[HN Gopher] Show HN: AboutIdeasNow - search /about, /ideas, /now...
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Show HN: AboutIdeasNow - search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+
personal sites
Hi HN! It's hard to find interesting people to work with on your
ideas. Our solution: index the /about, /ideas, /now pages of 1000s
of personal websites. There are thousands of cool personal sites
out there, with amazing ideas on them, but there's nowhere to
easily search through. So we built a simple site that indexes 7k+
personal sites [0]. We were inspired by Derek Sivers' Now page
movement [1] and other IndieWeb directories [2], but we figured
that it would be more useful if we: * Let you search directly
across personal sites without having to visit them * Take the
content from 3 specific pages, /about, /now and /ideas, to
structure everything * Define /ideas pages as a space to
articulate things you want to work on We hope this'll be a cool
place for people to find others to collaborate with - would love
your feedback. If you'd like your site to appear at the top, add it
via the form and add a last updated date of today (any format).
It's completely open source (MIT) and open to contributions [3]!
Peter & Louis [0] gathered from: 1) https://nownownow.com and
similar sites 2) checking all HN posts since 2020 with more than
100 upvotes [1] https://nownownow.com [2] https://personalsit.es
[3] https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow
Author : louisbarclay
Score : 331 points
Date : 2024-02-26 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aboutideasnow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aboutideasnow.com)
| Beefin wrote:
| this is amazing, so many people struggling with coming up with
| cool ideas haha
| phgn wrote:
| For me it's actually that I have too many ideas and none of
| them are great. What makes ideas great I think is having the
| right people to try things out with -- hence this tool.
|
| So there are a lot of uses for this :)
| thebestmoshe wrote:
| I have the same issue. I have too many ideas with very
| limited amount of time to work on them. When I meet people, I
| want to share my ideas and get feedback about what they would
| find interesting, use, pay for, etc.
|
| I'm building a platform to do this, so I can share my ideas.
|
| My page is at https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com
| sph wrote:
| Ideas are not worth very much, and many try to focus on world-
| changing ideas, which is the wrong approach. I sit on two or
| three profitable ideas at any time, there's just not enough
| hours in a day to dedicate serious effort to any.
| natashasalant wrote:
| Amazing idea and such a cool interface!
| bantunes wrote:
| Hugged to death right now, getting a 500
| phgn wrote:
| Fixed now, sorry! It was actually a bad deploy.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Still down
| phgn wrote:
| Error querying the database: FATAL: Max client connections
| reached
|
| It's weird since the SvelteKit load() server function
| should be cached.
|
| I added a fallback just now, sorry again!
| phgn wrote:
| Uh oh, the search overloaded the basic typesense.org cloud
| instance :(
|
| I'm upgrading it now!
| INTPenis wrote:
| Also /uses[1].
|
| 1. https://uses.tech/
| louisbarclay wrote:
| Oh wow, that is so cool! We hadn't come across it, nice UX too.
| Thanks for posting
| aranw wrote:
| Oh nice I really like that. Ace definitely will add one to my
| site!
| raduan wrote:
| looks amazing, will scroll and find someone interesting today.
| afrnz wrote:
| Love it - I knew /about and /now but /ideas is new to me. I am
| adding this to my site as well.
|
| Do you filter results based on last update?
| phgn wrote:
| Yep at least the /ideas pages that turn up on the page load are
| sorted by recency. You can also see the most recent /now pages
| by clicking the filter icon next to the search bar and
| selecting /now.
|
| And we re-scrape all indexed pages every few days.
|
| For now the search is purely sorted by relevancy (keyword +
| embeddings), but it yes would be nice to prioritise recent
| posts somehow. Since those are much more actionable.
| phgn wrote:
| And to clarify, we made up the /ideas thing. But IMO it makes
| so much sense since /about and /now are about the past &
| present.
|
| Because where else do you write about the future?
| jamesdwilson wrote:
| The only thing missing really is a search engine with an LLM.
| How do you plan to handle our new overlord indexing?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Cool site. Maybe implement /ideas and /now pages? I kinda figured
| they'd be there but they are 404.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Perhaps they could redirect to
| https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues and
| https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/pulls, respectively
| phgn wrote:
| Very nice idea, I just implemented this!
|
| Feel free to create some GitHub issues at
| https://aboutideasnow.com/ideas to grow the list :)
| isuckatcoding wrote:
| Seeing some obviously bad dates: "Dec 31, 1969"
| phgn wrote:
| Sorry for this! I believe it's fixed now.
