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Products that do what Scanned 1927-1945 Daily USFS Work Diary does

My great-grandfather Reuben P. Box was a US Forest Ranger in Northern California, and I've got his daily work diary from 1927-1945, through the depression, WWII, Conservation Corps, and lots of forest fires. I've scanned the entire thing, had Claude help with transcription, indexing, and web site building, and put the whole thing here: https://forestrydiary.com/ This is one of those projects I've sat on for years, but with Claude and Mistral helping with the handwriting recognition, and even helping me write a custom scanning app that would auto scan each page and put it into…

  1. 1IV
  2. 2IM

    Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!

    2025 · jameshard.ing

  3. 3EM

    I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…

    2024 · shademap.app

  4. 4AZ

    A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer. I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras. This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place. [1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

    2025 · byte.tsundoku.io

  5. 5IM
  6. 6
    Fireside344

    Capture stories of a lifetime, preserve for generations

    2024

  7. 7DB

    2023 · days.rory.codes

  8. 8FW

    Keep track of forests in your area by viewing changes in tree cover over time. I’ve build this as a demo of what you can do with the ArcGIS library and the geo data that is offered by Global Forest Watch and Esri. Don’t forget to click the history button. Works best on desktop! The demo is build with React and open source: https://github.com/vnglst/koenvangilst.nl/tree/main/app/(bla...

    2024 · koenvangilst.nl

  9. 9SU
  10. 10MI
  11. 11LS

    Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities. Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper archives, but when I tried every service only lets you search for keywords and dates, and gives you back raw images of the papers, and too many of them with no context. A sea of noise. Solution: I taught machines how to read the newspapers and so far I've extracted the content from >…

    May 2026 · snewpapers.com

  12. 12IB

    Hey HN. I'm a high schooler in Fremont, CA. Tuesday morning I got a county-wide AC Alert text telling everyone in Alameda County to prepare a go-bag for an East Bay Hills Red Flag Warning that starts tonight at 11 PM. The text went to ~half a million phones. The actual NWS warning polygon only covers East Bay Hills (NWS zone CAZ515). Most people who got the text don't need a go-bag tonight. Some in the hills don't realize how close they are. So I built this tool - https://redflag-check.info/ mit licensed public github -…

    Jun 2026 · redflag-check.info

  13. 13CA
  14. 14DO

    Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. Did you ever wonder what it takes to build and launch a software product from scratch? Not a high-level summary. Not a short essay that describes a year of development. Detailed, day to day activities. A captain's log. Mistakes and pivots. Technology choices. Marketing activities. Design considerations. You might know me as the creator of SumatraPDF. I'm starting a new software product from scratch and I decided to make it an experiment of building in public. I hope to inspire others to build more software by de-mystifying the process of creation. I'm on…

    2022

  15. 15TC
  16. 16HM

    I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page. For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data. Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab. The site is US-only…

    Jul 2026 · blockatlas.com

  17. 17I2
  18. 18NA

    Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle. It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them. It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city. Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!

    2025 · needle.news

  19. 199U

    2014 · demo.northavenue.net

  20. 20TD
  21. 21HM

    Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…

    2017

  22. 22SS

    Hey HN! We're Alex and Szymon from Bluesight (https://bluesight.ai/), where we're developing a foundation model for satellite data. We've created a demo to showcase the current capabilities of state-of-the-art models and identify areas for improvement. Our demo allows you to search for objects in San Francisco using natural language. You can look for things like Tesla cars, dry patches, boats, and more. Key features: - Search using text or by selecting an object from the image as a source ("aim" icon) - Toggle between object search (default) and tile search ("big" toggle,…

    2024 · demo.bluesight.ai

  23. 23DA
  24. 24DA

    I have never been able to keep a diary. Tried paper notebooks, journaling apps, daily templates. Always the same arc: a week of momentum, then nothing. The busiest days vanished first, because I was too busy living them to write anything down. At some point I noticed that I was already recording my life without trying. My calendar had every meeting. Slack had every conversation. GitHub had every commit. The raw material was there, just scattered across a dozen APIs. So I wrote a set of collectors and a cron job that pulls it all together every morning and has an LLM write a diary entry from…

    Mar 2026 · deariary.com

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