Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

390 points by TekMol ↗ HN
This thread is similar to the monthly "Who is hiring?" and "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" threads.

But this one is for people who don't want to work for money and are not looking for people who want to work for money. But for people who want to work together on cool projects.

For free to make the world better or to start a startup.

If you do, please post your project or your skills!

513 comments

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I am building an open source web framework comparison.

The idea is to put together a project that gives an overview of how to set up a minimal viable web application from scratch via all the different frameworks.

For each framework the project features a self explanatory shell script that builds a web app with routing, templates and user accounts. So there is no ambiguity of how to reproduce the results. And it is even possible to just copy&paste the steps into a docker container and see the framework in action.

Here is the repo:

https://github.com/no-gravity/web_app_from_scratch

So if you want to compare how the frameworks do templating, you can look at the "Let's use templates" part and have a quick overview of how it is done in Django, Laravel, Flask, Symfony, NextJS...

I wrote the beginning of the Django script and two developers contributed Laravel and Symfony scripts. So far we have routing and templates. All three still need user accounts.

If you are experienced in a web framework, feel free to add to one of the scripts or a new one and send a pull request!

Yes, there are a couple of these "build the same thing in different stacks" projects.

The main difference is the "no ambiguity" approach I take. When you look at the Django part of the project you linked to, you see it starts with 8 manual steps and then a bunch of optional steps in case it does not work.

I want to have no ambiguity. No manual steps. That is why every framework is handled by a script that is guaranteed to work on Debian 11 and leads to a running web app.

That sounds really cool, I have no knowledge of frameworks but I will definitely be a beta-testing user if needed.
I want to do something similar, only...for UI frameworks...

So on the sidebar you have components...one is a sidebar right? so you click on it..on the right pane it shows implementations on the top of the pain is a dropdown so you can switch from say. MUI to AntD to Vuetify, etc... some are narrow scoped frameworks (Vuetify for example is only Vue), some are Wide... Tailwind Kit for example or Daisy UI... they target tailwind but are JS Framework agnostic...

So under each implementation of each component might be code for Rails, Laravel, Django, views and maybe even some sort of api integration where you can have a webhook that can either connect to your dev and push the code to the right places, OR it could put it in a queue if your local dev can't receive incoming normal http requests, you could just use a cron job or manually import the code from your localhost backend...

I'm imaging this sort of being like a mixture of low-code meets Storybook with already developed ui components, and you could even import full templates, etc... So for backend devs w/ an idea 90% of the UI stuff is just drag/drop etc.... you could even have a way to combine elements somehow so you can build up a whole page of elements...and some sort of marketplace where people could share designs and maybe charge like $1 for the code snippet MIT license, but access to the code is $1.

Edit: It'd also be cool to extend this to data-layer..so say I am designing my migrations/models... and I want an Employees table....well maybe I type in employees and it organically lists all the columns previous people have used for employees tables and ranks them by how often it was used... so you can basically have most of the data points that are pretty common across similar apps be shared and almost done for you...and then you can export to django, rails, prisma, hasura, laravel, etc...

What you mentioned seems to be the point of www.polywork.com. They want to make meeting people who want to collaborate easier.
Yeah but that site has a strong monetary angle from what I can tell. This is just a simple list board of people sharing ideas.
From what I can see there is no monetary angle to polywork. Their goal is to empower collaboration.
I'm looking to support any climate-tech projects. I'm a mobile dev but can pick up any language / framework / tool. Particularly interested in ReFi and the intersection between web3 and climate.
Hello there! Send me an email (check profile), I've never thought about web3 + climate, but we do a lot of climate tech so let's talk.
contact me at morphle at ziggo dot nl for two climate-tech startups that can use your support
Hey, if you're interested in working on reducing emissions in product supply chains (Scope 3), reach out (no email in your profile).
I would like to code some Go. It’s been a while since my role now is way too far from the code

So if anyone has an idea that want to develop or a project in Go already let me know.

The trend these days seems to port cli applications to golang. I investigated porting rubygem's bundler to golang, but hit speed bumps (like in order to install the gem, you need to run ruby code).

I'd be interested in trying this out again.

I am a core maintainer on the KEDA HTTP Addon project (https://github.com/kedacore/http-add-on). It's 100% written in Go and we are a small group looking for additional contributors. I believe there are interesting challenges ahead of us that will be enjoyable to solve.

If you're interested, please reach out. My username here is the same as my username on the Gophers and Kubernetes slack groups.

