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

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

#61

Post by HKH2 »

I have a music playlist program which deals with the problem of getting used to music. It's effective because I seldom want to choose a track to play, and I don't find myself skipping a lot consecutively.

I have a dedicated key for skipping (and I keep adding meta keys to make it skip more (each meta key is x2)). The next track to play is automatically selected based on the combination of two factors: being skipped less and being played less.

I get to hear my whole collection in a way that's far more enjoyable than an unweighted shuffle.

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

#62

Post by AnonC »

simonsarris wrote: post #53

I built carefulwords.com simply because I wanted to type a word into the address bar and get a large list of synonyms and some historical quotes using the word quickly. For example: https://carefulwords.com/solitude https://carefulwords.com/think etc. Also unlike thesaurus.com, the search bar actually focuses so you can just start typing! It's not perfect, I need to do a lot of editing, but nonetheless I use it almos…

This is wonderful, and fast too (because it’s static I guess)! Thanks for building it. I’ll be checking it when I need some inspirational quotes surrounding a word.

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

#63

Post by dang »

Definitely my HN moderation browser extension, which lets me flip through HN super fast and do routine mod tasks without gruntwork.

If I live long enough, I will factor out a general-reader version of this that will bring joy to HN power users everywhere.

It requires a keyboard, though. Do the kids still use those?

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

#65

Post by madisp »

not sure how interesting but definitely useful :D I like to listen to Albums and I missed the "Give me a random album from my collection" functionality in Spotify so built a tiny webapp to do exactly that - https://shuffle.ninja.

It uses the Spotify web APIs to fetch your album collection and gives back a random album from it. I use it daily.

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

#66

Post by muzani »

I was playing a MMO with a market. Sometimes people would make mistakes, e.g. selling 100 iron for $1,000,000 instead of selling 1,000,000 iron for $100. I made a little tool that polls the API and sends a notification when someone made a mistake.

Eventually I got bored of grabbing these mistakes and left the tool with my clan. It had the side effect of getting people active on Discord, and making people more actively involved in countering raids. We ended up building one of the most elite clans in the game until some other whiz kid built a better bot.

There was also this little augmented browser tool that calculates the best order and timing to attack in the game, and the statistically likely result.

We'd joke that all the tools we built for that game were probably well worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's around the time I decided to quit and spend my time on something more useful.

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

#68

Post by ambicapter »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10

Smart RSS reader that, right now, ingests about 1000 articles a day and picks out 300 for me to skim. Since I helped write this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312018 I was always asking "Why is RSS failing? Why do failing RSS readers keep using the same failing interface that keeps failing?" and thought that text classification was ready in 2004 for content-based recommendation, then I wrote https://ontology2.com/es…

What do you mean by "outperform" in this context?

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

#69

Post by modeless »

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box.

I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone. Everyone got their own code, and it would text me whenever someone used a code so I'd instantly know who was coming. The text conversation was my timestamped access log. I also put time constraints on some codes so e.g. Doordash couldn't open the gate in the middle of the night, or I could set up a temporary access code for a party, and I rotated codes too, with text notifications if an outdated code was used.

I thought about making a paid app out of it, but it just didn't seem worthwhile. I didn't expect that many people would want to pay for it. For a while I was excited about a YC startup called Doorport that was going to make a hardware device that you'd install inside those dumb call boxes and make them smart with all sorts of cool features, better than my Twilio hack. But I think they pivoted to a much less interesting pure software thing and then got acquihired.

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

#70

Post by aschleck »

I built a cross of React + Wiz (a fantastic frontend framework at Google): https://github.com/aschleck/trailcatalog/tree/main/js/corgi . Totally irresponsible and probably full of bugs, but I was so tired of writing business logic in the same place as my view logic with React and now I'm free of it!
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