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Ask HN: What are you working on?
374 points by mlejva on April 4, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 730 comments
I thought it would be interesting to see what are other people working on. Those projects of course might not be ready to be shown you can only describe them and the main problem though.

Project: I am building a neural network which should be able to generate few frames of the video given the preceding and following frames. Currently I am feeding the network with simple videos I have created where is only a single moving pixel. Since I do not have much experience with neural networks I thought this could be good start.

Problem: Up until now I have not realised how hard is to find simple video datasets.




As a hardware side project I've been designing and building an open source split-flap display - the kind of electro-mechanical displays you used to see in train stations and airports that loudly flip through letters and numbers as they update.

https://scottbez1.github.io/splitflap/

Have a few working prototypes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslkflVv-Hw), but I'm currently redesigning the electronics/PCB to make it easier for hobbyists to build (i.e. avoiding tight pitch surface mount components - https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/issues/12), and I'd still like to figure out how to make them cheaper to build in small quantities.


This is super cool! The clackety-clack is soo satisfying.

I'm working with someone on developing electronic noses (arrays of gas sensors to identify compounds, do process automation), and he too is concerned on keeping the boards easily-built: DIP ICs, through-hole components, etc.

I always wonder what the actual demand is for this. Open-source hardware is great, but how many people are ordering bare PCBs, sourcing each individual resistor, power jack, trimpot, etc and soldering them? I use arduinos all the time and consult their schematics constantly, but I wouldn't dare build one when I can buy 3 nanos for $10.

I'm mostly making an argument for embracing the awesomeness of tiny surface-mount components and then getting a place like CircuitHub to do a fully-assembled bulk run of them.


Thanks! Yeah that's a tradeoff that I've been struggling with. I still think there's a lot of additional learning potential with through-hole components you can breadboard, though you do sacrifice board space, availability of components, and sometimes cost by sticking to through-hole parts.

Since the electronics for this project are simple enough I've ended up leaning towards a through-hole board to pair with an Arduino, but I'll admit that I haven't kept up with the cost of small orders of fully-assembled PCBs these days.


To just throw out a counterexample, this is exactly the kind of project I'd prefer to build with through-hole components, rather than buying a preassembled PCB with SMT parts. On the one hand, I actually enjoy soldering, which I freely concede is bizarre; on the other, through-hole parts can actually be worked with by hand, so that if, for example, I want to replace a resistor with a trimpot or a digital pot in order to play around with flip speed or the like, I can totally do that.

If I were going to turn this into a product-shaped product, I'd probably turn it into three: a bare PCB with a BOM for the buyer to fill, a prestuffed SMT PCB for people who just want to assemble the display and run it, and in between a PCB with a bag full of parts, for those who want what I guess would be a reasonably high-end-beginner-to-low-end-intermediate assembly project without a lot of hassle.

But that's just me! Opinions vary, and mine's worth exactly what you paid for it. This is a super neat project, though, however it ends up!


That looks great! I was about to comment that you can still see a large one in use, but apparently NY Penn Station took theirs down earlier this year.

https://nyti.ms/2kqiicj


They have one at the San Francisco Ferry building, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1gKvyghHsk . They put it up in 2013. Apparently it weights 700 lbs.


Thanks! Yeah, they've sadly been disappearing over time. But now that I've really gotten familiar with the complexity and precision required for each individual character I can totally understand why digital makes more sense than maintaining the old displays.


For some reason I forget what I wanted this for, but I literally was thinking about trying to find where you could order these things just a couple weeks ago. This is super cool. Good luck!


Building one is out of my league, but I would buy one for my desk. </hint>


Heh, I don't have any near-term plans to sell fully assembled modules, though I may consider making kits or something once I've refined things further. In the meantime, you could maybe try https://www.flapit.com ? No idea how they are (just came across them on the internet), but they appear to sell small assembled split flap displays?


This is great. I don't see how I can resist making one. I will probably 3D-print the hardware but use my own electronics and SW for controlling it. (I'm kind of addicted to writing my own software for controlling 3D printers and this looks like it would be an easy fit)

I suppose it's a stepper motor that needs to be moved to the right position? How is it homed?


Currently using an IR reflectance sensor and a hole on the spool gear - you can kind of see it here: https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/wiki/Electronics

The sensor is mounted on a PCB that can be physically shifted to apply minor adjustments to the home position. The adjustments could easily be done in software, but doing it physically "stores" the adjustment parameter for each module without having to reprogram the controller.


That looks great. Stanford has an awesome one: http://peterwegner.com/detail.asp?id=212


I'd buy it


Scuba diving computers have become a necessary part of diving. Current models have indecipherable interfaces that hang from dongles or are worn as bulky wristwatches. I have developed a scuba diving computer HUD with a simple graphical interface placed in the diver's mask and is easy to learn and use.

Also, scuba divers must maintain neutral buoyancy during the dive. The current method is manual, making it a difficult skill to master, and creating a dangerous risk for new divers. I have developed a physics-based automatic buoyancy compensator for scuba divers which is a technological advance that replaces the current manual systems.

With these two innovations, you would not need a certification course to dive safely.

Finally, wetsuits are made with neoprene, an air-bubble infused rubber. These highly buoyant suits force the diver to wear extra weight during the dive. They also compress at depth so the diver must compensate for the changes in buoyancy with the buoyancy compensator device. I have developed a wetsuit material using silicone and an additive that is a better insulator than neoprene and neutrally buoyant.

Eventually, I would like to put all three of these together into a complete recreational diving system.

www.nautosys.com


This is cool stuff and I wan that HUD, but I take pause with the following statement:

> With these two innovations, you would not need a certification course to dive safely.

There is a lot more to diver certification than learning how to control buoyancy and how to read your computer. You need to be comfortable breathing through your mouth, you have to know how to share air, you need to know how to configure and connect your equipment, what materials are appropriate for what kind of dive. You need experience with some trusted people. Most importantly, there's only one way to learn that spit and baby shampoo are the only useful defoggers for your goggles.


It's true a big part of the certification program is acclimating to the underwater environment and learning emergency procedures. I guess I should say it would streamline the certification course. It would probably reduce the all-day classroom portion to a one-hour video.


At least two ways: scuba diving and skiing.


I agree. I remember doing my basic certification. 1/3 of the class almost failed just from the test that requires you to take your mask off underwater then put it back on and clear it. The second they closed their eyes while underwater they would freak out.


I agree, just holding your breath is a huge no-no in diving. So is learning to deal with emergency situations. Diving certification will still be needed in some form, even if it is reduced.


I love the sound of a dive computer HUD - though I'd be curious to see how it would be affected if your mask leaks. I guess the 'watch' would still be present - probably a good idea as masks can get lost (I had mine accidentally kicked off by a fellow diver once).

I do take issue with your assertion that certifications can be cast asunder. A lot of what's learnt is about safe diving (e.g. don't dive after you fly, safer dive profiles, what to expect at different depths wrt buoyancy changes, dci, getting narced, etc.) and what to do when technology fails.

Wetsuit buoyancy has a due to neoprene is pretty handy if you surface and are in distress. If you're towing an unconscious diver, for example, and are only relying on their bcd to keep them afloat their legs drag terribly (as is the case for dry suits) and it makes the rescue very very difficult. There are other safety advantages too - it's not clear to me why getting rid of buoyancy is a great idea.


I believe buoyant wetsuits are a safety feature - if you run into issues, you can release your weight and float to the surface.


But the buoyancy variation with depth is pretty dangerous, I think. I do not know if that variation is truly the fault of the suit or the fleshy diver.


Neoprene compresses at pressure, which means it's less buoyant at lower depths.


Yes, I agree, that is what I was saying also. I just wonder if the human body doesn't also change buoyancy with depth, making neoprene density variation pretty negligible by comparison.


From what I understand, no. The only thing that compresses is the air inside your lungs, but you keep on breathing in & out pressure compensated air, so the buoyancy difference doesn't change as you go down. Neoprene compression has a fairly large effect, pounds worth of buoyancy. Look at this spreadsheet for example, at depth you lose 11.6 pounds of buoyancy due to the neoprene compressing: https://www.scubaboard.com/community/threads/the-ultimate-wi...


> Finally, wetsuits are made with neoprene, an air-bubble infused rubber. These highly buoyant suits force the diver to wear extra weight during the dive. They also compress at depth so the diver must compensate for the changes in buoyancy with the buoyancy compensator device. I have developed a wetsuit material using silicone and an additive that is a better insulator than neoprene and neutrally buoyant.

Awesome. The wetsuit might also be used by people with neoprene allergy. I have been using a suit from Fourth Element which does not trigger any allergies but doesn't keep me very warm either.


Have you looked into adding navigation / mapping / and comms to your dive computer? My company has a side project building a dive watch for divers. It has a navigation system and communications aspect where divers can send messages to each other and track a dive buddy's position. The project is mostly for fun but there is a market for it.


How do they track position? I know that (eg) GPS and Bluetooth don't work under water (or at least their range is so bad that they aren't useful). Seems like an interesting problem!


You are right! It is a very hard and interesting problem. Radio will not work underwater. Inertial/mag sensors can be small and cheap but the quality is poor. Therefore I have been using some 'intelligent' (hate to use that word these days) processing of the data. It is still a relative position estimate if you can minimize the drift you are good to go. To help, we have communications between divers using acoustics. Using some cleaver DSP techniques and information sharing between divers you can do a lot.


Are you hiring? I would love to work on this. This sounds incredible.


Interesting concept- do you have a product/prototype yet?


This sounds amazing. Is there anywhere I can learn about your wetsuit technology? I'm interested in the crossover to surfing.


I have a project idea that might be useful for someone to learn about audio processing (and maybe neural networks?). I like to listen to audio and watch video of podcasts (and lectures and other human speech) at faster speeds. Sometime, especially if I'm trying to "skim" to see if the media is worth listening to carefully, I'd like to listen at 3x or faster. Very often, the limiting factor is the intelligibility of the actual words rather than mentally parsing them.

Some software already removes complete silences, but this is a 10% effect and I think this could be taken much further. I would love audio software that could manipulate high-speed human speech to improve intelligibility by preferentially compressing parts with low information content (like vowels and "ughs") and uncompressing, or even "repairing", info-dense parts like sequential consonant sounds.

I've looked around and haven't been able to find anything like this. Could make a nice stand-alone app, or a library to sell to a podcast player.

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-...


I'd find that really compelling.

Consider hand-producing a sample via manual audio editing, to demonstrate the limits of what ought to be possible. Find some audio you think could be listened to at that rate, see how fast you can listen to it via standard sound stretching techniques (e.g. libsoundtouch and similar), and then demonstrate how much better you can do with hand-editing. Worry about how to automate that after you successfully demonstrate that possibility and make it compelling.


Yea, it's a good point. We can logically distinguish between the basic audio problem (which might be really hard) from the automation problem.

On the other hand, suppose we somehow got good training data by getting a bunch of audio samples at the same number of words per minute that were graded by human listeners as easy or hard to understand. Then in principle something like a neural net might figure out what audio features were responsible for intelligibility and then adjust the non-intelligible audio in that direction (a la using convolutional neural nets to make pictures appear in the style of a famous painter without changing the content). This would be done automatically without any humans actually understanding the solution.


Sure, you could try any number of things to produce a solution. But even if you try an approach where you don't know at first what might work, you should likely still put effort into figuring out what features made it work, so that you can improve it further and maintain stability.


Nobody else has mentioned anything along these lines so I'll do so.

If you haven't talked to the blind community about this sort of thing already I would strongly recommend doing so as they'll be able to rapidly point you at the bleeding edge of what currently exists - they routinely use text to speech cranked up to illegible speeds.

(I also heard of one guy who would listen to TTS from his computer with one ear, while using his other ear to hold a phone conversation. I believe I read this in Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust (978-1400204724 / 1400204720).)

The second reason I suggest this is that the blind community is a dense populus of users who use systems like this as part of their everyday lives, so if you aimed such a system at them the feedback quality would be extremely high and allow for ridiculously fast iteration times and a great product. High-speed speech (TTS in particular) is a genuine technology hole/need.


Great comment, thanks. Agreed that blind users would be at cutting edge of this and provide the most useful feedback.

> they routinely use text to speech cranked up to illegible speeds.

Note that this is not quite what I'm talking about. TTS is a slightly different problem since you're constructing the speech, and you can actually choose voice synthesizers that sound weird but remain intelligible at high speeds. On the other hand, trying to modify existing voice audio (with no text) for greater intelligibility at high speeds is a different problem.


>> they routinely use text to speech cranked up to illegible speeds.

> Note that this is not quite what I'm talking about.

Good point. I think I forgot to fully qualify that statement - while initially composing my reply I got completely distracted with TTS and forgot this was about altering speech to go faster. I realized and went back and edited it a couple minutes later, but didn't adjust it sufficiently.


I did a podcast/audiobook player app ('lectr') with gap removal and had experimental support for what you describe. Roughly, it removed samples if there was no significant difference in the frequency-domain spectra. This was a simple threshold test (the threshold could be adjusted by the user).

It works for some material. Some speakers (usually professional book readers) have even pacing and it's more effective. A simple 1.5-1.7x speedup is also useful there. Podcasters tend to be 'bursty' in that they speak rapidly and then pause, and gap removal was more useful there.

I stopped working on it as my lifestyle changed such that I wasn't using it. There was almost no commercial interest in the project.

I'd love to see a library, especially with MOOCs etc becoming mainstream. Most players provide 1.25/1.5/2.0x options, but between 1.5x and 2.0x is the sweet spot for me, and almost no apps provide that.


Thanks for your insightful comment! Is Lectr still available anywhere? Nothing showed up on a Google search.

> between 1.5x and 2.0x is the sweet spot for me, and almost no apps provide that.

Agreed, this is super frustrating and is some evidence that the market isn't that interested. (Why would they pay for advanced compression if no one bothers with trivial stuff like finer gradation?)

Fwiw, on Android I use Audible, PocketCasts, and Audipo for audiobooks, podcasts, and general audio, respectively. They are all serviceable and have 0.1x or finer granularity.


Not available any more. It was for iOS. I pulled it from the App Store a few iOS releases ago because it was crashing on startup.

I've taken the website down but you can still view it on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20160329053206/http://www.lectrap...

I still use Swift for finer gradation. It also worked for video files, which was fantastic (mine never did that). Swift is 32-bit and will stop working soon. I haven't found a replacement yet.

(On iOS, at least, the 1.25/1.5/2.0 thing is because that's what the OS provides for very little effort. Finer controls require use of a supported-but-undocumented API or AudioUnits.)


HTML5 video speed can be controlled with a bookmarklet on Desktop at least:

    javascript:document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=4
You probably don't want my 4x speed as chosen here ;)


Interesting idea. I used to watch Berkeley webcast videos at 1.5x to shave off ~30 minutes from a 90 minute lecture. Any faster wouldn't be intelligible.


I do the same. I usually watch all lecture videos at 1.5x or 2x speed. Saves me tons of time which is good because usually to videos are of random interesting topics that are distracting me from work.


It is the case that you can teach yourself to understand faster and faster speech. The blind often have human interface devices which speak at absurdly high vocal acceleration.


This also depends heavily on information density. I can listen to some types of content at 2x without issue; other content I can't accelerate more than 10-20%.


Some content I have to scrub and rewatch even at 1x speed.

Some content I can watch at 4x.


Blind people regularly teach themselves to listen at 4-5x speed.


This is doable. If one were, uh, hypothetically, to write a library that did this, how would the HN community recommend monetizing it? I have no experience selling my wares to anyone but a large company, let alone an app store or something like that. Would the tool primarily be applied to nice clean audio, like books on tape, or also required to work with significant background noise?


IANAL but I can't see any harm in releasing some demo samples of what your system can do. To be fair, an example of how the system breaks down it gets pushed too hard would probably be useful too.

With that in hand, perhaps you might create a new post showing the samples and asking for advice. (Maybe you could also let people make sample requests via comments?)

It's possible that you may receive offers from people interested in being business partners (treating the situation like a startup); have fun with that ;)


An audio version of those bots that summarize news articles could solve the problem in a different way.


At some point it might become useful to feed the audio in to speech recognition, then feed the result in to a Text-to-Speech engine. You will lose all of your prosody and speaker characteristics, but blind people have their screen readers at crazy speeds so it will stay intelligible.


I'd definitely use something that did this :) I usually speed up youtube videos/podcasts to 2x. Many times this is possible because the content that is presented is already known or is easy to understand. However, this breaks down when learning something new.


'Podcast Addict' (for Android) can speed podcasts up like this, up to 5x. Usually, I can comfortably bump the speed up to 1.25x-1.4x without any trouble. 2x for me ends up being too fast, but useful if you're skimming and not trying to absorb every second of the audio.


Another solution to getting through long audio segments quickly is learning to read spectrograms (time/frequency intensity graphs of speech).

Then you translate the problem into speed reading.

I'm (slowly) investigating this, expect a HN post in a few years :)


Is the goal for this to happen in real time?


That'd be nice but not really necessary. Biggest use case would be podcasts and lectures, which are usually downloaded in advance so there's plenty of time for off-line processing.


Problem: The process of getting thoughts from your head into an organized, written draft form isn't as fast or accessible as it could be.

Project: I'm building a conversational UI / bot (https://writing.ai) that helps people write faster. The basic idea is that it asks you a series of questions about a topic, asks follow-up questions for more detail as needed, and when it's done outputs a completed draft. You're still providing the content, but the system understands the structure of completed documents and knows what questions to ask to get the actual writing done more easily.

I just quit my job and started working on this full time last week, so no public version yet, but signups are very welcome.


This is a really interesting project. I just signed up to get notified of launch (andrew @ indentlabs.com) but if you want to shoot me an email with what you're working on and where you're at, perhaps I could help out or give you some feedback on the idea/implementation.

Either way, always good to have more eyes occasionally. :)


Thanks, sent you an email!


Echoing same sentiments as drusepth - would love to provide feedback and test things out if helpful (michael (at) michaeldempsey(dot)me


Thanks Michael, just sent you a note!


This is super awesome! I soo need this. Drafting with a structure is a part I often skip when trying to write something, which is why writing has become quite hard. I should stop doing it. But your idea is great, looking forward to seeing it in action!


Cool. I need a conversational AI to help me make good decisions about my to do list.

Orgbot: I'm sorry Dave, you won't have the energy for 3 meetings and a Meetup on Monday. Let's spread the meetings throughout the week and find something you can do in your pajamas while hung-over.


This looks really intriguing, I look forward to seeing where you go with it.


Appreciate it! I'm looking forward to it too, at this point.


I also find this fascinating. I just signed up..ryan@recraigslist.com I also have another use case I'd like to bounce off you if you could shoot me an email. Thanks!


Email sent, happy to hear about your use case!


What a cool idea! Writing is my least favorite part of development, just sent an email (loxias AT mit DOT edu), can't wait to try it out.


Thank you for the kind words!


Sounds very promising, I can think of some professional applications in software development. Signed up.


Thanks, and happy to hear about any applications you have in mind! Feel free to email nate@writing.ai if you'd like to discuss.


Sounds interesting. Is it more for creative writing or more business oriented?

I'm signed up in any case.


Thanks for the signup!

My initial target is short-form content such as blog posts and essays. I'm going to wait to see how that goes to decide what to focus on next, but odds are that it'll be more structured content like academic papers or technical reports.

I'm definitely not ruling out an eventual focus on creative writing, but it'll take a bit for the system to get to that stage.

That said, I'm designing it with the ability to ingest annotated writing samples of any sort, so it's possible that a wider range of writing types will be supported sooner than expected.


Looks very interesting. I guess I might be fighting a loosing battle here - but any plans for an offline solution? This is the kind of thing that I'd probably love to use on the train (many tunnels, no 4g/spotty in-train wireless) - and on flights (wifi is comming, but not always) -- or other places without good network coverage (composing a blog post on a hike..).


Yeah, I understand, it's a completely valid use case. I'm personally much more productive when I'm completely disconnected, so I really identify with the request.

I had, in the past, also been thinking a bit about how the system could work offline because it would avoid a lot of security issues for something like a medical office that wants to create content that's then copied into a medical records system.

My initial thought was to bundle a local copy of the server with pre-trained models, but that becomes problematic on mobile clients. I'm writing the server in Go, so if I go that route I'd probably need to reimplement parts of it in another language and avoid using any remote APIs.

So the answer is: very likely yes, but not initially. You've definitely moved the functionality up my planned features list.


A self-contained binary would work fine for me (If it could run on a Surface Pro 4 - or as a VM image - eg. hyper-v and/or virtual box).

I always prefer a Free software/open source solution - but I'm not sure how you'd monetize that. Maybe charge for the app (ios/android) - and provide a free/open self-host server solution, along with a subscription service and a web client? (The payment for the app would also grant access to the subscription, and for those that didn't want to self-host/wanted to support the project could pay for the subscription and use the web SaaS solution?).


The plan is to offer a subscription service even if there's an offline component. For a bunch of reasons, it's the best approach for a one-person venture trying to get off the ground.

I've been an OSS user and supporter for a long time. I don't think I'll be open sourcing the core system anytime soon, but I'm very likely to release any useful NLP or ML-related libraries that are created as part of this project. Not sure what those will be or when they'll be ready, but I do have a mind to give back to the OSS community.


I understand. Fwiw I recently had a look at "cyberduck" again - they do a gpl+free(nag) binary+sale through windows/Apple appstore:

https://cyberduck.io/

Not sure what kind of income they see, though.


I just signed up and am awaiting launch!️️dkermitt@gmail.com


Thank you! I'll keep working to get it launched ASAP. The response from HN today has been extremely encouraging.


Problem: My experience taking audio tours at various museums showed the use of antiquated and expensive hardware. Most alternate solutions used mobile apps which are inconvenient to download and take more time to release.

Project: I went about developing a web app that allows anyone to quickly create an audio tour for free:

https://www.youraudiotour.com/create

I also integrated Amazon Polly to automatically generate audio based on text inputs. This further increases ease of use by eliminating the need to record and edit audio.

It was a great learning experience since I learned rails from scratch and don't have a background in programming. Now to see if I can get more people to use it!


I like this idea but extending it to the whole world based on geolocation. Use an app and earphones to find voice/text descriptions of places and landmarks, monuments, sculptures, buildings, etc. Everything can be geo-toured.

Of course in a museum is perfect but based on geolocation it doesn't have to be linear, you can go anywhere in the museum and get voice/text about that particular place/masterpiece and when they are changed then easily change the audio/text for the place.

Love it!


Really cool idea, I think people would love that! The biggest hurdle would be getting enough interesting content. You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations.

If you were able to get enough content I think that would be an incredible app/service.


I'm doing something similar for local news/events, called SeeAround.me, where people can see/submit local news stories and their locations. But I could see sort of a cross between that and Your Audio Tour as particular interesting for people who want to do their own walking tours, for example.


I already made that for a client. Don't think users will write stories from their mobile, at least good ones. It was difficult to start with no content, too similar to twitter.


I find that's the trouble with alot of good ideas I have. They work great if you can get to scale but that's easier said then done!

Is your site still up? I would be interested to see it.


> You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations.

Exactly. Wonderful service with world wide use and translatable to all languages. You definitely would need "curators" for every place and at the beginning let people add their own transcripts in order to build a huge database.


Nice! Check out https://www.detour.com/, similar platform primarily focused on city-level audio walking tours.


Cool, thanks for the link! Looks like a great way to explore new cities.

I'm hoping my site will be more helpful for smaller, less tech savvy, organisations who want to create their own tours. Many of these sites create tours in house or charge a pretty penny to create your own app.


Nice! I'll be passing this along to my museum friends. I could see this being especially useful for smaller museums that may not have the budget to buy a full application or edit the audio. Do you think you'll still keep the custom-audio option, or only Amazon Polly?


Thanks! Appreciate the kind words. The target was definitely for smaller museums that lack the time and budget for a full tour. I noticed a lot of these museums don't have audio tours which I think is a shame.

I actually had the options to include custom audio and record audio in the browser. I took them out to simplify the product but I would definitely consider re-implementing them if there was demand.


You should check out guide from Casa Batllo in Barcelona. Definitely the best one I have seen so far https://www.casabatllo.es/en/visit/videoguide/


This is awesome! Would be interesting to add BLE Beacon support for autoplay when you walk up to a specific area on the tour.


Thanks! Ya there are a ton a features I think you could add to this - beacon and location support would be very cool.


Great idea! Would it be implementable with Google Project Tango? Currently working on an idea with museums, and they don't want to handle any installations (i.e. beacons)


At the moment I haven't considered how I would implement that feature. First I want to see if I can get people to use the basic version.

Do you have a website? If so you should share it, would be interesting to see what you're doing.


I see:) We are in the same boat, too early even for a website! Will share an update once we have some progress!


Problem: I don't know when the optimal times to go to Krispy Kreme for hot donuts are.

Solution: http://hotdonuts.info/

And yes, this is the most important problem in the world.


