Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 960 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#941

Post by TheMightyLlama »

telchior wrote: post #929
TheMightyLlama wrote: post #902

Over a year ago I became hugely frustrated with the narratives that were being presented to us. Every 'social media' platform as well as 'news' platform presents us with an undifferentiated feed of news. The problem with an undifferentiated feed is that we, as consumers, can never get a solid view on what's happened or is happening on a single event. Moreover, the existing platforms encourage doom-scrolling and keep…

I think you're right; there's immense potential value in news aggregation that goes beyond "this got the most eyeballs / articles". What do you think of the possibility of ranking articles by some metric? If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).

I've given this a lot of thought. Even to the extent of trying to understand what an alternative twitter would look like were it possible to somhow classify a tweet based on its legality in a region and thus giving the user the option to see only tweets which are 'legal' in their jurisdiction. This is a tough nut to crack.

> If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).

It is one thing to have to trawl through 30 articles and figure out which one has the content which is both most accurate at describing the truth and is covering all aspects of the situtation. And it is another thing to filter articles out for having certain attributes.

The first is more difficult. The second is easier and a good feature to add. As the articles are added to the database it's possible to obtain the content and parse it for references to those particular attributes. I'm actually starting work on one at the moment, adverts.

We know that the current model on the internet is to get eyes on an adverts. Not articles. Adverts. And, when we see an outrageous headline "Billie Eilish shaves off own hair in outburst!", we're going to open that page to see what's going on. And surprise surprise. Ads all over the place. I'll be using the number of ads as a metric and in order to provide the user with a warning as to the reliability of the information on the page "This page has more than X adverts. Please be aware that the page may have been designed to obtain your attention and the information within may not be accurate".

As I said in the original comment, I'm going to expand this in such a way that it is beneficial to users to identify "healthy" articles where "healthy" means: few ads, representative of reality (true) and with multiple aspects of the news event.

I have high hopes.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#942

Post by l72 »

jeffdn wrote: post #879
l72 wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have been working on public transit for my city in the US and several smaller cities that I visit that tend to get ignored by the big apps. Most of these cities have real time data, but it is from a 3rd party vendor that either tries to lock up the data or has a terrible app. For example, the one for Steamboat Springs Colorado, a small little ski town, uses a 3rd party vendor for real time tracking information.…

Steamboat Springs is an amazing place! One bit of feedback on your website -- it's agonizingly slow to have to wait for the list of cities to scroll -- a bar or an arrow would be lovely.

Thanks, I'll add some arrows. I guess it isn't intuitive that you can click and drag to scroll left and right through the cities.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#943

Post by burntsushi »

pmarreck wrote: post #918
burntsushi wrote: post #878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it took that much time. If you count the time involved in the regex engine though, you might get a bit closer. :-)

LOL. I thought I read that somewhere in your blog post about it (which was amazingly detailed and interesting), but human minds are poo. Thanks so much for this sweet tool! Is there a ripgrep lib that other software can build on this, btw?

Technically yes, and this is the best I can offer: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/1009

In practice, there's no real high level documentation. And there is still a considerable amount of "glue" code in ripgrep's main executable. So the library layer exists at a lower level of abstraction, which may or may not be okay for your use case.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#944

Post by sim04ful »

tunesmith wrote: post #59

I have two, one more ambitious than the other. First is a site that has existed for around 25 years now, although it was shut off for several years. It came back to life when the pandemic started, and is behind private auth now. Basically, it lets me and other creative writers collaborate on branching fiction novels together. I write a chapter and put a couple of choices at the end, which serve as writing prompts. A…

I'm really interested in this. Closest thing we've got is https://www.kialo.com/do-aliens-exist-1258

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#945

Post by metaketa »

As a kid with a band and a love for Guitar Pro 4, I had the dream that all scores and guitar tabs for all music ever made would exist and be freely available. Now a decade later with blockchains and score rendering libraries in Javascript, that is on the road to become a reality. Now, the vision of transcribing all music ever made is of course so large that it is impossible, but working on a free sheet music editor and the NFT blockchain protocols with a DAO is so much fun that I'm already happy just having made a glorified online version of Guitar Pro 4. If any musician likes working with Elm, Rust and blockchain protocols feel free to join me on mission impossible!

https://parture.org

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#946

Post by telchior »

TheMightyLlama wrote: post #941
telchior wrote: post #929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right; there's immense potential value in news aggregation that goes beyond "this got the most eyeballs / articles". What do you think of the possibility of ranking articles by some metric? If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I want (which may be something like longest, or shortest, or without embedded video).

