Show HN: Rentaflop – Render your Blender projects without sacrificing quality Hi HN, My name is David Sokol, and I'm the founder of rentaflop (https://rentaflop.com). We're a crowdsourced render farm aimed at making Blender rendering fast and affordable. If you've used Blender, then I'm sure you've experienced the pain of waiting around for your animations to render. You've probably even had to sacrifice the quality of your work to reduce your render times. I've been there too. If you're like me, then you're also disappointed with the alternative solutions: spending thousands of dollars on graphics cards or using prohibitively expensive cloud render farms to get fast render times. Our solution to this dilemma is to leverage low opportunity cost hardware from around the world to allow Blender artists to render their projects quickly, affordably, and without compromising on quality. Since most graphics card owners aren't utilizing their hardware to do valuable work 24/7, we provide them with a way to make money without lifting a finger, while lowering the cost curve for 3D rendering. We're currently doing a private beta. If you'd like to get early access, check out our site (https://rentaflop.com) and join the waitlist. If you're a graphics card owner who wants to help Blender artists while earning money, reach out to support@rentaflop.com and we'll help you get set up. Please leave a comment below, we'd love to hear your thoughts :) August 1, 2022 at 04:29AM
Show HN: Ordinary Puzzles, a free puzzle game inspired by Picross and Sudoku Hello hello HN! I wanted to share with you Ordinary Puzzles, a little puzzle game I designed and developed in my free time, inspired by Picross and Sudoku. I already posted it here ages ago, but I wanted to share it again now that I updated it to also be playable online as a Progressive Web App. Ordinary Puzzles is open source, is built with React Native, and it’s available on the mobile app stores, on the web (as a PWA), and as an Electron app. Hope you give it a try! (Please don’t skip the short tutorial :P) https://ift.tt/dNzyXMH P.S.: The puzzles come from https://ift.tt/pWqgL0b (the author is credited and has been contacted before using them). https://ift.tt/xO79KDp July 31, 2022 at 11:01PM
Show HN: I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work. https://playcode.io/ July 31, 2022 at 09:57AM
Show HN: Chunk – Code sandbox for back-end devs Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch: As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere. So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code. We couldn’t find an easier way to do this, so we built it. Chunk is an all in one web editor (think of the codesandbox experience) that allows you to write, deploy and run a piece of code in the cloud from a variety of triggers: HTTP, WebHook, manual or scheduled (cron). No setup, no build, no deploy. Chunk makes you go from idea to code running in the cloud in seconds. Let me know what you guys think! https://chunk.run July 28, 2022 at 11:19PM
Show HN: ColorAround – where you need to find a color around u using the camera Hi I made a game in an evening, I would like to share and get feedback. You get a random color palette and have to find it for yourself. ColorAround is an easy and fun color game. It is recommended to play on mobile devices https://ift.tt/bWn0T6m July 29, 2022 at 11:19PM
Show HN: TapeMeasure – Swift class for creating segmented, labeled lines in UI TapeMeasure is a utility class, written in Swift, for generating a visual tape measure, or any other graphical elements that need layout in a measured sequence. I created this class to help with a pet project I'm working on, where I needed to generate segmented, labeled lines to use as axes on charts and graphs. It occurred to me that this seems to be a pretty common task, involving a lot of boilerplate code and tedious calculations. Why not decouple the code and move it into a dedicated class? It's self-contained, nice and simple, and easy to unit test. It can also handle a lot of tweaks to the "tape measure", such as boundary clipping and shifting offsets. It's especially good for animation, where you can just change a parameter or two during animation, and call for the re-calculated data to re-render your measured line. That makes it great for animated sliding and scaling effects. Anyway, enjoy! https://ift.tt/6LPoFb7 July 29, 2022 at 11:09PM
