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Ask HN: What are you working on?
136 points by Anon84 on July 12, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 229 comments
I know this question has been asked before in one way or another, but in the mean time projects have been started and finished. People have changed jobs or even fields, etc...

What are you working on? And where? Start-up? Academia? Your favorite MegaCorp?




I am doing something slightly weird. (I can talk about this on HN, but I am keeping it quiet otherwise).

I read an article on Slashdot about John Carmack where he said, (emphasis mine)

" After I took the job at Softdisk, I was happy. I was programming, or reading about programming, or talking about programming, almost every waking hour. It turned out that a $27k salary was enough that I could buy all the books and pizza that I wanted, and I had nice enough computers at work that I didn't feel the need to own more myself (4mb 386-20!).

I could still clearly remember my state of mind when I viewed other people as being ignorant about various things, but after basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was. That has been reinforced several additional times over the seven years since then. "

The phrase "doubling my programming knowledge in 6 months" caught my eye and I thought I'd take a crack at it. I've set aside 6 months to do this. Given my smaller "quantum" of knowledge as a compared to Carmack it should be easier :-P.

So anyway, I've set a fairly ambitious(for me) agenda

(1)work completely through Algorithms by Cormen et al and Randomized Algorithms by Prabhakar and Raghavan, doing every exercise in each book,

(2)become really good at lisp and Forth - write about 10,000 "lines of code" in each language, versions of the HRL library (see below)

(3) release an Open Source java library of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms (something extracted from a consulting project I recently completed.).

I've taken a 6 month sabbatical from my consulting work. It was kind of weird explaining to my clients that I am completely unavailable for the next 6 months, but I think it is worth a try. The bank account looks healthy enough (touch wood). I've been working on this for the last 10 days, averaging 12 hours a day and loving it. .


The referenced John Carmack Interview: http://slashdot.org/games/99/10/15/1012230.shtml


What kind of pace are you setting yourself? A month ago I started a routine of doing a few math problems each day, and reading a Japanese article every day that contains at least 10 new kanji characters. I'm testing the tip I heard somewhere that instead of doing huge chunks and then forget about your goals for a while, it's better to do a bit every day. At least it feels nice, as if I'm traveling on a road that will lead to a nice place. Looking forward to reading books and playing games in Japanese, if not earlier then at least during my retirement days =)


"What kind of pace are you setting yourself?"

I am working "flat out", but it doesn't really feel like "work", though some proofs are taking longer than I'd like. More like when started to program when I was about 10 years old and didn't have to worry about things like making a living and so on. I guess this is what working for a ycombinator startup feels like minus the revenue related stresses.

"I'm testing the tip I heard somewhere that instead of doing huge chunks and then forget about your goals for a while, it's better to do a bit every day."

Even better might be to work a lot every day and not break off. I once asked a (top notch) musician about whether it was better to practice only a little every day, or "woodshed" in huge chunks, he replied the best way was to have both quantity and quality, but if that is not possible have high quality and regularity, rather than a huge effort followed by a vaccum. I suspect that might be advisable to programming skill upgrades as well.

So yes I am "working" 10-12 hours a day, but I am not forcing myself to do anything and don't feel stressed. It is just that without the "distraction" of consulting etc, I am able to work uninterruptedly. I keep the guitar nearby, to play an etude or noodle around when I need a break.I also work out every day. I suspect this is not a sustainable (over years, say) pace, but so far so good. we'll see how it evolves.


10,000 lines of forth is going to be quite the monumental task, forth is very 'small'.


Why Forth?


"Why Forth?"

Just a "mind expanding" language chosen to be as different from lisp as possible (I am comfortable with static type systems and OCaml/Haskell for example). Also, I'd like (at some later date) to grok Factor.


I can't answer for plinkplonk but my guess is, for CS learning purposes, Forth paired with Lisp is a combination like pizza and beer (as opposed to pizza and sandwich).


very interesting analogy but I still don't get the picture :-)


I'm trying to develop my own mobile device. Going to be fun. Intel Atom 1.6ghz, Ubuntu-based, hopefully some kind of 5" capitative touch, software written in Qt/C++ (for lack of a better framework/X drawing option). http://avecora.com

Also working with hnuser://jasonlbaptiste on Ramamia (beta), which lets you keep in touch with your family. http://ramamia.com -- as well as status updates for sports games at http://tickrtalk.com (we were launched, but the data source pulled the plug on our API access...)

...and Classleaf, http://classleaf.com - bringing education a bit more into the 21st century by helping teachers create class websites, with homework, test and due dates, events, file attachments, email lists, pages, and more, and class tracking for students. (You can tell I say that pitch too much.) Mostly managing sales staff (they're working on commission, $1000 per sale) to make sales to high schools primarily.

Lastly, working to study/improve SAT/ACT/SATIIs/my abysmal GPA so I can actually get into a decent college come this fall... sigh. Anyway, overview's mostly at http://markbao.com.


Lastly, working to study/improve SAT/ACT/SATIIs/my abysmal GPA so I can actually get into a decent college come this fall...

Enjoy having no time for your personal projects and instead having to do mindless "introduction to cutting-and-pasting java 1.1".


Even if his "decent college" has such a class, and he can't pass out of it, I can't imagine that one intro class would take up that much time.


I'm really disappointed in how little you're doing with your time ;-)


Why do you want to go to college? Speaking as someone who did, I'm not sure you'll learn much that you haven't already.


College social experience, connections, academics, and excuse to be in NYC (that is, if I get into my top choice NYU)


I believe strongly in higher education (I'm getting my PhD afterall), but sometimes it needs to be said that college is not the only place you can get all these experiences. You will build your own social networks regardless of wherever you go and whatever you do, and your connections from your various businesses are surely just as strong, if not stronger than what you'll find in college. And of course, if you're such a self-starter as you seem to be, you'll take the time to learn the subjects on your own regardless if you go to college or not.

Please realize that there are many different paths through life. We are lucky to be in the top 1% to take advantage of these educational opportunities. But we're also just as lucky to have the freedom to choose how we want to live our life in a way that brings us the most joy.


Speaking as a college dropout, who dropped out due to lack of money and immediately got a programming job, I would like to stress the importance of college. As far as the social experiences go, you will rarely ever be in an environment that is anywhere near the social level of college. As programmers we tend to get jobs where we are locked in on the computer all day off in our own world. I have definitely made social connections from working, but no where near the level that you get with college.

I agree with some of the other posts that you will not likely learn things in college that you don't already know or couldn't easily learn, about _computers_, but my recommendation is to ignore the computer curriculum in college (unless the program is outstanding) and pick a completely unrelated topic that you enjoy. Your college degree will be a piece of paper that no one cares about, so make college about you, not about getting a degree to impress someone else. This also has the advantage of keeping programming fun, a lot of programming classes and homework take topics that are very interesting and make them tedious and unenjoyable.

If I was to go back to college and start over right now, I would double major in physics and linguistics, and minor in greek/roman history and in philosophy. You can still take programming classes, but ignore the earlier classes, figure out the materials, teach yourself anything you need to know, and test out of those classes so you can just take the classes you are interested. There is also a lot of interesting math classes you can take.

(EDIT: typo)


I'm also at NYU. Contact me when you are in NYC.


I totally agree, but having a college degree is still a great plan-B, and it gives you a lot more credibility in certain circles which makes dealing with business folk easier in certain contexts.

Can't wait to see the fruits of your labors with Avecora Mark...best of luck!


From your page: "Mark Bao (formerly Steven Bao)"

Interesting intro :)


Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)

Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.


