Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple.
Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
I'm a big fan of HSLuv and I've been looking for a way to generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
I like HSLuv too as its color picker looks familiar while having a Lightness slider that works the way you'd expect compared to HSL. I see color nerds promoting OKLCH but OKLCH color pickers can look intimidating.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
fwiw I was very confused with what I was supposed to do on this site and I run a few websites using Tailwind colors. I don't really get how the color selector on the right interacts with the mock previews on the left. It also wasn't obvious I'm supposed to hover over each element in the mock preview.
Thanks, that's helpful! The color selector on the far right
is mostly there to let you change which color you're editing if you're not interested in the mockup preview on the far left, and to add new colors. You can mostly ignore it if you'd rather select colors by clicking on the mockup.
For what you're supposed to do, you're meant to drag the points or curves in the hue/saturation/lightness columns to customize the colors swatches to create your own custom palette. The mockup will update as you make changes and warn you if there's any accessibility contrast issues. You can click elements on the mockup to select colors to edit and check their color contrast.
Does that help at all? Any more hints on what part wasn't obvious and what would make it more obvious? I could hide the color selector by default maybe? Add better labels or hints?
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
Thanks, Dan, for that clarification. The question each month is actually two-fold: what have you been tinkering around with and what new ideas are thinking about. It's an invitation to dialogue.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's to...
Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.
There’s simply no “HN is not for self promotion” policy. You’re asked to not use your account primarily for self-promotion, and repeats are allowed, so you can roll your dice multiple times on your Show HN already as long as you’re otherwise a good contributor to the community and only do it sparingly. Flooding another topic with commercial promos simply turns it into another https://news.ycombinator.com/show, what’s the point then?
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
One thing I do like: When people call themselves out -- "hey, we buy this software... or I work for this company and you might like this software"... then they share some software that is relevant to the discussion. I rarely see those kinds of contributions downvoted due to their transparency. Plus, I learn about lots of interesting companies and solutions that way.
It's a good idea and consistent with the original use of the term on HN. I guess the downside is if anyone with a cool side project thought that it wouldn't belong under that smaller-sounding umbrella.
Another option would be to go the whole hog and explicitly reference side projects in the title, or at least in whatever will become the instructions at the top of the regular thread.
Hi Paddy! Hmm - I'm not sure. Are you talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38424478? That doesn't seem to have had significant attention on HN yet. It's an open source project. It might be fine in this thread.
Whatever the line is, it's still gelatinous. We want to figure it out in a way that optimizes the thread for interestingness, which means avoiding repetition and prioritizing the long tail of projects that probably wouldn't get discussed in other contexts on HN.
Working on finding a job. Maybe in 2025 I can use these threads as a small devlog on the game I want to work on. But until then my progress has been "did questions on trees and backtracking". woohoo.
Though games for sale seem to be treading the line of the "no self-promotion" guideline. It's not coming out anytime soon and I have a very unconventional pipeline for developing it, so I think it'll be worth sharing the tech and process of that along the way.
Busy market, hard to sell to companies who need to migrate. The main reason for migrations is price (eg. Auth0 being super expensive), which is not a good thing. I'm probably not telling you anything new.
I'm building a social network for humans[1]. I plan to make each user a verified human and disallow AI content as standard. I will also ensure that each human can only have one account, to eliminate the ability of state actors/rich people spreading online propaganda.
I can't explain why, but that makes me extremely uneasy. I won't even give Telegram my phone number. I can only imagine the things a nefarious actor could do with a copy of my passport.
Your passport won't be stored anywhere. It will be verified, then some details like passport number will be encrypted and stored to ensure uniqueness but that's it.
Sure, that may make you uneasy as well, but I hope being transparent about what gets stored and how will ease that uneasiness.
I've been working on the idea of building synthetic workers. I'm trying to implement a planning workflow system for scenarios where the workflow definition, the environment, or the task are not well defined. I also ended up implementing a micro Palentir plugin system to support the action system for the synthetic users.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
Do you have a prose description or repo you'd be interested in sharing? I'm acquainted with Zotero and Omnivore, but I accumulate papers to read much faster than I get through my TBR pile and it's getting pretty unwieldy already.
maybe not that different in terms of functionality.
I have some opinions about ux/ui. I don't understand the graph of obsidian. It's very chaotic. I think the essence of visualization should be simplifying or distilling information, not making things fancy but complex.
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
I'm working on synthesizing a genome at home! Here is a video with more details, as well as a picture of my home lab. I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).
This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!
Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
Definitely, producing open source works that would help me! Feel free to send me an email and we can talk about what makes sense to you. Also put some more above.
That's encouraging! The barrier of entry for BioE feels very high compared to software. What do you think is a good way to make a transition between them?
Also, I second what Dig1t said. I would gladly get involved and volunteer my time and skills, just to get my foot in the door. Would contributing to dnadesign be a good place to start?
Definitely! If you're willing to help, throw me an email so we can talk where it would best fit for you :)
some sets of problems I have right now (on the hardware / software side):
Hardware: It'd be great to have an open source plate gripper. I wrote a little bit about the general problem of transferring here - https://keonigandall.com/posts/transfer_problem.html . I have a uarm lite6, but wanted to investigate building an arctos robotic arm to move plates between machines. Just need the gripper! This is something I cannot do myself - I have software skills, and can build things with my hands, but have zero skills on designing new hardware.
Software: A lot more here, but depends on interests. I have some general life-improvements I'm looking at doing, but also some wild ideas that need prototyping
yep, nothing in there prevents me from doing work. That article is mainly their legal team fluffing their own feathers for their clients, which I'd hope that one would be able to read between the lines for, considering it was published by the lawyers themselves. The lawsuit itself is quite frivolous and accusing me of stealing and using source code I didn't steal/use, so just have to go through the legal motions to prove that. The more details you know about the case the more absurd it becomes
I love the idea and thought I'd do a rough check on the math:
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
The whole idea sounds pretty insane really. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for a battery-powered kettle just so they can save 1-2 minutes of time (and less if you're just making enough boiling water for 1 cup). I use a little 100V (900W I think, according to the label) kettle to make tea, either 1 or 2 cups at a time, and while it's certainly not as speedy as those EU/UK market kettles, and a bit slower than a US kettle, it's fast enough.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
There are lots of products that aren’t _necessary_ at all but bring an amount of fun to the world. This feels to me like one of those. Not convinced it could even recoup development cost, but I’d be happy to be surprised. There’s certainly a niche for well off Brits (and EU folks) living in 120V land hankering for a fast cuppa.
The reality of product development and manufacturing is that economies of scale affect prices such that low sales quantities (i.e. a "niche product") generally means extremely high prices. Also, the BOM cost alone is probably going to be high, because of the huge batteries needed (with high current ability) and the power electronics involved. Then when you consider the safety ratings and certifications needed (since this is something that could easily start a fire with the power levels involved), I don't see how it could be sold at any kind of reasonable price unless there's a really big underserved market.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
I'm supportive of the original idea because I think it's fun and cool. I agree with everything you've said, but we're talking a bit at cross angles. You're looking at it from what it would take for this to be a successful, competitive, and profitable consumer product. I'm looking at if it is technically feasible and can be made for non-absurd amounts of money. Our threshold of non-absurd may also differ, but given there are some people will pay $20k+ for an espresso machine, there are likely some who would pay several hundred dollars for a tea kettle.
Sure, it's technically feasible, but I'm questioning if it's financially viable at all. Being fun and cool isn't all that great when you end up with a product that just has some prototypes and a bunch of hype, but then the company goes bankrupt before it goes anywhere. There are some examples of things like $20k espresso machines that were successful, but I think they're rare.
Been working on our startup laudspeaker (an alternative to firebase cloud messaging) [1] as well as trying to write more! I like science fiction thrillers similar to what michael crichton used to write and have been working on a story called Panopticon around encryption, spycraft, and three letter agencies [2]
I am building a digital replacement of all universities in the world with full courses across any subject, in any language, tailored to your individual learning style all.
I'm building https://exoroad.com to help people find US places that are a better match for them to move to. Like compare stats on SF vs. NYC or find the warm places with good schools and low crime.
I'm developing an implementation of what I call Hydra – Multi-Head Prediction Embeddings [1], which I believe represents the next evolution in transformer architectures.
Updating some of my negative core beliefs. Years of Buddhist meditation only got me so far. But two months of this new technique, and I finally see a path to being able to program my emotional self like I program a computer. Here's how it works.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
Yes. Claude tells me it's a novel technique. It also tells me it's a dangerous idea to focus on negatives. But negatives are a more visceral feeling and have more weight in the training. The technique is working for me.
Does that mean you actually know that you're a good manager but can't shake off the feeling that you're not? And this technique is a way to achieve that?
well I know that I need to stop feeling like I'm bad at it. We all tell ourselves in so many different ways that we're not enough. This is a technique for training those beliefs away.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I'm building a custom NC manufacturing robot from scratch.
