ashfn's comments

On: Show HN: I made islechat, like Slack but in the terminal over SSH

[ashfn]

Updated the title it was a bit misleading!

On: I built my own CityMapper

[ashfn]

Im thinking it might be better to revisit the project and analyse long term patterns in bus arrivals

[hbakhsh → ashfn]

What would be the source of truth for verifying that the bus made it to the location on-time/late/early?

[ashfn → hbakhsh]

Potentially using the live arrivals APIs and seeing when its right now, not 100% it would work but might be worth a shot

On: I built my own CityMapper

[ashfn]

I used this exact API extensively for both buses and tubes :)

On: I built my own CityMapper

[ashfn]

It looks like TFL's journey planner API has the ability to do some of these national rail trips, only tested a few though

[mwagstaff → ashfn]

Unfortunately, I believe it's limited to TfL stations only (e.g. Overground) rather than National Rail.

Oh, and I should have mentioned that I'm also aware of this, but it's not free so automatically outside of my app development budget. :/

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/developers/online-journey-pla...

[ashfn → mwagstaff]

I tried a route from a London tube station to Newcastle train station and it found one on the frontend for the tool so I think it may support national rail

On: Hiding messages in a deck playing cards

[ashfn]

That sounds very interesting, I'll look into it thanks :)

On: Hiding messages in a deck playing cards

[ashfn]

Hey all, I found a cool way to convert text into a specific order of a deck of playing cards. I detailed the instructions of how it works in the blog post but a brief overview would be that it uses Lehmer codes which allow you to uniquely identify each permutation of a set i.e. each of the many many ways a deck of cards can be shuffled/arranged

[pmarreck → ashfn]

TIL about Lehmer codes... and "poker encoding" ;)

(I just prefer poker to solitaire...)

Someone else mentioned that the orientation of the cards (up or down) and possibly even the front-back facingness of the card (facing up, facing down) would add another 2 possible bits to the available encoding space. (Of course, at that point you'd have to also encode which side of the whole deck is the "top"...)

My own thought was to add par2 to make it robust against small errors... at the cost of some transmission space!

[hungmung → pmarreck]

> Of course, at that point you'd have to also encode which side of the whole deck is the "top"...)

An asymmetrical joker could indicate which short edge is "right way up", while also indicating which card is the first or last of the deck.

[russellbeattie → pmarreck]

> "...which side of the whole deck is the 'top'..."

A dark line drawn across the top of the deck would be enough. Though it would ruin the stealth factor of the cards.

Also, the pattern on the back of some playing decks isn't symmetrical, so that could be used as well.

[istjohn → russellbeattie]

Decode it both ways and see which isn't gibberish.

[OkayPhysicist → russellbeattie]

Use a casino decommissioned deck. They typically have either a hole punched in them, or a corner cut off. Either way it won't be symmetric, but still perfectly plausible as a cheap deck of cards.

[ashfn → pmarreck]

Yeah that would make an interesting addition. I was thinking about error correction so if you swapped two cards it would be okay but was struggling with how it would work, but I think it would be quite fun to add :)

On: Tailscale is pretty useful

[ashfn]

Its relatively straightforward to host a nextjs app in a docker container and route it with nginx and cloudflare, but you probably wont get as good uptime

[o1o1o1 → ashfn]

Thank you for the advice, didn't consider using docker instead and saw a lot of potential alternatives to Vercel for self-hosting which support a great deployment experience (Caprover, Dokploy, Coolify, Stacktape etc.).

[jonathantf2 → ashfn]

Better uptime than having to take it down bc it got hugged though

On: Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed

[ashfn]

You can use copernicus satellites for free which ive found generally have at least 5 or so pictures each month but the resolution isnt that high (>10M i think)

On: Show HN: I built a book discovery engine using AI-powered semantic search

[ashfn]

Really like the UI for scrolling through the suggested books, although it does act a little bit buggy on mobile occasionally

[ziwa → ashfn]

thx! which browser are you using on mobile?

[ashfn → ziwa]

safari iOS

On: I built a game then realized it's banned by Spotify

[ashfn]

Yeah it's really annoying, and even if your app is oerfectly fine apparently their process for getting it unlocked from the limited developer mode takes an unholy amount of time.