I'm playing with keyword extraction algorithms in arc. Yesterday I discovered it was super easy to pull the classic porter stemmer C library (http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/c_thread_safe.txt) through mzscheme's foreign-function interface and into arc. That's not really about the language, but it suggests arc made a really good platform choice. Just by making mzscheme salient it's responsible for getting me hacking more on lisp.


> Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)

Fatherhood, Arc and YC are three things, though:-) Don't know if it's your intention to share anything about the first one, but I'd be curious if you did, and very understanding if you didn't.


Any thoughts yet on what other types of applications you'll be working on?


1886 is short. Anyone else surprised?


Read the source code for arc.arc, srv.arc and news.arc, and you'll probably learn something new about programming. I did, at any rate. Apparently PG isn't just some investor who can't hack... :^)


Care to give some examples of things you learned?


speaking for myself, the idea that everything has an id from the same range and that the context figures out how to use that id was a neat thing. I'd have split it up into several structures simply because that seems to make the most sense but this works well and in fact makes the code very compact.

Articles, comments it's all the same.


I'm working on newer and better software for controlling stage and club lighting. It's still in the early stages, so the final form of the product(s) isn't clear to me yet. A likely initial release will be aimed at the club market, currently dominated by Martin LightJockey since a decent offering there won't require any custom hardware.

I'm using Haskell and functional reactive programming. I intend to expose some sort of programming language (probably graphical) to the user so they can extend the effects engine[0] in ways I probably haven't thought of. Internally, I'm going for a very abstract design so I can build several types of control interface on top of one core.

[0] To oversimplify a bit, effects engines in lighting controllers allow the application of functions of time to any of several attributes of an automated light. A simple example would be a sine wave applied to tilt to make it swing back and forth.


I've done this before profitably. I ended up leaving the market in frustration. I can give you one piece of advice, don't deal with club owners. They are the scum of the earth.

Owners of night clubs don't get into the business for profit, but rather for lifestyle. Your fancy code will just be seen as "huh it lights some shit up".

If you can put yourself above dealing with individual owners, more power to you.


I'm quite familiar with club owners, and I'm well aware that they have no idea why lighting control matters[0] even if it's explained to them in painful detail. I'm honestly not sure how best to go about marketing such a product. I suspect I'll do better to market directly to people who will be using the product and make them handle selling it to club owners.

What was your product?

[0] I'm not sure if it actually does matter in the sense of making an event more popular, which matters to both profit and lifestyle oriented owners. It can make a huge difference with a live band, but a lot of times it's below the audience's conscious awareness.


I may be speaking out of turn, since I have no special expertise with either club owners or club lighting, but you might try taking it to the channel to market. If you can find club lighting supply houses (which I am only guessing exist) -- and allow them to make hearty margins, they'll push your software for you as part of their new installs / sales.

Again though, I don't know the market or niche, so take this suggestion with LOTS of salt.


It's not a bad idea. At the consumerish end of the market, people often buy club lighting from Guitar Center[0], which sells a large selection of generally low-end to midrange DJ and club equipment. An aggressively-priced low-end version could sell very well there.

The higher end of the market is served by specialized lighting dealers. Professional lighting equipment is very expensive, such that prices are not usually listed. A lower-end professional console goes for around $10k (based on used prices I've found for an Avolites Pearl Tiger).

LightJockey, the market leader I mentioned in my original post costs about $1300 and sits somewhere between consumer and professional. It is not available at Guitar Center, so that's a potential means of displacing it in the market. All I need to do is make a superior product, and I'm sure I can do that.

[0] A US chain store that sells and services musical instruments and related equipment.


I bought my first Les Paul at Guitar Center, so I'm familiar.

I think if you could get them to push for you, and maybe MusiciansFriend.com (a similarly sized competitor, a la New Egg vs. Tiger Direct), you'd be in decent shape, distributor-wise.

Either way, best of luck. Let us know how it goes.


Have you seen Mike Sperber's papers on stage lighting using functional programming? http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/sperber/pape... (I haven't read them, you just reminded me of their existence.)


I'm reading them now. Thanks for the link.

The Lula software he wrote looks interesting, though it's theater-oriented and not directly applicable to what I'm doing in a UI sense. The source isn't available, though it's old enough (runs on PLT Scheme 103) that I suspect he's largely abandoned the project and might be persuaded to release it.

Many of the underlying mechanisms are probably very similar to what I'm working on. I'm glad to see that someone else has had good results in a research context.


Wow, awesome to hear there are other people into lighting on here. I'm spending my weekend working on a Max/MSP patch that spits out patterns onto an LED grid controlled by a 4/4 time signature. I plan to tie these patterns to music clips within Ableton once Max for Live comes out later this year. The idea is to have layered patterns corresponding to my layered music clips (minimal techno) during my dj performances.


I think you may have just signed up to beta test... something. We'll see what it turns in to.

When I'm not coding for money, I'm a lighting designer - mostly live concerts, but I do some club stuff as well. I've found the options in that market very unsatisfactory. There are some good options starting in the $4000 range and up, but they all require a trained LD. The average DJ is unlikely to be willing to deal with the Emacs-like learning curve of a real lighting console.

I think the market needs something DJ-proof, high-quality and affordable, and I think my first product will be along those lines.


This is really interesting. I am running Mugasha.com. Electronic dance music service. Essentially making it really easy to listen to long dj sets. We should all talk more.


Awesome. I'm interested to see what you come up with. Shoot me an email at the address in my profile.


I would expect nothing less fun from you Zak :-P


what is your hardware platform?


PC and an Enttec USB/DMX interface. It's common practice to require software controllers to use a proprietary DMX interface (as an anti-piracy measure), and I may look in to having one manufactured.


Slightly off the beaten track - I'm currently in a small developing country in Southeast Asia working on renewable energy projects for rural villages. I've been here for 4 months and am absolutely loving it... it's actually a satisfying use of an electrical engineering degree!


what country?


Laos


How did you get there? Are you with a company or doing volunteer work?


Laos is actually WAY off the beaten path.


Now for something completely different...

I've been working on a global model of epidemic spreading for about a year now (the project was actually started about 3 years ago). The idea is to be able to forecast the progression of the disease across the globe as in where it will hit next, how many cases, there will be, the efficacy of possible governmental interventions, etc... (think weather forecast for disease spreading)

Swine flu came around just when we had finished testing a more detailed traveling model. It's been holding up pretty well so far!


Sounds very cool, I found the link in your profile and thought others might be interested to read more also: http://www.gleamviz.org/

As an Indy resident, cool to see this is happening at IU.


So, what are you predicting for the future?


H1N1/A seems to be taking over seasonal flu in the southern hemisphere. Chances are that if you get the flu over the next 6-9 months, it will be H1N1/A. What this means in terms of actual number of cases and fatalities depends on the rate of mutation and how quickly the vaccine becomes available.


Do you mind if I pass your info to someone working on a similar, but more general framework? He is a fellow Lisper of mine and published a book on the subject as well. NYC based.

Cheers!


Please do. I'm always happy to exchange ideas (although I'm by no means a Lisper).


As is the theme with the hackers here, I gave my letter of resignation last week to my employers and will be working full time on some underground/blackhat technology that I've developed.

I will also be working on a few of my startup ideas; I am also going to pursue my self-education full time (as in 2 days per week). I have a rigorous self-made curriculum worked out.

My strongest startup idea is to create a pornography web application that uses an in-house ontology to describe the media in-depth. User interaction will be a simple "I like this" or "I don't like this" system to refine individual user's results. The ontology is the key though, most of the creative and foot work will be in that.

I'm also going to be building an RDF Triple Store using Clozure CL; complete with graph inference, a RESTful API, and built to operate as a distributed system.

