
Ask HN: What are you currently building? - _1tan
During my christmas break I started building an automatic investment system.<p>What did you start?
======
charlieirish
I've been having fun the last few months by creating and launching! The latest
of which seems to have struck a chord: MailScope

[http://www.mailscope.io](http://www.mailscope.io) adds profile data to your
existing mailing list. Why? Well, if you don't ask for firstname and lastname
on signup, you'll get increased conversion. But if you then want to get
increased open and click rates when you actually send email, you should start
personalizing (one way is to use firstnames in the body) and segmenting.
That's where MailScope comes in. Each new subscriber you get, MailScope will
automatically add firstname, lastname (and other profile data).

It's just the start and I've been having great fun expanding the possibilities
- alerting you when an 'influencer' signs up so that you can reach out
directly; auto-following subscribers on twitter when they signup. I've already
got a dozen or so paying customers who use MailScope to enrich their mailing
lists and increase their revenues. It's awesome to have learnt so much here on
HN and finally be able to start offering something of real value back to
business owners.

~~~
arrmn
Interesting idea how do you get the names? My initial idea would be to crawl
some social networks for the name.

~~~
tim333
Not the guy but on the site it says "We search hundreds of different data
sources including public databases, private APIs and social networks. We can
accurately match over one billion email addresses to firstname and lastname."

------
benjamincburns
What did I start? An autonomous lawn mower. My goal is to get it done for
under $1,000 USD using mostly snap-together hardware. My timeline is to have
it mowing via RC by the end of January (shipping to New Zealand takes a while,
especially when you're on a budget), while I'd like it to be capable of safely
mowing autonomously by July or so - though I'm optimistic that it'll reach
good-enough stage by March. I'll publish the build log on my website [1] as I
hit major milestones.

What did I finish? I've been rebuilding my larger quadcopter and I finally got
it up in the air and it flies well enough for my needs, though admittedly I
did trim my friend's tree with it a bit. I'm chalking that up to pilot error,
however. I hadn't flown anything in a few months and it turns out that line-
of-sight orientation on quadrotors _isn 't_ just like riding a bicycle. It
could still use a bit of tuning -- projects like those are never really
finished.

I also have a few fairly interesting/exciting projects which I desperately
need to write up. One such example is a wide field-of-view stereo head-mounted
display for FPV flying which can be built in an evening for under $200 USD.
Another is my as-of-yet fruitless efforts to build a very low latency HD
digital video transmission system - also for FPV flying. If these are projects
which you'd find useful, or which you'd simply like to read more about - leave
me a comment or flick me an e-mail [2]. Encouragement always helps when it
comes to getting things written up.

1: [http://www.benjamincburns.com/](http://www.benjamincburns.com/)

2: My username at gmail.

~~~
mrfusion
Awesome. What fail safes do you have?

~~~
benjamincburns
The only _real_ failsafes I have are overcurrent detection on the blade motor
(when you hit something bad, current will spike) which triggers immediate
shut-off, as well as a big red emergency stop button that will be on top of a
pedestal at between knee and waist height.

Otherwise I intend to implement naive obstruction avoidance to start where I
detect proximity to an obstruction and simply steer away from it when I'm too
close. In the case where the distance to the obstruction decreases faster than
warranted by vehicle velocity, I'll simply shut off the blade and stop moving
until either the obstruction goes away, or some timeout expires.

Later on I'll add some smarts to this w/ a bit of mapping so that the static
object "too close threshold" varies depending on whether or not the object is
known in the current map - that way I can implement wall-following for close
edging without that behaviour conflicting with the lower-level "don't turn the
neighbour's cat into sausage" behaviour.

Edit 1:

My yard is quite private, and lawn mowers (even electric ones) make scary
noises, so I don't really expect that much will want to interfere with it
while it is running.

Edit 2:

It'll also have a camera and I'll be experimenting with various monocular SLAM
and odometry algorithms. If nothing else, I'll use the camera to capture video
for remote FPV control and for offline structure-from-motion mapping purposes.
My hope is that if I can get decent enough pose estimation (likely from fusion
of VSLAM + wheel odometry + AHRS/IMU data + GPS via an EKF), that I can
compare the live camera image with one taken from the map at a similar pose to
find and avoid dynamic objects in the scene. Of course, to do that well I'll
actually need some sort of statistical map of the environment, as a single
textured 3D mesh won't convey the expected variance of the scene (things
blowing in the wind, etc).

~~~
mrfusion
Also think about something for shutting down if one of the wheels lose contact
with the ground. Eg being lifted up (or flipped over)

~~~
benjamincburns
Good point. Will definitely do this.

------
miguelrochefort
I'm rethinking the computer. The hardware, the software, the UI paradigms,
everything. Xerox PARC 2.0.

\- We must stop writing UI by hand

\- We must adopt a new language that's less ambiguous

\- We must prefer graphs to trees

\- We must not build service-specific apps and websites

\- We must stop thinking of computer hardware as a personal device, and make
switching from a device to another completely seamless

\- Local storage must be nothing but a local cache of sections of the ONE
universal knowledge base

\- Speech and text must not be the primary way to interact with a machine/AI

\- Service providers must never have a say when it comes to UI/UX, as services
must be completely decoupled from UI

\- Everything is an agent, the system shouldn't make a distinction between
human users, AI, smart contracts, APIs, etc.

\- There must be no difference between creating software and using software

\- Money shall be replaced by a social currency, a form of trust score (based
on reliability, honesty and predictability)

\- Businesses must adapt their practices and models to software, not the
opposite

\- Brands must be eliminated and replaced with a trust score

\- We must allow for non-precise facts to exist (ranges, set of weighted
values, conditional constraints)

\- We must allow for non-universal facts (opinions, contradicting values,
different weight/credibility based on the user's trust graph)

\- "Undo" and "Predict next" functionalities must be ubiquitous and present
everywhere

\- Intentions and Predictions are communicated by logging events in the future
(where the date doesn't need to be precise as allowed above)

\- A cooking recipe, GPS directions, task dependencies, a playlist, IKEA
directions, a tutorial, must all use the same model

\- ...

~~~
joelg
We have surprisingly identical ambitions. BVic's "Future of Programming" is
particularly relevent to several of your points and really puts how terrible
our current system is in context....
[https://vimeo.com/71278954](https://vimeo.com/71278954)

I feel like this sentiment (of "everything is wrong") is gaining traction
recently (last year/two). Maybe it's just wishful thinking though...

~~~
miguelrochefort
Although some people seem to share our understanding that things must change,
it usually stops there.

I haven't seen anyone present a radically new paradigm for computing
(especially consumer UI) in the last decade.

I intend to change that.

~~~
sethjgore
I intend to do that too. Why don't we all get on a chat room and work at it?

~~~
miguelrochefort
Let's do this.

