Alternatives
Products that do what 70 Days → 800 GitHub Stars (Cold Start) – My Secret Was a Problem Map does
Hi HN, I want to share a story that might resonate with anyone who has tried to launch an open-source project from zero visibility, zero budget, zero network. Seventy days ago I created a repo called WFGY. I had no prior followers, no launch partners, no ads. Today, it’s at 800 stars and counting. Pure cold start. The “secret”? Not marketing. Not tricks. It was building a Problem Map. --- #### What is a Problem Map? Instead of claiming my system “improves reasoning” or “solves RAG bugs,” I wrote down 16 concrete failure modes engineers hit every day: * Embedding drift (semantic ≠ vector…
- 1
- 2IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
- 3MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 4SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 5IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012
- 6HM
I made this as a pair programming exercise with o1-preview. o1 did most of the heavy lifting, through high level prompts, but eventually I needed to diverge from it to get to completion. My initial prompt was: --- I'm making a web app: It's like 4chan, but each thread starts with a gps coordinate. People can only post text and images. I want to build it with flask and sqlalchemy. I want just the backend and data model that supports these threads, anonymous users, and users that can register a permanent username. Write as much of it as you can for me. --- This produced a fully scaffolded…
2024 · mapchan.com
- 7MI
Hi! Recently I've launched - mybfio.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect. Prehistory Many great system are already in place that allow people to search and rate software products, including the site I am publishing this post on. However I have always felt that those systems are not specifically centered around product/software development lifecycle (releases, real users feedback over a product entire lifetime, so on) and often too broad or not designed specifically for that type of work, which is ok. Why? As an opensource author I would like to have constant…
2021
- 8IB
After years of struggling with onboarding to new projects, I got tired of spending weeks just trying to grasp the basics of a codebase. The README rarely tells the whole story, and "just read the code" isn't practical for large repos. I built RepoIQ to create personalized learning paths through any GitHub repository. It analyzes the codebase structure, identifies key components, and creates a step-by-step guide tailored to your learning needs.
2025 · repoiq.be
- 9WE
So yeah. After months of semantic rabbit holes and weird math, I pushed WFGY out into the world. Didn’t expect much. Now it’s hitting 2k+ downloads/month, and the dev behind Tesseract.js even starred it. That was the surreal part. WFGY isn’t a framework, it’s more like… an engine that lets your embedding space do things. Think of it like a semantic OS — not a database, not a chatbot, but a way to let meaning drive behavior. We just launched one module: Blah Blah Blah – Truth generator. One button → 50+ perspectives on your input. Not retrieval. Not summarization. Just pure divergent…
2025 · github.com
- 10IC
After 6 months looking for an idea, procrastinating and over analyzing what I should build. I built a tool that allows people to find problems using custom plugins built with Grok and Claude.
2025 · gotaprob.com
- 11IM
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
- 12IB
I’ve spent the last 2.5 months building a product that runs LLM-powered code reviews on my pull requests — and I just launched it. The tool is built specifically for solo developers. You install it on your repo, trigger a scan by creating a pull request, and it leaves structured review comments using OpenAI under the hood. Funnily enough, I used the dev version of this app to review its own pull requests while building it. It helped me spot bugs, simplify structure, and keep quality high — all with minimal need for another human in the loop. Things I want to try out in the next months : -…
2025 · codii.dev
- 13A7
Hey HN, A long time ago, due to the lack of viable solutions with E2EE and offline-first syncing, I decided to dedicate my time to making one (which has its own story: https://yaad.one/blog/yaad-story). In the course of ~3 years, I developed a knowledge management app with these primary features: - Primitives: Notes, Tasks, Contacts - Grouping with "Boxes" - Offline-first - Multiplatform; currently available for Android, Windows (x64), macOS, and Linux (ARM). - Fully end-to-end encrypted (AES-256-GCM) - 13 Languages, 8 calendar systems - Light & dark mode Last night, I…
2024 · yaad.one
- 14IM
Hey HN, I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last 3 startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. Recently I started with cold outreach (its a struggle, since I dont have much experience with marketing). I am finding leads mainly using exa.ai websets (web vector search, extremelly good for multiple use cases, recommend checking them out) and then sending them through smartlead. I ran the campaign for the past 30 days and 12-15% emails always bounced. This wasted my email credits & chances of reaching…
2025 · verifyemailai.com
- 151R
I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev
- 16VL
Launch and grow your startup 3-5x faster with the No BS Startup Guide. Get +400 specific tactical activities that you can start doing today, to save 2,000 hours of research, and know exactly what to do every step of the way. I started the guide initially for myself. I posted on reddit over a year ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/q7by8n/the_ul...) and it became super popular. I kept using it and adding to it as I've coached and mentored over 200 founders. After thousands of hours of research and field testing, I am ready to release it.…
2023 · nobsstartupguide.com
- 17SG
2020 · github.com
- 18GW
hey all! Vaibhav and Ethan here. We asked a silly question, "what if you attempted to look into every commit of every repo?" and over the holidays ended up building something kind of fun. Here's some interesting stats: Charlie Marsh has put a crazy amount of work in on UV... so far #1 with over 149k minutes of work this year. (103 days of non-stop coding ).. #2 is me with 85k (just over 59 days...) on BAML #3 - Jérémy M. with 82k (57 days) working on Twenty #4 - Alexander Belanger with 79k (54 days) working on Hatchet Some fun repos:…
2024 · wrapped.dev
- 19IM
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net
- 20IM
Hi there! I've been working with data in one form or another, professionally, for about 5 years. I've been thinking about my own personal data and how it's used for at least twice that long. I've been sort of building something in my head for a while that solves my own problem and, in the beginning of this year, I found the opportunity to spend some time building it out. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the blog post but, in short, I built what amounts to an API crawler combined with a data processor to help you download your personal data from 3rd party services and work with it using…
2024 · joshcanhelp.com
- 21YA
I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731 Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project. Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones. p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.
2012
- 22MP
My first "real" web app! I appreciate any comments/suggestions.<p>Also I am available for hire. Contact me at www.sambolgert.com
2012 · se.cret.ly
- 23AS
Hey everyone, here is a small project I've built over the last weekend. I'd love to know what you think :)
May 2026 · starguessr.vincentwill.com
- 24PI
2015 · porter.io
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