It's been ~one year since the first lockdowns started. What are you working on now?
I'll start: I'm building PriceUnlock, a tool that will help you find the best pricing for your SaaS product. I'll post more in the comments so as to not hijack the post's description!
But the gist of it is:
* We're aiming to make it easier and less risky to try charging more/less
* Aiming to help you stop leaving money on the table (or take too much money from the table?) by enabling you to easily charge different prices in higher/lower-income countries — like Apple, Netflix, etc. do
* Aiming to make A/B testing of prices headache-free
I'm still building PriceUnlock and revealing more bit by bit! Curious to hear your story about your SaaS pricing and how you got there — and whether you ever got to 100% confidence that the prices you set were "right"?
That aside, would love to hear what others are working on now to see if my feedback can be helpful!
Interesting, I think there's a lot we could improve in the way we do things. You're talking about an automatic pricing tool that learns the market through time and region and automatically seeks optimal price points?... Some kind of drop in library tool a few lines of code thing would be awesome! Also if you're making me more money, I'd be willing to share a percentage with you considering I may not have had that money otherwise.
Not really automatic price-setting, at least not by default! I would personally like to have control over the knobs in my product.
It would give you a dashboard where
A) You would be able to set the prices manually (with suggestions, of course, and with taking into account things like extra Stripe fees, rounded estimations so you don't wound up with £28.837 in the UK).
You'd set them manually based on country, so you won't leave money on the table by not charging less in India, for instance.
I'm always mentioning India because Apple is the widest example that comes to mind: Apple one is £15 and £25 in the UK, whilst $1.5 and $3 in India
B) Run tests that you set manually on prices. $19 vs $29 — see, with metrics, which one brings your company more revenue. Or perhaps same revenue, but more users, so more word of mouth — who knows what the test will show?
You'd be able to either schedule (e.g. $19 for week 1, $29 for week 2) or run tests at the same time (show 50% of ppl $19 , show 50% of ppl $29 // OR show ppl in the Uk $19, show ppl in the US $29)
RE: your last comment — the best part would be that it'd be a flat fee per month, no percentages! So every extra cash that you receive from ppl on top of the flat fee is yours to keep for... well for as long as your "LT" in LTV!
So, essentially, you're building an A/B testing tool specifically for pricing?
Thea complexity you've alluded to in your various descriptions start to get really hairy once you scratch the surface, for example:
You mentioned trading off lower prices for more users. Whether the tradeoff is worth it depends not just on the difference in income, but on the marginal cost of serving another user (which itself may be variable).
You mentioned more users leading to more WOM. That is a huge assumption, you have to actually measure your viral coefficient (which might actually change with different prices) to know whether that hypothetical WOM actually leads to more users.
You may need to optimize for cash flow instead of just income. As one example, you could try a higher monthly price combined with a larger discount (two months free instead of one) for paying up front for a year. That may lower the total number of signups but a greater % pay for a year, improving your cashflow (and with fewer signups, you may have better profit margins on a similar income).
You can add an additional expensive plan to act as an 'anchor' that no-one ever picks but makes the regular plan seem like a better deal.
There are so many ways to adjust pricing, and every part of your conversion funnel (and business model) may be affected, sometimes with counterintuitive results. Figuring out what some change to your pricing plans is really doing for (or to) your business can be really hard. Instrumenting your funnel and business model so you can actually see what a pricing change would really do to the businesses finances over time would be extremely useful.
Create sharable links with different images, so you can share the same article multiple times, e.g. on twitter keeping your feed nice and clean.
For those interested in the details, it renders an html page with custom metatags and immediately redirects to the target. Redirect happens in js, so crawlers actually display our metatags vs the target ones. It's just a hack I've tested a while ago, a couple marketer friends liked it and so I decided to make it into a micro SaaS.
If you want to try it out, I recommend to have a blog post handy. (also, credit card are disabled, but I like to keep the landing page "final".)
Ohh, kinda like Seth Godin's blog! If you share any of his blog posts, there's a rotation of pics that come up in Twitter's preview. Did I get it right?
Thanks - do you mean increasing the price or blocking signup with credit card? The first I can do. :) The second it's not worth my time to handle the complaints, especially if I post it on HN to ask for feedback.
For Seth Godin's blog, it seems he's periodically rotating the image tag at his blog level. All the post get the same image for a certain amount of time.
With MultiPreview you set the images you want. But the time rotation could be a nice feature, I'll add it to the list! Thanks again!
This tool displays you timestamped alerts (nudity, sex, violence or gore). So if you plan to watch a film with your child, your parents or other conservative relatives - you know when the danger scenes are going to hit you.
Since I watched lots of films during the lockdown, I thought this would be a good use of time.
