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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?

#271

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?

I don't personally use Chrome but if you open an issue I'll try to port it next time I have some free time.

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

#273
post #146

I like to buy used electronics online, but it's very tedious cross-referencing model numbers and benchmarks and such to determine what's actually a good deal. For example which is better, a 10th gen i5 or a 7th gen i7 at the same price? So as a pandemic hobby, I made a website to scrape eBay laptop listings, extract all the relevant data, cross reference against benchmarks, and sort the result by "value" (aggregate p…

This is awesome! I regularly encounter the same problem. Particularly when shopping for electronics, where there is a clear metric that counts (say, USD/Watt hour for batteries). But how often had I wished something like this existed for other items as well. Say, toothpaste. What do I care about the brand? I care about the abrasivity factor (RDA), and the amount of flouride. Or sweaters. I don't care that it looks like wool, or that other people use it as replacement for wool. Instead, I want something that's 100 % wool, and no acrylics. Or think supplements. I don't care about fancy pictures of healthy people. I want to know what's in the capsule, where it was source, and how much of it I get per USD.

I get that a site like yours cannot solve all of that. You can only extract the info that's already there. And parsing such data for different categories of products is a major league hassle.

I once built a tool that did this for used cars. And it would allow you to plot all available listings that matched your filters in a price/milage scatter graph. To make the outliers really visible.

Can you share how you solved the parsing problem in your implementation? Is it just regexes, or are you employing NLP span categorization techniques?

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

#274
post #248
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.

Oh, I didn't know about F5bot. If it had twitter it would be perfect for my use case, but I still need to give it a try!

With mine you can get two types of notifications:

"real-time" using a Discord/Slack bot;

"reports" where you get a daily/weekly email with an aggregation of the mentions;

But even the "real-time" part is not instantaneous as the service is not constantly searching, and instead performs searches every 5 minutes. Because the keyword I use gets about 20 mentions a day, I personally like the daily email option to avoid the constant distraction and I also use the service search-engine capabilities to filter/analyze these mentions on a monthly basis.

The biggest reason mine is not free is because I wanted to build a SaaS like solution, integrated with Stripe and such, as I never done that before. But if I would get many users, the monthly bill would also increase so I am a bit scared of having it free to be honest.

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

#275

I made a tool to export YouTube subtitles directly into Anki without downloading the video, it must be useful since it even got me a job offer by one of the users (pretty famous person). I never did more marketing than a Reddit post when the proof of concept was made. Coincidentally, I've worked on it recently and added some useful functionality. Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube2anki/boebb…

What made you build it? It looks like one would use it for learning a language... mapping written text to pronounciation on flashcards? Why do you think making your own cards from YouTube subs is better than dedicated language apps that already include spoken audio?

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

#276
post #215

I made a MIDI-controller out of cheap sonars and an Arduino, that lets you control anything with movement "in the air". You can use it to control filters, or volume, or anything really. Here's me playing it with a silly wig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgH-WU-9CZA The artist "Mezerg" uses a MIDI-enabled Theremin to do something similar, but it's costly. The BOM for my thing is around $30 when building just one at…

I love that video!

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

#277

UK-specific - scraping online grocery store prices across stores daily since 2020 but never built on top of it, and not packaged to market as api or data set..

It'd be interesting to track shrinkflation too. I reckon it's something news services would want to do a regular segment on.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, if I spent half the time learning the language as I have making tools, I'd probably be fluent by now... Hahaha, I made the same mistake to the point of going into PhD in the field. Most of the (prototype) tools aren't even released.

That’s really cool actually! Did you discover any techniques to be particularly effective? I recall a PhD working on language “wait learning” which I’d love to use, but it never made it out of the lab. Maybe you’re also sitting on some good stuff. (If you’d prefer to link papers, that’d be great, too!)

That was a complete shitshow thanks to cultural differences, my personality and covid. I had interest in Japanese/Chinese while my lab only focussed on English. Basically whatever I proposed for 3 years was thrashed to the bin without any explanation, and when I found another lab more appreciative of my work it was already too late to switch. The only "guidance" I got during this time was to "make a quizz" (multiple choice) as if it was something revolutionary and doctoral level.

In the end, I had to back back in my country, where I was able to reconnect with someone that did his PhD on a very close topic (albeit not using computers), so I plan to finish my degree here using things I worked alone on for years. It's infinitely easier to work with people able and willing to understand ideas and who focus on quality instead of quantity. I'm indeed sitting on some stuff albeit it would need a lot more development for some to reach the light. I'm also finishing writing some papers but it's progressing slowly due to having a 9-5 job with 3 hours half commutation.

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

#279
I made an app that download all news items from Dawn.com (Pakistani newspaper) [1]. The news items are basically jpgs stitched together and it's easy to have all images in one folder and scroll thru. Takes less time to read the whole paper :) The app is lying somewhere in my GH.

[1] https://epaper.dawn.com/

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

#280
https://github.com/pannous/netbase a semantic graph database (written in c++) used internally to host and query the freebase/wikidata datasets with almost a billion relations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) https://www.wikidata.org/

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