Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadPS, typo on list item three:
> Time Trigger is meant run individual tasks a a specific time.
Also "easy humas readable dates" should be "easy human readable dates"
Speaking, listening, reading, writing, and typing are all different parts of "learning Mandarin". All of them are hard.
Pingtype (translator) can help with reading. Pingtype (keyboard, at the bottom of the page) can help with typing traditional characters. Listening can be done with music, check out the Lyrics for some bilingual Christian songs (audio is on YouTube). Singing is kind of like speaking, and can be done in church without other people looking at you weirdly when you pronounce tones wrong. Writing will make your hand hurt, and many native speakers don't know how to write their own language [1]. Speaking is pretty much impossible without a tutor, and I'm still not conversational after ~4 years. I can understand some of what other people say, but talking is hard.
[0] https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHskrqMqII
First I wasted a lot of time looking for how to study Chinese. The best thing to do is to consistently practice. Don't worry about grammar.
Just try learn new words everyday and then deliberately practice them with speakers.
No tool will help you with this.
Try to identify why you need to study Chinese. You'll learn much faster if you need rather than want to learn it.if you don't have a need try to create one.
Learning characters is much easier than you think. The hard part about Chinese for me is the pronunciation and when you finally get good enough to hold conversations understanding that people don't say what they mean.
Documenting it here: https://surjan.substack.com/
I've gotten a tad weary of only reading programmer's blogs. You can only transfer over things like stateless application design so far into other fields. Mechanical Engineers deserve some love too! Sadly, the closest I've come to a "Hacker News for Mechanical Engineers" is the FSAE forums, aka, not close at all. So your blog is very welcome!
https://www.3cosystem.com -- a simple startup events calendar. I'm surprised it is still up. It scrapes the Meetup API firehose, filters for tech events, and drops indexes on 65 cities world-wide. It never gets updates, and I'm surprised it still works.
https://github.com/undernewmanagement/3cosystem/issues/25
Not sure it will get much attention, but thanks for the input.
I have no idea how many people are using it regularly.
I think it's more than one, but I don't really care, I enjoy using it immensely and I've been writing ca. 1k words per day, consistently, for more than a year. Can't ask for more:)
OpenAI gave up after beating 99% of players in a limited version of DOTA2. They essentially just figured out how to out-micro human players. We want to let players play alongside AI assistance, like a racing car driver backed up by their team of mechanics and engineers.
https://github.com/amethyst/shotcaller
I don't make any money, instead I've spent around $130 and 400 hours so far. It is actually a lot of fun to learn web development and encounter various unexpected challenges everyday. There are also rewarding aspects - 9 couples, who met through the site, have reached out to me and were grateful. This feeling of changing people's lives in this way is amazing! I have no clue where this brings me, but I enjoy it so much. I try to spend at least 1.5 hours a day in 2021. In 2020 I had a goal to spend at a least 1 hour a day on my side projects and that's how firedating was born ;)
To be fair, the ratio was not public at the very beginning.
I value transparency and happily share stats and why I make specific decisions.
I've got an idea of such "open" page from levelsio's https://nomadlist.com/open.
My previous experience was that it was taking more of my time to collaborate than to do stuff on my own. I agree that this might change and that's why I am open to explore :)
Each to their own I guess!
Wordo. An English dictionary that my friends and I built. It has a handful of active users, who swear by it. Other than that, no one uses it. It's existed for a few years and I keep pushing small updated a few times a year, it makes me happy :).
I have never written before this, and not sure if it's something I will after this - but at this stage I need to "get it all out of my head". I don't foresee this being a forever project because ultimately I would have said all I want to say. But at this stage, it feels cathartic :)
Early (no signup/in browser storage) version is live at https://app.flowtelic.com.
A video showing how to use it is here: https://youtu.be/Zo9hIuffz_0
I’m documenting as I build this over on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams
I'll add some more pointless two cents. I use, and love, Obsidian for the following reasons. I'm a research engineer, and it supports latex equations, markdown formatting, pasting images from the clipboard, and syntax highlighting. It is also beautiful from the get go (as is your app); the line spacing is just-right, the colour scheme is pleasant, the editor and preview mode typefaces are both delightful. But, I do use it as a full-fledged note taking app.
In your shoes (and contrary to the spirit of the thread, I admit), I would definitely spend time getting to know to whom you're targetting this app. Perhaps yourself, which is fair. But, for instance, it wouldn't work for someone like me. Still, I like what you've done here and I wish you all the best!!
The only things on your list that I hadn’t considered was latex equations and whether I should offer different design customisations of the cards.
I’m glad you picked up on the index card size default. I will offer both full-page notes as well, but there’s another reason why I want them as card sized—so you can lay them out on a virtual workspace to help answer questions from your slip box.
Honestly, there’s too many ideas that I can’t do everything. But it’s sure fun working on it and gradually making it better each release.
It’s a pattern weight, essentially an 80mm wooden cylinder, 16mm thick, with a metal weight embedded inside.
We’ve sold a grand total of 50 (sets of five) but it’s been great as a way to learn to run my CNC router!
