I am working on an experiment called UltraStrong, completing an Open Strongman Competition, and running a 50 miler Ultramarathon over a single weekend. I have done each separately but can you do both simultaneously? During the process I am keeping a journal, documenting everything, with the idea of writing a book at the end in a similar style to Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
331–340 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#332I am currently developing an open-source (MIT) database that can be directly accessed from the frontend (browser and apps) , that is distributed, and capable to deliver data in real-time. The primary goal is to provide support for any use-case that requires close proximity to users and, most importantly, it is entirely free to use and run by yourself if desired.
If you would like to view it, please visit: https://github.com/mateusfreira/nun-db
Feedback is always welcome, especially if you have a use-case in mind that you believe it may be suitable for but are unsure. I have already utilized it in many of my personal projects and for a few clients with a small number of users, but I am hopeful that it will soon be ready for larger-scale implementation. Comments here, issues on GH or emails are welcome
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#333I'm building https://www.markix.com, a transactional email service that's meant to be boring and reliable.
At this stage, I'm primarily targeting small senders that need great reputation. There are no dedicated IPs. Emails are delivered from a pool of shared IPs that have great time-to-inbox and deliverability.
In contrast to other providers, I do not plan to support click and open tracking to protect recipients privacy. I'd appreciate feedback on that though.
Always happy to chat about email in general if there are any questions.
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#334http://polymorf.me/ A Talking Avatar AI generator similar to d-id. Worked on it for 2 months but I have problems adding natural head movement to the speaker. About 100 users so far but 0 revenue. Very low traffic (like 10-20 users/day). Not sure where to go next, at moment trying to focus more on marketing and getting feedback
Have you tried just going image-to-depth map? You could render the image in 3d with shallow depth then just shift the camera a bit The main issue with moving mouths is the relative stillness, it's enough to introduce coherent motion in the user's field of vision. If anything it might give you a unique distinction vs d-id, the head movements it doesn't aren't natural at all, but it's enough to not make it feel stiff
Interesting. I guess camera movement on 3d scenes would make the video more dynamic. That will put the focus more the "video aspect" as opposed to "Avatar" aspect of the product. I might explore that feature a little bit.
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#335Currently working on a site that allows you to use your data from run/bike apps to visualize your data on a map, make it look neat, and order a print.
I have an early version of it hosted on https://ridemapper.henrygrant.dev and add features as I think of them/when I have time.
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like an awesome project but a terrible product, but in a good way. You are not hooking the user, but you are not hooking people with gameplay. However, if you can give it a nice aesthetic, this might work as a game on the desktop/mobile. Regarding Bevy, my wife and I recently started a games company recently and she did a ton of research on game engines. The verdict in Bevy was that it needs to mature a l…
:) Yeah, the "awesome project, terrible product" idea you're expressing has crossed my mind many times. It's an interesting line to try and walk to be sure. Care to share more on the research you did? I'd love to hear more. While I'm not a stranger server-side languages, the last decade of my career has been mostly building CRUD apps with JavaScript. So, I initially tried building out this simulation using React + Pi…
The whole games development has been a wild ride so far, we spent 9 months learning it without bringing out any game. We threw away a lot of prototypes though. Our background is in open source and server side stuff, so we needed to let go of a lot of concepts to be efficient.
Research-wise we did a whole lot of reading and a bunch of work building games we threw away. Here's what we found and I can share publicly:
- Unreal Engine: pain and suffering for awesome results. You must love debugging. You get source code access to help with that. Have a Rider subscription to lessen the pain of C++. (I'm not joking.) Loves to crash a LOT, but at least you get a stack trace. C++ has garbage collection here, which is neat. Did I mention to get Rider? Not web friendly though.
- Unity: works, relatively easy to get good results, lots of tutorials, but no source code access unless you fork out a lot of cash up front. Didn't crash on us.
- Godot: Free, open source, easy to start, stupidly hard to master. Needs a lot of fine tuning to make look good. Random weird bugs pop up with no stack trace. Has a custom DSL called GDScript which has some weiiiiird design decisions. (E.g. a Vector2 is not an object, but a data type.) GDExtension takes some experience to set up. I like C++ with UE a lot more.
- Phaser: It's a toy, lacks too much to do anything serious with. Love it though. Might be wrong on this one, only built one small game.
- BabylonJS: Built our website with it (see my bio), sturdy workhorse but you need to optimize your stuff a lot beforehand. Love it. Forums/community are awesome.
The ones we didn't test:
- Three.js: didn't try, but the API is apparently not very stable.
