Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978631

by superasn • 9 years ago

488 569 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

louisstow• 9 years ago

https://walloftext.co

I genuinely find it useful for note-taking and organising things.

superasn3• 9 years ago

The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me.

But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work.

Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp...

[2] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extreme-article-marketing-conve...

mysterydip• 9 years ago

On the gamedev subreddit, it seems most questions are around how to market and get exposure for your game, SEO, making a successful kickstarter, etc.

It's great to take a step back and just make something that people enjoy, even if it does not bring any income. Getting "fanmail" or seeing the # of hours someone has put into something you've made is a great feeling.

As long as you have a day job that pays the bills, I say go for it.

Qwertious4• 9 years ago

I think /r/hobbygamedev was made in response to the whole "I don't want this marketing shit on my game development subreddit" .

caspercba• 9 years ago

Hi, a software developer here. I also feel like you. Started coding very young, then uni, first job, first team leader position, then moved to Europe for 5 years working in big companies ( and saving as much as I could). Now I'm back home in Latin America. Built a couple of houses cash with savings, got married. But I'm bored so I spend my time playing with my 3d printer and home automation little projects in my spare time. I don't think I will last much longer working on something I don't enjoy.

Every month I save enough for living at least 3 months (4.5k USD ) without working which is quite good, but on the other hand, I don't like what I do. It's tough to quit when you know other people are struggling to pay for basic needs in other areas.

I guess my plan is to keep saving and at some point next year ( when I get around 2-3 years worth of expenses) do something about it.

Anyways, at the moment my hobbies keep me going. That's my advice, a hobbie.

ghostbrainalpha• 9 years ago

What kind of home automation projects are you working on?

sgentle• 9 years ago

I think this is the worst thing about startup culture. Don't get me wrong, I like startups, but there's so much hype and so much money around them that it sucks all the oxygen out of anything else.

I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all.

Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability.

Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".

bhnmmhmd• 9 years ago

So what is the definition of startup from your perspective? I mean, if I have an idea and just build it, wouldn't someone else take the idea, build it, and look for VCs to make it profitable? In this case, isn't it better to always look for the possibility that my idea can actually catch on?

wheresvic13• 9 years ago

I recently created Ewolo, it's a web based workout tracker optimized for mobile as well - https://ewolo.fitness

I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)

thecolorblue• 9 years ago

If you think about it, isn't all front end open source? :)

wheresvic13• 9 years ago

Haha, yes definitely. There is something to be said about allowing people to get a full view of the structure vs letting them prettify the bundle however.

yakshaving_jgt• 9 years ago

I've thought about it, and no, not really. I mean, try reading the source of http://elm-lang.org/.

atomashpolskiy3• 9 years ago

Yes, I've developed a full-featured BitTorrent library in Java: https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt/blob/master/README.md#-... . It was very warmly received by HN folks

It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)

superasn3• 9 years ago

This is very cool. Being a Java lib I guess it can be compiled directly inside Android apps too(?) which is definitely a very big plus!

atomashpolskiy3• 9 years ago

I haven't checked myself yet, but probably yes, if a proper Android SDK with Java 8 de-sugaring support is used.

pgsandstrom• 9 years ago

I like to create small tools that are optimized for me and my families use case. For example we used Google Keep for shopping lists, but I found it too bloaty and slow. So I created bös.se (it got SSR and websockets, wohooo!)

http://xn--bs-fka.se/test-note

It's fun to just care about your own needs when developing. For me it becomes work when I get feature requests that I don't like myself, but I implement them to appease others.

davchana4• 9 years ago

Do you really use those 2700 lines of CSS code? Just asking, as I usually trim all the extra code, and use the one I actually need, in all my single page apps.

j_s4• 9 years ago

Ain't nobody got time for that!

Do you have time to share any of your experience with the tools / process that enables you to get this done in a reasonable timeframe? I'm specifcally interested in how these have changed over time - how have changes to tools / process helped get this done faster?

garysieling2• 9 years ago

https://www.findlectures.com/

This is a big enough project to can explore most programming subjects (e.g. machine learning, Javascript, databases, email), and I enjoy learning about history by watching old videos.

pul• 9 years ago

Nice work on this site! I think I'll have something to do the coming time ;) How did you manage to find and index all these videos?

garysieling2• 9 years ago

The best thing for finding speakers is having a form on signup for the emails because I ask people for suggestions, and I've had hundreds.

For the crawling part, this might be interesting (I have a talk coming soon too) http://findlectures.com/articles/2017/05/15/Building-a-Crawl...

Usu• 9 years ago

https://gitnotifier.io

I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects. A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.

nikivi• 9 years ago

I am working on a community curated search engine to learn anything most optimally :

https://learn-anything.xyz/

Everything is open source and is MIT licensed, both the search engine and the entire database it searches over.

There are however many things that we can still do to take this idea further. Hopefully more people join to help us with that. :)

syveen2• 9 years ago

This's really cool :) thank you for bringing this up

subhashp• 9 years ago

Very interesting concept, nice presentation! It will be valuable when lots of experts start adding knowledge to it.

alexanderson• 9 years ago

Https://github.com/Thorium-sim/thorium - Starship simulator controls. Think Bridge Simulators (like Artemis) meet D&D. The controls facilitate doing space missions, where one participant is a game master and the others take various roles on the ship.

I love working on the controls, and I’m learning a lot too. I’m going to start taking donations soon, but don’t plan on making a ton of money.

stavros• 9 years ago

Oh man, that describes all of them.

http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS

https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface

https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin

https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers

https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns

And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff:

https://www.stavros.io/projects/

wheresvic13• 9 years ago

Spamnesty is dope! How do you avoid getting blacklisted by the spammers though?

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

I don't, but there are plenty of spammers to go around :P

kzisme2• 9 years ago

Those are all pretty awesome!

Since they don't really make you any money - do people use them often then - if so how do people find them?

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Thank you! It depends on what you mean by "often", I guess often enough. I use Pastery all the time (especially the editor plugins), and all my developer friends love it too.

I guess people use some of the other services too, for example I get lots of comments for Spamnesty. I don't really care enough to look, though, as I built them for myself or because I thought they'd be fun, or because I just wanted to make something with a friend.

azdle• 9 years ago

Thank you for pastery. Best pastebin I've ever found, use it more than any other.

tradersam• 9 years ago

Thank you as well, going to start using it regularly.

fapjacks3• 9 years ago

Hah! I just noticed "Not a git repo" on the main page. Say no more! I completely grok why that's there.

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! Try the editor plugins, they're 90% of the site's value. Pressing a single key to share code is amazing.

shpx• 9 years ago

In pastery's FAQ it says

Everything goes over an encrypted TLS connection, so nobody other than the intended recipient can see what you're pasting.

It should say "nobody other than the intended recipient and the developers of this website".

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

I have changed the wording to be more accurate, thanks!

MikeTheGreat2• 9 years ago

First: these are awesome, and thank you for sharing. (Esp. Spa.mnesty.com - that's hilarious and incredible at the same time)

I tried timetaco.com but it's not doing anything. I tabbed my way through the day (it filled in today's date - 2017, then 8, then 10). I select 5 : 10, which is about 3 minutes in the future, and then clicked 'Generate'. It just changes the date (all three parts) to red, and doesn't do anything. (I'm clearly missing something - what am I missing?)

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Hmm, that's odd... Maybe it's detecting your timezone incorrectly? Can you try setting a date that's tomorrow?

sonofaragorn• 9 years ago

Try 17:10 instead of 5:10?

bryceneal• 9 years ago

Neat projects! I'm curious, have you seen very much interest in eternum? I have an idea for a similar project, but I am not sure how many people are really interested in IPFS.

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Hmm, moderate, really, but it's early days. It certainly has been encouraging, and I wanted it mainly for my own use, so if IPFS takes off, that's just an added benefit.

rb666• 9 years ago

Nice work!

This thread is all over the place haha! Did they ever get to meet at the bridge??:

https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/amhhqthp/

Entalpi• 9 years ago

This is amazing!

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Hahaha, those poor people! They meant a conference (ie phone) bridge, and no, the bot never went :P

mailshanx• 9 years ago

That's really prolific! How do you find the time to create so many projects?

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Most of them are just weekend projects, and took two or three days to create. Then I spend the odd few hours here and there. I also go to bed very late, which gives me ample time to work on stuff during the time when everyone else is asleep.

chanux2• 9 years ago

Your work is appreciated! <3

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Thank you! <3

saurabhdatta• 9 years ago

Forwarded 10 spam mails to your service. I absolutely love the idea. Hoping for some interesting conversations.

dajohnson89• 9 years ago

I tried to create a timeTaco countdown for today, but it didn't let me? AFAICT, it only allows for blast-off dates in the future. Also, a little clarity about time format (12 vs 24) and time zone would be nice. Overall though I love the simple UI.

StavrosK16• 9 years ago

Yep, we're going to fix the UX on that ASAP, thanks! Currently the 24-hour date assumption is a bit confusing.

sideshowb2• 9 years ago

http://www.tropic.org.uk/~crispin/quantum/

Upside: it's got a quantum physics game engine, and can teach you quantum mechanics

Downside: HN will continue to tear me apart for making them download a JAR file but you can grab the source and compile it yourself if you like

camtarn• 9 years ago

Looks cool.

I'd love to be able to see more screenshots of the game - at the moment they're faded out and placed in the background, and when you click them you end up just downloading the game itself.

I actually don't mind the JAR file thing ;) but I'm unlikely to download and try it without knowing a bit more about the game concept.

sideshowb2• 9 years ago

There are more screenshots here http://www.indiedb.com/games/quantum-marble-maze

Blog describing the physics here https://linkingideasblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/learning-q...

I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape.

One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)

anfractuosity6• 9 years ago

A few of mine:

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - 'painting' the LEDs on my christmas tree.

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/optical-magnetic-stri... - optically decoding data from magnetic stripe cards.

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/zymeter-simple/ - a rather unsuccessful attempt at measuring specific gravity.

https://github.com/anfractuosity/musicplayer - playing .wav files via RF emissions from a laptop.

atomashpolskiy3• 9 years ago

I dig it. Man, this is what real engineering is supposed to look like

I now have 57 GB of audio files of bubbles

Sounds like.. FUN!

anfractuosity6• 9 years ago

Haha, cheers

tonetheman2• 9 years ago

The xmas tree is great. Good stuff.

sunilkumarc• 9 years ago

I have been developing side projects for fun since my Engineering days(from past 6 years). Below are the ones worth showing:

1. Track Courier - This was developed to learn the tech-stack Node.js + Backbone.js + PostgreSQL (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/track-courier)

2. Form Filler - This was developed to solve my own problem of having to type common fields like email id, username etc again and again on different web pages (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/form-filler)

3. Subtitle Corrector - This is a linux command line utility to correct subtitle files. Using this one can adjust the entire file by +x or -x seconds (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/subtitle-corrector)

4. 100 - This is a project I started to learn to solve Algorithms and DS problems for my interview preparations. The plan was to solve at least 1 problem everyday for 100 days. But I couldn't do it everyday. Still whenever I solve a problem I put it in this repository (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100)

5. Desktop Commentary - This is again a linux utility which shows Cricket scores every 10 seconds on your desktop as a Notification Bubble. The problem I was trying to solve here was to avoid going to Espncricinfo website every now and then to check scores when a match is going on (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary)

6. Alarm Manager - This is one more linux utility to set multiple alarms (up to 5) on your linux machine (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/alarm-manager)

ivanceras• 9 years ago

A few of mine.

https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus

https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown

https://github.com/ivanceras/curtain

https://github.com/ivanceras/rustorm

I've spin up some semi-polish desktop app, but never get some revenue.

golergka• 9 years ago

Curious how no one mentioned kids yet.

daleroberts• 9 years ago

Practicing to make kids == sheer joy?

max05632• 9 years ago

Kids? Do they have a Github repo?

yev3• 9 years ago

Making vue components:

https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-modal

https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-toggle-button

https://github.com/euvl/vue-notification

iDemonix2• 9 years ago

I'm just getting started with Vue 2, these look great and I'll definitely be downloading to experiment with.

yev3• 9 years ago

Awesome! Feel free to ask questions in issue tracker if you'll get stuck :)

cdubzzz• 9 years ago

Nice. We looked at vue-notification for Timestrap[0] and will probably use it whenever we get development rebooted.

[0] https://github.com/overshard/timestrap

yev3• 9 years ago

Wow, great! Let me know if you will need anything, I'll be happy to help you out! :)

titusblair• 9 years ago

https://pitchpodcasts.com http://stockbrokergame.com https://bookcelerator.com https://cakedomain.com

yogthos2• 9 years ago

http://www.luminusweb.net/ and all my GitHub projects https://github.com/yogthos

christophilus2• 9 years ago

Well, even if it doesn't make you money, I hope you know how much you're appreciated in the Clojure community. Thanks for all the hard work!

yogthos2• 9 years ago

Thanks, it's great to hear. :)

syveen2• 9 years ago

wow.... keep up, I just followed you

wigrb23• 9 years ago

https://collegecollections.co/ - marketplace for artwork by art students

SirHound• 9 years ago

https://popmotion.io - JavaScript animation framework. Writing this over the last few years has probably done more to improve my career than my actual jobs.

I really enjoy it but sometimes maintenance does come at the cost of doing other projects.

kadirayk2• 9 years ago

http://apimockery.com/ - API Mocking as a Service

I built it to learn React and brush up my Go skills. I occasionally add new features.

It makes $0 now, but I plan to earn 10$ a month before my amazon free tier expires :)

shime2• 9 years ago

This is a great idea! Design could use some love, though.

kadirayk2• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! The text below annoys a good deal of people as well, I should add 'improving design' to my big pile of todos :)

kvz• 9 years ago

I'm writing a bot for cryptotrading without having the proper knowledge for something like that. Learning as I go and I expect to lose some money on this (certainly won't give it a budget to manage that I can't afford to lose), but I'm having a ton of fun entertaining the fantasy that I could 'game the system' with my bot

NicoJuicy• 9 years ago

EMA sounds familiar. I'm exactly in the same position with dot net as programming language. I'm interested in working together , i know other programming languages also

aaronhoffman• 9 years ago

https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/ - drag-and-drop d3.js visualization tool

https://www.gmailcontactsync.com/ - sync gmail contacts between accounts

sellislem• 9 years ago

http://techexplicit.tk/ - a tech based news and review website that makes 0$

deepakkarki• 9 years ago

I built https://discoverdev.io - just to refresh some basic web skills and learn some machine learning!

