One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.
There are amazing projects in this thread. When any of you is ready to post yours as a Show HN, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll try to help. Read these first:
Creates 3D-printable elevation maps of Earth's surface. I originally made it because I couldn't find a tool to make a particular 3D model I wanted, and then decided to open source it. However, to use the code you need to download ~80 GB of elevation data, which I thought would be a stumbling block for a lot of other hobbyists, so I put together a little web interface and hosted it myself.
It sometimes breaks even over a month from the occasional donation, and I think it's gotten me at least one job, but the best thing is the emails I get from users showing me what they've made with it. Seeing these really cool art and education projects from people more creative than me is pretty awesome!
I'm planning on buying a printer soon elevation maps are one of the things I was hoping to print - thank you for the awesome tool! Assuming the users are okay with it I think it would be cool to show some of the pics people send you for inspiration.
SRTM3! It's all available from the USGS. I'm in the (slow) process of upgrading to SRTM1, which offers 3x better linear resolution, so 9 'pixels' to each of the current 'pixels' I have now. The drawback for me, though, is that the file storage requirements are 9x higher with the higher-res data
https://github.com/akavel/dali was one (a fully hand-written non-Java, non-JVM assembler for Android .apk files); I managed to write a rudimentary flappy-bird-like prototype in it and did a presentation about the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR... but it's on a shelf now, didn't get much attention, and I don't feel bad about that. Had some roadblocks, but managed to overcome them, and I'm honestly surprised how the core effort was basically easy to implement and how the formats were open and relatively simple. (The main real issues I had were that debugging via adb logs was tiresome when something was not working.) What was funny about this project was that I started it with basically a thought of: "there will be probably some annoying roadblock at some point that will make it unviable to continue; I accept that and will be ok with stopping once I stumble upon it; but I don't see one clearly from the start [I did some quick initial research how the formats & the bytecode look and they seemed rather simple], and I'm really curious how far I can get if I decide to not think about this possible roadblock". Turns out I was able to get all the way to the end :D
There is a wine grape varietal called St. Laurent which is cousin of well known Pinot Noir varietal and it originated from Burgundy, but curently you will find it mostly only in Austria, Slovakia and Czech Republic. It is interesting grape, but there are many problems with it: it is very vigorous so it take quite a lot of work to tend and the bunches are big so they tend to squeeze, crack and rot.
Thanks to cultivation dificulties as well as bad image from previous times (thanks to big yields it use to be used for poducing cheap table wines) make this varietal slowly dying: old blocks are being replanted by other varietals.
I think it is a pitty as St. Laurent wine is very interesting and quite memorable. Luckily I've bought few blocks with old vines and I am selecting plants with loose bunches and am trying to create new clone with more favorable growing characteristic.
I have never heard of this grape variety before, now I read this and the next thing I see is Lidl's next week's wine offer for St. Laurent/Spätburgunder wine. I will give it a try!
It is definitely a niche varietal, planted area is still shrinking, especially in my home of Czech republic where it was most planted red grape varietal, but there is growing interest among high end growers in Austria so I think the varietal has some future among wine geeks.
Of course! I do hang NFC tags around preselected vines and I did wrote small iOS app that after scanning the tag I am able to attach photos, labels or other metadata that are interesting from breeder perspecitve. I am also able to track lineages and compare the stability of attributes I am interested in.
Most other breeders use pen and paper and they are fine, but hey I am programmer and I am going to write software.
A Lisp machine from the 80s from a parallel universe with hi-res graphics and sprites, built-in p2p networking on a rudimentary "WWW clone", sound engine, database support, etc.
It's quite functional but nothing to download yet. I expect it to be out of alpha by the end of this year. I plan to put it on Steam but I don't think it could be a "success" - it's, mildly put, quirky. Maybe I should add mouse support.
For me it’s the Zettelkasten/smart notes app I’m working on. I’ve been a frustrated with how I take notes from books, videos, blog posts, etc. I want to build a zero-inbox style workflow around organising my notes consistently so that I can start to blog with a wealth of research and ideas at my fingertips. So I’ve started building Flowtelic.
It's lovely. It's amazing how little things can make such a big difference. In your case, the index-card default size of the note subtly, but powerfully, encourages smaller notes. Typical new-age zettelkasten apps are still A4 sized pages, so this is a welcome change.
I'll add some more pointless two cents. I use, and love, Obsidian for the following reasons. I'm a research engineer, and it supports latex equations, markdown formatting, pasting images from the clipboard, and syntax highlighting. It is also beautiful from the get go (as is your app); the line spacing is just-right, the colour scheme is pleasant, the editor and preview mode typefaces are both delightful. But, I do use it as a full-fledged note taking app.
In your shoes (and contrary to the spirit of the thread, I admit), I would definitely spend time getting to know to whom you're targetting this app. Perhaps yourself, which is fair. But, for instance, it wouldn't work for someone like me. Still, I like what you've done here and I wish you all the best!!
Thank you so much for the feedback. I too am an Obsidian user which is really nice for technical documentation. I have to be careful that I don’t confuse the audience: those who want to collect thoughts for writing; and those who organise notes for research (i.e. technical knowledge). I actually do both and there are different needs in each.
The only things on your list that I hadn’t considered was latex equations and whether I should offer different design customisations of the cards.
I’m glad you picked up on the index card size default. I will offer both full-page notes as well, but there’s another reason why I want them as card sized—so you can lay them out on a virtual workspace to help answer questions from your slip box.
Honestly, there’s too many ideas that I can’t do everything. But it’s sure fun working on it and gradually making it better each release.
Thanks! Yes, this is quite important. I plan for there to be a desktop version which allows you to backup/import/export your notes automatically to your own file system. Getting 100% markdown compatibility might be a challenge with some future features (like embedded images). Then there's the sync so you can jump onto different machines and continue.
Really happy to hear that! Great idea, I've set up a landing page which I'll use to let you know when it's ready for early adopters.
https://join.flowtelic.com/
I develop https://firedating.me - my hobby project and a place for FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) enthusiasts to find friends and a partner. My goal is to help FIRE people build meaningful connections and decrease the amount of loneliness in the community.
I don't make any money, instead I've spent around $130 and 400 hours so far. It is actually a lot of fun to learn web development and encounter various unexpected challenges everyday. There are also rewarding aspects - 9 couples, who met through the site, have reached out to me and were grateful. This feeling of changing people's lives in this way is amazing! I have no clue where this brings me, but I enjoy it so much. I try to spend at least 1.5 hours a day in 2021. In 2020 I had a goal to spend at a least 1 hour a day on my side projects and that's how firedating was born ;)
I agree, I was also assuming a worse ratio. However, I tried comparing this with other dating sites and they report better ratios. At the same time, I suspect that FIRE community might be biased towards males (even though I heard that majority of Mr Money Mustache followers are women).
It's a really smart move regarding sustainable growth. Males will refrain of signing up without an "healthy" ratio. Not doing it would just cause early abandonments and decrease goodwill. Everybody wins.
To be honest, everyone was always asking for this. I already had a public stats page back then, so it was very easy to just include it there (to save my time calculating this manually).
To be honest, I am not sure whether engineering is a bottle neck as of now. Site's functionality has actually pretty much converged and it already works. Full blown open sourcing seems like a large endeavor and I just spend 1.5 hours a day. I tried finding collaborators, but unfortunately people just get busy with time and don't contribute. If you are interested to collaborate (Django/Python) or have specific ideas/advice on open sourcing, I would appreciate to discuss more (https://firedating.me/feedback).
My previous experience was that it was taking more of my time to collaborate than to do stuff on my own. I agree that this might change and that's why I am open to explore :)
I've got an idea during a FIRE meetup, so there was already initial interest (~10 people). Once I had the site running, I made a post on Reddit and people just joined. In 1.5 months around 500 users joined (there is a graph here: https://firedating.me/open/). It was indeed a chicken and an egg problem, because a dating site without users provides 0 value. Fortunately, people joined even despite this. Nowadays, it is much easier. Just saying "we are 2800 users" is already much more convincing.
Vertical indoor farm to reach the highest throughout possible per cubic meter are, using only non-GMO plants by discovering the right phenomics- https://hexafarms.com
Vertical indoor farms are getting a lot of attention in the recent times, but the issue is the lack of plant expertise. Even if you were to go through all the literature, you would never find a holistic study that takes into account all the optimal factors for specific plant growth. For example, for lettuce, the best you will get would be EC, Ph, Light Intensity, CO2 ppm over an average range. However, approaching it from a perspective of 'systems' design where all these things play a role (often in an interaction with all factors) is still missing. For example, what part of the artificial light spectrum + nutrition level + air composition would be most optimal is still missing.
I'm a computer scientist by training and I'm trying to solve this with ML. It's a really hard problem, but I'm doing it. I have a mini-farm setup in my appt where I collect the data, but hopefully I'm getting some more seed-money to build a 10m^2 farm to be able to demonstrate the optimization. My goal is to hit as high as 370 kilos of herbs per m^2 (or 2.5 cubic meter) per year from only a four layer farm.
The Dutch are apparently the second largest vegetable exporter in the world (!) using these kinds of techniques. Lots of interesting research happening at Wageningen University and Research. A greenhouse that keeps getting mentioned is Duijvestijn Tomatoes.
Ah yes, the Dutch and Belgian tomatoes: they're atrocious. I'm from Eastern Europe, and our local variety of tomatoes is way tastier. Or any other variety for that matter.
I agree about the taste, but I don't think it's caused by variety taste difference. Problem is that when tomatoes are imported from further away, they are picked and transported (more) unripe and later exposed to ethylene gas to ripen closer to consumer. Being grown using hydroponics or bags of mineral wool certainly doesn't help with the taste either.
I can agree that many people who eat salads, will not care about the difference in taste between hydroponics and well composted soil. Especially when it comes to the cost difference. But that doesn't mean there isn't a difference, because there is. Any home gardener can tell you that the exact same lettuce variety grown in well composted soil, over produced commercial soil void of natural nutrients (and biological ecosystem in the soil) and hydroponics, are all difference in taste. I think Butter Lettuce varieties are the most intense and shocking in difference (my experience).