I have a minor, but chronic medical condition I am trying to get in check, and I just wanted something incredibly simple to identify good and bad days. I was inspired by "year in pixels" calendars.
And I took the opportunity to try out Userbase[0] and build something with a secure backend and no tracking, considering the potentially sensitive nature of it.
No plans for monetization at the moment. I could see adding more features such as tracking multiple data points, stats, correlations, notes, etc., and creating a premium version. I would need more users and feedback.
Agreed! I've added a couple screenshoots of the main views within the app. I know more can be done around this, but hopefully this is a good start. Thanks for the feedback!
I've always found various solutions that use git for sharing configuration files cumbersome. I set out to make my own simple version control system, and a lightweight web application where I can browse and edit them remotely. The main idea is that paths are aliased to simple names, so I can say `dotfile pull i3` and it will install https://dotfilehub.com/knoebber/i3 to ~/.config/i3/config
Overall the project is stable and I use it daily for all sorts of miscellaneous files.
Would love to comment with feedback but I'm not techincal enough to use it! Sounds like a time-saver though. Do you have any plan with Dotfilehub? Sell it as a product, keep it free, accept donations if it becomes widely used...?
My plan is to find some users for it, but I'm not sure the best way to get it out there.
I don't think I'd ever want to accept donations or sell it. It should always be pretty cheap to host unless it blows up, which I kind of doubt. But who knows!
HTTPS://PDAP.IO a nonprofit with the goal of scraping and making accessible county level police data. With this data aggregated and made available, policing the police will be more possible.
I'm building https://pygma.app, a tool to turn Figma files into real websites. Perhaps not quite a side project as I've been spending half of the week on it. Should be launching this week.
You have to use the auto layout feature within Figma to have a consistent output for now (I intend on relaxing this requirement, but auto layout makes things much easier). But you don't need to do anything external to Figma. There's a plugin (currently in review) and you will be able to manage everything from there.
Will come back to this post to give you feedback later.
Hey, sorry I just realised I forgot to come back to this, here's some feedback:
I think the landing page is really well done - that kind of format can be bad if the content isn't well written but each sentence made me want to read the next so I think you've pulled it off. I do think some visuals to reinforce your message might help (e.g. a graph of willingness to pay vs location, etc.).
My understanding of this is that it's going to sit amongst your pricing code and run experiments to change the price dynamically and return the best result after some time - is that correct? If so, I do wonder why no one has pulled this off particularly well as a SaaS before? (or have they?). I believe that Profitwell for example makes their revenue from consulting.
The other thing is that if my understanding above is correct, what stops the user from just cancelling once you've optimised their pricing and you lose capturing a lot of the value you've created for them (again, you revenue model may be completely different, I don't know).
I would also question whether this kind of thing isn't ultimately solved by the old "talk to you users" thing and understanding what they would pay from that strategy rather than software (at least with purchasing power parity though software + independent research does seem more likely to work since it's hard to talk to people from all over the world).
Ultimately this is the kind of thing I would give a try once I have some moderate amount of revenue and I feel that I've at least figured out who my customers are and can then optimise from there.
Pretty cool anyway, hope it succeeds and I'm in a position to try it out in a few months.
Cool. I've fiddled with A-Frame and I've seen supermedium before. cool stuff.
Why do you focus on couples though? I love the concept of partnering together but I don't think you should limit your audience.
I'm just starting with a clear niche and solving my own problems. Where many of my friends and myself are in bilingual relationships that have been trying to learn our partner's languages.
In the US, 15% of new marriages are multi-ethnic, so that's pretty large already. I think people are surprised how common it is. And it easily pique's people's interests who are in the situation versus another generic language learning platform.
If the project goes well, it can expand and branch out (e.g., adding friends/family, connecting to other peers, finding strangers to learn with). Right now, it works very well as a language learning tool, even without a partner.
I like the idea of learning a language with a spouse or partner, how about the usecase where neither person is a native speaker of the language being learned?
Yeah! I actually do have some users learning Japanese together with a platonic friend with the app. It seems to work well. The use case for learning languages with friends and other family is wide open, just taking the baby steps!
Like most people do I seem to start a million and finish none. I have been having trouble tracking my options trading cost basis lately and am thinking about writing something for that. I want to integration Plaid, but the version that supports Brokerage accounts starts at $500/mo :|.
I completely identify with this. it's about bad time management or whatever, no tool can fix this - it's about education. well organized people use excel just fine to track whatever, and also some artists don't track anything and do amazing. so it also depends on your purpose.
this is something I think about a lot. I think this affects some people more than other, not sure if this is ADHD, ADD or whatever but it is a huge problem even more so the information age.