 __Feel free to join:
__[https://bettercomputer.slack.com](https://bettercomputer.slack.com)

~~~
i336_
I've been pondering how to attack the problem of making better UIs for going
on 10 years now. Half the time I think I'm completely out of touch and that my
ideas are irrelevant (with good reason), the rest of the time I wonder what
would happen if I actually tried to implement some of the stuff I've come up
with. (I strongly suspect I'd get a rude shock and realize how much iteration
would be needed to make it usable, heh.)

I'd love to bounce ideas back and forth, but... agh, a Slack URL. I tried
Slack once, felt too stifled, and bolted. The poor team I joined still has no
idea where I went or why I left.

I'm torn between asking for an invite and just passing because, ironically,
the software being used grates too much (XD)... maybe you could enable the IRC
gateway?

One thing at a time though; if you're using Slack, so be it. My public email
is in my profile. The private email I'd want to sign up under is different.

------
someotheridiot
[https://rebrickable.com](https://rebrickable.com) \- A LEGO database that
shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also
includes thousands of fan-submitted designs.

I started in a few years ago, but over the Christmas break I put a lot of time
into it and it's growth has spiked quite well as a result. I need to upgrade
my servers now :/

------
wicker
It's been a really fun break!

I'm getting interested in super low frequency signals so I looked up the E202
Very Low Frequency (<10kHz) receiver[1] and laid out/built a variation of
it.[2] Right now the whole thing is a broadband receiver with no antenna
(obviously) and the whole circuit board assembly is functionally acting like a
microphone. I can hear when I touch any component or move my hand around in
the air. I'm going to add a 60Hz notch file and then take it out to the middle
of nowhere.

I think it would be awesome to go find a pipeline to use as an antenna...

Next project is to take my BlueROV[3] and build a hydrophone array[4] for it
so a friend and I can see if a underwater acoustics engineer friend and I can
use it to track other objects (like a remote-controlled toy boat) in the
water. I've been doing some Kivy visualization of an accelerometer and gyro
(MPU9255) and I think we could use matplotlib's interactive mode or something
in Kivy (maybe) to visualize it all in realtime.

There's nothing cutting edge here but I've done a bunch of radio frequency
(RF) stuff like GPS and WiFi and I'm really enjoying how tangible audio seems
in comparison. Just having fun with low frequencies, basically.

[1]
[http://www.vlf.it/romero2/explorer-e202.html](http://www.vlf.it/romero2/explorer-e202.html)

[2] [https://github.com/wicker/e202var-natural-radio-
receiver](https://github.com/wicker/e202var-natural-radio-receiver)

[3]
[https://www.bluerobotics.com/store/rov/bluerov-r1/](https://www.bluerobotics.com/store/rov/bluerov-r1/)

[4]
[http://www.dosits.org/files/dosits/hydrophone_instruc_w_imag...](http://www.dosits.org/files/dosits/hydrophone_instruc_w_image.pdf)

~~~
benjamincburns
FWIW, you may wish to add a 50Hz notch filter as well. If you're in North
America 50Hz noise won't be as much of an issue, but if your receiver is
sensitive enough there's likely still enough of it floating around from
various DC-AC inverters and the like. Of course, if you've got a good enough
tuner you can likely just measure the noise in that "band" yourself.

Re: using a pipeline as an antenna - I wonder how difficult (or illegal) it
would be to use mains power lines. My RF-foo is only marginally above white-
belt, but I'd imagine that a fair amount of low frequency signal would make it
through the transformers.

~~~
wicker
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that! I posted partly in hopes that
somebody would reply and solve problems I didn't know I had. That's the joy of
being totally new to this stuff. I don't know what I don't know. :D

Re: using mains power lines... I actually have a friend who might be able to
answer that, so I'll ask him. We were also considering transmission towers,
since plenty of the hikes I know will take me across a clearcut for the
transmission lines, and I can get some altitude with good, unobstructed views.

------
pedalpete
On Dec 30th, I built [http://bucket52.com](http://bucket52.com), a simple app
which asks the question "what did you do in the last week that was
memorable/remarkable?"

The idea being that even if we do great things and are very active in
different areas of our life, we actually end up doing the same thing again and
again. If we track the things we do, and look for something that was different
and special, will that entice us to do more diverse and interesting things,
and get outside of our comfort zone?

It's very MVP, just seeing where it goes at the moment, but so far, it seems
people like the idea.

I also built it in Meteor, which I only tried for the first time on Dec. 30th,
and I have to say, for prototyping something basic like this, it's been really
great. Some of the poor quality of the site (like slow load time) is probably
due to my inexperience with Meteor.

------
LukeB42
A prototype peer-to-peer caching proxy that uses socket.io to turn web pages
into etherpad-like canvases[0]

It currently requires something akin to EigenTrust++ implementing in the DHT
namespace, except EigenTrust++ requires information about the amount of
successful downloads peer nodes have made, so it's going to require minor
adjustments for decentralised HTTP.

On the frontend it requires a way to insert arbitrary elements into the DOM
using something akin to Mediums' impressive little editor.

Also missing RPC_EDIT, so there's no inter-instance web page editing /just/
yet.

[0]
[https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony](https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony)

------
chuhnk
I'm building micro - a microservices toolkit
[https://github.com/micro/micro](https://github.com/micro/micro). I was part
of the platform team at Hailo which built a global microservices platform and
before then spent some time at Google. I think with the shift to cloud and
docker, being able to build distributed systems is becoming ever more
important but the tooling hasn't caught up yet. The goal of micro is to
simplify building and managing distributed systems.

~~~
navalsaini
hello ... i am building archiejs (a mircorservices framework - please do a
CTRL+F on this page) ... it would be good to connect.

~~~
chuhnk
Hi. Come join the slack channel [https://micro-
services.slack.com](https://micro-services.slack.com) if you would like to
chat. Self invite here [http://micro-invites.herokuapp.com](http://micro-
invites.herokuapp.com)

------
kaolinite
For the past month or so I've been building a notes app as I wanted to move
away from Evernote and couldn't find a good replacement. It has been really
fun building something that I use every day and building it exactly as I want
to use it.

[http://github.com/timdavies/trunk](http://github.com/timdavies/trunk)

------
matiasb
An experimental, proof-of-concept, distributed forum built on top of
Ethereum[1].

This means all the posts are cryptographically signed and stored in the
blockchain.

[1]
[https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/etherforum](https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/etherforum)

~~~
chc4
That's awesome! I tried signing up, but it's lagging out my browser a little
bit and it doesn't look like any forums are up yet. I'll definitely keep an
eye on this though.

Did you post it to /r/ethereum yet? Cuz you totally should.

~~~
matiasb
Thank you, I removed the version that was online because I'm planning to setup
automatic deployment for it.

I think I've posted it here [0], I will hopefully finish a better release
soon, and I'll share it again.

Thank you!

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ynznd/poll_what_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ynznd/poll_what_should_we_do_with_the_official_forums/)

------
client4
We're working on an automated financial management system for our business. I
co-founded an ISP and so far we've found quickbooks to be terrible, banking to
not be fun, and small tedious processes multiplied are starting to take out
chunks of our time. Thus we're working to combine plaid.com + subledger +
Dwolla + lob + stripe to create an automated billing and accounting system for
credit, ach, and paper billing.

~~~
mhluongo
I was just going to suggest Subledger, only to see you're already on it! We're
working on a Subledger integration as well for
[https://foldapp.com](https://foldapp.com). We need to account for USD,
bitcoin, and multiple gift card brands, and they've been a huge help so far.

Context for everyone else- Subledger is a double-entry accounting API that
gives you the tools to implement your own accounting system.

------
olegp
[https://meetabit.com](https://meetabit.com) \- an easier way to run tech and
startup meetups

As the organizer of HelsinkiJS and a new dad I find it takes too much effort
to organize monthly events. Meetabit makes this easier by letting companies
offer sponsorship & speakers submit talk proposals. All that organizers need
to do is pick a date. The service handles sending out invitations, handling
registrations, providing a wait list and even getting speakers to add links to
their slides after the event.

To see some of the features available, check out the HelsinkiJS community
profile: [http://helsinkijs.org](http://helsinkijs.org). If you're an
organizer yourself, it would be great to hear from you - just drop me a line
via the feedback link in the footer.

------
enobrev
A mashup of Mint.com's data and Simple.com's "Goals" interface[1], in a
locally run web-app. I've used Simple's Goals interface as my primary
budgeting tool for the past two years with a great deal of success, and want
it for ALL my banking. Thus far, this has been the best way forward. It
automatically imports my banking data from Mint, then allows me to apply
"goals" to the transactions, along with some advanced filtering and matching
to automate goal-matching, and "pulling" some of my available funds into goals
on a daily basis. I'm sure I'll be tinkering with this throughout the year.