Economically speaking, for wide scale production, most people don't care about the flavor of their lettuce or spinach. Which I understand and don't have a qualm with. I just have a problem with people who have never held a shovel in their lives try to act they know everything about farming and make wide sweeping judgements (what's that fallacy about lack of knowledge and thinking you know it all?). When you grow it yourself in a good environment, you enjoy eating leafy greens alone because you can taste actual flavor.
What a lot of people outside of agriculture don't know is the movement to recreating the top soil back to a healthy state. Commercial farmland soil is borderline clay and sand, especially compared to well maintained soil. Chemical fertilizers only go so far. A wide variety of decomposing organic matter is needed in soil to help maintain it. Along with letting a field sit for a few years with a cover crop (or variety of cover crops to speed up the process) is needed. Adding in grazing livestock is even better.
Mostly, I know you all think farming and agricultural science are stupid, numbskull pursuits because you're all techies. The obvious and only way to save agriculture is to use silicon chips, plastic and metal to fix it all. But "dirt" agriculture is extremely in-depth and complex. Especially the last 2 decades worth of research has been insane due to the realization that our "tried and true" commercial farming operations are more unsustainable than our dependency on fossil fuels. I don't see an inherent problem with vertical farming. I have a problem with the hubris that over commercialization is the only method of fixing these problems, even though that's the reason we have the problems to begin with.
I will also add the constant aggression by the scorching sun of Southern Italy. Why do you think they’re supposed to be full of antioxidants and other healthy nutrients? Coincidentally for your consumer pleasure, or did the plants evolve them to survive weeks upon weeks of implacable 40C temperatures and a flood of UVA-B.
> they grow almost 70 kilograms (154 pounds) of tomatoes per square meter. That's at least 10 times the average yield from an open field in Spain or Morocco, but with eight times less water and practically no chemical pesticides.
A promising method with a yield like this shouldn't be abandoned just because the taste isn't as good. This is just something the market will force them to improve, if customers don't continue to buy them. Personally, I've never tasted a tomato that I would label as atrocious so I'm now intrigued to try them :)
It was!!! Personally, I have no aversion towards GMO. But in the end, it's the customers. It's already so hard to convince that food grown in clean and sterilized nutrient medium is far better than the romantic soil everyone is clinging to; GMO would take way more convincing. However, there are tastes that are indeed only found in the 'old' seeds, so there is do see the aversion non-GMO from customer side.
In terms of optimization, here are some:
1. What is the optimal time for getting a lettuce plant until harvest without juicing it up with nitrates?
2. What parameters could double the functional components of my mint (think about essential oils) and basil plants just by proper timing in stress and nutrition. These are already questions that botany departments have worked on- I want to bring them out in commercial setting (and may be a bit better).
3. Does back-radiation i.e. reflected light from plant leaves help in measuring plant well-being?
4. What's the right grow medium
5. In general, I BELIEVE, that there is a sub-optimal application (as in wastage) of light (which is roughly 20-30% of indoor farm expense), sub-optimal production in terms of the harvest we get. An improvement in harvest timing by a day would still be a very big volume once you scale it to bigger grow area; more importantly, I believe plant experts are good (even though very rare and expensive), but a DeepFarmer might be able to do better (and this is my main bet), both in terms of scaling and expertise.
OP here; not kidding, but once you get down to talking to your actual customers, one has only so much energy to convince people that GMO is not necessarily bad. May be I'm harming myself by being so honest here- but the general consumer is so pleased to know that our produce is so good and is not 'the plastic GMO thing'. This, so far, has been what I've found in over 10 restaurant/gourmet/general consumer interviews.
I would argue that saying all GMO products are equal and the entire concept is safe is also not correct. To me, "GMOs are totally safe" sounds a lot like saying "chemicals are totally safe."
There are multiple techniques, many possible product categories, with many possible safety outcomes. The safety relies on regulation by U.S. agencies which are mostly compromised by regulatory capture in a market with trillion dollar IP potential.
It is not insane anti-science to question the deployment of GMO products into the food chain and ecosystem.
> I would argue that saying all GMO products are equal and the entire concept is safe is also not correct.
GMO products are as (un)safe as all other products. This label just has not meaning related to safety. You can create harmful products using GM or by x-ray irradiation (which doesn't count as GM) or by using fertilizers. The "non-GMO" label is simply misleading, it doesn't mean what people think it means.
> To me, "GMOs are totally safe" sounds a lot like saying "chemicals are totally safe."
So do you suggest to print on every product (food or not) "chemical-free"?
"By the year 2025, 63% of the world’s population will be living in cities" I wonder if Covid will revise those trends. Where I live (rural), there's plenty of unused land that needs a lot let contortions to farm (cheaper) but is indeed further away from the mouths to be fed in cities. How is the math behind urban farms vs simply shipping food into the city?
True, but I can't really predict the outcome due to covid. Just saw Dubai post-covid-onset, and to my eyes, nothing has changed much from food-supply-chain side.
I personally believe that permaculture would actually be the best solution overall, but our modern economy's pace and expectations would always keep such methods at bay. But at the same time, for leafy produce, and herbs, I think proper vertical farming would not only make it more affordable but also sustainable too. For the math, the rough estimates are production per m^2 (2-4kg on ground vs 70-400kg indoor farm), 10% lettuce in solid won't see the dining table i.e. they'd die, here there's no loss, off-season non-perennial produce, no problem for a vertical farm, the expenses on operations change too. Overall, if done properly, a very high-tech vertical farm should be able to break even in 2-3 yrs, even assuming a sales at no premium (which is very easy given the high-quality) i.e. at the shipped food i.e. the status-quo. But once people get used to the high-quality, and wholesalers get to enjoy the short supply chain due to indoor farms, I think the remote once will face a fierce competition, at least for select crops.
> Just saw Dubai post-covid-onset, and to my eyes, nothing has changed much from food-supply-chain side.
Forget Dubai, it's natural that a city in the desert that relies on tourism way too much will keep itself open. Government even mandated schools to open (no one's sending their kids, except the really desperate parents), mandated malls to stay open and cancel temperature checks, mandated employers to open up offices. They just recently closed up and put in all restrictions once again (although not European levels).
I think a lot of countries will see shifts from major cities to cheaper cities (as long as they are safer and have basic services). The only reason people (like my parents) are still staying in Dubai is because it has gotten cheaper - rents are falling, home prices are falling, there is a visible glut, and it's a buyer's market right now.
I imagine COVID may possibly have an impact on our megacities trend (even though it had many dying signals already), but I don't believe it may push people into rural areas. Rural life isn't for everybody.
perhaps you're looking at US? Generally I see a trend of people moving back to the countryside as remote work is by default now. London, UK is pretty empty too - all the restaurants and offices closed - means all the food that used to be consumed inside the city is now eaten somewhere in the commuter belt. That's a major shift...
I think the advantage is more in the use of far less water and virtually no pesticides - 2 things which will become more important as the climate changes.
I've worked on this in the past too (not as rigorous as it sounds you are). My main problem: how do we define our optimum function, and how do we quantify the variables going into it? How do you do it? I assume you're not sitting there and tasting, comparing and scoring 25 salad samples every 3 days...
I have been interested in this for a long time and also had a small setup in my apartment. I have been interested in getting back into this lately. What kind of mini farm setup do you have there? How big?
Right now (re-starting almost the fourth time), my goal is to get consistent 1. images 2. co2, ec, ph, temperature, humidity, light intensity/quality readings. Anyone putting in money (besides me) hesitated until now because they couldn't see what was in my head. So I'm remaking the setup with data-collection in mind first. It's almost shameful to confess that it is an 8 bed farm only :/ And this will be the setup for next 2 months. Once you've a 1200 plant bed (which is only 10 metre^2 with four layers), I think you will be able to demonstrate the efficiencies with the available data. ps: You can get a harvest every 19 days, roughly.
Computer vision is a big chunk here, and me being no expert, I'm trying to have the hardware setup right so I'd have to do little on the software side of data processing.
If you're doing on your own, and don't want to spend a lot, I'd just say that almost everything can be done with off the shelf boards and sensors.
How mature is this field? I get the impression that all the existing companies doing this have cracked a secret. Can a hacker-type really make significant headway in this space still? (I'm really really interested in this)
I love this! Is there somewhere where I could follow your project? Have you experimented at all comparing flavours? Could I purchase some of your herbs anywhere? This is super exciting to me.
It's a remake of a game I made for Android years ago that I still get messages about for being really addictive. It was fun remaking it using only HTML5, while polishing the presentation and rules.
I also work on a freeium Chrome extension that crawls multiple pages at once to check for SEO, speed and security issues. Try it on your website or landing page to see what issues it can find:
Haha, guessing the whole of itch.io and other well known gaming sites are blocked? It's the first time I've used itch.io. It's cool for quickly throwing up a web game page.
- https://getworkrecognized.com - app to keep a work diary and create self-reviews, actually paid for itself. Got promoted twice within 2.5 years at current company
- https://linkedium.com - app to schedule LinkedIn posts, mainly for marketing use of the other projects; its also not live yet
Its similar to https://progressionapp.com. The difference with my project is that I try to target the actual employees. Its just a different targeting group but its really difficult to get people to pay for it of course. Will try to revamp onboarding/trials somehow in the following months and thanks for the encouraging words. Feel free to give me any feedback and if you wanna try it for free, feel free to reach out to getworkrecognized@gmail.com
For caseconverter.pro? Pennies right now because yeah (per month), traffic is low because its not SEO-optimized. I would need to write a lot of content case conversions and optimize the page in multiple ways. Question is the motivation haha ^^
This sci-fi [0] music player with automatically generated visualizations. https://glitchy.website/
Eventually I will make it more like an actual music player since right now it only plays one file and provides different seek points so you can jump to the song you want to hear. I think it will also be an interesting way to keep me invested in releasing new music that I can put on it.
I’m working on restoring a couple of old H.320 ISDN terminals and integrating them with something more modern. As part of this I’m building basically an entire ISDN stack including a software switch and H.320 multiplexer. Everything except the hardware (well, DAHDI is pissing me off rn, so I’m praying the non-Sangoma hardware I purchased is easier to set up). I have no idea how far I’ll get given the terminals are odd and mysterious in their own right and all the stuff is legacy and not really supported much anymore. Impossible to really monetize these days, but I plan on doing an extensive write up both of my analysis of the terminals hardware/firmware as well as releasing my stack/utilities under and open source license. I plan on it being extensive, but one step at a time. It’s starting to get difficult/expensive to find some of the hardware I need and as I mentioned earlier these terminals are kinda odd and I’ve kinda sat on them for months with just a little reversing.
