
Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? 2017 Edition - yitchelle
A similar question was asked just under a year ago. So I thought it is about time to ask again for 2017.<p>2016 edition is https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11259746
======
rayalez
[http://webacademy.io](http://webacademy.io) \- a collection of the best
learning resources for Web Developers and Startup Founders(still work in
progress).

[http://hackertribe.io/](http://hackertribe.io/) \- a community of hackers and
founders.

[http://lumiverse.io/](http://lumiverse.io/) \- discover great educational
videos.

[http://fictionhub.io/](http://fictionhub.io/) \- fiction publishing platform.

------
ccvannorman
SuperMathWorld.com, it is awesome because we let kids actually make video
games in a mathematical sandbox!

There are a ton of math learning solutions but most of them are pop-up
worksheets slapped on top of a game. In SMW the math is integrated so every
interaction has a mathematical property.

The "making games" part is possible because we expose the editor in WebGL
game, because we really want to put kids in control of their experience--
nothing helps move a kid's mindset from "math sucks" to "math is fun" like
being able to create your own world of math toys.

We're in beta, launching June 1 and always looking for collaborators! Reach
out if you're a math or physics geek, we can make some pretty neat
visualizations/interactions using our engine.

------
schoen
I'm working on an update to the border search whitepaper that I helped write
for EFF in 2011 (the 2011 version is at [https://www.eff.org/files/eff-border-
search_2.pdf](https://www.eff.org/files/eff-border-search_2.pdf)).

The update will feature new legal analysis, including references to court
decisions that have come out in the meantime, fewer elaborate technical
suggestions, and more concern for the problem of how border agents may react
to noticing that you've took precautions against searches (not only for
whether the precautions are effective).

There's been a lot of awareness of the risk of searches of electronics at the
border lately, so hopefully we can get some up-to-date and informed guidance
out there.

------
jjoe
I'm working on Cachoid -- a Varnish-as-a-service platform --
[https://www.cachoid.com/](https://www.cachoid.com/)

Site caching is so underrated I had to do something about it. In fact, I
recently announced its first public beta. The one USP is this: you create a
Cachoid and it automatically starts caching your site. No need to get into the
nitty-gritty details of caching or get your hands dirty. It just works!

The difference between Cachoid and other platforms is that we guarantee memory
allocations per Cachoid (Varnish instance container on steroids), which is
crucial to achieve speed. A multi-tenant content distribution network doesn't
always have a memory-store SLA for its tenants.

More info: [https://www.cachoid.com/](https://www.cachoid.com/)

Quick overview of its architecture:
[https://www.cachoid.com/blog/2017/01/15/high-level-
architect...](https://www.cachoid.com/blog/2017/01/15/high-level-architecture-
of-cachoid/)

Docs: [https://www.cachoid.com/support](https://www.cachoid.com/support)

~~~
ezekg
Looks like a cool project, good job. I feel like your pricing section should
drop the "upgrade" verbiage and instead use something like "buy now", seeing
as most of your traffic there will likely be new users. Also, those buttons
lead to a login form—I would default to a sign up form, with a link like
"Already have an account? Sign in." to reduce friction for new users. Good
luck with Cachoid!

~~~
jjoe
_> I feel like your pricing section should drop the "upgrade" verbiage and
instead use something like "buy now", seeing as most of your traffic there
will likely be new users. Also, those buttons lead to a login form—I would
default to a sign up form, with a link like "Already have an account? Sign
in." to reduce friction for new users._

You're right, I didn't see it from that angle. Plus the registeration link
would auto login already registered users anyway.

Thanks!

------
krapp
>2016 edition is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11259746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11259746)

Wow, mfw I'm still working on the same projects.

What was going to be a Berzerk clone[0] has turned into an attempt at a more
general purpose framework for games in C++ and Lua[1]. Eventually, I'll get
around to actually finishing something in it. Mostly it's just a time sink for
self-education.

And I'm still slowly working on a HN-like forum in Hack[2].

[0][https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/berzerk](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/berzerk)

[1][https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_framework)

[2][https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum](https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/basedforum)

~~~
wirddin
Have you deployed the HN-like forum somewhere?

Also, off-topic, but why bitbucket?

~~~
krapp
> Have you deployed the HN-like forum somewhere?

I tried getting it to run on OpenShift but their HHVM cartridge wouldn't allow
me to run Composer through it instead of PHP, which I had to be able to do,
and their version of PHP was out of date.

Given the state the project is in, I haven't bothered trying anywhere else -
it wouldn't be worth spending money to host.

>Also, off-topic, but why bitbucket?

Free private accounts, not as much social media nonsense as there is with
Github.

