- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban...
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/20/opinion/ancie...
But I'm a believer in asking for help in order to cast a wider net. If you happen to stumble across an obscure-yet-newsworthy dataset, or have a strong feeling about a particular guest essayist that we should be approaching, or can't stop thinking about an argument that's itching you — pitches and tips are always welcome: [my hn username]@nytimes.com
So I'm building a software platform for local first applications on top of CRDTs. Its called Replica, though we haven't talked much about it yet. I want to be able to:
- Edit any data from one device in my house and have it just show up on any other device
- Share items with other people, and collaboratively edit with them
- Support lots of different applications - including multiple different applications live editing the same data. Like a universal plugin model.
Linux can't compete with cloud software like google docs because anyone running hosted platforms gets punished if the platform is successful. Ideally I'd love to get replica embedded in linux, as an alternative for desktop applications to use to store their state. Then users could open up the same app from different computers and have all their data there, and collaborative editing and things like that would just seamlessly work. I want to be able to open the same file in two different editors and have typing in one show up live in the other as I type.
I want to opensource the whole thing, but we'll probably go with some sort of open core model and charge for our official hosted version (which you want for backup and delivery). I want this project to be financially self sustaining - otherwise I don't think it'll survive. But still opensource enough that people can self host if they want to.
All profits go into the neighborhoods we serve and our bylaws are based on the US Constitution. No investors or different class shares. Management term limits, workers vote for CEO and a cooperative ombudsman (termed) for representation during yearly plan/budget proposal.
The CEO proposes a yearly plan/budget to the collective of ombudsman representatives, which vote to approve or amend. The yearly plan includes all P&L numbers for previous years, open balance sheet, salaries, as well as hiring, growth, acquisition plans for the following year(s)
I'm leaving out a lot of details of course, but the overall gist is that: incentives are aligned across the co-op such that management is incentivized to care for their employees above all, and there is no pressure from investors to grow more quickly than our company can sustain. Basically will not pursue increased margins at any cost.
We will provide the best service at a price that ensures we can fully take care of our employees such that they have a great life and can provide amazing service because they have the time, and trust to care about how we serve each other and our residential communities everyday.
This was a surprise to me, my dad, and many others. Some of her girlfriends knew this situation existed, but never got a name.
And so I spent my summer in what I call "old lady Facebook groups" and learned the tricks and the trades to investigative genetic genealogy. One of the useful tips you can apply to your DNA matches called DNA color clustering — it's incredibly useful: https://www.danaleeds.com/dna-color-clustering-the-leeds-met...
Of course, I didn't want to do this by hand. There were some tools out there that existed but they were "old school" software packages: you know, you install it on your own device! "Worse" yet, I'd have to give it my raw password — no thanks! It started there, and morphed into a lot more, and now it's used by "search genies" and consumers alike: https://sherlockdna.com
There's a lot more that can be done in this realm by both providers and hackers. There's a niche for these "pro tools" that exist but the typical DNA test taker is not after any sort of genealogical exploration that requires substantial effort. There is a very sizable group of people who do, though, and those people, I have found, are very pleasant, kind, and nice to be around. I like surrounding myself with good people, so I'm happy to help them while I scratch my own itch.
All this, and I am yet to find the guy I'm looking for despite having invested over 1,000 hours into finding him. I have, though, found over two dozen "wanted" individuals (not in the criminal sense) and united them with their searcher — at least that part is satisfying.
I have been dreaming of living on my own product since I started as a developer 10 years ago and tried a lot of different ideas out but it just wasn't happening. When I found out that my girlfriend was pregnant with twins in spring 2022 there was this now or never moment. I thought there would never again be enough time available in my life to do something like that. I decided to quit my job to put a gun against my head. Then I contacted hundreds of people on LinkedIn and other places asking them if they had an idea on a product to build. One guy responded telling me about how far behind in digitalization his industry is and that we could potentially do something here. I went with it and have been building it since.
As the product starts to mature we have showed it to potential customers and the response has been amazing. We have been promised around $8000 / month from 8-9 companies as soon as we finish a couple of more features and we estimate that there are at least 100 potential customers in our country.
This autumn has been so intense since I'm doing this while doing 40h/week consultation do get money plus having 2 newborn kids at home. I feel very lucky though that I finally got an opportunity to go all in on my own product.
One thing I have learned: There are so many software developers with both the skills and drive to create a business, but what is super hard is to just come up with an idea. The key is to connect with people outside of our community. The whole world is waiting to be digitalized and our skills are in short supply. The further away from the normal dev community you go, the less crowded will it be and the easier for you to find an opportunity to add value.
The C++ code no longer builds (it's missing proprietary dependencies), and I no longer have the binaries or even the hardware needed to run them (it's a PocketPC game).
If I manage to finish the rewrite, I'll get in touch with the rest of the team, to ask if they'll let me upload it somewhere public.
So far, I'm surprised by how readable my C++ code is. :-)
It's really hard to explain statistical concepts without bullshit... there are all kinds of formulas and rules of thumb, so it sometimes takes me 2x or 3x rewrites before I find an explanation that is simple enough and free of unnecessary historical baggage. One thing that I have going for me is the ability to use computer simulations to check all the equations, and generate nice visualizations. Seeing the equations + graphs + code in parallel makes stats concepts finally click... at least for the author, I hope for the readers too ;)
If you're interested in checking this out, I maintain a continuously-updated book outline here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwep23-95U-w1QMPU31nOvUn... I also have a mailing list where I send chapter preview PDFs as they become ready (see the end of the gdoc).