The interface is based on react.js, and it's allowed me to play around with
jspm (not ideal - not awful), Baobab (fits me better than flux), react-dnd
(confusing, but smart), Javascript es6/es7 (dig it), and localForage (which I
already know and love).

Also started working on an Android app that talks to my Anova 1.0 (bluetooth-
only) because I wasn't happy with the official Anova app. Was great to learn
about controlling a device over bluetooth from Android, which was
simultaneously a pain in the ass and easier than I expected.

1: Cheesy Example, but shows the basic premise of the goals interface:
[https://vimeo.com/58997158](https://vimeo.com/58997158)

------
NetStrikeForce
I'm working on a SaaS project to eliminate all the burden with VPN tunnels.

I'm planning to mainly target developers that have resources spread among
different providers and need a secure way to either connect to them or connect
resources to each other.

It will be easy to setup and seamless to use. You'll just have your VMs
connected between them on the same local network, so all your application will
seamlessly work with it. This will potentially unlock other ways of
architecting your apps.

E.g. you might have some VMs in Amazon and some other in Azure, Linode,
Rackspace, Digital Ocean, bare metal in any other hosting provider (OVH?) or
locally in your DC. Each of those providers might offer something different
and it'll be great if you could just use them all together without opening
your services to the whole world or without having to tinker with IPsec VPN
tunnels or firewall rules. You just need to create your new network in our
system and deploy the client with the provided config file on each of them.
I'm making it as simple as providing you with a DHCP server already, so you're
ready to go after launching the client. Every machine you join will be part of
this virtual network in a completely transparent way.

~~~
karambahh
The idea seems very interesting. Would you care explaining how you tackle
these issues?

~~~
NetStrikeForce
Update: I made available the first public version of this -->
[https://wormhole.network](https://wormhole.network)

------
mdip
I write software in C# so I took on building an extension to make my life a
little easier by allowing different background colors to be applied to methods
in classes (Visual Studio) based on the kind of method that they are:
[https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/91cb9cc4-13a3...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/91cb9cc4-13a3-41fe-a3fe-545786a0ceab)

~~~
i336_
Wow, this looks really cool.

Two things.

1\. Will this work in Express? I plan to get back into Windows at some point
soon, Express is where I'd probably start.

2\. Is the vertical function naming thing part of the engine, or did you add
that?

I don't think the reference / date / change count thing is part of VS itself.
That looks really awesome.

------
ironrabbit
Playing around with neural networks to try to salvage my fantasy hockey
season.

~~~
olegious
What exactly are you doing? I've been gathering data for few seasons in my
league, going to use it to help me draft next year.

~~~
ironrabbit
My first pass is actually attacking daily fantasy (i.e. given data about past
NHL games, predict a player's performance in an upcoming game). I'm scraping
some NHL stats sites to build input vectors based on a couple dozen manually-
chosen features (e.g. "number of goals scored last game", "opposition goalie's
save percentage in his last 5 games") and passing them through a neural
network to see if there's any usable correlation between the input features
and a player's eventual performance (goals, assists, +/-, etc.).

It's all in good fun -- mostly an excuse to take a look at TensorFlow and
regain some of my machine learning knowledge from undergrad :)

I'd be curious to hear about anyone else mucking around with machine learning
for fantasy sports!

~~~
olegious
Very cool. I'd check the fantasyhockey subreddit, I've seen a few people
working on various analytic projects posting there.

------
s_kilk
I've been writing a wrapper around PostgreSQLs jsonb column type to make a
somewhat mongo-a-like json document store:
[http://bedquiltdb.github.io](http://bedquiltdb.github.io)

Not sure if it would actually be useful to anyone in the real world, but I've
learned a lot about writing PostgreSQL extensions and such.

~~~
andymurd
Great stuff. I would love to be able to use Mongoose.js with Postgres, it
would massively accelerate my development process.

~~~
s_kilk
Not sure about mongoose, but I'm sure someone could write an ODM library
around node-bedquilt.

------
btdiehr
I'm building a Flexible Editor - A Flex-Box based layout creator:
[http://briandiehr.com/#/layout-editor](http://briandiehr.com/#/layout-editor)

Source:
[https://github.com/BDiehr/briandiehr](https://github.com/BDiehr/briandiehr)

~~~
i336_
While basic, the tangibility and interactivity this provides would promote
flexbox to a lot of people who would otherwise shy away from it.

Definitely a concept worth throwing at /r/css, /r/webdesign, places like
that... after it's been tidied up a little. It's still rough around the edges:
the thick dashed borders and color scheme could do with a little polish; text
and image blocks (both customizable and lorem-ipsum/stock-image-based) would
be great; adjusting margin/padding would be a good idea; and being able to add
arbitrary CSS declarations (like font-family, color, background, etc) would be
good too.

------
vayeate
I am in the beginning stages of creating a web application to interact with
Bitmessage (a theoretically totally anonymous messaging platform). I am
modeling it after Mega.co.nz, which provides varying levels of ways to be
confident that the JavaScript it is serving you is not compromised, and relies
on you having a private key it never intercepts.

I think the biggest barrier to privacy online right now is how inaccessible
applications like Bitmessage are to the average user. Having to install a
local python code base and store gigabytes of data that takes potentially
hours to download sucks.

A browser application like this is not a fool-proof method of privacy, but
it's pretty darn good, and is leaps and bounds better than Facebook which
stores your data in plain text and proceeds to sell it or whatever. It's also
better than something like a zero-knowledge service such as SpiderOak's Kloak
where your data is still owned (but encrypted) by some random person who can
revoke your access at any time and track your usage, who you're communicating
with, and possibly serve you malicious JavaScript.

In summary, an application that: * Provides completely anonymous, encrypted,
untraceable, uncensorable messaging between people and groups (using
Bitmessage as the data store) * Is accessible like any other web application
and provides pretty good security in doing so * Can be used as a browser
extension if you want virtually guaranteed security/privacy * Relies on a data
store that no one owns, everyone can access, and everyone can forever
contribute to

There are questions about the security of Bitmessage, but I know it will be
improved over time.

It is a struggle to decide how much time to dedicate to this application,
though. I'm a somewhat underpaid developer with aspirations of actually making
money to support myself with side projects, but at the same time wanting to
contribute with open source applications like this to make the web a better,
more private, place.

------
chc4
I made an image upload site powered by Urbit around Christmas. It's currently
very barebones (just image uploading and a feed), but I plan on adding voting
and fun stuff like that. Being able to leverage Urbit's built-in identity
system and having all messages between browser and server be strongly typed is
awesome.

[https://github.com/chc4/urporn](https://github.com/chc4/urporn) (the name is
tongue-in-cheek, please don't actually use it for porn)

For fun, check out
[https://github.com/chc4/urporn/blob/master/home/ape/porn.hoo...](https://github.com/chc4/urporn/blob/master/home/ape/porn.hoon)
and see if you can actually figure out what the hell is going on :D

------
azeirah
An infinite canvas library that I can use in my drawing application
prototypes. It's working already, performance is good, only misses the ability
to sync with a server now.

~~~
ntide
Have you seen
[https://www.madewithmischief.com/](https://www.madewithmischief.com/) ?

~~~
azeirah
Absolutely. But as I said, it's for my own drawing program prototypes, I
cannot build upon their application.

------
robinhowlett
Parsing horse racing PDF charts into JSON and then visualizing the race as a
motion chart using d3.js

------
kjksf
[http://dbheroapp.com](http://dbheroapp.com) \- a GUI database app for
PostgreSQL & MySQL, for Mac and Windows. Very early days (been actively
working on for about a month).

~~~
danieltillett
Interesting. What technologies did you use here?

~~~
kjksf
Go, React, es6. Swift for the mac app. .NET, Winforms and CefSharp for Windows
app.

