Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

https://pastmaps.com

Been working on this as a new way to find, explore, and view old historical maps and aerials of my area. Still heavily in development but have been surprised by some early traffic stats (1-2K organic uniques / mo and growing 200%+ m/m right now)

Hoping to add in more advanced map tooling within the next week or 2, including new basemap options, 3d terrain view, and then a proper search box which I've been pushing off for far too long

nicolas_ · 3 years ago

That's really cool! Just wanted to share the following site as the city of Toronto created something similar a few months ago https://map.toronto.ca/torontomaps/

Soupy · 3 years ago

Amazing, just bookmarked this!

ismokedoinks · 3 years ago

This is really cool, makes me nostalgic for a lot of time georeferencing random maps from the library of congress or from municipal archives etc.

In that same vein, you could add a feature where users could contribute georeferenced map files for community review and approval--I think that would really increase your scalability. I see you have an email for that currently.

Soupy · 3 years ago

I love love love this direction. And yea, I have a basic email but I really think a super simple upload and maybe even dead-easy georeference tool for folks to contribute data is a no-brainer! I'm bumping this up on my backlog, thank you!

i-am-gizm0 · 3 years ago

I love it! A suggestion for much further down the line: a timeline on the map which composites many maps from a similar time period so you can see them all stitched together (somewhat like how https://skyvector.com/ stitches together multiple sectional charts into a continuous map, though I know it can't be as seamless). Or you could attempt to run some extra processing steps to warp the map to match the background map's projection. Those are both big undertakings, though.

Soupy · 3 years ago

Very doable, these are called mosaics in the GIS world and it's actually not that crazy to do

Really love this suggestion, I could see it making map exploration far easier since now you just need to explore by year instead of by map and by year (reducing dimensionality by 1!). Thank you, I'm going to chew on this a bit more but I really think there's something here

adperry · 3 years ago

Your site is similar to https://www.oldmapsonline.org/

I have found the ui for map difficult to use in the past.

Soupy · 3 years ago

Yea I used to use this site quite a bit but it is clunky as all hell. I found myself cobbling together my own tools or stitching 3-5 different resources together over time for my research and this eventually just led to me starting work on Pastmaps. I'm hoping I can build something far more comprehensive, modern, and intuitive

monero-xmr · 3 years ago

Obviously I want to buy a high quality print of the map focused on an area.

andy800 · 3 years ago

Damn, for a second I thought this was like weedmaps but for linguini (which would be an awesome site) and then I looked a bit closer. Still cool though!

fhk · 3 years ago

Have you thought of running super resolution on the images?

Soupy · 3 years ago

I actually think that's a great idea! I considered doing it as part of my ingestion pipeline when starting out but honestly got a bit overwhelmed with all the options so put it on my backburner. Maybe I should take another look. I think it would be an awesome way to enable even more crisp zooming

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ckrapu · 3 years ago

I found a map of the area around my family’s farm in 1894 super quick. Awesome site!

tectonic · 3 years ago

This is super cool, thank you for making it!

Bitgrid[1][2] is a continuation of an idea I've been carrying around since the 1980s, and tweaking from time to time. If I can maintain focus long enough, I intend to learn RTL, VHDL or Verilog well enough to get it entered in one of the Google open source chip shuttles. I think this approach to computing if applied to neural networks may offer a cheap way to get far more compute, perhaps exaflop performance out of a single chip.

It's an FPGA without routing hardware, which on the face of it, is the stupidest thing to do. However, because of the clocked nature of the bitgrid, you all data only has to travel to neighboring cells, so lines will be short, and clock rates should be able to be up in the gigahertz range. Instead of worrying about how quickly you can get a signal from one side of the chip to the other, the latency will be 1/2 of the number of cells across, if the signal takes a straight line.

However... everything along that path can be compute, and routing should be trivial. It avoids the trap with GPUs where they are Turing complete, thus hard to reason about. Like an excel spreadsheet, you can track dependencies, and know exactly where a given bit came from. The chip as a whole, on the other hand, is Turing complete.

If anyone knows how much energy in FemtoJoules an 4 bit latch and a 4 bit input LUT take up, and a static ram cell... that would help in estimating the real world power consumption/feasibility of this thing. I can't find a good answer anywhere.

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[2] https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/2005/03/bitgrid-story.html

generalizations · 3 years ago

Have you contrasted this with cellular automata? It seems like an advanced form of that type of construction. Could possibly benefit from some formalization.

mikewarot · 3 years ago

Cellular automata apply the same rule across a grid, a bitgrid is an array of lookup tables, essentially stuffed between the cells of a static RAM. The RAM holds the values in the tables, and an latches maintain the state of each cell's inputs. Thus each cell in a bitgrid is individually programmable.

A provision needs to be added to be able to read and or write (override) inputs for debugging or other purposes, such as testing, updating constants, etc.

I agree that formalization is required. I've built an emulator, and hand coded some logic into it as a test, and can simulate a 1024x1024 grid at about 35 Hz on my desktop pc (half that on my laptop).

My near term goals are to be able to take an expression, run it through a set of tools to be written, and then feed it into the simulator, and run it.

