https://bauble.studio/ is a lisp-based procedural 3D art playground that I hacked together a while ago. It's fun to play with, but it's a very limiting tool: you can do a lot to compose signed distance functions, but there's no way to control the rendering or do anything "custom" that the tool doesn't explicitly allow.
So lately I've been working on a "v2" that exposes a full superset of GLSL, so you can write arbitrary shaders -- even foregoing SDFs altogether -- in a high-level lisp language. The core "default" raymarcher is still there, but you can choose to ignore it and implement, say, volumetric rendering, while still using the provided SDF combinators if you want.
The new implementation is much more general and flexible, and it now supports things like 2D extrusions, mesh export for 3D printing, user-defined procedural noise functions... anything you can do in Shadertoy, you can now do in Bauble. One upcoming feature that I'm very excited about is custom uniforms and embedding in other webpages -- so you can write a blog post with interactive 3D visualizations, for example.
Am I right that the output of the lisp code is ultimately a plain GLSL shader (like one might find on shadertoy.com)?
I built a SDF-based rendering system (2D) for my game, and one of the big hurdles was how to have them be data-driven, rather than needing a new shader for each scene or object.
Would be curious if/how you tackled that problem (:
Yep! It just outputs GLSL. It doesn't do anything smart -- it's a single giant shader that gets recompiled whenever you change anything, so it wouldn't really work for something like a game. I mean, it could handle like basic instancing of the form "union these N models, where N<256" but there's no way to change the scene graph dynamically.
I've done this for a project where the SDF functions are basically instructions, and you can build up instrictions on the CPU to send to the shader. and then the fragment shader runs them like a mini bytecode interpreter. You can tile up the screen to avoid having too many instructions per fragment. Kinda wild idea and performance may vary depend on what you're doing
The CPU builds an RPN expression (like "circle, square, union, triangle, subtract"), and the shader evaluates that in a loop.
I wasn't able to find examples of other people doing similar, but it seemed too useful to not be invented yet (:
Do you have any links to your work?
I'm writing some blog posts for my approach, but haven't finished them yet.
> You can tile up the screen to avoid having too many instructions per fragment.
I don't quite understand this part... If a given SDF needs N instructions to be evaluated, then how does tiling reduce N?
> performance may vary depend on what you're doing
Yeah, fill rate was not good enough with a straightforward approach, so I had to cache the evaluated distance values to a (float) texture atlas, then use those to render to screen. Luckily, standard bilinear filtering on distance values produces pretty decent results.
Yes sounds like the same thing! I also couldn't find anyone else doing it. Sounds super interesting what you're doing so I'd love to read your blog post when it's done if you want to drop me a message/email.
My project was using 2D SDFs for UI which meant you could use a bunch of primitive shapes and union/difference between them, and also add outlines, shadows, glows etc. This means that if you tile up the screen and use a union between two rectangles, only the tile with the overlap needs to calculate the union. It's a little more complicated in 3D with frustum culling.
I was doing it in webgl which doesn't have storage buffers and so I had to use uniforms to pass the data which is a huge limitation. Apparently webgpu could be better so I will try to figure that out one day. But it is early prototype so no links or anything yet.
I’m a tech nerd rare coin & currency dealer! I took my two hobbies and combined them into a real business and I’m having the time of my life. Just launched a proper retail site here:
About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.
The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.
I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).
Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:
I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.
Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.
I have a question - I've seen TikToks of people who buy rolls of coins from the bank and sort through them for rare imperfections then sell them on eBay. I've always wondered whether it would be possible to develop an automated system where a camera takes high res photos of the coins on a conveyor belt, compares to a DB of known imperfections and sets them aside?
Is anyone doing this? It's an interesting business model as the product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss.
Nobody that I know of is doing this, and see no reason why it wouldn't be possible from a technical standpoint. I think the only reason I can imagine NOT to do is that the ROI probably isn't that high in reality. Now, granted, I don't watch the coin TikToks because 95% of it is clickbait, exaggerate, etc. But my actual impression is that there simply isn't that much actually-valuable material out there hiding in bank rolls (despite what TikTok says).
Most of the people I know who do bank roll hunting and doing it because it's just kinda fun and there's a thrill when you find a silver quarter from 1964 (worth about $5) hiding in a roll of otherwise-normal quarters. But so much of the good stuff has already been plucked from circulation.
Having said that, nothing should stop a good hacker from doing something just for the hell of it :)
do you know why vendors take credit cards, square and applepay, even though those services charge several percent fees? part of it is for convenience for the customer, but another part is that shuttling cash around to the bank and back is time consuming, risky, and takes you away from running your business (let's say you are a breakfast place, you don't make your own cups and napkins or farm your own eggs and coffee either)
>product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss
you're grabbing the expense part of the business that everybody else is trying to shed. Let's talk also about time value of money. All the money that you've invested in cash is not making money passively as other investments do. Compared to putting the money in the stock market, you're losing 7% a year on this scheme, plus the expenses of running your business, and opportunity cost of not doing something else that generates income.
I did this for personal collections a while back and went through a lot of Canadian quarters to get one from each year and never even found the 1991 I was looking for which is somewhat rare. I guess if you do it full time or automate a bunch maybe you could make money, seems hard though.
One of my favorite design elements is the Guilloche patterning on currency, along with the history behind the use of Guilloche as a form of anti-counterfeiting.
Your site is very simply visually appealing.
Also - I like to order $2 bills from the bank. You can order then, mine delivers them on tuesdays - and they give you a stack of brand new $2 sequentially serialized bills. They are great for tips and gifts.
100% agree! I often get folks asking if their $2 are valuable, and tell them exactly what you do -- no, alas, they're not worth more than $2, but they are super fun to leave as tips because people still get a kick out of 'em.
Infra: I was hosted on Google Cloud for a while -- literally a single VM running Docker Compose, but I decided I wanted something a bit more flexible and interesting, so last month I switched everything over to Fly.io and I am incredibly happy with them. It's just so easy and fun to manage.
The retail site (rarity7.com) is just a small VM running a Crystal server process to handle web requests. Image hosting is all done on Cloudinary. My backend / inventory management / trading + research engine is a separate Crystal process in a separate VM. Both connect to a Fly Postgres DB. There's one other service which is a small python process on another VM which is doing inference on my regression model. That's super lightweight and I don't need any GPUs to do the inference (tabular data is nice like that).
Overall it's really nothing fancy and it works quite well. A few web-serving VMs and an inference service for my pricing model. I train/retrain the model a few times a year on a local box (my repurposed gaming rig running a 2080Ti).
I did it all in about 2-3 years. I was a big collector as a kid but didn't get back into it in a serious way until 2021. Becoming an authorized dealer is basically, fundamentally about building trust. The whole coin industry operates in a very old-school relationship-based trusted way. To become a member of most professional orgs or become an authorized dealer, you need to have 5-10 VERY solid references from other members or authorized dealers, and the only way to get those references is to be a part of the community, build trust, and build relationships by doing business with others (which means honoring your commitments and your word and writing good checks, etc.). In the end, you need to ask 5-10 people to personally vouch for you, so they'd better know you and actually trust you.
This is great, my brother is a history buff and a few years ago I bought him a Hadrian coin for his birthday. I'll look through this and see if I can find something else he'd be interested in, holidays are coming up and I'm always looking for nice gifts.
EDIT: is there any way I could set up an alert for when you add some non-US currency into stock?
That's awesome and a very thoughtful gift for him! Yes I'm planning on building alerting - BUT - I'm probably not going to expand beyond US-based stuff for the foreseeable future. It's just the niche I know and even though there's a big wide world out there, I haven't spun up my brain to learn about it all yet.
If there's any country in particular you're looking for, shoot me an email. I know a ton of other dealers in the business and I'd be happy to point you to someone who might have something he'd enjoy.
Awesome -- thanks! Tell your son to join the Instagram coin community if he hasn't done it already - there are tons of kids & adults on there and it's a real community that meets up regularly at coin shows, etc. Send me an email and I can give you a heads-up on some starter accounts to follow and get involved.
So let's say I have a few hundred silver dollars. Is this a tool to help me sort them, or does such a tool exist? Like take a picture and it identifies it, looks for common errors, and provides a base price estimate?
There really should be, but the fact is there isn't a tool that does this yet. It would not be deeply hard to build, but it would mean training a model which means getting good enough training data which means taking the time to actually do it. It hasn't been done because it requires someone who is deeply knowledgable about coins AND someone who knows how to train a model and build an app, and the fact is that intersection is pretty small (it's me and probably 20 other people? Give or take). This is very much on my long-term roadmap.
In the short term, the easiest way is to find someone who does this (eg me) and just email me some pictures. I'd be happy to tell you if you've got anything good. The old school neural net between my ears can assist.
That's fair. I have to imagine that there's a market for a product like that. My mind goes to auctioneers and estate sales. I know the local auctioneer would kill for a tool like that.
Something to keep in mind if you do build that: have a one time purchase or month long purchase option. When my wife's grandma died, we had to go through her coins looking for good ones. I would've killed for something like this but for a month.
Great question. Authenticity is easy - I mostly deal with certified coins, which means they’ve all been authenticated and guaranteed by a 3rd party service which stands behind their mark (they will pay you for the coin if they make a mistake, which does happen).
For shipping, that’s just pretty standard across most industries - I have shipping insurance and if USPS fails, they’ll pay for it. But losses happen and it’s just a matter of business (thankfully they’re rare).
Yes! Very much so. And in fact, the grading services are owned by the same parent companies. NGC and PCGS are the big coin graders and I think their card graders are CGC and PSA respectively?
I’m working on a collaborative ebook reading app. The idea is that you can create a reading group, invite people and then share comments and highlights and see each other’s reading progress.
It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for example to read a book with a group of friends or with a work team, but there’s lots of other possibilities including author reading parties, proofing and education. Got the basics of it working now, need to polish the UI and add the commenting and highlighting features.
I’m using Next.js and Supabase, neither of which I’ve used before so it’s been a fun but often frustrating process. Claude has been an amazing assistance, fixing my mistakes and countless type errors.
Ooooo.... Idea! One thing I've always wanted is an "asynchronous" book group. Basically, some way to tie the questions and conversation to a page or chapter, and then you can follow along at your own speed. Just passing the idea along since I'll never do anything with it.
Storygraph[1] does this with their Buddy Read feature. My wife and I use it to read books together and leave messages about different happenings, which only get unlocked when you mark that you've read up to that page in the book. It's a great feature, and we really enjoy it.
I wish there were discussion websites for media like this. If I've finally watched a tv show, everyone is already talking about another season. I want some sort of "season one insulated forum" or something. For all those that are in the same "temporal" spot.
That’s a cool idea, thank you for sharing. Yes, I want to tie conversations to specific locations in the text, but I love the idea of being able to set discussion questions as well. Will look into that.
Hey man, it is an amazing idea. I have been thinking to build something similar.
I am building reading clubs for my custom library - on top of crypto tech, and in the process, I have experimented with several book reader tech. pdf.js, muPDF and some other tools, which one did you settle on?
That’s a fascinating project, thanks for sharing. I’m using epub.js as it already has things like annotations and highlighting and it’s fairly easy to override the book styles.
From the research I’ve done, it seems that most ebook reader libraries are old and not very well supported. Haven’t considered PDF readers yet.
Is it going to be P2P? It would be much more easier to handle book versions and other such technocalities if it is, allowing people to share the EPUB via the platform and stay in sync
This is a hierarchical representation of any given piece of knowledge.
It starts with a tree root node that you specify (let's say Kung fu), then it branches out into multiples subcategories (techniques, styles, philosophy, weaponry, ect...) and then you can click on these subcategories to branch out even more into the graphical tree.
This is all generated on-the-fly with Claude 3.5. There is no limit to what knowledge you might explore.
The killer feature is that it is totally free and does not require to login.
Just click the link and have fun. I'll keep it free like that, as long as I can.
I hope you like it guys because it is the best project that I have up my sleeve.
As a marketing spin for this - consider packaging it into Nvidia NIM format and make it generate 3D graph as 3D OpenUSD scene. From where I'm standing this route has a lot of potential.
Also if you never looked into it there is a project called wikidata. There each object contains a unique ID and hierarchy, which helps build semantic web. Exploring their data using your interface might be effective. (please check similar projects though as an idea seems straightforward and someone might have already done that for them)
You're a legend mate I know nothing of what you say, but it is very interesting. It is time I brush up my skills and I thank you very much for the clues! I'll look it up.
Making a note to try this when it's not slashdotted (hackernewsed?).
This sort of thing is _very_ interesting to me, and I rather desperately want something like to this tied to listings of books.
I would like to read more diversely --- at one time I was trying to read one book from each LoC division, starting at the top/broadest (so A--Z), then iterating down, but this got to be exhausting because it was difficult to determine which book to read.
A later effort was to read biographies of famous people to my children in chronological order as they were growing up --- dry run was the very simple set of U.S. Presidents --- but again researching and ordering was a big problem.
So, my hopes for this are that it includes footnotes/references/links to supporting material (perhaps affiliate links on Amazon would be one way to fund things?) and that it is possible to click through to find information on specific technical topics as well as general explanations.
Thanks. I had tried that but the AI keeps inventing false books or providing fake URLs. When the AI will be proper I will include that feature, for sure!
A message to everyone: Thank you for your interest and comments and mails and votes and feedbacks. I am sorry the service was interrupted & down & I had to makeshift with ugly donation links in a ugly sidebar for hours, ect (I got 5€ donation! not crazy but it was actually useful)...
Anyway I managed to get it back running, and running strong! Mail me if you have nice words to say or if you think we can do partnerships. I received nice proposals already, which should improve the service significantly in the coming days. The goal is to entertain and educate, and as free as we can! haha, modestly. Thank you again for everything!
This seems really cool and I'm excited to play around with it once it's up and running properly again. These type of things are my favorite applications of LLMs.
A while back I made something similar in the form of an incremental "clicker" game where you split things ad infinitum: https://lantto.github.io/hypersplit/
It is back and running, and running strong! Enjoy. Your game is nifty maybe it'll give me ideas. There could be an option to hold Ctrl to split branches vertically without branching down, ect... cool
Nice work. An AI populated mind map. I like it.
Just missed a way to go from a node to more textual content if I want to know more than just a bullet list. E.g. an abstract-style paragraph, or even just a web search for the string.
Good idea mate I'll probably include a Amazon "search list" for books, and a video "search list" for Youtube, ect... Might be cool. If I try to provide direct links I get a lot of false results but I didn't think of adding web searches themselves.
(There was a feature to generate dissertations on whatever topic but I had to turn it off because I believe it was abused and that cost a lot of credits. I'll try to add it more securely very soon.)
Love this! Such an interesting UI choice. Would almost prefer new branches to appear further out to the right instead of overlapping existing words, and then auto-scroll me to the new spot to reduce clutter when browsing several tiers in.
The context sidebar is great! Maybe the first good "AI search engine" UX I've seen (most attempts copy Google look/feel which is more suited for web page results).
This is a very fun idea and I’ve had similar thoughts, without yet turning my mind to execution. Bravo. Is there somewhere I can follow more of your work in the future?
Hi cyrillite. Send me an email with "subbing" as object: pierre.treeofknowledge@gmail.com
Then I will gladly send you what I got, whenever I get it.
I will not forget. Thank you, friend!
I'll probably make a full blog soon for added convenience. (it'll be about AI products & production)
If you want a bite of some of my other work here is a AI game I made & which got totally ignored:
https://lywald.itch.io/the-fall-of-mankind
I tried to monetize it, that was a bit lame, but in the next few days I'll release it as free.
Well, since you said Kung fu, I started at martial arts and 5 clicks in it's telling me about the self defense applications of swinging from chandeliers. This is yet another pile of LLM word vomit.
> One innovative approach involves using ceiling fixtures to gain leverage and mobility. This concept can be particularly beneficial in scenarios where traditional movement options are restricted.
...
> Utilizing ceiling fixtures for movement in self-defense is an innovative method that capitalizes on environmental elements to enhance escape techniques. By integrating body mechanics with strategic use of surroundings, individuals can increase their chances of successfully evading threats in confined spaces. Always prioritize safety and practice these techniques to ensure readiness in critical situations.
I like this project but I don't think I agree on the 3 branches that I see when I open the website.
Science is not a standalone category. In fact science is directly connected to mathematics which is directly connected to philosophy (through logic for example)
We might argue that also art is an extension of philosophy (e.g. finding objective or subjective beauty).
Probably Claude doesn't agree with this definition.
I agree with you. Truth is this was the first branching generation which I generated, and so I kept it for the sake of history. If you manage to create a better "starting branching tree" which looks nice and feels nice then I might take you up on this.
I'm sorry guys but my API key is out of funds until tomorrow's or maybe tuesday's paycheck. I'm only a student and so my money is very limited. I'm sorry this is pathetic. I didn't expect to have so much trafic these last few days, and then with this thread. Come back soon!
What do you think that I implement BYOK (bring your own key), does that interest anyone so that it is never down for them but they have to pay Claude on the side? Is anyone interested?
Thanks, fastneutron! I might give you the code if you send me an email and you explain your intentions. No problem. For now, it is not full blown open source because I don't want the added headache of managing that (double checking security & quality... I have no time for this is a sideproject).
I have this creative writing website where writing friends can write branching fiction novels together. Sorta like choose-your-own-adventure, but more literary - third person past tense, actual characters and narrative arcs. Configurable number of choices at the bottom of every chapter, and as you're reading, if the choice label doesn't link to a chapter yet, you can write it. It's been floating around since 1996 or so, so my big project lately has been upgrading it. v1 was perl and gdmb files. v2 was php and codeigniter, and it's been limping along there for several years. When ChatGPT came out, I rewrote the whole thing for scala/play and that was super fun. Moved from ubuntu14 to ubuntu20, mysql5.5 to 8.0, etc. I'm done with the rewrite now but am still messing around with launching it, upgrading to ubuntu22 (done today), figuring out if I want to update jvm/scala/play before launching, etc. All this for only a group of six writers (so far)! But collectively we've written more than 425 chapters across a handful of stories, 450,000 words, and had a lot of laughs. I even wrote a snazzy graph visualization thing that animates the structure of the story maps. After I finish launching the thing on hardware/software that actually isn't EOL, I might open up membership to others.
