IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. Critique of Perseus & alternative resources
The new site is often compared to Perseus, with users questioning its added value and noting problems with reliability and data access.

"It would be really surprised if people preferred it to Perseus." — milkcrate
"Perseus considers itself end‑of‑life; there is an analogous project that's supposed to have succeeded it." — thaumasiotes

2. UI/UX shortcomings of the dictionary pop‑ups
Many comments focus on making the pop‑ups clearer and easier to use—e.g., bolding meanings and improving the close‑button behavior.

"Bold the meaning of the word so it pops out a bit better." — boss0565
"Clicking out to close a dictionary popup only works if you click empty space within the layout center." — gfaure

3. Personal classicist interest & modern tooling
A strong thread is hobby classicists leveraging LLMs and custom projects to enrich Latin/Greek study.

"LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software." — frollogaston

🚀 Project Ideas

[Perseus Uptime & Corpus Expansion]

Summary

  • Build a resilient, open‑mirror network for Perseus‑style ancient text repositories, eliminating 503 errors and downtime.
  • Open‑access the FOIA‑reclaimed, publicly funded TLG/Scaife corpus to extend searchable, extensible datasets.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Classicists, students, digital humanities researchers
Core Feature Zero‑downtime mirroring + extended open corpus from State of California data
Tech Stack Docker, AWS S3 + CloudFront, Python/Flask, Elasticsearch
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: Tiered institutional subscription ($5‑$15 /mo)

Notes

  • HN users repeatedly complain about “503 all the time” and unreliable access; a stable service would be instantly adopted.
  • Access to FOIA‑released data would let the community build richer search and annotation tools, sparking new discussions.

[Contextual Ancient Text Reader]

Summary

  • An interactive web reader that preserves original spacing, typography, and breathings while offering one‑click lexical popups with morphological breakdowns.
  • Allows users to sort entries, toggle modern/ancient fonts, and view word‑by‑word popups without leaving the page.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Hobby classicists, language learners, educators
Core Feature Inline pop‑ups showing definition, part‑of‑speech, and context‑highlighted meaning
Tech Stack React, TypeScript, Unicode‑aware rendering (New Athena Unicode), SQLite for lexical DB
Difficulty Low
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Commenters request better fonts (e.g., New Athena Unicode) and spacing fixes; this product directly addresses those aesthetic pain points.
  • The ability to sort by date/range or display chapter breaks would please users like “bohnohboh” and “gfaure”.

[Anki‑Ready Ancient Language Study Toolkit]

Summary

  • A desktop application that converts any classical text into spaced‑out, annotated versions and auto‑generates Anki decks with vocabulary, morphology, and example sentences.
  • Integrates with existing corpora (Perseus, TLG, Diogenes) and can pull breathings, accents, and iota subscripts correctly.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Self‑directed classicists, language hobbyists, graduate students
Core Feature One‑click generation of spaced‑text and synchronized Anki deck export
Tech Stack Python, PyQt5, Pandas, AnkiConnect API, SQLite lexical cache
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: One‑time license $29 or bulk academic discounts

Notes

  • Users like “milkcrate” and “veqq” want vowel‑length markings and proper spacing; this tool automates those enhancements.
  • The community frequently mentions needing “critical apparatus” and “chapter‑by‑chapter” study aids—perfect for this suite.

Read Later