I've given this a lot of thought. Even to the extent of trying to understand what an alternative twitter would look like were it possible to somhow classify a tweet based on its legality in a region and thus giving the user the option to see only tweets which are 'legal' in their jurisdiction. This is a tough nut to crack. > If there are 30 or 300 articles, I don't want to do the work of figuring out which version I…

There's probably something to be said for human editorial in ranking sources. There are a finite number of actual news sources with actual reporting, and it occurs to me that your once your automated filter detects possible crap quality, it could kick it up to a human for review and subsequent permanent deranking.

This is one of Google's problems: they are monomaniacal about algorithmic ranking. And that's got them very far on the open web, where the number of sources is too wide and varied for human review. But while news has the appearance of being a wide domain, the majority of what's out there is regurgitated content on sites that could safely be branded with a permanent mark of distrust.

Meanwhile metrics like # of ads could incorrectly derank sites that are just run under a poor business model, but do employ good journalists / analysts / whatever.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#947

Post by hiptobecubic »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #216
ss108 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ this Would add: prestige law and government jobs; trying to be an actor; working at Amazon; working as a chef/cook at most restaurants, esp fancy ones--the list is quite long of "passion jobs" that pay poorly and involve all sorts of abuse people wouldn't put up with at other jobs.

working at Amazon is a passion job?

I think people would generally describe "software at FAANG" as a high quality job. Amazon is being called out here because it is notoriously stressful compared to the rest.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#948

Post by olek »

Hi Guys,

Since June 2021 I have been co-developing my side project - Difree https://www.getdifree.com/ - a rich text editor to write on many things in a distraction free way.

When I asked myself a question, is my side project, the project:

  where I don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but I am working on it regardless.
I answered 'partially' :-)

I mean,

1. I don't care about if it makes money or it gets a lot of attention.

2. But I would love people to find Difree and find it useful, as I do. That's it.

Does it mean, I want 'a lot of attention'? I don't know.

Right now with Difree I have been basically scratching my itch. We have been developing it, because I found I had a problem and there was no suitable solution for that.

In the past, I missed a tool, where I can write something longer and/or more meaningful, like a reply to an e-mail or a post on Reddit, in a simple manner without distractions.

Built-in editors in websites like Gmail, Reddit, or Slack leave much to be desired, eg.

1. Gmail's text editor is poorly designed. By default, I have to write an e-mail in a small window, in the bottom right corner of the website.

2. Slack's text editor is full of distractions. While writing I am usually being bombarded with incoming messages.

3. Reddit's text editor is... well, both :-)

My workaround was, I wrote the text aside in an external tool and then copy-paste it.

But I couldn't have found the right external tool, e.g.

1. Notepad sucked at formatting.

2. Evernote was slow to start and difficult to write.

3. MS Word is not free and cluttered.

4. Google Docs is overcomplicated for this purpose.

5. Google Keep is for taking short notes, not meaningful writing.

The only tool that partially worked for me was iA Writer. It looks neat, simple, and elegant. Writing is distraction-free. I used it quite often, but I missed two things. The ideal text editor for me should be handy and fast.

1. By handy, I mean I could work on many things.

2. By fast, I mean open in a second.

This was when the idea of a simple, fast, and distraction-free editor came to my mind. Using the proven framework for text editors like Quill and making it easily accessible as a browser's extension, seemed to be the fast lane.

The keynote for Difree is to build the text editor that is

1. distraction-free,

2. fast,

3. and handy

I guess, if it works for me, that's fine. I am sure, there will be people having the same problem as I had and find Difree useful.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#949

Post by brianvoe »

I have maintained an open source project for many years now called Gofakeit. Not too long ago I released a website for it so that everyone else can use it. I really dont know where I am going with it but it's one of those things that I personally use and right now thats enough for me.

github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit gofakeit.com

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#950

Post by wswoodruff »

Charlieholtz wrote: post #112

I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about work…

Hopefully they'll switch to Node soon so I can help too
Post reply on HN