Funny story, I had it released in the mid-90s. There are versions of it still on the wayback machine. You younger folks might not realize this but there was a time where there were a lot of fun internet happenings, and there was no spam. People hadn't figured out how to spam yet. There were also no T&C's or laws governing membership accounts. The first version of my site had no membership accounts. People would just create a chapter and assign a password for that chapter so no one else could edit it. And it was on GDBM, which could only handle one simultaneous connection.
Eventually, two things happened: the site got busy enough that people started experiencing errors when trying to submit/edit to the same story at the same time, and, spammers started realizing they could write chapters about certain erectile dysfunction medications. :) They also guessed some chapter passwords and overwrote them.
I didn't have a quick fix for this, plus I had ignored the site for a while, so by the time I realized, the site was overrun with spam and all my authors (who I had no way of contacting, remember: no user accounts) had disappeared.
So I took it offline for twenty years. I had copious backups, and over time I would reconstruct the story history. I had learned php by then from my career, and so I started rewriting the whole thing, which was honestly a huge project, especially because now every chapter has revision history. I had tried relaunching the site a couple of times without attracting any writers.
Then Covid happened and I was able to relaunch it and find writers. It's been fun since then. I have approximately zero commercial intent for this; I can't bear to turn on ads in the middle of an immersive reading/writing experience. Maybe someday paid accounts for extra features or a share of the copyright. My most fun idea for any sort of revenue is printed books for completed stories, or a mobile app "reader" with more features than ebook software. I think a wide release could be counterproductive since all the members currently kind of know each other, chat on Discord, and have writing nights. So it'll probably be a slow invite sort of thing.
I like this too! Kind of like those picture drawing games we used to play as kids, someone draws the head and neck and folds it over, someone else continues the lines... it always ends up in something crazy but entertaining.
I noticed my 2.5 year old niece likes zooming into photos of bugs on her mom's phone. I'm making her a little "game" where she can flip over rocks and find different bugs and other weird surprises.
A few months back, I posted an essay here about how I think we are entering an age where the personal library will become an asset class unto itself [1]. This is due to a combination of the advent of semantic search and the revival of personal knowledge management in the deluge of our age.
As such, I’ve been working on the software to bring this vision to life, which is called Your Commonbase (a portmanteau of Commonplace Book and Vector Database).
In short, the purpose of the work is to create a data structure that works the way humans store, retrieve, and share information. By making these three elements as close to zero stress as possible, you catalyze creativity through remixing and augmentation of memories. My hypothesis is a lifetime building a Commonbase creates an idiosyncratic system, filled with the interpretations of an individual or a group. This individualized structure then creates demand that others want. I.e, a curation of all of the books you have read, organized by the marginalia you have added to them. This is a system people would pay for, and also a system that becomes more valuable over time.
I’ve been “working in public” by posting updates on my site [2], and am just beginning a small waitlist alpha testing phase (email me if you want in!)
I've read a ton of your writing on this topic. There is still much more, but I'm tired. You described the problem well, and if your software alleviates it, then I see the value.
I'd like to try the software if it'd available please. But I'm not sure where it is or if it's out yet. Is it the Obsidian template you linked here, or is it a separate software called Your Commonbase? Because the Obsidian vault has a different name.
I have to say that the irony is hilarious that I can't find this information in the (well written) sea of information you posted. But then of course I'm not using your solution yet!
The problem with existing knowledge management systems is that they all eventually become victim to scale the operator can no longer manage.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
You have a chaotic system of notes, dispersed throughout random pieces of paper and digital notes on your phone and computer. You have a relatively easy go of it when saving new notes (its as simple as pressing "New Note" or pulling out a new sheet of paper), but as you add more notes to your system it becomes harder and harder to find a particular piece of information. The cost of adding stays the same, but searching goes up and up. Scenario 1 causes us to eventually succumb to chaos.
Scenario 2:
You have an extremely rigid system of tag management, headings, sub-headings, sub-subheadings and sub-sub-subheadings. This taxonomy makes it easier to find information...at first. The problem with these systems is that they require a ton of manual maintenance, and they also make it easy to find certain "classes" of information, but fail at geo locating others. Much more perniciously, this scenario eventually stifles creativity as it falls prey to too much order. The cost of searching stays roughly the same, but the cost of insertion goes up and up.
(I am personally guilty of creating a system like this btw [1][2]).
Both of these systems eventually begin to become inert holders of information, as the processor (us), begin to fear them and stop working with them.
IMO, the closest technology to managing human information well in my opinion is well over two thousand years old, the commonplace book [3]. Simply put, a commonplace book is extremely resilient to chaos due to its centrality of information, but even people like John Locke had to create indexes to fully utilize them [4].
This changed recently with the advent of vector databases[5]. It turns out that commonplace book entries are the perfect form factor to benefit from an address in vector space, since entries are atomic. In simpler terms, the vector processing layer handles the order, allowing our system to "live" and assign headings/tags/etc. as it evolves. Vector databases love commonplace books as well, because many vector solutions have way too much noise as they chunk and store useless information at quite a disappointing ratio.
My system differs from current offerings because it makes no attempt to automize parts that are meant for the human, and makes no attempt at making humans do the work computers should be doing. Ergo, creating a type of symbiotic relationship.
Finally, a note on why I use the term "asset". An asset should become more valuable over time, and particularly, each individual component of the overall asset class should be worth more (e.g. $1 in a bank account of $20 is inherently less valuable than $1 in a $20MM bank account, because it grows slower). So in our scenarios above, the transmutation of information to knowledge peaks out at a logarithmic curve, subject to the scale issues I mentioned before. Old entries appear less frequently in even the most ordered systems, and when they do, it is only in one particular context. My system stores time of entry in the metadata, but since I use vector addresses, the information is accessible in many different ways (dog can be found when query == canine, fido, perro, mans best friend, etc...). An informational asset should scale linearly, and each action of create/read/update/delete should improve the health of the overall system.
There's much, much, much more I could say here, but I'll stop for now :)
I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.
It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.
I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released.
I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.
Steam recently made some changes that are pushing game studios away from prologues. Instead, demos can have their own steam pages. Plus all hyperlinks will soon be banned.
I also noticed your game has been up on Steam since January 2022 and by the looks of it, you've done about zero marketing (steamdb.info). Hope that's on the horizon, it's a pretty darn important part of game development now!
Thank you! If you replace a prologue (as standalone game) with a demo, can you transfer the wishlists?
Marketing isn’t my strong point, if I ever had the money to make another the first person I’d hire would be marketing. My boss owns a PR agency and she said she can help in getting it out to journalists but that’s about it. I tried CPC and it came in at about $1/wishlist.
In case anyone has the same problem, I asked and they can't. Luckily I only have couple of hundred wishlists on the prologue so I'll switch it out easy.
This looks fantastic! Love the premise & well done for what looks like an incredible solo effort. I was tech lead on Ozymandias & have another minified 4X in the works at the mo & putting out feelers with publishers etc. Sounds like you plan to self publish this one but I’d love to chat & see if there’s any way I can help with your launch, whether just through advice or via introductions etc. You can reach me at biggles (at) bravobravo.games though I may end up finding a way to contact you directly first :-)
In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.
If this one does alright my next would be a crusades game with similar-ish mechanics, feudalism, the pop system from Victoria 2, multiple-settlement provinces and realtime movement.
They recently released Pharaoh: Dynasties which is pretty much a complete overhaul of the base Pharaoh game, and is pretty much what the game should have been.
They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.
But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.
A safe generalization about Dynasties is that “no one cares”. It has about 2.5k players now, same as Attila (one of the most controversial titles released 10 years ago).
People keep bringing up Dynasties, but it’s obvious CA doesn’t know how to make successful historical titles anymore. They dropped the ball even on 3k which had some kind of potential.
I started in uni during the start of Covid because I was playing Warband and I wanted to see if I could do something like the overworld in Unreal. Then I left it for a few months, got the idea of turning it into a proper strategy game and worked on an off until this year when I really started working on it. I probably put in 2-3 hours on weekdays after work and 6-7 on weekends. I think that I'm definitely more productive now because I have more experience, and I had literally no money at all at the start due to not having a job.
This looks great! It seems to solve the issue I always had with civilisation where the game becomes progressively easier as you advance ahead of the AI, leading to a late game which involves lots of management but little risk.
I wondered this myself and found some. I've played: When Rivers Were Trails, Thunderbird Strike, Dialect, Zulu Dawn, This Land Is My Land. There are a lot of options in boardgames (maybe more than with video games?), such as Burn the Fort.
Most paradox games enable this to some degree. It's pretty limited in terms of imagining what this could look like outside of the european conceptualization of civilization progress but it's there.
A feedback: the art and assets feel like they are AI generated but an interesting game idea, not sure if it makes sense as most the need to defend an empire that took me days to build greater than a procedurally generated one.
Right now I'm mostly thinking about AI. Right this minute I'm sitting in a cafe reading a book on Multi-Agent Oriented Programming with a framework called JaCaMo[1], and later tonight when I get home I'll probably spend some time getting my Fuseki[2] server loaded with some base schemas (SKOS, FOAF, etc) as I slowly start working on getting things set up to explore some ideas around integrating symbolic logic with LLM's.
And I took my new quadcopter drone out and did some flying last night for the first time. As in, my first time flying a drone, ever. The results were... predictable. Let's just say, I bought a cheap (< $100) drone for a reason. This thing will wind up destroyed. In less than an hour I managed to crash it into fences, walls, bushes, cars, dumpsters, the ground, an armadillo, Elvis Presley, a 1974 AMC Gremlin, and Nickelback. Well, more or less.
It brought to mind this famous scene[3] from the movie Days of Thunder:
Harry: I want you to go back out on that track and hit the pace car.
Cole: Hit the pace car?
Harry: Hit the pace car!
Cole: What for?
Harry: Because you hit every other god-damned thing out there and I want you to be perfect.
I’m working on a screen play called DRONE RACER about kids who race human sized quadcopters through the subways of NYC. It’s a mix of Hackers and Fast & The Furious.
Using a lot of off the shelf AI and pushing the limits of what’s possible.
If HN supported images in replies, I'd totally be posting that "shut up and take my money" meme right now. As it is, I'll just say "that sounds awesome, and I hope it sees the light of day eventually."
As an experienced drone pilot - if you can, DJI is unbelievable at stopping you from crashing. Start there to get the feel of it (and more importantly not get frustrated and give up)
If you want to learn more freestyle without assistance, i can't recommend enough getting a simulator on your computer and crashing a digital drone a million times first. It's much cheaper. I think there is a lot out there now but i used Liftoff for many hours before i tried to fly a proper drone
I was wondering. I have a DJI and it is stupid simple to fly. I’ve yet to crash mine but I don’t fly it a ton. I’m certainly not trying to fly it through complex paths like an open doorway and into a house or something.
Yeah, I'm flying a super basic drone with none of the built-in crash avoidance / navigation / etc. stuff for now. I'll upgrade to something fancier later, but for now I'm totally satisfied with something I can crash repeatedly and when it breaks, throw it away (or salvage parts from it to build another drone).
I'll look into the simulator thing. I didn't even realize that drone simulators were a "thing" so I had not gone looking for anything like that.
I would highly recommend getting a drone simulator off Steam. You can practice the controls and drill them into your fingertips during times when you can't fly the real thing (battery recharging, night time, weather, ...). Most advanced radios allow you to hook them up to the computer so you can fly with the exact same inputs, but a console controller is also acceptable.
Making fingerboards. Little skateboards you can do tricks with. I'm always fingerboarding at work when I take a break from programming.
It's a ton of fun, especially writing Fusion 360 scripts to do all the parametric modeling of decks and molds. Then 3D printing molds with different parameters, pressing decks with veneer, making art for the decks, packaging, etc. It's an incredibly niche hobby but I've always found fingerboarding and making fingerboards to be infinitely creative.
A friend of mine started with fingerboard more than 20 years ago, and also selling half pipe for fingerboarding made by wood. He got a degree on architectures, created a company to make half pipes and he made de skate park for Paris Olympics, xgames, redbull etc.If you are curious, take a look on @insaneramps on Instagram!
Yes! You can make obstacles pretty easily, too. I made a rail with a drawer pull I got at Home Depot screwed together with two blocks of wood. I use it on my desk all the time.
The cool thing is, you can fingerboard on almost anything. Get a stack of books and you can make a stair case. Get a piece of a granite counter top sample and you can make a ledge. You can use a bathroom sink as a skate bowl. There are also lots of companies making fun obstacles with different materials. The possibilities are endless.
I'm working on a web app that helps you discover books, movies, TV shows, video games, and songs that you'll like. The app makes it super easy to describe what you're looking for and then gives you a unique set of 10 suggestions on each run.
It's the first solo project I've done in many years and I'm having a great time learning. I've also been able to get some great recommendations for myself and it's fun to use!
However, I gave it "Jane Eyre" (a mid-19th century novel by Charlotte Bronte; it's a classic) with the expectation that it will return "Wuthering Heights" – another a classic novel written in mid-19th century by Emily Bronte (yes the authors are related) – among other things. People who like Jane Eyre tend to like Wuthering Heights, and vice versa.
But everything it returned were new works – published in the last 20 years – of stories that are set in the 19th century.
The only filters applied were:
"Preferred: Gothic romance novel, Victorian literature, Highly influential classic literature, Early 19th-century England ".
So, something seems amiss for now. Nevertheless, it's a very cool idea.
(Edited to fix my grammar; English is not my first language, so pardon me for any mistakes.)
This is happening because I intentionally added a strong bias for more recent books. I thought that's what most people would be looking for - at least for fiction - and I also assumed there were other good ways to discover older books (lists, collections etc).
You're absolutely right though, it should give you some Victorian lit given your preferences! I'll work on addressing this.
This is amazing, bookmarked and will try and use it to discover some new artists.
It seems to reverse the song/artist names occasionally. For example I've got a recommendation of 'Russian Circles' by Harper Lewis, but it should be 'Harper Lewis' by Russian Circles.
It is also telling me the song 'Ten Billion People' is by As I Watch You From Afar (who have a song called '7 Billion People all Alive at Once'), however it's from Explosions in the Sky.
How to find "Military science fiction series" that are "Complex and Strategic" and includes "Space battles and tactics", "Action-packed sequences", "Strategic dialogue", "Multiple book series expansions", "Futuristic space environment", "Spaceships and battle fleets"? Use yogurrt. Never found it so easy to narrow down my interests and find new books. Thanks!
Bookmarked. It actually does seem to work well for the items I have selected. I actually got some interesting hits I feel compelled to look up now ( nice call on adding purchase link -- unobtrusive way to monetize it ).
This works surprisingly well. Just shared it with my sci fi group.
Idea: make an email opt-in and then new releases based on old preferences. My use case is always to go to DVDs/netflix releases, filter for sci fi and then high IMDB.
The results of the categories look similar to what happens when prompting ChatGPT with "describe a list of {genres/moods/etc.} for <content>". Also the links are all for query pages on amazon/spotify/etc, which says LLM to me (rather than a database). This dynamic schema generation -> UI supported query builder seems like a really interesting direction. I'd love to see it for the web more generally and I bet Exa.ai+LLM of choice would be a pretty good place to start. If it's an LLM I'm curious about hallucination rates and excited for future web-level RAG in only returning real objects.
Also you can supply content which doesn't exist and it will automatically infer genre and such (another strong indication of LLM). I.e. you can imagine the aesthetics of the kind of content you might want by title and then use the UI to explore real recs related to that.
PS to the creator: I love the simplicity of the design and the execution is inspiring. Sent a dollar for my searches :-)
You are spot on :) - including about potential additional and broader use cases for this kind of UI. Hoping I can explore that more. Thanks for the tip about Exa.ai!
Also, I'm sincerely flattered that you like the design and execution. Thank you for that and for your contribution!
This is a huge gap we have these days. Everything out there is incentivized to suggest the most selling stuff rather than unique and interesting stuff.
Yeah, this is definitely an important aspect of the problem I'm hoping to solve. I've found that selecting interesting preferences yields some interesting, non-obvious results "out of the box" - but if you really want to go off the beaten path try selecting the "Little known" preference under Other (and make it Required).
It's going to have online text courses with interactive examples and coding exercises, but I'm also in the process of adding video tutorials. These videos will be of 2 types: ones where I teach you the theory, and ones where we actually build a project from scratch.
I feel like CSS has always been something that was made to look harder than it actually is. In its essence, the syntax is very simple, and the vocabulary is quite basic. There are only a few things you need to know to be able to code an attractive and flexible responsive web page. For comparison, I find programming backends much more difficult.
Even though I've been working on this project for almost a year, I decided that next month will be the day I finally launch it.
Sounds great, I know a lot of people who could benefit from this.
I think CSS has historically been a lot harder than it was supposed to be, because browser support was shit. They were slow in adopting new CSS features, and existing features (even simple features!) weren't correctly implemented in all browsers (looking at you, Internet Explorer!).
Things are better now, for the most part, but everyone seems to have migrated to web frameworks, and writing HTML and CSS from scratch has become something of a dying skill.
Sounds nice indeed! By the way: Ironically, I’ve found a few CSS issues on the landing page (input placeholder is cut off on mobile viewports) and your personal website (the blinking line is overlapping the opened menu on mobile). Hope it helps!
I'm working on FreeInChicago, a site for finding all the free activities to do in the city.
I love Chicago and the incredible wealth of free festivals, museums, public art, music, parks, workshops, and so many more activities available to appreciate. I've found there isn't a good way to discover them though so I'm building the tool that I've always wanted. Right now I have a landing page up, have done some work on sourcing data, and I'm working towards defining a discovery interface.
Nice! I'm a fan of SF Funcheap https://sf.funcheap.com/ and always miss it when traveling to other cities. Another up-to-date local resource is something to look forward to.
Thanks for sharing! Seeing someone building something similar and being successful is incredibly energizing. I had doubts that it would be something folks would actually be interested in using.