My self-education entails all of the classic subjects: Mathematics, Rhetoric, Writing, Greek as a foreign language, Logic, and the Sciences. Some of the more specific subjects include: Knowledge Engineering, comp-sci, &c...


Trying to make building customized websites suck less. Have you ever tried to build a MediaWiki site with extensions, or an osCommerce/Zencart site with contributions? It sucks so bad, I'd rather claw my eyes out. Most of the installation instructions consist of:

Open this file. Find this code. Paste this code before it. Paste this code after it. Save the file. Rinse and repeat for 10 more files. Upload and pray. Error Troubleshoot Insert the missing semi-colon Upload and pray. Rinse and repeat.

On top of that, you have thousands of people all over the internet doing exactly the same thing. again. and again. and again. What a waste of human effort!

My answer: http://flooha.com

Choose your app, choose your add-ons, build it, install it, done. So easy anyone can do it. No downloading, unzipping, reading instructions, opening files, copying, pasting, comparing, merging, uploading, etc... Just clicking. Uploading addons is as easy as filling out some form info and uploading a zip file.

The site is live, but I have not yet "launched", meaning that I haven't done an ounce of marketing. I had actually planned a "Please review my app" post on HN on Tuesday, but I couldn't resist this tread.


I just launched the online version of Bingo Card Creator and am busy iterating as fast as I possibly can before the school year starts. This weekend I added breadcrumb navigation to the main workflow, put in spinners for some of the AJAX interactions, built in some more analytics into the backend, and finished the Mailchimp integration.

Next (workable) weekend: finish QA on Windows version 3.0 of the desktop app, and get it in the hands of Mac testers.


I'm working on a solution to unify all the major SCMs (ClearCase, Git, Perforce, Subversion, etc.) and abstract the data it in such a way that I can provide information that can be digested by all levels of an organization. I'm calling this my full spectrum tool as it's intended to be as useful for developers as it is for executives and everybody in between. Basically I'm trying to change how we communicate and access information when it comes to software development.

I've been working on this fulltime for over a year now and it seems like I can't make a dent in it. Don't get me wrong, I have a very solid foundation so far that includes an indexer and a very flexible server/client framework that should work for any organization. However, even with this I still have a boat load of work to do.

There are definitely days where I think I've gotten way over my head, but I figure I've invested too much to walk away now.


Have you ever thought of open-sourcing it (or even parts of it)?


It's still too early for me to think about this, but I'm sure some aspects of it will be open sourced.


I just got Ming, the Flash library, working in Ruby. I'm instrumenting the pure-ruby Ruby-AES library to "snapshot" each transformation of the AES round function, and playing with different ways to visualize substitution and permutation. I'm hoping to lay out step-by-step transformation of AES blocks, left-to-right, on a 34"x24" poster for Black Hat.

Our Chicago intern, who we found on Hacker News, is going to be helping me with this project this week. He doesn't know it yet, though.

I'm also finishing our "official" poster for Black Hat, which is a hex/ASCII chart with "interesting" characters highlighted (like a calendar with holidays).

Starting sometime in the next couple weeks, I'm coming off a solid 18+ months of back-to-back consulting projects and moving back to product work for Playbook (http://runplaybook.com), Matasano's product. I have a lot of customer calls to make. Another thing that entails: recruiting a jQ/frontend Ruby developer in Chicago. Leads welcome!


I'm working on a startup that's, well, it's a secret. Not everybody is going to tell. ;)

Last November I was laid off from my job. Haven't been able to find a new one, so I've been teaching myself to code in the meantime. It's a completely different field but I'm in love with it. :) I come from a mixed business/finance/IT (Win sys admin) background. I've run several self-employed small businesses which weren't scalable.

Amazoned about $400 in coding books and am chewing through them nicely. Struggled for months but eventually built a partial working prototype for my startup, and know that I can finish and launch it. If it fails miserably, well damn, I'm going to walk away smarter than I've ever been before, and am going to be well positioned to go on and do it all over again.

Definitely looking for a partner or two in the Boston, MA area. Ideally someone with experience in, or willingness to learn:

- Python w/Django 1.x

- Windows App development (C# I think???)

- Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL Stack

- Objective-C w/Cocoa (App Kit) | PyObjC

But I'm not set in-stone on the technologies. Whatever is easiest and most time/cost-effective. Ping me if you're interested and we can discuss further. I don't bite, except for apple's. Contact info here: dave-gallagher.net

"Find out what you can not do, and then go, and do it!"


Wait, so you want someone with Python, Django, .NET, sysadmin, and Cocoa experience? That's a heck of a lot of hats, even for a startup.


I'm trying to solve, once and for all, the problem of hacking music on a computer, using Lisp and a couple venerable libs. You'll all be the first to know when I release the alpha (very soon).


I quit my job a month ago for my second crack at bootstrapping a business: http://www.shirtstastegood.com

I'm in nyc and I would love to hear any feedback! Thanks.


If you like any of the shirts, I made a coupon for HN readers: http://www.shirtstastegood.com/coupons/lXgcYWo4XEQ9fVAq


Love the shirts. Wish you the best of luck.

How about taking it one step further, and giving viral video content creators an affiliate cut in the shirt profits. With Store front widgets, that could be placed anywhere. Transitioning into a platform.

We do sketch comedy, and I could see us using a service like that.


We are working on a viral video incentive program right now!! The store front widget is a great idea, we did not think of that. Do you mean place the video embed and accompanying t-shirt into a widget to be included on blogs etc? That way the content creator has an easy way to spread the t-shirts as well because they get a cut of each sale! Thank you so much for the input!! I love it!


exactly, an embed code that could be placed on blogs, or other sites. It seems like a great angle for everyone.


Those are pretty good! I can definitely see the appeal (which probably means I spend way too much time online).

How tough is the online t-shirt market? It seems like every time something goes even remotely viral, everyone and their dog tries to sell t-shirts. Do you even see random websites and opportunists as real competition (do they actually sell much?), or does your competition consist mainly of the other large t-shirt sites?


Thanks! There are a ton of t-shirts out there made from viral videos, but they are really scattered throughout the net. The biggest provider would be zazzle, but the designs are generally not created by graphic designers. We want to become the definitive place to look for high quality youtube inspired t-shirts.


Great idea, good artwork!

Minor amateur opinion: the artwork seems too large on the shirts / too overstated.


Thanks! We appreciate every bit of constructive criticism. We did make the artwork for a few shirts deliberately big. For example, we wanted We'll Do it Live to really be in your face just like good old Bill. Or do you think we are too bold with all of the shirts? Thanks again for the input Adam!


Working on my first startup after spending 11 years designing web sites. My startup is a time tracking application called Minuteglass. It's been an adventure. I can't wait to do one of those posts on HN where I ask people to review it.

http://www.minuteglass.com/


As has been for a while, my primary personal activity is developing the x264 video encoder, for fun and for profit. I work on ffmpeg as well from time to time.

Some current commercial activities:

Working on optimizing CoreAVC video decoder for CoreCodec.

Working (9-5) at Facebook, primarily on video and photo-related stuff.

Working on the encoding backend for ShowReelPlayer.


Just resigned from my 9-5 to focus full time on my baby GMTV, a sketch comedy series on YouTube, and other fun projects. Currently, Building a sound stage in my loft for filming.

project 2 - a music aggregator that delivers new hip-hop tracks being discussed on twitter, the goal is to rank based on conversational patterns. m.grownmantv.com

for fun, I help students make sense of financial aid through video, twitter, and the good ol telephone. stuffa.org


Hey, i tried the music aggregator - nice I want something like that. Feedback: It would be great if the the the next song would start playing automatically after the current song. Much like www.hypem.com. also, maybe there is a way to make the song info not pop up in its own box, but somthing more inline, in the page?

good luck


Thanks!! an inline in the page is great idea, like growl, that's my new goal.