(You're of course welcome to just go pick up an issue in the repo if you'd prefer)

Hi Alejo,

I commented about my current project above that is in need of some Go expertise. I am currently working to get into the summer YC class, so if that interests you, feel free to use the email in my profile!

The web has gotten boring.

I'm starting a static web host where every page is remixable by default.

One click and you have a copy of any web page hosted on the platform.

Not only that, but the front-end code (HTML, CSS, JS) is treated as the source of truth. Whatever changes the owner makes to a page (through DevTools, some custom JS, or clicking a button that does something) is saved permanently to the DB.

This makes it possible for front-end devs to create interactive applications just by adding a JS plugin to the page.

I'm hoping projects like this idea will lead to a renaissance of blogs, personal websites, and remixable apps that push our normal conception of what a website is to the breaking point.

(Email in my profile if you want to discuss. This is a new project I haven't started yet.)

You can also add page versioning and forks to this!

If I want to see an older version of the page I like: click click click I have a (like really) permalink

If I wanna modify a page that someone else made, fork and edit!

It's like Github, but for our pages!

(too many exclamations smh)

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not but there is literally something called github pages that does exactly what you describe.
Sounds pretty exciting. Be sure to implement Webmentions and IndieAuth and other IndieWeb stuff as a first step so you're not re-inventing things that are solved, but need more traction.

The web has gotten boring.

This is so true. Before it was boring, it was hard to use, though. I think that's why the federated/decentralized/indie stuff still struggles to find mindshare.

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I've been approaching it from the other end. The web hasn't gotten boring, but the signal to noise ratio has gotten really bad. The big problem for both creative websites and their long tail audience is discoverability.

There still seems to be a lot of interesting creative content out there, but it doesn't play by google and social media's rules, so what you find is listicles, blogspam, click funnels, various forms of low effort crap made in bad faith.

Here are just a few links to websites I've found that I thought were interesting (I'm not affiliated with any of them). Tell me, when was the last time you saw that type of stuff on google, facebook, or reddit, or twitter, or HN?

http://sod.jodi.org/index.html

https://dreamcult.xyz/

https://www.floppyswop.co.uk/

http://godxiliary.com/

https://dannarchy.com/

https://www.toiletpapermagazine.org/

I think it should be possible to build something genuinely useful in this space. I'm not exactly sure how or what, so I'm still experimenting with various ways of bringing audiences to websites off the beaten path, but it feels like I'm closing in on something.

I've been approaching this in a sort of independent R&D fashion, just trying things and seeing what sticks. If anyone is into this general space, maybe shoot me an email. Not really sure what's a good format for collaboration though.

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I went through a couple of rounds of a similar project, started just snapshotting a document's innerHTML to disk to capture edits, then created a customElements framework (really a thin wrapper around the official api) to swap out one custom element for another while maintaining all the state on the DOM.

I called it MIXINT for remixable interface. It's abandoneware now but IMO a pretty good vanilla-JS approach to window panes with class-sensitive menus. see github for code and manic dreams in the readme [0] and video of the interface swapping out one class of window for another [1]

But what I really wanted was to expose the guts of the code in a way that made it easier to edit, and as a protest to JSX I threw together a unified JSON syntax for templates that get rendered into HTML/CSS so that I could write javascript code that returns objects and just build up DOMs that way - but when I started implementing variable substitution and array mapping in my JSON templates, I realized I could do away with the javascript altogether and write entire web pages as declarative JSON, just using a few prefixes that trigger macro expansions, replacing one branch of the tree with another until no more prefixes are left (the eureka moment came when reading about macro expansion in the TRAC language - I was just going to stick to feature parity with Handlebars before realizing I had a bone fide programming language on my hands)

This is all off and on the last 4 years. I'm about to overhaul the years-old homepage with better examples but you can see the concept here [2]. Maybe some of the code would be useful, I'm certainly on board with the mission, I just wish I was better at avoiding those pesky rabbit holes :)

[0] https://github.com/jazzyjackson/MIXINTvNegative1

[1] https://youtu.be/URMHbhK0zrs

[2] https://lookalive.software

I really like this. And remake looks very powerful. I'd like to support this. I have a project management tool that ties in with financial planning for small businesses and am looking to add on basic web design features / customer portals for all my clients in a sustainable way that also unleashes their creativity. This type of tool - remake - and this seem to open the path to a more fun place and a useful place for making partnerships / getting to meet new people . Very cool.
I like this. Your messaging is a little weird to me.

