Alternatives
Products that do what I built a random dilemma generator does
Last week my 9 year old son walked up to me and asked "Would your rather shit your pants in public or drink spoiled milk?", and I was intrigued. Turns out he did not make this up himself, but got the dilemma from a card game. A couple of nights ago I decided to digitize some of these cards and create a simple open source app for it. Just a little fun project; no monetization or bigger goal, really. Link: https://dilemma.wtf Tech stack: - Back-end: Laravel - Front-end: Plain HTML and Tailwind with a sprinkle of Alpine.js - Deployment: Laravel Forge, linked to a Hetzner VPS.…
- 1IM
This is our entry in the "spontaneous event creation" ring. I'd love to hear what HN readers think!
2011 · shoutfast.com
- 2IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
- 3M4
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
- 4UM
Long time listener, first time caller. I am coming up to the eight-month mark in my "Heads Down, Learn Programming" experiment. This is my first app, an open source Magic the Gathering sealed deck generator. At the moment it is severely limited in scope, but I've worked on it for ~ six hours and I figure this is a good time to stop and let it breathe for a while. It's on github (https://github.com/alxjrvs/Sealed-Deck-Generator), as are a number of other half-completed project. Each was started with a goal in mind ("Mess around with Bootstrap", "Get off your ass and TDD", "Kick around complex…
2012 · unsealed.herokuapp.com
- 5MW
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
- 6MF
I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!
2018
- 7TA
Hey peeps! Here's a project I've been working on for the last two months. It initially started as trying to be a simplified boilerplate for Laravel, but I think it's gone a bit beyond that. With recent tooling releases in the Laravel ecosystem, there's a ton of exciting tools to work with, but it's either annoying to set it all up every time, or it's difficult to try and gather it all up for every piece you'll need for your SaaS. To that end, Toybox attempts to collate what is in my opinion the best of modern Laravel, and while being simple to start, run and launch with. This is how I also…
2023 · github.com
- 8IM
After I posted about https://cosme.dev/ask-docs on Reddit I received some messages asking me how If I was going to make the code open source or if I could show them how I did it. So I decided to create this repo so you can take a look at the code and maybe apply the same techniques on your own apps. It's made using only PHP as language so I think is pretty different since most stuff out there is made using python or javascript. It uses the OpenAI API and Redis as a vector database.
2023 · github.com
- 9FA
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 10MM
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
- 11SL
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
- 12MI
As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways... Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality and a little different from my usual projects. I've spent a lot of time polishing the flow and trying to make sharing an inherent part of the app. It's built on Ruby/Padrino/Sinatra, Postgres and uses S3 for image hosting. This is actually my first Ruby project coming from a pure…
2011
- 13IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz
- 14IM
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
- 15IB
I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it
2024 · thecuriositygame.com
- 16IB
I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…
Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com
- 17IF
So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it. Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too. This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable. I'll be the first…
2011
- 18ST
I wanted to make a cute game for Thanksgiving this year. It's built with React, Tailwind, InstantDB and a bit of Opus :) Feeling grateful for HN and sending good cheer to you all :)
Nov 2025 · savetrippy.com
- 19MN
This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, and I decided to finally code it up. In the same way that Scrabble decomposes words into letters, what if there was a game that decomposed letters into sub-shapes? There’s a lot of directions this could go, and I’m still exploring the possibility space. Enjoy. Suggestions welcome. It doesn’t have a real name yet.
2024 · shovemedia.com
- 20AR
A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL
2011
- 21AA
I recently prototyped a web game for a nonprofit to highlight the dangers of phone addiction, but unfortunately I ended up making a really addictive game instead. :-\ I'm sharing this here mainly to serve as an indicator of what can be achieved early-2026 by a senior dev working with Opus 4.7 over 2 days using genuinely collaborative prompting. (ie plan->feedback->iterate) Hope it provides some inspiration or entertainment - there's a level editor too - maybe Hacker Newsers could share their favourite creations here? PS: If there's enough demand I'm happy to Open Source this (or DM me) -…
May 2026 · downtime.partridge.works
- 22YA
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
- 23YR
Had this idea recently and just had to get it out of my head and into a (super quick and dirty) prototype. It's like Letterboxd but for anything, and with a simpler rating system you don't have to sweat about.
2023 · yynn.app
- 241M
Howdy, long time HN'er. Spent ~20 years in FAANG and startups, got the pink slip during a big layoff wave in spring 2023. That's ok, I was about to quit anyway :) Finally got back to a lifelong goal of mine, making an "indie" game. (Indie is subjective, but you get the drift.) So, here it is: Ballionaire, a "fast-paced pachinko roguelike where strategy meets physics to create outrageous wealth!" My influences were: Plinko(TM), Luck Be A Landlord, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I was really fortunate because localthunk, the dev behind Balatro, noticed my game during its first month of…
2024 · store.steampowered.com
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