A Rust- and WebAssembly-based simulation product that helps design, communicate, and analyze systems of software tooling. It’s a fun and interesting side project, which should be finished pretty soon.
Alright, so what you have here is pretty innovative. The problem for me was that it just took way too long for me to figure out what it is you did.
You might be spending a bit too much time on the problem here. It may be worth spending a bit more on the solution and making that clearer.
Right now it seems that its hidden within the modal underneath the copy. It should be much higher and not within a modal.
I would also try to say more with less with the problem. Again, it felt like it took a little too long to get to the point (and the point you're making is a pretty good one I might add!).
I find that with people who are more on the 'founder' end of the customer spectrum, particularly those who are tech focused, too much 'copy' and 'slow salesmanship' can be a negative. We tend to err on the side of 'just tell me and I'll figure out if its valuable' if that makes any sense.
FYI - the landing page tells me nothing about what it is you're selling, and "Why PlanFlow" leads to "Access Denied". I don't want to give away my email if I've no idea what it is I'm signing up for.
Plus some bugs you might want to be aware of - the "Coming Soon" floating labels are pretty off-centre on the links, and the hamburger menu when the browser is in portrait is nearly unusable and splits the "Sign Up - Free" button in half. This is on Safari on a Mac.
Thanks man. Yes, we've had some issues on Safari for a while now (seems like its the new Internet Explorer :)). I'll take a look at this.
The site in general is in 'under construction' mode right now, so rest assured these issues will all be resolved by launch. We're just dedicating all of our energy towards the first version right now, so have not polished everything.
I'm working on a system hand off nodejs workloads over a serial port to another machine running some host software.
My intent is to easily write Internet-connected software for old machines where a host machine is doing all of the heavy lifting. I have been messing with 68k Macintosh systems first. The code is very much a work in progress that I am actively chipping away at, and not in a usable state just yet. I write a lot of nodejs professionally but haven't used C since college so its been a fun project.
Still WIP, no live demo at the moment, but the screenshots that you see on the dev-portal repo are already what you get :)
The design reference that you link is how I want it to be, I spent quite some time focusing on the look and feel with Figma, and I'm really happy about the results, I just need to do the 90% of the work now :D
Happy to hear that Welder seems meaningful for you. You should definitely give it a try.
Btw thanks for letting me know what convinced you, we are actually in the process of updating the LP and this is valuable feedback.
So when covid thing happened we started on a few side projects as we though it's a great opportunity to build something that will help people in current situation.
We created MVP of app for therapists to do remote sessions, system for creative people to share their thoughts, Slack bot for devs to streamline their workflow and Welder.
Welder took of the most in our validation phase.
We decide to jump full time into it straight away as the demand was big. Few months in we already had paying customers, but the growth was not as fast as we needed.
We started thinking about VC funding, but finally it didn't feel right, we loved the product, but not as much. We didn't feel like it's the next unicorn. We would be lying to the VCs and we didn't want to.
So after 8 months we decided to put it back on side track as we had two options
1) VC capital and boost the generalistic tool as hell > Nope
2) Finding a niche, stick with it, understand it and deliver solution that is different enough from other generalistic competitors who raised (we didn't love it enough and we didn't feel big enough differentiator is there).
I am building Savory to save my open tabs and bookmarks for later. It lets you add tags to organize and quickly find the link when you need it. It is similar to other bookmark managers like pinboard and delicious (rip).
I have a document for myself where I note down what I believe to be future industries — trying to time the market. In the same way you might've timed the market in the early part of the previous decade by betting on remote working becoming a pretty viable option (hindsight is 20/20 tho!)
Self-hosted for privacy reasons, to me, is like a bomb waiting to explode. Just like covid accelerated our habits around healthcare (Perhaps future generations will look down on those who don't wear a mask when one catches a cold, the same way we look down on those who don't wash their hands after using the toilet... but in the 17th century that wasn't a thing), I believe mass privacy-awareness will come with a major leak/event.
Looking forward to Apr 1st (if the beta is launched there and it won't be just April Fools' lol!
Easy self-hosting is great for privacy and a lot fun, finding it makes the web/net/computers exciting like it was when computers and the net were new. It does feel like a lot of things are coming together where self-hosting solutions may boom.
Something like this is what I've been looking for for a while now! Are you going to offer Miniflux as part of your repertoire? I have lots of feeds, but I'm assuming you're going to charge something.
A Csv editor/viewer in Rust using druid. Very early stage, but the goal is to open large files (1 GB and over) easily and have some good filtering / sorting options.
