Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

395 points by notpushkin ↗ HN
Release early, release often. Don't worry, be crappy. Fail fast. Iterate.

Show us your half baked, not really ready for prime time projects.

Also, if you need any help with a project, a startup, or an idea, just post it here.

707 comments

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I'll start with a project by my friends:

FXcursion is an STM32-based guitar processor prototype. It has 3 stereo inputs and outputs, builtin effects chain, looper and recording. It lacks proper user interface (we've found a designer last week, so it's in the works now!), and the hardware still needs a lot of changes, but I've been impressed with the progress so far.

https://github.com/RATsynthesizers/FXcursion

I am participating in a competition of a wannabe IT guys when some mentor is searching for one such a student. I have summed exactly his proposal which he has published in Russian and all my work and I have ended up with a 19-page whitepaper 6 pages of which describes my original tradebot idea, in English of course. If you know how real tradebots work feel free to help me to enrich my understanding. Current status of my participation is waiting for the day when the winner will be defined.

https://github.com/eimrine/resume/blob/main/eimrine-s%20rese...

That's kind of interesting. Did you get any sponsors?
There are 2 days remaining for the announcement of the winner.
All the URLS I purchased on Name cheap lol.
We need an auction site for unreleased project domains
Honestly, I'd happily give my unused project domains to a fellow hacker who can make better use of them. (If interested, see my profile)
You should really just create at least one page talking about each project idea. I use dreamhost because I can host unlimited* websites for like $40 for the year.

that way the domains look seasoned in googles eyes.

Here was the video I watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVeybVWSUP4

I'm working on an LLM-based tool to assist with fiction writing. The goal is to help writers get unstuck in case of writer's block, not to do autonomous writing.

One has to enter some abstract of what they want to write, and some text they have so far, and the tool generates possible continuations.

It requires quite a bit of editing, maybe 3-4 attempts for each completion if one wants to generate decent text. Feedback was mostly positive from a dozen or so professional writers who tried it out for a day.

I feel that it generates more naturally looking text than ChatGPT with the typical prompts.

See my profile if you want to try it out. You can use the demo without registration.

Nice project!

Demo doesn't work for me in Firefox for some reason – I can't type anything into the “Start typing...” field.

I want to create an intelligent CRM that gets users from your database automatically, and categorizes each user with behaviors. Do you think it is a good idea? I talked with some users but they are choosing traditional CRMs over mine. Is this a wrong positioning or just the idea doesn't solve any problems? Thanks!
You know, in some countries, people are using Whatsapp a lot to do b2b. I don't know any CRM integration with it that could segment/classify customers using the app.
https://invitivo.com

A website to create digital invitations. Similar purpose as WhatsApp groups for invites, but taking away the noise and adding way more personalized design to the invite.

The UI still has lots of issues and I need to i18n the landing page, but it works and a couple of people use it every day already. I‘m spending 2€ per day on google ads to see how my changes to product alter user behavior.

It’s a side project and I‘m not planning to squeeze money out of it. Just want the world to celebrate more and I want to experience building a product from zero to „actively used by many people“.

Appreciate all feedback and input!

https://github.com/vortext/esther

Esther is my personal project to develop a diary app that talks back. Basically. Along the way I learned how to htmx, llama.cpp via JNA and practical experience with LLMs. I suffer from type-1 bipolar disorder with psychoses and normal life just ain't gonna happen. So unemployed, single, #nolife ... I decided to build a chat bot for myself. It's not finished the RAG stuff still needs implementing, but oh well. It's written in Clojure on GraalVM (because I wanted to try polyglot) other than that it's nothing /too/ fancy ... but it feels great having an LLM + UI you can just build the way you like it

Damn you are smarter than most people if not everyone I've worked with.

This is so cool.

this sounds cool. is it like audio version of hey pi?
Many ideas started out as "it's just for me and my problems..." but end up helping a lot of others. What you're working on is actually humanitarian on many levels. Please continue!

Once ready reach out to community of psychologists and doctors to help get your product in the hands of their patients!

https://whenwillirunoutofmoney.com/

I thought it’d be cool to have a small textual language where you could describe “this payment goes out every quarter” and “this one goes out monthly from date X to Y” and so on. As a freelancer it can be difficult to know how much cash you have available given taxes go out at weird times, and it’s useful to simulate “let’s delete this row where the customer pays” to stress test your finances and so on.

I also wanted it to be “privacy-first” because I figured I wouldn’t trust my financial data to a random person on the internet, so neither would I expect anyone else to.

So I created this site and put it online but I’m a developer, not a marketer. I did a “Show HN”, it got some nice comments but not much traction.