I can guess at the energy required to change states, and thus get a rough estimate as to power usage/efficiency/speed, etc. If I get myself to the point where I've got a chip designed, I'm sure the EDA tools can give me far more accurate numbers.

jakeinspace · 3 years ago

Are you sure this can run backprop?

mikewarot · 3 years ago

There are many ways you could do backprop... if you want to probe the values straight from the middle of the grid, you could do that. You could poke new values right into the middle of things (by using configuration/random access mode), but everything else is going to pause while doing so. Or you could ripple in new weights along with data.

To me, this feels like starting from where Turing stood and inventing a new type of computer. The sky is the limit.

toomanyrichies · 3 years ago

I'm writing "The Impostor's Guide To The Shell". My theory is that reading popular open-source codebases, and Googling stuff you don't understand until you grok it, is a great way to overcome impostor's syndrome. The goal is to take a reader from thinking "Maybe a 10x engineer could understand that library, but I never could..." to "Oh, that's all it does?".

The guide covers things like:

- shebangs

- exit codes

- parameter expansion

- file permissions

- how to look up docs via "man" and "help"

- And a lot more.

The codebase I'm starting with is a Ruby version manager (written in bash) called RBENV. I've published it onto a platform called HelpThisBook.com, a platform to help authors get feedback from early readers (co-created by Rob Fitzpatrick, author of "The Mom Test", "Write Useful Books", etc.). Instructions on how to leave feedback should be given when you open the link below.

https://helpthisbook.com/richie/impostors-guide-to-the-shell

Too late to edit my original post, so adding this comment to say that the above link just covers RBENV’s shim file code, not the whole codebase.

I have a 600+ page Google doc which covers the remaining code, and which I mostly wrote for my own edification. I was worried about overwhelming my potential audience by showing it all to them at once, and I want to get feedback on just this first section, before releasing the rest.

We’ll see how it goes with just this small first section.

sublinear · 3 years ago

If it helps anyone reading this, everything in tech boils down to "Oh, that's all it does?".

blackhaj7 · 3 years ago

This book looks great - I love the style and I am trying to improve my shell skills.

Is there anywhere I can pre-order it?

Oh wow, thanks for the compliment! You're the first person to ask haha.

The first step in this process is making sure I'm even writing something that's useful to my target audience. So for now, I'm laser-focused on getting reader feedback via that HelpThisBook.com site.

That said, I'm continuing to add more free content to that site on a weekly basis. I recommend watching that space for more updates.

Thanks for reaching out!

eternityforest · 3 years ago

Wow, what a great idea for a thread!

I'm trying to pare down my personal projects to just the really exciting ones, so I don't have much, butni think the most appropriate to the thread is https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

It's mean to be a cross-framework library for creating device integrations, so you can, say, write a handler for RTL SDR weather stations, and use it in a simple script up to a mega framework.

I kind of dislike the way HASS and others handle automations where they have special purpose primitives for everything that needs lots of hand written code.

I just have config entries, they must be strings, and data points, they can be strings, numbers, bytes, or objects. You can put metadata on them. There's also a few other utilities like the ability to make subdevices, and the ability to request things from the host.

There are no special subclasses, a light bulb is just a device with a brightness point.

It currently runs my security system with object detection recording, QR decoding if desired, multiple regions, motion detection without decoding every frame, and subsecond latency streaming to the browser, a nice recordings browser that can view a recording while it's being made, etc.

klakierr · 3 years ago

An app for language learning by reading books in the target language. It takes the book (any epub book) in the target language add inserts translations:

—Arthur —dijo con tono cortante, ["Arthur," he said sharply.] y su voz sonó como el chasquido de una ratonera—, [and his voice sounded like the click of a mousetrap.]

All of the existing apps that I checked only display translation upon clicking a word (like in Kindle), but that 1) doesn't work well when you're only starting to learn; 2) takes too much from the reading experience, and becomes a chore. Also, most of them only allow a limited selection of books.

I'm using it myself for over a month now, and enjoy reading with it a lot. I feel almost no friction using it, it's the usual pleasure of reading a book with added exploration of a new language.

The problems:

Translating can be hard or / and expensive. Cheaper / free translations are often incorrect, and struggle with idioms. DeepL would cost > 20€ for a long book. ChatGPT hallucinates, and adds to the original. I'm using Google Translate for now and it's good enough for me, but I don't feel it's good enough to charge for. It often mixes genders (as opposed to ChatGPT which can deduct them from context I guess), and occasionally mistranslates.

Would you want to use such app even with the often erroneous automated translations?

fbarred · 3 years ago

This sounds very similar to the books manually curated using Ilya Frank's Reading Method: http://english.franklang.ru/index.php/ilya-frank-s-reading-m...

jamil7 · 3 years ago

That sounds cool, I had a similar idea a while ago but it was a browser extension. I only pulled out keywords from news articles with spacy and then ran them through deepl, I was trying to make automated flashcards to help learn to read articles in your target language.

