Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024) • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#801

Post by carlnewton » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

nirvael wrote: post #433

carlnewton wrote: post #224

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving…

I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance. The key idea is that you c…

Awesome! For me, the desire is very much about the place and not personalities or any kind of ego attached to their posts, so I've avoided any kind of functionality that will allow to follow a person, or see what else a particular person has posted, but we'll see how it evolves. If you have any programming experience, I do recommend just diving in rather than waiting for someone else to do it, as I have discovered that a lot of people seem to think that they share my vision but when it comes down to the details they have their own thing in mind. So if you want this Instagram with locations to exist, you might find that someone else's vision doesn't quite meet your desires for it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#802

Post by wanderingbit » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:14 PM UTC

I am working on a personal digital mentor, in the spirit of Dross from Will Wight's "Cradle" series.

I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than Notion AI's response when I tell it something like "look at the last 7 days of notes I've taken and run a retro with me.

I like it because it scratches a personal-improvement itch of mine, it's a nice project to become acquainted with the popular LLM app tech, and I can share it with others who may find it useful.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#803

Post by carlnewton » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:15 PM UTC

rsolva wrote: post #485

carlnewton wrote: post #224

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving…

I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here! One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?

Yeah this is something I've been thinking about recently, not so much in terms of the difficulty of managing spam on a per post basis, as I'm thinking that the instances will be very small and moderation on that front should be easy, so long as you can keep the problematic user from signing up in the first place. One thing I've been thinking is that perhaps there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle. It doesn't stop anyone else from using Google street view or something but it does make the bar the bit higher. I don't know how to deal with the obvious accessibility issue with this though so I'm going to keep it in mind until I get around to that sort of thing. Long term of course we're going to have the issue with federated spam also, so I don't want to implement a solution that will only be in my way in the long run.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#804

Post by gbrindisi » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:16 PM UTC

wanderingbit wrote: post #802

I am working on a personal digital mentor, in the spirit of Dross from Will Wight's "Cradle" series. I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than…

I like it! How does your stack look like?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#805

Post by chriskkim » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:16 PM UTC

I personally believe Toronto hosts some of the best child care resources and options for young working parents, though issues of affordability and information asymmetry are palpable.

I'm not naive to think that technology alone can fix this problem, but we are looking to balance the scale by 1) making existing child care resources easily accessible and 2) connecting parents and alternative caregiver options to fill the gaps that the current industry left behind. We are calling it Kindervillage (http://kindervillage.ca/).

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#806

Post by carlnewton » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

jcass8695 wrote: post #349

carlnewton wrote: post #224

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving…

I like the idea and have been ruminating on something similar myself - starred!

Thanks so much! I work on it almost every weekend so hopefully you'll continue to see good progress.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#807

Post by escapecharacter » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

caramellow wrote: post #136

I've been working on some projects in Rust relating to image processing and rendering. I'm between a few projects at the moment though but the biggest one is an image processing application I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of stuff I've programmed and learned about over the last 3 years has been leading up to the goal of making something like this haha. I wanted to leverage OpenCL for compute but I had…

When you say "develop" a raw file, do you mean convert it to a viewable colour space, given a known screen? Like HDR or some other type of choosing the exposure/gain?

Re: 3D, are you aiming to infer a 3D scene from a single photo? There's a few approaches for that, but they tend to show off the examples that work well, and conveniently avoid examples that work poorly. But depending on the content of your photos, you might find an algorithm that works out of the box.

For data representation, we used a sparse voxel representation of a Truncated Signed Distance Function to represent surfaces for this project: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/kinectfusio... However, I can't recall interacting with the sparseness; that level of abstraction may have already been resolved in the code by the time I got on that projects. TSDFs are cool as hell and way more interesting than representing ambiguous surfaces with mesh triangles.

Also, I've been there with the turbulence a couple times. Sometimes months happen in a day and vice versa ;)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#808

Post by matthewfcarlson » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:22 PM UTC

I'm working on an ESP32 based NFC record system using OwnTone (https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/) as the music hosting and playing solution (as it supports AirPlay to all the HomePods in the house). Each HomePod has a smaller ESP32 with a knob for adjusting the volume in a room.

I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#809

Post by popol1991 » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

I've been building a chrome extension called Skipper [1] that helps people to organize their browser tabs with AI.

For my whole career so far I've been applying ML (as they called it back then) / AI to various domains like drug discovery and cybersecurity. Both were fun but, man, it feels really different to build a consumer app. It's just very exciting to be able to develop something, push it, and get compliments/complains the second day! We've even noticed that the ADHD community are especially engaged with the extension because they suffer the most from the tab overload problem.

Anyways, for those who might need it, here's the link:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skipper-fewer-tabs-...

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

#810

Post by smileysteve » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 6:28 PM UTC

tyjkot wrote: post #516

In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing. I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two. I decided to create a mobile ser…

I find it interesting because this seems to be information asymmetry - and there is nothing wrong with that.

AutoZone, O'Reilly, Advance advertise that they do things like replace batteries, change light bulbs, add washer fluid, wiper blades.

It's arguably imperative for their brand that they offer (and advertise) these store services when compared to Amazon or Walmart (without a car center). It's even clearer when they offer 20% off codes for online ordering 12 months a year. (Also interesting because basic bulbs for tail lights and turn signals are often also sold at gas stations and grocery stores)

They're not ASE certified techs, but I'm under the impression that staff receive some training related to it.