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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#221
post #35

Nothing of any importance. Managed to screw myself up to the point of having constant generalized anxiety, so yeah, things are really working out here.

That sucks. I highly recommend the book "Anxious" which is about the neurobiology of fear and anxiety. Reading it feels like reading the owner's manual to my brain.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#222
post #217

Was going to finish some things but got hospitalised for optic neuritis (temporary, almost total loss of vision in one eye) three consequitive times (3 days each, over 3 months) before they (hopefully) stopped it. Its not MS luckily, its 'just' NMO. It's rare as hell. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket :). Saying I'm greatfull to the medical staff and the people who stayed home so that the hospital was not flooded a…

I wish you the best recovery!

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#224
I made a tool for visualizing text in 3D: https://nebulate.ai

It runs a machine learning model in your browser to convert the text into points in a high dimensional space, and then it projects those points down to 3D.

Right now you can tell it to visualize post titles or comments from any subreddit or tweets from any Twitter user. I find it especially interesting to explore the news with it since every article is naturally presented alongside other articles that are about similar topics, often giving useful context.

Only works in desktop Chrome right now unfortunately. I was hoping to make it Firefox-first, but I need an API Firefox hasn't implemented yet.

Since the model runs on your machine, the "running model" stage will be slower or faster depending on your local GPU. If you have a decent GPU, I recommend bumping up to 512 points.

Would love any feedback! Here, on Twitter (@gradientassent), or in the Discord channel linked inside.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#226
I made a deduplicating version control system for large binary file based around the Restic chunker library: https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver

I like to think that this (well, deduplicating version conrol in general, not my crufty project) will be the future of version control and we'll leave the ugliness of git-lfs behind us. For now at least it's a fun project.

Edit: There is an existing project called Boar that does the same thing, though it appears to have been abandoned and is stuck in Python 2

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#228
Browserboard (https://browserboard.com), a multiuser whiteboard. It's a crowded space (excalidraw, awwapp, miro, freehand, etc.) but I think it's pretty good! There are lots of fiddly technical details that go into smooth drawing, good performance with lots of objects, erasers that behave properly, etc.
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