Nifty! I worked very briefly about 12 years ago on a similar concept that was live at chicago.com. Things didn’t work out with it for various reasons but while it was up I found it quite useful. Some of the original team is still in Chigaco and building stuff. Best of luck shipping it!
I am building an Excel extension that lets me use LLMs in formulas. For example, I can write =PROMPT(A1:E1, "Extract keywords") in a cell to extract keywords from a row and drag the cell to apply the prompt to many other rows. I find this useful when I want to use AI for repetitive tasks that would normally require copy-pasting data in and out of a chat window many times.
I actually built it for my girlfriend who was writing a systematic review paper. She had to compare 7.500 papers against inclusion and exclusion criterias. She obviously did this manually because she cares about scientific integrity, but it sparked the idea to make an AI tool to automate repetitive tasks for people like her who would rather avoid programming. Now I just find it useful myself for a lot of ad-hoc analysis tasks like prompt engineering, rag tuning, and comparing model outputs from anthropic, openai, and google.
Yes I am really interested in good use-cases, send me an e-mail at kaspermarstal@gmail.com! It’s called Cellm, implemented with ExcelDna and is fully functional for Anthropic models. Currently preparing the repo for public release and writing some docs.
I work in a scientific field, and I was analysing a large amount of data related to clinical trials. Part of the work required categorising the data fields, and while traditional Excel approaches were helpful, ultimately I had grind through a large number of fields, manually sorting/categorising and Googling details for about half of the entries.
I wondered whether an LLM could be helpful for some of the steps I was taking manually (hence a quick exploration for such a tool) but there didn't seem to be an easy way to test this. (I could have pulled it into Python and tried to automate it that way, but I didn't time/energy on that occasion.)
Thanks for sharing! If you want to try it out, it will be published to github.com/kaspermarstal/cellm in the coming weeks. Will reply to this thread when it is live.
I recently created a custom 220gsm pre-washed cotton fabric by twisting thrice a 60s yarn (60/3 Ne) into 20s before knitting. It could never be commercially viable so released something similar.
Essentially combining the softness of fine count cotton with the weight and durability of a heavier garment.
I've bought a lot of different T-shirts and I'm always interested in trying to find a better (more durable; more fashionable; more comfortable) one. My current favorites are the Buck Mason Field Spec t-shirts https://www.buckmason.com/collections/mens-tees — could you explain how your shirts might compare? I'm willing to buy one just to try it out, but since you're the owner, figure I might as well ask you for more information — especially why you created a custom cotton fabric.
One thing I like a lot about Buck Mason is that their T-shirts are made in America from American-grown cotton, are any of your T-shirts made in America?
EDIT: just ordered a variety of your shirts, looking forward to trying them out. Very easy checkout experience!
Buck Mason makes great tees. Our flagship tees use 100% American-grown Supima Cotton and are similar in weight to their classic Pima ones.
The Heavy Crew is closer to their Field Tee— ours is likely not as heavy but softer and more durable due to twisting two fine cotton yarns into one before knitting. They’re made in our own facility in Southern India.
I’ve been refining our fabrics for nearly ten years to get the best fit and feel, sticking with cotton for its comfort. More on our fabrics here: https://www.marchtee.com/us/difference
Thanks for commenting on the checkout! We’re gradually rolling out stateside, so any feedback is welcome—just reply to the order email anytime.
Great work, for some unknown reason I cannot bear wearing non-cotton shirt and cloth, but cotton based clothing is far from durable. The best cotton shirt that I ever had until now (in terms of wearability and durability) is a mecerized golf cotton shirt by PGA Tour (casual wear not for golfing) but now I cannot find any golf shirt (PT included) with the same material anymore. As far as I'm concerned you have got a winner there mate if your cotton shirt is as good if not better than the PT shirt, hopefully your clothing materials will be available globally off-the-shelf.
Do you mind explaining your sentence here?
>It could never be commercially viable so released something similar.
We do mercerize some of our products, though it’s more costly with regulated heat. If you're near an M&S, they carry a mercerized Polo, but I find it too crispy.
> It could never be commercially viable, so released something similar.
Apparel is about scale. You can make a great tee, but fewer people will pay $100 versus $30, so finding a balance is necessary. Cotton can age well, but the trade-offs (fiber blends, uneven yarn, spirality resistance, no ribbed neck) often show in tees under $50.
The recent relicensing of Redis to a non-open-source license bothered many in the community. But the groundwork for the relicensing was laid much earlier. I've been working on relicensing monitor to track various projects attributes that can affect the ease of relicensing a project.
I also think CLAs are eerie and goes against the open source spirit, I don't think CLA alone puts a project in "high risk". I'm not sure about the FAANG open source projects that are used as libraries (Guava, React, ...). These projects fundamentally don't jeopardize these company's businesses, and serve to increase the developer goodwill amongst the engineers. Nobody can predict the future but I can't imagine these projects becoming relicensed.
More plausible scenario is them becoming an abandonware, but even in those cases the community can carry the torch.
Agreed, and there's a few projects with CLAs that are ranked lower due to mitigating factors, like K8s [1]. I honestly don't get why they have a CLA, anyone know?
The impact of developer good will is difficult to measure, so I don't attempt it. Redis burned community good will so badly with their relicensing that several forks rapidly emerged. Seemed like a predictably poor decision to me.
I also don't want to pick favorite companies, because it's subjective, companies can change strategies or even sell projects off. What if Meta decided to sell React to a patent-troll-like company instead of just abandoning it?
> I honestly don't get why they have a CLA, anyone know?
There are valid reasons to have a CLA: confirmation that your contributions are not encumbered by an employer contract is a good one. What there is rarely an excuse for is a copyright assignment, which often gets bundled into a CLA.
The only non-nefarious example of copyright assignment that I can think of is the FSF, but only because they have such a strong record on software freedom.
do you consider the likelyhood that a project will be forked?
for example react is listed as high risk, but at the same time i would consider the risk to be very low in the sense that if it is relicensed then it will be forked immediately backed by a community that is strong enough to sustain such a fork.
i'd go as far as saying that for react relicensing would kill the project because the majority of users would go with the fork.
for other projects the risk is higher because they don't have a strong FOSS userbase that could sustain a fork, and because most current users would not care.
What happens after the relicensing isn't measured as the community has already been disrupted. I'm also less certain on how to fairly measure and predict fork likelihood.
One challenge for forks is that relicensing doesn't always jump from fully-open to fully-closed. There's a lot of "fake open-source" and source-available licenses, like the one Redis now uses. These may "only impact you if you are AWS", so a fork "that AWS can use for free" feels less compelling. If React was to relicense, I expect they'd similarly take a small step.
Is there a specific reason that Firefox is considered low-risk for a rug pull? In my view, Mozilla doesn't seem the same as it once was but maybe there are specific reasons the open-sourceness isn't in jeopardy.
Firefox scores well because it uses a copyleft license and the ability to relicense contributions remains with the original authors. Mozilla can't unilaterally relicense the Firefox code base as they haven't been granted that ability by the contributors. The copyleft license means they can't slap a new license on top (like a permissive license allows).
The rating criteria was designed to consider legal facators, like license terms and CLA, so concerns like Mozilla buying an ad company aren't factored in. Those concerns feel more subjective to me, but are certainly valid.
I imagine Firefox would die instantly if it moved to a restrictive license. It would be too easy to simply switch to a popular fork, and Firefox's userbase are the type that would be compelled to follow through with it. Even ignoring FOSS principles reasons, most folks are browser-savvy enough to understand the implications of such news -- their favorite browser is about to kill itself so they have to pick another one.
Also consider that Firefox would no longer be the default browser in most Linux distros, and likely prohibited from official package repositories entirely.
A new CI/CD platform. Local CLI (run without git push), remote debugger, automatic content-based caching, DAG-based definition, and dynamic tasks. It’s taken a lot of work to build it, but I’m really excited about how well it’s working. https://rwx.com/mint
I haven't tried this yet, but I wanted to say I think there's a lot of potential in this space. There's so much friction with the current popular solutions...and yet it's so hard to justify trying some of the newer and less popular ones.
I wish you luck because there are a lot of good ideas in here. Running locally and remote debugger are the most exciting to me.
I like the idea, but I have used Azure Pipelines, and the key differentiating it from GitLab.ci is its "service connection" that enables seamless integration with third-party services and a wide range of tasks (PowerShell, pscore, az, docker, etc).
I wish your dependency semantics yaml could be converted to Azure pipeline task, job, and stage similar to how typescript converts to javascript.
I am saying this because there are very complicated infrastructural problems that hundreds of people work on at big companies when creating a ci/cd I see you are not focusing on them yet but that DAG logic could be applied to existing azure pipeline yaml.
This seems really neat! I'm a huge proponent of incremental CI for any project that gets big enough to care about test speed.
I'd be pretty worried about an abstraction ceiling on the caching here relative to something like Bazel, though. Like would Mint get mad if I generated 4000 dynamic tasks?
Out of interest: CircleCI also has flaky test detection, rerun failed tests etc. Or did you mean that the CI that you were moving towards could benefit from Captains features?
I didn't make myself clear I think. You mention that you love Captain, and wish you had access to it when migrating away from CircleCI. I'm interested in understanding the specific reason(s) for your love for Captain's features, that seem to also be available in CircleCI?
I haven't been working on much at all lately, struggling from bore-out at work. 8 hours of boredom a day is surprisingly exhausting, and it's spilling over into the rest of my life. Starting a new gig next month, hopefully things will pick up again.
I had a bit of a tough time towards the end of my last job, and felt a similar ennui. If you can, I’d highly highly recommend picking up a completely unrelated hobby to fill your non work (and occasionally work, when you’re in that limbo) time. I couldn’t believe the effect it had on me, and it meant that I started my new role feeling refreshed and optimistic, rather than just diving into it like I normally do.
Personally, I hit the gym for 4 months, mostly to fix the lack of sleep that came with the restlessness and lack of mental exercise.
I’m working on a new game. I’ve been trying to get back to the basics of the adventure genre. A fun and engaging story, choices, strategic combat and a simple, straightforward approach.
No microtransactions, no advertisements. No networking! The game is meant to function completely off line. The game will start with a mobile release in probably October and should be available on Steam shortly after.
I’ve been using Flame, Flutter’s game engine to develop my app. My artists are amazing and have been providing fully animated sprites using Spine. I’ve used Flutter before but this is my first time getting into Flame.
If you’re curious how it’s going, hop on the mailing list at https://danger.world to learn more. I’ll be looking for my initial playtesters here in the next few weeks.
I'm writing a book. A novel. By hand (this is, no AI involved, just me and vim).
Sometimes I feel I'm loosing the time, because nowadays there is a lot of AI generated content and even more competence in self-published books.
After a long walk against myself, of about 10 months, it's nearly finished (in my native language, Spanish). It still needs a few more reviews and retouching.
I got recently unemployed after +20 years as Linux sysadmin, and my wife is now unemployed too (after +20 years in HHRR), fortunately we have still a few savings.
I dream that it will (economically) work, but most of the time I intuit there will be less than a few sales from family and friends.
Depending on how it goes, I've already the script for the second and third parts.
In parallel I'm researching different ways to generate cash flow without working for another person. I would like to avoid going to search for a job in the current market of cloud, docker and kubernetes, as I'm more a hardware/colocation guy, and 99,9% of job offers request for docker/kubernetes.
Mainly I use vim. But yes, sometimes I also use a traditional notepad with a soft ink pen. To avoid myself some screen time, because I'm out of home, or just to make some use of it.
I think the output flow is about the same using pen and paper than using vim, at least for me.
The original "By hand" did mean "without AI help/inspiration".
I'd love to read when it's available or in preview mode! The mental organization I think that develops when writing on a notebook is far worth the trouble of typing it on vim later, especially for fleshing out scenes and redrafting.
Not sure if call it mental or physical organization, but there is more crossing out of words and whole sentences, words that I try to fit into small spaces, or arrows to/from outlined areas below with more space. Like:
A technique that I don't know what to call, is the horizontal brace. Like the ASCII 123, but horizontally, to insert something between two words, above or below the line.
A handicap of the notebook, is that you can't find historical data/names/dates so easy, or synonyms... but as I iterate a few times over the text after the first draft, those gaps can be fixed latter while typing the text.
I am working on improving a system to inform citizens about the public benefits for which they are eligible [0]. It's hold by Barcelona City Council.
It analyzes the social situation of a person, or group of people that live together, and forecasts those benefits that they could access. It is an old base code that uses OpenFisca for the back, and React for the front. However, it's quite fun though. Currently I'm working on make it more stable as there are still some parts that could break the process.
Hey! It's the English version, something got broken. Your message made me learn about that. Thanks! Spanish and Catalan versions seem to be working properly.
On my next deploy that will be already fixed. Unfortunately, software done for the city council has very slow cycles due to several actors interacting. And the deploy will delayed specially now, on summer. Today I'll fix that, but probably you won't see changes until next week.
I’ve been working on Don’t Double Book Me (https://dontdoublebookme.com) the past few weeks out of frustration with keeping my personal and work Google Calendars in sync.
Previously used Reclaim but found $10 a month to keep 2 calendars in sync was excessive and the software was increasingly becoming more team oriented, no longer for individuals. Felt like I was paying for a product and also the product. I just needed to keep 2 calendars in sync, not smart meetings, analytics, integrations, etc. ideally I set it up and forget about it.
I really needed a way to sync my calendars privately, without all the extras. Now that Dropbox has purchased Reclaim, it's even more important I feel like my calendars are not spied on. I knew I could provide a similar service.
Here’s what makes me excited about it as a user:
Affordable: Just $20/year with a 7-day free trial. Cancel at any time for a pro-rated refund.
Privacy First: No need to store events on a servers enabling unlimited calendar syncs.
Working Hours: Adaptive feature that adjusts if an event falls outside your specified working hours.
Round Event Times: Opt to round event start and end times to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes for cleaner scheduling.
Invitations: Block time between calendars when you receive a meeting invitation that you haven't responded to yet. Decline it? The time block on your other calendar is removed.
My plan is to keep it small and focused, while also listening to user feedback for how you'd like to manage your personal and work calendars more efficiently.
I don’t have a personal calendar and my work calendar ends at 5. I think your market is a lot smaller than you think. The kind of people who ask friends to book time on their calendar are considered freaks anywhere outside of tech hubs
Don't Double Book Me isn't some crazy startup idea that needs funding, I am not shooting for the moon with this. Feature development was basically done in a few weekends and I like that it solves a single problem well. There is definitely a market for people who need a tool like this. Look at Reclaim, Calendly, Clockwise, CalendarBridge, OneCal, etc, which have successfully tapped into this market but are focused on selling to teams.
I designed it for individuals balancing personal and professional commitments. I work somewhere with a heavy meeting culture, nothing I can really do about that. I found myself double booked often with personal commitments I had. Consider a scenario where you need to attend your child’s school play, but you forgot to also block off time on your work calendar, now your colleagues think you’re free and invite you to something. You've been double booked.
Events outside your working hours aren’t synced, protecting your personal time and privacy. The default setting is to create events on a destination calendar with the summary explicitly being "Busy" without any other information, but you can change it so it mirrors the event details should you choose.
I put a generic “out of office” block on my calendar if I have personal business and it’s rare enough that I don’t get why it needs a solution. Maybe other people are scheduling things during work hours a lot more often than me?
That totally works if it is rare for you! The last 2 months I've had a few things I've added to my personal calendar that synced with work calendar: lunch with a family member, dropping off or picking up car from service, haircuts, contractor stopping by, dentist, vet appointment, etc. It's nice to not worry about it since it marks me as Busy right when I create the event.
This is a nice idea, but assumes both your employer and your personal account use Google Calendar. If that assumption goes away I might be interested in this.
What guarantees does this make about access to data and how does it make them?
I've mentioned my project a few times around HN, but might as well reiterate :)
I took some time off from work to teach myself Rust and to build a WASM colony simulation game. You've got a colony of ants, they're in a cold, foggy crater, and you help them grow and survive. The simulation runs 24/7, like a Tamagotchi, but a bit more complex, like a simplified RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress. I am hoping to design game play systems which focus on mental health, self-care, addiction, motivation, and personal growth and to use the gameplay as a means of encouraging awareness in the player.
I haven't added any features in a while, unfortunately, but it's on my mind. For a while I was just adding whatever popped into my head, as a means of learning Rust, and I naively thought the full idea would crystallize with time, but it hasn't. So, I'm trying to take a step back and figure out how to actually make a coherent game that does justice to the mechanics I want to see in my simulation. I've spent a lot of time thinking rather than coding, but I'm optimistic that I'll get through this phase sooner or later. I will admit, though, that trying to take a novel approach with game design is overwhelming at times. That's okay, though! I'm enjoying the process of tinkering with the project and will likely continue tinkering on it for many years to come as a creative outlet for self-actualization.
> The ants are on an alien world, the user is in a satellite orbiting the planet, and the two establish a symbiotic relationship, out of necessity, as a means of terraforming the planet.
That reminds me a lot of Helliconia books trilogy. Congrats for it! I'll look for some time and give it a try.
Tip for those looking for some more details on the mechanics of the self-care aspects of the game: Some details are present in the google doc linked in the repo README.
Hi! This year I quit my corporate job to work full time on https://crucialexams.com/. This month I am working on expanding our new offerings at https://pmpready.com/ and https://vitalnursingexams.com/. Our platform provides a fun way for students to test their readiness for industry certification exams like the PMP, BCEN, CompTIA, AWS and more. Written in ASP.NET, MySQL as backend and good old Javascript/Bootstrap for the frontend. Nothing fancy, works great!
Officially retired. Managing the money I saved to retire on, which is more time-consuming and stressful than expected. Working on yet another static site generator but stymied by my terrible Git/GitHub skills. Studying historical Western secular music. Jazz guitar too.
Happy site-maker-makin'... It is a most respectable yak shave. I had such a good time making mine a couple of years ago in Bash (https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite).
If Git/Github are interfering, just drop the folder in dropbox (or suchlike) and version control like it's 1990 (ssg_2, ssg_3, ... ssg_final_final :). Nobody can fire the officially retired developer for doing this in 2024.