Not sure if I should spend effort marketing it. It’s just a free site so I’m only doing this for fun. Or maybe the product is wrong and needs changes e.g. more features.

Difficult to know what to do. Advice appreciated!

it takes a long time to load. I gave up
Thanks, yeah that’s not the first time I’ve heard that. On my computer, and I think on most people’s computers, it loads instantly. But on others it basically crashes the tab, like it goes into an infinite loop or something. A bit difficult to test without adding debugging tools, apparently Sentry is a good one?, which would definitely conflict with the privacy-first approach. I’ll have to ask more friends, maybe one of them can reproduce the problem. Anyway thanks for trying it and commenting!
I tried on my phone and gave up after like 15 seconds. Just loading screen.
(comment deleted)
In Chrome the page just never arrives. No client-rendered loading spinner, just a tab that seems to want to crash. In Safari, after a decent wait, the page arrives and then there's a loading spinner. After 30 seconds of that, nothing seemed to happen.
(comment deleted)
Here's a couple...

This project I made a while ago and never took it further: https://github.com/weinberg/concurrencyRunner. Concurreny Runner allows you to debug multiple running processes simultaneously, with breakpoints set to allow specific interleaved execution paths to be explored. This allows you to trigger concurrency scenarios which are typically very difficult to analyze because they rely on random timing. That repo has examples which demonstrate typical database concurrency issues of "read skew", "write skew" and "read modify write". I envisioned it as something you could run in CI to actively test for these things like we do other integration testing.

This other one is in the sad graveyard of promising projects which I never could devote enough time to: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=69545.0. It's an adventure game where I recorded hundreds of panoramic images and stitched them all together into a seamless walkable player experience. One day...

Your first link sounded interesting, but it 404s for me -- is it a private repo perhaps?
https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

View, search, and analyze arbitrary source code (best support of Swift right now) in 3D and AR space. You open your phone or tablet, yeet hundreds of files into 3D space, and can start highlighting, moving, and tracing execution by literally walking around your code. The desktop app has similar features, and the standard 3D viewer is just as fun. I would love help - from anyone of any kind - to build this out towards greater usefulness.

It’s a lot of fun, it’s super cool to look at, and it’s the thing I’ve wanted to use since I was a small child. “Let me touch the words!!”

P.s - the dictionary and word wall samples are fun too

P.p.s: there are two versions, and you can download the original SceneKit implementation for both macOS and iOS from the releases section.

Maybe, scale the size of the code based on how long it takes to execute that section.

Would make it a cool way to find underperforming code.

Love the idea! I really love input like this because it refines and validates what to work on. For example, I really wanted to stick in some kind of scripting console to manage controls, like a more flexible or programmatic way of touching the code live. That’s a bit of my league at the moment though.

Feel free to ping me more thoughts!

https://nsfwseek.com

This is a NSFW site that uses randomization. I'm trying to work towards some of the magic that StumbleUpon used to have.

"Find Random Porn" can't get a clearer tagline than that
Thanks, I was optimizing the title text for mobile and needed to keep it short.
MTREES: MODULAR TRANSNATIONAL ROBUST EXTREME ENVIRONMENT SYSTEM (best on iPad)

https://mtrees.io

I want to say that graphically I like what i see, but having scrolled around your website and downloaded the ebook, i still have no idea what i'm looking at.

I searched on youtube to ee if anyone made a video explaining it, but i'm back at square 1

sorry OP for highjacking this thread but ChatGPT is helping me invent stuff and it is relevant

I am still working on it. Invention game. Doing a beta test with some D&D players at a table top bar. You really have to read the Big Book I am making to understand it and yes I am making an overview video but I want to find a few colleges or classes first to practice. Its sort of a joke, me and my friends just come up with funny inventions. Sort of like the old SCP text game if you remember that. eBook kind of sucks. There's a poetry book that is integrated into the Big Book and it tells a story. https://mtrees.io/video-small.mp4 and https://mtrees.io/MTREES-PROMO-2.4.pdf

Still very much in Master Beta phase!

https://vanyalabs.com/

FHIR data viewer (a healthcare data format if you're new to FHIR). I've been working on it for some time now, and just released the Mac build a couple of weeks ago.

Had a 'soft launch' on LinkedIn a week ago that was very well received by my followers.

Still a lot of work to do before a commercial release - huge features missing. But last week's launch was positive - a real boost.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7114844...

My Show HN was a flop. :)

I started on a Navidrome/Subsonic/Plex/Jellyfin replacement for my bachelors thesis this year - I haven't had the time to actively work on it since starting work but I really want to as I've been daily driving it for a while and it's lacking in quite a few areas.

