Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9528520

by RomanPushkin • 11 years ago

40 57 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I think its good having this kind of thread at some period of time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957989

I'm a business guy not a technical guy, so these projects will reflect that. By day, I'm a consultant helping mid-sized companies build growth management systems, so these projects reflect that a little as well.

There are 3 markets here - Coaching, Tourism, Barristers - so I'd love to hear from anybody also playing in those spaces.

1) I'm building the business system for a business coaching organisation. They're nominally competitors of mine, but I think they have a great niche and expertise and more clients would benefit if they had a systemised approach. This might scale for other coaching / consulting companies.

2) I'm researching micro-operators in the Travel and Tourism space, to see if an approach to strategy and traction I built for a similar organisation can be shared at scale and at their price point. Finding it challenging, because many of these micro businesses don't want to grow / invest in growth.

3) Early market feedback from Barristers indicates their 'business' training is inadequate. I've developed an overview for building a Bar practice from pre-startup to a thriving specialisation, and am currently talking with potential partners in their area of specialty (eg, personal financial planning).

So my focus is seeking scale. These aren't going to disrupt the world, but they're also 'not another to-do list app' so I feel I'm helping.

trevordev• 11 years ago

1) http://trevorb.cloudapp.net:3000/ personal dashboard to read hackernews/reddit/web comics without seeing the same post twice (I swear I can waste time 10x more efficiently)

2) http://trevorb.cloudapp.net:3001/ mmo type game exploring webgl, socketio and just experimenting

sidcool• 11 years ago

+1 for Personal dashboard.

kidproquo2• 11 years ago

The personal dashboard is awesome.

Suggestion: put a count on the comments icon to know if there are any comments on the article (I find the comments more valuable)

sjs382• 11 years ago

A while back, I made something similar to the dashboard over here: http://news.http410.com/

munishm• 11 years ago

this is beautiful. Kudos!

meesterdude• 11 years ago

Something of a cross between reddit and craigslist. Not live yet, still sorting out voting. Hopefully eventually though.

bluejellybean2• 11 years ago

I recently launched Steam Profile Lookup!

https://steamprofilelookup.com/steamid/76561197982486517

Fraud is a big problem in the steam trading scene and this tool basically allows people to do a quick background check before they trade.

This is my first real project that I've been able to put in front of users and it's been a blast. I've found it's a lot more enjoyable for me to have actual users trying stuff out rather than just building internal tools. Getting feedback, trying stuff, and running tests is just deeply satisfying. It's also really forced me to write good, production grade code.

fsimoneschi2• 11 years ago

Credit scoring and fraud detection/prevention are big problems in games and virtual economies in general. Keep me posted about your progress (DM @fsimoneschi).

bluejellybean2• 11 years ago

This is very true. Currently the best communities can really do is name and shame. Obviously this means there will always be a larger percentage of scammers here than normal. The other big issue with the community driven method is that people can't really take their lumps with a temp ban. Make one bad decision and it will haunt you

As people spend more and more time inside virtual worlds the natural progression is for people to trade in-game items for cash. If someone could make rent just playing WoW and selling items, there in-game time would skyrocket! Unfortunately game companies are pretty against this with the only real exception being Valve.

The biggest argument against cash trading is that it ruins the markets for 'normal' players who don't want to grind gold. Markets in general are hard but throwing in the requirement that they also have to be fun makes the challenge extremely difficult. Competing against bots just ruins the market aspect of the game for most players.

I'm not sure what the solution is but I think a core issue is that most companies don't think of structuring the game around the economy and item entropy. This leads to weird inefficiencies and massive inflation when players and bots alike start grinding gold heavily. The only game that really comes close to fixing this issue is EVE Online. Their market is fairly well built and expensive items can disappear in an instant making runaway inflation not as much of an issue (though still very present).

It's an annoying problem from the traders prospective because fraud runs rampant and there isn't a ton we can do. Sites like mine help raise the bar required to scam large amounts of money but without the game companies support it will always be an ongoing battle.

amirouche3• 11 years ago

This kind of app can be super useful to do background check in other situations (startups, so called head hunters).

tomjacobs• 11 years ago

Something where people can talk about their projects that they're working on:

http://glitchclub.com

gordalina• 11 years ago

I'm working on wits (written in the stars) - an app that takes western astrology into today's mobile platforms. It's kinda sad that there aren't any proper astrology apps in stores today. http://astrowits.com

misframer2• 11 years ago

I'm working on a network flow monitoring system called Cistern [0]. Part of it is a time series storage engine called Catena [1]. I've also written a few protocol implementations for it, including sFlow v5 [2] and SNMP [3].