Making swim baits. I started carving and paints fishing lures during Covid. It’s easy to knock out something that looks like a lure, but it’s surprisingly nuanced to make something that behaves in the water as you want it to. Mass production is absolutely the correct way to go about this, but - you know - it keeps my hands busy in the evening and I’m improving my carving, airbrushing, weighting/buoyancy, etc with each one.
I have a ton of respect for people who can craft beautiful and functional baits. I watch Nate Marling a lot on Youtube and it amazes me what he can do with a block of wood and some wire.
Do you fish your lures, or is making them just a hobby unto itself? If the former, what species are you targeting? I consider myself a bass angler, but I honestly haven't a. had much time to fish lately or b. had much luck catching bass when I do find time to fish.
I’m in Minnesota, so mainly targeting panfish, bass, and pike. Salmon when I can get away for the run. I do fish them, but I’m only now getting to the point that my crank/swim/glide baits act right. Hand carving right now, but may try to start making molds next.
Engineered Angler Lures is another YouTube creator worth checking out.
Also, I try not to be precious about them. Give them away to friends. Don’t stress if they break off. Just make another one.
I’ve been building a personal finance app that runs fully in the browser (using the automerge crdt and sqlite) for over a year now at https://tender.run.
Recently I’ve been taking more of being able to flexibly run sql against this data, and this past week I’ve been working with d3 to make fancy sankey graphs to show income/expense flows. Quick preview here: https://demo.tender.run/reports/sankey
That looks quite nice and the local first approach was a good idea.
I wonder how it will compare to ActualBudget and its pre/post rules and the GoCardless account data importer.
Side note: The first col of all text overlaps with some other text on mobile devices (both landscape and portrait mode) and thus is unreadable.
Also the inbox didn't work an I can't look at the inbox as the filters stay open.
Edit just noticed that this is a SaaS. If it would be a single payment for a license or sponsored FOSS, I believe it could work. The current way, I would assume that it will meet the fate of all the other apps in this non-market. Good luck though!
Pretty interesting take on a finance app! I like the inbox and filters on transactions. I'm not sure I understand the benefit of storing it all in the browser though. Does the data just live in the browser? Does anything store on a server?
Originally this was a privacy angle - the data is primarily stored on your device, with backend storage that’s treated like backup and sync only. I had plans for e2ee that built on this but it didn’t turn out to be a big differentiating factor.
Working in local-first turns out to be really nice for making the app feel super snappy. The responsiveness you see in the demo is the performance you can expect in day to day usage.
I recently bought a used Seadoo and discovered the dirty little secret of personal watercraft that they don't want you to know. Unlike cars with their standardized ODB2 ports, those aren't a requirement for PWCs. And the diagnostic scanner hardware/software costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Major affront to the right to repair, so I'm ending up doing some CANbus hacking.
That’s kinda surprising. In Polaris ATV’s they seem to have this built into the interface of the machine itself so you can read the codes on its LCD. I don’t know how complex they are but I assumed they were a bit more open than OBD-II instead of less.
I've never seen an LCD screen in an ATV; my neighbor repairs small engines and stuff like riding lawnmowers and ATVs - i hang out from time to time and he's said more times than i can count "i got no idea what's wrong with it, probably a wiring issue somewhere i gotta track down" or somesuch. Some of the machines he's repairing cost upwards of $40,000 so i'm not sure it's a price thing.
My point is, i'm sure he would have mentioned how great or how awful such a debug console was, at least once, in the decade i've known him.
> For more information on diagnostic codes and display code definitions for your vehicle, contact your Polaris Dealer.
uh huh. MIL, FMI, SPN? anyhow the next time i'm at his house i'll look at any of the polaris vehicles there and see if any of them actually have useful diagnostic information. canbus and odb-II are standardized; i expect the polaris codes to be "ohhhhhhhh. you should bring that in to the dealership straight away" regardless of what it is.
You can tap a few buttons and get trouble codes. At least on the 2018 or so Sportsman I had. This feature was described in the manual, if I remember correctly, and all the trouble codes were well documented. It would show things like “P0012” which then said “high voltage to xyz”. It was very similar to OBD-II systems I’ve used.
I'm trying up standup comedy this summer -- open mics for now.
I thought it would be absolutely terrifying to be in front of a bunch of strangers and try to make them laugh, but it turns out if you're prepared, it's not that hard. Open mic crowds are benevolent and don't expect you to be the next Richard Pryor or George Carlin anyway, and I don't "engage" the public at all; I just tell my jokes.
I try to come up with new material each time so there's some work to do, but it's fun.
If it doesn’t psych you out too much, trying to engage with the crowd maybe once per set or every other set could be a good way to force the habit and make it easier over time.
Not that it’s necessary for all styles, but when I’ve been to comedy shows in the past the people who are able to deal with the crowd really well are always the most impressive to me :)
Good luck! I am happy to know that you don’t do crowd work, which has become fashionable now. I remember Big Jay Oakerson’s roast where someone pointed out that crowd work is what you do when you don’t have any material :)
Crowd work almost always comes down to race or profession of the audience. It can be funny only in so many ways.
My first job was in a FinTech and the way production access was managed scared me. This is my approach at streamlining the process.
Basically a PR review flow for SQL queries, enforcing the 4-eyes principle so you never accidentally can do a Delete * form users, forgetting the where clause.
Thank you! This was initially a startup idea but it was very hard to sell a cyber security solution with a very bare bones product to companies large enough to have this problem. Because the required features of such large orgs are just too much for such an early stage team.
So I'm now doing it a bit as a side project but I hope to at some point also offer a paid version to fund development long term.
Yes, I already thought about this. In theory all "production access", be it ssh, k8s commands, database access of any kind or even a ruby shell could go through such a a flow.
It's a bit of a pain to integrate well with everything though, but I have a lot of plans, will just take some time to mature :D
Working on adding better phrase matching for Marginalia Search.
The way position used to be stored in the search engine was approximate, using something like a bloom filter. With this change, they'll be stored in an exact fashion using a gamma coded positions list instead.
In the phase of dotting t:s and dashing i:s at this point. Hope to have it in production in September.
Compared to the majority of what I read below, I'm a rank amateur and have no right to post.
I'll do it anyway, as I need to learn to own where I'm at and have a backbone. :)
I'm learning the Zola static site generator and using to to build my blog at https://jeff-mitchell.dev. The focus is my mis-adventures learning the Rust language.
I've found it a challenge to get off my feet with Zola, but I'm slowly figuring things out. Little victory this evening, finally figured out how to get images linked in posts to render properly.
A graphic novel about a future world run by benevolent AIs who have found that the best way to get humans to behave in easily-predictable ways is to manifest as extremely unctuous clowns.
Thanks! I really need to get around to making my Wordpress installation email about new stuff.
Right now the best way's either to follow it on Patreon (no money needed) or to follow me on Mastodon (@anthracite@dragon.style). Or fire up your RSS reader and point it at the site.
The insight is that if you read text from a tiny enough box right below the front camera on the MacBook, it appears as if you're talking to the camera.
Boom! Easy Eye Contact With Camera.
I scrunched up the Notion app and placed it as well as I could in the safe area to test it out for a couple of videos, but then I just wrote a web app because it seemed like the next logical step.
Once you paste the script and hit play... you can only see the text in the safe area so your eyes don't wander.
Real teleprompters have a person feeding the text at the perfect rate, for pauses, and so on. It'd be an interesting experiment to feed the audio to Whisper or such, roughly match it to the text shown, and control speed based on that.
Oh, wonderfully simple, might use it for recording voiceovers. Might be useful to add some kind of syntax for pauses, like a blank line between paragraphs.
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
I recently left a startup I had cofounded after a few years because we were a remote team and I came to the conclusion that we weren't going to be successful without working together in person. I wanted to make this site to help people like me use location as an early filter to find good companies and teams to work with. Let me know if you have any feedback!
There's a site called SwissDevJobs.ch that similarly maps tech jobs down to a neighborhood level. You might want to compare notes, especially on company transparency & community calendars.
I think this is pretty incredible, and lots of potential. I simply love anything that's displayed with a map visual representation. Do you have a team you're working with on this? Shall we chat privately? ping me here - sibynyc@icloud.com
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
It works with 90% of the bikes/motor brands on the market, so I assumed that some people here might be interested, if they got a non-functional batteries but they still want to use their e-bike?
We believe that everybody should have control about stuff they own, and we should fight against planned obsolescence!
Here are a few videos about our founder on the battery itself, why we built it, and how to assemble it:
We'd love some feedback from the e-bike DIY builder community
Oh, and it's launching as a Kickstarter in September and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com/1 for a 25% discount on the battery!
I thought the reason the packs are sealed is to stop amateurs from swapping in cells of differing voltages, which short each other out and cause sparking/fire hazards. There's a reason li-ion battery charging is current-limited, they have no internal resistance.
As I understand it, it's somewhat the opposite for internal resistance. You need to have current limiting in place because the internal resistance of the cell is turning that current into heat, and heat is the enemy of batteries.
(Probably there's also a complicated chemical reason for current limiting that I don't fully grasp)
This is why our Infinite Battery comes with a casing that we designed to resist the heat of a fire, thanks to it's thick aluminum casing, and a design which dissipates heat quickly.
And YES THIS WORKS! We have put a massive effort in making our casing sustain the battery fire, and extensively tested it (videos coming soon), so you can sleep safely (and us too!!). See our complete fireproof testing on our documentation/FAQ
Prevention is better than cure though. plus you've got to consider cell gassing/venting/explosion risk/toxic fumes as well as fire prevention.
If they were doing per-cell protection, fair enough (cheap 18650's don't have cell protection usually), but I think they are still connecting 4 cells in parallel, with only serial-bank MOSFET's like in usual sealed packs.
> a casing that we designed to resist the heat of a fire, thanks to it's thick aluminum casing, and a design which dissipates heat quickly
Thus turning a difficult to deal with Li-Ion inferno into a slightly less difficult to deal with block of superheated aluminum, that will happily set on fire anything that looks at it funny?
This is always my concern about fire-proof metal casings for batteries: where do you put that so it doesn't set anything on fire?
Also spot welded connections work well, transfer reasonable amounts of current and don't tend to vibrate off during use. We tear down packs at my job and there are warnings inside some not to re-use cells for vapes, they really don't want you taking these apart. Larger packs like EVs and E-bikes are probably worth refurbishing and repairing.
Indeed, we recommend swapping all the cells at once! But using our battery it means that you recover cells in perfect conditions that you can use in second life applications!
Super cool! Any plan on making different form factors? For electrified cargo bikes, the battery is better placed bellow the cargo [0] so a squarish and flatter pack would be nicer.
This is a great idea. I'm actually researching DIY solutions to electrifying my boat (I was a USAF electrician, once upon a time) and the prepackaged battery solutions are so expensive and inflexible. (Granted, for marine use there are some extra considerations...)
There is a guy that rides the trail near me thats riding an ebike with a triangular battery pack that looks identical to one some HNer built here - He's too fast and I havent been able to stop him.
Another question for the DIY e-bik crowd, is what kind of OTS motor could one harvest, like a motor from an electric lawm mower, or edger, weed-wacker? Are there power tools where the electric motor is useable? (like how people originally used mower engines in goKarts and such?
Also, for fireproofing - mix Powdered Aerogel into a Silicon Slurry and dip the battery in that - the silicon and aerogel will make a heat sleeve thats quite fire resistant.
Thanks for your message! The battery is already designed and in production, it's running on 1500 free-floating e-bikes in France without issues since around 2 years
We're doing a Kickstarter because we're a startup so we need the upfront money to buy the parts and build the battery! We expect to ship to Kickstarter customers in November 2024!
Since you have the ESP32 - can you emulate the Apple Airtag on it please.
I have a $7,000 Orbea E-bike and I have an Airtag hidden in it. Its a great feature.
Not sure if I could redo the Orbead Battery this way because its internal to the frame - but it does have an extended battery pack option - perhaps this could be wired to use that connector as your interface allows for any ebike it seems?
The post recently on HN about the flipper zero being able to emulate the airtag is pretty nifty, and you could use these guys effort:
The Goauche BMS Tesrt Bench needs its own video/HN post - and this is exactly what would be great info to get via a LORA messaging for all the telemetries from the pack?
I'm the CEO of Tile and we are working on a line of products for theft.
As a genuine question, I'm very surprised that many people don't seem concerned that AirTags alert thieves to their presence. If your bike is stolen the thief will get the notification, even if they are on Android (with the new shared platform rogue tag detection).
I'm trying to understand the user psychology here - not pitch our own products.
Do you have any specific features you would like to prevent theft?
Great to meet you. I have a ton of thoughts on this matter, but not well threaded for quick reply: so forgive the stream-of-thought nature of the following.
There is no real secret answer to stopping bike thieves, because the primary problem is both cultural and infrastructure.
We dont have bike culture that allows for safe bike leaving-about, and we dont have bike infrastructure for safe bike locking-about. (Bike Hack SF: Take your nice bike into a nice hotel and tip the DoorMan $5 to check your bike into luggage check rather than lock it up)
So, my airtag is in a case with security bolts under the bottle cage - and its more a check that I can know where it was last seen. Though I didnt remove the chirper.
What if you could have a TILE that is the fob for this battery. Where the battery wont go unless the paired Tile Fob is present?
A Lora Tile would be killer If you had a Lora network on this battery, with a TILE app infra on top of it and all the batteries talked to eachother - you built an anti-theft-mesh so all the bikes tiles all tell eachother about themselves.
Tile integration with Shimano Motors and e-tube iso app to stop the motor from running unless Tile fob/phone app present. A magnetic Solonoid crank-shaft-blocker.
And above all else pushing for better bike policies in municipalities.
We are doing a satellite integration with Hubble Network - 24/7 global coverage, no increase in battery life. It sounds like scifi but 2 satellites are up. Give us a year...
I want to build things using Instant DB... I keep finding ShinyObjects here, but - Tiles using a LORA Network which updates a csv/json style payload and transfers GPS through lora messages.
I think there a lot of interesting things to make bike mesh a part of a security fabric - but ensuring that there is no way to spy on location data thats not yours? Doubt thats possible...
The fact that something is being tracked and the thieves know it’s being tracked is a deterrent itself. Like the value of stolen iPhones crashed because activation lock made them worthless. So they moved on to Samsung Galaxies, until they implemented their own activation lock.
If you steal a bike with a tracker on it you’ll probably leave it right there for the real owner to find.
Of course I know this, but I am trying to go deeper. With AirTags and the new standards you literally can find and disable the tag for anyone using the Google or Apple networks.
I am surprised that people think the benefits of AirTags outweigh the downsides given the alternatives, of which we are one. I'm mainly just trying to learn.
I also think you probably are overestimating the deterrent value. Thieves are not necessarily thoughtful and the alerts aren't real time. Once they get the alert they might ditch the bike, but if it is back at their garage they will probably disable or remove it.
I also am a bit triggered by this line "Honestly, you as the CEO should know this." which is on the edge of being an ad hominem. Why did you choose to include this? And wouldn't you know that I know these things? Like I am asking questions to get nuanced user feedback. Do you think someone who runs a consumer product company (I started Life360, Tile's owner), isn't deeply aware of how customers think?
First, I want to apologize. The last statement came out a lot more combatant than I realized. So I removed it.
I was a Tile wallet user until I stopped carrying a wallet completely. There are 2 types of thieves: the professional and the opportunistic. Opportunistic, the majority, aren't doing more than they have to and if the bike has a tracker they know about it makes it less appealing. And if you can get the casual thief to give up immediately then the device has already payed for itself.
The professional will chop it immediately. I see kids in my neighborhood with $2000+ Trek Marlins, with all the expensive mountain bike parts removed. They simply wanted a bike to freestyle on. And doing all that probably took hours if not days. The professional is not going to spend anymore time than they have to disable a tracker when there are better options all around.
Im curious how Tile addresses this concern for the safety of individuals themselves in the opposite direction. I know people who have been stalked and assaulted before. Does tile have protections against this for people hiding tiles in your vehicle or bag?
It's a very nice concept and I think it's much better than the held-together-with-duct-tape concepts usually seen in diy bike conversions.
That being said, I am a bit skeptical about your claims to be fireproof. Did you try to start a battery fire inside your enclosure? Aluminum melts at about 600C, while lithium burns much hotter than that.
Helping others with their mental health (after my own struggles).
Worked as a software dev/manager for a decade, went through workaholism, burnout, then alcoholism, depression, all that. Doing a ton better now, and taking some time off to write about what I went through and hopefully help out others going through the same thing some: https://depthsofrepair.com/
An Open Source Hybrid AI Search Engine: Instantly get accurate answers from the internet, bookmarks, notes, and documents. Obtain the most precise answers in the shortest time. With one click, AI indexes your personal knowledge base, eliminating the need to remember or manage it.
I'm working on an invite-only, personalized medical education platform called MedAngle, particularly for emerging economies. I started it in my third year of medical school, and we're now at 90,000 doctors/medical students, along with over 100 million questions solved and billions of minutes spent studying and excelling.
I get to lead a team of 175 doctors and students across premed, medical, and dental education. I am the first doctor + full stack technologist in the country. It's super rewarding. No funding, just off our immensely low price point that things are still growing quickly. All software written in house.
I and a friend are working on Elixir Emporium [0], a single-player crafting RPG that uses layers of generative AI to create and inject new game data as you play.
It started out as just a prototype asking what happens if you task an LLM with generating crafting recipes for every combination of items in a game (which was already super fun), but it's exploded into all kinds of crafting, harvesting, and item manipulation systems that literally weren't possible in games just 5-10 years ago.
Now we're working on NPC simulations based on last year's Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior [1] paper. Dialogue and persistent memory are obvious, but we're also using the ReAct pattern [2] to give NPCs an influenceable decision loop that dictates what actions they take throughout each game day. And there's some other fun stuff like quest generation and using LLMs as a decision engine to determine if certain player actions complete these dynamic quests.
