I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
One of my 1000 unfinished projects was a e-reader app for android that generates coloring book pages, or illustrations for young kids who are in that weird age group where there are no more pictures in their books, but they still enjoy illustrations. I have a gifted niece who is way ahead for her age at reading but still enjoys pictures/coloring so I planned on making it for year. Don't know if I'll have the chance to finish, but I'm sure Kindle will integrate this into their new color kindles (and probably every other e-reader) at some point.
I also recommend printing out puzzles, mazes, riddles from https://krazydad.com/
You can download pdfs, staple them together and let your kids sink their time in.
Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?
Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
My niece tends to finish a book start to end within a week or so, hence why I thought of asking. Another reason is I don't get to see her too often, and it is easier to hand over a book a visit, color a page together to get her started, and then she does the rest.
20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?
Similar story, but for the mobile era: I knew an indie app developer who built a portfolio of early mobile apps. His top-earners were a coloring book app, bead animal patterns, and a no-essay college scholarship app. Those three allowed him to pay himself and a partner salary and drop contract/client work.
Amazing! My son also colored a lot but he'd pick only a few pages out of every coloring book so I got the idea to find some online; one-page things to print but the ones I found at the time claimed to be "coloring book pages" but were actually more black-lines-on-white-background actual artwork. Much too complex for simple coloring. Your site would have been the find of the decade!
The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.
etc. etc.
I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/
I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
You are the closest I have found to this, even though it is a digression:
Do you know of any communities with self-built airplanes? (especially novel-esque designs for propulsion or wings?) I realise these have far more regulations, but experimental GA is something that really excites me.
Are you familiar with the Experimental Aircraft Association? EAA.org
They have had a handful of articles of people working on electric propulsion in their magazine. I would imagine you could reach out to some of those featured. I once contacted a person who was building a DIY HUD and he was very friendly and eager to talk about the project. Overall a very good community!
Yep, EAA, and chances are, your local regional airport may already have a local EAA chapter you can visit and/or join. If you're into kit builds, there are dedicated web forums and groups specific to many different manufacturer's kits.
If you are in the US, you probably already know about Mike Patey but I'll share this here anyway. He has a track record of building something custom pretty much every year. I believe he is trying to build a community around a similar idea, but also catering for more mainstream GA too.
I don't have a direct answer for you, but I would checkout any AirVenture Oshkosh groups online. I know people build planes ahead of the event to fly in.
I still have my fingers crossed that one day someone will build an electric drivetrain for a very common engine design (akin to how people put bigger engines from bolt compatible vehicles into smaller ones so they go faster), and for iconic vehicles so that we can keep them on the road. There are plenty of collectible cars out there that already lack matching serial numbers. Swapping the engine on those is no great sin against history.
Cool. I knew someone who was putting a Porsche engine into a VW, because it required very few modifications to get it to work. I suspect it's not an accident how many of the kits here are for Porsche or VW?
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
It's a good idea and consistent with the original use of the term on HN. I guess the downside is if anyone with a cool side project thought that it wouldn't belong under that smaller-sounding umbrella.
Another option would be to go the whole hog and explicitly reference side projects in the title, or at least in whatever will become the instructions at the top of the regular thread.
Hi Paddy! Hmm - I'm not sure. Are you talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38424478? That doesn't seem to have had significant attention on HN yet. It's an open source project. It might be fine in this thread.
Whatever the line is, it's still gelatinous. We want to figure it out in a way that optimizes the thread for interestingness, which means avoiding repetition and prioritizing the long tail of projects that probably wouldn't get discussed in other contexts on HN.
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
yep, nothing in there prevents me from doing work. That article is mainly their legal team fluffing their own feathers for their clients, which I'd hope that one would be able to read between the lines for, considering it was published by the lawyers themselves. The lawsuit itself is quite frivolous and accusing me of stealing and using source code I didn't steal/use, so just have to go through the legal motions to prove that. The more details you know about the case the more absurd it becomes
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
That's encouraging! The barrier of entry for BioE feels very high compared to software. What do you think is a good way to make a transition between them?
Also, I second what Dig1t said. I would gladly get involved and volunteer my time and skills, just to get my foot in the door. Would contributing to dnadesign be a good place to start?
Definitely! If you're willing to help, throw me an email so we can talk where it would best fit for you :)
some sets of problems I have right now (on the hardware / software side):
Hardware: It'd be great to have an open source plate gripper. I wrote a little bit about the general problem of transferring here - https://keonigandall.com/posts/transfer_problem.html . I have a uarm lite6, but wanted to investigate building an arctos robotic arm to move plates between machines. Just need the gripper! This is something I cannot do myself - I have software skills, and can build things with my hands, but have zero skills on designing new hardware.
Software: A lot more here, but depends on interests. I have some general life-improvements I'm looking at doing, but also some wild ideas that need prototyping
Definitely, producing open source works that would help me! Feel free to send me an email and we can talk about what makes sense to you. Also put some more above.
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
This seems like something which would be annoying to create digital without supporting tools, but awesome in analog. I could see value in a specialized camera-app which transforms hand drawn box-structures to digital boxes, or a kind of play board where children could arrange cards to create a program and learning programming.
I doubt that Funciton, in its current form, could be useful in education. It doesn’t embody the most widely used programming paradigm (procedural) but instead is a declarative functional language, which makes any skills obtained by studying it pretty much untransferable. Secondly, its syntax does not allow for naming of variables and parameters (except perhaps through comments) which is an anti-pattern. If these could be addressed in a derivative concept that is actually designed for education, it could work. As it stands, however, it’s just a quirky esolang.
The “better mousetrap” of visual programming is inventing a diff tool that works decently. If you can do that, the world will beat that path to your doorstep.
This is awesome! I think what it needs now is tooling/an ide to "draw" programs :)
I've long wanted to look for a sort of "ascii drawing program" where one can just draw on a grid with monospace ascii characters and have tools for boxes, circles, etc. Maybe it already exists!
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
Excellent! When reading Galois' coroner's report, I was happy to be able to find an old Paris map online that showed roughly where he had been the day of his duel and the route the farmer who found him would've taken to the hospital.
Just be careful in countries like Japan where old maps sometimes are used illegally to discriminate based on caste (tracing ancestry of workers/candidates to discriminate against ones coming from certain historically lower caste areas of towns and cities). You might catch negative attention if your tool makes it easy to reference these maps
Wow this is super cool! I've hacked together some equivalent for small projects. Curious if these are hosted as tiles that can be referenced by third-party servers?
For context I'm working on an app called 3DStreet[1]. It's mostly used by planners for future projects, but I've been excited about the possibility of helping to visualize the past too.
For anyone wanting interesting YT videos for their kids (and not wanting to take anything away from OP's project), I highly highly recommend thekidshouldseethis.com. It's basically a curated stream of cool videos, and I would feel totally safe letting my daughter browse it alone (she never does because we usually watch them together, but the curation is that good). Videos on all sorts of topics, and good enough to be really entertaining for both kids and adults - I can spend an evening there easily. They also have a really fantastic gift guide.
Absolutely amazing. Bookmarked, gonna be very useful in 5 or 10 years ahahah
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
Oh, if you think that is bad, wait until you're looking for educational apps for them. What a total hot mess in a sector which should by rights be amazing.
This is a great idea! Recommendation algos are weaponized against kids and would be great to have some way of managing it.
There is a similar problem with movies as well. It is hard to know whether a movie is appropriate for a child e.g. some kind of violence may be acceptable but not adult themes. So marking a movie PG-13 for example doesn't help much. There are some crowd-sourced solutions to this right now such as https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews But LLMs could really help automate this
Is there a version for adults? Something that keeps you from getting pulled down engagement bait rabbit holes would be great. I don’t want it to be overly focused on children’s education though.
I disabled all suggested content on my YouTube account. My “home” page shows as totally blank. Only the subscription tab works, or explicitly searching. You still get recommended “related videos” but it helps stay focused on the things you’ve chosen to see.
I exlusively watch youtube videos from my homepage and from the related videos section. You can train the YouTube algorithm to not feed you garbage, most of the videos on my homepage are 30+ minutes long educational content. I just wish you could permanently hide the Shorts section (I guess ublock can do this), so that I could see more than 6 at a time.
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
sent you mail,
I would love to be associated with this project. I was looking for a solution for some time, at least one which allows to restrict the content from the main youtube. Youtube kids app they have is a joke.
YouTube recommendations for kids shouldn't be driven by engagement (e.g. "oh, you watched 20 hours of MrBeast videos. You probably need another hour.")
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
I’d go further and say nobody should be subjected to this stuff. Engagement is a euphemism for addiction. Self improving addiction machines are a horrible idea. They’re actively bad for people and society for a laundry list of reasons.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
One thing I would like to see is an algorithm based on expressed rather than revealed preferences.
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
"The algorithm" was different in the early 2000's and all of our lives were richer for it. Before Facebook publicly embedded psychologists into the development teams and before the goal was more and more attention. The internet used to be great.
> How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
I probably wouldn’t. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were all invented before recommendation algorithms existed, and they worked great. Reddit still doesn’t use a recommendation algorithm.
Would they make less money without this stuff? Yeah, probably. But I think that’s a good deal for humanity.
I was really struck in The Social Dilemma how at the end they asked devs if they’d let their children use the platforms they’ve made. People interviewed overwhelmingly said no. If that’s the case, you know it’s bad. Just stop.
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
Lots of cars make it easy to change out bulbs. But some cars are a massive pain to change certain bulbs, and/or require special tools. Do you exclude them? Or upcharge them? (E.g. the left headlight bulb on a Subaru Outback is an absolute nightmare.)
Unless you are doing this purely as a public service, $10 seems VERY low. Many independent mechanics in my area charge a minimum of 1 hour of work for anything they do, and bill at $90/hr and up. And they won't come to you for that price. (Nor are mechanics a highly paid profession in general.)
I really do wish you all the best, maybe I'm just not seeing the whole picture.
Edit: Something else to think about: when I replace bulbs in my cars, I always do it in pairs. Reason being that if one side burned out, the other is likely not far behind, especially headlight bulbs. The headlights also have another quirk: if you replace one and not the other, you usually end up with the new one being much brighter than the old one.
I have all the tools to replace headlight and taillight housing and bulbs for probably most vehicles including semis.
For my Saab's headlight bulb replacements, I have to remove my front bumper and then the headlight housing unit itself, just to replace turn signal and headlight bulb. I am fairly mechanically advanced.
It's not quite just $10, it's $10 more than a single bulb would cost you at your local parts store. If you lookup how much a headlight bulb is these days, it's about $20. My service will be $30 flat for bulb replacements in my area with a small mileage fee for out-of-towners.
The great part about Minnesota, is most of us hate the cold. I however do not. Many people get lazy and will Doordash or find other convenient ways to have things delivered. Not many people want to change bulbs in the cold or bring to a mechanic to be over-charged. What my population is looking for is a service exactly like I am providing.
Again, the pricing of $30 per service is perfectly sustainable for me and I have no issues replacing most parts in vehicles, lights are a walk in the park for me.
*Will correct typos later, at work ATM.
What I really care about, is moving the world forward. This is a service that the area I am in, is lacking. I don't need to make excessive profit, I just need sustainable profit and I am happy to provide this service as it's well within my skills.
> But some cars are a massive pain to change certain bulbs
This weekend I did this with my 18 year old Mitsubishi. It seems you need child sized hands to be able to change them. In the end I had to take off the bumper and remove the whole light housing to get access.
Suggestion: Costco sell car batteries for ridiculously low prices, because they don't include installation. I recently got one for my Kia Telluride and it was $100 cheaper than any competition (because all competitions include the installed price). Installing is as easy but can feel intimidating to people: Could be another source of income for your app.
I live in San Francisco and a few blocks down the street from me is a street that always has a bunch of Saabs parked out on it. I don't know if it's one person that owns them or fixes them for others but I thought it was pretty random and interesting.
I find it interesting because this seems to be information asymmetry - and there is nothing wrong with that.
AutoZone, O'Reilly, Advance advertise that they do things like replace batteries, change light bulbs, add washer fluid, wiper blades.
It's arguably imperative for their brand that they offer (and advertise) these store services when compared to Amazon or Walmart (without a car center). It's even clearer when they offer 20% off codes for online ordering 12 months a year. (Also interesting because basic bulbs for tail lights and turn signals are often also sold at gas stations and grocery stores)
They're not ASE certified techs, but I'm under the impression that staff receive some training related to it.
Contextually; yes, I have relatives that ask me to get their battery changed at Autozone, even though Autozone will do it for free -- and relatives who don't know that Autozone sells (and will often perform) a refrigerant top off if your AC isn't cold.
Neat! Do you pick up the bulbs as needed from an auto parts store? Or do you keep a supply on hand?
I think you want to keep this as simple as possible, but I see headlight restoration (which can be done in 30min) and wiper blade replacement complementing this nicely.
No bulbs at auto stores are inflated far too high to be a profitable parts for me. I have to order through a supplier and keep supply on-hand, which is honestly fine and more profitable for me.
Hey thank you for that idea! I am going to be adding in headlight/taillight housing replacements as well, but I do like the idea of wiper blade replacement, I may keep that on the back-burner for some time until demand approaches.
However, the headlight restoration idea is a fantastic one. Definitely will add this to my list of primary services after launch.
Not sure if it was mine or my friends car, replacing one of the lights was neither fun or simple :). Some manufacturers really seem to prioritize style over repairability!
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.
I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.
The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
Awesome! For me, the desire is very much about the place and not personalities or any kind of ego attached to their posts, so I've avoided any kind of functionality that will allow to follow a person, or see what else a particular person has posted, but we'll see how it evolves. If you have any programming experience, I do recommend just diving in rather than waiting for someone else to do it, as I have discovered that a lot of people seem to think that they share my vision but when it comes down to the details they have their own thing in mind. So if you want this Instagram with locations to exist, you might find that someone else's vision doesn't quite meet your desires for it.
I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here!
One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?
Yeah this is something I've been thinking about recently, not so much in terms of the difficulty of managing spam on a per post basis, as I'm thinking that the instances will be very small and moderation on that front should be easy, so long as you can keep the problematic user from signing up in the first place. One thing I've been thinking is that perhaps there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle. It doesn't stop anyone else from using Google street view or something but it does make the bar the bit higher. I don't know how to deal with the obvious accessibility issue with this though so I'm going to keep it in mind until I get around to that sort of thing. Long term of course we're going to have the issue with federated spam also, so I don't want to implement a solution that will only be in my way in the long run.
> there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle.
Hah, that is a fun idea! But it could be a challenge to implement, unless you have a trusted person in that location selecting an image or some other local funfact – and at that point you might as well implement a graph of trust, spreading out from the first user in that area. Kind of like an invite system, where everyone vouches for the next one they invite in.
Come to think of it, having a limiting factor that an invite system imposes, might make the whole concept more attractive and a bit mystical, as it takes some effort to access the network.
I can see a lot of challenges implementing this though, but it is fun to explore different new directions this could take!
Thanks, I'll give the trust system some thought. These are both systems that could be turned on or off per instance so I'm theory they could both exist. I was thinking that the instance administrator would have to be the one to prove the images for the captcha.
Hey, sorry, I didn't initially see this comment. It looks like Jodel could be similar if you were to set up a Habitat instance that exclusively didn't allow for locations to be attached to any post, but that's not what I have in mind, and it's not how my instance will be set-up, because the location attached to the post is what I'm seeing as one of the main purposes of Habitat. In most cases, I envision a post representing an exact location. Perhaps a building, a country park, or a monument or something. Jodel looks like generic discussions that are filtered by proximity, which Habitat would have also by nature of federation, but the posts will be about places, and focused around a map-location of those places.
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
I never felt more isolated and lonelier than when I was in a dense urban environment and reliant on dirty, unreliable, often unsafe public transport to get around. If I ever blew my nose after travelling on the London Underground, the tissue would be black with brake dust and other pollutants from that awful environment. If I tried to cycle, I'd be stuck behind diesel busses for much of my journey, breathing in their pollution and slowed down. And obviously, cycling is completely impractical for many people, or if carrying luggage or passengers.
Living in a countryside town where I have the freedom and flexibility granted by my car has opened up a world of better possibilities - travelling to any part of the coast with my family. Doing bulk shops. Carrying heavy loads etc. Driving regularly to my parents, avoiding excruciatingly long journies on public transport.
Having a car has made family life possible in ways that public transport does not, and cannot achieve.
> We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I would prefer that politicians, architects and property developers minded their own business and let me choose the mode of transport (an electric car) that works best for me, my family and the environment. I don't want to live in a dense, grey, impersonal urban cluster. I want to be surrounded by countryside and have the freedom to roam. I don't think I'm alone in that.
Making public transit clean, reliable, and safe are important goals, and very achievable goals too. There are many examples around the world.
But few transit advocates are saying that we have to 100% eliminate all personal vehicles. They will remain an important part of the overall transportation infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
It would also be folly to advocate for eliminating all rural living. There are many necessary activities that take place in rural communities, such as agricultural production, that will remain critical to society.
The thing that I see most transit advocates targeting is excessive suburban sprawl, communities that aren't really countryside, but also aren't dense enough to be urban. They sprawl on and on for miles, with nothing to distinguish them, often simply the same tract home design repeated with only minor differences over and over and over. I am sure there are some folks that prefer these communities, but I also think that many residents would prefer wither moving into a less dense rural setting or a more dense urban setting, and many of those left that like the density would still prefer that the way these communities are structured be changed.
Fair comment. I'm very much opposed to the "Croydonisation" of the countryside in the UK
With rising pressure to house hundreds of thousands of new arrivals every year, there are no easy answers. Do we make miserable dense cities even denser? Do we build new sprawling, characterless "garden cities"? Do we build around historic countryside towns and ruin their character?
Personally, I'd rather see net immigration returned to the manageable levels it was prior to New Labour (who doubled net immigration) and the Conservatives (who further tripled net immigration).
In recent years of high net immigration our economic productivity has fallen, our public services have worsened and the prospect of owning a house has slipped away from our children and grandchildren. We need a political re-think on this issue, as opposed to trying to patch over the inevitable environmental and congestion related issues.
I haven't yet been to the UK, so I can't comment directly on the state of things there. But I grew up in a rural town in USA, and I have traveled to communities large and small across the USA and other countries, including one of my favorites to visit- Japan. In my experience, dense cities don't have to be miserable to the majority of people. I still live in what would be considered a small city, though not nearly as small as the one I grew up in. The city I live in could definitely see significant growth and increased density while maintaining the qualities that make it unique and special. But it would take a lot more planning and vision than what I have seen from current political leaders.
I meant to add that of course there will always be those who prefer small rural communities, and that I think we we build more densely ( in an intelligent, thoughtful way) in the urban areas, we can easily meet the demand for housing while continuing to preserve plenty of small towns for those who prefer that. Of course, I can't say what the situation is for sure in the UK exactly, but here in the US, there are plenty of small towns that are slowly shrinking and disappearing. Many of these communities had much higher populations 50 or 100 years ago, and in another 50 or 100 years may not even exist as a community anymore.
You have to be joking. Having blown my nose on many subways, tissue turning black is absolutely baloney. Either you have a truly horrible disease or you're lying. I've raised two kids very successfully in a city with no car.
Can def echo that sentiment in London, how do you avoid the commute? Work from home? Found a job outside of London? Job opportunity/pay inequality is often the biggest constraint for most people.
No offense, but this statement seems like an ignorant lack of understanding around the issues with the growing problems around urban sprawl and the issues it causes environmentally or otherwise. No one is going to take your countryside home from you, but it’s worth educating yourself on the issues.
Surprising that my personal account, all of which is a truthful reflection of my own lived experiences in both urban and countryside settings, is considered "ignorant."
I'd be interested to explore the reasons and/or psychology behind your judgement.
There's a quote from Bill McKibben's forward to "Creating Cohousing" by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett that I think about every time someone brings this up (it's about the U.S., but it applies to lots of other places and you may recognize your own countries development model here too, or not):
"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."
You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!
Is it possible to support the goal of vibrant, interconnected communities, to understand all their advantages, but still want to live at least a quarter-mile away from the nearest human?
yah, absolutely; like I said in another post, small towns near where I grew up are frequently that way. You enjoy the city vibe you live in the apartments or houses right off the square. You don't, you live on one of the outlying farms (and even those in one case that I can think of have small neighborhood establishments; they all use the same farmers machine shop to fix stuff in one case, or there's a random coffee shop/pub way out that the surrounding places frequent, etc.) and when you go into town to go to the hardware store or the grocery or whatever you still have lots of opportunities for chance encounters because of the mixed zoning and way everything is built fairly close (so sure you have to drive to get to town, but then once you're there you walk around, do errands, stop in for a coffee, etc. without having to think about how you're going to get around as much).
As opposed to the actual town that I grew up in nearby where everything is spread way the hell out and you have to go on a giant 5 lane highway to get to walmart on one side of town and the hardware store on the other and 30 minutes in another direction to get to a coffee shop, etc.
I love this! There is similar inspiration in the US with non-profits such as KidSafeSF [1] in San Francisco or Families for Safe Streets [2].
I also have a fullstack background and have taken an approach to work on the street design software itself. Although AutoCAD is used by professionals, it's overkill for most street design projects and difficult for laypeople to use. I've been hacking away at a project called 3DStreet [3] to make street design easier for anyone -- like a figma for street design. Still in its early days. Happy to collaborate with your org, we do group sessions to help folks learn street design to influence local government to make positive changes.
OP here. I tried out 3dstreet. It is a great idea. Simplified web based 3D editors of all kind, is the future for making people involved in city planning and architecture.
I’m helping a YIMBY group in Austin, Texas. In the USA, we’ve tied the legal right of what you can build to the land. So, a housing shortage causes land prices to skyrocket. We need to break those connections (height limits, unit limits, floor area limits, etc.) to bring urban prices back to reasonable values.
Then, people who want denser, walkable, social neighborhoods can create them.
I do data analysis for the group, on land prices and politics. (E.g., campaign donors). If anyone has questions, reach out to me at hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com
Thank's a lot! So far the project haven't paid off much. But that is not the most important goal. It is about making something really useful for people. In this case nice cities and neighbourhoods.
At least in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere) the design of the suburbs encourages neighborhoods with individual houses and very little walk able space (occasionally there are sidewalks or parks in the richer areas, but developments may be large and they're not evenly spaced throughout). Exclusionary zoning in the U.S. has also reduced the number of "third spaces" (coffee shops, malls, grocery stores, barber shops, etc. where people congregate and meet) near or in neighborhoods. This means fewer chance encounters since you have to plan to both go out in a car to meet. You have to find a friend then say "let's go get drinks at 13:00 across town at this place" instead of just happening to walk into the small neighborhood grocery and seeing each other.
