Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40955565

by vednig • 2 years ago

12 46 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What side or main projects are you guys working on this week. Share your startup stories.

rozenmd2• 2 years ago

Normally I'd say OnlineOrNot but it's been several weekends in a row where I couldn't be bothered (normally I do 4-6 hours a weekend on top of the two hours I do before each workday).

So it's a Steam Deck weekend for me.

vednig7• 2 years ago

Whoah, OnlineOrNot seems saturated enough for itself. It's a great project. Does it keep getting traffic over last few weeks since you stop working on it? How has the journey been? Any last minute perks or quick suggestions you wanna share?

rozenmd2• 2 years ago

I invested into content marketing pretty early on so that tends to buy me time - when I started I'd get no traffic if I didn't spend every day talking about it, now it's a bit more relaxed.

daevis2• 2 years ago

I was working on this project https://github.com/lucidl/tededroid before, now I'm going to record a video with usage, I'm looking for suitable article with text and lots of pictures.

vednig7• 2 years ago

That's a nice project.How many languages does it supports and how does the app has access to webpages? Also is it accessible for differently abled or people that require special care?

daevis2• 2 years ago

It works with texts, so it support lots of languages, but now I'm using the sentence tokenizer only for english, so in other languages that sentences are not correctly detected. It should be improved in the future, but I realized, I don't need 100 % correct detection of sentences. I'm using OpenNLP libraries for it. It scrapes webpages with Jsoup. Again I'm using libraries like Readability4J and Crux for parsing the webpages and removing ads etc.. So, the main idea and payoff of the project is to have a chunk of text associated with the picture. It's good for focus and have distraction free environment. For example, for me, it is a problem to read longer texts and don't be distracted by the surrounding chunks of text (before and after the chunk I'm reading in a moment). I have a positive feedback of one dyslexia patient, but he is no longer on Facebook, so it's the question if it helps dyslexia as well. But I personally use it for incremental reading webpages almost daily and I can better focus with it. I'm glad to share it as open source.

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

The project now which is taking the most of my emotional energy is gentling a feral cat which has had me questioning what it means when I say "I love my cat". I know he needs a better space but until I can get him neutered I have to keep him in a smaller room that he can't escape from.

I cried all the way to the bus station one morning because I was so slow to help him and it cleaned out my soul and when I got on the bus I had a "meet cute" right out of a movie.

It was the kind of event that could change the way I spend my spare time and it has reactivated my interest in image making and printing so this weekend I am scanning an old science textbook to print some cards with the Mascot character "Iggy". Here is one pic

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112780705488252948

I have a system for printing cards that have "three sides" in the sense of an image, some documentation on the back, and a QR code that points to a web site. For example

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112345803041544935

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111819415515904907

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111275639588948846

Something changed in the software and that system is in pieces on the floor, I have to put it back together so I can reprint old cards to fill out my portfolio as well as print new cards.

hash07e2• 2 years ago

So to make him "better" you are cutting his balls?

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

I'll admit there is some irony in my story.

The thing is we have people up the road who have a cat colony at their house and we think a population of several ferals who leave in our beaver swamp, we really don't need more. It's not like his having kittens is going to be somebody else's problem, it is going to be our problem.

On top of that are all the other problems like he could fight with our domestic cats, disappear for days looking for "action", spraying, etc.

vunderba3• 2 years ago

I'm predominantly working on an easier system to post new content to a blog. I still have a wordpress site, but it was starting to feel bloated and required too much effort to maintain, keep the plugins updated, backup the MySQL database, etc.

I wanted to have more end-to-end control over everything, so I decided to switch to a static site generator (Pelican). But I was looking to develop a turnkey solution so I could post to my blog directly from Obsidian using a custom plugin that runs directly inside it.

With one click of a button, my markdown note is converted/formatted and all the image assets are compressed into optimal WebP format. All of that is then handed off to Pelican, a static site generator which combines it with a custom theme, and creates a set of exportable HTML files. These files are then pushed to my GitHub repo. From there, a GitHub runner takes over, copies the new article onto my VPS, and then everything is instantly refreshed on my website.

It's less about the overall aesthetic—because I know the site looks like hot garbage—and more about a frictionless experience for posting new content.

The first test of the POC was an article about building the entire system.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/obsidian-to-pelican-exporter

xwowsersx2• 2 years ago

Hadn't heard of Pelican. Looks pretty good. I'm also looking to move away from WP. I use Obsidian as well so your blog post is really helpful. Do you have examples of what Pelican sites look like out of the box? I can't seem to find any examples to get an idea of what things will look like...or is that entirely up to me?

vunderba3• 2 years ago

Glad it was helpful for you. I honestly chose pelican over other static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll because it's written in python, a language that I'm very comfortable with.

