Show HN: Bookable Schedule – Schedule meetings directly inside ONE email Hi Hacker News! We released a new meeting scheduling product today! You can use Bookable Schedule in Boomerang for Gmail or our iOS app to create a set of availabilities and share it as many times as you’d like inside your email. Recipients receive an image of your live availabilities and through the use of image maps, they can see and pick the right appointment slots directly inside whichever email client they’re using. If the recipient also has Boomerang, they can overlay their calendar on top of the schedule (still inside the email) to see which times work best for them! It works great for things like office hours, client appointments, sales calls, and more. It also doesn't shift the work of scheduling meetings to the person you're inviting, so it's better etiquette[1] and easier for recipients as well as the scheduler. Please feel free to take a look and play with it, we’d love to hear your thoughts! [1] https://twitter.com/JCornebise/status/1486809751602319371 (By the way, we are hiring for frontend and fullstack devs - i.want.to.work at baydin . com) https://ift.tt/kpBR4AU March 30, 2022 at 11:47PM
Show HN: Code reviews intimidated me, so I built a course on how to master them I’m excited to share Master the Code Review: forge a better process, give better reviews, write better code. It’s a video course with 4+ hours of content [1]. I’ve linked a 21-minute sample below [2]. 6 years ago, I began my software engineering career at Amazon Web Services. I struggled with Pull Requests. My authored PRs received many comments, sometimes 50+. They went through many revisions, sometimes 7+. I often shipped late. My reviews of other PRs were surface level and counterproductive. Long story short: I improved. Through trial, error and experience I learned how to be effective in all 3 dimensions of code reviews: process, reviewer, and author. I came to realize that there isn’t much information out there, giving developers actionable guidance to succeed in a code review environment. Doing so takes specific soft skills, social skills, and technical skills. Very few people talk about them. Late 2020, I started writing about code reviews on my Medium, Twitter [3] and LinkedIn. I grew from 0 to almost 17K followers across platforms. The internet held me accountable for ambiguities and inaccuracies of my public writing. I learned a lot, and leveraged both positive and negative feedback to refine my ideas. My writing experience gave me the confidence to build the course. I created it for my younger self, and I hope developers everywhere find it useful. I launched it a month ago. So far there have been more than 650 students. I’ve received positive feedback from senior managers and principal engineers across big tech. Happy to answer questions! [1] Course: https://ift.tt/Xc5jpls [2] Sample video — Writing effective code review comments: https://ift.tt/AmyP6QO [3] Example Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann/status/1317149417330364421?s=20&t=q4gYZPN4BhXDrHtcTTiHmA March 30, 2022 at 11:04PM
Show HN: A Better Alternative to the AWS Console Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and free to use. You connect a limited-access IAM role (read-only + ability to manage RIs and SPs). You'll see cost reduction recommendations on the Recommendations tab, your active and utilization status on the Plans tab, and the ability to splice-and-dice your data on the Instance Search page via Filters. We make money off of a 20% Savings Fee. If you choose not to let Usage optimize your spend, you'll never need to spend money on Usage. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas! Blog post: https://ift.tt/bEUsqcZ Try free: www.usage.ai March 28, 2022 at 10:30PM
Show HN: Ingredients for Change For far to long ingredient parsers been unavailable to the public. Either due to obsene complexity: https://ift.tt/Rdb3yMw Or because of the dreaded paywall: https://ift.tt/w7fGDby Wait no longer, I introduce PyIng. An easy to use python package for changing this "2 ounces of spicy melon" into this {name: melon, unit: ounces, qty: 2.0}. https://ift.tt/cdN2kyo March 29, 2022 at 12:49AM
Show HN: Free Hosted JupyerLab with GPU Hi, This is Dan and Genevieve from Burstable AI. We've iterated and made a 45 degree pivot, taking what we learned from developing burst ( https://ift.tt/X7J6Fc2 ) to introduce a cloud service that provides access to a GPU-enabled machine using Jupyterlab to provide notebooks, shell access, and a code/text editor. GPU access is measured and the first 50 hours are free. This is *not* a platform to do crypto mining or run weeks of model training for free. We are focused on the R & D phase of modern AI/ML, where developers/scientists are iterating, testing, and measuring results. We are running a beta program with a few seats left to get feedback and constructive directions for how to make Cloudburst a killer environment for modern exploratory AI/ML research, whether you are a high-school student hacking on the weekend, a small team at a startup, or a consultant building ML pipelines for SmB's (or some other user story we haven't thought of yet). Presently, signup is through your github account. If you have questions, please email us at beta@cloudburst.host. Thanks to all our beta folks! https://cloudburst.host March 28, 2022 at 02:36AM
