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Show HN: A star map creation tool with Common Lisp

by juanre on 6/20/19, 10:01 AM with 63 comments

  • by nabla9 on 6/20/19, 12:31 PM

    This is a specialized market if anything is.

    I can see that it could work beautifully if you can develop a customer base 100-200 customers who sell products based on these maps.

    Incidentally this is where I think Common Lisp will win big. Small companies or research groups who keep developing special products and expertise over long time.

  • by tsuru on 6/20/19, 3:06 PM

    Are you able to speak a little to the Lisp engineering without giving away "secret sauce"? Is Lisp serving the web pages too or only generating the star maps? Did you use CLOS heavily? MOP? FFI? Anything else "exotic" that I've failed to ask and you can speak about?

  • by skosch on 6/20/19, 5:56 PM

    I had no idea what this did until I watched the video.

    Suggestion: let people play with the map customization tool directly on the landing page, then charge them for changing the date/location and for hi-res exports.

  • by juanre on 6/20/19, 10:01 AM

    Reading PG's ANSI Common Lisp was a pivotal event on my career as a programmer. I wrote a high-resolution star map generation tool in CL about 14 years ago, and have been working on it and selling the maps it produces for many years.

    Now I am moving away from the things I don't do well (ranking in Google and promoting) to what I think I do best (making beautiful maps) with this new site, where I open the engine to people who want to add custom star maps to their own products.

  • by halter73 on 6/20/19, 11:55 AM

    I have no idea what a free account gets me, but the fact that the lowest "Explorer" tier costs $39/month for 1 map per month causes me to lose interest immediately.

    I have two suggestions:

    1. Show a bunch of prominent examples of star maps on giftable items like mugs and shirts memorializing various events like a birth or a wedding. The more explicit you are about the stars matching the night sky on the day and place of the event, the better. I could see these making for cool party favors, but I think the concept will go over a lot of people's heads (pun intended) unless it's spelled out for them.

    2. Offer a la carte pricing. The couple planning their wedding on a shoestring budget might buy a star map for $40, but starting and cancelling a $40 subscription could be too much of a hassle.

    Longer term, I might look into partnering with a company like zazzle.com and integrating into their create-your-own-shirt-or-mug-or-whatever pipeline for a royalty.

  • by throwanem on 6/20/19, 5:02 PM

    I'd drop the tattoo example on the gallery page. You would have a very difficult time finding an artist who'd even attempt that, much less one who'd do it well - and you'd be wanting to have it covered up inside a decade, most likely, in any case, given the way ink gradually migrates under the skin.

  • by cossatot on 6/20/19, 1:58 PM

    This is really cool, and I'm heartened that you've formed a business around this. What kind of projection do you use? DO you select the displayed stars from the zillions in that azimuth by their distance to Earth, or brightness on earth?

  • by umvi on 6/20/19, 1:02 PM

    I keep hearing about Common Lisp, but I just don't "get it". Is it really as mind-blowing as people say when you "get it"?