Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830808

by basdevries • 13 years ago

33 41 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi HN,

I thought it was nice to open a tread in which people can post their projects and get feedback on it as a better way to gain attention than solely submitting a HN post.

Unthough HN is the best way to get feedback in an honest way, it's hard to gain traction due to their populairity.

Tell me what projects you are working on and don't forget to vote up so, more feedback will be given!

boulem• 13 years ago

personally i work on making a little java ide using javafx

yen223• 13 years ago

I'm currently trying to teach myself web development by building a simple wedding organizing app. Still in its early stages though, nothing to show for it yet.

stevekemp2• 13 years ago

I'm working on a modal, console-based, email-client. It's developed in C++ and has fully integrated scripting provided via lua.

http://lumail.org/

https://github.com/skx/lumail/

It is pretty different from the existing mail clients for the console (pine, alpine, mutt, sup, notmuch), partly for being modal, and partly because it only handles Maildirs. No IMAP or POP3 support at all.

In terms of functionality it is usable for sending, processing, and receiving emails. But there is still missing support for attachments.

shurane3• 13 years ago

If I wanted to pair this with an imap or pop3 mail account, what other command would I need to run?

stevekemp2• 13 years ago

I think you have a lot of choices, so it comes down to personal preferences.

Basically this tool will only work against a local set of Maildirs, so your job is to get the mail from the remote host onto your local system in Maildir form.

Off the top of my head that means one of:

* imapsync

* fetchmail

* offlineimap

stevoo• 13 years ago

I am currently working on creating a p0rn site ( there are some money there, but it is hard to implement ) as well as a photographer site

markwillis82• 13 years ago

My pet project at the moment is programmatic battleships. Write your own client - play against other users running automatic games and see how we'll your client fairs up in the leaderboard

siddboots• 13 years ago

Similar to mine. I'm working on an online ant colony sandbox where people can write AIs to compete for resources, etc.

jamesjguthrie• 13 years ago

I'm working on a few things:

A 32 channel data logger, driver communication and information aid for motorsport and automotive testing

A kids education app with a Scottish 'teacher' character - this will hopefully be uploaded for App Store approval this weekend

and I have a few client projects on the go

joshcrowder• 13 years ago

Nice idea for a thread!

I'm working on a new project management tool called Matterhorn.io its for companies who are design led and follow agile for development.

There are a million and one project management apps but none of them are a fit for us, we like basecamp but need a scrumboard, we like jira but find its too complicated. We are building a happy medium

atomical• 13 years ago

Used Pivotal Tracker?

goo• 13 years ago

Working on Zoomforth, helping companies collect, manage and display video from their employees and partners.

https://zoomforth.com

jlengrand• 13 years ago

I am currently working on a simple way to share spotify tracks so that anyone can listen to them (and not only spotify users). The core is finished for a while, but I struggle with the design! Man it's hard to make something look nice

wturner• 13 years ago

I'm working on a very simple and inane tool that block diagrams my code with cables so I can write programs visually. It doesn't compile or run any of it, it's just a visual tool. It's a mashup of two JQuery libraries: JsPlumb and Jquery TE. I also have an idea for a very large meteor.js/Web Audio API project that I am gradually piecing my way towards with small one-off do-dads like this: http://helpknow.com/portfolio/drumapp/

helen8420003• 13 years ago

I've been working on http://www.postalcandy.co.uk - it was an MVP test for two weeks. It has been an idea I kept coming back to for a while now. I really want to sell a fun product.

While it's just basic technically, I've learned a lot about A/B testing & driving traffic.

Have taken the first few orders which is proof of concept! Currently working on the next version, integrating more product images & branding too.

Also I work on http://foundcamera.com - it gets quite a bit of natural traffic & submissions are backing up. Could do with some php help if anyone needs a weekend gig!

basdevries• 13 years ago

That looks very cool! Could you share some intel with me about gross margins and how you calculated the prices for postalcand.co.uk? Foundcamera is awesome too :D I'll check for a lost camera tomorrow in Amsterdam, you might just want to add the feature of sharing your lost camera but maybe I overlooked it (says already enough) and a reward program would probably finish it up. Good luck!

helen8420003• 13 years ago

Thanks! I've been putting the candy packs together for quite a while, for family & as gifts for friends in the US.