You nailed it with Project 2. Any chance we can get a Playlist feature (unless its there and I cannot see it)


great idea! HN is truly awesome.


Justin.tv. Who would have guessed that 2.5 years after putting a camera on Justin's head, we'd still be going strong? I was really expecting more of a blaze of glory followed by immediate failure, not a sustainable business.


Funny, how that is turning out, eh? What were your thoughts when you started kiko -- was it the thought of a sustainable business?


Yes, I expected Kiko to look much more like how Justin.tv has turned out. Whoops!


Working fulltime for http://transpond.com (web-based widget generator/builder)

In my spare time I'm making tools for web developers at http://www.binaryage.com.

Also look at http://hashpage.com (mashup builder on top bespin, github and google app engine) code: "michael" -> click to generate homepage -> woid -> "edit"

Anyone uses XRefresh, FirePython, FireQuery, FireRainbow, Visor? Gimme feedback! :-)


Continuing on with my console editor ( http://purepistos.net/diakonos/ ). Aiming to get it to live up to being billed "A Linux editor for the masses". A recent version formalized an extension system (even though it has been extensible with Ruby for a long while now). Upcoming roadmap items: modes; window splitting; further development of the git extension; ...


Excuse me, but do I know you from somwhere? :-) In case you're wondering fcoury == _grepper


Are there any plugins for Diakonos?


As listed in the release announcement ( http://purepistos.net.twi.bz/f ): a basic git extension; a Selector extension (isolate-as-you-type searching, using CSS or XPath); a comment toggle extension. Links to these are in the announcement.

More extensions to come. With the extension system, you can: create functions in Ruby, map them to any keys; bundle editor configuration (key config, syntax highlighting, new language defs); integrate the functionality of gems; you name it.


A new approach to the relational database. Relationships are handled differently allowing them to change on the fly. And the query language is straight-forward; no joins, etc.

We should reach private alpha by the end of August. It's a start-up in Prague, Czech Republic, but strangely all four of us are American.


http://280atlas.com/ - You've probably seen this by now.

http://narwhaljs.org/ + http://jackjs.org/ + https://wiki.mozilla.org/ServerJS

- Attempting to make JavaScript more usable on the server and other non-browser contexts. Bringing it up to par with Ruby, Python, etc. Includes a standard library, package manager, etc.


I'm leaving San Francisco at the end of the month to begin a Master's program in Mechanical Engineering at John's Hopkins University. My undergraduate work was (mostly) in Biology/Neuroscience, but I realized late in the game that I was much more interested in doing engineering-type work. My primary area of interest is robotics.

In addition, I've just begun working on a wine-related iPhone app (my first), which I'm very excited about. I'll be sure to submit something here when I've got more to show for it.


I've been slowly creating a site to help japanese students learn kanji reading and context at readthekanji.com. I'm quite happy with it as it gets much better with every release and I'm learning a lot as I go.


Insanely well done! Love the clean look, context-based learning, and web-based IME. The IME is especially cool - I've never seen it done anywhere else. Great job.


Thanks, I'm really glad you like it! The IME wasn't difficult because unlike most cases of Japanese input, there is no need to convert it to kanji, which saves sooo much extra work.


Very nice! Have you considered adding pinyin for people who speak mandarin?


transitioning away from my legal work back to startup work, learning rails while working on 2 early ideas and 1 underway.

the 2 ideas i'm at will to share:

1 - .org - wikipedia-style database of case-law commonly used by pro-bono lawyers -- create something that would assist legal clinics manage their information locally but also something that stores that data and shares it with other clinics doing similar work. caselaw is supposed to be free and without copyright but somehow its come to be locked up by the lexis/westlaw duopoly. I understand they add value, but we believe there is room for a simple database of opinions & briefs, even w/o the shepherdizing.

2 - .com - brainstorming site for early stage startup development, using principles from Covey & Napoleon Hill. i.e. weekly meetings with small groups of founders discussing multiple ideas, voting immediately upon disagreements, etc.

I'd love to discuss the last idea as its the one I'm actually working on coding right now but the folks I'm working with want to remain hush-hush for now.

I'd be fascinated to hear folks' ideas for startups with a broad focus on the role technology can play in community development, government & regulation & even stuff like troll regulation / comment scoring. If anyone wants to IM or chat, hit me up at hitesh@gmail.com.


Forgot, something I sometimes do on the side is work on my fake Sean Hannity fan-site @ http://www.fannity.com. This is a intentionally ignorant joke that attempts to fool people, both liberals and conservatives, with sometimes hilarious results. A story of mine was posted on blackplanet.com and it led to some hilarious comments left by a few thousand visitors from that site over a weekend.

Also, at one point the fake news site 23/6 thought my fake news site was real (and actually advocated that Sikhs put flag pins on turbans). This is perhaps the most hilarious thing that happened on the site: http://fannity.com/?p=553&cpage=1 . The users "backdoorman" & "gacracker" were in on the joke and pretending to be Hannity fans.


Your .org sounds like a possible .com


I can see that. We thought we'd keep it wiki-style at the beginning, possibly setting it up as a foundation. we think its more likely that legal clinics & others are more likely to trust it & use it that way. We would start as narrow as possible, possibly focusing on mental health working with the clinic I used to work with and then expanding outwards.


I started to write a comment on how/why this could easily be a business. I have recently been involved in this area.

But then I remembered some interview with the founder of betterworldbooks.com: "This idea would be best embodied in a company." In this case, maybe it's not. Lowering the barrier for a non specialist lawyer to work on the kind of cases that attract pro-bono attention is good work.


I think there's something to be said about the indication users of the site will get from knowing that profit-maximizing will never be a goal of the software. It may pay some salaries (as wikipedia does) but it will never sell out its purpose first and foremost as a collaborative tool.


to clarify #2 - the question is whether businesses can be crafted somewhat similar to how open source software is crafted, which is democratically. Somehow, entrepreneurs could get together and butt heads and form small idea-groups that go off and talk on their own, with features like the software figuring out how much each person's contribution is worth, etc.

With free software, say someone has a good feature they want implemented, they have a means to affect that change in theory in a way a user can not do with closed source software. If they can't win the project over, they can fork the idea and start their own variation. the theory is that these kinds of mini-democracies lead to the most efficient software, could this work for businesses as well?


htsh - would like to get in touch. give me a ping - me at euwyn.com


excellent. will email after my breakfast & coffee this morning. -hitesh


On my hosting start-up: http://webbynode.com. I am the programmer behind our Manager app. :-)

Our main difference is providing ReadyStacks for easy bootstrap of servers: watch the screencast for more info here - http://webbynode.com/railsvimeo.


Oh, hey, cool. I heard about Webbynode with the video that RailsEnvy did documenting the reasons to use it (which I found on Rubyflow). Can't seem to find it right now, but really liked the features. We're on Linode right now, but looking at our other options...


Thanks for your comments! You're most welcomed to give us a try. Is this the video you mentioned:

http://www.webbynode.com/screencasts/webbynode-sixreasons.mo...

?


Yeah, that'd be it! Nice promo.


Seeing if Hex-Rays' decompiler plugin (http://www.hex-rays.com/decompiler.shtml) for IDA Pro (http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro) can be reimplemented in Python with little work for much benefit, following the Pareto Principle. Not really cloning their work; rather, noting that IDA does not expose even trivial data-flow analysis.