There's still a lot of work to do to make it feel more like a polished game, but we've been focused on the underlying systems and getting them feeling great and I'm really excited to see the game come to life.
I'm working on something similar but instead of basing my efforts on the generator agents paper I'm basing it on a technique I call narrative generation. It requires far less context and fewer prompts, and focuses on generating narrative aspects and letting the traditional game engine things simulate the remainder of the world.
As an example, with the system I am building you only need to input what action the player has taken, and all the NPC's actions and dialogues will be generated.
Secondary applications for med school - once your initial single app gets processed, every school (out of the 20+ you apply to) wants multiple essays from you. The process of preparing for and applying to med school is a nightmare and consumed the last two years of my life. I've had a lot of really cool life experiences because of it though, learned so much about medicine, and done some actual good. But I just want to get in this cycle and be done with endless essay writing.
I've been working on and off on building an app for learning chest x-ray interpretation, but that's shelved until I finish applications.
I've been working on an iOS app called snapmail: lets you take any photo on your phone, filter / sticker it, and send it as a 4x6 postcard anywhere in the U.S. for $2.99. Fun way to stay in touch with friends & fam. One of a few no-account-needed, single use iOS apps I've been working on.
I've been building a web extension for an Inuit language (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ).
Most Inuit in Canada speak Inuktitut, which is a language with long words and two different writing systems: the latin alphabet, and syllabics. Syllabics are specially adapted for Inuktitut and well-loved by the Inuit, but unfortunately can be a pain to input on a computer, so often times the more cumbersome latin alphabet is used in casual writing.
Tom Scott has an awesome video about how syllabics work[1], but breifly, the shape of the character determined its inital consonant spund, and the rotation determines its vowel sound. So ᐱ = pi, ᐳ = pu, ᐸ = pa, ᑎ = ti, ᑐ = tu, ᑕ = ta, etc. The word "Inuktitut" becomes ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ in syllabics.
Transliterating between the two is fairly simple, but there are edge-cases around dialects and whatnot. The more interesting problem from a technical perspective is having a web extension that can detect Inuktitut on a web page (in wither writing system), and transliterate that into whatever writing system the user desires, whilst never accidentally transliterating the other text on the page ("inhabitants" could be picked up and transliterated as "ᐃᓐᕼᐊᖯᐃᑕᓐᑦᔅ", for example, even though that makes no sense).
The project is mostly using Rust via WebAssembly, which has been a lot of fun to work with and has let me do some awesome things, like avoiding heap allocation and using compile-time hashmaps to do conversions on the text. The build system has to do a lot and I eventually settled on python. Right now I'm trying to wrangle JS and the DOM (there's a lot of edge cases to deal with), and that's been difficult as it's not my wheelhouse.
Could your project also extend beyond DOM, to Canvas and WebGL code? I could imagine some very interesting creative uses in a game engine setting. Also: check out Aya by Cohere, a Canadian AI company.
I think you may have replied to the wrong comment or misunderstood my project, it's mostly finding text from a certain language based on some (fairly simple) heuristics, then converting it from one script to another in a systematic way, with some options a user can set. I doesn't have much relevance to LLMs or game engines, unless your game has an Inuktitut translation, in which case it'd be better to transliterate ahead of time ;)
Inuktitut is very cool. I'm not a speaker so I'm relying heavily on research, but I've always loved making tools for syllabics and working with text generally.
Then congrats all the more on this work, I had assumed a motivation from attachment also. As for the tech stacks and langs yeah they're fun, but I meant in how abstract Inuktitut looks, I guess the human language in the loop is the real meat of the problem and of the "working with".
If you're curious, I don't have any direct connection with the Inuit but I got into syllabics because I have some Ojibwe speakers in my family, and Ojibwe also uses syllabics. None of the current speakers I know can write in Ojibwe (in any writing system) due to their residential schooling, but we have letters from the generations that have passed on.
I made a few syllabics converters for Ojibwe when I was younger, but Ojibwe and Cree are harder to build converters from than Inuktitut because they have a lenis-fortis distinction in the latin script but not syllabics, so the word "anishinaabe" can be converted unambiguously to ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒃ, but trying to convert the other way could render any one of anishinaabe, ani*zh*inaabe, anishinaa*pe*, or ani*zh*inaa*pe*. I don't think it could be done accurately without some sort of machine learning. There's also a lot more complexities surrounding how different dialects are encoded. In the end, Inuktitut was simpler to work with and has a lot more everyday speakers and text to work with, especially because the Canadian territory of Nunavut publishes its government documents and websites in Inuktitut too.
There's a lot to cover but I think the technical challenges might be interesting to the Hacker News crowd, I may make a series of videos about it someday!
Yes it is right up my hacking alley. I'm working too with two-way asymmetric conversions between languages/charsets as noted in this thread. It's interesting to have such a niche tech challenge associated with your ethnic group of languages. In Manitoba are any of those spoken?
Ojibwe and Cree are both spoken in Manitoba, but it's too far south for Inuktitut.
I read through your other comment on this post and read about the work you're doing. I didn't quite understand –I think it's hard to explain a lot of these linguistics tools briefly without uploading a lot of context– but it seemed up my alley as well.
> It's interesting to have such a niche tech challenge associated with your ethnic group of languages.
That's true, I think it can be a lot of fun and rewarding for technologists. Kevin King is a font designer who was tasked with making a new font for syllabics, then found that some syllabics had never been adopted into Unicode and set about getting them approved[1]. He worked with the communities and the Unicode committee and got them into Unicode, and that must have been really rewarding.
There's difficulty in approaching from the outside, though. I'm trying to be careful to provide value and not overstep. The Inuit especially can be defensive, because you see a lot of people online who sort of fetishize the culture, or people (certainly linguists) whose work can seem extractive to the tight-knit Northern communities.
I've always wanted to build tools working with text that people use on a day-to-day, but I also worry that this will be just another project I spend months on that will not see any use. I'm trying to make connections so that I can build value without seeming extractive. It's hard to know where to start, however.
I wouldn't consider your months spent on it in any way wasted, even if you have native critics, it's a kind of ad-hoc anthropological resource that you add to the pool of tools available in the web, and on the long run I think it will have a good impact.
Thanks for your review also and yes it's still early days, tons to do but of the fun type. I'll look into Manitoba as I have relatives which may be related to the cultures you mentioned, thank you!
When you say syllabics it reminds me of syllabaries (?) of mesopotamian languages and hieroglyphs, but I guess it's just the terms sounding alike.
I'm working on android app that exposes camera stack trough http/websocket API.
The idea is that phones have very nice cameras and lot of media processing power and such API could enable hackers to easily incorporate capable camera stack in to their projects without android development experience in any language they like.
There are millions of working phones in the drawers battery backed, with plenty of computing power, nice cameras, hardware acceleration, good connectivity (WiFi, ethernet over usb), that could get new purpose.
Previously I was working on automated photogrammetry rig and this is perfect use case for that.
If you see other use case for such API share your ideas.
If you think that's cool idea to develop and would like to help write me at hn@zelo.pl
I checked droidcam before and AFAIK it solves the problem of using adnroid device as webcam using server and client apps.
I want to expose low level camera capabilities like manual focus controll, capturing raw images, iso, etc. DroidCam exposes only subset of functionality I need.
In short i want it to be more like programmable controlled digital camera than webcam.
BTW scrcpy offers similar features trough adb to DroidCam.
I'm working on a plasmid (vector) editor called PlasCAD, for molecular biology. I'm doing it mainly as a learning project, and trying to fill in the gaps where I found limitations in existing software. As of last week, it's in a state where the main features are there. I'm going to now focus on polish, and adding specialty features. Would appreciate any and all feedback!
It lets you view and edit plasmid sequences, features, and primers, and has some tools like automatic primer creation for cloning, primer QC, protein sequence viewing, and interop with common file formats.
I’ve been working on robotics for a few months now. I have built an arm, started receiving parts for my quadruped, and have learned enough RL to at least hold opinions on it (my background is ML/LLM training, so a bit different).
Eventual goal before I return to work next year is to have a robot I can take on walks with me that will pick up trash.
When the hype was focused on chatbots, I joined a startup that built one focused on ecommerce. It turned into a useful product that actually help real customers.
Looking back, there wasn't any material to actually build a useful chat agent that resolved real-world problems. So I'm writing the guide that I wish I had when getting started.
I'll publish it on github and post here as more progress is made. I've created three parts. Part One is a non dev focused which explains how each of the moving parts work, what is Ai and what isn't. Part two gets technical and explains the tech stack. Part three is a bonus section that looks at how Ai assistants like google and Siri work and can be improved.
The working title is Automated Agents.
Edit: adding a link for those who want to follow along.
I wanted to record more of my life, but I found that the act of noting it down was too cumbersome. Looking to minimize friction, I created a Telegram bot that saves all messages you send it into a Google Spreadsheet.
Hashtags can be used to split the text into sheets and columns, if so desired. Besides jotting down quick thoughts, this is very handy for short-form journaling such as tracking expenses, workouts, mood, period, weight, diet, etc., with the added bonus of easy charting and summarization from within the spreadsheet. It also supports pictures and other attachments that are uploaded automatically to Google Drive and linked into the spreadsheet.
I'm experimenting to figure out the simplest setup possible that allows me to expose an internal web service (eg localhost:3000) to the public Internet (eg app.example.com).
A million ways to do this, of course, but I'm focused on using wireguard so that eg only my wireguard peers can get access to my local service, and for internal traffic (ie vpn).
At the moment I'm settling on having a simple script that I can run on a host alongside wireguard. The script will function like `wg-quick`, parsing a wireguard config file and handilng the routing stuff behind the scenes, and returning a cleaned up config to be passed to `wg`.
Ideally, the wireguard configs could be generated by some other tool or service, like https://wirehub.org, and automatically fetched and applied to the running wg interface.
So, a one liner on a server with a public IP and the services exposed by your wireguard peers can be accessed via a custom domain name while still respecting internal wireguard routing rules (based on AllowedIPs).
If anyone finds this interesting and wants to chat about it, I would love to! My contact info is in my profile.
This is what ngrok does right? I'm really interested in how this works, I've never looked into it before. Presumably it requires some kind of dynamic DNS updates if you don't have a static IP?
ngrok, localtunnel, pyjamas, the list is endless..
Yeah, many ways to do it, one is running your own DNS server and have wireguard connections use that DNS server.
I want to avoid having DNS issues, so I'm thinking more like this:
1. DNS CNAME *.internal.example.com 123.23.45.67
2. On 123.23.45.67, run wg.
3. On 123.23.45.67 , run nginx. nginx must be in the same network to do geo blocking on Wireguard peer addressess.
4. Create one nginx server config per service to map domain names to upstream servers. Use variables for upstream servers, allow nginx to start even if upstreams unreachable. Add internal locations for custom errors (Forbidden, Unreachable, etc).
5. When connecting to 123.23.45.67 via Wireguard (ie, Peer Endpoint = 123.23.45.67), ensure 123.23.45.67 is in the range defined by Peer AllowedIPs.
https://www.notationer.com/ (a tool to switch across (code) notations, like camelCase, PascalCase, snake-case).
Frontend is mostly in React/Next.js (Some older projects have frontend still in the old ASP.NET MVC and Ajax :-)). Where the backend is needed, it is written in .Net/C# and running on Azure.
My truck. It has sentimental value as my first car. I just gone done with the water pump and I just solved my steering "pop" issue. Next up is a new steering wheel as the old one is gross and sticky. While I'm at it I'm going to install a new turn signal/wiper control lever and fix the turn signal auto-off spring.
I just replaced the rear brake pads and rotors on my truck. PITA, but it's fun sometimes to get outside, have tools in your hands, and work on something tangible.
I have another project lined up for my truck that I'm going to get into soon. I'm going to add a secondary high-current power distribution bus with a couple of bus-bar distribution blocks at convenient points, to make it easier to add accessories. I've already replaced one of the battery terminal screws with an aftermarket one that adds an extended stud and a nut, where you can attach a cable with a ring terminal. And I've got heavy duty copper lugs, some #2 welding cable, a hydraulic crimping tool, and the distribution blocks waiting on a shelf.
Once that's in place, It'll be very convenient for adding ham radio gear, an air compressor, a power inverter and some other things I've been chewing on.
Cool! What's yours? I just found a 1984 Chevy Scottsdale for my kid. It was my first vehicle and now he'll have one too.
It's a sneaky way for me to limit his time tearing around the countryside with friends, because all his money will go towards parts and (if I get my way and put in a much larger engine) gas.
Scams usually start with messages. Predominantly SMS/email sent with links.
ML models exist to determine this, but we are prototyping using Gemma2 2b to utilise its natural language understanding to see if a better firewall could be built, one which users can talk to.
I'm working on Relay [0] -- a collaboration plugin for Obsidian using yjs to provide live cursors and folder sync.
I'm currently thinking about how to robustly Integrate different edit sources like iCloud, obsidian sync, git, and yjs updates. I think it could be cool to create a crdt persistence format that can live alongside markdown files (like note.md + note.md.crdt) to support edit history tracking from multiple users and their devices.
I've been taking a (mental) break from programming and doing a lot more climbing, getting back into my body. After twenty years of boulder/sport/trad/big wall I've drifted into the dark art of rope solo. It's an wild way to climb that really appeals to my engineering brain - lots of deep knowledge about gear and the mountain intertwined with various logistical puzzles. Very rewarding when it works. The latest mission has been optimising my system a lot to start tackling bigger stuff.
Thats great to hear. I'm also working on my body after 2 spinal surgeries. Doing pilates each day, and additionally weight training and cycling on each alternating day.
For a skinny guy who never did any resistance training, this transformed my body to a lean, muscular type in what it seems to me like overnight. I cannot emphasize enough how good that was (and is) for the body. The body at first doesn't like it, but giving it a bit of consistency it learns and yearns for it.
The back pains I had are gone and even if they come back here and there they are much less intense and more manageable. Doing some impromptu exercises for couple of minutes fixes that too.
One of the biggest wtfs I had was when I decided to drill some holes in the wall because I was unable to for months after last surgery. I've grabbed my battery powered drill from the shed and was open mouthed how suddenly light that tool was. I literally checked if I've put the battery on. You don't notice the strength gain that much during normal work in the house, but do something which you know was heavy before and be amazed.
I definitely credit good people on this site for sharing their experiences. At first I thought that only weirdos and meatheads do resistance training and always had a mental image of steroid laden walking muscles. Then I've read that article where was the graph of expected life expectancy for a person taking on training in their forties vs not training and it really did concern me. As a guy in early forties I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with very poor quality of life/mobility. I didn't want to be glued to my computer all day long as it would virtually be the death of me.
I wanted to write a blog post about this journey (which is still short, but memory is fresh;) maybe to help geeks like us to see that being in front of the computer all day long is terrible. It works when you're young, but it absolutely doesn't as you get older. And everyone will get older whatever the younger people think. If I knew stuff I know now about fitness 20 years ago, I'm sure I would be 5 times more healthier, and I wouldn't need any spinal surgeries. But nobody told me anything and I thought "doing stuff" on the computer all day long is fine. "I'll be mobile and skinny even when much older, what else would I need?". Oh boy how wrong was I.
I am currently working on a custom markup language called atex. It's syntax reminds of latex syntax, but with @ instead \ as a special character (very similar to the Lout language, if anyone remembers it). Also, the atex language hasn't any predefined commands. Instead, all commands are defined via schema specified in a separate YAML file. Schema defines commands that can be used and means of "rendering" those commands to different targets (HTML, Tex, Typst, whatever...)
Just today, I finished first working version of the new compiler (https://github.com/ubavic/mint). It is written in Go, and there are lot of things on the TODO list, but it works :)
This is actually the second compiler for the atex. The first one was written in Haskell and compiled fixed document schema. I used it for writing a book on Haskell (https://github.com/ubavic/programming-in-haskell).
I'm currently working on an Art Project stemming from the mixture of cellular automata and neural networks in Rust. The YouTuber Emergent garden has already implemented this idea but I wanted to go much deeper. With different coloring algorithms, neuron types, time travel values, arbitrarily connected networks, crazy activitation functions etc. I just uploaded a very short showcase of it here:
https://defguard.net/ - open-source SSO service built with rust on top of wireguard & OIDC. It's been a lot of work but we're slowly gaining traction and nearing the 1.0 release.
Some of the features:
* OpenID Connect based Identity Provider
* OpenLDAP synchronization - currently supporting users and groups synchronization
* MFA with TOTP, email, WebAuthn / FIDO2, crypto wallets
* wireguard client GUI integrated with OIDC, supporting multiple locations (https://defguard.net/client)
* secure enrollment & onboarding
* yubikey provisioning
Currently we're working on external OIDC providers integration.
65 Words is an anonymous challenge to write 65+ words daily in the language you're learning.
The real focus isn't just on improving your writing but on having the opportunity to think about how you'd express something without the pressure of the moment.
There's no hidden science behind choosing 65 words. I found it’s achievable even on a very busy day.
The goal is to help learners practice daily and build confidence through consistent effort.
I've been working on an electronic music controller designed around seven-limit just intonation that I'm calling the Mosaichord. It's a 4-octave keyboard using a scale with 28 notes per octave. The keys are pressure-sensitive.
Recently I got a DIY strobe tuner I've been working on up and running, which pairs nicely with the Mosaichord.
The Mosaichord works pretty well these days, and I've assembled a bunch of them. Just got a new batch of PCBs yesterday to make more. There's a basic website up, but I haven't yet set up a proper web store.
I have been making YouTube videos about a project I built a couple of years ago. It took a while to find the time and the right approach to documenting it, but I'm finally happy with the results.
I also recently left the Big Tech world after 11 years at Google, so I'm trying to figure out what comes next. (I don't think I can make professional YouTuber pay the bills). If it's not inappropriate to mention here, my resume is at https://hire.masto.me/
Maybe, but I doubt I could make them at a price that would earn me any profit.
I'm hoping at some point someone will comment or message me to say they've built one. I just added the parts list and CAD models to https://github.com/masto/LED-Marquee/tree/main/hardware, and in the next video I'll explain how to build the software.