Show HN: Automation the KISS way. No YAML involved Hello HN, I like Ansible as a tool for automation to perform tasks on multiple remote hosts. But like many of you, I'm sick of the custom YAML DSL that many of this kind of tools provide. How many times have we said "just give me a true scripting language!" ? That's why I started this project `tricorder` (as in Star Trek's tricorder, a simple device to do pretty much anything required by the plot). For now, it's only a tool to execute a command on multiple hosts (like ansible, but without the YAML) and returning the outputs as JSON so you can query it with other tools like `jq` in your bash scripts. But with time, I intend to add other tools to provide the following features: - mimic the "gather facts" feature from ansible - upload/download files to/from remote hosts - Rust API to include in your projects - bindings to other languages like Python/TypeScript/Go I'd be happy to have some feedback on the source code (as Rust is not my main language) or on what features you'd like to see implemented. Thank you :) Link to the Github repository: https://ift.tt/7AgSouQ March 26, 2022 at 01:46AM
Show HN: Vault – Sports bet data aggregation app Hey HN, this is Caleb and Zach, we co-founded Vault after realizing how behind the times consumer-facing tech was in the sports betting industry. After creating various products and prototypes for sports bettors for most of 2020 (many with little/no success), in early 2021 we realized a key problem that sports bettors faced... Most of them were tracking their bets, ROI, and net profit using Excel tables or other forms of manual entry. Gaining inspiration from fintech apps such as Intuit Mint and CoPilot, both of which link with your financial accounts and aggregate your data, we created Vault. An app that links with a bettor's sportsbooks (i.e. DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars) and aggregates that data. Would love to hear your thoughts, and feel free to reach out to Zach and I at info@vaultsportshq.com https://ift.tt/v7h4yi2 March 23, 2022 at 03:52AM
Show HN: AI helper to avoid reading reviews on Walmart/Amazon We wanted to build something simple to help people spend less time reading reviews. The current prototype let's you compare two products Pro/Cons for each product using GPT-3 for entity extraction Summary of Reviews for each product using BART fine-tuned with a small dataset Decision Matrix using entity extraction --> clustering --> sentiment analysis pipeline https://ift.tt/Aj9hp2O March 21, 2022 at 11:32PM
Show HN: Open-Source 3D Location-Based Wireless Mesh Network I've decided to open source the project I've been working on called Hyperspace. Hyperspace is a suite of software implementing a wireless mesh network for IoT devices. My main requirements are listed on my repo but I'll copy them here. 1. The mesh shall enable nodes to route packets amongst themselves. 2. The mesh shall allow nodes with limited power to participate in routing packets. 3. The mesh shall be IPv6 based. 4. The mesh shall be local. I.E. not require connection to a remote server. 5. The mesh should provide 3D location to nodes in the network. Nodes use the Decawave DW1000 UWB radio to transmit and receive data, and to measure distances to other nodes. Location can be determined with enough distance measurements (see the documentation for more details). The implementation is pretty primitive at the moment. The border router server and the iOS app are super basic and have very little in terms of actual functionality, but the core ideas are there. I'm not happy with the state of smart home devices. I don't like it when a manufacturer shuts down a key server and bricks a bunch of devices. I don't like it when devices don't interoperate. Therefore, I've decided to open source this project in the hopes that it gains traction and that we can work on creating better IoT devices together. https://ift.tt/RZ7n8yq March 21, 2022 at 05:15AM
Show HN: I built a platform for projects to find maintainers A few days ago, someone I follow asked the community for help maintaining his side-project, 512kb.club. This got me thinking. There are loads of maintainers out there feeling burnt out, but they can't abandon their project since people are depending on the project to be maintained. In an effort to combat this, I built a website that lists projects looking for new maintainers. It's still quite empty and has some rough edges. Any feedback is very welcome! https://ift.tt/WJTEGrY March 21, 2022 at 02:02AM
