Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

news.ycombinator.com

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#881
I had subscribed to an IPTV service with SO many channels that loading it was a massive pain, so instead I dipped my feet into python for fun and created a filter service that breaks it into a more manageable list:

https://github.com/cmcconomy/iptv-filter

I since stopped subscribing to IPTV so the project is abandoned, but I have a couple of friends who still use it; I'd probably write it completely differently today - but it's still trucking!

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#882

This thread is giving me a complex. Why? Well, because the answer is basically "nothing". I mean, don't get me wrong - I've built all sorts of stuff, and plenty of it was not for my $DAYJOB. And I think (at times) of myself as being fairly creative and having lots of "ideas". And yet... at least in the context of this thread (the way I'm interpreting the OP's question anyway) I just don't have much to offer up. FWIW,…

This is a classic effect of social media: people only post their wins, and the ones you notice are the biggest ones. "Oh man, Kathy is having a holiday in the Sahara! John bought a badass motorbike! Frank ran the NY marathon! I've never done any of that, I'm such a loser..." This thread is the nerd equivalent of an Instagram feed.

It's fine: you keep doing you and finding your own happiness. Don't feel pressured into matching these folks, nobody expects you to.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#883

My wife has her work schedule in a mobile web app, but the app is really bad. Turns out the app is just a wrapper around a web site. So I made a KVM instance which does one thing - login automatically, start Firefox, login with Selenium, then uses some kind of other Python desktop control contraption to press CTRL-S, tab-tab, save the web page to the Downloads folder. Then, the python program proceeds to parse the HT…

In similar vein: my local recycling collection is different from week to week (i.e. paper one week, plastic the next, etc). It's supposed to be on a fixed yearly schedule, but during COVID lockdowns the schedule changed dramatically, often day by day. There is a website that will tell you the most recent plan, but you can't just bookmark it - every time you have to specify the address and the date, which is annoying.

So I built a scraping script in python that runs once a day and sends me an email the evening before a collection is due, telling me what I should place outside that day. It's been working great for three years now, with zero maintenance.

I considered turning it into a public service, but i don't want any pressure from neighbors when things eventually break (as they will, inevitably, sooner or later). And really this should be a basic feature offered by the local authority website, so I hope they'll implement it one day on their own.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#884

I built a web app that keeps track of every link I ever find to be interesting. It allows for fine-grained topics (e.g., individual academic papers, or topics more specific than that). It groups the topics in a DAG, so that you can get to a topic via more than one path from the top. And it allows you to look at intersections of transitive closures over topics in order to narrow down a search. It keeps a history of ev…

I’ve made the exact same website for myself. It’s just a little PHP static webapp but I can write reviews for posts and it’s got a simple SQLite/PHP ^8 backend.

https://artsie.red/

I could have used something like Safari’s reading list, but that wouldn’t scale to all of my devices. And I don’t like the idea of putting control of those links into a service I can’t delete.

This site literally solves one problem perfectly and beyond the occasional functionality upgrades (auto-fetching post metadata, a refresh button, and a little CMS behind authentication) it’s super light and useful for me!

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#885
I created an AI that can beat the first and second boss in my favourite pc game Dark souls 3

First boss:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcbH7jt4w0w

Second boss:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeEoQVT66t8

I am using cheat engine to get information from the game such as hero position, boss position, hero animation, boss animation, time since animation change, life, stamina, current rotation and the angle between the boss' heading and the hero. (to see if hero is behind or in front of or to the side/behind the boss)

When the boss or hero starts an animation i start a counter at 0. For every timestep that the animation is still running i increment that counter and feed it as inputThe AI has no knowledge about the lengths of the animations. It has to learn that.The animation names are converted to a one hot encoding and fed to the network

The different examples shown in the videos have only been trained for a few days in real time (only 1 instance of the game running). But the episodes are cherry picked. In the Iudex case it actually kills the boss almost every time, however Vordt is a lot harder to learn so these are the some of the kills that i have picked out.

Other games have APIs made for reinforcement learning so that the agent can take an action at each frame of the game. I have kind of hacked my own implementation and are actually doing keypresses with sleeps in between each step as i can't control the frames on a frame by frame basis.

I am using python and stable baselines for the reinforcement learning part. I made my own implementation of a "gym" for dark souls. Then i set up a lua script in cheat engine that opens a socket from this socket i read the state in my python script.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#886
I created a service you can text to get fun conversation starters based off a topic, or an observation. I used Twilio + ChatGPT to build this so I could come up with interesting questions anytime, anywhere.

Simply text 1 (434) 404 6822 with an observation.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#887
https://umbrellatoday.app

The idea has emerged from a personal frustration with umbrellas If you buy a too big and expensive umbrella (take for example a gulfbrella), you might recall that it's such a hassle to drag along - just by its weight and size. Also, its something that you will most likely lose during a company event, after one or two drinks.

If you buy a small and cheap version instead, you won’t get sufficient protection due to the small surface. In addition, such smaller variants tend to break quickly, and when this happens, you might as well not have dragged one with you in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#888
Built a service and web app that listens to Frigate car events via MQTT. It analyzes the video and image to determine the make and model, as well as OCR the plate.

Uses some fuzzy matching logic in an attempt to match it to a historical vehicle. Also attempts to look up Make, Model, Year and VIN based on the state and plate.

Been running pretty well for a few months. Can easily see history of a vehicle or search vehicles by make or model. Has come in handy once when someone in the neighborhood experienced a road rage incident and I was able to provide info on the car to the police.

Next step is to build “detections” for anomalous vehicles. Or weird behavior like a vehicle passing by multiple times in a given window.

Built with Python and HTMX cause why not.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#889

I have glued BLE beacons onto my trash cans in the backyard and written a Python program for a Raspberry Pi that uses its Bluetooth interface to detect the beacons and keep track of whether they are present or not. It also downloads the trash collection calendar from the local utility provider responsible for collecting them and produces an overview over all four types of trash cans with info on their whereabouts (in…

XML + XSLT brings back memories :D

It's a great tech that was sadly mostly forgotten when JSON took over because it was way easier to parse with Javascript.

Post reply on HN