|
| In which timezone do you live by the way?
| city41 wrote:
| A lot of cards say "Updated December 31, 1969", what date are you
| all using to populate that?
| phgn wrote:
| GPT-3.5:
| https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...
|
| But in this case the date seems very close to the unix
| timestamp 0 which we use when there's no date found. Maybe it's
| a local timezone issue...
|
| Edit: this should be fixed now!
| city41 wrote:
| Oh interesting. I never would have thought AI would be used
| for this. Does it also find things like the meta "revised"
| tag or anything like that? Doing some Googling it seems like
| officially it should be "revision", but seems like it's very
| common to use "revised"
| phgn wrote:
| I tried using https://www.npmjs.com/package/metascraper
| before which I believe does check this meta tag.
|
| But a few websites set their updated date to the current
| date which was annoying, maybe to rank better in Google?
| And some people (including me) only mention the update time
| in the page text content.
|
| I've used GPT to parse human formatted dates in another
| project too, it's quite reliable if you validate the output
| timestamp. And relatively cheap too if you only pass in the
| first part of the page text.
| city41 wrote:
| I can see how it's a tricky problem. I wish html had more
| structure here (and people followed the structure, a
| whole other problem...). FWIW, my page has a "last
| updated" date on its now page but comes up as 1969 in
| aboutideasnow.
|
| Oh, now aboutideasnow shows no date at all.
| phgn wrote:
| The vast majority of indexed websites don't have a date
| unfortunately :(
|
| What's your website so I can take a look at the parsing?
| city41 wrote:
| https://mattgreer.dev/now
|
| It says last updated today because I really did update it
| today :)
|
| anyway, cool project!
| phgn wrote:
| Ahh, I believe we're not trusting the current date at the
| moment because of spam potential: https://github.com/lind
| ylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...
|
| Which seems bad if you update your site and submit it
| afterwards. I'll remove this check for now.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Like others said, I love it. This is good way to connect people
| by connecting their independent sites.
| phgn wrote:
| That's the idea! And especially if more people start writing
| /ideas pages I think the search will become better and the
| results more actionable.
|
| Also, if you find something to improve, people open a GitHub
| issue: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues
| bilsbie wrote:
| Neat idea! But where are all these websites coming from? People
| have personal websites AND they share random ideas?
|
| Btw I don't have a website but here are some ideas I'd love to
| work on:
|
| Anything applying LLM to robots
|
| Device that rides on top of roomba and taps its bumper (to turn
| it) if it sees something bad.
|
| An employment agent for letting people try out new careers.
|
| Cheap simple pickleball out ball detection
| phgn wrote:
| Yes seems like a good number of people randomly decided to add
| /ideas to their website. /now is more of a standard, see
| nownownow.com
|
| There are some good results for your third idea, maybe you can
| talk to those people :)
|
| https://aboutideasnow.com/?q=employment+agent+for+letting+pe...
| kgeist wrote:
| Are submissioms manually reviewed by a human? Otherwise it can be
| abused for spam. Is it reindexed from time to time? Say, the
| submission looks okay, and then they change the content to
| something spammy. Maybe a Report button could be added in that
| case.
| phgn wrote:
| No, there are just some static rules to exclude missing pages
| and /ideas pages which don't actually talk about ideas:
| https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...
|
| And yes it's re-scraped every few days.
|
| How could a process of reviewing the pages look like? Maybe it
| can be implemented with GPT.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I wonder if you could go through twitter posts and find idea
| posts.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Hm or Fediverse https://mastodon.social/tags/idea
| KomoD wrote:
| Last I checked bleepingcomputer, ifixit, vibilagare.se, psyche.co
| and libreboot.org aren't personal sites.
|
| None of those actually have an /about page, yet your site says
| they do...
|
| Another funny thing: just search 404 or not found and you'll get
| a lot of 404 pages
| phgn wrote:
| Yes :(
|
| Do you have an idea of how to remove company websites in an
| automated way? I didn't want to manually review all 7k indexed
| websites.
|
| This is the GPT prompt I used for filtering domains to add, but
| it gives false positives: You are an API.
| Return a JSON array of booleans indicating whether each
| provided domain is someone's personal website. Use common
| sense. Make sure to return false for company websites.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe change the API so that GPT can express uncertainty
| (make it a ternary value or even a confidence percentage),
| and then check the "uncertain" cases manually.
| phgn wrote:
| Great idea, I will try this. Thank you!!
