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Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

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Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#181

Post by samlinnfer »

eszed wrote: post #161
samlinnfer wrote: post #23

Making a fake AirPrint printer. I have a Brother printer that has two printer trays, one manual tray (that takes variable sized paper) and a A4 tray. However, when printing from iOS, it doesn't have the full print preset dialog and it is impossible to print from the manual tray, nor is there a way to tell it I want print A6. Of course I insist being able to print A6 whenever, wherever I want with AirPrint and accept…

How did you solve that last (expected port) problem? (I've run up against that elsewhere, and couldn't get over the hump for iOS.)

You can run in a container with bridged networking so it gets its own IP from your lan.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#182

Post by bobbiechen »

A few years ago, I wrote an interactive visual decoder for flag semaphore cipher: https://bobbiec.github.io/semaphore-decoder.html

As a habitual puzzle hunter, I found it slow and tiring to decode with existing tools, so I wrote my own and still use it.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#183

Post by remipch »

jononor wrote: post #104
remipch wrote: post #44

A minimalist MP3 player for my grandmother. The whole user interface is a single physical button on her desk : - ON : indefinitely play all MP3 files randomly - OFF : stop playing The longest task was to find her favourite pieces of music from my aunts and uncles. https://github.com/remipch/radio_colette

Fantastic :D this is what personalized tech mean! Not some privacy invasive, data harvesting, adware service...

Thank you.

I had fun making this little toy project, I felt like a software artisan assembling some simple existing pieces of hardware and software.

It's a refreshing change from complex professional projects that take months to complete.

And Mamie Colette loves it too !

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#184

Post by remipch »

leemailll wrote: post #147
remipch wrote: post #44

A minimalist MP3 player for my grandmother. The whole user interface is a single physical button on her desk : - ON : indefinitely play all MP3 files randomly - OFF : stop playing The longest task was to find her favourite pieces of music from my aunts and uncles. https://github.com/remipch/radio_colette

iPod Shuffle without copy files EDIT: wait, after take a look at the repo you do remake iPod Shuffle

Yes, it's close to an iPod Shuffle but my grandmother cannot use an iPod Shuffle, it's too complicated for her with 5 (too small) buttons.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#186

Post by selmat »

I created PoC for merging similar system requirements and performing gap analysis between vendor documentation and internal company SOPs and policies.

Everything in Python flask + Azure OpenAI. I am working on moving AI part to Claude Sonet. Seems that results are bit different since GPT model has more rough approach to merging requirements and also less sensitive to finding gaps.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#187

Post by RGamma »

isoprophlex wrote: post #167

Scraping 6 million HN posts (out of a total of 40 million, 6M = some ~3 years of posts) and embedding them with openAI's text embedding models. Making these full-text and fuzzy searchable with Postgres+pgvector, using reciprocal rank fusion to merge the two rankings. Very rapid query times on a 6 year old intel NUC; a kind of hn.algolia.com search only with added semantic search, not just text search. Reducing the di…

Having this natively here would be pretty useful. There's so much good stuff that "disappears" in the barrage of submissions, that can be hard to surface via simplistic search.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#189

Post by iskandery »

petargyurov wrote: post #152
iskandery wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I've actually made something like that to help people figure out where to live in London based on the criteria they care about -- here it is https://findmyarea.co.uk/?search_type=areas Would be great to see similar tools for other cities!

This is amazing! I am curious what algorithm is behind the scenes? And how easy would it be to make this work for any city?

Thanks! It's a bit outdated now but I wrote up an explanation a while back that gives the general idea behind the scoring algorithm: https://findmyarea.co.uk/blog/how-findmyarea-works/

In principle it should be possible to do the same for any city. The hardest part is getting the data and massaging it into shape, which can be somewhat tedious. London is a fairly "easy" city for this due to the large amount of open data that's readily available from the ONS and the like.

Re: Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

#190

Post by CharlieDigital »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #150
CharlieDigital wrote: post #84

Last year, my wife and I were planning a 12 day trip and I was struggling with Google Docs moving days around while we planned our final route. Told her to give me 2 days and ended up making a small app to help us plan our trip; the first version was built over New Years weekend: https://turas.app Kept working on it and it was good enough to share to Reddit 6 days later [0]. Got a good number of users and still keep…

Nice! I personally use wanderlog and am a paying user (even though the free plan gives me everything I need), maybe you could take inspiration from their monetisation strategy?

Honestly don't know enough about their monetization strategy, but we did a user survey and -- at least the audience of users currently using Turas.app -- only a small % was interested in paying a subscription. So to make that scale, we'd have to invest heavily in marketing to get more users to make it sustainable.

Felt like it was better to just keep it free and ad-free :P

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