In the meantime since DAHDI is giving me so many issues and I’m waiting to receive some alternative hardware, I’ve been working on a very, very rough software simulation of a.DS0/DS1 interface so I can at least start developing the ISDN stack on something.
I built it for myself because I just hate not having privacy living with my girlfriend. Then some other people enjoyed it and I made it into a product that is launching on Kickstarter soon.
This is a very niche product. It also solves a quirky issue, so finding people who'd be willing to actually pay for it is going to be a very big challenge. Also, and to be blunt, it is not terribly slick looking, so the $99 sticker doesn't seem to be well-justified.
Basically, your target audience are people (1) with this particular issue, (2) motivated enough to do something about it, (3) willing to pay the price and (4) liking the design/aesthetics. I realize that this is a "don't care if this succeeds" thread, but I'd still encourage you to not get your hopes high for the KS campaign.
My parents just had the radio hooked up to the same circuit that was driving the bathroom lights. You enter the room, turn on the lights and there was instant audio. Makes sense to put this into a product.
It's amazing how we are repeatedly going full circle: we managed to stigmatize a completely natural farting sound (you are in a bathroom so the smell is contained), and then come up with "solutions" to feel free to produce the same sounds.
It took me a while, but I've convinced my wife that farting is ok, and that you should only worry about subjecting others to lousy odours, and even that only when you are visiting someone or some place (indoors). Closing the door usually resolves this. The stigma is especially bothersome with a naturally shy toddler who wouldn't take a dump anywhere but home.
FWIW, music does not stop people walking into smelly toilets, but to each their own. :)
The product likely even makes sense, I just find the phenomena curious and sometimes infuriating (like with my toddler).
Well, the bathroom hasn’t always been existing in our own homes. We used to do our business in privacy away from the living quarters.
So it’s great we can use technology to help us be comfortable again in the modern world.
My room was next to said bathroom with rather thin walls, so I always appreciated the sound at least be a bit played down by the music.
Another side effect was that you always knew when the bathroom was in use (aside from someone forgetting to turn the light off, which you now had radio playing to remind you off).
Oh, I am not disputing the fact it was likely helpful (and I only replied to your comment since it was one of the examples of "solutions" yet to get a reply; if anything, that one is pretty neat).
But why and how did we become bothered by the _sounds_ of it? Are you bothered by the coo-coos of birds, or morning rooster calls. Cats purring, screeching cat calls or dogs barking? All of these can be similarly annoying, but we are not "solving" them.
It's weird how our association of sounds with smells and dirtiness of taking a dump has made sounds which are rarely that bad in objective sense (loudness, pitch...) so unpleasant.
It's also how it's considered impolite to slurp a soup, and some people are outright disgusted by hearing it being done.
Yeah I wanted to do that but I was scared of playing with electricity so I built the first prototype with a raspberry Pi and soldered on a PIR-sensor to it.
Edit: In a Shared Apartment we once connected a Radio and a Disco Ball to the light Switch. It was a windowless guest bathroom, we completely painted it black. Fun times.
I want something like this, but for dining rooms. If I were the king of the world, this would, by mandate, be built into every table.
I have a quirk that I can't stand eating in silence - hearing the biting and chewing sounds of other people, and of the utensils in operation, is causing me extreme discomfort (this also applies to my own sounds, but I usually have computer fan noise to accompany me when I eat alone). I need a source of noise - intense table conversations, or background music - anything that stops my mind from focusing on the sounds of food being eaten. My wife knows about this, and whenever we visit our families, she secretly arranges for some sort of music to be playing by the time we sit to dinner.
There are audiologists starting to work with misophonia patients now; you should see if there are any in your area and if they can help you with this at all. I've had some promising success so far.
I got a motion sensor that plays audio files on Amazon and put a waterfall type noise on loop. Only had to charge it every couple months. I think it was like $50. I hate random music in my life but maybe more people would prefer a variety of music
I’m the opposite because I’m tired of all the choices today. Just pick for me! Anyways Loodio will have a memory card reader so you can upload your own music. :)
Curious if there’s some way I can contact you regarding questions about getting a hw startup off the ground. I have an idea for a small household electronic which would be similar in size and (probably) complexity to yours.
My project involves turning an old Saab into a racecar, and using it to explore moonshot ideas like creating a composite from natural materials instead of fiberglass or carbon fiber. The racecar part keeps it fun, even if the ideas don't pan out.
Fantastic! You're such an engaging writer. Subscribed.
I've gotten a tad weary of only reading programmer's blogs. You can only transfer over things like stateless application design so far into other fields. Mechanical Engineers deserve some love too! Sadly, the closest I've come to a "Hacker News for Mechanical Engineers" is the FSAE forums, aka, not close at all. So your blog is very welcome!
A little nervous sharing this, since it is a work-in-progress, but here goes nothing :)
I'm currently learning about sales and marketing and think I can share my modest knowledge on the topic in a way that is fairly systematic.
One of the draws of programming for me—and I believe this is true for a lot of developers—is that software development is fairly a systematic discipline to get into, unlike sales or marketing, for instance.
The path to learning how to program is fairly systematic i.e. learning follows a well-defined path where you learn your first "hello, world", then learn about constants, variables, expressions, conditionals, loops, functions etc.
Making recursion the first lesson is a recipe for confusion for most beginners to programming.
My goal with the guide is to explain sales and marketing—in a well-defined way similar to how programming is learnt—using plain language, while avoiding jargon, as much as possible.
Learning this way has been helpful to me and I think a guide like this would be helpful to developers out there that struggle with answering questions like whether to do sales or marketing first, build an audience before building a product etc.
I'm on the free tier of ConvertKit so I'm trying to figure the easiest way to automatically email subscribers a copy of the current draft of the guide.
I've seen a couple marketing guides pitched at engineers, and I think there's more potential in this space for sure. The value prop is intriguing to me.
Quick feedback: if you want more early reviewers, perhaps put up an example post. That would answer a few things for someone like me: is the writing good, what level is the material (beginner or intermediate), can I walk about with at least one non-obvious insight.
Hey, I’m also very interested in this! Just an FYI, IME using hello@domain or any similar role-based or impersonal email from an unproven domain OR while using a service that lumps you in with a bunch of other accounts will make it really hard to end up in a primary email inbox. Most of the time you’ll get diverted to promotions (Gmail) or spam (a bunch of others).
Thanks for the feedback, octostone! I'll keep this in mind and definitely fix it, if I do move to another ESP.
A bit of context: I set up the landing page with some basic copy two days ago (February 1). I saw this Ask HN on the front page yesterday (February 2) when it was about 7 hours old, so I made several edits to the copy to make the message clearer, before sharing the link here.
So, I was plenty surprised by the number of subscribers‡ I got from this comment alone. Thank you to everyone who subscribed to be a reviewer!
‡If anyone is curious about my numbers, yesterday, I got 17 subscribers, currently at 20 subscribers!
To play devils advocate why should someone learn marketing and and sales from someone that doesn't have real world experience? The noise to signal ratio is already so high in the field. Good luck regardless.
> To play devils advocate why should someone learn marketing and and sales from someone that doesn't have real world experience? The noise to signal ratio is already so high in the field.
The same way you can't become a programmer, if all you have is knowledge gained from reading a book on the topic; you have to put in the work by learning from your mistakes in a programming environment.
My goal with the guide is to help a technical audience gain a basic, but clear understanding of the concepts that constitute sales & marketing that they can build upon. The guide is not promising readers that they'll become a highly-sought after sales person or marketer, overnight.
I have been working for years now on Exomind[1], a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have an iOS and a web/electron client at the moment, and a simple Chrome extension for bookmarking. I plan to eventually add files (blobs), definitions and support extensibility via WASM applications.
Its backend (Exocore[2]) is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.
It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years (it was on another tech stack before).
As for the Gmail integration, it is quite crude at the moment. I use it mostly to organize incoming emails, but I still use Gmail to send or reply to my emails. Exomind inbox is synchronized with Gmail, so all emails that you remove from one or the other get removed / archived on the other side. It also supports multiple accounts.
If you are interested to try and not afraid of the rough edges, just let me know. I added Discussions to the GitHub repository.
I have wanted to be able to play this game for a long time, and probably thanks to pandemic, I did the work to enable it to be shared with others. It has made a grand total of 3 sales this year, and that isn't really bothering me (the main frustration is the apple developer fee...)
There is various info (including a trailer of sorts) here:
Nice! What you can do is reuse the structure of your game, and make another one. Basically, just re-skin it.
Then, I think a better approach is to just give it away for free. Then, display ads, or sell tokens when they player dies.
Only display ads, in non-critical parts of the game, like when the player dies, or when he pauses the game. Or in between levels.
But, the biggest money maker, might be to sell tokens. Once in a while, you’ll get some guy that just drops $20 on your game. These guys are the whales.
Most of the development time was offline (on a train), so this basically ruled out anything to do with networking.
There are probably heaps of ways to monetize it (from what I can tell, the "buy a game upfront" model is mostly dead and everything is now free to play. But the reason I'm mentioning it here is because "I don't care if this succeeds".
It was written in C (using SDL2 as the library for getting things on screen). I did have a version in swift, but being able to do most of the development in linux made made things much better for my workflows.
Please don't support such dark patterns that are already used everywhere. Your comment honestly reads as if you don't want the game to be enjoyed and this isn't at all in the "I don't care if this project succeeds" idea of the topic.
I'm working on it. It is incredibly hard to get videos in the format that apple demands when you have limited hardware. I now have an M1 mac, and I was hoping it could do things in real time in the simulator so I could capture videos that way, but something about OpenGLES support or whatever that I don't understand means that simulators still run really slow.
I don't have an iPhone and my wife's phone is an SE, which apparently isn't high resolution enough for Apple to accept the video from. The video on youtube was recorded that way.
It is available in all the countries that Apple says they will handle the tax for. Any country where I need to worry about tax is unfortunately missing.