Show HN: A photo sharing app that isn't trying to be a TikTok clone We launched Pidgeon a few weeks ago, and since then we've had a chance to fix a lot of bugs and upgrade the usability a significant amount. The app is made just for photo sharing. No videos, no NFTs, just pictures, comments, and chats. Each post is ranked like on reddit - a combination of the user upvote/downvotes and the amount of time passed since the post's creation. We're also trying to stay away from ads, and instead adopt a freemium model. The main reason for this is because people are a lot more concerned with privacy these days, and if we aren't serving ads, then the user knows that we don't have an incentive to steal their data. There's already a small community of about 1500 on the app, with a lot of them being professional photographers. So the photos going up look really nice (at least in my opinion). But we don't just want to be a community of people who consider themselves photographers - that's a mistake that other platforms like Flickr and VSCO make. To become widespread, you need to make your platform simple to use for the casual person; only catering to professionals will necessarily keep your community smaller than it otherwise would be. Users have been asking for a desktop client, and while we don't have one yet, we do plan to add it - and it won't take us as long as IG to do it, and neither will it be an afterthought where the UX is intentionally made poor so that you're pushed to use the app instead. But we want to polish the mobile app first before we get there, and there's still a lot of work to do since it's super early days. If you want to try it out, here's the link: https://ift.tt/pbj6LV1 https://ift.tt/i0lpuHa And please do provide any feedback you have on the app! It really does help us make it better. March 20, 2022 at 11:58PM
Show HN: I’m Building a Nerf Dart Missile Defense System [video] I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air. I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges. Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye. This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF-f_AdCxl0 March 20, 2022 at 09:17PM
Show HN: Transcrib, a speech-to-text Android app for WhatsApp voice notes Hi, I made a subscription based Android app to transcribe and read WhatsApp voice notes, supporting all the most common languages. It can be tried for free for 3 days, I'd love to get some feedback! https://ift.tt/epdtM6H March 19, 2022 at 10:30PM
Show HN: Redis Unleashed: A Free Udemy Course from the Rockstar Frank Kane Frank Kane is a popular instructor on Udemy and has taught millions of students. He has now created a FREE course (limited time before it becomes paid). Check it out: Check it out: https://ift.tt/HqDbE2K Overview: Today's Redis is more than a cache! Learn how Redis Modules can replace NoSQL, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, Kafka, and more. Chapters: - Deploy Redis Cloud to AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure - Cache key/value data with Redis - Store persistent JSON data with RedisJSON - Query JSON data with RediSearch - Interface with structured data in Python with Redis OM - Analyze time series data with RedisTimeSeries - Create a real-time multi-cloud service environment with Redis Cloud Enterprise - Generate real-time recommendations with RedisGraph - Build a real-time leaderboard with RedisBloom https://ift.tt/HqDbE2K March 18, 2022 at 12:13AM
Show HN: Fast subdomain enumerator written in Rust Hello! I'm learning Rust and also information security, so what better way to learn than to put a tool together practicing both skills? I've tried to use a couple of different tools for subdomain enumeration (part of the Discovery-party when it comes to penetration testing), but none of them were very fast, even if the DNS resolver I pointed them towards is, so I wrote my own tool that leverages concurrency to check a lot of subdomains, fast! It's written in Rust, main parts being using Tokio and async_channels, and I think it works good enough for a first release. I wanted to get recursive subdomain enumeration to work too, but couldn't figure out how to send into the same channels I'm reading from and knowing when to close the actual channels. Will work on that next! If you want to check out the project, it's located here: https://ift.tt/4cq0ZAf I'd love your feedback on the code, idea or anything in general! Usually people here have very good feedback, so I'm excited to hear what you think. Thank you! https://ift.tt/4cq0ZAf March 15, 2022 at 11:21PM
Show HN: I made Devzat – It's like discord but in the terminal, over SSH Run `ssh devzat.hackclub.com` to try it out! The repo is here: https://ift.tt/OJgTkqe (golang). It has markdown and emoji support, DMs, channels, and it can show images too. You can send code, and it gets syntax highlighted (you can change the theme). You can ping people like so: @user and it sends them a \a, which should play an audible sound if the terminal allows it. There's inbuilt games and rainbow names and a lot of other small things I don't remember right now. You might find the auth system interesting: it's based on a hash of ssh pubkey (bans use that and a hash of IP, so it isn't so easy to get around a ban) Also an interesting issue: bots that go around trying to brute force ssh into random IPs with common usernames. My current solution is banning if rapid successive joins are detected. March 15, 2022 at 11:32PM
