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sideprojecton Show HN: I built a tool to extract tables from PDFs

Can you tell me what is not loading? the homepage?

sideprojecton Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

is a recent community built around AI contents (built on a tool called HN+ - https://www.hn.plus)

sideprojecton We’re all just temporarily abled

I once sat on a zoom call with a vision impaired user to do some accessibility testing on our site.

First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.

Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.

I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.

sideprojecton Throw away your first draft of your code

Well, maybe not throw away everything, but I understand the principle. There are also other areas where this could help - and one of them is "naming". Sometimes when you start a project, you don't really know what the best names are for things. Project name, repo name, service name etc. So you choose something that you think it's ok and you go ahead. As the project progresses, you realise you've named things wrong, but renaming is so annoying and tedious. Often we ignore the bad names because it doesn't seem significant. But names are how people burden their cognitive load (an example, we named our repo after planets rather than describing what the repo does - "acme-customer-module-frontend" but we named it "pluto" - now everyone has to remember what pluto is and make sure pluto is not neptune).

sideprojecton Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

Is there anything equivalent for Vue? I know there was VueNative and NativeScript and there is even Ionic in Vue, but haven't really seen any framework that is either dedicated to Vue or has a strong support for Vue.

sideprojecton Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model (2019)

I'm genuinely looking for a "calm" company. Is there such a thing? I have a few anecdotal stories of companies being absolutely chaotic (my current one included). I don't know where to point fingers to. I could start at pointing myself. Customers demanding custom features. Execs and sales people asking for unreasonable estimates. Engineers not feeling safe enough to say "no" but have to make something work, introducing tech debts. Engineers picking technology tools without much research, because there is no time, which increases complexity. People leaving, and then new people can't understand everything holistically. All of these factors combined into one gigantic bowl of mess.

sideprojecton XML is the future

That post was a good (or bad?) walk down the memory lane. :)

sideprojecton Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022)

Oh wow. Thank you. Never heard of Yuka until now. Used it all morning to scan barcodes! Love it.

sideprojecton Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022)

We were recommended Breville. They are more on the pricey end. But we did get them second hand via FB marketplace.

sideprojecton Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022)

An oncologist in my family anecdotally told me how her patients are getting younger and younger - speculates (with research) that lots of food chemicals might be contributing.

Since the beginning of this year, our family has been much more conscious of the ingredients in the food labels. Lots of additives with many different numbers. We've been trying to get back to more natural things with less numbers. We bought breadmaker and started making our own bread (fun and messy). Bought a second hand ice cream maker (fun, tedious, but yum). Never knew how simple popcorn making was! Lots of colours of vegetables, home-grown spring onions. Our grocery bills on vegetables and fruits went up sharply. But it went down on crackers, chocolates and other things sharply.

I don't feel anything - but it helps me to think that I'm eating less numbers.

sideprojecton My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do

I was rummaging through my junk and came across Sony Clie PDA - I'm going to boot it up and write a post about it soon - I do have a font memory of buying this expensive toy thinking I was so busy that I needed an electronic fancy to-do list only to find out later that I was just playing games on it.

sideprojecton Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)

I bookmarked this just in case I need to read it later. :)

sideprojecton The Fear of Shipping (2012)

Oh I'm guilty of this. So many projects that were not launched. And the easy default for us (developers) tends to be coding & building features. But even if you ship, you have to continuously ship. And by shipping, I mean, you need to continuously tell the users. You ship it, you announce it, you need to market it, send out newsletters, feedback, improve, email the users again, cold-reach-out to other users who might be interested, and on and on we go. This is why it's difficult. Are you ready to put in as much work into these non-technical work? I wasn't and I was certainly unaware.

sideprojecton Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

I've recently launched HN+

https://www.hn.plus

For anyone interested in HN-type forums (with lots of other features we've built)

sideprojecton Spinning Diagrams with CSS

I'm more impressed with the domain name.

sideprojecton Node.js 20 is now available

I've used this - https://adonisjs.com/ - I don't think it's "standard". Is there such a thing? I guess Express was a de-facto standard. I'm a bit biased since I come from Laravel background, so adonis feels familiar.

sideprojecton Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

As a Korean & English speaking person (Korean Australian) I've grown to love my mother tongue more as I've gotten older, spoke English more, read more Korean books, tried to analyze the differences in languages and communication approaches etc. I just "feel" Korean as a language is, so different to English - more, expressive? nuanced? I'm sure there are plenty of other languages out there that are like that. I don't know how knowing these two very different languages have helped me and shaped me, but I'm certain it's been positive.

sideprojecton Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

I built Newsy. It's a tool that automatically generates content-aggregators. I focus on people who have domain names that are unused.

https://www.newsy.co

sideprojecton Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

I recently launched a tool called HN+

https://hn.plus

It's a tool where you can create your own HackerNews clone. Obviously, while working on this, I had to emulate the HN ranking algorithm. But what I found is that the algorithm actually doesn't seem to work well for a "young" forums.

