kikki

We must be at critical mass now - I’m pretty tired of every project or business I see being something LLM based. I get it - it’s the new thing - but there’s such little creativity in this space right now it’s just not very interesting? I used to be so excited to read about the startups happening from the community on HN!

What cool projects or startups are people working on that aren’t (at least directly) caught up in the AI hype?

Hi HN.

Some of my recent hobby projects have involved user's uploading their own files, such as videos, images, and generally things that don't belong in most databases. It's important to me that if they were to trust me with their content that I'd have reliable storage - so I don't want to spin up my own solution for this and looked around to find something that already exists.

The obvious first place was AWS S3, and while it doesn't directly serve this need you can set it up to do so with presigned URLs and object permissions (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/ShareObjectPreSignedURL.html). This can work, but as far as object storage goes AWS is very expensive. I also looked into Google Storage through Firebase (https://firebase.google.com/products/storage) which with some configuration through Firebase authentication can also achieve (but locks you into their auth) - and again, very expensive.

My ideal would be an option like Backblaze B2, which is considerably cheaper - but isn't designed with this use-case in mind. Depsite having an AWS compatible API, and supporting pre-signed URLs, I couldn't find a reliable way to assign objects to users through metadata.

I was really hoping for some easy-to-use white label solution for this, but it just seems like it doesn't exist.

So what do people do for things like this? My AC is:

- Allow specific users to upload any media

- Allow user > object assignment

- Some auth around the above

- Reasonably priced (minimal egress costs)

Since the start of the internet we've had everything from guestbooks to real time chat rooms - but it seems to me like there really hasn't been much innovation in the format of online discussion. Perhaps that is expected, perhaps we are at the perfect way to communicate with each other online, but I'm interested to know if there are some innovative takes on online communication and discussion. Here are some standout examples of what we currently have:

* Guestbook: Probably one of the earliest forms of online discussion. A single list of replies on a page.

* Message boards: Top level thread with sequential replies, usually paginated. These get cumbersome after a few pages, and for busy threads with hundreds of pages, almost all of the content in the middle gets lost

* Facebook / Instagram: A top level post with a mess of replies that on Facebook can be sorted by relevant, on Instagram I'm not sure can even be sorted, just load more infinitely. I think these examples show really poor execution of online discussion yet are still immensely popular

* Twitter: Twitter has probably the most conversational style for non-live communication. Tweets can be replied to with tweets which can be replied to, nested conversation chains. Jumping into the middle of one of these discussion gives you context by also showing you the previous 1 or 2 tweets.

* IRC: Grandfather of chat rooms. Join a room, chat in real time, leave

* Slack + Discord: Evolving chat rooms with reactions, persistence, a nice user interface - and for Slack threaded replies which are an interesting addition - but somewhat unmanageable with many responses