Life is fleeting.
So I’m working on “working” as little as I need to.
By 2005 (a very decent shelf life), the game was all but dead. This was a significant part of my life gone.
In 2018 I found the source, forked it and began FortressOne, a modern port of this classic game.
There are now a thousand people on our discord channel and daily games in four continents. I’m over the moon but more work needs to be done. This year my goal is to get it on steam.
So I'm planning to make a custom (software) solution. A small set of focused, minimal, productive and interesting apps in a controlled, noise-free environment. I want her to use the computer as a TOOL to enhance and complement her daily activities, not as a toy, an addiction or an entertainment.
(Think a PICO-8 high-res system for general usage, not only for making games.)
(And yes, she would be able to alternatively watch cartoons and play videogames, but not in this "work/learn" computer)
So if I have to build all this myself on my little spare time, it will probably take me the whole year.. :sweat-laugh:
I wish you a healthy and joyful 2023, dear reader.
That realization over the last couple weeks has been a huge relief. I'd like to explore some things I'm naturally curious about such as agricultural waste management.
I’m especially excited about harnessing some of the recent advances in ML. There’s been a ton of exciting advances that haven’t been fully productized yet. And maybe ActivityPub has some cool things that could be built now that people are starting to actually get the value of federation. The last few years have been frustrating, with most of the smart tech builders I know wasting their time on crypto. But finally it seems like people’s eyes are clearing a bit. Lots of exciting times ahead.
But I’ve got to get the theater to a good enough spot first.
Also, now when I have my dream tool for publishing, I am thinking of my next web book project (probably on Complex Analysis).
I mostly implemented all the features I wanted, and I'm now focusing on getting more studios on the platform.
I'm still working part time, and as a software engineer, it's a little bit harder to get motivated doing sales things than it was when programming the web app.
I don't do a lot of coding any more, so it is nice to keep my hand in. I was feeling pretty rusty. I also suck at front end dev so pushing my comfort zone. I don't know where I'm headed with it, but I am hoping I will find it useful, and some of my friends will too. I suppose I will keep adding features and see how it goes!
If anyone here likes bonsai then maybe take a look at bonsai-garden.com where you will find how far I got over Christmas!
I'm hoping this will be a nice distraction from my career for a while!
The other thing: Travel. I've never travelled beyond the western US. I hope to get my passport and fly to one country outside of North America.
For work, focusing on keeping my support team amazing and helping the startup I work at scale significantly.
- I'll make as much progress as I can on my text adventure.
- I would love to update my Pico-8 z-machine "Status Line" to v3.0 to support said text adventure (add .z5, .z7, .z8 support). Then I can finally stop thinking about that project and mark it officially "done," bug-fixes notwithstanding. (https://christopherdrum.itch.io/statusline)
- If the Jai programming language releases, I'll definitely put time into it and that would likely supercede the below projects entirely.
- As a Pico-8 lover who is frustrated by some of its limitations, I'll tinker with Picotron now that "Picotron Playground" has launched. (https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=playground)
- Continue with my C studies. My problem to date is I just haven't had anything I wanted to build. Now though, I think I'd like to take a stab at making a text adventure language/system just to deconstruct and understand how that process works. Inform6 is tethered to the past too much; Inform7 is simply not my cup of tea. I haven't been smitten by the other options (TADS, et al). This would more likely happen in 2024, if I'm honest with myself.
Public streams have RSS, you can follow my dev and product streams if you like.
Landing page is rubbish, api is not there, but I hope it's good enough to present the idea. I've recorded a video [1] to showcase the features
[0]: https://dabdab.org [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJURq8PH_d4
Happy new year.
If anyone is interested in collaborating, please reach out. I am especially looking for experts in sales and marketing.
--
[1] National Assessment of Educational Progress. (2022). 2022 NAEP reading assessment. The Nation's Report Card. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/
[2] Education Advisory Board. (2019). Narrowing the Third-grade Reading Gap: Embracing the Science of Reading, District Leadership Forum: Research briefing
[3] Although the estimates of reading capability are for children to reach NAEP’s Basic level, the mission of this project is for every child to reach NAEP’s Proficient, which requires more than just the skills of reading.
Last year I learned Rust deeply in the hope that it would be my “everything” language to build games, web servers, and CLI/TUI apps.
I like Rust but using it for personal projects taught me that I value higher-level tools as well as very fast prototyping and feedback loops much more than I realised, particularly for games.
So I'm planning to go back to Godot for game prototyping and Go for CLI/TUI/web services, then join a bunch of hackathons to help normalise fleshing out rough but useable prototypes in two days instead of two weeks.
Basically, you sign up for the service, integrate in your SaaS app, add commands and your users will be able to reach to actions/documentation/menus easily with Cmd-K.
The biggest hurdle is that there are several command palette libraries [3] but not many (even not a handful) services, hence we are trying to build something which is fairly new to others.
The platform is based on PostgreSQL, Nodejs, GraphQL and React Native, running on AWS.
We were supposed to announce it on December but decided to build a few more (required) features after talking to several product managers.
[1] https://magny.io
There's no reason for you to be allergic to things. The way we treat allergies today, with antihistamines and nasal spray doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just tries to cover it up. Accessible allergy immunotherapy is the future. And in the future, taking antihistamines for allergies is going to seem like taking a painkiller for an ear infection. Why would you treat the symptoms when you could treat the root cause?