I used to work at a PNW Krispy Kreme and the hotlight hours there are wildly off. For the store I worked at hotlight is 5-8AM and 4:00-6:00PM.

In my experience, most Krispy Kremes (at least the ones franchised by Kremeworks, which owns the stores from Vancouver, BC to Beaverton, OR and then one in Maui) have pretty set hotlight times with a variance of a few minutes due to human error.

There are also sometimes "bonus" hotlight hours where they make donuts in between normal hours due to demand.

If you're going by the Krispy Kreme API, it's totally dependent on when people actually turn the physical hotlight on, and people tend to forget to turn it on or off, especially during the "bonus" times.

Also, they only turn the hotlight on for the Original Glazed donuts, but that totally leaves out the hot cake donuts and fritters.

There's not a lot of advice in this post, just some insider info. It's definitely a cool project though, but you might be better off just asking your local store when hotlight times are.


I believe the MacArthur Foundation will be contacting you soon.


You have a problem with zip codes that start with 0 eg 07001.


Dammit, I didn't even know that they could start with 0. Thanks!


New England, New Jersey and parts of New York start with a 0.

http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/zipcodes/images/usa-zip-code-...


In high school - BASIC class - we had to build a program to let a user input an address.

I took the input for the ZIP code as a string, and the teacher 'corrected' me because ZIP codes were numbers, not letters. I said "if I starts with 0, that would be lost".

"ZIP codes don't start with 0," she replied.

"Umm... yeah they do." I pull out a copy of my New Zork Times from Infocom, located in MA, and their ZIP started with 0.

It was only years later I learned the ZIP code system didn't even start until the 60s, and she'd likely grown up without it even being a thing, so I (retroactively) cut her some slack. Really didn't think anyone in the US could not know that in 2017 but... I still run in to people who don't. And... it's probably less important today (what with email and ebills and whatnot), so I'll cut everyone else some slack too... :)


> Really didn't think anyone in the US could not know that in 2017

Well I guess you are just much much smarter than us. That goodness you cut us some slack. ;)

I don't know if I have ever seen a zero prefixed zip code.


yeah... was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek (my tongue, my cheek).

I guess I just pay too much attention to addresses/formats, and have for years.

You can have as much slack as you want, FYI :)


TIL. Thanks, fixed it!


Fixed it!


I'd love to use this, but due to an even bigger problem, unfortunately my body can't handle Krispy Kreme donuts: they're way too high in calories.


Is the start date supposed to be in the future?

"The scraper came alive Tuesday, March 7, 2017 at 12:33 AM."

Or am I in the past...


It's April 4th, 2017.

But it's okay… I thought it was 2018 earlier today.


totally sharing with all the rest of my friends in atlanta. sometimes fun and simple ideas are the best!


I just found an official Krispy Kreme App that does the same: http://krispykreme.com/hotlightapp

But I'd rather not download an app.


Yeah, I knew about that, but I wanted a way to see historical data so people would know "the light will probably be on at these times". It uses the same API.


I love it! cool project


Prepping notes before I dive in to redraft and finalize Ghost Engine, my new space opera for July 2018 (UK publisher will be Orbit; US publisher TBA).

Also working on a Wild Cards short story for George R. R. Martin, and awaiting the copy edits on Dark State, the second Empire Games book (publication scheduled for January 2018, by Tor).

And in the queue behind that, is the scheduled final rewrite of Empire Games book 3, Invisible Sun (due for publication in January 2019, from Tor).

This should keep me busy through to the end of the year!


Project: I'm building an 'abstract visual debugger,' which aims at clarifying the behavior of algorithms under execution by letting you watch the data they're manipulating.

Screen: http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png

Quite outdated video: https://youtu.be/sdEo4v2yivM

It works by monitoring data structures (and soon general objects!) in your code, and sending operation data (e.g. element added/removed) to the server app which does all the actual visualization. Different clients can be written for different languages, though I've only written one for monitoring Java code so far (but the clients are semi-trivial to build).

Problem: a lot of what's difficult in programming is that you can't watch the 'state' of your program as its running; we approximate it with print statements etc.—but there is no easy way to view trees, graphs, tables, lists, hashmaps, etc. especially when they are being actively modified by a program.

I'm hoping to have an alpha ready in a week or two. Back to work!

Edit: split into Project/Problem format.


This is a fantastic idea!! Do you have a github link or a project page I can bookmark and periodically check on? How hard would it be to adapt to C and/or C++?


> How hard would it be to adapt to C and/or C++?

I don't think it would be particularly difficult. I can tell you more about what the process would be like if you're curious.

Project page is here for now: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd (Everything there is unfortunately quite out of date because my initial work on it was ~2.5 years ago, and In the past 3 months I've picked it up again and ran with it :) I'll update the page soon though.)


Also, here is the source for the Java client: https://github.com/westoncb/DSViz-Java-Client

It's still a work in progress, but I plan on wrapping things up for an initial release over the next couple of weeks—at that point, I'll write a tutorial explaining the structure of the client and principles involved in writing a new one etc.

Edit: forgot to mention, I don't have plans for open-sourcing the server at the moment since the plan is to sell it so that I can continue working on it.


You might be interested in this: https://visualgo.net


I, along with my co-founder, are working on a shopping platform for furniture and decor seen on the set of movies and TV shows: https://www.seenonset.com

Startups definitely like to deck out their offices with some of the nicer high-end designs. Even Y Combinator's home page image carousel has the likes of the Bertoia Diamond Chair and the Nelson Saucer Pendant Lamp on show! Though a lot of startups go for the replica route - I know Airbnb went with replicas in their Dublin office.

The show Silicon Valley (https://www.seenonset.com/tvshows/174/silicon-valley) is a great example of what we do.


This is beautifully thorough. I can't say I'd purchase items based on their appearance in TV shows. But, the idea of a catalogue of the items and the time it must take to create this is beautiful in an artistic way to me.


Thank for the kind words. We actually also try and cater for folks who are doing a more typical approach to online shopping (e.g. a desk lamp). The set design is a nice way of showcasing the product in use.


I really enjoy seen on set, I've been checking it out for a little while now. Keep up with the good work!


I'm designing a 3D printed robot arm that doesn't suck.

It uses all brushless outrunner motors for at least the 4 large axes (final two in wrist may be hobby servos for now).

The arm is similar dimensions to a human arm. Initial calculations show it will be able to lift more than 2kg at full extension if I can make it strong enough. Actually the (rough) calculations say more than 10kg but that would break something. It's also 200 milliseconds for 90 degrees of shoulder movement, supposedly.

All hardware and software is open source, including the brushless drivers.

It uses low cost 3D printers. I am currently using a $320 Monoprice Maker Select modded with a 1.2mm nozzle and I will be adding a $450 TEVO Black Widow modded with a 2.5mm dia nozzle to the mix. I may try a pellet feeder. The goal with the large nozzles is to increase strength and reduce print time so it's not maddening to print. This will make it easier to iterate.

My goal is to make an open source low cost arm that is useful for manufacturing, and then design open source workcells for it and actually use it for productive work.

You can look at the jumble of CAD BS right now. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/5b474270e4af0ef979e6fade/w...

Find the tab with the assembly called "Arm3 Assembly".

Please fork it and contribute.


Cool. The onshape link asks me to login right away. Without logging in, I don't see your 3D item. You're invited to also upload the robot arm to www.3dprintmakers.com.


Onshape is free and cloud based. It's good because you can easily create an account and edit the file yourself, but a bummer because it's not free software and you can't export raw files, only dumb solids.

Despite the drawbacks, I'm keeping it in OnShape though, where anyone can fork and edit the file for free.


You should look into Automata. They have built some impressive 3D printed robotic arms with very tightly integrated industrial design.


will it be fully 3d printed (no metal/carbon tubes)? I think the main problem with hobby robot arms is flex in the arm itself and backlash in the motors.

Low cost arms (eg. dobot) have "0.1mm repeatability" with no load but the moment you put a kg on the end effector it starts flexing.


Aside from bearings, motors, and possibly some fasteners, it will basically be entirely 3D printed.

I'm using printed spur geartrains that will have all kinds of backlash. In an effort to make something that is primarily printed, I'm throwing any hope of precision out the window. At least mechanical precision - we can use visual servoing to get more accuracy at the end effector.

But my hope is that the other benefits (low cost, easily changeable design, good speed and strength characteristics) will make it useful even with poor rigidity.

I imagine for example pulling things out of fixtures and moving them in to boxes.

There must be a good variety of tasks that can be done with an arm like this. I'm working to the strengths of 3D printing and not trying to fight what it isn't good for.

That said, I may reinforce the frame with a carbon fiber wrap if more stiffness is needed.

The goal is to have a low BOM cost AND low tooling cost so I want to avoid the need for any metalworking equipment.


A couple...

1. Record one album a month. An album must consist of no less than four songs. At least one song must be an original. I can only record on a 4-track cassette recorder.

Problem: I'm getting older and find myself nostalgic for the days when I was running my record label and playing in bands. A small, manageable project with no expectations or demands to scratch that itch and get me away from computers for a few hours a week is nice.

2. http://postgra.ph -- Almost ready... just a landing page to test an idea: A GraphQL Backend as a Service powered by PostgreSQL. I just have to add the SSL certs tonight when I get home.

The MVP is based on ideas from PostgREST/PostGraphQL -- generating the API from the public schema of the database. It'd be the bare-bones service that I could throw together in a couple of weeks.

If it takes off then I'd look into integrations, adding PipelineDB support, auto-scaling, etc.

Problem: I just wanted an API-as-a-Service that would give me full control of the data schema but didn't require me to write yet-another-web-service-in-dynamic-language-framework-foo. There are nice solutions out there for different folks but I'm a big postgres fan and wanted something that didn't require me to learn a new framework, interface, etc.


It's going to take more then a couple of weeks, been working on it for more then 1 year :) https://subzero.cloud/


How do either of you plan to handle authentication and authorization? How will you handle CORS? Just curious as I've worked in this realm as well.


Authentication and especially authorization can be completely handled by PostgreSQL. In front of it all sits OpenResty (nginx) so that is where you would add whatever headers you would need


jwt's are a touchy subject but was the well-trodden route I was planning to follow for authentication.

Integration with auth0 and other third-party services would be a roadmap thing for me.

Authorization can be handled by PostgreSQL: it has built-in facilities for role-based access control and row-level security. You can develop the authorization scheme that fits your application.


You're way ahead of what I'm thinking of. :)

Nice job.


For a service like this to work, one thing needs to be solved, automating the code deployment (i am talking views/functions/roles/grants/RLS). As far as i know (and i've asked other people) this is not a solved problem. This is what i am working on now. The rest is done


I was with you on your #1 until I saw 4 tracks- I'm not sure I could even get myself down to that few. I know the Beatles did it, but they were far greater musicians than I. I haven't listened to a cassette tape since 1999- how's the quality?

I think I could maybe do 4 tracks if it recorded to an SD card. Do you find the length of a tape adds to limitations in a way that keeps you brief?


> how's the quality?

Good. I record on high-bias Type-A tapes. You still get some hiss and tracks bleed the tiniest bit. But I think it sounds pretty good for the kind of music I'm making.

I've been using the procedural drummer in Garageband as the drummer for some of my songs and with a decent amount of swing it sounds "authentic" on tape.

> Do you find the length of a tape adds to limitations in a way that keeps you brief?

You get about 60 mins of record time per tape so... not really.

I find I like recording this way for many of the same reasons I like writing on my typewriter: zero distractions, low friction between thought and recording.

The restriction of 4 tracks and that I only have a month to record 4 songs keeps me from "fidgeting" with a song. I'm not able to aim for "perfect." It's more ritualistic. I show up on the same evenings in the same space. I begin the ritual by opening my journal and listening to last weeks tracks. I record some ideas, experiment. I end the ritual with a glass of bourbon. I close the book. I've written one song I think is pretty decent so far. Try as I might though they each have little tiny, beautiful flaws. Only so much you can do.


I am developing a new TCP/IP stack targeting embedded systems primarily. It is being written in a restricted subset of C++14 (e.g. no dynamic memory or exceptions, but virtual functions are great).

There is a LOT of things complete already, it pretty much works. ARP, IP(v4), TCP (with NewReno congestion control), PMTUD, DHCP client. The design is single-threaded around an abstract event loop that a user would generally need to implement unless they found one of two provided implementations useful. The focus is correctness and reliability rather than performance, hence no DMA support for now and maybe forever.

Source code is here: https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/tree/ipstack/aipstack

Actually this is currently in its testbed project (APrinter firmware for 3D-printers) where it supports the integrated web interface using a custom HTTP server.

In addition to the one embedded platform where the firmware currently supports Ethernet (Duet board), it is possible to run on Linux with a TAP interface which is my primary testing setup.

If anyone is interested (in assisting development ;) I can help explain things and show how to set it up.


How familiar should one be with networking? I know some C++ and know the low level C apis for maintaining sockets but never implemented them. I also never took a networking class.


It helps if you ever looked at the packets for example in Wireshark and have at some understanding of how TCP works. But the most important thing is the ability to read standards (RFCs).


Project: R.I.P.Link - a tool for finding dead links on the web[0].

The inspiration for this project came from Wikipedia and the Internet Archive partnering to fix broken links on Wikipedia[1]. After briefly searching around I couldn't find any great tools for this, and I decided it would be an interesting side-project. I was also looking for a good medium-size project to improve my Go skills and understanding of concurrent programming.

From here I'd like to implement recursive searching functionality and depth limiting. I think this would greatly improve the appeal of the tool.

* [0] https://github.com/mschwager/riplink * [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broke...


I made a link tester for all the links on my webpage, after I did not maintain it for a while and half the links were dead: https://github.com/benibela/site/blob/master/manage.sh#L33


Like many people, I use Evernote as a personal Knowledgebase. I started this because I realized a lot of my bookmarks were rotting. But of course, links in my evernote notebooks face the same problem (as much as I try to capture the content).

Would it be possible to extend your tool to search Evernote, bookmarks, Confluence, and other link lists for rotten links?


It's definitely possible! I'd just have to teach RIPLink to ingest data from different sources. I.e. have it parse a text file (or other type of file) instead of HTML. Would you mind opening an issue on Github?


It would be neat if you could extract the desired data (text) from the page and hash it so that you could later fix the link (by pointing to a new valid link).


aim it at SEOs if you want to make money, broken link building is a pretty big strategy in the SEO world


Yup. An old but probably still used grey-hat strategy was to identify dead/forgotten websites with lots of 'seo juice' (had high rankings, google associates them with keywords strongly, etc). Then you buy that domain and host your new site on it, taking advantage of its history.


Interesting! I like the idea!


We're building a new type of wind turbine that generates energy using significantly less material, making it cheaper to install. We do this using huge fixed wing kites made of carbon fibre. Reqd more qnd follow our progress on http://kitex.tech


This is awesome! Are you hiring/accepting volunteers/do you need help? It's a really interesting project.


Thanks! We like it too... We're not hiring at the moment, but if you drop a line to "kugel at [companyname] dot tech" maybe we can find some common ground! (Except that I've also briefly been a fruit picker in Japan, great project btw!)


Currently a student in college and I'm working on https://www.60secondseveryday.com, the fastest way of keeping track of your memories.

You get a phone call every night and record your 60-second response to the question "How did your day go?". From there, your response is archived into your private online journal and displayed alongside your photos, twitter posts, check-ins, etc from that day.

Soon, you'll start getting Flashback emails (ex. "Here's what you were doing 6 months ago") with all of those cool things so you can reflect on your past.


That's cool I've been kind of thinking building something like this. Are you using Twilio? How are the transcriptions?


Thinking of removing them since honestly, they aren't very good. Yep using Twilio. Would love to chat more if you're interested.


Have you looked at IBM's Speech to Text? - https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/speech-to-text.htm...

Not sure if there is a difference but might be worth trying a few different services.


Project: Hosted & On-Prem fast full-text search with faceting, filtering, multiple ranking algorithms and plenty of other features.

Not yet ready for launch but built a simple demo trying to get into startupschool ( failed unfortunately :( ), which lets you search every hackernews post while letting you filter based on domain / user / story type.

http://searchhn.com


Thank you all.. I am finally getting some search requests. I applied for startupschool and was desperately looking at the logs everyday for someone to try it out :)

With 50K plus amazing companies that applied, it is very difficult to stand out :( Slowly building a team with some of the best engineers that I had the pleasure of working with to take this to the next level. We badly wanted to get into the startupschool to help guide us and get us to the next level. Wish we were part of the program, but glad everybody gets to view the lectures :)


Cool project. Could you briefly talk about

* the backend you use and how it will scale to sites with large amounts of data across servers

* can third party sites integrate your search service?

* How is it different from eg- Algolia

Good luck with the project!


Thank you !

Backend is custom built written in C and assembly. Supports sharding and replication which is rack aware and data-center aware.

> can third party sites integrate your search service?

Yes of course.. that is the end goal.

Algolia is awesome.. but you end up paying a lot based on how many ways you sort / rank data. This operates with an on-the-fly ranking model and rank on any field in any direction. Also different ranking algorithms, extensibility with Lua and a lot more when I officially do a showhn


You tried any open-source ones in c/rust ? Are you doing anything differently/better (what/how) ? What are you using for replication/sharding ? Possibility to split-shards ? What are you using for server-backend-framework (ex seastar) ? Any libraries etc that you're using (i'm interested) ?

You have to write a really long blog post on why you've chosen this way.


Yes.. this will take a very long blog post. This started many months ago as a project to learn 'golang' and as a way to index my everygrowing collection of music / movies / documents / subtitles / lyrics and everything on my servers.

Got hooked into it and became obsessed with speed and rewrote everything in 'C'. Replication is based on 'Raft', actually the multi raft variant proposed by the amazing folks at Cockroach (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/scaling-raft/)

It does not use a backend framework. It is a simple http/https server (epoll + multi-threaded) which talks json. I use Jansson for json and utf8proc for unicode handling. Index is custom built.

I have been working on low powered distributed systems for over 10yrs, which certainly helped. Will definitely let you know when I get that blog post written :)


This is amazing. Are you also going to implement Soundex?


Thanks.. yes that is something I'm planning. Keeping the engine super flexible. Currently does TF-IDF, Okapi BM25 or an Algolia like tie breaking algorithm.


really cool! is there a way to search by domain?


Thank you.. Yeah the current UI sucks Im sorry :(.. just search for a post that you know is in your domain and choose the domain checkbox on the right. You can then change the search text or any other filters after that.

Will probably fix the UI this weekend and do a proper 'Show HN' with more options, charts and analytics.


In light of today's Apple Mac Pro announcements, I'll chime in...

Problem: Building macOS desktop applications as an indie-developer.

Project: Fileloupe for Mac and Videoloupe for Mac

Fileloupe is a lightweight media browser that I actually announced on Hacker News a few years back. Videoloupe was just released and is a video player/editor in the spirit of the older QuickTime Pro 7. I work on both of these full-time and I'm currently in a coffee shop in Bangkok. The jury is still out whether or not being a macOS indie developer is sustainable...

https://www.fileloupe.com https://www.videoloupe.com


I have to say the file size for File Loupe is impressive - only 5MB for all that functionality.

PS Is it written in Swift or ObjC?


Both are 100% Objective-C. No plans to make the switch anytime soon. I'm comfortable with Objective-C and understand it reasonably well.

Applications can be pretty small when they're 100% native and include almost no artwork or auxiliary assets.


Nice.

Get yourself listed on http://alternativeto.net/browse/search?q=videoloupe


Sorry to go off topic but are you living, holidaying or "digital-nomad"ing in bkk?


uh wait... what Apple Mac Pro announcements?


Discussion on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031619

Daring Fireball "The Mac Pro Lives":

http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives


So, a slight bump to the existing machines and a promise for a fully revamped one next year.

I have the most recentish Mac Pro. It's a fantastic machine, I wish it had sold better, but perhaps the proliferation of iDevices and laptops more or less killed it except for special niches :/


wow this is great! I've been searching for a tool like videoloupe for a long long time!!


Glad to hear. Feel free to follow up by email with any feedback, comments or questions.


Grep for the internet.

What I often want is not a search engine, not a recommender, but a filter. Something that would allow me to look at the distributions of content on the Web rather than trying to answer my questions. I badly wanted to pay someone a few quid for a service like this, but had to build it myself.

Feel free to piggyback on the next batch job; use fBd7guQLDLx6RIm00GE7uH5h0Lk1CKKl as access key.

https://alpha.crawlfilter.com/


Cool.

Suggested secondary source: https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls?&sort=-publicdate&pa... (spotty; sometimes the crawls are dark and can't be read)

Also: when you get lucky with ACD: https://redd.it/5s7q04 (I've heard other users getting hard-capped at 100TB though)


Project: An open source home automation solution. Currently, I have code for a thermostat (https://github.com/alittlebrighter/thermostat), garage doors (https://github.com/alittlebrighter/rpi-garage-doors, android client: https://gitlab.com/igor-automation/garage-door-remote-androi...), and a bare bones webcam (code inside of the garage doors repo). Planned features are a unified client for each service and then remote control via encrypted configurations stored in Firebase.


My main current project has to do with my home media system.

Any sufficiently complex media system needs either more than one IR or RF remote, or it needs a universal remote.

The best universal remotes are activity based, and maintain information about the state of the overall system.

However, it's been my finding that many of them (looking at you, Logitech) focus on the software at the expense of high-quality hardware that's pleasant to use.

So, what's a person to do? Implement customizable command logic for a variety of command output formats (serial, IR, HDMI-CEC) state management (power on, power off, muted, projector screen open, lights on or off, etc.), and logic (power button does this if we're in state 1; otherwise do that and shift to state 3) in a webapp interface that runs on a Raspberry Pi and that can learn your favorite dumb remote's buttons via LIRC.

I'd love for anyone with an interest or a possible use case to reach out; right now, I'm just writing for myself.

Code: https://github.com/haikuginger/riker


Everyone is writing about their startups. My startup makes self-driving delivery robots (http://robby.io).

But that aside, one of the things I'm working on is trying to use RNNs to create a better digital piano. Even the best digital pianos out there are far inferior to a even a YouTube recording of a concert grand piano. One of the biggest problems I notice is the complete decoupling of resonances between strings; most digital pianos treat notes independently and just sum up the audio signals. In reality it's a giant, heavily interconnected physical system with tons of resonances and nonlinearities, and I want to see if some signal processing combined with backpropagation can be used to abuse a neural network to simulate the energy transfer in a physical system of that complexity.

I haven't been terribly successful yet, but it would be amazing if there existed an open source digital piano that performed spectacularly and could be plugged into an el cheapo weighted keyboard for decent piano sound.


Do you know pianoteq?

https://www.pianoteq.com/


Thanks! This is interesting.


Pianoteq is without a doubt the best sounding piano synth on the market today. Uses all sorts of interesting physical modeling algorithms (including string-to-string resonances, with a more-than-first order model...), unfortunately, unpublished. ;)

If you're interested in chatting about sound generating software and algorithms, feel free to shoot me a line. "Also, do I remember you from ec-discuss?"


Yep I used to live at EC :)


Are you sure that you are comparing with the best digital pianos? I mean they have been working on more life-like digital pianos for decades, going back at least to the Kurzweil stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzweil_Music_Systems


Surely you mean "What should you be working on?"

Too many projects, nothing is ever finished :(

I envy the people who a) have some creative ideas and b) manage to ship them. More than once an offhand remark of "wouldn't it be nice if we had X" made me write the damn thing in a much better way than I could have ever described a project of mine. Maybe that's also the reason I'll probably never start a company again (and if, it would be consulting again, not a product)

To not completely derail the topic, I recently launched a small microblog at http://f5n.org/nano/ - mostly to test a web framework and also to not clutter my blog with small blurbs. As you can see I immediately stopped using it after the launch :)


funny enough, the service i'm building is to help people with such problems of nothing getting finished.

I believe in you, indeed in everyone, a great potential of skill and creativity that is waiting to be unleashed with the right words at the right time. I think a lot of people could use just a little help, and it can unblock them in huge, life changing ways.


currently making low-cost and low-powered tree cameras that will hang from Atlanta-area fruit trees and send us once-a-week tree photos.

The idea is that we can hang them in trees all over the metro area and keep an eye on when they ripen. This is mostly powered by the Twilio programmable data service and the Ai-Thinker A20 (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIYmall-ESP8266-A20-Wifi-GPR...) -- WiFi and 2G cell radio for $14!

We can likely get battery life in the range of several months, so we can put the sensors up at the beginning of the season and then take them down when we harvest.


I was thinking of doing something similar actually! That looks pretty cool.

Do you know roughly how big the images that the camera takes are slash do you happen to have any example images?

I have a few more questions that I can't think of at the moment, but I'd be happy to give you a hand with any battery-related stuff (a specialty of mine) if you'd like! My email's in my profile, feel free to reach out even if you don't have any battery questions yet.


Haven't received this camera yet, but it advertises as 0.3MP, which I assume is 640x480 (640x480 = 307,200). We might have to play some with camera placement too in order to actually get relevant images.