Show HN: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AMA Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions. Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year. Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better). By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work. The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app. This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of? We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything. https://ift.tt/Q8brjoU March 11, 2022 at 03:21AM
Show HN: Prepform – AI and spaced-repetition to optimize learning Hi, I'm Eric and I'm the founder and lead developer of Prepform. A high-quality education helped me pursue my interests and achieve my goals. I started Prepform so students of all backgrounds have access to the same kind of education. I grew up in Southern California, surrounded by dozens of SAT prep programs, and I swear I must have gone to all of them. Different programs followed different styles and techniques, but the strategy they shared was to create a study plan and review mistakes. A study plan is taking a diagnostic test, setting a target score, creating a study schedule, identifying mistakes, and finally reviewing those mistakes. I wanted to take this structure and optimize it with machine learning, while accounting for elements of human learning and memory. I'm a big fan of SuperMemo, a memorization technique developed by Piotr Wozniak, where you review material just as you're about to forget it. Cognitive psychology tells us human forgetting follows a pattern, but Piotr quantified this behavior to identify the precise moment forgetting happens. The goal was to build on his research with AI and tailor it to not only test prep but to the individual student, and make it the engine of the study plan. The result is Blended Prep, which guides students to internalize knowledge rather than memorize material, and gives them the best chance to ace their next exam. I'm so excited to share this with the HN community, and would love to know what you think. You can try it out at https://prepform.com . Thanks for reading. https://prepform.com March 11, 2022 at 01:57AM
Show HN: I wrote a good React book / website Pre-covid, I was traveling full time to teach ReactJS to corporate clients. My students (mostly developers at banks and insurance companies) would ask me 'What's a good React book?' and I would struggle to recommend something, knowing that all the books sucked or were really out of date. When all my face-to-face training work dried up and I really didn't want to do online training, I magically got a contract to write a book. I started by reading all of the best-selling books on React, and, yeah, they were all really out of date, incomplete, or just wrong. As I started writing what I hoped would be a really good React book, I also wanted the website to be something useful and a notch above a typical book website. So, I tried to have working examples of the code listings on the site and to organize them in a way that would make them useful for when I started teaching again, or for anyone who doesn't want to buy a book and just wants to see how things are done. The book just came out today! The website isn't perfect or done, but here it is: https://ift.tt/QeYSvkf . How'd I do? March 10, 2022 at 02:40AM
Show HN: A Notebook about using `client-go` to write Go clients for Kubernetes Hi everyone! I just published the notebook "Using `client-go` - (season 1)". This is the first “Season” about Kubernetes `client-go` library; it will: - cover the foundations and the core ideas - introduce you to the whole concepts preparatory to master custom controllers implementation You can download the TOC (and then if you like buy the notebook) here: https://ift.tt/CGNcW5M If you just want a look at the source code, you can find it here: https://ift.tt/6c2HhWz All the best! Luca https://ift.tt/CGNcW5M March 9, 2022 at 10:07PM
Show HN: HyperSudoku – Multiplayer sudoku puzzle every 15 min Hi All, This the second iteration of a multiplayer sudoku web-based game I built recently. Hope you like it! Features: 1) No login needed, 2) Web app, that can be added to home-screen as needed, 3) Works on Desktop (with arrow keys supported) & Mobile, 4) Share link with friends to invite to the game Game Rules: 1) New puzzle starts for everyone every 15 minutes, 2) Game ends if you run out of time, 3) Fill all empty tiles correctly before time runs out to win, 4) Incorrect moves will disable the board for a few seconds, with penalty increasing as you've fewer empty tiles remaining Get started here: https://hypersudoku.app March 9, 2022 at 09:20AM
