Show HN: Calculator for US Individual Income tax, from 1970-present I wanted to share a simple web app I created recently, which lets you estimate income taxes owed in the US: https://taxsim.app All the calculations occur directly in the browser, and are powered by a Fortran program that has been converted to WASM using emscripten. This calculator was originally developed in the 1970s [1] by the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER has been maintaining this F77 codebase for the last 50 years, and uses it primarily for academic research on tax policy. The Fortran source code itself is over 1MB of text, because it codifies both federal and all 50 states' tax laws for each of the last 62 years. I first learned about NBER TAXSIM [2] a few months ago via an interesting paper they published "Automatic Tax Filing: Simulating a Pre-Populated Form 1040" [3]. The Fortran code itself is not open-source, but is available on request for research purposes. I reached out to NBER and proposed compiling it to WASM, so it could be run directly in a browser. With relatively little effort I was able to create a js/wasm version [4], thanks in huge part to previous open-source work [5]. This WASM build now powers https://taxsim.app, which is my attempt to create an interactive UI to allow for easier exploration of the US tax code. Specific tax scenarios can also be shared easily, by simply copying the browser URL. The code for this webapp is also open-source [6]. This was my first time experimenting with WASM, and I am already a huge fan. Not only was I able to take a 60 year old codebase and get it working on every modern browser and device, this work is also now benefiting the academic community. For example, the js/wasm can be run directly in V8, which means it can also now be run locally within R using libv8 [7]. Previously most researchers were uploading their tax scenarios to NBER's servers via ftp/ssh/http. [1] https://ift.tt/fxWgYMj [2] https://ift.tt/usdJzR0 [3] https://ift.tt/mQJjVgC [4] https://ift.tt/qLNZSK7 [5] https://ift.tt/UXOEkVS [6] https://ift.tt/3m2V0wX [7] https://ift.tt/opMdA8c June 30, 2022 at 02:52AM
Show HN: ColorTiles Browser Game Hello HN! Here is a little game I made, colorful tiles must be placed next to other tiles and match in symbol or color. This game is inspired by Passage 3 and similar games like Qwirkle, Rummy or Dominoes. There exist some browser-based versions here and there, but I wasn't completely satisfied with any of them, so I made my own. This is optimized for a broad range of screen sizes and auto-rotates the playing field for narrow (portrait) viewports. As I've discovered with my own parents, folks who enjoy playing Solitaire, Hearts and similar games might enjoy this as well, so gladly spread the word. Have fun and feedback is appreciated! :) https://colortiles.net/ June 29, 2022 at 08:08PM
Show HN: Ploomber Cloud (YC W22) – run notebooks at scale without infrastructure Hi, we’re Ido & Eduardo, the founders of Ploomber. We’re launching Ploomber Cloud today, a service that allows data scientists to scale their work from their laptops to the cloud. Our open-source users (https://ift.tt/B8TZz16) usually start their work on their laptops; however, often, their local environment falls short, and they need more resources. Typical use cases run out of memory or optimize models to squeeze out the best performance. Ploomber Cloud eases this transition by allowing users to quickly move their existing projects into the cloud without extra configurations. Furthermore, users can request custom resources for specific tasks (vCPUs, GPUs, RAM). Both of us experienced this challenge firsthand. Analysis usually starts in a local notebook or script, and whenever we wanted to run our code on a larger infrastructure we had to refactor the code (i.e. rewrite our notebooks using Kubeflow’s SDK) and add a bunch of cloud configurations. Ploomber Cloud is a lot simpler, if your notebook or script runs locally, you can run it in the cloud with no code changes and no extra configuration. Furthermore, you can go back and forth between your local/interactive environment and the cloud. We built Ploomber Cloud on top of AWS. Users only need to declare their dependencies via a requirements.txt file, and Ploomber Cloud will take care of making the Docker image and storing it on ECR. Part of this implementation is open-source and available at: https://ift.tt/ibFNKDy Once the Docker image is ready, we spin up EC2 instances to run the user’s pipeline distributively (for example, to run hundreds of ML experiments in parallel) and store the results in S3. Users can monitor execution through the logs and download artifacts. If source code hasn’t changed for a given pipeline task, we use cached artifacts and skip redundant computations, severely cutting each run's cost, especially for pipelines that require GPUs. Users can sign up to Ploomber Cloud for free and get started quickly. We made a significant effort to simplify