Turned out pretty decent, and now I spend about 20 minutes everyday curating interesting engineering links. Don't think I'll make any money out of it, but is an interesting post dinner routine :D

shime2• 9 years ago

https://github.com/shime/livedown - Realtime Markdown previews for your favorite editor

https://zapsnap.io - Temporary peer to peer screenshot sharing (MacOS only for now)

eneve• 9 years ago

FAQr - Android app for reading Gamefaqs (best for retro ASCII) - https://faqrapp.com

joelennon• 9 years ago

https://programmingpodcasts.com - it's a directory of software dev and related podcasts. Haven't ruled out monetising it and to be honest maintenance is almost zero as it runs on autopilot. I'm it's biggest user, use it everyday.

j_s4• 9 years ago

Have you considered tracking the various programming live-streamers across all the different services?

marcus_holmes• 9 years ago

http://celtic-knotwork.online

had to get that code out of my head and onto the web. There's more stuff I want to do to it when I get the time/passion

viridian2• 9 years ago

I started a podcast with another Hacker News poster. We have no ads, make no money, but it's great fun just talking about big local events in Columbus Ohio, and also big tech news. It's obviously extremely niche and local, but there's always something new happening in urban development, politics, that sort of thing here.

http://columbusthisweek.podbean.com for the RSS feed, or itunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/columbus-this-week/id126...

ellius• 9 years ago

I don't see a lot of Columbus, OH on HN so here's a shout out. I'll definitely try the podcast.

viridian2• 9 years ago

Cool, thanks for that. Eric and I are both pretty big Columbus evangelists and are pretty active in the startup weekend community.

roryisok• 9 years ago

http://getpoe.com - distraction free / focus writing app for Windows, and soon Linux and macOS. It makes me nothing, but I love working on it. I built it to have a focus writer on windows 8 (there were none that played move with metro at the time) but I spend more time coding it than actually writing these days

dmitri1981• 9 years ago

https://www.hnlondon.com - been running it for about seven years and had some amazing speakers give talks. Sets me back a few grand a year in sponsorship shortfalls, but is an amazing experience when a great speaker inspires the whole room.

tugberkk• 9 years ago

Hey, this looks pretty good! Nice work.

jasoninprivate• 9 years ago

I started a blog (this week) focusing on how retail investors can get exposure to startups and other private companies, which are normally reserved for VC and institutional investors.

The ultimate goal is how can we, as startup employees and enthusiasts manage our own risk? Since we are heavily exposed to risk in ways other players in this space aren't (because we work for one company at a time, and they invest in many).

Not sure where it's going to take me yet.

https://jasoninprivate.com

mclemme• 9 years ago

Built a few things to teach myself new stuff, the ones that are still online are:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitmasch.b... - Wanted to learn a cross platform app framework. Built a simple game that would help my niece get better at basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Made with Apache Cordova. She only played it a few times, but her dad (my brother) ended up getting hooked on it for a while, beating other people's high score with 50-100 points every time someone beat his highscore.

http://p2pool.jir.dk - Wanted to get some experience in building a crawler and was interested in p2pool cryptocurrency mining at the time, so I built a p2pool crawler. The site does have adsense, but it doesn't really make any money.

mosselman• 9 years ago

https://cadodo.nl/en - Create wish lists for your next birthday/wedding/etc

https://bookmarkify.it - Create javascript bookmarklets

https://github.com/abuisman/freudjs - Component library in JS for when view libraries like React are overkill

davchana4• 9 years ago

I typed simple Javascript codevas following in your bookmarkify.it

    alert(1);

It gave output as:

    javascript:(function(){window.s0=document.createElement('script');window.s0.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');window.s0.setAttribute('src','https://bookmarkify.it/bookmarklets/6804/raw');document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(window.s0);})();

So every time this bookmarklet is clicked, a http request goes to your website, and then the code executed? I can see the possible use of this in super duper long javascript code, but why this trip even for simplest code?

viralpoetry• 9 years ago

Alzheimer password generator - Chrome extension for domain dependent password generation

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password...

https://github.com/viralpoetry/alzheimer-password-generator

ghusbands• 9 years ago

Looks good, but that's a really terrible name for it. Please consider changing it to something less insulting.

TYPE_FASTER• 9 years ago

I wrote a web e-mail client that pulled e-mail from three or four accounts into a single responsive UI, and filtered through a whitelist. It was really handy. Note to self, get that working again.

zie• 9 years ago

https://sexwork.us/ SexWork.us is aiming to be a reference guide all about sex work.

jimaek2• 9 years ago

Definitely jsDelivr https://github.com/jsdelivr/jsdelivr

Billions of requests every month. Building the service is pure joy. I have lots of new features coming like a new website, stats per project and more.

aaomidi• 9 years ago

How do you handle the traffic? How much does this cost you to run?

jimaek2• 9 years ago

All traffic is served by CDN sponsors for free. But I pay for most servers, services and freelancers like designers and developers.

It costs a lot when I do changes requiring external help which is quite often.

spajus• 9 years ago

As someone who wants to be a gamedev some day, I'm building a community for indie game developers: https://www.gamehero.org

overcast4• 9 years ago

https://kidisms.com

Sharing funny kid quotes.

Been going for years, not a whole lot of traffic, but the family loves it (that was the intention). Recently migrated from a severely aging kohana/mysql backend to express/rethinkdb.

jansho2• 9 years ago

This is great! My smaller siblings say the wittiest things (often without realising) that brighten my day, I often wonder if there's a platform to 'record' them. I hope that your project will eventually turn into that!

overcast4• 9 years ago

Thanks, that was the intent :) Kids say a lot of great stuff, and it's often just forgotten. I'll add a json export so users can save off at some point.

davchana4• 9 years ago

If by save you mean write/type, save on a cloud backed notepad file with F5 for timestamp.

FooHentai• 9 years ago

Just to let you know - The page shows no quote in IE11 (hail corporate) ;(

Also, 'Show More' button does nothing.

http://imgur.com/a/QAB7f

overcast4• 9 years ago

Thanks for the heads up! Bug with vue resource version, resolved!

kevinyen• 9 years ago

https://sympost.com To help you get heard on the internet instantly. Early beta.

stefantheard4• 9 years ago

http://www.overseer.tv

I built a show tracker just for me (it's not nearly where I want it to be, so I don't share it anywhere, eg. currently my show database is out of date I need to see what broke my cron tonight. no ssl cert, no optimization at all I don't even know if my js is minified tbh, etc).

I am the only active user http://www.overseer.tv/user/smt and I built this because I watch a shit ton of shows and I often forget when premieres come, or what episode I left off on. My site is basically one click to mark a show/season/episode "watched" and I have a calendar and upcoming section, which is all I wanted from many other sites I tried before creating my own.

I host this on an EC2 instance for 29$ a month, and my own usage alone makes it worth it to me haha.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 9 years ago

That sounds really cool.

Is it open source?

stefantheard4• 9 years ago

Sure is: https://github.com/smtheard/ShowTracker

It's not too pretty in there, but it is functional (arguably) haha.

DKnoll2• 9 years ago

Either this is the worst-scaling web application ever made or you are massively overpaying/overspeccing your VPS. Going to assume the latter.

stefantheard4• 9 years ago

It's the latter. I don't know why it costs so much, this is the first time I have ever hosted anything so I didn't realize I was overpaying. The way it was phrased I thought I had a year free and then it would be 29$/month but they just started charging me immediately. I haven't had time to look into it. I'll investigate tonight, thanks for pointing it out.

MikeKusold• 9 years ago

Have you heard of https://trakt.tv/ before? It seems to have similar functionality.

stefantheard4• 9 years ago

No I hadn't but looking at it, this is essentially what I wanted. Really wish I had found this before I built overseer lol. That's a great looking site, I'll give it a try.

dogas• 9 years ago

I built + maintain todolist[1] which is a GTD-style task management app for the command line. It's getting a bit of traction now which is pretty fun. It got a ton of upvotes on Product Hunt which was really cool to see[2].

I have very loose plans to monetize via a paid subscription for syncing with other devices / phones, but there will always bee a free / open source version as well.

[1] http://todolist.site

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/todolist

sshasan• 9 years ago

I have been looking for something like todolist for a while now to help me keep track of stuff. Very cool & Thank you for building this!

TamDenholm• 9 years ago

I'm grumpy, i dont like christmas: http://whychristmasisbullshit.com/

snickerbockers3• 9 years ago

That is the realest website I've ever seen.

NumberCruncher• 9 years ago

> Christmas is worse than a puppy because you cant put Christmas in a sack and drown it.

I love this one.

exikyut5• 9 years ago

This is awesome. I'm very curious what sort of crazy amount of spam gets fed into that unprotected text box though.

mdpopescu• 9 years ago

Before then, there multiple variations of his look.

You're missing a "were" after "there".

nfriedly2• 9 years ago

Everything to do with cryptocurrency! I wrote trading bot that was actually making a small profit - and then the exchange got hacked and took all of my coins & dollars with it :(

I've started to get into Ethereum and Solidity recently, but mining even a few coins just to have gas money costs more in electricity than they're worth. I'm letting my desktop mine anyways, but when I reach my pools payout threshold in a week or two (it's got a 3-year-old GPU), I'll probably kill the mining. (I know I could just buy some ETH with USD, but that's probably even more expensive and somehow feels different.)

(To be fair it hasn't been all negative - I bought a copy of the game Portal with the first bitcoin I ever earned, and a Kindle with the second bitcoin. But looking at it from a strictly money perspective, I'm definitely in the hole. In theory, it will be positive eventually.. but I'm still not sure exactly how.)

anfractuosity6• 9 years ago

The trading bot sounded fun. I was always curious about the bots that were apparently used on betting sites like betfair to perform arbitrage.

amingilani2• 9 years ago

I one quadrupled my capital with a betting bot running a martingale strategy. Then I made it run overnight and lost all the funds. Turns out there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run.

With a martingale strategy the chances of losing are miniscule but if you play 10,000 rounds at a 0.01% of losing, you're going to lose once. And that's when you lose all your capital.

nfriedly2• 9 years ago

Yea, it was; I might come back to it some day. The source is available at https://github.com/nfriedly/Coin-Allocator

agentultra2• 9 years ago

Working on a proof of a modular exponentiation algorithm in Lean with a focus on performance. Hoping to be able to extract a low-level ASM or C implementation from the proof.

aneutron• 9 years ago

Any chance you'd have a link to a repository where you publish your work ?

agentultra2• 9 years ago

I'm not working alone on it. Publishing my work at https://github.com/agentultra/lean-modexp

jordanrobinson• 9 years ago

Making websites like this: http://javascriptbythekilogram.online/

Though I can't really take the credit on this one, I just had the idea.

kehers• 9 years ago

https://thefeed.press/

Built for personal use. Not currently making any money but hope to monetise sometime later.

dkarp• 9 years ago

I made and maintain https://transparentmetric.com/

I find it fascinating watching the changes made to news articles over time. It lets you get into the mind of the various journalists and editors at different news organisations and see how they react to things. I just wish I had more time to develop it further.

vanderZwan3• 9 years ago

It doesn't have to be a full project, right? Do random drive-by PR-requests to open-source projects count?

A few months ago I ended up scratching an optimisation itch for weeks, trying to figure out ways to make the lz-string[0][1] library faster and smaller. Near the end I went a bit nuts with trying out what works, methinks (nested trees built out of arrays and such), but I had a lot of fun.

It's not even my library, nor did my PR request get accepted/rejected yet. It did however make the compression up to 2x to 10x faster, depending on how well the data compresses.

And hey, I now have an intuitive understanding of LZ compression that I never thought I'd have!

Since a few days I've been working on writing a component for idyll[2] that lets you embed p5js sketches[3]. Progress here[4][5].

[0] http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html

[1] https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/pull/98

[2] https://idyll-lang.github.io/

[3] https://p5js.org/

[4] https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/issues/117

[5] https://jobleonard.github.io/idyll-p5/

ovrdrv3• 9 years ago

Do you like the coding train[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman

vanderZwan3• 9 years ago

I have commented many a time on Shiffman's twitter that we need more gifs of him dancing, so yes :)

exikyut5• 9 years ago

Interesting. I need to do some deep diving on LZ myself, to build a highly-compressible custom file format.

Would benchmarks from a really old laptop be useful for #98 ?

vanderZwan3• 9 years ago

Probably, because it's trying to be backwards compatible.

LZ is really elegant once it clicks, and Pieroxy's approach of growing token size with alphabet is a very neat solution to the problem of the unicode alphabet being huge

preinheimer2• 9 years ago

Global Ping Statistics - https://wondernetwork.com/pings We have ~240 servers world wide, we get them all to ping each other every hour, and record the results.

We've been generating them for years, they're a pain to store, we've made $0 with it. But I really like the data we're getting. We recently moved a lot of the legacy data into S3 to save our own backup & restore process ( https://wonderproxy.com/blog/moving-ping-data-to-s3/ )

iDemonix2• 9 years ago

What makes them a pain to store? This looks perfect for something like Graphite.

preinheimer2• 9 years ago

Well, we went with the datastore we knew, MySQL. So on the upside we've got full granularity forever. On the downside we were backing up the full dataset every night. Plus the large amount of data was slowing pages down (even on indexed queries).

Now that we've moved the data older than two weeks over to S3, and query with Athena our site is faster, and we're not treating our backup infrastructure quite as poorly.

donald_the_game• 9 years ago

I created https://donaldsbizarreadventure.com/ because I always wanted to be a game developer.

shalabhc• 9 years ago

http://howl.io

A lightweight, native, extensible text editor.

bcruddy• 9 years ago

https://github.com/bcruddy/taco - a create-react-app + redux + express boilerplate. It currently grabs pricing data for BTC, ETH, and LTC and I mostly put it together for myself about a month ago.

https://github.com/bcruddy/GramLikeCam - my Panthers' fan friends seem to enjoy it. Initially I wanted to write a bot that would grab new instagram posts from Cam Newton and translate the weird characters he uses into plain english and post it as the first comment but ended up going pretty much the opposite direction.

https://github.com/bcruddy/tumbo - a very unpolished ascii video chat to play with websockets and string compression, I'll occasionally check out the website and see someone live streaming a day in the office.

dmuth• 9 years ago

I built a website which offers real-time statistics for Philadelphia's Regional Rail train system: https://www.septastats.com/

This lets public transit passengers answer questions like:

- "My train is getting later and later, is it actually moving?"

- "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly)

- "Is it just my train, or are many trains running late?"

- "What was the on-time performance of this train like yesterday? 2 days ago? 7 days ago?" (Some trains tend to be chronically late)

It may come as a surprise that the backend of the system is actually not a database, but Splunk (http://www.splunk.com). DBs are nice, but Splunk is fantastic when it comes to data analytics and reporting.

I'm currently waiting for Splunk to make some of their machine learning modules available for free so that I can start pulling in weather data, train the machine learning component against both that and the train data, and use that to predict the likelihood of any given train becoming late.

MadSax• 9 years ago

Neat.

skykooler• 9 years ago

As a Philadelphian, this is pretty awesome!

killahpriest• 9 years ago

Nice! You should add it to https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit. There's another SEPTA perf related thing on the list: http://phor.net/apps/septa/.

qzervaas• 9 years ago

This is pretty cool.

My "project that doesn't make me money" is https://transitfeeds.com

Currently it archives a ton of static schedule data, and some basic GTFS-realtime archiving stuff.

My longer-term goal is to archive all the GTFS-rt feeds every 30 seconds to provide similar analysis to what you've done here.

Obviously this requires even more storage than I'm already using and a ton of data processing, which is probably above my pay grade.

tomascot2• 9 years ago

Do you know where the gtfs file is located by default? I know a bus company in Argentina that has that info somewhere and Google.is using it in maps but I couldn't find the gtfs file.

spondyl2• 9 years ago

Sweet! I've been wanting to make something similar for my local transit line (they have a public JSON API) but I've been wondering how best to structure it.

kmano8• 9 years ago

This is great!

I made this septa app years ago when realtime-ish data became available.. http://septa.kaybox.org/

Displays all on-time trains as blue, and late trains red. Locations update every 30 seconds, I think.