It's even worse in the exurbs where large housing developments have been created with no amenities nearby, sometimes within upwards of an hour drive!
There are a number of good books on how the built environment affects our social life, if you're interested. It's not specifically about suburbs but "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg is one of my favorites that covers a lot of this sort of thing.
It likely depends on the rural area. In the middle of North East GA where I grew up, it's about the same, social isolation is becoming a huge problem because you're forced to drive long distances and plan ahead to meet with people.
In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.
I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.
It is interesting that you say it is becoming a problem. Why was it not a problem in a past?
> It's a smaller town
Towns are usually considered urban. I was imagining actual, by definition, rural. Living in a small town (~2,000 people) right now, I'd say it has less of a social community that the rural areas I've lived in previously. Still nothing that should leave you feeling isolated, but there is certainly less of a "automatically friends with everyone" vibe. Granted, my rural experience is strictly in agricultural areas where everyone are farmers, which gives common ground on which to "automatically" become friends. If nothing else, you can talk about farming.
Is that the problem with the suburbs? That the people there can't find common ground on which to build friendships?
Roads have been around for several hundred years or more, along with public transportation (trains were commonplace in rural areas in the past), and the car has been the primary mode of transportation for about a century. After all that time, why is this still becoming a big problem?
A terraced street in London can have a metric boat-load of social isolation and no cars. I don't think it's (necessarily) the car or the literal distance between houses. At the very least, it's a multi-faceted problem.
Nah, bullshit. I grew up in a rural area [0], my parents are still in a rural area (their postal address literally contains 'rural route'). You just don't go to town every day. You didn't go to town every day in the past; you planned your trips ahead of time. It was a rare occurrence - maybe a monthly, quarterly or even less frequent occurrence. And if you do go to town, it might be a multi-day trip. Why? Because you were either walking or going on horseback. People got around before roads. Roads make travel easier. People have been trying to make traveling easier since the dawn of history. See: roads, ships, animal husbandry, the wheel, etc.
People can live far apart without problem if they're self-sufficient or plan ahead: grow your own food, have stockpiles that can last months if you can't make it to town (rural winters can be a bitch). What's new is this dependency on others and belief of "oh my god, I'll die if I don't make it to town (grocery store) this week".
[0] Our closest neighbor was a quarter mile away. Nearest paved road (and our bus stop as kids) was 2.5 miles away over private dirt roads with about 1000 feet change in elevation. It was 8 miles to town, 20 to city (which would barely be a suburb most places).
Yah, it's not the distance of the houses that matter (well, it does, but it's not the whole story), it's the distance between amenities. Like I said, the actual town I grew up in was terrible. It's 30-45 minutes to get anywhere and most things are stand alone. There's a shopping mall kind of development (Walmart, chain restaurants, etc.) on one side of town, but to get to most of the housing you have to drive 30 minutes. The nearest coffee shop is in another development at least 45 minutes away from both of those places, etc.
Meanwhile, the other nearby town I mentioned has plenty of outlying farms that are pretty far away, but when they do go into town to go to the grocery or whatever they can also walk into the coffee shop, or the little stores or whatever and have chance encounters with their in-town neighbors. Even among the farm areas there's a coffee shop / pub that everyone goes to at the end of the day. There's even a dance hall that used to be a one room school house and now gets re-purposed for monthly dances. You don't get that in the suburb I live in now where having anything like that in a residential or agricultural area is forbidden by the zoning code.
Similarly, back before cars sure you didn't pop into town as regularly, but everyone knew when events were happening and when you did go into town for something everyone was there and things were relatively close together and easy to get to (once you were there already, I mean).
Maybe there's a language barrier here, but isn't a suburb defined by being at the edge of a city? So wouldn't a bar in the city be the communal place for the suburb, just like the bar in town is for those out on the farms?
Granted, I've known of a small number of bars operating on farms (usually farm-based craft breweries/cideries/wineries), but is not the typical use of rural properties. Having one next door that you could walk to would be unusual.
It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs. Plus in the city there are lots of places and in most of our cities they have similar walkability problems (I'm from Atlanta which is particularly egregious in terms of transit and walk/bikeability). There's not naturally that one place where your neighbors are going to go and happen to bump into each other. You have to first meet them, then plan "let's go to this bar at 13:00, and here's how parking is going to work, etc." as opposed to just "everyone is in town, or at the bar in their neighborhood, the obvious place where you're just going to happen to bump into someone else who showed up for happy hour" or whatever.
I'm sure I'm conveying the difference badly, but it's the difference between random encounters with your neighbors whom you'll see the next time you both go to the grocery and then walk over to the fun coffee place vs. random encounters with strangers you'll never see again.
> It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs.
It may be harder, but surely you're doing it anyway? It is not like the suburbs have a grocery store either (usually). Driving into the city is the name of the game, much like it is for farmers.
> Plus in the city there are lots of places
Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though. Certainly in my youth the big city bar I hung out at had a wonderful community of regulars. If you pick a new bar every night you're going to never get to know anyone, perhaps, but there is no reason to do that.
That said, the youth today seem to be rejecting alcohol and thus bars, so perhaps the bar is a bad example for a current conversation? Or maybe it's the right example as it visibly presents something interesting that is happening. When I was young, you'd have 20 year olds, 40 year olds, and 60 year olds all mingling together at the bar. It's just what everyone did. Now the 40 year olds are busy taking their kids to youth sports leagues, the 20 year olds are doing whatever it is 20 year olds do nowadays, while the 60 year olds are still there hanging out at the bar.
Which appears, to my eye, to have created a huge division in communities. There are still micro-communities found within that, or nano-communities, particularly with the sports leagues (the parents don't really seem to mingle outside of their immediate team's social circle), but the cohesion of an entire community seems to be devastated by that separation.
Maybe that's the source of isolation that people are feeling?
This may be different per city, but at least near me this isn't true, the suburbs have a grocery (or several).
> Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though
Sure, and you'll likely only see them in the grocery and not elsewhere. Probably the same with the bar; I too know a bunch of regulars at a local bar, but likely not going to run into them outside that bar unless we become friends and make specific plans to do so. Also those people probably aren't my actual neighbors. It's a different kind and frequency of chance meeting when the built-environment is designed to facilitate community. I'm not saying that you'll literally never meet a neighbor in the grocery, it will happen, it's just not going to happen with the same kind of frequency as if we actually designed the built-environment to encourage it.
The default suburban life leads toward a comfortable kind of solitary confinement. Someone who lives in a “single family home” equipped with air conditioning, a privacy fence, a big screen TV, a garage door opener, and the internet will tend toward isolation because all of those technologies make aloneness easier.
The reader may point out that many people are isolated in big cities too. This is true – if an adult has decided to be alone, they can be. But in the city, one's lack of social connection is more often felt whereas a suburban home can diminish the effect, like ibuprofen taken for a headache.
How does that meaningly differ from rural homes, which do not have the isolation problem? Rural areas have the strongest social communities I have ever seen.
That's fair. Also a lot of "our great-grandparents were friends, so I implicitly trust that we are also friends".
But what about the suburbs destroys that? Or, would it be more accurate to say that those who already don't have connections have a preference towards living in suburbs? Perhaps that is where they feel most at home?
I don't think there is some special physical property absent in suburbs and present in rural areas that contributes to social isolation in the former but not the later. Rather I think it has to do with the kind of person that lives in each place. My grandparents and cousins live in a rural area. They all have ancestry in that town going back to the early 1900s. So do most of their neighbors. Families live next to (where "next to" admittedly might be a few miles depending on how rural) each other for generations. This is obviously conducive to strong intra and inter-family social networks.
People who live in cities and in suburbs on the other hand seem to be far more transient. They move around for school or careers and aren't tied down to one place. I grew up in suburbs in three different cities. New neighbors frequently moved in and out of all three places, and the street where I lived from aged 5-10 has only two "original" families left.
For those people, the built environment in suburbs being conducive to social isolation (in American suburbs anyways) becomes a problem. The nearest grocery store, restaurant, or interesting venue of any kind is likely 30+ minutes away if you try to walk, and the walk is likely to be dangerous due to poor pedestrian infrastructure and poor public transit. There are few accessible third places in which to meet people, it takes a lot more intentional effort. This is even more of a problem if you're a kid, as you're now entirely dependent on your parents and their car to meet friends or go to places where you can meet friends.
I moved from upper-middle class suburbs to Washington D.C. The difference in how many people you meet who you might want to be friends with, and in how easy it is to get places where you want to go (especially without a car) is night and day. Will suburbs ever be as good as cities in this regard? Probably not. But mixed-use zoning and returning to "streetcar suburbs" would probably go a long way (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...).
There's also other reasons to oppose current suburb development patterns. Suburban sprawl is highly inefficient in many ways. It takes dramatically more infrastructure to serve the same number of people that you could in a denser area. Roads, power lines, pipes for drinking water and sewage, etc. The taxes that many suburbs pay don't cover these expenses and suburbs end up being subsidized by people living in denser areas. Rural areas also suffer from this to some extent, but rural areas are a necessity for society to run, hosting farms and other resource extraction activities, so subsidizing some costs is fair. People in rural areas are also more likely to be self-sufficient, having their own septic tank, private well, etc., and aren't offloading their costs to society.
> Rather I think it has to do with the kind of person that lives in each place.
This does seem to be the repeated consensus – that suburbanites choose to live in suburban areas because they want the isolation. Which, I suppose, makes sense as it is not like you have to live there. People by and large live where they want to above all else. Obviously there can be exceptions (e.g. children needing to live where their parents do), but as far as what prevails goes.
> There's also other reasons to oppose current suburb development patterns. Suburban sprawl is highly inefficient in many ways. It takes dramatically more infrastructure to serve the same number of people that you could in a denser area.
Is denser the actual alternative, though? It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people, they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas, so then you just end up with the same there (without the practical reasons traditionally associated with subsidizing rural areas).
In fact, I'm seeing more and more spreading of the so-called "15-minute city" conspiracy, which has people believing that there is some kind of organized plot out there working towards forcing people into living in dense cities. While the conspiracy itself is not particularly important here, the sentiment of people fearing that they might be forced into the city conveyed alongside it seems quite real and indicative that denser is not the direction they are willing to head.
> that suburbanites choose to live in suburban areas because they want the isolation.
I don't think most of them want isolation, I strongly suspect that most people moving to suburbs are doing so for their career, as most well-paid jobs are in metropolitan areas. In a metropolitan area your options are mostly:
1) city
2) suburb w/ very little mixed-use zoning
Cities tend to be more expensive for less space. There are going to be many people who would want to live in a city with their family but simply can't afford the rent, so they live on the outskirts of the city (suburbs). Alternatively they may want the space, yard, etc. that a house provides, but this doesn't mean they want isolation. They may very well prefer suburbs with good mixed-use zoning and public transit, those are just very rare in the US.
> It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people
I'm not proposing taking suburbs away from people, nor are the vast majority of urbanists. We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing. Suburbs that have these features tend to be in high-demand, they're just rare today because they're illegal to build in many places (I think there's some commentary on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0).
> they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas
Unlikely IMO because again I suspect that many/most have moved to suburbs for their careers. There aren't nearly as many jobs in rural areas.
> 15-minute city
Anyone claiming this is bad is just being disingenuous IMO. ~Nobody promoting 15 minute cities wants to force people to live in cities, they want cities where you can meet most of your needs by walking or cycling or taking public transit. If you don't want to live in a city or want to live in a city and spend 10s of thousands of dollars on a car you still can. I don't think we can extrapolate much about what the average American wants based on those who believe that conspiracy theory, because the people who believe it are either woefully uninformed about what it actually is or are just being malicious reactionaries.
> I strongly suspect that most people moving to suburbs are doing so for their career
Doubtful. Moving somewhere for a career is fairly abnormal. There is good reason why job search places always lead with: "Location". The vast majority of the population choose where the want to live first – in fact, the majority of the population still live within a small radius of where they were born! – and then figure out what they want to do for work.
Yeah, there is a small segment of the population who will chase work at the cost of where they live. Let's say this is who ends up in the suburbs. Perhaps that's the problem? As in they end up being comprised of people focused on their career, and thus don't prioritize community? Perhaps want isolation is too strong, but how about doesn't care about isolation?
> We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs.
Does that actually appeal to the people of the suburbs, or are you projecting? Presumably these people are constituents of a democratic government, and therefore can already have anything their collective hearts desire. Why isn’t this already the reality?
> Anyone claiming this is bad is just being disingenuous IMO.
Are you unfamiliar with what a conspiracy theory is...? Regardless, it resonates precisely because a lot of people don't want to live in cities. If the listener was all "Hell, ya! Get me out of this hellhole into the dense city!" it wouldn't garner any attention at all, but that's not the reality.
> The vast majority of the population choose where the want to live first – in fact, the majority of the population still live within a small radius of where they were born!
> Moving somewhere for a career is fairly abnormal.
I think you're probably right on a job-to-job basis, most people aren't picking up and moving across the country for each new role. But it only takes one move to another city for the "several multi-generational families in close proximity" dynamic of many rural areas to be disrupted. Even short moves could easily make someone much more socially isolated. Move 50 miles away from your hometown and now you're seeing your former neighbors once a month or less instead of a few times a week.
> there is a small segment of the population who will chase work at the cost of where they live. Let's say this is who ends up in the suburbs. Perhaps that's the problem? As in they end up being comprised of people focused on their career, and thus don't prioritize community?
Not sure this is the right way to frame it. It isn't necessarily about "ending up" in the suburbs when a huge percentage of the country was born in the suburbs or in a city, never having had a tight-knit multigenerational community to begin with. 80% of the US is urbanized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...). Most people are moving from generic suburb to generic suburb (or city). A kid born in some suburb isn't choosing to focus on their career over community, but nevertheless economic migration was likely the force that caused them to end up there.
> Does that actually appeal to the people of the suburbs, or are you projecting?
Somewhat remains to be seen, but my gut feeling is yes. I think that most suburbanites haven't deeply considered other alternatives given that they've mostly only been exposed to "default US suburbia." That was the case for me until I got into urbanist YouTube and moved to a more urbanist location. When I share urbanist material with friends and family that haven't been exposed to it before, they tend to be pretty receptive. Anecdotes yes, but I'm not being disingenuous.
> constituents of a democratic government, and therefore can already have anything their collective hearts desire. Why isn’t this already the reality?
In theory yes, but in reality these are changes that will take a long time. There's a lot of red tape when it comes to building and zoning, and vocal minorities (NIMBYs) can often block or delay efforts that have popular support through lawsuits (recently near my area: https://www.arlnow.com/2024/09/27/breaking-judge-overturns-m...). Consider that there are plenty of issues that have wide bipartisan support among US voters as a whole but haven't been implemented for political reasons. Even when there is popular support and policy is implemented, whole areas can't simply be rebuilt overnight.
The US definition of urban includes towns with 2,000 people, though. Not exactly density city. Only around 60% of the population live in places with >100,000 people, and of that it seems a significant portion of them live in the suburb portion. So it seems that most of the population live in what is colloquially considered "rural". I'm not sure that is a coincidence. It seems most people would much prefer to live on farms (how often do you hear I want to give it all up and become a farmer around here?) – but most can't afford farmland (the same reason we ended up with the urbanization movement in the first place), so they settle for pretend rural as a compromise.
> But it only takes one move to another city for the "several multi-generational families in close proximity" dynamic of many rural areas to be disrupted.
While I think it is fair to say that rural dynamic was already disrupted generations ago, was that not already rebuilt in the urban areas? With housing affordability being a hot topic of late, the idea of having to leave one's friends and family behind to build a new life in a more affordable place was met with shock pickachco face, as if these were the first group of people to ever have to do such a thing. Suggesting that multi-generational family dynamics had been built elsewhere once urbanization had been settled. Otherwise it would have been considered normal to leave.
> When I share urbanist material with friends and family that haven't been exposed to it before, they tend to be pretty receptive. Anecdotes yes, but I'm not being disingenuous.
How do they react when you present your vacation slide show, for sake of comparison? Do you get a "that's nice, honey", are they booking a vacation to the same place, or "thanks for the invite, but I am not interested" People can be quite good at faking being receptive.
But, regardless, you don't have to sell me. It all does sound like good ideas. I'll not disparage that. But at the same time, I'm not sure it is better that what could be, more of a "we're stuck with this, so how do we improve upon it?" Improve it does, seemingly (but that is ultimately for the people who live there to decide), but then if you are the type of person who wants better, wouldn't you go for where the best can be found?
> I think that most suburbanites haven't deeply considered other alternatives given that they've mostly only been exposed to "default US suburbia."
That's intriguing. When I was a kid, albeit not from suburbia, we spent a lot of time talking about different lifestyles and which were to our tastes. Some were happy with what they had, others were ready to escape as soon as possible. What do you think it is about suburbia that kills that zest to consider the world around you?
> There's a lot of red tape when it comes to building and zoning
Only if the constituents want there to be red tape, of course. There is no magical deity in the sky that created this. It only exists because the people want it to exist.
> (NIMBYs) can often block or delay efforts that have popular support through lawsuits
Which, again, exists only through recognition of the very same population (albeit probably a larger one, granted). Clearly the majority are, at very least, not bothered by this or it would have been done away with long ago.
> whole areas can't simply be rebuilt overnight.
Absolutely, but we've been talking about this for at least 20 years! It was never going to happen overnight, but when we're still saying the policy – never mind the actual work – needs to change decades later...
While I do not live in a suburb, I do live in a place that had similar goals to what you are describing. The policy literally did change overnight as soon as the people decided that is what they wanted, and the work started underway soon after. It takes no time at all to do away with the red tape, if that's what the people want. If that hasn't already happened, one has to look at why the people don't want it to change.
yeah the transiency thing is huge. I think a big part of that is young people moving away from their home city for university and then for a job. It really breaks up the social fabric at an important stage and replaces it with uni friends and work friends. I find there is a bit less of that here because people are a bit more likely to get into the trades/small business so schooling doesn't uproot them as much.
The difference walking makes is interesting to me because rural communities are obviously not that walkable, though I guess as a kid I could bike to my friends' place (2km).
I really don't get the appeal of suburbs, I think they might just be a reaction to failures in cities, and companies inability to set up shop where their workers/customers are. I've heard of people who drive in 1:30 - 2:00 to their workplace in a major urban center, why wouldn't the companies just move out to where they live, drop their wages by 10% and everyone would have more time/money. So yeah, true suburbs make no sense, the only reason people choose them is because cities get expensive and/or scummy.
Rural communities have strong social cohesion out of necessity, not desire. I grew up rural, so I have some experience with this.
Suburbia hits the sweet spot of introverted personality types: you don't NEED to know your neighbors, because there are sufficient services/resources to handle everything yourself, but you also don't get hemmed into an urban chicken coop that forces you to know your neighbors.
The only people who raise alarms about "social atomization" are extroverts, and they're entirely incapable of understanding that some people actually prefer their isolation.
There is no pub to walk to, grocery store to walk to, no shared public space for walking and cycling to places, there’s no concept of being in a space shared with others. It’s that you simply don’t see people unless you choose it. If you live in the city you learn quickly to be around others. At least that’s my experience.
Rural areas tend to have strong social communities, though, despite all of those same, if not exacerbated, conditions.
Based on several adjacent discussions it seems not that the suburbs cause isolation, but that those who prefer to live in isolation are more likely to choose to live in the suburbs – presumably because it offers the isolation they seek. Even if an individual in the suburbs does not wish for isolation, if everyone else there does that limits the social possibilities.
I have lived in rural Vermont and that was only true if you were the right kind of rural Vermonter. There were plenty of those who didn’t belong and never would with no alternative they might find in the city.
I think it is fair to say that large cities are more likely to cater to those who are unique, but large cities return to the same problem again: Everything is far away and you have to get into vehicle (granted, it might be a publicly operated one) to reasonably be able to engage with it. The chances of your neighbour being of the same unique blend that you seek is no greater in the city than in the country.
At which point it really makes no difference if you physically reside within city limits or live in a suburban/rural area as the time and effort to get to the places that cater to your particular niche approaches being about the same in all cases. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to access the amenities of a large city when you don't live in it!
Needing to take a vehicle that’s not my feet wasn’t true when I lived in Berlin or Tokyo. It definitely wasn’t true in smaller cities I’ve lived in like Oslo, Brest, or Utrecht. Needing a car was only ever true when I lived in Austin and atlanta. And I’m talking about going out to bars, hanging out with friends, going places, like yeah maybe I needed the train occasionally but really the train is a room you hang out in for ten minutes while you magically transport somewhere else. It’s not like driving a car. You don’t have to think about it.
Edit: ok I take that back we always used a car to drive ten minutes to tryvann ski mountain in Oslo but that’s because we have jobs and the bus takes like 40 minutes.
Perhaps you missed the part about someone being unique? Not even the largest cities offer that uniqueness on every street corner. Yeah, maybe there is a bar on every street corner, but generally they are going to cater to the population at large. If you fit into that scene, you are already the "right kind of Vermonter".
There is probably one or two places in the city that cater to that kind of uniqueness, but the chances of it being next door is unlikely. Most likely you'll have to travel long distances to find it. Longer than your feet can reasonably take you. At which point it doesn't matter all that much which direction you are coming from.
>At which point it really makes no difference if you physically reside within city limits or live in a suburban/rural area as the time and effort to get to the places that cater to your particular niche approaches being about the same in all cases.
What is your reference point here? This isn't the case in any large European, Asian or dense US city like NYC, Boston and Chicago.
Are they disappearing, or are they actually becoming more prevalent, dividing the population and leaving few people around to support each third space? A third place needs to more than a place – it also needs people.
I can think of 10s, maybe even hundreds, of third paces I could theoretically go to within a short distance. None of them particularly appealing, though, because they don't have enough people to create an engaging environment.
If these third places consolidated their efforts, seeing most of them disappear to focus on one third place, there is a much greater chance that the single community would thrive. Combined, it could be huge, but so long as they each try to go at it alone...
An apartment in a major us city costs >4x per more per square foot than the adjacent suburban sprawl. Clearly a lot of people realize the value and are willing to take the financial hit to have it.
Is it value, though, that they perceive? Or is the necessity to be in that location that drives prices up? If that's the case, that necessity might not have positive causes either...
What could be more valuable than satisfying a necessity? Your question presupposes some kind of opposition that makes me think you are using words with definitions at odds with the ones I know.
If you define “bigness” of my house as being more value than living next to all my friends in a very walkable city with tons of things to do at any time I want where I don’t need to ever drive my car then sure.
Personally, I’ll take my $500k condo in my very amazing city that is 1000sq ft over a 3500sq ft empty house that is 2 miles from the nearest grocery store.
As a fullstack developer, how did you even landed on such projects? Are you even using your SW Engineering skills in this? I really want to know more how are you able to lead an urbanism and architecture project with, supposedly, no formal backgrounds. Are you partnered with other people in this endeavour?