Excel stops at a certain amount of rows, LibreOffice is ok but slow and other editors I looked are not cross platform
I know you can just import a Csv into a sql DB but it can be finicky it can take some time to map the columns, filter out invalid data etc. This can and should be all be automated
I work at a large financial company and every day we have a ansible job to get CSV file that's >1GB and move it to our shared drive. It's very idiot way of moving files but there are tons of companies still using this approach.
Then someone somewhere in India needs to make sure the job ran successfully by attempting to open that CSV file and doing a smoke testing.
I have been working for a few years now on Exomind[1], a personal knowledge management tool that takes the form of a unified inbox in which you can have your emails, tasks, notes and bookmarks organized into collections. I have an iOS and a web/electron client at the moment, and a simple Chrome & Safari extension for bookmarking. I plan to eventually add files (blobs), definitions and support extensibility via WASM applications.
Its backend (Exocore[2]) is built on top of a personal / private blockchain and is made from the ground up to be hosted in a semi-decentralized fashion on your own personal devices (your computer, raspberry pi, a cloud instance, etc.). It is written in Rust and has iOS, C and Web (WASM) clients.
Last fall, during covid-19, I started working on an app to use my iPhone as a webcam for my Mac. I had some interest in it, so I recently released it publicly last month.
There are similar apps out there, but to my knowledge my app is the only one that is both 100% free and supports 1080p @ 30 FPS.
I love you for this. I was pulling my hair out trying to hack something together using the crappy apps out there for it. Can’t believe it’s not a native feature. Excited to try this and send it to some friends facing similar issues!
Yes. Well I was wondering how hard it would be to support other platforms than Mac. Had it used a standard protocol it could have been possible to plug and play a different virtual webcam provider.
I'm working on designing and implementing a new programming language right now. Most of my work is for the web platform (be it frontend or backend) so this is a nice break. One of the more "back to CS fundamentals" projects I've done in a while.
Personally, my go-to side project is to build a MUD (an online text-based multiplayer RPG, totally free. To play around with a popular one, type this in your terminal: telnet avatar.outland.org 3000. No affiliation with Avatar, but it's my favorite one to play.) There are some open-source MUD libraries written in C, C++, and other languages that might be a good reference. No web interface required!
I am pretty sure you don't really mean 'anything'. If I am wrong about that, there are plenty of ways to make money that are legal but distasteful to most folks that you can pursue.
I came across that app a little while ago - it definitely inspired my current side project! https://github.com/SaahilClaypool/SearchStory which is a similar locally-hosted web app with a Lucene search index
I'm working on a discussion tool with different modes (real-time, async, docs). Started out as an internal tool for remote writing culture, but now serving small communities — https://demo.gardens.to
I've been tinkering with decentralized communication protocols lately and made me think about the XMPP ecosystem (also about ActivityPub integrations with it), so I've started these two projects:
Software Development Job Search with metadata to allow developers to filter jobs by any facet that Software Developers could want:
- Interview Style
- Open Seating vs. anything better.
- Pay Rate
- Work Hours Expectation
- Automated Productivity Monitoring/Surveillance
Of course hiring managers would be reluctant to divulge so much; I'm currently working to attract enough (free!) Software Developer/Job Seeker profiles that hiring managers will be more or less compelled to post on the site.
A casual "game" that lets you organize information (text, pictures, video, webpages) within a 3D building, allowing you to browse and jump in/out of different contexts easily.
Oh wow I love it! Love the simplicity of installation — it's definitely a trend that's going up lately, but I'm surprised to see that, since Stripe made it mainstream back in the previous decade, it's... not very very common to have products that are installable with a code embed
1) Can you talk a bit more (to a non-technical person) about how the code embed works
2) As a suggestion, I think you'd do well in no/low-code communities or products. Webflow is a tool I use so I believe it'd be a success there, since the average Webflow user doesn't know how to code advanced stuff, but they know Webflow has a 'code embed' where they can slap a few lines (i.e. Fastcomments' snippet) and stuff works
Low-code communities/products makes up a good portion of our existing userbase indeed (Wordpress, Webflow, the like). Webflow, Zendesk, Shopify, Salesforce plugins are planned. We currently have an awesome WP plugin.
The other half of our customers are using tools like Gatsby.
Webflow - yes, that's the plan! Spending lots of time on documentation currently.
I looked at price unlock. I saw you start with providing an email and backed out, didn't understand what kind of information I'd have to provide or get at first glance. Good idea though.
I am working on FINT, a gRPC test client that combines functional testing and performance testing in a single application. Been doing this for over a year and the software now has an extensive list of features.
Most recently I built https://www.timelineify.com/ - Spotify messes with the order of albums & singles, making it difficult to hear an artist's works in the order they were released. Timelineify generates a chronological playlist of an artist's entire discography with a few clicks!
