What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”
I didn’t claim it violated them either. I just thought having a curious story was a good enough value for this post to exist. I don’t think it needs code or a product.. in fact .. I wish more people did this kind of posts.. and just encourage people to do stuff for the sake of it .. be it a notification system for your friends … or just a story about friendship.
Also from the guidelines, HN is not primarily for (self) promo. This isn’t a Show HN, though, so it’s not necessary for us to have something we can hold and play with. Look with your eyes and enjoy OP’s thing vicariously.
In the vibe code era, is it gauche to ask for code?
Considering that OP hasn’t made any other posts or comments in any other threads, it’s fair to assume that they are like 90% of users who don’t post or comment, but they did in this thread about their stuff, so it is sort of a legitimate criticism.
I don't get it. What in the post did you find so novel that you want a full solution based on that? It's just a notification service which you can whip up in half an hour with any messaging service. It would probably take 10 minutes to do it using telegram. 30 if you need to create a brand new bot.
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
This was a fun read. Being experienced in various methods of self hosting, it was cool to learn of coolify. Seeing more people get into self hosting always makes me happy.
i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great.
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk
Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew.
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
This reminds me a lot of the days when we would just hang in ventrillo and teamspeak to just hang out even when not playing games. Especially around the time when communities gathered around dedicated servers were still a thing. Miss those days :(
I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)
Interesting. But in my experience, the Australian need for daily social interaction with a group of peers - preferably including some sort of large alcoholic beverage - is quite a bit above average. Not sure how a group of Americans would respond.
"Scheduling" can become a four-letter word when it comes to adults organizing for game nights. In many groups game night rarely seems to rise to the formality of scheduling sports with organized practice/play sessions.
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
If folks don't want to understandably install the discord app perhaps notifications could be sent through something like ntfy. Like create a dedicated channel for notifications for this and have the interested people subscribe to it. Can't say for sure if the discord.py library will allow for something like this but I think it should be possible.
Reminds me of our Teamspeak Server, that we have already running for over 2 decades. Not only for playing games but more for just come online and hang out, quietly sitting next to each other, "lurking". We do this almost every evening, someone is always there. Probably couldn't live without it T.T.
I had the idea of making a website where anyone of a group of friends can post their evening plans - go to trivia, play tennis, etc - and others would be able to sign up to join.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
I always try to solve problems by using what people already have, so I wonder if having another group on Signal, where only “I'm playing!” messages would be allowed, couldn't fix the issue…?
Please, fix the contrast of the clicked links and your background. The discord.py link is unreadable. Same with supabase and coolify. Those I'm sure I haven't visited.
This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!
I tried that a long time ago with teamspeak, and then discord, but my friends are not big users of these tools and so it didnt work. Discords do too much. If whatsapp could do this it could work
I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
69 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 85.2 ms ] threadLike you made this thing only for yourself and there’s no way for me to obtain it, paid or not.
There’s no real tutorial content on how I can do it myself.
So what value is the audience getting out of this article?
I realize I’m not owed anything but I hope you see what I mean here.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”
I think this satisfies my intelectual curiosity.
In the vibe code era, is it gauche to ask for code?
Considering that OP hasn’t made any other posts or comments in any other threads, it’s fair to assume that they are like 90% of users who don’t post or comment, but they did in this thread about their stuff, so it is sort of a legitimate criticism.
getting idea that they can replicate or confirmation that such idea worked for someone
This is something that Claude will get right in a single prompt. It's the idea that's valuable, as well as the experience report.
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.