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
No, its neither a CNC mill nor a lathe nor a robot arm. It's a specialised machine that automates one production step. But it needs to react to variations in the input work pieces, which is why it needs to be computer-controlled.
3D printer/laser engraver electronics are great for lots of things actually. You get
A (at least) 3-axis motion control system with G-code processor
Spindle controller (usually)
Limit switch input
A nice graphical display
(Sometimes) Wi-Fi or BLE
Arduino framework
All for around $50.
I was exploring the use of one for an open-source infusion pump controller. However, it turned out to be too bulky, but it would probably have been fine otherwise. Even after all these years, I was blown away by the insane amount of capability that I could buy for $50.
1,187 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 440 ms ] threadIterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
For what you're supposed to do, you're meant to drag the points or curves in the hue/saturation/lightness columns to customize the colors swatches to create your own custom palette. The mockup will update as you make changes and warn you if there's any accessibility contrast issues. You can click elements on the mockup to select colors to edit and check their color contrast.
Does that help at all? Any more hints on what part wasn't obvious and what would make it more obvious? I could hide the color selector by default maybe? Add better labels or hints?
Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)
Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
> Ask HN: What are you exploring?
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's to...
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
Another option would be to go the whole hog and explicitly reference side projects in the title, or at least in whatever will become the instructions at the top of the regular thread.
Whatever the line is, it's still gelatinous. We want to figure it out in a way that optimizes the thread for interestingness, which means avoiding repetition and prioritizing the long tail of projects that probably wouldn't get discussed in other contexts on HN.
Isn't this what everyone is working on?
Though games for sale seem to be treading the line of the "no self-promotion" guideline. It's not coming out anytime soon and I have a very unconventional pipeline for developing it, so I think it'll be worth sharing the tech and process of that along the way.
The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.
https://github.com/olzhasar/mess
1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com
How do you know something is AI content?
It is statistically similar to human content.
> each human can only have one account
Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
Nope. All I need is a passport :)
> How do you know something is AI content?
I won't. But I will certainly ban anyone who is found to definitively be sharing AI content.
I can't explain why, but that makes me extremely uneasy. I won't even give Telegram my phone number. I can only imagine the things a nefarious actor could do with a copy of my passport.
Sure, that may make you uneasy as well, but I hope being transparent about what gets stored and how will ease that uneasiness.
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
unfortunately I can't share the code, because our company disallowed it due to conflict of interest.
I have some opinions about ux/ui. I don't understand the graph of obsidian. It's very chaotic. I think the essence of visualization should be simplifying or distilling information, not making things fancy but complex.
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
Video on what I'm doing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiuS1oHnKw
Picture of my home lab - https://x.com/koeng101/status/1844150979484319842
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p
Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
Also, I second what Dig1t said. I would gladly get involved and volunteer my time and skills, just to get my foot in the door. Would contributing to dnadesign be a good place to start?
some sets of problems I have right now (on the hardware / software side):
Hardware: It'd be great to have an open source plate gripper. I wrote a little bit about the general problem of transferring here - https://keonigandall.com/posts/transfer_problem.html . I have a uarm lite6, but wanted to investigate building an arctos robotic arm to move plates between machines. Just need the gripper! This is something I cannot do myself - I have software skills, and can build things with my hands, but have zero skills on designing new hardware.
Software: A lot more here, but depends on interests. I have some general life-improvements I'm looking at doing, but also some wild ideas that need prototyping
[1] https://www.sideman.com/ronald-fisher-and-ellen-leonida-achi...
110 volt plug, 220 volt power.
(You could use the same concept for lots of other appliances too)
It spends ~33% of its battery on one cup.
It sort of works if you bring pre-heated water in a thermo.
Heating water with conventional batteries is a terrible idea.
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
This is really a solution in search of a problem.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabgpt-ask-chatgpt-...
[1] https://laudspeaker.com/ , https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381009719_Hydra_Enh...
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
I started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
Launching next month @ https://daemonstack.com/
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
I'm curious what you mean by a custom NC manufacturing robot? A CNC mill?
A (at least) 3-axis motion control system with G-code processor
Spindle controller (usually)
Limit switch input
A nice graphical display
(Sometimes) Wi-Fi or BLE
Arduino framework
All for around $50.
I was exploring the use of one for an open-source infusion pump controller. However, it turned out to be too bulky, but it would probably have been fine otherwise. Even after all these years, I was blown away by the insane amount of capability that I could buy for $50.
Before anyone else asks: https://github.com/makerbase-mks/MKS-DLC32
Maintain your basement and its waterproofing kids! Otherwise the next owner will hate you.