~~~
danieltillett
Thanks for this. So you are native on both platforms - the screenshots look
really nice :)

------
simoncion
I wonder if you and I are working on the same thing. ;)

I'm building infrastructure that I'm _hoping_ will be needed to complete the
Stockfighter trading puzzles.

( _Hoping_ , because it's entirely possible that I will be lied too _far_ less
than the documentation leads me to believe, and I won't need all of this
sanity checking.)

~~~
danielvf
Good visualization is super helpful. The current levels don't require that
much infrastructure. The level descriptions do deceive a little - just figure
your own ways to the winning conditions.

(I finished level 6. Now building a limit order book in golang for the heck of
it)

~~~
simoncion
Urrgh. I should have put up a "Be dreadfully careful with your replies, lest
they maybe contain spoilers." warning.

Mea culpa. :P

~~~
danielvf
Zero spoilers in my replies, I think. The order book has nothing to do with
winning the levels, just for fun.

~~~
simoncion
For these sorts of things, I'm _unreasonably_ sensitive to spoilers. The
assertion that the current levels don't require that much infrastructure is on
the spoilery side of the edge of spoiler territory for me.

Like I said, there was no way you could have known, as I didn't mention my
opinions on spoilers. So, no worries. :)

------
mikejmoffitt
I'm writing a metroid-like game for Sega Genesis in C and 68k assembly.
Probably nobody is going to play it.

~~~
i336_
It's the journey that counts sometimes. I'm yet to get to the assembly point
myself.

/r/retrogaming would probably like it :P

------
alphadevx
You mean in between long sessions of Fallout 4? I built a new todo app (yeah I
know!), because I could not find an existing one to support my simple daily
work-flow: [https://five.today/](https://five.today/)

------
JoshMnem
Not exactly a product, but I worked on building a programming community in
Berkeley and helped it grow to 1,200 members. We meet twice per week. Our
100th meeting was yesterday. If you like programming, feel free to stop by.

[http://www.meetup.com/codeselfstudy/](http://www.meetup.com/codeselfstudy/)

[http://codeselfstudy.com/edu](http://codeselfstudy.com/edu)

------
jaisonjustus
We're currently building a desktop based time tracking application for
ourselves, later we will release to everyone. Our main goal is to bring us
back on track on our personal projects. Also billing solution for our
consulting work.

~~~
wicker
I'm really interested in this! I've basically strung together some text files
but occasionally lose a couple of hours tinkering to see if there's a better
way. What backend are you going for? If it's Linux-compatible I'd love to beta
test for you when you're ready.

~~~
jaisonjustus
Nice to hear that you are interested in out application. We are making it
compatible for all platforms. Application base is Electron/NodeJS and views
using ReactJS. Sure we will send you the application once the beta is ready.
Thanks. Peace

------
MichaelAO
Atmospheric cube satellite kits for STEM programs:
[http://www.trimtab.space/](http://www.trimtab.space/) We 3D print a cube
satellite, send them to the school, they fill it with their experiments
(conditions are extreme at 100,000 ft.) and we send it up on a high altitude
balloon. We've got a 3U launch planned a few weeks from now.

~~~
justinclift
100,000ft isn't even close to Low Earth Orbit.

Isn't calling that a "satellite" mis-representation? :(

~~~
MichaelAO
Good point, not really about altitude though (velocity).

We're calling it a 'cube satellite' because of the form factor. Any
suggestions would be appreciated!

As an aside, I recently worked on an altitude control system for a weather
balloon (like Project Loon) which is generally called an 'atmospheric
satellite' even though it's not technically in orbit.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite)

~~~
justinclift
Guess it depends on the target audience. If you're launching cube-sat's to
100,000 ft for some pre-testing purposes, then "satellite" might make sense.

    
    
      eg environment testing of cube-sat's at 100,000 ft, as part of their dev cycle prior to real (rocket) launch
    

Other than that though... "High-altitude balloon cube-sat", or "Atmospheric
cube-sat" maybe? :)

------
Schoon
I finished a project! A FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) client for OSX
written in Haskell. [http://www.macbeth-ficsclient.com/](http://www.macbeth-
ficsclient.com/)

------
stuaxo
Just finished a fun year off concentrating on creative code type projects (and
travelling) -

Many improvements to shoebot - (A cairo port of nodebox). Experiments in
graphics for python \- started a midi mapper / OSC controller in kivy. \-
learned about bezier curves. \- wrote various music vis experiments in shoebot
and nodebox-gl. \- wrote a couple of simple VJ apps and actually VJd with
them. \- Experimented with building native android apps using SDL. \- Did
numerous opengl + shader tutorials (and contributed fixes).

Currently finishing off a sort of 'leaderboard' of chapters for a book writer
(to choose the order of the chapters).

A bunch of other things \- vext - a way to use libs like Gtk from virtualenv)
\- time learning about 'boring' stuff, testing, packaging etc.

It's been quite a bit of fun ... hopefully when I start back at work can use
some of this knowledge and not be just 100% back on the backend work.

Doing all this has been really good, and if you are a contractor and have the
chance I'd recommend doing something similar, have been very lucky !

------
ftfish
[https://botwiki.org](https://botwiki.org) \- a "Wikipedia" of online bots

~~~
arsenide
Is there a "random bot" link I missed when perusing the site? I would love to
click on such a thing a few times

~~~
ftfish
That would be great, see
[https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org/issues/35](https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org/issues/35)

Also, I only saw the title, not realizing the OP only asked about projects
started in December O:-)

------
_____________-
A new web browser with a smarter search bar, DuckDuckGo integration, and a
design that makes it easier to focus on the webpage.

------
chippy
Building a "how bloated is this website?" service / browser extension.

~~~
danieltillett
Great idea - include a function so you can email the CTO automatically telling
them to remove the 22 tracking scripts that their site just has to have.

~~~
chippy
Nice idea. I am thinking on having some way for the company to "claim" a site
to be able to knock it off the hall of shame, and so there should easily be a
way to contact them automatically also!

------
karam
SwipeyTunes - Swipe left or right and clean up your iTunes music library.

[https://medium.com/@Duj/swipeytunes-or-how-i-fell-in-love-
wi...](https://medium.com/@Duj/swipeytunes-or-how-i-fell-in-love-with-my-
music-all-over-again-b3e686b075b3)

------
jpt4
An implementation of hyperorthogonal (aka ZigZag) data structures in Scheme
[0], that respects the bottom-up, dynamic extensibility envisioned by T.
Nelson.

[0] [https://www.github.com/jpt4/chanadu](https://www.github.com/jpt4/chanadu)

~~~
nalck
I'm working on a related project that uses hyperorthogonal data structures to
create better bookmarks:

[https://github.com/ixtechnology/z-mark](https://github.com/ixtechnology/z-mark)

~~~
jpt4
Full disclosure: nalck and I (jpt4) are both members of Ix Technology.

------
oxplot
I'm building a new controller board for Apple Wireless Keyboard (A1314) so
that I could have complete control on what each button does and add new
functionality (e.g. switch b/w devices quickly, fast blutooth
connect/reconnect, longer battery life, mouse control).

~~~
JustinGarrison
Sounds interesting. Would it be applicable to laptops too? I was thinking it'd
be great if I could add functionality to my built in kb

~~~
oxplot
I presume it'd be a lot harder since the builtin one hooks straight onto the
main board. One could perhaps turn the builtin keyboard into a USB one and
hooks it up to an unused port.

------
makaimc
There's nothing like big blocks of time to get some writing and coding done.
Full Stack Python
([https://www.fullstackpython.com](https://www.fullstackpython.com)) got some
major updates with new pages, additional sections on current pages and new
links to resources. The change log [1] and commit log [2] capture what's new.

