Show HN: TimerVana a Local-first scheduler for real world routines
3 by granto | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I’m the creator of TimerVana. It's not just "another timer app". The engineering analogy is a lightweight task scheduler for things people do in the real world. A normal timer models one countdown. TimerVana models a small dependency graph in JSON: some steps run sequentially, others run in parallel, and everything can converge on a target finish time. You can also combine multiple timers (e.g., combine a timer with all the steps to cook a steak + a timer for roasting vegetables). I originally built it because I often set multiple timers and alarms when cooking and got tired of repeatedly juggling separate alarms to get a main dish and several sides ready together. The same model also works for workouts, study sessions, morning routines, and other repeatable processes. The iPhone app is local-first by design [0]. You can create, save, and run timers entirely on your phone without an account or cloud sharing. If you want the networked features, the companion website lets you browse and download timers, upload your own, and share them with other people. Everything available today is free. I may eventually add optional AI-assisted timer creation as a paid feature, but I haven’t settled on the business model or pricing. I'm more doing this to solve my own problem and hope it will help others as well. I’m interested in whether the underlying abstraction makes sense: does a sequence of dependent and parallel timed steps help you? I’d also appreciate feedback on the balance I took between the completely local experience and the optional sharing layer (I was partially inspired by the old iOS Workflow App, which was acquired by Apple and is now called Shortcuts). Of course, any other feedback very much appreciated. [0]: https://ift.tt/Kt50TeQ...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why isn't there a cursor for video games development
Ask HN: Why isn't there a cursor for video games development
2 by JimsonYang | 1 comments on Hacker News.
So I was prototyping with claude code and Godot engine, and I thought it was weird that this specific category of AI isn't as big as video gen creative suites. Like theres big names like runway and higgsfield but when it comes to video games there's no major company trying to make a one stop shop using AI to make video games. I'm sure it isn't because of a lack of trying, I'm sure developers thought about it as one of the first things to automate. If I had to guess there's a couple reasons: 1)Quality-making a good game requires extreme attention to detail all of which is non coding related. The animations on idle characters, how the background characters look, the sound design and clever story. 90% of gaming is art 2) backlash from players. I think this is an important factor but not the dominant factor. For reasons like games like Slotbound have had amazing positive responses despite being ai generated as long as they are high quality. On the flip side reputation does matter for major studios so adoption can be slow. 3)No money in the industry. Most game studios aren't raining in money, therefore making video games would be an expensive and time consuming hobby that got slightly easier, but is still difficult. A normal prosumer simply doesn't have the time nor dedication to make an project that is going to take months of their time These are my guesses, but I would love to hear responses from people in the industry or people who have attempted this idea or VCs who have their own thesis on the market. p.s. this isn't a lazy attempt startup research, I'm seriously just curious
2 by JimsonYang | 1 comments on Hacker News.
So I was prototyping with claude code and Godot engine, and I thought it was weird that this specific category of AI isn't as big as video gen creative suites. Like theres big names like runway and higgsfield but when it comes to video games there's no major company trying to make a one stop shop using AI to make video games. I'm sure it isn't because of a lack of trying, I'm sure developers thought about it as one of the first things to automate. If I had to guess there's a couple reasons: 1)Quality-making a good game requires extreme attention to detail all of which is non coding related. The animations on idle characters, how the background characters look, the sound design and clever story. 90% of gaming is art 2) backlash from players. I think this is an important factor but not the dominant factor. For reasons like games like Slotbound have had amazing positive responses despite being ai generated as long as they are high quality. On the flip side reputation does matter for major studios so adoption can be slow. 3)No money in the industry. Most game studios aren't raining in money, therefore making video games would be an expensive and time consuming hobby that got slightly easier, but is still difficult. A normal prosumer simply doesn't have the time nor dedication to make an project that is going to take months of their time These are my guesses, but I would love to hear responses from people in the industry or people who have attempted this idea or VCs who have their own thesis on the market. p.s. this isn't a lazy attempt startup research, I'm seriously just curious
New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: 30, burnt out, with 6-10 months of runway. What would you do?