While owning a printer is still a curse (1), and software continues a cloudward spiral (2) I’ve made solid progress on a local-first indie barefoot app for designing and printing labels. I just shipped a new feature where you can use modern JS to build logic for each label, modifying variables, hiding and showing objects, formatting dates, etc. More at https://label.live/guides/add-logic-with-script-variables
I left my home country for Portugal when I was 18, and was refurbishing iPods for money while living in a hostel. In my free time, I developed a Bluetooth kit, a crude first version which required hours of hand-soldering soldering, CNC milling, etc. to manufacture. While selling these I used the money to prototype and manufacture the second revision.
That's the version you can purchase today, which can now be assembled in about five minutes. This has allowed me to scale the business, and now we're a few employees big, shipping worldwide. A few grey hairs have appeared at 22 but finally I can relax a little.
In my novel (see profile), there are stories within the story as well as simultaneous actions. I wanted to typeset simultaneous events set within a sub-story. Using Markdown, a natural way to do this would be:
> ::: simul
> Simultaneous section 1.
> :::
>
> ::: simul
> Simultaneous section 2.
> :::
Still working on https://exist.io, a platform for quantifying and tracking data about your life. We've been around for about a decade now and seen many competitors come and go — this niche is definitely not at the peak of the hype cycle any more. On the other hand, Apple Watches have normalised tracking body stats like activity (and sleep to a degree), and yet we think there's still so much more that can be done with that data. We're still (always) working on improving our insights and correlations to find better ways to use the data to optimise your health, mood, productivity, and so on. But not with "AI" :)
I've been working on something to handle the "plumbing for your observability". It's a way to collect, stream, and route observability data that can get it from and into a wide variety of systems.
It's not targeted at the 'cloud native' crowd, but rather more at traditional on-prem infra.
It is all manageable via an API and provides a Kafka API for streaming data (RedPanda under the hood).
I had surgery for a torn meniscus repair. I’m on the couch for a least another month.
I’m using this precious expanded free time to compose music, my primary form of artistic expression.
Software-wise, I’m on a platform team for a large company. I’m making some performance enhancements to our http client, and a plug-n-play library for app devs to easily integrate LLMs in their products.
Piling on the "Do the Physical Therapy" train, I had this done 2 years ago, did the PT work and now back 100%. It's a pain (literally and figuratively) but future you will be super happy current you did the work. Look into chair yoga, it will help you keep all of the other bits stretched out. Good luck!
Although I am currently 16 and the summer vacation is coming to an end, I have made big progress during these few weeks. My mission was to build an app with the help of the Flutter framework, and I have succeeded!
The app's website is vid-note.com, if you would like to check it out. The value of the app is that one no longer has to watch endless videos but can find exactly what one needs about a certain topic within the notes that we offer. What is good to know is that most of the notes are centered around business and self-improvement for the reason that we, the founders, are interested in these topics. We understand that many would advise us to let an LLM write the notes, but for this project, we have decided to sway away from the flawed results that LLMs bring with them.
This is the first venture my business partner and I have decided to pursue, and we look forward to finding out if we must pivot or preserve. For those wondering, the app has been approved for external testing on the App Store, but we have decided not to make the jump yet, simply because we still have to handcraft a few notes ;). We predict that a release on the Play Store will soon follow. Cheers.
I was working with the Facebook API for another project, but I was surprised that a website as popular as Facebook had exclusively old API wrappers for it, that all required too much setup, and were cumbersome to write code with.
I wanted a better approach using the standards I have come to appreciate with modern API wrappers, and so I decided to start work on a more intuitive, faster approach for the Facebook API.
My initial launch goal is to allow for programmatic authentication, posting, and commenting, all with one setup command through a CLI.
I am currently working on developing a procedural, interpreted language that is amenable to genetic (evolutionary) programming.
I have decided to shelve my work on architectures that are biologically inspired for now. I was getting reasonable results with spiking neural networks and evolutionary training, but there are so many hyper parameters to think about and how they behave over time is really hard to predict. I was also struggling deeply with how to manage topological concerns like network growth over time.
With interpreted evolutionary programs, the memory access patterns are so much more ideal with the program counter stepping through (mostly) contiguous bytes vs totally insane recurrent spiking neural access patterns. You get so many more generations & candidates evaluated per unit time that it can make previously apparent "dead ends" viable, simply because you don't need to have extreme patience to find out anymore. I am discovering that iteration speed is the most important thing in this arena. The faster you find out how bad a certain parameter adjustment is, the sooner you can get to the good ones.
I am also working on an unrelated contract to integrate some back office banking systems. Not much worth discussing there.
I agree visualizing neural networks is challenging. The flexibility and consequences of network connections is also confusing. If you decide to go down that route again, the best work I've seen by far is the recent one by Stephen Wolfram: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...
I'm working on a workout API and native apps (iOS/Android) for Strength Level [1] as another interface for my.strengthlevel.com [2]. Strength Level helps you understand your relative strength - how strong you are for your bodyweight.
Using PHP Slim Framework, MySQL, and vanilla Swift/Java. Prioritizing reliability and efficient sync between local storage and server. Currently finalizing API endpoints and feature matching the web app. Next up is adding a subscription model.
It's challenging as:
- Users want to use the app offline which means we need to sync
- We have to match our existing features on [2] in the first version and evolve the API and database to support reliable sync
- Users want to also track their cardio too e.g. Running Level [3] and Rowing Level [4] but that will have to come out in a future version
almost 1000 comments suggests that this is very popular. doing this monthly would really help, although people may want to repost, so maybe some rule is needed for that. probably marking a post as "REPOST" or "NEW" would help regular readers find new projects.
Adding "REPOST" or "NEW" does nothing to ameliorate the problem of the same comment occurring over and over in search results (particularly hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate searches).
On the other hand, if each repost consists of just a link to the original post, or a link plus a few words, that would prevent the unpleasantness in search results.
fair point, but i think linking to the original post would make it more difficult to scan though the page, and people would simply not read those posts. might as well ban reposts altogether. so i think if reposts make sense then a tag is better than a link. if links are used they would at least need a short description, so for those that wrote a more detailed post at first, a link with a short desctiption would make sense, but that would benefit from a tag as well.
other tags such as "UPDATE" or "MAJOR UPDATE" could also be considered.
maybe something like this:
Please tag your posts as NEW, REPOST or UPDATE. For reposts and updates try not to repost the whole description but keep it short and link to the previous post instead
We’re building an off the shelf software and ECU that allows you to convert anything to EV (classics and low volume OEMs) with enough tweakable knobs to suit every application.
There are some players in this space already, but we have repurposed some OEM grade hardware that we usually reserve for the big players and so we can offer differentiating features such as DC fast charging, bidirectional/V2X, and things like this to the retrofit market.
My ultimate goal is to bring brain signals to the browser and develop neuro-apps, all in public. I share updates weekly on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/mind-tether
Hi there! We published our book(https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/) in May 2024, but getting visibility has been a challenge. We've posted on HN before and are currently using Amazon ads, but the results have been underwhelming so far. Any advice or strategies for improving our reach would be greatly appreciated!
I think you need to work on the pitch a bit and probably tone it down. Multiplying the promises under "Skills and Insights You'll Acquire" with "Who This Book Is For" just seem wildly unrealistic for one book and an oversell.
I get the vibe of a "become a 10x developer from scratch and land a rock star job in a month" bootcamp. 2/3 of your audience are likely to have seen enough of this already to be turned off. Meanwhile, perhaps some more junior will be intimidated and say "not yet" by the supposed advanced level (the material is also targeting people 10-20 years ahead in their careers after all...)
If you write another book in the future, I'd suggest splitting it into a couple more focused ones, rather than trying to cover all these dimensions for all seniority levels at the same time.
We are working on building a funding subscription for impact innovation called Marabou (https://marabou.pro/). Our plan is to allow people to subscribe starting from $50 per month and receive equity in innovative startups that benefit either human health (biotech, femtech, healthtech, longevity, drug repurposing) or environment(climate tech, adaptive tech, renewable energy, mobility, agriculture).
Our first campaign to fund Ethan Perlstein's research to find cures for rare diseases officially starts on Sep 9, but we already opened a pre-campaign. This one is a one-time commitment and it's heavily leaning on the charity side.
I have been reading the Reinforcement Learning textbook for the past three years religiously- didn’t get the concepts clear until this week, made it past Chapter 3 finally. The excellent YT lectures by David Silver and Emma Brunskill have been helpful but it took me a long time to ‘get it’.
Next, I will try to build something using RL next but try not to use the Gym/Farama stuff to force myself to learn this from scratch.
I'm working on https://reciperium.com which is a website to host recipes, with the twist that uses a specialised language for recipes, and you can fork recipes from other users and adapt them to your liking.
Not sure if I caught the train but still. My name is Max, a software developer based in Central Europe, and I'm working on my course "Building Command-Line Interface App from Scratch in Go" (this is a working title).
In this course I want to teach how to write CLI application from scratch in Go without any external dependencies (exception: driver for DB).
This is not another one course about how to write CLI app using Cobra or any other command-line builder library. Instead, in my course you're gonna write your own Cobra-like command-line builder library (package) to build command-line interface application from scratch.
Thus, you will know how to build an API for building CLI like Cobra and you can use it later on for your future projects. I will also talk about Command-Line Interface Guidelines showing how to make powerful, useful and easy-to-use command-line application which you can use every day in your workflow.
The course is still work in progress and I don't even have a web page for it. But I do have my newsletter where I share best resources about Go. By subscribing to this newsletter you will be notified once course is ready to launch. Also, everyone who's subscribed to my newsletter and will be in first batch to buy a course gets a 50% discount.
So, if you are interested in this kind of stuff join the waitlist for course in my newsletter on https://kovalevsky.io
P.S. I also have daily base newsletter about Go - Daily Golang. If you subscribe to this newsletter you will also be notified once course is ready to launch you and will get 50% discount to buy the course - https://kovalevsky.io/daily-golang.
I am building my very first computer game, Tungsten Moon, a VR+desktop spaceflight simulator with realistic physics and engineering, inspired by Orbiter, Eagle Lander 3D, and a little bit of Subnautica: https://tungstenmoon.com/
I'm working on a command line billing/invoicing system. I couldn't deal with the ones I've tried (too heavy on UI, too difficult to automate stuff with).
So far I just use it for my company billing, but it's quite delightful for me: My process is to save the services we provided in CSV files (exported from time tracking in org-mode, but you could use any tool that supports exporting), then I run this over it and it creates PDF invoices, and stores all the data (which I query occasionally, e.g. for quarterly VAT payments).
Technologically it's weird, the invoice templates are written in LaTEX, and the code is in Common Lisp.
I don't think about turning it into a business, but I think I'll open source it once it's a bit less messy. For now, I just focus on implementing the features I need (about 1-2 per quarter now).
I kinda doubt it, but if anyone is interested in command line billing tools, I'd be excited to talk about it. Contact info is in my profile.
This is super interesting to me as I have been focused on picking up Emacs and Common Lisp this year for my own freelance and startup workloads. Would you ping me or reply here if you do end up open sourcing this?
I just started working on an engine for turn-based table-top games like Dominion, 7 Wonders, Catan, etc.
During university, I spent some time working on an AI agent to play Dominion, but a very large part of the work was building a way to simulate the game.
The goals are:
- Develop an engine that's efficient enough to use in simulations (for training AI agents or analyzing the game).
- Still emit events that can be used to visualize the current state of the game when real people are playing.
- Create primitives that are easy to distribute across a network for remote players/agents.
I'm a tech exec who misses their physics roots. In my spare time I'm interviewing "materials manufacturers" to come up with a viable startup idea. I'm hoping to build a company that leverages simulation and ML to accelerate material discovery.
Keeping key bits of the idea to myself. If this admittedly vague idea excites you let's find some time to talk.
Senior SWE with Comp Sci + Chemical Engineering background, considering a masters in materials science. If you're ever looking for someone who can bridge those spaces, would love to chat. Email etc in bio.
I'm working on a device that records surgery and uses AI models to analyze the procedure for things like surgical technique, efficiency, instrument usage, blood loss, etc. We're starting with using it for medical education because that doesn't need FDA approval, but eventually it'll be deployed in operating rooms. The goal is to enable every surgeon to perform like the greats (most aren't), improve patient outcomes and ultimately save lives. We just got into Techstars. Aside from that, dad life in suburbia
I am working on a SaaS for real estate agents. Customers get their own tenanted database and web front-end with some fancy front-end tools like geospatial searching to keep customers attracted to said customer's portfolio. I have a paying customer who's been using a 1.0 version for more than a decade now. I don't know whether I got lucky or there's a legitimate market for v2.0 out there. I am building it with boring tech as it's a boring product. I guess I should get back to building it.
I'm developing Weavus (https://weavus.app) as a way to take my events away from facebook. It's a social app (mobile only for now) where events are the main element and the home screen shows your upcoming events. The philosophy is no feed, no ads, no addiction, just your real social life.
The idea is also to merge in a single app many needs of events, like group chats, photo albums, expenses splitting, and I'm planning to add more. I realized groups have similar needs to events, so I added them as well (think small private groups, not massive communities).
All of this is stil very early in development and it definitely needs some more work before a Show HN, but we've found it very useful for weekends and holidays already.
Consider it an open beta, so feel free to give it a try and give me your honest feedback :)
Not in the short term, I'm working alone on this and don't know much about decentralized protocols so I can't work on it yet. Also, Weavus is not a social media: there are no posts, just events, groups and their content. So not sure it's as relevant.
Trying to use Literate Programming to create an OpenSCAD library for a Python-enabled version of OpenSCAD which is able to create DXF and G-code files for creating CNC projects:
I made this bookmarklet, which will speak highlighted text in the browser regardless of platform. It also makes the initial letters of each word bold. This is the code:
javascript:void function(){ javascript:(function(){ var selection = window.getSelection().toString(); if (!selection) { alert("Please select some text on the page."); return; } var encodedSelection = document.createElement("div"); encodedSelection.textContent = selection; var processedContent = encodedSelection.innerHTML.replace(/\n/g, " <br></br> "); var words = processedContent.split(" "); var formattedText = ""; var speechContent = ""; for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) { var word = words[i]; var chunkSize = Math.floor(word.length / 3) + 1; var boldPart = "<span style='font-weight:bolder'>" + word.substring(0, chunkSize) + "</span>"; var lightPart = "<span style='font-weight:lighter'>" + word.substring(chunkSize, word.length) + "</span>"; var formattedWord = boldPart + lightPart; if (word.endsWith(".")) { formattedWord += "<span style='color:red'> *</span>"; } formattedText += formattedWord + " "; speechContent += word + " "; } var newWindow = window.open("", "_blank"); newWindow.document.write("<html><head><title>Spoken Content</title></head><body><input type='range' min='0.1' max='10' value='1' step='0.1' id='rate-slider'><p id='content' style='background-color:#EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-height:200%25;font-family:Arial'>"%20+%20formattedText%20+%20"</p></body></html>");%20var%20rateSlider%20=%20newWindow.document.getElementById("rate-slider");%20var%20utterance%20=%20new%20SpeechSynthesisUtterance(speechContent);%20rateSlider.addEventListener("input",%20function()%20{%20utterance.rate%20=%20rateSlider.value;%20window.speechSynthesis.cancel();%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20});%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20})();}();
I'm a software engineer with a passion for pencil portraits (https://bpsagar.github.io/sketch). As an artist, I've often thought that a companion sketching app could help beginners and intermediate artists improve their process.
I'm currently working on an app that provides a step-by-step guide to drawing from a reference photo. My goal is to make the sketching process more accessible and enjoyable for everyone.
As someone who has always been absolutely awful at sketching, this sounds pretty interesting. Is there a mailing list or some other type of notification I can sign up to?
Thanks for expressing your interest. I've registered the domain Portrait.Coach, but it's not live yet. If you're interested in staying updated, please share your contact details using the form: https://tally.so/r/npNGy3
I'll email you as soon as the website is launched!
A data-oriented JavaScript engine called Nova (https://github.com/trynova/nova and https://trynova.dev/), basically trying to answer the question of "what if everything in the JS engine heap was stored in vectors in creation order?" This has some interesting properties; it's basically an ECS kind of engine.
This isn't really very interesting or innovative compared to other comments here, but lately I've decided I want to build a home server to do a few tasks: Jellyfin server, photo server (probably using Immich which looks like a nice clone of Google Photos, where I'm almost out of space), automated device backups, etc., so I've been doing a lot of research into this. I've built computers in the past many times, but I got out of it a while ago so a lot of things have changed.
I looked into pre-built systems like Synology and QNAP, but they seem too proprietary and limited, and somewhat expensive for the hardware they have, so I decided to build my own, but trying to decide on all the HW and SW is a real task: btrfs vs ZFS, Intel vs AMD, RAID levels, etc.
I'm hoping to do something similar, but only use HW that I own or can find at yard/estates sales. I bought a 4Tb WD My Cloud this weekend for $5. Found a 2Tb for $1 several years ago and WD replaced it for free.
Open source presenter software. The idea is anything you want to show on screen, all can be controlled through a single page. Useful for any events like concert, conference, camps, etc. You can also use it for digital signage.
Very early stage right now but I hope to release alpha soon. I'm already using it privately right now but there's a lot to do to make it user friendly.
Working on a SaaS that associates a person/company and their tech stack with psychology profiles. The intent is to better connect job seekers with companies.
In short, if you want a person with Language A experience, but Language B is close enough, my software will provide the signal that the candidate is good enough for a closer look.
Example: PHP and Go devs are likely to have similar approaches to how software should be built. Ruby and Go, perhaps not so much.
In tech, I'm interested in native systems programming, at the moment with C++.
Outside of tech, I do quite a bit of "long" distance running, swimming and e-biking.
When out on a run, it leaves lot of time available for listening on podcasts, mainly technical podcasts.
At the same time, when exercising, I want to publish tidbits I've learned, do projects with raspberry pies, arduinos, make statistics over time series (power consumption, electricity price, internet usage++).
When I'm home, I'm thinking I'll do it later :).