The product seems less ‘the web has gotten boring’ and more ‘we are low code development’ — a happy fun place between no code development and the normal overly complex web development of today.

Which funny enough, I think your audience/clients are best for actually big boring development via some enterprise clients who require stricter security rules or giant less skilled employees with occasional custom requirement (imagine a big painful US gov type organization). I don’t see this getting hobbyists but easily could be wrong.

Cheers and congrats. Really cool stuff! Excited to see where you land.

I am working on a Java UI kit that works on both desktop and browser:

Demos: https://www.reportmill.com/snaptea/

Repo: https://github.com/reportmill/SnapKit

There is a lot of benefit to this - fast, traditional desktop development with great deployment. It also has built-in developer tools and online access to a UI Builder. I hope this could make Java Client development interesting again.

I need collaborators to help write demos and improve the kit.

Jeff at ReportMill dot com

I'm building a live video cdn backed by a kademlia dht (the BitTorrent one). https://github.com/muxable/cdn

No major benefit of using a dht except it's kinda cool that the entire thing runs sans centralized database.

If you're interested, the space is what my startup is working on but the cdn specifically is mostly a fun tangent to learn about kademlia for me. It's always fun to work with more people in the live video space since it's a small community overall.

What is the advantage over BitTorrent?
Using WebRTC makes the file "live", in that it publishes from the current timestamp instead of when the publishing started.

In principle I think BitTorrent can be adapted to this, but essentially the output "file" doesn't hash correctly so I think it would be a lot of hacks to the point where it's avoiding actually using most of the parts of BitTorrent anyways. In particular this is evident on the DHT, my understanding is the DHT actually stores fragments of data and BEP44 verifies integrity. In my implementation, the DHT stores some metadata for who can publish the data because the media stream is live and we don't want to broadcast every packet over the DHT.

Of course, I'm new to BitTorrent so that's my understanding. I'd love it if I could use more BitTorrent components directly :)

I missed the "live" part in "live video cdn". Got it, thanks. I've used apps like Ace Stream and I know BitTorrent Inc launched a live streaming service a few years back [1] but I can definitely see the appeal of better, web-based solutions.

I also know PeerTube has a Live feature now, but I have no idea how they do it. I think they use WebTorrent (at least for the non-live videos).

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/bitto...

Yeah I saw that and I tried it out as well, my experience was it was pretty high latency. My understanding is they were shoehorning HLS into BitTorrent so latency is governed by the longest segment length. Unfortunately there's a tradeoff if the segment length is too short then BitTorrent starts not behaving well and if it's too long then HLS will increase in latency. It's really cool tech though and especially doing it back before WebRTC was really a thing was an achievement.

My goal for the CDN is to make it lower latency that it could be used for video conferencing. In practice I have more of a one-to-million distribution in mind but it's a cool puzzle.

If you're interested, I'd love to talk more! I'm in NYC if you happen to be too, I love meeting people interested in live video :)

I recently took over maintaining https://github.com/capacitor-community/camera-preview, an MIT licensed Ionic and Capacitor camera plugin written in Swift, Java and Typescript. I stepped up because I needed it, and lots of people wanted to embed a camera in their apps. Thanks to contributors I got a new release out yesterday.

I'm not a Swift programmer, or Kotlin programmer, and haven't touched Java in a decade. I would love to collaborate with people on this project. I can offer lots of enthusiasm, and if you like programming without hassle I'll handle all the user-facing stuff and managing GitHub issues and support requests, project admin and writing documentation :)

There is much to do (and users really want video recording on iOS), but I've not got the coding skills to start. Picking up one language would be a nice challenge; keeping the iOS, Android and web versions at feature parity... I can't do it on my own.

I'm with a friend and we're focusing on building cool SaaS projects as a way to improve our product building skills and possibly make some money.

At the moment we have a HR platform that one client is using and we're looking to build other stuff - we have some ideas in the making.

If anyone wants to join

Hey there, I'm interested in your HR Platform and maybe expanding that? If you've got one client already, it might be scalable! Currently I'm working on wordpress plugin development to try and make small software that I cant bring to market quickly. Would you wanna connect?
I have been looking for similar like minded focuses. I spend a lot of time in the DevOps space while always expanding to other areas. Please do reach out, sean (at) ulation (dot) com
Myself working as a product manager, I'm always happy to improve my product building skills as well. I'll be glad to help.
Hey, I'm an Engineering Manager trying to solve my own problem / scratch my own itch, which is building solid relationships with my teams, and 1:1s are a big part of that. Think solutions like Lattice and Fellow if they were unapologetically built for technical leaders, and didn't have tens or hundreds of millions in VC to justify.