I was interested in playing around with the Spotify API and this was a narrowly-scoped problem I personally had and could solve in a single weekend. I'm happy with the results, about 500 users have logged in and created a playlist.
I'm building a cryptocurrency automated trading platform and use it for myself. I feel it's a good side project to learn Rust and quantitative trading.
I’ve been working on a space telescope constellation. No website or anything yet since marketing is the least of my concerns, there’s so much hardware stuff to work out the feasibility of first. It’s entirely COTS and I’m building the software stack on top of KubOS and Major Tom https://www.kubos.com, and using RPi and Pine64 hardware. LimeSDR hardware and getting the local jurisdiction RF permits to begin work on the communications stack are the next major step after I finish getting the OS built for the various boards it will need to run on.
I’ll keep an eye on the the thread, feel free to ask me any questions. (Or email me, email is in my profile)
I’m a bit late here, but I’m building AsyncGo (https://asyncgo.com) to be an async communication tool, replacing (Zoom) meetings and Slack for situations where collaboration doesn’t have to be real-time, which is quite a lot of the time.
I think the world is better when you give people more flexibility about when and from where the can collaborate with each other - I saw it in action at GitLab when I was working there - and I hope this makes a difference for people.
The model is implemented in PyMC3 and runs daily as a batch job. The model state and predictions are stored in DynamoDB.
Early each morning this batch job loads the previous day's posterior as priors, fetches the results for the games played that day, and then fits the Bayesian network to the game results to get new posteriors. I make predictions with these posteriors and then write all the results back to DynamoDB.
The frontend is essentially D3, Django, and Zappa.
Recently launched https://nocommandline.com, a GUI (graphical user interface) for Google App Engine. Did a Show HN last week and I'm currently working on fixing bugs identified from that show HN.
Getting it out there (the Show HN) got me some very important feedback and identified some issues which I'm fixing right now.
I thought I'd see if I could build an 8mm film scanner using stuff you can buy at the dollarstore to leverage your smartphone. So kinda the google cardboard of film scanners.
I've been working on a viewer for Github's Awesome lists to make them more useable. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm close.
With most of the lists being text based, it was hard to know if the repo it linked to was still being maintained and popular enough to safely use in personal projects.
Now anyone that uses my project can easily visualize all of the repos and query them to find projects that are still actively maintained.
Working on a person focused task list/note taking app for me to be less forgetful.. Personal itch, but though others might like it. https://150people.app
I'm interested, but without your text here I'd have no idea this was a task list/note taking app. There's not a single mention of that on the site, if I were discovering this for the first time I'd think it was a "mindful" exclusive social media site.
I get that. Currently trying to nail down the messaging and this landing was my first pass at getting _something_ up. This week I'm going to rework the site to make it more clear what the app is.
I am in the process of building a(nother) recipe website. My goal was to minimize the choice paralysis that people face when they seen a million of recipes at once. I also wanted to try to keep the recipe fetching performant so I built my own index :).
I just finished the functional pieces. Right now, the site is a bit rough in terms of styling but I am tackling that next along with UX.
I'm designing a data format that takes the interoperability and readability pain out of sending data between systems.
With current solutions, you either have a text format with limited data types and have to encode things into strings (hoping the other side will understand how to convert them), or you use a binary format that's painful to read and use. My solution is a twin binary AND text format with seamless 1:1 conversion between them, and support for all common data types.
* No more coercing everything into potentially incompatible strings.
* No more interoperability issues - all common types are supported natively.
* No more having to choose between efficiency (binary) and readability (text).
I'm still finishing off the reference implementation and there will probably be some more tweaks here and there on the spec, but here's what it is currently: https://concise-encoding.org
Gamefactory: https://gamefactory.tech
A job search platform focusing on the video game industry.
It has job ads and company profiles for you to browse.
Just chiming in to say I love bearblog, it's a fantastic platform! I'd be interested to know how you monetise it, or if it's unmonetised, then how you plan on doing so in the future if the platform grows past a hobby project.
P.S. I understand the "Made with Bear" in the footer is part of the growth strategy and the "price" (albeit a tiny price) to pay for getting your blog hosted, is there option (paid or otherwise) to remove this, say if I wanted to host on my own domain?
A daily newsletter with one piece of art in it, each day. The goal is to brighten your inbox up just a little bit. Also, I feature artists from around the world you would normally never see.
With a friend I build Kameleont.me ( https://kameleont.me/ ) - A link "shortener" where the url redirects to diffrent targets based on device or OS.
On my own I build SOGDb ( https://sogdb.com/ ) - An open database for all available Stadia games with filtering options for local/online multiplayer support and such.