I suspect that most of the fancy stuff is locked up for decompiler users only, which would make sense since the decompiler is much more expensive than IDA itself. So far, I have du and ud chains implemented in a nice, readable fashion and will be releasing the codebase this week, after my advisor and I discuss licensing issues. Going to write well-engineered code for automated analyses that are often done in an ad-hoc fashion by the RCE community.

EDIT: after reading another comment about how short news.yc is, just shortened an idiom that was repeated 5 or 6 times. It would be sort of nice if this was done at compile time to avoid the overhead of function calls and nested generators, but it's still quite elegant IMO to clean up common loops with generators.


Finish porting Gambit Scheme to the iPhone so I can quickly develop apps with technologies I'm familiar with.

http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem...


Rewriting all the back end software for a big kids' TV show site (www.icarly.com). Recently launched polling system and search system (reverse index). Entire site is generated as static pages + JS data so we can server the 4 million registered users and 270 TB video/month off of one box (with Akamai's help). Next up: the user registration/login and user generated content management systems.


Trying to make MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) suck less.

Also working on a tool to make scientific collaboration easier.


How are you trying to make it suck less? (I'm just curious: recently, I had three MRI scans while I was in hospital).


The variable cost of MRI is scan time. The MRI technician needs to make a tradeoff: more time for higher quality image. I'm trying to get a better quality in the same time.

Big picture idea: the MRI doesn't spit out pictures, it spits out encoded pictures (the Fourier transform). Using a simple model of what bodies look like, I can dramatically narrow the search space when decoding the pictures.


Wow, that sounds amazing. Don't forget to emphasise the benefit to the patient, as well. Spending two hours in a small, hot tube when you've just had heart surgery is not fun.


I'm getting ready to switch from consulting to bootstrapping for a while, so I'm looking for new startup ideas and partners.


Feel free to shoot some ideas by me. I'm looking for ideas/partners too.


Cool. Will do.

The most interesting topic today for me along those lines had to be the auction site story

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700738


hmm me too. you guys wouldn't happen to be in the bay area would you? i've got a couple of ideas that i want to pursue, just looking to build the right team.


I'm in the bay area, and also batting around some ideas. We should chat.


I'm hosting Hackers and Founders Meetup this tuesday night in Mountain View if you guys are interested. www.HackersandFounders.com


reading everyone's tasks on hand, i feel like an ant standing in a herd of mammoths.

anyways,I am working thru clojure -using the only book available. reading some code. unlearning OOPS...and trying to make sense of the marsh of doing many things and not accomplishing anything.

in one word - struggling.


Heh. I'm probably standing with you, further down the food chain in this thread. That said, everybody started out somewhere, and you're learning.

The only advice I can give is to work on an actual project, however small, while learning a new language. It helps me learn ALL of a language, instead of just the tricky bits, and I feel more accomplished when, instead of having just read a book, I actually BUILT something. Chances are the something you built will suck, or at least not be leveraging all the cool stuff you learned later in the book, but it's something. You can either keep playing with it or do nothing else, but if you're in a job interview, and somebody asks if you know "x", you can point them at some code to show exactly how well you do (or don't).


Thanks. I will get the rubber burning. " The only advice I can give is..." a very crisp advice. I am going to stick to your advice rather than borrow from it.


Polishing Twiddla. It's amazing how much work you can put into something and have it still look sort of the same from the outside. It does a lot more though, and it does it a lot better. Our customer service load is as low as it's ever been...

I'll be tweaking the revenue model a bit over the summer, to make sure it keeps bringing in enough to finance the next 6-12 month roadtrip. I'll be flying one-way to Guatemala in October and slowly working my way south for some surfing in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and bullet dodging in Columbia. Just picked up a used Thinkpad X60 that will fit in the bottom of the bag without bogging me down, should hopefully survive the trip, and will be powerful enough to run VS.NET from the beach.


Working my 9 to 5 (which is more like an (8 to 8), and trying to learn Django well enough to start an open source product I think Django makes sense for.

Django is fun, and surprisingly productive even while learning, though with little free time it's going slower than I'd like.


Working my day job at http://recursive.com.au

Current side project is http://twitterscribe.com, an archive for your tweets that exports in PDF and CSV. (Yes, another Twitter-related app.) I have some things like OAuth to integrate, then we're going to publish custom books of your tweets.

Hopefully that'll bring in a bit of money, then I can move on to one of the other ideas - either my "tag the world" location database, or a "social networking inspired" enterprise intranet. I'm thinking the second has a better chance.


I'm working on a web based blackjack program. I have a beta up at http://www.barracudafix.com . My idea is to make it easy to learn card counting with this free webapp. I'm using java, spring, mysql, and dojo. I'm thinking of porting the ajax stuff over to jquery.


Wow. So noone here working on an IDE or text editor? Anyway I do :-)

Recently decided to give a break on my degree (physics) and finalize my neverending Python IDE (Windows only - sorry :-)) while making buck on Django gigs for the bills. I don't even remember when I actually started on that. Must be the beginning of 2002. Now is the time.


Solved problem: Emacs :-)


Yeah, I heard that OS has its devoted fanatics :-)


Indeed please hit me up at m.utku.k__AT__gmail.com to include yourself in the early closed beta process in a month or so. Would be much appreciated.


Same ol', same ol', still saving the world. http://singinst.org/


I am currently working on what is turning out to be a somewhat funky graph-database in Erlang that will be used to power the semantic recommendation engine for a news/questions/info site targeted at a professionals and industry people in a particular market.


Looking for people to work on interesting projects or people who need help working on interesting projects. Anything unixy/obj-c/system services/web stuff-related.


What do you have in mind? I can do objective-c/mac/cocoa/iphone stuff. Until recently I was working with a startup, where I wrote the beginnings of a Pandora-like music streaming service.

I'd love to join another startup.


Doing my 9 to 5 at http://www.cukerdesign.com

Nights and weekends are split between developing my side-startup (a service to help makes diabetes management simpler), the occasional WoW session, and spending time with my wife and year-old daughter (not necessarily in that order).

Also planning a natural language datetime parsing service with a friend who was an old boss at another startup.


Honestly, I wish I was working on something outside of the office. The reality is I wish I was working on something worthwhile while I'm in the office. Lately the job has become a job again, and although it pays the bills, its still meaningless work. Building the same applications ten different ways for ten different purposes. Its futile.

That said, I'm glad I work where I work otherwise I might be struggling. Being the go-to guy has its ups and downs, but for now it'll do.

Things I have been neglecting, however:

* HackMyJob.com - Job automation script sharing. Working this with a coworker outside the office. We're just trying to learn Django, honestly.

* FragTweet.com - Just a simple service to tell friends when and what you're playing. Unfortunately, a competitor has beaten me to market on the advanced features.

* MeetTheDress.com - A outfit sharing/comparing site. Still not even out of the spec on this one. I'm just not motivated at the moment.

* All my personal sites. Just last night I jumped two Wordpress point released on AbyssKnight.com. Maybe those sites need some TLC...


Been working on Wingify (http://www.wingify.com/), a behavioral targeting, real time analytics and website optimization software. Lots of learning on the way: Design of Experiments, Tokyo Cabinet, Distributed System Wide Job Queue, Scaling, etc. etc.

Aim is to make best on site measurement and targeting app ever!


I'm doing a NSF `Research Experiences for Undergraduates' thing at school... the project is trying to help out with an optimizing compiler for Linear Algebra kernels.