the experience (https://ift.tt/w5ryEsq). There are three plans (https://ift.tt/spylLUq the first is the Community plan, which is free with limited computing. The Teams plan has a flat $50 monthly and usage-based billing, and the Enterprise plan includes SLAs and custom pricing. We’re thrilled to share Ploomber Cloud with you! So if you’re a data scientist who has experienced these endless cycles of getting a machine and going through an ops team, an ML engineer who helps data scientists scale their work, or you have any feedback, please share your thoughts! We love discussing these problems since exchanging ideas sparks exciting discussions and brings our attention to issues we haven’t considered before! You may also reach out to me at ido@ploomber.io. June 29, 2022 at 08:34PM
Show HN: I ranked news websites by speed I've been working on building "the fastest news website" for a few reasons: 1. I got tired of waiting for news websites to load, so I made a text-only news website that only has major news headlines. 2. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that if you want to build something really fast on the web, you can do it without loads of JavaScript. 3. I wanted to show that you can design something that looks good without having tons of images, etc. I put together the speed page at https://ift.tt/OGpbRSC to hold my website to be more accountable for speed, but it's also interesting to see how fast other news websites are (or in most cases, are not). Some feedback I'm interested in receiving: 1. What's your take both on the speed ranking methodology for Legible News? 2. Are my descriptions of the metrics for a non-web developer reasonable? Example of that at https://ift.tt/GSz7eXB , and if you click through the links on that table, you see a description like https://ift.tt/oGL5n9z Sorry ahead of time, but I can't fit all news websites on the speed report. I had to target general news websites, not ones for specific niches like HN for Tech. If there's something you think that's missing please post it, but I can't promise that I'll add it. If you like it, please consider subscribing! Thanks! https://ift.tt/OGpbRSC June 28, 2022 at 11:05PM
Show HN: CRProxy is a simple and affordable ngrok alternative CRProxy is a new reverse web proxy service. We have a generous free plan that includes the ability to use custom domains and semi-custom sub-domains. We have reasonably priced plans with good bandwidth and no additional usage charges. Please give it a try and let me know what you think. Thank you, David https://crproxy.com June 26, 2022 at 11:19PM
Show HN: Tone v0.0.4 – now hackable command line audio tagger, any feedback? Hey HN, I just wanted to show the progress on my little (maybe useless) side project called tone[1] to get some qualified feedback. tone is a cross plattform command line audio tagger deployed as a single static binary without dependencies, so a wget should be enough to install on any platform (seems not to work on M1 Macs atm... if someone can help here I would really appreciate it). Features: - Supports most common formats (mp3, m4a, flac, ape, etc.) - Most common AND custom metadata fields - Chapter support - Embeddable pictures - Hackable (write your own taggers with scripting language) Thanks and have fun. [1]: https://ift.tt/1gFBmjK June 26, 2022 at 03:37AM
Show HN: Product Analytics in SQL with dbt Hey everyone! Like many data analysts and engineers, I love SQL and the dbt ecosystem. So it bothers me that we have to use separate tools for product analytics. We do our transformations, BI work, and ad-hoc queries in SQL, but when it's time to look at funnels and flows, we have to use (and procure) a separate platform like Mixpanel or Amplitude. This dbt package is a (very rough) start at fixing that. With it, you can create event streams and run funnel analyses via dbt[0]. More features like flows and retention are coming soon! But I'm mostly curious how you all are doing product analytics right now. Are you using a dedicated tool like Amplitude? What could be better? Do you want to do product analytics in SQL in the warehouse or would you rather it live somewhere else? Would love to get your thoughts, and thanks for taking a look! --- 0. (and soon, with dbt Server, in your favorite BI tool or SQL client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdSMSbQxnO0&ab_channel=dbt https://ift.tt/jS5bDY6 June 26, 2022 at 12:53AM
Show HN: Feather – 90 percent of Bloomberg terminal, for 5 percent of the price Hey, Wanted to share what my friend and I built — Feather. It provides investors with all imaginable financial data, without breaking the bank. Effectively 90 percent of the Bloomberg Terminal, at 5 percent of the price. We just opened sign ups for early access — all you need to sign up is your email address. We’ll open access to the software in order of sign ups, and we’d love to have you onboard. Check it out! https://try-feather.com June 26, 2022 at 12:05AM