I'll drop you a line!


What kind of a cell plan (and pricing) do you use for this?


Currently we're using Twilio Programmable Data. $2/month/sim and then $1 / megabyte. I think we can get by with 640x480 photos, but that's what we'll be experimenting with this season.


Problem: We believe document versioning is broken for most people: writers, attorneys, academics, journalists, etc. We engineers have Github, but others don’t. So, we decided to solve this problem and create Tuiqo

Project: Document versioning for humans

We built a prototype: http://tuiqo.com (video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBj8ezqLCOs). We are accepted to YC Startup school founders track.


Quick note - your homepage says 'try without registering', but clicking on the editor button prompts for a login.


Hey, thanks for replying! This definitely shouldn’t be happening, would you mind sharing which browser/OS you’re using? Do you maybe have cookies/javascript disabled? You can send a quick mail to dzeno at tuiqo.com if you want.


Looks like you fixed it. :)


I'm working on a programming language. Just as a hobby, not commercially. :-)

Design-wise it's really just how my ideal language would work: functional, compiled, statically typed(higher-ranked, impredicative, but type-level functions are first-order, and no effects system), mutable refs that are _not_ GCed, first class delimited continuations, equi-recursive _and_ iso-recursive types, implemented in C so the compiler itself has a good performance baseline, etc...

It has been really fun so far and an amazing learning experience. I intentionally didn't read up on type theory, so implementing the type checker was a huge challenge.

Amazing feeling when I finally got it to (correctly) work, though :-).


What do you mean you didn't read up on type theory? I'm guessing ypu've studied it at a university?


No, I really didn't know much about type theory. (And I don't think I can study that at my university actually).

I had an intuition of how parametric polymorphism worked because of my experience with Haskell, but I didn't know a type inference algorithm works, how that integrates with checking against an assumed type (and the whole unification shebang that comes with it); how universal quantification plays into that, the amount of pit falls that come with certain design decisions(impredicativity etc.).

I personally gain the most insight into something when I'm trying to think about it from first principles, so I avoided extensive research about type theory beforehand so that I wasn't "tainted" by preconceived ideas :-).

Of course I got stuck quite a few times. I would then look how Haskell does something and trying to understand why and how etc.


Project: I am working on improving the 2 factor authentication (2FA) user experience for end users.

Problem: 2FA is an east way to drastically improve one's security posture with many sites (e.g. AWS, Github, Google, Stripe, etc), but it is still an incredibly annoying user experience that gets worse the more sites you use it with.

- When I pick up my phone to enter a 2FA code, I often get distracted by an email, text, or other notification. I'll put my phone down a minute later and think "what was I doing? Oh right, I need that 2FA code".

- It is also annoying to visually identify the correct site/account combo in my list of 2FA codes because I use many online services and may have multiple accounts at each one (e.g. AWS).

- Though some apps have a better UI presentation of 2FA codes, the classic Google Authenticator app shows all of the codes in a single list and I would often put in the incorrect code from a row above/below what I intended because it was difficult to visually keep track of the correct row as I transcribe the 2FA code into my desktop browser.

- It is annoying when the 2FA code changes while I am entering it in my desktop browser. Often, sites will accept the previous 2FA code as well, but if I only entered the first 3 digits and don't recall the last 3 digits, then I have to start over entering the new 6 digit 2FA code.

I am working on a new user experience which replaces these pitfalls and annoyances with the ability to simply click a button on your phone as your second factor of authentication. This workflow is compatible with any site that currently implements 2FA (e.g. AWS, Github, Stripe, etc, etc) and provides the same level of security as using another 2FA app such as Google Authenticator, Authy, etc.

It would be really encouraging/useful if you could leave a comment explaining why you might find this new 2FA UX useful or not! Thanks.


Just curious, how are you planning on approaching this problem in a way that apps like Authy aren't doing?


As johnmaguire2013 guessed, we will have a browser extension which will request a 2FA code from the mobile app. The mobile app will receive a push notification and ask the user whether they would like to allow or deny the request for a second factor of authentication. The user only needs to click one button on their phone and the 2FA code is securely sent to the browser where everything else related to submitted the 2FA code can be automated.

The browser extension can integrate with any site that currently supports 2FA without any integration or changes required on the part of the sites.

Let me know if you have any more questions! Do you think you be willing to change your 2FA workflow to the one described above? If no, what are some of your concerns, thoughts, etc? Any and all feedback is appreciated!


It sounds like he's going to support OTP 2FA, likely through a browser extension? That's my guess anyway.


Yup, you nailed it. That is exactly the plan. Any thoughts on that approach? Do you think you might be willing to update your current 2FA workflow to the one described above?


I think it's a very cool idea! The other big UX issue with 2FA (in my opinion) is backup & restore -- nail both and you'll have a pretty solid product.

For disclosure, I work for Duo, so I'm a big believer in push-based 2FA. (Consider applying if you're interested in usable security!)


Ah! Duo is definitely one of the incumbents in the space that we looked at during our competitive analysis. As far as I understand it, your push based 2FA solution only works for sites which use Duo as the 2FA provider. Is that correct?

I am hoping to build a solution which has a similar sounding UX to Duo Push, but works for any site that currently implements 2FA without requiring the site to make any changes at all. I think that this will provide more comprehensive coverage of sites that developers and other users interact with on a regular basis. For example, Github will not update their backend to use a 2FA service that I write because they already have a good solution in place, but by using a browser extension I can build the UX that I want without any changes required on Github's end.

Admittedly, I had some trouble getting started with actually trying out Duo to get a feel for the UX, but I will definitely have to check out the features that you provide to see what competitors in the space are already doing.

I agree that Backup & Restore is another prime part of the 2FA UX that needs some TLC. We've got some thoughts on improving that as well, but the first step is to nail the UX of actually being productive with 2FA and then come back to add enhancements.

Here is to some healthy competition! :)


Yep, we have integrations for many services, but software must integrate or support SAML (as Github Business/Enterprise does) for us to do 2FA. Our core product isn't really 2FA however, and we have different target markets: Duo primarily targets businesses looking to protect the services their employees access, while it sounds like you're trying to provide better UX for any consumers of 2FA.

I completely understand your approach and think it's a really neat idea. Looking forward to seeing it. :) Feel free to connect with me via email, I'd love to beta your product.


Thanks for the background on Duo.

I'll definitely reach out once we have a beta to demo. We'd love to get some feedback from folks outside our immediate team!


I'm working on an Amazon Alexa app that can send your phone arbitrary push notifications.

Ever since I bought a dot, I've been frustrated with the relatively high friction of sending data from the dot to my phone (why do I have to open the Alexa app to see the full weather forecast? why can't Alexa send me a link to a full Wikipedia article? why can't Alexa start composing a text for me? etc). The solution is to build an app which can route you from an Alexa request (e.g. "Send me the Wikipedia article on X"), to your phone, to the appropriate app.

There are relatively few use cases that I've found so far, but I think the Alexa -> Push interface is a cool one to explore, and it's been really cool to work with the platform and finally get to the point where my app receives a notification from the Alexa cloud. Open to suggestions for this if anyone has any as well!


check this https://alexa.devpost.com/?ref_content=featured&ref_feature=...


We're building an SMS chatbot for the Canadian cannabis market. It allows you to purchase marijuana directly from dispensaries and licensed producers in a few messages. We’re adding NLP and a basic recommendation engine to help increase retention and drive purchases.

We built out the infrastructure in a hackathon and are grinding away at an MVP. Starting to demo for dispensaries soon. I think we’re really on to something! People have been texting their drug dealer since.. well, the advent of cell phones, so we aren’t changing behaviour. It’s just nicer to chat with a friendly bot (with dispensary to doorstep delivery) than exchanging goods from a blacked-out Malibu in a Walmart parking lot.

Landing page here: http://hicanna.io/ Super happy to discuss our stack or anything else if you’re interested in the project.


Hey, not sure if this is helpful but I have a side project that might save you some work: https://www.smsinbox.net


Very cool - I'll look into it


I think you're on to something. Not much time left before July 1 2018, I hope you can build a good team of partners/PR. Good luck!


Project: A website containing programming projects accompanied by explanations, unit tests and etc.. (a la tutorials) to help beginners to get off the ground quickly.

Audience: It is aimed at learners who already know the syntax of a language, but are unsure/unable to start a project of their own.

More info: I have written more about it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/62r1wr/i_...


This looks like a nice fill-in between "How I start":

http://howistart.org/

and the aosa-book "500-lines or less":

http://aosabook.org/en/500L/introduction.html

(and maybe with a hint of rosettacode in the mix: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code )

I'd love to see some collaborative projects like this - idiomatic/recommended setups of editing/debug/release, as well as approach to coding.

I notice that Python is still absent from the "How I start"-series - something like https://github.com/pypa/sampleproject might form part of a starting point (also the Flask "flaskr" tutorial sets up a bare-bones python package, but needs minor adjustments for windows, as I've noticed using it for a small course on web programming - I'll have to find the time to file an issue and patch).

The great thing about such projects being open to contribution, is that aside from the bike-shedding, one of the best ways to get a correct answer to a problem quickly, is to post the wrong answer on the Internet.


I'm building a 21st century farm.

I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only 8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the fun stuff. Right?


Possible issues: capital, interest, land acquisition, zoning, weather, water, climatic region, crop seed availability, need for supplementary transportation (seeds, equipment, fertilizer, etc.), unpredictable transport overheads, etc.

The fact that you are sharing hard figures before a method really shows that you haven't advanced your thinking very far. Plants don't need technology to grow, they grow anyway. I'm not a farmer either but I can tell you the expensive part of farming is not the growing, it's the capital acquisition, land acquisition, transportation overheads, preparation, crop selection, harvesting, getting to market, and venture risk mitigation.

The most expensive part is often harvesting. The traditional US solution is "industrial scale farming and industrial scale harvesting equipment". The problem is that monocultures really suck in terms of biological efficiency (you start to need pesticides, fertilizers, machines and fuel for their deployment, crop rotation, wind breaks, etc). Better is inter-cropping, where you have different plants together in the same field. A smarter, robotic harvesting system to effectively harvest these naturalesque "mixed" fields could really be a game changer. Then again you could just employ Mexican immigrants like everyone else...

Another option would be an automatic guerilla farming drone to avoid paying for land. You see this done manually a lot in China. Something that can identify an area, clear it, plant it, potentially monitor or water it, and harvest it semi-autonomously. You would probably need a very high value crop to make this work, security would be a problem, and only certain types of unused land would function (legally, proximity-wise, security and visibility wise).


Thanks for all the advice. If I wasn't on mobile I'd try to respond to key/valid points. A lot of these are very real issues and it's going to be interesting discovering what are the limitations and bottleneck for a lot of these activities? Is there a viable, small-scale solution?

You mentioned harvesting and this is what I'm actually looking forward to most. Immigrant labor is getting more and more expensive, costly, and risky. Entry-level farm hands will always have a place, but we're going to see a lot of growth in automation equipment. I'm planning for it in my designs and once the costs reach near parity it'll basically be my solution and catalyst for scaling.


Interesting. If it can be implemented in an apartment, I am game :)


Fortunately that's one of my starting grounds. I have a 8' x 8' x 8' (tall) sun room in my apartment that I'm trying to plan for. This first year I'm only shooting for $10,000 with a 6 month grow season. I had plans for sod/turf but my buyer bailed out on me.


Yes, I'd be interested as long as it's legal. Illegal urban farming is known to generate a lot more than $100K/yr.


How do you get started with something like that? Do you have a blog or anything?


Lately I've been following Curtis Stone[0] on YouTube[1] and he's offering quite a bit of advice.

There's quite a few people out there doing this stuff. Google "urban farming" or "urban horticulture" and see how much that stokes your curiosity.

0: http://theurbanfarmer.co/ 1: https://m.youtube.com/user/urbanfarmercstone


@mlejva https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/announcing-youtube-8... - half a million hours of video, with item bounding box metadata to boot. Or if "simple" is the hard part, just YouTube and your favorite keyword - "animation", "minimalist", "simple", etc. The advantage of your problem space is that any video will provide a TON of input data, since you get 1500-3600 frames for every minute of video.

I'm working on two different side-projects, and have been for far too long - working may be a bit of a stretch. The first is a CRM for job searchers, turning a must-have from the business world around. The second one is a password/secret manager with audit as a first-class citizen, focused on enterprise sharing and reporting.

I have a "fun" one too, to build a Google Moderator clone as a hosted service. I'm doing that as my intro to Serverless, and will probably do a write-up of how to build and launch on AWS with little/no fixed-cost.


I'm building a stock option calculator for startup employees. It walks you through how to collect the information you need to know about the stock options you own, or have been offered, and figure out how much they would be worth in various scenarios.

http://www.optionvalue.io


I would have found this incredibly useful when I was doing research to understand stock options that I have had in the past. Sounds like a really cool project. Keep at it!

Also, to get a more accurate estimation, you will have to know the amount of investment in each round and the permissions that come with different classes of shares. For example, liquidation preferences and investors deciding whether they will convert to common shares or not, etc.


Thanks! I'm definitely planning on adding liquidation preferences -- a lot of people have been requesting it.


Problem: It's hard to configure Vim/Neovim to work like an IDE, and the terminal UI isn't the same as something like Atom, Sublime, or VSCode. Vim plugins for those editors never quite hit the sweet spot for me in terms of using the muscle memory I've built up.

Project: Oni (https://github.com/extr0py/oni), a Neovim front-end with out-of-the-box IDE functionality (right now, supports JavaScript & TypeScript).

Cool to see what everyone is building!


I'm working on https://programmercv.com, a résumé builder with superpowers:

- import from linkedin, xing or stackoverflow - multiple résumé versions - track your job applications - export to any format you need (doc, pdf, html, xml, json) - publish on Github Pages - No lock in: build on open source tools

(most features are still work in progress)


Have you investigated linkedin profile import feasibility yet? Their API is really restrictive and they're blocking most of the hosting provider IP ranges.

Ridiculous that they restrict access to user profiles even if with the explicit user permission (via OAuth).

Let me know if you find a solution :)


Yes, their API is useless, imo. At least at getting stuff out. They want their users locked in.

I'm building a tool thats parsing .html files (your public profile), and extracting relevant information. Build on nokogiri, and open source. More info here: https://programmercv.com/resume-exporter


Nice, cashing out on the fact your audience is technical :)


Upvoted for Mr.Robot's sample resume :D


Yesterday, I published a library for automatically generating 3D models. Input is a simple list of unordered, undirected vertices and edges (soup). Output is a triangulated mesh (as vertex, normal, and index arrays), with consistent winding order, and per-edge weighted normals. When it's done the graph analysis once, then you can give it any set of vertices with the same topology, and it will instantly give you back adjusted normals. Or, you can pass a deforming function or lambda, and it will apply it to the vertices, and give you that mesh instead.

https://github.com/andy-wood/AutoMesh


I'm working on a Slack-based RPG called Chat & Slash: http://chatandslash.com/

It's been interesting, trying to shoehorn popular RPG tropes and expectations into Slack's interface. It's turned into something akin to a MUD, although the multiple-user interaction isn't there. I guess it's more of a massively-single-user-dungeon?

Anyhow, I have about 50 testers in right now and about a week's worth of content. I'm just about to start working on the next major area, which should hopefully add about a month's worth of content. I'm always happy for more testers and more feedback!


Software defined radios that can work in extreme conditions (like during or just after a giant disaster), an IoT kernel that does useful work in a mesh network without a back haul, a personal 'internet radio' that can stream your home market AM/FM stations to you anywhere, and computer system to teach the mid-levels of computer science between programming and and database design.


Where can I read more about your SDR project? Is it a transceiver or just for monitoring communications? I'm a HAM (KK6BXK) and starting a website (http://www.survivalscout.com) that plans to cover this type of stuff. I try to link out to neat projects like this


Could you explain more about the computer system to teach computer science ?

Would it be like an iron python notebook ?


In my opinion, there is a gap between what you can learn on an Arduino type environment and a Raspberry Pi type environment. When I started using Cortex-M level processors (32 bit, very simple MMU (protection only) I realized that it could be the basis for a "PC/AT" type system where you could explore everything from a simple monitor based operating environment (think MS-DOS or AmigaDOS like) through to a self hosted set of compilation tools. The hardware is pretty easy (there are lots of different ideas in this space) but the curriculum is currently still a bit weak. So with the addition of a simple FPGA based frame buffer I've been building a system that can be used to teach a student computer systems.


Made this web app to help you figure out how your favorite language is doing in the job market / what to learn next.

Every month I scan the previous months’ Hacker News 'Who Is Hiring' thread and build these stats. Hope others find this useful. Constructive feedback welcome.

This is only the first version. Next I'm planning to add more data for previous months/years as well and show the evolution of individual languages over time.

http://langstats.azurewebsites.net/


I like it.

A couple of little things:

    You've got both "Objective-C" and "Objective C"

    It would be nice to separate out the APIs, like Cocoa and QT, or make a different graph for APIs/Frameworks


Thank you, hadn't caught that. Will definitely add more graphs for frameworks and other things in future versions.


Damn, no FORTRAN.


Really neat website. Would be awesome to set a time frame or pick a month etc.


Thank you, will be adding that in next versions.


Neat app!


Problem: unsatisfied with package management on OS X / macOS

Project: rekindle an old project of mine [0][1]

Caveat: definitely works (as in I'm using it daily), but not ready for real public prime time as some meta+infra stuff still needs to be figured out. Will post instructions to get things running if some daring folks are interested.

[0]: http://www.arch-osx.org / http://www.archmac.org

[1]: https://github.com/arch-osx / https://gitlab.com/arch-osx


Not to be critical, but isn't Homebrew or Fink good enough? What features does your package manager offer that are better than these active projects?


A very valid question, I've been a Fink user, then MacPorts, then Arch OS X, then Homebrew and now Arch OS X again, and I've got some more detailed writing about this that I ought to publish one day. From the top of my head:

- PGP-signed repo db + packages (Homebrew relies solely on git SHA1s)

- package binary deltas

- building new packages is very simple thanks to ABS (Fink and MacPorts are a pain)

- doesn't write everything as a single user in a possibly multi-user machine (yes people sometimes still do share machines)

- doesn't get clobbered by software that puts stuff in /usr/local (installs in /opt/arch)

- daemons such as postgresql can run as their dedicated user

- uses sudo, so can do stuff Homebrew won't (like populate /etc/shells, /Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/Extensions)

- makepkg builds under user, "install" with fakeroot, only pacman needs root

- synergy as an ArchLinux user, so have the benefit of a single way to manage packages

To each his own, and Homebrew is awesome (I've contributed some stuff there myself) but sometimes there are itches to be scratched: no one use case is exactly the same as another.


Sounds interesting, I will check it out for sure.

I'm mostly happy with Homebrew but I have had trouble occasionally with the multi-user thing. Because some people (at least one!) still use different user accounts on the same Mac, e.g. "work" and "private."


I wonder how mature Nix is on OS X.

I don't have any Apple hardware anymore, but I just wanted to mention how fantastic this package manager is. NixOS quickly became my favorite OS, simply because of the sheer power of Nix.


I've wondered about this myself. My thoughts always ended up deciding that what we need is a Mac equivalent of apt, which relies on the existing `installer`, as apt relies on dpkg.


Problem: software developers want to hear about software needs in other industries.

Project: Opps Daily (http://oppsdaily.com) interviews people about the software they wished they had, and sends the interviews out every day. We then connect interested devs to the interviewee when possible.


This would be helped by doing a bit of extra research to include a summary of existing solutions; ideally the interviewee would explain a bit of detail about anything they had experience with (why it didn't work).


1. How big is your list?

2. How does one get interviewed?


Hey!

1. ~3650 subs

2. Email me - cory@oppsdaily.com and I can send you the questions!


Project: Distributed, trustless, anonymous, encrypted, messenger/mailer with the goal of hiding senders and receivers of messages. Also can't be brought down since it is distributed.

Problem: Limited time to work on it. I have a working prototype with one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many messaging/mailing working fully encrypted over ipv4. Building out the transport methods is the next main task (ipv4 works, need ipv6/tor/i2p/file/qr/etc).


You might find Ethereum's Whisper messaging protocol interesting.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whisper


I'm curious about your cryptographic schema. Are you using encryption-by-proxy to hide the sender/receiver?

How are you making them anonymous?


Elliptical curve asymmetrical keys for the actual encryption. No encryption by proxy by default. Basically think of a shared database where you don't know who inserts data or who selects data. Making all payloads the same size, and constantly transmitting/receiving at a set rate ensures that even your isp can't tell if you are the sender or receiver of a message. The security/anonymity levels are adjustable so you don't have to use the features if you'd rather not. Also with shared asymetrical keys, users can communicate without having to sign/identify themselves within the message. This also provides plausible deniability. There are a lot more layers, but I'll keep it brief here.


Like Ricochet (https://ricochet.im/)?


Kind of, but more anonymous and not tied to tor. More like Bitmessage (https://bitmessage.org) but with a fresh approach. You can connect via tor (tor-tor) and talk to people on i2p, or clearnet, sneakernet, etc.


Sounds really interesting. Would you mind shooting me an email at aakil at safezero dot org?


I maintain a Debian packager for nodejs [0] & two Rust libs for CSRF protection [1] [2], and contribute to SecureDrop [3].

[0] - https://github.com/heartsucker/node-deb

[1] - https://github.com/heartsucker/rust-csrf

[2] - https://github.com/heartsucker/iron-csrf

[3] - https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop


http://www.eathow.com/ EatHow is a web app that helps you plan your meals and gives you recipes you can make with the food you already have.

Long term Id like to completely automate grocery shopping and meal planning so all you have to do is a one-time setup where you set a budget and diet preferences and Eathow takes care of planning everything else.

While anyone who cooks at home would find it useful, it would be particularly cool for people who need to worry about diabetes, high cholesterol, weight loss, etc.

Except for a coding bootcamp a couple of years ago, I have no experience with building software so take it easy on me haha.


My wife and I have talked about the need for a recipe search based on the food we already have for a long time, so I like this idea!

Where do the recipes come from? I mean, do you add your own recipes?


I've been making all the recipes and adding them. Initially, I was using recipes from a multitude of sites but that turned out to be pretty terrible for user experience.

There are 80 now and I'm adding more every week.


Out of curiosity, how do you get and maintain what food the user has on hand? Obviously in the long-term you'd do everything so it'd all be in the app already, but short-term do I need to enter everything I have in my kitchen into the app, and update it every time I make something or go shopping?


I like this idea, and I'd enjoy hearing more about it. (Email in profile if you're interested in discussing further.)


how do you handle food that has a short shelf life?


(1) Considering the problem of real time logistics for spoilable goods to support our startup http://8-food.com/. Interestingly in nominal approach I am finding a lot of crossover with a previous cryptocurrency-focused transaction system I conceived building a Bitcoin exchange 6 years ago @ http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa... ... basically each node within the network becomes an independent agent with centralized reporting but also an internal logistics and scheduling system. Many potentially useful related fields exist like Supply Chain Management (SCM), Operations Research (OR), Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing, high availability engineering, risk management, game theory, etc.

(2) Learning mechanical engineering to build the http://8-food.com machines. Many different sides from HVAC to industrial magnetism to UVGI to exotic door hinges to available materials and production processes to 3D modeling. Big job. Visiting factories, speed-reading huge numbers of books.

(3) Relocating my family and company to Shenzhen. Getting buy-in, travel and shipping, getting to know the city, projecting near and medium term requirements, real estate hunting, etc.

(4) Determining and achieving the ultimate international legal structure for the company. Obtaining advice, comparing different jurisdictions based upon their legal and financial infrastructure, degree of precedent, multi-provider fees, government fees, possible bottom-line benefit under disparate investment scenarios, etc.


Problem: Writing regular content for your product's blog is time consuming.

Project: We are working on automating the content writing process. Articly (https://articly.me) is a automated content strategy and writing platform. You give us your site or product and every week our platform sends you a new article to post to your blog.


I love this idea, and I'm curious where you get your writers and who they are, generally speaking. (I understand if you don't want to reveal that.)

As an American on-again, off-again expat, I have long thought that there should be good money in getting educated native speakers in "cheap" locales to write and edit stuff.

I know a few Americans and Brits who make a good (local) living as editors for various organizations that need to publish things in correct English for, say, the EU.

But your idea seems like it would scale much better. At the risk of everything sounding like it was written by a milennial backpacker. :-)

Best of luck with it!


Thanks for the kind words!

We get our writers from all over, almost exactly as you say. My business partner and I are expats in Asia and have made a good network of US and U.K. writers looking for work as they travel.

That and freelancers who've applied through the site. :)


I'd like to "TRY" before making a bigger cash commitment. I can pay BUT want to have an 1 off article to see the quality. I am not saying free. Just gimme a taste. Before i fork over the dough.


No problem, we have a one article option for $60!


that's what im sayin. I'd pay $60. Let me look for it


$40/post seems pretty low-end, no?