This is what I'm fixing with Wyndly: https://www.wyndly.com
Think camelcamelcamel with price charts (and other aspects of the products) tracked over time and Google Shopping so you can compare the same product among stores.
Hoping to get the MVP out this month, been tracking data heavily since ~last September and currently have ~150k data points across about 37k products in 32 stores.
Biggest problem I'm having right now is matching up products across stores, since each store can name their products differently, some like to add random text to the titles "NEW!!!!", and data points don't always match up due to the batch based aspect of the products. I have a very basic matching system working, enough to extract (some of) the needed metadata from products and roughly match the products.
Current version is good enough for the MVP launch, mostly just working on cleanup / UI work right now before it goes out.
I have a customer who does marketing, SoMe, SEO and all that (as a small business for other small to medium businesses) but it turns out she spends a lot of time dealing with tech issues from WP sites (plugin update errors, other tech issues the hosting provider doesnt handle etc).
I’ve been a SW dev for 10+ years now and know very little about WP. But it has always seemed crazy to me how everyone in the “WP space” seems to be making changes directly in prod o_O. I know WP is mostly configuration management, but Im going to build a platform for hosting based on methods and best practices from “my world” (docker, blue/green deploy, multiple environments (eg for test), automated tests, etc).
WP wasnt exactly intended to be run this way but I want to build it as both a personal challenge, and to prove - at least to myself, that the current Leeroy Jenkins in Prod approach has a better alternative, and ofc because I have a customer willing to pay for the service. And to be able to provide GDPR compliant by design (WP) hosting (EU based).
Im using Hetzner Cloud for the servers.
Today I got a blue/green deploy setup working with docker-compose, nginx and wordpress images, in which WP updates are installed just by updating the docker image version, and the switch betweem active instance (blue/green) is a simple cmd.
I'm now excited to be playing with Arquero [1] and Uber H3 [2] and hopefully I'll scratch the itch and release something!
[1] https://uwdata.github.io/arquero/ [2] https://github.com/uber/h3-js
Post launch we're going to be working on buying/selling alerts to save people from having to watch charts all day (which I do, but I enjoy it). Also a few more features we're looking at, such as crypto analysis. But with the current bear market, I'm less enthused that it's a worthwhile avenue currently.
I'm sure such a thing already exists but I'm having a go at it anyways. I have an app I use today (that I didn't create) to roll dice but it's just computing an RNG value and displaying that number in text and doesn't support multiple players. I want my creation to be flashier and physics based.
Skills I'm flexing
- technical artist skills with modeling, texturing, and VFX from writing shaders and crafting particles
- UX design from the interfaces and considering types of audio to delight the player
- gameplay programming from defining the simple loose "dice room" sandbox
- multiplayer programming obviously from having everyone connected to a room
- AWS solutions architecting from arranging my cloud resources, driven by terraform
- Linux system administration from providing a service on the internet in a secure way
So it's one of those small things that has enough going on with it for me to chew on for a few weeks to possibly even a few months if I want to support player customization topics. You know, custom dice, custom VFX, and maybe even being able to customize where the numbers actually are on your D*.
Fun stuff.
I feel like Instagram is a hard medium because the photos that are trending are mostly the same overdone and oversaturated landscape or travel photos, and while I do take landscape and travel photos myself, I try to not fall into the "bright oversaturated"-look that so many seek.
In the end I guess I want to do more people photography, showcasing cultures etc., but it is a challenge to find good subjects for more serious work rather than just the occasional snapshot. I guess you have to go more all in while traveling and actually travel with the purpose of photography if you want it to become an occupation, rather than just taking pictures along the journey as I do now and not explicitly planning for it.
Has anyone had any experience in this field?
If you want to check out my work I post at https://instagram.com/madscphoto
I need to figure out how to find people who might want to buy that. I suspect they are legion, but getting solutions in front of people is sort of the challenge.
I also have legal questions on this topic; for instance if I have copyright of a reference application, and I clone it or paste it into your repo... Can we both have copyright or does the customer only get an unlimited no attribution license?
Etc
Job is related to climate change, so will continue mixing workflow managers, climate experiments, HPC, Python, data analytics.
Other than that continue moderating r/functionalprogramming and r/fuzzylogic on reddit, add more Brazilian Portuguese expressions to https://speaklikeabrazilian.com, and try to release Apache Commons Imaging 1.0, and a new version of some old Jenkins plug-ins I haven't managed to find someone to adopt them.
If I find time will probably try to learn some more Prolog and reasoners with SPARQL/RDF/Jena...
Launched last year to a really supportive subreddit. Currently working on a very light weight way to use the existing data in the wiki to operate tournaments for clubs on the very cheap (the entire point of the site is to support blue-collar/municipal clubs), which should incentivize adoption with the exact audience I'm targeting.
Have recently created some instructional videos for golfers unfamiliar with .svg graphics, to be able to map their own course in an editable way, with an extremely light weight filetype: https://www.youtube.com/@golfcoursewiki2140
Do need to work on differentiating image blobs vs svg and improve blob storage, but I'm quite happy with where I'm at.
Cheers hackernews I hope you're all able accomplish your wildest dreams this year or in the years to come .
Brief trailer: https://youtu.be/i0CwhEDAXB0
Bannerbox is targeted at existing site owners, specifically non-technical people (i.e. Marketing).
