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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#451

Post by karolist »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #450
karolist wrote: post #449

I made a data takeout tool for the SaaS kindergarten communication platform used by my child's daycare. On it's own the software is really simple and could have been a few hundred lines of Python, but at some point I changed my mind and wanted to share this with other parents in case they find it, the things that make a project fit for publishing took 95% of actual work since you want it general and robust enough som…

I find the use of docker on Windows totally overkill and added complexity for non-technical users. Why don't you just build a single .exe they can download and run? With Golang, that should be rather easy.

You may be right, I considered that step but testing all this on another platform seemed too much, given I personally run this in a container pointed to a Synology photos mount point. I thought about wrapping all of this in a PyQT + PyInstaller combo with a simple button and distributing an exe for that. But valid criticism, appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#452

Post by willhackett »

jasondigitized wrote: post #390
willhackett wrote: post #93

I've made an email-based AI personal assistant I thought I'd roll into a business, but ultimately have kept it for personal use. I may open source this as it's a fun project built entirely on Cloudflare Workers (with the exception of one Postgres DB & mail routing). I've written some really crappy Notion API (before the official API) to act as a CMS for a headless site. I'm at a weird point in my life that I need to…

What does the personal assistant do?

I can CC it on emails to handle the back & forward of booking meetings - quite handy when I need to organise with a group of people.

It can also send follow-ups at set times on my behalf or handle some vague inbounds. It's not the best, but it's ok.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#453

Post by kj9 »

Recently, I created a website that displays a map of restaurants featured by my favorite Japanese food YouTuber (who is mainly famous as a local TV personality). It's a public website primarily for personal use by my family and me, with minimal traffic.

As a fan, I was frustrated by the lack of a comprehensive list of featured restaurants, with watching all videos being the only way to find them. So I developed this website to see all locations on a map. I was surprised by how many restaurants were featured, so many pins on the map! Now, I'm enjoying trying out and planning visits to these places.

The biggest challenge was extracting restaurant information from the videos. Each video ends with a brief 3-second slide showing the restaurant's name and partial address. My solution converts videos to images, runs OCR, extracts text, uses an LLM to generate JSON data, and adds geolocation information. I set this up as a GitHub Action that regularly scrapes new videos and updates map markers automatically, all within the free tier.

It took me a few months to figure out the video information extraction and create the website using SvelteKit and MapLibre.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#454

Post by fardinahsan »

stogot wrote: post #444
fardinahsan wrote: post #171

Yes. I made two recently. - TalkToYoutuber[1]: Download the transcripts from a youtube channel and hook it up to gtp4 with RAG to let me "talk" to youtubers. There's a bunch of youtubers who have useful knowledge to share, but no blog or wiki, so semantic searching their video transcripts is the next best thing. - YoutubeThumbnailSearch[2] - Embded all of a youtube channels thumbnails using CLIP and search them using…

> I am thinking of making a scaled down version of [1] so I can "talk" to long videos, like conference speeches or university lectures. Should take an hour or two to cook it up since it will reuse most of the code from [1]. This would be useful to me as well. If you do end up making it, could you reference it on your existingGithub

Yeah, I'll add a reference to it. Are you watching the repo ?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#455

Post by dougdimmadome »

dudus wrote: post #277
dougdimmadome wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I have a very similar thing, mine uses a dropbox folder as a backend s…

Sounds like you'll be better served by obsidian. The free plan covers all those use cases and more

obsidian came out 2020 and I built my version before 2017. also the initial version was on Windows Phone and I migrated to android later

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#456

Post by jborden13 »

jasondigitized wrote: post #387
jborden13 wrote: post #200

Not for me, but for my wife. She does financial advisor marketing & advertising compliance for a financial broker dealer. Her rules for validating compliance were stored in a local Google Doc and her advisors are often uneducated & confused about what disclosure rules are applied to what types of marketing. So I structured and organized the rules on a UI and then built an AI tool that let's her upload any advisor mar…

Would love to hear more about your implementation

It followed something like this:

1. Defined the project intention: organize rules into a consumable/learnable format and create a tool to easily validate the rules against advisor marketing collateral. The audience is for my wife with an eye towards positioning it for her advisors.