[0] https://github.com/PreetamJinka/cistern

[1] https://github.com/PreetamJinka/catena

[2] https://github.com/PreetamJinka/sflow

[3] https://github.com/PreetamJinka/snmp

nubb• 11 years ago

interesting! I am a network engineer so I am curious to ask - what benefits would your tool bring me in my environment? 100+ branches, 3 large data centers, etc...

misframer2• 11 years ago

I'm trying to make it very scalable so that you wouldn't need a big machine to monitor many systems. Using Go helps with that, but I've had to make protocol implementation efficient too.

I want this system to be very developer friendly. I think I could make this more like a database instead of a monitoring system. You wouldn't insert data into it directly; that happens with network flows. You should be able to query it like a database with rich data models and aggregations.

I don't think it would be a direct benefit. I'm hoping that it will become a great framework so people can write tools on top of it that would be way better than anything I can make.

krapp• 11 years ago

- Building an entity-component framework in C++ and making Space Invaders. No code because it's literally terrible but here's some "gameplay footage" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxQZz0yr4V4

- Building a forum that's a sort-of-but-not-entirely HN clone in PHP. It's a free app on Pagodabox and still mostly doesn't work but assuming it's awake what there is of it is here: http://original-oak.gopagoda.io/ This might wind up being my final project this semester, and if it is I will post it here, or maybe not I don't know.

- Unity tutorials and ragequitting/restarting Handmade Hero all the time.

lewisl9029• 11 years ago

A proof-of-concept for a multi-platform, secure, distributed, client-side chat application called Toc Messenger: http://lewisl9029.github.io/toc

Built with web technologies such as Ionic, Telehash and remoteStorage.

It's very bare-bones and severely under-optimized right now (have fun downloading 4MB of code lol...), but I have some pretty ambitious features planned for launch such as simultaneous logins, group chat, voice/video chat, file transfers, some kind of email-based user on-boarding process (I'm looking at integrating Persona), and peer discovery using the Bittorrent DHT over the internet as well as automatic discovery for clients on the local network.

And yes, of course it will be open-source. =)

andrewchambers2• 11 years ago

A service which is a cross between git and dropbox with client side encryption and deduplication.

The clients are GPL open source with a cli client underway here https://github.com/buppyio/buppy

My server is private but based on a kubernetes cluster. I hope to add a server version people can setup themselves if they don't want to pay for the official server.

Still too wip for alpha, but I want to announce and get alpha testers soon.

colinbartlett2• 11 years ago

https://StatusGator.io It monitors the status pages of various cloud services and then alerts you.

http://BrushbackApp.com Baseball news app for iOS and Android.

http://taxstax.com Tax withholding service for contractors.

dhagz• 11 years ago

I'm going to be making my first Ruby Gem. It's going to enable easy lookup of weather forecasts. I want to unite geocoding APIs and weather APIs, basically.

It started from a simple "whats the weather" app I wanted to make to learn Sinatra, and then I realized I could turn everything I was doing into a gem and that would be kind of cool, and definitely new for me. It's simple, but I figure if I do a good job it will be useful to someone, as there don't seem to be a ton of (well-documented) options for this kind of gem out there.

colinbartlett2• 11 years ago

That's awesome! Good luck, post it back here when you have it.

deet• 11 years ago

A personal banking assistant you communicate with using natural language. (Using speech recognition, NLP, and ML).

https://www.wealth.ai/

Will launch in a few months.

andrewchambers2• 11 years ago

That is really cool.

cmstoken• 11 years ago

Extremely cool. It'll be nice to see it catch on.

amirouche3• 11 years ago

I am not sure about the domain “personnal finance”, seems to narrow. It looks like a small H.E.R. application.

The design is convincing.

I went through your blog posts, nothing about your stack. Could you explain what do you use of “speech recognition” (and “speech synthetisis” if any)?

jbwashington• 11 years ago

I'm making a countdown timer for my university's transit system.

https://github.com/jbwashington/BusHog

I find myself making a series of countdown timers in the morning based off my class/bus schedule, I figured I would cut out all the bloated map UI and pull data straight from the school's bus API.

jamblesjumbles• 11 years ago

Working on making Portfolio, a sweet way to keep up-to-date with your stocks.