Mordenstar is using a slightly modified version of the octopress theme.

They also have a gallery of some of the themes that you can use:

https://pelicanthemes.com

The creator of pelican is very responsive on GitHub as well.

1ilit• 2 years ago

I'm working on https://github.com/drawdb-io/drawdb trying to optimize the editor and have it lag less when the number of tables increases. Also have some highly requested features I'd like to implement before launching on Product Hunt.

Then I wanted a change of pace and started on something so ambitious that it's stupid... I'm trying to make a web browser from scratch I guess. So far tokenizing the html is going fine but I'm not sure how far I'll be able to get.

vunderba3• 2 years ago

That's a neat tool, it kind of reminds me of the table diagram/editor for SQL server that visual studio had.

ddgflorida3• 2 years ago

We have the same interests. Beside the Javascript library for database functions I mentioned, also working on a SQL parser in Javascript, and a Sqlite Database Explorer.

mmarian• 2 years ago

Alerts for any replies you receive from your posts/comments: https://hackernewsalerts.com. It's a side project.

undopamine• 2 years ago

A bookmark organizer powered by language models, demo coming soon at https://www.undopamine.com?src=hn

coolThingsFirst• 2 years ago

Contemplating omscs

iamflimflam1• 2 years ago

I’m currently working on this: https://esp32zx.substack.com/

The latest prototype should arrive this week. I need to prove that my new keyboard design works and then crack in with the software side of things.

I’m also evaluating adding on an RP2040 to do HDMI output. But I can decide if o should adds this to the main board or do it as an expansion board.

vednig7• 2 years ago

It's interesting one. Something like framework laptop's swappable design would do.

sandreas• 2 years ago

I'm working in a tool "voicebuilder" that can take an ebook(epub) and an audiobook (e.g. mp3) and build an ljspeech dataset to train a text-to-speech model with your favourite narrators voice.

It splits the ebook into sentences and matches the audio part for each sentence, similar to whispersync.

My goal is to have a minimum of manual steps and it is working out pretty well so far.

Open sourcing it is part of the plan, but docs are important and it will take a while...

Turboblack• 2 years ago

I'm working on a simple CMS without frameworks, and hosting that is based on this CMS. https://github.com/turboblack/HamsterCMS

The great thing about CMS is that it has multi-templates, you can assign each page its own design (template)

http://web1.0hosting.net/

hosting is a home for geeks, like geocities 30 years ago, but with one interesting change - you can run a blog, you can install a chat, use ready-made templates (there are already more than 70 of them), and administer your site even from under DOS (and many templates work in Internet Explorer 5 from 1999)

Since March, we have seriously expanded the functionality, and now it is a rather interesting platform with a social component, in addition, if you bring friends, you always receive an additional 500 MB for files, and so on every time, if there is a recommendation from you.

official website of the CMS http://old.net.eu.org/

but since then it has undergone many changes, additions, improvements, but just in case, I left the very first version so that you can compare where it all began

fvicent2• 2 years ago

I have just launched my Django tutorial: https://django.pythonassets.com/

This is the material which I've been using for a couple of years when teaching Django. Since I'm no longer working as a teacher, I decided to update it and make it available online. I think it's a valuable resource for those learning web development for the first time, or switching from other languages.

ddgflorida3• 2 years ago

Love it - I'm intermediate on Python but weak on Django.

fvicent2• 2 years ago

Thanks for your feedback ;)

ddgflorida3• 2 years ago

I created a Javascript library for common database functions for Dates and Strings. I have over 120 functions. The coding is complete but needs more testing. example - var x = dbFunctions.to_char(new Date(),'YYYY-MM-DD HH25:MI:SS PM'); Most date functions from Oracle, Postgresql, MySql, Sql Server are implemented.

the_law• 2 years ago

Hey I'm working on generating chess puzzles from my own games, by fetching the games from chess.com public api, then scrutinizing them with stockfish to find missed opportunities. I'm learning Rust with it

https://github.com/The-Law-1/ChessPuzzles

vednig7• 2 years ago

That's one way to play chess I guess.

myronov_alex• 2 years ago

I'm trying to write educational articles in my blog - https://almynotes.com/blog/all/. Apparently it's difficult to write usefully in a clear way.

vednig7• 2 years ago

You have interesting content on your blog. Also, simple UI I like it.

mikewarot• 2 years ago

I'm trying to impedance match my BitGrid [1] idea to the real world. I've got a simulator that runs at a reasonable speed.[2]

I'm now stuck in analysis paralysis, trying to get to the next steps. How would I interface it to external hardware How to represent the values of the look up tables, etc.