This sounds (at least) tangentially related to your HR work, so I'd love to connect and share ideas. You can contact me: hello at marigoldapp dot-com

JS / PHP Developer here. Interested in new projects.

Email is in profile. Thanks!

Hey! I'm a Product Manager with some web dev and data science skills. Would love to connect and see if there's something we can work on together :)
This is a cool idea. Thank you to post your imaginative idea!

Recently there was a post reminding people about the excellent "polling" feature on HN. Suddenly there were a bunch of polls with great discussions that followed. It would be helpful if this page (https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) included tips about how to create a poll.

I'm interested in collabs on the make-inspired build system I'm working on, macrome. Repo is here: https://github.com/conartist6/macrome

My goals are:

- Restore the ability to use git repos as packages to the frontend ecosystem

- Simplify tooling needs by encouraging devs to check in a readable version of their product compiled down to standard javascript

- Provide the first interoperable way to package components, even those with styles

- Make it all Just Work as long as you run `macrome watch`

I work on tools to help companies/people keep track of their carbon emissions as open and transparent as possible.

Always looking for others to join me or have a chat with.

Emails welcome, check my profile.

I'm ideating around productivity and todo lists, I'd love to talk with and bounce ideas with any UX designers interested in the space!

Email in profile :)

One thing I've been looking for is a simple to-do list app that allows sharing/syncing cross platform.

There are some nice and simple to do list apps (eg. Notally on Android) that have no syncing. Then there are some platform specific solutions (eg. the Apple's Notes app) that work well on platform.

I've been looking for something just to share a shopping list with my SO, and all I could find were elaborate SaaS productivity suites with projects and deadlines and calendars and project management features, but nothing just for syncing a single to do list between an iPhone and an Android device.

Did you try Google Keep? It does exactly what you ask for: sharing a simple todo list with another person.
No, I haven't. Thanks for the tip.

(I've been trying to use as few Google services as possible, but it seems very hard on Android.)

Have you looked at Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/)? Allows you to share a subtree of your overall knowledge universe, works on all platforms, etc.
Looks nice! But I'm not sure I need all that complexity for a shopping list, and $60 a year is a bit steep if I'm only going to use it for a shopping list.
I used it free for years without running into the limit that i needed to pay for.
Sounds like something todoist should well be able to handle: https://todoist.com/ They have been around for years but they really focus on being just 1 thing, a good to-do list manager. Sharing lists/tasks amongst people is as far down the collaboration rabbit hole as they went.

If your use case is really just groceries there is even an app just for sharing shopping lists with others (some friends use it and like it, personally for me it felt overkill): https://www.getbring.com/en/home

Thanks for the pointers, but I'm not sure those are what I'm looking for.

Todoist sounds more like a "Get Things Done" style task tracker (like OmniFocus). Due dates and assignments and priorities are way beyond what I want a todo list to do.

As for Bring, yeah that looks like it's way overengineered.

anyone interested in the pdf -> word doc space?
I'm interested to hear more if you can share.
Very interested in the PDF -> anything structured solutions (primarily HTML but...)
I'd love to work with people who want to find ways to build low cost 802.11ax mesh implementations. Think high powered raspberry pis (or their equivalents) being customized to compete with the crazy high costs of Orbi implementations. And I absolutely have zero interest in the monetary value here. RPi + wifi shields + fun is what counts. If you're interested, I'd love to team up! And I bring all kinds of nerdy engineering skills to boot and I'd be doing this for fun with other engineers. The goal would probably be an implementation that would one day show up on hacker news as a post for other folks to build and enjoy!
I'd be interested in that! Would be a good learning experience and a way to understand WiFi more deeply. My experience so far is mostly in cellular.
I'm convinced every side project should lend you awesome learning experiences. Why else would you do it? These specs and the chipsets that are implementing them seem to be deeply maddening, but I bet that's a good thing, right? :)
>These specs and the chipsets that are implementing them seem to be deeply maddening

Oh yes. Much to the frustration of even the phone OEMs. Hopefully WiFi is easier to handle than 5G lol

I'd love to follow along once you get this started. Sounds like a lot of fun.