Show HN: TensorDock Core GPU Cloud – GPU servers from $0.29/hr Hello HN! I’m Jonathan from TensorDock. After 7 months in beta, we’re finally launching Core Cloud, our platform to deploy GPU virtual machines in as little as 45 seconds! https://ift.tt/o7EtsVz Why? Training machine learning workloads at large clouds can be extremely expensive. This left us wondering, “how did cloud ever become more expensive than on-prem?” I’ve seen too many ML startups buy their own hardware. Cheaper dedicated servers with NVIDIA GPUs are not too hard to find, but they lack the functionality and scalability of the big clouds. We thought to ourselves, what if we built a platform that combines the functionality of the large clouds but made it priced somewhere between a dedicated server and the large clouds? That’s exactly what we’ve done. Built to make engineers more productive. We have 3 machine learning images so you can start training ML models in 2 minutes, not 2 hours. We provide a REST API, so you can integrate directly your code with ours. And, there’s a community CLI you can use to manage your servers directly via command line We provide a feature set only large clouds supersede. We have storage-only billing when the VM is stopped (for only $0.073/GB/month) so that you aren't paying for compute when you don't need it. We also provide the ability to edit virtual machines after they’re created to downsize costs. If you provision a NVIDIA A6000 and find out you’re only using 50% of it, stop the VM, modify it to a NVIDIA A5000, and you’ll be billed the lower hourly rate without needing to recreate your server and migrate data over! Our infrastructure is built on 3x-replicated NVMe-based network storage, 10 Gbps networking, and 3 locations (New York, Chicago, Las Vegas) with more coming soon! - CPU-only servers from $0.027/hour - NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000s from $0.29/hour - NVIDIA Tesla V100s from $0.52/hour - and 8 other GPU types that let you truly right-size workloads so that you’re never paying for more than you actually need We're starting off with $1 in free credits! Yes, we sound cheap… but $1 is all you need to get started with us! That’s more than 3 hours of compute time on our cheapest configuration! Use code HACKERNEWS_1 on the billing page to redeem this free credit :) TensorDock: https://ift.tt/ke6vKaL Product page: https://ift.tt/o7EtsVz API: https://ift.tt/7Kk5dwt Community CLI: https://ift.tt/ChxJbIN Deploy a GPU: https://ift.tt/GUBzjPK I'm here to answer your questions, so post them below! Or, email me directly at jonathan@tensordock.com :) https://ift.tt/o7EtsVz July 29, 2022 at 01:58AM
Show HN: Equities.fyi – Startup valuations based on public company data With the current down markets, we were wondering what private company valuations looked like when compared to similar public companies. We were inspired by the a16z article ( https://ift.tt/qRhaolT... ) for calculating valuations and figured out the sales-to-valuation ratio of public companies at the time of the last fundraising round and applied the change in the public market to get the current startup valuation. If things don’t look right, our defaults might be off - please feel free to change those if they’re too different from what you’d expect. https://ift.tt/cVmXv9f July 28, 2022 at 10:57PM
Show HN: Looria – A product (re)search engine About 1.5 years ago, I introduced my review aggregator BuyForLife on Hacker News, where it became the #8 most upvoted Show HN project of all time[1]. The idea of helping people to make better purchasing decisions continued to chase me over the last year. Here are some stats that illustrate how important online reviews are: • 90% check online reviews as part of their online buying journey • 43% visit 5-10 websites to research a product • 75% spend more than a day doing research before buying a product The top frustrations with the current process are: • Google full of SEO spam and Ads • Fake reviews • Fragmented trusted sources • Inconsistent information across sources Thanks to the recent advances in NLP (transformers, GPT-3, etc.) it became possible to solve these problems at scale, so I decided to team up with my co-founders Johnny and Tavis to build https://Looria.com . We aggregate and summarize the most trusted product reviews on the web like Reddit, Youtube, or Consumer Reports. Just like Rotten Tomatoes provides trustworthy ratings for movies, Looria offers ratings and reviews for all kinds of products. Our vision is to make Looria the go-to platform for making purchase decisions. Let me try to answer a few questions that come up frequently: # Why should you trust this meta review site over the 100's of other meta or search sites and 10,000's of fake review sites on the web? -> We are completely unbiased and transparent. We are not affiliated with any of the businesses or products that we review, so we have no