We are still testing out pricing, but for now this seems to strike a good balance for the types of customers we get, mostly small product builders with one or two people.

We automate a lot of stuff to help lower costs for our writers and we have writers on staff from our agency that fill in the gaps and do editing.


Neat-- Just applied to create content.


Awesome, we'll make sure to reach back out!


Potioneer: The VR Gardening Simulator.

I'm trying to combine Animal Crossing, Morrowind's Alchemy skill tree, and Minecraft into one game. A core requirement is a personal goal to have no user interface in the game. Everything you do must be using your hands, not through menus, etc.

I recently released the Creative Crafting update, which you can read about here: https://potioneer.focusonfungames.com/doku.php?id=news:creat...


While working with clients and partners at Alaris Prime, my co-founder and I realized a big under-served market. These are projects that are too large for UpWorks, Freelancer, Gigster, Guru, Project4Hire but too low for IDEO, Leo Burnett, Razorfish, and other digital agencies of the world.

When we work with our customers we make sure that their projects get done. Even with the involvement of other partners, we make sure that we take the responsibility of our customers’ project. Sometimes, our customers go on a vacation while we execute the projects with highly qualified professionals that has been vetted by our team.

http://WorkSigma.com is an evolution of that pattern, and we want to formalize it, make it big, and be able to help more customers. We want to be a trusted place to get projects built - be it for the web or connected mobile devices.

P.S. Minimum 20% discount for all HackerNews users for the year 2017. Use code "HackerNews2017".


FWIW, the product by Upwork Global Inc (formerly Elance-oDesk) is now "Upwork", not "UpWorks". May want to adjust that if this is part of a pitch elsewhere. :)


Got it. Thanks.


I have an app for hundreds public libraries. Such libraries have online cataloges where you can search books, or renew books you have lend, and my app connects to their webpages to show all catalogs in a common interface. Or do things the catalogs do not support, like automatically renewing every due book: http://www.videlibri.de/index_en.html

It takes an awful amount of time to maintain, since there are no APIs and I have to parse the webpages. Every other week/month some webpage changes and I need to adjust it.

It has been going on for years, and I need to update a lot of internal things, too. It is all in German, I need to work on an English translation. Often libraries have multiple copies of the same book. Then you want to search the book, select one copy and order that copy. The current version only stores these copies as strings, because each book is a list of string->string pairs, which looks bad when the user is show the string "Copy 1, library building 1, 123456, orderable". (i.e. an index, building where you find it, the signature of, and status). I just made a new version that would show that all such copies in a 4-column table, but it needs more testing before a release. Each library has different columns, and too many columns might not fit on the screen.

And I made my own programming language to minimize the amount of time spend on adjusting the webpage parsing: http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html

It was just for small webpages, so speed did not matter and its evaluation just interprets the syntax tree, but now I made it XQuery compatible. Someone wrote a raytracer in XQuery, and when I run that in my implementation, it runs quite slowly. I probably need to build a byte-code for it.


Project: In early prototyping a IMSI-Catcher Detector.

Why another IMSI-Catcher Detector?

Mainly trying to address the problems with the current open source solutions which is that they are tied to phones, the phones must be rooted. Given that there is no such thing as a secure phone something that runs on other devices using software defined radio would be better, it is also unreasonable to expect everyone that would like the provided security to be comfortable rooting their phone. It would also be of use to organizations to prevent corporate espionage too as it could operate as a centralized security device.

Technologies have been carefully chosen so that it is as portable as possible. Currently it runs across Linux, Mac, and Windows and everything should be portable to Android also in the future.

Also it is completely absurd companies charge $40,000+ for a small embedded computer with a SDR, I built a touchscreen ARM tablet for the prototype for about $200, even with a amazing SDR it would have only been about $700.


Sounds interesting. Do you have a website or blog where I can look for updates?


It isn't presentable yet but the project is open on GitLab if you want to watch it. No website yet but it is planned once the prototype is completely functional. We plan on having having it functional within two months then to clean it up before deciding if we are going to move forward with it.

* Project GitLab: https://gitlab.com/finding-ray

* Documentation: http://finding-ray.gitlab.io/antikythera/index.html

It includes some support projects like dockerizing of GNU Radio for use with the application, which is a beast to install.


I'm working on Dullahan - an open source, headless browser SDK that uses the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). It is designed to make it easier to write applications that render modern web content directly to a memory buffer, inject synthesized mouse and keyboard events as well as interact with web based features like JavaScript or cookies.

Currently working on Windows 32/64 bit and macOS 64 bit although there is still lots left to do on both platforms as well as pulling together the pieces for a Linux version.

Source repository is here: https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/

Some examples with screenshots are here: https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/src/default/example...


What is the advantage of your project over regular headless Chrome? It appears you have prioritized Windows + MacOS while the official version only supports Linux.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headle...

I am also curious regarding the timeline of your decision to implement this on CEF vs. the official headless support finally picking up steam around the same time (October 2016).

Keep up the good work!


Thanks for the info j_s.

The project has been going for some time and as far as I know, headless Chrome wasn't an option back then.

I've come across it in the past but I didn't realize it was as far-forward as that page suggests - looks really neat and sadly, might render my modest efforts obsolete.

Windows and macOS are the priority now since we are using it for rendering web content inside my company's primary application and for us at least, the focus is on those platforms. There is a working Linux implementation - it just needs some love from someone who knows what they're doing.

I'll take a closer look. Thank you!


* A pixel-perfect WebGL/JavaScript implementation of UIKit/QuartzCore that runs basic iOS apps in a web-based simulator at 60fps

* A Swift 3 -> JavaScript compiler with many language features, full type inference and more

* Many interesting ways of combining the above to form interesting new development/learning/prototyping tools

* One such tool/product has a full WYSIWYG app builder, with drag/drop UI components, auto layout, etc (think Interface Builder but with pluggable logic). I have a backend supporting this that can generate an .xcodeproj, compile, codesign, etc on the fly to a real, fully native app

Started as a browser-based version of Reveal (https://revealapp.com/), and spiralled out of control from there.

One of the spin offs: http://shopmo.co (not fully live)


> A pixel-perfect WebGL/JavaScript implementation of UIKit/QuartzCore that runs basic iOS apps in a web-based simulator at 60fps

That sounds really interesting. Do you have a demo URL or (60fps :D) video of this in action?


How's about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD15ncn7KQw

Note: this video is 100% real, but I trimmed out some frames here and there (during keypresses and Shopify auth) to make for a seamless pitch.


Now I kinda understand why no URL yet; this is amazing, and I imagine you don't want to leak how you're doing it quite yet. (How ARE you doing it?)

Is the homescreen part of your system, or is that a synthetic simulation?

I wish I had a practical reason to ask to use this. I definitely want to learn if there's ever a demo I can play with :D


Thx, appreciate it! Pop me an email and I'll keep you in the loop: lee@shopmo.co


Project: Designing my own cruise control

Currently I'm a MSc. student in Systems & Control. To put theory into practice I'm designing a cruise control for my car. Eventually this should become an open system to assist the driver. This allows for integration of things like following distance, speed limit, traffic density to improve safety and comfort.

Currently I'm working on parsing data from the GPS and other sensors. Read more about this on my blog: http://willemmelching.nl/. Code: https://gitlab.com/pd0wm/open-driver-assist


Problem: in aggregate, k12 teachers spend enormous amounts of time creating (redundant) curriculum content which in turn limits how effectively they can personalize this curriculum for each student.

Project: starting with assessment - intending to move into lesson planning and performance - our project allows teachers to curate assessment elements from a collaborative library (on the subject area/school level initially) rather than creating them from scratch. This saves teachers time up front while also opening additional opportunities for iterative improvement of those resources and personalization for students.

This is a young project, currently in the design/MVP stage of development.


Interested in this due to my wife working in the space. Signup link?


Also interested!


Too early for a sign up - but we will surely do a Show HN when the time comes.

Feel free to drop me an email (in profile) if you'd like to hear a little more about what we're thinking.


Working on my second encrypted email project. The first one got some traction but ran out of money.

https://oakmail.io/


I worked for an encrypted email company for ~4 years and I'm pretty familiar with the space.

How do you solve the user experience problem associated with PGP in terms of sharing keys? You cannot send an encrypted email to someone you have never communicated with before, right?

Do you have a blog or anything to follow?


> How do you solve the user experience problem associated with PGP in terms of sharing keys?

Rely on keybase.io and keyservers to offer some potential matches + in the future work on a better protocol for key discovery (e.g. key discovery as an smtp extension). This was talked about before, and in the past our competition showed interest in supporting it.

> You cannot send an encrypted email to someone you have never communicated with before, right?

Yes, unless you generate a keypair as the sibling comment suggests. That's not something we're considering yet, I'm not sure yet how it would affect our policy of "zero knowledge" (misappropriation of a cryptography term, meaning that the server doesn't have access to unencrypted data at any time).

> Do you have a blog or anything to follow?

Subscribe to our mailing list ( https://oakmail.io/ ) or hit me up at my username at google's email service.


The guy who does backend at Oakmail here.

1. Supporting external APIs greatly helps the cause. Keybase, Facebook PGP.

2. Custom protocols for TOFU key sharing. There has been some effort in ModernPGP regarding that. Not a fan of that.

3. Certificate Transparency implemented for WoT. Something that Gary Belvin from Google proposed during 2nd OpenPGP Summit. Pretty cool stuff.

4. Legacy key servers.

People say that you can't make e-mail secure. Sure as hell you can - the protocol is very flexible and if you cooperate with other companies you can at least create a mini encrypted ecosystem for emails. If we finish the product, we could grab a significant market share away from the competitors and get them to implement new features to finally create proper products.


I can't comment on oakmail, but I can tell you how i'm doing it for my project (decentralized mailer/messenger, look for my post on this page). But basically you perform a lookup (X address = Y privatekey). The problem is when your users don't want their pubkeys to be public.

In a nutshell, I create a new keypair using the recipients address as the seed for the keypair. Addresses in my system are similar to bitcoin addresses (I also use elliptical curve encryption) so the addresses have embedded hashes and checksum of the public key.

This means that pubkeys are encrypted and only people with your address can retrieve your pubkey.


Creating a new, technology-driven commercial and wholesale bank in the UK.

Fintechs in the UK need to partner with a bank or get a regulatory license to do business. Bank partnerships move slowly - their technology and processes are outdated and expensive. Similarly, getting a license takes time, people and money.

This makes starting a fintech company hard and costly. We want to change this by creating a new bank that's built to work with technology companies (focusing on fintechs, but for general technology firms as well).

https://griffin.sh


Project: Resume builder that is very opinionated. More focused on underemployed and unemployed. Folks who don't know how to sell themselves well. http://jobhero.org It is open sourced on github.

Problem: Need more (good) resume template designs. Want to move to react to learn react (angular 1.6 currently). Will move to JSON Resume standard for storing the resume. Will include a login provider instead of the current uuidv4 url as auth. Need to build a landing page and better on-boarding.


What a great idea. If you're not charging, I wonder if craigslist would link to you, there are so many people posting resumes on there that are just hopeless, it makes you feel sorry for them. Some people just can't write well, a service like this could really help.


Problem: Despite there being plenty of articles and discussion posts online, I've not found a way of easily tracking how a given corporation is conducting itself ethically.

Project: I started Suitocracy with a friend so we can log events as they're reported in the media, and also get peoples' thoughts. We're essentially trying to capture it in one place so we can see how companies improve (or not) over time.

https://suitocracy.com


That's cool. Is there any chance you're going to open source the code behind it?


Project: For over a year, I have been developing and maintaining a score-tracking social network for pinball players. We recently broke 1k users who have posted over 20k scores. I'm currently in the process of refactoring the entire codebase and updating/testing dependencies. Once the mobile app is polished I intend on making a web version as well. As a newer developer (~3 years), the scope of this app and the size of the target community are the perfect challenge for me. I've learned about deployments, image uploads, CDN, DBA, and community engagement.

Problem: I'm really struggling with deep-linking. I want to make sure that links open in the app if the app is available and fallback on opening on the site. Sharing to social media is also giving me a headache, but that's due to my stack.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pindigo-your-pinball-scores/... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascrewaske...


I'm working on building something that will incentivize site owners who have some kind of creative content on their site to remove ads in favor of donations to their site. It's a pretty unobtrusive widget they can add to their pages and it makes it so the user doesn't have to leave the page to donate. Still a WIP, but it's getting there!

http://trussapp.com


Not sure why but your link didn't work for me (Server not found) but that one http://www.trussapp.com/ did.


Interesting! I'll fix the DNS. Thanks a lot!


Problem: Researchers and scientists have to go to multiple vendors to get true end-to-end genome sequencing performed.

Project: We created The Sequencer Center. We provide next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, and data management all in one facility. No more dealing with multiple labs, crazy file transfers, miscommunication between labs on analysis, and increased cost and time.

Audience: Researchers and scientists at Academic, Pharmaceutical, and Clinical research organizations.

Advantages: We've created a subscription sequencing model that bundles NGS, bioinformatics, and data management into a monthly cost. This allows us to reduce the cost between 3-5x normal sequencing rates (depending on sample). In return, organizations get static pricing on high volume, recurring sequencing of the same type of sample.

Tech Stuff: We utilize Docker + AWS for our bioinformatics pipelines. Some pipelines leverage GPUs for acceleration. Also using Redshift + Glacier for data storage (still building portions of this out). Next step is to automate data from sequencer -> bioinformatics pipeline -> data storage.

http://www.thesequencingcenter.com


Project: I am building Deep Video Analytics, Currently there are several libraries, models and datasets available for Computer Vision research. However its still difficult to apply a model to your own dataset without writing a non trivial amount of glue code. There is a need for a drop-in solution that comes with UI, algorithms and pre-indexed dataset ready to use out of the box. Using Deep Video Analytics you can quickly index images, videos for visual search, detect objects, and recognize faces and incorporate large pre-indexed datasets via fast approximate nearest neighbors.

https://deepvideoanalytics.com/

Also regarding your project take a look at http://web.mit.edu/vondrick/tinyvideo/ which also tries to generate videos by predicting frames. It comes with stabilized videos selected from Flickr YFCC. http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soundnet/


Problem: I write reStructuredText notes and essays to myself (and run rst2html) about things I'm learning, exploring or have learned, e.g "Cool shell tricks" or "How to manage my diabetes." Managing lots of rst and html files becomes a mess, especially links to other pages if you refactor, or just finding your stuff.

Project: Miki - Makefile Wiki. A small, personal wiki to manage the above. No software written, just a makefile that coordinates tools you already have or are easy to install. The README emphasizes using the navigation features that your browser already has, rather than writing navigation pages.

https://github.com/a3n/miki

You can use any or each of reStructuredText, Markdown or AsciiDoc.

It produces any or all of .html, .pdf and .txt.

Also produces a bare-bones book/media catalog in .json format. Because I sometimes link to my books in my wiki pages.

The refactor problem is "solved" by "make badlinks", which prints out any bad internal links it finds.

In your markup pages, you end your links in the markup suffix of the link's destination (if it's to an internal page). This way you can easily use your text editor's "go to file under cursor" feature to open the destination's source (who wants to open a pdf in Vim?); Miki transforms that into a .html, or .pdf or .txt suffix during output generation, as appropriate

Coincidentally, yesterday I decided that it's "done enough," barring bugs or feature suggestions, and I recorded that observation in the Journal page in my local Miki-based wiki. That feels very slightly like a self-hosting compiler.


I'm working on the NHS.UK Transformation project:

http://www.nhs.uk/transformation/

"We are designing a service that better connects people to the health information and services they need, when they need them. Our tools will help people care for themselves and relieve pressure on frontline services."


I'm working on a tool to help dating app users get more matches in an honest and organic way: https://www.picbot.co/

Problem: People are really bad a choosing the right dating app photos and often end up frustrated thinking there's something wrong with them when they just have awful photos.

Launching in a few days on iOS.


Maybe you could have people peer-review each other's photos and help them pick which one looks best. It could be based on a photo-liking mechanism whereby the most liked photo is the one shown to people first in the organic search. EDIT: I went to your site and saw what you're doing. Good job.


Just for fun: https://www.playnesta.com

100% JavaScript NES Emulator... loaded with about 35 games. USB Gamepad support, Save Game/Load Game, etc.


We're working on a bulk editing tool for data cleaning and of CSV files.

Currently, cleaning data and editing a few thousand rows one by one isn't much fun. Excel, while magical, isn't made to clean data. With our tool, you can format fields by example and find and replace in groups. And with validations on fields, you can get feedback immediately on errors as you edit.


I'm working on a web application for tracking personal finances (think GnuCash for the web or an open source mint.com). My main issue with GnuCash is that I can't enter transactions from anywhere (if I eat out, I have to keep the receipt until I get home instead of being able to enter it on my phone).

https://github.com/aclindsa/moneygo

I'm currently sidetracked implementing a Golang library to request bank and investment transactions from financial institutions using OFX. Automatically pulling transactions from banks is important for any project like this and I couldn't find a suitable library in Golang (or really at all - most open source OFX parsers I could find only support parsing, not making requests, and don't support investment transactions).

https://github.com/aclindsa/ofxgo


I'm working a platform that gives athletes advanced stats and analysis on their activities by using their GPS data. Think Strava but aimed at the more serious athlete.

http://www.scinder.io

I'm now learning React Native to launch a mobile app and working on segments and routes functionality which is quite touch.


Interesting project

I think the focus on analysis is more important that the statistics - i mean there is so much training data out their, and hardly any of its used. Ideally I would want the application to highlight the area of the quickest gain - and factor in training sessions off the back of this?


Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. Completely agree with your point on focusing on analysis. Making sense of an athletes training data is where the real value is going to come from. Rest assured it's in the pipeline :)


I'm also learning RN - are you (planning on) sharing code with the web version (regular react)?


That's the plan. At the moment the web version is built using KnockoutJS which I wish I hadn't used so I'm looking to move over to React. Once I've done that I'll definitely share code between them.

Ideally this would work by setting up a private npm repo and then I can share components between the two.


I've recently launched https://pingtiger.com I now have some free trial users who are helping me with figuring out features they need the most. There are a lot of existing solutions for the same problem, but I'm trying to make the user experience simpler and more pleasant.


We believe that information is meaningless until we connect it. So we built a network that helps people put their research in Context. We map the connections between different pieces of information and describe how they are connected. Check it out @ http://mosaic.network


Problem:

Text editors like Emacs, Vim, Atom, etc. all have designs that are too tightly coupled.

Project:

A text editor (similar to Emacs) where every aspect of the editor is defined via user configuration. One or more sane default configurations can be provided, but the user can always redefine any behavior.

Main features:

Decoupled UI: The editor runs as a daemon in the background. Any frontend uses IPC to interface with the editor. When a frontend process starts, it sends a table of compatible features (mouse support, colors, fonts, etc) for the editor to use as an API. Input events are sent directly to the editor daemon.

Modular runtime:

Every piece of functionality exists in a distinct module. Every module defines its API in a global table (associative array) of attributes. Any configuration is accomplished by changing the attributes in the global table.

The user can pick from a predefined runtime that emulates his/her favorite editor, a unique runtime, or even an empty runtime, and make whatever changes he/she wants.


I'm working on a Uber like service for home-made food in my spare time (apart form having a day job).

http://crave.yorker.me


I love this idea. I recently saw a documentary about the home-cooked lunch business in India -- basically women, often single mothers, cooking great food at home and then middlemen selling it on a subscription level to office workers.

But how do you reconcile "home-made" (as opposed to restaurant-made) with whatever Health Department equivalent operates in your area?

Are you just planning an end-run around regulations[0] a la Uber/AirBnB?

As far as I can tell, in most of the US (and probably many other countries) this isn't quite legal[1], for a combination of bad and good reasons.

[0]: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/licenses-need-home-cooking-bu... [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/3061498/the-food-sharing-economy...


Thanks for the feedback.

1. Reconciling the "home-made" food with restaurant food is not really necessary. It just gives home chefs to compete with restaurants regardless of whether or not they use this service. It is like Airbnb where regular folks like us can list our homes, but they don't stop commercial properties listing either.

2. As for regulations, yes for now run around the regulations until it gets really noticed. If it does, that means we already gained some traction. Recently many states introduced "cottage food laws", where they allow limited amount of food selling considered non-commercial, but I believe the food items are limited as well. We have to see how this goes. This is indeed an area of concern.

3. This type of business if not quite illegal. Most of it falls under gray area with "collage food laws".


Do you plan to expand to other services beyond home-made food?

In the city I live there are large condos that are almost like small towns. The one I live in has 300 families and around 1200 people. Some time ago I thought of developing an online service that would allow such condos to build internal "yellow pages" listing services such as: home-made food, baby siting, car washing, hair stylist, nails, dog walking. The condo administration would pay a fixed monthly fee based on the number of units. Administration would also benefit with features like general announcements and the "condo agenda".

Let me know if this sounds interesting to you.


Not at the moment. I am focused on food services at the moment. I believe there are enough services for listing local businesses / services like craigslist, etc., The value our platform will add is not only bringing the cooks and customers together, but also providing them with delivery service.


great idea, I have a few friends in NYC that order food from chefs. I am working on a different sort of food app as my side project.


Awesome. Let me know if your product is more or less ready (if it is OK with you). Love to see what you're doing. I believe there is so much scope and room for many of us here :-)


I have had the prototype up for about a year now. I am just trying get version 2 out the door in the next month or two.

How do I get in touch with you?


johngummadi at gmail dot com


Two Projects

1st Problem: Went through a round of interviews a while back and was talking with friends about the feedback or lack thereof and thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could practice and get feedback from someone who actually does this and made . . .

Project: http://site-1146624-6257-8128.strikingly.com/

2nd Problem: Grew up playing Star Control 2 which was open-sourced as the urquan masters. However, the project seems to have lost some momentum and I feel like (on Windows at least) finding all of its exact dependencies is not easy.

Project: I've been porting a fork of UQM (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/) to Windows 10 and SDL 2 (still private) and playing with VCPKG at the same time.


I'm trying to make a search engine that gives you the opposite of what you search for: this is what I've got so far http://sample-env.wk77znpmqm.us-west-1.elasticbeanstalk.com/


I registered the domain "duckduckno.com" a while ago for reasons that have now passed. How about I point it at your search engine?


That would be really cool! Let me know if you do it!


How opposite is it?

My animal searches still resulted in other animals.

The other day I wondered if one could find the furthest wikipedia entry and which it would be. The classical "opposite" is usually very very close: do/undo, matter/anti-matter etc...


This is hilariously fun.

If you drop search_term from the query it bombs out though.

And when I searched for "KKz4xj0jON+5zfTrikgvIXiJLXE=" (head -c 20 /dev/urandom | base64) I got a 504.


I have zero experience in web development so I decided to start a self project to learn some of the basics of front-end and back-end development and server management. So I created a home server to host machine learning capabilities.

I set up a Linux web server with an Angular front end that users can create an account and log in. From there they can use the web UI to design and create deep neural networks. Currently it supports autoencoder, fully connected, convolution, and a host of other network layers. The user can also upload data and train the network. The server hosts a nVidia GTX1080 GPU to train and run the network. The website was served using Flask and Tensorflow was used to create the networks. Successful models could also be deployed as an API endpoint.

My final solution wasn't very scalable but I learned a lot from it!


I am working on this: https://onlyusedtesla.com/

A marketplace to buy / sell a used tesla.

My opinion is that Tesla is doing EVERYTHING differently. It would be highly likely that the Tesla on-board vehicle super-computer (currently made by Nvidia - leader in AV tech) could easily handle selling the used vehicle per the owner's request automatically online. All Tesla vehicles are connected to the web via LTE 24/7.

I hypothesize that a Tesla owner or Tesla could automatically upload vehicle mileage, age, options, etc. on to a dedicated used tesla website. Perhaps onlyusedtesla.com can be an exclusive website to Tesla (the company) through a strategic partnership. (know a guy who know's a guy?) can you get me an intro? anyone have elon musks email?


Are you making it so tesla cars literally​ sell themselves?


Tesla owner needs to cash out and sell his tesla. Opens my app and gets an offer OR uploads to get offers from buyers. I am not sure. What do you think?


Could be helpful to people. Not sure how often it would be used though, since tesla also sells there own used cars. You could also try to scope outside of Tesla's as well. Tesla may have a great computer in it, but alot of cars have computers in it. I'd says start with tesla definitely (since you seem to have already started :) ) but don't be afraid to Branch out!


Yeah so i am working on a dealer side. A dealer gets a tesla and can upload thier inventory. I found a few examples and have to figure out what is the value prop for a tesla owner who can upload his ad to cardotcom/ craiglist / autotrader and the likes. I want make it STUPID easy for a user to post an ad and get value from his $100. I am listing ( develop the market) 100 for free. I am doing it manually right now. But improving and a friend is calling all the used car dealers around here in NY to see if they want to list their used tesla inventory and we find them a shopper / send them a lead do the PPC FOR them etc....


https://github.com/kahing/goofys/

I've been spending what free time I have on this. It started out as a curious project to learn Go and to prove that a useful and good s3fs like project can be done relatively quickly. These days it's used by companies moving PBs of storage into S3 to research labs trying to analysis RNA sequences with 100s of machines.

