HN Explorer

Ask HN: Share your side project

38 points by Svetlitski ↗ HN
What have you been working on in your free time lately? Links to GitHub repos, websites, pictures/videos (not all side-projects are software!) of your creation in action, or whatever else best showcases what you've made would be great. Don't worry if your project is half-baked! I've personally found that getting feedback from the community can be a great source of ideas and motivation, even if the project is at a relatively early stage.

70 comments

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Svetlitski
I'll kick things off. About a month-and-a-half ago I posted a "Show HN" for a nifty CLI tool I built called fcp [1], a significantly faster alternative to the classic Unix cp(1) command, copying large files and directories in a fraction of the time. Since posting about it (and receiving a lot of excellent constructive feedback from the HN community), I've continued to improve it, ensuring it gracefully handles edge-cases (e.g. attempting to copy a directory into itself) and further increasing its performance while reducing its memory footprint.

[1] https://github.com/Svetlitski/fcp

the_only_law
Mine aren’t even half baked, more like still raw. Maybe a hundred lines of code written between them. I love to talking about them though. The few “active” ones though are:

1. A user mode ISDN stack written primarily in Erlang, with bits of C and Java for certain components. This one is pretty ambitious but it will end up supporting both typical LAPD/Q.931 connections as well as Frame Relay and X.25 on both BRI and PRI interfaces. I’ve sunk more money that I should have on hardware for this project and still need more. At the interfaces level, though the stack will support DAHDI devices (if I can ever get it to work properly), the osmo-e1d interfaces, which is a neat price of hardware I found about about through HN[1], and whatever normal ISDN terminal adapters I can reverse engineer control protocols for (I imagine most are at least somewhat AT compatible). Biggest barrier for this project is just my laziness and unwillingness to write some of the more boilerplate stuff as well as handling the U-interfaces for BRI since it’s just not possible to get an actual ISDN BRI line anymore. I’ve wondered about hacking around it with NT1’s or U-interface expansions for Cisco routers, but I have my doubts it would work. I could also use some CO simulators but they’re rare and other line emulators are rather expensive. Its hard to get help when I get stuck because it’s just so niche. Can’t really reach out to most retro resources and most telecom stuff around those seem mostly analog/PSTN type stuff and more modern networking/telecom communities will likely just play 20 questions trying to figure out why I’m using an obsolete technology. Like I said it’s an ambitious project, and I’ve planned out extremely good design docs, reference applications including a H.320 video soft phone and a couple of APIs to interface with it (CAPI and JTAPI). I’ve probably mentioned this project so many times that people don’t actually believe I’m working on it though.

2. A custom DOCSIS modem, built on a limesdr. Unfortunately I only have a very old DOCSIS CMTS and cannot run this on a real line legally so it’ll be based on whatever DOCSIS version is supported by my CMTS. Haven’t done much work on this because there’s just so much setup to do. I need to reset the CMTS, set up the sdr, brush up on calculus, keep the manual for the CMTS and DOCSIS specs open to refer back to, etc. I also plan to make Linux and Windows (NDIS) drivers so you can connect the sdr directly to the coax and get a network interface.

maynman
I've been working on a little website to pull out links from the comments on the "Ask HN" page. Often there is some great advice in there, and it seemed in the spirit of Hacker News to automate that.

https://www.askhnwisdom.com/

muzani
This looks like it could be really useful with a bit of work. Right now it misses context though. It might be great with certain threads like book recommendations.
shanecleveland
Love this. Some ideas:

It would be nice to be able to provide a link to an older post and get the links.

Stats, such as top sites included across posts (all-time, this year, etc.), or posts with most links.

maynman
Thanks! I like those ideas. Definitely been pondering better ways to filter the links and ensure the most relevant ones rise in prominence.
matt_s
Something that might be useful (and maybe pay for hosting/aws/whatever costs) is to find products people mention and get affiliate links going. That is if you want to monetize it, if not thats cool too.

