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

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

#241

Post by greazy »

primax wrote: post #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 whe…

That is very very cool. I work at a hospital campus (Melbourne), all hdds require destruction. So I wonder if your customers should be businesses not individuals.

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

#243

Post by TT-392 »

n3t wrote: post #219
TT-392 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sure, but I wasn't exaggerating when I said it is probably not usable on other peoples computers. It only works on linux, it doesn't work on wayland, and because I am using xinput to disable the keyboard, you will have to replace the device name in blockKeyboard.py: https://github.com/TT-392/keyAlarm/tree/master It shouldn't be too difficult to write your own though, so, if anyone wants to do so, feel free to…

> I mean sure, but I wasn't exaggerating when I said it is probably not usable on other peoples computers. That's totally okay! I love when people share their "works on my machine programs". Just say upfront that it's your personal tool so others won't expect production-grade software. The code might inspire others, let others fork it (if a license says it's okay), teach code readers about some technique or tool, or…

That is nice, as for a license, I think half of the program is someone else's keylogger code I found somewhere online, so putting my own license on there seems shitty. But I put a line in the README that anyone can steal the idea of the concept of the program, if someone is gonna do that, they are gonna want to rewrite everything anyways.

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

#244

Post by TT-392 »

mkl wrote: post #233
TT-392 wrote: 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.

Right, the mouse is a concern for most people as well, I never really considered that part since with my i3wm + vim setup, I basically never touch the mouse anyways.

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

#245

Post by ionwake »

yewenjie wrote: post #210

A simple browser extension for Hacker News that shows a sidebar with links buried deep in HN comment threads such as this one - so that you can quickly glance at all the external things people are talking about. https://github.com/dit7ya/hnlinks

Cool! Any chance for a chrome extension?

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

#246

Post by dbattaglia »

I made a web game that's a mix of the board game Stratego and the classic rock/paper/scissor game. Its single player only, and the computer player's logic can use a lot of work but I haven't spent much time on it in a while. Basically you move your pieces to try to catch the other player's flag.

https://rock-paper-scissor-battle.com

https://github.com/daniel-bytes/rps-scala

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

#247

Post by jraph »

I developed a web app that allowed my friends and me to watch the same video synchronously during the lock-downs / curfew after Summer 2020. The video would be served by my server, and anybody could control the playback. Pausing or seeking would do it for everyone. We would all connect to a Jitsi Meet room so we could hear people laugh or react to the video.

I called this "Meet Anyway", it was my first Svelte app, and never released it for several reasons, among them:

- I had to do some manual video upload and provide the exact video URL to the app to make things work

- the thing had some glitches even if it mostly worked and did the job

- I had other things to do, in particular taking care of an open source network implementation of a popular letter-based game that I started in 2016 and then forgot (ran all this time on my server without maintenance at all, not appearing in top) and which suddenly attracted people during the lock-down.

- and now I'm interested in other things, especially that the lock-downs are over. It would be nice to finish it and publish it though, but I'm more interested in the other things, and there are major issues: the videos need to live under the same domain as the app if I remember correctly because of browser security, so either people have to host the tool themselves or we would need to offer a service that would host people's videos while they are watching it, or at least to proxy them. I did not want to set up such a service and so the tool does not solve the issue for many people, only those who are technically inclined.

This was my second shot at this issue, I had first put together a Python program which allowed two users to watch the same video locally with a regular Linux video player, so I could watch stuff with a relative, using MPRIS, a unified Linux / Free Desktop D-Bus interface to control music and video players. This one I actually released it, but there's actually a mature project that does this better, is actually maintained and is cross-platform: https://syncplay.pl/

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

#248

Post by eps »

deon09 wrote: post #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://th…

How does it compare to F5bot in terms of reaction time? Asking because the latter is nearly instanteneous and it's coverage is similar. It is also free.

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

#249

Post by eps »

Grustaf wrote: post #223
paulirish wrote: post #221

You improved the speed of something. It took 430ms before and now just 160ms. But how do you quantify that? https://how-much-faster.glitch.me/ gives you a few options for how to word things.

Sounds like it's already quantified? 160 ms vs 430 ms.

Quantifying the change, relative to the base or the new value.

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

#250

Post by ezl »

HighlandSpring wrote: post #144
ezl wrote: post #138

https://www.lost-item.com I lose stuff a lot. It started as a URL ( https://www.lost-item.com/eric/ ) that I can put on a sticker on my stuff so that when people find my phone, wallet, credit card, keys they can contact me. I preferred that over my phone number or email address because I didn't want to put anything that identifies me on the items, so a form on the internet acts as a barrier. In general, I find that p…

This seems like something that could have massive tail upside. You help someone with lots of resources recover something of sentimental value, they tip you couple $k.

Yeah i have all these ideas for what I would do to market this eventually. Life keeps getting in the way, but because at this point it provides me a lot of utility it doesn't matter to me that other people don't use it (i have stickers on my phone, wallet, airpods, etc. I have iron on patches in clothing items, my backpack, etc)

In a world where I have more time and energy for this, I would implement tipping systems, sell the actual stickers and iron on patches to users, try to partner with schools and PTAs so kids who lose their stuff can recover it, etc.

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