ClimbsRocks2• 9 years ago

If you've got the data, try tossing it into auto_ml: https://github.com/ClimbsRocks/auto_ml

Super easy automated machine learning in Python. Fast enough to run at production speeds. I'm the author, and would love any feedback you have! The whole point of the project is to make ML available to people like you who just like building things, and think their thing could be better with a bit of ML.

fl0wenol• 9 years ago

boo (it's neil)

tcash• 9 years ago

https://github.com/mini2Dx/mini2Dx - A simple API for writing 2D games in Java (originally inspired by Slick2D)

I've been extending and updating the framework for a few years now. There's a tiny userbase but I like writing my games with it.

khc• 9 years ago

goofys - https://github.com/kahing/goofys/ - like s3fs except a lot faster

catfs - https://github.com/kahing/catfs/ - generic disk cache for fuse filesystems

codeplea• 9 years ago

I have a lot of projects like that!

https://f5bot.com - Social media monitoring. It can email you when your keyword (e.g. company name) appears on Hacker News or Reddit. I don't have any plans to monetize it. I just made it as a small fun project.

Also, like many here, I've made a bunch of open source software for no reason other than the joy of it. Don't ever see that changing. https://github.com/codeplea https://github.com/tulipcharts

LikeAnElephant• 9 years ago

A friend and I run https://www.brewnotice.com

It started as a project for us and a handful of friends, now we have around 2,000 users. All running on a $5 / mo Digital Ocean server.

We're not planning to ever charge for it. Right now it's just fun to work on, and it gets us into a handful of beer events. Win win!

anfractuosity6• 9 years ago

That looks very nifty.

I sometimes browse untappd to find people reviewing beers in pubs to see what's probably on tap, but that seems to require going to each specific pubs page on the app to check what might be on.

So your site looks very handy! (I'm in the UK though alas so I assume I can't use your app?)

nara_s• 9 years ago

As a sport enthusiast, I run a website for athletes to tell stories based on activity data http://storyteller.fit

Doing it out of passion is a great source of motivation and continuous learning, plus you get in touch with a lot of people.

fergie• 9 years ago

https://github.com/fergiemcdowall/search-index/ - its a lib for making embedable, torrantable, load-into-the-browserable search indices. Pretty modest downloads so far, but I love hacking on it.

guaka• 9 years ago

Hitchhiking guide http://hitchwiki.org dumpster diving guide http://trashwiki.org social network https://www.trustroots.org

literallycancer• 9 years ago

Hitchwiki is very useful. There's been something wrong with downloading the point of interest lately though (timeouts with large datasets like the one for Germany).

vasusen• 9 years ago

I have my take on moon-phase based messaging app that I continue for fun - http://moonletter.com/

max05632• 9 years ago

Didn't make too much progress yet, but I am making a PHP web framework inspired by the one file codebase that Bottle.py uses and the structure (loosely) of Flask. I am a Python programmer that recently had to use PHP for work, if you haven't noticed :P

https://github.com/Max00355/Feather

calebsurfs• 9 years ago

I need coastal weather data to find the best waves for surfing so I built http://www.swellmatrix.com

I would start other projects with money- making potential but there are always features to add to the site that can get me more waves...

t0mek• 9 years ago

Yet another Game Boy Color emulator, written in Java:

https://github.com/trekawek/coffee-gb

It's quite compatible and brought me a lot of fun. Blog post describing it:

http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/

Insanity5• 9 years ago

Wow, that is really cool!

I did not have the idea of creating an emulator, but some time ago I got curious as to how games were made for the GBA, so to try that I made a small Pong game [0]. It's really fun to play with 'old' technology from our childhoods.

[0] https://github.com/DylanMeeus/GBAPong

devotedtoneu2• 9 years ago

Very cool.

I wonder why you disqualify your multiplayer mode? Sure on the SP it would be unrealistic but I see no reason two players couldn't share an original model GBA, holding one end each.

geuis• 9 years ago

https://jsonip.com

Been running it for years and supports millions of requests a day. Started off as a simple experiment with node.js years ago but turned into a utility thousands of people use every day.

* Ignore jsonip.org. Some Trump troll set that up in June. I made the mistake of not registering all of my domains. Oh well.

davchana4• 9 years ago

You can't and don't need to register all the domains, as now there are literally 100sof extensions.

kgabis• 9 years ago

A JSON library in C: https://github.com/kgabis/parson

mcone• 9 years ago

I made an API that allows you to programmatically monitoring the status pages of hundreds of web-based applications: https://statusbot.io/

Hoping to add a bunch more services and webhooks soon.

dhpiggott• 9 years ago

I built https://www.liquidityapp.com/ over the summer of 2015: "Liquidity is a smartphone based currency built for Monopoly and all board and tabletop games.", and I actively maintain it. I have enhancement ideas too, but I barely have any time to put into it these days so it is primarily just maintenance.

It's one part Android client and one part Scala backend (though there's some Scala in the client too). While I'm fairly pleased with the UX and UI I was able to create (given that I really don't consider them my speciality), the backend is the bit that keeps my interest now. That uses Akka, Akka Persistence (i.e. it's event sourced), and Akka HTTP among other things. The clients communicate with it via websockets.

The details aren't exposed to users but it uses public key authentication so as to not burden users with passwords/PINs. Each app generates a keypair when first used, and QR codes are used to make changing account ownership simple.

vegasje• 9 years ago

This is a really cool idea. Nice job!

bradbeattie2• 9 years ago

I'm working on collating as many sources of Canadian federal data into a single relational database, and exposing that data via a public API.

https://api.iscanadafair.ca/

Given the sources of this data, I'm pretty sure I'm not even allowed to profit off of this. Not really a problem as I'd be doing this in my spare time anyway.

The data-visualization side of it (e.g. https://iscanadafair.ca/data-visualization/example-usage/) isn't my strong-suit, but it's fun to muck around in regardless.

vijayr• 9 years ago

I did something similar on a much smaller scale for census, bea etc (only the DB part).

Here in the US, federal gov data (census, bea, bls etc) can be used in commercial products as far as I know. Might be the same in Canada, worth looking into?

Great idea

bradbeattie2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I don't recall where I saw something that suggested fair use. https://lop.parl.ca/ImportantNotices-e.html#Copyrights doesn't speak directly to that issue, but it's probably easier to just cite my sources and not bother with the revenue side of things. It's more important to me that this data be freely and easily available than it is for me to turn any kind of meagre profit.

allengeorge• 9 years ago

This is absolutely awesome! Makes it so much easier to source data, as opposed to trying to trawl various websites, etc. etc.

dflock• 9 years ago

You should talk to these guys: https://twitter.com/CDS_GC

PizzaPete• 9 years ago

Together with an old study pal I've built a platform for students in the Netherlands to find housing: https://www.roombase.nl/

We've never made any money with it, it's only costing us money. Learning new techniques and seeing the site being used makes up for that.

vitomd• 9 years ago

I couldn´t find a good online site to discover new nonfiction books based on selected great quotes so I made http://arandomquote.com

Another project is gDriveSync.js: Javascript wrapper library for Google Drive API v3. You can list, save, read documents just using html and js https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js

Another one Sorter: https://github.com/vitogit/sorter is a webapp to organize ideas, tasks and information using bullet points and hashtags.

lawrencewu• 9 years ago

I created Juicebox, which lets you listen to youtube/soundcloud songs with other people: https://www.juicebox.dj/

I have made no money off of this. In fact, I've probably paid hundreds in hosting/domain fees. But I love what I've built so far and use it everyday with my friends. Please check it out, I'd love to hear any feedback!

kermittd• 9 years ago

This is random but I saw you on reddit, great product!

rayalez2• 9 years ago

I occasionally create digital art:

https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez

and make video tutorials about it:

https://www.youtube.com/digitalverse

Computer graphics is still by far the most fun hobby I've ever had, I absolutely love it, it's like the most engaging computer game you can imagine times 100.

There's not much profit in making art(unless you want to do it professionally), but it's an awesome way to spend my free time, and sometimes it generates some ideas I like to share on youtube.

If you want to get into it, I highly recommend checking out SideFX Houdini. It's a bit technical, but extremely powerful and well designed 3D software, kinda like emacs of CG applications.

tonetheman2• 9 years ago

beeeeeeeeee-youtiful stuff. Keep doing it!

rayalez2• 9 years ago

Thank you! =)

rsync• 9 years ago

"Oh By"

https://0x.co

I continue to believe this is a useful tool even though we've sold fewer than 100 of them ...

avh022• 9 years ago

built a slack slash command to spew out excuses (inspired bigtime by giphy) - mainly because I was unemployed and wanted to learn how the slack APIs work - https://xqz.es - I put a blog post together covering how it came to be [1] - also forced me to learn how to get Let's Encrypt certificates.

Also built a twitter stream reading android app [2] - it's butt ugly but was super useful while I lived in Beirut and there was the occasional bomb going off (at the time, that's kind of settled for now, and I no longer live there) - there was a lot i intended to do with it but just sort of... stopped.

[1] https://arahayrabedian.github.io/writing-a-slack-application...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rollingbla...

da02• 9 years ago

Where did you move to after Beirut? Anything you miss about Beirut?

avh022• 9 years ago

as cliche as this answer often is: I miss the food and drink most - never quite had anything like it since i left (e.g: bartending just doesn't seem the same on average anywhere else I've been).

so I last 'permanently' lived there in 2013, worked in Dubai for almost 3 years after that and now finishing off my MSc in the UK for the past year.

(edit: to add: I'm from there - so i go back often and get my food fix)

apankrat• 9 years ago

A networking IO abstraction library in C - https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper

Based around an idea of IO pipes with minimal semantics (duplex, reliable, ordered) that they can then extend to implement other traits like IO buffering, atomic send, packetization, compression, encryption, etc. [1]

This then allows merging together pipes of different types (by attaching the output of one to the input of another), which combines their traits and yields, for example, a reliable datagram carrier with in-flight compression.

With this it also becomes possible to write a simple IO bridge [2] that relays both data _and_ operational state between two pipes. The bridge in turn can be used to implement all sorts of interesting things, e.g. proper TCP relay, SSL tunneling proxy, TCP trunking proxy, etc.

[1] https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/i...

[2] https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/i...

makapuf• 9 years ago

I created the bitbox console, a DIY console for which I and a few others develop random games, which is starting to get some traction. The console is based on baremetal ARM cortex m micro. And then I ported a few 8bit emulators. Edit: added url http://github.com/makapuf/bitbox

tejas1mehta• 9 years ago

1. imse.co - internet movie search engine. Its google for movies. Allows for search queries like:

- johnny depp fantasy movies on netflix

- english scifi movies on netflix

- english movies about lawyers on netflix or hulu

- movies similar to the pursuit of happyness

2. activify.org - search engine for movies, shows & music.

billforsternz• 9 years ago

I've been working on my chess GUI for over seven years now http://triplehappy.com. I've made a few hundred dollars in donations, but maybe 10 cents an hour is not why you work on something like this, it has to be a labour of love. I do wonder if I am going to be working on this for the rest of my life, there's always more to do....

uncled1023• 9 years ago

I make a bunch of different little services for others to use. Started for just friends, but has grown a bit.

I use it a lot to test out new ideas, and learn from it.

https://www.teknik.io/

Also, I work on a lot of little projects: https://git.teknik.io/Uncled1023

khedoros1• 9 years ago

That's...everything that I program that isn't part of my job. A near-universal trait of my hobby projects is that they're basically things that I don't think I could sell. The two that I've put the most time into over the years are an NES emulator and an attempted reimplementation of the Ultima Underworld game engine.

There are also things like a C++ port of some Python code to control a PWM-generating chip (inside the skeletal codebase that will eventually control a quadrupedal robot), and a collection of utilities that mostly have to do with things related to DOS-era games.

Willfire19• 9 years ago

I've spent about a year building out AmaranTime (http://store.steampowered.com/app/566800/AmaranTime/), mostly working on movement mechanics. I actually just made a breakthrough, so soon players will be able to run in place to move without having to press and hold a button. While it is for sale, I haven't made much money. Besides, I do this for fun!

cknight• 9 years ago

I built https://suitocracy.com very slowly over the last few years. It is for collating information on the ethical conduct of large corporations, as well as rating and ranking them on various criteria.

It'll never make money, but it has been a good project for me to modernise my web development skills which had gone rusty over the preceding decade. I also took the opportunity to learn NGINX and a few other things that I hadn't really been exposed to beforehand.

TimJRobinson• 9 years ago

Nice work! I've always wanted something like this but as a browser extension for Amazon. On each product it would insert a box that shows how ethical the company behind this product is. Could also show things like how sustainably it was made and if it wad made in a sweatshop etc.

raybb• 9 years ago

I built a tool to schedule Gmail messages to be sent later but without any 3rd party, messy spreadsheets, or self hosting.

I just did it for fun and because I wanted a tool like it.

https://github.com/RayBB/easy-gmail-scheduler/

jimhefferon• 9 years ago

I write math texts that are Free. It is my creative outlet. My Linear Algebra (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra) has gotten some traction (and I get a small amount of money from Amazon). I also have an Introduction to Proofs: an Inquiry-Based Approach (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs) that I find helps my students, but is in quite a niche area. And I'm working on a Theory of Computation.

If I didn't have some creative work I would be much less happy.

ciro_langone• 9 years ago

This is awesome! You should keep up with this - maybe develop a curriculum and host it all in one place one day?

cthulhu0• 9 years ago

I'm sure I read your linear algebra book in my undergrad to help me get a grasp on it. I probably still have it on my computer. Thanks for all your work.

Buttons840• 9 years ago

Didn't expect to see you on HN. I also read your book for self study (not for a class) and really appreciated all the exercises with solutions. Thank you.

grecy• 9 years ago

I created, run and maintain http://wikioverland.org, the community encyclopedia of overland travel

It's a wiki of all the info you need to drive your own vehicle around a country, continent or the world.

Border crossings, paperwork, insurance, gas prices, camping, drinking water, safety... it's all in there for a massive number of countries in the world.

I'm driving around myself, and it occured to me there is so much info out there but it all slides off the front pages of blogs and forums or is buried in facebook posts. Every three months people re-write and re-post the same stuff because they couldn't find it in the first place. The idea is not for WikiOverland to contain all the info, but at least link directly to it.

jjjensen90• 9 years ago

I run/develop/manage a private MMOARPG game server for a dead game called Hellgate: London that we call London 2038. You can see more about it here http://london2038.com

Not only do I not make money on the project, it actually costs me money! :)

I have seemingly undying motivation to work on it, knock out bugs, release patches, catch cheaters, etc. The community being so active and excited helps keep me going. I probably spend 30-40 hours of week on the project.

Edit: grammar

abledon• 9 years ago

That was an awesome game! Great work maintaining this

jqbx_jason2• 9 years ago

Makes no money but it does helps me discover new music and I really enjoy the community :)

Also the development challenges are super fun (real time chat, multi platform, AI).

https://www.jqbx.fm

Come join the fun!

jqbx_jason2• 9 years ago

Sorry- should also point out: It's a platform that lets you listen to music in sync with others through Spotify (like tt.fm). You can be a DJ, vote on the track, or star it for later. Has been super useful for music discovery and making internet friends.

m52go4• 9 years ago

100 Million Books -- mission is to promote intellectual diversity.

It's a Chrome extension/homepage that shows you a new book every time you open a new tab, plus a special hand-picked idea that teaches you a new perspective/fact/concept.

