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/kodah/girc
The idea is to have a chat client that can have panes that more resemble Discord with rich media utilizing IRCv3 tags as well as a configurable pane for more traditional terminal style views.
The motivation is that I'm not really a Matrix user. I like Freenode and that's really the only place I want to hang out. I do want a modern IRC client though, one that can grow as IRCv3 is growing. One that could potentially rival Slack, Mattermost, and Gitter while staying open source.
"Obsessively private messaging app", that will be available at silent.app. In many ways a LOT more secure (and much less user friendly, alas) than Signal. I expect that maybe 3 people in the world will need that. If you're interested, reach out to me, I have a private alpha available.
Hey I see a bunch of us working on browser extensions, so cool! Now that everyone's working from home and glued to desktop screens, I really think that browser extensions are the new HUD for productivity.
I'm working on a browser extension that helps me discover new stock to trade when I browse the web. Say I like to shop on lululemon.com. I may not know that it's a public company, or that I can easily buy its stock even though it's a Canadian company. My browser extensions tells me that I can trade LULU, and other fun facts about the stock.
How do you discover new stocks to trade? I'll trade my free extension for your feedback :)
The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
Here's what I'm planning next:
- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.
- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.
- Showing a CO2 savings estimate.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...