The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
Hello everyone! It was so fun working on this project for the past few months with some of my fellow high school students :) I am so excited to share our first prototype and hopefully we'll be done with it all soon! <3<p>(ofc, it's open source, contribute here: <a href="https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider</a>)<p>The goal of the game is to slowly teach function composition that get progressively more complex while you also help the ghosts ski on the slopes and explore the entire map!
Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
Hello everyone! It was so fun working on this project for the past few months with some of my fellow high school students :) I am so excited to share our first prototype and hopefully we'll be done with it all soon! <3<p>(ofc, it's open source, contribute here: <a href="https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider</a>)<p>The goal of the game is to slowly teach function composition that get progressively more complex while you also help the ghosts ski on the slopes and explore the entire map!
I built a vector map from scratch
Hi HN<p>I've used a lot of vector maps in the past, and was always fascinated by the technology, so I decided to try and build one from scratch as a way to learn more about how it works, and also as a reason to (finally) learn WebGL.<p>I've uploaded the source to GitHub <a href="https://github.com/kochis/webgl-map" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kochis/webgl-map</a><p>Hope someone finds it useful / informative, and open to any feedback or tips as well. Cheers!
I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard
Hi HN,<p>During lockdown I took up the keyboard hobby but I couldn't find anything I liked the aesthetic of. So I set out to design my own keyboard from scratch that shunned the gamer look in favour of a more minimal, serious design.<p>I've built several prototypes but I would love to get some feedback from the HN community.
Exponential Smoothing: faster and more accurate than NeuralProphet
We benchmarked on more than 55K series and show that ETS improves MAPE and sMAPE forecast accuracy by 32% and 19%, respectively, with 104x less computational time over NeuralProphet.<p>We hope this exercise helps the forecast community avoid adopting yet another overpromising and unproven forecasting method.
Show HN: I made a web-based notepad with a built in unit calculator
Hi HN<p>It also supports percentages, dates and variables.<p>I've been working on this alone for a few years now, so would love to get some feedback.
Quaternions: A Practical Guide
Show HN: Japanese Complete Book 1 Released
Hello friends at HN
For the past 3 years we have been arranging our physical textbook series and the first one has been published.<p>You can view sample chapters and see that the book is printed on premium, photo-quality paper here:<p><a href="https://japanesecomplete.com/book-1" rel="nofollow">https://japanesecomplete.com/book-1</a><p>In true hacker ethos, Japanese Complete was a project started to address a need the founders had and now it’s turning into a tangible product so it is quite exciting for us and we appreciate your continued support.<p>All the material in the first book is available with a free online account on our online curriculum, only that it is much more beautifully laid out for convenient look-up in the book. A much more compelling representation down to the feel of the cover and the weight of the text in your hands like fine silverware.<p>Please only get the book if you can afford it, because as mentioned you can also get the same course material with a starter account at no cost to you.<p>We developed a lot of innovations for teaching and acquiring Japanese rapidly and to-remember. Please ask any (sincere) questions here.
Show HN: A web text-editor where you can write, compute and draw
Show HN: A web text-editor where you can write, compute and draw
Hacker News Predictions
Show HN: A VNC viewer for eInk devices capable of 30 FPS when writing text
Show HN: A VNC viewer for eInk devices capable of 30 FPS when writing text
Lumina Desk – digital desk for health and productivity
We’re Mike and Raymond – cofounders at Lumina. We’re excited to share what we’ve been working on, the Lumina Desk (<a href="https://getlumina.com/desk" rel="nofollow">https://getlumina.com/desk</a>).<p>Last January, we founded Lumina with the mission of building the next-generation workspace.<p>We started off by launching a product called the Lumina Webcam, essentially a modern webcam that uses software to make you look good.<p>Building hardware is hard, and it’s been no different for us. We ran an Indiegogo campaign in September that raised ~$700k, scrambled to figure out hardware production (encountering every obstacle you can imagine - customs, supplier issues, parts incompatibilities), and chewed through enough glass in order to start shipping in December. But between then and now, we’ve scaled up production and have gotten some great customer feedback.<p>Next: we’re building the desk. We set out to rethink this centuries-old product and figure out how to make it into a more useful, productivity enhancing tool.<p>To start, we’re viewing the desk as a digital device, not just a mechanical one. Your desk could be an extension of your digital workspace; a complement to your phone and computer.<p>So we’re designing the Lumina Desk to have an embedded display. The thought is: from your desk, you’ll be able to check your calendar, receive call and chat notifications, and more. Or you can install (or build your own) apps to further customize it.<p>Think of the browser tabs that you keep open to occasionally glance at – the ones with dashboards or calendars or news feeds. These can now be in your desk, playing a role similar to a paper calendar or newspaper, but now in a seamlessly digital format.<p>With a digital desk, it can also play an active role in your health. Like a way to schedule times to sit or stand, or sensors that detect ergonomic input, or an in-desk dashboard that shows you your health stats.<p>Finally, we surveyed all the desks on the market and were surprised that few of them had the core fundamentals people want. How many desks have enough cable storage to hide all your cables? Enough usb and 110v sockets to power your workstation? Enough wireless charging space to charge all your wireless devices? These features should be tablestakes for any professional desk.<p>We’re in the early days of the desk, and there’s still room to shape the development of the product. If you have ideas on how we make the ultimate workspace, reach out and let us know. If you might be interested in building apps, we’d love to talk to you about building our first few apps.<p>Thanks so much for reading this. There’s a ton of work to be done, and your early support means a lot to us.