I'm evaluating a couple different paths to make it profitable, but it's not currently making anything since Amazon cut me off its affiliate program.

http://www.100millionbooks.org

imsd2• 9 years ago

Would you be open to sharing why this was cut from Amazon's affiliate program? Seems to be a pretty cool tool that they would want placement on.

m52go4• 9 years ago

Sure, straight from their email:

- Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors

- Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed

Now does any of that really matter, if the service is moving books? No. But there's no appeal process, and no one to discuss this with.

So I'm not glad it happened, but I'm glad it happened early. I've always been hesitant about affiliate programs because of the lack of control (e.g., I didn't launch with it; only integrated it after many users said they wanted it so I could devote more time to it), and now that my concerns have been verified, I know I need to be more creative.

sketchthat• 9 years ago

I use this, it's really cool. Thanks!

m52go4• 9 years ago

Thank YOU for using it :)

pedrokost• 9 years ago

I have been making https://www.klubi.si/ sporadically over the past many months (it was meant to be a weekend project, but it never ends there...). It's a map of sports clubs in my country.

The idea is to help people find klubs nearby, as well as provide a basic internet presence to those klubs whore founders don't have the time or knowledge to create and maintain a website, or even a Facebook page.

The website works by volunteer revision of data, as well as twice a year email reminders to founders to review the data. This helps ensure that the data is the most up to date as possible.

Unfortunately, not all klubs even have a public working email address, so thinking of it, I could probably do something about as well.

pesfandiar• 9 years ago

JavaScript Online: http://javascript.onl

A few JavaScript problems that you can solve and grade online (it's a static website). I haven't done any work on it recently. Added a few Amazon affiliate links originally, but they didn't make any money and Amazon has closed that account now.

heyok• 9 years ago

http://heyokapp.co It was fun to code and it makes organizing with friends a breeze

Here's the facebook page - facebook.com/heyokapp About video - https://www.facebook.com/heyokapp/videos/460327694335849

ebbflowgo• 9 years ago

Oh, what? This is great

dchuk• 9 years ago

Only launched recently, and the prospects of it making money one day are slim: https://engineered.at

Still fun to keep up to date with Rails with, and to just code in general (as a product manager now, don't get to code much).

tomcam• 9 years ago

Hope I don't get flagged or anything. I am astounded by the generosity of the amazing people on this page and have been upvoting like a madman. I probably look like a bot at this point

superasn3• 9 years ago

Yes people here are just awesome. When i made this thread i never expected so many responses. It's a huge motivation for me to see how so many people are doing so many awesome things just for the joy of doing it.

andywood• 9 years ago

https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/gaia-eternal

It's a big procedural crafting game. The long-term goal is to make a Civilization-like game set in a Minecraft-like world, with really good AI. It's also a testbed for a bunch of ideas I've developed about massive, virtualized simulation. What that means is that you could in principle have thousands of cities with millions of individual inhabitants going about their business. But it's sort of analogous to lazy evaluation in that things are only computed if they would be perceived by the player, or need to be consistent with past information the player already knows.

CiPHPerCoder• 9 years ago

Virtually everything in the paragonie namespace on Packagist generates zero revenue, but we built and maintain them because we want to make the PHP ecosystem more secure by default.

https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie

ioddly• 9 years ago

I wrote and use meditations ( https://github.com/ioddly/meditations ) to help me organize my day using the principles of habit formation. It's been pretty immensely helpful to me. Funnily enough although I never thought of monetizing it, assuming there wouldn't be much interest, there are several similar apps that seem to be pretty popular and doing well. I keep working on my own because it's a good learning exercise and I can keep my data encrypted, locally.

expertentipp• 9 years ago

Dead simple personal website in Python and plain JavaScript with contact form, URL shortener, private bookmarks, etc. It's my own territory and I do what I want! fuck unit tests, fuck linters, fuck commit messages length limit, fuck your newest web framework, fuck transpilers, fuck pull requests.

mslate• 9 years ago

A video podcast of guests sharing their career advice for folks coming into software engineering from unconventional backgrounds:

http://theaccidentalengineer.com/

It's an absolute joy, I am making $0 at this point in time.

kryptogeist• 9 years ago

I made an app to help me study guitar scales: https://www.coolfretboard.com/

Basically it's a guitar/bass fretboard where you can select a scale and a root note, then it displays the notes of that scale on the fretboard. It also has a bit of info about the scale, like the intervals used to build it.

Initially I didn't plan to publish it, but since it was barely decent I tried to put it online. I just spent a few bucks to buy the domain, but it don't cost me anything to keep it online, since it's just a static page and I use Netlify to host it. Btw, Netlify is awesome! Highly recommended!

pottersbasilisk• 9 years ago

Im working on a small project to have ai learn to paint scenes based feeding in styles and objects that I personally classified.

Its been very interesting and almost parental joy to see when the right logical connections are made and the art looks good.

nitramm• 9 years ago

I was surprised how many different types of prime numbers exist. So I am building - https://prime-numbers.info - to find out which one belongs to most of them. Current winner is 5 - https://prime-numbers.info/number/5 - but still lot of types is missing.

StefanKovachev2• 9 years ago

I'm inlove with primes... Great work!!

reagent• 9 years ago

I built this dead-simple "image enhancing" app (http://en.hance.me) to focus in on potentially embarrassing details in photos. It allows you to specify a zoom area and create a 4-panel stacked image that progressively "zooms in" on your target area.

joshschreuder• 9 years ago

Seems like something you could possibly make money off with ads given it's a pretty popular meme

sir• 9 years ago

Com-Phone: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ac.robinson.med...

An Android app for putting photos/text/sounds together into videos, with the key aim being to have an interface that is as simple as possible. Started as part of a research project many years ago, but now mainly a labour of love for the ~30k users.

chubot3• 9 years ago

I'm building a new Unix shell called Oil: http://www.oilshell.org/

It's definitely not making me any money. I would say the motivation is a little bit "joy" / learning, but also frustration that shells are so old, unintuitive, and work so poorly.

I've been going for about 16 months and it's still fun, so that's good. I think that seeing progress is what make things fun.

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

I agree that shells need a great overhaul. But how it should look and how the path towards the "better shell" can realistically happen I have no clue.

I applaud your courage!

chubot3• 9 years ago

Thanks! I have a very clear idea, but it's a huge amount of work. I think it's going to get there though :)

One thing that blows up the amount of work is the "realistically happen" part... For it to happen, it needs to be compatible, and compatibility is hard (or at least tedious).

Qwertious4• 9 years ago

I'm starting to wonder how the hell anyone decided shellscripts were a good idea.

chubot3• 9 years ago

I think it started the same way batch files did -- although of course shell came earlier. "Hey let me put the stuff I type in a text file":

    mkdir foo
    cp myfile foo/
    ls foo

"Then I don't have to type it over and over". The "interpreter" was probably a 20 line function inside the interactive shell, or maybe just a single if statement to redirect stdin from a file and not a terminal.

That started sometime in the early 1970's. Along the way, people added loops, conditionals, functions, various hacky expression languages (test/[, find), many external utilities like sed/grep, full-fledged languages like awk/make, etc.

And today we have on perhaps 50 million+ machines an unbroken chain from 45+ years ago.

It's kind of amazing... If you can somehow score languages by how old they are plus how widely used they are, shell is probably #2 behind C.

C has had a ton of effort that has gone into cleaning it up, deciding upon semantics, standardizing it, evolving it. Shell has had POSIX, which was like 30 years ago, and that's about it.

In summary, nobody "decided" -- it's an amazing and horrible instance of evolution :)

acabal• 9 years ago

I'm working on Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org) in my spare time. Not only is it not-for-profit but the work is released under CC0 too, where applicable.

We got on HN a month or two ago--people really seemed to like the project and we got a lot of great new contributors. If anyone else is interested in contributing, drop me a line :)

rmb81• 9 years ago

I built an interpreter for the pseudocode language my uni uses to introduce programming. It´s in Spanish, you can give it a try here:

https://pl-lang.github.io/playground/

There´s an example program here:

https://github.com/pl-lang/jsplint

My goal is to help students who might be struggling with the assignments.

dumbfounder2• 9 years ago

Twicsy (Twitter picture search) still gets around 1.5 million visitors per month, but nets no money. But I wouldn't call it sheer joy though, maybe sheer stubbornness?

http://twicsy.com

Insanity5• 9 years ago

Looks cool though! ;-) What are the costs associated with that if you don't mind me asking?

dumbfounder2• 9 years ago

Servers are about $1200 per month. (I have about 12tb of SSD on 5 servers). Then there are some misc costs (business costs) that are maybe $200/month.

bherms• 9 years ago

Working on a project for connecting fans of the band Phish and allowing them to share and curate their stories... Paying out of pocket for minimal hosting costs, donation buttons all go to Mockingbird Foundation... Hoping to launch in the next month or so. Doing it because I am a huge fan of the band and the community and it's a huge part of my life I'd like to give back to.

snickerbockers3• 9 years ago

For almost a year, I've been writing a SEGA Dreamcast emulator called WashingtonDC. It's slow and it doesn't play any games yet, but it can boot the firmware menu and display the animated "spiral swirl" logo. https://github.com/washingtondc-emu/washingtondc

kevinschumacher• 9 years ago

How'd you name that?

snickerbockers3• 9 years ago

DC is the acronym fans usually use to refer to the Dreamcast.

futhey2• 9 years ago

Great name.

yangyang• 9 years ago

Porting an ancient 6502 Forth to Z80. Nobody will ever use it and there are already loads of Z80 Forths around, but it's fun and forces me to learn exactly how a language that's always interested me works. Not on Github yet.

msquitieri2• 9 years ago

I created a site as a poetry project that generates random poems from sentences in Craigslist Missed Connections. Some of the poems are actually really poignant and funny.

https://craigslistpoetry.com

https://twitter.com/craigslistpoems

tortoise_face• 9 years ago

I. Love. This. It's genuine emotional revelations mixed with mundanity mixed with outrageous sexual deviancy.

msquitieri2• 9 years ago

Haha thanks!!

CM302• 9 years ago

Wario Forums and absolutely anything else associated with it:

https://warioforums.com

Yeah, I know it's not particularly fancy, nor does it involve any clever coding tricks or interesting features. However, it's literally the only community on the internet dedicated to the series, and one I've decided to run for a minimum of two decades to make sure said franchise finally builds a decent fanbase.

Is it going to make money?

Probably not, given how the franchise it's based on sells about 2 million copies worldwide at most, and hasn't gotten a new game since either 2013 (WarioWare) or 2008 (Wario Land).

But it's one with a passionate audience that up until recently had nowhere online to discuss the series nor anywhere specifically dedicated to their favourite franchise. So I decided to change that by setting up and promoting a community based on it, with the guarantee I'd keep it open for decades in the hope that eventually a community at least the size of the Earthbound one comes about here. With the hope that eventually I won't need to run the forum because there'll be enough sites about it to sustain a decent fandom.

sgspace• 9 years ago

This is awesome I love Nintendo thank you!

iwebdevfromhome2• 9 years ago

Awesome! But looks like it's down now :(

CM302• 9 years ago

Seems my hosting is having problems at the moment. I host Gaming Reinvented (https://gamingreinvented.com) on the same server, and that's been going down a fair bit today as well.

Which is weird, given how even after being linked from the home page of Eurogamer, Destructoid, Nintendo Life and various others all the same time, it didn't move an inch.

Huh, guess LiquidWeb must be having a bad day or something.

Sorry about that!

jonmb• 9 years ago

That's cool. I can admire a dedicated Nintendo fan site. I ran Mario-Kart.net for a decade. In its most popular days it was #1 on Google for "mario kart". I let the domain expire recently since the site was outdated and I don't play anymore but it was a good long run. We had a dedicated forum base for a while too.

gwintrob• 9 years ago

I run a newsletter all about APIs called GET PUT POST (https://tinyletter.com/getputpost).

Each edition features a Q&A with a company about their API and killer app ideas for developers. Here's a recent example with a YC S16 company called Nova: https://getputpost.co/an-api-that-unlocks-global-credit-data...

A few people have reached out about sponsoring it, but just for fun right now :)

cbeach• 9 years ago

http://www.caption.me

I built it 12 years ago and have fostered a small but hugely loyal community of caption writers ever since.

Automatically loads three funny photos every day from a Flickr group, and is an ongoing caption competition.

For fun I wrote a real-time collaborative mind mapping feature (node.js / D3) so people could brainstorm caption ideas for upcoming photos.

kovrik2• 9 years ago

I'm writing R5RS Scheme _interpreter_ implementation in Kotlin (previously in Java): https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin/

It is a hybrid of R5RS Scheme + some things from Kawa, Racket and Clojure. It doesn't have a proper name and documentation yet.

I'm writing it as a hobby sandbox project, for learning purposes and fun. Trying to keep it simple and easy to understand (some things are not perfect though).

Features:

- full numerical tower

- lists, vectors, maps, sets, arrays

- symbols, keywords, strings (mutable/immutable), patterns (regexes), chars

- one-shot upward continuations

- Java interop

- futures, promises, delays, boxes (atoms)

Not implemented yet:

- macros

- persistent data structures

- compiler

- bugfixes :)

PS: it is a pleasure to write it in Kotlin. Great language!

kristianp2• 9 years ago

Cool. You probably already know this, but note that R7RS-small [1] is the most recent small scheme (the spec is not too much larger that r5rs). There are enough similarities that it might be worth supporting it.

[1] http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/R7RSHomePage

kovrik2• 9 years ago

Honestly, didn't know that! Looks great, thank you very much! I will check it out!

jetti• 9 years ago

All of my Elixir open source projects:

  * Plsm - https://github.com/jhartwell/Plsm - which is an Ecto model generator based on existing schemas

  * Taex - https://github.com/jhartwell/Taex - A technical Analysis library for Elixir.

I'm also in the process of writing a GDAX (https://gdax.com) Elixir library but won't open source that until it is more complete. I'm using that and Taex in a cryptocurrency algo trading platform I'm developing.

moasda• 9 years ago

I made a wiki engine: http://moasdawiki.net/

I started working on it during my PhD as I was missing a wiki engine to organize my knowledge that run on a USB stick without installation, supports images and stores the content in simple text files for easy backup and restore.

Now I am using it every day in office for my personal notes on projects, running inside a TrueCrypt container. Meanwhile I added an Android App to sync the content on my mobile phone.

showhndaily• 9 years ago

https://twitter.com/showhndaily

Created a simple Twitter bot back in 2013 that auto-tweets every post marked "Show HN". Updated to HN API (Firebase) in 2014 or 2015.

Small claim to fame: Had a daily email newsletter for the first year or so. Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt) was on my initial subscriber list, before PH launched. Now if only I had just pivoted to feature new wow-ness for the world PH-style, hmmmm ...

weddpros3• 9 years ago

I built https://sslping.com/ to help monitor website TLS/SSL security and certificates. It has 300 users and checks almost 7000 servers every day for TLS problems.

It's a little like SSLlabs server test, only much faster (5 seconds instead of 2 minutes), plus the tests are recurring every day, and you receive the diff if any.

It's always been a joy to receive thank you emails from users, or adding new features for users.

SSLping also allowed me to learn React and Redux. I'm still working on it, adding new features and refactoring what I don't like.

If I ever have to stop hosting it, I'll open source the whole thing. Or maybe I'll open source it anyway. If I could find a deal with a security company, I would work on it fulltime.