I do all of the design and coding myself (both backend and frontend in Typescript). I've been building this on the side and it's been a slog. I'm nearing feature complete and aim to start marketing the product this year.
It's currently costing me ~$50/month in hosting fees and generating 0 in revenue.
However, I also have a day job that I like which pays well, and I'm not sure whether I'll proceed.
The other idea I want to work on is longevity as a service, helping folks track health metrics that have been reliably shown to affect life expectancy. Things like hormones, cholesterol (apoB, lp(A)), inflammation...
This is a torii gate that has been in progress for a while: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm7LNGRP8-r/?hl=en and I plan to finish it this year (painting + gilding + carving)
* automated goal detection
* trigger things like lighten up the field on specific events (e.g. a goal)
* build a league backend / frontend and player management
* allow players to "login" via NFC on the table itself
There are a lot of ideas and questions right now. I pitched the idea to my employer to make it a continous "hackathon" for the employees. If that gets rejected I have at least one colleague that wants to build it in private.
Of course the idea is to make at least the software stack open-source (and give instructions on the integrated / used HW) but before that there is a lot to think about regarding the architecture ("offline" only? connect to a "cloud" component for league management outside of the office?).
The thing works but looks and feels barebones, and I also need to focus more on marketing (which, as a techie, is a thing I avoid the most).
I also plan to get more hands-on experience with the current state of the art AI - probably more prompt-engineering level than pytorch level, but I do like to dive in so who knows.
And a more secure software supply chain is possible with device attestation and cryptographic measurements of software.
For personal use: a workout app that automatically plays high energy music during a workout set and downbeat music while resting between sets. The right music really helps me workout more effectively.
- choosing a 'green' time of day to charge an EV
- 'overdrive' heating/cooling during times of high greenness, reducing usage during
- dream: a large scale user could take greenness into account when scheduling
- dream: the nightly weather report includes a green forecast
Feedback on idea/execution greatly appreciated!
It’s a webapp written in Django which lets customers perform scans on their machines to help them get a better view on which ports are open, which machines are reachable etc.
I’m planning on adding more features as time goes on but I’m focused on building a MVP for now. 3 days in and I’m loving it so far - I’m new to Python (and programming in general, really) so it’s a great learning exercise either way. I’m hoping to monetise it as SaaS.
Then back to building my Zettelkasten inspired note-taking app Flowtelic:
Records all application level method calls within your app, along with their important context.
Visual nesting of the method calls allows you to easily see which methods call which.
Request params, method argument values, method return values, local variable values, all are recorded.
You no longer need to debug with binding.pry or puts statements, as the entire callstack for a given request is captured.
Any new engineer joining your team can quickly understand what are the important calls/views for any given request.
Teammates can comment on changes to your call chain.
Latest update over on my blog: https://samhuk.substack.com/p/exhibitor-update-3-v200
Perhaps I’ll also try some other platforms/side projects as well to avoid getting too stuck on just one platform.
[1]: https://github.com/roqr/roqr [2]: https://roqr.app
https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive
I've been thinking about this for a stupid amount of time... thinking that someday someone's going to improve on Anki. Finally got tired of it and said that person's me.
Looking at the past few years, my project list has only grown, as I repeat the cycle of getting excited about a new idea, starting to work on it, reaching a snag and getting frustrated at the lack of progress, only to get excited about a new idea and repeat the cycle.
This year I intend to focus a little more about being generally disciplined about all the little daily things, and just being grateful for what I do have today.
My hope is that improved discipline will make sticking to one project easier, and being more content generally will help make the stakes of finishing projects feel less daunting.
And because I recognize this answer isn't totally in the spirit of the question -- I'm also working on building a personal blog site with Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView/Tailwind. I really like the programming model of these tools and how easy it is to build a scalable distributed app with Fly.io, and think building some mastery in these tools will be valuable in the long-run.
This year, I will use them to double my productivity at work. I also plan to integrate them to my life management framework.
2. Reading and writing an essay on all the books in my library; roughly 300 books.
Posted on another thread.
For way too long I've been getting inconsistently toasted toast out of my toaster. My idea is to introduce cameras into the toaster that are used to recognize when the perfect amount of toasting has been applied. It is a way better approach than just using a timer. I have a few problems to solve...
Narrator: it will never be done.
First is a routine/task management app designed for people with inattentive ADHD. The goal is develop automated strategies that catch and counter the tendency for such tools to spontaneously turn "invisible" to the audience, whereupon they lose progress and time until they find a new strategy or reconnect.
Second is publishing a fiction serial via a self-hosted Ghost instance using a custom theme. The v0.1 of this is about to launch. I've been pottering towards this since lockdown. The goals for this project are two fold - try and build a web-based reading experience that is low friction and enjoyable (probably on top of epub.js), and test my theory that the internet is big enough such that there is an audience that will support any creative work as long as they can find it.
I'm betting there will be few of these popping up, mostly based on ChatGPT/Whisper. I'm a bit more loose with the "AI" angle, because I'm taking a slightly different tack (after a lot of development and experimentation work):
1) I'm incorporating actual lessons, rather than open-ended/free-for-all conversations.
2) I wanted to interact with an actual avatar, not just a textbox.
3) ChatGPT makes mistakes (sometimes, really bad ones - grammatical, vocabulary, you name it). I'm vetting all lessons/content to make sure it's accurate.