Ask HN: 30, burnt out, with 6-10 months of runway. What would you do?
3 by throwaway_30yo | 0 comments on Hacker News.
After being let go from a small agency due to financial reasons, I find myself having at least 6-10 months of downtime for the first time in 10 years. I am around 30 and feel burnt out from my tech career. I do not feel any interest or happiness towards building things right now. I chose this career mostly due to monetary reasons and pursued undergrad and graduate degrees in CS in Europe. After which, I worked as a product manager for a while in the networking/telco sector in internal enterprise systems. I am really at a loss for what to do now or how to spend time. I was always interested in doing my own thing, but would not call myself a good engineer or as having deep skills in a particular domain. I am more of a jack of all trades. I dread just getting the next job and continuing the corporate grind, but I really worry about what to do in the near future career-wise. If you were in my position, what would you do with the time?
3 by throwaway_30yo | 0 comments on Hacker News.
After being let go from a small agency due to financial reasons, I find myself having at least 6-10 months of downtime for the first time in 10 years. I am around 30 and feel burnt out from my tech career. I do not feel any interest or happiness towards building things right now. I chose this career mostly due to monetary reasons and pursued undergrad and graduate degrees in CS in Europe. After which, I worked as a product manager for a while in the networking/telco sector in internal enterprise systems. I am really at a loss for what to do now or how to spend time. I was always interested in doing my own thing, but would not call myself a good engineer or as having deep skills in a particular domain. I am more of a jack of all trades. I dread just getting the next job and continuing the corporate grind, but I really worry about what to do in the near future career-wise. If you were in my position, what would you do with the time?
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Devbar – Point at what to change. Leave a comment. Your agent ships it
Show HN: Devbar – Point at what to change. Leave a comment. Your agent ships it
2 by linesofcode | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I built this toolbar to power my agentic ui/ux design flows. Too many times I found myself copy/pasting screenshots into Claude. Use devbar to select elements on a page, leave your notes and easily send them to your agent or copy-paste to your clipboard. Integrate with our API to send bug and feature reports directly to Slack...then auto-triage and implement with your agent. Are you tired of receiving bug reports without a URL or session information? With devbar.sh that's a remnant of the past. Give devbar to a product team or customers and have them mark up your entire site with annotations that can be handed off straight to the agent.
2 by linesofcode | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I built this toolbar to power my agentic ui/ux design flows. Too many times I found myself copy/pasting screenshots into Claude. Use devbar to select elements on a page, leave your notes and easily send them to your agent or copy-paste to your clipboard. Integrate with our API to send bug and feature reports directly to Slack...then auto-triage and implement with your agent. Are you tired of receiving bug reports without a URL or session information? With devbar.sh that's a remnant of the past. Give devbar to a product team or customers and have them mark up your entire site with annotations that can be handed off straight to the agent.
New ask Hacker News story: Both recent GCP outages caused by fiber optic maintenance
Both recent GCP outages caused by fiber optic maintenance
2 by fastest963 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Both of GCP's recent outages were caused by "fiber optic maintenance". On August 20th when us-west1 went down they said [1]: > The disruption originated during scheduled fiber optic maintenance, which unexpectedly compromised network capacity between data centers within the us-west1 region. Then on September 1st when us-central1-b (and collateral affects in other zones) went down they said [2]: > The immediate technical trigger for this event was the inadvertent physical disconnection of network fiber-optic cables during a routine hardware maintenance procedure. Not sure if they're related but apparently procedures we're significantly changed after the first incident to prevent the second incident. [1] https://ift.tt/qHbCvJk [2] https://ift.tt/fVmBWKJ
2 by fastest963 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Both of GCP's recent outages were caused by "fiber optic maintenance". On August 20th when us-west1 went down they said [1]: > The disruption originated during scheduled fiber optic maintenance, which unexpectedly compromised network capacity between data centers within the us-west1 region. Then on September 1st when us-central1-b (and collateral affects in other zones) went down they said [2]: > The immediate technical trigger for this event was the inadvertent physical disconnection of network fiber-optic cables during a routine hardware maintenance procedure. Not sure if they're related but apparently procedures we're significantly changed after the first incident to prevent the second incident. [1] https://ift.tt/qHbCvJk [2] https://ift.tt/fVmBWKJ
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Open source ML programming language playground
Show HN: Open source ML programming language playground
3 by softwarewrighte | 0 comments on Hacker News.