For a personal project I've been working on compiling Scheme to JVM bytecode; I'm fixing bugs in my syntax-rules implementation right now. My code isn't so great but I'm hopefully learning a lot!


Incorporating a non-profit hackerspace in Baltimore, Maryland and preparing to sign a lease on a workshop. http://baltimorenode.org


I might see you there Wed :)


Starting up my second start-up, in the mobile space. Doing customer discovery right now, so it's a bit early to talk about it, but I have high hopes (and no, it's not making iPhone apps). There are a lot of opportunities in mobile if you don't focus on the app store.

Other than that, doing iPhone and (soon) Android consulting to pay the bills.


Any tips on finding "opportunities in mobile if you don't focus on the app store."?

Also how does one get into iPhone consulting. Do you still get paid if your client's app gets rejected?


Think B2B, for example. The iPhone (and the others - Android, Palm, Blackberry), combined with the app store model provide two things: 1) users effectively get a handheld computer which always has internet access, and 2) developers get much more access to these mobile devices than carriers have traditionally allowed. Pick an industry - what does this allow them to do that they couldn't before? (ideally, something that is difficult to do with a simple mobile version of a website). Chances are they're hearing a lot about this iPhone thing, but don't really know what to do about it - can you help them figure it out?

As for consulting, I started out with a bit of luck, a company I was subletting office space from wanted an app made. Past that, referrals are priceless. And yes, this hasn't come up yet, but they absolutely pay if the app gets rejected - you get paid for the work you do, not for the success (or failure) of the app. Most clients are curious (and fearful) of the approval process, and it's very valuable if you can guide them through the submission process and likely pitfalls - but approval is not ultimately your responsibility.


Sorry for the newb question, but are you saying that ANY app developed for the iPhone (including a custom app for a client) must go through the App Store before being installed on their phones? I'm asking because we have a web-based intranet app that we could create an iPhone-based version of, but it's only useful to the client. So, there's no reason to put in on the App Store. But it sounds like you're saying all apps must go through it. (Edit: I don't own an iPhone so this is new territory for me)


For small deployments, you can use "Ad-hoc" distribution - users have to jump through some minor hoops (give you their device UUID, then drag the app file into their iTunes and sync to the iPhone), but it works. It's mainly aimed at distributing copies for testing or reviewing before an app hits the app store, and I think there's a limit to how many copies you can distribute this way (100 different devices? Don't remember 100%, I'd have to look it up).

You can also physically install the app yourself from your development machine if you get their device (again, there might be a limit on the number of devices, since you have to register each one).

As rdouble mentioned, there's also the enterprise program.

And, of course, there are jailbroken devices with third party app "stores". I don't have much experience with these, but jailbroken iPhones are supposed to make up a significant percentage of users - might not be as useful for business use, though.


Ahh ok, thanks for clearing that up. I remembered after my last post that my professor showed me a free Standford web class on developing for iPhone, and they were giving real, in-person students iPhones to test their apps on. Still, they shouldn't limit this, nobody would overtake the appstore, they just can't stand even the smallest percentage getting around them. Makes me sick. The iPhone could be such a better device, but Apple keeps cutting apps for the use of 'undocumented APIs'. A few apps made the camera do things that Apple never imagined being possible, and they get cut for the above reason. I just wish they would open up more, broaden their horizon a bit. They're such control freaks.


There's a way to do it but you need to be an approved "enterprise" developer. Nobody I know has actually completed the process. This PDF has more info:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Gu...


Thanks for the link. After reading the deployment notes, I'm kind of shocked that they make it so hard to deploy custom apps that you have no intention of selling via App Store. It sounds like a web-based app tailored to the iPhone is the way to go.


Wow, you can't even load your own apps onto iPhone? Damn, I knew Apple was closed-minded, but this takes the cake. If you spend that much money for that monstrosity, you ought to be able to put what you want onto it, you know, like all other phones i'm aware of. Holy Crap. Just another reason I'll never buy one. Can someone confirm this? I'm having trouble even believing that. If this were true, how do you test it, with only an emulator?


Recently "finished":

eproject - file/buffer grouping for emacs, http://github.com/jrockway/eproject

cperl-mode for MooseX::Declare - http://github.com/jrockway/cperl-mode/tree/mx-declare

On my agenda:

Emacs/LLVM; compile Emacs to LLVM bitcode, link with extensions written in arbitrary LLVM langauges. Right now, even my simplest attempts immediately segfault, so it is on hold for a while. http://github.com/jrockway/emacs

(Once this works, I want to make ECL run on LLVM. Then we can write Emacs extensions in a real programming language. I hear Python compiles to LLVM now also, so that's another option. Eventually Perl will too.)

HTTP::Engine refactoring; removing unnecessary metaclasses and adding support for requests inside preemptable coroutines: http://github.com/jrockway/http-engine (A threaded web server without the disadvantages of threads.)

Persistent application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/eventful (Generic foundation for web applications, TCP servers, IRC bots, ...)

Persistent command-line application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/app-persistent (Make your slow-starting Perl application start up instantly.)

Path::Class replacement based on Forest::Tree::Pure: http://github.com/jrockway/data-filesystem (I also have a binding to make a Data::Filesystem tree into a FUSE filesystem.)

Once this yak shaving is out of the way, I have a few applications to write:

Filesytem::Kindle - plug in your Kindle and see the books as unencrypted HTML (this one is going to be released anonymously, you didn't hear this from me, I was never here...)

PleasureChicken - email / im / irc message consolidator, indexer, data extractor. The idea is to let the computer read your messages for you, so you don't have to. When you buy something from Amazon, it will stick the UPS delivery date in your calendar, and remind you that you just spent $300 on your Amex. When your boss IMs you at 3am with the word "broken", play a sound. etc., etc. This might be a hosted service one day, as well. http://github.com/jrockway/pleasurechicken

Angerwhale 2 - A weblog for programmers that doesn't suck. http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale-ng (See also: http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale for the old version.)

Unfortunately, my time is being taken up by menial $work_tasks, which distracts me enough to not get much done. But that should all be ending soon.


A small business selling stickers: http://www.supplycrate.com A ventrilo status website (taught myself codeigniter): http:///www.ventstatus.com A ajax risk clone (using codeigniter and learning jquery): no domain


Working on Neybor, an Automated Real Estate Marketing platform: http://neybor.com.

Working on PHP framework as well that I use for Neybor and other projects at http://phocoa.com.


Full time job: Largest IT Consulting firm around processing security paperwork for clearances

Startup from College: http://www.studentsherpas.com/ - Trying to help out college students. Adding a free job board for local jobs for local businesses

Side Project: Working on news aggregator where not all users are created equally. Basing it off a pseudo-physics system where users have mass and give stories/links inertia and they gain mass by passing interesting links.

Other things: Doing some coding for a fitness competition based startup. Currently working on a discussion system for them.

I have a few other ideas mulling around that I would love to have someone to work with.


I'm working on two DNS Service Discovery related projects at the moment.

The first is a Wide Area Bonjour hosting service which will be of interest if you have a few Macs that you wish could find each other when they're not the same LAN. I'm hopeful it'll become my income stream in the near future: http://globalhostname.com/

The second is a Firefox extension that adds discovery and registration support to Firefox: http://bonjourfoxy.net/

Both are in the midst of heavy updates and any and all feedback on them would be appreciated - see profile for contact details.


Working the day job (in-house dev. at Nationwide Insurance).

In process of incorporating an LLC with a businesss partner; our first project will deal with web widgets...should be live (selling from day 1) by the end of the summer.

