81–90 of 242 posts
A 15-minute-city analyser using OSM data. You gave it a list of everything you wanted to be close to (ie a school, restaurant, doctors office, food store etc.) and it would show you which parts of a given city had all those things with an N minute walk.
It shows related discussions for each submission page. Many times, I found myself intrigued by interesting discussions which left me hungry for more and I'd go down a rabbit hole, or maybe it was promising but didn't get enough attention and I'd need to check if there were any related discussions in the past about the same subject.
I found that even though HN is a news aggregator, many discussions on HN are timeless (just like this here).
I'm proud of it and find the experience and flow to be very enjoyable. It also helps me find great stories that I might not have stumbled across.
My grandmother's primary method of communication is a cheap Android tablet. It unfortunately includes a preinstalled SMS app that upsells a VoIP SMS service. My grandmother gets extremely frustrated by accidently clicking the message icon and opening an upsell page. There's no way to uninstall the VoIP app. So instead of giving up and buying a new tablet or paying for an unnecessary service, I hacked together a way t…
Another often possible solution is installing Lineage.
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:
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 it maintained/updated. Also have some videos showing the progress and major features over the last year [1]. It's been fun; my go-to project to tinker on when I feel bored.
Tried to monetize it, but didn't really find a market so just keep it free for the users that are on the platform :) The folks that come back to it tend to be obsessive planners (like my spouse).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TravelHacks/comments/105s90u/i_buil...
A simple game I posted here before [1]. I think it’s rather hard to finish a project in under one weekend. And we tend to easily say “I did it over the weekend” but mean “I had something working after one weekend”. Especially if the weekend is not one where you spend 48 hours in front of the computer (counting Friday evening in). So, I was quite proud to get it finished in one weekend under normal conditions. [1] htt…
They didn't provide that data, but it turns out with a little bit of grokking and staring at that 10gb text file, you could reverse engineer it so you could extract all the kids of a given school, and aggregate all of their answers. I produced a nice little report for our admins, with the questions of the text next to how we had performed in the aggregate and state averages, as well as averages of our "competitor schools."
The best part, though, is how I remember it being a bit "bullshit" that we, a private school, could afford to do this, but since the data was actually valuable to inform practice, surely the department of education should do that for every school! Whelp, over the weekend, I computed that info for every school in the dataset, and just stored a CSV for every school in an S3 instance (this was my ridiculous caching strategy lol). Spun up a frontend where you could select your school, and nicely visually go through every question, as well as print a pdf summary of the whole thing. On Monday morning tweeted at an ed journalist, and in a few days had a spread of me in the country's top newspaper, and people emailing about jobs "at my company."
This was the most rewarding project I've ever done, and I'm sad to say nothing has come close since. It cost me $0, produced a public good that I could see was being accessed from every state in the whole country, was technically interesting, and I saw it through from start to finish over the weekend!