incentive to skew our ratings in any way. Our team has a deep understanding of the product review space and the specific problems that exist within that market. We're also solving our own problem after spending countless hours finding and researching good products. # Why can't I just go to Wirecutter or Consumer Reports directly? -> Most people don't trust anyone blindly and look at multiple opinions (4-7 websites on average). One single place will never be "just enough" for a product you're planning to use for a long time and spend quite some money on it. There is often at least one deal-breaking issue that you will find after reading through different sources. Many people rely on Reddit for reviews. Redditors and other forum members are more interested in boosting their ego by showing their depth of knowledge on the topic (and correcting others on the topic), whereas corporate websites are more interested in generating clicks. # How do you avoid fake reviews? -> Fake reviews are a big challenge that even platforms like Amazon don't have under control. Good fake reviews are technically almost impossible to detect, even with sophisticated network analysis of the reviewer's profile. We focus on keeping track of and removing the special status of sources caught getting paid to write fake reviews. Some categories are more prone to astroturfing than others, and we account for that by restricting the sources. Actively curating the sources is part of our daily work. # What are Exit Reviews? -> Another big frustration with product research is the lack of long-term product information. We should reflect upon how a product performed over its duration of service instead of when it first arrived and people haven't spent much time with it to learn the quirks. That's why we're building exitreviews.com - a community where people can learn how products performed over their lifetime, where they failed, and how to fix them. Looria is still in beta and our data is far from perfect. We're working hard on improving the data quality, adding better filters, and scaling to many more categories. [1] https://ift.tt/HmeXFov https://looria.com July 26, 2022 at 11:22PM
Show HN: TypeScript query builder with full type inference Hey HN! Colin here - a TypeScripter, open sourcer, and engineer at EdgeDB. As the creator of Zod and tRPC, I'm interested in designing tools/APIs that use type inference and generics to make life easier for devs. This query builder represents another step in that direction. We set out to build an EdgeQL query builder that can express queries of arbitrary complexity (EdgeQL has feature parity with SQL, roughly) and infer the static type of the query result. We introspect the database and generate a schema-aware client that represent any query, including ones that use built-in functions, operators, string/array/tuple indexing, aggregations, conditionals, type casting, subqueries, computed properties, etc—things most ORMs can’t represent. This post mostly discusses the API design, which I think will be interesting regardless of familiarity with EdgeQL. I’d love to see some of these ideas bleed into future generations of TypeScript ORMs/query builders too. Best way to try it is to clone the sandbox repo and follow the instructions in the README[0]. Or jump into the docs[1]. [0] https://ift.tt/RSNka7t [1] https://ift.tt/3azK0ty https://ift.tt/XJz83KI July 26, 2022 at 04:24PM
Show HN: PickCode – An educational coding environment for students after Scratch PickCode is designed for use on desktop and tablet, and supports creating chatbots, visual designs, and 2D games. There is plenty of functionality missing - you can't add media to games for instance, but the current version shows off the foundation of what I'm aiming at. I taught myself to code using MIT's App Inventor, so I have an enormous respect for block based languages like App Inventor, Scratch, Snap!, MakeCode, etc. PickCode is my attempt at adding options for students who want to learn more about programming without making the jump to text, or as an alternative to block coding for beginners coming to programming at an older age. The visual language is meant to lower the barrier to entry to coding but the far more important aspect for me is giving students the ability to make things they're proud of as quickly as possible. A JS/Python API for controlling the chatbot and game engine are in the works. As of now, there are sample programs to play with and an editor which saves your programs to local storage. Full user accounts, tutorials and administrator accounts for teachers to organize assignments are on their way soon. If you're interested in using PickCode in a classroom or want to discuss feedback, send me an email at charlie@pickcode.io https://ift.tt/tL2MZQX July 26, 2022 at 01:46AM