4) Everything on-device, no APIs and no remote hosting. If you buy it, it's yours forever.
Maybe code, maybe writing, maybe organizational.
But something that in 10 years time will look like a significant, positive investment.
Flexible surveys are an incredibly broad challenge both from the client side and the analytics/dashboard side. Since it's by nature solving long tail problems the level of complexity is such that you have to have several different user paths which "just work" under the same umbrella. And entering into different markets ensures a constant flow of new features to roadmap. I am focused on e-commerce currently but it could continue to branch out into multiple sectors given enough polish and tighter integrations with relevant third party providers.
1. Get back into the habit of writing and reviewing evergreen notes (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes, An Executable Strategy for Writing: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw...) and refining my Zettelkasten knowledgebase and perhaps making it publicly available at some point.
2. Continue refining the precision of my vocabulary and my understanding of the etymology of words. I've realized that I only have a fuzzy grasp of many of the words I use on an everyday basis, yet by becoming more aware of the nuances and subtleties of the usage, origin, and connotations of different terms, I will be able to express myself more accurately and also perhaps better be able to read between the lines of what others say and write.
For example, consider the following definitions:
Compound: composed of two or more separate elements; a mixture.
Complex: consisting of many different and connected parts.
Consequently, a set of buildings which share the same property but are unconnected (for example a mobile home community, or standalone military barracks buildings) should be referred to as a compound. In contrast, if the structure has bridges between the different parts, it should be called a complex.
Also consider:
Sophisticated: (of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity.
Complicated: consisting of many interconnecting parts or elements, often involving many different and confusing aspects
(from Latin complicat- "folded together", from the verb complicare, from com- "together" + plicare "to fold")
An automobile is a very complex machine, since it consists of thousands of parts and systems. To a mechanic, it might be complicated (as reflected by manuals which are hundreds or thousands of pages long and hours of frustration), while to a user it is sophisticated - capable of doing many things, and yet still easy to use, since the complexity is abstracted away.
These 4 words are seemingly very closely related, yet through careful word selection, we can use them to communicate very different ideas and emotions.
And also learning two very promising technologies like eBPF and Zig.
I want to leave tech.
Once this is done, Im going to start work on a custom model BART train+track. Goal is to have it running with a live third rail, and then long term add some code for controlling the train coming into "stations"
Also get a job at a tech company in the fall...
There are quite a few modules I'd like to see... and smarter bridges for inventory management
I "just" want the healthy-ish person's food list with deep links into grocery apps (Instacart, Walmart, Amazon, etc) and autopopulate it. No different than how I can follow people's song choices on Spotify. What did you last order, I want to order it too. Publicly broadcast, public, private, all optional.
There are tons of apps for "sharing grocery lists", but between a tiny group of people or roommates. And one or two that will let you take a single recipe and get the ingredients into one grocery delivery service ("Tasty" recipe to Walmart, for example). They all require you knowing what you want already, and I don't know. I want to change my diet to different food, I'm fine not learning how to do that.
I think this problem is overlooked, and frankly invalidated. I don't want to be a recipe enthusiast and I don't care that other people enjoy running around a grocery store in fetch quests as half of the fun in cooking, or that other people don't like how the food delivery person chose the wrong fruit. These aren't important issues to me, and I think there are lots of people like me, although I haven't bothered to quantify this!
So that's decent alpha because I think a lot of people are in similar boats and with this kind of data you could totally elevate a single product for mass purchasing when everyone is buying the same ingredient over food delivery. People that are already fine paying hidden premiums for food delivery.
It's a modern take on domain parking (I know I know) that I'm using for my own ~50 domains.
I will most likely also be re-working on SideProjectors - a marketplace for buying and selling side projects.
https://www.sideprojectors.com
I am also about to launch HN+ (Create your own HN!)
* Security (tightly specified, safe defaults, consistent implementations, future-proof).
* Native type support, so you don't need to string encode things (I mean c'mon, it's the 21st century).
* Easy to use (no special files or build steps).
* Efficient for humans, efficient for machines.
Public launch in a month or two
I have a VR lab I built so you can visualise chemical reactions in a huge empty room, just because I wanted to learn Unity and multiplayer and WebGL deployments
Modelling for quantum Monte Carlo is almost finished (about 2 weeks away)
Just a lot of tidy ups before public launch really, this is a hobby project of mine, so I’m really just jamming and playing, learning heaps and having tons of fun
This one I'm trying to write in English -- but the writing isn't the hard part; the hard part is finding out what to write. I have a general idea that I think is pretty good, original and relevant for our times. But the division into chapters and scenes is proving quite difficult.
I may have found a system though... Exciting times! ;-)
I'm working on a CLUI that will receive notifications from my configurations and plugins - so that I can filter what I want specifically. It's a good excuse to play with several random things.
I am currently using Music and TV shows as learning materials. Testing out the process on me and validating the NLP components on English and Spanish. I have some books as well to avoid pronouncing things horrendously wrong.
Starting something from scratch is terrifying but exciting.
I'm really looking forward to digging into my ancestry. I've already discovered some really cool stuff and I see it as problem solving, research and correlation, all of which I really enjoy.
I currently have a prototype but nothing that could be used in production yet: https://donadigo.com/d0/
I’ve been chipping away at it for quite a while, but I’m finally in the position of standing up the production coasters and letting people on.
The last 10% seems to always take 90% of the time!