Show HN: Domfetch.com - free tool to find expired domains with history We have finally launched Domfetch! Domfetch is a free platform to find expired domains. Users can search through domains that are (almost) available for registration. We enrich these domains with extra data to help users find valuable domains. We created this tool because we found the (free) alternatives lacking certain data, such as Moz, Alexa history (we check 5 years of data) & search volume history over a period of 1 year. Let us know what you think! More features and tld's will be added in the near future. https://domfetch.com June 24, 2022 at 04:46PM
Show HN: In-depth photographic look at all the golf courses I play I'm an avid golfer; it's my main hobby. I decided to start taking pictures of all the courses I play. While there's a lot of golf websites out there, none of them really try to document the courses in depth and look at each hole, along with the course facilities like the practice areas. I live in Chicago and am starting with the courses in this area (of which there are dozens of public courses to play). While I play golf, I take photos with my phone of every (relevant) aspect of the golf course I can think of. Then they're processed and organized on the website. Obviously I'm starting this journey on my own, and in that sense it's not scalable. I won't be able to visit all the courses in the US, let alone the world. I hope to find others that would like to contribute to the effort. At some point I'd like to add course news and histories to the site. Many golf courses in the US are over 100 years old and have rich histories. And of course many older courses exist in Europe. I also have started adding descriptions/commentary for each hole on courses. For example, see: https://ift.tt/LkMQ2Sp... And maybe went a little overboard on this one: https://ift.tt/Qn7tEsl... Anyway, it's a fun project and could go in a lot of directions. PS: I'm always looking to expand my golfing circle. If you're in Chicago and want to play sometime, hit me up -- contact details are on the website. https://ift.tt/mCLYO3P June 24, 2022 at 01:23AM
Show HN: Pragmatic Formal Modeling (Tutorial series with runnable examples) Formal modeling is a mathematical approach for designing and checking correctness of software systems. It focuses on standard software engineering and distributed systems problems of the sort programmers face every day. It takes a pragmatic engineering approach: each problem starts with UML diagrams, design decisions and sometimes even a requirements document. We work through how to get from a whiteboard design to an initial mathematical model. Then we refine it based on logical errors found by the model checker, which return with a level of detail unheard of in a standard debugger. Formal modeling is a skill every engineer should have in their toolbox. All the examples are downloadable, and their is a quick setup section at the start. Additionally, there is an explorable model error debugger build right into the website. https://ift.tt/I1V2cq5 June 22, 2022 at 11:13PM
Show HN: Crocodile - Better code review for GitHub Hi HN! I've been working on a code review app for GitHub called Crocodile for about a year. I used to work at Microsoft where we used a tool called CodeFlow for reviewing code and I missed it after I left. I know many other ex-Microsoft engineers feel the same. Here are some of the distinguishing features of Crocodile that are inspired by CodeFlow: * Comments float above the code instead of being inline. Long discussions that are displayed inline make it really hard to review the code. * Comment on any text selection in the file, even a single character. * Comments don't get lost when code changes. I hate it when comments become "outdated" because I rebase or the line is edited. I also implemented lots of features that I wish CodeFlow had which you can read more about on the blog. [1] For those curious about the tech stack: it's mostly written in Go with Alpine.js, HTMX, and Tailwind CSS for the frontend. For storage I use PostgreSQL, S3 compatible object storage, and Redis for caching. I use Pulumi for infrastructure provisioning and Kubernetes deployments. Everything is hosted on DigitalOcean. Feedback is welcome! [1] https://ift.tt/l7iBDLv https://ift.tt/GzUumHf June 23, 2022 at 01:37AM
Show HN: Just – Zero Config TypeScript Development Tool I built a cli tool that gets you started with TypeScript development with zero config. Initially created to solve my own problem but thought it might be useful for others as well. - SWC compiler - TypeScript type check support - Live reload support - .env file support - Path alias support - Typescript script runner - REPL support Please tell me I am not going down a rabbit hole. https://ift.tt/NIKdAhY June 21, 2022 at 01:22AM