I wrote a meal scheduler - https://gitlab.com/dustin-space/meal-scheduler. It tracks ingredients we have at home, it has a database of recipes, it knows where we can buy ingredients online (for delivery).
It schedules meals for my shared household.
I can give it a request like: "next week I want to cook 4 vegetarian meals with 3 portions, and 1 vegan meal for 8 people for big shared dinner, and I want <=2 of those to be noodles.
It thinks for a bit with a planner (implemented in Minizinc - https://www.minizinc.org/ - with OR-Tools for a solver), and out pops a plan, like: "OK, you need to check you still have 500 g of potatoes, ..., then buy 1 kg of carrots, 1 liter of coconut milk, and here's links for the online store; I also checked those ingredients in stock; I also need cayenne pepper, you'll have to get it yourself because I don't know how to get it online".
The planner can understand things like "there's risotto rice, jasmine rice, arborio rice, etc.; some recipes ask for specific type of rice but some recipes are OK with any kind of rice". And there's more things I plan to support in the future, like ingredients that allow "use this ingredient or this other ingredient", or optional ingredients.
When we get a plan, we then check we have all the needed stock, and if we don't, we update the stock and replan. And when it's done, it generates an ICS file with calendar entries we add to our shared calendar ("today we're cooking gnocchi with pesto for 4 people, here's link to the recipe"). It also generates stickers, which you print on sticker paper, and you put them on the ingredients that will be needed to cook. The stickers ensure someone doesn't accidentally eat too much of them before we need them.
It's given us a lot of utility for our household. It lets us make tasty fancy meals without the toil of planning. It's quite rough around the edges - no fancy UI, lots of "you have to enter this textproto here and there's next to no validation". But I'm slowly improving it in my spare time to make it more convenient and useful for us.
Right now, the published part of it is not useful, it only includes like 8 recipes that we manually entered. But I'm trying to design it so that it can eventually be a platform, and ideally easy-ish to use for households.
That sounds like a fun application, both the usage and the implementation.
I wonder if you have any interesting example data-files that could be used with the model, preferable both something small and something larger? Would be fun to test the model locally to see how it behaves.
Unfortunately the model is wildly unoptimized. You can extract small minizinc inputs by `blaze test //plan:wrapper_test` which tests the model on simple use cases, the temporary files will go to `--test_tmpdir`.
I don't have a big minizinc input on hand. In our database it takes about 2 minutes to plan for a weeks meals. The model is probably wildly inefficient and optimizing it is one thing on the long term bug list.
If you have the time, extracting a large sample would be nice. Real-world usage is always more interesting than academic examples. Something that takes around 2 minutes feels like a sweet-spot for optimization as well, long enough to matter but not long enough to be annoying to experiment with.
This is cool I have a similar thought in mind as well as far as having specific meals/ingredients to buy and suggest at random with cost for next grocery run.
Looked at the repo, any screenshots of the UI/interface?
I don't have any on hand, but it's extremely bare bones. Plain HTML, no CSS, no JavaScript. Also I don't have a permanently running server yet, I just boot it up with a sqlite db in Git when i need to use it. Might respond later with screenshots if i remember when its more convenient for me.
More of a scratching my own itch kind of thing. Has over 30k registered users but I don't even get enough to pay for my server! LOL.. So meh.. doesn't matter...
Looks like you have a paid plan now, good for you! But $29.99/yr seems waaay to low. I would suggest making that the "personal use" tier and adding a third more expensive tier for businesses.
Because I launched it as a free app... I didn't have any confidence in it and at that moment, there was no way for me to accept payments internationally.
I recently revamped the app, added features like real-time collaboration, chrome-app integration etc., and put that under a subscription. But have no time to market or spread the word around. Moreover, I'm not sure how to get free users to convert over to paid so, that's why exactly why I think this site is an apt example for this topic.. haha!
Just an idea.. Try the wikipedia model maybe and ask for some donations if you've been using the app. I did this with an old product and it was helpful.
It's using my custom game engine, that was developed from scratch in C, the only dependencies are SDL2 and OpenGL. The engine and game were developed for the last 6 or so years (with breaks) in the evenings/weekends as my evergreen side project. The game was released last Halloween. I still support the game with patches after the release (both new features and fixes), one of them is expected to come out very soon. And to be honest I plan to do so in coming years. I was fun to develop and still is.
I have no idea how many people are using it regularly.
I think it's more than one, but I don't really care, I enjoy using it immensely and I've been writing ca. 1k words per day, consistently, for more than a year. Can't ask for more:)
I made a web app which gives you a breakdown of an image's color distribution. Lets you pick color schemes from a subset of the image's colors (specifically, those which form a convex hull, when visualizing the colors in RGB color space).
(Note: There are still some issues with showing images on iOS browsers)
I mainly made this to satisfy my own curiosity. I had the idea of forming a convex polytope based on an image's colors, and I thought it would be cool to be able to explore that in a responsive way through a graphical UI. Also it was a great way to learn Svelte and ThreeJS, which in many ways work rather well together! If anyone is curious to see the source code, I'm happy to link it too.
I am developing https://vocab-boost.online/ (smoke test page, extension is being reviewed in webstore). It is a Chrome extension to make language tests out of any page. I used this approach to improve my vocabular to pass German C1 exam.
Thank you! My crux was to expand the vocabulary using texts I enjoy (not the testing itself). One could call this "very active reading", where I try to fill in words from the context.
It regroups my personal data, and displays it on a timeline. Sort of like if Google Photos also included reddit posts, personal journal entries, text messages and other slices of life. It's a sort of "on this day", but for a single person.
I do it both as a way to back up files and photos, and as a way to keep an enhanced journal. It's also a way to divorce myself from companies that hold my personal data hostage.
It's already live, but I'm still extending it with new data sources (especially GDPR data dumps) and simplifying its structure for further development.
it's essentially a crowd sourced rock climbing destination filter for world class destinations. Most similar tools will have ALL climbing areas meaning you have to filter through a bunch of noise to find the real diamonds.
I originally built it to solve my own problem of "I don't really know where I should go on vacation" so I don't mind if it isn't successful because I actually use it myself quite frequently.
everyone I've showed it to thinks it's amazing and that it will do well but I have no idea how to spread the word effectively so I think it's destined for mediocrity haha.
How many users do you have? Were you able to grow an active community? (Forum or other).
The website feels lonely without seeing what other users are doing I feel.
according to google analytics my 28 day active users is 134. I haven't really tried to grow an active community yet to be honest. I feel like I need to fill out some more destinations(I'm missing a lot of south america and africa) before I pursue that.
Beyond that, there isn't really a strong need for anything social given what the core product does. On the other hand, you're right, the site feels very empty because of that... maybe I just miss websites from the 2000's haha.
I bought a couple 80meter ropes and I plan on doing some giveaway promotions to hopefully drive some traffic once the pandemic has subsided though. I'll have to think about a social aspect to the site I suppose.
To me it sounds like a nomadlist-type model could work.
What draws people in to nomadlist is the info (cities, budget, etc..). What hooks them is the community (forum, Slack chat, # of nomads in the city).
thanks! That is something I'll definitely add at some point if the site ends up becoming popular. Most of that info can be easily found on sites like mountainproject or ukclimbing though so I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
I'm pushing a few commits every week on a spatial note app.
It's a big alpha WIP a this point and as you say "I don't care if this succeeds" as I know I need it anyway and already use it every day, as well as a bunch of friends. I'm a visual thinker and to me notes in apps like Evernote always end up looking like digital soup. Putting everything on a big 2D map helps me tremendously. So far it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/WkuLENm.png
https://pingtype.github.io - it helps me learn Chinese, and I'm going to keep using it even though it doesn't have any traction. Generating word spacing, pinyin, and literal translations for interesting text, rather than just homework books, is far more motivating.
There's a lot more to Pigntype than just the front page - check out the links along the top. Particularly the blog, with the link to ways I've tried and failed to learn. [0]
Speaking, listening, reading, writing, and typing are all different parts of "learning Mandarin". All of them are hard.
Pingtype (translator) can help with reading. Pingtype (keyboard, at the bottom of the page) can help with typing traditional characters. Listening can be done with music, check out the Lyrics for some bilingual Christian songs (audio is on YouTube). Singing is kind of like speaking, and can be done in church without other people looking at you weirdly when you pronounce tones wrong. Writing will make your hand hurt, and many native speakers don't know how to write their own language [1]. Speaking is pretty much impossible without a tutor, and I'm still not conversational after ~4 years. I can understand some of what other people say, but talking is hard.
First I wasted a lot of time looking for how to study Chinese. The best thing to do is to consistently practice. Don't worry about grammar.
Just try learn new words everyday and then deliberately practice them with speakers.
No tool will help you with this.
Try to identify why you need to study Chinese. You'll learn much faster if you need rather than want to learn it.if you don't have a need try to create one.
Learning characters is much easier than you think. The hard part about Chinese for me is the pronunciation and when you finally get good enough to hold conversations understanding that people don't say what they mean.
I work on a mod for the original Quake Team Fortress. We’ve been getting roughly eight players a night for many years. That’s enough to play. That’s enough success for me. https://www.FortressOne.org
I usually do short projects (usually 4 months or less) so that I plenty of time to explore the subject while still short enough to avoid procrastinating.
Once I complete a project, I usually open-source it and write a blog post so I can have something to show it to somebody like a prospective employer. The most recent project I completed is a ray tracer made completely from scratch ->
I have a friend who has a car garage. He needed an easy way to document activity and to print this to his customers. All applications available were hard to work with(old, windows installers, expensive). I made him a web application: https://www.la-moldo.ro. After 3 years with no advertising other than a facebook page, app has almost 1000 users and users calling to thank me for this. Some even ask to pay but i have no monetization strategy.
I'm too lazy to open text editor, save a file and run a compiler, so I wrote a service that allows me to do that easily in a web browser. It's kinda buggy, and probably unusable for anyone that isn't me, but it's on the internet anyway.
It got a lot of attention last week, but I've been working on it since 2012, almost entirely for myself. It's impossible for me to know but I assume that until recently I had on the order of ten users at most…
I just published https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing which lets me (and maybe you) failover a PPPoE session between two FreeBSD hosts, so it's possible to do regular maintenance without losing the IP or impacting TCP sessions.
