Ask HN: What are you working on right now and why is it cool?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563465

31 43 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Last one was a few months ago--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122731

I don't really consider the project itself to be objectively cool (it lets you receive files that are too big to send over email directly to your Dropbox folder - you can send files up to 1 GB to me at http://dbinbox.com/cgenco), but it's really cool to me personally because:

* it's the first project I implemented payments through Stripe with (which is an amazingly cool API)

* it's the first side project that's generated enough revenue to quit my day job

* it gives me an active excuse to make other, cooler things that will eventually spin off as their own projects (like a cheaper Mailchimp integrated with Rails on SES)

* it's the first time I've ever needed to scale beyond one server, so I get to learn all about multi-server deployments and keeping your data (on RDS) separate from your app servers separate from your worker servers

* I'm getting really good at chugging through support emails, and thereby email in general. I've got a really nice inbox 0 flow going on that I plan to write about soon

I also now get to work whenever I want, take as much time off as I want, and not overanalyze small purchases because it's likely I'll get a notification from Stripe that I've just received an order of magnitude more money than I'm deliberating over.

It's a blast :D

dshuang• 12 years ago

Congrats on your revenue milestone! How did you come to think of this product?

christiangenco2• 12 years ago

I was studying abroad in Australia and didn't bring any flash drives with me. One of the labs (or tutorials, as they call them) had us working on files on the. School computers. I needed to send them to myself somehow, but didn't want to log in to my email or Dropbox to upload them because I didn't feel like the computers were very secure.

I hacked up the first version in a few days and used it for the rest of the semester, then promptly forgot about it until it started getting blogged about :p

JSeymourATL• 12 years ago

Kickstarter: Great organic coffee direct from farmers (cut out the middle man). 100% Farmer Owned > https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/640878266/coffeecsaorg-...

ASquare• 12 years ago

PlanitWide: http://planitwide.com

It's cool because it solves the biggest pain points associated with finding travel information & creating realistic itineraries

Even everyone's favorite search engine(s)contributes to the issue of findability more than most people realize.

Wrote about the problems related to search in more detail here: http://blog.planitwide.com/thing-will-take-pain-planning-tri...

Subscribe if you think travel planning is stressful/painful/inefficient :)

lgmspb• 12 years ago

Staply: https://staply.co

It is basically a file messenger. It's cool because it lets you turn files and links you share into one easy to read feed. So that later you would know who sent what, when and why. Think of it as a shared folder with a messenger built-in. It also looks and works great.

dangrossman• 12 years ago

Improvely: https://www.improvely.com

Conversion tracking and click fraud monitoring for online ads. I've been working on it for about two years.

Over the past few weeks I gave it an API, which was a major milestone feature on my long-term TODO list. Adding an API opens up a new market segment for me, since many SaaS customers weren't able to track customer lifetime value well without one.

I also set up 'real' load balancing for the first time. Round robin DNS, HAProxy on all the frontend boxes, and a new sharding & replication setup for the databases.

aegabriel2• 12 years ago

Streamkeys: http://www.streamkeys.com

It's a Google Chrome extension that lets you control a bunch of online music players using global hotkeys.

It's cool because it's open source! And there are quite a few contributors adding new sites to the extension which is great :). Also, people seem to like it and find it useful.

CrowderSoup• 12 years ago

Was honestly just commiserating that I couldn't use my keyboards hot-keys to start / stop Google Play Music. This is really useful! Thank you!

analogmind• 12 years ago

This is great! I'm always switching back and forth between tabs! Thanks! Why does the app wants to read browser history though?

aegabriel2• 12 years ago

I make use of the chrome.tabs API which (in theory) could be used to store and track a user's browser history, which is why Chrome has started displaying these messages.

Of course the extension isn't actually doing this :). I'm using the chrome.tabs API as a way of communicating to individual tabs in Chrome. If you are interested the extension source is here: https://github.com/berrberr/streamkeys

wise_young_man• 12 years ago

UserDeck: http://userdeck.com

Embedded customer support software that works with your existing website.

The first product we have is Guides, an knowledge base that you add to any page of your site and inherits the styling and blends right in.