| tetha wrote:
| Yep, most of our systems end up exposing a parameter like
| that to the customer. Some people only like the system to
| take action if the system is very sure, hate incorrect
| action and prefer unprocessed stuff in a queue. Other
| customers hate unprocessed items and prefer to cleanup
| incorrect actions. Takes tinkering to find the best.
| netghost wrote:
| For the 404s (assuming the status code isn't a 4xx), use a
| URL that you strongly suspect won't exist, then you can do a
| comparison (levenshtein distance, bag of words, etc.) to see
| if it's very similar to one of about, ideas, etc. pages.
| KomoD wrote:
| > For the 404s (assuming the status code isn't a 4xx)
|
| Most are a 4xx code, I checked myself, some may be 301/302
| redirect to 4xx not being handled properly by their crawler
| phgn wrote:
| Good point. We're using https://crawlee.dev, I think
| there's a way to handle more status codes as errors...
|
| Right now it only excludes pages based on the text
| content: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob
| /main/apps/a...
| andai wrote:
| I think openai embeddings API could be useful here. Perhaps
| one of the neurons responds to corporate speak.
| netghost wrote:
| Since I see you're using GPT already, it might be nice to include
| a summary of any about page for a domain with the non-about
| results. That way I can see a little something about the person
| to give me more context.
| anon115 wrote:
| i feel like this could be its own social media idk.
| bbsz wrote:
| I had the same thought. Doesn't aggregation of this type fall
| pretty squarely with federated/activitypub/bluesky -kind-of-a-
| thing?
|
| It became almost pointless to try to host such a small
| search/aggregator as a separate web (discovery through web
| search is almost impossible and it's hard to make people stay
| on a new website today because of activity sinkholes like
| twitter/reddit. add to it a hassle of managing modern
| application at scale etc).
|
| I don't know. But I feel that projects like such will have a
| higher 1yr survival rate when developed directly as a
| "feed".And, AFAIU, that's what activitypub got created for.
| phgn wrote:
| That's very interesting... What would you like to see
| "updates" about?
| digging wrote:
| Super cool project. Reading this introduced me to /now and /ideas
| and /uses, all of which I will be adding to my site this week. (I
| guess I know what goes first on /now now!)
| burningion wrote:
| This is great, would love to see something like this turn into a
| social network of people building sites / pursuing ideas
| publicly.
|
| Added my site makeartwithpython.com too.
| thebestmoshe wrote:
| I'm building something like this. It's not yet available
| publicly, but you can see my personal page at
| https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com
|
| You can see more details about this specific idea
| [here](https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com/ideas/i_mos2)
| phgn wrote:
| This is so cool! I love the upvote function :)
|
| Could you put it at /ideas on your website so it appears on
| aboutideasnow.com?
| thebestmoshe wrote:
| It's currently available as a subdomain of my personal
| site, since I have not yet finalized the domain for this
| project. However, each user's page will be at a path of the
| primary domain (e.g. example.com/moshe). `/ideas` is not
| supported at a sub-path (e.g. example.com/moshe/ideas).
|
| I will be supporting custom domains, so I could support
| `/ideas` only for those sites.
|
| Other options include redirecting/rewriting your personal
| `/ideas` path to this product. Or, offering subdomains
| (e.g. moshe.example.com/ideas)
| spencerflem wrote:
| I like the site, but I wish I could see all the /ideas posts
| chronologically without applying a filter
| phgn wrote:
| Mhh why do you want to go through all posts? My thought was
| that searching would be more useful than a huge list.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Certainly its not more useful, and ik the pitch for the site
| is a way to find collaborators which this wouldnt help at
| all.
|
| I just like seeing personal sites in a people watching kinda
| way. Its neat, and there's usually something interesting
| there, but I don't really have an objective behind it. Like
| scrolling twitter but instead of short form comedy and
| engagement bait its just peoples random ideas.
| panarchy wrote:
| I first thought it would be showing all ideas, about, and now
| simultaneously, but then noticed all the cards only had /ideas,
| then I thought I had to do url.com/now only to find that
| redirected to github instead. Then finally I noticed the little
| filter button. Kind of feel like the categories shouldn't be
| behind the button, it's not like they really get in the way
| visually and with them being the only thing there it feels like
| just an unnecessary extra click for a common function.
|
| /userstory
|
| Edit for positivity: It's a cool site though and I'll definitely
| be checking it out again in the future.