An example - I posted a question about non standard keyboard/mouse setups for coding. There were a lot of product mentions in there and what people are doing with them. Not a lot of links though so it would take some text processing.

jerriep
Over a 25+ year career I have had to code far too many Admin Panels. Frameworks like Laravel have products like Nova and Backpack to help with this, but sadly there is nothing to speed up this process for ASP.NET Core. So I am working on StellarAdmin to try and fill that gap.

https://www.stellaradmin.com/

app17
I have been working for a few years now on Exomind[1], a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have iOS and web/electron clients at the moment and a simple browser extension for bookmarking.

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's extensible via WebAssembly written applications.

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

seanwilson
A simple browser word game: https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid

See how high a score you can get and let me know if you can think of any gameplay improvements. :)

I also work on https://www.checkbot.io/, a browser extension that checks websites for SEO issues.

muzani
I play a lot of these games. I expected this to be yet another boring one, and before I realize it I've spent half an hour on it. It's great! I'm not sure what you can add to it. It's almost perfect as it is, with the countdown and the way tiles are replaced. The animation and the way words are linked are nice. Maybe a timer free zen mode would be good, so I could play it with my kids.
seanwilson
Thanks! Yep, some timer free mode would be cool. I hope you managed to figure out what the orange/bonus tiles do - my goal is to have no instructions to read but this area could use some more hints.
oneearedrabbit
I have been doing software development for over 15 years, and I thought that I could apply some of my skills in another dev domain for fun. This time I wanted to try something different, and I started working on a tiny 1-bit retro game. I heard many horror stories that gamedev is hard, and I wanted to get the heartfelt first-hand experience. While it is certainly true that prior experience helps, but gamedev requires a multidisciplinary approach. One has to compose music, create sound effects, draw tiles and sprites, think carefully about game mechanics and many many other things.

On top of that, I am a solo-developer, and I have to prioritize ruthlessly, i.e. whether a new idea adds something meaningful to a game, or it is nice to have but will drain my energy, and I will abandon a game quickly. I am lucky to meet great people in gamedev groups. Also, I find gamedev community very friendly and supportive. I am still miles away from the first playable build, but it is a rewarding experience. If anyone is curious, here is what it looks like: https://twitter.com/oneearedrabbit/status/142057536513165312...

schappim
Hi I'm Marcus and I created https://hologrid.app .

During WWDC I was amazed at the new Object Capture APIs for MacOS Monterey that let you create 3D models from photos (see https://hologrid.app/explore ).

Unfortunately these APIs aren't available on Intel Macs nor on iOS devices.

Because of this I created https://hologrid.app/explore

With Hologrid you can create, manage, and share high-quality Augmented Reality (USDZ) experiences within your browser.

I'm trying to create "the Vimeo of augmented reality".

If you upload a zip of images to hologrid, my bank of m1 macs will turn your images into a model. They'll then host the model on your behalf, and also generate a GLTF/GLB preview (so you can view the model in your browser).

westcort
I made a catalog of all of the out-of-copyright books in the Library of Congress, a pun generator that has all puns of the form 'You put the X in Y', and language learning resources: https://www.locserendipity.com/.
pramodbiligiri
Mine is Paper Time (https://papertime.app) - a way to browse the latest Computer Science papers on Arxiv, and also listen to their abstracts in audio form, like a custom podcast.

While the audio is supposed to be the main draw, I'm actually enjoying finding interesting new papers there on a daily basis! You can see my recent submission history to know what I mean.

Any feedback / suggestions welcome.

kobigurk
I love this idea. How hard would it be to adapt it to eprint.iacr.org?
pramodbiligiri
Thanks! Are the papers on iacr.org different from what gets uploaded to Arxiv?

I need paper metadata to be available in a structured format. I currently support the "arXivRaw" metadata format of the OAI-PMH protocol [1]. Unfortunately I didn't support RSS yet. Are you one of the maintainers of iacr? What is the size of its userbase?

[1] - https://arxiv.org/help/oa

kobigurk
iacr.org is for cryptography-related papers, and a lot of pre-prints go there. I think a lot of them don't get to Arxiv.

