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Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

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231–240 of 306 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#231
We built this during the pandemic (https://www.share.clinic), because we thought it would be useful for people to market all of their online classes, etc. on social media. When it was done, we became so busy with other projects that we didn't have the time to market it. If somebody is interested in taking this on as a project, let us know.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#232
If you've ever played on The Oldest Anarchy Server In Minecraft, 2b2t.com, then chances are you experienced a login queue hundreds of users long. From my experience, 600 users would make you wait about a full day, while having Minecraft open and connected to a server.

I cooked up what amounts to a wrapper for minecraft protocol ( js lib) that creates a proxy that connects for you, you connect to it when ready and bobs your uncle.

I posted it on reddit twice, it was used as a scapegoat for a guy who did a really clever exploit that exposed peoples bases and that's about it. I stopped playing Minecraft a while ago, but the OSS community is still updating it every now and then.

Https://github.com/themoonisacheese/2bored2wait

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#233
post #131

I was having problems with my hands from muscle exhaustion due to typing. My doctor recommended I should use an alarm clock, to remind me to not type for more than a few minutes at a time. Instead, I thought, I could do better. So I made the following program: It is a program that has a countdown, lets say, 100 key presses, and every time you press a key, it goes down by one, and every, lets say second, it recovers 1…

I use Workrave (https://workrave.org/) for the same purpose. It's time-based rather than count-based, and takes mouse into account as well as keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#234
A service that notifies when specific keywords are mentioned on different social media like twitter, reddit, hackernews, etc...

It was pretty fun to build, and although it has 0 users, I use if for myself to keep track of mentions about another product that I have helped to develop (which has ~1M users).

Hosted on AWS, with a low monthly bill, so I have keep it running as I get some actual value from it :)

https://thesocialwatcher.com/

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#235
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there even are a lot of clouds that provide consumer GPUs. I heard GPUs designed for computation doesn't perform as well in games

The dealbreaker is that consumer GPUs (and their drivers) have a terms of use prohibiting various aspects of datacenter usage.

The vGPU feature can be unlocked for several Nvidia GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

I did not yet try it myself (maybe it doesn't even work anymore?), and it might not be an option for businesses.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#236
* An app which downloads all the invoices received as email attachment in the last quarter (in order to send them to the accountant).

* An app which identifies the 200 hashtags most frequently seen in Instagram's top posts containing a given hashtag.

For both of these projects, a factor leading me not to start marketing them was the complexity and risks in relying on Google and Facebook APIs as data sources, respectively.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#237
* A fuse filesystem for Linux that mirrored another directory, except for files that were marked as executable. When you tried to access those files, my program executed the file and let you read from stdout.

* A KDE plasmoid that let you drop executable files onto it, and when you did the files got executed. Very simple, although I was proud of the name--dropkik.

* An alternative to markdown that has an ANTLR grammar, so it's easy to generate parsers in many different languages. It's not as nice as markdown though. Also it supported direct export to PDF, so it didn't require a LaTeX install.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#239
I built a trailer sized heavy duty hard drive shredder that could shred drives down to 1mm aggregate in about 1 minute.

It is acoustically silenced down to about 70db and doesn't need any external power sources/connectivity

I actually did do a bit of marketing but honestly it's not a service Australians want to pay for and the opportunity cost and risk of pushing it further isn't worth it.

Might dust it off again when/if regulations change to require destruction of other people's data on drives at EOL.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#240
When mongodb (or some similar object-like storage engine) was pretty new I played around with it by writing some HTTP API using PHP. I was frustrated about how I would mostly write code to check if the user was allowed to r/w an object, if the input format was alright and overall do very little productive work on actually doing something with the data. So I implemented a "universal" API that allowed arbitrary access to the database. Permissions, ownerships and permissable data were stored as template or metadata objects. So basic API methods could be easily setup and only more complex actions would need actual coding.

Wasn't finished beyond a basic PoC, and I did it more fun/practicing than for anything of more tangible value. I believe the code has been lost.

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