It aims at being a fully featured server app to share screenshots, and will be having a desktop and android client. The far-far end goal is to have something as good as ShareX but self-hosted and cross platform. The client will feature a toolbox as the one found in ShareX which I really love but with the added benefit of allowing plugins to enrich it
Been on it for half a year more or less, as of today, I've got the API working and a cli client that works well in conjunction with maim, and I'm focusing on the web ui
https://pancakes.cloud - A minimal recipe web app which stores all recipes in simple plaintext format and lets you share your recipes with the community. All this, but without all the fluff, ads, stories and infinite scrolling before you get to what you actually want.
I've been trying to think through something called Story-So-Far which is supposed to be an IDE plugin which logs user keystrokes with timestamps and saves it to a local file .ssf . This file should be replay-able in the IDE which essentially means other developers can literally see how the software was made by the original author. This aims to replace tutorials and also increase open source contributions once you see for yourself how the software was written. I know there are security risks involved. But one problem at a time. Haven't started on the actual implementation yet.
I've been investing for a short while and found no real tools to track my progress to any sort of FI. Before I would use an Excel sheet to keep track of my portfolio value and my net worth, but tracking investments manually was a bit tedious which is why I've started writing a small tool / website to track them for me.
At the moment there's no way for me to integrate with brokers and get up-to-date portfolios, but since I am a mostly passive investor it only takes me a few minutes a week to update my positions.
I'd appreciate any honest feedback and tips as I haven't had much success in finding anyone besides myself who'd want to use this.
Please change your password policy. Correctly used long dictionary word-based passwords[1] are no worse than mumbo jumbo alphanumeric 3 symbol and 5 non repeating emojis requirement.
These are, somehow, curated news extracting relevant trends and some edge cases. I see it as a way of using my procrastination positively so I don't really care how popular will it be. I always wanted to read something like this but couldn't find it elsewhere. It may be useful to others also.
Something that displays your personal history on a timeline: photos, geolocation, social media, searches, browsing history, transactions, chats etc.
My goal was to have a repository of my personal data that isn't controlled by a third party. I can use it as a much more contextual diary, and as a way to locate things in time (e.g. purchases, motorcycle maintenance). It's both interesting and useful.
It's inspired by my travel diaries, Google History, my photo stream, and the notebook that sits on my desk.
It's live since a while, but I'm still working on adding new sources of data.
Theres also https://github.com/nicbou/homeserver, my personal streaming service. It's in production since a few years. Recently, I added a watch party mode (WebSockets!) and updated the reencoding logic to waste less disk space.
- Permanent Archives (Private WYSIWYG and archive.org)
- Full text search on browsing history
- Save all your open tabs in 1 click
- Chrome (and family), Firefox extensions
- Reader Mode
- Fully open source codebase BSD licensed
- SaaS & Self-hostable
- And more...
Use coupon code HN to get 50% off your subscription.
I used to keep running into issues where I remember reading something somewhere on the internet but would forget where I read it.
I have tabs open for documentation, github, PM tools, cloud storage, AWS, localhost, etc.
It becomes a mess, especially when working on multiple projects, and adds cognitive load.
I've used many bookmarking services. Pinboard can save tabs but the full text search doesn't support SPA sites and the product has stopped evolving. Raindrop is beautiful, but it can't save the browsing history or tabs. The permanent copy they both save is what their server sees, not what I see in my browser.
I wanted a swiss-army knife of bookmarking tools that does it all so I can keep everything in one place, and that's what I've made.
PS: I built this around 5 years ago to scratch my own itch and learn Flask, I'm working on finding the target audience that would pay for something like this. Can anyone help me there?
It allows you to save tweets to be your new tab page on Chrome. I mainly built this to have stuff like pet pictures and random inspirational messages every time I opened a new tab.
https://www.budgetbloom.com - Personal finance and budgeting app. It began as some Airtable tables I used to manage my own finances, then I realized I could build something a bit better to visualize the relationships between financial data. Hoping it could potentially earn me some money on the side, but either way it's become a labor of love over the last year that I can't seem to quit working on.
I'm actually just using styled components and styling everything one-off (trying to re-use components as much as possible to maintain some sense of cohesiveness). Started building a design system in Figma awhile back, but realized how much time I was spending on something that wasn't adding value and backed off.
I'm working on something similar (Airtable-based finances), though it stopped being a side-project when dozens of people started signing up and I got carried away. Very modest income still, but ramen-profitable -- I have no other source of income. Extremely satisfying to eat from the work of my own hands.
Hashtag Editor, https://rusinov.me/hashtag-editor - niche app for organizing social media hashtags. You create campaigns, add your own hashtags (no creepy APIs used), and copy result to clipboard.
It's not monetizable, but I'm playing with reinforcement learning. It's incredible to watch a computer "learn" to play super mario using just input pictures.