Show HN: Pipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So I did just that =). I find hexagonal pipes a bit more difficult than the square variant because there's a larger variety of possible tile shapes. For an extra challenge I implemented wrap mode where the board can connect to itself (right to left and top to bottom), so there are no convenient outer walls to start from. The site is made with Svelte Kit, its code is available on github at < https://github.com/gereleth/hexapipes >. Hope you enjoy playing =). https://ift.tt/IYgyhbr July 25, 2022 at 12:20AM
Show HN: Redirect clicks using a formula Part of my day job requires me to review a report monthly. The URL for July's report looks something like this: fancyreport.com?from=2022-07-01&to=2022-07-31 Typing this URL manually every month was just enough pain for me to put up a simple script on somedomainiown.com/magic that redirected me to the report for the current month by automatically filling in the "from" and "to" values in the URL. This way, I could bookmark one link and always open the latest report with one click. At some point, I figured I should put this behind a UI so that I could share it with my colleagues and maybe HN too. A couple of weeks of hacking, and here we are with an MVP the little imposter inside me finally accepted to post online. P.S. the "formule" implementation gets the job done for me, but is pretty rudimentary. Would love to know if you have a specific use case that'd benefit from other parameters or a more advanced formula system. https://ift.tt/dtM7Pl9 July 25, 2022 at 02:35AM
Show HN: Zazow – Generative Art Toy (fractals, spirograph, satori, etc.) Im finally ready to share a fun side project that I've been working on. For 20 years, Ive been fascinated with Mandelbrot fractals. Back in the day, I made a MacOS9 app that rendered them, and I missed it. So, I decided to bring it up to the modern age and build a website to explore this and other similar fractals. In the process, I discovered some other types of generative art that looked fun, so I made those too. One is a spirograph, another is similar to an old AfterDark screensaver called Satori (anyone remember that?). Others draw paint splatters and random squiggly lines. The user is given a bunch of interactive settings to control how the artwork is generated. Im hoping to continue adding different styles of generative art to the website over time. Its a fun, relaxing project to work on and I hope other people enjoy using it to create pleasing images. https://www.zazow.com July 22, 2022 at 10:44PM
Show HN: Scribe, a Go library for writing, running, and generating CI pipelines Hi there. This is a passion project of mine I started after spending many painful hours working on CI pipelines. The general idea is that I wanted to stop making flimsy scripts in build & release pipelines and start writing software. I'm happy to answer any questions. Please let me know what you think of the idea and if there's anything you'd like to see. https://ift.tt/yMzVNkQ July 22, 2022 at 03:28AM
Show HN: I built an all-in-one virtual production platform for indies After being frustrated with the budget and learning curve requirements of the big names in the Virtual Production field, I decided to create my own all-in-one platform designed with beginners and less-technical folk in mind. It takes complicated tasks in other engines (tracking, compositing, floor plans, etc.) and makes them two-click solutions. And, with the free companion mobile app, you can track cameras, scan your sets, and (coming soon) do full body motion capture! There's a ton more features that I'm super proud of, and I'm open to any and all feedback! Thanks! Https://SceneForge.app July 21, 2022 at 03:43AM
Show HN: I built a handheld CHIP-8 game console to teach myself embedded systems A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to write all the firmware from scratch and even designed my first PCB, resulting in a finished (though not very polished) handheld CHIP-8 console. For those curious, the GitHub repo also has links to my dev blog about the project as well as a build guide. Thanks for looking! https://ift.tt/8APjd54 July 20, 2022 at 03:12AM
