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Products that do what Walk-through of rocket landing optimization paper [pdf] does
Hey all! Long time lurker, first time poster. I found this rocket landing trajectory optimization paper cool, but it took me a while to wrap my head around it and implement it. I wrote up an expanded version of the paper including details that would have helped me understand it the first time through, with the idea being that it might make the content more approachable for others with similar interests. The source code is also linked in the document. I'm open to feedback, I'm always trying to get better across the board.
- 1IB
I got pretty good at (and very addicted to) the lunar lander game from a few days ago... so I decided to make an autopilot for the lander based on what I felt like was the best strategy! Now I can have perfect landings every time without lifting a finger :D Writing the autopilot code was a lot more fun than I expected! It felt a bit like programming a robot. Source code: https://github.com/szhu/lunar-lander-autopilot Original lander HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
2023 · szhu.github.io
- 2IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca
- 3RL
I (17y/o) have been developing a rocket launch simulation that allows the user to explore what it's like launching a rocket from earth and putting it into orbit. This idea originally started as an educational simulation but as i've gone more down the rabbit hole the more i've wanted to make it realistic. The problem is that I've never had a formal orbital mechanics class or anything like that so I don't know what I'm missing, what I currently have implemented is: Variable gravity Variable Atmospheric drag (US Standard Atmosphere 1976) Multi-stage rockets Closed-loop guidance /…
Jan 2026 · donutthejedi.com
- 4SC
Have been working on this for months, hope you guys will like it. Feel free to share your own side project in the comments.
2012 · sideprojects.com
- 5IP
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com
- 6MF
Hi, I'm Will. I'm 24, autistic, and have OCD tendencies. I'm learning to code and this is my first public project. I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! This project lets me solve some of my OCD problems online. There are a couple of parts of the forums that I visit – Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing – that I want to remove. Specifically, I hate seeing indicators of how much is left in a forum thread, because I keep thinking about how much content is left. It stops me from immersing myself in the story. It stressed me out. Before I learned to…
2024 · github.com
- 7UA
Hi, my name is Aditya, and I’m working on teaching math through a mission-based approach. I’ve provided a video link that serves as a trailer for one of my challenges. Here’s how it works: 1. Understand the Challenge: In this mission, the goal is to design a UAV that can fly between mountains to avoid enemy radar. 2. Create Your Solution: Students create a basic design—either on paper or using Blender—while doing calculations. Topics like algebra, geometry, etc., come into play. Once ready, they upload their design. 3. AI Analysis: The AI analyzes the design, runs a simulation, and provides…
2025 · youtube.com
- 8NF
Two weeks ago I posted a link to my side project (http://flightlite.com) and got some great feedback from HNers. I've spent a lot of time tweaking and improving based on that and I'm really happy with the result - it's much more usable and useful now! What's better: - reduced complexity of the main tracking page based on feedback from #veb - new search functionality (auto-completion, blended all search types into one search box) - thanks #robyates for your input - failover to large Google Maps view if Google Earth isn't installed with prompt and link to install from - added a proper 404 page…
2011
- 9CM
Today is the 55th anniversary of Apollo 8. I figured it would be fun to make a CAD model with a space for a model rocket engine and also as an augmented reality model. The tutorial is for Fusion360 but the steps can be adapted to most CAD programs. I would love to know what you all think!