[0]: https://nimbusws.com
- User authentication & authorization - Background worker & scheduler - Roles & permissions management - Pre built UI layouts and themes
It's a dead-simple data exploration and prediction micro-saas, but with a lot of nice pixels and state-of the art AI/ML algorithms. Most people think AI/ML is indistinguishable from magic (especially high-ranking decision makers). Let it look like magic!
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Currently in open alpha. I'd be quite thankful if you the reader want to provide feedback, or tell you need a feature, or tell if you feel you have a need for it (or know someone who does), and how much you would pay for it; at contact@explicable.ai or pro+hn@benoit.paris or here. Do not hesitate to ask me for a demo, or tell me you want to start buying the service ;)
Quite open to be sponsored/funded as well!
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How you interact with it:
1) Prepare your data in excel/csv according to guidelines, upload it
2) Explore it like in the demo and get insights. Get a report and a link that you can share.
3a) Redo a cycle to 1) if necessary
3b) If it's ok, you can upload new data for prediction
It's a private local server monitoring that runs on your computer and alarm you if something is going wrong. No data ever leaves your computer except just to check your license! No complexity just showing the vital info and thats it.
With the tool, anyone can easily sort through a variety of money-making and money-management platforms to find work, investment opportunities, budgeting tools, and more.
When you find a platform you're interested in, you can easily learn more about it, read user reviews, and evaluate it on your own.
I'm hoping this tool will make it easier for people around the world to improve their financial situation.
My main love of software has always been writing programs that deal with music and audio. I'm going to spend more time writing plugins and building out more of my ontological approach to music theory, and eventually work on more evaluation models.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autotype/mgcgenipp...
Still early in the journey, but feel free to star or follow along:
At least that's the long-range plan!
* Automotive ECU tooling, https://github.com/bri3d/VW_Flash
* DJI FPV forward/reverse/all sorts engineering, https://github.com/fpv-wtf
I've been working a lot with various folks using Discord and contributions are gradually shifting from me towards others, which has been great to see. As the old adage goes, teaching a project is truly the final form of knowing one - much harder than hacking alone, but ultimately more fulfilling.
When I started my automotive ECU journey my goal was to demystify the "tuning" scene for a broader software engineering community, and I think I've generally been successful at this.
It's working and I'm currently making performance adjustments. Hoping to share it here with the technical journey in the next few weeks!
We have a NEW and tested vidicon, and others that we can test in a newer Motorola camera, so that's a plus.
In the past we gotten several HP 5061B cesium beam atomic clocks[2] back from the dead, so we'll get there eventually.
I've been working on this App for 3 years now, I've earned some users in my country. I'm planning to bring more growth in other countries.
- A browser extension for HN written in WASM (Rust)
- A book about NixOS
- Want to finally set a start up, hopefully, I'll have something to show within 2 months
I also have a newsletter for my blog [0]. If you wish to track the progress on the mentioned items, feel free to subscribe, that would be highly appreciated. Btw, people are subscribing, but many have not confirmed their subscription (newsletter is double opt-in).
You would think that 20+ years in Python and PHP would make any modern framework a breeze. Not so for an Adobe product! (yes, I know that Adobe purchased the framework, but did not develop it... I suspect that the purchase appeal was the developer "experience")
Apparently PHP is just too hard to use, so to make customization possible by content managers without needed a PHP developer, Magento employs an XML config system. Because XML is so much easier to use, right? Because there exist easy to use XML tools that warn of misconfigurations, bad syntax, typos in element names, typos in attribute names, typos in attribute values, and typos in tag values. Because content managers can safely SSH into the server to recompile the entire XML config from a CLI. Because content managers can read the docs - not that there are much in practice anyway - and understand how to configure the XML. Because content managers can grep and sed and perl and awk and sort their way to finding what depends on what. Because content managers understand when a namespace needs a leading backslash, and when a leading backslash is forbidden, and case sensitivity, and the difference between an underscore and a dash and a space and a and whatever nonprinting unicode character they managed to copy off Raj's blog post. Because content managers understand that config relevant to Magento 1 is not relevant Magento 2 (which share only name and logo) so that needs to be checked _before_ you put that in the live config and recompile while users are trying to browse the site. Because content managers understand that _this_ element needs CamelCase, but the same string must be snake_case when used in that attribute over there.
Don't get me started on the PHP aspects of Magento! Or the Magento ORM. Or the Magento docs. Or the Magento deploy process. Or the heavy dependency on a patched minor JS framework for all backend UI elements. Or the server spec requirements. Or the heavy reliance on PHP magic methods. Or the fact that the entire community seems to exist due to the benefit of one prolific blogger who burned out two minor versions back.
It’s a mix of Intercom and Bugsnag, but made for technical people. For indie-hackers and small dev-houses where developers themselves have to support users and are not affraid of code and stack traces. Especially for mobile apps.
All these customer support tools are web only and focused mostly on marketing and sales. But my experience from my failed startup is that it works really well to get in touch with your users when you’re an indie hacker. Or to bugfix while on live chat with the user who can reproduce a bug.
Also I don’t know why, but all these support tools except Intercom have really bad ux and are slow and buggy. They also neglect mobile apps, all is web only. Or maybe I’ missing some real gem on the field…
For this year i'll learn from my mistakes and move over any remaining logic from QML/JS to C++ so that it can be made useful for other OSes, for the remote chance that anybody would care about it.