Show HN: Ex Platform for SWEs Hey guys, just sharing this project that I've been working on. Let me know what you think. This idea came primarily from my own experience in the software industry. After a while, I was feeling discouraged by my job, mostly because I felt expendable (like a code monkey), burned out, and had unchallenging work. It felt like the employers I was working for didn’t have an idea of what was going on or how their employees were feeling. They would talk a lot about the technical challenges, but never did we talk about any mental/emotional challenges. So I started thinking about what could be done to mitigate this problem and came up with this solution. An employee experience platform that tracks multiple psychological dimensions (specifically customized to track problems that can be faced in a software engineering environment) and gives the managers some insights into their teams/employees. I'm still currently working on the MVP but would love to hear what you guys think about the idea and landing page. The MVP should be out in 2-3 weeks from now. https://smartteams.ca/ July 17, 2022 at 01:24AM
Show HN: Hacker News Mods - A collection of tools/mods for HN Hey HN! I built Hacker News Mods as a place to collect any tools or sites related to HN. We just started building one mod/tool for HN per week, and I thought it’d be a good idea to showcase all of the tools we’ve created, as well as tools that others have created as well. The site is pretty scrappy, so any feedback is appreciated! Also, please submit any projects that we don’t already have listed! Thanks, Jarren https://ift.tt/DjkOYmM July 16, 2022 at 02:09AM
Show HN: Eesel – Federated search without API integrations Hey there! Amogh here from eesel ( https://eesel.app ). eesel filters your browser history to show the docs you need for work, right in your new tab. You can see recent docs, filter by app or search by title or content. We're trying to solve a pretty universal problem. Everyone's work is spread across apps - there's a project brief in Google Docs, issues in Jira, a mockup in Figma, PRs in GitHub - and with this kind of sprawl, it can be a game of trial and error to find the links we need to do our job. Trying keywords in the address bar only works if we remember the title and it's specific enough, search in apps can be slow and noisy, company "knowledge hubs" in Confluence or Google Drive are usually not up to date, and we ultimately just ping each other on Slack to find things. I was struggling with this acutely as a PM at Intercom, and it felt ridiculous that I could search the web faster than my company's docs. It was around this time that I also discovered an Effective Altruism blog post on Operations ( https://ift.tt/DZvefq1 ) and how "maximising the productivity of others in the organisation" can have this multiplier effect for your own impact. That's when it clicked - here's an "operations" problem that felt tractable for my skills and I could potentially multiply my impact by solving it. This is what gave the conviction to prototype something on the weekends, and things spun off from there. Let's talk about the solution more. The magical thing about eesel is that we don't use APIs. When it comes to "search across apps", integrating with different APIs is a pretty default way to approach things. That's how we started, but things felt uneasy - could we really build API integrations with _everything_? There's so much out there, and this list is pretty much always changing. If we really did want a search across all work apps, we'd have to play catch up with old and new APIs. You could argue that these were just the schleps ( https://ift.tt/Ud79qkD ) we had to overcome, but it was amidst this we realised that uh, the browser exists. We mostly work in the browser, and the great thing about it is that it's built on web standards. From HTTP and URLs to HTML and CSS, all apps in the browser follow the same predictable patterns: documents are accessed via URLs, content lives inside the HTML, there's a page title, there's a favicon, and so on. It's not a perfect replacement for APIs, but it felt good enough. We didn't need to manually integrate with each app, and could instead rely on existing web standards. And that's what we did. eesel works with any app in the browser, including apps without APIs (like that internal company tool), or apps that don't exist yet (the new Product Hunt hit). Not using APIs also meant that we could go an extra step with privacy - eesel works fully locally by default and you don't need to login to _anything_ (even eesel!). Simply install and it works. We want to keep building on this approach and improve how we work in the browser. For instance, eesel uses keywords to automatically organise pages into Folders, and there's Commands to take actions (spoiler: you can customise a JavaScript to inject on a page, like this script that goes to a Notion backlog and clicks the "New" button - https://ift.tt/8Ceq3ZI... ). Alright, that's a lot of writing from us. We have a bunch of ideas, and would love to hear about where you think we should take this next. https://www.eesel.app/ July 15, 2022 at 05:44PM