A couple things I hope to get done this year:

* a reasonably easy way to use it in conjunction of docker

* a reasonably easy way to expose this over NFS/CIFS (for devices/OSes that don't support fuse)

* a reasonably easy way to do caching

A bigger vision is to build more things on top of relatively commoditized web services so free software can adapt to the 21st century without a large operating budget.


This is neat, I'll certainly give it a try!


As a hobby, I'm working on a project that allows you to run a subset of the AWS infrastructure on your local machine. Yes, there are related projects such as Serverless and more recently LocalStack from Atlassian but my intent is to focus solely on Lambdas written in Java and I'm learning a lot about the AWS APIs and orchestration semantics along the way. I try to leverage existing open source projects (DynamoDBLocal, Kinesalite, etc.) running in Docker containers and provide the glue to do things like spin up an entire system locally while being able to debug Lambdas, etc. I'm working on it in the open here: https://github.com/digitalsanctum/lambda


A personal bookmarking site [1]. Wanted to learn nodejs and thought building something useful to me would be nice and useful.

But after I built a workable site I realised I just did not like nodejs at all. Its a bit of a PITA.

[1] - https://pagebank.in


I'm working on a tabbed console-based editor that doesn't want to be vim. Like micro, only lighter and with a few extras like multiple cursor support.

https://github.com/tomas/eon

I like to restore old (90's) computers for fun, and realized that if I wanted to actually use them for something, at the very least I needed a decent code editor that would run on them -- i.e. use at the very most 5-10 megs or RAM.

It's not 100% yet, but it's quite usable right now and works both in Linux and macOS. I actually had to fork the termbox library in order to get keybindings working correctly across different terminal emulators (xterm, urxvt, gnome/xfce term, OSX, etc).


After wishing for years for a better way to get an overview of Twitter conversations, I decided to give it a go myself. One problem is that the Twitter API is very limiting, so I built an extension that sits on top of the existing UI. It's been a fun toy project. I'm not a UI designer by trade so a lot of this was new to me.

GitHub: https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/treeverse/aahmjdad...


Project: A city marketplace of local retailers of all kinds, listing their in-store products for 1 hr delivery facilitated by our couriers, which offers more quality assurance and quicker delivery times, and it'll be cheaper than shipping. We're starting in NYC and would love any input/suggestions.

Problem: It's been frustrating to wait days after a purchase to receive the item from major retailers; also, everybody here has complained about Amazon recently, whether it's counterfeits or unreliability, but it's still commonly used due to avoiding a store visit. It'd be great to combine the conveniences of receiving the item quickly and avoiding a visit to the store for it.


As a hobby project I'm writing a VM based on VLIW opcodes, so an interpreter written in C (and in assembly for few popular architectures) could run reasonably fast without requiring JIT (i.e. instead of fetching one instruction per iteration, a big instruction containing many instructions with its respective parameters is fetched). On top of that will run a scripting language optimized for fast string processing (I'm not sure about the viability of the compiler, yet -I guess I'll have to put customized opcode combinations for most frequent load/alu/store combinations, for the specific need of the scripting language on top of that, i.e. not academia stuff-).


I'm trying to make an alternate resource to https://git-scm.com called https://www.gitdvcs.com. I've spent the previous 4 weekends building it. The goals were to simplify the architecture by creating it as as static site that can be hosted on GitHub rather than a RoR site. I also want to help provide better resources for the Git community in general.

This is an extreme side project and it's very much a WIP, but my goal would be to eventually buy git.com and see if I can become the authoritative source for git information.


Problem: My SaaS trialers either convert or expire without me really knowing why.

Solution: Collect data on every action that anybody does during a trial, Bucket finished trialers by "Converted" and "Expired". Visualize that data to find out what motivates trialers to convert. Run crazy ML magic on it to predict outcomes for individual trialers. Act on that information.

About half a day into building, it occurred to me that this is not in any way specific to the one product I was building it for, so I moved the API endpoint out to its own domain. There's a general purpose product there in beta now:

https://unwaffle.com


Looks really nice but, Youch - the pricing seems kind of steep.

I'm not sure what a participant is, since it only appears in the pricing and nowhere else on the page - but if it is a new user (new signup) then 200 seems a bit large for a hobbyist.

I'd consider a tiny $10 - 20/mo one, sans "Assisted onboarding"


Ah, but consider the value of a 1% uptick in conversion rate.

Imagine you have a little $10/month SaaS, with 100 trial signups a month, for which the service in question is outrageously expensive.

Assuming one of your users sticks around for a year, his Lifetime Value (LTV) is $120. And assuming there exists some low-hanging fruit optimization that can get you a tiny 1% uplift in conversions. That translates to (0.01 * 100 * 120) = $120 in extra revenue for your startup each month. So even if you spend the rest of your days just looking at our pretty charts and graphs, you're still doubling your investment.

So yeah, it's priced high because it makes you a lot of money.


I'm building myself a publishing platform which I'd like to make available to others for $12/yr. It'd be a GUI for static-code generators, where you can write markdown in a browser, hit "publish", and Jekyll/Middleman will generate content for you + push the newly generated article to the GitHub repo. I'm spitting out tools, as a side-effect of that:

https://github.com/wkoszek/lastpass-ansible

https://github.com/wkoszek/ruby_packages


I'm also working on something similar, check http://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/


I think this is a viable project - I've thought about doing something similar myself. How will you differentiate from Netlifly CMS, though?

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms


I’m working on an open source verb conjugator for different languages, currently in Korean and Hindi. The conjugator will take in a verb and a grammar form and output the conjugated word. For example, the future form of ‘하다’(to do) should return ‘할꺼야’(will do). This API will come handy for people who are learning a new language or, if you’re like me, building a language learning app. It gives us the flexibility to create learning materials like flashcards. The project is still in its early stage, available at https://github.com/llipio/conjugator.


Hi, this looks very interesting. I signed up at https://llip.io/, but how do I choose Hindi? I am not able to switch from Korean


Hi, thanks for checking out our app! We are currently working on the Hindi lesson contents. We'll be sure to email you when it's ready. In the meantime, please feel free to ping us about our progress or contributing to our conjugator project.


Problem: Track players on an ARK: Survival Evolved (Steam) server, to better manage inter-tribe aggression. (When does another tribe have more players online - at what hours should we be diplomatic, and when can we be aggressive?)

Project: ARKData has been an ongoing project since mid-2015, when it began as copying player names from the arkservers.net page into an Excel spreadsheet. Having transformed this into a static site generator has taught (and retaught) me a great deal about front-end technologies and application architecture - from data ingestion to browser rendering.

I'm currently working on 2 upgrades - first, porting the SteamQuery application from PHP to Powershell, to natively use it instead of having to depend on another data source. Steam servers reply with a blob of information, when given the correct command over UDP. Arkservers.net just runs a PHP application called SteamQuery that queries a server with UDP and parses that into JSON. I rewrote my port yesterday - output is only missing a few data items - player play times, & server name/map/filename since these are not delineated. It's a series of pre-parsers, parsers, and post-parsers - Valve, why do your servers not speak JSON directly?

Second, using SQLExpress as a back-end. I'm currently using numerous CSVs and JSON flat files as a data store. Hopefully, this will improve application performance somewhat, and allow for better statistical analysis. With flat files, it takes several seconds to build a list of players seen in the past 24h.

The application isn't currently running - I only run it when I'm playing, against the server I'm playing on, and I'm not currently playing on any servers. There's a demo site still up, from the last time the application was operational: http://gilgamech.com/ARKData/_Wiped_2_4__NoobFriendly_8xT_3x...

Github (Slightly out of date): https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape


This looks real baller! I'll have to look into ARK...


http://bsnip.com - A screenshot and annotation utility. I wasn't happy with any of the available options, either the price was too high, or the feature set was lacking so I decided to make my own.

I believe BetterSnipper stands out in its ability to dock to the side of the screen, making it especially good at taking/editing/uploading multiple screenshots.

I've been working on this side project for a few years now and it's starting to become more mature, but still a lot of work left and features to add, but a ton of fun to learn and see it come together.

I'd love to get any feedback or suggestions :-)


Nice. I've enjoyed putting animated GIFs into presentations lately as a not-quite-video lightweight animation tool (I use ShareX).

I didn't see whether or not your program supports capturing/creating these or not.


Thanks for the feedback! Gif recording isn't supported yet, but definitely on my ToDo list.

(ShareX seems good, but I've always been confused about some of the random stuff they include in the 'tools'. (DNS Changer, Hash Check, Directory indexer). It never felt like a good tool for an 'everyday user', more for power users.)


...and my download link was broken this morning. Just fixed this in case anyone wanted to give it test drive now.


I am working for data engineering consultancy company and I noticed that we often need large datasets for various reasons, but it's hard to find those. So we started building open source tool which allows us to quickly generate large volumes of data. The idea is to create DSL for describing the data and allowed values and the generator should generate the data set based on that.

https://github.com/smartcat-labs/ranger/blob/master/README.m...

Any help and ideas are more than welcome.


I could see this becoming a popular website (assuming there isn't something out there already). Including a bunch of standard (countries, cities, provinces, etc etc) datasets and whatnot, links to other sources.....like a one-stop directory for online datasets. Again, if there isn't already something (I don't think there is!?)


I'm working on a service, WillYou DidYou, two brothers to help people think about and follow up with their goals, like going for walks, or doing laundry. Will asks in the morning if you will (go for a walk, for example) and did asks in the evening if you actually did it.

It's not a technically amazing app - it's purposefully boring on that front. I think i have, 6 DB tables. I've put a lot of focus on making it enjoyable and useful. It's in beta right now, but it's helped me improve myself, and I hope to have it available for sale soon. Getting public info going is my next todo.


Is this an open beta? Sounds interested I'd love to give it a spin.


I like it. Also thought about an iMama :D


A compact way of encoding nutrition information so that it can be transmitted via a data URI or 2D barcode.

The idea is you could include it in a menu or cookbook or recipe website and scan/click it to add to a food-tracking app.


cool idea!


Project: Building an ML model (in an iOS app) that detect different fitness movements, count the reps and indicate if the user used a proper form.

It's mostly a fun side project I am building to improve my ML knowledge.


I'm interested in this. Whats your progress so far? What techniques are you using; can you point me to any research papers? Best of luck on your project.


Currently working on LeadMine https://www.leadmine.net - Find new prospects and their email address.

LeadMine is lead generation software for any type of business. With their powerful and flexible tools users can now find qualified leads along with their respective email addresses in seconds.

Using the capture feature, you can add and track all your prospects with a simple interface - will eliminate the use of spreadsheets. Once list is generated, users can then begin to contact leads and convert sales!


I am working on iheartreading.co. I Heart Reading is an easy-to-use platform that allows students to track their reading, submit responses to reading and start a conversation, through comments, with their teacher about a book they are reading. Making reading a habit can be difficult for students. I Heart Reading helps students build regular reading habits by allowing them to add books, update their progress (number of pages read, books finished) and write reviews about books they have enjoyed. All of the responses to reading, reviews and progress the student inputs into the site are accessible to their teacher, making it a simplified and streamlined solution to independent reading. It is targeting K12 school in the US. I am working on getting new schools to use it (I have only two schools right now). It was mainly to help my wife, and to learn React/Redux. I have a lot of ideas on how to make it better. I see it as a private goodreads.com, and I am excited on working on gamification.

Second project I want to work on is an automatic answer generator for /r/cscareerquestions, as most of the questions are duplicated, I think it would be fun to work on a program that would give the most ironic response possible to some of those threads. I would like to work on NLP problems and that would be a good introduction to it.

Note: I am looking for design help for iheartreading.co, I did the best I could but it could be much prettier.


I'm attempting to take e-commerce UX design to the next level with my cheap e-liquid brand: https://www.suchvape.com


I've been working on http://calmbird.io for some time now.

As a freelancer, I've had my fair share of miscommunications and various forms of unnecessary distractions. This tool is designed to solve this by giving you the tools to better manage feature planning and client communication.

Basically, I am trying to build a tool, which will largely automate having to send mundane emails to clients with status updates or having to respond to slack every couple of minutes.


Summertunes, a usable web interface for playing a beets music library: https://github.com/irskep/summertunes

This year I switched from streaming to MP3s for at-home listening, and I got fed up messing with 3.5mm audio cables, bluetooth, and switching between devices in general. So now I just run Summertunes and Spotify on an old Mac laptop hooked up to the speakers, and I'm happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.


Project: SeeAround.me - an app to see and share hyperlocal news by location (like Waze for what's happening nearby). All content is user generated, with most of it in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley for now.

Frustration: It's hard to see what's happening near you based on your location (hyperlocal news, events, restaurant openings/closures, construction, etc.) Local news is distributed across so many sources, and it's not easy to see where exactly stories are taking place.


As a side project I have a reddit chrome extension which I like working on every couple months, but I recently have been working on a node service that screenshots and compares the landing pages of different news sources, think (Huffington Post vs Breitbart) which is endless fun with the new administration

extension: http://iampueroo.github.io/rComments/ news differ isn't finished


I'm currently working on a webpage that describes central topics in digital communications, via short python programs and their generated plots, rather than stuffing one equation after the other. I'd like to extend it to more more simulations of wireless systems and in general write more content. Eventually, if people like it I can imagine creating an eBook out of it.

http://dspillustrations.com


I am working on a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling used camera gear. Currently, the only way to do this is via Craig's List, Ebay or forums. We're creating dedicated marketplace and we'll be facilitating secure transactions among buyers and sellers. It's going to be a long road. If interested, you can sign up for early access here: http://gearoffer.com


Love the idea. Are you building the marketplace from scratch or building on something existing?

How long until you launch?


I'm working to build a coding school that makes up for the weaknesses of other coding schools. You can read about what it does better here: https://medium.com/@michelleglauser/this-is-the-coding-schoo...

Basically, it's a nonprofit called Techtonica.org that works with tech companies to provide free tech training, living stipends, and job placement to low-income women and non-binary adults locals. We're in the San Francisco Bay Area for now—did you know there are areas in the Bay Area with income disparity worse than Rwanda's? You can read more about my reasons here: https://blog.techinclusion.co/techtonica-how-to-diversify-te...

We've picked our first full-time students and they are seriously amazing—I can't wait to help them succeed! Just working out the sponsors and space now. See more info at https://techtonica.org.


Problem: Kickstarter et al founders not communicating shipping information. I'm looking at you Antsy Labs!

Project: Crowdsourced backer shipping data. A backer can share their order date, delivery date, and optionally their order number. This allows other backers to see when (if!) orders are being shipped and delivered. We can then estimate when backers should get their order.

Audience: Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers.

Stack: Rails 5 API on Heroku+PostgreSQL, S3 hosted React client.

Launching: This week.


Launched! http://www.backerETA.com


Nice! I saw someone spin up something very adhoc but similar when the Mavic drone was released and delayed.

I can imagine something similar being helpful when the Tesla 3 launches but not sure how to get the shipping data...


For Kickstarter I'm accepting shipping data from founders but other than that it's going to all be crowdsourced. It will be tricky to keep the data reliable. If anyone has ideas I'd love to hear them.

I'll add the Tesla when we launch. Should be fun to see what happens!


I'm working on a journaling app.

Basically I wanted:

- Evernote - with Private data - In a journal style (infinite scroll, no selecting single notes) - With powerful search and filtering - and some simple todo handling

They are a dime a dozen, but I already use it every day (for the last several months) and am slowly motivating myself to get it over the hump. I want to ultimately make a suite off app's that are similar to existing services, but let you control all the data.


Postgres Compare, a Postgres schema comparison tool. https://www.postgrescompare.com

There are many many businesses using SQL Server, Oracle or similar that would like to switch to Postgres but face the challenge of not only moving the database but also the tools they use for managing those databases. One such tool is a solid schema comparison product so I'm building it!


An app to let people tell their mind ... You download the app , and there is two role one listener and one that talk. Then a meeting is arranged beetween the two and one can tell what he have on his mind and the other listen.

Then they will never meet again.

And each time , listener and talker are randomise.

It s just to let people talk what are on their mind with a total stranger.

problem :

A lot with server side problem , and app developpement and mainly time and money.

I would love to be on full time on this but it's a free project ...


Learning Haskell via implementing a type system and type inference on a simple functional language.

https://github.com/jin/hindley-milner

Typeclasses were surprisingly easy to grasp. Got tripped up for a couple of days trying to implement a way to generate fresh variables ("a", "b", ...) and ultimately grokked the State monad to implement it.


A search engine for the world's laws: global-regulation.com. It has over 800,000 machine translated laws.

Two person company in Toronto. One dev (me). Lots of big universities are clients, currently trying to expand to more corporate clients.

We charge customers according to the purchasing power of their country so it's cheap for developing countries. We are trying to aggregate all world legislation, convert it to English, and make it available to everyone.


I am working on a website where GitHub users can see how they rank compared to other users.

The site analyses GitHub profiles and commit history to make a more extensive summery then GitHub does. I made it mostly to learn more about ranking algorithms and automatic text generation.

If you have GitHub profile you can look your self up here: https://www.findsosial.com/search


Right now I'm mostly focused on building NeuralObjects, an open source "Machine Learning As A Service" platform, and the associated hosted service offering to go with it.

The idea is to simplify the provisioning of compute clusters and the installation and configuration of various F/OSS platforms and toolkits for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and then provide convenient APIs for common operations. For the first release (coming Real Soon Now, really) we'll have engines based on DL4J, probably SystemML, and a very simple engine based on Apache Commons Math (for doing simple stuff on a small scale). We also bundle Apache Zeppelin as part of the stack, for interactive analysis in a workbook format.

We'll have a REST API for operations like - defining models, training models, working with model versions, and making predictions with models. We'll probably also offer an RPC based API for predictions, likely based on gRPC.

Long-term, the vision is to serve as a one-stop-shop for all of the popular (and maybe some not-so-popular) F/OSS tools in the ML/AI space. Some things are are on the roadmap include Tensorflow, Caffe, Keras, Mxnet, SK-learn, and MLLib.

The first cut is using clusters based on Hadoop/Spark, but we'll probably also add the ability to provision MPI clusters. We'll also be exploring how to possibly take advantage of the Amazon FPGA instances down the line.

And since the whole thing will be OSS, anybody who wishes to install it locally will be able to do that as well. To that end, we plan to eventually add support for provisioning with OpenStack. We'll also add support for other cloud environments besides AWS at some point.


Currently I'm working on Rakun.js (https://github.com/lukaszkups/rakun.js/tree/dev) (but as You can see I didn't push code to dev branch recently <oops>) - it's an un-opinionated JavaScript framework.

The idea behind Rakun.js is to create framework that doesn't require any additional dependencies but at the same time provides all the modern framework features (router, state management, components).

My main objective is to create tool, with a bit old-school'ish feeling (e.g. front-end devs, who worked till now only with jQuery etc. should feel like at home during work with Rakun.js) but at the same time powerful as other modern frameworks.

If I should compare Rakun.js to something, that will be Vue.js, but without templates method - it will be up to developer which render solution he will choose and how components will behave when their state updates.

You can read more about Rakun.js on my website: http://lukaszkups.net.


My brother runs a movie web site in Chinese, that has some traffic. He's a writer, not a developer, but he learned some basic HTML some 15 years ago and has been publishing articles in raw HTML files since then.

The site is as web 1.0 as it can get, and he wants to modernize it. I'm a developer.

My side project currently is to help with this. It's actually fun to work on.

There's no breakthroughs or interesting science/engineering problems being solved. It's just a mix of things that make it fun. Everything from picking a proper CMS with a list of interesting requirements (easy to use, as attack-proof as possible [i.e. not Wordpress], as few moving pieces as possible but easy content authoring), converting old pages from HTML to some markdown format for future-proofing, making sure old URLs work and redirect to new URLs with better SEO formats, converting old Chinese encoding (Big5!) to Unicode, responsive design of pages/mobile focus, adding AMP and FB Instant Articles features, and so on. It's a mixture of building a CMS in 2017 and rethinking how a modern content site should be.


Myself and a technical partner are working on a linting SAAS project that comments on style issues right on the PR in GitHub. As the non-technical partner I am working on optimizing conversion and prioritizing product work. We check style for 11 languages and looking for feedback on what to tackle next, or fix in the current product. Here is the page if you want to check it out: www.stickler-ci.com.


How do you guys plan on competing with Hound besides on price? In my experience Hound is fast and from thoughtbot, but a little bit pricy for what it does.


We have to added more languages, and give it more functionality. For example, ensure it works with GitLab and add auto correcting linters.


I have a project to get to know something about ML in computer vision. The project I'm doing that with is OCR of a noisy, low-resolution image (~32x16)

Main problems:

* Since the resolution is very low, I found it hard to use traditional CV approaches to segment individual characters and classify those (for example: is this rectangular blob a few pixels diagonal a dash symbol or just noise)

* End to end CNN approach on artificially generated dataset is approaching usefulness. Training dataset is completely artificially generated, test dataset comes from manual labeling (~2k samples, ~50 classes). This approach is almost usable (96.8% accuracy on test dataset), but it is still not acceptable performance. Next thing I'm going to try is first train the CNN on training data as best as I can (have had >99.9% during training, but that could be overfitting) and then do another training run just on a part of my test data to "fine tune" the weights from first run and use remaining test data for cross-validation.

All existing OCR engines I tried could not handle such inputs: abby, tesseract, google cloud vision.


Have you tried this. Convolutional recurrent network in pytorch. https://github.com/meijieru/crnn.pytorch

I think this is the current state-of-the-art (or close to it) for OCR on noisy low-res images.

Here is a broader list of resources/papers for scene text recognition https://github.com/chongyangtao/Awesome-Scene-Text-Recogniti...


No, I have not- thanks for the pointer!

I guess by this time, there really is an "Awesome-<insert ML topic here>" list for everything :)


What is the use case? Why can't you 'enhance the resolution' CSI style?


I'm working an a visual-language that compiles to RegEx that let's you write scalable and readable long regexes.

https://github.com/karyfoundation/orchestra

It gives you 2 compilers and one IDE that let's you edit Orchestra code and then compile it to RegEx or compile RegEx to Orchestra...


I built a mobile app for fitness enthusiasts to connect with like minded people around the world.

Mark your gym on a map and send messages to people that are working out near you. Post funny gym stories and pictures to motivate others.

Website: https://gympulsr.com

The biggest problem during development was the framework itself. As there aren't many people out there that are using Qt for mobile app development, it was sometimes a little bit difficult to find help. In case you are interested, here is a lengthier post about my experiences with Qt for mobile app development: https://gympulsr.com/blog/qt/2017/02/23/working-with-qt-mobi...

The biggest problem now: Get people to use the app.

I honestly didn't thought this would be that hard, but unfortunately it's really tough to get some traction and create a solid userbase.


"If you build it, they will come" only works in the movies.

There are several devs turned marketers here on HN that have taken the time to document what's currently working for them. The most recent I'm aware of is Austen Allred: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877509 Some of his stuff he made freely available (apparently a bit dated per discussion): https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-get-press-for-your-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438634

As seen on: PR 101 for engineers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169309


Problem: the Metaverse should fundamentally be a web application: open to everyone, based on open standards, uncensored. But tools like Unity and Unreal don't play nicely with the web. Their emphasis on proprietary editors causes vendor lockin for anyone who puts in the time to learn them, and presents a barrier to entry for anyone who isn't interested in learning yet-another-platform-when-the-ones-we-have-are-just-fine-thanks. And their compile-to-webgl stories are a joke. A "metaverse" of siloed applications living as gigantocorp platform exclusives is not a metaverse at all.

Project: https://www.primrosevr.com is a web-oriented, immersive environment for building applications. In Primrose, you write idiomatic ES2015 JavaScript code to define interactive objects and let the framework manage the VR-ness for you.

I've been a web developer for 20 years, and I've been building VR and AR apps in browsers for almost a decade now. Primrose started as a collection of my habits for building browser-based VR apps to become the first WebVR framework in the world.

I've built a few apps using the framework, including this one for a client (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/goldman-s...). Y-Combinator was interested in us, but I most emphatically do not want to leave DC (y'know, cuz the metaverse isn't just one city).

Definitely open to taking on collaborators. I'm open to taking on motivated beginners, even open to mentoring people, so long as I don't need to constantly chase you down to see how you're doing or spoon-feed you answers.


Problem: Heroku is great, but can get costly for small projects that need things like SSL certs, and more than 3 rows in a database.

Project: https://www.stackforge.co an alternative for those who love the ease of Heroku but don't want to pay $100/mo for a basic site. Built on Open Source to cut costs.