We're looking for more users to provide feedback and pain points they experience in other tools as we build more products like ticketing and live chat in a tightly integrated way.

MarketMatrix• 12 years ago

MarketMatrix: http://marketmatrix.edgecapture.com

It's an app for the iPad that lets you watch tons of assets at the same time in the stock market. It also has voice alerts for economic calendar events.

HN really isn't the target audience for this product, but I'm looking to find people who'd give feedback and help me evolve the feature set. I'm trying to make the app something where news, signals, and market events convert into easy-to-spot effects on a tile grid. The app is cool because the app lets you visualize relationships between assets and it lets you construct those groups yourself. Oh, and the tiles in the app drift around in response to the market during the day, so you can see relationships evolve.

The challenge with making this app though is that everyone has a different broker for realtime data sources and different inputs, so I'm trying to work with different types of traders to help me craft something that is more generally usable by everyone and not just me.

bobbylox• 12 years ago

A fantasy videogame that teaches programming (within the game referred to as magic) to kids, and especially girls. http://codemancergame.com

It's cool for many reasons. 1. It's a game, so that's cool. 2. Magic is programming (and vice versa)! I invented a minimal visual programming language for the game. 3. The current cultural context for technology is forbidding to some, so pulling the skill-building out of that context, and into a fantasy world, is more inclusive than most ways of getting started in programming. 4. An author is working on a companion book to go along with the game. 5. I've also promised an online course, 'Python for Codemancers' that will help people who beat the game transfer their skills into a real-world programming language.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bobbylox/codemancer-a-f...

adam_h• 12 years ago

Flownote: https://flownote.io

Note taking and sketching software that aims to be as easy to use as a paper notebook, with the benefit that you can have a hierarchy of notebooks and you can share, search and export your notes. That's what makes it cool. It also has markdown support and a really clean user interface.

After getting some initial user feedback and then changing and fixing a few things, I'm mainly working on the UI at the moment.

convivialdingo3• 12 years ago

Looking really good! I like it.

friddz• 12 years ago

http://plstats.com

A site showing stats from the English Premier League that you do not see on the usual football sites. You can for example easily see how a team is doing compared to the same fixtures last season (http://plstats.com/#/ComparedToLastSeason/Liverpool).

It's cool because this is my first try at a passive income (ads) and its mostly built using tools/frameworks I have never used before: Go, MongoDB, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Amazon EC2.

rgbrgb4• 12 years ago

Open Listings: https://www.openlistings.co/

We're trying to change the way people buy homes to make home ownership easier and more affordable. Basically if you want to put an offer in on a house, we'll represent you in the transaction and we refund you the majority of our commission (which is typically 3% of the sale price). We can charge dramatically less than a traditional realtor because we're not physically driving around and looking for the house with you (there are a plethora of apps that make that part easy to do on your own). Saving 3% may not sound like a lot but if you put it in the context of a typical 15-20% down payment, it's 15-20% of the upfront cost of purchasing a home. Put your refund into overpaying your mortgage and the savings is compounded.

This problem feels important because home ownership is essential to community -- it's hard to feel a sense of equity in your community when you have no literal equity. The data also supports this, numerous studies have shown a strong inverse correlation between home ownership rates and crime rates.

aagha• 12 years ago

I like the idea, but why start with a mobile app? I could be in the minority, but I don't feel the home buying experience is something I want to do on my phone.

rgbrgb4• 12 years ago

Anecdotally and from the traffic numbers we've been able to get from top listings sites, people are shopping for houses on their phones. We saw that other listings products weren't doing a good job of transitioning to mobile and we had an idea for an instagram-like feed of new properties as they come on market. Our product/company has since evolved from a mobile listings app to a digital brokerage.

We agree that large and serious transactions can be handled more comfortably in your browser, so the closing process happens in our web app.

porter• 12 years ago

Is this legal?

rgbrgb4• 12 years ago

Yes. Redfin has a similar model but they can't refund as much because they provide full-service agents.

mrfusion• 12 years ago

How do buyers view the house without an agent? I asked the sellers agent to show me a house once and they wouldn't do it unless I used them as my buying agent also :-(

rgbrgb4• 12 years ago

It's quite common to go to open houses without an agent or to ask the sellers agent to show you around.