Since QML has many dialects and basically needs duplicated effort for several platforms, the "frontend" part should be as slim as possible.
That, and actually get around to study more math and read more books and write my own horror and scifi short stories, that I have floating around in my head.
Busy year.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-lit...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode-lite/bdl...
Also hoping to find some small uses cases for cutting my teeth on using Zig beyond the toying around I've done recently.
The first thing we've built is https://peanut.to - a way to pay people with just a link.
Happy to take feedback and suggestions!
A rebrand is also likely on the way, as the concept has proven to work.
[1] cyb3rsecurity.tips
I'm launching a series of community-focused dinners for Colorado-based CEOs and VCs (https://www.ThunderviewCEODinners.com)
I'm launching a social photo-sharing game that I designed over a decade ago and then put in the icebox. Super excited to share when this comes out.
I'm launching a new coaching program for successful entrepreneurs on finding enduring fulfillment and happiness in their lives by identifying and pursuing their greatest values.
And I'm still coaching 15+ early-stage startup founders at any given time. Despite all the work, I've never been happier.
This year I'm going to move it from being an Electron app to online (and a PWA). I'm also going to introduce the ability to stream video from live matches (also capture it for later playback) as well as capture the events from the games themselves and connect that with some kind of data analysis tooling so you can ask questions like "What % of headshots were landed in the pistol round of my last three CS:GO matches".
I plan to release it on Steam and Google Play Store this year.
I'm the solodev making the Game, Game Server, as well as various integrations to external systems
https://testfromthetop.com/ReadyToTest/
This is aimed at getting managers new to testing up to speed from the very beginning. For me this is the start of a series of material progressing to more advanced concepts.
If you're interested at all I'd love to hear from you! We're starting a beta-testing program before release, message me to try the course for free.
Also interested in making the home as energy efficient as possible (LED bulbs, better insulation, smart thermostatic valves on the radiators etc). If anyone has any resources to read on this please share! For anything "smart" I'm looking for local-first systems without cloud dependencies.
More broadly but still related, tomorrow I start as a Squad Lead at work, which will be my first foray into any sort of people management. Excited to learn new types of skills!
It's all very doable, but i've never had the time (or made the time), so here's hoping it's this year.
I also have a few other startup ideas to pursue, hopefully one of them can turn into a profitable business :D
Something that would let me select a couple of academic journals and display latest papers published in them, along with abstracts.
I can't even find a free API to reliably get abstracts. After spending an hour reading the docs and failing to understand the monetization model, I refuse to use Elsevier's APIs.
I will probably use Crossref's API and just not display abstracts at all. I will put links to publisher's site and to Sci-Hub in the dashboard items.
This year I'm using my product development/tech background to help her make a logo, brand guidelines, set up landing pages for her Chinese teaching programs, setup CRMs to track potential student leads, help her write a sales script, etc. It's lots of fun!
I think there is a huge opportunity in the dampening of the financial markets, to use that to get people to buy my products and services.
We help individuals and companies get visibility on and optimize their cloud infrastructure costs. Currently support AWS, Datadog, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks and Fastly.
We originally launched on HN nearly 2 years ago now and it's been a very enjoyable experience so far. Feel free to shoot me a note if I can help out on anything infrastructure-cost related.
A game that allows you to build machines.
This a video of a very simple demo:
https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegames/comments/zolsc4/dominoes...
[0] https://casscss.github.io/cass/ [1] https://www.hyperhyperspace.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/zydup3/i...
So I just join them, so far its quite an active community working on pushing out the initial 0.1 version.
I host P25 monitoring appliances that I've built and have hosted in a few different cities (that I have apartments at) and want to know if there's a fire/police/EMS call near my house without having to listen to the scanner 24/7.
I basically just want to know if it's safe to walk my dog or if I should wait 15-20 mins.
Perhaps find a way to commercialize it as there are quite a lot of users that have signed up already, any ideas?
Happy to also get your feedback on the most wanted features.
I had a few itches to scratch:
- one off events now that fewer people are on facebook;
- planning in advance for subs in team sports;
- some work events have max capacity, so building out a wait-list
It's been a good way to play around and learn some tech I've been meaning to get around to, like NextJS and PrismaDB, but I kinda regret not giving Remix a shot.
I'm planning to create a secure webapp hosted on S3 that would call AWS APIs to restore my backups into a graviton instance so that I don't get blocked if I'm out of town. Has to be one click, low bandwidth, and highly secure.
Then: Getting back into more technical stuff by refreshing python and SQl skills - mostly to have more fun in my next job (trying to move from a pure Product/Program mngr role into a technical PM role/Sol Architect).
As a technical recruiter, technologies like ChatGPT have the potential to save significant time [1]. It seems like the technologies are in its early days and we'll continue to see new capabilities emerge in 2023.
nosmallplans.io/mindful-values
Mostly non-tech projects for me this year :)
https://github.com/EamonnMR/gopher-wp-bridge
And my life wouldn't be complete without working on another space game
It's an app that let's you try on new hairstyles with AI technology.
Launched the MVP in November and released the full app in December.
It was well received so now my focus is on making it the best possible experience for users & doubling down on marketing.
This year I plan to go all-in on scaling customer acquisition and getting the business out of infancy and into the next level of growth.
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/techstars-invests-120-000-dlt...
I'm writing it in Rust. Using ECS instead of OOP. Going well so far.