Working on a realtime library to share state and events in the most simple way ever, using pure JS. This is all thanks to ES6 Proxy. socket.io with no servers, firebase with no config, cloud persisted variables for free: https://github.com/DiegoRBaquero/V


I'm working on an open source search engine as a Redis module, written in C. http://redisearch.io/

More specifically, right now I'm working on making it work on a multi-node cluster, so it can scale beyond a single node. This is not a trivial task even working on top of redis cluster.


Problem: Finding newly-registered companies (to market services to them) in the UK is hard. The government releases an updated registry of all four million UK companies once every month, but they come in a huge five-part spreadsheet. It's difficult and painful to sort and filter through this data.

Project: I constantly poll the UK government's databases for newly-registered companies. I also geocode each company's registered office address. I can send you details of the newest UK companies by email every day (or week, or month), and you can choose to only see companies of a certain type (hospitality, technology, etc.), and/or companies in a certain area (within 10 miles of London, etc.). You can also log in to the dashboard and view historical company data at any time if you prefer.

Built with Haskell, Elm, Redis, and PostgreSQL, if you're interested :)

https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/


nice. Have you had much traction? b2b sales can be hard.


I haven't opened it up for people to use yet, but that should happen within the next couple of weeks. I have about 30 people on a waiting list to start using it. Of course, I'll know more when people start paying.


I'm working on building an indie room-scale VR MMO.

https://orbusvr.com

It's pretty ambitious for a small team, but we did a successful Kickstarter campaign previously and we're keeping the scope reasonable. We've held a few successful stress tests already and Closed Alpha starts in a couple of weeks.


Project: I've built a small app that assists in efficient, timecoded note taking, like "03:25 - doesn't recognise the download button (unhappy)"

Problem: when doing interviews and usability tests/walkthroughs, it's hard to keep track of time, take notes, observe the persons emotions and have it in sync for reviewing the recording later.


It's that time of the year when I dust off my math project of six or seven years running and have another go at it. It's a research problem in Riemannian geometry I've been tinkering with since my thesis. This time I've managed to see some interesting things I hadn't spotted before, but the general pattern they conform to doesn't permit me to prove anything attention-grabbing. For the first time I wonder if I've taken the project as far as it can go. It might be time to do a (nice, cleaned up) core dump to the arXiv and move on.

I've gotten an offer to do contract work in web development for the company my wife works for, so I'm considering language and/or framework options. I've only done backend stuff so far, so it might be a nice change of pace, given that I properly communicate to everyone involved what to and not to expect. Plus the extra money would be nice with the baby on the way.


Several things around VR. Creating 360 degrees content that can be viewed using HMDs. Creating a website that is a directory of any fun place that people can go to. I though of this after I realized I hardly have any fun and I couldn't get one place that had a list of outdoor activities. The directory can be monetized by doing 360 photography and videos for all the listed businesses, e.g bungee jumping, safari walks, etc. And finally, merging all that by creating a commercial vr showcase. This will be done by syncing several devices (preferably samsung gear vrs because of quality) and use this to do product showcases and demos at events and trade fairs. Yeah! Its a lot and maybe am getting over my head with how much impact VR can be. I'd love to hear thoughts. My location is Kenya (Africa) by the way. So all this is completely very new in the market and experimental and am in it full time. Zero competitors.


> I am building a neural network which should be able to generate few frames of the video given the preceding and following frames.

You might be interested in the links provide at the bottom of this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inpainting


I'm sure this will be poopoo'd, but after performing countless phone screens I decided to make a software engineer screening service. I'm using Azure ML to adapt the screens in real-time as the candidates work through the assessments. It will decide if we should stick with a topic a bit longer and if we should dive a bit deeper into a certain subject. Right now it is just academic and code reading multiple choice questions. I'm currently working on the code editing portion.

There are other services that are similar, but I'm specifically targeting the screening market and offering more detailed reporting. Also as a bonus, candidates receive a "study guide" based on the questions they missed.

As for pricing, I'm forgoing the subscription for a "credit" based system where you trade 1 token for a screen (buy in bulk or on demand). No contracts, nothing to cancel, just purchase what you need.


I'm working on an open source "interactive time series forecasting app"[0] powered by Prophet[1] and Plotly[2].

I aim to make it a fully featured front-end to the Prophet forecasting tool released by Facebook's Data Science group.

I loved Prophet at first sight and thought it can be a goto solution to the problem, so I have decided to use Plotly's interactive charting and React's declarative programming for the performance.

It's still in the development phase for now, my next task is to enable installation through NPM or PIP.

[0] https://github.com/Prophetly/Prophetly

[1] https://facebookincubator.github.io/prophet

[2] https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js


I'm building a ML model that will understand interior design. Currently I indexed 5k images for 8 concepts. I need a lot more train data. I developed a mobile webapp to train/test the model https://marketio.co/experiments/


My team and I are working on solving the 3 biggest problems in mobile app management - distribution, monetization, and enterprise mobility.

Our idea is to build a platform for discovering, managing, and monetizing apps. Kinda like a Spotify for Apps.

So essentially, we've built a mobile app that lets you run embeddable apps (applets) in containers (i.e. webviews with native hooks), and developers can hook the applets up to a mobile backend-as-a-service similar to Firebase.

Businesses can also use it to manage and setup shared workspaces that contain private, work-related apps, and get all the benefits of enterprise mobility (BYOD, security, etc) without all the complexity.

We've just finished a successful private beta and are gearing up for a limited public beta. Check it out - https://formelo.com

If anyone is interested in participating in our beta run, shoot me an email - niyi @ formelo . com


I am working on an NLP sentence parser (and other related NLP tools), that is trained with using human-generated parse data like the Penn Treebank. It works at some level, not quite state of the art, but I am making steady progress. You can see the demo version here:

http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView....

Because I'm not tied to a specific training data set, I can define (and must) my own grammar formalism. I wrote a blog post against the standard PCFG formalism that has been widely used in the field:

https://ozoraresearch.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/chuckling-a-b...


I created an API (that is still a WIP) to provide forecast data pretty cheaply. Last fall I was working on another side project(that got shelved) that needed weather data, and I was blown away by how expensive most of the other APIs are if you need quite a lot of data.

Shoot me a message if you'd like a trial token to do some tire kicking.

www.cheapweather.com


Just curious, what's your data source? I'm not a potential consumer or competitor, just wanted to know where one would go about getting something like weather forecast data to provide as an API.

If you feel that information is part of business secret, you don't have to answer.


No secrets here. I pull the data raw data from the NWS and put a prettier interface in front of it. I had high hopes to pull from other public data sources... but you know, priorities.


Problem: no note taking app suited my needs. Solution: write your own

http://github.com/ekblom/noterium

Write notes with CommonMark, save where you want (dropbox, disk), notebooks, etc.

Two years and counting, just open sourced it, why charge for it when its built with OS-libs. :)


I'm working on http://chatwoot.com.

Problem: Customer support still depends on age-old channels like email and phone while the world is moving fast ahead. People want instant replies to queries and all the brands have an online/phone presence. But none of them are leveraging these channels for effective customer support.

Solution: Chatwoot.

It's an app for multi-channel customer support. You can connect your brand's Facebook Page or your Telegram bot. You will get all the messages on Chatwoot, and from here you can reply, assign conversations to agents and get reports on how your agents are performing.

I will be launching beta soon with Facebook Pages as a channel. Soon to be followed with WeChat, Line, Telegram and possibly Whatsapp as soon as they release their business API.

For the technically inclined: Built on RoR + Vuejs. Completely on AWS.

Would love to know your thoughts.


A lot of customer support platforms already started offering chat features a few years ago. (I used to work in the industry.) The same can be said for Facebook and Twitter integration.


Working on a deep reinforcement learning library that can be used in practical applications and not just simulations. The idea is that there might be many developers/ml enthusiasts interested in deep reinforcement learning, but existing research code is often tightly coupled with simulations like OpenAI Gym, somewhat brittle and requires a lot of know-how to adjust for a new problem. The goal is to have a library that allows to create and configure different deep RL agents with just a few lines, so they are easy to play around with.

Development is going slowly because there is a lot of research output that is difficult to integrate into one consistent architecture (also a weekend project), but working prototype with example usage is here:

https://github.com/reinforceio/tensorforce


Two things:

First, my torrent tracker, "Notorious" (https://github.com/GrappigPanda/notorious). This has been a constant project of mine for at least 7 months now. There's still a lot of improvements which can be done, but this brings up the second project I'm working on: "Olivia" (https://github.com/GrappigPanda/Olivia), a distributed KV store. I'm currently reading through Paxos papers and geearing up to implement Paxos, Raft, Epaxos, or something (by myself because I like difficult things) so that the KV store has consensus.

I plan to have a horizontally scalable torrent tracker, for no other purpose than to have said I did it.


A "Codecademy" for effective writing.

There are plenty of books & lectures teaching this, but nothing interactive.

I got the idea from running a game that makes effective writing competitive:

http://brevitybowl.com

Training section will be up soon. Getting format, design, and approach has been tricky.


I'm working on a search engine for talks - https://www.findlectures.com

Currently working on converting the backend from Node to Scala Play. Also in the background, working on indexing slides in videos for talks and books speakers have written.


A mobile app for grassroots groups that are resisting Trump: https://getamplify.org

Currently spread thin between building features for group admins and improving the end user experience--- get in touch if you want to lend your skills to the country :)


I've recently launched https://reservv.com a platform for facilitating online appointment booking. Not the first to try and tackle the problem but I'm trying to make the UX simpler and the whole process better for both sides.


Outdoor survival guides

http://www.survivalscout.com


I'm working on V2 of my domain portfolio management system (you can check it out here: https://beachfront.digital). It'll be free during beta, after which it'll be $11/year.

I have CSV import/export working for those currently keeping track of their domains in a spreadsheet. When adding new domains into Beachfront, there's a WHOIS search run on the backend and the registrar/expiration fields are automatically filled in. Price is manual entry but when you do, you'll begin to see how much money you spend per month/year and by TLD on domains.

I'm just trying to add value any way I can while also eliminating friction points. I'm hoping that domain management and personal analytics will be appealing to people.


Project: I am developing a platform that lets people try any products before buying them. Its free if they buy one of the products they try on the spot or else they shell out a tiny flat fee for the trial.

https://dais.me (it's not live yet)


i am a student and i recently started an organisations that provides short bootcamps (1 to 3 days), tech-talks and hackathons for other students at our university[1]. While i think my university provides a very challenging education, it's short on teaching practical skills (like python, react etc.). This is ok, the university should focus on what they are good at and not "waste their time" with teaching frameworks etc. We don't have any experiences with these bootcamp-style formats yet, maybe one can chime in and give us advice how to best approach it. We want to provide it for free and rely on other students who want to share their knowledge.

[1] beware, german! also we are reworking the website: https://hackundsoehne.de


Micro - simplifying distributed systems development

Started in late 2014 with an idea and a very fuzzy prototype. Today the open source development is sponsored by an enterprise company and it's no longer just a project but my full time focus.

https://micro.mu


Egg Inventory - a record keeping software for poultry layer farmers: https://egginventory.com

It allows farmers to record daily production of their chickens, manage orders and customers and view available inventory/stock at any time.


I'm building a football management game: http://footballpresident.net.

It's an Electron front end (Angular) which connects to a bunch of micro-services for messaging, fixture generation etc.

Sort of like a tycoon mixed with a simulation game.


School work for one. I'm really behind on that.

Also, I'm working on my blog/YouTube channel. Honestly, the blog is more beneficial to me rather than the random individual to decides to look at it since it's so bad.

I'm working on improving my presentation and research skills, video editing, SEO etc.


I'm working on an uptime monitor system[1] and a color palleter[2]

My issues with existing tools is they doesn't support phone call alert and have to integrate with pagerduty. I just want something that's simple with phone alert.

I also want to config check use a chatbot because at the end of the day, I only want to get alert when my site is down, that's ll. All nice UI is just an add-ons.

I also want to have better control on interval checking time. Spend around 4months on it until now and probably public launch this week.

During the time, I have a hard time to chooese a color scheme. So I think why not generating color pallete from popular sites.

Both of open sources project but no one contribute except me haha.

---

[1] https://noty.im

[2] https://kolor.ml


I get bogged down super easy, so only pick up really small personal projects.

I have been working on tutorials for the newly released Construct 3 beta. The kids I teach at codeclub have been begging for Construct 2 tutorials, but now that all of them can participate (some are on chromebooks/macbooks and Construct 2 was windows only).

https://jonoshields.com/tutorials/construct-3/

Also working on making the shadows more realistic in my procedurally generated mountainscape thing.

https://jonoshields.com/2017/03/29/creating-procedurally-gen...


Problem: the 2016 MacBook Pros exclusively came with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. It's a big hassle to find out which cables and chargers are decent and don't fry your laptop. Plus the ecosystem isn't really mature yet so some devices work straight away, and some don't.

Project: we've blocked a couple of hours every week to work on our site http://usb-c.today/ All it really is, is a simple Wordpress site, listing what products we found to be working. We either test them ourself, or look for reviews from independent people like Benson Leung, Nathan K. or in-depth technical reviewers like GTrusted.

Audience: anyone who has a laptop with USB-C ports and wishes to use them in an controlled manner.


1st impression after opening your website: you need to show more/bigger pictures on the front page. Add an image to every post, so visitor can see a picture before clicking the post title.


Problem: most businesses find out they've have a data breach at the same time as everyone else, which reflects very poorly on their brand.

Project: Putting together a SaaS which will scrape a large number of sources for evidence of a unique canary which we supply them with. Each businesses canary can be triggered in a number of ways; being found on the internet, receiving any type of email, or even receiving a phone call. Currently it's in development but I've put together the classic landing page to try and get a list of potential early adopters to help shape the project once it's in closed beta. You can see it here https://breachcanary.com

Any feedback would of course be greatly appreciated!


I'm working on a large collection of short stories called the Daily Story Project (guess how frequently I write the stories).

It's intended to be listened to as a podcast but I also publish the recordings as YouTube videos.

Not really "on topic" for HN but I did write a script to do the video to mp3 conversion!

If you're looking for a representative sample of my writing style I would say Ghost Squad is a good one: https://youtu.be/zzMOK86J7IE (113).

Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-story/id1212062965... Youtube: youtube.com/krisshamloo


My current side project: I am working on an app to go through my social media accounts, pull down the text of every URL I have ever posted (2,000+), and do natural language processing on the content of each URL retrieved.

Reasons I am doing this:

- I wanted to brush up on my Python and get acquainted with the request and BeautifulSoup modules

- I wanted to use Sqlite for a project and try out some new database design ideas in a non-production environment (immutable rows and JSONifying all data that's not indexed, for example)

- I wanted to get familiar with natural language processing in Python (NTLK module).

Been working on it on and off over the last month or so, and am trying to make some sort of measurable progress each evening. When completed, I'll put the code up on GitHub along with any interesting results I obtained.


I am designing a Single Instruction Set Computer and working to take it beyond the 'that's interesting but useless' stage and make it very useful.

https://github.com/BillBohan/NISC


Project: Build an easy to use tool for backtesting ETF portfolio combinations that you see recommended all over investment blogs. Let users have a shareable link to send around so others can easily see and tweak the portfolio. Start a blog around critiquing recommendations I find around the web.

App: http://app.mytradelab.com Blog: http://mytradelab.com

Problem: Would like to include details about holdings inside ETFs and how they change through time, but havent found a good data source yet. Would be cool to build in functionality to compare ETFs based on their fees and what they hold, but current holdings is just a snapshot in time.


Problem: I'm making a tool that'd help web developers and javascript library authors cut down bloat in the websites and libraries they make. This is done by helping them visualize the real world performance impact of adding a new dependency on the end users.

WIP here: https://cost-of-modules.herokuapp.com

Motivation: Maybe if I were to tell you the gzipped + min size, download times and the parse times of that ridiculously heavy react/ jQuery plugin _before_ you add it to your site, you'd think twice?

Problem: It's tricky to arrive at a configuration for webpack/rollup that would successfully bundle all npm packages.

Parse times are device specific, so calculating those reliably can be tough.


I have been improving a Ruby gem that I think would be useful for building web connected sensor applications (IoT stuff) in a hurry.

The tool implements a serialisation spec called The Blink Protocol. The spec is similar to Google Protobufs with a few differences, mainly:

- It's more compact on the wire (important for LPWAN)

- It's minimalistic and has a proper specification document

The gem implements a schema parser, a dynamic message class generator, and an extensible codec generator.

The idea is you can use the tool for both ends of your application:

- Use the codec generator to generate C source for your device

- Use the dynamic message class in your web app to consume messages

On the Ruby side it should be as easy to use as JSON.

https://github.com/cjhdev/slow_blink


I'm working on JQBX, an app that lets you listen to music in sync with friends or strangers on real time.

The app hooks into your Spotify account so you get access to a huge library of high quality music. You can also save things directly to your playlists so you keep all the cool stuff you discover in one place. If you're more hands on you can be a DJ, play your favorite stuff and get real time feedback from the crowd. If you're more of a hand's off kind of person it's great for getting high quality hand picked music for long stretches at a time (eg the 8 hour work day).

https://www.jqbx.fm

It's totally free, I wanted the product so I built it- has been a great learning experience!


I'm building a MUD[1] in Go. It's basically a port of the merc/diku mud, but I went in different directions on a couple of things. It's basically feature complete at this point, so my next step is to build a bunch of areas and flesh out the a world and play with it for a bit. Add some mobs, some spells, some items. Create a few quests and storylines. If it works out and I think it's enjoyable, I'll stick it on a server somewhere and real people can access it.

I mostly did this because I've always wanted to build my own MUD, and I've also been dying to get really into Go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD


Project: I'm learning to (ab)use nuget packages and micro libraries as a means of increasing my motivation and completion rate on personal projects.

I've had a tendency to (re)start new personal projects from scratch instead of continuing old ones. I'm up to around 300 dead and abandoned projects. Compounding the problem: "I don't want to manage #include paths, library names, paths, and deal with other build errata - for multiple platforms no less - just to escape a lousy JSON string!". A native nuget package can reduce this to a few clicks, which is much more palatable. I've been doing a lot of reusable build automation to make creating .nupkg s a no-brainer. So far I've figured out how to make decent nuget packages for C++, C#, and Typescript projects.

I'm applying this approach to the creation of a native C++ library for sentry.io (because I'm tired of unreported assertion failures within a company being a problem, ever). I've spun off a lot of terrible v0.0.0 junk: https://www.nuget.org/profiles/MaulingMonkey (follow the "Project Link" for the corresponding Apache 2.0 licensed github repositories)

So far I this includes libraries for unit testing, formatting JSON, enumerating the callstack, and a snprintf wrapper. (I've been muttering "always be shipping" to coworkers and friends - taking the piss out of the phrase "always be closing". A former coworker suggested something even better, which I'm trying to embrace: "always be shipped", hence my willingness to put even v0.0.0 stuff out there.)

Problem: My makefiles for linux builds are absolutely horrific - and I'm not just talking about my propensity to use tabs for non-indentation purpouses: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/libMmkJsonWriter/blob/dc26d...


A cross-platform dual-pane file manager [1]. It made the front page and top 10 on Product Hunt last month. I'm busy implementing feature requests and figuring out a way to grow it sustainably.

[1]: https://fman.io


This seems cool! If you'd like some design/growth help, I may be the right guy for that. My email is in my profile.


Ps. Search everything on Windows searches through NTFS. Which is insanely fast ( thought it could be usefull)


Thanks! I'll keep it in mind.


Feature requests (windows): a right-click context menu, remove confirmation dialog box on drag and drop.


Thanks for the requests. The first is already captured by an issue [1]. If you thumbs-up there it will be moved up in priority. For the second, I'd ask you to file a new issue.

Thanks, Michael

[1]: https://github.com/fman-users/fman/issues/43


An idea: have an unobstructive popup that says "hit ESC in 5 seconds to undo <the action>", and do the move/copy only if the user doesn't press that key in the specified time. Maybe use backspace instead of ESC because the MacBooks' touch bar thingy. Allow to disable/ change the interval.


It's nothing amazing but I'm in my final year of college so I'm finishing up my final year project at the moment on a CMS that focuses on passive security. It's mainly centred around two-factor social authentication, user roles and automatic form CSRF protection.

The CMS part was tough because it had to be one codebase to host multiple sites as well as the security stuff. But I think I've sorted out a good design pattern which is nice :) It mainly uses JSON to layout the CMS backend per-site and then you get to override everything else using Classes within each site's "theme" folder.

Not spectacular to look at atm but here is the Github repo: github.com/thejokersthief/GraniteCMS


Defining, detecting and ultimately stopping fake news.


That sounds very interesting. Tea?


That sounds very interesting.

Well it's ambitious, so it has that going for it...

Tea?

I'm not sure I get the reference. Yes?


I think he means you can sit around and talk about it for a long time, but will not get anything actually done.


That sounds very generic too. How do you even define fake? How do you know it's not fake?


How do you tell spam from ham? How to tell a forgery from a real painting?

The answer is: classification is now for some problem domains a tractable problem where before it required human intervention. Telling fake news from real news requires a body of data (doable), a classification algorithm (mostly a solved problem) and the will, time and other resources to actually do it.

To me it sounds very much as something worth doing and possible, that Google with their vast resources appears to drop the ball here (see Google News, which gives equal billing to ham and spam alike) leaves room for an outsider to go and tackle that problem in a decisive way.

I can see all kinds of possibilities and this to me seems like a very worthwhile task.


How do you even define fake?

That's a very good question, which is why I included it. I like one definition I saw circulating which revolved around "news items intended to deceive". I agree that is too hard to pin down to be useful.

How do you know it's not fake?

There's two way I could read this. The first is distinguishing newly emerging news stories for which the facts don't exist and the second is how to automatically check.

Both are valid questions. For the first, I don't know. For the second there is an entire field of computational fact checking, as well as a range of other features.


I think a better question to ask is: how do we structure discourse around content to make our society better immune to the proliferation of low-value content? (Whether that be fake news, clickbait, disguised advertising, etc.) Also, how do we do this without creating political silos, each with their own propaganda?


I think that this is a really good question too.


I am working on version 2 of my side project bestfoodnearme https://bestfoodnearme.com

It is a side project I am doing for fun in my spare time to solve a problem I have when deciding where to eat out.


hi, I am working on something similar with https://samosasnearme.com.

I am unable to sign in to your website using FB.


Thanks for the heads up, it appears something has changed in the social login code since I put it up in 2015.

I am working on version 2, so I hope to have this fixed soon. I am doing a complete redesign and moving from a custom database engine I build over to a well know open source db. It has been slow going.


Ok. May I ask what your source of data is? I am using Yelp's API currently.


just a few users inputting data as they come across food.

I have not really done any major marketing for this as its a side project right now. I may in the future


Project: A webapp for teaching people FPGAs from the ground up: https://www.blinklight.io

Problem: Right now I'm looking for a hardware partner to manufacture the accompanying "dev board"


Problem: too many bot and voice app platforms are emerging and writing apps/skills/actions for each one won't scale.

Project: I'm developing an SDK for building conversational apps that has pluggable "frontends" for different platforms. It's based around the AI concept of "frames" to organize your code and an MVC-style template renderer for building responses.

Challenges right now are learning more about Typescript and NPM modules, refactoring, writing tests, and getting it documented for release.

I also would like to build a business around it (already doing consulting building Alexa skills), but I'm not sure if it would be better to keep it closed source or dual license. Any advice?


Two projects recently started that I expect to have available in the coming weeks:

* a MUD-style game to teach the principals of Erlang concurrency and the actor model.

* Take the half-dozen blog drafts I have, clean them up and publish them. Fix my broken personal site in the process.


Project: Monitoring cheap weekend and midweek flights from the UK to Europe and sending e-mail alerts to subscribers. You can check it out at https://citybreakflights.com


I'm working on packaging Kiwix (http://www.kiwix.org/) for Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/).

I am not otherwise affiliated with either of these projects. My motivation was to promote the idea of trying Sandstorm on mesh networks. Having Wikipedia on your mesh sounds like a useful thing. Making it easy to deploy along with the other Sandstorm apps makes it more attractive.

I'm decently far along. I got over my biggest hurdles. Still a handful of things left, but it'll be in the marketplace soon I hope!


ProtoAPI - A tool for people building apps to get functional APIs in minutes, while they are sorting out the backend properly. https://www.protoapi.net/


Project: I am creating a database of all Finnish Instagram users. It's been a long and hard task to do, but it's currently looking pretty good, I have over 250k accounts that are considered Finnish and their posts data. Now to actually think what I will do with this data...

More info: I am currently building a website to showcase the data, but in the mean time I have a Instagram account where I for example once a weekly update what are the most popular hashtags in the Finnish Instagram community. https://www.instagram.com/iigeesuomi/


You could probably do something like this: https://www.dataminr.com/about/. Actionable alerts for people/businesses interested in the Finnish market.


At my day job, I'm working on a project moving retirement and pension data out of a 30+ year old mainframe system into a replacement system that is still being built in .NET/Angular.