Would love feedback if you're on an iPhone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/portfolio-instantly-know-wha...

jacobtracey• 11 years ago

Been working on https://fris.bi for a while - it's a WebRTC group video chat app.

Would love anyones feedback!

RomanPushkin2• 11 years ago

Need demo on the main page without registration!

philippnagel• 11 years ago

Together with another dev I am buildung the file sharing and editing service we always wanted to use.

Editing-support for lots of file-types, encryption, git-like workflow, are some of the things we Plan to implement.

siquick• 11 years ago

Been working on http://www.soundshelter.net

Sound Shelter is a platform for electronic music lovers to recommend their favourite vinyl records to each other.

We then use the recommendations to build a personalised feed full of music we think they'll love.

burritofanatic2• 11 years ago

An ebook that'll function as a guide as to how to quit law and code based on my experience.

http://www.quitlawandcode.com

gxespino2• 11 years ago

This is interesting to me. I'm a nurse who recently made the transition to developer and I think others could benefit from my experience.

Did you validate a need for this book prior to starting? Do you see an exodus of lawyers leaving the profession? I ask because I don't necessarily see nurses leaving their professions although most everyone I know is unhappy with the job.

burritofanatic2• 11 years ago

You aren't Jared Sinclaire are you? http://jaredsinclair.com/about.html He's a registered ICU nurse who became a developer - I thought this transition is more unique than mine.

More than a quarter of licensed attorneys who graduated from law school in 2000 are no longer actively practicing for a myriad of reasons. A significant number from my year, 2008 hold jobs that don't require a law degree.

These articles should give you a glimpse into the situation. There were several others I really like from over the years, but I can't seem to find them at the moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/business/dealbook/burdened...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/30/job_market_fo...

I don't believe the general job market for nurses is as bad as it is for attorneys. People also have a great difficulty accepting a potential sunk cost, or refuse to believe that there's greater opportunity elsewhere once they have both feet committed somewhere.

nstart• 11 years ago

A lot of things at once. I'm finally committing to finishing them in order.

A) My personal CMS. Standard CMS but outputs a static website. Kind of a static site generator without going through all the "put file in folder run [jekyll/bootstrap] whatever to generate site and upload via ftp" hassle. Just blog like you normally would if using wordpress or medium.

B) A couple of SMS applications to generate some money on the side for me. Junk apps along the lines of "send 'quiz me' to 7890 to get a new quiz everyday". They are big (huuuge) in some parts of the world still.

C) An android app to create a single image from two images. This is just to learn android development.

D) A firefox addon for...

Sigh. I should probably shut up and go back to working on this stuff.

edencoder• 11 years ago

Heaps.

1) A framework (edencoder/eden) 2) A (sort of) imageboard https://www.1eden.com 3) An online marketplace (adlist) 4) A rental management software

... and a full time job

mod• 11 years ago

Paginate (imageboard)

archagon2• 11 years ago

I'm working on a sort of DAW-ish thing for iPad. Except it's not really a DAW — more of a musical sketchpad. When I was sitting down and thinking of what I would like in a music creation app, I thought of two things. First, the typical DAW grid structure (and sheet music before it) is far too rigid for modern music. It's really hard to annotate music with syncopation, pitch bends, and fluid rhythms unless you already have the song in your head — and even then, it takes forever. Second, the feedback loop in most DAWs is really large. By the time you've pecked away at your piano roll and fiddled with the dozens of switches, your song is no longer fresh in your head.

In other words, I wanted something akin to musical clay: a very simple, very malleable representation of music in space that focuses entirely on ease of interaction.

With my app, I try to solve both of these problems. In regards to the former, you have the option of drawing every note arbitrarily in pitch or time, as simply as in an ordinary drawing app. (Snapping is an option, too.) And as for the latter, the whole thing is a scroll view, so panning and zooming are incredibly simple. Furthermore, you have immediate access to undo/redo and can also rewind to the last place you played from, meaning that iterating on your ideas takes only a few seconds as opposed to the arduous process of controlling a DAW. The UI tries to get out of your way as much as humanly possible.

I should emphasize that this won't be production software; the music you create will sound like MIDI. Rather, my goal here is to make an app that you can freely sketch and create musical ideas in, which can then be used as a rough draft for working with a more featureful DAW.

Performance is a top priority, and I'm targeting 60fps on my iPad 3.