Show HN: Kaado.io – Unifying Personal Productivity Hi HN, a while ago I discovered a problem with problem with personal productivity tools: Every time you find a tool that works well in one regard (say, habit tracking), you neglect your previously working systems (say, your to do list system). So I set about to build a system which unifies all the different aspects of personal productivity. Everything is represented in cards (like flash cards) which are defined in Markdown. The following types of cards exist: * Learning : Classic front/back prompts to memorize things. Think "What is the capital of Argentina?" on the front and "Buenos Aires" on the back. Works with a spaced repetition algorithm so time between prompts is optimized. * Habits : Recurring actions you want to do - you can set the frequency individually. For example "Stand up and walk around your room" every two hours. * Checks : Recurring prompts, similar to habits, but always questions referring to the past. For example a daily "Did you drink enough today?" prompt * To do : One time actions that are deleted upon completion. * Reading List : Used for books, articles, talks etc. There are always a limited number of reading list items active, which will prompt you to read a page a day until you are done with the given book. * Other : Everything else - interesting websites, quotes, art or even memes that you will occasionally see. The idea is that there is a single queue for all types of cards, only ever showing you one item that's due next - whether habit, learning prompt or a random note. This prevents choice fatigue, the dread of lengthy to-do lists and the boredom of endless dry learning prompts. I've been using the app successfully for myself for quite some time now but would love external feedback. You can check it out at https://kaado.io. It's currently completely free (and in fairly early stage development). Simple email signup is needed but you won't get any unprompted mails. Apart from that I would love your takes and ideas regarding personal productivity and what works for you. March 8, 2022 at 08:32PM
Show HN: Prodscape.net – Map your mobile app Hello HN, Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I've created a service that creates a "flow map" of your mobile app. Check it out at: https://prodscape.net . The goal is to reduce last-minute regressions, promote holistic discussion, and help develop more ownership within an organization. This is something that I would have liked to have had when I was working at a big company. Some caveats: 1.) Only iOS is currently supported but Android-support will be coming soon. 2.) You need a developer-signed IPA file (see the guide on creating an IPA file here: https://ift.tt/CikWwr4). I would appreciate your thoughts on: 1.) your barriers to trying it 2.) your impressions of the map 3.) whether you're interested in applying this within your team 4.) anything else. Don't have access to an IPA file? Email me at illahi@prodscape.net and I will send you one to try. Thanks! March 8, 2022 at 01:47AM
Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Backblaze Creator here. I was looking for something as simple as Backblaze Personal [1] but privacy focused and open source. This is my attempt to build that. Uses PyQt6 [2] for the GUI and Pyinstaller [3] for creating the platform specific binaries. The backup engine under the hood is Restic [4]. The server code is written in Laravel [5]. All the code is on GitHub [6]. I actually really like Backblaze (even use B2 for this offering behind the scenes) so this isn't meant to throw shade their way. Just wanted a private open source alternative. Something like Bitwarden but for backups. [1] https://backblaze.com [2] https://ift.tt/ImE8KMZ [3] https://ift.tt/192GoaP [4] https://ift.tt/7p3G2FN [5] https://laravel.com [6] https://ift.tt/AJlKLY1 https://blobbackup.com March 6, 2022 at 07:28PM
Show HN: Mailwitness – Digital Signatures over Email Hi HN, I'm Marek Dopiera and I wanted to share the digital signature solution which I made with my software house. Your feedback would be much appreciated. We've just launched it - it's a service for signing documents over e-mail - https://mailwitness.com . It still has some rough edges, but hopefully it is useful already. To sign a PDF with somebody, you e-mail them the PDF and put sign@mailwitness.com in CC. If they agree, they need to forward it to sign@mailwitness.com. When they do, you all get your document signed. You can generate PDFs from e-mail, too for convenience. We made this to raise the safety bar of agreements made via e-mail. Via anecdotal evidence, we know that if people do not use services like DocuSign or HelloSign, they consider an e-mail conversation as proof or they print, sign and scan documents. I think we're offering more safety and convenience, because we're preventing the documents from alteration, forging fakes and backdating (by using OpenTimestamp, which essentially constructs a Merkle tree and