Show HN: Effortless Authentication for Your Web Application Hey folks, Michael here. I have been working in this project on and of for about a year and a half and I finally got it into a state where I can share it. I initially started this project to learn Rust and afterwards decided to make it useful for others. Vulpo Auth is an authentication server that you can host yourself. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for you to get started and have a complete authentication solution without you having to configure anything. Project Website: https://auth.vulpo.dev The Project contains: - Auth Server (Rust) - Admin Dashboard - JS and react SDK - Prebuilt Web UI (currently react) (https://ift.tt/PQZXdk3) - rust SDK for rocket Some of the features: - Email and Password Auth - Passwordless Auth - Google Auth - Translateable Email Templates - Enable/Disable Sign In or Sign Up - Password Reset Flow - Update Email Flow There is still a lot to do, the code base is full of experimental ideas and there a bunch of things to clean up, but first I want to focus on writing documentation and guides before adding more features. Besides the missing documentation, what are you missing? June 19, 2022 at 10:38PM
Show HN: Remove Silence from Videos with Ffmpeg There was recently a Show HN for a program that lets one remove silence from video files [0]. I was almost certain that ffmpeg could do this... But after searching for it, it turned out I was wrong: ffmpeg can't do this out of the box, and also can't read input from an EDL file [1]. So I set out to write a solution, as simple as possible: produce a list of select filters that are applied to video and audio, and retain only the non-silent parts. The 'silencedetect' audio filter detects silences, and produces timestamps for when silences start and end. So one can pipe the output of that to a Python script, that builds an ffmpeg command with the appropriate select filters. The resulting ffmpeg command can be run to re-encode the video without the silent parts. Hope this helps. - - - Notes: 1/ I did find something somewhat similar to what I ended up doing [2], but it's complicated, and does the video encoding inside of Python. Granted, moviepy uses ffmpeg under the hood, but it's still better if ffmpeg does all the encoding directly. 2/ This solution doesn't produce a myriad of intermediary files that it would recombine afterwards; there is just one encoding of the output video file. 'silencedetect' is very fast, so all in all running this should be pretty fast. [0] https://ift.tt/Z3rGyml [1] https://ift.tt/4Ek3ZIP [2] https://ift.tt/woEcbdH... https://ift.tt/nIL07A6 June 18, 2022 at 11:21PM
Show HN: Soliciting post placement on Hacker News Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to Product Hunt, HN gives higher priority to users with higher karma. I usually keep up with recent discussions via RSS feed on Feedly, but almost neve post. So I thought I'd reach out to someone that has authority. My product is called Popupular and it helps embed just about anything into a popup via a Google Chrome extension. [rest of email truncated] June 15, 2022 at 11:17PM
Show HN: Thoughts on Digital Sticky Notes All the apps that allow you to put stickys on a board to manage progress are missing the point. Tasks to do tasks dont necessarily lead you to accomplishing your goals. I built a tool with my team that makes users align all work to their goals. No way around it. We call them missions. Let me know your thoughts! Roast it, love it, be confused by it...let us know! https://twigflo.com June 15, 2022 at 06:13AM
Show HN: PostgresML integrates Hugging Face to bring SOTA models into the db Hello folks, It's been a few weeks, so we thought it might be time for another update and this one is very exciting indeed. We've added automatic integration with Hugging Face transformers! By running just a single SQL command, anyone is now able to deploy any of the state-of-the-art models into their Postgres DB for real time inference & tuning. The list of models is long, but here it is anyway: translation, sentiment analysis, summarization, question answering and text generation. Let us know what you think! Montana & Lev https://ift.tt/dFRgraw June 13, 2022 at 11:42PM
Show HN: I built a tool to describe ~4.3B colors A simple tool I made over the week to explore and learn about different colors. You can select any color with any opacity #000000-FFFFFFFF (~4.3 billion colors/variants), and you can view a dedicated page detailing the color's closest name, conversions to Hex, RGB, CMYK, etc., shades, tints, tones, harmonies, opacities, and WCAG contrast compliance. https://colorwaze.com June 11, 2022 at 01:27AM
Show HN: Color palettes generator for data visualization A generator app for charts/visualizations color palettes based on the article "How to pick the least wrong colors" [1] by Matthew Ström featured recently on HN [2]. The code is available on github [3]. [1] https://ift.tt/NJ9dCnu... [2] https://ift.tt/0kVeNrZ [3] https://ift.tt/v4gBFk8 https://ift.tt/yLOGhqQ June 9, 2022 at 12:59AM