I used to let my DSL modem handle PPPoE and NAT, so failover was easy, but found out fragmented IPv6 crashed the leased modem, and the replacement modem also sucks, so bridge mode + a custom PPPoE client (built from netgraph pieces, I'm not completely nuts) it is. Sadly useful in 2021, because PPPoE is somehow still a thing.
I recently built a service (https://timetrigger.dev) that was mostly for fun and not profit. I wouldn’t say I don’t care about it per se but if it makes no money that’s ok. Hopefully it will at least get some customers though!
Re: the disaster - had to look it up [1], but it didn't help that you didn't answer any of the (pretty serious) questions raised in response to your announcement.
I answered the question in the first section of my blog -- I copied the `ArcTo` code from WebKit and I admitted it was a license mistake, and the copied code had been deleted 3 years ago.
This is good to know. My point was that your original post could've used more engagement on your part, in place. Especially when it came to the uncomfortable questions.
Apologies if I sound overly harsh, but you've got to listen to the feedback.
2 people complained about the same thing, and you gave feedback that was "it's over here, but not where you think it is" that's a UX problem in a README.
I went to look at the README me, clicked Sample App (with Screen Shots) and there's no screen shots. I gave up.
Make the screen shot, at least one, front and center on the main README.
2 were nice enough to complain, but you've got to believe so many more people would be interested if they could just see it.
Feedback is always nice and wonderful if people freely provide it, but I don't see - especially in light of this Ask HN topic - why one 'has to' listen to it? Or to 'complaints' for that matter, on someone's pet OSS project. Sure, it might be prudent to listen, but it is totally up to the maintainer to do so or not.
I use Twitter a lot and often find really good tweets and want to bookmark them in different categories, so I can browse them easily next time, unfortunately Twitter doesn't offer categorization, so I built a Twitter bot and website to store Tweet bookmarks : https://bookmarklite.com
So far just me and 2 other users actively using it, lol
Temporal NoSQL (XML/JSON, though relational data is theoretically possible as well) database called SirixDB, using a flavor of XQuery/JSONiq as a query language.
Dealing with the changes that occur to data over time can be complex. SirixDB simplifies it somewhat by recording the system time of every transaction. I'm actually writing a blog post to show some of the problems with changing data, and how SirixDB can be used to assist with the problem.
SirixDB also uses functionally persistent data structures to efficiently share data between revisions, preventing storage bloat.
I've been working (on and off) on the ecosystem/tooling for SirixDB for over a year now. I do almost all of the ecosystem work, and for the most part, there is only one dev on the core. While I think that SirixDB is at least feature ready, I don't think anything will ever come of the project. I wish the project would get some users though, that would be exciting :).
A suite of realtime chatrooms, for travellers to talk about their flights, and the airlines that run them.
The idea is to let the use enter their flight details into a search box, find the chatroom for their flight, and let others know what's on their mind.
Before the pandemic, me and my wife would travel to see family often enough to experience the mind numbing frustration of sitting in a cabin of a delayed flight. In some case, for hours at a time.
We were also shocked at how often airlines will change the T&C's, often to the detriment of the customer. Especially in regards to seating plans (separating friends and family), and baggage allowance.
I wanted to do something to help customers challenge airlines on such issues and, where possible, discuss solutions amongst themselves.
Techwise, while simple (Elixir, Vue, CouchDB), I think it works well. But the marketing side of it has been tough... It hard to know where to start.
Not sure if the idea is bad, if the timing is off (pandemic) or the execution needs improving in someway.
Are you limited to only chatting with people by flight number? Odds of more than one user on the same flight for a new app has to be low. Seems like it would be difficult to bootstrap an audience that way. Might help to start with airport chat by airport code, or just grab user's location and place them in the closest airport's chat room automatically. Also maybe add hooks for other messaging and chat tools.
Not by flight number. Each room has the airline and depart/destination airport as their key. A chatroom per airport would be an easy change, but would be a bit of a departure from what I intended the app to do. For example, the difference in customer service standards between British Airways flights across long haul and short haul products is huge. Almost night and day by my amateur reckoning.
I want to draw this kind of info out of the customer base.
As you don't need the flight number, the idea is that customers on the flight itself can make use of the realtime chat when appropriate, but prospective travellers can also peek into a room, review the chat, and ask a few questions like a regular forum.
I think you'd be better off trying to get a general flight chat off the ground first, before you worry about grouping people into individual chats per flight. Hard enough to bootstrap that, but if you did, I would recommend adding tags for Flight Numbers, Airlines, and Airport Codes, and attach those tags to the messages in the chat (as badges next above the message). Ask the user what their next upcoming flight details are. Let the user save those deets. Then once you've gotten enough users and the chat room gets noisy enough, introduce filters, where you can filter by airport code, flight number, airline, etc. Bootstrapping is hard, but I would promote the chat in various subreddits and facebook groups and consumer discussion forums or any interest groups about flying and travel in general.
Dev to Agency (https://devtoagency.com) - I am writing on how developers can start and run their own custom software agencies. This is from my experience starting, running, and selling my agency over 8 years...
I have never written before this, and not sure if it's something I will after this - but at this stage I need to "get it all out of my head". I don't foresee this being a forever project because ultimately I would have said all I want to say. But at this stage, it feels cathartic :)
It's a no signup way to send encrypted messages to people (think usernames and passwords etc) that includes the time limited decryption key in the email we send to the target user and when the target user views the email, the message is deleted from our system.
This way if the target email gets hacked in the future, the link is useless.
Much better than emailing passwords around the place.
Could turn it into a service, but just haven't gotten around to it.
I remember using this kind of service. The messaging platform I used to transmit the link tried to render a preview but that deleted the data because it was set to destroy after the first page view. Do you deal with that?
Never thought of it that way :) Once you send the secret though, it is not recoverable by the sender or us or the receipient without clicking the link in the recipients email within the expiry time.
It's not that I don't care about the outcome. I really hope it will be useful to many students, and I mean to publish it. But I am writing it primarily for me, as a way to keep being involved in mathematics even if I am not doing actual math research anymore
My finite element library (https://github.com/kinnala/scikit-fem). I consider it complete and add features only if my research requires, but I'll likely maintain it until Python is dead or I'm dead.
ScribeGen (https://www.scribegen.com/) is built with GPT-3 and can help content marketers, blog writers, or just about anyone get working copy to edit from as fast as possible.
The launch has been fantastic so far, but even if it's less successful than I hope the experience working with GPT-3 and other language metrics has been eye opening.
This past month I built a photojournal blog to host my street photography & assorted other shots from this crazy year.
I both wanted a place for my photos to be viewable in higher resolution than Instagram, as well as to establish an ongoing chronological log of my life as it unfolds - as some kind of crazy experiment I will probably soon regret.
I built this from scratch with Next.js and Typescript. Probably spent more time in Figma designing it than I spent programming! This was a fun excuse to learn Next.js though - amazing how far we’ve come since CRA.
I haven’t officially “launched” (promoted on other channels) yet, so I guess I’m soft-launching on HN right now :)
It's almost done, and I do plan to spend a little effort promoting it when it's complete, but it's been a great focus for me even if no one ever reads it.
I use a fair bit of infrastructure at my job that was set up by others. It was nice to go through the practice of setting it up myself.
I learned a good bit, but also it's nice to have all this knowledge written down in a place not owned by the company I work for. If I use GCP at future jobs I'm sure I'll reference this book myself.
The content is awesome! Have you considered converting it into something more accessible, like an mkdocs style?
I can recommend mkdocs-material. I'm doing blockchain video courses and I am using it for the study-materials - it's all markdown. And reception has been great.
Mine is sword making, and I will share the results with people doing it full-time and also the local HEMA people. Once I am done, so. That will really take a while, due to injury and time constraints. The material is there already!
The most tricky part is heat treatment. The only supplier I found able to treat sword blades, due to length, is using induction hardening. On paper, that seems to be a pretty good way doing it. Penetration depth can be controlled, almost no deformation. Funny thing is, nobody seemed to have tried it so far. Curious to see how it works out. Maybe I make a blade for destructive testing, but we'll see.
It's a platform for hikers, backpackers, and outdoor enthusiasts to share trail information via GPX files for interactive maps and elevation charts, notes, trail features, points-of-interest, and pictures.
After 6 years and almost 800 individual trails written and tracked (of my own), it seems like this project is a total waste of time some days. Other days it's super exciting to see traffic and knowing folks are out exploring something new. I also never thought anyone would pay money to support the site, so no complaints.
My wife runs an online fabric shop with a very... focused target market, and I’ve spent countless hours developing and fabricating a product for that shop.
It’s a pattern weight, essentially an 80mm wooden cylinder, 16mm thick, with a metal weight embedded inside.
We’ve sold a grand total of 50 (sets of five) but it’s been great as a way to learn to run my CNC router!
Coded it during the Christmas break and improved it a bit since. Scoring still doesn't work and it's rough around the edges, but people been praising it as a fun 5 minute novelty.
I built it for myself, but a few friends have already asked to use it because they are fed up with how bloated and ad-heavy most recipe websites are these days.
If you would like to try, the beta access key is currently set to 0qWgGgohJ88MO6sb
Both for you and anyone else considering signing up: Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress and I give no guarantees of any kind. If you'd like to get in touch regarding anything, my email is in my bio.
but I basically just made it to get better at kubernetes design doc writing, and play around with hasura, next.js, vercel and a bunch of other tech toys.
When I set out to learn new skills, I usually try to wrap them in a project. I also try to document and open-source the whole process, both for my own learning, but to enable other to leverage my failures and learnings.
Here are the projects I've done so far:
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 main draft 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.
https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade A full-size Arcade Machine I built from scratch (including, code, images and tutorial). It's done, but there's a lot of improvements that can be done.
Love a good / dubious project I can bang out over a rainy weekend. Finger.Farm is a modern re-implementation of fingerd in Node, but with an API and whatnot. I built it mostly as a demo for the Jr devs on my team who haven't had the opportunity to finger each other, but there are some ideas there I might bring back in other projects...
A calculator for the terminal I made to help me develop my gameboy emulator.