I consider it's a success, even if the numbers are not as high as I'd like.

andruby• 9 years ago

Thank you for this! I have a post-it note for sideproject ideas and wanted to build exact system. I'm glad you already built it :) Also glad I found out about it before building it myself.

weddpros3• 9 years ago

It's good to hear! Feel free to use it and tell me if you have any suggestions, or anything really

exikyut5• 9 years ago

FWIW, the site design is really nice. I like the brown, and the use of all-caps for the site name.

And of course 5 seconds is how fast it should be :P

EDIT: Wondered what constructive criticism I could add, in case it was useful.

I guess the one thing I'm thinking of that isn't there is a cert tree breakdown, showing the cert structure in an easy-to-read format (which can be done xD), showing the trust root used, etc etc. I'm also reminded of all the little incidents that have happened with different SSL providers, and wonder whether people would appreciate seeing "you're using XYZ cert provider, here are controversial things about them". A feature like this would require careful presentation to work at scale though. Now I understand why you took the "go/no-go" super-simple route!

I also discovered (after noticing the fun URL query approach you use when you type in a domain) that disabling JS results in a white screen. That's common nowadays, so no comment.

Danilka2• 9 years ago

I love it, way to go! You should submit it as a "Show HN" 1. You should charge for it. Maybe after a month of monitoring or something. 2. Give more actionable responses. Maybe some links or directions on how to fix the issues. 3. Can you make any money on affiliate links to paid certificates? If not, direct people to Letsencrypt when their cert expires.

weddpros3• 9 years ago

Thanks! I did submit a Show HN, but I only got 1 or 2 upvotes and a few visitors... Go figure, this comment had more success!

As for charging or monetizing one way or another, I'm still thinking of the best way. It's not easy when you already have 300 free users.

And I've already considered giving more actionable advice, it's in the backlog already!

But thanks for your comments!

eejdoowad• 9 years ago

I've been building a keybinding Chrome extension like Vimium for about half a year now. It started when I struggled to add a feature to Vimium and figured I could do it better myself.

From my biased perspective, my extension is better. User uptake has been negligible, but I think the lessons I've learned have made it worth the time invested.

https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key

enoch_r• 9 years ago

https://agh.io/about / TicTag is a passive time tracking tool that randomly samples your time to get a statistically accurate picture of your life. It's like RescueTime except that randomness allows it to be for everything, offline and on.

For example, this is how much time I spend reading:

https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-1...

This is how much time I spend riding my bike:

https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-1...

(How it works: every 45 minutes, on average, it'll send you a slack message. You respond with tags for what you were doing right at that moment, like "job dev" or "bike" and it compiles your responses.)

lcall• 9 years ago

I created this system which I've mentioned before (AGPL):

http://onemodel.org

...because it tracks all my thoughts, plans, & resulting to-dos, and I mark them off when done ("archived") in a few keystrokes. Then there is a simple feature for displaying the ~"journal" for a date range which defaults to starting yesterday at midnight: everything created or archived in that time is shown, so I've basically stopped keeping track in any other way, of what I have done, as I can always look it up.

I used to use org-mode, "inspiration" (an old windows program for collapsible outlines and mind maps), and various text editors, but this is the most efficient and flexible I have found. In my use, it is like a textual, ever-expanding comprehensive mind map that is highly efficient to use from the keyboard, uses postgresql, and can handle large amounts of data, having the same thing linked in more than one place, etc etc, so you can organize all possible stuff in arbitrary ways to suit yourself: I tend to use a few hierarchies and some frequent categories go in multiple places, for convenience. I use it to keep lists of gift ideas, calendar, personal journal, and it just gets the job done with the lowest impedance of anything i have tried or heard of. It has an auto "journal-generation" feature, some finicky import/export features to html or to/from text, searching, somewhat limited file storage, and more.

It has no mouse or mobile support yet, but it is the best thing I've found for any kind of note-taking (I'm the author). It needs simpler installation and added features but is stable and works really well, really efficient once you get familiar, and everything is on the screen. I hope to add anki-like features in the future. Contributions welcome. I'm told it needs an introductory screencast, which I plan to put up eventually, but for now there is a tutorial at the web site, on which feedback is welcome.

The latest code is in github, where I am working (very slowly) on an infrastructure for linking or exchanging info between instances.

hoppyluke• 9 years ago

I made some Android games a few years back https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=hoppyluke

There's one I still play every now and again, fairly sure I'm my most active user.

evantahler• 9 years ago

actionherojs.com

I've spent far more than I've made on this... but it's how I think API frameworks should work!

jesses• 9 years ago

https://gigalixir.com After falling in love with Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, etc I built this to help increase Elixir adoption by solving the biggest pain point I saw: deploying.

samcodes• 9 years ago

This is great! I've looked for exactly this in the past.

StefanKovachev2• 9 years ago

https://inwhy.net Means "Inside the question 'why?'" still working on my idea...

rock_hard• 9 years ago

I am running a Burning Man camp with 200 people on the side.

We have developed our own modular solar electric grid...that powers the whole camp...trying to prototype carbon neutral living...it's a lot of work...and a lot of fun :)

purescript• 9 years ago

I work on the PureScript (http://purescript.org) compiler, tools, libraries and book in my spare time (along with many other unpaid contributors), because it's the programming language I wished had existed when I started creating it. It's still the closest thing to a perfect environment for web development, at least as far as I'm concerned :)

ves• 9 years ago

Thank you for all your work!

christophilus2• 9 years ago

PureScript is amazing! Thank you for making it.

mikekchar• 9 years ago

Another big thank you from me. I used PureScript to learn functional programming. For me, being able to read the resultant Javascript made a big difference.

Also, I have to say that your code is lovely (both the PureScript code and the Javascript). Every time I think, "I wonder how this works/should work" I take a quick glance and within a few minutes I have my answer. I will start reading the compiler code when I get some time.

jtruk2• 9 years ago

130 Story - a daily microfiction challenge.

https://www.130story.com/

I started this as a Twitter game a few years ago; it felt like a compact idea with a good hook. Earlier this year I automated it- so it picks its own words and collates the stories on the website itself (mostly successfully).

It doesn't have a big following, but the people who play are passionate about it. Some people play every day, and the most prolific author has written ~650 of them.

I've seen people get better as writers, some experimental stuff (like an improvised longform story built over many daily prompts), and occasionally I see a microstory that knocks it out the park. That makes it worthwhile.

cdelsolar2• 9 years ago

This is really cool. Some awesome little stories in there. I'm sure you're aware of "The Red Wheelbarrow" - such imagery in fewer than 100 characters.

jtruk2• 9 years ago

Thanks! I've had a few people trying to submit the classic six word story over the years.

biztos3• 9 years ago

Great idea! I just contributed one. :-)

open_bear• 9 years ago

Nice idea! This reminded me of 750words.com. I tried it for a while, but writing 750 words every day was too much. I think 130 characters will better suit my ability to write.

brian-armstrong• 9 years ago

I've been working to fill what I see as a gap in free software. My library encodes data into sound and works cross-platform. As far as I can tell it may be the most robust, cross-platform freely licensed library that does this, though there is still much I need to improve on

https://github.com/quiet

kaundur• 9 years ago

I built Cmdo, a command line todo list written in python. Still in its early stages, but it’s been fun to create

https://github.com/Kaundur/cmdo

jonotime• 9 years ago

https://github.com/jonocodes/envoy

Docker Envoy

Encapsulates a kind of different Docker workflow. One where your Dockerfiles live in a separate area from your project. Includes a bunch of bash helper functions for common things the containers need to do like wait for other services.

It also provides a little Dockerized testing system using pytest - which I might eventually separate out. I am working more on the testing part these days. And I'm writing a book about some of this.

adnanh• 9 years ago

https://github.com/adnanh/webhook

Incoming webhook server

krisives• 9 years ago

hashes.download a Bitcoin Cash API one of the first

edumucelli• 9 years ago

http://eazy.bike/ - Always find a bicycle or empty slots on bikesharing systems

Eazy.bike picks best bicycle stations considering real-time information of how many bicycles and free bicycle stands are available in more than 400 cities in 48 countries. Behind it uses machine-learning to predict what will be the availability of empty slots so that you can maximize the probability to find a place to park your bicycle.

It took me a huge work to write the whole stuff, API, Android, iPhone and web application, but I really like it.

lecarore• 9 years ago

I built a super lightweight web app to draw on images. It targets mainly cheap android phones that don't have storage for a proper app. It's called https://minimage.tk, and I use it all the time to annotate screenshots now. It was a nice pet project to build a progressive web app in full vanilla.

gbl08ma• 9 years ago

I have a bit of a obsession with the Lisbon Metro, even though I don't use it very often. I started by building this:

https://github.com/gbl08ma/disturbancesmlx

This started as more of a statistics page for the service interruptions published by the Metro on their website, which I scrape. The slight tongue-in-cheekiness of my website, which opens up with a large text saying something like "XX days since the last disturbance", where XX is usually a single-digit number, made it become mildly popular (at least in terms of what I'm used to).

This particular subway system doesn't operate on a fixed schedule and doesn't show the ETA for the next train outside of the platforms nor on any app or website. (Google thinks there's a schedule, but they've been fooled.) They also don't publish usage stats for each station, which would be of great interest to everyone who likes daydreaming of expansions, network reorganization and the like. Furthermore, I read and heard multiple reports of delays and interruptions that never made their way to the website. So I decided to build a Android app to unobtrusively crowd-source data and communicate the service status back to the users...

https://github.com/gbl08ma/underlx

...and the very ambitious goal is to, one day, be able to calculate train positions and ETAs based on real-time data reported by the smartphones of people riding the subway. Pretty much "Waze for the Lisbon Metro".

Yeah, I've put months of work into this and there's absolutely no business plan; it perpetually feels 5% complete. But it's been fun putting together my second Android app, playing around with Postgres (after many years using MySQL), designing the REST API and writing the server in Go. I plan to use this big project as my sandbox for experimenting with machine learning and other AI techniques, as well as data analytics and visualization. There's already a small but extremely interested group of users, which really motivates me to keep working on this.

thexa4• 9 years ago

I work on Empires Mod, a 10 year old real time strategy and first person shooter hybrid. It's playable for free and still has an active playerbase. It's very satisfying to fix bugs that have been around for more than 5 years.

We're currently looking for someone that can do UX design, if you're interested in making an impact on a live game send me a message.

https://empiresmod.com

FigBug• 9 years ago

http://socalabs.com/

I just started a few days ago, I'm making VST plugins that emulate sound chips from old consoles / computers. (There is also a weird vocal synth in there). Currently working on a C64, hope to have it done tonight.

salutis• 9 years ago

I work on a simple 4-7-8 breathing relaxation app for iOS:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/essence/id768594011

Great for practicing and exploring — architecture, value types, test-driven development, etc.

pboutros• 9 years ago

I've been doing this for years - it's my favorite.

www.cheeseand.beer

netsec_burn• 9 years ago

Making a robot. It's fun, I look forward to making it every day and log my progress. So far it has depth perception and I have a goal in mind for it. It's an expensive side project though, I underestimated the price but you learn a lot about electronics in the process.

jrm2k63• 9 years ago

I started working on iparklikeadumbass.com. The idea is for me to upload pictures of people parking like idiots, blur the license plate and just have it out there. I know I wont make any money of it but it is a good way of preventing road/parking raging.

brett40324• 9 years ago

You get my vote for most humorous! I'll be checking that url again one day, and hopefully there's dumbass parking photos up.

jrm2k63• 9 years ago

Will probably create a Show HN thread as it would definitely be a hit.

pablo983• 9 years ago

Unable to reach it

jrm2k63• 9 years ago

Yeah I just bought the domain name a while ago impulsively, still working on it. :D

jventura• 9 years ago

I built MockREST - http://mockrest.com/ - to create REST APIs from JSON content.

I've only spent 9€ to buy the domain as the application (django application) is on a shared server. I'm making 0 €$ from it, as it was made to solve a problem that I had while teaching mobile development where I teach.

foxhop• 9 years ago

http://botoform.com | Architect infrastructure on AWS using YAML

arthurjj• 9 years ago

I wrote a children's picture book "The ABCs of Programming" to explain what I do to my toddler. Previously I was telling him "Daddy talks to robots". Hasn't made much money yet, but I launched only this week.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074FVWDYJ/

ztravis2• 9 years ago

http://www.arabicreference.com

I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research".

It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on:

- fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs

- cleaning up the UI/display

- moving onto a "real" server framework

- writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data

- making an API?

Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!

abusaidm2• 9 years ago

hi, great project.

any idea if you plan to release the code or article of how you built the similar matching?

Thanks

ztravis2• 9 years ago

Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much of it would be of general interest).

mattbgates• 9 years ago

I built https://mypost.io which I technically did as a learning opportunity and was planning on charging, but I'm keeping it free. I built it to teach others how to code.. using HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with hints of BB Code.

It is being used around the world.. never advertised it ever, except for the few times I posted on here and twitter.

RomanPushkin• 9 years ago

http://libretaxi.org libre uber alternative, lot of fun, users, traction, no money

donohoe• 9 years ago

https://article.rocks

This is my swipable curated news feed. I only tested it on my iPhone 6, bookmarked to Homescreen. Outside of that your experience might vary.

I've been redoing it every few months for the past 3 or 4 years. At one point it included summation text and opened inline AMP links for articles that had them.

It's an automated curation of content I like and includes some basic sentiment analysis and popularity metrics.

The content is interspersed with a custom ad template just for fun. When there is enough content it includes mediative looping gifs/video.

It scrapes content, rewrites headlines, throws images through random filters to good/bad/artful effect.

This is my entire morning subway commute.

(Feedback always welcome)

iwebdevfromhome2• 9 years ago

SuperMovies Rank: https://movies.teslark.pw

Just posted this a couple of days before! Not much notice but still it was worth a try.

It's a tool to help people create their list of favorite superhero movies and share them with everyone.

It was a fun way to get myself more familiar with React

gadgetoid• 9 years ago

https://pinout.xyz

A somewhat interactive GPIO pinout for the Raspberry Pi.

Not so much out of sheer joy, but because I needed it.

It started as a basic way to explore each pin and its available alt-functions.

Listings of add-on board pinouts were added later for people who want to use multiple boards- or perhaps connect them to a different host.

ryandrake• 9 years ago

Cool, I've used that site, nice reference.

kruffin• 9 years ago

Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site. I used it when trying to figure out how to hook up an RFID reader to the Pi. It was suprisingly hard to find the pinout, but finally found your site. This is what I put together: https://bitbucket.org/kruffin/rfid_play

LongTermBond007• 9 years ago

This site is a great reference, thanks for all your work!

stryk• 9 years ago

Oh, wow! I used this website as a reference fairly heavily when getting started with RPis, and still use it quite often (the WiringPi diagram in particular came in handy many, many times as there a whole lot of pins to it)

spondyl2• 9 years ago

I'm building a wiki for a little known South Korean mobile game I enjoy and it's fun both learning how to manage and build a Mediawiki install.

It's also a great excuse to suck up all the lore and properly analyse character conversations and what not!

