Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

news.ycombinator.com

431–440 of 793 posts

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#431

I don't like having my 2FA codes on my phone and I don't want to trust any cloud 2FA managers or closed-source solutions. I couldn't find anything open source so I made a simple CLI tool that utilises a popular Go OTP library. In combination with pass, which maintains the state (ie. the 2FA secret key), I now have an open source solution I can trust: https://github.com/sirodoht/frank

This is very cool. I've always found the insistence by companies to force us to rely on phones even more for the sake of """security""" absolutely infuriating.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#432

I was annoyed by Wikipedia's noisy design choices, so I built a very scaled down read-friendly mirror of Wikipedia that presents the text as though it was a book, doing away with inline links. It's desktop-first as I don't really use mobile browsers, my fingers are too big. https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News

I like this. How does this work? Is there an api you use to obtain the text from the wiki articles?

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#433
Over Covid, I got really into solving the Rubik’s cube. I couldn’t find any minimalistic apps to help me time myself and learn algorithms. So, I ended up writing an app for myself, which I later showed off on Reddit.

People really seemed to like the design, so I cleaned it up a bit and made it available to everyone. The site (https://cubedesk.io) has been free to use for 3 years and has 50k users.

Most recently, I've been working on an email marketing platform to help me email those 50k users. I noticed that emailing all those people was expensive and tedious, so created and launched https://cc.dev

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#434

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn't always update the website regularly, and we'd find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we'd even seen them. I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint…

Kinda similar story for me.

I was trying to find a used motorcycle. So I created an in-browser javascript app that could go over the listings in a country local second hand site, and score the listings to my liking. Like decrease for long mileage, increase for young age.

That worked pretty well and found me a great one. Good times.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#435
I wrote a Prometheus exporter for metrics gathered from the air conditioning unit in my home lab. The A/C unit has a slot for a network management card (NMC) which is a tiny Linux machine that exposes a web interface and SNMP while communicating with the A/C. I wanted to just use SNMP for this but for some reason there isn't any useful data specific to the A/C being exported, only typical Linux machine data. I did some additional searching and found that there was an API available on the web interface and sought to just scrape that instead.

Normally I would have written this kind of thing in Python since I'm more familiar with the language, but I wanted to take the plunge into Rust and this is the first project I created using it. There's still a couple bugs that I haven't gotten around to fixing like finding out why the Prometheus metrics descriptions don't get displayed in Grafana or finding out why the NMC itself just seems to need to be manually rebooted every few weeks. Other than that it's been working great.

https://github.com/0xC0ncord/padm_exporter

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#436
A browser based controller for the LEGO Duplo train using the Web Bluetooth API. It works best on mobiles in portrait mode and you can find it here: https://legotrain.netlify.app/

The source is a single HTML file that also contains the JS. Just view source and modify if you're interested in taking this further. What's cool is that the protocol allows you to receive readings from the train and not just send commands. Also, it allows you to drive the train faster than you can via the official mobile app.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#438
In my spare time I created Dash. An app used to track metrics from Strava in the form of iOS widgets. Officially Strava hasn't done much on this front, so I took the matter into my own hands. After two years, I still use Dash every day. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/dash-widgets-for-strava/id1556...

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#439
If you create collage (cut and paste) art using typography, you might find a tool I created this week useful. It cycles through randomly picked Google Fonts and lets you edit the text. I'm using it to create art inspired by Chris Ashworth (https://www.thisisme.art).

https://fonts.joeldare.com

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#440

An algorithmic trading platform. I ran it successfully for a couple years with my own capital alone before opening it up to others ( https://grizzlybulls.com ). It's been quite successful compared to the S&P 500 since launching publicly in Jan 2022. Performance of our various models vs. the benchmark below: SPX (benchmark): -3.31% VIX TA Macro MP Extreme: +29.91% VIX TA Macro Advanced: +23.08% VIX TA Advanced: +3.42%…

nice! do you have any explanation why those trading algorithms have had so great performance figures in the past but basically stayed flat (or negative) in 2023? i've observed this at a few others like velvetai and whitecloud capital and it seems your models show the same ( e.g. https://grizzlybulls.com/models/vix-ta-macro-advanced ) also, are you planning on adding automatic trade copying?

One thing to note is that if you are looking at the premium model charts, the last 20 trades will be hidden if you don't have the appropriate access tier so you could be missing the last 6+ months depending on which model you are looking at. 2023 has actually been a strong year for most models. The first half of 2022 was quite poor as several of the models had a structurally hard time adjusting to the new bear market, high inflation and rapidly increasing interest rates.

On each model's summary table you can check the YTD performance, and note that most of the positive performance came from this year, with last year flat to slightly negative (which was still good compared to the market's abysmal performance last year). i.e. the model you linked above is up 28% this year.

Also, of importance to note is that every model has a varying live start date but also includes the backtest period in the chart. It's always wise to assume that models will underperform their backtests in live trading. However, our goal is to build models robust enough that they can underperform the backtest while still substantially outperforming the S&P 500 on both absolute and risk-adjusted basis.

Lastly, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "automatic trade copying", but we do have a few Platinum members who've opted to use our managed account, whereby your IB account will be set up with the same trade execution software I use in production to automatically follow the VIX TA Macro MP Extreme model signal changes, implemented by a combination of ES and MES futures trades.

Post reply on HN