| phgn wrote:
| We actually had an argument about this and I wanted to remove
| the filters entirely (since I didn't see a use case for
| filtering), Louis wanted to keep them. The compromise is the
| filter button :)
|
| I agree that showing all recent posts types would be more
| expected given the title. But with the stated purpose of the
| site right now being to "find people to collaborate with",
| /ideas posts are the most useful IMO [0]. And I really want
| people to write more /ideas pages.
|
| Why did you want to see a list of people's /now pages?
|
| [0] An earlier version of this site was actually called
| ideasideasideas.io and had only /ideas posts. But the other
| content makes the search much better.
| panarchy wrote:
| I agree that showing... That sounds pretty
| reasonable! I do wonder though if rewording
| "Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching
| across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of 7487 personal
| websites." might help a bit? Maybe something more along the
| lines of
|
| "Find new /ideas to discuss and collaborate on or even search
| for what's /new with people and what they're /about" to focus
| on the ideas coming first and are not just one of the tags of
| equal importance to search on with the others.
|
| Why did you want to see a list of people's /now pages?
| Just exploratory curiosity (I also tried /about and /ideas,
| but left that out for brevity). Being pretty unfamiliar with
| the idea of /ideas and /now pages I just wanted to see what
| they tended to be like and it seemed like a core part of the
| website given the name.
|
| Given the focus on the ideas part I don't imagine this
| suggestion to be entirely relevant, but I had an idea about
| turning your logo header thing that links to your about page
| (which imo is kind of unintuitive) into the filter. Have it
| so that that only the current one (or ones?) are colored in
| and the others are desaturated. And potentially moving the
| "building open source, starting a community, etc" div/search
| suggestions to show with the hamburger filter button.
| phgn wrote:
| Good points about changing the intro text, thank you. But
| from all the HN comments I gather that /about and /now are
| actually core to the experience too and it shouldn't only
| be about /ideas...
|
| I had the same idea of showing the filter in the header but
| figured nobody would try to click it :)
| esrh wrote:
| It's also not visible on mobile
| phgn wrote:
| True, I removed it there without Louis noticing :)
|
| Why do you want to filter posts by type?
| tunnuz wrote:
| I love this!
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Awesome, just added this! I'm looking for someone to grow my
| "micro PE" of two side projects together, because I sure can
| build stuff, but not make them grow ->
| https://andinfinity.eu/about/ (or /now) I have paying customers
| for 2markdown, but not nearly enough for the potential it has.
| phgn wrote:
| 2markdown is actually very interesting. You could expand into
| handling request proxies + JS rendering for people as well then
| it would be the easiest way to index web pages. We should
| definitely chat. I built unclutter.it before and the content
| ingestion for a reading tech startup. Will send you an email.
|
| And thank you for the shout out of aboutideasnow.com :)
|
| Making connections like this is exactly the purpose of the
| website.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This is really cool. I'd love to see duplicates or near-
| duplicates (as determined by the LLM?) to help match the
| thinkers.
| phgn wrote:
| YES!
|
| Submit your website on the site and enter an email address in
| case this ever gets implemented :)
| simonw wrote:
| The semantic search actually works really well -
| https://aboutideasnow.com/?q=data+journalism ?q=data+journalism
| gave me a bunch of interesting people thinking about data
| journalism and related ideas.
| breadchris wrote:
| yes, this. it feels pretty magical to immediately find people
| across the Internet who have most likely "gone deep" on
| something I also have. it is surprisingly hard to connect with
| people like this in 2024.
| joeriddles wrote:
| I added my site and received the following response:
|
| > josephriddle.com/ideas without update time
|
| I looked into the source code to determine how it's finding the
| update time. Come to find out, it's using ChatGPT! [0] It appears
| to only be looking at the article contents for the date, not at
| any page metadata.
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...
| a_petrov wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this great project! Randomly browsing through
| the first page results, I ended up reading some of the ideas.
|
| Reading that someone else, somewhere else, has a similar idea,
| has made my day. Cheers.
| phgn wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Reach out to them and make the idea a reality :)
| bhasi wrote:
| Great! I don't have an /about or /ideas page, but I do have a
| /now and a /uses page.
|
| https://gurudas.dev
|
| I currently only have a short blurb on my landing homepage
| instead of a full /about page because I struggle with anxiety
| when trying to describe myself and my journey so far (also
| impostor syndrome).
|
| I like the /ideas page too, but I may not end up finishing ideas
| if I get my dopamine fix early by publishing them to the world.
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(page generated 2024-02-26 23:00 UTC)