logoalt Hacker News

Show HN: Subth.ink – write something and see how many others wrote the same

44 pointsby sonnigtoday at 6:34 PM28 commentsview on HN

Hey HN, this is a small Haskell learning project that I wanted to share. It's just a website where you can see how many people write the exact same text as you (thought it was a fun idea).

It's built using Scotty, SQLite, Redis and Caddy. Currently it's running in a small DigitalOcean droplet (1 Gb RAM).

Using Haskell for web development (specifically with Scotty) was slightly easier than I thought, but still a relatively hard task compared to other languages. One of my main friction points was Haskell's multiple string-like types: String, Text (& lazy), ByteString (& lazy), and each library choosing to consume a different one amongst these. There is also a soft requirement to learn monad transformers (e.g. to understand what liftIO is doing) which made the initial development more difficult.


Comments

NitpickLawyertoday at 10:11 PM

Your thought's hash is: 7456a8269266134d67e9e0b2b26dbbc2227ba976add87c05e91e4cc9937b8b21 You are the first person with that thought. Congratulations!

"You are absolutely right!"

Well, at least we know claude didn't hit the API yet :)

donbaletoday at 9:38 PM

This is great, but never seems to say that its an original thought always defaulting to: "Including you, 1 person had that thought already! First time was less than a minute ago, last time was less than a minute ago."

show 1 reply
lumirthtoday at 8:19 PM

I said "I love my wife". Apparently, I was the first. Then I said "penis". I was the fifth.

Neat!

show 3 replies
susamtoday at 8:47 PM

Some of the top items:

  hello world
  4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52

  hello
  4358f43b660389eecd435dc2a5f5cee29786245cd2cff27bd4de0b3e8fd53b79

  4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52
  406cc6dbc566bf6c672a2167868341e9853f7fbbd2a21eb1caa4d08006abae41

  hi
  661ce2e5ed28422eb8b51ec2a217c976e05e37713246166e8fcbf67be4824380

  test
  83d34c0abee918ed3edf585b6cb8ce97fe8286027b012bacdfa71b967924f9b2

  a
  beef7c4d3141c30ab4f6ebf1f724936c50f609ee1915951d802046ba1d9fa23d

  subth.ink
  3f3b05abaec959c9950d5a93a64525971c7d9fcabf6436d653edba62f29d5bea

  lol
  39567a3cc35a4c68d72d01beac88414d0ced5c20b437ff9bc6e2cb20615a47b7
Thanks to Y@Y for 4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52.
show 2 replies
Aprechetoday at 8:11 PM

This would be more interesting if it was generalized. Using a hash, even one character difference will result in a miss.

If I could have it analyze my blog and then find people who have similar ideas that would be incredibly useful.

show 4 replies
Rygiantoday at 10:26 PM

I was the first to state that, contrary to popular belief, "the quick brown fox did not jump over the fence"

pvdebbetoday at 8:46 PM

I love this. Shouting into the void with the distinct feel, hope that if the idea was popular enough, it'd be brute forced back to existing.

I noticed that the input is not being treated any way before hashing. I'd remove all non-letter characters, and then lowercase everything before hashing to help with some unnecessary misses.

nullchantoday at 8:21 PM

"helloworld"

Your thought's hash is: 06ad246627b5f973559a1dbcf2a6b96791d9b15ed2d8cb45c344f98b14d10f76 Including you, 1 person had that thought already! First time was less than a minute ago, last time was less than a minute ago.

haha, cool.

SwiftyBugtoday at 9:14 PM

I was very susprised to not be the first to enter a quotation by Nelson Rodrigues. Nice.

JoshTripletttoday at 9:23 PM

Fun idea. One potential issue: the same person writing the same text repeatedly will count more than once, so it'd be pretty trivial to spoil the rankings. (This is why we can't have nice things.)

Imustaskforhelptoday at 9:01 PM

Another comment here as I got way too much excited in the other one, but this is genuinely so good man!!! KUDOS!

It actually provides a simple curl command. Oh boy, this does open up a few more ideas. I feel like my wall of text -> link shortener / blog and all other comments on that wall of text being comments themselves might be implemented & this does open up to a lot of possibilities

I actually got a vps of like 8 gigs 4 cores 500 gigs ssd for 3 months prepaid and I snatched it during a recurring deal.

If you want, i can transfer it to you or share half the resources or similar to you if this project ever needs one.

One of the most interesting things is that this (unlike my idea which was just a "proof" if it was possible in a more complex environment) actually does make it simple and for normal devs to build upon

You are mentioning scotty, and I am not sure if you mention scuttlebutt the protocol or as if scotty is some haskell web framework (sorry don't know haskell)

What are your thoughts on scuttlebutt or (nanotimestamps), I have it open source under the MIT license for anyone to build on top of it with.

Your project's really polished and I admire it but I would hope that you can look more at the decentralization side of things because one of the ideas I had which never got to fruition was that adding on top of it, we can just have a social media similar to nostr but without the relay mess that nostr has in many instances (or so I have heard)

I am curious as to what are some use cases you are thinking of it as I'd love to know your opinion on it!