After joining a ML Study group and trying Google Colab I decided to create my own array programming language to help me learn and visualize machine learning. There are many demo repos using this language which has become more general purpose. Under active development. See github link in footer. Built in Tour, Demos, Tutorials, Glossary, etc. Can use this same UI on a local system to program Apple Silicon, NVIDIA GPUs, or to use Ollama models for context aware help in the REPL. The system architecture is documented in the wiki: https://ift.tt/rvVd2xN
3 by softwarewrighte | 0 comments on Hacker News.
After joining a ML Study group and trying Google Colab I decided to create my own array programming language to help me learn and visualize machine learning. There are many demo repos using this language which has become more general purpose. Under active development. See github link in footer. Built in Tour, Demos, Tutorials, Glossary, etc. Can use this same UI on a local system to program Apple Silicon, NVIDIA GPUs, or to use Ollama models for context aware help in the REPL. The system architecture is documented in the wiki: https://ift.tt/rvVd2xN
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities
Show HN: OwnTime – a chess clock for your day's priorities
14 by fmos | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I made OwnTime to balance between competing priorities in my life. The idea is based on two main influences: the concept of "roles" from "The 5 Choices" (2015), and my repeated failure to effectively implement time blocking due to the necessary flexibility in my role. The app allows you to define time budgets, which are not much more than a few mutually exclusive countdown timers. The UX is essentially that of a chess clock for an arbitrary number of players with configurable time. The whole point of the app is to kick you out of the running role/priority when its time is up. One feature that was essential for me was AlarmKit alarms, which only became possible last year (>= iOS 26.1). Another was watchOS support, as a natural surface for time-related matters. The current version is strictly focussed. The timers track time allocation during one day. All timers are reset at midnight. I didn't build any statistics - you can export the raw internal SQLite store and make any evaluation or dashboard you want from there. I don't plan to extend the app nor to convert it into a service. All data stays local on your devices (synced between phone and watch locally) and fully open to you. No need for an account or subscription. Thus, I ask for a small one-time fee of $1.99. The website has a short video and rendered preview: https://owntime.app If you want to go straight to the App Store: https://ift.tt/y5qangZ I look forward to your comments and feedback.
14 by fmos | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I made OwnTime to balance between competing priorities in my life. The idea is based on two main influences: the concept of "roles" from "The 5 Choices" (2015), and my repeated failure to effectively implement time blocking due to the necessary flexibility in my role. The app allows you to define time budgets, which are not much more than a few mutually exclusive countdown timers. The UX is essentially that of a chess clock for an arbitrary number of players with configurable time. The whole point of the app is to kick you out of the running role/priority when its time is up. One feature that was essential for me was AlarmKit alarms, which only became possible last year (>= iOS 26.1). Another was watchOS support, as a natural surface for time-related matters. The current version is strictly focussed. The timers track time allocation during one day. All timers are reset at midnight. I didn't build any statistics - you can export the raw internal SQLite store and make any evaluation or dashboard you want from there. I don't plan to extend the app nor to convert it into a service. All data stays local on your devices (synced between phone and watch locally) and fully open to you. No need for an account or subscription. Thus, I ask for a small one-time fee of $1.99. The website has a short video and rendered preview: https://owntime.app If you want to go straight to the App Store: https://ift.tt/y5qangZ I look forward to your comments and feedback.