What that sellers agent was telling you sounds illegal, and I'd be very surprised if they wouldn't show you the house if you insisted on not having another agent there. They have a fiduciary duty to get offers and show all of them to the seller they are representing.

convivialdingo3• 12 years ago

Unnamed social network (#deHashed for now)

A p2p social network that utilizes djb's curve25519 crypto elements for a fully anonymous network. Almost all networking avoids the use of servers(a DHT server is used to locate initial nodes). A distributed hash table is used to route messages to avoid metadata tagging. All networks are established with ephemeral DH, all operations use authenticated & signed packets. All networking is over UDP for now.

New connections are made person to person using QR codes on screen which are also DH encrypted PKI signatures used as DH keys. Connections can also be established by exchanging random word sentences or having a friend sign your signature and vouch. Either way, we avoid all MITM attacks.

I have a few ideas to monetize, inluding secure distribution of content (micro payments), integration with bitcoin and opt-in advertising. Again, users can participate as they like and we won't ever force content on users without asking first.

Aiming for basic functional iOS and OSX beta in December.

hndude• 12 years ago

I'd like to help you work on this. Would that be doable?

convivialdingo3• 12 years ago

I'd be happy to have help. Contact me at gmail (same as my username).

dturnbull• 12 years ago

A sequel to my book about the Meteor JavaScript framework.

This was the first: http://meteortips.com

But since that one just hit its 2nd edition, I'm keen to talk about topics I'm yet to cover. Lots of work ahead though.

brickcap3• 12 years ago

Great thread this :)

I am working on wrinq, an application that allows tenants to pay their rent online. I think it's cool because it makes it convenient for tenant to pay his rent and for the landlord by taking care of bookkeeping and reminders. I am set for a launch in December.

Also I am working on an openresty book[2] (definitely an openresty guide) which also should be complete by December. The official docs for openresty are very good but when I was starting out I struggled with a few things(like ngx.location.capture) so the goal of this book is to help someone who is new by quickly showing him some core concepts. I think that a lot of people who already use nginx can benefit a lot by using openresty.

[1]http://www.wrinq.com/

[2]http://www.staticshin.com/programming/definitely-an-open-res...

boca2• 12 years ago

Wrinq is an interesting idea that even I had thought about earlier. I pay my rent using a personal check which the landlord then encashes at the bank. I will prefer to pay my rent online using a credit or debit card. But from a landlord's perspective, wouldn't it incur an additional processing fee if he/she were to start accepting a credit/debit card thereby reducing the net amount for him/her? The only way for it work for the landlord would be to increase the rent which I, as a tenant, will not like. I understand there's convenience but don't think it would justify a rent increase of 3% (average credit card processing fee) which can be a lot depending on where you are. How are you handling this problem? I know some landlords already have the option of paying by credit/debit card. It may work out in case of a new tenant but what about existing tenants? How does the landlord or you as a service provider justify the not-so-insignificant increase for them?

brickcap3• 12 years ago

Good questions. Before I started building wrinq I surveyed landlords and tenants:-

1. Some of them flat out refused to use such a service. As you say the increase in costs was a detriment to them.

2. Some tenants said that it would be a very good idea and they would not mind paying higher rent if it meant that it was more convenient for them to pay.

Group #1 were people who had a family to support and increase in cost was significant. Group #2 were single persons with high salaries and 30-100 additional monthly cost meant nothing to them (this includes the fees of wrinq as well).

I also discovered a third group of people. Landlords who were willing to take in less rent if it meant that their tenants were happier. These people did not keep tenants for profit but for company and maintenance of their properties ("better than it being empty and gathering dust") so I will be targeting groups #2 and #3.

Also I think you can have a tremendous advantage if you look for landlords locally and offer them additional services. Like I have tied up with a few agents in my locality so when the existing tenants leave I am going to make sure that the landlords find new ones quickly without any difficulties. This way I promise new business to agents, good tenants to landlords and continuous income stream to myself.

