
Ask HN: What side projects are you working on? - kkoppenhaver
Doesn't even have to be anything profitable (but hopefully covering your hosting costs at least).  I'm just interested to know what others are working on in their free time.
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sea6ear
I've been dabbling with the idea of taking Awk style patterns and translating
them to JavaScript to run in Node.js (with the intent of allowing Awk style
programs that also allow higher-order programming constructs). At this point
I've got the translation working for some simple cases.

I've been pondering whether to trying to generalize the concept to work on
http requests instead of just files, at which point I think a fairly elegant
micro web framework could be made that applies Awk style pattern / action
pairs to the incoming http requests.

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dreadsword
<http://linkthing.co>

A delicious replacement that uses twitter syntax to organize stuff - i.e.:
hashtags and @people. App integrates with twitter for both tweeting bookmarks
that you add, and importing links you've tweeted previously as bookmarks.

Not at all complete (both features and fixes to be done), but solid enough
that I use it every day for myself to organize links that I use for
references, collect things that I'm researching, to create a "to-read" list,
and so on.

It was learning foray into bootstrap and jquery, and has gone pretty well.

Right now, its sign in through Twitter only. I'll add native account creation
at some point, but you're more than welcome to try it out in the meantime.

Edit: Screengrab of Linkthing in action <http://imgur.com/Rrr0g>

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kkoppenhaver
Love the look and the concept. I'll have to check it out.

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dreadsword
Right on - thank-you! Be warned - its incomplete! You'll probably bump into
what you consider to be missing key functionality, broken things, etc.

If you do go in and try it out, I would love to hear your feedback!

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cjstewart88
I've been working on tubalr for 2 years this september. It's allows you to
take advantage of all the great music content on YouTube.

I'm out of features for now, been improving on UI and design lately.

<http://www.tubalr.com>

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tsm
Writing a program that analyzes traditional Scottish music and composes new
tunes in the same style. Right now I'm in the careful planning phase--reading
up on LSTM recurrent neural networks and such, but I should be able to start
coding shortly (at the very least I can do all the software engineering parts
while I figure out what the best algorithm to use is).

I'm not deluding myself about its long-term non-profitability...I'm just doing
it because I find it fascinating. At least there's no hosting cost--I already
have a laptop running SBCL and Emacs, which is all I need.

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rvid
That's really interesting. Will you be open-sourcing this?

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tsm
Thanks. I am planning to open -source it once I start coding.

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georgemcbay
In my free time I'm writing an alternative firmware for chumby devices (and
possibly similar devices, if I ever get my hands on a Raspberry Pi or alike)
that focuses solely on streaming radio services (ones which have usable open
APIs) with no dependence on the chumby backend servers.

All of the app layer is written in Go with a custom widget set and pure Go
rendering right out to an mmaped /dev/fb (the rest of the firmware is a
lightly customized openembedded build).

This won't make any money but it is teaching me a lot of Go.

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spoonfoe
C# / Asp.net pays my bills, but I've been playing with node.js lately. Just to
kind of see what the hubbub was.

I took Ryan Dahl's chat room demo and added a database for validating users &
message logging. I've added a couple commands that allow users to change their
nicknames on the fly and some other feeble functionality.

I think eventually i'd like for users to be able to run javascript across all
sessions, which could be a complete mess or kind of cool.

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kkoppenhaver
I've been looking into node myself and this seems like an interesting
application. I'm hoping for the "kind of cool" option for you when it's all
said and done!

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callmeed
A "daily photo challenge" iOS app. For those not in the know, it's sort of a
sub-community of Instagram with over 1 million users (my wife is big on it).
(see <https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23photoadayjuly>)

So, for kicks, I thought I'd try and build an Instagram-like app that is just
for a daily photo challenge.

If anyone wants to be a tester, let me know.

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godisdad
Been working on and off on <http://mtransit.herokuapp.com/> \-- a mobile
optimized site for looking up transit schedules for the Minneapolis / St. Paul
bus system. It's built with Flask and a sprinkling of JQuery. I am hoping to
factor out some code into a standalone lib for others to build competitor apps
with.

~~~
kkoppenhaver
I've been looking to do something like this myself. I go to school in
Bloomington, IL, and for the large amounts of students and their tech savvy,
the bus system is still very low tech. Would love to hear how the development
turns out.

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QuasiPreneur
<http://VentingPost.com> and <http://Nurdology.com> and
<http://QuasiPreneur.com>

Gotta spend more time and energy into Nurdology.

And I have more but.. realizing.... stupid me.. I'm spreading myself too
thin...quantity != quality! :(

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frankphilips
I'm building a platform where non-profits can host virtual garage sales, so
their members can buy/sell stuff and donate a portion of the proceeds back to
the NPO. Think of it as an Ebay for Charities. It's a side project as of now.
Would love your feedback :) <http://shruffle.com>

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victorhn
Do you realize that all your "poor third world kids" are asian/brown/black and
the donors/buyers are white? Maybe there is some correspondence with reality,
but this just reinforces the streotype IMO.

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frankphilips
Being South Asian myself, I can strongly say that is purely a coincidence.
Good observation though, I didn't catch that myself.

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nickbarnwell
I'm working on <http://callmemae.be> \- originally built it at an 8-hour
Hackathon in SF and now working on turning it into something a bit more robust
so it can be properly used for introductions and a demonstration of my
technical abilities.

~~~
hodgesmr
Before I log in, can you explain the service a bit more?

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nickbarnwell
Improving the landing page is high on the list of priorities. Have an
incredible designer onboard now, so look for improvements and a ShowHN soon :)
Non-FB login will come at that time as well.

Essentially, It lets you share a virtual business card via email or SMS (see:
<http://callmemae.be/nb>). Essentially it was created because I can never
remember my cards when I go to events, but always have my phone.

Some of the features I'm in the process of writing are:

* Bump two phones together to exchange contact info (all JS/HTML5) * Share contact info with an entire group at once * Customize your card background and choose your own fields * Analytics surrounding sharing (who's opened your card, clicked the mailto:, etc...)

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philipDS
Isn't this what Bump is doing too? Or am I wrong?

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nickbarnwell
bump requires a native app, we're all HTML5 - someone can navigate to our site
and be sharing in two clicks, not 10

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fjellfras
I am writing a search engine. The main purpose was to work on a large project
to give myself exposure and polish as a programmer (sysadmin by trade). The
crawling and indexing systems are done now. I am finding the ranking to be the
most challenging part but it is quite fun overall.

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sanchitg94
<http://secretify.herokuapp.com/> it's like the iPhone app Snapchat. It's used
to send images in a more secured fashion. Working on making it more secure but
it's fully functional as it is .

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hodgesmr
<http://deductivepolitics.com/> Not making any money off of it, just an
experiment I'm doing. I try to predict who people will vote for in November
based on Facebook likes.

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skram
<http://www.mappyhealth.com> \- tracking disease trends on Twitter (more data
sources including CDC reports coming eventually) and trying to make sense of
it all.

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adam-_-
I'm currently at the validation stage of a social analytics and monitoring
tool <http://twitcherhq.com> \- undecided whether to take it further yet.

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byjess
I'm working on the One Platform.

One platform to rule them all One platform to find them One platform to bring
them all And in the darkness bind them.

