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

1901 points l2silver | 2 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 2.468s | 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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drcode ◴[28 Apr 23 17:43 UTC] No.35744621[source]▶
I just moved to the bay area. I made an app that scrapes all bay area events from meetup, eventbrite, and a couple of other sites- This way you end up with around 100 events a day, way too much to read through.

So next I take each event, send it to chatgpt3.5 and ask it to rate this event on around 20 parameters. Next, I take the latitude/longitude of each event and measure driving distance from my house. Then I have a master formula based on my personal interests and driving preferences and an app shows me the 10 events every day most likely to be interesting to me for any day.

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Alifatisk ◴[30 Apr 23 18:09 UTC] No.35765048[source]▶
How did you measure the driving distance?
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1. drcode ◴[30 Apr 23 18:59 UTC] No.35765526[source]▶
I asked chatgpt4, and it did some insane formula that uses lat/long and the radius of the earth to measure distances, then asked it to add a bonus 20 minutes for any destination in SF, 15 minutes for any event in Berkeley/Oakland (and it correctly put bounding rectangles on the three jurisdictions).
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2. Alifatisk ◴[30 Apr 23 22:47 UTC] No.35767265[source]▶
Cool, thank you for the insight.

I stumpled upon a similar quest where my app had to calculate the walking distance between two coordinates (the client and the restaurant).

OSM seem to be the only good option, I could not find any better alternative in my case (Ruby).