I think it represents a new class of Turing machine. One that could be scaled to Exaflops of performance without much effort.

Distributed bitgrids should be an easy way to extract sufficient horsepower out of even a Raspberry Pi pico, if you have enough of them.

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

LarsLarson• 2 years ago

I'm working on a website where you can subscribe(via rss) to your favourite Audiobook Series and get a notification if a new entry in the series drops.

http://audiobookdb.net

shaftway• 2 years ago

On my backburner is "argparse-sh", a program that does command line parsing for bash scripts written in Rust: https://github.com/Hounshell/argparse-sh

This is my first "real" Rust program, so it's probably pretty terrible. When you run it you give it a bunch of command line arguments to define what arguments exist, their format, etc. Then you give it a `--` and forward the arguments your script was called with. The output is a shell script that sets a bunch of environment variables that you can then use to access the values.

Here's the canonical example:

    $ cat demo.sh
    eval "$(argparse-sh \
        --string text \
        -- "$@")";
    echo "$TEXT"

    $ ./demo.sh "Hello World"
    Hello World

At this point I think I've got a decent feature set and I'm letting it soak in a few of my scripts to try to flush out usability problems.

appsDev2• 2 years ago

I am a SwiftUI dev, and I am currently trying to promote my game. It's called Imagine Storiez, and the goal is to try to make a story using 5 random words in under one minute. My friends and family had fun struggling to add all the words into a cohesive story, but I want to get outside feedback.

I tried to make a Show post today but it didn't get any traction, possibly because the target market for the game is families / teens and not software / entrepreneurship related. Or may just be that it got lost among other posts.

If anyone has any organic marketing ideas please let me know. Thx

vednig7• 2 years ago

- You should consider creating and uploading How-To Videos of your Game on YouTube.

- Do a Stream or contact people on Twitch asking them to stream and Play the game.

- Also make a campaign with real prize for reaching a level or something and Use Paid Digital Ads on Google, Youtube and Adwords to start people to play.

appsDev2• 2 years ago

Those are great ideas! I am trying to use the organic non-paid approach if possible first, but if that doesn't work making a campaign probably will.

Just as an update, another idea I got is to challenge myself to get 100 organic downloads by the end of the week, and make it public. I am blogging about it and posting YouTube shorts tracking each day's progress, and hopefully something will pick up :)

Here are links if any of that seems interesting: Blog: https://medium.com/@tech_talk_/best-ios-game-for-whole-famil... Yesterday's YT video: https://youtube.com/shorts/wVDbC3Cv9wM?si=Q6lkYfNBG2lrSj4F

austin-cheney• 2 years ago

I am writing a web server in vanilla TypeScript/Node. It is raw sockets first and then minimal http support over the socket layer.

This morning I wrote the proxy solution in about 10 lines of code. Its really just some supporting code around these two lines, because everything is much easier when it’s just streams:

    socket.pipe(proxy);
    proxy.pipe(socket);

The goal is to use this as the web server for my home network supporting all my vanity domains that scales up to allow drop in applications. My first home app will be a wrapper around a yt-dlp/ffmpeg script available through a web page.

hahaworld• 2 years ago

I am working on the embedded software for an air conditioner controller used on a self driving vehicle.

zzzgydi• 2 years ago

I am working on an AI application, https://github.com/zzzgydi/ailiuliu. I just finished the MVP last weekend, but I haven't added any documentation yet.

purple-leafy2• 2 years ago

I’m working on my next browser extension, to change the way you use your browser. Stay tuned!

vednig7• 2 years ago

What are you working on actually? Like what problem does it solve or is it an alternative to existing solution?

purple-leafy2• 2 years ago

Keeping it under-wraps till launch, as it’s insofar a novel solution in the market

aminmemon• 2 years ago

Working on multiple stuff.

https://draftss.com

https://abun.com

https://clientPortalOS.com

qiushuangju• 2 years ago

I am developing.NET +Vue+UniApp mall,It can use wechat or H5 shopping, may be not code very well, but I am doing. https://github.com/qiushuangju/QShop https://gitee.com/qiushuochina/QShop

Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

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