Alternatives
Products that do what Ithihāsas – a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in a few hours does
Hi HN! I’ve always found it hard to explore the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa online. Most content is either long-form or scattered, and understanding a character like Karna or Bhishma usually means opening multiple tabs. I built https://www.ithihasas.in/ to solve that. It is a simple character explorer that lets you navigate the epics through people and their relationships instead of reading everything linearly. This was also an experiment with Claude CLI. I was able to put together the first version in a couple of hours. It helped a lot with generating structured content and…
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As an enthusiast of Indian classical music, I needed to write music notations in the traditional typeset format. When I didn't find any existing editors, I developed a Swara Notebook, a mobile focused web app to write North Indian Classical (Hindustani) music notations. The notes (called Sargam, similar to Solfege) can be written in English, Devnagri and Bangla scripts. The transcribed song can be played back in 6 different rhythmic cycles (Taal) to the accompaniment of the Tabla(a type of drum) or a metronome. Here's an example of a transcribed song…
2023 · swaranotebook.com
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I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io
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I built this project as a way to learn more about NLP by applying it to something weird and unsolved. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book written in an unknown script. No one’s been able to translate it, and many think it’s a hoax, a cipher, or a constructed language. I wasn’t trying to decode it — I just wanted to see: does it behave like a structured language? I stripped a handful of common suffix-like endings (aiin, dy, etc.) to isolate what looked like root forms. I know that’s a strong assumption — I call it out directly in the repo — but it helped clarify the clustering. From…
2025 · github.com
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Hey all, I’m coding up a new tour system for my 3d Egyptian work. After the last feedback, I focused on building more interactive content and fx into the guided tours with sound and telling the mythology in the wall art. I’d love feedback with the new version – this is built with vanilla Three.js and footage captured on my iPhone 12. For various fx, I coded many of my own shaders based on work by https://twitter.com/akella and others on ShaderToy, so I’m keen to test on more devices. As the hacker, so the (ancient) painter.
2023 · mused.org
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Previously when I wanted to learn languages by reading the original, I started looking for an EPUB reader. I wanted it to be 1. browser-based, so I could use my browser extensions 2. cross-platform, so I could read on different devices 3. able to read multiple books at the same time, so I don't have to open multiple windows Unfortunately, I didn't find it. As a developer, I really like the flexible layout and power of VS Code, so I tried to combine its design concept with EPUB reader, and Lota was born.
2022 · lotareader.com
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Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es
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Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
Dec 2025 · lingoku.ai
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2024 · github.com
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Hey HN! I built a little side project I wanted to share. Shelvy is a free, visual bookshelf app where you can organize books you're reading, want to read, or have finished. Sign in to save your own collection. Not monetized, no ads, no tracking beyond basic auth. Just a fun weekend project that grew a bit. Live: https://shelvybooks.com Would love any feedback on the UX or feature ideas!
Jan 2026 · shelvybooks.com
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2015 · temple.io
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Hey HN, After hours of re-watching Brandon’s creative writing BYU lectures[1], we converted his ideas into a framework to rapidly iterate and build sci-fi fantasy worlds. The app is divided into 3 sections: - World: To create a unique magic system intertwined with distinct physical and cultural phenomena - Characters: To create character arcs and give them unique traits that evolve over time - Plot: To weave a series of events in this world following the character arc We are newbie devs, any suggestions on the app improvements and usability would be great! The idea is to capture the essence…
2023 · worldengine.in
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Bhagavan is a calm, modern app for exploring Hinduism. It brings together philosophy, stories, scriptures, prayers and daily practices in one simple, accessible place. It’s designed for people who feel Hinduism can be overwhelming or hard to connect to and want a gentler, more modern way to explore it at their own pace. What’s inside (all free): • Guided exploration of Hinduism through structured learning paths • Clear, accessible explanations of scriptures (Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis, Puranas) • Complete Bhagavad Gita with translations and key takeaways • Deity profiles with stories,…
Feb 2026 · bhagavan.io
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