What I'm most curious about, is how people, and I, can stay organized. All information feels like a mess :)
I haven't had any checklist for a couple of months, due to holidays and so on. Earlier I've tried various formats; post-it, small notebooks, notes, paper, trello, notes (iPhone) and keeping it in my mind.
Sometimes the tasks are too large, and will easily take days to complete, which puts me off. Sometimes the tasks are too small, and I do them there and then. Sometimes they are right-sized.
When the tasks are written down, they become 'not important' and 'I can do it later', also they are easier to stow away out of sight :).
Not to mention there are also a couple of hundred open tabs of various stuff I'd like to research... but most of them can be probably be closed.
When it's routine, I've got no problems doing stuff like making dinner, vacuuming, exercising, getting groceries and so on.
But when it comes to projects, and publishing, I feel there is no more juice left.
Thanks Rob. It's been a long time since I wrote this much for a 'human' and not for a 'machine'. I'll try to continue reviving a couple of drafts.
I'd like to work on my writing skills. Some mix of nerdiness and personal Journaling. https://dynomight.net/ is a website that I'm quite inspired by, as it's a interesting mix of personal commentary (https://dynomight.net/advice/) and deep data dives into e.g. homelessness and seed oils.
My main barriers are 1) writing discipline and 2) some obsessive need to link/cite every claim I make. This results in me taking months to write an article, be it due to laziness or constant rabbitholes/google scholar searches about an idea.
Any clue on dedicated disciplined writing time or even considering "reducing" the rigor of writing?
I find when I'm swamped it's because I lack decision making skills. It's a soft skill to keep your workload manageable. There's no substitute to constantly making decisions. And I suspect is the key to being a 10x developer (besides being smart)
Over-researching is probably better than under-researching. To reduce time spent researching, try imposing a deadline. The difficulty will be sticking to it, since nobody but yourself will be breathing down your neck.
I've always found adding custom metrics and monitoring to applications to be a big hassle, so I'm experimenting with one that uses the log stream instead of agents/daemons.
I have one that I'm making open source, as a digital montage system.. think of the "memories" feature on Google photos or iCloud.
I basically want that to be open and free. I'll have an app to easily create albums, and have the ability to connect to any storage or montage service you like. You could even make your own app connect to your own storage and montage service, so it can be completely diy. I have a few write-ups but I'm transferring it to notion at the moment so I won't link it just yet.
My other idea is a "bill hamper / consolidation" service, that I'm doing for my sister. She pays me a flat fee each week and I pay all of her bills for her. Gives her peace of mind and allows her to save some money without stressing on paying random bills
Hello!
I'm working on a low-code API builder based on Flyde, the open-source visual programming language I launched a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39628285)
Unlike existing low-code API builders, one can easily eject to a ".flyde" source file and run the API wherever they want without being commercially vendor-locked
I'm one of the people working on Prodigy Reloaded (https://prodigyreloaded.com), recreating the Prodigy server to work with the client software in DOS and Mac. The new server software is written in Elixir.
My part has been to generate news headlines and weather maps using current news and weather information. The most interesting part for me has been deciphering the 1980's era graphics format, NAPLPS, which Prodigy uses and making a library to write files in the format. I treat the file format as a data transformation, taking the NAPLPS file generated so far and appending more commands to the end of it. The commands naturally pipe into each other in an idiomatic way in Elixir.
The Prodigy PC client runs in Dosbox, it's how we do most of our testing. If we, or someone, can get dosbox working in a browser then it's possible. But when it's displayed at vintage computer festivals period-appropriate hardware is used.
Google will review the listing and eventually add it to the map, no further action required by you. Once they do, you'll want to get your customers to write reviews.
I build a computer app to make it easier to do projector sewing. This allows you to take a PDF sewing pattern and use a projector (often mounted on a ceiling, shining down on a cutting mat) to see that pattern at life size. You can then easily cut it out and sew it together.
I do think it has uses beyond sewing; enlarging art, for example, or perhaps painting stage backgrounds, or maybe laying out patterns for building something out of wood.
I'm looking for new ideas for my witch.inc comic strips, it's like IT-Crowd, but for witches and wizards. I kinda ran out of them after I quit my tech-support job. Doing database administration now but it's not as rich in corporate slip-ups
Though I am not actually _working_ on anything concrete(facing analysis paralysis. Also, as a coder, I have no idea how to deal with the sales site) this should turn to a monthly post
Also, Should be a messier version of this as a monthly post where people like you and me post "hey I dont have a project in mind per se, but wanna throw some things out there and maybe hit on a collaboration? Or at minimum idea path validation?
I’m building a travisher [1]. Both wooden body and iron.
I found it amazing the importance of the small details in old woodworking tools and how toolmakers solve problems and improve tools. Particularly in very simple tools.
Working on https://www.shareback.com , team of 2. Been working on it for a few years, trying different ideas. We are trying to build something that we'd be happy to use by ourselves so it's been an interesting journey of self-discovery, research and coding. Also my partner in crime is non-technical and sometimes I kind of forget that people might use software in very different way to how, for example, I would do.
Outside of that I am also building a gym up for myself which I could use without glasses (all apps I tried have tiny buttons or controls that I cant see in the gym)
Re. client side prediction and server reconciliation, may I recommend https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....? Even if you don't roll your own solution, it might be worth understanding the theory so you can use these libraries correctly.
My interest in sound design and music production took a surprising turn and I now spend my weekends studying alien vocalization. More specifically, figuring out how to synthesize believable alien vocals and make them expressive and customizable enough to be a tool for anyone who needs that sort of thing for their creative work.
I've been learning how to use Blender. For a long time I've thought that working with things in 3D could be made simpler by having an app where your phone is a sort of 3D cursor, and e.g. for modeling you could use your phone as a sculpting knife by moving it around in the air.
So I spent some time trying to make an app that allows you to do that, but can't shake the thought that such an app would work better as a Blender addon/plugin rather a standalone app. And I also am trying to figure out how people work with 3D currently, to see if such a tool would even be an improvement over existing tools.
Cool! Didn't know about the pen, though I've seen clips of similar tech being used.
I've got a long ways to go with this app though so it's still just a pet project. The position tracking is very suboptimal right now, so I need to switch to a better library. And then I need to start adding actual actions because right now the app is just a glorified object viewer.
I'm insanely flattered that you think it's interesting though. Very motivating to me.
I love this space of hybrid computing. If you want to see some inspiration, look at
- bill buxton at Microsoft research
- Disney research has a lot of really cool stuff too
- anything siggraph
Please keep me up to date one way or another. If you have linkedin, add me, a blog or newsletter? I'll sign up. Discord? Let me know. Just let me know where you're active.
That was cool! Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing I'm working on too. I don't have it that you can draw like he does, but it does let you view an object in a similar way & it can stream data to a server connected over wifi so that you can see mirrored behavior on a desktop app. But it's missing so much still, you can't interact with anything yet.
I believe typescript / js is missing standard library and find it rewarding to work during weekends on those lower level libraries/modules with no/low dependency fanout, publishing them here [0] when they're ready to see the light.
They're driven by what problems I see at work and while playing with other weekend projects so coverage may be asymmetric (some parts are well covered, others that should be are absent <<ie. documentation>>).
I find definition of success as just "working on it" very pleasant.
Evy is an app for collectors, both professional and casual, to help them keep track of their items and share it with the world. Currently there are either overly complex inventory management systems, which are overkill for casual collectors, or generic social platforms, which are "fine" for everything, but great for nothing. My goal with Evy is to fill this gap by offering an easy way for any collector to manage their items.
In short, it is an asset management system tailored specifically for collectors.
Currently working on game development in Godot. We're making Dice'n Goblins, a dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by classics like Etrian Odissey and Wizardry VII, with a cartoon aesthetic similar to Paper Mario. The twist is that you have to collect and use dice to beat the monsters that crawl inside the dungeon.
I am working on an open book Library and a "new" D-Licence.
It is an experiment for the exploration of the free aspect of blockchain storage, where the book library is now permanently hosted on the blockchain, and it's content voted upon by its members.
The licence is based on creative commons, and enforces that the data is decentralized and doesn't need any account, or wallet, to use.
There is also the creation of a new label, the D-Safe label, for a safe experience across generations.
A fun side project - which I have been working on for several years now - rewriting it fully already 10 times - and been restructuring my mental health around it.
I'm a Master's student in Artificial Intelligence at UofT. Right now, I'm adding the "ML (Machine Learning) Streaming" feature to PyMilo. PyMilo is an open-source Python package that provides a transparent, safe, and end-to-end way for users to export pre-trained machine-learning models.
After version 0.9 release, PyMilo became feature-completed with full support of scikit-learn models, now it's time to move on to PyTorch and then Tensorflow. But we decided to add the "ML Streaming" feature before getting into PyTorch, in order to provide an easy way to smoothly stream your ML model. By using the "ML Streaming" feature you can easily deploy your model into the remote server, connect to it from the client side, and choose the working mode, either delegation or local mode, through delegation mode your requests will be relayed to the remote server and you can easily work with your remote model from any devices without any further dependencies, and finally, you can download model for local use.
We will release the 1.0 (tenth) version of PyMilo around Sep 16th, this release will be the first release to have the "ML Streaming" feature with support of REST API, and we will next add other protocols such as Websocket.
Derived a SOTA method that finds the proven optimal solution to the multiperiod blending problem.
This is a problem that every refiner solvea to select raw msterials. They traditionally solve with local optimization methods (LPs) that rely on initial guesses and return suboptimal solutions.
For the same refinery we can find raw material acquisition solutions with 2-5% higher profits.
We made a cloud platform for it and hoping to change the landscape.
I’m building a door. I find that mortises (my frame is mortise and tenon, the tenons were easy on a table saw) are much harder to create if you don’t have a proper plunge router. I’m using some chisels and it works fine but I have eight mortises to make and I’ve finished 1.5 in about the same number of hours. I don’t want to buy a plunge router, because I’m unemployed at the moment, but it would finish the job in minutes. I guess I’ll go get to chiseling! Next door I make will use half laps, so I can use the table saw for both ends of the joinery.
So back in 2021 I built a loyalty platform for a chain of gas stations in the Caribbean. Thought it would be a quick deliverable, then hands off.
It's turning into a full time side gig that's paid off in handful of batches (~$25K and running)
I'm trying to become a loyalty vendor API.
Would really like to work on my own interconnected systems of blogging tools and social media. Kinda a blend between having your own site and myspace? Not really targeting a market or anything like that, just think it would be cool to do for personal use and sharing with family and friends
I went to school with the son of the owner. For about 3 years off and on he'd been asking me about building apps, where he could find good devs, what price to pay.
I'd sent him some info, but never got too involved. Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself with a bit more time to kill, so I listened more to what they needed.
They basically wanted to get a loyalty program going at their gas stations and partner gas stations, but wanted custom rules which their current provider couldn't do with their off the shelf solution.
They also wanted to use one of those old school CC machines that were everywhere before the likes of square showed up. But getting your hands on those units is expensieve.
So I started planning it out. They needed to store customer data, and needed a point of sale device to swipe customer loyalty cards on, which needed to read in customer info, do a deduction, or a store credit top up and print a receipt.
I found a android terminal machine off alibaba, opened up android studio and started hacking away. I hadn't done more than a basic android hello world at this point.
For the backend I used django to get started quickly, and they were very happy to use the django built in admin panel to do stuff as needed, and view transactions.
After I got the devices talking to django, I had to integrate a loyalty vendor they already sourced, and just went along with it, but that was a mistake. The vendor points API doesn't really add much value on what django can already do for me, and my new goal is to become that vendor since I think I can do their product better.
But basically I iterated on it for about a year, launched a little over a year ago, still working out some edge cases and kinks, but they do roughly 25K transactions a month on devices spread out at over 20 stores.
They want to bring it to new islands, so I'm trying to remove some of my duct tape fixes with more stable fixes so that can be smooth sailing come next year.
EDIT: Might get back to writing and update with a much longer post. Draft:
Wow, thanks. This is fascinating and it's also a useful outline or storyline for how these sorts of B2B projects come about. Particularly the part about how their current provider couldn't or just didn't want to provide or develop new services or perhaps just didn't see the customer base developing. Driving a wedge between big enterprise solutions and "move fast and break things" guerilla solutions.
[EDIT: Just wanted to add that I'll definitely be circling back to read the rest as you finish it and the lessons learned.]
I've been working on an exciting project called DataSignal, where I'm developing a sophisticated Named Entity Recognition (NER) and enrichment system. This system is designed to identify and extract key entities from blocks of text, such as names, locations, or organizations, and then provide rich contextual information about them. The goal is to transform raw text into meaningful data that users can easily understand and leverage in various applications.
The real magic of DataSignal lies in how it delivers this contextual information. It can be seamlessly integrated into your workflow through a browser plugin, which instantly highlights and explains entities as you browse the web. For developers, DataSignal can be embedded directly into a webpage via JavaScript, enhancing the content on the page with dynamic insights. Additionally, it offers a REST API, allowing for flexible and customizable integration into other software systems.
Whether you're a developer looking to enhance your application with smart text analysis or someone who wants to streamline research and data gathering, DataSignal is poised to bring a new level of insight and efficiency to text analysis. This project aims to make complex data more accessible and actionable, transforming how we interact with and interpret information.
Bungee is our audio stretching library. It can change music tempo and pitch effortlessly in real time on all common devices and browsers.
Bungee is unique in its quality, performance and controllability. Every media player, DAW, video editor should use something like Bungee for smooth scrubbing and audio slomo.
I know my project is unworthy of upvotes from HN, but I’ve been working (hard) on a simple real estate site https://davegooden.com. No big deal. No real tech. Just lots of work and lots of potential upside.
I'm trying to make it easier to run clubs, associations & organizations with a platform called embolt.app[1].
We're offering online memberships, event management, and a member database packed with features. Membership management is a crowded space, but it's also a low-tech space with lots of sleeping giants not willing to iterate on their product.
It's been a really fun project so far and even more rewarding to see clubs using embolt for their daily operations.
Looks very cool from what I can see. Any plans to have an open / public API? For many associations past a certain size, an integration is going to become an inevitability (syncing member lists between systems is the most common, but also events, i.e. letting people register for an event on your site and then syncing to Zoom for automatic registration and email handling).
Working on Pulselyre, a touch-focused Windows app for producing electronic music live. It doesn't output audio on its own, but it lets you configure various virtual "instruments" on screen that can send MIDI note and control messages to other MIDI devices or VSTs configured to receive MIDI messages. You can record notes and events for each instrument and then loop them over a configured number of beats. Also has some other features to make creating music easier, like saving/loading note sequences, an arpeggiator, receiving input from external MIDI controllers/keyboards, and some other stuff. I've been meaning to record a demo video, but I'm not actually very good at playing or making music myself, so I haven't come up with anything presentable yet. I'm also not really married to the name, but it works for now...
It's built using C# and WPF, and a related project I work on is an open source MVVM framework called UpbeatUI for making WPF apps that behave vaguely like mobile apps. It's for apps that have a main bottom layer and modal popups that float above and can be closed by clicking/touching the background. Pulselyre uses UpbeatUI, and I actually originally extracted UpbeatUI from a much older version of Pulselyre.
https://www.justbeepit.com/ started as a web annotation tool that I hacked together with a friend. Now, it’s a full-fledged visual task management platform with over 2,000 users.
In 2022, I wondered what it would be like if my manager could leave comments directly on the live website for all the edits, rather than sending a bunch of screenshots and videos. That’s how I came up with the idea for a "simple" browser extension that lets you leave comments on any site, anywhere on the screen.
There were several challenges along the way:
Attaching Comments to the Correct HTML Element: I initially struggled with ensuring comments were attached to the right element, as relying on X/Y coordinates would not be responsive. Now, I use a combination of element IDs, classes, outer HTML, and attributes. This approach works correctly 95% of the time. Do you know of any other methods to find the correct element in the DOM?
No Third-Party Libraries: Extension development only allows pure HTML, CSS, and JS, with no external scripts from CDNs. Building a text editor from scratch was one of the most challenging parts.
Real-Time Functionality: Keeping the extension's background page active was tough because it deactivates when not in use, making it almost impossible to maintain a socket connection. I wrote code to wake up the background page and reconnect the socket whenever it goes to sleep.
I stopped all my freelance projects, and now three other people and I work on this tool full-time. We recently became #1 on Product Hunt: JustBeepIt.com
There are still many issues we're working on, such as using it with iFrames or inside scrollable objects, but we're tackling these challenges one by one.
Have been working on a protocol library [1] meant to be a substitute for "JSON-RPC over HTTP/WebSocket". Part of the goal is to more natively support byte-oriented data structures and reduce overheads. It supports a bidirectional HTTP2-style "channel" concept, but without making any assumptions about how they're meant to be used. It also can be configured to require authentication of the client and/or server, but punts secrecy to a lower-level transport protocol. It uses Rust macros to generate traits and wrappers to make the ergonomics fairly easy.
Currently I've built a call/response RPC abstraction with it to use it for another project that I'm working on. Eventually I'd want to add a streaming message system beyond the basic call/response pattern. I also might like to ship some easy setup to bridge between these protocol abstractions and ZMQ, JSON-RPC, be able to behave like inetd, etc.
It's functional enough to use in non-production environments but not completely seriously yet. I'm working out the kinks and improving the DX by using it for that other project. There's still some easy improvements around the byte encoding that I still haven't gotten to yet.
— I’m still curating my newsletter / post series focused on humans and their blogs to help people rediscover that part of the web (https://peopleandblogs.com)
— I’m working on a second newsletter that’s more discovery oriented but still focused on the personal web space
— I’m setting up a private, invite only discourse forum to create a space where people can hang out and connect in a more meaningful way
— I’m working on a new studio site in collaboration with a friend
Open source online backgammon. Backgammon is fairly niche, so there seems to be a lot of opportunity for backgammon software to be developed. I'm taking inspiration from Lichess, having enjoyed playing chess there for years. Check out the server, client and backgammon AI I'm working on at https://bgammon.org
It's fast and easy if you are willing to accept big losses, but slow and hard if you want to save thousands of dollars.