Here‘s the link to the Ludum Dare entry in case anyone is interested: https://randomaccessgames.itch.io/neon-kata
It’s a free, private online journal with a focus on mental health.
I spent $4k usd in the domain name in 2015 and around another $4k in operating costs since then.
It has virtually zero marketing and has organically picked up around 1,500 users. I use it myself every day which is success enough for me. Fun project that has helped me land a few jobs, and my scant user base seems to dig it.
Is it encrypted at rest?
I would be too paranoid to put personal stuff on some website, if I don’t know the encryption techniques and technology used behind it.
A small search engine for simple, non-commerical webpages.
https://hacknotescenter.com/
I need to do an about building blog post
but I basically just made it to get better at kubernetes design doc writing, and play around with hasura, next.js, vercel and a bunch of other tech toys.
https://imgur.com/a/u1IMmJg
I was just asleep lol.
Hopefully it works for you
Love a good / dubious project I can bang out over a rainy weekend. Finger.Farm is a modern re-implementation of fingerd in Node, but with an API and whatnot. I built it mostly as a demo for the Jr devs on my team who haven't had the opportunity to finger each other, but there are some ideas there I might bring back in other projects...
If you want encryption there is a way to hang it out over ssh protocol.
Which brings me to a very small project to create a quick password.
ssh -q passwd@netzbasis.de
Its backend (Exocore[2]) is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.
It has very rough edges, but I'm using it daily to organize my life. It has also been my learning playground to improve my Rust skills over the last two years (it was on another tech stack before).
[1]: https://github.com/appaquet/exomind [2]: https://github.com/appaquet/exocore
As for the Gmail integration, it is quite crude at the moment. I use it mostly to organize incoming emails, but I still use Gmail to send or reply to my emails. Exomind inbox is synchronized with Gmail, so all emails that you remove from one or the other get removed / archived on the other side. It also supports multiple accounts.
If you are interested to try and not afraid of the rough edges, just let me know. I added Discussions to the GitHub repository.
In the meantime since DAHDI is giving me so many issues and I’m waiting to receive some alternative hardware, I’ve been working on a very, very rough software simulation of a.DS0/DS1 interface so I can at least start developing the ISDN stack on something.
So far just me and 2 other users actively using it, lol
That being said I’m able to spend very little time working on visually appealing content and instead I’m usually buried in SQL. So in my free time I like to publish visuals (leveraging whatever data visualization platforms peaked my interest that week) on my site thriftythoughts.io which focuses on bringing additional insight to financial independence and the FI/RE movement. It has quite a few subscribers but I started it with the intention of it being a creative outlet- not a means for revenue.
I built it for myself because I just hate not having privacy living with my girlfriend. Then some other people enjoyed it and I made it into a product that is launching on Kickstarter soon.
I urgently need it.
However it would be nice to get back those 50k I’ve spent on the development process but in either case I learned a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_Japan#The_Sound_Pri...
Edit: In a Shared Apartment we once connected a Radio and a Disco Ball to the light Switch. It was a windowless guest bathroom, we completely painted it black. Fun times.
Loodio always plays music when you enter the bathroom unless you mute it.
It took me a while, but I've convinced my wife that farting is ok, and that you should only worry about subjecting others to lousy odours, and even that only when you are visiting someone or some place (indoors). Closing the door usually resolves this. The stigma is especially bothersome with a naturally shy toddler who wouldn't take a dump anywhere but home.
FWIW, music does not stop people walking into smelly toilets, but to each their own. :)
The product likely even makes sense, I just find the phenomena curious and sometimes infuriating (like with my toddler).
Another side effect was that you always knew when the bathroom was in use (aside from someone forgetting to turn the light off, which you now had radio playing to remind you off).
But why and how did we become bothered by the _sounds_ of it? Are you bothered by the coo-coos of birds, or morning rooster calls. Cats purring, screeching cat calls or dogs barking? All of these can be similarly annoying, but we are not "solving" them.
It's weird how our association of sounds with smells and dirtiness of taking a dump has made sounds which are rarely that bad in objective sense (loudness, pitch...) so unpleasant.
It's also how it's considered impolite to slurp a soup, and some people are outright disgusted by hearing it being done.
That’s my understanding of it anyways.
You should save some electricity with a Loodio instead ;)
I have a quirk that I can't stand eating in silence - hearing the biting and chewing sounds of other people, and of the utensils in operation, is causing me extreme discomfort (this also applies to my own sounds, but I usually have computer fan noise to accompany me when I eat alone). I need a source of noise - intense table conversations, or background music - anything that stops my mind from focusing on the sounds of food being eaten. My wife knows about this, and whenever we visit our families, she secretly arranges for some sort of music to be playing by the time we sit to dinner.
Basically, your target audience are people (1) with this particular issue, (2) motivated enough to do something about it, (3) willing to pay the price and (4) liking the design/aesthetics. I realize that this is a "don't care if this succeeds" thread, but I'd still encourage you to not get your hopes high for the KS campaign.