I am not alone. Our website is made by the man who created the CSS standard while at CERN, Håkon Wium Lie. https://arkitekturopproret.no
Most of the social media activities is done by a couple of fellows who is really into digital marketing. We are a team of 5 people working mostly for free now.
I have no formal training in architecture or urban design. I am just a nerd who used to love playing SimCity and read Astérix comic books. Paul Graham have always focused on finding real problems and making people happy. Car dependent housing projects and bad architecture is making peoples lives miserable. It needs to be fixed.
>> I have no formal training in architecture or urban design.
Same, but I do get caught thinking about how inefficient our roads are in the US and what might be done about that. I've worked in the auto industry a lot and when calculating fuel efficiency (MPG) there is a "urban drive cycle" and a highway one that are used. The average speed on the urban cycle is a hair under 20 mph, which seems absurd because our typical speed limit outside of neighborhoods is 45mph or even 50. So I started timing my drives around town and measuring on a map... Turns out 3 minutes per mile is about right for expected drive times. The main culprit is intersections, stop lights, and left turns. You seem interested in eliminating cars, which I can appreciate but I spend my time trying to figure out how to make traffic flow more efficiently and how those layouts might be retrofitted onto the grid of roads we have. There are not easy problems.
Somebody else mentioned Strong Towns, and that's a good organization who have been thinking about this issue for a while.
You're right that they're not easy problems, and it's because it encompasses more than just road layouts, but city design, land use and culture. North American cities, for example, tend to put a bunch of their amenities like supermarkets in a few places, with homogeneous swaths of housing-only suburbs so people have to drive, and those drivers have to use all the same roads to get where they're going.
One thing you've noticed is the so-called "stroad", a highway that's attempting to be both a road (an efficient, high speed connection) and a street (a destination, where people live, work and shop). These two objectives get in the way of each other, so you end up with a road that can't carry traffic well because it has too many entrances and intersections, and a street that is hostile to anybody not in a car. Generally, efficient road design separates these two, so the higher speed connections don't serve any destinations directly.
The way to make traffic flow more efficiently is to get a bunch of cars off of the road. More and better public transit with dedicated space, protected bike lanes, roundabouts, traffic calming
>> The way to make traffic flow more efficiently is to get a bunch of cars off of the road.
No. I mean yeah, but no. Rural areas are the only place where traffic is low enough to meaningfully improve flow. We should be able to improve traffic flow and MPG without eliminating vehicles. IMHO bike lanes are kind of stupid because putting bikes right next to car traffic is stupid. Same for sidewalks. Separating pedestrian traffic from car and truck traffic would obviously be safer.
If you separate vehicle traffic too thoroughly then you essentially just turn roads into walls for everyone that isn't in a vehicle.
I think the idea of optimising vehicle flow in urban areas is folly. It comes at the cost of too many other things.
Here's an example of what I mean. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pati5dBBTnSgxZ1m9 . It shows a road in a built up area that has been optimised to increase vehicle flow to the airport (using a roundabout instead of lights) and the effect that has on someone trying to travel by foot - turning what would be a <1min walk into 30min.
Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
> Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?
Yeah I'm currently considering working that in.
Right now existing game AI techniques can manage giving NPCs a daily routine, and I'm trying to focus on demonstrating something new, VS another solution for an already solved problem. But having NPCs just talk about the hero is boring. I'll likely get around to adding private life stuff for each NPC before I do an announcement and share the project more broadly.
Jokes aside, this is interesting because I have thought about this since the first time I killed the dragon outside of Whiterun. There is a brief change with the guards nearby where they are wowwed by your feat, but some of the standard NPC responses sneak in and make the immersive aspect of the game shaky, at best.
I always thought, overtime, the honeymoon phase of a hero's deeds would wear off, and the villagers would swing more into a negative mindset, asking things like "who is going to clean this up?" or "how will we be compensated for damage to our homes?" etc. Community disruption tends to devolve into a lot of cynicism about the people in charge, in my experience with everything from natural disasters (obvious negatives) to new urban shopping centers (less obvious negatives). Regardless of what actually changed to disrupt the community, eventually it is perceived as the source of problems.
I'm not a psychologist or civic engineer, so I am not sure if there is a name for the concept I am referring to.
It would be great to give each of the NPC's their own character. For example, some of the NPC's could have a grudge against the hero for reasons of their own. They could be cheering against him for causing such a ruckus in their village, or maybe some "Monday morning quarterback" happening, thinking they could have handled the problem much better than he did. I think an LLM may be pretty good at coming up with some ideas. Or maybe even make it a bit tongue-in-cheek and have some of the NPC's be fans of the hero's enemies.
I'm thinking of going full on soap opera complete with a love triangle.
Visitors need some sort of vested interest in what is going on.
When properly prompted, even GPT3.5 can write compelling short stories[1], but I'm using such tiny models for this that I'll have to do a lot of guidance to keep things interesting.
[1] IMHO it was better at this when GPT3.5 first released, it was able to do some awesome stuff!
Having played with the demo a bit I think it's a couple of things:
1 - If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.
2 - There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
> If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.
During one iteration of testing the NPCs decided to throw a party for the hero and they all congregated in the tavern. That was 100% awesome and if I can hit that type of WOW factor more often I think it'll all feel magical.
> There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
This is just a tech demo so I'm not sure how much I want to put into it. Especially since the end goal is to get a recognized and get a job!
Autopilot for my sit-on-top fishing kayak. Designed, modeled, and printed an assembly which attaches to the rudder rod. Moves the rod via a stepper motor connected to a Teensy 4.0 which gets NMEA 2000 messages from a Garmin heading sensor and a Garmin fish finder/chartplotter. Uses PID control to maintain any course I set on the chartplotter, using the cross-track error and heading. I’ve had it out on the water a few times now and it works great. Also put together an iOS app that communicates with the assembly via BLE so I can modify the PID gains as needed depending on conditions.
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
Please keep up the great work on this! I love this split flap project. It's gotten me into electronics. I haven't had the chance to build it out yet, but I want to put together a sign as a project.
I'm working on a 3D infinite canvas of text, focusing on code. Runs on iPhone, iPad, macOS so they can all act as separate viewports into a space. You can point the app at a repository, download a copy locally, instantly render the entire repository into space in less than a second in most cases, and then fly around and search for text. I just got an optimization working for larger files and it's kinda fun how much even an iPhone can do with instanced rendering.
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
You should add another use to it which is exploring live in-memory object graphs of applications. Make some adapter library to allow getting those objects from apps that want to use and then you can fly through the data being processed. For debugging, exploration and education. I'm using a basic version of this idea for debugging: https://github.com/Quiark/overlog
I've thought about this a lot, and `overlog` looks awesome! I appreciate you validating the use case. I've seen a lot of apps that have something like this - either an open socket that runs that allows the app to consume data, or like you mentioned, something that you install via a small library and output something readable. Either one sounds feasible, honestly. I'd love to chat with you about this, maybe see if we can some up with something - it's super useful to have lots of data like this on screen at once!
How did you learn Metal? The documentation on it from Apple leaves a lot to be desired for learning it from scratch and all the books I’ve encountered look woefully out of date.
Well first and foremost, by doing exactly what you're doing now and asking a bunch of people for help too, haha. It's not been easy, and I'm truly still terrible at it.
However, honestly, most came from following this tutorial series on YouTube which broke down building a basic game engine, and I stopped about 20 or so videos in once I had the tools I needed. I highly recommend!
And hey feel free to DM me on something if you'd like - I'm happy to answer questions and help where I can!
Not yet, but I was planning on putting up at least a beta within the next few days or so. Most of the features about editing, searching, colorizing, syntax analysis, etc., are in some almost-finished stated or another, but I'd love to publish something for people to play with! If you drop a line to my email on GitHub, I can make sure to add you to the beta, or at least send ya a link when it's up =)
I'm making a VSCode extension that can record & replay interactions with the IDE: all scrolls, selections, and modifications synced to guiding video, audio, and visual aid tracks.
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
Really cool! I'm building something with a little bit of overlap.
A personal data collection/archival platform with the goal of focusing on timestamping everything possible.
Basically, I realized that when I have multiple pieces of data (e.g. a note, some commands, a screenshot), almost always this data is naturally connected by time and that's also how I want to query it. So: it's nice to be able to e.g. create wiki links in note taking tools like obsidian but it would be nicer if one didn't even have to do the linking manually (most of the time).
I am building on postgres with a time series extension. On the client side I want there to be able to be multiple "collectors" that can collect data which is then sent to the server. So far I only have a keylogger collector but I have many more ideas such as a screenshot collector à la copilot etc.
I think the data you are recording would also be a candidate for a collector for this system.
I'm gearing all my personal tooling stuff towards collecting a ton of data points—screenshots, logs, notes, todos—that I can then pare down over time to make them useful. I've got a similar setup with a central monolith that can handle anything I throw at it from stdout.
Lately, I've been focusing mainly on the collectors because I figure the state-of-the-art in any middleware I write is going to change quickly. I've been playing around with knowledge graphs for visualization and might consider using them as a data store for this kind of thing. I'm still thinking about it. My watchword has been minimalism when it comes to design—no added steps or latency to existing workflows.
This is very interesting and I agree that creating a knowledge base in obsidian (or org mode) is veey nice but requires a lot of effort. So anything that makes it easier and more automatic is a win.
Having said that, in my experiments with CodeMic, I started to realize more and more how important the editing process is in order to create polished consumable content. My goal is to get as close as possible to 3blue1brown level of clarity but for programming content. So far this has required to focus more on editing part of CodeMic: cut, merge, insert, speed up/down etc.
So if you log everything, then I think the problem becomes how to make sense of all that content from all the noise. I'd love to hear your ideas on that. Feel free to email me :)
The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
The immigration office does not collect data about the time it takes to process a case. I am building the infrastructure needed to poll my users at a date in the future.
I hear this a lot but I don't believe it. Every other office people - immigrants and natives - interact with is falling apart from lack of personnel, outdated processes, lack of digitalisation and excessive bureaucracy. This is just part of life in Berlin. Immigrants just have to do it all at once and feel it more.
If you look at the numbers, the Berlin office has double the workload it had five years ago, and a rather modest increase in headcount during the same time period. They can be fairly criticised for a lot of things, but malice is not one of them.
But if you wanted to discourage immigration, wouldn't you do exactly that? Reduce funding and increase bureaucracy in a system that's already creaking under the weight of a massive influx of immigrants?
I'm trying to OCR a very large book: 45 volumes of ~500 pages each. The digitization has been done (not very good but not too bad either), but the pages have comments in the margin and lots of footnotes.
Just doing plain OCR doesn't really work because the notes in the margin and the footnotes get mingled with the text, which results in gibberish.
But, when sent to Google Vision API, each page results in a json file that has an object for each word and the four coordinates of its bounding box.
That json file is pretty big (around 1.5 Mo when pretty printed, or 500 k with no indents or line breaks) but it can then be fed to Gemini, taking advantage of its large context window.
Gemini is pretty good at identifying each section of the page (headers, main text, margin comments, footnotes) but it takes a looong time to respond (2-5 minutes per page).
So another approach is to ask Gemini to write a python script to analyze the json result and group sections depending of the coordinates of each word, and then run that script against the json output by the OCR phase.
But it's quite difficult to have a script that works for any page; comments in the margin are always in the margin so that's pretty easy, but footnotes can start at any height of the page (some pages contain only footnotes running from previous pages) and Gemini likes to be pretty specific, giving hard 'y' coordinates for where footnotes should start, which obviously only works for the one page it's working on.
I'm iterating and making some progress but I feel like I miss a big breakthrough and it all should be simpler than it currently is. Information about OCR is pretty scarce online. Any pointer is welcome!
Are the footnotes in a different font or fontsize? If so, then the bounding box for footnote words should be smaller. Perhaps that can help with categorization.
Yes thank you, that's one piece of information that I examined. The font size of the footnotes is a little bit smaller but the difference is very narrow. On a given word it's not really obvious enough. But maybe by calculating the average height of a whole line it would be significant.
The width of words would have larger difference than the height of characters, so use the width. I would
1. Manually categorize a few thousand words of normal and footnote text. Then solve a linear system to figure out the width of each letter in normal and footnote. Now, you are able to compute the expected width of any word in normal or footnote font.
2. Now, when you get a fresh page, go down line by line. For every word in the line, compare the actual word width with the expected normal width and expected footnote width. Whichever is closer categorize the word as that. Then for the whole line, take the majority vote on whether to categorize it as normal or footnote line. Once you hit a footnote line, you are done.
You're right that all I have to do is find the first line of the footnotes, because everything above is the text and everything under it is footnotes.
For now I have selected a crude approach: there is a gap in the page between the text and the notes, of about one line height. So if one simply takes all the first words of each line and compares their vertical distance, when that distance grows significantly, it's where the footnotes start.
I have tested this method on a dozen of pages and it works, but it remains to be seen if it will stand the test of many pages, esp. those that are askew.
Using the average width of letters instead of their height is a neat idea though; visually it's undeniable that there is a greater difference of width than of height between the footnotes and the main text. I may resort to that if the crude approach proves too simple!
It's an early 20th century edition of 18th century memoirs, in French. The project is not secret by any means but I'd rather not name it directly so as to not generate expectations that I may not satisfy.
I'm experimenting with a "new" kind of lisp macros.
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
THANK YOU! I've been trying to understand wtf lisp macros are for so long I'm embarrassed to say. I've heard that their "extremely powerful" and kept thinking "Macros? like in C? In Excel? WTF is the big deal about macros?"
Now I understand why I should learn lisp other than to play with its weird-but-kinda-cool-looking prefix notation.
It's barely functional, but I banged away with GitHub CoPilot and managed to put together a BitGrid emulator in React.js[1]
It's wild seeing something I wrote run in a web browser on my phone. I've been doing desktop programs since the 1980s. I've included a link to the GitHub repo[2].
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Also somewhat working in this space. Building a BMS (Building management system) to manage and control everything in commercial buildings. Think Homekit for commercial. There's something like 70% of buildings don't use one and they can be much more environmental friendly.
Very familiar with BMSs but the lack of open standards and protocols has been extremely frustrating - makes me appreciate how good we have it with HTTP, etc.
Lots say they support BACnet but that’s only if they’ve been configured and the points exported, etc.
Haystack is a great step forward for labelling too but adoption seems fill with complexity :)
Have had to implement the BACnet spec for scheduling, and wow, that BACNet Standards PDF is huge :'}
Haystack definitely has it's challenges. My main concern is it's not very client-side friendly when attempting to use haystack-core types. But it's a cool framework.
Currently, other than my day job, I am obsessed with making sense of the "shape of stories". Mapping embeddings and see how they move through a sequence.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
I'm obsessed with visual space representations of word as well. My application has a test mode where I render an entire dictionary (like, Webster) and then "plays" a book word by word, highlighting the word, then it's definition, and those words definitions and so on and so on, and it creates a trippy and distinct visualization kinda like an audio visualizer.. but with words. We should chat if you're interested in this kinda thing!
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat
Yes. We have integrated this into our RAG pipeline. Looking for a benchmark which we can try. Have been using this to give feedback to my marketing team on our blog posts.
Also, as I mentioned, now, trying out experiments in the video domain with some pretty cool results. Will post the details this week.
Building a pneumatic long-range candy dispersal device (candypult) to launch Halloween candy from my garage door to the street. As is the case for many of us around here, I get bored of making digital tools and want to build something in meatspace. I'm trying to use as much material I already own as possible, so building out of leftover metal framing and old decking.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
Wife and I tend to plan long, multi-day, multi-destination travel.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Today, kindergarten was closed and I had to take much of the day off to take care of my five-year old daughter. We asked Chat GPT to assume the role of a master board game designer and to lead us through the creation of a novel boardgame, with input from us. She came up with the setting - we are unicorns that need to rescue princes and princesses that have been captured in a scary forest full of monsters. Quickly, the LLM proposed a full list of rules and props to make. We then had fun for around two hours drawing various cards and markers.
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
An "offline-first" client web app for Github. I don't want to have to wait seconds to load up an issue, and then wait seconds (or keep another tab open) to go back to the list of issues/PRs, ...etc. I want everything to feel instant, with optimistic updates, and a backend sync process that doesn't require me to refresh the page to see new updates.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
I've also had this idea in the back of my mind. A few weeks I ago downloaded the official Github client without really thinking, on the assumption that obviously that's what it would do. Only to be sorely disappointed.
Hi David. Would you be open to chatting for a few minutes about this? I've been considering bringing Rust into our organization and having someone with experience would be helpful toward that. Not trying to interview you, more just understand what type of people to look for, what types of projects fit well, etc. My email is in my profile. Thank you for your consideration David.
I've tried setting timers for certain apps, but I find myself deactivating them again and again. In the past, I've had phones that allowed me to lock myself out for an hour, which worked but was a bit annoying when I had to do something else on the phone. I wish I could lock myself out of certain apps for certain time periods with no way of deactivating it outside these time periods, e.g. Instagram, Reddit or youtube only allowed between 8PM and 10PM.
Another problem is the urge to immediately grab the phone whenever I have nothing to do. I've had success putting the phone in a bottom drawer turned off over the weekend, but that's not always feasible. Perhaps some training would be helpful, or an app that would gamify the aspect of not constantly unlocking your phone.
Thank you for sharing - it's really hard to fight human psychology. Did you try to download apps to control screentime? There are already some solutions out there, though none of them are perfect.
- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.
- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.
- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.
Getting a (useful) notification and drifting off to other stuff is definitely a problem. Interestingly, a smart watch has helped me with that. I now read notifications on the watch, and about 75% of the time I don't have to take out my phone anymore.
An app to collect memories easily. You capture vocal notes, which are transcribed & corrected with AI.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
In 2019 I made a fairly simple app that sends me an email everyday that I just need to respond to and the text of the reply gets added to a database. I have almost never missed a day since Oct. of 2019.
Some observations:
- it can be pretty hard to remember a mundane and ordinary day just 24 hours later, and after 48 hours it's usually completely gone from memory
- important or unusual events (or parties!) stay in memory a little longer
- and for me at least, food is an excellent memory anchor; if I feel lazy and don't want to add to my journal, just noting what I had for lunch and dinner will help me remembering the rest of the day much better later.
Right now I'm testing key shapes and sizes and the manufacturing of key caps. I thought I needed a resin printer for best results but FDM printed caps with a blob of epoxy resin on top works surprisingly well.
There's no firmware yet, I have not even decided on a micro-controller or software. But I want to use Kailh Choc v1.
This is my first time exposing this project to the public so I'll be very happy about some feedback!
What's the "up/down" key in the bottom row, centre, between the 2 return/enter keys? (I ask because my "dream" keyboard would have a thumbwheel just below/between the 2 spaces bars on an Alice layout keyboard) EDIT: it's a toggle key.
The different heights and layout look interesting; did you perform any statistical examination of which symbol keys were most used? Are you intending on using QMK layers to enter the extra symbols?
Can your fingers accurately hit all those modifier keys? Does that layout lead to less or more pinky usage? (I'm terrible at hitting other keys, I'm just a clumsy person)
That would be the perfect spot for a thumb wheel, it's a cool idea.
I myself did not do any statistical analysis, the effort was done by the neo layout project (https://www.neo-layout.org/) and the hybrid English/German variety called noted. I modified it slightly to fit my hex grid.
The height difference makes it possible to hit the edge of the key without pressing the key below. And you'll find the home row more easily just from the bent layout shape. This should also help with hitting the right modifiers.
I want to try Jan Lunge's Keyboard configurator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtYJYFMWjNM) for KMK but have not made a final decision. If I hit a road block with his configurator I might try QMK. Either software supports layers.
Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
If you’re not into PWAs but would like to get some breathing practice in your daily life, you can also subscribe to the YouTube channel where I plan to share mostly shorts of the same exercises
Outside of the software world I'm also working on opening a Bike Shop and frame building studio. I'm hoping that one day I can actually make a small living on frame building since I don't do software for my day job anymore, but I'm not quite ready to build for other people yet (so far I've only built frames for myself and I'd like to thoroughly strength test them before I risk putting someone else on one of my creations!)
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
cool project! I'm currently (as a part of learning) importing and playing around with quadruped in simulation. Mostly for the purpose of training RL agents and do sim2real on my little quadruped I got.
If you end up generating Meshes & URDF or SDF file along the way it would be cool to try using it in simulators!
I’m building a way for developers to easily deploy open source applications (Postgres, redis, sentry, elastic search, etc), plus have a full heroku like workflow for their own applications, all within their kubernetes cluster, with what I hope is a super intuitive and friendly UI.
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
I can't find any pricing info on that page except "Get started for 1$$" and then it wants me to sign in. No thanks. I'd like to know what I'm getting into before signing up.
Actually, the $1 thing is a relic, I just removed it. I have no pricing whats so ever, since all canine has to do is connect to your cluster and do all the hard work there, it is totally free :)
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
I've been teaching kids programming 1:1, off and on for 10 years or so. This time around I'm collecting my various impromptu puzzles and exercises into a single app anyone can go through at their own pace on any device, computer or phone (though iOS unfortunately requires jumping through some hoops). All on a platform that is open source and live-editable and lets you write all-new programs with graphics and sound in addition to the puzzles and exercises.
I'm working on a unique discovery app / recommender for books, tv, movies, video games, songs, youtube channels, newsletters and podcasts - and more categories soon!
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
I was surprised to learn that each recommendation for preferences costs nearly 1 cent. From what I can tell, you don’t seem to be caching preferences. For example, each "Let's Go!" click on a show like say "Succession" generates some variation in the preference recommendations. My hunch is that if we ask LLMs to "over recommend" preferences based on the content you’re using (my guess is a mix of MovieLens, IMDb, TMDB, and Wikipedia) and do so in an ordered fashion (preference1 is a solid, but preference7 is a so-so), you could cache these results and strategically display them. For instance, when users choose to "fix" certain categories and get new recommendations for others, these "over recommendations" could help create variations without additional LLM calls. This could be repeated like N times until new categories require further LLM calls.
I am not sure if this would work with the personalized descriptions of recommendations part. I kind of love how they’re tuned based on my selected preferences.
I am curious about the design of the whole system. Fun project! Thanks.
Thanks, I'm glad you like it! That makes me very happy!
You're correct, I'm not caching the results right now. I determined that caching whole queries would not make much difference in the aggregate, since the vast majority of queries are unique. (However I also just saw that OpenAI added their own caching layer with lower prices for cached results, which is nice!)
However - the new Replace function was my first step toward fetching recommendations one-at-a-time - I agree that potentially opens up interesting new possibilities for caching and other things as well!
I really like your idea and the clean, simple execution! I'm looking forward to using it more in the coming days.
I'm curious about the technical side of things—how did you build the app, and how do its inner workings function? Is it open source? If possible, could you share more technical details?