Now I just gotta see if I can get some official looking art renders authorised for release from the devs since a press kit was never released

viiralvx• 9 years ago

socialmuter.com, pageunliker.com, fade.pics. All are pure JS, haven't modified them, they work fine.

the_cat_kittles• 9 years ago

serious, measured tone "all of these projects are of no benefit or value to anyone, otherwise they would be earning money."

epx• 9 years ago

Morse code player: https://epxx.co/morse

Koch method to learn Morse: https://epxx.co/morse/koch.html

audiometry• 9 years ago

nice. I tried to use another (pay) site's koch method, but the website worked terribly. The "tech support" was awful, so I abandoned the effort.

wolfpld• 9 years ago

https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/etcpak/wiki/Home - A very fast ETC texture compressor. Being 80x-500x faster than every other compression utility (with not that much quality difference) was quite fun.

https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/usenetarchive - A set of tools to process and view large collections of usenet/mailing list messages. For example, an archive of polish usenet is 56+ million messages.

rahulshiv• 9 years ago

http://www.notematics.com - AI Note-taking assistant for sales calls. Learning AI & building this has resulted in a lot of fun & personal growth!

lchsk• 9 years ago

https://github.com/lchsk/xstarter

Never planned to make any money out of it, I've made it because I needed it, and to play around with building a unix tool in C. It's pretty simple but it's definitely one of the projects I've had the most fun working on and I still have plenty of things I want to add.

domainkiller• 9 years ago

Nomie! https://nomie.io The easiest way to track any aspect of your life.

boundlessdreamz• 9 years ago

Thank you for nomie! This was the only app on Android which ticked all my requirements

dgavey• 9 years ago

This is really impressive. Too good to be free in my opinion.

megamindbrian3• 9 years ago

How does this work?

TazeTSchnitzel• 9 years ago

http://pictoswap.ajf.me/

It's a note-drawing messaging single-page web app for the Nintendo 3DS, in homage to the long-since defunct SpotPass (i.e. Internet) functionality of Nintendo Swapnote/Letter Box.

(Also, every open-source contribution of mine ever.)

happybuy• 9 years ago

I'm about to release Magic Lasso – a free ad blocker for the iPhone, iPad and macOS simply because I think advertising on the web has gone too far.

http://magiclasso.co/

Won't make money but hopefully will help make the web better.

MikeTheGreat2• 9 years ago

https://github.com/MikeTheGreat/GLT

I wrote "GLT", which stood for 'GitLab Tool'. It was going to enable me to manage a classroom's worth of git repos, 1 per student per homework assignment.

I chose GitLab because you can set up your own server, and then lock down stuff so it's harder for students to copy homework within the system (obviously they can still copy it offline).

Then I got busy with other stuff.

Then I found out about GitHub Classroom, which is the same thing just hosted by GitHub. I haven't retooled it to work with GitHub, but I'm hoping it's not too tough.

(I started off idly wondering whether to pronounce it "Guilt", like "Why haven't you done more of your grading?" or "gelt", like the candy.)

kyletns• 9 years ago

https://www.groupmuse.com now envelopes my entire life :) We have starting making a bit of money, finally, but not much and it sure ain't why we've been at it for 5 years!

sbuccini• 9 years ago

I love Groupmuse! Great idea, and execution. If you're in the Bay Area I'd love to buy you a coffee/beer!

qwerty2020• 9 years ago

https://www.mescale.co

Simple online weight logging app with pretty charts, first web app I've actually pushed out into the public. It doesn't make a dime, but I love tweaking it and seeing the user number slowly climb.

kaivi2• 9 years ago

I'm hoarding profile data diffs from a well known social network. Been crawling every single user for the past 2 years and saving the changes. Had to stop doing it last month, after storage costs became too much.

SIRHAMY• 9 years ago

Woah, do you have an end goal with this. Willing to let people get their hands on it?

kaivi2• 9 years ago

I'd like to set it up as a subscription service like Domaintools. I'm also crawling and storing user's comments, friends, posts and links to media published in other groups.

It will make a great tool for profiling a person, but I'm not sure on how (il)legal it will be.

j_s4• 9 years ago

Can you share any of the techniques you use to avoid being blocked for scraping?

Interesting to hear that storage was too expensive. I'm sure you could find personal sponsors here who would help with funding in exchange for access to the data - even with a 'no commercial use' type of restriction!

dunstad• 9 years ago

A program that allows you to control robots in Minecraft from a web browser: https://github.com/dunstad/roboserver

bpchaps• 9 years ago

Super cool!

I wrote something that converts png files to OpenComputer 3dprint .3dm files. Next time I play, I'll try to combine your code with my own for easy portraiting :).

carc1n0gen• 9 years ago

https://weelnk.com little link shortener I built. Been a while since I revisited it

chaostheory3• 9 years ago

Late to the game again =/

I'm working on https://theymadethat.com It's an IMDB for everything, not just movies. It does show you who built what but it does more: theymadethat can show you what they used to build it, what those things are made of (parts, ...), their evolutionary history, who they worked with, and so on

I can't say that I'm building it out of sheer joy; it's more out of obligation. There are so many people who's contributions to mankind should never be forgotten. Wikipedia is great (and I see it being complimentary to theymadethat in the long term), but we need something more. I could be wrong but I strongly feel that theymadethat is the answer.

tenaciousDaniel2• 9 years ago

This is super interesting to read through, and was very happy to see the Pentax K1000 mentioned! That was my first camera and I used it all the time during my teenage years. The thing was a beast, you could own the same one for 30 years and it would never die on you.

chaostheory3• 9 years ago

Thanks man - Pentax K1000's entry is actually a stub that needs work; still - glad you liked it =)

This is a slightly better entry in terms of cameras

https://www.theymadethat.com/organizations/slx/polaroid-corp...

On a related note, if you happen to know anyone related to the the K1000's design and manufacture, feel free to add it

zapperdapper2• 9 years ago

One of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Wonderful!

chaostheory3• 9 years ago

Thanks - let me know if you feel that there's anything I can fix or improve

Spien• 9 years ago

Cat chasing raspi car using a CNN.

typpo2• 9 years ago

I built this 3d visualization of the upcoming Perseids meteor shower!

https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Perseids

tenaciousDaniel2• 9 years ago

wow, very impressive! do you use a public api for the data?

typpo2• 9 years ago

Thanks! The data is publicly available at http://cams.seti.org/

mimming• 9 years ago

http://dinopacks.com

I fill out those 'other comments' on order forms with a request for a dinosaur drawing.

is0tope• 9 years ago

http://randomport.io

My first attempt to create something using create-react-app. Generates a random ephemeral port if you can't think of a port for a service.

albahk• 9 years ago

Free OpenStreetMap Data extracts (be kind, it is a rushed POC at the moment)

http://propdata.io

I have created a free site containing extracts from OpenStreetMap data. Unlike the metro extracts sites (Geofabrik, Mapzen), my goal is to extract specific datasets such as buildings, schools, hospitals, fast food restaurants etc from OSM rather than standard map/gis data.

My overall goal is to make the extracts available, and then to encourage people who use them and get value to actively update OSM to improve the quality of the data they are interested in. By doing this, the overall quality and coverage of data in OSM should (in theory) be improved.

stanislavb• 9 years ago

http://emojihomepage.com

rytill• 9 years ago

https://www.poltr.com

Clean quick polling website

orblivion• 9 years ago

Host Wikipedia on Sandstorm.io:

https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/5uh349d0kky2zp5whrh2znahn27gwh...

Kiwix itself is not my project, I just packaged it for Sandstorm. I saw Sandstorm as a great potential tool for the off-the-grid, mesh networking, etc world. Being able to easily host a local copy of Wikipedia was one missing piece. I hope to work on the next piece soon.

(Kixix also supports Project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Ted Talks, and much more)

cozuya• 9 years ago

My web adaptation of the social deduction board game Secret Hitler: https://secrethitler.io

Pretty fun, don't get to do much back end stuff so its a learning process. Its creative commons so can't make $ off it but the $10/month digital ocean box is doing fine. About 100 players on at peak and always games going.

j_s4• 9 years ago

This sounds similar to https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3955/bang

0xcoffee• 9 years ago

Looks pretty cool, but is it possible to mute spammers? http://i.imgur.com/vwLkukw.png

RealityNow• 9 years ago

I'm at a point where money doesn't matter to me anymore except in the sense of retirement. I'm not rich by any means, I'd just rather live a life working on the most important problems in life, which these days I believe are mostly political/economic.

http://www.endwageslavery.org/

lhuser123• 9 years ago

Very interesting. Keep up the good work.

zapperdapper2• 9 years ago

Keep it going - this is important work.

p.s. South Korea does not sound like a nice place!!!

Windson• 9 years ago

www.thankyouopensource.com

Write a thank you letter to your favor open-source project

jhy• 9 years ago

I created and hack away on jsoup, a HTML parser/scraper for java. https://jsoup.org

I created it initially just to scratch a personal itch (to make another project, https://alterslash.org, more resilient to upstream changes in HTML), and now get a lot of satisfaction just in knowing how much it's used around the world for all sorts of use cases I hadn't really imagined when I started writing it.

And it's great fun finding new areas to benchmark and micro-optimize.

Lerc• 9 years ago

Sheer joy is an interesting term. I like making things but I don't think that is my primary motivater for _what_ I make.

Most of my free stuff is because I think the things should exist and they are things that shouldn't have to be paid for.

Some things are just plain geek fun

https://github.com/Lerc/stackie - Makes textures using a very compact stack machine language

https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8 - Emulator for an 8-bit computer that never existed

Some things I wanted to have exist

https://github.com/Lerc/smallcalc - A compact pop-up calculator for the Cinnamon Desktop

https://github.com/Lerc/plops - (old) A lightweight Desktop widget engine that I made when I developing for 256-512mb boxes/

https://github.com/Lerc/whio - A Javascript canvas rendering lib for beginner programmers using Globaly avalilable functions + mediaWiki plugin to run in a worker.

http://fingswotidun.com/code - A wiki usisng the plugin from the entry above. Has some introduction to programming javasctipt tutorials.

And the mad project that I come back to every couple of years to push a bit further along.

https://github.com/Lerc/notanos - A html/js login deskop for Linux.

And a lot of games.

Here's a silly one http://screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD13.html

Here's a really hard one http://www.screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD14.html

And here's one that might give your browser a hernia http://fingswotidun.com/ld21/

raphlinus5• 9 years ago

I have a largish open-source portfolio, including a markdown parser, a regex engine, some music synthesis, and some more researchy stuff like a font renderer and a prototype of concurrent text editing using CRDT's. I'm lucky to be working at Google where I get paid 20% time to work on this, but the motivation is definitely not money.

The biggest item in my portfolio is xi-editor, and I confess I'm wrestling with some of the questions raised in this thread. I think it has the potential to be a serious player in the editor space, with extremely high performance goals (including fast startup and low RAM usage) yet a modern feel. It also has a great little open-source community around it who have been contributing significant features.

Yet it's at the point where it's _almost_ done enough to use for day-to-day editing, and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. It's also the case that I'm very interested in the engine and the core of the UX, but the complete product needs a plugin ecosystem and along with that ways to discover, upgrade, and curate the plugins (including making sure they are trustworthy, lately a fairly significant concern). That's potentially a huge amount of work, and it doesn't really line up with my interests.

I'm wondering if it's possible to focus on the parts I care about and try to foster the community to take care of the rest, but I'm not quite sure how that would work.

If this were a business and I had some way of making a few coins from every user, then my incentives would be lined up to make the best overall product possible, including the less fun parts. But that's off the table; among other things, there are a number of good free editors out there, and the niche for a better but non-free editor is also well occupied.

Maybe the HN crowd has some ideas?

Mz4• 9 years ago

and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users.

A) What is "lots" of users? (Give me a number)

B) What makes you think you would suddenly have lots?

Cuz most things seem to struggle to get any traction.

raphlinus5• 9 years ago

A) I'll toss out 1M because you asked for a number.

B) Because if I build out my full ambition, it would be better by most objective metrics (speed, features, integration with IDE-like capabilities) than all the free editors out there, and I think there is a real demand for a better editor.

I know what you mean about the struggle for traction. It is of course possible I'm massively mis-estimating the potential userbase.

Qwertious4• 9 years ago

xi-editor

I read the github readme.md, and I'm wondering.

1. Why should want to switch if I already have a text-editor? 2. Reading through, there seems to be an emphasis on clean data structures and interfaces. Have you taken a look at Kakoune? Because your text editor seems to share quite a few design decisions with it. 3. So, there doesn't seem to be any mention of novel UI/control features even in the front-end. Is that a deliberate choice to emphasize the technical aspects as the selling point (or is it lacking/outdated in documentation), or are there just not any in the first place?

raphlinus5• 9 years ago

1. If you're using an Electron-based editor, I imagine you might not be entirely happy with performance. I can fix that. 2. Yes, have looked at Kakoune, and even have some plans to emulate its keybindings. It's an interesting project. 3. I'm not sure novelty is the main thing people need. I think we pretty well understand what people need, and there's something to be said for just doing a good job delivering it.

justinclift2• 9 years ago

Went looking for it, and it's showing up as mainly developed/owned by the Google org on GitHub:

https://github.com/google/xi-editor

Kind of feels a bit weird to be considering if/how/etc to commercialise it personally, when it would potentially be considered Google's property (?). Even though you're clearly the main author as per its commits & README.md. Then again, I have no idea how Google looks upon that kind of thing, so you may be all good.

With the "it'll probably get a million users quickly" thought... hmmm... depends if you're thinking to leverage Google's reach in some way. If so, then yeah it might have a better than even chance to happen. :D

raphlinus5• 9 years ago

The thoughts on commercialization are a hypothetical. As I said in my original comment, it's off the table (though I gave other reasons than being employed by Google). I'm just saying that if there were a revenue stream, then I'd be incentivized very differently (and more in line with what users need) than purely as a labor-of-love open source project.

And yes, if there were a good reason to, Google could bring considerable resources (including marketing) to bear.

sterex• 9 years ago

I liked the disclaimer on your github readme. :)

aroberge• 9 years ago

http://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html is a site to learn programming (using either Python or Javascript).

However, unlike other similar sites, the focus is equally on making it easy for students to use AND making it easy for teachers/mentors to use, adapt and create their own learning material. To this end, I am currently writing an online book as a "Teacher's Guide":

https://aroberge.gitbooks.io/reeborg-s-world-advanced-world-...

This is a project that started out 13 years ago as a free desktop application (http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/) and which I have been working, on and off, during all that time just for the joy of it and knowing that people have found it useful.

palerdot• 9 years ago

I have hotcold typing - http://hotcoldtyping.com, a fun way to learn touch typing with instant feedbacks. I'm proud of this tool even though it doesn't bring me money.

Also, remindoro - http://remindoro.com, a chrome extension to have recurring reminders to help me take breaks.

misra8• 9 years ago

www.zemneo.com

Wanted to solve the problem of information overload and product discovery , not making any money because I am not passionate about marketing. Do you think this is worth pursuing?

jakehilborn• 9 years ago

Speedr - Free Android app that calculates how much time (or how little time) you save speeding in your car.

https://jakehilborn.github.io/speedr/

fibonachos• 9 years ago

http://www.proggyfonts.net/

I didn't create any of the fonts. When I discovered the original .com domain had been lost to squatters, I decided to grab the .net domain and go about hunting down and re-hosting as much of the original content as possible.

The original site was later restored at a different domain (linked in the sidebar).

thesquib• 9 years ago

I dabble a bit: Http://playerpart.com - for Shakespeare play reading groups, helps distribute parts on a play fairly and with as few adjacent speaking parts as possible. Still in development!

https://ranktracker.squib.co.nz - a tool to track an in game characters stats for a very old game called Clan Lord from Delta Tao. In development.