[1] [http://www.fullstackpython.com/change-
log.html](http://www.fullstackpython.com/change-log.html) [2]
[https://github.com/makaimc/fullstackpython.com/commits/gh-
pa...](https://github.com/makaimc/fullstackpython.com/commits/gh-pages)

------
0xCMP
Realday. "A tool that helps you plan your real day"[1]

I got frustrated with GTD a long time ago. I was super frustrated that my todo
apps would eventually be full of useless information. I loved the ideas of
some bloggers to basically just pick a few tasks for the day and do them. I
thought: "Why not mix the calendar events and tasks in such a way that you
have software that actually encourages you to focus only on the tasks you have
time for?" Hence, you have your "real day" as opposed to the day you thought
you'd finish 20 huge tasks and end up with none attempted.

realday.co (Had MVP up like a few years ago but scraped in favor of current
Golang/ReactJS version I'm building now)

1: Work in progress

------
dr_win
I started a fork of Chrome(Blink) DevTools to enhance developer experience
with ClojureScript:
[https://github.com/binaryage/dirac](https://github.com/binaryage/dirac)

Now struggling to get REPL working properly.

------
navalsaini
I am currently building a new nodejs+go/polyglot framework (known as ArchieJS
- work in progress and on github
[https://github.com/archiejs/](https://github.com/archiejs/)) which makes it
specially easy to build web APIs that can scale using microservices in the
backend.

I was quick to build the Nodejs part of the framework. I have been taking a
longer time building the Go part. Mostly because I am new to Go and am trying
to figure out whats the best way to go about it.

These days I am reading a bit into Dagger, and trying to figure out if I can
put some learnings from Dagger into Archiejs (or particularly the Go part of
ArchieJS).

------
c17r
A couple of Twitter bots:

* [https://twitter.com/hn_frontpage](https://twitter.com/hn_frontpage) displays Hacker News top 30 (to deal with ranking volatility, an article is tweeted once a day) and has both article link and discussion link. Haven't found an existing one that is both the front page and the discussion link.

* [https://twitter.com/tic_tweet_toe](https://twitter.com/tic_tweet_toe) for people to play games of TTT. It remembers each person's W/L/D record.

Working on a web version of cribbage that isn't a Java applet.

Researching idea for my next bootstrapped company.

------
vital101
I started working on getting my private Wordpress plugin and theme update
service out of beta. It's getting closer! Maybe by the end of the month.

[https://kernl.us](https://kernl.us) \- Come check us out!

~~~
coreymaass
Dealing with private, or non-repo updates myself recently, I've been exploring
what it takes to do these. Currently I'm using Freemius, but I'm sure at some
point I'll have to make this work. I'm excited to see another option out
there!

~~~
vital101
We make it pretty easy to do with Kernl. It also supports "push to build" from
GitHub or BitBucket if that interests you. If you have any questions send me
an email: jack at kernl dot us

------
nascentmind
I have been writing a FAT32 driver to understand the FAT32 file system. It is
very exciting as this is my first time I am dabbling with file systems. I will
be porting this to my baremetal firmware for the MINI2440 SBC.

~~~
cristiandonosoc
That's a pretty cool project

~~~
nascentmind
The idea to write a tiny modular driver came to me because of need. Sometimes
developers do not need a write and simply need to read a file. Sometimes they
want a very minimal read and then would like to write. This would be in case
of storing ADC samples and then transferring it via a wireless interface or if
a USB is connected they would want to mount the space as a drive.

------
kaugesaar
A Raspberry Pi/Toggl button-board - where each button represent a client.
Press it and time starts tracking in Toggl.

~~~
danielvf
I was planning on building something similar for my homegrown time tracking
system. Then I realized that I almost always start or switch projects by going
to an email from the client. I setup a hotkey to run some AppleScript that
grabs the current client from the from address in the email.

------
marai2
A Hacker News for Books!

[http://www.vivalabooks.com/](http://www.vivalabooks.com/)

~~~
codewritinfool
Cool! I tried to sign up and keep getting an error about my password not
meeting your requirements.

~~~
marai2
You can email me if you're still having issues, otherwise it requires one of
the following classes A-Z, a-z, 0-9.

------
joshmn
Helping America's inmates reach the outside world.

I used to be one.

~~~
gwintrob
Interesting! Have you seen [https://pigeon.ly/](https://pigeon.ly/)?

~~~
joshmn
I have, but briefly. This is solving a different problem.

I was told today in discussing it with a peer that it's a "marketers dream."

But I am not a marketer. Yes, this is me welcoming intros. :)

~~~
i336_
Do you have a landing page or signup thing yet?

------
adamwong246
In know its a crowded space but I really wanted to "build my own lightsaber"
and design a productivity tool to my custom needs

It's based on the google calendar api. It serves the purposes of a calendar,
todo list, evernote and emacs org-mode as well as being a really pretty time
visualizer. The idea is to be able to visualize your time, from the scale of
minutes to decades. It also tracks your "focus", that is- which activity held
your attention and for how long.

~~~
i336_
This sounds very very interesting.

Some suggested ideas for next steps, in ascending order of responsibility and
burden:

\- Release screenshots for educational/inspirational/as-is purposes (yes
please yes please :D I need ideas for exactly this)

\- Do a code dump in the style of "Have at it. Updated when I add/fix features
I want. I praise PRs and ignore all else. Wanted: maintainer, apply within"

\- Reach the point where you're ultimately answering GitHub issues and closing
tickets at 2:15AM

------
dynofuz
I started [http://percht.com](http://percht.com) recently. I'm tired of
searching multiple sites to find the lowest price for what I want. Percht
aggregates top retailers and finds the same products across them using neural
networks. You can also get price alerts and filter products by specifications.

It's still early so i only have cameras listed, and things may break. I'm
adding tvs next. Let me know if you have any requests.

~~~
guftagu
I tried a similar thing once for my country but the market was too small. I'm
interested in knowing how you're using NNs.

------
lapimlu
Over winter break I made a multiplayer online Connect 4 game.

The twist is, it's a single page app that doesn't use any JS tags.

You can play it on my test server here [1]. Consider it a puzzle to figure out
how it works.

If you want to see the source, it's on GitHub here [2].

[1] [http://45.55.194.211/](http://45.55.194.211/) [2]
[https://github.com/pimlu/connect4](https://github.com/pimlu/connect4)

~~~
i336_
I see what you did there; very cute. :D

Also, kudos for sharing it via mysterious IP address. That kinda thing just
isn't done that much any more :(

------
bphogan
I'm writing [http://codecaster.io](http://codecaster.io), a tool for teachers
to help students in software development classes. Been working on it for over
a year and been using it in my classes. I'm looking for other teachers
interested in using it so I can get feedback.

I have plans for pricing, but before I can approach that, I need more data on
how people will use it.

For technical folks, it uses Phoenix and Elixir, and a lot of JS.

------
tonyhburns
I've been having a great time the last few weeks working on a niche product
database website for flashlights. Since my new operations engineering job has
me moving away from doing web development full time, it's been a nice break
and a good way to stay sharp on the application development side of things.

[https://github.com/flashlightdb/flashlightdb](https://github.com/flashlightdb/flashlightdb)

~~~
i336_
I'm getting NXDOMAIN. :(

------
acesubido
I've been writing a self-hosted Rails application where a company can upload
their binaries/product-files for their customers. Having accounts, their
customers can privately comment or bring up issues on what releases/products
they purchased from the company.

It's somewhat like the "Releases" feature of Github, without everything else.
A minimalistic selfhosted-internal-appstore-slash-customer-service-desk if you
will.

------
acconrad
I finished up the first round of my side project: PeerGym

[http://www.peergym.com](http://www.peergym.com) let's you search for quality
gyms in your area by membership price and amenities - the kinds of things
services like Google Maps and Yelp don't do. Most people do a particular kind
of workout (running, weights), and need special equipment (treadmill,
barbells), and you can't always guarantee you'll know what you're getting just
by the name and a few pictures.