Offering flat pricing including shipping seemed to make sense for this type of purchase. I checked the prices of similar food subscription packages and kept that in mind - they seem to range from $17 to $33 typically.

I put together several candy packs at different weights and settled on 250g, 500g and 1kg - I priced them up and worked out a per gram price point so when I'm looking at new products I can work out if it's good value. Eg. x pence per gram of candy.

I put together a chart of shipping prices. Listing 3 different world zones (EU, US/CAN, AUS/NZ) and delivery speeds (surface/airmail/48hour). That enabled me to put a flat price on shipping. So for example I use the AUS/NZ price as standard, if people order from other locations then I save on postage.

I'll probably make some pricing adjustments over time, as orders grow I should be able to improve margin by buying larger packs, once I get around 10 orders per day that brings down shipping costs too, I can pass that value on to the customers. I'm looking forward to getting the new site launched! Thanks for your feedback!

thesmileyone• 13 years ago

I really like the concept of PC, however what puts me off ever so slightly is the use of a .co.uk domain whilst all the currency is USD, surely either a .com or £GBP would make it more uniform?

helen8420003• 13 years ago

Well the produce is coming from the UK & my target audience is the US.

I do have the .com domain too but I'm currently trying to wrestle it away from the clutches of GoDaddy & waiting for it to transfer.

huseyinyilmaz• 13 years ago

https://github.com/huseyinyilmaz/talkybee . I haven't work on it lately due to a class I am taking on coursera. But I will finish is as soon as I am done with the class I am taking.

mast• 13 years ago

I made a tool (http://complex-area-calculator.appspot.com) for calculating areas of polygons. Initially, it was really just cobbled together and there are a lot of problems with the code. I'm currently in the process of a re-write, but by blog (http://foodconstrued.com) also takes up a lot of my time.

jamesk14022• 13 years ago

The area calculator is really interesting, good job!

bjoerns• 13 years ago

I'm working on a revision control system for spreadsheets (http://www.spreadgit.com) so people can sort out their Excel mess, ie. track changes, diff and eventually merge versions like you'd do with code.

saturdayplace• 13 years ago

A while back I tried brainstorming a bunch of revision control for <x>'s. I figured there were plenty of industries outside of programming that could use a tailor-made versioning system. Later on, I ran across one of them at https://layervault.com/ which is for graphic designers, which seemed (to me at least) to prove that the more general concept has legs.

pkinsky• 13 years ago

I've built a tool to create arbitrary rigid 3D surfaces and support structures from laser-cut-and-perforated folded tyvek panels. It's probably never going to be commercialized, but it is fun to tinker with.

The use case is 3d shapes where the volume makes 3d printing cost-prohibitive, for example this 4 foot long tyvek dolphin: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102064314320177820526/alb...

If you're in boston, stop by the collision19 show for a look: http://collisioncollective.org/show/collision19

flipcoder• 13 years ago

p2p file transfer tool w/ some cool features like auto-accept rules, tag-based (semantic fs) syncing

http://deployanything.com (win,mac,lin + pi)

Tech: C++11, Qt, node.js

shurane3• 13 years ago

Wow, that's cool. Very cool. Do you guys have any competitors? Does this even need a server to use? If it's p2p, it's already decentralized, right?

dmitripopov_com• 13 years ago

I am working on my own help authoring tool "with blackjack and hookers" :) It has a cool name: Helpinator.

krapp• 13 years ago

I upvoted this because everything is better with blackjack and hookers.

hbien• 13 years ago

I've been working on a console Pomodoro timer: http://thymerb.com

There were already a few around, this was for fun and I wanted one with easy pre/post hooks.