However, it's important not to be too cheap - a friend of mine was stuck with a $150,000 balance on CS.Money because he only wanted to withdraw money in the most optimal way.
I had this realization that, sometimes, people on my team are doing the same tasks in different ways, resulting each of them taking different amount of time. In certain scenarios, there is an optimal way of doing things, and I don't even know about it. Trying to test out if current AI-models are solid enough to do comparisons from a screen recording, or just general suggestions for improving white-collar workflows. I could see an eventual platform that could be built out of it.
It's possible they aren't talking about code at all.
"This team member, and this other team member are both filing a particular kind of report but are doing so in very different ways, is one of them more effecient?"
I like it. Seems like there could be lots of ways to automate the creation of SOP for many businesses. I do wonder how high level of tasks it could pick up on. Though maybe that gets better with a bigger context window.
Hm, if you mean software design patterns, then not exactly. It's probably harder to detect in just coding world, but the easiest one I can think of in our realm "checking current CPU usage of X service". In my current company, there are quite a few ways - logging into AWS -> switching to production environment -> going to ECS -> Looking up the service -> Clicking on metrics, or opening DataDog -> Dashboards -> Service Name.
I understand it's very reductive and simplified, but for every task there are alternative ways to reach the goal, and from my historical experience, everyone does everything differently. Some things can be optimized significantly, if others just knew about the possibilities.
I'm working on Devlog — https://dev.log.xyz — software that I hope will help teams work better by making it more obvious who is doing what. It should help answer questions like "what did Sarah do last week?" or "who worked on frontend performance in the last year?" It's very much in alpha-stage, more a tech demo than a product, and I'm not sure if it will actually succeed. My cofounder just bailed on me but I'm going to keep trying to make it happen. Dogfooding it has made me a better engineer — I write better and clearer PRs — and as a former Senior Engineering Manager, I know it would save me time if I were still managing a larger team. But the setup is onerous (you have to connect your Github so it can analyze your PRs) and the value prop is more vitamin than painkiller unless your team is somewhat disfunctional, and no one likes to admit their team is disfunctional.
Happy to talk more about this with anyone. If you're at all interested in "software to make your team run better" I'd really love to hear what you're having trouble with and how your team runs, maybe I can figure out a way to help you, even if it's not at all related to what I've built already.
Right now it only looks at Github PRs, particularly the descriptions and titles (although I'm also experimenting with the code diff itself), for these reasons:
- Most teams that I'd sell to use Github PRs to write code.
- Looking at PRs, the "common unit of change" of most teams, lets Devlog work for teams regardless of how they end up merging in changes (merge commits vs squash vs rebase... doesn't matter because the PR is what is reviewed and submitted)
- I believe that part of being a great engineer is learning how to describe (a) what your code does, (b) why you're making the change, and the PR title+description is where we as an industry expect you to communicate this information.
- A commit history filled with great PR titles+descriptions is extremely valuable for your team and only becomes more valuable over time, so building tools that analyze this and incentivize you to do a better job of writing good titles+descriptions is good for your whole team.
I'm extremely open to looking at different sources of information (Linear/Jira/Github tickets; the diff itself; ???) if it improves the product. What were you thinking it should look at?
From my perspective as a dev, the question I find myself always asking is "Who's the SME that can I ask about this code that still works here?" So for me the benefit of your project would be using it basically as an intelligent git blame that says who's done what to a particular line/file/module/project, and why. If that SME isn't available anymore, I'd like your tool to help me build context around the issue I'm working on. I'd want to see at least git commit message history and authors included in the available knowledge. If the repo has docs included, even better.
Another reason I would want git history included is because I think it would make your product more valuable quicker. I see your tool as a way to improve the dev culture by promoting the points you mentioned, but it's not clear how long it takes it to start to pay off and be able to answer some of the more historical questions you've suggested. I question, if my team had poor/nonexistent PRs in the past, when would I be able to get any use out of it, and would there always be blindspots around code that didn't have a good PR.
Thank you for taking the time to give me this feedback, really appreciate it. I think Devlog has the information needed to help answer these questions, but right now it doesn't do a particularly good job of making that easy.
> I question, if my team had poor/nonexistent PRs in the past, when would I be able to get any use out of it, and would there always be blindspots around code that didn't have a good PR.
This is a great question and the answer is that with poor/nonexistent PRs and documentation, Devlog cannot help you other than by incentivizing you to do a better job so that it can be useful — so not that helpful. I'd love to find a way to make it better in this kind of "cold start" case, that's part of why I appreciate your feedback about other potential uses. Thank you again.
My pleasure! I've got a few more thoughts that came up.
It would be nice to know more about how I would interface with your product. It's not clear if it's a daily report, if it's a text box where I ask "What did Intern #3 work on last week?", if it's a chronological page, or something else.
Do different people get different answers? Would a CEO get a different answer than an engineer if they asked what the devops team worked on? Basically do you offer different levels of granularity for different user profiles.
Love the project and looking forward to watching it grow!
- Analyzing grocery pricing patterns for 7 Canadian grocers. I took care of the data acquisition. Now it is time to speak with economists / data analysts who can make sense of it. Are you interested? Please get in touch!
- Gathering and archiving all graphical material from the "Printers International Specimen Exchange". The gathering is done, now working on a writeup.
- ... various side quests from the above. Incl. a tutorial on making mobile-friendly imagemaps
- A "vibe shift" has occurred at work. Separately, my own thoughts have been more unkind/uncharitable towards others. Recently I realized that the two are connected. Isn't it funny how the vibe-shift trickled down to affect my own mindset without me even noticing?
- I think that Google is going to fall apart soon. Before they do, they'll cut money-losing boondoggles like, oh, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Groups... Who will step in to save all that data? And what does a post-Google world look like in general, anyways?
- AI is incapable of the kind of impact that is being promised. But we are still going to have a period of ~2 years until corporations realize it (it sounds like AI companies will run out of cash at that point). Until then, we're going to have a lot of layoffs because Mike-the-MBA thinks AI can do people's jobs. What should normal people do? Sit tight and sit out the game for 2 years until things stabilize?
- All of the above is part of a crisis of meaning that people - and esp. tech workers - are having. There's an enormous opportunity for Government jobs to become prestigious again. It used to be a mark of pride to work for the Government. You don't need to burn out and become a woodworker to "do real things": your local city government has plenty of "real things" for you to do in a real community.
Ooo, that is interesting. There was a website that kind of did that, but you could only compare single items at any given time, which kind of defeats the purpose (if it is to save money).
Ideallly I'd like to see something like a personal basket where you can add your recurring stuff (eggs, milk, etc) and compare the subtotal among local grocers. Bonus points if you add in value of store points + credit card bonuses (which might be significant, like 5% for Amex cobalt at a market coded as a grocer VS 1% for non grocer code like Walmart).
I'd like to do something similar to the "personal basket" as a way of comparing "value" at different vendors. Thinking of using $/100g of common sandwich ingredients to demonstrate how much "making the same sandwich" at different stores would cost you. I'm not aiming to use this data for a product/commercial endeavour, though.
I am making the data available for others to use for academic analysis and/or supporting legal action. The large Canadian grocers are known to price-fix and collude, and it would be interesting to see if there are any patterns in their pricing movements. (My contribution is "getting the raw data")
The data was posted publicly online on the merchants' websites.
I started working on my opensource water meter again (https://y-drip.com/). Hardware is basically done so I'm working on the backend website for those that don't want to setup their own server. More technical details here: https://hackaday.io/project/191398-ydrip
Experimenting applying Meta's V-JEPA [0] architecture for representation learning to chess. One of the challenges is that validating if the model is learning useful dynamics of the game, so I'm using it as an excuse to learn some reinforcement learning by using the representations generated by the JEPA model to approximate useful Q-values [1]. This method currently has no search so I'm planning on comparing with this paper [2] which achieves GM level chess without any search. Honestly, Im unsure if the full pipeline is stable enough to even converge, but it's fun experimenting. I'm bad at chess so I really want to make a bot that challenges the best bots on lichess.
Working on a web app to check various metrics on cloud servers (or virtual machines on-prem) and suggest optimizations to reduce cloud waste (and costs). I'm basically automating a good part of the infrastructure maintenance I was doing as a full-stack dev in my previous job.
There are already a lot of services to right-size servers, but I want to focus on small teams that might not have a full-time devops yet and lack the time to check every server manually.
The app will be simple with an educational part, it should be like having access to continuous audits on our infrastructure, just like the CI/CD tools we use on our codebase.
It already helped me at home to reduce the load on my oldest Raspberry Pi by shifting some services to a newer one that was mostly idle and right-sizing some VMs in the Proxmox cluster of the rack in my homelab. Having a green check next to each server name is a good motivation!
Another thing that is scratching my own itch is server discovery (especially in a multi-cloud environment) and integrations because it's just so easy to forget some servers in a cloud when you do a lot of experiments and keep paying for them for months.
The MVP is getting ready to launch, I'm making the landing page right now, and then I hope to find some early adopters to iterate on the app and make it useful to other devs. I'm also thinking about open-sourcing it.
I'm interested in having conversations to discover the pain points of other people in that space, so feel free to reach out to me!
Keurig for microgreens.
A system whereby the user provides power, water, and proprietary seed cartridges to a device to manage scheduling, succession, water, light, and other environmental factors to successfully grow microgreens as easily as possible.
I've found that filing out job applications is rather boring and takes a lot of my time for just a few applications. That's why I'm creating an AI tool to rewrite resumes and automate the jobs application process. I previously created a scraping tool for Glassdoor and LinkedIn, so this a natural next step. List of features:
* Analyzes candidate information
* Examines job descriptions
* Generates unique CVs and cover letters for each job
I'm working on readjusting after getting married. It was a big wedding, and for a whole web of reasons I'd rather not post on a public forum, I was responsible for a lot of the cat-herding leading up to the big day. Best day of my life, and my wife and I are overwhelmed with joy. Yet, now it's been a week and I'm still sitting here thinking "...wait, what the hell was I doing 6 months ago?"
I’m working on a test integration tool. You write your tests declaratively using YAML (ie. setup the environment, databases, etc., load fixtures, make api calls or db calls, and check assertions), so it’s completely language agnostic, which makes it perfect for grey-box/black-box testing. This way of testing also ensures you’re testing functional, business cases, and gives great stability on an exposed interface, because everything runs with real dbs, real queues and so on. From experience, this way of testing hits the perfect balance between reliability, usefulness, maintainability (when done right), and verbosity (at a previous company we replaced the tests on all of our layers with this kind of integration tests and it ended up being the most stable code base and test harness we ever worked on).
I’m currently polishing the logs and reports as much as possible, and then I’ll add support for more tools (Kafka, Rabbit, Nats, etc.). I have tons of features in mind to improve UX, speed, and bring more value to the tests.
Down the line, I want to find a business model for this tool and sell it, but I need to do a lot of thinking on this side since I’ve never done this before.
Yeah I didn’t came up with the idea first, at my work we used an in house solution[1] but it had lots of shortcomings (hard to read output, hard to debug tests, virtually no documentation, and the code was very hard to extend and fix). My plan is to fix all these issues and more :)
Hey guys, at Dispensed are working on Vending as a Service.
For $100 we ship a vending mechanism for you to put on your own custom vending box.
We then provide online marketplace and payment services (Shopify for vending machines) so your customers can use their phones to buy products from your vending machines.
Great alternative for products that don’t justify big $10k vending machines.
I'm not sure I understand what you're actually doing with this. I think that adding photos of the components you're shipping would make the page clearer.
Last week I made an in-browser notes editor using TipTap & InstantDB! (https://owri.netlify.app/) - the idea is, you can keep all the notes locally and publish only the ones you want. Some things I'd like:
- keep track of your writing streak? graphs?
- publish your personal site/blog
- Write one-off HTML websites that're really just docs+links
Feel free to tell me if there's anything you want!!
New idea:
So currently I'm trying to learn leetcodes, but thinking of alternative/structured ways to do it. What if there's an AI-powered book that's basically like your personal Wikipedia into anything?
You start with a topic, it generates you outlines/courses -- and what'd be great is if this was social, like you can see what everyone else is learning about, what nodes they're expanding...
My current project is TrendBowl (https://www.trendbowl.app) which summarises trending entities across multiple sources on the web, including Mastodon and Wikipedia. On a 24 hour basis you can see which terms are relevant in different languages and sites.
It is implemented in Go, Python and JS, with support from Postgres, TimescaleDB and Kubernetes.
Why no Twitter/X? I believe they have an API that you can use, but they've locked down scraping pretty hard. The API should be cheap however, if you're only scraping trending once per day.
Originally I had Twitter support, but they changed the API around and it ended up not working any more, see the project blog for more info: https://blog.trendbowl.app/
The Pro subscription to the API now seems to be $5000 per month!
Currently I'm working on file compression program in Rust. Nothing too fancy, it just use common algorithms (LZ77, LZ78, etc.)
The only difference here is that the program will switch on the fly between different algorithms depending on which one that can compress file smaller.
It can compress 1 GB file (enwik9) down to around 230 MB. Pretty good I guess for something that I worked in my spare time.
I'm not publishing it yet, since I'm still experimenting with it a lot.
Figuring out how to add game boxart and screenshots to my recently-relaunched MIDI and chiptune player: https://pixeltune.org/
It's a fun challenge, because I need to figure out how to reliably determine the matching game for files like /pub/johnny/midi/games/sc2kmenu.mid, and also to show them in a way that fits nicely in the UI.
I'm working on a serialization format, somewhat based on apache arrow but row-based. Includes end to end typescript type safety, and significantly faster than JSON in serialization and deserialization. Seems to do fairly well in the native version I threw together, but more of a javascript/typescript operation for now.
https://github.com/Trint-ai/TrintAI I've been working on integrating different opensource tools and ML models to create TrintAI. TrintAi is a powerful open-source tool for transcribe and understand speech with multiple capabilities.
This is an open-source alternative to paid services like:
AssemblyAI
Deepgram
Gladia
Google Cloud
Microsoft Azure
RevAI
With trintAI you can build your own custom workflows & integration for speech-to-text transcription.
The main features are:
- Speech-to-Text Transcription: Converts audio files into accurate, readable text in real-time.
- Summarization: Provides concise summaries of long audio files or transcripts. This feature extracts the most important information and key points from the text, allowing you to quickly understand the main takeaways from meetings, calls, or any extended audio content.
- Sentiment Analysis: Detects emotions within the transcribed text.
- Language Identification: Detects the language spoken in the audio file and can transcribe in multiple languages.
- Diarization: Identify and distinguish between different speakers within an audio recording.
Give it a try! it is open-source. Your feedback is very appreciated!
I am building a belt tension meter to attach my z-belt idlers to on my voron 2.4.
I'm still contemplating what I want the final form to look like, but currently it's a 5 kg load cell and a floating idler and an rp2040 reading values via hx711.
Navigation using photos.
Did not like existing apps, so made an app that lets you match a photo to an (OpenStreetMap.org) background map, and shows your position on that photo during your trip.
Works great with physical maps, screenshots of maps or downloaded pictures of maps.
NavigateAnyMap.eu (Android only, sorry!)
Free as in beer, will tell you is uses ads, but have not added them yet (and will make a paid, non-ads version first).
An automated dubbed translation service. Supports translation into English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. The other options on the market often have jarring audio artifacts and glitches, which Audiomatic avoids.
My friends and I are currently working on improving the voice quality and adding new features.
I have been working on creating a hosting project where I can provide access to lots of private frontends (invidious, redlib, etc) and different services (vaultwarden, nextcloud, etc), etc. I have been setting up glusterFS (a distributed nfs) which I can use in Docker swarm to share the volumes for different nodes. I would wanna work on writing a distributed nfs once I am done with this small project
I’m building an integration platform, think Zapier or Workato.
We’ve been hand coding full-service integration workflows for 2+ years on a large B2B agency model, and in parallel have been building a platform using what we’ve learned to build better abstractions.
We’re at an interesting point where almost all new workflows are being built on the platform, and we’re serving over 100 clients.
We’re prepping for public release in the next few months.
Sorry, just saw! I'm working on something very similar in a very niche space, also trying to take lessons learned and productize a more general solution / platform based on past experiences.
It's a steep cliff between one-off integrations and a general platform with workflow/trigger/action type functionality (assuming you do anything like that, since you mentioned Zapier).
In my experience the hardest part of a general solution is all of the one-off custom business logic that each client seems to have, even when integrating the same two systems. There's custom fields, which in one system could be represented as a special object and in another is just another column in a database. There's tons of if-else logic. Etc.
When doing something like field mapping, did you end up creating an internal/intermediary data model to map everything to, or did you end up creating System-A-to-System-B type mappings? How did you end up handling the special cases; is there a sort of scripting system for special and conditional logic or do you have something like a set of predefined transformations / conditionals that can be applied to the data? I'm sure a lot of this could be handled by a workflow/trigger/action system if one were willing and able to go fine-grained enough on the individual steps.
Other than that, what would you say your biggest hurdle has been in getting this thing off the ground and running smoothly without too much babysitting on each individual integration?
Sorry if this is too much or if I'm asking questions about your secret sauce, feel free to ignore, or email me at my username at gmail.
Trying to innovate digital language learning by building actual learning games, not just gamified apps.
Currently experimenting with a game build around the old classroom method of Total Physical Response — you can see a very early prototype here: https://kolja-sam.itch.io/the-tpr-game-gala
So lately I've been working on a "v2" that exposes a full superset of GLSL, so you can write arbitrary shaders -- even foregoing SDFs altogether -- in a high-level lisp language. The core "default" raymarcher is still there, but you can choose to ignore it and implement, say, volumetric rendering, while still using the provided SDF combinators if you want.
The new implementation is much more general and flexible, and it now supports things like 2D extrusions, mesh export for 3D printing, user-defined procedural noise functions... anything you can do in Shadertoy, you can now do in Bauble. One upcoming feature that I'm very excited about is custom uniforms and embedding in other webpages -- so you can write a blog post with interactive 3D visualizations, for example.
(Also as a fun coincidence: my first cast bronze Bauble arrived today! https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1827461714524434883)