As a side project, I'm working on building a class to teach people ETL using whatever data integration tool we choose (currently Talend, but want to keep it agnostic). It's meant to be tailored to complete newbies as well as people coming from other backgrounds (software, BI, etc.) as part of a bootcamp.

Note that I'm a full stack dev. who got pulled into the data world as I've done so much of it, and am currently interested in bridging the gap.


I'm working on CauseGraph, a set of tools for analyzing cause/influence relationships between people and events over time. http://causegraph.org


I'm building a wholesale order sheet that is shareable with a link.

https://www.deliteapp.com

Businesses are purchasing millions of dollars of product through paper order sheets or PDFs passed through email. Delite takes out the hassle for the buyer - they can fill out quantities and submit the order right on the form rather than download, scan, fax, send back, etc.

The vendor can share these orders through text, email, or on an in-person basis. The forms can be created and customized with a form builder, and also come with a backend to manage orders and customers.


It would be cool if you added data feeds, for product and inventory to it, and made "giving out" those feeds easy. And then had a system for "consuming" the feeds that was "easy".

As a small eCommerce site, i'd LOVE to have feeds from all my suppliers, but unless you're selling millions a year for them few suppliers bother with the effort. Most suppliers create feeds by having an FTP server, and they periodically throw a csv file on it.

Then as a consumer of the feed, since so many of these solutions are "home grown" you learn to not trust the data. So you have to build up really sophisticated systems. For example if a supplier tells me in a feed he had 10 widgets, and I got that feed 2 hours ago. My algorithm might tell me he only has a reliable supply of 2.

I've thought about building something like this, but I didn't want to get into the business of selling software to suppliers (they're notorious cheap skates).


I'm working on a same-source MIR to "HSA IR" for Rust, allowing full use of generics and closures. The first target will be for SPIR-V, but it'll be easy enough to leave the door open for other targets, including FPGAs, so I'll be writing code to allow that.

This project is in it's early stages; I've finished the research in the Rustc compiler and figured out how I'm going to provide new "primitive" (ie a 4 by 4 matrix, a 16bit float type, etc) types to the framework (and work closures in), and have started writing code, but I have nothing working as of yet.


Project: I'm hard at work on a "smart" worldbuilding tool[1] for authors, game designers, and roleplayers to flesh out detailed worlds in a structured, semantic way.

[1] https://www.notebook.ai

I'm still deciding on the best ways to crunch world data to benefit all users feature-wise (and what other worldbuilding features to expand into), but I'm working on an infographic of common tropes seen across genres now (did you know that ~2% of the population has green eyes, while nearly 60% of YA protagonists have green eyes? Fun!).


For anyone else not familiar enough with the term to get the reference without some googling, that's: "Young Adult", as in media and fiction targeted at young-ish readers/viewers. (eg: the Maze Runner)


Oh right, thanks for the clarification. Spending a morning neck-deep in jargon makes you feel like everyone is familiar with everything already!


I am building a search engine for a mind map I am working on.

(https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map)

I want to make a collaborative mind map where one can see all the knowledge of the world at a glance and be provided with the resources on learning any of the topics there.

I really dislike the black box nature of Google/DuckDuckGo where you first have to know the question before getting an answer. It would be amazing to actually visualise everything and let users explore rather than search and wander around.


really cool stuff!

PS: damned, I had already starred it on gh :D


We built a simple web app which helps plan group activities which normally end in chat hell (find a date, a place to meet, how brings what etc) and discovered that the mechanisms required solve a problem of current collaboration tools just as well:

No more searching for important info, URLs or whatnot - a simple mix of Slack Group Chat and Post-Its get the job done for us.

URL: https://jaypad.de/

Screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLQxPaM5Jao


I'm working on a few things;

1. A bunch of dev books, tutorials and content for https://getGood.at

2. A zero config JS dev tool, you can see the prototype for it on GitHub https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar. Currently working on a major rewrite using Reason.

3. A JS bundler and ES7 compiler in Reason. Think webpack and babel but ridiculously fast (compile times measured in ms instead of seconds) and with a massively simplified developer experience.


P2P file transfer in the browser: http://directsend.co

Did this web app out of fun, with no intention of turning it into a service.

I use it to transfer files between my Phone and my PC when I'm feeling lazy to search for the Phone cable.

Works for most Android and Desktop browsers, but doesn't for iOS because it depends on RTCDataChannel[1]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/RTCDataChannel


Code Corps is intended to be a place to find and volunteer for open source projects you think are worth whatever free time you have. For maintainers, we'd like to make scaling your community trivial: acquire and retain volunteers, onboard newcomers, recommend the right tasks to the right people, and fund your operations.

https://www.codecorps.org

As an aside, I'm kind of curious how others feel they fare on building new projects. Do you feel slow? I worry constantly about how quickly I'm moving relative to peers.


I don't like that I cannot browse projects without signing up. I like looking into things before acquiring more spam mail.


You can definitely browse projects without signing up.


I'm working on terms of service, and legal agreements API for websites, mobile apps, & SaaS products called CoContract.

You can track user acceptance, profile data, and versioning of your website's most common & critical legal documents all from one dashboard.

It's required to be legally compliant when doing business online and then to track and manage this over a long period of time can be tedious and disorganized.

We're making it easy for developers to easily add legal compliance in their software offerings.

https://cocontract.com


I've been working on a bookmarking app with a feature that reminds you to revisit bookmarks (either algorithmically or manually via a schedule.) It also has built-in wishlisting and a bunch of other stuff I always wanted out of a bookmark app. Bookmark apps are a really crowded space and I have no idea how to advertise something with so many alternatives, I built this app because I always wanted these features I couldn't find elsewhere.

https://www.mochimarks.com/landing


I can appreciate the reminder feature. I always thought that something like that would be useful if combined with an archiving tool for short notes, quotes or text snippets: Here's the quote you saved last year on this day ...


At the moment I am working on the next iteration of the secapps market with the intention to make information security testing simpler and more accessible for developers of all kinds.

The last iteration, an appstore-style application, failed to achieve the grand vision, hence why the remodel.

You can find the new work here:

https://market.secapps.com

All tools are free to use with the caveat that in the future there will be some sort of licensing model while still allowing to take advantage of all tools for free as long as not for commercial use.

I hope that helps.


I act as an advisor for DronesBench from Italy, http://www.dronesbench.com , we are currently at the pre-commercialisation stage and in the Drone Community contest from Commercial UAV Expo, Brussels, 20-22 June. We would be very happy to have your vote! Video here (the one with the "Light Training" screenshot) http://www.dronecommunity.eu/vote.html . Thanks in advance.


Most recently, I built www.halfchess.com (a personal project using React.js, Node.js and google cloud).

It is targeted at chess lovers who find it difficult to keep their chess skills sharp, as a game requires a continuous commitment of 20-30 mins. Halfchess is played on half of the board and a game completes in 1-3 mins.

Lately I am experimenting (while spending 15-20% of my time) on a new interface for wallet - that just works by taking pictures (an OCR library) and is useful for bill payments. It is targeted at digitally novice users to pay their bills by simply taking pictures.


Im working on http://www.OfShops.com I decided to apply different organic growth techniques to an ecommerce project, to test out the different maxims that are being taught in Digital Marketing nowadays. I figured that if you're going to try to grow something, your best bet is to grow something that can be monetized. In the long run, if it grows enough, it could potentially become an interesting acquisition option for one of the bigger players in the ecommerce business.


Building a social, collaborative creation platform. Starting with vector images, with other media types coming soon: https://www.formgraph.com

Working on a market where users can sell prints of collaborated-on works. Also in the process of building similar web based tools for composing music.

Also, I'm dangerously close to running out of money and having to go back to getting a job, so if you have any full stack web or iOS work you want done on contract, reach out to me! (jwatson@formgraph.com)


I'm implementing a quota and usage tracking service for OpenStack: https://github.com/sapcc/limes

We already have something like that in our own OpenStack web dashboard, but it's a crude hack in many ways, so I'm now splitting it out into a proper microservice with a properly defined API.

If you find this useful for your own OpenStack installation, please use and fork it. I will happily accept contributions to expand the number of supported OpenStack services.


I'm working on an automatic chicken coop door. Using a linear actuator and ESP8266. A mix of Arduino c and HTML/JS for the interface. Playing with flexbox, svelte, webpack, and fontello.


Would love to see a future write-up on this. I've seen some similar things. So far too involved to replace having to go out and close up the chickens myself each night. For those that don't know ... chickens are very low maintenance, and they do put themselves to bed each night before dark (very instinctual). But they do need to have something between them and the other creatures of the night, which usually means trudging out and closing their door after they have decided to go to bed. And then letting them out again in the morning.


Is it just going to open/shut at predetermined times? Or is there some "smarter" behavior?

Going to release it anywhere? There's other hackers out there with chickens (me!)


Problem: people don't want to have to enter the sms TAN manually when they do online banking.

Solution: I'm creating an android app + webservice + chrome plugin to do it automatically. So the app reads the tan from the sms, sends it to the webapp. The webapp sends it to the browser plugin. Browser plugin enters the tan for you. ... Huge win :)

User base: everyone who does online banking with sms TAN 2fa but can't be bothered to enter the tan manually/doesn't care to much about security. ... So basically just me I guess ;)


Other potential users: People who are overseas who need to make transactions, but don't have cellular roaming available (whether by choice, or because the carriers don't have a roaming agreement), but can get Wifi. This particularly applies for travellers.


https://ohsloth.com

Sloth is a modern day copy and paste manager that allows you to search snippets by both content and context. Context here being what program you copied from and the type of text (whehter it's an ip, python, or bash script, etc.).

Right now I am working on a custom machine learning model to do better text classification.

It's built on electron and I am adding slack integration to create a shared clipboard. Essentially, slack would act as a cloud storage.


Idea : Saving all the git and stackoverflow searches made during the day.

Thought : We hit Git or stackoverflow mainly to check up on something that we don't know about. Saving all these searches is something to begin with . Making sense of all the data by the end of a month is something which I have work on next. Else it will all turn in to dumps of "never seen again" data. Basically, having an overview of all new topics searched and digging in deeper in to interesting topics is the idea.


Working on a better way to manage songs and Spotify playlists through an interface like Spotlight search. No more dragging and dropping songs in playlists.

It's a Mac app, you bring it up by pressing CMD+SHIFT+SPACE and it adds the currently playing song to a playlist you type in.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mick-tagger-spotify-playlist...


Mostly two things:

1) online platform for learning foreign languages via simple games, currently trying to make it work on mobiles (http://language-monster.com)

2) attempting to create a classic 2D real-time strategy game, although it's in early development: https://github.com/lchsk/knights I intend to make it work on Linux & Windows


You be interested in some software I found yesterday called Godot: https://godotengine.org/

It's got a fairly nice GUI and allows you to script events in a scripting language that's like a mix between Python and C++. You can also just use C++. Everything works as part of a "scene-tree". The physics and rendering engines are swappable. I believe it uses SDL2 by default. I'm pretty new at game-dev stuff. Most of my work is in back end web development. I just thought you may find it interesting or helpful.


Hi. Thanks, I've heard about godot, although haven't tried it. For now, I prefer to have more flexibility though.


Totally understandable. I'm personally terrible at C++, so it works for me.


I like the idea of gamifying language learning, and your first project is cool.

Can anyone recommend good 'game' type apps to help learn Chinese?


Thanks. Don't know of anything made specifically for learning Chinese unfortunately, but I do hope to extend my project to include Asian languages someday.


On Android I've gotten great results from ChineseSkill


Problem: I wanted some high quality mosaics that I could create and print out.

Project: Create a mosaic effect that can be applied to arbitrary photos. I launched a MacOS version couple of months back but have been constantly refactoring the algorithm. Since launch, I've brought down the processing of a 1024x768 photo from 40 seconds to under 20 seconds. Currently building out an iOS version.

https://www.mosaicshapes.com


Problem: notes app are increasingly complex and usually unencrypted. With all thats going on in on the privacy front, there needs to be a universal notes app that focuses on privacy, simplicity, and longevity.

Project: Standard Notes. Focuses on being as simple as can be, but gives power to extensions and privacy. All notes are end-to-end encrypted. It's available on all major platforms, and just works.

https://standardnotes.org


React-inspired framework for building CLI apps with JSX.

https://github.com/vutran/wonders


StarshipHub

I'm going to be living on a sail boat, probably. I mean I own the boat.

StarshipHub is (going to be) my management console for dealing with the two types of data.

* Live, real-time(ish) data about things like how much water you have, or the GPS co-ords of all the boats who's AIS transmitters you can hear.

* Static cache of files, mostly web sites.

For the former, I'm using rethinkdb. For the later, ipfs (because it's neat). The frontend is going to be written in ember, and the server in python/aiohttp/websockets.


Project: Building a custom email service allowing users to send emails from their own domains, looking into eventually reinventing the modern modern email UI.

I wanted to originally create my own private email server, but realize I had the option to allow others to use this. I also got really frustrated with the current way email UI worked so I'm working on revamping the UI to something more modern.

https://quantummail.io


Sounds great. Are you using Roundcube with a custom skin (or similar), or is it written from the ground up? Would be cool if you had some screenshots of your UI in any case.

Which mail server software are you using? Are you doing anything to increase deliverability? Do users get their own IP address, for example?


tracking user engagement on a federated social network. its an interesting problem, because there isn't a central database i can ask for basic information like: login time, recent activity timestamps, or even usernames. i built a proof of concept using a bunch of huginn[1] agents, but i want to build a more robust system using a gnu/social server and a statistics bot.

the goal is to have real-time statistics for the entire federated network, tracking update volume, user activity, and user acquisition. i should also be able to determine how much time people spend on the network per day.

[1]: https://github.com/cantino/huginn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023396 https://source.heropunch.io/bbnet/fedstats https://loadaverage.org/fedstats https://social.heldscal.la/xj9


I am working on an Open Source Online Learning Platform. Think of it as Ed-x or Moodle alternative but technically more modern with focus on UI and UX. The idea is that it should be able to cater to multiple audiences including more traditional style LMS or simple entrepreneurs who want to setup courses and sell them online. The core will always be simple and light while there will be provisions for extensions if this thing becomes successful.


Working on an iMessage App and new features for my Q&A site: http://www.oneqstn.com

And version 2 of my inhouse factory production and stock management app stockcontrollerapp.com, adding some features that I would have found useful during this last season at work (we are winter based) and also overhauling the data model and adding a cloud based backend and web app.

Also fixing a herniated lumbar disc


At the moment I'm working on EmailOctopus, a cheaper alternative to MailChimp:

https://emailoctopus.com


Interesting. I am using MailChimp for my https://citybreakflights.com project but will keep an eye on this.


Cheers Carl, give me a shout if you have any questions.


What's the difference with Sendy?


Working on a location-based bulletin boarding system using React Native. Kinda like a mashup of Craigslist and Tinder. Started as a project to keep my brain from atrophying while I do some (long term) traveling, and a resume-builder for when I decide to eventually go back to work, but I'm gonna see where it goes. I'm calling it http://www.puffboard.com


Problem: coordinating weekly carpools with N > 2 drivers

Solutions: https://beta.snapridesapp.com, React/iOS/Firebase app to basically coordinate user provision, group membership, schedule, calendar synch & email/push/sms notifications. Had two weeks between gigs to port to Firebase; so far so good, waiting on Apple to approve and push the update.


Just launched a new company with a few friends! We are creating predictive algorithms that train and run directly on mobile devices. The idea is to give mobile developers APIs that can predict users real-world behaviors (going home in 20 minutes, will go for a run in 1 hour, about to sleep). Our goal is to do it all on device so we can give users greater security (no stored data) and also run in real-time no matter the connectivity.


We released our MVP last week, https://blog.set.gl/setsdk-pod-available-on-cocoapods-484b60...


I'm building MediaSend (https://mediasend.co/). It's a video CDN with built-in transcoding and video embedding (with plans to add any kind of media to the CDN).

Currently it's on private beta, and I would appreciate some help launching it as a side project! I'm good enough in backend and technical product development, but suck at launching things.


Problem: AWS Lambda cannot be used for high-traffic low-latency APIs over HTTP right now, because of cold starts and high API Gateway costs.

Project: Keep AWS Lambda functions warm by calling them every so often, making sure enough containers are provisioned concurrently. Currently working on a prototype for an API Gateway replacement.

Prototype available on https://lambdacult.com/


Project: Build a website to teach myself nodejs and angular 2. Try to make it profitable.

Problem: Code is very effective and learning objectives where achieved. (Will be working on implimenting angular2 soon, right now just Codeigniter/Bootstrap.) The problem has been making massive amounts of money from the website.

http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals


I've been getting derailed into a game project based on Minecraft 1.11: http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-madness/ https://github.com/airwindows/SnowballMadness

Maybe it's lame but I like using that system to experiment with what happens in gameplay, especially in an anarchistic mode where it's the system itself that copes with entropy. Been playing with this particular toyset for a few years now. The main feature is making available to players, VERY destructive features on a persistent server. You can fire infinite TNT artillery just off the hotbar, 'multipliers', pickaxes that remove terrain outright, very nasty semi-tame mobs: the idea is to take lots of 'hacked client griefer' behaviors and build them into the game in still grander forms.

Then the trick is, how do you resist entropy and allow for any sort of constructive use? I came up with a system where the server (on unloading chunks) checks for a diamond block at the very center of a region. If it doesn't find one, it marks the region for deletion on restart, which regenerates the area. The idea is that there will be random destruction, but some of it will revert to normal: and you can't necessarily tell the difference between normal, and protected/built on, in just surface gameplay.

A lot of the coding addresses challenges the plugin makes possible in the first place: for instance, placing a giant sphere of fire is one thing, but then if you multiply that times 16 times 16 per shot and begin spamming the multiplied fire spheres, it's pretty obvious the server will grind to a halt. So it turned into a more sparse placement, with a special 'fire spread' handler to make spread die off a lot quicker so the server crunch would only be a minute or so.

Next, since there's the capacity to empty water with an empty bucket, it seems like a good idea to make an 'ocean filler' that fills back up areas that were emptied. Seems like there is always a new concept to play with :)

Previous experiments showed me how easy it is to just get swamped in toys and effects, so at some point it really became a 'generalize effects to create a logical discoverable system' project…


Continuing to build "Oh By"[1].

I launched it last year and saw some initial traction and use - and was surprised and delighted to see how some folks put this tool to use.

Right now, we are adding a "raw" output mode that will allow you to use twiml code in an Oh By Code ... I like the idea of giving people a free, anonymous, instant (and throwaway) address for twiml ...

[1] https://0x.co


Problem: Making appointments with others is easy, making (and keeping) appointments with YOURSELF is hard. Easy to get distracted, hard to get back on track and make consistent progress.

Project: http://Focuster.com - automatically schedules your todo list in your Google calendar, uses smart reminders to help you manage your focus and recover from distractions.


Working on an embeddable programming language (think Lua, ChaiScript, etc. use-cases) with simple yet powerful syntax, NO null pointers, static typing, and memory management WITHOUT A GARBAGE COLLECTOR (XD). It's not ready for public eyes yet, but you can follow the details on the official blog: http://copperlang.wordpress.com


Project: I'm working on a visual web app designer that will enable non-developers to build sites, and developers to build sites much faster. It exports to Docker+React+Node.JS but could feasibly export to other platforms too, and is automatically responsive and isomorphic.

Problem: cleanly representing different types of logic (positional/layout, CRUD logic, maths, styling) in a cohesive GUI is challenging. Fun though!


Project: I'm implementing several machine learning algorithms in (near) base-python. I've almost finished the Naive Bayes classifier, then on to decision trees (and boosting and random forests come almost free from that), linear and logistic regression. I want to give a good depth of control and make it easy to share classifiers by writing dictionaries and exporting them as JSONs

Problem: Validating inputs is tedious


Working on Tagly: http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/

Something similar to HN but more advanced. Just finished the roles part.

Now finishing the automatic import of RSS feed ( and adding the appropriate tag immediatly). Then adding "remote Actions" when posting through tags

And then i'll setup something usable. Now it's used as personal bookmarking service.


==== When is your PRODUCTIVE HOUR ? ====

Started as a StartupWeekend Project ( still young )

http://www.dailyhigh.co


This is a nice way to check your CNS activity - which in turn is a very good predictor of athletic performance. I think the crossfit world is very eager for a cool solution.


Project: I'm building a simple management interface on top of Elasticsearch. I find their pricing model where you can only get some key enterprise features (like security) when you take a support package somewhat restrictive. It's still early days, but I'm getting there :)

https://github.com/eagerelk/proxes


I'm porting over some CUDA-related code for Gorgonia (https://github.com/chewxy/gorgonia), which is like Theano/TensorFlow for Go. I can't seem to figure out why I'm not as productive as I used to be

I'm also working on finishing up the design and implementation of some logical form related stuff


Weekly Google Search Console email reports: https://clickpost.io

I was usually only looking at my data if I thought there was a problem, and then it wasn't always obvious to me what to look for. With this, I have already found some proactive ways to improve individual site performance.

There's a lot I can improve on and add to it. I would love some feedback!


We developing new search platform Bubblehunt (https://bubblehunt.com), where every user can create own search system and become independent information provider.

More info: https://medium.com/@bubblehunt/faq-9dd92c741b23da


Project: Gauntlet.io (https://gauntlet.io)

Problem: it's tough to run multiple security tools and get a quick security assessment of a web application.

Description: It runs multiple security scanners against your application and consolidates the results. It's great to integrate to your delivery pipeline. It's free forever for 1 target :)


I am working on an app to organize the passport information. Like visas associated with it, expiration, date of leaving/entering a country. Idea is to make it easy to get certain information of your passport when you need it without having the passport handy. For now targeted towards immigrants in USA. Using xamarin to build the app. Plan is to finish development by April end.


Please be careful.


With xamarin or visas? ;)


Problem: No way to virtualize surround sound in headphones exists without paying a subscription fee or using expensive proprietary hardware (looking at you Dolby..)

Project: A few friends and I are working on an open source project to virtualize surround sound in stereo with any .mp4 movie with 5.1 channel surround sound. Any CIPC HRTF can be used so that the user has the best experience possible :)


Key/Value as a Service: Cloud Key/Value Store with REST API

https://keyvalue.xyz


I've been working for about a year now on Juicebox, which is like turntable.fm but better:

- Can play from YouTube and SoundCloud

- Autoplay makes a juicebox more like a radio station that plays your favorite tracks

- Allowing users to create and curate their own juicebox gives them a sense of ownership

https://www.juicebox.dj/

Use the invite code HN to create your own Juicebox!


https://www.inphood.com

Demo: https://youtu.be/QwZFolZL_ZQ

Project: create free USDA standard nutrition labels

Solution: paste/type your recipe, we generate a label, share it on social media/blog etc.

Current Audience: food bloggers/nutritionists

I would appreciate any feedback on the tool.


I'm currently working on a project for real-time server monitoring using websockets in python. Might have been a mistake to use Python for this sort of thing but regardless...

https://github.com/gmemstr/platypus/tree/tornado take a look if you want


https://usmnt360.com

I'm a big fan of USMNT and just wanted to building something for it.

There's also an Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.usmnt360.a...


SSL appears to be a problem. (Heroku domain; unable to load insecure content for the schedule; etc.)

http://www.usmnt360.com works.


I'm working on R5RS Scheme implementation in Java: https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-java

There are only 2 major things TODO: macros and Java interop (currently working on it). Almost everything else is complete.

It's just a one person hobby project, but that's a lot of fun!


Web app for making resumes. As of late I've been bombarded with individuals and companies asking for me resume. But following several years of freelancing and entrepreneurship, I don't have one. Thus, I'm making a web app with Vue, and Mongodb to demonstrate my skills, and help others who find themselves in similar situations make their own resumes.


Me and a friend are working on a load/stress testing framework. We intend to sell this as a consulting service. We will test your website and identify weak spots under load by writing "realistic" tests which simulate user activity.

We are searching for pilot clients who are willing to experiment with such a thing (while we also test/tune our software).

My email is in my profile.


I'm putting the final touches on a desktop app that will take audio files and chop and recombine them into entirely new sound libraries. The end product has been promising. But since a lot of it is node.js code calling GPL-licensed binaries, it's difficult to see how I could ever monetize it.

Nonetheless, I think it's some of the coolest tech I've ever built.


Currently working on quering OpenStreetMap using graphql.

Working demo over here http://kushanjoshi.com/owesome/ .

Github https://github.com/kepta/owesome . Would love to talk more about it.:)


Currently working on RecruitDoor (http://www.recruitdoor.com) - recruitment software for recruitment agencies that's simple to use and looks good on the eyes. Currently only targeting South African recruitment agencies, but will be going international in the next 2-3 months.


A robust radix tree implementation to reimplement certain aspects of Redis. I should hopefully be a couple of days from the release.


I've recently been working on a simple-to-use birthday reminder service (simple as in: no need to open any accounts, no need to ever login anywhere, no passwords etc.):

https://ReminderExpress.com

Just finished working on v1 of this a few minutes ago, by sheer coincidence; it should now be fully functional.