With it I can combine multiple representations (0x) (0b) (decimal), do bitwise operations while visualizing the bits, change the amount of bits used in each calculation and some other neat things :)
While all of these projects are amazing. Yours is the one that made me genuinely smile, thanks for that! There is something so charming and cheerful about creating a niche tool to support a niche tool.
Edit to add: Well documented too, full of surprises :)
I'm making https://extensionpay.com to make it super easy to take payments in browser extensions.
I care if it succeeds, but I don't feel super attached to the success. Maybe another way of saying it is that my bar is very low — if anyone uses it and it makes any money I'll be happy :)
That would be my open source robot Rover. I am making it to learn both about 3D printed robotics [1] and computer vision in unstructured environments [2]. It’s a really fun project, and success would be if anyone ever decided to clone or fork it and sell them. I’m considering working with a friend to design an aluminum version for low volume production for researchers, but I have a lot on my plate so I’m not sure if I really will.
Still it’s rewarding for me to work on. I started it after my startup failed and I was so exhausted working on something I wanted to succeed. So I made a totally non commercial open source project and it’s been a lot of fun.
Writing a book on how to advertise on google ads. Don’t care if I make any money; I see so much money wasted on Google ads I want to at least try to centralize good Ads practices.
Awesome! I spent a little bit of money playing around with this but gave up because it was clear that either (1) I was terrible at this, (2) adwords couldn't be good for a startup like mine, regardless of who is buying the ads, or (3) a combination of both.
I'd love to read your book! Contact info in profile.
Yeah, add me to the list. I'm happy to review -- i'm in the same boat. We were outsourcing our digital marketing but after consecutive failures and about $50k in smoke, I took a handle on things and our adspend is lower, performant and attributable!
https://blanq.io - A url shortening platform. I have been working on this app for a year now. With just one paying customer, I sometimes question its worth and existence. Yet, I slog everyday fixing bugs and adding new features.
What keeps me motivated is how much fun I have working on it. When I wake up every day, I look forward to hearing from my users. It gives me great pleasure knowing a handful of users love my product and use it on a daily basis.
While daily office grind bores me to death, working on my app is exciting.
The other factor is that it costs me $36 per month to run it - so cost-wise I don't mind since its low. I just need another customer to break even.
I don't think anything will change if it grows to a million users. I have not really thought about it.
Mine is ULeague (https://www.uleague.ru). It's a platform for collegiate esports in Russia. We automate Dota tournaments and organize our own collegiate events.
It was and probably is a playground to learn coding and trying new technlogies: steam bots, rabbitmq, microservice architecture, svelte, typescript. A lot of fun and experience.
We even built a seperate platform for organizers to manage the tournaments. For now we use it ourselves. Pretty cool to host Dota games from the smartphone. Players just get instant invites to the in-game lobby. And after the match is finished the score, the bracket and the stats are updated automatically.
Not much time recently for new tournaments. But very cool to get positive feedback from the community.
A simple (mobile-first) website that helps you convert volumetric recipes to weight. Made this during my baking phase of the pandemic to help me more accurately (and quickly) measure out ingredients.
That's cool. Although, it's beyond my comprehension that people still use volumetirc measures. It's not as though accurate scales are expensive or hard to use.
> You cannot control the actions of others, but you can always choose how you react.
> Don't let them steal your peace or your joy.
> If something isn't making you stronger, smarter, or better, then it isn't serving you.
> Even if leaving is hard, painful and takes a lot of effort… it's still better than wasting your life.
> Go where you are celebrated, not tolerated.
> If you're waiting for the "right time," it'll never happen… just do it.
> You can figure out how and why later.
> It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. #quotes #wisdom
I maintain a set of libraries in Go for XMPP (Jabber) and related technologies, https://mellium.im/.
While XMPP is still probably the most widely used federated instant messaging network (Matrix is the Internet's darling, but the sheer number of XMPP clients and servers is significantly higher, and even though Google and Facebook may have ditched it it's still widely used commercially and is pretty much the defacto standard in video game chat) so I believe it's an important piece of infrastructure that needs to exist in the Go ecosystem. Also I just wanna chat with my buddies and didn't like any of the TUI clients I've used very much.
I'm working on https://github.com/uberswe/beubo - It's a CMS similar to Wordpress but written in Go. It's still very early and it has a lot of bugs but what will make it powerful is plugins and themes. Performance is the biggest difference between Wordpress, plugins will most likely use RPC/gRPC which means they could be written in any language.
I'm mostly writing it for use with my own projects like https://tournify.io but it would be awesome if a few others found it useful too. It's a nice way for me to practice my Go programming skills.
Interesting project. I'm creating my own blogging CMS with a similar tech stack, Go + sqlite3 + Go templates. Works well so far. I plan adding plugins as well. Do you use a special library to support those?
I wasn't happy using Microsoft To Do for groceries so I made a shared grocery list app: https://bakalist.app
It's a pwa with offline functionality. It can suggest when you might need to buy something again and can also try to give an estimate on how much the current list will cost at the store.
I've been pretty happy using it for the last few weeks, so I don't really mind if the user base never grows.
I started building it for myself at first, scratching my own itch.
I don’t feel the same pressure as I had with my open source projects. I’ve been adding features when I feel the need for my own use (i.e. alerting system), or customers made a good point for why it’d be useful.
Also, I don’t work on stuff that nobody requested yet. For example, you can’t even change your account email yet.
So far it’s been fun working on it, and slowly getting paying customers. But it might take 1-2 years for it to replace my day job income-wise. That’s fine, it’s just about having the right expectations, and keeping up a sustainable pace.
It's a set of logos with hand-drawn aesthetic. It is meant to create presentations, software architecture diagrams, documentation, tutorials, etc. in the fastest way possible. They are also compatible with Excalidraw[0].
I'm doing the project with my best friend. He's an architect (the buildings type of architect, not a software architect), so he's drawing, and I'm building the site. We would like to make some money out of it, but we are mostly doing it for fun.
I thought most WebAudio wrapper libraries aimed at games were kind of useless or only really designed for simple usecases so I wrote my own. Also partly as an excuse to learn TypeScript, the horrendous web build architecture better and put something up on Github that was kind of an end-to-end project.
I’m building a minimalistic, 1v1 MOBA game (Dota/LoL) that’s all about grand strategy at the macro level, like chess. It is designed from scratch to accommodate AI development.
OpenAI gave up after beating 99% of players in a limited version of DOTA2. They essentially just figured out how to out-micro human players. We want to let players play alongside AI assistance, like a racing car driver backed up by their team of mechanics and engineers.
It's a tool to install (in one line) and manage reverse SSH tunnels for access to my geographically dispersed, outdoor Raspberry Pis (that are contributing to various aeroplane position reporting systems, my most relevant being Open Glider Network e.g. https://www.gliderradar.com/center/39.16414,-12.65625/zoom/3 ).
It’s purely for my own reference, as a sort of glorified bookmark manager, but other people are finding it useful too.
Technically, I built it with Jekyll as it was supposed to be a simple site. I’ve long got past the point where it probably should be based on something more dynamic, but can’t be bothered to do the rewrite. Instead I’ve wrangled Jekyll collections into something resembling a relational flat-file database.
I created this as a tool for me to memorize chess openings. Since then I added more tools like tactics and endgames where I took theoretical winning endgame positions with the challenge to beat stockfish in them.
The project is open source [1] written in Elixir using Phoenix and also utilizing LiveView for some pages like the search pages.
Since about three years I work on a classical Multiplayer Online Role Playing game.
Why I don't care about the outcome: (1) I think such a project is out of scope of a single person, (2) I simply don't have many skills required to make such a game, (3) I think people moved away from this kind of games, (4) I have a day job and only work on it when I have some idea.
But it's amazing to see how complex systems, built from tiny parts take shape over time.
I use it everyday and I like this way of splitting tasks and getting things done. There is so many options out there from a simple txt file to complex apps... this means there isn’t a one app fit all and I enjoyed taking a year off to prototype it and shape it around my paper bullet journal habits.
If people find it useful it’s great but I mainly pay 99$/yr for my own custom app which feels great
An engine rewrite of a Japanese roguelike I played a lot[1]. I like Emacs, so I decided to see what would happen if I tried writing it in the style of what Steve Yegge calls "living systems", where all the code is interactively callable in-game and reusable in mods. There is no scripting layer, the implementation and extension language are one and the same (Lua). I like to think of the engine as a massive programming runtime with a bunch of libraries and functions made for the sole purpose of modding the game. You could whip up a scratch buffer and start tinkering around with the game state or prototyping new mods fairly quickly.
The engine is not general purpose either, it's specific to the quirks of the original game. The number of weird ideas that I could graft onto it keeps increasing with each week. Yet, without stability and feature parity with the original, it's a long way away from having those things.
Another downside is going back and playing the original now isn't as fun, because I keep thinking I'm playing the rewrite and expecting bugs to pop up at every corner. Working on a project like this for so long affects your perception of the end result in ways you can't easily unsee.
Also gets pretty lonely working on something alone for years you're not sure anyone will care about when it's playable.
I've recently "finished" (still some bugs here and there and some planned improvements) https://genewly.com a simple tool that tries to automate finding new domains by generating new words and checking for availability. This concept is not new (I've seen similar projects here on HN a few times) but it was fun finally having a project where I got to do everything (meaning UI/UX, frontend, backend, models, etc.)
https://classical.page/ Follow your favourite classical music composer or classical works, and Classical Page will email you when the relevant music is going to be played in concert near you. This means you can get in quick with tickets and never miss out.
Launched in New York and London, more cities coming soon.
I've used it as a testbed for trying out Google Cloud technologies - it works with Cloud Functions, Big Query and Cloud Run.
Bit perfect cd archival tool; extracts all possible non-track data (lead-in/out, subcode, ecc data, etc.), while losslessy compressing audio and meta into a single archive file per disc. Enables binary reconstruction of discs down to the etm layer.
Well mine is domecode.com now, made it open-source too, build it as a platform that I wanted to succeed initially but then realized with everything else in my life right now, the probability is very less so now it's just out there, has some users too but whatever.
Built it from what I imagined an ideal platform for developers to learn anything, code anything and be productive would look like, of course it didn't turn out to be that but rather 25% of what I imagined.