Show HN: Mapedia.org – A Crowdsourced Learning Map Hi HN! We're happy to announce the launch of Mapedia.org, an open source crowdsourced learning map! Mapedia is a new kind of learning platform at the crossroad between Wikipedia, Google Maps and Khan Academy: a learning map built collaboratively to support online learners to learn any topic seamlessly. We built an interactive learning map of topics to be able to visualize the different fields of knowledge, what concepts are included in them and how they relate to each other. This allows for curiosity based exploration, identifying knowledge gaps (unknown unknowns) and figuring out what to learn next (and in which order). For each topic you can then find community and expert curated resources, learning advices and smart recommendations in order to learn as efficiently as possible. We want people to spend time learning rather than figuring out how to learn, and in particular to empower self-directed learners. The idea came out of the frustration and inefficiency of learning online, and I've been working on it for 2 years now. The vision in itself for it is not so new, Mapedia is rather a different take on it that particularly believes in the potential of crowdsourcing and online communities. Our roadmap includes implementing learning groups based on shared goals rather than shared course/learning material, customizable "constructive" feeds of learning materials and adaptive learning paths. The topic map is obviously far from complete and we are still in the early product iterations, but you can checkout a few examples here: https://ift.tt/U9eVA32 -> The explore map from the top level topics https://ift.tt/uphciXS... -> the map focused on functional programming, showing how concepts relate to each other https://ift.tt/36FQTPy... -> the page for the functional programming topic, with curated resources https://ift.tt/IOdBnNs... -> an example of a learning path (this feature is in a very alpha version) Let us know what you think! We're very open to feedback and suggestions https://mapedia.org/ July 15, 2022 at 11:57PM
Show HN: App to help with planning, producing, reviewing, and publishing video Hey everyone, I've started working on an app to help companies, freelancers, and even individual content creators plan, produce, review, and publish their videos and streams in a more organised way. We're just getting started so not trying to sell anything at this point, but I do need feedback on where we're headed. I recorded a video walkthrough of some mock-ups at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTtB_EkUA-M, or you can take a look at them yourself at https://ift.tt/za751Vr (it is somewhat self-explanatory, but in the video I add more context). You can think of it as a potentially better, more organised alternative to having a bunch of stuff in random Google Docs and other places that you have to pass back and forth. I also eventually expect to add a lot of automatic post-processing type features (captioning, lighting/sound adjustments, "umm" removal, etc.) for people who don't know how to do that on their own. Any kind of feedback at all is welcome, positive or negative, on whether there's an idea here that you think I could develop into something people would pay for, or if there's something you'd like to see in an app like this. Thanks in advance! July 14, 2022 at 05:15PM
Show HN: Typewaiter, the typewriter that doesn't wait Howdy HN, just recently made this silly typewriter variant and think some of you might enjoy it so thought I'd share. Here the cursor takes no heed of what you're typing and just advances at a steady pace, with the effect that typing something reasonable-looking requires you to type at a very steady rhythm. There's also the bonus that the space character is no longer needed—you can (and kind of have to) just wait—so the keyboard minimalists among us can shave even more space off their devices. Only desktop for now. It's an interesting contrast to the last one I made—which requires you to do all the heavy lifting in moving the cursor position yourself— https://ift.tt/VxK42dZ https://ift.tt/tRUF0Z1 July 11, 2022 at 03:57AM