I am working on the Vanta for sustainability and climate disclosures. Climate and sustainability disclosures are starting to come online in many sectors and parts of the world. We offer compliance-as-a-service so that startups and covered entities can fulfill their compliance requirements in a mostly self-serve manner without having to hire expensive consultants or undergo significant restructurings. Our platform provides a single source of truth for your climate, sustainability, and emissions data. For example, if you are an American company trying to go-to-market in Europe, all it takes is purchasing an additional module and we will automatically generate the compliance documents and checklists for you based on the existing data we have on your company. We also offer managed “Climate Trust Center” dashboards that you can subdomain on your website for investors reporting and to satisfy disclosure requirements.
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you:
hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
I'm building a service for podcast websites with transcripts[^0]. I have paying customers, including Volts[^1], and I'm genuinely passionate about serving them.
What's holding me back from scaling is primarily my own resistance to marketing, plus some pending improvements to the ChatGPT-based transcript editing system. Once I finish optimizing the LLM integration, I'll have no more excuses to avoid sales outreach. One thread I want to pursue is a magazine of podcast transcripts that I inherited: https://podread.org
I'd appreciate advice on authentic outreach strategies for reaching knowledge-focused podcasters. If anyone here has experience in this space or wants to collaborate, I'm open to connecting.
It is probably not substantial among the projects people have commented on this thread, but I am happy to be working on my first personal website made from plain old HTML and simplecss.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
Something like this is desperately needed, keep up the work. One thing that I immediately noticed is that all downloads are named "download.svg". A more descriptive name would be helpful.
Edit: Also, copying the SVGs to the clipboard would be nice. Download from the browser still sucks, and with web based SVG editors (like my own one, www.hyvector.com ) people can quickly edit the generated SVGs without having to go through the downloading and uploading process.
I'm building a language learning app, specifically for multi-ethnic couples that want to learn each other's language in a very personalized way: https://couplingcafe.com
I've eschewed jobs and even a funded YC startup to work on this idea for years, ideating. Just following my passion and deep belief I'm making a more effective way to learn a language while also strengthening an emotional relationship!
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
3D printer/laser engraver electronics are great for lots of things actually. You get
A (at least) 3-axis motion control system with G-code processor
Spindle controller (usually)
Limit switch input
A nice graphical display
(Sometimes) Wi-Fi or BLE
Arduino framework
All for around $50.
I was exploring the use of one for an open-source infusion pump controller. However, it turned out to be too bulky, but it would probably have been fine otherwise. Even after all these years, I was blown away by the insane amount of capability that I could buy for $50.
No, its neither a CNC mill nor a lathe nor a robot arm. It's a specialised machine that automates one production step. But it needs to react to variations in the input work pieces, which is why it needs to be computer-controlled.
Getting ready to release a big Halloween update for my survival-horror game for the Playdate, Plight of the Wizard[0]. I just added a spell that targets the closest enemy, which was a fun challenge to implement. Performance optimizations for the hardware have been getting tougher to nail down, so I’m spending a lot of time figuring out inefficiencies in my code to target a stable 30 fps. I’m having a lot of fun releasing updates that make the game more fun. But with more refinement comes the desire to add more content and improved art. I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
I'm still working on my first self designed PCB. It's nothing special, just a temperature and humidity sensor using esp32. I started it to teach myself more about PCB design and embedded programming. Yesterday I published a blog article on it. https://www.felixmaurer.de/blog/2024/10/27/building-an-iot-s...
This is something similar to what I've been working on. Currently designing a HAT for a Raspberry Pi that includes temp/humidity sensor as well as particle matter (PMS5003). Trying to end up with my own personal weather station which I'll then publish to a small web app.
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
I’m working on a zine. The first issue is on system evals for LLM-driven apps. It’s set in a world where Bear and Fox are opening a cafe with an LLM shoggoth generating custom recipes.
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
I'm working on helping my wife get her print-on-demand Shopify store off the ground. She designs the products herself, but ran into challenges with SEO. So, I built a custom app that connects to her Shopify store via API, using GPT-4o-mini to handle SEO optimizations—things like generating descriptions, titles, alt text, SEO-friendly URLs, and more, all based on the product images.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
I created KopiMap (https://kopimap.com) to help people discover great cafés in Jakarta Indonesia, but I wanted to take the UX further by automatically organizing user-submitted photos into meaningful categories (menu, food/drinks, ambiance).
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation:
- Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser
- Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews
- Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior)
- Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems:
1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client
2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization
3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on:
- Optimizing the model size further
- Alternative approaches to client-side ML
- General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
I've been working on an automatic sky tracking telescope over the past few months. I'm a few weeks behind on blogging but making solid progress. V1 is nearing completion. Then I want to rework some of the electronics to design and get a custom PCB printed. Also the physical design needs a complete redesign to make it more sturdy for long exposures and solve some wiring pains.
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm working on a solution to the age-old problem of tracking my food intake. Every app I have every tried from the many dozens on the market has not met my need of a low friction simple UI tool, so I've built it myself.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
I've wondered if a camera you "show" your groceries to as you unpack them would be enough to track incoming items accurately.
Or a couple of cameras around the kitchen, with an ML setup that recognizes both incoming food items, and their use in cooking. Then it could give you notifications/calendar items on things expiring :)
My grocer emails a receipt, so it's even better, lol. Although at the store they print out a short receipt with nothing on it, and I had that in mind when thinking of the "ML scanning groceries" bit. whoops!
I had to track my physical inputs and outputs for a week for medical reasons and I used a google form. I placed a shortcut on my phone and it immediately opened the form for simple and easy tracking. Everything was then saved to a spreadsheet, which I could analyze once my week was done.
Spent a year improving my p2p networking library. The software is async python 3 and it's designed to solve a simple problem: create a connection between any two computers. I haven't done a write-up yet but if you want to try it out the github is here. You can also install through pypi too
Im working on a platform for people to run their social hobbies and activities. Organize meetups, find when to meet, run ticketed events. for free!
I use it myself to organize my weekly cycling group of friends and friends of friends.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
Love the landing page and the Swedish city references :) I'm working on something similar, actually, but in the lunch/dinner niche. It's a nice feeling to build something that you actually use yourself to meet other people, but I find it's hard to scale beyond that. What are the major features you're missing before making it an open sign up?
Btw for ticketed events, I've seen that https://posh.vip has been growing pretty quickly for music performers.. maybe some inspiration for you there.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I'm developing a pipeline to sync underwater passive acoustic audio with whale sightings around the hydrophones, to then classify that audio using Google's open sourced whale models. The goal is to enrich data from happywhale.com with whale voices, so scientists can further explore communication of these species. I'm trying to keep things as system-agnostic as possible, but am building the first implementation to run on GCP.
I have one e-commerce system that ships boxes of organic coffee to people's homes all over the United States.
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans.
It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
I am the maintainer of beanborg (https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg), a set of scripts for automated categorization of financial transactions on top of beancount. Using plaintext accounting in the last 5 years has dramatically improved my family's financial health.
Unfortunately, plaintext accounting is not for everyone.
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis.
There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I've been building a chrome extension called Skipper [1] that helps people to organize their browser tabs with AI.
For my whole career so far I've been applying ML (as they called it back then) / AI to various domains like drug discovery and cybersecurity. Both were fun but, man, it feels really different to build a consumer app. It's just very exciting to be able to develop something, push it, and get compliments/complains the second day! We've even noticed that the ADHD community are especially engaged with the extension because they suffer the most from the tab overload problem.
Anyways, for those who might need it, here's the link:
I've been working things that could be classified as "a11y for ADHD folks" lately, stuff like this really inspires some of my own projects. thanks for the work! (I am doing something much less robust/featured on my workstation with firefox, but I'm going to try this next time I'm on chrome.)
Slowed down my PC lol, what are you guys doing in the background post-install? Granted, I had 1400 Tabs open (most of them suspended using marvelous suspender) but the CPU usage shot up to a consistent 100% until I uninstalled Skipper
Hey thanks for the feedback! Would you be happy to connect so that I can diagnose and help with the resource usage? Let me be honest, I'm curious of why it'd take so much CPU usage as well, and I'd like to find out and fix it for other users to.
I trying to create a management software for Integral Coops in Portugal. In a gross oversimplification Integral coops tend to be location based and allow freelancers and small groups to come together and have a infrastructure as if they were a big business while keeping their independence on the work they want to do
I'm trying to make it: a collective project shared between multiple coops, open source, sustainable in the long term.
I've already did some micro projects to the coop I'm a part of, like changing the workflow of expense invoice management from a totally manual process to an 80% automated process so I'm pretty sure I can provide significant benefits to the coops. Right now There's already a prototype andI'm in the process of talking with cooperatives finding financing and making it real.
website is at https://coops.pt (very early stages, in portuguese)
I am working on a private transportation service. Think Uber, but in a small market. We have an aging population, poor public transportation and some of the bumpiest roads you can find in the West. It will fill a void.
Not my idea, though. Through our local geek community, I met this taxi driver who pitched his app idea. He convinced a few other drivers to pay a small fee to kickstart the project. Then he convinced me to help with the technical stuff, and I convinced a friend to tag along.
I am intrigued by the concept of an open source Uber equivalent. I was involved early in a few rideshare app concepts before Uber came to market and it was surprisingly complicated. You have the technical challenges combined with being a "market maker" for both riders and drivers. It's possible but hard.
> I was involved early in a few rideshare app concepts before Uber came to market and it was surprisingly complicated.
Can you explain some of the difficult parts? I'd think it would be fairly straight-forward. Is the technical challenge of market making the hard part? or getting enough users on the app to actually make a market?
The hardest work is getting users on both sides of the transaction when you’re doing it from scratch. It’s tough regardless of the tech. And then 15 years ago gps enabled apps were not as easy as today. GPS errors are compounded when there’s money and multiple people’s time on the line.
So getting users is the hard part. The tech behind this stuff has been quite easy and readily available for quite some time. You can leverage apis and clouds and such. I don’t know why you’d constrain yourself to whatever limitations were present 15 years ago. Truth is the day people started caring internet enabled gpses everywhere with them, this all got pretty easy from the technical side.
Ubers growth and scale and how rapidly they grew posed some problems I’m sure, but I doubt anyone in this space will ever experience that again. Definitely not what’s being discussed here.
I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.
I am working on Shepherd.com and trying to reimagine book discovery online.
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
We source the book cover from the publisher, create author entries, etc.
Eventually, we started paying Nielsen a lot of money to use their Book metadata API. It is "ok," and they don't update it often. But it helps us automatically pull in an author's name, book title, genres, and age-group.
We still manually source the book covers as they only have super small and blurry covers. And we screen every book we add to make sure the data is correct.
What is especially frustrating?
- Author names are text and not linked in any way. So we have to decide what is a slightly different name but the same author and what is a different author.
- The BISAC genre standard is full of errors and abuse by publishers. For example, they might tag Dune as "AI" which marks it also as being nonfiction because they don't know how the BISAC standard they created works :).
- It lists book editions and has no concept that all book editions belong to one book.
- No real concept of a book series.
- Terrible book descriptions where publishers put in all kinds of reviews and nonsense that we need to figure out how to scrub eventually. They also abuse weird symbols to make it stand out.
It requires a lot of work to fix and manage all of this.
I am about to redo the entire topic/genre system due to some of these problems (this winter).
I am hoping to build a database of all books to use with new features in 2025. I don't know what we are going to do here. We might license a full DB of books from Ingrams (expensive) or Bowker. I liked Ingrams, but Bowker didn't email me back for months and gave me a lot of worry about working with them in the future. I might just do the best I can or break down and use Amazon's API (lots of stipulations in using it).
when I asked you, I already suspected that obtaining the data would be a real challenge. It’s actually unbelievable that you have to put in so much (manual) effort to get clean data—and then pay a lot of money for it, too. It’s a bit unfortunate.
I do have one more question: Shepherd.com seems to be specifically tailored for the American book market, right? Are you planning anything in the future to serve an international audience as well?
Since I’m from Germany, I looked into how things are here regarding book data. It seems like we might have it a bit easier when it comes to accessing book information. We have the VLB (https://vlb.de/en/), which provides book data—I’ll look into it more closely. The German National Library (probably similar to the Library of Congress) archives every book published in Germany! Their data might be quite useful too.
By the way, I didn’t realize it was so expensive to get an ISBN...
Wishing you continued success with Shepherd! I think it’s wonderful when someone pours so much passion into an idea—especially one focused on books!
It is frustrating, as this info should be free and accurate. Publishers only benefit if devs can play with it and build cool stuff. Google Books does have an API, but crazy rules, it can be used for private projects.
Ya, I am focused on the global English market, so USA, UK, Australia, Ireland, India, and English-speaking readers globally (a lot in Europe).
I would love to do other languages, but I just don't have the resources yet to handle that level of complexity. My hope is one day I can. I'd probably start with Spanish, French, or German.
I'm working on Pictera [1], an AI product where users can upload their photos (like selfies) to create high-quality, hyper-realistic images of themselves in just about any style they want.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
I built a site that saves time by summarizing YouTube videos or news articles by simply inputting the URL. The tool preserves the original context, allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
My daughter loves creating things — art, books, videos etc. She's shown an interest in learning to code, but she's only six, and I don't want learning to code to be a chore. So I've built visual scripting into her favourite game!
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
An email client that just “does the right thing” in terms of showing new emails I care about.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
I am playing around with LLMs and Game Theory. Currently, I let them play 5x5 board games in a tournament against Reinforcement Learning Agents and a Random Player. I am capturing the "thoughts" of the agent for behavioral data analysis. My background is Risk Management, I am trying to gather an understanding how such LLMs report their "decision" for applications in human/ai interactions for identifying and reporting governance flaws.
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time:
* Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose.
* Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI).
* Various bugfixes for the database queries.
* Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well.
* Link to the actual auction results.
* Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
I wrote (some) of a Lua interpreter in Rust, which runs PUC Lua 5.1 dumped bytecodes. Now I'm rewrite it all because I want to do type specialization: I'm implementing "Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning", which is used as the basis of Shopify's YJIT for Ruby. I have a decent idea of how it needs to be implemented and have a prototype kinda working, although some of the jump targets are still wrong right now. Once I get it all sketched out then I'll have to scale it back up to a full Lua implementation again, and then I'll add table shape specialization afterwards (which is a bit trickier, and outlined in a sequel paper).
Not exactly what I'm currently working on, as it got released last week, but...
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
I have! Mill is a lot more thorough, handling things like caching and parallelism for you. BLD is a lot more minimal, which would be fine for small projects but maybe not for larger projects as they grow
I am working on eliminating waste in cloud resources.
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
It's nice! A few notes: I think, the ability to read the comments of others, who have already cooked a recipe, would be great! Additionally, it would be great to have the possibility to group ingredients, since many times you start with creating two ore three independent mixtures, that you only combine in the end.
My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines. It's great, that you are currently adding images. This is, I think, pretty important for deciding, if I want to cook something or not.
Regarding the comments, I'd really like to implement activitypub on reciperium. To add the ability to follow users and comment on recipes. And to be able to comment and follow from the fediverse. It's a good opportunity for me to explore the protocol.
What do you mean by combining ingredients? You can currently link to other recipes. So if you make a sauce, that can be a recipe on its own, and it can be linked from another recipe. See this for example: https://www.reciperium.com/rodriguezflors/roti
> My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines
That's a good idea, I'm optimizing a bit the search engine now. I've been also thinking of writing a blog
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
I can't explain why, but that makes me extremely uneasy. I won't even give Telegram my phone number. I can only imagine the things a nefarious actor could do with a copy of my passport.
Your passport won't be stored anywhere. It will be verified, then some details like passport number will be encrypted and stored to ensure uniqueness but that's it.
Sure, that may make you uneasy as well, but I hope being transparent about what gets stored and how will ease that uneasiness.
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
Last time I posted that I'd work on my first PCB. That somehow fell off the table, can't really grip where the time went.
Job is very stressful as Q4 is peak-season for us. Managed to stick to some healthy habits though, like doing sport regularly and trying to eat less junk food. It ain't much but it's something I guess.
Also made a good deal on a broken Kitchen Aid machine. I want to repair it for a friend of mine who would like to have one but can't afford it right now. I think that will be a nice christmas present. Really need to get that going though, when time flies again.
I am working to deploy some remote sensors on my farm to help keep an eye on important infrastructure. Things like voltages, bin fill, water levels and other resource management. I may just add a weather station for fun.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
I've been working on a free, in-browser "pre" video editor. Upload your clip, use a transcript interface to cut it down to the takes and salient bits you want to keep, then export your cuts to FCP or Resolve to complete your editing. This tool saves me about 25-30% of my editing time.
Uses transformers.js & WebGPU for running transcription, so it's pretty fast. It's still a bit rough around the edges, so I'm looking for feedback.
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I am building a graph based semantic search engine. We can use low cost LLMs, like Haiku, or local models to extract semantics (named entity recognition).
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
Very interesting, I've been thinking about this kind of approach but haven't had the time to really work on it. So what kind of business model do you have? Is it a kind of drop-in replacement for vector dbs?
Out of curiosity, if it's not a trade secret, how do you plan to handle conflicting data (two sources saying different things on the same topic/data)?
It will perhaps not be a drop in replacement for vector dbs in every situation but yes it will be so when you want accurate results that follow the semantic chains (entities and relations).
At this moment, we have not entered the territory of conflict resolution but I know what you mean. Interestingly I just came across this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18415 (released on Oct 24, 2024).
I'm working on a wearable device with a camera+ultrasonic sensor which is capable of accurate hand pose estimation, which will then result in sign language recognition mainly (extending to gesture recognition and HCI applications). The device should be able to integrate into a smartwatch. I'm only at the 'will it work?' stage, working on the algorithms for recognising ASL words through synthetic data. Would appreciate criticism and pointers on what to keep in mind :)
Hey there, I've been working passively on something somewhat on the same page. A wristband that has both input and output modalities: haptics and gestures.
Here's a notion of some of my bookmarks, ideas, you might find a few things useful:
very cool, hard and exciting problem!
How are you handling the stability of the ultrasound sensor relative to the hand? Usually that's the shakiest/blurriest part.
honestly, haven't thought about it yet. I was thinking of calibrating it with a fixed hand gesture or indicating the user to press their palm against a flat surface, but yeah come to think of it, it might not be frequent enough.
Finished a project that serves as a launching pad for GoLang HTTP APIs. It does decoding of request parameters into structs using instructions found in tags amongst a bunch of other utilities.
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
I'm working on a digital version of a board game. It's 2-4 players, turn based. Im using Rust (actix) on the backend for learning purposes; React, redux, immer on frontend. Communication via Server-Sent Events.
Im experimenting with redux-like contstructs, which reduce the boilerplatey stuff, for example:
I wanted to to make a PoC (Proof of Concept) to show genuinely good and original use of AI in gaming.
I found a gameplay loop that requires the user to understand what was meant by a generated image, and the main gameplay element is to argue something, to have real language-based interactions.
I think in some ways it is achieving some of the vision from the old interactive fiction games.
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'.
Neither solve any problem people really have.
And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC.
I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
For me, the most important problem that needs to be solved right now is a way for people to access reliable health information.
I'm working on plumfin.com, which lets you ask questions to Canadian or U.S. board certified doctors. Theres no need for video chats or waiting for appointments, you can message a doctor anytime and you'll be alerted with a response.
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
I'm working on ways to allow developers and deployers of LLMs to express how and why their overall system is compliant and adversarially robust, and what to do when that's not the case.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to:
1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z);
2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives;
3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds;
4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
The term "ergonomic" isn't regulated in the US, so the market is full of supposedly "ergonomic" keyboards that offer little real benefits—and in some cases, may actually cause harm.
My main gripe is with split keyboards. The traditional keyboard layout is wrong in so many ways (from the perspective of physiology and biomechanics) that just "splitting in the middle" isn't enough to avoid long-term injury.
Splitting is not wrong, but alone, it's not enough. You need to tackle it from multiple perspectives: Yes, Split the keys, so your wrists aren't bent outward, support the palms so they're not bent upward, and angle the middle part up (like a tent) to keep your forearms from twisting. That twisting is especially bad because it squeezes the carpal tunnel and can lead to nerve and tendon problems.
FatBee is my attempt to incorporate all these elements while creating something that doesn't feel too overwhelming to use.
I'll first say that is a very pretty device that I would be glad to introduce to my workspace.
This might be outside the scope of your work, but I'm considering going more extreme with ergonomics. What if the keyboard was split and mounted on my chair arms? What possibilities are there with a keyboard on a free-floating arm, whether it's full-sized or several smaller ones? I like that you use the word "familiar", I'm not looking to reinvent how keyboards work, I just want to rethink where I hold my arms.
A concurrent project, I'm working on finding a chair that fits my specific dimensions. I'm too tall for the average chair and have been searching for solutions. Currently, I use a $40 Coleman camping chair that lets me sit at a 135-degree angle with my laptop on my lap and a portable monitor to the side. However, it offers very little support for my head and shoulders, so I'm looking for a chair that can adjust from 90 to 135 degrees and support my frame.
As someone who tried (and failed) to adapt to other ergonomic keyboards (like a Microsoft Sculpt a few years ago), this really speaks to me.
The interesting thing is I did manage to fix most of my right wrist pain, but not through an ergo keyboard – switching to an Apple magic trackpad did the trick.
But I'm still intrigued by your design - if it was something I could buy (instead of building) I would give it a go.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Hey there. Been where you have been and can safely say, there is always a way out of it.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
If there's one thing I've learn over the last few years is that it's incredibly difficult working on a project when you don't have peace of mind. It can be difficult working on something or staying motivated when you're battling depression, or if you're sad, don't have friends, or if anything is troubling your mind.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
Even without the other problems, I can assure you that the vast majority of managers will think that a 80% done project is almost done. The truth is the remaining 20% is where you have to fit everything together so you revisit an rewrite most of the project. It's a different kind of work that feels boring because you already did those things maybe 3,4 times already. It helps to understand the phase of the project you are in, to reduce the frustration. It also helps to do something even very small, every day and focus on that. One day you will run out of things to do.
Seems like you are discovering the truism that the last 10% of a project takes as much time as the first 90% of the project. In my experience, it is always a slog to ship a product. What you are feeling is normal and the experience of many developers. You should plan for this part of the project and figure out ways to motivate yourself to ship something.
It took a long time to train myself to ship at the 80% mark and simply walk away to let it germinate. Over time, you cultivate a garden of nearly-done projects that are all ripe for expansion or rewrite.
A long dormant side project of mine to design a realtime raga [1] detector.
For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
I'm trying to start an educational YouTube channel in the vein of CGP Grey or 3b1b with a focus on CS. The first video is taking me a long time. It seemed like a natural leap from blogging, but the effort is exponentially higher.