Show HN: State-of-the-art German speech recognition in 284 lines of C++
Micro-SaaS Alternatives to BigTech/VC
Hi HN<p>I started this crowdsourced list to find small internet products made by solo developers (or tiny teams) that can be used as alternatives to BigTech/VC-funded startups.<p>E.g. you can use Tally (by two devs, $14K MRR) instead of Typeform ($190M funding, 600+ employees)<p>or Plausible (by two devs, $83K MRR) instead of Google Analytics.<p>I added a link to a form where you can send me suggestions to alternatives, happy to add to the site!<p>Thanks,
Rauno
A generically typed pipe function in TypeScript
Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game
Hello, HN! Figure is a little side project I’ve been working on. Someone described it as Bejeweled meets Wordle.<p>I built the puzzle interface and website in Next.js and React, which was a first for me and overall a great learning experience. The daily puzzle data is queued up in a PostgreSQL table. Another table stores anonymous solve stats. Once a day, a cron job hits a serverless API that promotes the next puzzle as “live” and prompts Next.js to update the prebaked static site with the new data. The game state is managed with Redux and your stats are persisted to localStorage. Framer Motion for animations. Styling is mostly Tailwind CSS. I use Figma for design and Logic Pro to make the sounds.<p>I get a lot of questions about how the puzzles are generated. It’s not super sexy. I generate random grids of tiles and then run them through a brute force solver (sounds rough but the puzzles don’t feel anything). Every few days, I play through puzzles that look promising based on the solution space and pick some good ones to go into the queue. The rest are sent back to the void (again, painless).<p>I’ve spent a little bit of time tinkering with a procedural generator, but so far the random ones are better. The downsides of the random approach are (1) the curation effort required, and (2) the high variability in puzzle difficulty. I have a feeling there’s a whole body of math and CS knowledge where Figure is an example of something that I don’t know the name for (imposter syndrome intensifies).<p>As for the future of Figure, I feel strongly about keeping it free of ads, login walls, in-app purchases, or anything else that infringes on enjoyment or privacy. I’d also like to make sure Figure is accessible to everyone. English isn’t exactly required to play, but translations for the UI and website would be nice. I’ve tried to build Figure to be friendly to people who have color vision deficiency and people who rely on screen readers and keyboard navigation, but I have no idea if it’s actually any fun in these cases.<p>Here are some miscellaneous thoughts…<p>1. It’s been surprisingly satisfying to build a web game with a modern frontend stack. I’ve noticed a lot of grumbling on HN over the years from OG web developers who yearn for the days of semantic HTML, a sprinkling of CSS, and vanilla JS. I was in that boat too and have grumbled plenty about the breakneck pace of frontend evolution. One of my goals with this project was to pick some popular frameworks and give them an honest try. I’m now a believer, but there’s still no way I can keep up with all the progress.<p>2. I found Tailwind awkward at first, but after a while I realized I was using Figma a lot less and just designing in code with utility classes, which is great for focus and flow. Having lived through the Web 2.0 standards revolution, it was hard to let go of some deeply rooted opinions about semantic purity, but overall I’m sold.<p>3. I really love side projects. At most jobs, you’re pushed toward specialization. Side projects allow you to build out a generalist skillset, which makes you better at your core job function and better at collaborating with others. It’s also liberating to explore and pivot around without time pressure. Figure started out as a 3D fidget toy in Unity where you fling projectiles at floating objects…<p>4. I made this game on my trusty 2013 MacBook Pro, which has been almost completely sufficient (ahem Docker ಠ_ಠ). I’ll probably get an M2 Air soon, but I’m reluctant to say goodbye to the best computer I’ve ever owned.<p>5. I’m very grateful for the people who build and maintain open source projects. It’s also delightful how many paid services offer generous free tiers to let developers play around: Figma, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, and Pipedream, just to name a few that I’m currently using actively. If you work on FOSS and/or these excellent platforms, thank you.<p>Anyway, hope you like it. Happy to answer any questions.
Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game
Hello, HN! Figure is a little side project I’ve been working on. Someone described it as Bejeweled meets Wordle.<p>I built the puzzle interface and website in Next.js and React, which was a first for me and overall a great learning experience. The daily puzzle data is queued up in a PostgreSQL table. Another table stores anonymous solve stats. Once a day, a cron job hits a serverless API that promotes the next puzzle as “live” and prompts Next.js to update the prebaked static site with the new data. The game state is managed with Redux and your stats are persisted to localStorage. Framer Motion for animations. Styling is mostly Tailwind CSS. I use Figma for design and Logic Pro to make the sounds.<p>I get a lot of questions about how the puzzles are generated. It’s not super sexy. I generate random grids of tiles and then run them through a brute force solver (sounds rough but the puzzles don’t feel anything). Every few days, I play through puzzles that look promising based on the solution space and pick some good ones to go into the queue. The rest are sent back to the void (again, painless).<p>I’ve spent a little bit of time tinkering with a procedural generator, but so far the random ones are better. The downsides of the random approach are (1) the curation effort required, and (2) the high variability in puzzle difficulty. I have a feeling there’s a whole body of math and CS knowledge where Figure is an example of something that I don’t know the name for (imposter syndrome intensifies).<p>As for the future of Figure, I feel strongly about keeping it free of ads, login walls, in-app purchases, or anything else that infringes on enjoyment or privacy. I’d also like to make sure Figure is accessible to everyone. English isn’t exactly required to play, but translations for the UI and website would be nice. I’ve tried to build Figure to be friendly to people who have color vision deficiency and people who rely on screen readers and keyboard navigation, but I have no idea if it’s actually any fun in these cases.<p>Here are some miscellaneous thoughts…<p>1. It’s been surprisingly satisfying to build a web game with a modern frontend stack. I’ve noticed a lot of grumbling on HN over the years from OG web developers who yearn for the days of semantic HTML, a sprinkling of CSS, and vanilla JS. I was in that boat too and have grumbled plenty about the breakneck pace of frontend evolution. One of my goals with this project was to pick some popular frameworks and give them an honest try. I’m now a believer, but there’s still no way I can keep up with all the progress.<p>2. I found Tailwind awkward at first, but after a while I realized I was using Figma a lot less and just designing in code with utility classes, which is great for focus and flow. Having lived through the Web 2.0 standards revolution, it was hard to let go of some deeply rooted opinions about semantic purity, but overall I’m sold.<p>3. I really love side projects. At most jobs, you’re pushed toward specialization. Side projects allow you to build out a generalist skillset, which makes you better at your core job function and better at collaborating with others. It’s also liberating to explore and pivot around without time pressure. Figure started out as a 3D fidget toy in Unity where you fling projectiles at floating objects…<p>4. I made this game on my trusty 2013 MacBook Pro, which has been almost completely sufficient (ahem Docker ಠ_ಠ). I’ll probably get an M2 Air soon, but I’m reluctant to say goodbye to the best computer I’ve ever owned.<p>5. I’m very grateful for the people who build and maintain open source projects. It’s also delightful how many paid services offer generous free tiers to let developers play around: Figma, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, and Pipedream, just to name a few that I’m currently using actively. If you work on FOSS and/or these excellent platforms, thank you.<p>Anyway, hope you like it. Happy to answer any questions.
Show HN: PDF-Diff - Visualize any differences between two PDFs