I'll be using it for e-commerce clients, who want to feed the news of anything related to their business. Currently it's kinda slow ( not optimized for 1 million items with tags on my slow VPS, where i host a lot of test things )
I was building a small library [1] for WebRTC signalling by sending the signalling messages over Matrix (or Signal or Discord in future). Once the signalling is completed, the connection could be utilised for anything like peer to peer games, drawing boards, or just plain old chatting.
Since COVID people are using it less, but consumption is not all that low surprisingly.
And yes it's not 100% compared to a chemical test I know.
Same tech but better use than facial recognition.
It’s a free, private online journal with a focus on mental health.
I spent $4k usd in the domain name in 2015 and around another $4k in operating costs since then.
It has virtually zero marketing and has organically picked up around 1,500 users. I use it myself every day which is success enough for me. Fun project that has helped me land a few jobs, and my scant user base seems to dig it.
http://yetihehe.com/wcalc/ Weight calculator which applies simple control algorithm to help you lose weight. I've lost 10kg (huge success for me, never had such reduction before in my life), but it was probably too fast and I couldn't keep up. Stores data in browser, nothing is saved on server. Control algorithm - weigh yourself in the morning, enter your weight and it tells you how much food you can eat that day to steadily lose weight to target, currently pegged at 0.2kg weight loss a day. Only in polish, but I may translate and expand it if anyone thinks it would be helpful.
Field names:
Start (start date of diet)
Waga początkowa (starting weight)
Waga końcowa (detination weight)
Waga (current weight)
Przelicz (recalc)
Data utrzymywania (last day of weight reduction)
Limit jedzenia (how much can you still eat today)
After entering first 4 fields, you know how much you can still eat today. You can weigh yourself many times a day and it checks current hour. After last day of dieting, it tries to maintain target weight.
I've recently been getting more interested in the culture and history of streetwear so I started website interviewing streetwear startups to learn their stories.
I'm just doing it for the fun of talking to interesting people and a making content some people will enjoy.
A few people have already told me they liked the first interview so I'm happy with that!
It's an open source map to expose fossil fuel polluters. Add custom points to the map by pasting the URL to your Tweet. It can even do longer map stories through continuous Twitter threats.
We started development during the NASA SpaceApps hackathon, we're still going without much attention because we like the idea. Making money is not intended.
Unfortunately the map at https://map.decarbnow.space/ wouldn't load using an adblocker (ublock). Once loaded the map mostly works with an adblocker, but I couldn't get the popups or left hand panel working.
[clicky](https://github.com/daniel5151/clicky) is an emulator for Clickwheel iPods I worked on in the many boring months between University graduation and starting full time work.
Unlike retro consoles/handhelds, there doesn't seem to be much nostalgia in the public consciousness for OG iPods - which is fair, given that most people just see them as antiquated MP3 players. That said, some of the later models did have some pretty neat little games which have yet to be preserved, and can only be played by owning the original hardware.
It was a lot of fun hacking away at the project, and I'd made a surprising amount of progress given that I'd opted to roll my own full-system emulator (in Rust!) as opposed to using something like QEMU.
Who knows, maybe when I have more free time I'll revisit the project and keep pushing it closer to completion. Not sure when though - emulation is a real time hog when you're also juggling a full time job!
I started a blog about no-dig gardening. I think it could have some value to people because I am just starting out on my new vegetable garden, but I have some experience in the subject.
The site is very new and has some rough edges still.
I wrote a simple markdown to static site script in python, and am hosting on Netlify.
Had a lot of them. Like radio which utilizes mpd. Music can be added via youtube links of uploading. You could vote and talk in a chat. And had telegram bot integration. Had to shut it down, but it's opensource https://github.com/pawnhearts/aiohttp_radio
As a freelance web developer, I have registered 25+ domains for myself and my clients from various registrars including Namecheap, GoDaddy and Porkbun. I'm building a web and mobile app to manage DNS settings and domain name renewals for domains registered through many registrars.
Even if the project fails, I don't care as it solves my problem atleast
Turning Gmail into an infinite scroll like Twitter/Instagram. And grouping newsletters into topics to feel more like a RSS reader - https://www.getbreef.com
I start 99% of my emails with 'sorry' - I live in fear of going into my inbox, and so when I do it's a distinctly whiffy guilt laden experience, so I don't go in again for a while, and the cycle... well, you get the idea :-)
I've tried other addons to help (both using and making), but keep failing to invest the effort. In the end I went with "what's the simplest, speediest change that might have a lasting impact" and this was it.
It started as a weekend hobby in September, but I've been trying to polish it as more people have found it helpful. (This is hard work as I'm a dreadful aesthetic designer. It's more a case of 'monkey see, monkey copy the html').
https://www.3cosystem.com -- a simple startup events calendar. I'm surprised it is still up. It scrapes the Meetup API firehose, filters for tech events, and drops indexes on 65 cities world-wide. It never gets updates, and I'm surprised it still works.
A Steam dedicated Source Engine game server push notification service: https://ikamu.io
It’s been live and running for 6 months but generates no revenue, and has only a few users. It has monetised features, but no payment or subscription mechanism.
You add your favourite server ip addresses, favourite map names, then you get push notifications whenever any of those servers starts playing any of those maps.
I created it specifically to watch all Zombie Escape servers in CS:S and CS:GO so that I could play whenever servers started playing my own maps in order to record and gather feedback for improvements. Nowadays though, It’s really only useful for some custom game modes on Garrys Mod, Counterstrike Source and Counterstrike Global Offensive (such as Zombie Escape, TTT, Zombie Survival) as they have large map pools, and each play can last for up to several hours.
A wrapper for static analysis tools and similar things. There are a ton of other similar wrappers in this space, but it works for me, living on the command-line.
This change isn't live yet, but in the v2 (next month or so) it will a) fetch new Spotify releases by genre every week, b) rank them by popularity and extract top 10, and c) publish them as a blog post and add them to a playlist others can follow.
Basically the opposite of Spotify's generated (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) and other curated playlists, because it doesn't care about your listening history what so ever, you just pick a genre and know you won't miss anything.
Starting small (3 subgenres of house music), but once I nail it down, it should be rather easy to scale it up to dozens of genres with little to no time investment on my part.
A cloud / web based radio playout system. It's a bit of a niche but it'll get rid of the desktop(s) running some web radio streams.
We operate as a "voice tracking" service but need to cater for presenters with limited hardware. First goal is to give them audio library access, then onto log editing and voice tracking. Even if the current system continues to play audio "on air" for now.
My message queue https://github.com/queer/singyeong It's been closer to research into how things could work than a project meant to be used in prod, and I've learned a ton from it.
https://hanami.run an email forwardinf service and and also support logging incoming email and smtp. it replaces my own gmail now and I wont bother if its succeed or not. I needed it for my own and even my wife used it.
PaperVoice: Free audiobook app for LibriVox recordings ( Or classic audiobooks). We started this project to support our friends who wanted the audiobook for their books. Since Audible doesn't allow machine voices ( and human narrating is expensive). We decide to create a platform for these authors.
So, It's a platform where any author can publish their audiobook.
I wrote it based on some scripts I had, and then added Wireguard support and configuration generation.
I'm now working on making a proper backend so it can be used as a library (i.e. to run a few requests through different VPN connections, e.g. for web scraping for websites with geolocation-sensitive content), and also to learn a lot more about Linux system calls.
Eventually I'd like to expand that to use the network namespaces and firewall rules to allow for different virtual network configurations so I could use it for testing out distributed systems development too.
A big problem I see now is that lot of "positive" changes being added to existing protocols aren't backed by anything but existing holders beliefs that they will work, and being able to simulate changes/forks on local testnets agaisnt will make it easier to objectively say why an additional will be better/worse than another protocol/previous/future protocol changes.
I strongly believe big libraries will come with their own easy to plugin static analysis rules as the norm (a lot already do). I also believe writing static analysis rules needs to be easier. And that devs will write their own static analysis rules more regularly in the future. I wrote checkr as a small rope bridge towards this. Clearly we need something better than simple regex, yet less daunting than abstract syntax trees. But regex gets us a lot of the way there.
https://github.com/get-set-fetch/scraper - I've been working (intermittently :) ) on a nodejs or browser extension scraper for the last 3 years, see the other projects under the get-set-fetch umbrella. Putting a lot more effort lately as I really want to do those Alexa top 1 million analysis like top js libraries, certificate authorities and so on. A few weeks back I've posted on Show:HN as you can do basic/intermediate? scraping with it.
Not capable of handling 1 mil+ pages as it still limited to puppeteer or playwright. Working on adding cheerio/jsdom support right now.
I recently just launched this jigsaw puzzle website!
The reason I originally built it was for a few family members who were tired of how slow other jigsaw apps were. I wanted to build something faster and easier to use.
Even if it doesn’t take off, I have a few players already that want me to keep updating it. I don’t mind since it’s pretty cheap to host and doesn’t require any maintenance. It also serves as my first attempt at running a side business with an optional premium subscription tier. And the last thing is that it’s an experiment for me to see how well Svelte and Rust perform in production :)
My take on the todo list, with a feature the procrastinator in me appreciates. Don't forget to bookmark the URL (with UUID) if you don't want to lose your list, as there are no user accounts.
Whenever I want to try out new tech stacks, I add a project here. So far I've played with (and really enjoyed) Django+intercooler, ClojureScript + REST API and Phoenix LiveView, but have only made the bug reporting/feedback system public (that's the ClojureScript one).
https://github.com/sgrodriguez/ddt a decision tree lib in golang for building custom rules decision tree. It allows adding a pre-processing stage to the input before comparing it with the following possible branches of the tree. One of the default preprocessing stages in ddt is calling a method of a struct (CallStructMethod) and getting the attribute of a struct (GetStructAttribute) using reflection, so you can have a struct user with some methods and attributes and build a tree asking question about the user.
Create the tree programmatically or by json.
I've created a couple Android apps that I published. I did it mostly to learn and have fun. They weren't really successful and I didn't make any money, but there are/were (haven't checked lately) a few thousand installs.
I have literally just started one - I am putting my few minutes per day up on YouTube as a screencast - "The Software Mind".
The idea is to build up my "making and marketing software products" muscles.