------
jacobzweig
Just finished up my dissertation and I've been working on taking some of the
deep learning and RL techniques I've used for my research to build something
new.

We just launched Optimail ([https://optimail.io](https://optimail.io)) - it
uses reinforcement learning to automatically optimize drip email campaigns.

~~~
ezekg
This is really cool, great job. Who is your target market? I've been (slowly)
delving into machine learning/AI and found parts of your marketing copy hard
to understand, so couldn't imagine somebody with a marketing background being
able to grok it.

~~~
brockf
Hey thanks! I'm Jacob's co-founder at Optimail.

We only just launched yesterday, so I think we are still working to find that
exact product-market fit. At the moment, however, we're targeting medium- to
large-sized businesses that use drip email marketing campaigns, such as
onboarding campaigns, lead nurturing campaigns, and retention campaigns.

Thanks for the feedback on the copy! If you are feeling extra generous and
have a second, shoot me a PM and let me know what parts you found confusing.
We want it to be accessible to non-technical marketers who might be using
older software like Mailchimp, etc. (After all, a main benefit of using AI
here is that you don't need to get into confusing automation-building stuff
like multi-branching decision trees.)

~~~
ezekg
Sorry for the late response. I'm a developer and a few sections I had to
Google definitions for were:

> Our suite of advanced analytics, including Cohort Analyses, Sequence
> Analyses, and Algorithm Metrics will unlock new insights in to your
> customers and campaigns.

> We use a combination of deep reinforcement learning and hierarchical
> Bayesian models to quickly and accurately learn about your customers and
> optimize your campaigns in real-time.

I think you could simplify those a bit, maybe hitting from a higher-level with
a link to a more detailed explanation of how Optimail does its thing. I
totally get the value in using these terms, but for the landing page I would
imagine using simpler language may result in non-technical users being able to
grok the benefits of your product a bit better.

~~~
jacobzweig
Thanks for the feedback - it's so hard to hit the right level of description.
I'm definitely biased here after just leaving academia since I keep thinking
"if we don't mention the hierarchical models they're going to think we're
frauds!" \- ha.

But you're absolutely right - our goal is to appeal to developers as well as
marketing types, so perhaps this level of detail is just confusing and
unnecessary on the landing page.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other feedback - I really
appreciate it!!

~~~
ezekg
Will do! Btw, I signed up yesterday and _really_ like the look of everything!
I'll try and give it a spin in the next month or so whenever I'm ready to set
up a campaign.

------
joshuamorton
For a few years now, I've been working on an autonomous vehicle
([https://github.com/gtagency/buzzmobile](https://github.com/gtagency/buzzmobile))
that some friends and I hack on. We just recently hit what I'd call 1.0 in
terms of a huge system refactor to make the entire system much more robust and
testable.

I started working on this recently:
[https://github.com/joshuamorton/tut](https://github.com/joshuamorton/tut),
and might go back to it. After seeing Kenneth Reitz's Pipenv I wanted to do
something similar but a bit more extensive that included testing tools and
some other stuff. And tut is the WIP result. Think Cargo for python.

~~~
joshu
This is useful. I am currently building an autonomous gokart in ROS.

~~~
joshuamorton
Heh, we're a student organization, so there's lots of membership turnover, and
that forced us to really upgrade our documentation and build tools over the
last year to prevent all kinds of weird issues and allow quick onboarding.

I made it my mission over the last year or so to build something better than
rosunit and rostest, because having to more or less copy launch files for
every test seems arduous. I ended up with the test_utils library that we'll
probably spin off into its own package soon, but its a much, much nicer
interface for writing tests for ros, and at this point seems to be relatively
stable, with one or two minor changes I need to make.

Glad its helpful!

------
thenomad
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760](http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760)
\- Left-Hand Path, a Dark Souls-inspired horror RPG for the HTC Vive and
Oculus Touch VR platforms where you cast spells by drawing arcane symbols in
the air.

It's going rather well - 87% positive reviews on Steam and people saying
things like _" In years to come, I think this will be seen as one of the
seminal VR titles"_ (paraphrase from a recent review on Reddit.)

------
Belar
[https://remotejobseu.com](https://remotejobseu.com) \- Remote jobs open for
developers from European time zones. It aims to solve a job hunting problem
when browsing popular remote job boards.

Offers are hand-picked/filtered and companies are verified (lightly, as much
as one can tell from a fast look at public info; mostly regarding remote
environment). It should also be fast, with well-formatted data - so far, so
good.