It was mostly an excuse for me to learn Elixir and Phoenix. I've tackled auth,
uploads, geolocation/geospatial DBs, SSL and more, so it's been a lot of fun
and hopefully I can turn this into some sort of tutorial series on building
out a real-world app.

For the future I want to add reviews, community edits, and advanced filters to
make them easier to search and populate. And hopefully, accept payments if
people want to buy passes to their gyms online (or automatically renew their
memberships.

------
jiahen
I am working on a VR editor for Aframe
[https://aframe.io/](https://aframe.io/)

------
johnnycarcin
[https://thewishler.com](https://thewishler.com) a site to create online wish
lists. The "about" page covers the reason (mainly it was a need I had
personally) but it also gave me a reason to play with some new things. Next on
the list is learning how to write a chrome add-on to interact with the site :)

------
jacques_chester
Robojar.

A microsubscription (cf. Spotify, Google Contributor, Apple Music etc) system
that works on the open web while remaining robust to attempts to siphon
payments through fake visits.

As is typical of an engineer, I spend entirely too much time running down
technical rabbit holes. Thanks a lot, ADHD. My current rabbit hole is getting
everything into Concourse CI.

------
turaw
Just started it this weekend, but a git remote + LFS proxy for Perforce
designed around ease of collaboration without requiring a central 'git-to-
Perforce' gateway. Yes, it's a fairly large project, but the time spent
implementing it should be small by comparison to the years it'll add to my
life.

------
drakonka
This isn't something I just started, but I'm going on my third year of
building a browser snail simulation.

------
highsea
[http://whentoexchange.com](http://whentoexchange.com) \- Know the right time
to exchange your money.

Added a bunch of new features, Bitcoin support, etc. over the break.

It’s a website that calculates the best time to exchange one currency for
another accounting for the various exchange rates involved.

~~~
NIL8
Site looks great! I am saving it and will definitely be using it. I've wanted
something like this for years.

------
IceyEC
I started building an instant messaging system based on Tor's anonymity model
while taking advantage of NaCL and Rust for type safety, speed, and modern
crypto. Have gotten most of the crypto functional, now I just have to figure
out my DHT implementation so you can find the person you want to chat with :-)

------
fananta
I've been building a fun concept that I've had to deal with as a product
manager.

A product update timeline (change log) that you can quickly add to your
website: [http://productmap.co/](http://productmap.co/)

Will be ready for a beta launch at the end of this week!

------
cinjon
A translation service for large foreign documents (mostly PDFs). There's a
first pass reproducing the PDF in html and a second that machine translates it
into English. Users can then gist a document and select any section to get
professionally translated. It's live at OneDossier.com.

------
trm42
Just finished my Raspberry Pi 2 -> Macintosh Plus DIY HW project:
[https://medium.com/@trm42/raspberry-pi-2-macintosh-plus-
rasp...](https://medium.com/@trm42/raspberry-pi-2-macintosh-plus-raspintosh-
cd2f6691fecf#.yjsf6im6d)

^____^

------
Arguggi
A substitute for the conky part in my $ conky | dzen status bar. It's
practically a learning exercise.

I was inspired by posts like this one [1] to give the free monad a spin and
after ~300 lines i'm almost done. But then I found other posts that talk about
free and cofree [2] that I still can't really understand so I guess there
still is some room for improvement.

[1] [http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-
invented...](http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-
free-monads.html) [2]
[http://dlaing.org/cofun/posts/free_and_cofree.html](http://dlaing.org/cofun/posts/free_and_cofree.html)

~~~
codygman
I'd say try and finish before making further improvements.

------
durch
I've been keeping busy with re:search, an Amazon product review search, mining
and insights, [http://research.oneiros.cc](http://research.oneiros.cc)

An interface on top of a learning algorithm that would alert users when
certain conditions are met (certain word mentioned for example) as part of an
Amazon customer review.

POC version would allow users to subscriber to products sold on Amazon and
search through its reviews, as well as get some basic statistics about lexic
patterns in reviews (positive or negative, most common words...). Based on the
initial adoption the learning algorithm would come into play and provide
suggestions and insights based on customer reviews.

------
zbjornson
Finished a lot of stuff:

\- First blog post, benchmarking AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure
storage, [http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2015/12/29/cloud-storage-
perfor...](http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2015/12/29/cloud-storage-
performance.html)

\- MongoDB driver for Mathematica,
[https://github.com/zbjornson/MongoDBLink](https://github.com/zbjornson/MongoDBLink)

\- Started packaging bioinformatics tools for Mathematica (a la Bioconductor),
[https://github.com/zbjornson/BioTools](https://github.com/zbjornson/BioTools)

------
waigani
Over Christmas I open sourced Lingo. A tool to manage code quality at scale.
Here's the story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832511)

------
anindyabd
I'm building a website for managing personal budgets for my girlfriend
(existing applications do not meet her needs). I'm using Node and React for
the frontend; this is giving me a chance to learn React, which I've never used
before.

------
bbrennan
I've been working on a web-scraping tool for API documentation, scrape-to-
swagger

[https://github.com/bobby-brennan/scrape-to-swagger](https://github.com/bobby-
brennan/scrape-to-swagger)

------
mrfusion
A tool to guide you when optimizing a piece of Sql. It will rerun it and tell
your if your results have changed from the original Sql.

It will give you tips on what to change and let you time your query and see
other resource info.

Anyone interested in being a beta tester?

------
mhluongo
Experimental scraping tools in Clojure.

Right now I'm focused on what we need for
[https://foldapp.com](https://foldapp.com), supplementing what we've already
built (first Python, then Scala).

------
fundamental
I've been slowly working on a new UI toolkit designed to provide first class
mruby support, provide linear programming constraints for layout, use openGL
rendering via nanovg, and use a variant of qml (dsl using reactive properties)
for widget definitions. Qt was nice for some initial prototyping, but given
the scope of some user interfaces that I'm developing a new toolkit seemed
justifiable. The old pain points mainly included ease of scripting,
performance, and easier custom widget definitions (mainly for data
visualization).

------
palidanx
Over the holidays I built a site which returns foods with the highest amount
of a given nutrient. So for example you can get all the foods highest in
potassium, vitamin d, iron, etc.

http:/www.getnutrient.com

~~~
poushkar
Why not using WolframAlpha? For example:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=food+ranked+by+potassiu...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=food+ranked+by+potassium)

------
JimWestergren
I'm building a website and API which presents stats and data for millions of
domains: [http://domainstats.io/](http://domainstats.io/)

------
bovermyer
I started building a personal dashboard app that centralizes a few things I do
all the time in one place: task management, note-taking, GitHub assigned
issues/PRs, etc. Health tracking is next on my list of features to implement.
Then I'll probably do a design pass.

It's not really intended for use by anyone but me, but the code is open source
anyway. [https://github.com/BenOvermyer/kettle-
dashboard](https://github.com/BenOvermyer/kettle-dashboard)

------
notoriousarab
A pushd / popd like utility except that it works globally. You aren't
restricted to having each terminal with its own stack; it's a global stack. I
found this to be a much quicker way to navigate the terminal.

It uses shared memory to store the stack, thus making it "global". Still needs
some polishing.

Check it out. feel free to give feedback, pull request, whatever.

[https://github.com/christarazi/global-pushd-
popd](https://github.com/christarazi/global-pushd-popd)

------
chown
Finished big milestones for couple of projects and on going development:

\- Snub: Manage .gitignore files from the terminal or from the status menu
bar. Free and open source:
[https://github.com/ashokgelal/Snub](https://github.com/ashokgelal/Snub)

\- LightPaper: Finished rebranding, just released 1.2 alpha and continuing the
development:
[http://lightpaper.42squares.in/](http://lightpaper.42squares.in/)

------
ld00d
An iOS (Swift + SpriteKit) game my 8yo designed late last year. I started on
it late last year, but I didn't get very far. During the break, I started
fresh using Tiled.

------
LAMike
Bitcoin + fantasy sports

------
benologist
Started making a 1200 piece, 5k resolution jigsaw puzzle app.

------
samuelngs
A mithril server-side render for Go, another project is a socket.io-like
websocket framework which focused on horizontal scaling written in Go.

[1] [https://github.com/samuelngs/go-mithril](https://github.com/samuelngs/go-
mithril) [2] [https://github.com/samuelngs/go-
sphere](https://github.com/samuelngs/go-sphere)

------
revelation
Qt, and it's taking forever.

------
DonaldFisk
Over the Christmas break, I got macros working in Full Metal Jacket. There's
one more thing I need to do to make the language easier to program in, and a
few loose ends to tidy up. I'll update my web page
([http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html](http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html))
soon to reflect this.

------
codegeek
building a brand new Learning Management System (LMS) or simply call it Course
Builder. Planning to make it open source for self hosted but not quite ready
to put it online yet. Building it with API first in mind so technically you
can build your own interfaces on top of it. Backend including API portion
built in PHP Laravel. Default Front end in Angular 1.4 but lets see how it
turns out overall.