I like this idea where the service does not need any accounts, just an email address. Do you have plans to monetise it?


Family has a birthday party supplies business, so there might be some non-intrusive ads for that with the birthday reminders.

Initially the plan was to partner with existing birthday reminder websites, but I didn't like that they required logins, passwords, etc. for something as simple as a birthday reminder.


Love the idea of not having to sign in. Got an error message however.


Can you send me a screenshot? Haven't gotten any other reports. Seems to be working from here.


Umbrella App:

Open source, Android App to help high-risk travellers, journalists and activists manage physical and digital security on the move. Take lessons to learn about security, checklists to implement and keep up to date with feeds from places like the Centres for Disease Control.

https://secfirst.org/


Project:

http://lightscript.org

A concise dialect of JavaScript built on Babel (superset of ES7+JSX+Flow). Has been a lot of fun to build, and a lot more fun to program with.

Problem: The moderately cluttered syntax of JavaScript (Python and Ruby have cleaner syntaxes, while JS is the platform we're bound to use for many things).


I've sold two phones now and only realised after that I had valuable voice recordings on there (e.g. my little one saying something cute; guitar riffs; those million dollar ideas) and I plan on fixing it once and for all with https://getvoicecapsule.com/


We believe that information is meaningless until we connect it so we built a network that helps people put all their research in Context. We map the connections between different pieces of information and describe how they are connected. Check it out at http://mosaic.network


Rendering ribbon diagrams of proteins using nothing but Go & its standard library:

https://github.com/fogleman/ribbon

Also been plotting them with my AxiDraw v3 plotter:

http://i.imgur.com/u6pN4G2.jpg


I'm building software for floating wave and tidal platforms - both to run on the industrial computers on the device (PLC C89 with no prints or malloc) and also Python logging/DB/analysis code. Currently I'm also speccing long range wifi antennas and industrial networking gear - got to be a jack of all trades in this job :)


Project: An easy-to-use, all-in-one tool to help small service business owners run and grow their businesses. Want to ultimately teach people how to run a healthy business as a byproduct of using tools that help them do just that. MVP was just launched 3 weeks ago.

https://workweek.com


I am building a self-service Fps-Visit editor from photos. Here is one Fps-visit, made in 2 hours : http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-positions-50/b...


I'm working on a job board for designers/creatives with positions ranging from UI/UX designers to Video Editors, Art Directors etc...

My next step is to incorporate a map, and pinpoint all of the jobs there so you can browse visually too!

Check it out @ https://www.designerjobs.co


I'm working on two projects in parallel (nothing public yet):

- a blog centered around making programmers more effective at their job with topics like editors, tools, automation, source control, learning new technologies, writing documentation and more.

- a self-hosted (possibly saas in the future) software licensing platform for companies selling desktop software.


I am working on a wonderful themes and templates collection site for Semantic-UI: http://semantic-ui-forest.com

We are almost ready to release the first edition, and do some broadcasting to those who may be interested in it.

It may help those who chooses Semantic-UI for building websites.


I recently created a web app to find restaurants nearby that would serve samosas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902445

I am also working on this utility that would let people know when new restaurants open up in the neighborhood


I am working on a simple "Online form endpoint for devs" (https://liveformhq.com/). I also do screencasting on Elixir/Ruby and am planning to get more organized about it (something similar to what railscasts did).


Music player not database. Browse visually by spines just like a CD shelf or record crate. Curate albums and playlists as m3u. https://twitter.com/ptaffs/status/849313415810121733


A file downloader for Mac, like IDM for Windows. First version out. https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/idownloader-fast-and-elegant...


A messenger bot that aggregates data from 3,600 ski resorts, letting you setup daily alerts to you favorite resorts and letting you pull up snow condition reports and forecasts pretty fast whenever you need them - http://snowy.ai/


Right now I'm focused on understanding political issues and trying to come up with realistic, pragmatic solutions to them. Most of my other projects (UE4 game project, stock-market research, etc) are on hold. Also, trying to finish up my BS (quit in the middle of college to do an IT support startup)


A tree structure editor for S-expressions.


My first CS class in college taught was in Scheme. I have a feeling this would be a very useful instructional tool.


A Clojure template and libraries for developing server-side apps on Google App Engine.

The aim is to make developing apps on GAE with Clojure easier. It uses the Java SDK.

https://github.com/nickbauman/cljgae-template


I've been toying with three ideas recently and it's time to take development of one a bit more seriously - What does HN like best?

1) A better Mac App Store

2) Letterboxd, but for reviewing Music, Your interpretations of songs and human-powered recommendations

3) A UK-staffed Charge-Per-Task Virtual Assistant service (Ala Fncy Hands)


> 1) A better Mac App Store

Depends on in what way, because there's already https://www.macupdate.com ,but I've been thinking about a similar service for Linux, one that makes it easy to discover new apps and find out how to get them easily for your particular distro.


I´m currently working in a website that shows most relevant political tweets attending to favorites, rts and when were written. Currently I support 10 countries and I`m adding new people to monitor quite frequently.

http://www.overt.news


I'm working on https://esper.com. It's a bunch of tools to get rid of useless meetings like auto-cancelling meetings if no one confirms they want to go, rating meetings, and tagging and charting calendar events.


I've been working on a new programming language mainly to be what I think Go could have been. I think that it is important for us to have a compiled language that feels like a dynamic language. Its taking a lot of influence from ruby, erlang, and some assorted functional languages.


Any example syntax?

Sounds like you're implementing OCaml with Ruby syntax.


I don't really have much out there right now. I have some spec, but it's really out of date. I have done some ML and I would say that while patten matching/powerful type inference are important to the language, in a lot of other ways my language won't feel as limiting as a purely functional language like ML. One of the important things I think a modern programming language needs are functional components that can be used when necessary. An example is annotating when you want the compiler to verify that a given function is a pure function(no side effects). This allows the compiler to make certain optimizations in both removing computation when results are ignored, and massively helps with concurrency(functions can be run in parallel when you have the guarantee that they won't interfere).


I've currently been working on https://www.interviewbreeze.com in my spare time as a resource for learning coding interview questions. I have hacked away on it here and there for the last year or so.


Creating a series of Android applications. Nothing available yet but I did knock together a react-native alarms library: https://github.com/ioddly/react-native-alarms


A utility to sync PostgreSQL roles with Active Directory.

  http://padnag.io/
The closest thing I could find was a nightmare to deploy on linux, so I decided to fix that. It's getting really close to finished, I just need a few more hours in the day :p


First I really like to see so many great projects. Iam currently working on:

Project: I am building an open source API management tool which should simplify API development (http://www.fusio-project.org/).


A Newsletter for the Lua programming language: http://luadigest.immortalin.com

Trading platform: http://kloudtrader.com

Audiobook generation service (WIP)


Two projects: An FPGA based database accelerator: paine.nyc/dau-site paine.nyc/dau paine.nyc/ffpp

Along with this im designing a PCIe fpga board to interface host the accelerator.

And,

A reactive algorithmic trading system for trading BTC/LTC/ETH across multiple exchanges: paine.nyc/algo-coin


To dive deep into React Native, I'm working on a crowdsourced playlist creator called Jampot. Currently, it's super simple; you create a mix and send a form to input a Spotify playlist URI to the friends you want to add to the mix.

Written with a Flask/Postgres backend.


I am building open-source challenge platform where developers can find open-source projects according to their skill level, favorite language, and framework, domain.

Collecting data from challenges completed we will also build a profile with rating, areas of expertise.

Please provide your suggestions.


Self service virtual visit from photos.

http://www.free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-positions-...


I am building libraries for predicting which pronunciation of a homograph to use for in a text-to-speech application. E.g., when we go to synthesize "bass", should we use the pronunciation that rhymes with "mace" or "pass"?


I am basically taking "notes" in the form of an iOS application from language-learning material.

E.g. I needed a chart of some rules in the language, so I added it in the app. Needed a way to search substrings in a wordlist, added it to the app. Flashcards etc.


I'm building a quick feedback/correction web app for stuff you write. I'm also building a nap/meditation app that tracks your heart rate.

Both projects are built with React, with a side goal of staying up to date on the latest developments there.


I was frustrated with Selenium community so I started selenium-utils and selenium-components. The first deals with advanced Selenium acrobatics whereas the last provides a set of components (page object) that are commonly used (datepicker etc.).


I'm currently building an React Native app for my http://ForeignNumbers.com application. I have experience with React but React Native is a pretty different beast.


Problem1: I want to travel, but I don't know where. Problem2: Skyscanner's search-everywhere feature doesn't help 100% on that.

Project: Events + Flights + Airbnb. Events for now are Film festivals, music festivals and sports events.

Check it out: www.natzar.co


Nice work, cool project and I could see this being really useful planning trips with friends / SOs. The first thing that comes to mind for me as a consumer is wanting more filters for Airbnb room types, hotels, flight stops, etc.


WebODM, a free, user-friendly, extendable application and API for drone image processing. https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/WebODM


I'm working on deeplearninghq.com a HN clone focused on Deep Learning with the goal to be a (community driven) resource that helps people to be up to date with the latest news, research, papers and discussions on DL. ETA ~2 weeks


3 ongoing projects:

1: Write 1 blog post a week on blog.benroux.me

2: Continue to improve automatic spam moderation with detextion.io

3: Write an iOS dictionary app that tracks every word you look up and sends you words every week from that list to help you remember them moving forward


I'm building a very opinionated iOS app for learning Spanish. It teaches primarily by ear and in context (rich conversations). http://supercocoapp.com


Building an online 3d try room - http://sensestyles.com/tryroom

Some minor issues are pending but besides that we are able to wire up end to end flow


Project: http://upmilk.com/ app design microservice by reusing UI elements to ship apps faster and cheaper.

Problem: design and dev cycle of an app is too long.


Improving the User Experience for Life Sciences: http://www.pistoiaalliance.org/projects/uxls/


At work I am working on a video game; at home I am working on a snail simulation.


I'm building Artisfy, a marketplace where anyone can hire digital illustrators for any project:

https://artisfy.com/

I'm a solo founder using the Meteor.js stack.


https://docstub.com/ - Document/Presentation sharing portal where people can share their content and earn money.

Kind of youtube for documents.


Project: an app that reads pdf table data from blood panels to better display trends in values.

Problem: it sucks to have to flip around various labs to compare results.

Also, trying to make a better search engine for fine-art that is for sale.


Im currently trying to decide whether to scrap my gps heatmap website and move on, or redesign it with better features -

http://www.gpsheatmap.com


Problem: Whimsical, web based, zine based, Windows 95 themed operating systems just aren't what they used to be.

Project: https://whimsy.space


Setting up MySQL to redshift replication pipeline using Kafka. Debezium provides a stream interface from binlogs to Kafka. Cool stuff.

Need to build a monitor or component to handle missing on delete cascade records.


I am writing an interpreter for Gedanken (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443298).


Working on a book to explain the history of Russian disinformation campaigns and its effects on the 2016 election. Obviously still trying to figure out a good title. Gladly taking suggestions!


A set of tools to engage citizens and make politicians aware of the biggest issues in local neighborhoods.

https://goo.gl/c61b9S


Linear regression as a service with integrations to S3 and Salesforce.


3d-printing new battery cases and replacing old batteries with new (Li-ion) for my old electronics for which it is no longer possible, or at least not cost effective, to buy new batteries.


I wonder if there might be a way to do this in a long-tail way, like maybe people send you their old batteries and you 3D-scan and print them new ones.

Good luck with the project!


I'm currently working on a website screenshot API. It also converts webpages to PDF.

You can check it out at https://urlbox.io.


I did something similar ( simple hack really), that uses phantom https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService

It gives a screenshot of the url, with optional variables ( height, width and onlyFrontPage)

How are you doing it?


The stuff under "up next", from the top down: http://christian.gen.co/projects


Working my day job, a side django project, but mostly... trading futures(ES & ZB) for the past 3 months. Hopefully if you ask again in 3 months, only that last answer is there.


Recetly launched https://centi.in , alternative analytics with "ask questions to your data" approach .


Brushing up Python skills, did a scraping project where data was fetched from semi-structured site and tabulated into Excel worksheet.

Doing keyword research for a niche site project on the side.


Working on my blog where I talk about C# in the AWS Cloud, and working on my Python skills to try and land a remote job for a US company.. A man can dream :)


I'am working on building a interactive Website with lots of JS and CSS3 animation and The platform built with Drupal 7.

Problem: I'am quite new in Drupal platform.


A color palette generator that searches palettes from dribbble.com

http://paletteship.com/


Working on a video mosaicer. Gist of it is:

Extract frames from video

Replace each AxB tile in each frame with another frame which has the closest average colour

Rebuild the video from each mosaiced frame


I had an idea for a deal aggregator, put together an MVP to test it out:

https://www.swipe.sale


Tools to track shipping from Indonesian courier

https://berdu.id/cek-resi


I'm trying to write my own A* pathfinding implementation in PostgreSQL using the Swedish Geological Surveys data as a graph.


Hardware project. Stream guitar and microphone via wifi to record on iOS and Android. Kickstarter launch is planned for July 2017.

www.riffpod.io


Problem: Internet/phone access while travelling

Project: Building an Android-based cellphone that people can use while they are travelling


I'm working on a writing project to write 1,000,000 words, just for the sake of it. Currently 66.2% of the way through.


1. Eisenhower Interstate System miniture sets


Working on a planner app focused in mindfulness for the modern-day worker and how to slow down, simplify and de-stress.


Conformed microservices http://microfabrik.com


great initiative! Always great to see what people are building!

I am working on a minimalist habit tracker (https://everydaycheck.com)! Focus is on keeping it as simple as possible while helping people form new habits, and basically, get things done.


I am working on a self balancing two wheeled robot, based on EduMPI, building on top of my new Beaglebone blue.


I'm currently writing a shitty CRUD job board, because we don't have enough job boards already.

I ran out of ideas...


Animatronic "face" for trees (primarily Christmas trees).

It sings Christmas songs and tells Christmas-themed jokes.


Two small projects:

- A deck of planning poker cards as an offline PWA

- An app that auto-generate tweets based on all the tweets from a user


Working on a spend management tool geared toward understanding and managing spend on SAAS services.


Do you have anything you can share about this? I'm very interested to see and am happy to provide feedback.


I'm only about 60% done my MVP, probably a few weeks more before I am ready to put anything out there (just working evenings and the odd weekend atm).

If you are interested, send me an email and I'll forward you a link when I have something a little more ready to go!

ben(dot)pottle(at)gmail.com


I am working on validating a customer succes management tool for enterprise customers.


Signupper.net, a a CMS for managing web application accounts signup forms.


24/7 Instant Personalized Dating Advice

https://hermes.social

A chatroom that instantly connects you to a dating expert for help with common issues. E.g. getting your ex back, writing a Tinder message, or dating anxiety.


Building an aquaponics greenhouse, wanted an outside hobby


a browser-based frontend to gdb

https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui


Trying to organize labor in the tech industry.


Almost ready: postscriptum.co

sends messages after your death


I've had a project on my mind for a long time now. Just for my own entertainment value.

I wrote a Python script a while back that would take two people's Google Location data (from Google Takeouts), and find out where they've crossed paths. I found out that my girlfriend and I were only a mile apart, within 5 minutes of each other, two years before we met (she was gracious enough to download her location data and share it with me..). It was a horribly, horribly, horribly written script, that I made when I was just learning Python. But the results were pretty fun.

I've since wanted to rewrite things and extend this idea to an entire 'agent' system, where you can import data from any source that lets you download it (Facebook, LinkedIn, Mint, Google, etc.), so that you can 'recreate yourself'. In other words:

me.photos(date='2016-01-01') would bring up all the photos I took on that date. Or me.location(date='2016-01-01') would bring up all the places I was that day. Or me.texts() would show all the texts I've sent via SMS or Messenger, or Hangouts, or whatever source I've allowed importing of.

But the most exciting idea for me, would be to make this into a life story of sorts. On a map, animate what places I went, who I sent texts too (and what the contents were), what I spent money on, etc. And allow me to do analytics on all of my data - where am I most likely to spend money on snacks (mint + location)? How fast do I tend to walk when I'm at work (fit data + location)? What's my favorite grocery store? Who do I text the most when I'm at the bars (sms/messenger/hangouts + location)? What time of day do I write the most angry emails (sentiment analysis + Google email data)?

Then if you have friends who don't care if you know everything about them, let them import agents and somehow have them interact. Recreate an entire world. Then somehow import this data into Unity or some other game engine, so you can recreate your virtual self. Watch yourself move through life from a third person view. Or first person. Whatever.

Given the sensitive nature of data like this, I figured I'd write code for this and somehow do all the processing locally. But I'm not a software engineer and really haven't been able to move forward with this idea. It'd really be for nothing other than my own amusement.

It's funny how, after a long day at work, I'll sit down and be determined to finally start materializing some of them, but then realize that all the excitement I had about the ideas in my head isn't enough to overcome the RSI in my wrists, or mental fatigue from working all day.

Maybe at some point I'll finally get a move on with it.


I actually wrote a rough version of this for my fiance and I.

I never finished the analyzation but I had saved all the texts we had sent in our 6 year relationship.

I would totally be on board with this. I was freaked when I saw what Google was saving on me without asking them to (Everywhere I ever went with my phone. Imagine what they don't show me)


Project: a lightweight budget app for my android device. I couldn't find anything that didn't want to sync with my bank account, and I'm sure not going to do that. Ideally, I open the app, it opens quickly, I punch in a $#, and close it.

So far this is going pretty well and while it isn't ready for public consumption I've been dogfooding dev versions for a month and successfully built a habit of using it, so it will work, at least for me!

Three problems: 1. I am not an android developer (yet)

2. there are difficult questions surrounding how to change a budget in the middle of a running period, for example two weeks into a month, altering the budget from $400/mo to $50/wk -- Those intervening two weeks must be handled neatly. What about dealing with time zones? A user could set up a budget to turn over on the first of every month, enter a neighboring timezone and spend money on the 31st while it's already the 1st in their primary time zone. This is tough, and how that is handled matters a lot to questions about what happens if a user permanently changes their time zone after setting up a budget. This is a fun data structures & UX problem.

3. Getting home from a long day of programming at work and wanting to continue programming is not easy.

Another project: Expression pedal router. Effects pedals that accept expression input are nice, and if you have more than one and want to control more than one with a single expression pedal in a live setting, you will be doing a lot of crawling, plugging & unplugging in the middle of a set. Even in a non-live setting this is a pain, especially if the pedalboard is crowded. The solution is a routing box that all the pedals can be plugged into as well as the expression pedal, and rout the signal from the expression pedal to an effects pedal selected by a rotary switch.

Unfortunately it is not that simple, because having the expression jack filled will alter the sound of the non-selected pedals, and with that circuit open will have whatever setting is controlled by the expression pedal fully dry or wet. The real solution is a much more crowded active circuit that drives a network of SSRs to either pass any given effects pedal through to the expression pedal or to a local potentiometer to replace whatever knob on the pedal is being overridden by the expression input.

That's a lot more expensive and can't be effectively hand-wired in a reasonably sized enclosure, so the problem I face is taking the dive and ordering the prototype boards, but I'm afraid to waste the money if it turns out I actually don't know what I'm doing laying out circuits with CAD systems. Instead of having my nice expression pedal router I've been sitting on this project for a few months for fear of throwing away $120 on (mostly) components & PCBs.


a new Linux PAM login/sshd auth backend, in mostly C


ff


dd


Prime Factorization - Just as a fun side project. I do not expect that I will ever be able to solve it but at least once a week I learn something new about math!

I've Been working on it for 3 years now and It's getting more and more fun every day. In fact, I have rediscovered so many things on my own that I thought never existed. My biggest "Eureka" moment was when I discovered factorization via the difference of squares method on my own by using 2D geometry. I previously did not know that such a method existed nor that GNFS is based on it. Later on I discovered that a composite number is actually a perfect square less a function of a triangular number which lead me to develop a method of factorization that is rather cool but unfortunately still not good enough. I have had literally dozens of these moments where I find a certain relationship between numbers that I later on find out is some sort of rule/conjecture that was made hundreds of years ago by some mathematician!

To some of you these might be really trivial and well known facts that you learned in school. For me however, it is something I take pride in as math was by far my worst subject growing up and I actually dropped out of college because of math. The last math course I took was in high school over 10 years ago.

I have a new found love for mathematics and algebra in general and I would encourage anyone reading this to pick a problem and try working on it just for the fun of it :D


I used to spend a good deal of my time looking for patterns in prime numbers - and similarly re-discovered many older theorems. It is an addictive activity for certain :)


Indeed it is :D


I have had a hard time with math in formal education, I would love to hear more about how you are learning it now :)


I know that feeling!

I just took on a problem that I found to be simple to understand yet for some reason is still unsolved. Simple to understand turned out to be crucial because when I started I had no idea how much "I did not know" and for that reason I underestimated the problem which is a GOOD thing. It allowed me to slowly grow with the problem over time and learn more about what I need to do to get to where I want to.

The most important part for me is to find a problem that is interesting enough that will keep sucking you back in. Prime factorization is a great example because it is a simple problem so you will continuously make progress and actually feel/see your personal math improvement from week to week.

Initially, I started off by writing down all the numbers up to N to see if I could find some pattern. 20 mins in after some HTML and PHP I had this: https://imgur.com/a/7EhdI (primes in blue, everything else in white)

If you look closely you can see the diagonal shape of the primes. If you try changing the number of columns from 5 to any other number, you will get a distinct shape. The shapes sucked me in, why do they occur? wtf is up with them?! this is so cool yet random.

After having my curiosity tickled, I opened up an excel sheet and started experimenting by throwing these numbers/positions/order/whateverICanThinkOf together in an attempt to find some pattern. Currently, I have an excel file that consists of 35 sheets with different experiments on each sheet. Most experiments and ideas will fail, some will give you a result. But one thing is for sure, I have learned something from each one of them, especially when it comes to algebra. I just get an idea and try it. If I need some help I ask around or google for some info.

The latest idea/experiment that I did showed me that composite numbers do not occur in a random position along the axis of numbers. In fact, numbers come in chains that are related to each other "geometrically".

That's it really. It's like throwing whatever you can think of at a problem to see what sticks. While attempting to do that I slowly learned algebra, a bit of genometry, a bit of statistics and then some. Been fun really and that's all that counts :D

edit: sorry for the wall of text!


What exactly is the problem? Finding the prime factors of numbers? Or doing it fast?


basically doing it fast for large integers.

Here is the challenge I am working toward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge


If you have a breakthrough and start factoring RSA numbers and >=1000 bit composites (edit: on a system that costs less than 100 billion $), I would definitely start thinking about OpSec and finding a nice signal free place to crash. Good luck :)


lol.

Like I said, I don't expect to reach any tangible goal. However, I am not looking for an extended "search" algorithm. I am looking for a "solution" or at least a solution in say O(log(n)) to begin with. That's the goal I put up as a challenge. I will most likely not be able to do that but still fun to try :D

Edit: Forgot to say thanks!


Ok cool. I'm a big fan of taking on fundamental problems like this. Even if you're unlikely to get anywhere, you always learn a lot :)

Nice that there's a cash price for incentive as well.


IBM has these monthly challenges called Ponder This, and this month's challenge is to factor 3 large numbers (~100 decimal digits). Have a look:

https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/challenges/Apr...


sweet!

I didn't know about this. Thanks for the link.


I'm an undergraduate at UMD working remotely. As a side project, I am working with a friend on https://txtpen.com

txtpen provides highlights and context comments for websites. It is like medium for non-medium sites. Most importantly it follows the W3C Annotation Standard.

It is so close to finish. If you have a tech blog and would like to be test it please email me at ricky@txtpen.com

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks in advance


How's your side project differ from https://hypothes.is, and how come it's not possible to highlight parts of another highlighted piece of text?

Good job for following the W3C Annotation standard!


Thanks for checking it out. txtpen differs from hypothesis in 2 aspects.

1. Full publisher control. Publishers can moderate and pin highlights on their sites. However, all annotations can be retrieved via RESTful API as per W3C standards.

2. Only pick the best highlights to value add the reader. Otherwise annotation is nothing more than digital graffiti.

Also, we strive to be the best annotation service out there. The load speed is within 150ms compared to 2080ms of hypothesis. And we plan to cut that by half to within 60ms which is below perception threshold. The experience will be magical.


My side project is an app that will get transport data for my city and show you the next buses for your stop. It is a nice excuse to use React Native which I am quite enjoying learning.


I'm making YouTube videos, like this one: https://youtu.be/912WN4gUBCs


Please wear a helmet.


http://www.Reminde.rs - Recurring SMS and Email Reminders


4 years in and I'm still working on my daily newsletter curating the best tech & startup guides: FoundersGrid.com


Money laundering via Bitcoin.


Something something VR. Won't disclose what's about just yet.




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