Show HN: Evryca – fractal thinking tool to brainstorm and organize thoughts Made a tool to organize thoughts. Actually it is a mind tree, but in a more web-friendly form. It has pivoted from what I originally started building at evryca.com. Some years ago I got the idea of fractal conversation, instead of old-school tree/ladder-like comments. I wanted to see only comments related to the current level. I started making "something" with fractal comments. This "something" was a project discussion platform. But it turned out that even I myself don't use it, and the idea of fractal comments stuck there unused. And recently it dawned on me that it may be a conversation with yourself — thinking, brainstorming, taking notes, writing. So made this kind of cork/whiteboard, where one can dive into the subject and, being in the flow, write and see only related notes and rearrange them later. I'm trying to make it flawless and add keyboard shortcuts where it's possible (Ctr+Enter to submit idea, drag-and-drop to rearrange, Esc to jump level up). So finally I've made a tool that I use myself and will update it gradually (sorting, touch devices, ex/import (json, text), boards, more navigation with keyboard and other stuff, and login). https://www.evryca.com/ July 9, 2022 at 03:03PM
Show HN: I made a small Space Shooter Thank you https://opengameart.org for your service. People like me who can't draw or compose music are in your debt. The game, "Glitch and Rush" has been made in a few hours here and there. I've been tinkering in GameDev for years, if not decades, but I never released anything. The goal here was simple: - come up with a core mechanic - implement a single level - add some polishing - RELEASE I hope you'll enjoy it. BTW, my best time is 2min23s (yes, I'm bad at my own game, it's ok, I'm ok). https://ift.tt/SwrLDBF July 9, 2022 at 02:28AM
Show HN: I made an app to help insomniacs learn how to sleep again Hi HN! I suffered from chronic insomnia for over a year and tried everything from cutting coffee, blocking blue light, to taking melatonin and antihistamine, but couldn’t find anything that worked. I even bought a $500 research-grade EEG device to track my sleep, which was honestly kind of depressing because it showed that I was sleeping less than 4 hours per night for weeks straight. In the day, it took an immense amount of energy for me to perform even the most mundane of tasks, such as doing my laundry or ordering groceries. At night, I felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness and resentment as I lay in bed wide-awake, reading and re-reading Sleep by Murakami or mindlessly scrolling through reddit/ HN. My performance at work suffered, my personal relationships suffered, and my happiness suffered. When I finally decided to see a sleep specialist, I was put on a 3-month long waiting list. Eventually, I was able to get my insomnia treated, but I realized that there is no reason why anyone should wait 3 months to get treatment when the same therapy that I received can be delivered online. My co-founder and I both have experience in digital health, so we decided to partner with sleep experts to create a mobile app to help people with insomnia get better sleep using psychology. We launched in February this year, and have already helped over 500 patients improve their sleep permanently. Our data shows that our program is just as effective as group, in-person sleep therapy, and we’re doing a clinical study with Brigham and Women’s hospital and Harvard Medical School to prove the efficacy of our product. On average, our users sleep 74 minutes longer than before and spend 52% less time awake in the middle of the night. If you have trouble with sleep, try our app and let us know what you think! https://slumber.one July 8, 2022 at 07:53AM
Show HN: PostgreSQL proxy for integration testing things you don't control Hi hackers! I recently tried to get a stack of microservices running in a docker-compose sandbox for integration testing using their original (e.g. prod) configuration. This means I didn't know what credentials they'd be using or what database name. So I hacked together a postgresql proxy using an existing project ( https://ift.tt/TqBX8ve ) and simply allow any credentials to connect and make sure the desired database exists before returning control to the caller. Sharing this in the hopes it is useful for someone else. Lucas https://ift.tt/ms1TBEA July 8, 2022 at 12:12AM
Show HN: Barfi – Python flow based programming with GUI What? Another flow based programming library for Python? Yes. All the FBP libraries out there for Python need to be run as a self contained application. They are not components that could be integrated into your existing data workflows. Barfi, on the other hand can be integrated. At the moment it has a Streamlit component that you can use in your Streamlit apps. Currently, I am working on a Jupyter notebook widget. https://ift.tt/nZWbd0C July 7, 2022 at 02:30AM