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
I just make incremental progress on a daily basis and don't consider stopping work for a week or two quitting. I work in spurts nd focus entirely on one project a day.
I'm building a simple app to let friends and loved ones know how you're doing. I know many people in some of the current troubled regions of the world, and whenever a particular event happens it's really nerve-wracking for those of us not there, wondering if our loved ones are okay.
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
I've been working on an experimental modern C++20 fork of the popular SFML library, that introduces the following new major features/changes:
- *Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten*
- *Batching system to render 500k+ objects in one draw call*
- *New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices*
- *Enhanced API safety at compile-time*
- *Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles*
- *Built-in SFML::ImGui module*
- *Lightning fast compilation time*
- *Minimal run-time debug mode overhead*
The target audience is mostly developers familiar with SFML that are looking for a library very similar in style but that gives more power and flexibility to the users. Upstream SFML is more suitable for complete beginners.
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple.
Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
fwiw I was very confused with what I was supposed to do on this site and I run a few websites using Tailwind colors. I don't really get how the color selector on the right interacts with the mock previews on the left. It also wasn't obvious I'm supposed to hover over each element in the mock preview.
Thanks, that's helpful! The color selector on the far right
is mostly there to let you change which color you're editing if you're not interested in the mockup preview on the far left, and to add new colors. You can mostly ignore it if you'd rather select colors by clicking on the mockup.
For what you're supposed to do, you're meant to drag the points or curves in the hue/saturation/lightness columns to customize the colors swatches to create your own custom palette. The mockup will update as you make changes and warn you if there's any accessibility contrast issues. You can click elements on the mockup to select colors to edit and check their color contrast.
Does that help at all? Any more hints on what part wasn't obvious and what would make it more obvious? I could hide the color selector by default maybe? Add better labels or hints?
Building a machine learning framework from scratch to learn how everything works.
There exists a myriad of hobbyist frameworks from before, all of them in Python, so to add something original I'm doing it in VBA (for the extra challenge):
As a side project I'm working on a multitrack audio play along website. If you are learning bass you can mute the bass track.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
Random tip... I noticed the volume sliders only take effect when you stop dragging the knob. You can use the 'oninput' event for the slider to set its value as the user moves it around. Something like:
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures.
It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on
- distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids)
- spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM
- email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...)
- line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
I'm not doing anything world changing really, at least not yet.
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
I am working on a geography game where players take turn naming a city inside an area that get's smaller and smaller. It's called LOLA (longitude latitude) since you can choose to narrow the area down by either longitdude or latitude.
I'm working on coffeeplaces. Whenever I got to a new town, I like to taste the coffee there. For example, at my native place, filter coffee is popular. So I am making a website where people can add coffeeplaces that they've enjoyed and other people can see it.
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
Pretty sure no one will see this so: I'm working on a little game where you collect those really old T206 baseball cards and even worked out a system where you can send cards to people offline using a code system like Animal Crossing on the GC used
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
It'd limit the audience and involve a lot of work but maybe by co-ordinates? Bundle a bit of a walking tour of the team's history into the collecting process
I'm working on scoping out specific problems facing "software as a medical device" (SaMD) companies. In particular issues around being able to release software at a reasonable cadence. I've been a CTO in this space for a couple of years and I am now consulting with other firms around the intersection of tech and regulatory.
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I've been working on Relay [0] - a plugin for Obsidian that makes it real-time collaborative.
It uses yjs CRDTs to sync markdown docs and the directory tree. You can share folders (instead of the whole vault with Obsidian Sync) and I'm close to finishing files/images/attachments support. So far users have been really happy with it. There are a lot of students using it to collaborate on class projects, and few small companies who buy into the Obsidian file-over-app philosophy. The plugin code is also open source [1].
I'm building a language learning app: https://yakk.app. Way to go, but made a good start and even a little bit of money so far. I quit my job and moved to Asia on savings to keep building. LMK if any of you guys are in Bangkok, let's hang out.
I've been living in SE Asia for the past 9 months (mostly Vietnam) in order to make my runway last longer. In terms of Thailand, I have the 5-year DTV visa, which is probably SEA's best nomad visa option right now.
Big problem with the video: the audio volume is very low, then I raise the volume of the computer to compensate for it and BAM! an advertisement comes up screaming at me!
I’m very interested in this so I’ve downloaded and extracted your presentation adjusting the volume (24dB!) with:
I'm writing a build tool for SQL. I like to write SQL directly and to use it's more powerful features (like stored procedures and Postgres' ltee extension). But this is gets difficult to manage in a linear, "migrations" based workflow. I want to edit a file tree organized by topic, not a series of scripts run in order. Which is to say, I want to edit it like I would any other codebase.
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
Not presently! I'm on vacation and intentionally left my laptop at home. But if you send me an email I could send you a link when I push it to GitHub; my email is in my profile. Otherwise, I'm planning to do a Show HN around mid November. If you check my submissions on December 1st it'll be there.
I’ve been working on a bespoke smartwatch for kids with Type 1 diabetes & their parents. The watch presents reliable CGM data and not much else, so the only distractions from the watch are important medical alerts. It has a novel haptic algorithm that taps at a frequency based on the current BG trend, the idea is the wearer can develop a sixth-sense of their BG without looking at the watch at all. The entire watch is custom-made from the PCB up. I have a small batch of prototypes assembled and my son has been wearing his at school. I have a few screenshots up at my product studio website: https://subtractive.computer
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
As a personal project during my free time I'm currently working on adding more accessibility features, specifically screen reader compatibility, to my Terminal User Interface XMPP/Jabber client, Communiqué. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there's no actual way to make a TUI compatible with screen readers (reach out on the issue tracker, fedi, or xmpp, see link below if you know otherwise or have experience here, please, I'd love to pick your brain!), so my current plan is to re-write the UI with whatever TUI toolkit makes it easiest to also have a CLI/prompt mode that we can specifically design to be reader compatible.
Everyday, I get up and cold plunge. I exercise twice a day. I eat carnivore diet. I do red light therapy. I drink a gallon of water. I read 10 pages out of two books. Sometimes I get a third exercise in. I use the sauna (20 minutes at 205F). I stand on a vibration plate for 10 minutes.
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
I am working on an email-based space game (a la Eve Online).
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
Designing lenses with numerical optimization. It's surprising how much layers of an optical systems are akin to layers of a neural network during training. If you use rays as inputs and refractive surfaces as layers, you can pretty much use standard pytorch!
Background:
Over the past several years my friends and I would get together for music nights where we share albums and songs we've been listening to. We also have a projector in case we want to showcase music videos.
Eventually, I made us a music visualizer that analyzes real-time microphone input and draws various geometries on to the screen, giving us something to engage our eyes. I built it using the Processing library for Java.
I've been working on a note-taking tool / daily todo-app: https://crom.ai/ - Currently in closed beta. It uses basic markdown and some additional custom elements to annotate data.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had a lot of trouble getting OpenGL OpenCL interoperability to work.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
When you say "develop" a raw file, do you mean convert it to a viewable colour space, given a known screen? Like HDR or some other type of choosing the exposure/gain?
Re: 3D, are you aiming to infer a 3D scene from a single photo? There's a few approaches for that, but they tend to show off the examples that work well, and conveniently avoid examples that work poorly. But depending on the content of your photos, you might find an algorithm that works out of the box.
For data representation, we used a sparse voxel representation of a Truncated Signed Distance Function to represent surfaces for this project: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/kinectfusio...
However, I can't recall interacting with the sparseness; that level of abstraction may have already been resolved in the code by the time I got on that projects. TSDFs are cool as hell and way more interesting than representing ambiguous surfaces with mesh triangles.
Also, I've been there with the turbulence a couple times. Sometimes months happen in a day and vice versa ;)
Kidz Fun Art (https://kidzfun.art). Three years ago my two kids were 5 and 3 and loved to draw. I tried and tried to find a good iPad app suitable for them but everything I found was full of terrible click bait offensive ads. So, I decided to make them an app myself. It’s been a huge amount of fun, and these days thousands of other people’s kids use it too. I especially love when I get emails from them saying how their 4 year old just saw it and immediately understood how to use it.
Given how much use it’s getting I hope to keep working on it as an active side project for years to come
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
LookOutWindow.com , mapping the routes between airports, and showing points of interest along the route. I wanted a way to read about what I was flying over, and which worked offline. We have amazing views up there, but no idea what we are looking at.
I just rewrote https://hackyournews.com/ for its first birthday and am trying to optimize its performance and extend the different sites it can work with, beyond HN.
Being in my early 30s and moving to a new city, I have been thinking more about ways to connect with people in real life. A friend of mine remarked that no one seems to get lunch anyone, so we kind of thought it would be a great idea to try and bring back the modern power lunch.
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
I am working on a visual search & exploration engine: https://digger.lol
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
I've been obsessed with developing ways to make it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management".
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
Adding the ability to view the full title is an easy fix, I'll include that in the next push.
The history and bookmarks point is a good one. It's possible to specify those as optional permissions for the extension, so users could decide whether or not to enable them. One idea that motivates the project is that it's easier to close tabs when you know you can always get back to them quickly, so history and bookmark search are necessary to enable that mindset. I'll ruminate on this one a little more.
The idea of using it without replacing the "new tab" page had never occurred to me. Let me think about that one, too.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm testing interest on chrome, and, if it finds traction, I will definitely port it to be browser-agnostic. It _should_ be pretty straightforward.
I've been working on a new LLM prompt format and accompanying dataset for finetuning.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
I kind of got back to looking at my newsbetting app called Rashomon. I posted about it on here a few weeks ago to no attention.
Basically you get untitled articles and have to bet whether they are from far left, left, center, right or far right sources. The idea was to maek readers aware of their biases. I wrote my findings here:
https://nassharaf.github.io/ideasthete/projects/Rashomon.htm...
ValueError at /accounts/signup
The given username must be set
Request Method: POST
Request URL: http://www.rashomonnews.com/accounts/signup
Django Version: 2.2.10
Exception Type: ValueError
Exception Value:
The given username must be set
Exception Location: /home/deployer/newsbetenv/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/contrib/auth/models.py in _create_user, line 140
Python Executable: /home/deployer/newsbetenv/bin/python
Python Version: 3.5.2
Python Path:
['/home/deployer/rashomon',
'/home/deployer/rashomon',
'/home/deployer/newsbetenv/bin',
'/usr/lib/python35.zip',
'/usr/lib/python3.5',
'/usr/lib/python3.5/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu',
'/usr/lib/python3.5/lib-dynload',
'/home/deployer/newsbetenv/lib/python3.5/site-packages']
Server time: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:36:54 +0000
Is there a demo account we can use to test it out? or maybe give 1 or 2 articles for free so people can get a feel of it and then have them setup an account after.
I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
I built a CNC router table and am enjoying getting a hang of that. I have always wanted to take my software and systems skillset into the physical world.
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple.
I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
I'm working on an ESP32 based NFC record system using OwnTone (https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/) as the music hosting and playing solution (as it supports AirPlay to all the HomePods in the house). Each HomePod has a smaller ESP32 with a knob for adjusting the volume in a room.
I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.
I quit my job and depleted savings earlier this year to work on helping others overcome addictive habits and behaviors https://neurtureapp.com
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
I created a Weird Clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset within a conventional 12-hour clock face. This normally would only work on a 24-hour clock face, which is kind of unfamiliar to most people, so I developed a way to show a 24-hour day within a 12-hour clock face; essentially it shows a 2-turn spiral so both night and day will fit. This needs to know your location in order to compute your local sunrise and sunset, so don't freak out when the browser asks for location permission! Includes option to enter lat/long and other goodies. Works on phones but better on a large screen. https:\\www.coolweird.net
Working on a game engine to help me create my take on some retro games. My first one is a multiplayer bombing puzzle game[1].
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
I am spending my retirement working part-time on a realistic spacecraft simulator (3D, VR) set in the late 20th century on a fictional moon made of Tungsten ("Tungsten Moon"). For some reason, I decided the spacecraft needs a "real" flight computer with code that can be modified by the player, so I am now deeply immersed in coding a Forth virtual computer ("AMC Forth") to run in-game. It will control the navigation and systems on the spacecraft. If you've gotten this far, and you're intrigued, you can try the free demo on Steam (no Forth machine yet).
I've been wanting to provide some type of service for a while now. Unique endurance races and endurance challenges recently caught my eye as an area that doesn't have a ton of coverage.
My first idea was to jump right into building a website that made these types of races easily searchable. But I decided to slow down and just figure out the market first by creating a weekly substack newsletter. Each week I'll send out important upcoming dates for various unique endurance events and challenges. If I can grow this substack, I'll put effort into building this into a full fledged website!
I just finished writing a discord bot backed by postgres with a web frontend. Some friends and I like to do watch parties and this system lets you set a theme for a group of movies, everyone submits their picks, then it will randomize and post what the agenda is each week. Afterwards it posts a poll to let them respond with a thumbs up or down. The next thing on my list is to use the voting data to render a user score based on how well their picks were received by the group lol.
I got really interested in this idea when I decided to write it in a stack I don't normally work in, Go + HTMX. Go routines are incredibly useful. I used https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES.css/ for the front end and it's really become a fun bot all around.
Every application that I've worked on has had blind spots, or forgotten lands of code. Things like “how often do people actually use this feature?” …or… “does this code still run every night?”.
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
At first I thought you made a website that gives me an empty Markdown file. But I am glad I downloaded it its actually a pretty nice template.
What are you personally doing with the yearly goals in that file. Are you copy and pasting them from last week, or are you typing them down everytime to re-iterate them (and possibly even modify) ?
Yeah, currently I am just copy/pasting the Yearly Goals section over. I want to eventually add a feature to allow someone signed up for the email to edit that part. Then someone could modify that goal section and have it correctly emailed each week.
Carpeweekem looks like a really cool idea!
I suppose you exclusively use it for goal tracking and not for ongoing/open To Dos, right? At least if you don't carry over stuff from last week?
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. I'm implementing some of these techniques myself right now, but being able to try out different algorithms and having plugins etc available immediately is really cool! Can't wait to try it out.
The models have gotten much better at generating them with just the prompt. I have not implemented strict support for structured output or JSON generation yet. The response from the proxy are all raw text responses.
One way would be to just apply outlines or some library as a plugin to enable structured outputs.
I'm currently working on splatgallery.com. It's supposed to be a curated community driven gallery of the best 3D models reconstructed from photos or videos. It's currently in a very early stage and I am still adding more models to it hoping it'll gain traction from the community :)
I’ve been working on a free language learning app that uses a local AI model to translate words and sentences. You can read sentences, short stories, or watch YouTube videos with translatable captions. It mostly follows the principles of the comprehensible input theory. Think of it like LingQ, but free and with any language combination.
The main goal is for the app to run entirely on the client side and stay completely free.
Personally, I can’t stand Anki or Duolingo—I’d rather read actual sentences that are fine-tuned to my level.
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestion - you can slow down the hero animation of Boxento.
In general I like the project. It reminded me to Bento.me. I'd guess you are direct competitors? (I'd also suggest adding Boxento as an alternative to Bento.me on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/bento-me)
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
Nowhere near as exciting as some of the other cool stuff in this thread but... I'm building https://trytalo.com - an open source self-hostable game backend. Talo makes it easy to drop in features like leaderboards, player stats, analytics and more into games. There's a Godot plugin, Unity package and Steamworks integration too.
I'm really early on in getting Talo out there so appreciate any feedback/criticism/roasting!
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
In many books and talks I hear that ideas are worth nothing until they are executed. I am changing this narrative. Every person, entrepreneur or not, will have the ability to fast-forward their idea to a place of execution within one day. From idea to first dollar in one day. = 1 day.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
My son loves collecting pokemon cards and trading with his friends at school.
We talked a lot about Pokemon on Friday and it got me into a nostalgic mood...
Side Note: Pokemon has done a great job staying relevant for 3 decades.
So... I made a python script with gpt-vision where he can manage his collection and uncover the value of each one. He just snaps a photo and boop, there's the returned valuation. He's now got his whole collection documented and appraised. :)
Most importantly, we had a lot of fun spending time with each other on this.
Valuation can sometimes depend on things like whether it's still in the package, and wear and tear. It would be interesting to try to estimate that, have you tried?
I’m teaching myself elixir/phoenix by building a SDLC tool inspired by Trac, the simplest tool that ever worked for me. But with CI/CD.
It has morphed in the offing into two tools. One a federated CI/CD tool and one a personal productivity tool with affordances for neurodivergent people.
Atlassian struggles with being a jack of all trades. Bamboo’s integrations make it harder for devs to create repeatable, reliable builds, not easier. I’ve seen Atlassian struggle to scale with dev count so I want something more federated. Jira is in constant danger of becoming a panopticon, using developer’s transparency as a weapon against them at review time, destroying psychological safety. Devs only use these tools if they see personal benefit or are harangued to do so. My thesis is that you need one tool for personal accountability and a separate one for team accountability both to fight Goodhart’s Law and for people with variability in their daily productivity. There are many little tools for doing bits of this but they don’t talk to each other, leaving the plate spinning up to the developer, many of whom plate spinning is onerous.
I’m hoping this will do for bug databases and possibly wikis what interactive rebase does for pull requests. Do what needs to get done, then make it make sense to others afterward.
I'm working on making a physical console for the Pico-8. Its pretty simple, works on linux booted into kiosk mode, looks for when a 3.5" floppy is inserted or removed, and loads or closes the game via a shell script.
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
Amazing! I went through the same but opting to implement the console itself on the ESP32[0]. It ended up being a bit too much and it's mostly shelved now
which didn't really connect with people. I did a collaboration with some people where I'd barcoded work prints and found that the system was not so reliable and I'd gotten out of the house without publishing the "web side" of the prints. Also I had a few boxes of glossy paper which wouldn't let me print on the back so I developed a new generation of card
The new system reliably associates the QR code and "web side" with a print because it prints the front. I am planning a better "web side" than I had before, particularly to view stereograms with a VR headset, also to publish with the Looking Glass Go.
A different AI toolbox, for people interested in results, not hot stuff.
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
Resources for people moving to and integrating into Spain.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
I think your page demonstrates why it is best to employ a local administrator to do this kind of thing. It's worth paying to make the process quicker and less stressful.
Agreed. I plan to add some more context and guides around finding the right one. My experience with gestors (local administrators) has been extremly mixed.
A flat-file (micro)CMS written in Rust, the basic idea would be to make it as easy as possible for content creators to have a web presence without dealing with the nitty-gritty details, and similarly for web designers to be able make themes while treating the CMS itself as a black box mostly.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
I'm working on a tool to generate and host full stack web apps from prompts (just like everyone else). I'm loving it. Using llms to do as much of my coding as possible, so in a way eating my own dog food, although it's a more developer-driven effort than what the end product will be.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
I’m chipping away at a simple storefront solution that’s as low tech, reliable, low cost, and user-friendly as I can make it. I’m really enjoying the no-shiny-tech aspect of it.
I've been working on a cloud gaming service (like Stadia). Wanted to see how far I can get it done using open source, without ready-to-use solutions like Parsec/Moonlight/Sunshine.
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
Currently resolution is hardcoded, but sure, can be done. Also need to figure out things like changing language/keyboard layout or using IME, to be able to type text properly. Sending mouse cursor picture from server to client may be nice too, in case a game uses hardware cursor and changes it's appearance, like some RTS games - currently mouse cursor is just being baked into video frames. Many possible improvements!
Not yet, but I'll probably open source it eventually! Still need to clean things up a lot, and implement missing functionality, for example I haven't even bothered to implement audio capture yet, because I wanted to try video first
I really wish we could get a privacy-respecting standard for electronic receipts. But every time a shop experiments with it, it's using a shitty app which they use to track their customers.
A nodal real-time video processing tool : put together pre-made "processing boxes" to generate interactive video. It runs on pretty much anything, uses a plugin architecture.
Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.
GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage
Will it be something like TouchDesigner[1] ? I never used TD myself, but I follow a lot of creative types who do for making music visualizations, art installations, etc.
I can't find it on Github though, maybe repo is private ?
Be warned, zero documentation, because things are at larval stage and change often. Will include a couple of demos this week.
In the spirit, yes, but targeting different hardware, public, and environments.
* It runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Bare metal on rp2040 and rp2350 is planned.
* It written in C, build with Make.
* It is meant to run on something like a Raspberry Pi, Latte Panda, etc
* A setup is a text file, no fancy UI.
* The plan for live parameter fiddling will be a web server. Web UI will be tailored to each setup, no one size fits all UI. Typically I pay someone to do the UI.
* For now, it's only video, no sound output
It will be used for several large interactive LED displays and object tracking systems. It's a way for me to factories all those projects I was contracted for.
In my spare time, I am trying to port OpenBMC[0] to the BMC of the Gigabyte MC12-LE0[1], a cheap, workstation/server-class mainboard for AMD's AM4 platform.
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
I was working on a new website for https://flatcal.com. With Flatcal I'm trying[1] to scratch my own itch when sharing busy status with .ics calendars. My life is organized between corporate (Outlook), private (GCal) and freelance (various) calendars. Finding a freebusy slot or sharing my accessibility is not easy, and sending someone multiple links makes a little sense. So I figured that I will build calendar processing pipeline that will merge, filter, anonymize, inject, rewrite (etc) calendar events can solve this problem for me. And having all of them merged into a single .ics file is way easier to share, and safer too.
[1] Being solopreneur/micro-SaaS/do it all yourself dev is way more work than I thought
For a fun weekend project, I built Boardle - a daily wordle-like game where you guess popular boardgames using stats from Board Game Geek. The games are from BGG's top 150 games as voted by the community, so fair warning if you aren't already someone who plays a lot of modern boardgames this will be very hard as all the games are very nerdy
I'm currently building an open source CMS in Golang. Meaning fully implemented backend and frontend + support for custom themes in the frontend and custom collections/items in the backend.
Now, there is a lot of CMS software out there. Some of the better ones are paid products.
What I'm hoping to eventually accomplish is easy local creation of a website (content and themes) and after that easy one click deployment to a cheap hosting provider. Alternatively just copying a local folder to your own vps/server with the CMS should be enough.
My dream outcome would be a CMS that is a one-stop solution for most types of websites (blogs, company sites, shops, ...). To hopefully contribute to making people stop using facebook, twitter, other centralized and eventually login seeking services for hosting content people would like to read.
For this, a free/cheap one click hosting solution after locally creating and previewing a site would be necessary.
PHP is still pretty widely used here because cheap web hosting package support that.
I like PHP, but for open source projects I prefer Go because of the maintainability and fun of writing it.