~~~
NIL8
Would love to know more about this...

~~~
codegeek
sure. how can I reach you ?

~~~
NIL8
Do you have a website or something I can look at? I can send you my email. I
just don't want to post it publicly.

~~~
codegeek
sure. see my website on my profile. you can contact me through there.

------
ericb
A saas performance testing tool that lets you run real-browser load tests and
reuse your functional tests for load testing.

[http://browserup.com/signup](http://browserup.com/signup)

The idea is that machine-hours are cheaper than man-hours, and the hardware to
run real browsers is cheap enough that for non-trivial apps, it often makes
more sense to run real browsers.

------
dakoller
I am working on an AWS <-> Slack integration
([https://dev.aws2slack.com/](https://dev.aws2slack.com/)), which allows you
to interact with your AWS accounts from inside Slack using CLI commands.

Additionally you get Trusted Advisor checks and CloudTrail event
notifications, which you can e.g. use to get alerted on unauthorized API
access.

------
danielovich
Doing [http://hapii.co](http://hapii.co) a web app for continuously getting
feedback whether people are happy at work.

Intro here
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTYcCjYo2g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTYcCjYo2g)

Sign up at [https://app.hapii.co](https://app.hapii.co)

------
tmaly
[https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com)

a different take on finding food dishes by your location. I launched a rough
version a few months back, but I am in the process of adding picture support
and making it look better.

I have family with food allergies, and I have also wanted to eat better when I
eat out, so those two cases are going to be my focus.

------
jjuliano
I've been building Markdown-UI, a framework that uses the Semantic-UI
framework to write responsive and beautiful websites and UI's in Markdown
syntax. It comes with a REPL.

[https://jjuliano.github.io/markdown-ui](https://jjuliano.github.io/markdown-
ui) \- Create Beautiful and Responsive Websites in Markdown Syntax

------
tixocloud
I am building an app that helps Canadian homebuyers research and get more
information on neighbourhoods. It's still in the early stages but I am looking
to overlay more information.

Would love your feedback on the usability of the app. Also looking for help to
continue growing the website.

[http://getinsightico.com](http://getinsightico.com)

------
altsyset
I was looking for a free car buying and selling site. Couldn't find one in my
geographic location so I decided to build one myself.
[http://www.hulucars.com/](http://www.hulucars.com/) is just the start and
hope to continue growing. I have decided to take the MVP online and continue
developing.

------
yitchelle
I released a short book on unit test. I am focusing it towards embedded
software, and try to be agnostic to any particular unit testing tool.

I started it about 6 months ago on Leanpub and iterated it openly. Interesting
journey so far.

[https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest/](https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest/)

------
bsamuels
A networking and chapter "history documentation" site for alumnus of my
fraternity. There's a facebook page for alumni, but since many of them are
older people, it rarely sees use and many alumni don't even have a facebook
page.

The biggest hurdle in the design right now is figuring out a mechanic to
encourage people to visit the site regularly

------
YogeeKnows
I'm working on side project to lessen the pain of people who have got parking
tickets. Involves Meteor, iOS + android app.

------
justinholmes
I am working [https://www.ticketscale.io](https://www.ticketscale.io) out of
pure frustration of the current state of ticket selling solutions/platforms.
They either can't handle the volume and go down or they put users into a
queue. Ticketscale aims to address this.

SocksJS, Lmax Disruptor, scylladb

------
hactually
[http://www.cravecoffee.co.nz](http://www.cravecoffee.co.nz)

Coffee subscription service based in New Zealand.

Tech wise it's all Go on Google App Engine with a dash of jQuery and I had to
extend the library for Braintree payments to work with GAE.

Anyone interested in using/testing/anything please drop me a mail: nsglynn at
gmail

------
kidproquo
Spent the last 3 months building Tasktopus
([https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus](https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus)).

Tasktopus is a lightweight, task manager for the desktop (Mac OS X, Windows
and Linux).

Tasks are managed on a Kanban-style board with Backlog, Doing, Done and
Archived columns.

Built using Qt.

------
sianliu
Every week we'll do a family dinner with my in-laws. We love to eat and stingy
so I'm building a web scraper using Scrapy to scroll through Groupon & Qoo10
and save all the deals to a Postgres database. Then, I'll schedule a cronjob
query this database daily for food deals.

------
joongonn
I'm working on a C# self-hosting HTTP server library for standing up
restful/websocket based services. Managed code only, with focus on Linux(Mono)
deployment.

[https://github.com/joongonn/mHttp](https://github.com/joongonn/mHttp)

------
lindbergh
I'm also building a data driven (mostly NLP) portfolio optimizer, based on
expected utility theory! It's a naive model, but it also has statistical
bounds on its efficiency relative to the regret, which is an interesting
bonus.

Out of curiosity, what kind of model (loss function) are you using?

~~~
philippnagel
Still very early.

Currently I am planning combining quantitative and qualitative data (mainly
NLP and sentiment analysis). The main goal is to build a robust system.

Therefor I am working on implementing Minimax and Tail-Risk-Hedging as a
Spiking Neural Network.

------
andersthue
I am building an app for our agile work method called TimeBlock - a method
that helps makers and managers communicate better and more clearly thereby
helping them to a less stressed and more fun work enviroment.

[http://timeblock.com](http://timeblock.com)

------
rayalez
[http://fictionhub.io](http://fictionhub.io) \- the best place to share and
discuss fiction.

[http://orangemind.io](http://orangemind.io) \- my personal project, comics
series(started only recently).

------
widgetic
Over the past few months we worked on a simple web tool that allows anyone to
create visual interactives on the spot.

[http://www.vuzum.com/case-studies/widgetic/](http://www.vuzum.com/case-
studies/widgetic/)

------
namidark
Continuing work on adding more OS support for
[https://sysward.com](https://sysward.com) \- patch management and security
notifications for a range of linux OSs ( Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, SUSE,
OpenSUSE )

------
Lordarminius
1.An application that helps healthcare workers make better decisions.

2.An app for salespeople. It helps track prospects, keep sight of targets and
communicate with home office staff and other members of the team. You could
say I'm a SalesForce competitor.

------
lrvick
[https://hashbang.sh](https://hashbang.sh) \- An (intentionally) cryptic free
shell service, network, and community for the curious to learn
shell/unix/security with like minded people.

------
snowball2000
Updating my website which provides services for students in Australia
[http://www.studentbees.com.au](http://www.studentbees.com.au) I've added the
voat portal to replace the old forums.

------
jrm2k6
I am working on different things:

\- some newsletter + different API wrappers in Laravel

\- a widget easy to integrate on your website, fetching your contributions
from Github and Bitbucket to display them in a calendar.

