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Show HN: Curiosity of the Day

curiosityoftheday.com

26 pointsjeanmayer32 comments

Hey HN!

I've built Curiosity of the Day to help people increase their knowledge of the world, one day at a time. Each day, it presents the user with a new fact or piece of knowledge about anything from history and science to art and culture. I’d love to get some feedback on ways to make the app better, and any other ideas on how to make learning more fun and engaging.

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My thoughts after visiting the site, in order:

1. Cool, I didn't know that fact

2. This is a nice, simple site

3. Maybe I should make it my New Tab page...

4. Where are the other facts -- can I browse them somehow? I want to see how good they are and if they align with my interests

5. Oh, there's no history, I guess this is the first fact, weird

6. scroll down Oh, this is a thinly veiled AD for a web dev studio...

7. Hm, there's more words, design effort, and attention put into the AD than the main content of the page

8. It's weird I had to scroll to see that it was an AD

9. Oh, they're being tricky and making sure the ad part is always below the fold using `height: 100vh` in their CSS

10. That's tricky -- they're hoping to get a ton of upvotes on HN before too many people realize it's an AD

11. If only they'd waited a few days to submit this to HN and had a few items in history, I probably would've made it my New Tab page and upvoted it...

Yeah, the actual work seems to have been done by the people running the underlying http://numbersapi.com/4/6/date

Correct, just fixed to show the source. Wasn't intentional, and making note not to miss that again.

Note: ad is a normal noun, not an initialism. It took me a couple moments to realize what you meant.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback, let me clarify some stuff for you ;)

I'm using Numbers Api (http://numbersapi.com/), and it returns a random fact for the day I'm requesting, so there's no history indeed.

Yes, we are a dev company and make these cool projects for fun (and if you like our work and want to work with us, we would be happy to help).

You can check https://samedayskunkworks.com to view other cool projects, all for FREE.

Just want to clarify a bit here, this was a short project that I put together in a few hours because I really like fun facts like this. I'm part of a team that builds fast projects regularly and we have a default global footer that is applied to every site (see here for example: https://www.ghostlystock.com/ ) so unfortunately something we built to be tasteful was misinterpreted because it's obviously so over the top here.

It's a learning lesson for me and I'm going to do things differently moving forward. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure if there's a lesson at all. I think your setup is fine.

This comment is so unbelievably on-brand for HN it's hard to tell if it's parody or not.

This is great!

Until you realize that it's a cheap rip-off of http://numbersapi.com/ without giving credit. Shame on you, ae.studio. If that's how you work, you failed with this ad and won't get me as your customer. Or employee.

(To clarify: I don't find it a problem that this page contains an ad for their studio. It's out of sight, which is nice. What I'm taking issue with is that they are not attributing where they are taking the data from.)

Edit: Ah, now the attribution was added in the lower-righthand corner. That's good, at least they are listening and fixing issues quickly. That this had to be pointed out first and publicly shamed still leaves a sour taste though.

Yeah, we made it a simple and easy way to view that data :D

just added a reference to numbers api

I specifically love how it's not just a call to numbers.com, rather a call to /api/curiosity on the site, but passing in a url to numbersapi.com as an argument to the request. So... Not only the call to numbers.com was hidden from the networking tab from casual onlookers, but I think the server will just download arbitrary content if we ask it to... And I could certainly load a random lipsum.com/feed/html. Since there's no call to that domain in my networking tab I assume their server does it. I won't be the person to include a link to a 400gb file there, but someone will.

you are right, terrible idea to pass the URL as an argument. Will fix that in 5 min.

Thanks for pointing that out. Just fixed it.

Thanks for the feedback, I can definitely see how this could be distasteful. Not attributing was 100% an accident and I fixed asap.

Like I mentioned in another comment: I'm part of a team that builds fast projects regularly and we have a default global footer that is applied to every site (see here for example: https://www.ghostlystock.com/ ) so unfortunately something we built to be tasteful was misinterpreted because it's obviously so over the top here.

What actually happened here is that I decided to share this project and the new footer wasn't at top of mind for me.

Sorry about that.

It's not the footer that is the problem. It's not telling anybody that you're recycling other people's work.

I explicitly pointed out that the footer is fine. I generally like this type of ad the most -- do some great work, publish it, tell everybody who you are and that you are hiring or open for business opportunities. But this backfires if the thing you built is questionable.

I believe that this was an honest mistake. But unfortunately a quite telling one regarding team culture. Building things fast should not be an excuse for ripping other people off.

This is awesome! A few years ago, I used to be a frequent reader of Knappily, a free news application that divided each article using the 5W1H method. They used to write an "On This Day" article every day. Although their publishing frequency is less now, you can still find their old stuff by searching on Google for "on this day <date> site:knappily.com".

Cool! I love these curiosity/fun facts. I'll add to this site soon, an option to use AI to filter for your interests, so it's even more engaging and personal :D

There should probably be a "read more"-link pointing to relevant information for us people who have learned as much about baseball from Fallout 4 as from anything else.

Won't happen, because the service they are using (without crediting it) to get this "curiosity of the day" doesn't provide such a link. So they can't add such a link.

They could add a link to http://numbersapi.com/ though.

Fixed, sorry about that. Not intentional. Making note for the future too!

Nice and succinct. It has "new tab" vibes about it and might be something you could offer as an extension.

I am subscribed to a newsletter that does a similar thing in longer form each day that I enjoy and tend to mention whenever I can: https://nowiknow.com/ (it's nothing to do with me, I just enjoy it)

yeah, definitely has browser extension vibes.

I've created this extension -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-new-ta...

and this other one with English words -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/increase-your-engl...

From a french speaker perspective: the date was written like this: jeudi avril 6, 2023. This is the US date format, but with the day and month translated in French, while the rest of the page is fully in English.

Interesting. I think it's because I'm formatting the date to a Locale string. Will fix that soon, thanks for the feedback!

Cool concept - maybe make it a little more different than the Numbers API. Actually see a lot of potential based on how interested people are in short-form fun facts and knowledge. Good luck!

Yeah, I'm adding a feature so you can filter by interests, using AI. Thanks!

One year for now, would I be able to see the curiosity from today as well?

It's random per page load.

I just added a button to reload the curiosity, there is more than 1 per day. But it's random, you might see the same after a few clicks.

Ow cute, curiosity of the day!

"April 6th is the day in 1994 that the Rwandan Genocide begins when the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira is shot down."

There goes a bunch of happiness I had gathered today around me.

This is what hit me as well. To me, “a curiosity” is not just some fact about a historical event. And when many of the events are grim moments in history, the site quickly strays from the idea of curiosity and becomes just another random regurgitation of “on this day” content.

To the authors: I think it’s an interesting idea, but would benefit from the ability to select categories of interest.

I’m all about improving my knowledge of the world, and I’m willing to spend time doing that. But the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of it is a spending of time that I’ve started to ration intentionally due to the volume of information and noise in my life, and this site unfiltered seems a bit noisy.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely make another version of this site using AI to get the data (or maybe add this option to this site).

It's easy to filter and get interesting data from chatGPT for example.

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