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Currently working on promoting Software Engineering Handbook (https://softwareengineeringhandbook.com/), a book that goes beyond typical technical guides by addressing both the technical and life aspects of being a software engineer.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
I'm working on a JavaScript library for drawing on web maps called Terra Draw - it uses an adapter pattern so aims to work with a bunch of different mapping libraries such as Leaflet, Google Maps, MapBox and MapLibre. You can see it at: https://github.com/JamesLMilner/terra-draw
I've always struggled to find a place where serious programmers would be there to talk and exchange experiences on various topics related to software development. So I built a simple site from scratch where we can chat, send files, post things and share images and links on a single platform. https://chat-to.dev
It's not progressing well, but I'm still obsessed by trying to prove my idea of the "Birthday Benchmark" to test data structures / caches.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
All of my friends wanted my mom's recipes when they came round for my birthday. Now I realised she doesn't store anything - it's all in her head!
Then the same thing happened with my girlfriend although she writes hers down in a diary (how old school).
And then I noticed so many food influencers posting their recipes in the descriptions of their tiktok/insta posts.
And then as I started searching for recipes online, I found the websites full of ads and popups and terrible UI. I only cared about the ingredients and the method. So I created this, and have been having a lot of fun with it.
I hope to see up and coming food influencers using this as a platform directly to link with their social media posts, engaging and competing with an already interested audience.
I'm working on an application. It's really challenging to be a solo developer and build a web application from scratch. I've been working on it for four months now, and to be honest, I've gotten a bit lazy over the past few weeks. But I've decided to launch it before it's completely finished. I'm a perfectionist, which makes things harder, but I know I can do it.
We're working on a specialised graph compiler for speeding up simulations and computing derivatives automatically (backpropagation/adjoint differentiation). It now supports C++, Python, and C#; AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets, multithreading; Windows, and Linux.
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
I never finish my books, so I created a small site with concise summaries of books that I want to read. Each summary includes key concepts, critical reception, and recommended related books, along with an audio version for listening on the go. It's still early days with just a few summaries, but I'm enjoying the process of creating them, all by AI with my refined prompts. There are a lot of book summaries out there, but I haven't found one that I like, so I made my own.
I've always dreamed of flying by just flapping my arms, and have been building osm4vr to do just that. It's a 3d / VR experience that runs in the browser and allows you to fly around buildings with the data taken from OpenStreetMap.
I'm currently working on a programming language that will probably be very boring in practice (Algol/Pascal structure, C-ish syntax, traits/typeclasses but only modules can be generic, not sure if GC or borrow checking but probably a hybrid).
The idea is to have something efficient enough, with the least amount of implementation complexity (including codegen), and still being nice to use, which is a really interesting balancing act.
For example, instead of implementing loop optimizations I could add APL-style broadcasting; I could make a complicated but efficient GC runtime or a complicated but efficient borrow checker, but I could also make both a dumb GC and a dumb borrow checker that somehow complement each other.
It's kind of a researchy language, but not trying to be new or interesting. Just "globally simple".
Most features are in an theoretical design phase, but I'm currently working on a new backend (LLVM is too fancy to count, QBE is too basic).
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
Here is an example of using a Raku made Command Line Interface (CLI) app/script for translating natural language commands into DS computational workflows (via LLMs):
> concretize --l=Python make a quantile regression pipeline over dfTemperature using 24 knots an interpolation order two
I'm working on a social network based around link sharing!
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
This kind of reminds me of Google Circles where you would group people into areas of interest. I always thought that idea was really good and should’ve been pursued further.
I’m working on https://sweetlemon.app - a tool for tech companies that help them save money on license costs by identifying unused and wasted licenses.
Having worked for 15 years bootstrapping and organically growing digital agencies, I’m now trying to get my own product off the ground.
I’d love to connect with businesses, CTOs, COOs, IT Managers or anyone else who want to talk about trimming down cost in tech companies.
Organizing all of the information that comes at you in the workplace into a social-style news feed, with AI summaries.
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
Right now, I’m working on a startup with my cofounder called Hypership – an all-in-one platform designed to cut through the chaos of modern web development. After years of building products, I’ve seen how tangled the ecosystem has become. It feels like every tiny feature is another SaaS subscription, with its own login, data silos, and integration headaches. Want error logging? That’s another $20. Need analytics? Another login. And don’t get me started on the documentation for half these tools.
Hypership is our attempt to fix that mess. We’re building a platform where you can deploy, manage, and track everything from one place. No more juggling 15 different tools just to keep your app running. The vision is simple: let devs focus on building great products, not wrangling disconnected micro-SaaS.
Still building with metal in my free time. This months project is an 8ft tall corner plant stand. Picked up some really unique looking boards from seconduse I need to sand and stain but still working on the shelf itself.
Also started tiling my guest bathroom and tiling the ceiling of the shower. First tile project I’ve attempted.
I'm about to finish my first provably / likely correct software.
The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon.
- I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
Building a VR IFC viewer in C++ without external dependencies.
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
- Trying to get over my procrastination and finally start (the standard way of) prepping for software dev (staff/etc) level interviews after having taken a considerable number of months as a gap
- An idea of a platform to connect sports venues to players. (In a way that is better and richer than the only/shitty option available in my geography. Why do I call that service shitty? They have been around for almost a decade or close to that by now and they are still shitty and unstable and barely useable). With a bit of differentiation - instead of individual and venue bookings (the service that offers right now) - connect venues and groups where payment is taken care of already (no running around collecting payments and worrying about no shows and ignoring them in future them/etc). We were reaching towards a demo kinda product but the friend on the backend side got bored of software and started focussing on stock trading where he is sadly doing spectrally bad
- Also did a bit of work on trying to connect users with the laundry list of (e)bicycles, e-scooters et cetera providers (i.e how there are common booking platforms for all airlines; or for buses; etc) so that they won't have to install all the apps until it finally reached our skulls that maybe those services are looking for a lock-in so they would never open up their APIs and we lacked perseverance and resources to force them to adhere to the Govt suggested broad inventory db mechanism in my country. Basically we started on it without any research.
The problem with me is - software engineering/coding (I have been told I am not bad at it though)/platforms/libraries/etc excite me fuck all. But problem solving does. I should not have been a software engineer really. So interviews get tricky. While I can (and have) clear interviews at early stage startups, the work-life balance they offer is horrendous, but MNC/etc ask for every thing I have never used and will never use, or anybody ever will (mostly), that means thorough prep. I am just ranting, ignore it.
I'm building a wayland sleep and gamma handler that has lua scripting integration. It bothers me that it's so hard to set different timeout handlers. So I recently integrated wljoywake, which allows me to handle timeout on joystick commands and am in the process of adding flux like functionality.
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
Cabinette[0], a macOS app for musicians/producers to manage their music catalog. My WIP folder has about 75 songs, ranging from electronic/orchestral/piano, and I wanted something with dedicated filtering, tracking progress over time, and pretty drag/drop. So... I built it!
Currently in TestFlight, but 1.0 is launching soon :) Feel free to give it a spin, and drop thoughts on the feedback board.
(Another idea I'm starting is an easy-learn, hard-to-master, productivity app: split calendar and todo list, with fluid drag/drop and power user features. Targeting the iPad at first, and will hopefully bring to more platforms. Keep an eye on my website[1] for launch!)
Trying to get a chatbot to invoke Apify actors so that I can get around the "sorry i dont have live data" limitation of chatbots. If this works, then next is to set up payment so that i can order pizza just by talking to the same chatbot that I can order socks from.
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit:
If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
I'm in the middle of releasing my Python Component library, which makes it possible to write __truly reusable__ HTML (or any other markup) component libraries in any web framework or project.
I'm building a platform for developers to build, deploy, and share web crawlers. It's built entirely on Cloudflare and aims to be the cheapest and easiest solution for crawling tens of millions of pages.
From my last comment in August 2024 [1], I have made progress!
The project I'm developing is called Your Commonbase, a self organizing scrapbook built around Personal Library Science.
The big updates are:
1. From Fleeting Note to Connected Note with The Entry/Comment Model - An entry has its own marginalia (comments), which are also embedded as first class data. These comments allow your search model to improve over time, and create surprising clusters. See this video to see an example of the Entry/Comment model in a d3 graph [2]. All the connections are created automatically! Entries go from "fleeting entries" inbox (not linked or commented on) to "main entries" which spread and connect ideas from across the space.
2. Using yCb as a creator - I created a Google Docs extension and have been using it to create Zettelkasten's for my blogs. On average each blog references 12 or more books. This is a real use case of a PKM system outside doing it for the love of the game [3].
There's so much more including mobile upload, [[links]], audio upload, and more, but you can explore the Notion page in [2] to see the features I've added.
Inspired by Heart of Clojure, and especially Jeaye Wilkerson and his talk about jank-lang, I’ve dusted off my toy Clojure compiler that produces 16-bit x86 code.
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
I'm making a battery powered e-ink dashboard that uses openai api to summarize the weather and suggest the correct toddler clothing for my son at a glance. It refreshes every hour and so far been pretty good at catching things I might forget, for example wind chill and sun exposure.
I am working on my next course "The Road to Next" which teaches full-stack React with React 19 and Next 15. I started this full-time adventure 6 months ago and I am knee deep into recording the lessons. The project with all the code and the step by step instructions are already there and I am super eager to hear what people think about it.
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
I've been working on training YOLOv8 to identify my cats specifically. We've had some issues with them getting on the counters and going outside of the litter box. Previous camera systems to try and find the culprit we not always triggered by the cat's motion. I'd wanted to move to a self hosted camera system anyway so I got an IP camera and modified Frigate NVR to support ultralytics and slapped my custom trained model in. The training has been interesting as I've never done anything with computer vision before this. The hardest part was getting enough pictures and then labeling them. If I retrain it in the future I'd like to use the trained model to identify any cats in the source pictures and then just fix the ones it missed or overzealously marked.
I am working on a personal digital mentor, in the spirit of Dross from Will Wight's "Cradle" series.
I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than Notion AI's response when I tell it something like "look at the last 7 days of notes I've taken and run a retro with me.
I like it because it scratches a personal-improvement itch of mine, it's a nice project to become acquainted with the popular LLM app tech, and I can share it with others who may find it useful.
I'm working on MedAngle, the world's first Super App for premed, medical, and dental students. We offer an all-in-one feature set called the Smart Suite with dozens of Smart features, and it has tens of thousands of questions, quizzes, clinical cases, and other educational content.
Best of all, we're hyper-personalized for the institution you study at, making us the first to do this in history. I get to lead a team of 175+ doctors and top tier medical/dental students.
I also am the first full-stack technologist who also is a medical doctor in the history of Pakistan, a country of 250+ million people, and have been featured on national TV and media platforms.
I am working on a collaborative ebook reading app, rather like a sort of online book club.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others.
Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
Working on https://someguys.app to make it easier for people to find sports meet-ups and stay active, whether at home or exploring a new city. Personally, I’ve always found it tough to stay motivated and consistent with sports after retiring from 25 years of semi-professional sport, especially solo.
Having a group around makes all the difference, but it’s not always easy to find one—especially for sports that aren’t as mainstream or easy to organize.
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
Playing around with LLMs to generate fictional stories and I'm working on a journal of sorts based on a traveler that goes to various parallel worlds not unlike our own except for one or two minor but key differences. He reports on his findings there and how it affects social, political, and economics for that timeline. A new timeline drops every day and I have a lot more planned to take it beyond the simple blog format it's in now but it has been a fun challenge to learn how to do some deep prompting with AI to generate random entries without veering off into crazyiness or getting locked onto the same thing over and over again.
I'm building an online forms-as-a-service for static websites. I decided recently to revive my personal static site on netlify, where I share out with friends and family my recipes and movie recommendations. I wanted a simple "contact me" form, and decided to scratch my own itch with this service, and build out the server underpinnings so I can iteratively solve more problems static sites may have.
In building out my cheap CI/CD process I wrote a simple web hook utility, using pure python and base libraries, and called it Duct-Tape-Hook: https://github.com/nullfocus/duct-tape-hook/
If this is at all useful or interesting, drop me a line!
I'm building Reasonote, a platform where you can learn anything with personalized, interactive lessons, and podcasts.
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
A sqlite extension that provides a virtual table backed by an Automerge document (https://automerge.org/).
I believe that there are plenty of applications that could benefit from the collaboration or sync-ability that CRDTs* provide, but that don't need to manage the CRDTs directly. Moving the CRDT management into the database seems like a natural fit.
It's very early, and not public anywhere, but I'd be happy to chat about it if anyone has any thoughts or questions.
Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!
I've been just screwing around and building little apps, mostly seeing how quickly I can get something going using ChatGPT or Claude. Seems like Claude in particular is great with code. The most recent thing I did was a little app [0] to help one of my parents log their blood pressure readings easily, since they had to do it a few times a day in different positions and such. I've used that as an excuse to learn how to make something really basic, single task, easy to use for folks that aren't so great with technology. I'm also trying to learn a bit more about accessibility in web development, which this is helping me do.
I'm working on robots. In the long run I'm interested in dexterous manipulation for industrial or commercial tasks (e.g., assembly of products) but given the big $$$ already deployed in this space, am wondering if I can find a simpler (and faster to build!) application.
Playing with 6-axis arms but also built RoBart for fun, controlled by Claude. Would love to connect with folks to ideate on the concept of a very cheap autonomous robot (maybe with some very limited manipulation ability for e.g. opening doors). I can think of an application in the health care space already.
Footage at my web site (which badly needs a redesign lol): http://trzy.org
To get some experience launching webapps that can be put into the play store and play around with image generation models, prompting, I am building an app to generate application/corporate photos from a few non-professional selfies.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale!
Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
I started a Slack community for the South African tech scene [1] that turns 10 in January so I've been pondering my successes and failures there, as well as what it's future holds.
At work, busy adding internationalisation and localising an Angular 16 application. Figured out you can do runtime language switches, without having to maintain separate builds for each locale. Angular's documentation is rubbish.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Inspired by three people, so I tried to find three fitting ways to let people know this story exists. 1: On a website currently showing deep-fake propaganda to support a fascist (felt a bit icky posting there). 2: On a dapp/chain that is the premiere place to lose money on sh*coins (as a sh*coin itself, but at least I'm not going to call it collateral as a pretense for fraud). 3: Here, where they actually managed to get rid of someone (who later proved himself un-rid-able elsewhere).
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
I'm trying to make a spreadsheet interface for solving scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
If you have multiple servers with multiple SSH users it starts to become hard to manage who has access to what.
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
I am adding more features to my Google Sheets add-on as requested by users. I planned to keep it a micro-SaaS but it seems people want it all at one place. They will pay or not is another thing.
I am working on a parser for org-mode, based on a (PEG) grammar. Still got some reading to do and it is all early stages. There is so much org-mode supports, that I am not sure I will ever make it to fully able to parse all org-mode documents. My idea is, that anyone can later take my grammar and extend it, make better parsers and maybe make org-mode more ubiquitous.
After years of lying dormant, I'm reactivating a hacky PHP script to test 'technical SEO' knowledge in the way of a challenge - more aligned to a technical web challenge, with a "SEO" bent more than anything spammy.
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
I’ve been working on open sourcing a background jobs library I built for Rust and Postgres, called Underway.[0] Unlike other similar queuing libraries, it offers a simple “step” functions API for defining dependent units of work.
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
Burned out with the job hunt after a rough year so I'm building out a remote job listing site... because I'm searching for a job. I figured I will build something that scrapes top sites I visit and normalizes job postings and company profiles, to which I can subscribe/save/apply/archive listings, get jobs matched to my resume etc. Just a nice little CRUD app.
I figure it's better to launch something then go job hunting instead of job hunting off a resume that hasn't been updated in a good while.
I built dailycodingproblem.com with a friend way back and we got #2 on PH so I am trying to get back to that life again!
Thanks! I'm going with nuxt3 on the frontend, and just firebase for everything else. Anything in the startup/remote world. There's a few go-to job boards I go to so it would be nice to get it all into once place.
I recently bought a Lotus Elise and have set up a small website to collect most of the things new owners need to know about the car - https://lotus-center.vercel.app/
I've designed medical devices, implants, surgical robots and other complex, mission critical hardware that has been used to do thousands of surgeries, implanted in people all around the world and even in the Smithsonian.
After celebrating the 10th anniversary of my product design firm, nerdian inc, this year I've been focusing on building my San Francisco Design Lab here in SOMA.
We can design, 3d print, cnc machine, injection mold, build electronics and do all the integration for a complex piece of hardware all under on roof, right here in SF.
I've shipped dozens of complex pieces of hardware that are in use today. What can I ship for you?
I've completed the draft of Part 1 of my online book "Automated Agents: How effective chatbots work"
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
I personally believe Toronto hosts some of the best child care resources and options for young working parents, though issues of affordability and information asymmetry are palpable.
I'm not naive to think that technology alone can fix this problem, but we are looking to balance the scale by 1) making existing child care resources easily accessible and 2) connecting parents and alternative caregiver options to fill the gaps that the current industry left behind. We are calling it Kindervillage (http://kindervillage.ca/).
I finally got around to building and hosting my personal website on my own tiny VP. In the medium to long term, I'm hoping that people will find me through my website or word of mouth, instead of online social networks.
I'm working on a WebGL-based timeline that covers the entire history of our Universe and let's you zoom in to see more detail. After I finish this 2D version, I plan to create a 3D VR timeline that you can "walk" through, complete with animated dinosaurs, etc. A while back I had started on the VR version using Unity but unfortunately lost all the code when I made a mistake migrating from Google Drive to iCloud :(
https://youtu.be/Jj0tfwX3JVE?si=3WDYUzYjQUnsLU7E
I am building a web framework in Go that has all of the nice advancements in development experience that React has. Having spent a significant amount of time writing js, I get frustrated when things break and my developer momentum comes to a grinding halt. For everything that Go is, it is not a language that breaks because time has passed. Building this project is my long term bet that with the right tooling, Go can become a competitive language for writing full stack websites.
I like to research companies that I'm interviewing with and I've been automating my process lately. It's also been a good opportunity to explore many of the challenges in LLM/RAG applications like user trust, dealing with bias in the information sources, and static vs dynamic graphs.
I have worked on social dynamics on social media particularly how why certain kinds of content/people become viral. To that end, I have been working on a large-scale simulation that simulates twitter. It pulls data from a random distribution, generates users with specific interest vectors. its modelled as a Agent based modelling with the users as agents, posting every timestep, reading content posted by others, recommended to them by a recommendation engine. all of this this then generates data for research.
I'm building techtalksweekly.io – a free weekly email with all the talks from software engineering conferences uploaded in the past 7 days to save my readers from scrolling through messy YT subscriptions.
If you're into software engineering conferences (like GOTO, PyCon, Devoxx, CppCon, JSNation, RustConf, etc.) and enjoy watching tech talks, you should check it out.
A pure passion project. I have been fortunate enough to ride a bike across the world in numerous amazing places and it's been wonderful.
What is not great, however, is the amount of money it costs to get a tour planned which is often expensive for very little value.
Therefore, I have started collating my information slowly but surely and trying to give people confidence to plan their own trip. Doing it with Sanity.io, NextJS and a few new technologies to me. I have learnt a lot.
Still a long way to go, but you can find current progress here: https://rides.bike
I've been making https://AppGoblin.info for an overview of mobile app advertising ecosystem. I've been expanding it to include development tools and marketing companies as well.
My main, but longer, main project is building an MMP (mobile advertising attribution platform). It's really far from done, so if anyone is interested please reach out. I need help writing Android and iOS SDKs and with the analytic dashboard for the frontend.
Also, interested in starting a skyscraper construction blog if anyone is interested.
I am playing with a Tillitis TKey, to use it as an HSM. I write its firmware in Zig (works great on that small RV32 chip), while learning it.
I am also launching a consulting firm specialized on cryptographic solutions.
Finding a reliable service for writing research papers can be challenging. However, the research paper writing service by https://studyprofy.com/custom-research-paper/ stands out for its professionalism and quality. Their team of experienced writers ensures that every paper is well-researched and tailored to your specific requirements.
I'm building a fork of firefox for android that blocks sites that I find addictive e.g. youtube.com, but allows wildcards: youtube.com/watch?v=* so I can watch an individual video. Then I block all other browsers at that operating system level using mdm in Android.
I'm running a hacky version on my phone and it's been surprisingly effective at stopping me from doom scrolling.
I've been working on the ability to read sky brightness without a sensor.
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
I'm close to finishing out a practice planner for basketball coaches, specifically I'm excited about the drills library. Youth coaches today tend to source drills from all over the internet (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc) so having one central place to refer to them is going to really help.
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.
[1] https://embolt.app
A kind of a configuration management tool, helping me manually "reconcile" between three concurrent aspects of the state of a machine (and then apply the result):
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
What's the difference between the latter two? Apart from that, it sounds like a gitops thing "deploy on push", while trying to meld the mutating pets with declarative cattle somehow.
Nickel vs. Nix? as I wrote, Nickel is a "statically-typed successor" - newer, created (in progress) by people with Nix experience, vs. Nix being dynamically typed.
I'm building an open source messaging app similar to Discord or Slack, but with the notetaking/wiki capabilities of something like Notion or Confluence integrated. I just finished rewriting it in Rust, and while the new release is somewhat buggy, I feel like it solves many of the problems with Discord being the "black hole of knowledge".
This is not very concrete, but I've been thinking about the parallels between software development and Factorio and how to tie the two together to be (personally) beneficial. This includes finding ways to make software development as enjoyable as the game* and also pondering ways to make programming more visual. It would be cool to "see" a software project functioning similar to the moving parts of a factory.
* setting small, clear objectives
* spending enough time on refactoring
* giving myself a small reward for completing objectives
In general: technoetic software - tools for exploring consciousness through technology. I have this idea to try to revive the terms "technoetics" and "psionics". I feel like there's still so much ground to cover in this space, yet no one pays much attention to it, except for a small niche of weirdos like me.
If you're into tech and (non-materialist) ideas about consciousness, follow me on X (see profile or https://technoetics.org/ )
in my work, inventory of raw material (computer system, scanner, printer, computer screen) is still done using paper so i'm building this android studio app that uses OCR and sends text to the server that will write it on excel sheet.
the data I want: model, serie, inventory id, type
so I have limited the text output extracted from the image to 4 lines and started each line by the necessary property e.g
model: HP prodesk 3000 MT
serie: XCQOUNF24
inventory id: to be added manually
type: to be choose manually (printer, screen, computer ... )
I've been working on an android app that lets you automate android the JavaScript way, it's made using Cordova. The tech stack is Vue, Sqlite, bootstrap and jQuery.
The idea is that a user can create js scripts containing methods I have provided that programmatically interface with androids native features like sim card, Bluetooth, WiFi, battery, network, TTS, Flashlight, etc..
https://github.com/MurageKabui/PhoneDo
https://CodePeer.com - An AI-assisted code review platform that manages the lifecycle of a PR. We make sure everyone knows whose turn it is, we show you only what needs to be reviewed, and all historical edits and comments are intelligently presented. We say “AI-assisted” because it’s a human-first approach to design - that said, you can use AI to do everything from making simple code suggestions to executing the entire review for you.