~~~
Bashmaistora
This is really cool

------
wbrocklebank
For the last two years we have been building out an AI-driven anomaly
detection service that monitors critical equipment for failure:
[https://shprd.com](https://shprd.com). We make it possible for small & medium
sized companies to be able to get the huge cost and manpower benefits of
predictive maintenance as a turn-key solution - connect cheap sensors to
motors, boilers, A/C compressors and monitor them for correct behaviour, alert
on abnormal performance and before failures (a full list of what we monitor is
at [https://www.shprd.com/deployment](https://www.shprd.com/deployment)).

We are using various ML modelling methods to understand each sensor's normal
operating behaviour - more info on the tech is at
[https://www.shprd.com/technology](https://www.shprd.com/technology)

We are just coming out of our R&D phase and into full commercialisation. Any
critique of the explanation site or other info welcomed!

------
andrew-lucker
I'm working on a port of OpenAI gym/universe to the Rust Programming language.
It will be awesome because everyone is interested in AI now, and Rust is cool
too.

[https://github.com/andrew-lucker/rust-openai](https://github.com/andrew-
lucker/rust-openai)

------
ezekg
Currently finalizing things for the launch of Keygen[0], a RESTful API for
managing software product licenses—everything from individual users to the
machines they’re allowed to use.

Been in beta for the past few months and am excited to finally launch, having
spent nearly a year developing it any chance that I get.

I’m currently working on wrapping up some great _business-ey_ features such as
an admin dashboard that will allow users to visually monitor metrics for each
product to get insights for popular license types, as well as other crucial
metrics like license churn, overdue license check-ins, usage across different
machines and more.

Been a long road, but I'm excited to try and put my sales hat on soon. It's a
service I've always needed for developing small niche desktop apps.

[0]: [https://keygen.sh](https://keygen.sh)

------
Huhty
Blog Enhancement Suite:
[http://blogenhancement.com](http://blogenhancement.com)

It's a growth tools suite for bloggers (as explained on the landing page.)
Right now we're in pre-launch but we're launching in late Feb / early March (a
couple weeks). It's awesome because:

1\. It gives bloggers social/growth tools never before accessible.

2\. It provides a new/different source of revenue.

3\. It can replace the redundant/impractical "timeline" widgets offered by FB,
Twitter, etc. Those currently act more as a glorified social channel promoter
than anything actually beneficial to the blog itself.

4\. It's free (for the basic version).

5\. It's powered by Snapzu, our Reddit/HN like voting community platform.

Would love any feedback, and am open to answering any questions. Cheers.

------
DrNuke
I act as a business dev and advisor for the internationalisation of
DronesBench [http://www.dronesbench.com](http://www.dronesbench.com) , an
innovative tool for the diagnosis of drones from Foggia, Italy. With a novel
benchmark for efficiency of drones, two academic collaborations and a pre-
series completed, commercialisation is going to follow by the end of April.
Educational (for high schools, universities, flight schools) and professional
(manufacturers, repairers, certifiers) packages offered.

------
shakna
A hobby microprocessor based computer. I'm finally moving from design to
prototyping this month.

A programming language that I've been designing for about two years now. I'm
in the initial bootstrap phase, and about to rewrite the compiler in itself.
The goal is to use it as an experimental test bed, as an example, the compiler
should use a tracing inference model I wrote a thesis on, for automatic type
inference, and function overloading. The overly-ambitious goal is "As easy as
Python, as safe as Rust".

------
ruairidhwm
[https://brandfox.io](https://brandfox.io) \- It's awesome because it lets
Instagram users leverage a resource that does nothing other than gather likes.
It's also awesome because it lets brands advertise using authentic images and
compare/purchase influencers.

------
gliechtenstein
I am working on an open source project that makes building cross-platform
mobile apps as easy as writing ONLY a JSON markup
[https://www.jasonette.com](https://www.jasonette.com)

I did a Show HN about three months ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879179))
and was so grateful for all the great constructive feedback I received, it
really encouraged me to keep evolving the project. And I really have come very
far since then.

So I thought I would share what I have achieved so far:

1\. The original release was iOS only, but so many people told me I should
build an Android version, so I did. Now both iOS and Android are completely
open source on Github and they both use the same JSON grammar. Here's a recent
post where I talk about how I designed the JSON-to-Native mappings on both iOS
and Android: [https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-to-build-cross-
platform-...](https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-to-build-cross-platform-
mobile-apps-using-nothing-more-than-a-json-markup-f493abec1873#.r0m9f21t8)

2\. I've implemented functional programming in JSON. Yes, a function in JSON.
I had to come up with a JSON grammar that can represent all aspects of a
function like invocation, arguments, callbacks, call stack, recursive calls,
subroutines, etc. If you're interested, check out the post I wrote about this:
[http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/15/functional-
programming-...](http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/15/functional-programming-
in-json/)