Show HN: C3 – A C alternative that looks like C Compiler link: https://ift.tt/czU4tGx Docs: http://www.c3-lang.org This is my follow-up "Show HN" from roughly a year ago ( https://ift.tt/SMC6yEY ). Since then the language design has evolved and the compiler has gotten much more solid. Assorted extra info: - The C3 name is a homage to the C2 language project ( http://c2lang.org ) which it was originally inspired by. - Although C3 mostly conforms to C syntax, the most obvious change is requiring `fn` in front of the functions. This is to simplify searching for definitions in editors. - There is a comparison with some other languages here: https://ift.tt/rfQYvuG - The parts in C3 which breaks C semantics or syntax: https://ift.tt/XyKlDzN - Aside from the very C-like syntax, one the biggest difference between C3 and other "C competitors" is that C3 prioritizes C ABI compatibility, so that all C3 special types (such as slices and optionals) can be used from C without any effort. C and C3 can coexist nicely in a code base. - Currently the standard library is not even alpha quality, it's actively being built, but there is a `libc` module which allows accessing all of libc. Raylib is available to use from C3 with MacOS and Windows, see: https://ift.tt/mRzilS4 - There is a blog with assorted articles I've written during the development: https://ift.tt/TxIcFJL July 7, 2022 at 01:01AM
Show HN: Graphsignal – ML profiler to speed up training and inference Hi, Graphsignal founder here. We've launched Graphsignal earlier this year to make machine learning profiling practical and easy to use. Basically, it enables the profile-optimize-benchmark loop. For example, making inference faster by optimizing an ML model, while still maintaining accuracy. We've make a lot of progress that I wanted to share. The profiler now natively supports TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning, Hugging Face, XGBoost and JAX frameworks along with built-in support for distributed workloads. Profiles now include tracing information in chrome trace format. Process and GPU utilization data has been extended as well. It is now possible to monitor all run metrics. Useful for long runs. Profiled workloads are now sharable across teams and publicly (if enabled). I'm excited to show it here and appreciate any thoughts, comments and feedback! https://ift.tt/PoULa7h July 4, 2022 at 05:10PM
Show HN: Trane, an automated system for learning complex skills Hi HN, I released Trane over the weekend: https://ift.tt/m1QxKyh . Trane is an automated system for learning complex skills. Think of it like defining a skills tree (technically a graph) of all the smaller skills you need to master a complex skill and having an automated system to automatically traverse the graph as you master them. The seed for Trane was planted after my frustration trying to learn music, and jazz in particular. There are simply too many things you need to master first (e.g. knowing the names of a note, knowing where the notes are in your instrument, timing, etc) and it becomes difficult to track what it is that you should focus on, and there is a process of constant atrophy, even if you practice consistently. Trane is an early state, but is already usable. I have released a command line interface at https://ift.tt/oiDr8pI and some music courses at https://ift.tt/wS5MyRH . I would like to get some ideas in regard to what other skills could be a good fit for Trane. I am thinking chess, programming, or languages could be a fit. I am wondering if Trane could be applied to something like learning pure mathematics. I would love to hear any suggestions. Perhaps there's some of you who have found a similar issue while practicing your own hobbies. https://ift.tt/m1QxKyh July 4, 2022 at 11:34PM
Show HN: WebReducer – micro event sourcing cloud function Hey everyone, WebReducer is a project I've been working on since last December. You can read about my process here: https://ift.tt/XfTxHUB Send some data to WebReducer. Then, write a reducer function to retain some state. You can change the reducer function as much as you want and recreate that state. Still working on how to explain it. It's a tiny FaaS platform. It's a tiny database. It's micro event sourcing. It's "redux" on the server as a service. It's a backend for tiny personal projects. It's a place to send your webhooks. I'm looking for feedback on the following: - Do you get what it is? - What would you use it for? - What would I need to iron out for you to seriously consider trying this? https://webreducer.dev July 2, 2022 at 11:47PM
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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