2. Convert rules: I converted her disorganized rules document into usable rule objects, from:

> (for all tax related references/ Tax disclosure)

> [FIRM NAME] does not render legal, accounting, or tax advice. Please consult your tax or legal advisors before taking any action that may have tax consequences.

into:

{

      "title": "Tax Disclosures",

      "slug": "tax-disclosures",

      "original_text": "[FIRM NAME] does not render legal, accounting, or tax advice. Please consult your tax or legal advisors before taking any action that may have tax consequences.",

      "summarized_text": "Consult tax/legal advisors before actions with tax consequences.",

      "parent_rule": null
}

3. Educational portion of UI: I built and organized the rules into the UI and fought with an experimental vuetify plugin for far too long to display the rules in an easily consumable manner.

4. Rules validation tool (UI): Accepts an uploaded/dropped file and displays any rules that have been successfully or unsuccesssfully validated by the backend API.

5. Rule validation tool (API): Parses the incoming file into two different extraction pathways, either text extraction from a document or base64 extraction from an image. The extracted file info and the ruleset are passed to OpenAI api (using vision with an image) with a prompt looking for a list of all applicable rules that are either succcessful or unsuccessful, as well as a brief summary of the result.

6. Deployment: AWS Amplify & API Gateway/Lambda

That's about it. Currently waiting for feedback for any future iterations...

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#457

Post by omerhac »

galdosdi wrote: post #41

Reminds me of a classic story that makes a good programming parable: Back in 2011, my girlfriend was working at a catering company that announced shifts via a webpage and workers had to sign up for them. Other workers tended to pick them up very quickly, so it was hard to get too many shifts. I wrote a quick web scraper to automatically accept any shift offered and email her. For a couple weeks it was great, suddenly…

Great story. Did they fire her for that one time she didn't show up? Thats tough

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#458

Post by jborden13 »

whitehexagon wrote: post #300
rowofpixels wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I originally bought some solenoid valves to experiment with, but ended up simplifying my approach. I use a submersible pump that is plugged in to power. I can just automate turning on/off power to that outlet (I have two TP-link / Kasa HS300 strips). The nutrients / water are in a tank below the tray of plants, so when the power is "off", gravity brings the water back through the pump into the tank again.

What a clever and simple solution, I love it. I have been thinking about such a grow system for a long time for my chilli plants, and after having had a few split solenoid valves on a different irrigation project I was very hesitant. Thanks for the inspiration.

It's a relatively common setup known as Ebb and Flow (Flood and Drain).

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#459

Post by jonahbenton »

emilburzo wrote: post #396
jonahbenton wrote: post #57

Bank and other statement PDF processing tools to feed records into Beancount. Because CSV downloads are not a legal record and are often not correct and contain no balances, and giving permanent access to aggregation services like Plaid and others are not worth the privacy violation.

Is any of the code public? Or at least the tool(s) you use? I have the same need but it's surprisingly difficult to get it right, at least with the `camelot` or `fitz` python packages.

No public code. This has been a long running project for me. Last I touched it- pre-LLM world- it had turned into a real Rube Goldberg machine. Hard to imagine anyone else putting up with it.

PDF to text (using either python or Java lib), which then is turned into a "header" structure with dates and balances via configuration driven regexes, and a "body" structure containing the transactions. The transactions themselves go through an EBNF parser to extract the date(s), narration, amount, and balance if reported. The narration text gets run against a custom merchant database for payee and categorization. It is a painful problem! The code is Clojure so there is not much of it, and there are high abstraction libraries like Instaparse that make it easy to use grammars as primitives. And the rube goldberg has yielded for me balance-validated data now for the last several years from half a dozen financial providers.

I have been incorporating local LLMs, running on an RTX 3090, into some other workflows I have, hope over the summer to see if those can help simplify some of the workflow.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#460

Post by jart »

boricj wrote: post #421
jart wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial if you can compile the binary with `cc -static -r` and you don't need to extract dwarf data too. If relocations are stripped, you're fine so long as you can count on st_size being present (i.e. doesn't contain handwritten assembly) and you're able to parse the machine language. If symbols are stripped, then it simply can't be solved. It's just reverse engineering at that point.

If you reduce the problem statement to an ELF x86 program written in C, with a symbol table and a complete relocation table (not just the one you get when dynamically linking), then sure it's trivial, you have almost all the information you need to make an object file (issues like switch jump tables can still crop up in that case). If you don't have that relocation table from `cc -r` however, you'll run into problems…

> the MIPS relocation synthesizer is a thousand lines of absolute eldritch horrors

Wow I only really know amd64, arm64, and i8086. What is it about MIPS that makes it so evil?

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