3\. I've implemented a "require" for JSON, so it can be used to parallel
process multiple JSON objects from different sources, which I think is great
for people who want to build a mobile app for their decentralized apps. I
personally think decentralized apps will take off in 2017 and going forward
for many different reasons, so this means a lot to me: I wrote about this
here:
[http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/17/require/](http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/17/require/)

These are just some I have worked on personally, but the REAL cool part is
that the community has really picked up and many people have been contributing
to the project. And I think THAT's the main reason why it's awesome. The fact
that some nobody with no track record can just release something that
resonates with enough people and anyone from around the world can just jump in
and help. This is my first ever experience with an open source project and
everything feels so magical to me. I hope to update you guys with even better
news in the future!

~~~
joshu
I would love to chat if you think about raising money for this...

------
cdiamand
I'm working on [http://oppsdaily.com](http://oppsdaily.com), a daily email for
software devs who want to solve the problems others face at work.

The email consists of a brief, 5 question interview, asking about a problem
someone faces at work and the software they wished they had (that they would
buy) that would solve the problem.

Each day I receive a handful of responses from developers who want to learn
more, and I try to connect them to the interviewee

~~~
wirddin
Hey there! Read your medium post yesterday about a competition. Great work
there man! :D

------
ganeshkrishnan
I am working on [https://www.aihello.com](https://www.aihello.com) which is
Machine Learning platform for ecommerce sellers.

Thinking of selling something but hate working just by gut feeling? AiHello
will give hard starts (sales, competition, price, profit etc) and whatever you
plan to sell.

We help online sellers launch their product quickly on multiple channels like
Amazon,Ebay, Jet.com etc as we have inventory management built in.

------
slededit
I'm currently working on an open source search engine for the internet as a
whole. Google has been getting too smart for its own good and that actively
deteriorates quality of technical searches where precision matters.

I'm also hoping to use it as a platform to test some of my theories on how to
apply traditional IDE search techniques to help find and understand code
snippets.

Plus its just a fun way to see if I can write code that "scales".

------
wirddin
An app which connects you anonymously with other people online, based on
similar interests. Just published an MVP on Play Store ( and will soon release
Apple ) and now I'm planning to go for a few user acquisitions who would help
me build a better version of this. I'm calling it Matchr.

You can find it on [https://matchr.in](https://matchr.in)

~~~
cholantesh
I like the idea of these kinds of apps, but I really don't want to create a
Facebook account just to use them. Are you planning on adding other
authentication options in the future?

~~~
wirddin
Hey! Which account do you suggest should I add? One of the biggest reasons I
chose facebook was the authentic data I got : less fakes, more genuine
information. Plus, can't risk email+password with an app like this, anonymity
without verification is scary.

~~~
herbst
Twitter does more verification for new accounts than Facebook does these days.
I have several completely non legit facebook accounts btw, i dont see that
verification worthy at all.

~~~
wirddin
But doesn't twitter have a huge amount users with incomplete profiles (or
eggheads)? Or is it an assumption?

My main concern is that I won't be able to get the user's picture and basic
info.

------
jiten_bansal
Just launched [https://betapage.co](https://betapage.co) 2.0

~~~
Main_
I did not understand what the website is about. You could put a summary at the
top of what the website does, that would be very helpful. I browsed for 10
seconds and left.

Hope this helps.

------
miguelrochefort
An app that replaces 80% of all apps.

It will destroy millions of jobs.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
That's been done, it was called The Last One:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_\(software\))

------
joshu
I am putting together an autonomous vehicle event at a racetrack and a spec
vehicle for competition. Http://selfracingcars.com/event

------
zump
Does anyone else think startups are just incredibly boring?

~~~
stevekemp
Some are. Some aren't.

I create hobby-projects for fun, I have two (I think?) that I charge money
for. They'll never be "real" companies, but they cover their costs which is
all I wanted.

I see broad trends on sites like this, for example you can pretty much
pinpoint the moment that every other Show HN started adding "Deep Learning" to
their submissions. That kind of herd-mentality is pretty depressing, but also
fascinating to watch in action.

Startups as a meta-topic are fascinating, although again I have that same
feeling of depression and sadness when I read "Growth hacking" tips that
basically boil down to fancier ways to spam and mislead, but I appreciate
reading about real people and real-projects. The posts that start out "I
posted on my blog, which has 50 million readers, and suddenly I was
profitable" are pretty unrealistic.

Simple projects that have slowly become more and more popular, like the guy
who is frequently talking about his webcounters, are a breathe of fresh air
from the hype.

I'm sure I could code a web-counter. I'm sure that it'd never become super-
popular, because long-tail counts for a lot. Then again I do have a few
readers of my blog ..