Neural nets in general are much less complicated than I thought they would be, at least as a practitioner.
The stack is basic. I develop on an old lenovo laptop and test for a few dozen frames(you can learn a lot without a CUDA GPU) before pushing it to a desktop with a cheap nvidia card. It uses pytorch and pyboy, and the model is just a couple Conv2d expansions and compressions before hitting a Linear layer outputting predicted reward for certain keypresses(basically). The model training is based off of deep Q learning. I'm looking at a pytorch tutorial[1] when I get stuck, but I'm trying to fumble around and try it myself as much as possible before looking at it.
I have an idea to have variable Q training propagation based on the amplitude of the reward so that bigger rewards propagate more, but I haven't got there yet.
Here is a great video on reinforcement learning[2].
Visual editor for cubical-agda code, currently I am rewriting it in haskell and integrating with emacs. New version will allow to edit code in 3 and 4 dimensions :)
https://MexicanTrain.Online - An online version of the dominoes game, MexicanTrain. I started a year ago so my family could keep playing. It's brought hundreds of people closer together, which feels great.
> qrxfil: file exfiltration across airgaps using QR codes.
I'm a little confused about the scenario here, how are you getting qrxfil onto the airgapped system, and why doesn't that method allow data egress?
For example, using ultrasonic audio as a channel allows you (once installed on the target system via a usb device) to invisibly exfil files to devices with no line of sight to the airgapped system.
Another method can steganographicly encode files into benign-seeming printed documents.
Building an integrated platform for distributed teams to source, onboard, and hire remote full-time developers from India.
Here's the link
https://outteam.nurturelabs.co/
It's a Employer On Record(EOR) service - so hiring is 100% legally compliant there no need of registering a separate legal entity or signing separate contract with each employee.
I’m building https://Interweaveapp.com a customer product feedback loop application to help startups and product managers manage the full lifecycle of feedback.
Feedback turns into insights, which turn into ideas, which turn into shipped product. Interweave helps collection of feedback (interviews, surveys, bug reports, and idea boards), helps you synthesis that, helps you prioritize work, and connects back to users when you ship something they're linked to.
Can you elaborate a bit on the 'insight' and 'idea' artifacts? What do those look like? Are they tied in any way to metrics for validation (and perhaps invalidation if something changes at some future time)?
I'm working on a project I'm calling TripMix. It lets you build travel guides for your friends. Copying my explanation from a recent thread :)
My girlfriend and I really enjoy good food and travel. We spend a lot of our time cooking, eating, and going to breweries and wineries. We have a few favorite cities near us, like Charlottesville and the surrounding wine country in Virginia, and Portland, Maine. We've been there with enough frequency that we've developed a sort of reputation as the go-to experts for those areas, and have sent a long e-mail itinerary and travel guide to our close friends probably 10 or 15 times for each place.
Sometimes our friend requesting recommendations doesn't drink alcohol, so we go through and scrub all the breweries and wineries. Sometimes they're gluten free, so all of the pizza and bagels we love get cut. After doing this several times, we realized it would be cool to have an app to do this. So that is my side project!
It will be part Canva, part Facebook Recommendations, part knowledge-base. Filterable lists, creation of itineraries, notes about each Place (Google Places/Maps integration). Export to a static site with a link you can share.
The neat thing is, as I mentioned above, it has filters. So you can tag places with "winery" or "vegetarian" or something, and when you're building your guide for your friends, you can filter on those tags really easily. You could just click the "winery" tag to instantly create a "Virginia Wine Guide".
I'm not totally sure it has broad appeal, but I'm hoping a few friends and maybe some travel bloggers get some use out of it. V2 will probably have some sort of "export to CMS" feature. V3 will hopefully be more of a social network.
This is a great idea. I personally over-optimize my travel planning. Being able to reference peer recommendations with tags would be a significant improvement over travel sites and Google searches.
Glad to hear! I agree, and almost always reach out to several other traveling friends for their recommendations whenever we go places. I envision a lot of value being delivered from sort of formalizing the FB Recommendations engine into its own social network and interface.
Feel free to drop me some feature suggestions if you have them: adamp319@gmail.com :)
I'm developing a knowledge graph for Marketing case studies and examples.
I work in the Digital Marketing field and every time I want to take a look at what other brands are doing is always a mess to find good examples.
The idea is to have everything in one central place where you can check for brands by industry and region and then learn how they are approaching a topic i.e. e-commerce for EU companies in China, social media case studies for TitTok, etc.
Still no domain registered, should be up next week or so.
Free version is doing all right. It's surprising to find what people use it for. One interesting example I found was this manager who uses it as a clock in website for their direct reports.