Not one of the maintainers, just an avid follower :)

jjice
The TTS is pretty solid, what did you use for that? Amazon Polly is the best options I know of personally, but I'd love to know what you use because it's pretty solid.
pramodbiligiri
Thanks! Actually I keep worrying that the TTS is the weakest link. Good to know that there are people who feel it's up to the mark.

I'm using Google Cloud's Text-To-Speech - one of the WaveNet models over there. Haven't tried Polly at all! Perhaps I ought to explore that a bit.

hbroadbent
Lately I've been working on Sponsaurus, a tool to help email newsletter writers book and manage sponsorships.

I've got a demo up here - https://demo.sponsaurus.com/wells-weekly

And a bit more info on a landing page I put together - https://sponsaurus.com/

I'd love some feedback!

adithyasrin
Love the name!

On the demo, perhaps a link to the newsletter's website? If I were to sponsor, I'd love to take a look at it.

hbroadbent
Hey I know I'm late but that's a great suggestion! Thanks!
Stoot98
I've been building a wee app to let you see the Twitter chat from when the TV Show you are watching on catch-up first aired - pick the time/date the show first aired and it will feed you the hashtagged tweets as if you were watching live. Meaning no spoilers!

Check it out here: https://www.hashtagreplay.com

Would love any feedback or comments!

joefarish
I think this is a great idea. A few thoughts on the site:

1. Initially I was entering the hashtags with the # included e.g "#formula1" and I couldn't understand why it wasn't working. Perhaps you could just automatically remove/ignore the # symbol if someone types it in?

2. It would be great if you could provide links to some pre-canned searches for recent events. For example: a recent F1 race (f1calendar.com) , football game (https://footballcal.com/) or popular TV show.

2.a) Related to the above it would be great to be able to link directly to a particular hashtag & time period e.g https://www.hashtagreplay.com/?t=1627822800&h=f1

3. Would you be able to add the ability to "pause" or "rewind" a hashtag? Sometimes I'll be watching a show (normally live sport) and the TV feed or stream will be on a slight delay. I'd love to be able to pause the twitter feed so that I can get the two in sync.

4. Perhaps a "premium" feature could be the ability to replay tweets from a twitter list/collection. For example, replay the tweets from Formula 1 journalists during a race.

allenleein
Mine is an AI-Powered search engine helps you find your photos & videos with a description, keyword in 0.9 sec instead of scrolling through hundreds of photos

(iOS, macOS)

http://sortingai.com/

ainzzorl
I've been assembling and annotating a collection of instructive and self-contained code examples from open-source projects, to make it easier to learn by reading good code.

Code Catalog: https://codecatalog.org

greaterscope
I love this idea! Bookmarking "Terraform Graph Algorithms" and "HTTPie Download Progress" for later. Thank you!
gidorah
I've been learning Flask over the past few years. I' an accountant, not a programmer, so these have been purely for fun!

Hermes (https://hermes.dev.huginn.uk) accounting software

Cosearch (https://cosearch.dev.huginn.uk) front end for Compnies House API.

Tripper (https://tripper.dev.huginn.uk) Planner for multi-leg trips.

hkiely
What are the key resources you have used to learn flask?
gidorah
I worked through the Flaskr blog demo on the Flask website. Then from there just started building!

If I got any errors I would just search until I found the answer. I find making something by modifying code the best way to learn.

ramtatatam
This is not a project that will become business, it's more of a new hobby.

I was recently refreshing my TRON bot on codingame.com and decided it would be nice to write an environment to run it locally. So I did, I was nicely surprised to see python3.9 has subprocess in asyncio module, lots of fun :)

davidajackson
I've been building Blocktimize, which is a no-code solution for smart contract integrations on Ethereum. https://www.blocktimize.io/

Using Blocktimize, you can receive webhooks for smart contract events instead of having to connect a node/scan blocks, connect smart contracts to analytics engines like Amplitude, and finally I'm working on adding daily and weekly reports for smart contracts.