I'm personally limited on cycles currently (N.B. I am a cofounder / direct of eng. of an ISP that builds custom 802.11ax-over-mmWave last mile access networks and CPEs in-house), but since I have enough experience in that world I can probably jump in at points to help as I free up.

I'd bet you'd be a fantastic person to lend cycles to keep the guesswork within reason. And if you had cycles to put to the weeds, I doubt an engineer would turn you away. We should get in touch! pavgup at gmail dot com!
I'm intrigued by mesh networking, too. I'd like to see an open source implementation of Bluetooth Mesh networking for embedded SoCs like ESP32 that's not limited to a single chip (and ideally usable with MicroPython). This could make cool games possible running on all those hacker conference badges!
Years ago now, I was building baby monitoring tools, and putting BLE implemnentations into place on ESP8266s might have been worse than smoking cigarettes. I swear, my life was shortened, but I love the idea of device-to-device mesh systems. These 802.11ax systems are basically intelligent wireless backhaul systems, the devices that actually connect to the backbone could be boring, but it'd be so cool if devices helped to expand the mesh...
This is a great project. Orbi systems are so expensive. Are you basing your work on any open source mesh projects? Do you have a project site or GitHub where people can follow along?
Great question. The *WRT (OpenWRT primarily) communities are clearly the winning universe around this and we should take (with generous attribution) what we can from that world, but I've yet to see a real DIY hardware implementation. These Orbis are honestly very powerful individual routers, so I suspect there's a real thing around their hardware, but I bet DIY can find a way... what do you think?
OpenWRT is missing a big piece of the puzzle: configuration management and the ability to work with a "controller". OpenWRT is currently great at running stand-alone but has essentially zero support for being part of a "fleet" of devices managed centrally.

This means something as simple as changing the network name or password requires changing it on every single access point manually, and even worse if your mesh system relies on sharing frequently-changing state between devices.

OpenWISP tries to address this problem: https://openwisp.org - I suggest you check it out and solve the configuration management problem first.

The actual "mesh" part is actually relatively easy. Most commercial systems use basic Linux networking tools, HostAPd (sometimes with custom improvements, but this all ends up upstreamed or reimplemented upstream given enough time) and custom glue code to tie them together. A "mesh" system is typically a user-facing network being broadcast by all APs (with shared settings such as name and password) and an invisible, "backhaul" network each AP hosts (either on a separate interface or on the same interface as the AP - I believe some wireless cards can act both as AP and station as long as the channel is the same) and the other in the path connects to, and the glue code handles configuring all of that. 802.11s is also an option that can be used, and I'm pretty sure all of this is already possible to configure manually in Linux - what's lacking is the "glue code" to set up & manage all of this automatically.

OpenWRT is a good community. I made a garden sprinkler controller using OpenWRT and an Arduino Yun a few years back. Seems like OpenWRT has since added support for a few mesh standards.

Another mesh community is Thread, which seems to have Zig-bee, Apple & Google involved https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)

I haven’t looked into mesh networks in a few years. Back then, Germany seemed to have a few open source mesh projects.

On the current place to collaborate, there's actually nothing. And at your suggestion, here's where collaboration can start: https://github.com/pavgup/meshitup/. Empty repositories are all opportunity. PRs welcome!
Please reach out to Eric, the founder of wakoma.co He is working on this exact thing and I'm certain he would love to collaborate.
Very curious. At first glance, it's not clear he's targetting the Wifi 6 (or Wifi 6e) mesh implementations. If he's already running something, he's the place to send collaborators that are interested here. The goal here would be to compete with Netgear's Orbis with DIY low-cost hardware...
I'm interested in the hardware side of this but also the software side - building a resilient, E2E messaging system not reliant on cell networks or centralized national inter/intranets to work. Is the latter too off-base for it to be worthwhile for me to reach out?
I am surprised that there have been no responses to your question as this would be like the holly grail for people interested in privacy oriented and robust peer to peer messaging. I wouldn't be able to add much know how to the technical aspects unfortunately.
I have a finance / operations / marketing background and could probably help find a use for this at scale that can get it out. Even if not for the $$$ this could help get the tech out and build solid use cases. Would be fun to work on.
It looks like from the responses here, we could at the very least create a community?
Unquestionably. I started this conversation, I won't let it just hang. There's something seductive about building things that best at lower cost the available best consumption thing. We will find a way!
I'm an instrument-rated pilot. I'm working on a Python library to model aircraft performance with just a few numbers specific to your airplane (e.g., the drag coefficient, and some measurements). I used performance data generated by the library to fly across the entire United States at altitudes and with efficiency beyond the POH.