This is an awesome idea. Traditional use of anki (i.e. med school) is super helpful for memorizing and retaining a vast amount of information making it especially great for recall when solicited on a test or irl. Have you found the ai component to help with learning the meaning of a word or phrase in various contexts?
I'm building an AI Data Engineer @ Ardent AI. It's an autonomous AI Agent that can perform data transformations in your databases (mongodb,postgres,supabase for now) from plain english queries
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
I’ve been putting my mechanical displays to work. Right now I have one displaying date, the current temp, the daily high temp and daily low temp. I created a web socket based serial server that gets messages and writes them to a rs232 usb device. The weather data is a node app that pulls Open Meteo data. Also learned how to make systemd service files to make it start on boot.
A simple site that counts and displays requests to each path: https://requests.at/, for instance https://requests.at/robots.txt . The site isn't intended to characterise crawler traffic or serve any other purpose but a slight sense of meta.
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
well I know that I need to stop feeling like I'm bad at it. We all tell ourselves in so many different ways that we're not enough. This is a technique for training those beliefs away.
Yes. Claude tells me it's a novel technique. It also tells me it's a dangerous idea to focus on negatives. But negatives are a more visceral feeling and have more weight in the training. The technique is working for me.
I’m starting a company in my hometown to help the local area with electronic waste. We offer commissioned sales, repair, refurbish, and any other straightforward computer-based tasks.
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
I'm working on an app to help anyone experience their first lucid dream :)
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
Given my name [1], lucid dreams are something that I used to interested in and have experimented a lot with. In the Elric of Melniboné books, most of the empire spend most of their lives in dreams, as a hedonistic escape from reality. Needless to say, the empire decays.
I’ve been noticing a trend of companies avoiding hiring non-technical PMs for as long as possible, in order to keep small technical startups (particularly dev tools, it seems) focused on building and not hiring too many people too early who can’t contribute code. I’m looking to set up a fractional service for product management consulting to support this way of working: https://www.metaluna.io. We will see if the demand is really there or not.
A custom email sorter / spam filter that uses a fineruned multimodal LLM: my emails are turned into images (turning them / extracting html then rendered with selenium) and passes to the vision LLM. I went from ~200 to ~15 useful emails a day.
A point anc click model pretraining tool. Simply put all of your data into a directory of directories. Next, point the software to this directory and a few days later you get a pretrained model out.
I'm working on a weekly "tournament game" in which the goal is to select the top 5 open-source projects (in a particular topic) per programming language. The first iteration is going to be a copy of SaaSHub Experts https://www.saashub.com/experts/about but for open-source libraries. If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know, and I can send you an invite this or next week (hopefully).
Professionally, I'm working on extending Nx, the Elixir ML framework which I help maintain, for distributed and sharded computing. Should have an working v0 by December!
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
Building a nodeless Kubernetes service; no servers/worker nodes, pods are scheduled transparently as micro VMs (planning to make this flexible, so Fly Machines, Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, what have you). Optionally, you can bring on your own worker nodes if you want to!
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
I’m working on a crossword app, with the intent to add “kaizo” elements, as a way to take any puzzle and add obstacles aside from the clues, which I hope will be fun. But I guess I won’t know until I try.
I'm working on Starlake.ai, an open-source data engineering platform that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It's designed to make data engineers' lives easier while maintaining powerful control over data pipelines.
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
I'm absolutely not impressed by reddit search functionality. I like to play metrodivanias but when I want to find something specific for a specific game, the search is just too random.
Trying to build a chess club management app for our school/district. It's mostly basic CRUD, though it's an avenue to learn Svelte & SvelteKit. I'm becoming more involved with the club and can't stand that everything is run on paper forms and giant Google Sheets. (If it was all smoothly running, I wouldn't rock the boat. But when I found that we're writing out dozens of match cards by hand every week and have ~0 way to track progress, I couldn't resist.)
Building a little CLI tool that stores API requests and spins up a small REST server that allows them to be pinged. This stemmed from being on a flight, not wanting to buy WiFi, or the WiFi being slow and I just want to build something around an API.
I am converting all the short farm stories I wrote into little audio stories using AI voiceovers. It’s not perfect and has kinks.. but I am enjoying it.. 5 done, 15 more to go!
My next project is one about lunar habitat and food production systems but as a podcast ..entirely with AI voices. Because I can’t find anyone from NASA or SpaceX to speak with me..hah!
NAT traversal with STUN and UDP hole punching, yeah. But the idea is to use IRC for the rendezvous since they're everywhere and the payload is quite literally just external IP:PORT.
Still working on the bluetooth "wall of sheep" app. https://github.com/skittleson/bluetooth-wos . im hoping to put more insight on each device and receive avaliable notifications from the devices. I even figured out a rough estimate of how far devices are away with just RSSI and other available devices that have TX Power and RSSI within a few meters.
We are building a new social media platform where people can enjoy content and join debates without worrying about language barriers (e.g., https://powtain.com/pow/KVbf5Q).
I continue working on JustFax Online[0] - a service to send a one-time fax without the need for an account or subscription.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
I'm working on Blazed.deals, a THC/CBD product search engine and price tracker. It scans the prices of cannabis stores and ranks products by mg/$. It has a bunch of categories and filters so people can find the perfect product for their preferences.
When FAANG was all the rage, I had a hard time getting feedback on my coding skills. So, I made a website where candidates can post their code and experiences folks can give their feedback.
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
Hey. I've released the fix for this (v1.25.2). You can enable or disable it by using the chat textfield's context-menu (Right-click on the textfield, read more below)
Looks good so far! If it helps, some of the challenges I had with take-homes as a hiring manager were:
- We'd suggest to spend an afternoon on it, no more than 4 hours, but many candidates would go far beyond that
- Senior candidates tend to have less free time to do take-home assignments. Some would decline to do them and others would have to delay their interview pipeline for weeks (and by then, many candidates had lost interest or progressed with other employers)
That said, take-home assignments were very helpful for junior candidates who didn't have much experience on their resume.
TBH working too much and i may call it’s a tackling phone addiction.
Using Roots to reduce it tho, adds stuff like app limits, downtime, and a “balance score” to help ppl keep their screen time in check. Just tryna make it easier to unplug and stay present without feeling too forced.
I'm working on a self-hostable replacement for Google Timeline, which is being discontinued. It includes a web app to view my timeline and an Android app to send tracking pings to the server. It also includes an import function for exports of your Google Timeline data so that your historical data from that can be integrated as well. I'm planning on open-sourcing both the web app and the POC Android app early next month.
In line with the self-hosting idea, I'm working on an iOS app which can be used as a native app, or can serve itself as a webapp on your local network (so that you can also use it from your laptop). There is no cloud, your phone is the server, your data stays with you at all times.
I'm kind of surprised no one seems to have explored this idea before (happy to be shown examples proving otherwise!)
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
maybe not that different in terms of functionality.
I have some opinions about ux/ui. I don't understand the graph of obsidian. It's very chaotic. I think the essence of visualization should be simplifying or distilling information, not making things fancy but complex.
I'm building a window manager for macOS. I got frustrated with Divvy having inconsistent resizing on several apps, eg Firefox, and I wanted to be able to fully control window size and position with _only_ my keyboard (like increasing the width/height or moving the window one column to the left).
I'm currently working on Mockoon, an API mocking tool. It's an open-source project that I've been relentlessly improving over the past 7 years. I decided to build a SaaS/cloud offering to help finance my work on the project. I'm solo bootstrapping, and revenues are slowly growing. It's not the easiest path, but definitely worth it!
I've just updated https://ryelang.org website, adding new asciinema demos (hn/somafm util and eyr), new cookbook pages, references to rye-gio(ui) project, etc. There is still tons of work, on the language front, bindings, console and on documenting it all, but if we keep moving forward step by step eventually something of value will be produced, I hope :)
I'm currently (and have been for a few weeks now) building a self-hosted Git "forge", à la Gogs/Gitea/etc.
The main motivation for this is that I usually juggle many side projects at the same time, and since none of them are in a finished state, I don't really feel like putting them out in the open on GitHub or Codeberg or something else, and would really like to keep all of this experimentation private. I know GitHub provides free private repositories, but I really dislike the interface and I feel like most of the features offered are not for me.
I tried running a private Gitea instance, but I did not like having to manage a second software to be able to run CI pipelines on my repositories (like Drone). I also really dislike GitHub Actions so I was kind of disappointed that Gitea's integrated CI is based on it.
I also tried running a Gitlab instance (which is currently what I use) as I much prefer GitLab CI over GH Actions, but the whole package is so much of a resource hog and tries so hard to be "more than GitHub" that I feel it isn't for me either.
So, in the end, I decided that I would build my own platform, with a simple scope in mind: be a nice Git repository hosting solution for single hackers or very small teams. Along with the smaller scope, I added a few restrictions: no JavaScript unless it substantially improves QoL (and even then, never require JS for the website to work), no external components required (apart from OpenSSH and Git).
So far I have a very minimal SSH handler implementation that allows push/pulling repositories from the server through authenticated SSH (public key), and what's starting to become a nice web interface to manage and read all of that. It's almost at the point where I will soon be able to dogfood the platform by hosting itself there (as a backup remote, not the primary yet).
The tech stack is kept relatively simple on purpose (I really dislike "modern" front-end development):
* Rust + Axum
* SQLite
* Bootstrap with SASS to customize it
* libgit2
Everything is server-side rendered as HTML before being served to the client, using Minijinja (reimplementation of Jinja2 in/for Rust by the same author).
Anyway, not yet ready to share any links or anything but I am still excited about the project taking shape after weeks/months of sporadic work on it! I'm building this not only because I feel a need for it, but also to learn more about Rust and Git internals, and I feel like I've learned a ton already!
I am working on a presentation about meals in space that I'll be giving just before Thanksgiving to some writers.
I am also working on cataloging my books. This will be my third try and I'm just using a spreadsheet this time. One time it corrupted all my date and the backup got mangled when I tried to bring it in. Then the online space went under. So I'm doing it the simplest possible way.
I'm working on a more general purpose programming language called "Pear", rather than the DSL I wrote before called "runny" (a Make/Just equivalent).
I want it to have a more concise syntax (no keywords, fewer characters) but feel familiar to most programmers. All definitions use square brackets in combination with some other set of characters.
This is not about new ideas for humanity, but for me.
I started the development of the game engine.
This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
Thank you for working on light theme, it seems that 90% of themes are dark nowadays. Depending on languages I switch between dark and light themes and for the latter there's lot less choice. My brain has gotten used to that Java and R must have light themes, most other languages dark. I even have different color theme for each language. It's how my brain works.
It had been a community request from the beginning. Personally I still use the default Monokai Pro, but dark themes aren't suited for coding in very bright environments, like outside for example. Then a light theme really works better, and I'm glad I can offer that now.
I am working on making stats on financial securities accessible to more people so they can make better trading decisions. This is very much a work in progress.
My goal is to enhance the visualization and increase performance to reduce animation generation time. Additionally, I want to improve the overall aesthetics by applying colors and designing the paths to resemble a serpentine shape rather than a pipe.
I am working on Openkoda, an open-source platform for insurance applications based on pre-built templates and generative AI to accelerate the implementation of new insurance products and distribution channels.
Why?
The insurance sector is probably the slowest to adopt innovation in finance, lagging far behind banking. E-commerce is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Currently working on a hand-soldered nunpad and an mp3 player using a esp32 s3. Not quite sure if the esp32 will manage decoding and encoding audio quickly enough though, as I'm planning for it to be Bluetooth only. So it will need to decode flac, encode the pcm to sbc and then send it to my earphones.
I accidentally fried my last spare esp32 yesterday though, so I'm waiting for new ones to arrive. Wops.
I’m building a social network[1]. I recently finished the MySpace-esque music player[2]. It’ll launch in 2025 as a paid service…only way to guarantee real humans sign up.
I'm maintaining Basti, an open-source AWS Bastion Host management CLI that lets you connect to RDS and other resources at almost no cost. Check it out: https://github.com/basti-app/basti
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
By default, the instance is deployed to a public subnet but any ingress traffic is not allowed by the instance's security group. This is needed for the instance's ability to connect to AWS SSM service (egress only).
The user can also deploy the instance to a private subnet but this would require them to manually ensure connectivity to the AWS SSM via NAT gateway, VPC endpoint or other means.
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
Not working on it yet but can a small box sitting on your counter do LLM, TTS all local with maybe outbound queries to the internet.
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
I'm working on software for use by home hospital practitioners (scheduling, routing, and so on). Ever since the pandemic home hospital (where the doctors come to you, at home, rather than you taking a hospital bed) has been on the rise both to save the hospital bed and because being at home is a huge win for many patients. If you're in this space too I'd love to talk!
Decentralized Global Social Feed (https://github.com/did-1) Think of it like a decentralized Twitter where the data is entirely in the user's hands and where everyone is free to post content and subscribe to new posts. It could be also be compared to decentralized global RSS feed.
In the beginning stages of building a SAAS to help homeschool co-ops and collectives run their organizations. There are established players, but I feel like there is room in the market for new ideas and innovation. I also feel that more families will be turning to homeschooling in the future, increasing the demand for modern software solutions in this space.
Refining 3D printed parts for a hobby grade 3D metal printer. The complex internal geometry of the design still takes 4 hours of machine time to produce, but at least home users will be able to replace high-wear items themselves.
Boring RF stuff related to Metrology.
Adding some features to a fork of DerFetzer/spectro-cam-rs to validate some narrow band-pass laser filters.
Other boring stuff people really won't want to hear about. =3
I'm back working on my lighting desk [0]. I stopped a couple of years ago because depression robbed me of all motivation, but now it goes and I've done a few gigs with it. Still lots of bug fixes to do then a backlog of new features, but I'm glad to be back on it
It helps SaaS teams create interactive product demos and SOPs quickly. It’s been super useful for user onboarding, making it easier for new users to get started without a bunch of back-and-forth.
The goal is to minimize support tickets and ensure users actually adopt new features with less friction.
I am working on a software (for Windows : it is on your computer you own it, no recuring payement) that can export all data from Wordpress and WooCommerce shop to a json and csv file.
It is already working for a few clients that uses the software for orders, products and tax reporting for their e-commerce shop (yes they use a lot of excel in France where I live).
I hope I can sell it on a page in the next few mounth.
A text-to-speech (TTS) model. Most good TTS models are closed-source. I intend on making this one open-source.
All the decent open-source ones are fairly basic with limited fine tuning and no alignment (RLHF).
I plan on adding those things. Although I am not sure if there will be any demand for it. Plus, there's a decent chance meta will make llama 4 speech output making this one obsolete.
Deep Q & A for friends, family, and strangers. My goal is to create a space where people can get to know each other a bit more deeply and spark conversations. Would love some feedback!
My inbox was full of film related newsletters for special screenings in NYC so I decided to build an ai agent to track upcoming events and publish to a web and social media
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
We make it easy for any website to take advantage of the latest LLMs for sales and support function. Been reaching out to freelance clients and finding many of them want this type of feature so we can provide it to them easily, sometimes with little to no customization.
i like to bounce between projects week to week and am in a huge phase of just trying to build services i pay money for.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
I've just started experimenting on an AI wrapper that blends companion and assistant into one (think Replika meets Claude), but with an anime-style avatar for the main interface.
As I'm still very early (still in the ideation and prototyping phase), I'd love to hear about experiences that have stuck with you, or any works that got you excited about the possibilities.
I don't have a link for it yet, but I am working on using an HCL-like syntax to write CI pipelines. Ideally it would function a lot like dagger but written a lot like terraform.
The main problems that I want to solve are the really slow feedback loop of complex GitHub Actions / GitLab CI, but without the limitation of having to run it within another CI provider.
In a crowded "AI space", I continue to work on txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows. It's not as popular as the big frameworks but I believe it's a better solution. Time will tell.
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
There are lots of products that aren’t _necessary_ at all but bring an amount of fun to the world. This feels to me like one of those. Not convinced it could even recoup development cost, but I’d be happy to be surprised. There’s certainly a niche for well off Brits (and EU folks) living in 120V land hankering for a fast cuppa.
The reality of product development and manufacturing is that economies of scale affect prices such that low sales quantities (i.e. a "niche product") generally means extremely high prices. Also, the BOM cost alone is probably going to be high, because of the huge batteries needed (with high current ability) and the power electronics involved. Then when you consider the safety ratings and certifications needed (since this is something that could easily start a fire with the power levels involved), I don't see how it could be sold at any kind of reasonable price unless there's a really big underserved market.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
I'm supportive of the original idea because I think it's fun and cool. I agree with everything you've said, but we're talking a bit at cross angles. You're looking at it from what it would take for this to be a successful, competitive, and profitable consumer product. I'm looking at if it is technically feasible and can be made for non-absurd amounts of money. Our threshold of non-absurd may also differ, but given there are some people will pay $20k+ for an espresso machine, there are likely some who would pay several hundred dollars for a tea kettle.
Sure, it's technically feasible, but I'm questioning if it's financially viable at all. Being fun and cool isn't all that great when you end up with a product that just has some prototypes and a bunch of hype, but then the company goes bankrupt before it goes anywhere. There are some examples of things like $20k espresso machines that were successful, but I think they're rare.
- An AI web app builder that aims to overcome many of the problems that similar solutions have. I have a wait-list you can sign-up for while I build the prototype: https://aiconstrux.com
Hiya, Most other competing products only offer one or two components needed for building a robotic system. You end up spending time and money building "shim" hardware and software to connect different components from different manufacturers.
Our main product is a whole, networkable system that aims to cover most of the things you need to build a high performance robot.
It is pretty straight-forward to add new components and integrating the software into your project is just including one library. Thanks very much
On my free time, I am creating a Restaurant POS on Cloud with Online ordering. Let me know what you think. Basically A POS which you can use to start using in 30 min or less with scan and order online. https://get-prest.com feel free to send out your suggestions or say hi at hello@defx.in
An app that syncs a timeline containing posts with whatever you’re watching (TV Series, Movies, etc).
The discussions and content displayed will be relevant to whatever is currently playing on your TV at the specific time.
Have a rough app built and my potential initial target audiences identified. The integrations aren’t TOO technically challenging and should be feasible.
A few years ago, I made a silly little platforming game for my wife that was holiday-themed (Thanksgiving). Since then, I've tried to create at least one new sequel each year for a different holiday.
This year, I'm doing one for Halloween. They only take a few hours to make, but are a fun little thing for me to enjoy making and her to enjoy playing.
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
Jira Align sucks as a planning tool. But my company insists on using it for product planning. I got fed up with it recently and decided to create my own planning tools using python and REST API (which sucks too btw). My short term goal is to automate all the syncs I have to do from my personal notes to jira align, eventually who knows where this goes.
After years of building virtual things out of code, I want to pivot into building buildings. I'm working on https://buildersqrcodes.com/ to scratch my own itch to easily communicate technical requirements to workers on the ground through QR codes.
I’m on parental leave - first time not working for money for twenty years. Obviously it’s still time consuming, but not even firing up a computer for the last three weeks has been great. I’m fortunate to have this paid leave and a job guarantee, but it’s been a revelation stepping away from out all for so long. For the better, even though I’m exhausted.
I’m developing a simple iOS app to detect Ultra Processed Food (UPF). The ones that are in Apple Store now are either too complex or paid-only without a chance to test it for free. I believe people should be able to detect UPF and learn how to detect it even without the app (in a long term). I will launch it in 2 weeks max.
I'm experimenting with an AI assisted world building / story telling tool: https://youtu.be/OGkSI3VfxRU . The idea is to do kind of what Cursor is doing for programming; accelerate the creative process (rather than replacing it).
Interesting. I've been exploring this space too, but for a LLM-driven MUD (multiplayer text-based game). The most challenging aspect is coming up with an architecture that can easily lend itself to handling "semantic collisions" in a multiplayer context, pretty much like non-neural game engines handle spaceship collisions, or prevent a player from entering a box if another player is in it, but going beyond and handling more abstract, more "semantic" aspects, such as narrative elements.
By the way you should get interested in "narratology" at large. There are benefits to driving the LLM generation with an explicit representation of the narrative structure. For instance if the bad guy turns out to be the good guy, then, narrative logic demands that the good guy was the bad guy all along. As a consequence, appearance and deceit should be keystones values of the hero's arch. There are many interdisciplinary approaches to this domain, some more naturalist/empirical such as trope databses, some theoretical like 70s semiotics while some other framework approach the problem from the perspective of cognition and entropy.
Even though I haven't really started coding anything, this is a very interesting topic to think about because of the technical challenges it raises as well as the scope of the project. Any papers exposing new LLM use and prompting techniques is of potential interest to me now.
Last week I added screen transitions to Neverball (https://play.neverball.org) which grew out of wanting to animate a small detail in the UI for another thing I was working on. Only took 20 years and literally does not affect the game, but feels good, man.
Yesterday I created a simple Nubmer Factorization website. Basically to learn webasm. Will be spending few days implementing different algorithms and optimizing the hell out of it.
As a software developer who later got into hardware design, I've always been pretty disappointed with the quality of HDL tools. You get a bit spoiled by the quality of compilers like gcc and clang, and then you run into ridiculously expensive closed-source SystemVerilog compilers that fall apart on valid and obvious code, can't be run in a build farm, and which report cryptic messages for errors. So I've been working on my own open source SystemVerilog compiler / frontend for a while now, and it's nearing 100% completion in terms of language support.
This past week or so I've managed to reduce my AWS Lambda spend by more than half by moving the compute to Cloudflare Workers (where I don't get billed for I/O time, only CPU time).
A llm backend fantasy game. It uses structured output and supports Openai, Anthropic and LM Studio. Gemini support is ending, at the moment it is not working reliable.
https://github.com/HabermannR/Fantasy-Tribe-Game
https://www.voxtodo.com
App that generates subtasks from high level tasks. Useful for chunking which is a concept of breaking down highly complex tasks into their atomic bits. Made this for my HS Junior son who has a medical diagnosis of ADHD
I'm working on my own game, but I'm trying to generalize some of my code to be reused in future projects. I don't wanna say I'm making an engine as much as a framework for writing graphics code in DirectX. I'm also working on various tools for creating configuration files
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
If anyone here has an open source project that they want a docs or README review from fresh eyes, please reach out. Establishing what problem your software solves, for who, with no initial context is a fun challenge. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I enjoy looking at new stuff.
Still working on the Falling Fruit beta! We had a good Hacktoberfest with a suprising amount of people who stopped by and fixed something, and the site is getting there, but there are still bugs and features from the old site we want to keep, and we only just started an internationalisation effort.
A library of documentation (nearly 1 million high res images and documents) of recent contemporary art exhibitions from all over the world. Free to the public, operated as a small non-profit.