I seem to end up working on stuff with a very limited user base!

rocky1138• 9 years ago

Potioneer: The VR Gardening Simulator

http://store.steampowered.com/app/544410/Potioneer_The_VR_Ga...

beenBoutIT• 9 years ago

Chromium for Android is an amazing open source browser. I made getChromium so that everyone can run Chromium for Android. https://github.com/andDevW/getChromium/blob/master/README.md

xeo84• 9 years ago

Touchboard: http://www.timelabs.io/touchboard Open source app for iPad to send keys to your pc / mac. I use it for gaming, I really find it useful, here is a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KOUj9SK_c

I've also made CbrConverter: https://github.com/timefrancesco/cbr-converter

Coverts pdf to cbr and vice versa.

And then there are a bunch of other small projects like:

- Ebay Search Scheduler (schedule Ebay searches with custom parameters)

- Twitter Time Machine (download and browse your twitter timeline) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweet-time-machine-2/id83212... - windows version also available

- Autosleep (put the windows down for good) https://github.com/timefrancesco/autosleep

And many others I really enjoyed making and using.

fernly• 9 years ago

I discovered the historic CHIP-8 architecture and decided to write the mother of all CHIP-8 apps, including an interactive dev environment for it:

https://github.com/tallforasmurf/CHIP8IDE

biztos3• 9 years ago

In addition to some random, minor bits of free software and one larger bit that's nowhere near finished, I have for years kept a goofy little minimalist thing going just to have it in the world:

http://thislikethat.com

It costs me almost nothing, I check in on it a few times a year, and once in a while I find something fun there.

amorphic• 9 years ago

I co-founded and run a makerspace called SparkCC (http://sparkcc.org).

It's not-for-profit but I've met lots of amazing people. I've been able to use my skills and knowledge to help many of them and many of them have used their skills and knowledge to help me. It's fantastic...:)

yourduskquibble5• 9 years ago

I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you.

My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. social share bars, cookie notices, etc) through a filter list that works with uBlock Origin.

I update the list often, and admittedly am probably entering into an arms race but I'm just really sick of websites hijacking (what I think) the web was built for (information).

Feel free to subscribe to the filter list by pasting the URL below[1] into the 'Custom' section under the '3rd-party filters' tab of uBlock Origin.

This filter list also works on mobile Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin installed.

[0] Project Homepage https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoya...

illnewsthat• 9 years ago

This is fantastic, thanks! I started using this "Kill Sticky Headers" [0] I saw on HN once and I find it very useful.

I'll give the ublock list a try.

[0] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

yourduskquibble5• 9 years ago

Finally, I just don't care right now about navigating your website, or following you on Twitter. I'm trying to read. Let me focus on that for now, please.

Your link is exactly right!

werber• 9 years ago

I am doing a redesign right now and they wanted one and I had to fight against it. Sure in the office we all have a few external monitors, but I'm a MBA user irl and they kill me

brobinson• 9 years ago

Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

kristianp2• 9 years ago

On a related theme of annoyances, I use this extension to prevent auto-playing videos:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-autoplay-blo...

hbosch• 9 years ago

This is great. I wonder though, how much could you achieve just by creating 1 blanket rule: change every instance on a page of "position: fixed" to "position: absolute" - layout and nav should be more or less the same, across the board, but nothing will follow you down the page!

Kryptonite would be sticky footers, but if you're on a site that uses those you should just close the tab anyway. :)

kdamken2• 9 years ago

This could mess up a lot of modals pretty badly.

yourduskquibble5• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, cosmetic filters that don't target a specific domain have performance implications[1] so I try to make every filter specific to a domain.

That being said I do have a few generic cosmetic filters as part of the list (you can see them near the top of the list) that don't target any specific domain but I don't use the "position: absolute" rule on any of them.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1892

tripzilch3• 9 years ago

You also need to nuke "position: sticky" but otherwise, yeah. I never miss these elements.

baystep• 9 years ago

Could you add/did you add killing the annoying "call to action" pop-up dialog? You know, you visit an article and BAM! A fullscreen modal asking to sign-up for their book newsletter? That would be awesome.

nitin_flanker• 9 years ago

Also, the exit intent pop-ups. I, most of the time, just open a tab and switch to a different tab to read the current one later and then that Pop-up comes. It just annoys the hell out of me.

Even sometimes I don't pay much attention to it and when after reading other tabs I come back to this tab; all I see is that pop-up standing there, asking for attention. It even makes me forget why I even opened this tab in the first place and makes me leave immediately.

yourduskquibble5• 9 years ago

Yes, I add these to the list when I come across them.

megamindbrian3• 9 years ago

Oh man, so annoying. Here's my immitation of the thought process of the marketing team that designed it: "enter your email address so we can continue sending you offers and adverts and all kinds of information on that thing that you clicked on that we are now blocking with this popup preventing you from reading even though you're just passing by".

heavenlyblue• 9 years ago

I suppose the script that removes all of the 'would you like to receive desktop notifications from this website?' popups would be nice as well.

benjaminjackman• 9 years ago

I had a very similar idea but to make a bookmarklet for use on mobile safari. Sometimes reader mode goes too far and I really just want to nuke all the sticky floating junk.

yourduskquibble5• 9 years ago

Check out http://staticding.com - same idea you have but I've found it doesn't always work when I've tested it.

spookyuser• 9 years ago

Thank You! This is amazing and I love it.

tripzilch3• 9 years ago

I've been using a bookmarklet approach (named "FIXEDFIXER") that aggressively changes all `position:fixed` and `position:sticky`[0] to `position:static`. (I've posted the one-liner code a couple of times before already, can repost on request)

Quite often the stickied elements disappear entirely, possibly hidden below other elements or outside of the window--I've never felt the need to check where they go.

Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements. I could've set them to `display:none` or removed them entirely and I think it will still cover my use case perfectly.

I don't think it would be so terrible if `fixed` and `sticky` would go the way of the blink-tag. Except that people would probably reimplement it with JS at expense of performance, because they like nagging people at cost of UX.

[0] it used to be just `fixed`, but `sticky` is used for the same webdisease

kbenson• 9 years ago

Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements.

My two cents is to automatically apply, but make sure to have a notice when it actually changed something. The only thing worse than a site not functioning correctly is when it's only not functioning correctly for you, and nobody has any idea why, including you.

quangv• 9 years ago

Sweet post bait. I'm working on an online notes organizer. I have ADHD-PI and I've been creating one for myself for the last few years. (I recently found out I might have ADHD)

HTTPS://OrgNote.com

notgoodrobot• 9 years ago

http://sharethewub.com

A music player made from URLs pulled from sub-reddits. Its a work in progress.

monkey_slap• 9 years ago

Working on a GitHub iOS app to make managing GitHub projects easier. Fun part is now that it's shipped I'm using it to manage itself.

https://github.com/rnystrom/Freetime

Turning this into more of a social experiment now, seeing where he community wants to take this. Publishing download reports and stuff.

Even made a landing page.

http://freetime-app.com/

wingworks• 9 years ago

I run a tv show countdown/tracking site with no ads, because I hate ads.

https://tvdown.co/

It's rather basic at the moment, (I wrote most of the code about 10 years ago) but I'm working on an update.

beilabs2• 9 years ago

Late arrival to this thread. One of my projects involve working with local female co-operatives in Nepal and help them sell their hand made products around the world. Paypal doesn't operate here, merchant services for international cards are impossible to get. They don't understand technology in any way and there is a lot of hand holding.

The site is https://www.pasatrade.com

We make no money off of this, I operate it at a loss, but each and every sale gets more money back to the women who really need it; a few extra dollars here and there can really make a huge difference in Nepal. The interesting part is they make more money on each sale through us than they do locally or selling through Fair Trade channels.

jeromegv2• 9 years ago

I have a similar website with similar concept (for Filipino products). However, I would strongly suggest you find a way to make it a sustainable business for you as well.

It sounds nice that you do not take a profit from it but the reality is that your life will change and one day you won't have time for a project that makes no money/operates at loss. Those women will start to rely more and more on the income from your website and this would be really unfortunate if one day this revenue totally stops because it was just a volunteer project for you. The more sustainable it is for you, the safer it is for them.

beilabs2• 9 years ago

Yeah; I need to really put some processes in to make it more sustainable. We're quite strict with who can come on board as we're really only looking for non-profits or co-operatives.

cdelsolar2• 9 years ago

https://www.aerolith.org - My pet project for the last 10 years, a Scrabble word study app. I love working on this thing.

na_ka_na• 9 years ago

Two projects on github currently:

Run SQL queries over JSON / Protobuf objects https://github.com/na-ka-na/object-query

Compare Excel sheets via command line https://github.com/na-ka-na/ExcelCompare

aroc• 9 years ago

http://www.get-jumper.com/

A way to motivate people (including myself) to exercise with a chat bot that tracks your progress.

Originally built it to track how often I worked out, and if I didn't, what the reason was and have that reported back to me regularly. Now I have a bunch of people using it, but as you can imagine, makes me zero dollars. Well, technically it costs me money so it makes me negative dollars.

longnguyen• 9 years ago

Great job. Thanks for sharing. It doesn't recognize me though

Hey undefined! Interested in exercising more? Great! I'm here to help!

I'm following _kaizen_ technique to improve my reading skills (eg. reading 20-30 pages, everyday). Would be interested if your bot support more than exercise

kovsky• 9 years ago

I'm making a browser extension so that when users buy online with it installed, portion of the money goes to research-backed charities (no costs for user). It's a nice feeling to build something that has a possibility of improving someone's life. And 13 GBP raised so far! :))

URL: https://altruisto.com Github: https://github.com/Altruisto/altruisto

cromulent• 9 years ago

The Helsinki Foundation - land conservation through direct action.

https://www.helsinkifoundation.org

beachy• 9 years ago

Such a great idea. It raises lots of questions (can I visit my space? pest control? etc.), but kudos to you.

empressplay• 9 years ago

We built an Apple II emulator that renders pixels as OpenGL voxels so you can play games in 3D to encourage younger people to explore classic software http://octalyzer.com

dmjio• 9 years ago

Rewriting Elm in Haskell.

[0] Project Homepage: https://haskell-miso.org

[1] Github: https://github.com/haskell-miso/miso

reviewmon• 9 years ago

Mapduel.com GoogleBattle.com

redbluething• 9 years ago

Yep. I have been working on mapping the Patrick O'Brian age of sail novels for the last 11 years.

http://www.cannonade.net

maehwasu• 9 years ago

Getting reasonably complex front-end programs running in a purely functional (Purescript) was really fun, and made me like the front-end for the first time. Been meaning to do a writeup of my experience when I have time.

davepeck• 9 years ago

A little website for people who want to play a (casual) game of Go: http://go.davepeck.org/

sideproject• 9 years ago

https://www.sideprojectors.com

Been running it for good 4 years now. Do a little bit of maintaining here and there. I first did it in a hackathon and won a 2nd prize, thought I'll run with it and it's fun. :)

laktak• 9 years ago

I started http://hjson.org as a JSON for humans interface but I constantly run into the "I love it but I'll wait until it's used by more people" problem.

thasaleni2• 9 years ago

I see myself using this

germinalphrase• 9 years ago

The potential of AR is very exciting as I imagine it. I have been considering how I would like to see it implemented as an assistive instrument in my profession - k12 teaching. Teachers largely make traditional use of traditional tools in their lesson design and - especially - lesson performance. Sketching out needs and affordances is a fun kind of daydreaming for what-could-be, but it's not as serious a project as what others here are sharing.

jv22222• 9 years ago

I created ezSQL way back. It's a database abstraction layer for PHP.

https://github.com/ezSQL/ezSQL

It ended up being used by Wordpress and I got a kick out of that.

Edit: It has been far surpassed by modern query builders such as Laravel Eloquent. However, it might be useful for hardware projects or other micro codebases that use sqlite, for example.

GenKali2• 9 years ago

NextTrain: https://www.nextrain.co.za

We have a fledgling train system in the Gauteng area of South Africa (this area includes Johannesburg and Pretoria). However, the only way to see train schedules is via a PDF (2MB) buried deep on their website.

This was a quick weekend hack to show when the next train is for each of the stations, and some additional info.

thasaleni2• 9 years ago

Is this for the GauTrain? or normal MetroRail service?

GenKali2• 9 years ago

GauTrain only

whataretensors• 9 years ago

My brother and I work on a generative adversarial network(deep learning) with pip package and API:

https://github.com/255BITS/HyperGAN/

It's meant for artists, developers, and researchers who are interested in this new tech.

futhey2• 9 years ago

Thanks!

markwatsonatx• 9 years ago

I started minienv (don't really like the name) a few months ago: http://minienv.com

Trying to make it easier to deliver sample applications that run in your browser and include backend databases, jupyter notebooks, etc. It basically allows you to run Docker Compose environments in your own little sandbox + adds an online editor for modifying code/etc.

I can see it either going towards more guided tutorials or something more like glitch. Honestly, it's just been super fun to build.

iokarr• 9 years ago

Currently I am building a self hosted push notifications application[0] which is using emqttd[1] as a message broker.

I am writing it in Elixir using Phoenix framework[2].

In the beginning the driving force was my need for a solution like that, but in long run I started to feel in love with Elixir and Phoenix.

[0] https://github.com/7-iris/iris_server

[1] http://emqtt.io/

[2] http://phoenixframework.org/

teapot7• 9 years ago

I guess I do ask for money for this, but it's pretty overengineered and I wrote it knowing that nobody wanted or needed it:

Long ago, when Sun workstations were new and exciting, I wrote a simple Roman numeral digital clock, which just showed the time in Roman numerals.

My friend, instead of admiring my cleverness, said "But that's not how the Romans told the time" - which is true. The Roman day started at dawn and finished at sunset, which meant that day and night length were different every single day, as well as in cities at different latitudes.

Several decades later I did something about it, and wrote it up as a mobile app which showed either the modern time or optionally the Roman time.

Then I made it use the Roman calendar, where you don't have individually numbered days of the month, but count instead how many days until the next Kalends (start of the month), Nones (fifth or seventh day) or Nones (thirteenth or fifteenth day), even if it occurs in the next month.

Then I thought I might as well go all the way, and spent more money than I would ever earn from it on having the help text translated into Latin, just in case any ancient Roman time travellers wanted to use it.

A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy.

http://www.teapot7.com/roman-clock-app/

aeorgnoieang2• 9 years ago

A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy.

Reads like the best kind of waste of time and money!

apancik• 9 years ago

I made Plain Email [0] just because I couldn't find any email client with clean work flow without distractions. I use it pretty much every day. Thinking about open sourcing it - just can't find the time to refractor it nicely.

I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity.

[0] http://www.plainemail.com/ [1] http://10hn.pancik.com

aeorgnoieang2• 9 years ago

Is anything beyond professional embarrassment stopping you from open-sourcing Plain Email as-is? It looks really nice.

I'm not on a Mac currently so I can't test it. What does 'defer' do?