Fun recent project was a thing I threw together "in a weekend" to make finding things from nearby cities on craigslist easier. Prototype at: http://didyoucry.com/clshop/

And re-roofing a section of my house. (Oh the pain of having to use muscles for "real work" after years of cubicle dwelling.)


Docley (http://docley.com/): Simple Document Management


On my nights and weekends, I am trying to get the pieces aligned for a mobile news startup, and stumbling on the back-end challenges (not surprising, considering I am not a hacker).


Startup - http://www.learnitfirst.com is a video training company I started in 2004 as a side business cum full-time business.

You, OP?


I recently (about 4 months ago) quit my job as a Marketing Engineer, which I had taken when I graduated with Mechanical and Electrical Engineering degrees. I am now supporting myself full-time with my consultancy while I work on my startup (http://www.ratemystudentrental.com), which offers a Web-based rating system for student rental housing, with a management system for landlords and a private-label housing portal for universities.

I also just recently launched a new service that spawned from an internal RateMyStudentRental system I had developed, after a few people who incendentally saw me using it just "had to have it." And that one is called http://www.leadnuke.com.

I'm also trying to finish getting our band's first album mastered (just finished recording and producing), so we can post it on our site for downloading (http://www.moirocks.net).

And my new goal I just set for the next six months is to transition from running in typical cross-trainers to being able to run barefoot :-)


Start-up, while undergrad at Georgia Tech. Fun times :)


Adding features to my MySpace application that turned out to be surprisingly popular (http://bit.ly/mDZYb). Specifically I want to let users see who lives near them, and maybe get some dating aspects going. Also playing some more with the Twitter API after our first failed project with it, let's see if I'll get something released this time.


I'm creating an online spiritual-learning (Christian) site for kids: http://kidbuilder.net.


you're in the wrong website. try: love the almighty dollar, with all your heart, and your mind, and join a startup with your fellow, as you promote yourself.


Working on http://flowmingle.com

FlowMingle is a group oriented online dating site that leads a small, local group of singles through a guided introduction process. I'm working with two other full-time partners in Lexington, Ky. Specifically, at this moment we are integrating the ability to sign-up and login with multiple social networking APIs.


Building a full text search tool for Haiku (http://haiku-os.org). Fun times :)


i actually worked at be, back in the day, before they went out of business. i've since moved on to macosx, but beos was pretty cool for that time period.


Cool. What did you work on? Just curious.


i did my best work on beos before i worked at be, unfortunately. this is what got me hired:

http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/

be had their "focus shift" shortly before i started. after that, they were no longer pushing beos as a standalone product. they repurposed it as an os for embedded devices. the whole company was working on the ill-fated sony evilla when i got there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_eVilla

it was pretty obvious to me and most of my fellow employees i talked to that this product was not going to be a success. it wasn't.

be went out of business seven months after i got there and i was laid off. would have been a good experience if i'd jumped on the bandwagon two or three years earlier, i bet.


Numbrosia 3 iPhone/iPod touch app: http://amichail.posterous.com/numbrosia-3-screenshot-and-des...

Also see Numbrosia (in iTunes store) and Numbrosia 2 (under review): http://www.numbrosia.com


I spend most of my time working at http://www.directsupplycareers.com/careers/ (if your thinking about applying I can refer so drop me a line) and I spend the rest of my time working on a maps/weather mashup.

Until I go to school that is then I split my time between them.


I am working part time on my side project http://sanbit.com for fun, I would like to turn it into a startup, but now sure on the angle. I am also looking into working on some projects with other people, anyone interested in getting a project going?


I'm working on rebooting my LLC for web development and training. I'm also working on a few application ideas.

I've really begun working on my blog again in earnest, unfortunately though I have had a tough time choosing technology based topics to write about. We'll see though.


Making a new spreadsheet. Trying to make it fast enough. Learning about spatial data structures.


Recently went from full-time to part-time day job to focus more on my startup, http://www.launchset.com .

If you find my site useful and want to use the service, let me know. email me - danny at launchset.com


Not as much as I'd like to be. Lots of consulting, and http://BikeChatter.com for fun. Hopefully going to be doing some more with Hecl soon. Being a dad takes up a lot of time.


I run a 3 person startup full-time: http://www.carbonmade.com

And then on the side I run a small design blog: http://www.burstoid.com


I am developing a web wiki with a WYSIWYG user interface. It has an in-place editor instead of forms and textareas (stole some ideas from Zim desktop wiki).

I am also creating a new programming language for the wiki - a mixture of many ideas from lisp, python and other. The language can be expressed by HTML lists.

Working from home in Vilnius, Lithuania. Currently on child-care vacation paid by the state.

I will opensource my work, but haven't found out yet how to make it support my further development after my vacation ends and I have to return to my bank job.

If you have ideas how to make some money from yet another wiki/cms -- I would be very thankful for them.


Working full time on a new version of http://xp-dev.com/ - the new platform should be out in a few weeks and should do everything that everyone has been asking for (will be easier to use as well). Git hosting will be coming up as well (Mercurial later on).

After the recent debacle with stolen code and what not (took my off for a week), I'm back on full steam working on it, and having fun! :)

(Nice to read what everyone else has been up to. There's actually quite a lot of interesting projects/products being worked on here).


Most recently http://www.pdfamigo.com which lets you create PDF forms online. In fact I asked for and got feedback right here just yesterday.


Formerly: 2 years at Publictivity as founder/CEO

Now: Ramamia.com co-founder with Mark Bao. Part time side project, but may make it full time. Also, CTO of MIT Enterprise Forum in florida (nonprofit).

more: jasonlbaptiste.com


I'm working for Microsoft this summer on the team developing some of the Office web apps...specifically, I'm working on the Word Viewer.

I'm also working on a startup that hopes to launch this fall.


Thinking of continuing to work on my javascript physics engine: http://fuzzthink.com/openjs or starting something else.


Trying to polish off metapaw-dip in my spare time http://www.metapaw.co.uk/projects/metapaw-dip/


I'm working on getting our bootstrapped genealogy research site ready for private beta: http://www.genlighten.com.


If I tell anyone, I'll lose my motivation. Scientific fact!


I'm just working my day job over at eirestudio.net - design/dev work. I have a few side projects going which are mostly for fun and learning more JavaScript.


Small company. Financial software. Yeah, that seemed a lot better a year or so ago.

But I've been at this a few years, this recession too shall pass.


Academic start-up: Multicriteria Mapping.

I'm in Poulsbo, a Norwegian settlement just across Puget Sound from Seattle, WA, USA, working (remotely) with Andy Stirling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Stirling) at SPRU, University of Sussex, Brighton, England, on his Multicriteria Mapping (http://www.multicriteria-mapping.org/) methodology and related analysis software. MCM is a hybrid qualitative/quantitative multicriteria analysis technique, (over to our colleague Molly Morgan) "which through its novel approach to discussing different options in contested areas of technology policy might be up to the task of opening up decision making and engagement methods" (from Molly's article on the Science Progress site: http://ow.ly/h6hY).

Researchers use a small Java application (MC-Mapper, by another developer) to run two-hour long structured interviews with participants, and a larger Java/Python/Hibernate/MS Access/MS Excel mashup (more mish-mash, really), MCM-Analyst (by me) to prepare text reports and charts from results aggregated across the participants.

As I write I'm preparing a draft Marketing Plan as part of our bid for some funding for marketing and product development: we're a startup, someday hoping to spin off into a non-profit trust to oversee the development and application of the methodology and provide tools, support and consultancy services to support its use.