2022 · makezine.com
- 10NO
Hi everyone, This is the new landing page for OpenLoopz: https://openloopz.com/welcome It’s based on the excellent feedback I received from the original post. I know it’s far from perfect and there is still a lot of material I haven’t had time to add yet, but it’s a start. I plan to iterate and improve on this over time as I learn more about marketing and promotion. I hope it gets the message across about what OpenLoopz is and why you might want to use it! I will be adding more pages soon, such as testimonials, pricing info, FAQ, use cases, etc, and more detail in general.…
2015
- 11AR
Hi HN, I’m sharing a small open-source project I’ve been working on: a native C++ ballistic solver that computes launch angles to intercept moving targets in real time, under gravity and air drag. Instead of relying on vacuum assumptions, closed-form equations, or lookup tables, the solver formulates the intercept as a nonlinear problem and solves it numerically using time integration and iterative methods. The motivation came from game and simulation scenarios where simpler approaches tend to break down: - moving targets - strongly curved trajectories due to drag - real-time constraints The…
Jan 2026
- 12WB
Introducing my latest project, We Build Landing Pages. https://theredbit.github.io/webuildlandingpages/ Excuse the blatant infancy of the project but I take 'releasing early and often' pretty seriously. The goals of this project are to... 1. Build a solid network of clients who need landing pages while learning how to run a business and to help earn funds to survive while I search for a job. Long story, I'm in a rough spot and I'm trying to get on my feet. 2. Build and release open-source tools and foster the growth of a community based on this work to help developers…
2018
- 13DR
Hi HN, Would love your thoughts on Open Paper Digest. It’s a mobile feed that let’s you “doomscroll” through summaries of popular papers that were published recently. Backstory There’s a combination of factors lead me to build this: 1. Quality of content social media apps has decreased, but I still notice that it is harder than ever for me to stay away from these apps. 2. I’ve been saying for a while now that I should start reading papers to keep up with what’s going on in AI-world. Initially, I set out to build something solely for point 2. This version was more search-focussed, and…
Dec 2025 · openpaperdigest.com
- 14AS
Hey HN! Y’all are great. It is so fun to build things these days. I wanna show off this archive that I conjured to run at home for consuming the recently releases of UFO files from the US government. This started as a Mac Mini-hosted project that I executed with my OpenClaw over Discord. After showing this to a few friends, I decided to get it online and find a catchy domain. Cloudflare was the perfect hosting choice. There’s a lot of bonkers things out there going on, so I added human curated “Signals” - news, analysis and discussion of UFO and adjacent news. The backlog of signals was…
Jun 2026 · didyousee.xyz
- 15WP
This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com
- 16OD
Hi all! I've been doing spacecraft system engineering since grad school and got to keep doing it after school at Care Weather. I tried several approaches for keeping hundreds of napkin math equations and connected simulations up-to-date, but none of them were both reliable and easy to use. To solve that, I made Oneil, a design specification language with clean syntax for specifying and evaluating math describing a complex system. Oneil has been really helpful as we design one satellite iteration after another for ground testing and spaceflight. I'm really interested in hearing feedback and…
2024 · github.com
- 17OW
Hello HN! My partner and I just published issue #5 of The Orbital Index, our brief & technical weekly newsletter about space science and the space industry, and so we've taken the project out of beta. The process of finding a voice and fine tuning the level of technical detail is ongoing, but we feel like we've arrived at something succinct, interesting, and technical, in a large part because of the great feedback that we have received from HN subscribers from our last Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227434) a month ago. Here's our website, where you can signup…
2019
- 18IM
Full write-up explainer blogpost here: https://dayvonjersen.com/blog/announcing-dj.exchange Maybe I should have linked that instead of the landing page??? What do you think I'm new to this :)
2023 · dj.exchange
- 19MN
http://flightlite.com Flightlite is a visual flight tracker combining 3D and overhead views and flight information. It is my first launch since I started reading Hacker News and was developed as a side project for the past 6 months or so. I made the final push on it this morning to get it to a semi-launchable state. - The best coverage is US and UK - Sometimes the data I get is a bit crazy (spent a lot of effort to correct/sanitise it but it's not perfect) - Doesn't work in IE 64bit or Linux due to Google Earth not being available I'm now trying to work out how to take this further, if there…
2010
- 20
- 21OM
Hello HN, www.LandingGear.me is designed specifically for building single page landing pages. Our first MVP got a good response with a few hundred people visiting and downloading templates. So we've taken it to the next level of development, added more features and functions and added an option to pay. We're now wanting to get a little more validation and feedback. Would you mind please having a look and posting your feedback here? thanks! Anton Winter
2014
- 22IM
Hello everyone! I made a new Open Source landing page for agencies or studios and designed based on BetaMax. The site is built with Astro and Tailwind CSS The template is super simple and includes: - A landing page. You can see it live here: - https://astromax.vercel.app/ And grab the code and make it shine here: - https://github.com/michael-andreuzza/astromax *It's already submited to Astro's themes directory. Hope you guys like it and enjoy it. Take care!
2023
- 23MA
Hey any astrophysicist reading hn there? Was sick in august (yeah isn't that nice) and made a small python fits table viewer for the terminal with textual. It would be great to have people try it so if you find any issue I can improve it. If you have no FITS file but would like to try regardless there are some test file in `/test`. Ciao!
2024 · github.com
- 24AO
Hello HN! My name is Rémy and I recently published an astronomy dashboard where everything is open source: the code of the website, the framework it is based on and the library that computes astronomical data. For the last few years, I have been developing the Ruby library Astronoby (https://github.com/rhannequin/astronoby) with as much dedication and perseverance I could while I don't have any scientific academic background. My end goal was to use this library and build a website that not only provides as much data as possible, but let anyone access and understand how it…
Nov 2025
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