Show HN: I wrote an HN bot to suggest HTTPS url when people post HTTP URLs It's inspired by this comment I made: https://ift.tt/3dxKQhp. I actually saw several comments with HTTP URL posted, and that was the only one I bothered to comment on. So I thought that this is something better suited for bots than human. I hacked this together over yesterday and today: https://ift.tt/39E50Vx. Basically it uses the Firebase API (https://ift.tt/1s98Sn3) to find comments with HTTP URLs in them, try the HTTPS version, compare the contents, post back a comment if the contents are more than 95% similar. The "95% similar" part was actually the first part I wrote in the code. At first I tried a few existing go packages implementing diff/lcs, but most of them was quite slow and does a lot of allocations when I'm comparing two randomly generated 10KiB blobs, so I wrote my own (https://ift.tt/3dBlOh5), which is optimized for space (it does almost no allocations), and it's also faster because allocations are slow. (I know this is an unfair comparison that most of the existing implementations need to give you an output that can be used to reconstruct the two blobs back, so at least some of their allocations are required and unavoidable) I also wrote a bug that it would find the same HTTP url in every run and post the same comment over and over again. My apologize to dang or whoever dealt with it (or maybe the system is good enough that it blocked those repetitive comments automatically). In the end it successfully made 6 comments across ~4 hours (not including the repetitive ones). All of those comments are flagged (likely due to hn policy), https://ift.tt/3cRlkEJ is the only one that's still visible to other users at the time of writing, if you are curious. I just killed it completely from the request of dang. Although it only lived for a few hours, it's still a fun exercise. Maybe I'll convert it into a reddit bot next? Who knows. April 5, 2021 at 05:52AM
Show HN: Tape It, iOS recording app for musicians Hello HN, Over the last 15 months, two friends and I developed the music recording app we felt we wanted based on our own needs as musicians. It's called Tape It [1] and has just recently hit the Apple App Store [2]. We put a lot of effort into a good UX to help musicians really focus on playing their instrument instead of pretending to be a recording engineer. The app records in stereo on newer iPhones (although that's a premium feature; the free version only records in standard mono audio quality). I would be really grateful for advice from this community on how to best approach marketing. We had a great TechCrunch article covering our launch [3], and we posted it on various music websites. Turns out advertising on Google or Apple Search is a dark art, though. We have some good ideas for developing a good social media presence, but they will take time. Please hit us with feedback, opinions and advice that you think a young ind...
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