I had to tweak it so that on the frontpage, the posts that are more relatively recent rises to the top over older posts of higher votes. I know these are considered in the original algorithm, but I had to tweak it.

Which made me think that the algorithm should be considering the age of the community and also how active it is.

sideprojecton The best kimchi is made in earthenware pots

Growing up in Korea, I remember my grandmother making kimchi and then putting them in large earthenware pots and then digging large holes in the ground then putting them inside. In winter time, when it snows (that's how I remember it), she'll go out and grab some of this kimchi. The taste? I salivate now every time I think about it. To this day, I have not tasted kimchi as delicious as that - can't say it's objective. It's my nostalgia, childhood memories etc. But I'm so grateful for that taste memory.

sideprojecton How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

What a fascinating story!

sideprojecton Google Groups has been left to die

For community forums and tools somewhat similar to Google Groups, I've recently launched HN+

https://www.hn.plus

I've always wanted to create my own HN clone and use it for myself. Yes, there are many many forum tools out there :)

sideprojecton Show HN: A HN clone writen in Go

Awesome! Last week, I released "Launch your own HN-Clone" tool

https://www.hn.plus

I've tried to maintain true to most of the HN features and also included other features so you can grow your HN-clone community!

sideprojecton More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

I'm in the domain industry (created a tool called Newsy - https://www.newsy.co) and this is where the domainers take the opportunistic sales to established companies who can buy their .com domains they've been holding on for so long.

You may not like domain parking industry, but for people who have decent set of .com domain names and many of them generate thousands of dollars through just ad-clicking, it's an absolute no-brainer to continue on with this trade and they will always say "it's an investment" and "it's like real estate".

sideprojecton Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers

Related, but I created Scholars

https://www.scholars.io

Where researchers and others interested can create "reading rooms" of papers and discuss. I have also been thinking about something similar to this where a list of papers that people are currently discussing is shown.

This looks great too!

sideprojecton How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?

I've always been pretty cheap with my spendings on VPS. So, when building my web applications, even if the traffic is building up, I opted into optimizing before upgrading hardware.

I've been doing this for more than 10 years and I've been making incremental (sometimes really small) improvements to the way my web apps work so that I rarely need to go down to AWS, k8s, load balancer etc etc way.

Sure, these are personal projects and of course there is a diminishing return on optimizing (so I do upgrade hardware when I need to), but I always found it a rewarding challenge to first look at understanding the inherent issue, rather than just throwing money at it (at my work, it's completely opposite - see an issue? throw money and upgrade hardware ASAP and move on).

Some things I've done for optimizing are...

- Simple upgrading of software - going to latest postgres, upgrading PHP - Identifying data that are not frequently updated and then caching them - I've identified some bot traffics coming from China, so for one of my projects, I just blocked it completely (yeah, drastic I know, but not worth my $2!!)

There are also many many services out there that provide free tiers that you can utilize. So as a solo, indie dev, there are many ways to leverage to stay on a cheap $5 linode box as long as you need (I saw recently a box for $2.50 - tempting...)

sideprojecton Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?

Was there a revenue model though? It seems like it's just free?

sideprojecton Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?

https://www.newsy.co

My modern day take on domain parking. I used to have ~50 domains just sitting there doing nothing. Got sick of it. Didn't want to do ugly domain parking pages, but also didn't have time to develop them. I wanted something useful and something that still offered value.

Newsy creates an automated content aggregator (think of Reddit but automated) for your domain based on the keywords you describe. Over the years, a lot of features went in including newsletter, membership etc.

The best option for the users was providing ways to monetize - including bringing your own ads, charging for posts, paid membership etc.

sideprojecton Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

I'm continuing with my project Newsy

https://newsy.co

A modern take on domain parking. I have ~50 un-used domains. I wanted to make some good use out of them instead of just parking them. So I built Newsy to convert them into automated content aggregators.

sideprojecton Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?

This is exactly what I thought of coming into this post! I think I actually saw this first nearly 20 years ago and boy oh boy things don't change much (or should I say, people don't change much)