I'm finding David H. Bangs, Jr.'s "The Market Planning Guide" (http://ow.ly/h6hK) hugely useful: basically I'm working through it, piling it all into a ridiculously long Word document, with the next step being copying and pasting the necessary bits into what will become the Marketing Plan. This is my first time working on a proper marketing plan, having b*gger all experience in marketing beyond word-of-mouth, and this is all a... big emotional effort... I've been helped on that front by reading HN regularly.

The Jython/MS Office mish-mash has got to go: we're envisaging us gradually migrating to Eclipse/RCP/Jython. Hoping (with funding) to developing a web-based service to complement the existing not-yet-Internet-enabled desktop applications. We're envisaging doing that in Django: choosing that over eg RoR because of our investment in Python.

Oh, and some work here and in the UK doing web development in SilverStripe for small businesses.

I find many posts on HN a fantastic source of inspiration, energy, resources, and ideas. Just great. If I'm bored, this is where I go.


Just graduated, so working on getting a job (anyone in Toronto?).

In the meantime, brushing up on my Python with Project Euler and a Kenken solver.


Recently put together http://www.twitpare.com as a fun app for all.


I have been learning Python by implementing genetic algorithms.. Anyone else interested in machine learning? I'd love having someone to shoot ideas with. I'm in medical school so most of my friends don't know too much about programming.

moejoe16.geo@yahoo.com (this is my spambox that i only check when expecting email)


I'm trying to create a web analytics SaaS for blogs that is usable and provides some publishing-specific metrics (unlike GA and most other services). I started it because I love design and visualization and it was a pain for me to derive any insights from available web analytics services.


Just switched my personal website from Wordpress over to GitHub pages using Jekyll. So far, so good.


Bringing up a new embedded hardware design (RFID) at work (small and stable private company).


I'm fresh out from college, having an Msc in information engineering. I have a job, working as a researcher trainee. In my free time I'm working on a game with pygame, and collaborating in an open source project, a software which helps localization.


Testing mining and simulation products written in C and .NET for a mid-sized software house.


Learning ruby to start a few more projects, and excycle.com, as well as working part time


I'm building small, portable, high-efficiency LED-based lights these days. Unlike most of my "toy projects" I have real uses for high intensity, battery powered lighting.

Current one now in design is a belt-mounted light powered by a 3-AA battery.


This: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8

As before.


After keep saying to myself - C++ is good enough, I wound up in having all my projects being in different language: http://volnitsky.com/project (bash, python, c++)


In the oil business: http://eser.org


A way to tag text using google backwards. Don't ask :)


A course management system which is a lot more flexible than moodle and other software, but requires a lot more work from the school.


i should be working on my startup (on profile page) but i am recovering from catching mono and have been sick for several weeks now.


Trying to brand myself and build up my consulting business (basic web consulting with a niche-market twist).


working full-time on http://www.CrowdMind.com


Trying to get everything ready for our recently announced launch in August (www.psonar.com)


I'm working on revolutionizing the fiction publishing industry.


Doing feasibility on white label mobile social network.


wepay.com


A free ear training and music theory software http://www.trainear.com/ that few people use because no one cares about ear training and music theory


The ear trainer is very cool.

I think it might benefit from a simpler interface, and/or making it more obvious where I should look first. I wasn't paying much attention when I first checked it out and I thought I was supposed to hit the piano keys to answer the questions. Then I read that I could hit Replay, but I didn't see the Replay button, so I just hit Play. This changed the interval, which I thought was the intended behavior and didn't like that. Then later I saw there's a Repeat button, and then I saw the song answer choices.

If I were you, I'd do something like:

-Make the Song Answer Choice buttons bigger and/or brighter.

-Bring the Play and Repeat buttons closer to the answer choices and the piano.

-Change the instruction to click "Replay" to be consistent with the word "Repeat" (or change "Repeat" to "Replay").

-Hide the statistics, songs and other buttons from the main interface; instead, have them accessible with Show/Hide buttons or tabs.

I know there's a tutorial video, but I think you could still alter the interface to make it easier for people who don't want to watch videos (for example: me. I'm on a relatively slow connection right now and YouTube videos take ages to buffer.).

You might also like to grab random people, put them in front of it, and watch what they do, see what confuses them, etc.

I think it could be really successful! Maybe post it to Hacker News separately as a "review my app" kind of post.


Thanks for the thorough feedback and correction for repeat. I do plan to make a simplified version eventually but for now I'm still adding features and trying to document the most recent ones.

For now there's video tutorials there that guide through the basics of using the ear trainer and further instructions on the help page. There's a few things that are counter intuitive but are far more efficient that way. For example when you click the wrong answer the correct associated song starts playing. Clicking star wars and having it play here comes the bride might seem confusing but it's necessary for improving the song associating with the correct interval. Also automatically playing a new interval when you're correct is confusing at first but the more clicks saved the more efficient training can be.

I can't guarantee anything if they don't watch the tutorial or read the help page for now. Making it beginner foolproof would be great but not if older users have to make 5 - 10 clicks when starting up to get it back to the most efficient settings. I tried a version with elements hidden but in the end it's better just make another version and call the current one the 'advanced version'. The song buttons are packed because they're dynamic in length. The songs can be named anything in the song editor. Also if you select all chords or scales in the first dropdown it already overflows the expected area. There can be a lot of answer choices.

Thanks again for the detailed comment, It'll try and reciprocate my time if I notice somewhere I can or if you tell me something you want feedback on.


My wife is a beginning fiddler and currently uses www.learntohear.com. [She cares a great deal about ear training and music theory.] She likes how your site lets you choose songs that correspond to specific intervals.


thanks for checking it out. if you guys have any questions feel free to contact me. the songs are the main benefit. I couldn't master the higher intervals until i associated songs


This is completely awesome and something I've been looking for, for a few years. Thanks!


Looks like you were wrong, people do seem to care. There must be plenty of band kids out there that would find this useful.

Popular by Nada Surf is down, have you heard of grooveshark.com? http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Popular/21866669


Thanks for the updated link. The site gets about 200 new visits and 200 returning visits a day. While this is good it's a low turnout compared to how much I've linked it everywhere possible.

On the other hand my retarded anime episode crawler at crawlanime.com gets several thousands hits for a half ass'ed effort with curl. my roleplay site at Eliteskills.com/rp is crawling with people making god damn twilight roleplays at a depressing rate. I'm rewarded more often for making stupid shit than for making well designed sophisticated apps for improving actual skills.

That's where my frustrated statement comes from.


Ah, twilight could get anyone down.

Well, your intro video is very good, a good script. And, you jargon disclaimer is hilarious. Most good intros need a good disclaimer to remind new users that the ideas behind the jargon are simple and the real goal. The ideas are the forest, the jargon are the trees.


I do. I'll give it a try.


I've used it, it rules. jimmyr.com is pretty cool too, used to be my homepage.


what beat it


news.ycombinator.com, hah. that was most of what i read anyways so i just switched over one day


Your site is very, very visually busy. Can you reduce the clutter? This includes the app itself. Maybe you could widen the content area, encroaching upon the whitespace.


Sorry for trying to help.


Just joined an open source project, a p2p client for eDonkey, and eventually bit torrent and others. It is an older project that went proprietary/closed-source and failed, and we're breathing new life into it starting with the old open source code base. We're about done cleaning it all up, and will start on new features soon. Completely in C#, and runs on .NET and Mono. Great project, great people, already members from all over the world. Check us out on sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hathi/ Come see some real C# power in action, and join us in the fun! :-)


I've mentioned this in another comment here before, but I'm working on a social book summary website. Users can search for or submit up to 500-word summaries, vote on their favorites, and leave comments on them as well. It emerged from my frustration in trying to refresh my memory for books I've already read.

I would love to hear other people's opinions on it...




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