puts its root into a Bitcoin transaction). I'm hoping that our service becomes useful also because it doesn't require any sign-up (just one confirmation e-mail for Ts&Cs), it's free (in the basic model) and doesn't require the extra cognitive load on learning a web app or a mobile app. You may argue, that one can create a fake e-mail account and use that. That's a valid point, but the reality proves that verification via e-mail is enough for lots of people (vide the agreements over e-mail or DocuSign or HelloSign). In the future we may create paid options, which would include extra identity verification. Even without that extra option, things are not as bad, though: if you use your work e-mail, it's usually your employer who verified your identity. Another question you might have is spoofing. If your e-mail has a valid DKIM signature (which is the case for most major e-mail providers), we'll accept your message. If it doesn't we'll send you a message to verify that you can also receive e-mail. For data safety, we have designed the service such that we discard the documents as soon as we process an e-mail (usually a low number of seconds). Finally, there is legal safety. We operate under the EU law, which qualifies us as a "Trust service provider" and puts requirements on our service. What we do, qualifies as an "Advanced Digital Signature" and according to the EU law, cannot be denied legal effect based on the grounds that it is digital. Monetization path is unclear yet - I want to see if this catches on and if yes, how people are going to use it. Some options include extra services like using your own certificate rather than ours or identity verification. I would really love to hear your feedback - especially for what reasons you would not use it. Thank you https://mailwitness.com March 4, 2022 at 11:26PM
Show HN: I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown. The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges. After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to me), it lies at the end of the wiki page of the very topic [2]. Then I found a paper [3] that has nice pseudocode and a C implementation. I rewrote the pseudocode in Rust because I wanted to experiment with rustwasm. Honestly, I didn't care much about the math behind it. From then, I could continue to finish the app and show it to the world. This app is also my chance to learn about rustwasm and WebGL. FYI: this app is offline-only; your images never leave your browser [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgreAUpPwM [2] https://ift.tt/Pro6wkp [3] https://ift.tt/qeYthsw https://ift.tt/ugedaB4 March 2, 2022 at 11:26PM
Show HN: Type2Learn – Learn by typing the webpage text in the browser itself Ever happened that while reading a long article, you cannot concentrate and read the same line again and again? Try this extension now! Read the text by typing it on the webpage itself. Practice your touch typing by monitoring your speed, errors you make, and accuracy in real-time. Chrome store link: https://ift.tt/Saprkx9... https://ift.tt/af3lbT4 March 1, 2022 at 11:51PM
Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting. So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph. We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon). Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta: - A book-focused social feed (finally!) - Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends - Streamlined book recommendations to friends - Easily track reading goals and books you've read And many more... It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform. https://www.booqsi.com/ February 28, 2022 at 11:59PM
Show HN: Language aware diff on GitHub PRs Hi HN! We were frustrated with text diffs on GitHub PRs, so we made DiffLens ( https://ift.tt/3gSbFTR ). DiffLens constructs an Abstract Syntax Tree for each file, and uses that semantic information to intelligently diff changes. Checkout the demo on our website ( https://ift.tt/B1S4Lca ). Getting started with DiffLens is easy! Simply install the app on your repositories. The next time you open a PR, DiffLens will automatically create a diff for your changes. If you review code, especially TypeScript, JavaScript or CSS, give DiffLens a try! We're always looking for feedback. If you encounter bugs, or want to give us feedback, we'll be around. You can also reach us at support@difflens.com. https://ift.tt/3gSbFTR February 28, 2022 at 10:23PM
Show HN: I Created a Chrome Extension for PG: TRAB (Tweet Reporter and Blocker) A few days ago I saw this tweet from PG: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733 ...and guessed it shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome extension to do this (I had never made a chrome extension before) So I took a stab at it - took me a bit over a day to make it, and it was fun to put together. I responded to his tweet with the link to the extension but I'm not sure if he would've seen it. https://ift.tt/1gKswNC February 28, 2022 at 11:02PM