Hey HN, a while back, I saw Robin Linacre's post on HN showing his work on letter paths, a way for people to write in cursive: https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths
I thought it was quite fun and relaxing, even meditative.
Later on, I was watching a video on online betting, particularly Polymarket.
And I got an idea to create a simple app where we can use cursive writing as a form of meditation to overcome the urge of betting. That's when Urge Surfer was born.
The idea is that, for an urge that requires a screen and is something that you don't really want to do, you can use Urge Surfer to "surf" that wave. It seems that urges can sometimes be like waves: they get stronger, but in a short time period, they pass.
The sentences are self-compassionate, kind, gentle, and hopefully that helps people put themselves at ease while the urge passes.
Hey HN, had a bit of fun "reinventing" logistic regression. I wrote the text myself, but I extensively used LLMs to build the interactive widgets. I've been thinking of a new type of digital book, one full of fun and interactive widgets to really get the point across.
In my experience, I had to start out with a very specific idea, which claude code/codex could one-shot, but then it took some playing around with the result and some back-and-forth to get something that made sense and felt nice to use. I guess we'll always have our humanity.
This is hosted on github pages, so it's "free" to host.
The letters are based on how they're formed in the UK primary school curriculum.
Each letter is a json that defines the bezier curves according to a schema.
They were created by starting by drawing the letters freehand, yielding essentially a dot to dot, and then (2) using an approximation/smoothing algorithm to convert that into beziers. Finally,I went through touching up/fixing each letter by hand, using a purpose built editor.
So I would say overall it's more time consuming than challenging.
That stills leaves the problem of joining letters together. For that I heavily lent on AI to propose an algorithm, although it required a lot of back and forth to get something even semi decent. At the moment it's probably 'good enough' but there's still lots of room for improvement.
On the countries quiz, you should be able to move and zoom on the bloge using click and drag (or pinch and drag on mobile). Letter constellations uses shaders. Both of those are only tested on Chrome, so that might be the issue.
I've been working on my own GAN for a while, trained on a few different datasets. Then the EEG data is fed into the GAN in real-time and used to interpolate within it's latent space. I assign each brainwave band (e.g. alpha, beta, etc.) to it's own point within that latent space, so the core idea is that as alpha increases (for example) the output heads towards that point in the space and that's reflected in the output image. Happy to talk more.
I love tiled words, I've actually been doing the daily puzzle for a while, have completed over a 100 of them! It's part of my morning routine :)
I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!
Very fun game, thanks. When you try to change the speed of the game on mobile using firefox, it glitches and keeps opening the speed modal. Pretty much crashes the browser. Also +1 to the taxi fare not being paid in the currency of the country, but in some other currency. More jobs would be great! Appreciate the difficulty of not knowing exactly where you'll be taken, but without consistent jobs sometimes it's really punishing (or at least feels really punishing). I was thinking it might be cool to add stamina, and fancier hotels may replenish more stamina. An incentive to splurge ah.
I'm guessing that human accuracy may be lower or around that value, given that handwritten notes are generally difficult to read. A better metric for document parsing might be accuracy relative to human performance (how much better the LLM performs compared to a human).
I thought it was quite fun and relaxing, even meditative.
Later on, I was watching a video on online betting, particularly Polymarket. And I got an idea to create a simple app where we can use cursive writing as a form of meditation to overcome the urge of betting. That's when Urge Surfer was born.
The idea is that, for an urge that requires a screen and is something that you don't really want to do, you can use Urge Surfer to "surf" that wave. It seems that urges can sometimes be like waves: they get stronger, but in a short time period, they pass.
The sentences are self-compassionate, kind, gentle, and hopefully that helps people put themselves at ease while the urge passes.
The code is completely open source, and you can self-host: https://github.com/MartimChaves/urge-surfer
No data is stored except for the number of waves that have been surfed, and there's a seed used to randomize the sentences.
Thanks