Alternatives
Products that do what Fed up of ugly and weird diving apps, I built my own does
Hello everybody, I am new to HN but I must say I really enjoy the vibe. I have been coding for almost 15 years now and after having fired myself 2 times in a year (both from corporate and startup worlds), I decided to dedicate full time to what I love: building cool stuff for my own, with the dream of becoming a solopreneur. Among my many passions (some dangerous), I love scuba diving. All the logbook apps I tried had these problems: - Distant from the user experience and needs. - Complicated yet useless features that no one uses. Literally no one, not even those who created them. - Ugly. -…
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Log dives. Share adventures. Connect with divers worldwide.
Apr 2026 · scubaspot.co
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Inspired by the following post by photon_off... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1683309 I made karmurl last night. It's a simple app where you submit a URL for feedback, then for every piece of feedback you give to someone else's, you get to read one piece of feedback for yours. http://karmurl.com
2011
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A little over a week ago, I was wondering if anyone would care about the thing I’d just built. Let me rewind a bit. I’m a solo indie maker, just like a lot of you. I’ve built so many projects, put in the work, and then… nothing. A few months ago, I launched something I was genuinely proud of on one of the big platforms. I was excited, hopeful. But within hours, it got buried under a pile of other launches. No one saw it. No one cared. That sucked. Not because I expected it to blow up overnight, but because it felt like I never even had a shot. And I kept thinking about how many other indie…
2025
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I'm working on https://cubetrek.com, a web app to manage, visualize and compare your running, hiking, mountainbiking, skiing... activities. Some features include: a github-style calendar heatmap, 3D visualization of tracks (especially useful for hill climbs and mountaineous terrain in general), a world map displaying all your activities at once. Excluded features: although you can share yoir tracks to the world, should you choose so, there are no friends, no likes, no comments, i.e. none of that social networking stuff. And no ads. Any feedback is appreciated, let me know what you…
2023 · cubetrek.com
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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
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Submarius started as just a dashboard for diving conditions, but I quickly realized that there is simply no API for water clarity, nor even a simple way to calculate it. Divers call it viz, and it is one of the most consequential factors for a diving experience. So I dove the viz rabbit-hole. I landed on a state-augmented ensemble kalman filter. More details on the /clarity page. My question for the HN audience is if anyone knows of a better way of doing this? There is a ton of satellite data to train on, but a lot of it is messy (clouds read as turbid water, shallow reefs reflect…
Jun 2026 · submarius.com
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Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…
2025
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Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011
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An online planner exactly Cal Newport describes in Deep Work – live demo available! Let me know what you think :)
2024 · timebox.so
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https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.
2019
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Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
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Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012
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Almost one year ago I asked HN if anybody is interested to make a Web app to make reading and finding scientific papers smarter [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664648]. No one did, at least no one did what "I" think is the best way to approach this problem. A a few month ago I decided to do it myself.<p>Meet JournalClub iPad app (absolutely free), http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/journalclub/id443819334? I have a recommendation engine in the pipeline that I would introduce in the next update (hopefully in a month or so). I really appreciate any comments, feedbacks.
2011
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Hi HN, I’m pleased to release my “surf engine” to the public for you to try. This is might be for you if you’ve grown frustrated with commercialised SERPs, and want to find the other websites are (still) out there. Kudos to Marginalia Search for showing that it’s possible to build a search engine as a hobbyist: https://search.marginalia.nu/ Feedback of all kinds very welcome! Ali
2022 · highbrow.se
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I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so
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orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…
2021
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I am a product designer by profession, and recently, I ventured into coding and started developing applications. Today, I'm excited to share a project I've been passionately working on. The concept is a voice-activated journal: just voice-record your thoughts, and the app will transcribe them into text. I built this to help those like me who struggle to build a journaling habit. Also has features that encourage habbit building like a streak/tracker and a threshold marker encouraging you to record a minimum amount. I used OpneAI Whisper to power the transcriptions which means you can…
2023 · main.d35lo6kdqvpjht.amplifyapp.com
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