Finally tie up with your local banks. Despite what most people think banks these days are quite open do business with individuals. They can offer you a proprietary api for a small upfront fees (and lot lesser transaction charges) which you can use to lower your charges. But don't do this at first. This should be a last resort when you have exhausted other methods or if you want to grow your market to group #1.

Anyway don't give up on the idea. Talk to people in your locality maybe you can discover some other ways that you can help them besides collecting rent.

toumhi• 12 years ago

I’m working on a book to help startups get more and better user feedback (especially in the early days when you have a beta or launched recently).

You can sign up and get a discount when the book is out right here: http://www.saasfoundry.io/feedback-foundry/

Every one realizes the importance of user feedback to get their product in the right direction, but there’s lot of confusion on how you get useful insights and not just random noise.

frading• 12 years ago

https://www.printmosaic.com/contest/events/1-November

I added a contest to my startup PrintMosaic (https://www.printmosaic.com).

It is cool because some people will be able to win free posters and free high resolution images for Christmas.

To enter, you need to create a mosaic and apply with it. Creating a mosaic is easy and is done in 2 steps (1. Choose your main image and 2. Choose the small images)

The winner is the mosaic with the most votes. So you need to invite your friends to vote for yours if you want to win.

ifcologne• 12 years ago

ArangoDB, an open source NoSQL database that supports documents, key/values and graphs in one tool.

https://www.arangodb.com/key-features

Why is it cool?

You start with a few requirements, than learn something new about your business and your customers every day.

With the multi-model approach of ArangoDB you can adapt and change your data model, join between edges and documents and even extend the database by Javascript.

maresca• 12 years ago

Flocal : http://goflocal.com - Craigslist meets Tinder

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flocal/id894416534?mt=8&uo=4

It's a lot better than craigslist. It's quicker and easier to use. Immediately see how far away a post is. There's no registrations or signins. Every post has a pic and location, so you won't see a lot of the junk you see on craigslist where someone posts something with no map, no pic, and no address in the post.

archagon• 12 years ago

Tasty Imitation Keyboard (https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard), a basic replica of the default iPhone keyboard written in Swift. Features include a close approximation of the keyboard appearance on all iPhones, entirely programmatic art and layout, auto-capitalization, a built-in settings screen, and easy extensibility. I've already used it to write a transliterating Cyrillic keyboard and get it into the App Store[1], and I intend to update it whenever I release new keyboards or patch my existing ones. Code is messy, but I needed to get it out the door.

In the grand scheme of things it's not much, but as my first "real" open-source project, I'm pretty proud of it! There are a few other "looks like the system keyboard"-type keyboards in the App Store, and mine knocks them out of the park.

(I'm also working on a blog post about the pains involved in building a 3rd party iOS keyboard.)

[1]: Translit Keyboard, http://translit-keyboard.archagon.net

Concours• 12 years ago

https://www.feedsapi.org/

It's an all-in-one realtime monitoring and curation SaaS. Here are some of the cool things you can do with it:

* Turn shortened RSS feeds to Full Text RSS Feeds

* Curate feeds based on Keywords and ReGex

* Convert RSS to JSON on the fly and via an API

* Push RSS News alerts to any emaik inbox in real-time and a couple of other cool things.

aroberge• 12 years ago

Probably too late to get noticed, but here it is:

http://reeborg.ca/world.html is a "Karel the Robot clone" with advanced features. It's completely free (no login required) and I have no plans to monetize it.

It enables programming in Python, Javascript or CoffeeScript.

The home page links to some programming tutorials.

gesman• 12 years ago

Advanced security analytics app for banking/financial Web application capable of scanning 10,000,000 events per second to discover attack vectors, such as sources of shellshock attacks, SQL injection attacks and similar, and present results in half dozen highly detailed tables and charts.

It's nice to see that something that I built in 2 weeks brings as much benefits as crappier looking multi-million dollar solutions.

iSloth• 12 years ago

Subnet Cheatsheet (only home page works) - http://subnet.im

Because I'm fed up with poorly designed alternatives that are out there and can never remember the URL's

purans• 12 years ago

http://intomoviesapp.com, Community for movie and TV show fans. Right now only available for iOS platform but also working on android. Please try it out!

Ask HN: What are you working on right now and why is it cool?

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