The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week
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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
Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
Hey HN, I’m Brad, one of the creators of Superblocks and a YC alum, excited to share our internal tooling IDE.<p>As developers ourselves, we faced the problem of building tons of internal admin UIs, backends to connect siloed data, reporting jobs, and data pipelines. For UIs we would build one-off React components. For integrations, we would have to decipher vendor docs and implement auth. Finally, for reporting jobs we had to handle failures and observability – many hours of repetitive engineering effort.<p>So we built Superblocks, an internal tooling IDE to connect to any datasource (databases, APIs, data warehouses), drag and drop your common UI components (tables, charts, forms), spin up backend APIs and schedule cron jobs, all in one place.<p>Since developers we spoke to hated repeatedly handling permissions, hooking up observability, configuring security and managing CI/CD pipelines, we built Superblocks to integrate with popular dev tools like Datadog, Elastic, GitHub, GitLab, Okta and more. Use our cloud version, or run a self-hosted agent to ensure your data never leaves your VPC [1].<p>Superblocks is quite differentiated from other “low-code” tools out there:
* 100% built for developers: observability, debuggability, version control, extend with Python & JS
* A platform, not a point solution: An all-in-one builder for internal tools: app UIs, APIs and cron jobs
* Agent architecture: source-available, stateless and lightweight vs a legacy on-prem deployment
* Scalable pricing: Pay for apps by Creator and usage-based pricing for end users (based on day passes) so it’s affordable to have 100s or 1000s of end users. Workflows and Jobs are billed on the number of executions.<p>A quick 4 min demo on the website: <a href="https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4</a>
Developer docs: <a href="https://docs.superblocks.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.superblocks.com</a>
To illustrate Superblocks in action, we built this startup funding explorer last night [2]<p>Would love to hear feedback!<p>[1] Agent <a href="https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent</a>
[2] Superblocks Startup Explorer App <a href="https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-aa8b-ac7c7592574f/pages/bdf59690-18a5-42d5-9014-250f8318a8cc?environment=production" rel="nofollow">https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-...</a>
Show HN: Penumbra, a perceptually optimized color palette based on natural light
For this palette, I used recent advances in color science, which made perceptual design more accessible, to choose a set of colors (mainly for syntax highlighting) that have uniform luminance for less visually uneven, fluidly readable code, but at the same time maximally distinguishable hue and chroma. The background colors are based on natural (sun-)light and shade for a more pleasing look than equally neutral greys.<p>For much more detailed info, including the construction, check out the repository.<p>There’s also already a (bare-bones) VSCode extension, linked in the repository, but it could admittedly use more informed distribution of colors over tokens, language specific highlighting and perhaps more opinionated use in UI elements.
Show HN: Penumbra, a perceptually optimized color palette based on natural light
For this palette, I used recent advances in color science, which made perceptual design more accessible, to choose a set of colors (mainly for syntax highlighting) that have uniform luminance for less visually uneven, fluidly readable code, but at the same time maximally distinguishable hue and chroma. The background colors are based on natural (sun-)light and shade for a more pleasing look than equally neutral greys.<p>For much more detailed info, including the construction, check out the repository.<p>There’s also already a (bare-bones) VSCode extension, linked in the repository, but it could admittedly use more informed distribution of colors over tokens, language specific highlighting and perhaps more opinionated use in UI elements.
Show HN: Property Trends Scraped from Zillow
PiBox: a tiny personal server for self-hosting
Heya HN! We've built a Raspberry PI CM4 based SSD NAS for home hosting. We built it as a part of KubeSail.com - which is a platform aimed at making self-hosting easy and at making the technical bits (tunneling, backups, updates, etc) as easy as possible.<p>You may have seen plans for this about 9 months ago on HN, but we're finally in full production! I'll be booking tickets to fly out and help assemble the 2nd batch in a few days - we're effectively a two person computer company, which is a lot of fun and a crazy amount of work. Our mission is to make home-hosting a website, an app, or just personal photos a reasonable alternative to SaaS products.
Tech Compensation in Europe
Show HN: Emery – Personal productivity workspace
We're building an app that helps people manage their schedule, tasks and notes all in one place.<p>The goal is to create a workspace, where people can manage their various priorities, both personal and professional, see a single schedule combined of all their calendars and manage their days without switching between multiple apps.<p>At the moment we've implemented Google calendar synchronisation, basic tasks and notes. Also Emery has some things we really wanted to see in other apps – private notes for meetings, categories that can be used to group tasks/notes/meetings together, weekly productivity reports.<p>Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!
Show HN: Reduce SQLite database size by up to 80% with transparent compression
Show HN: Reduce SQLite database size by up to 80% with transparent compression
Show HN: I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years
Hi HN!
Thanks for your attention to my post.<p>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.<p>Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback.
There are 200,000 monthly unique users.<p>I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.