Have you tried llama2? Running that yourself might be cheaper, you could also maybe crowd source translation fixes eventually somehow.

phil294 · 3 years ago

This is very cool, looking forward to it! I've been doing the same thing with Spanish Wikipedia articles for a while, using a few lines of Bash + Regex. I was using Apertium for it. https://apertium.org/ It's definitely worse than most ML-based solutions, but it works reliably, deterministic, and fast; you can run it entirely offline. With Spanish translations, the main problem I was facing is lack of vocabulary, so I created https://github.com/phil294/apertium-eng-spa-wiktionary which about doubles the amount of recognized words, albeit with wonky grammar.

carlosjobim · 3 years ago

€20 is not expensive to translate a book. Google translate is of such low quality that it is not suitable for any real world use like yours.

Can you let the user herself pay the translation cost when loading her favorite book into your software?

Yeah I intend to offer different translation options and be transparent with pricing

addandsubtract · 3 years ago

I'm interested in something like this. I would be even more interested in a curated list of books by language level. Maybe you can offer a couple of books per level and cache those translations, minimizing costs and giving users an easy way to get started reading in a new/intermediate language.

zubairq · 3 years ago

If it works well I would use it (and pay for it)

_gabe_ · 3 years ago

https://github.com/ambrosiogabe/MathAnimation

If you’ve ever tried to make a mathematical animation (think 3Blue1Brown), it’s a real pain. I was using manim for awhile to make animations for my YT channel, but the whole iteration process felt very slow and repetitive. So I thought I would recreate manim over the weekend, except with a GUI and real-time feedback. It’s been a year and a half and I’m hoping this weekend will be done soon so I can move on and start making videos again.

So far, it does a lot, but it still needs a lot of polish and refinement. The readme gives some gifs and a better idea of the feature set right now.

xcdzvyn · 3 years ago

I remember watching the video you made on it[0] and was thoroughly impressed! Small world.

I had an application for this recently but the name made it hard to find :(

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iydG-e1dQGA

Ah thanks! And yea, naming things has never been a strength for me. I’ll have to come up with something more memorable once it’s ready for an alpha release :)

zem · 3 years ago

that looks really good!

harrykeightley · 3 years ago

A little niche, but https://run-in.app is an online encounter manager for DnD 5e that I've been (slowly) building this year. I initially built it because I was dming a one-shot for some friends and got overwhelmed tracking the health and position of 6 enemies + the party on pen and paper.

I wasn't happy with the solutions I found to this online, and thought it'd be fun to try and build one myself.

The main features for creating and running an encounter are ready: 1. Adding any 5e SRD mob or a custom mob to battle maps 2. Dragging mobs around the battle map 3. Turn and health tracking 4. Status effect tracking

But there are a few bugs to iron out, and more features to come!

As a heads up, if you visit the site and get a cold start of the container, it might take a while to be properly interactive. This is, unsurprisingly, the first thing to fix on the roadmap.

poetril · 3 years ago

Something like this is exactly what I've been looking for! Barebones, easy to use, and snappy. I find most other encounter builders are way to bloated for my purposes. But this seems to strike a really nice middle ground of convenience with all the right features.

I'm so happy to hear that! Please also let me know if you have any feature requests you think would really improve your experience

jcubic · 3 years ago

I just loaded a page from Europe, it took few seconds to load the images. I thought the page was broken, there were no loader of any kind.

gsuuon · 3 years ago

This looks neat! Have you thought of putting a demo video on the frontpage?

That's actually a great idea and would be much more engaging than a flat image. Cheers :)

janosdebugs · 3 years ago

I created ContainerSSH[1] in 2020 which is an SSH server that drops you in a container instead of launching a shell directly. (It's not a containerized SSH, it talks to the Docker/Kubernetes API.) It has since become a CNCF Sandbox project The main use case is creating jump servers and remote dev environments, but it can also be used as a honeypot due to its audit log features that allow you to reconstruct the SSH interaction accurately. We did a few demos where we showed the SSH interactions on a honeypot in real time on a web interface. The authentication and dynamic configuration of containers is done via webhooks.

A now-comaintainer from CERN also contributed X11 and port forwarding support to it and is now continuing the development of the project. Since I switched industries and am nowhere near containers anymore, the project could really use a few contributors.

A few feature ideas we had but never implemented:

- Web-based terminal that directly interacts with ContainerSSH via websockets.

- File manager using the same.

- Better audit logging for SFTP interactions, allowing for filename-based search.

- Web interface for viewing audit logs.

There are a few talks/videos available online:

- ContainerSSH in one minute [2]

- Building a science lab with ContainerSSH (CERN usecase, Red Hat Research Day EU 2022) [3]

- Build your own honeypot with ContainerSSH (DevConf CZ 2021) [4]

[1]: https://containerssh.io

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs9OrnPi2IM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7M7japaa1o

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqJpsx7HpkU

nik736 · 3 years ago

I tried ContainerSSH and it is great. What are you doing now that you switched industries?:)

Thanks, glad you like it. :) My wife and I left the company with the red headgear and started a games company called Something Pink[1]. It's still a bit in the making, but we are uploading discussions on our progress to YouTube. The only use I have for containers is running an SVN server. :)

[1] https://something.pink