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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: 0s | 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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stavros ◴[28 Apr 23 20:34 UTC] No.35746760[source]▶
I built a site to scrape events from my city and show them all on one page. It was amazing for finding things to do, until Facebook shut down their events API and the site died overnight.
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1. drcode ◴[30 Apr 23 19:03 UTC] No.35765580[source]▶
The secret is to not use any apis and just scrape with abandon (and then to only build it for yourself so that you don't get sued)
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2. stavros ◴[30 Apr 23 19:06 UTC] No.35765604[source]▶
I tried, but scraping ended up being too hard, so I binned it.