101–110 of 1001 posts
Open source Chrome extension for Metrc, the primary cannabis track and trace platform in the US.
It's free to use, but I'm proud to say that a significant slice of the cannabis industry uses this tool daily when reporting their business's cannabis activity.
For a bit I had google ads on my blog: https://ja3k.com but I only made $15 in a couple months so now I just have an ad for my book on my blog posts.
I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I eventually came up with a list of ~200 cards for the game, about 4 different decks, all stored in a big-ol spreadsheet I'd been editing on my phone (as I pace to get him to sleep).
But eventually with the idea, I kind of got it as far as I could with my mind's eye, and had to start actually playtesting. That would be practically impossible for me. There just isn't the time in my life right now to set up a small board game, play through it, take notes, and iterate on the balance.
So what did I do? I took that spreadsheet, dumped it to JSON, wrote a script to convert the JSON to placeholder .pngs of each card, and then built a dummy webapp with a canvas to simulate a virtual tabletop. Yes, I could have used TTS or something similar, but I felt the inner loop of changing the stats for cards, re-exporting them, then removing them and re-adding them wouldn't scale well.
This has ended up working great! I've been able to play through my game 20+ times now, all with a sleeping baby in my arms. I don't need to worry about leaving the game out on the table (for the 2 year old to find) - it's all just saved on my laptop. I don't need to futz with re-printing cards any time I want to change things, I just edit the "database" and reload.
I finally feel happy enough with the balance to show friends and family, which I thought would be a pipe dream just 3 months ago.
It achieves very promising performance (~1m writes/s, ~5m reads/s) for u64 sized types, which will eventually be an offset into a log. The core concept here is that it's O(1) for all inserts and queries with bounded database reads. The performance characteristics are not favorable for small datasets, but very favorable for large ones. However I have to use hash digests as pseudokeys for values, which will always have the potential for collisions. To get around this, I plan to use 128b or larger (256b) hash sizes. Right now it's just u64 for simplicity.
The other is a similar concept using modified B+Trees that have subtrees for all writes to a record: https://github.com/chiefnoah/hist-prototype
This one is implemented in Python for fast iteration, as I realized I wasn't happy with how fast I could iterate with Rust. This one is, IMO, a more complete approach towards full historical query-capable systems. I'm slowly chipping away at it, though I haven't had progress lately. I spend no real money to host them, just the code, though I'm certain I've shortened the life of my NVMe drives due to writing and rewriting large files for testing.
My ultimate goal with these is to build a general purpose KV store that can query the entire state of the system at a given point in time (either timestamp, or a TX increment) for the purposes of enhancing graph databases for temporal analysis.
It's kind of ridiculous that's what it costs just to run a service that sends a daily email to its users.
The price breakdown is $20/mo for sendgrid, $15/mo for hosted postgres, and $20/mo for vercel pro so my cron job doesn't time out (pro gives upgrades you from 10 seconds of execution time to 60 seconds).
I've done a Show HN last month [1], but it didn't get any traction (well, apart from 4 upvotes!). Perhaps because I didn't really capture what the project is about. I've reached out to dang and he gave some really valuable feedback (thank you!) and encouraged me to try again, but I'm still overthinking stuff :')
I've also got an email from Rishi with Pioneer [2], saying I've got a fast track to their accelerator program. I'm still looking into that but I've tried their Tournament thing and got some nice and encouraging feedback from other founders.
Overall, I'm not sure where this project gets me but even if we don't get any revenue at all, the experience of working on a passion project full-time is really nice.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068557
[2]: https://pioneer.app/
https://wordhazard.net/ "Heads Up" but online and in multiple languages at the same time, e.g. even if an English word is up to be guessed, you can enter the equivalent word in Spanish or German, and you will get points for that, too. I created this because I like word games like that but my friend group is quite multilingual and most are not native English speakers.
IBM Research has something similar called "Guess the Word!"(https://guessthewordgame.mybluemix.net/), where you can play with an AI agent. Their paper: https://www.katygero.com/papers/2020_MentalModelsofAIAgents....
Follow us on LinkedIn if you'd like to get an update when we launch. https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/conceptionary
Still didn't give up the project, as I use it every day. So last year I decided for a big refactoring (Ant Commander Pro) and to specialize it for developers.
The beta is for free but then I'll be charging again.