Seeking other pilot-programmer-contributors: [redacted]

I made a web application generation tool built on top of AWS. It deploys all the basics you need for a web application in the modern era (db, ui, api, users, groups, roles).

https://awayto.dev -- Check out the video

https://github.com/keybittech/awayto

If you like making tools for developers, contractors, and the business world. Come check us out and join the discord!

I'm a front-end developer / artist / father. I'm trying to make a software application for families common in my situation. I have an 8 year old daughter who is very autistic and there is a huge lack in tools I feel that a family and kid can communicate with. To that end - I am trying to make a communication board tool. In my mind think of Trello board but there's not much in the way of words only symbols. Right now I have mockups and am evaluating whether to do this in unity 2d or Web/JS. Throw everything you know of UX and common UI frameworks out the window this is for kids the world keeps turning it's back on to enable them to participate.
This is quite interesting and important. Do you have anything I could follow or some literature about the topic? I'm not even sure what to search for as I never thought about alternative modes of communication.
A quick google as an example but this is from healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/communication-board

I'll ask my wife who is a BCBA to share any studies related. The premise is symbols to help a kid reach from using symbols to letters/words. Right now they print a ton and velcro them to a board and communicate a complicated topic. There are apps out there but they kind of are lacking IMO and hard for a kid to figure out.

Cool sounding project, are you thinking of this as a hardware project or something that would run through a browser or as a stand alone app?

Also what kind of art do you make? Im an artist working as a dev as well. I know we're out there but we're a bit rarer than I was expecting.

I'm thinking it'd be an app running on android/ios atm. Kids typically seem to gravitate to an 'app' and something running in a browser could lead to unexpected consequences if a parent wants to protect their kids from the greater web. I'd like for it to run in a browser if needed but it'd be easier for a kid to manage as an app. Look at youtube kids app as an example.

As for art I love watercolor, gouache, ink and brush. I trained professionally to be an animator so I love cartoons.

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Also a father: 11 year old son who's very autistic. In process now of creating better visual tools / schedules to help him understand & have agency in his day.

Have thought a lot about this space, too, and identified similar needs. Please connect via email in profile.

I don't see your email. I put mine in the about box.
This sounds like a really cool project. I'm an iOS developer, if you end up needing native iOS contributions please feel free to reach out at the email in my profile.
I don't know what your family's needs are specifically, but there are several fantastic Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) tools out there that are open source and in active development. The community is very friendly and they always welcome help from experienced software engineers. I personally contribute to Cboard (https://www.cboard.io) and a few others but check out the OpenAAC website (https://www.openaac.org) for additional resources :-)
Yeah I'm thinking of contributing to and taking from Cboard. Basically I want to great an interface that uses the symbols to help a kid not just interact with peers to talk to them but also say write and send a note.
You might also want to look at other apps that use the OpenBoardFormat: https://www.openboardformat.org/partners

I contribute to Optikey and was involved in OpenVoiceFactory in its first incarnation. Optikey is primarily QWERTY based but does supported the Communikate pagesets - more general OBF support would be a welcome PR! Coughdrop is probably a better fit for your needs, and is open source so free to self-host, though they do offer hosted plans for $.

https://github.com/CoughDrop/coughdrop

Just wanted to jump in and say this sounds like an amazing project and I hope the best for you!

Make sure to do a Show HN when you get it far enough!!!

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I am a programmer and also a father, and working on using AI to revolutionize how we teach kid how to read.

I noticed that a very simplistic LSTM neural network model is able to learn very quickly all the rules of pronunciation ex:

- grapheme "EA" in “please” or "heat" is pronounced one way

- but grapheme "EA" in « death » or " bread" is pronounced in a different way

- but grapheme "EA" in "great", "steak", "break" is also pronounced in a different way In fact the neural network is learning the rules and able to guess the pronunciation of word it have never seen before.

This made me try to see

1- what is the minimal number of example the Model need to be trained with to learn all the rules.

2- What is the optimal sequence that rules must be learned ... This can all be discovered and measured easily and accurately by training the model with different training set. I believe this have never been done before, because experimenting with real kid is too slow.