Have a nice day man!

purrcat259today at 9:59 PM

wow seven people have the same password as me

silcoontoday at 9:40 PM

80f9d25eb732197e10d71597dca181e7a454eeda3cc484b1c3e129109b41db23

IamDaedalustoday at 9:12 PM

someone declared bankruptcy before me in the office style

MuddyTortoisetoday at 8:53 PM

[dead]

Imustaskforhelptoday at 8:41 PM

Hey, looks like I have written something like this too! But mine actually worked via a cryptocurrency for zero fees (that's the main part!)

You might be wondering how and I am always more than happy to tell more about it.

I want to tell something which I haven't shared anywhere else till now about why I made nanotimestamps.

I made it because I was thinking of walloftext.com, I wanted a way where people can create any /<something> and then since WOT doesn't contain timestamp capabilities that made me wonder if timestamps can be embedded in just text itself.

I wanted to create a link shortener service on top of walloftext.com itself which could be written anonymously on. I wanted to create a simple link shortener anonymously as I saw dub.sh made it require a sign up for one of my projects or similar (I was thinking of anonymous ways to create content and post them, like after anonfiles had shut down basically I wanted to create a more resilient form, I only used anonfiles rarely when sending files and I really loved its unlimited egress/ingress and It made me feel like a lot of the services we use are kind of centralized so is there a more decentralized way)

I always thought about cryptocurrency being able to do this and looked out for an idea to find out that there was this one called bitcointimestamps

Being the frugal and being on a good chunk of curiosity imparted partially by hackernews spirit, I decided to look for alternative ideas and found that in nano you can send transactions for 0 gas fees.

Now the question becomes on how to embed hash or just simply data in nano chain and that data would have a timestamp effectively timestamping that a particular person created something text (the WOT accomplished)

I thought of lots of ideas but in the end I found some nano vanity generator and ended up splitting a text into bunch of small texts (4-5 chars) and then create nano-vanity with that and then loop the transaction around it for completely zero fees (except some work function which nano requires but I do feel like it was a worthwhile tradeoff for an idea like this)

The idea is to create completely permanent and decentralized permanent storage for essentially free other than some compute of work function yourself.

I vibe coded a basic idea hooking all of this idea into something to create a prototype (without using any agents, I just copy paste the code and still do just from browsers, they are pretty good honestly and completely free)

I was being stuck on the primitive part on creating the establishment of the transaction loop so I contacted some person on nano's discord and they gave me domain and some help in it too!

I do believe that my idea has potential and I had built this almost an year ago. The idea has been in the back burner for so long & at this point, what I had built was a good prototype which I am proud of. But I don't know how to add effective value of it or (should I?) because I am the type of person who doesn't know how to monetize such a project or if its even possible and I don't want to take this idea which has great potential and make it muddle up with VC money or similar.

I want the community to build ideas on top of it and I can integrate more of my thinking or help other companies if they are interested in thinking something like this comes to my mind which seems to be the most sustainable way to manage things (I don't want to ruin a project with VC money and be like rest of crypto industry, sorry I didn't want to create a crypto project I just ended up building one after my WOT idea)

Honestly my initial idea had nothing to do with this. I just went one stack down the layer down the layer, my initial idea was pretty simple but I ended up trying the most complex solution just because I was curious and that did end up to something which then fascinated me for atleast a month just on its own.

I really like your post and I think you might like nanotimestamps as well

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/nanotimestamp/blob/main...

There is both video and gif format available. (I am gonna create a wiki right now to upload a video) Remind me if I forget to do so because honestly I am just happy that I am able to make this. I don't want more except the community to hack things with this idea.

Sorry if it sounds like a promotion but I earn nothing except some pride and smile while I am writing this!! Knowing that because I remember when I was thinking about this, I couldn't even comprehend telling it to my school friends or even one of my more coding focused group friend. I was alone lol with just internet. I hate AI but prototyping it was a good use of it imo! But it also gave me imposter syndrome as if it was AI which developed it and not me and that's partially true so I just take credit of an idea perhaps not the implementation so much.

Edit: looks like I got downvoted and I can understand the statement, trust me I hate crypto just as much as you do and I have written about this as well https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

I hope I don't give the impression that crypto is anything good for 99.9% use cases especially for the average person and in this case I do feel like its the 0.1% but please remember that Crypto's kind of stupid for most use cases. Source actually built something in it and I can only count on one hand (5 projects) at max which are net positive itself, maybe even less. So my point is, please don't invest in crypto & we can still play around with crypto (I didn't pay anything to work with this) & just invest in world index funds most likely instead of crypto. I hope Hackernews realizes that I built this actively trying to avoid crypto-space but it seemed too elegant to ignore in this context but I hate scams and I am a huge coffeezilla subscriber. Hope it provides additional context I guess and have a nice day y'all!

show 1 reply