Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I’m a tech nerd rare coin & currency dealer! I took my two hobbies and combined them into a real business and I’m having the time of my life. Just launched a proper retail site here:

https://www.rarity7.com/

About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.

The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.

I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).

Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:

https://github.com/noahlh/celestite

I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.

Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.

So let's say I have a few hundred silver dollars. Is this a tool to help me sort them, or does such a tool exist? Like take a picture and it identifies it, looks for common errors, and provides a base price estimate?

There really should be, but the fact is there isn't a tool that does this yet. It would not be deeply hard to build, but it would mean training a model which means getting good enough training data which means taking the time to actually do it. It hasn't been done because it requires someone who is deeply knowledgable about coins AND someone who knows how to train a model and build an app, and the fact is that intersection is pretty small (it's me and probably 20 other people? Give or take). This is very much on my long-term roadmap.

In the short term, the easiest way is to find someone who does this (eg me) and just email me some pictures. I'd be happy to tell you if you've got anything good. The old school neural net between my ears can assist.

(See profile for email).