We make the assumption that is something is easy to learn by an LSTM model it will also be easy to learn by a human. (turn out to be true)

There is a lot of design decision that need to be made about how to visually display "grapheme" and let the kid interact with them.

This is just a side project for now but I am in strong need of a UI programmer to partner with!

A concept I've thought about in this same area is some kind of color coding of words to help children learn how to decode words at the level of syllables. So for instance "please" might be "plea" and "se" – avoiding the sounding of of "pa la eh ah [no, they go together as an ee sound] sa eh? [silent e]". Lots of vowel insertion that makes it very hard to actually assemble those sounds into a word!

But in another way this could be a kind of overlay of information. Maybe it shows how words are split, maybe it's to disambiguate different pronunciations of "ea", ... I'm not sure what's the most important added information. But overlaid on the words it might be a kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for kids to successfully read words and gain the practice that makes it possible to remove that scaffolding.

There's a lot to think about there when it comes to reading (not to mention a ton of pedagogical knowledge)... I'm not sure I have the space to be a solid collaborator, but I do find this stuff interesting to talk about sometime...

Definitely interested in collaborating. My skillsets range from web (NextJS, React), React Native, native iOS, native Android, embedded systems (firmware and hardware).

I have a 12 year old autistic son. He attends ABA therapy. I am also looking to create tools and apps that can help him communicate better. Also, he's very musical, so I am looking at better ways to help him learn piano (he loves Simply Piano but I want something that let's me define a custom lesson plan based on MIDI files of songs he loves).

TL;DR--an automatic xkcd recommendation bot. [1]

"Relevant xkcd" is a meme that's been a part of online communities for as long as the comic has had online notoriety. [2] I wanted to build a bot to see how true that was. I've got a lot of the hard parts completed (data collection / curation, initial models), sitting in my TODO box for quite some time and would love to pair up with a collaborator to get it across the finish line.

The idea is an automatic xkcd recommendation bot that takes advantage of the latest and greatest in NLP advances (a fine-tuned hugging face model). [3] I've already got the training data (reddit comments that mention "relevant xkcd") and each individual xkcd's notes from the xkcd wiki. [4, 5]

Feel free to reach out to me via email (in my bio).

[1] https://github.com/adithyabsk/relevant_xkcd

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/xkcd

[3] https://huggingface.co/models

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3cej2b/17_billion...

[5] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I want to play around with development on Solana. Not sure where to start. Could use a learning buddy.
This may be the edge of what is off topic, but I’ve looked for a long time.

I’ve worked on a compiler for a HM type checked language for a while. Since September last year I’ve been stuck trying to implement tagged unions (such as Maybe). I’ve got all other features.

I’m looking for a tutor who would write a type checker with me in a screen sharing session. I’m located in Dalarna, Sweden atm, but can do any timezone that fits. I want to pay for this as I am really really curious to find out how it works! It’d probably be no more than around 100 LOC for just the type inferrer.

What language are you developing in? Is the project code up somewhere?

No payment necessary, but I'd be happy to do a videocall with you. I've implemented tagged unions once, albeit with a very different syntax: https://akkartik.github.io/mu1/html/033exclusive_container.c... (this is a Literate format that eventually tangles into C. The `scenario` blocks show what code in the language would look like. Though none of these is a good example. They all sidestep the type checker to some extent since they're creating raw objects in memory.)

Anyways, I'd be happy to chat with you :) I suspect it'll be a short call. There's a likely a single sentence somewhere that will get you unstuck.

I’m writing it in OCaml, and for prototyping I like to make mini languages in a single file - just a definition of type and expression and a typeof function.

Thanks for the offer! Sending you an email :-)

Can’t edit so adding: I write OCaml but am open minded.

HM = Hindley-Milner

My email is in my profile please feel free to get in touch regarding type checkers!

Here is a type checker, lacking inferring, for tagged unions. What I need to figure out is how integrate this with the unification algo http://www.martinjosefsson.com/ocaml/compiler/interpreter/ty...

Not super tech focused at the moment, but I'm trying to start a surf community in the bay area. Main reason is that sometimes it can be tough to find a ride share to the beach and also to share surf conditions at diff. places (cameras are pretty limited)
Although far away from the bay area (southeastern Europe), I had suffered many times from misleading forecast and lack of cameras around. If you consider expanding the idea more globally, I'd be happy to contribute.

I'm not super tech focused at the moment either, but work as a product manager / ba for the past 7 years and building a surf community sounds like fun.

Sure I’ll send you an email today