shurane3• 13 years ago

This looks cool. All the fun terminal programs are all over the place, but I love it when I come across another one!

stuglaser• 13 years ago

I'm reimplementing Go-style channels in Python, including multiplexing:

https://github.com/stuglaser/pychan

neilxdsouza• 13 years ago

I am working on a survey programming and cross tabulation engine. It's open source hosted here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtcc

There are 2 versions of the Survey compiler, one in production use and a newer version in advanced prototype targeted at tablets etc. The production use compiler is targeted at India and the Middle East and anywhere else where you do Market Research using Pen and Paper format. It can generate outputs for IBM SPSS-Quantum (a specialised software for data processing) and SPSS and and my own cross tabulation engine, described below. Our current offering to clients is a potential 70% speedup in data processing using our system for Pen and Paper data entry.

The cross tabulation engine is on similar lines to IBM SPSS-Quantum but removes many limitations and is potentially much faster. I tested it on 1 million records - each record had about 64000 conditions, it was able to process the data in 20 seconds (I tried this after seeing Evan Miller's post on HN and someone asked about how fast his software was on 10 million records). I compile the input programs to simple C++ fixed size arrays and data is stored on disk as a flat file, fixed length per record. I have been experimenting with sse instructions - there is a lot of potential for further speed improvement.

This is a git repository, active branches are: nc - this is a stable version of the compiler, but uses ncurses and

web-questionnaire-2: this is the new survey compiler

   Active GUIs/Framewors we can compile to are :
   1. gtk
   2. wxWidgets
   3. webtoolkit

   I have also separated out the runtime environment so that we can compile with emscripten
   Using this, we can compile with 

    1. Dojo, ExtJs
    2. DojoMobile - I could not get Sench Touch to work.

web-randomizer: this is a branch for a randomization grammar

rdg: this is a branch for a Random Data generator. This was used to generate the 1 million records for my testing. I was able to get it to go at a speed of about 170 records a second.

If anyone is interested in playing with it, please write to me - my email should be all over the source code. We are also looking to make a business out of this (I have 2 friends and family investors).

kkoppenhaver• 13 years ago

Just launched subtleshade.com to help my learn about all this cool new HTML/CSS stuff I keep hearing about! Design and cross-browser support is sketchy at the moment, but it's a v1.0.

EDIT: Should probably provide some more information. It's a easy way to add colors to the patterns provided on subtlepatterns.com without having to dive into Photoshop.

danielhughes• 13 years ago

Just launched http://www.babelmatch.com. It's a crowd-sourced alternative to language-learning programs like Rosetta Stone.

ThaiWood• 13 years ago

I'm currently writing Ruby For System Administrators at http://ruby.elevatedintel.com A book that helps SysAdmins become more productive and repeat themselves less using Ruby.

phdtree• 13 years ago

http://phdtree.org is a Wiki site that allows users to create & edit their academic family tree.

zedw• 13 years ago

I am working on a P2P network based around Kademlia. I have not got very far mostly due to lack of time and knowledge, but I keep going with it when I can.

https://github.com/zwerfvogel/Mimosa

pantoine• 13 years ago

three projects: Homenet a closed source home networking system, multimedia, it's own TV stack. Currently re-writing as i thought the networking was a bit weak, and the android remote control/EPG was UGLY!

Also playing with some vimscripts https://github.com/PAntoine/vimgitlog, and https://github.com/PAntoine/timekeeper.

also, just starting a project planner vimscript, ms project style, with project diagramming.

johnmoore• 13 years ago

Hotel Comparison Website.

http://www.cutpricedhotels.com

clockwork_189• 13 years ago

I am working on a SCRUM project management solution: http://scrumptious.io/

Why? Well, in my current company where I am doing my internship, we wanted to use SCRUM, but couldnt find a resource that was light weight, integrated with 3rd party tools like google cal, github, etc, and was cheap at the same time. As a coder, I decided to work on my own solution for this problem. I know that it may not be very monetizable, but in the long run, I can be proud of it as something I built.

Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

Related Stories