It's open (and alpha.) https://github.com/iesahin/xvc
Documentation: https://docs.xvc.dev
Hoping to get a handle on scaling my business, either through injection molding or just amassing a 3d printer farm; one new printer at a time.
The current state of development is very interesting, especially with embedded projects (bbone, rpi, jetson nano, odroid, etc.).
This time I will succeed.
Lots of potential places to take this in the future, so looking for ideas for more features to add!
This is a generative AI product. I'm building differentiating features I won't discuss yet. I'm considering a source-available license where you'd still pay a subscription for commercial use.
The app is meant as a guide through the museum and also a replacement for old audio guide hardware.
currently only in german: https://smartcompanion.app
[1]: https://tigyog.app
Link: https://getloaf.io/
[1] - Freelance leads as service for freelancers and web agencies - RemoteLeads
[2] - Planning to build the world's first Photo studio using AI
Currently growing https://www.fetcher.page/
I always ignored art without understanding its part on history.
As for right now I’m learning more about RISC-V to see how it can be applied in a cyber security oriented teaching environment.
Personally, I will be getting back to my NES emulator.
Might try to go for a few CompTIA+ certs.
Getting a 3D printer.
Also starting my WH40K army (mostly for painting).
Have a simple application I want to build also
We pulled it off, and it has been growing and working great for those using it.
Hoping to expand it to be a deeper part of the development lifecycle, and having a deeper integrations with things such as datadog.
Depends on what devs are looking for really, but we have a base direction to start with and are going strong.
* 2 books underway: software performace; sci-fi comedy novel
* making a sim related to democracy and climate
* ideas for tons more but learned must practice extreme prioritization
I'd be happy to have some people from HN joining the fun https://urbanpoll.com/dj
If my project seems to be going well then I'll keep at it and, if not, then it'll become more like an artistic self-expression and less like a failed attempt at entrepreneurship. :)
I'm building a "sneaky" mental health app. It presents as if it were a modern, sci-fi take on Tamagotchi coupled with a daily self-reflection routine. It's a fledgling ant colony on an alien planet being nurtured by a personality within an orbiting satellite. The player finds themselves compelled to keep their pet alive, commit to the routine of checking in on the pet when the satellite has LOS, and a meditative journaling routing is established by blurring the pet care routine with a self-care routine of journaling and breathwork. The player goes along with all of it since they're interested in keeping their pet alive and growing and are slowly fed entertainment as a reward.
Finch App is the most likely competition in this space. The largest difference is how our audiences discover and think about us. Finch users feel they need help and seek out Finch. Finch understands this, calls attention to the needing help, and presents itself as an anxiety-free warm hug. Finch wants users to "come out of their shell" and to engage with the world. Then, Finch nudges that engagement towards self-improvement. It's great.
Untitled Ant Game users think they're fine as-is (but are underappreciating how far from the ceiling they are), frequently lean into gaming to wind-down and as a means of escapism, and are more likely to adopt concepts that make themselves feel "smart" rather than applying labels to themselves that make them feel like they need fixing. Untitled Ant Game strives to talk about mental health at a higher level of abstraction, hinting at the complexities of psychology, and allows the user to feel like they are discovering knowledge by connecting all the dots. It then provides tools to allow the user to apply their new knowledge.
I'm excited to see how I improve myself with my software and if I can touch others who might typically be reticent of adopting additional self-care habits.
I'm also excited to try and build a game, lol. Everyone who's anyone says it's a bad idea, that it's hard, and that it's not valuable. They're probably right, but sometimes you just gotta touch the hot stove for yourself to really learn. :)
Full building in public, you can find a Discord link in my bio or you can follow https://www.untitledantgame.com/ it'll update ~daily for the forseeable future. Twitch streams coming once I get my thoughts more organized.
I run a tabletop RPG for some friends over the Internet using Roll20. As a player in other (in-person) games, there have been times where we've collaboratively made a map as we've gone along rather than the GM providing one, and I wanted to be able to provide a similar experience for my players. Since we found Roll20 didn't really work for this use case, I'm cobbling together an app that tries to make the experience as fluid as possible. It's only really intended for my group when I'll be on hand to explain how it works and I'll be the only one deploying it, so the docs are somewhat sparse, but in case anyone is interested:
https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher
I've also been working on a compiler for the most boring programming language in the world: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk
I maintain a library with ports to multiple languages (JavaScript, Python, Java). They have very similar structure, which means doing the same thing in pretty much the same way three times each time I make a change.
The idea I wanted to test with my language is: is it possible to extract a common subset that compiles into reasonably idiomatic code for those target languages? The compiled interfaces should be sensible (i.e. use of the code from the target language should be as good as if written in the target language directly), while implementations can be a little less tidy, but ultimately still readable and easily refactorable if the user ever decides to eject from my language and write everything in the target language(s) instead.
I doubt I'll ever use it in anger, and since it's nowhere near ready for use of any kind there aren't really any docs. In the unlikely event someone is interested, the most illuminating thing to look at would be the very beginnings of the reimplementation of the aforementioned library. Since I use snapshot testing with examples, you can see the source code, generated code and result of running the compiled test suite in one file:
Java: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk/blob/main/snapshots/%5B... Python: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk/blob/main/snapshots/%5B... TypeScript: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk/blob/main/snapshots/%5B...
It’s basically in it’s MVP form right now but have been overhauling it over the holidays. Excited for the re-release :D