Paid version, not so much. I haven't done very much to promote it however.
I've really enjoyed my Pi-hole so far, so I decided to make an open-source version on the ESP32. It's not quiet finished yet, but it is very close. There are only a few small things that need to be done before I can call it stable, but the last 10% of a project is somehow always the hardest.
Pictures can be seen here: https://imgur.com/a/uwwA54Y And the repository: https://github.com/zachmorr/esper
It's a fully native MacOS app (swift, not electron/etc) built on top of the Zoom SDK that transforms meeting participants into moveable/resizable circles on your screen and offers additional power tools to get your desktop back and have more control over your meeting experience.
It's just two of us now, working as fast as we can and listening to user feedback to drive priorities on our roadmap.
It's free to use - we would love to hear feedback from anyone willing to give it a shot!
Cleave is an application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.
Started because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources. Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.
I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
Man this is neat. I've been irritated by the non-separable context of a laptop, I don't always need everything but don't want to wait 5 minutes and open and setup everything again.
I was looking for something for Ubuntu, The idea is cool. Good luck.
A tool I created to replace Excel as an application container. I’ve worked in finance for years and our apps are mostly still hosted in excel. A live javascript programming environment is a great tool to replace Excel.
I've been working in meatspace on a cabin my wife and I bought in the mountains. So far it has mostly been being handled by contractors, but I'm considering taking more of it over myself and maybe filming it or recording a podcast from there. Something creative.
I am working on firedating.me - a community of FIRE (Financial Independence/ Early Retirement) enthusiasts looking for friendships and love. All stats are public: https://firedating.me/open.
It checks your website for the kind of things that get missed when you go from dev to production or can go wrong later - expired domains and SSL certs, broken links, robot options blocking search engine crawlers, etc. Adding more checks all the time and always keen to hear suggestions.
It's a self-hosted app for digital sales and newsletters. I can upload files, sell them, send broadcast/drip emails, handle bounces/spam so far. Still a work in progress.
I made a photography site https://www.focusct.co.uk for people to upload photos in competitions and such. It was supposed to help people during lock down and get them interested in photography but it's kind of died. I made it with Drupal and coppermine gallery. I can't decide if I want to kill it or redesign and make it better. Feed back is welcome.
Whenever I wanted to share my email on forums, I was reluctant. That's when I came up with the idea for Contact.do . It can also be used on personal sites
https://www.cybersecq.com writing practice questions for various infosec certifications and posting them to the website. It aims to help visitors practice for their certifications.
Nightfox https://green-byte.net/nightfox/
It's a low level command line tool to communicate over a subnet between computers without any servers in between. It's still lacking a lot of things like encryption, IPv6, a solution to pass NATs, etc... But it's workable and works on very low specs. The exact size in memory depends on your OS but it's typically a few hundred kilos.
PhotoStructure! I had a huge mess of photos and videos after N photo cloud services had come and gone, and left me with down-sampled or metadata-wiped files, and nothing could dedupe and organize the mess, so I wrote it.
Completely self-hosted. Cross-platform. Server and desktop editions. Community-prioritized new feature development.
It is a multilanguage picture book app that runs on iOS, Android and Windows and currently contains 100+ books that are actively translated into different languages.
I'ts a safe digital environment to let your kids find enjoyment in reading or being read to from a choice of narrators.
Currently we support Dutch, English, French, German, Arabic, Dutch Sign Language. More languages comming soon.
Don't know if this is just digital stuff, but I started building acoustically sealed sound/phone booths for open concept offices... they are coming along. We will see. (https://reverearchitecture.com/#/798817030644/)
Writing - really have the feeling it helps me to make my thinking clearer + publicly sharing has the extra bonus of kicking off interesting conversations and further projects.
I'm building https://gpu.land/. It's an online provider of dirt cheap GPUs for deep learning. It's 1/3 the price of major cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, etc.
This was a project for me to learn the full stack (non coder before) and been a really exciting journey. 6 months ago I thought it would take me 2 months to build and launch:D
I have been working on a task scheduler service for a while. I realized that there are no good task schedulers as a service which is cheap as well and can handle all kinds of scheduled jobs (cron, scheduled once, delayed jobs etc)
I have a few projects that I am actively working on
1. Soopr - https://www.soopr.co
Soopr is the easiest way to add like and share buttons to your website.
2. In addition, I have been spending time building a few open-source Jekyll based projects
Cookie - https://github.com/abhinavs/cookie - is a fast and easy to deploy landing website that comes with a blog, additional pages. It uses Tailwind CSS, that makes editing it very easy.
I'll start: I'm building PriceUnlock, a tool that will help you find the best pricing for your SaaS product. I'll post more in the comments so as to not hijack the post's description!