I also do 'inbox zero' but I don't really find Gmail to be too distracting. The one thing I keep wishing for tho (in any email client) is a default ordering/sorting of unread emails by date-time received, but in a descending order. I'd love to see how hard that would be to implement with your project!

armis• 9 years ago

Many small and bigger adventures like:

https://github.com/ziogas/cmdwrap - Command line/shell wrapper to a web interface. Basically forward any shell command to a nodejs-bootstrap powered web input and track its output.

https://github.com/ziogas/easyembed - Micro framework optimized for embedding small independent apps into legacy php systems.

https://github.com/ziogas/PHP-Redis-implementation - Php redis wrapper focused into simplicity with almost zero abstractions and future-proof.

https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro-must - Google Chrome extension helping you to stay in pomodoro mode.

https://www.statsglitch.com/ - Receive notifications from Google Analytics whenever happened statistically significant spike or drop in your traffic.

kapuru• 9 years ago

Created Unfollow (https://www.unfollow.io) because I wanted to know who unfollowed me on Twitch. Not a noble reason. But now that I don't stream anymore I just do it because it's so much fun and I don't care about unfollowers anymore. Lots of people use it which motivates me. It's free, but I'm looking for monetization strategies.

neya• 9 years ago

This is my current project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209. It's too long to describe in a sentence, but, it's essentially what I call it the mother of all software (internally). I created it out of pure annoyance towards many of the popular services such as Wordpress, MailChimp, Hubspot, Shopify, Unbounce who had screwed up some aspect of their tools. So, in essence this is a combination of all those softwares under one roof.

Here are some things you can do with this software:

1) Research your market, find out your target audience

2) Integrate with analytics tools and understand your users

3) Automate your marketing strategies

4) Maintain a central data warehouse

5) Maintain multi-domain content properties such as blogs, websites, news portals, etc.

6) Host online trainings, build a student list

7) Etc. (read the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209)

I've been working on it over 3 years now, while trying to jump from one web framework to another. Finally, I've settled down on Phoenix. This project alone has helped me learn so many programming languages and also helped me gain more experience as a programmer in general, while simultaneously being able to integrate new tools and platforms into my pipeline - This is how I learned React, VueJS, Brunch, Google Cloud, etc.

At the moment, I've built this only for myself, just to support and test out my startup ideas. I am thinking of open-sourcing it at some point, at least the core functionality.

But as of now, there's nothing else I enjoy doing on a weekend than working on this project :) (also why I'm still single)

Kevin_S• 9 years ago

This is so damn cool. Can I get on a list to hear more when you're interested in opening it up to the public?

kureikain• 9 years ago

I have two project which make zero money but I love doing them. I learn so much from writing code for them and use them as a playground to try out and apply new technology in a production environment, Yes, they are production environment because they are severving real customer, just that no one pays me so far.

https://noty.im An uptime monitoring tool

https://betterdev.link a news letter and from there, I spin up a link sharing service https://one.betterdev.link with full text search for content of link as well.

pawelkomarnicki• 9 years ago

I have a cooking/recipes website http://cookarr.com — it doesn't make any money, and I didn't even want to put advertisements there, because it's my stress-reducing project :-) And kind of a recipe book I made for myself (and others)

somid3• 9 years ago

You Exec - http://youexec.com

robin_reala2• 9 years ago

I contribute nice versions of free ebooks to the public domain via https://standardebooks.org . Working on a complete Keats collection and Crime and Punishment at the moment.

chanux2• 9 years ago

The library seems to be down.

robin_reala2• 9 years ago

Oops! I’ll ping the project lead. Edit: back up

rawoke083600• 9 years ago

https://www.fibretiger.co.za - In South Africa we got more than 10 fibre networks and almost double the amount of isps. I've put together this site to compare all the packages on all the networks.

koosjan• 9 years ago

If only more s.a ppl can get fibre ! Its like the new goldrush in s.a... who can lay the most fibre !

djadmin• 9 years ago

I built a CLI for reading medium.com stories. https://github.com/djadmin/medium-cli

negativ0• 9 years ago

I build simple products that helps my daily computer interaction, i never bother to publish them, the only one i published is a Chrome Extension to have an easy managing solution for tabs opened in Chrome. Published it only because some friends wanted to use it:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bettermarks/dknlgo...

ankitank• 9 years ago

Heimdall: HTTP request logger for Vapor Web Framework http://github.com/himani93/heimdall

chenshuiluke• 9 years ago

For me, it's this HN clone I started working on the other day: https://ng-hackernews.lukecs.com/

The advantages of using it include:

1. No need to open a new tab just to view comments 2. It loads a lot more stories at once than HN does, so you don't need to keep going to the next page

ichik• 9 years ago

https://sqncbrk.com isn't going to make any money any time soon.

eviaac3• 9 years ago

i made a website where i sell unused data that has been harvested from digital trash bins. http://binlover.net

eviaac3• 9 years ago

i made a website for selling unused files that have been harvested from digital trash bins. http://binlover.net

eviaac3• 9 years ago

and another project for some software piece i made, http://zer0berung.philippteister.com

install, and get your entire hdd occupied with zeros

LukeB42• 9 years ago

1. http://index.psybernetics.org A news archival service. Built on a Golang implementation of another project. Intending to open source the backend once it's mature. It's been running in production for around a year but the underlying httpd now either needs vendoring or the code sat on top of it needs updating.

2. https://github.com/lukeb42/emissary The first news archival service I wrote. Went through a couple of iterations. Not too happy with the multi-process model under the hood though.

3. http://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd This has been running in production for a couple of years. The scripting system was recently overhauled and we're using it instead of Consul or NATS for message bussing and service discovery at work (I technically get paid to make sure this is production-quality but it's not consuming time at the moment). It'd be nice to use the plugin system to implement a MUD as a channel mode that generated the world via numpy-based LSTM network.

4. https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony A peer-to-peer caching proxy. Currently working towards a C implementation of this before dedicating time to the other projects in this post.

raphaelrk• 9 years ago

https://summerplaybook.com :)

Essentially a map of where college students are over the summer, run by me and my friend. I work on it because I really love working with my friend, love that it connects people, use it myself, and enjoy programming in itself.

return0• 9 years ago

A directory of opensimulator virtual worlds ("open source second life") http://opensimworld.com

Insanity5• 9 years ago

All of my side-projects, and my blog. None of the side projects are that popular (few github stars, max is like 19 stars and that is technically just a blogpost..)

But I don't mind, I am doing them for the sheer fun of it. I get to hack around with fun things and feel good about solving some problem. I get much of the same joy from the job I am doing now, so I feel less guilty about not having as much time for side projects as I used to.

Some things I've done/am-doing for for the sheer joy of it: - Pong for the Gameboy Advance - Java Swing 'framework' (Just started to be honest) - Python text editor

For my blog I mess around with other things such as: - Sending keystrokes to Minecraft to 'cheat' (this was years ago) - Dynamically building a GUI based on Model classes in Java (reflection hacks) - Scraping webcomic sites to store the comics locally

But, as long as you are having fun, what does it really matter what you do :-)

victormours• 9 years ago

For the past year and a half, I've been organizing the Paris Ruby Workshop with a friend of mine. It's a monthly meetup where everyone is welcome to come and pair program on small katas, and chit chat over some pizza. It's free to attend so we don't make any money out of it.

It's always fun to meet people that we might not have talked to otherwise, since a lot of attendees are beginners who come from non-engineering backgrounds. And it's also a pretty good feeling at the end of the evening when people tell you they had a good time and learned of to program a little bit better.

I also found it surprisingly easy to setup : grab a few katas from exercism.io, create a group on meetup.com and find a local startup willing to host and provide free pizza in exchange for a bit of visibility in the community, and you're good to go.

pablo983• 9 years ago

I built a very accurate value estimator for properties en Amsterdam for the sake of it. Then put it here amsterprice.com . It is slowly starting to pick up, but as itnis for free I am only watching hosting bucks go. Still proud of it! :)

sisoytuceo• 9 years ago

cool tool dude! Good luck

pablo983• 9 years ago

Thanks! Now with an actual link: https://amsterprice.com

xcubic• 9 years ago

There's a bit of Machine learning behind it right? What algo did you use?

edhelas• 9 years ago

Movim, a social network project built on XMPP https://movim.eu/. I'm working on it for 9 years already and starting to have a nice little community using it daily.

I'm really enjoying developing Movim on my free time because I'm still motivated to show the world that we can have decent social-networks and IM solutions by using existing standard protocols (and not proprietary silos like today).

thewhitetulip• 9 years ago

https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...

Stopped making money for me a long time ago. I don't have a computer to update the tutorial sadly, since my macbook crashed, screen flickering after 1.5yrs. But I love the project.

I also have a youtube channel which gives me sheer joy.

logikblok• 9 years ago

I made a things while back using IFTT and Reddit very low maintenance but it brings me joy. http://www.putyouinabettermood.com/

martin_drapeau• 9 years ago

Been working on https://www.findyourtennis.com since 2011. Amateur tennis league/tournament management. 3 leagues have been using it recurrently for 3 years here in Montreal. The managers, volunteers, save dozens of hours every season.

Started off as a 'find a tennis partner' forum however getting traction was difficult. Chicken and egg problem. Slowly migrating to solving problems of league and tournament management. Will drop the forum one day. Long transition to do part time.

Now working on a mobile version with cordova. Testing it on the league I am managing. Saves us a lot of time since it automates lots of tasks and avoids the use of Excel.

I don't expect to make money. Market is small and problem is tough to solve. UX intensive. However fun to do on spare time.

My objective is to launch on the app store in 2018. Then I hope lots of leagues around tue world will use to simplify their lives.

everling• 9 years ago

Film nerd, want to trace inspiration between different works. Some find it useful, but I haven't bothered monetizing it in any way.

Currently reworking the scoring algorithm, will probably replace the awful UI at some point too.

http://www.cinetrii.com

dzenos• 9 years ago

Building https://tuiqo.com to try and solve a document versioning problem. We realized that even though we created a new way to do document version control and avoid "v1.doc, v2.doc, final_final.doc" problem; people won't switch to it because of lack of options such as formatting tools or any other pure editor features. We are thinking of possible pivots we could try out and we obviously don't have a product-market fit.

kroltan• 9 years ago

http://atmosphir.com/

Atmosphir is a 3D platformer where users create levels and play levels created by others, with diverse assets and tools.

We made a community game server that aims to restore playability to the game, since most of it required online to properly function. (user profiles, equipment and sharing levels).

It is even endorsed by the devs, who kindly redirected the original domain name to our website.

thsealienbstrds2• 9 years ago

I've been working on `moncat`, a tool that concatenates e-mails.

It's very 'Unix-y' in the sense that it's supposed to do this and only this.

I created it because I wanted to have a way to make notes without being dependent on apps. With moncat, I can use any e-mail client to incrementally create larger text files.

Currently, I'm using it to write a journal in Markdown that is automatically converted to HTML. How that works: I e-mail journal entries to myself, put them in a mailbox folder, and periodically compile the journal using a cronjob.

moncat accepts some basic commands that you can put in the subject line of the e-mail. For example, you can reorder items to be concatenated. It also handles attachments and nested folders.

...

Yeah.. so there is no documentation and the code is pretty shit, since I'm the only one using it. The upside is that the code is also pretty small (around 350 LOC Python in total).

So, just in case anyone is looking for a tool like this... here you go! ;)

https://www.pastery.net/xysbyq+juprcp/#xysbyq

koliber• 9 years ago

Ha! I love it. I just recently created a tool for personal use that does something similar to this.

I use Evernote notes with bullet lists as my TODO list. I created a tool that takes each line of a received email and adds it to my TODO list at the top. It is very convenient. My wife can email me things that need to get done!

thsealienbstrds2• 9 years ago

Nice! I like that basically now you have an e-mail interface to Evernote. What I like about that is that you get all operating systems for free and crazy robustness in terms of forwards compatibility (at least, on the client-side).

JulianLoehr• 9 years ago

"HID Wiimote" [0] a Windows device driver for the Nintendo Wii Remote & Wii U Pro Controller. Started as my Bachelor's thesis and am still working on it every now and then.

[0] https://www.julianloehr.de/educational-work/hid-wiimote/

xiaq• 9 years ago

A Unix shell that hopefully sucks less than more traditional shells: https://github.com/elves/elvish

swimmadude66• 9 years ago

I built a small website for some old groovshark buddies once that site died where we could meet up, chat, and listen to music together.

Its a collaborative radio, where users queue up songs in playlists, then rotate playing a song off the top of their list for everyone to hear. It was originally built as a stopgap until we found something similar but better, so we called it lifeboat radio. But it's kinda become our permanent home now...

Here's our hosted instance: https://lifeboatradio.com/

And here's the repo if you want to host your own! https://github.com/swimmadude66/YTRadio

Join us in our hosted instance on fridays for "Fuck it Friday" where we play (preferably musical) shit we found from deep in youtube!

megamindbrian3• 9 years ago

Working on managing Angular code using jupyter notebooks similar to Airbnb and their react-atom design flow? I think I got that right, they blogged about it but I never saw any code from it.

abhisuri97• 9 years ago

A chrome extension to help visually impaired individuals see images http://abhinavsuri.com/aat

shove• 9 years ago

I'm now a partner in a barcade. No chance of making any money any time soon :)

justinholmes• 9 years ago

https://mixmatic.io/

The site focus is about discovery and listening to music together.

Built by a remote team trying to find the best mixes in each genre from SoundCloud data. But given SC current status will have to be shutdown.

yumaikas• 9 years ago

I work on https://pisc.junglecoder.com as an exercise in building a stack based language that is a little less arcane than most that exist at the moment. It was inspired by Factor, Lua and Javascript, and is built in Go. I like using it for little tasks of generating bits of boilerplate code, and have some long term ideas around IRC bots, shells, and the like.

nexus-uw• 9 years ago

I have been working on https://ammobin.ca: a meta search site for ammo prices across canada for the past 4 months. It is completely opensource and has gotten some nice love from /r/canadaguns .

MrBuddyCasino• 9 years ago

A web radio / bluetooth speaker for the ESP32:

https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_MP3_Decoder

An Alexa smart speaker implementation, also for the ESP32:

https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_Alexa

Made them to learn C and embedded stuff. Exhausting, but rewarding.

jaden• 9 years ago

https://shortmarks.com - Keyword bookmarks across browsers (I started using them in Firefox, and it was a pain to keep them in sync). It has about 1,400 users, much fewer active. I keep thinking I should rebuild it and figure out a way to make money from it.

andrewdryga• 9 years ago

My open source API gateway - http://github.com/nebo15/annon.api.

We built it for a specific purpose since then I've added lots of features and tools. Right now meditating to find out what should be the next big step for it :).

jconcilio• 9 years ago

http://www.penginsforeveryone.com - giving away stuffed penguins. Just because we can. (Hoping to actually register this as a nonprofit, but right now it's basically a completely unprofitable business venture.)

ETA: On the development end this has been a pretty great project for my fiance and I. He built (and I'm learning from his efforts) a database for processing requests, filtering by priority, etc., and then an integration that allows those we want to send to be exported to a file we can pull into our stamps.com account, and that creates drafts of the Wordpress posts that power our map of sent friends. The database is pretty big (we're sitting at about 21K requests right now on a shared hosting platform) so some of the work has been to load the requests asynchronously so you're not waiting for 21,000 rows before you can manage requests...

kidproquo• 9 years ago

See N Tell [1] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0

[1] https://seentell.me

jonberk218• 9 years ago

This is probably going to be buried but YES, my weekly newsletter The Random Roundup(https://tinyletter.com/randomroundup) Granted, down the line I may be able to leverage the audience for something but right now sharing the gems I find while hitch hiking the internet is so awesome I'd probably even pay to do it.

MoDu_HN• 9 years ago

I keep developing LiveStickies, a UWP for simple notes, because all the existing ones were crap (for me).

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh4wm0q

In the meantime, I've grown to 20k downloads and 200 daily users.

I regularly receive e-mails and reviews from people telling they love the app and use it everyday, including someone's grandma, which is very encouraging. :)

tripzilch3• 9 years ago

Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

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