\- A reading companion for a middle school in San Diego.

------
siscia
I built a simple priority queue, the idea is to use it as microservice, now it
works only in memory, but if people likes the idea I can improve the software
and add features...

It is open source at github.com/siscia/numerino

------
tunesmith
I'm playing around with some of the various ways that dot/graphviz-like
functionality is workable (for some level of "workable") on javascript.
Currently fiddling with dagre-d3 and angular.

~~~
benjamincburns
Would be very curious to see what you come up with if you're willing to flick
me an e-mail when it's done (see profile).

------
wj
[http://www.workplay401k.com](http://www.workplay401k.com) \- automated
financial planning and budgeting software for 401(k) providers to offer their
participants.

------
MrFoof
Bootstrapping Business #2. Well, actually bringing in revenue, since I started
this a few months ago. Within about $200 of break-even at this point.

In summary, buy reliable used cars that are rough around the edges and with
low asking prices. Spend leisure time doing necessary repairs to ensure
reliability, safety. Spend time doing detailing work, which in the future may
include repainting panels, and basic underbody rustproofing. Use as a car for
2 to 3 weeks as a burn-in to ensure I have something that meets my quality
standards. Sell for 125-140% of cost. Limit yearly sales to keep under the
transaction limits for a non-dealer.

\-----

Pros:

* Excluding first car, cost me ~$2500 for good tools and safety/disposal equipment.

* Usefully leverages my vast knowledge of the automotive landscape.

* Improves my sales and negotiation skills, which will benefit Business #1

* Improves car repair skills and detailing skills, which is useful since I'm a hardcore car-nut.

* Turns a hobby into something that makes money. I'm having a blast and making money doing it.

\-----

Risks:

* Unable to move a car, reducing profit, which means time not well spent.

* Poor assessment of a car I purchase for resale. Risk eating all profits or taking a loss.

* Losing interest. Though I'd have all the tools I'd ever need for my existing toy.

* My spare time I could spend on other things.

* Fraud, which I'm taking precautions against. This includes things like payment issues, or buyers not completing title transfer and doing terrible things.

\-----

Where it goes next:

* Nothing exciting for a while. Sticking to things like Corollas, Civics, Camrys, Accords, CR-Vs, RAV-4s, F-150s, etc. Known quantities with easy parts availability and consistently strong demand that are easy to refine my process on (assessment/inspection, negotiation/paperwork, repair, pre-sale QA), and learn how to properly do bodywork at an acceptable level in a private garage.

* In 2 years the hope is to move into still easy-to-move cars with a higher profit-per-vehicle. Lexus ES, Lexus RX, Acura TL, Acura MDX, Mazda MX-5, etc.

* In 4 years the hope is to start going after cars people really desire on the used market. "Affordable dreams." Things like older BMW M cars, AMG Mercedes, Subaru WRX/STis. Late 90s Japanese sport coupes. This has the potential to bring in enough money to cover rent, utilities, health insurance/care, and groceries in full.

Business #1 will always bring in 4-5x as much money, but having a hobby pay
the bills 5 or 6 years from now? I'm stoked. Since there's no pressure for
this to pay the bills, I get to enjoy it too.

------
centrinoblue
been working on a node/angular/react static site generator (graffiti engine)
[https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-
engine](https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-engine) and now a
complimentary HTML template/fragment editor (graffiti composer)
[https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-
composer](https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-composer)

------
coderKen
Just a week before Christmas I started working on a SaaS project to help
organisations keep track and provide useful information on visitors. Involves
an app and a desktop client

------
lowglow
Playa - Open service exchange for autonomous intelligent agents.

[https://getplaya.com/](https://getplaya.com/)

~~~
leesalminen
iOS Safari 9 doesn't like your SSL setup and throws a certificate warning.
This is usually due to a missing intermediate and/or chained certificate file.

~~~
weddpros
Actually, it's because the DNS name doesn't match that of the cert.

My current side project tells me:

Hostname/IP doesn't match certificate's altnames: "Host: getplaya.com. is not
in the cert's altnames: DNS:www.baqqer.com, DNS:baqqer.com"

~~~
leesalminen
I spoke too soon! This happened to me last week because of a missing
intermediate cert.

------
billconan
I hope to update my old ios app from the ios 6 era to swift. I also want to
write a drawing app for ipad pro and apple pencil.

------
makebelieve
An interpreter for metabolic like computing to produce cell like structures as
a mechanism to create machine consciousness.

------
theoneone
A web app for comparing different energy suppliers and finding the cheapest
one all based on your current consumption.

------
jashper
A private messaging webapp that uses webrtc p2p connections and onion routing
amongst facebook friend circles

~~~
mike-cardwell
Is any of this publicly accessible? Links?

------
git-pull
I'm studying FreeBSD, C, C++, SDL2 and CMake. I'd love to highlight some of
the open source projects I pitched in with as well as some of my own:

\- aseprite ([http://www.aseprite.org/](http://www.aseprite.org/)) is a cross-
platform animated sprite editor by David Capello. I got FreeBSD support
working [1] and added a shortcut to center the canvas [2]. This was my first
C++ commit.

If you like retro game art, definitely stop by and check it out. It's GPLv3
and you can build it for free, check out their
[github]([https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/](https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/)).

\- uMario
([https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski](https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski))
is an NES Mario clone in C++ and SDL2. Check out the youtube video [3]. I got
it building on Linux, FreeBSD and OS X [4]

\- Then a couple of tiny C projects with CMake that are sort of boilerplate
ATM, but they're my first C programs. The cool thing is they use permissive
licensed libraries and build across platforms since they use CMake.
[https://github.com/tony/sdl2-playproject](https://github.com/tony/sdl2-playproject)
/ [https://github.com/tony/reST-lex-byacc](https://github.com/tony/reST-lex-
byacc) / [https://github.com/tony/ncurses-
example](https://github.com/tony/ncurses-example).

On that front, I'm reading a book called "Compiler Design Using FLEX and YACC"
by Vinu V. Das, which has been going good. As well as Lazy Foo's SDL tutorial
([http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/](http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/)).

\- Another thing to mention is automatically rebuilding / reloading scripts
when a file is saved. I started using entr(1) for that,
[http://entrproject.org/](http://entrproject.org/). Previously on projects
like tmuxp and vcspull I've used sniffer (and looked into watchman) but have
found this works best cross-platform. FreeBSD has file watching a bit trickier
since we don't have inotify or fsevents.

\- On the dot-config front ([https://github.com/tony/.dot-
config](https://github.com/tony/.dot-config) / [https://github.com/tony/vim-
config](https://github.com/tony/vim-config)) got virtualenv + python 3 + vim
working together [5], as well as neovim fully compatible with my standard vim-
config. I'm now using neovim full time and all my plugins without any
problems. They loads asynchronously with NeoBundleLazy and the autocompletion
is async thanks to Shougu's deoplete.nvim [6].

[1]
[https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/893](https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/893)

[2]
[https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/892](https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/892)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jya5He7KFsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jya5He7KFsE)

[4]
[https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski/pull/1](https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski/pull/1)

[5] [https://github.com/klen/python-
mode/pull/609](https://github.com/klen/python-mode/pull/609)
([https://github.com/klen/python-
mode/compare/develop...tony:p...](https://github.com/klen/python-
mode/compare/develop...tony:python3))

[6]
[https://github.com/Shougo/deoplete.nvim](https://github.com/Shougo/deoplete.nvim)

------
afarrell
A tutorial for learning automated deployment with SaltStack.

------
forgottenacc56
Another idea that no-one will use.

~~~
enobrev
Will you?

~~~
forgottenacc56
Actually yes. Useful for me.

I always start out thinking others will LOVE my idea until I release it and
no-one uses it.

You're a fool until you're a genius. One day I'll be a genius.

~~~
amorphid
What are you actually building?

