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Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

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111–120 of 165 posts

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#112
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aquarium owner here. Thinking of IoT hardware but turns out the sensor is expensive and error/breaking prone. Thinking to create yet another social media for people to post their aquariums and track the maintenance schedule then I realized I won't have the bandwidth (time and money) to deal with storing massive amounts of pictures, or policing the content to make sure it doesn't go down like social media dumpster fir…

Take the Google Chrome approach and just have the AI randomly ban posts at a high rate.

You don't need "AI" for that

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#114
Is there something that is annoying you? Do you know there is a better way to do it?

I've spent part of the pandemic automating OpenAPI spec with minimal annotations needed for an API. I was annoyed that the existing solutions wanted more annotations than actual code, when all the information OpenAPI/Swagger needed was already right there in my code. Just an example.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#116
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, human face recognition is quite accurate and humans all look identical in comparison to the diversity of cats and dogs

... ok what approach would you use for that? Let's say you use yolo to detect th bounding box of the cat, but how do you want to identify the cat, based on your sample images?

Re-train https://github.com/davidsandberg/facenet on cats?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#118
post #98

I don't want you to take this personally, but your post seems very low effort. How can we devote time to helping you if you only put 10 seconds into making this post without reviewing it? For one, writing skills are important. You will have a hard time selling your project to anyone on its merits if you write incomplete sentences with lackluster English. Second, you haven't taken the time to list out what your streng…

I love how your points make sense and seem reasonable at the same time that they were completely irrelevant to attract the right audience and feedback from the community. A foreigner does not need a perfect English (or English at all) to create and sell a product in their countries. Please keep in mind this is an international community. Foreigners should not be discouraged because of a broken English.

OP is from New York City according to his linked profile + homepage.

It is indeed low effort.

Your comment may be more insulting than the one you're replying to :)

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#119

The best products happen at the intersection of an existing niche you are some level of expert in already and a technology that has not yet been adopted in that niche. I've found one approach work very well with my mentees: - Figure out which "special interest groups" you are part of beyond software engineering. That can be "aquarium owner", "coffee lover", "morning person", "diligent grandson" — the less technical,…

"teachers who work from home" (education niche) + "automated submission and pre-grading of homework"

I homeschooled for a lot of years and my first blog was a homeschooling blog. I was involved with The TAG Project as part of supporting my homeschooling and I really hate this idea.

"Teaching to the test" is terrible teaching. Multi-guess answers aren't good ways to test student knowledge. They are just convenient for a teacher who needs to grade 25+ students.

Please don't run around thinking of yet more ways to making it nominally more convenient and easy for individual teachers to process tests or homework or whatever from large numbers of students. This is not a way to enhance the transfer of knowledge to the future generation and is also not a good credentialing method.

There are cool things being done with tech in the education space. There are people going online and learning things they want to learn because there are rich materials available for free. But they don't look anything like "pre-grading of homework" for teachers.

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