Show HN: Chesskool – Platform for Chess Improvement Launch day is here! This has been my passion project, to recreate Duolingo for chess! I always thought Duolingo had amazing "hooks" to help people learn new languages, so I implemented its spaced-repetition, reports and daily and weekly training reminders in a Chess learning platform for chess improvers! I built it in Meteor.js and React.js. I chose Meteor to be able to add Cordova in the future. The Caro-Kann course (for white) is completely free, if you guys want to try it. What do you folks think? https://ift.tt/sw6NbTM June 6, 2022 at 11:15PM
Show HN: Lorblets, a Little Puzzle Game Lorblets is a little puzzle game I made: https://ift.tt/CTyAiWu Lorblets is a variation on Lights Out. The goal of Lorblets is to turn ON all the lights. Unlike Lights Out (typically a grid of black and white squares), Lorblets puzzles have complex shapes (and bright colors!). The puzzles in Lorblets are generated at random from a seed, and they grow in size as you progress. The code quality is...not great? The design leaves something to be desired. And the game itself is a bit derivative. So why am I sharing this? Because I want to celebrate having shipped a complete game - modest though it may be. I'm a 39yo who has long dreamt of one day making a game. And yet I've tended to put my software engineering skills to work doing everything except that. I've devised complicated game mechanics on paper. I've written multiple overly complicated game "engines" in JavaScript. I've daydreamed for countless hours about my magnum opus: a 3D simulated open world with a natural language interface, narrative generation, character customization, scene building tools, a modding system... Long story short, that magnum opus has been fun to tinker on, but has not amounted to much beyond the spinning of wheels and the occupation of my free time. So over the Memorial Day holiday I decided to force myself to complete one game before the weekend was over. I would conceive the simplest possible game mechanic and UI. I would not worry if it was unoriginal. I would resist the urge to add complexity. I would not get bogged down standing up a framework. I would not build an "engine." I would not worry about clean code, or maintainability, or even performance. I would use the tech stack that I could work fastest in: web tech. And I would not worry that the astral projection of Jonathan Blow would visit me at night and chide me for having made a badly performing web browser game. So, Lorblets is the result. Whatever one might say about it, it IS a game, and that's something. Feedback is welcome of course - but I mostly just wanted to share my story with y'all. June 4, 2022 at 09:13PM
Show HN: I love FitnessSF, but I hate their mobile app In order to enter my gym, FitnessSF, I must load up their mobile app to open a QR code and scan in. Their app takes roughly 10,000 years to load so I stand like an idiot at the front desk, turning the app off and on again to just get the QR code. I wrote a little bit of javascript that hits the FitnessSF API and generates a Mobile Wallet Pass. I also hard coded all the fitness SF lat/long locations, so the mobile wallet will pop up when you're nearby. I hope this restores a little bit of sanity in someone else's life. https://ift.tt/MeFI7mr June 4, 2022 at 05:03AM
Show HN: Cryptid Zero Trust Authentication and Authorization, Open Source Oberon Oberon makes it possible for a service provider to issue capability tokens to clients in such a way that the service provider never sees the value of the capability token. This prevents the service provider from being able to impersonate the client. Oberon relies upon zero-knowledge proof presentation of the capability token so that the token is never transmitted norrevealed. Instead of the client sending the token to the service—as is done with API tokens today—the client sends a zero-knowledge proof proving that they have a valid capability token issued by the service provider; this is called proof-of-knowledge. GitHub: https://ift.tt/P9HVTx4 Get cryptid: https://ift.tt/UXc14Wj] June 3, 2022 at 11:17PM
Show HN: A color palette design tool for websites Hi HN, while building something entirely, I realized that there is a lack of tools to pick colors for websites and web apps. While there certainly is an abundance of tools for color palettes, but they mostly give you three to five bright or pastel colors. Not what you need for websites. For that, you need one or two primary colors, and then stuff like text color, background, and so on. So, together with another web dev I built a small web tool that allows picking exactly the colors you need for web projects and live preview your palette on a selection of demo websites. The first version of the tool is online at https://ift.tt/lVIBdhE. Free and no sign up. We are already using this to for early stage projects, so I hope this provides value for you as well. Of course we are also happy about any and all feedback. Cheerz :) June 1, 2022 at 11:38PM
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