I am doing this in non-work, non-family hours (what few there are) and really don't care what succeeds - it's just if I do t do something I will go crazy.
I don't want a billion - I just want to really try. (without the risk of joblessness and family etc)
The first one - reviewing my kids YT watching habits with them. Got a list of others to try.
I was actually pushed over the edge by a post recently of Andy Fry who is doing a 12 startups in 12 months thing. Had to give something a go after that.
Tic-tac-toe against a monte carlo strategist on iOS. Wrote the gameplay code years ago - nothing sophisticated just Apple GameplayKit, pretty dumb strategist but every once in a while it gets lucky. Dusted it off and launched it in the App Store just for something to do during the lockdowns last year. I'm still adding to it because I'm using it as a platform to test some augmented reality gameplay and learn motion graphics that I am using in a new game I have in the works now.
Surprisingly it has been getting a tiny bit of traction without any marketing.
Working on https://jalal246.github.io/dflex/ While a lot of people asked me why doing this because there are other solutions I am still convinced that the web is still away from a standard flexible layout. Because I know that partial solutions are not enough and hard solutions should not be normalized I am doing what I am doing. Releasing it's not an easy path I decided to go on with the project after I took a decision early at the beginning of this year to shut it down.
Video Hub App - Browse, search, and organize your videos.
Turns 3 years old this month. MIT open source, cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux). Selling it for $5 and $3.50 goes to a cost-effective (my favorite) charity AMF (Against Malaria Foundation). Would be great to get more donations to the charity - it's not a project I need to succeed financially.
I’m building https://nurturebox.in/ on the side. I made it to use for my boy but it felt like there’s some value for others.
However, pandemic forced to close all subscriptions and then the online education market boomed/over invested? with 100s of startups providing 1-1 online coaching.
Long term I believe that kids would get tired of online stuff and would want to do things with their hands and maybe it’ll get some steam then. Till then I’m designing the sheets and working on improving course design algorithms.
I'm working on getting an oyster mushroom farm going in Reykjavík, Iceland. It's a bootstrapped operation so it's going to be a slog of a run. I've solved most of the engineering problems associated with a low-tech mushroom grow, just need a place to put it. My problem is I need a small area (100 sqm) for packaging and an office and a sizeable lot to put 40' containers where the mushrooms are grown. I need good access to both 3 phase electricity and municipal water (both hot and cold). Hard to find those elements without going rural.
I've been writing a library to help me forecast my personal finances accounting for taxes, various expenditures, income, and unexpected windfalls. I started because I noticed that whenever I tried to forecast my future, I kept repeating a lot of code and thought it would be better to just build out a library I could re-use. Plus, it's been a cool opportunity to learn Rust :)
Great thing is that I built it for myself as a way of sharing my data science portfolio (https://nbs.isaacaderogba.com/spacy-entities-model)! I decided to make it a general tool in case others wanted to use (and pay) for it. There's comfort in knowing that there'll always be at least one user.
Mine is Perligo (https://perligo.io). It’s a digital writing critique group community I’m building simply because of my experience with software used in my Master’s program in creative writing. The program used discussion forums that were not designed for the types of collaboration and communication that happens in a writing group.
My goal is to launch this and have as many writers as possible use it. But if that fails, I know my old MFA cohort will use it with me, and I’m happy with that.
My friend group used to participate in some game jams in high school. Just two weeks ago, we decided that it’s time to take the best one of our creations and extend it so far that we can release it in some stores. We don’t expect to make a lot of money from it, we’re just in for the experience of creating something cool from start to finish.
I’m working on a Kotlin Framework to build Apps, APIs, CLIs, Jobs and Mobile apps, it’s available at https://github.com/slatekit/slatekit with docs at https://www.slatekit.com Been at it for a several years on and off, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to it, but I am using it to build a mobile app and self hosted mobile backend.
https://logicboard.com - A collaborative code editor/executor for interviews. I also built a code-replay feature that let's you replay the coding session like a movie.
my friends and I have been maintaining a music blog (https://groupbool.xyz) for the last two years. It started off as a place to formalize our iMessage discussions around some of our favorite tracks and artists. We have slowly been adding more content and the readers are mostly our other friends but it’s a creative outlet and fun to develop so we will keep it going.
I'm working on a design tool that allows you to create and export animated website backgrounds, with a growing range of templates.
Looking forward to seeing if anyone finds it useful, but I've primarily been building it so that I can generate particle backgrounds and gradients for websites.
I have a slow burn substack newsletter for the morbidly obese who are contemplating carbohydrate recovery. It’s never going to make any money and I don’t spend as much time on it as I want to but I’m glad I put it out there.
Hi all, I’m working on an app to help find and delete duplicate or near duplicate photos. I’m building it for my dad to help him consolidate all of the redundant family photos he collects, and I’m trying to do it quickly before he completely runs out of space on iCloud. I hope it’s useful.
It’s been a lot of fun to develop, and finally gave me a chance to try out Mithril.js which is a pretty sweet piece of minimalist software.
I'm currently building https://github.com/dealloc/wumpex, a library for building Discord bots written in Elixir.
Aside from being very helpful to learn Elixir (and Discord's internals), a couple of my friends are really into building Discord bots and have expressed interest in using it already.
Solve crossword puzzles with your friends, collaboratively: https://squares.io/
(Also great for solving solo.)
I built it because I wanted it to exist, and it's been fun to build. There's a small group of regular users, and I use it regularly myself. There's no monetization, though I have some thoughts about how that could happen in the future.
The Inkwell puzzles (https://squares.io/p/inkwell) are generally fairly easy (usually around NYT Tuesday level). If you need easier than that, you might have to search for puzzle archives. I remember the old yahoo/crosssynergy puzzles were quite easy.
Also, ask a friend to help! Two beginners can solve harder puzzles than either can individually, since you get the union of your trivia knowledge and also two brains thinking of different sorts of wordplay or cluing angles.
https://ideasfor.dev a simple newsletter/website for sharing my ideas with developers. It helps me learn how to manage a website and improve myself in writing alongside I've written this by Go, which I'm trying to improve my Go knowledge. I don't mind if I don't earn money from it, but I do my best.
Writing about the practice and publishing my analysis is improving me and making me a better investor. I don't really care if it will greatly succeed in driving audience - as the biggest benefit from it, for me, is the practice of putting my thoughts into text.
Tired of walled gardens and increased limitations of Chrome extensions, I'm building enough of the web extensions API to let me run them in my own desktop browser. Eventually I plan to build products from this project.
I'm working on it in my spare time and for now it's really just something for my own blog so I can get some sense of what people think of what I put out, but I'm planning on making some plugins for Gatsby.js and Wordpress.
https://dayzerosec.com - We do a weekly security podcast on exploit development and related topics/research.
Its a pretty niche target audience so its unlikely to make money or be any sort of object success. But its self-fulfilling; it has been great for keeping me on top of new research and trends that impact my job.
Helps people discover podcast episodes on business and startups, especially if you don't want to have to listen through 40 mins to know if you like it or not. It forces me to find a podcast that's 'insightful' and it's weekly writing practice. Even if it doesn't succeed, just the learning is worth it.
Is nothing related to code, but I recently launched a YouTube channel that does 30 second reviews of games. I'm working for a call center and that's what I can work on during my breaks.
Build a working instrumented prototype shed or cabin with a skytherm roof http://www.solarmirror.com/fom/fom-serve/cache/30.html as a possible way to address global warming or use in tiny houses, homeless shelters etc
Well I made https://www.lifepim.com which is a place where you can keep your notes and tasks online with a focus on privacy.
I love it - it works for me. I am the only frequent user, but I absolutely understand why others wouldn't trust an external website with personal notes, especially these days.
I started this two months ago and it's suppose to be a tool which helps me with personal planning. Sharing tasks with my wife, colleagues, friends and employees.
It's a side project and I still have a job, so I work during evenings and nights on it.
https://kanochart.com - free Kano surveys & analysis. I don't care if it makes any money because I love the method and I want more people to know and use it. Also, I wouldn't know how to monetize it. It hosts 5 to 10 new surveys per month. Costs me around $10 / month.
Wordo. An English dictionary that my friends and I built. It has a handful of active users, who swear by it. Other than that, no one uses it. It's existed for a few years and I keep pushing small updated a few times a year, it makes me happy :).
An app to note down the final scores from games with your friends to find out who has the most points at the end of the year. We play it with Doppelkopf (german card game) but it can be used with any kind of games where each player has a score in the end.
Applying CV to detect sensitive data in images, redacting on device https://gorp.app/
The extent to which healthcare providers have to go to send production screenshots of their apps paired with my itch to apply CV, done at a YC hackathon a while back
Armyknife.net: a website with all kinds of developer related tools (yes, the 1000th one, I don't care :P I just enjoy creating it and don't expect any big source of income from it): https://armyknife.net/
I run a podcast where I speak to remote marketing teams from across the world - https://anchor.fm/remote-marketing. I publish an episode every 2 weeks and the podcast is entering its third year.
Traverse (https://traverse.link/) - spaced repetition platform for connected knowledge.
It's a success even if it can introduce to just a few people to the joy of spaced repetition learning
No where near as technical as most of the stuff that's posted on here, but feel like if this could somehow gain a community following it'd be really helpful for a lot of people.
- portable spagettis cooker for business men.
- uber laundry site
- barkingdocmap.com
- google style with one field: what is your budget. and results populate according to your budget (trip, shows, things to buy...)
- many more
A vocabulary studying tool centered around writing sentences but still providing some support. I mostly work on it for myself because I am unhappy with Memrise, Duolingo and similar systems.
My hobby is trying to numerically simulate a nuclear weapon explosion, with hydrodynamics and reactivity calculations. I truly don't care if this succeeds. :)
NimbleText.com has always been like that for me. I use it so much that it’s worth building for me alone. (Others do use it too which is nice but not required)
Not yet. I just completed the script, slides, and code demo for part 1 today. It's three parts. If you're interested, drop me an email. It's my handle + gmail. When I start uploading, I'll give you early access.
naive idea: this should have a place to make a curated list.. or maybe not maybe these projects shouldn't be too popular, but I find them much more exciting than 'yet another <trendy app> variant'
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638
Some of you should consider applying to YC as well!