The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source
I've been working on Lurnby for 2 years. It's kind of like a mix of pocket + kindle + anki.<p>It lets you
=> add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app
=> highlight and add comments
=> tag and organize highlights
=> review them with a spaced repetition system<p>Today I made the decision to open source the project. I'm passionate about helping other people learn to learn better and hope that this will allow a lot more innovation in the tool and the space.<p>I'm very new to open source and development in general really, but looking forward to receiving the guidance of the community.
Show HN: Makers.so – A website builder inside Figma
Founder here. Makers.so is a Figma Plugin to build and publish sites without ever leaving Figma. Here’s a demo [0].<p>As a front-end developer I constantly go from Figma to code / site, but it’s tedious… I decided to automate the process with this plugin. It works great for simple projects like:<p>- Landing Pages<p>- Portfolio / Personal sites<p>- Resume sites<p>- Careers / Wiki sites<p>So, not a Webflow / Framer competitor (yet). Webflow and Framer are amazing tools, but if you are in the Figma ecosystem, it's boring to duplicate your work on a different tool. I'm trying to make life easier for Figma users. If this seems interesting, you can install it here [1] and give it a try.<p>—<p>For a bit of context, I'm a solo-founder and I started Makers after sharing my idea on the Figma subreddit about how awesome it would be to have a button in Figma to publish my designs. A good amount of people seemed to agree, and that was enough to start working on it. This is turning out to be a super fun project, and I’ve been working full-time for the last two months.<p>[0] - <a href="https://twitter.com/joaodmj/status/1488216877511884805?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/joaodmj/status/1488216877511884805?s=20</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/991438050654881175" rel="nofollow">https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/991438050654881175</a>
Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0
Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0
Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer
Hey, Hacker News! Today I'm proud to release jless, a command-line JSON viewer.<p>jless provides a JSON viewing experience similar to what you see in a browser's network tab in the developer console, but from the comfort of your terminal, with a whole suite of vim-inspired key bindings to easily manipulate your view of the data and full-text regex search. I'm sure many of you have some piped together some combination of cat, jq and less before; hopefully jless can replace that usage (hence the name). It supports newline delimited JSON too, so it can handle any output from jq.<p>I built jless to solve a problem I kept facing while building plaintextsports.com [1][2]. For the live data I use a lot of public, but undocumented APIs, and I was constantly digging through giant JSON files to understand how the data was structured. I tried installing multiple Chrome extensions, but was dissatisfied with all of them. I piped files through jq into less a lot, and that was ok, but not great. The Preview pane in the Network tab of Chrome's dev tools was pretty useful, and I modeled a lot of jless's behavior and appearance off of that, but it didn't fit well into my tmux + vim dev environment, and I couldn't easily use it to inspect files on disk. I wanted that experience, but in my terminal (and with search support).<p>Once I had built a rudimentary version of jless a few months ago, I immediately started using it whenever I was debugging something, and my usage has only grown as I've added more basic functionality. I've finally added all the features I feel like it needs to be functional, useful, and reliable.<p>There's definitely more features I want to add: Windows support, some way to filter data with jq filters (a la fx [3]), yanking objects to the clipboard, being able to hide keys entirely, streaming data in, so you can peek at the start of gigantic file, maybe a way to extract a schema from a file (like [4]), plenty of low-hanging fruit for performance. Support for different hierarchical data formats (YAML, TOML, XML) could be cool someday. I'm sure many people will ask for editing support, but sadly that is not something I plan on adding anytime soon.<p>I also used this project as a chance to learn Rust (code style and design comments appreciated!), which I had only dabbled with before. For a command-line utility, this felt like an obvious choice: small binaries (~3mb), instant startup, and great performance without any effort (try searching for comma in a big file!).<p>I hope you find it useful!<p>[1]: <a href="https://plaintextsports.com" rel="nofollow">https://plaintextsports.com</a>, live sports scores in plain text, no ads, no tracking, no loading<p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861043" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861043</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://quicktype.io/typescript" rel="nofollow">https://quicktype.io/typescript</a>
Show HN: PgCat, Postgres pooler with sharding, load balancing and failover
Show HN: Tally Forms – A free Typeform alternative
Show HN: Three Magic Words
Here’s a free, fun, novel five-letter word game for the web! It’s a game I originally wrote for the iPhone in 2010, but wasn’t able to finish before my first child was born. When I left my senior web developer job in September 2021 I figured I would postpone looking for work and finish the game before another 11 years passed, and expose myself to new skills doing it (in this case, Swift). I released it on the App Store in December, then turned my attention to doing a web version — when suddenly Wordle was in The NY Times, and then everywhere.<p>Perhaps foolishly, I plowed ahead and here we are. Like Wordle and some other NY Times word games, there is a single daily puzzle, but like traditional crossword puzzles, it gets harder throughout the week.
Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually
Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually
Show HN: Edit videos faster by automatically removing silences
Our team is filled with technologists and creators, and when we record and edit videos, 80% of the time is spent chopping up the video, removing silences, and picking the right takes. So we decided to build a tool that did that for you — or at least get you there most of the way!<p>Our initial implementation is somewhat naïve and uses a user configurable silence threshold that just reads in volume levels. In the future, we’d like to use a frequency-based approach that focuses on the human voice. We’re also open to ideas, so let us know if you have any!
Show HN: Veganize any recipe site with EatKind Chrome extension
Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang.<p>It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang.<p>It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?
Hey there,<p>First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people.<p>Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends.<p>I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way.<p>In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today.<p>So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design and was about to start my masters degree at Harvard GSD in Boston), then one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born.<p>The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your contacts (synced through your phonebook) into Circles that define what the relationship is. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers).<p>It also takes cues from other privacy focused social products. Posts are encrypted, reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with eachother, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile.<p>As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads.<p>We’re in the app store and google play store (yay, cross-platform JS frameworks), the invite code is ‘FULLCIRCLE’ and download links are below:<p>Landing: <a href="https://oncircles.com" rel="nofollow">https://oncircles.com</a><p>iOS: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/id1532621483" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/i...</a><p>Android: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles</a><p>I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. Hit or miss?<p>PS: If you want to chat about the idea or are interested in working together I’d love to chat. Always interesting to meet people on HN and we have the funds, ideas and drive to continue making cool things that can solve big problems. Send me an email at james@oncircles.com<p>Thanks!
Show HN: Just Launched an App for Dads
Hey there,<p>First time posting on HN. We're looking for feedback from parents.<p>We're 2 dads who started working on Dadditude in the midst of covid lockdowns last year.<p>Being a dad can be a long, emotional, draining, and lonely journey. Through our research we learned that dads want to improve their parenting but are too shy to ask for help, and are tired of reading content online written for mums. We set out to fix that and create a platform that would help dads feel seen, validated, and supported.
By helping dads, we hope to support moms and partners too, because all parents deserve more support.<p>Quick timeline so far:
We started a community of dads on Instagram last Feb to test hypothesis and learn about their needs. We then launched an MVP in April, a super simple app serving weekly coaching guides created with a parenting professional partner.
We made several updates in summer and fall, working like crazy in the background to convince parenting professionals to write coaching guides for us. Especially hard when you're a nobody. But people are kind and we found all the support we needed.
We launched a v1 app mid-December with 50 coaching guides and a more full fledge community board (and a paid membership tier).
We've just added on-demand parenting professional support in Jan.
And last week added a picture board for dads to upload pics of their families, and that's become more popular than the forums!! ← I knew dads wanted to feel more visible but I love these discoveries!<p>Super proud of the work done so far, but still so much to do to smooth out the product experience, and get closer to PFM. So much learning.<p>web: <a href="http://www.dadditude.app" rel="nofollow">http://www.dadditude.app</a>
ios: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558653576" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558653576</a>
android: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dadditude.app" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dadditude....</a><p>(part of the experience is behind a paywall, but you can test nearly all paid features once for free - so long as you register through Apple or Google)<p>All thoughts and feedback welcome in the comments below, especially if you're a parent entrepreneur. TYIA<p>[edited top statement to "<i>can be</i> long..." for the dads here who felt it was too gloomy - it was]
Grafana Incident: Smart incident management for your teams
Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users
Show HN: Magistrate – Plaintext legal contracts for developers
I made this because I think that if contracts were written in plain text files and managed more like software, from version control to IDEs, lawyers would work more quickly and intelligently for their clients, saving them money.<p>But the entire practice of transactional law is stuck on Microsoft Word. My clients are mostly technology companies with an appetite for innovation. With their encouragement, I am moving my own legal practice away from formats like Microsoft Word and into plain text.<p>Electronic signatures of plain text contracts is the starting point for that effort. The MVP is this developer API.<p>If the reception to this product is positive, I'll continue to release the products that I build. In time, my hope is that plain text will supplant Microsoft Word in the drafting, negotiation and execution of contracts.
Show HN: Magistrate – Plaintext legal contracts for developers
I made this because I think that if contracts were written in plain text files and managed more like software, from version control to IDEs, lawyers would work more quickly and intelligently for their clients, saving them money.<p>But the entire practice of transactional law is stuck on Microsoft Word. My clients are mostly technology companies with an appetite for innovation. With their encouragement, I am moving my own legal practice away from formats like Microsoft Word and into plain text.<p>Electronic signatures of plain text contracts is the starting point for that effort. The MVP is this developer API.<p>If the reception to this product is positive, I'll continue to release the products that I build. In time, my hope is that plain text will supplant Microsoft Word in the drafting, negotiation and execution of contracts.