Screenshot with rough "programmer" UI: http://cl.ly/image/1I0y0G2v0b2T/IMG_0281.PNG

Depending on my work ethic, I expect to release in a month or three.

amirouche3• 11 years ago

What do you mean by work ethic?

archagon2• 11 years ago

Well, hah, "depending on how lazy I am"!

creativeone• 11 years ago

Building a platform to assist in marketing some vacant office space we are buying in Atlanta. Will then try to take on CoStar.

kidproquo2• 11 years ago

Working on v2 of Flaming Notes (music game to learn sight reading, http://www.adhyet.com).

Main v2 feature will be the ability to import MIDI files to have songs instead of randomly generated notes.

RaitoBezarius• 11 years ago

I'm working on a web application that helps a group of friends to play virtual roleplay in a cool way (using advanced chat interactions - like soundtrack while roleplaying, others devices that helps you play while you're outside, everything that can enhance your roleplaying experience).

I'm also working as a side project to integrate AutobahnJS (a PubSub / RPC lib based on WAMP protocol) with React.

BaptisteGreve• 11 years ago

I'm working on Unimersiv, a platform to learn through virtual reality.

We believe that Virtual Reality can strongly improve the capacity of the human mind to remember the things it learned for a long time. According the Cone of Learning created by Edgard Dale, the american educatonist, after two weeks, the human brain tends to remember 10% of what it reads, 20% of what it hear but 90% of what it does or simulate Unimersiv yields the latter scenario impeccably.

With the educational content published on the platform students can interact with the virtual environment in person and manipulate the various objects within it. This supports “learning by doing” and also results in creativity by constructionism. There are already some great experiences that Oculus Rift' users can use to feed their thirst for learning, the most famous is Titans of Space which takes you into space to teach you everything about our solar system or Apollo 11 in which you become Neil Armstrong on what is the 20th century greatest achievment.

Link: https://unimersiv.com

tehbeard• 11 years ago

1) An API to get information about minecraft (blocks, items, entities, enchantments, commands etc in a similar vein to https://swapi.co/).

2) A client-side app using that API to make creating custom mobs and items easier.

prokes• 11 years ago

I'm working on TrackHSA (http://trackhsa.com), a website to manage your Health Savings Account purchases, receipts, and distributions. Launching soon, if you have an HSA check it out.

RomanPushkin2• 11 years ago

http://wellwellapp.meteor.com

Agile Retrospective feedback tool. Create a board, share the link.

purans• 11 years ago

Trying to build this.. https://github.com/narup/PubKit - Lightweight messaging, data store and push notification platform for mobile apps

andersthue• 11 years ago

I am working on an app for a new working method for makers that makes it more fun to be employed as a maker while making managers and customers happier.

The main gain for makers is that they get more time in flow and secondly get more control over their time and how and when they have to do the work.

http://timeblock.com

mcdevhammer• 11 years ago

An HTML5 canvas UI framework. Not really serious, just wanted to finally learn to do OO javascript properly and see where it goes.

revskill• 11 years ago

Write books on software engineering: http://checkraiser.gitbooks.io/rails-and-react-js/ https://www.gitbook.com/book/checkraiser/beginning-react-nat...

Stoo• 11 years ago

My main focus is still on Storytella[0]. I'm currently speaking to a copywriter about getting some good quality user guides set up. I set up writing-ideas[1] this week, just for fun really, and a chance to write some code without much thought for architecture or performance or testing or any of that professional kind of stuff that I have to do for Storytella. There's also Sunstone[2] which is in need of some love. Outside of code there's also Hollow[3], where I get to flex my music skills.

[0] https://storytel.la/

[1] http://www.writing-ideas.com/

[2] http://sunstone.stoogoff.com/

[3] http://www.hollow-audio.co.uk/

lnk2w• 11 years ago

I'm building a small system to control the development solicitations, changelog and database scripts. Also I'm planning to build a HR system with my brother and a friend.

canterburry• 11 years ago

I run a small SaaS business formatting images for responsive websites and are building a console which aggregates all my data in one place and correlates it to each of my customers.

For example, I use Stripe for payments, Desk.com for support, Mandrill for transaction email, MailChimp for campaigns and Gmail for email...I want to see any interaction I've had regardless of API for each of my customers.

I hope I'll can get better at spotting issues as they happen and address them faster.

someotheridiot• 11 years ago

http://rebrickable.com - Figure out what new cool stuff you can build with your old LEGO collection.

Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

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