Just as a warning, not even half of the stuff on the landing page are actually present in Coral but they absolutely will be future. The next thing on the plan is to re-write the UI in React Native so I can take Coral with me on the go.

https://coral.nectarine.sh (the download page is inactive, but you can grab a release from the GitHub page if you're so inclined)

I'm curious, what did you find lacking in Navidrome/...? I'm thinking about installing one of those pieces of software to serve my media and I'd love to know why you're building your own (if the answer isn't "for fun" :) )
https://inventai.xyz - Generative AI images, but I'm working on pivoting to an AGI system (applied to YC with the pivot).

https://logictrader.xyz - Online crypto trader, but still needs a lot of work. I'm a bit short on time now with the AGI project.

https://heyeveryone.io.

I'm building a service that helps founders (just like you and me) craft their investor updates in literally seconds. We're currently in the testing phase of the MVP, so I could really use some help.

I'd love to give anyone of you a demo of the tool and see if it ACTUALLY alleviates your pain related to any part of creating and sending investor emails, and if I'm not chasing windmills, haha.

Let me know if you're up for a chat sometime next week. 15min max, promise! https://calendly.com/n10v thanks

https://roughdrafts.xyz/home/

Slightly fancier paste bin with markdown support that I want to turn into a group editing service that takes inspiration from pull request style workflows.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-tab-a...

I built this for personal use, but maybe someone else also finds it useful.

It's a Firefox add-on that arranges YouTube video tabs based on the runtime of the video. I often hoard many YouTube tabs and at some point I want to either watch the shortest ones or play something lengthy so I can do household chores while listening to the video. This makes finding the correct video from tens of different tabs so much easier. There is one known major bug: if a video is playing, the sorting doesn't work.

There is an older version published for Microsoft Edge, but Edge Add-ons started rejecting the updates based on unclear reasons (something along the lines of "no value for user" ???). When reaching for support through email, I only get responses from people who don't understand English and just copy-paste the exact same unclear rejection report and close the ticket.

Chrome Web Store has a publishing fee and outright rejects me paying it, probably because I live in Switzerland and my credit card is from a Finnish bank.

This is super cool, I'll install this!
> Chrome Web Store has a publishing fee

Excuse me, what?! Everytime I think I'm unhappy with Mozilla, I find way more disturbing things at Google.

Cool Add-On btw, I'll try it!

I think it pays for the 5 minutes of someones time to glance over the extension and check it doesn't obviously violate the store rules.

Also, turns out $5 deters most spammers.

If I spend a few hours of my time developing a Chrome extension for free, and publish it on the store, then users get to use it for free, but if Google wants $5 then suddenly I am investing both time and money into something where I will never get any reward.

Somehow, donating time for the benefit of others, or money for the benefit of others is fine, but as soon as I'm donating both, it feels like it's not worth it.

Yes, this is an irrational view.

Just create a base system for yourself

You can convert easily between hours and money so that you can resolve the problem of both by conversion of one to the preferred

So assuming you make $100/hr:

“I can’t believe I gave 10 hours to this and then they want to charge me an additional $5 on top!?”

Turns into

“I just gave 10 hours to this, and they want me to give 3 more minutes of my time to publish it?”

This is mostly to deter malicious behavior because it makes it unprofitable for bad actors to publish malware by spamming the store with dumb apps that are only life-support systems for their little packages of joy.

It's a high enough bar to trip up a lot of bad actors, but low enough that it's a simple annoyance for most of us.

But yeah, reason 4,590,234,761 why people who misbehave make things more expensive/difficult/time-consuming for the rest of us.

ah yes the “this is why we can’t have nice things” fee
Interesting $5 one time is high enough bar for Chrome extensions store, but $5/mo. is not for bots on certain blue social media. Not disputing facts, just... weird.
Apples and oranges. Google bills you directly, Twitter/X bills indirectly through platforms who do not provide sufficient transparency to prevent repeat abuse.

Last I checked Twitter/X had no way to prevent you from signing up again after a ban if you paid via Apple Pay, as an example.

Is that new? I definitely didn't have to pay when I published an extension around november last year.
You might be interested in my CLI tool

After adding all the tabs

    pip install xklb
    lb tubeadd temp.db $(cb)
You can stream them by

    lb watch temp.db -u duration
or

    lb listen temp.db -u duration desc
If you use chromecast you can even do

    lb watch *above_args -c -t "Kitchen speaker group"
https://github.com/petabyt/fudge

Alternative Wifi app to connect to Fujifilm cameras. I mainly wanted to just try and make a MVP to see if it's possible, and now it's grown into something usable.