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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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allochthon ◴[28 Apr 23 20:20 UTC] No.35746585[source]▶
I built a web app that keeps track of every link I ever find to be interesting. It allows for fine-grained topics (e.g., individual academic papers, or topics more specific than that). It groups the topics in a DAG, so that you can get to a topic via more than one path from the top. And it allows you to look at intersections of transitive closures over topics in order to narrow down a search.

It keeps a history of every change to the graph in Git, so one day you could potentially implement some form of time travel and see what the graph looked like at an earlier point in time without too much difficulty.

I have used the app every day for years. I feel like there's something promising there that is of general interest, but I have not figured out how to communicate the value.

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1. u8 ◴[29 Apr 23 19:59 UTC] No.35756579[source]▶
I’ve made the exact same website for myself. It’s just a little PHP static webapp but I can write reviews for posts and it’s got a simple SQLite/PHP ^8 backend.

https://artsie.red/

I could have used something like Safari’s reading list, but that wouldn’t scale to all of my devices. And I don’t like the idea of putting control of those links into a service I can’t delete.

This site literally solves one problem perfectly and beyond the occasional functionality upgrades (auto-fetching post metadata, a refresh button, and a little CMS behind authentication) it’s super light and useful for me!