- Bevy: The community is very small, lots of parts seem to be still missing to build larger stuff. Didn't try it out in the end.
- OGRE3D: Couldn't get it to build, but it looks very robust. Would love to try again some day.
- PyGame: Good to learn the basics, but like Phaser, it seems to lack a lot to build more serious projects with it.
Keep in mind, opinions can be very subjective, it can be very hit and miss. We had fans of either comment on our YouTube videos and we have a feeling that getting into game engine discussions is similar to JS framework discussions.
One thing we learned for ourselves though, since we are trying to make money: stop wasting time. There are 20 year olds out there who release on Steam for a chance to become successful while we spent lots of months learning stuff. Technical prowess does not a good game make. It's all about the gameplay and the vibes.
Regarding Steam being a sit-down thing: both my wife and son love the Steam Deck and they often jump into a few short rounds of something. (Brotato is pretty good for that.) It is what you make of it, but the audience does seem to expect a gameplay loop that works over longer periods of time indeed
I hope this helps. ;)
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#337Vulgar computation.
The vulgus in Latin were the common folks, the non elite, hence referring to cussing ass “vulgarity,” as in “we nobles do not talk that way, that is how the common folk talk!”. And if I do my job right most professional programmers should be offended by the result? But that's a really awful thing to have as your north star.
The basic idea is that computation should be something that does not require a degree and work experience and other markers of professionalism... Computation is just an intellectual amplifier. I was shocked some 5 to 10 years ago to have gone to a guy’s “Excel Tips” meeting at the advertising firm I worked for—all the other programmers skipped—and saw a bunch of non-technical folks excitedly sitting down to learn what I rapidly realized was... programming! They were volunteering to run and sit at a programming class!!
But Excel is a shitty language, but it is also vulgar. When you go to learn it, there is no compiler step, the interpreter step is a repl of sorts, everything is being automatically printf-debugged for you by default, and helpful colorful boxes point to the data dependencies of the cell you're working on while you're working on it.
But it's also like, why isn't everything like that. If I give you a UI that is written this way, you should expect to be able to long press on a button and see the button disassemble before your very eyes, you can track the pipeline for its clicks, and if that button doesn't do what you want it to do, you just change what it does. Everybody on this planet should be able to do that, it shouldn't require ivy league ivory tower education bullshit.
So I have these prototype languages that are fundamentally graphical, and kind of amount to a sort of XSLT (of all things!) being compiled to WASM?. A bit of inspiration from hypercard here and there. And it's weird because the decision to WASM is kind of its own shit decision? Like, I wanted the ability to just text you an app that I am working on and you can run it on your phone and feel safe that I am not stealing all your secrets, was why I started compiling to WASM. But as far as I can tell there is nothing I can do with WASM other than to define a function library, so the resulting language such as it is, is mostly a bunch of conventions operating on a WASM function library, and it gets really elaborate and complicated and I am 90% sure that you could just exploit the conventions in the state that it is right now, so like “why am I writing XSLT-to-WASM who the fuck cares” sometimes.
Nothing fully worth showing off right now though.
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#338I've been writing a series on _Image Processing_ algorithms in WebGL covering a range of topics such as Color Correction, Blend Modes, Thresholding, Dithering, Convolution and Film Grain.
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#339I am creating a documentation management software, with emphasis on a diagramming and system building - similar to Draw.io [1] but with better support on PDFs/Files, text/markdown/Latex, web links, and Search. It is a desktop application and self-hosted, which will allow to sync with your work laptop and mobile devices without the need for 3rd party server. Many online solutions for knowledge management did not make…
I understand this isn't the direction you're going in, but I would love a desktop app which could edit documentation (mainly text, but with diagrams), but save it locally to be checked in to Git. Imho documentation should be near the source, and go through the same branching and PR workflow that the source it describes goes through. Ideally the desktop app would be a GUI which was easy to use, providing the basic fea…
> documentation should be near the source
I totally agree with this statement. Moreover, I plan to have a feature that will allow to place your whole project folder into your vault in my app and then reference a diagram through the code/inner file (e.g. using comment blocks). And that file will be visible, searchable, within my documentation software. Think of it as a layer above the code.
However I do not want to tie the documentation process to git as it will be harder for other team members (think of POs, Teamleads, clients) to find the documentation through git history. Instead, a separate IDE for documentation (as is my app) is an ideal place to store & share knowledge. Just like there is separate app for slack, e-mail, browser, etc.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Re: Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
#340[deleted]