Am working on an open source payment processing engine for banks and financial systems. It’s a generic message orchestration engine with scalability, observability and security in primary focus http://openpayments.tech
I’m currently trying to become an indie developer and have created my own Connections Archive game website. I love this game so much! You can give it a try too: https://www.connectionsarchive.org/
A model to predict medical equipment failure and predictive maintenance calendar based of a whole lot of data recompile from our own and clients cmms.
Its fun, extremely time consuming, frustrating, but fun. It also provides to our clients with some interesting and useful information
Aren't you afraid of them trying to come after you? I'm from the EU and had a similar idea for a local retailer. However, legally it's such a grey zone that I decided not to continue.
MLJAR Studio - IDE for Machine Learning. It is a Python notebook based editor with set of interactive code recipes and AI assistant. We would like to create an editor that would be suitable for Data Scientists on any skill level. It is a mix of no-code mixed with Python :)
I'm working on a PEG-based Turing complete language. It is self-hosted, generates standalone/embedable C, is reasonably small, and comes with a fully-featured REPL. It has only a single keyword: "macro". Feel free to reach out if interested.
I’ve been deep down the rabbit hole of custom mechanical keyboards for a few years now, and I’m now taking the plunge into designing my own PCB with KiCad. It’s been a very interesting project! It’s a split keyboard, inspired by the Sweep, but with 2 extra keys.
I replaced the frontend of the popular open source Phish streaming website with a new React UI and generated cover art using DALL-E over the last few weeks. Much nicer now, especially on mobile.
I'm researching and writing a paper on Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computer architecture. I'm focused on comparing the advantages/limitations of three different qubit modalities: superconducting, trapped ion, and neutral atom.
i'm working on a website to report trail conditions after Hurricane Helene in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and the Smokys of Eastern Tennessee.
there's a lot of unknowns as trails are still closed and there's not a conditions report feature in strava to use to figure out conditions as they do start opening up.
goals are to have:
- map search for a trail in the region
- click the trail, see a popup summary of open/closed, and number of reports on that trail
- page for each trail with most recent reports and ~maybe~ pictures
- recent reports on any trail on the home page
currently, i'm stuck on full functionality with mapbox directions api and getting the search-for-trail working.
An AI powered web scraper. Chrome extension. Uses interesting LLM capabilities in natural language (website of your choosing)->structured data. It’s working pretty well!
Working on improving my scripting programming language in my spare time ( https://github.com/nbittich/adana ), I'd like to improve the stability and standard library
I'm working on a social media post queueing program where you make a post to the queue and it tells you when it goes live. This is so I can let inspiration strike but not make the backlog look inconsistent. Gonna make it Bluesky native to avoid scope creep.
I'm working on (yet another :)) key-value store. It's 99% educational project for me, no ambitions to create a startup or such, just a good enough project to try various technologies e.g. new protocols, kernel by-pass, libraries like SPDK or xnvme. Planning to go distributed as well, probably using Raft. Quite a good opportunity to sharpen low-level programming and design skills, work with profilers, doing benchmarking, and optimizing things. :)
I've been getting my indie game Asterogue ready for web release (previously it was Android & Windows only). Last night I pushed the final build live yay! You can play it at:
I am working on framing the interplay between systems science and theology in technical and functional terms. I hope we can use the new insights from
this effort to bring about more beneficial and harmonious outcomes, with less waste, on the average.
I'm also working on an ESP32 open trivia button platform. The project was for a small class of high school age students I teach in an after-school program but I no longer volunteer there. Part of me wants to just finish it.
Ha, I was just reading your blog post on running next.js on cloudflare. It made me seriously consider remix as an alternative. I'll take this comment that remix is the way to go. I'm also working on a small webapp like the one you built
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
I've been working on an app to help VvEs* in the Netherlands self-manage.
For about a year, I was trying to get our VvE management company* to take care of major issues we have in our building's crawl space. We had an inspection done, but even after about seven months of constantly nagging them, they failed to get a single quote for the work that the crawl space needs. I called our manager, and he essentially yelled at me for twenty minutes and was not shy to express his anti-immigrant sentiments (I'm American).
Because of this, I'm now on a mission to get this company fired and take management into our own hands, which will save us a bunch of money. The existing VvE management tools are ugly, slow, and unnecessarily complex, so I'm building my own.
It's only been a month, so I haven't hosted it yet (still coming up with a name, to be honest), but I have made good progress functionality-wise. If anyone in the Netherlands is part of a small VvE and wants to chat, let me know! My email is my username (@gmail).
* The US equivalent would be an HOA (Homeowner's Association). Basically, a corporation that is responsible for the upkeep of shared resources for homeowners (e.g. the roof of a building or the pool in a gated community).
** Many VvEs choose to outsource management of the VvE to a third party. These companies—in theory—take care of maintenance requests, yearly meetings, voting, etc. From everything I've read online, almost none of these companies satisfy their clients.
Learning some more ATS2 while 3 isn’t yet released. Cool language with linear types (which go further than Rust’s affine types), refinement types, dependent types, proofs & dataviewtypes over C for zero-cost abstractions.
I'm working on a handwritten exam paper correction web app. You upload a student's answer (in PDF) along with the marking scheme, and out comes the result with students marks, suggestions for improvement etc.
Saving my career. I'm building a blog first (with more than I need) to host small projects I've already built, will contribute to open-source, and if all that fails pivot to infosec or something.
PID controller that I tune for wife happiness augmented by a variable interval reward system tied to a florist API as like a happiness autopilot. i call it "husband's little helper"
AGI. Writing up a paper on defining core principles of general intelligence on which artificial general intelligence can be built with a POC of an artificial life system that can evolve better AGI systems.
I'm building a music file manager using Electron. I'm deferring the actual music playing to VLC, but I need a way to sort through my many audio files to quickly select and launch what I want to hear.
With the Wordpress fiasco only getting worse, I have been working hard on launching my MIT-licensed open source CMS. I bring to the table with me running high traffic news publications on my own custom CMS'es and my learnings from it. What scales and what doesn't. Hopefully the community will like it and embrace it. On the surface, it sounds like a simple project, but CMS'es are quite complex than they appear (hence the time taken).
There are a lot of things the CMS universe accepts as normal, which shouldn't be the case. Even without the drama, Wordpress simply sucks as a scalable solution for large traffic sites without blowing up the hosting costs. Given the ongoing fiasco, I even think if Wordpress has been deliberately built this way as a funnel to upsell the hosted commercial offering to large scale news publications.
Hopefully, this benefits everyone affected by the Wordpress fiasco, as that is my primary goal. This has been a decade long project close to my heart and it is finally coming to an end.
I am also documenting this journey on Medium if anyone's interested.
I realized that many new startups routinely run into email sending issues in their apps and services. Most don't notice the issues and they linger longer than necessary. I experienced this myself in my career.
What is necessary is end-to-end monitoring of emails. wasitsent.com does that. It's like an uptime monitor for emails. You add the monitoring email address to your emails (as a bcc: recipient, for example) and configure the monitoring schedule. When your email is not received, wasitsent.com raises an alarm.
A basic webring which has two purpose: improve my rust with a simple project and bring together an online community. It's not live yet, but I expect it to be by the end of the week.
After developing decentralized applications for the last 9 years or so I found that its quite repetitive work. Thats why I've been building web3wizz.com through out the last year
Still working on my Quant-Trading-Bot, since 4 month:
Its nearly finished and it should go live these days - maybe i can stop working fulltime then and care about my own Tech only.
Low cost radio satellite("low", assuming you already have a 3d printer, micro controllers, two stepper motors, power supply, sdr and a raspberry pi zero laying around).
Re-working my course on Android Development. Next year will be the third year I've taught the course, and usually the third year is where I'm happy with the content. It's a fun course to teach, but I would never, ever want to work in the area professionally.
The biggest problem is the instability of the tools. IntelliJ is already complex, then you pile on all the Android Studio stuff. Within Android Studio, you are working with a hugely complex framework (Jetpack Compose) that depends, directly or indirectly, on probably hundreds of libraries. Sometimes, things just break, for no apparent reason. On some students' computers, the whole wobbly tower never works quite right. It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
Strictly hobbyist here. There is nearly zero overlap between game genres I like to work on as a developer and genres I enjoy as a player. I get the itch every now and again but the stuff I like best as a player is either art-intensive (so well outside my skills) or a huge technical undertaking.
In fact, to be precise, it takes time. Now I trade my time for money to support my family. If there's enough time, I'd like to write a game engine in Rust that's good enough to take out cocoscretor's game engine. Use this engine to realize the Sutra of the Mountain and the Sea, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Feng Shen Ban, the Romance of Sui and Tang dynasties... all kinds of scenarios as well as interactions I dreamed of.
I launched https://sellmycybertruck.com/
I make $1.6k buy fee from dealers / wholesalers. I try to avg 10 sales a month. been going good. Think of it like a KBB clone. But im a one man shop. I am just calling buyers all day long. I source leads from facebook. Forums. I just copied the tesla trade in UI / site. IDk its going good. I just launched it. Nothing fancy, i know but its making loot. I am not looking to be a unicorn BS. no BS AI. its just me. :-)
I'm finishing building a 120sqft shed in the back yard, learning Fusion 360, and hopefully getting my chronic sinusitis solved.
Poured a slab, designed, framed, used as much reclaimed lumber as I could, and sheathed a lean-to style shed. My first attempt at building a structure, and it's coming out nice. This is to replace the 64sqft 5' shed that a neighbors tree fell on earlier this year, but we really need the extra storage.
I got a Bambu P1S 3D printer for Father's Day to replace an old Ender 3 Pro, and it has just been a dream. TinkerCAD, while amazing and a very capable tool, I'm ready to move on to something else. I tried Plasticity, and it showed a lot of promise but I found it very frustrating, bumped against some missing documentation and ran out of free trial time. Tried FreeCAD 1.0RC/Ondsel, and it's a fantastic piece of software. Yesterday I decided to give Fusion 360 a try and it's just so much more refined. Started the Product Design Online tutorials on Youtube yesterday and the stuff you're building in the first 5 15 minute lessons are frankly amazing.
Currently going through the predictable chicken/egg motions of bootstrapping what is essentially a talent marketplace (need supply, more demand, more supply, etc).
ArduinoCogs. It's a library that adds no-code automation with a web UI, along with a tiny shell interpreter to configure WiFi and back up your settings.
Much like my KaithemAutomation project, you declare "Tag Points" which are like subscribable variables for your IO, then set up state machines that can affect them via the web UI.
I use TinyExpr for the expressions, and a regex to parse command lines. The shell is explicitly not a real programming language, it just allows logicless commands.
TinyExpr bytecode is fast, and other than that it's just raw C++, so there's no inefficient scripting language.
When used with PlatformIO instead of Arduino, it handles power management automatically, getting down to about 1mA with random spikes, as one might expect from the ESP.
But it does support a limited subset of here docs, and an equivalent to the shar command!
All the UI is generated from JSON schemas, and it's designed so you can add new "apps" to the web UI.
The base library includes an MP3 player app, and a FastLed wrapper.
I also have Trouble Codes, to make it easy to add diagnostics and alerts to the system, websocket based real-time dashboards, theme-ability, and there's a Python client (in the iot_devices library) to control devices.
You can configure multiple WiFi networks, and there's a web based file manager.
The two things I really want to add are LCD based UI, so you can actually create your menus and interfaces in the JSON editor, and some kind of mesh protocol backed by OpenDHT, so you could make a device globally visible. I'd also like to have camera and SD card support.
I think it might be a fun "OS" for an ESP32 smartwatch, although it's mostly for Tasmota style use cases.
Nowhere near ready to actually make a proper post , but usable. Kind of. This is pre alpha work.
Eventually I'm hoping it can make Arduino projects a lot easier, by providing all the boring UI and networking stuff so you can just add your core application logic and IO drivers, and get an end user ready customizable system.
nuqs: A type-safe URL state management library for React [1].
I shipped v2 last week and it got mentioned at Next.js conf (as part of Vercel's giveaway of ticket sales back to the OSS community). That was quite the rollercoaster week.
Create variations of your content, so that you can backtrack the source of a leak.
Just changing 5 words in various places of a page of a doc, it can back track 1200 variations. It uses technology from multivariate testing and natural language processing although I have a version that can/avoid using LLMs as well.
## Why Now
With over 1,800 data breaches in the U.S. in 2022 alone, and rising regulatory pressures from GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, companies must prioritize information security.
Traditional methods like NDAs and basic data encryption fail to identify the source of leaks, leaving companies vulnerable
The global enterprise data protection SaaS market was valued at $7.9 billion in 2023, expected to grow to $20.1 billion by 2028. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are set to grow at a 21% CAGR through 2028, while Information Rights Management (IRM) solutions will reach $1.1 billion.
## My ask
an intro to Apple or a large firm for whom document/email leaks are a real threat and want to pilot a solution that can be self hosted.
I have been so overwhelmed that all my side efforts have been tiny things for a year - actually since last Christmas when I had a few days off in a row and my wife wasn't demanding other work.
JSON Serialisation of GNU Makefiles:
I got quite far then and now, one year later, I'm hoping I will have the time to finish off the difficult bits: it's a way to get GNU Make to print out its internal database of targets and rules as JSON.
You get output with all the targets, all the options on those targets. Basically everything that make knows. I have most of it working but not directory targets for example. Why do this? Well there are many uses:
1. tools to rewrite makefiles - to simplify them or find duplication and implement transforms that remove it. e.g. all your CC commmands have nearly the same parameters - so make a variable or a macro containing the common ones and simplify all your commands (basic things like that could still be very handy).
2. tools that translate makefiles into other build formats. This is a big one for me. Make is like an almanac of all the build features one can have (nearly) but all done in various ways that make them of limited use. There are existing tools that are better in some areas and always the holy grail of the one build system that does it all and does it right. One is never going to get there however if one cannot convert existing work with a fair degree of ease and in a way that can be shown to truly do what is expected.
Sorry if I think the existing examples are not very good and that upsets you - they're all tailored for specific situations and work really well in those situations and if that's all you need then they tend to seem amazing. ...but...when you try to do something that's not in the examples they can be very inflexible. tup's basic idea (inverted dependency tree) is what I want because it lets you have giant makefiles that load quickly. The ability to describe a logical structure like Meson does is important too. Cross platform tests and option setting like CMake...check. Then some features from SBS (Symbian build system which none of you will know) and all the really interesting features of GMake that suck in implementation/performance such as pattern rules.
So this Christmas I hope to update to the latest version of gmake and handle directories.
I'm working on an app called Helm. It's the all-in-one macOS app that replaces App Store Connect, supercharging your app updates, localization, and ASO with AI-powered tools.
You should give it a try if you ship apps for any Apple platform :)
You might want to choose a different name and branding. [Helm](https://helm.sh/) is already a package manager for Kubernetes with pretty similar branding.
An entity database (rest api on postgres so dB is a stretch) with a crud frontend for platform engineering. Adding a similar control loop to kubernetes and bash script (or executables) as the extension language.
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
working on building extremely simple workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses who are still thinking to adopt automation and AI as they find it quite challenging and overwhelming
continual learning api, attention entropy sampling API. enabling a low performing LLM to actually be able to be instructed to perform competent task instruction related capabilities.
small macOS utility app that adds some missing functionality to Apple Notes, Apple Mail and so on. Things like backlinks, templates, export of notes and publishing online.
Lately I've been thinking about the "enshittification" of productivity apps, how everything is having features crammed into it that really get in the way of what users want to do, in the name of selling them subscriptions or optional buy-ups.
I've been mulling around the idea of some kind of foundation that could sponsor the development of what I would consider "Good for the end-user" software of this nature. Something to encourage building apps that are pleasant to use and keeping them pleasant to use.
It's a rough problem to figure out how this would work though, realistically. Some kind of binding license or legal contract that says "here's what you can't do to this software, for this many years, if we give you resources" essentially. But I am well aware that solutions like that also generally end with someone finding a sneaky loophole to take advantage of it.
I'm very passionate about this idea, but I just don't know how feasible it is. Maybe I should have gone to law school instead of learning to program.
Yesterday I was scraping NASA's SDO for images of the Sun, which I'll use to train a GAN to generate similar-looking images and video. This will be used in album artwork and audio-reactive videos for an EP that I recently finished.
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
It initially was a simple youtube transcript + summarizer but I've added a bunch of more features. My goal is to make it the tool that lets a user go from video to insight in the shortest amount of time.
Last shipment of components shipped today, so I'll soon build the project I mentioned [last time](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41700806), a remote for BabyBuddy. Main features are:
- 10 switches that I can assign to start/stop timers and trigger events (Kalih Choc Robin)
- One encoder + four way directional switch
- Round LCD display with touch
- 9 DoF IMU and ambient light sensor
I've started coding the firmware using Rust with the excellent embassy OS.
For the last little while now, I've been spending a lot of my spare time learning to work with a language called AgentSpeak[1] using a platform called Jason[2].
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
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On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
----
I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
Working on finding a job. Maybe in 2025 I can use these threads as a small devlog on the game I want to work on. But until then my progress has been "did questions on trees and backtracking". woohoo.
Though games for sale seem to be treading the line of the "no self-promotion" guideline. It's not coming out anytime soon and I have a very unconventional pipeline for developing it, so I think it'll be worth sharing the tech and process of that along the way.
I built CryptoGain, an (currently) android app for cryptocurrency market tracking and analysis. Started it after getting frustrated with the limitations other apps put on technical analysis features behind premium tiers.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
I'm working on a tool to transform what I call an Application Definition File (a format specified as a JSON schema) into a line-of business NodeJS/Express/Postgres web app.
You might think of it a lo-code tool, but I'm aiming more for it to be a no-code tool, as in the level of sophistication should be such that there is rarely a need to touch the generated application.
Here is a sample application definition file (to model an app for the tool itself):
I’ve written a project suite composed of familiar software with AI Agents integrated into this familiar software, who are both editable and duel experts in the software at hand and other expertise, any expertise, callable on demand. I realize this is abstract, so here’s some examples:
People collectively group to do things; they group into organizations like companies, departments, and teams. These organizations of people can be mirrored in my software as “organizations”, and each organization has control over their own custom and private AI Agents, they can clone, edit and use. An organization can be open to any members, or private and require membership requests. Once in, members can be kicked out for unruly behavior or leave on their on at any time. Additionally, an org can be visible or invisible, where a private invisible organization might be people who simply don’t want to be bothered, they’re at work.
Within an organization, private projects may be created. Organization Projects are collections of org members collaborating on a project. They use the organization’s customized AI Agents as these agents are integrated into the word processor, the spreadsheet, and multiple chatbots each with some integrated purpose within the suite of project software.
People don’t always want to work in groups, and solo people often want to privately and invisibly join groups to do their own private things. We fully accommodate that. Users can be “invisible” to other users, only revealing themselves to organization owners for membership requests, and then disappearing again. Once joining a collaborative project, they become visible only to their project collaborators.
Yeah, that’s still abstract, it is the foundation which enables users to get productive and creative. The system has a few example organizations to give users AI Agents they can immediately use, and ideas for creating their own organizations with their own customized AI Agents:
The Creative Writers Workshop is a collection of writing genre specific professional writer chatbots that are trained to act as literary critiques and muses for those authoring their own technical documents, science fiction, romance, autobiography, young adult fiction, mystery or horror. Conversations with these chatbots are augmented by “SuggestionBot”, who is making sure stones are not left unturned, and “LaterBot”, who is maintaining what needs following up.
Independent Paralegals is a collection of personal paralegals that help people seeking or with legal issues collect and formally document their issue for formal use. These paralegals include a demographic spread, because these issues are often sensitive and are complemented by demographic sensitivities: divorce, property disputes, adoption, and personal injury.
The Play Zone is a collection of entertaining and fun AI Agents, such as dungeon masters from alternative dimensions, here on vacation playing D&D. There are also interesting personalities for fun conversation, such as an immortal, a Polynesian Sun Goddess, and Mark Twain.
The Mental Health Tune Up Clinic is pair stress management chatbots that help people manage their self conversation bias, otherwise known as “playing yourself”, promote critical analysis, and guide users potentially toward greater life satisfaction.
Immigration Law Support is an organization intended to demonstrate a new client acquisition method for immigration law firms that pairs a legal intern or law student with an AI immigration attorney, and together they handle new client interviews. An otherwise costly task at law firms, because it requires an attorney’s time, time they cannot charge against a client.
Each of these organization types handle private and often sensitive information. To accommodate that everything that occurs with the AI Agents is private to the project their use occurs, data collected and shared between the AI Agents for request satisfaction are maintained encrypted, and all AI Agents are private to the organization they are owned. So, if one is stressed and wants to talk to those stress managing chatbots, make a project in their organization and invite nobody else into your project, you’re the only person that can see anything in that project.
Also, none of this has sharing or any social media type networking. This is for creative, private, professional, solo or collaborative work, whatever that work may be. Including support for geographically remote collaborations.
Did I mention voice? Yeah, one can use their voice in place of the keyboard for a lot here. But not the spreadsheet editing itself, just use your voice to ask the spreadsheetBot to make the full sheet you need, rather than muck about at the individual spreadsheet cell level.
At this point, I’m layering in additional privacy handling, which also requires “double blind” communications for those invisible users that communicate with invisible organizations, and a lot of documentation, with examples. It’s actually just a slight augmentation on familiar office type software: I’ve added on demand editable subject matter experts to co-author with you. But that’s kind of huge, actually. People need examples to understand what this opens up.
Tölvera is a Python library designed for composing together and interacting with basal agencies, inspired by fields such as artificial life (ALife) and self-organising systems. It provides creative coding-style APIs that allow users to combine and compose various built-in behaviours, such as flocking, slime mold growth, and swarming, and also author their own.
With built-in support for Open Sound Control (OSC) via iipyper and interactive machine learning (IML) via anguilla, Tölvera interfaces with and rapidly maps onto existing creative computing software and hardware, striving to be both an accessible and powerful tool for exploring diverse intelligence in artistic contexts.
Tölvera has been selected for Mozilla's first Builders Accelerator! Read the announcement:
I’m excited to introduce Trendly, an app I think you’ll find really useful.
Here’s what we’re solving:
* Social media is full of fake news and lacks depth, yet many still rely on it for updates.
* There’s too much content online, making it hard to find what really interests you.
* Switching between platforms to get full details on a topic is tiring.
Trendly (https://trendly.global/) is a mobile app that curates a personalized feed with trending updates based on your interests. It lets you dive deeper by asking follow-up questions as a chat—all in one app. We’re in the early stages, so while the chat function isn’t live yet, the other features are ready:
* The feed acts as a recommendation engine, curating content based on past interactions.
* Delivers concise, bullet-point summaries instead of lengthy articles
https://colorango.com/