

Ask HN: What are you working on right now? - andrewtbham

What are you working on right now?<p>I'll start...  I am working for as a contractor for a company that sends messages (phone calls, text messages, and emails) for schools and businesses.  Currently I'm working on an android app that is a front end for they system.<p>in my spare time i work on a side project... search engine with integrated social bookmarking
http://www.searchstream.co
======
Sukotto
I'm selling the majority of my stuff and prepping my condo for sale. I expect
my employer to go out of business soon and I have to leave the USA once that
happens (my work permit is non-transferable and the green card application
didn't work out).

~~~
simonista
Wow, that sounds like a bummer. I'm really sorry to hear that. May the future
hold better luck for you.

~~~
Sukotto
Well, it would totally suck if we were carrying any unsecured debt. Luckily we
live below our means so we have (some) money banked.

So I'm considering taking the family for a 6 month world tour (while I'm still
young enough to handle it)... if we're frugal we might be able to stretch it
out to a full year.

Guess I better put "get homeschool materials" on my todo list eh?

~~~
prawn
Do it. My parents took me (and my siblings) out of school at age 14 for four
months in Asia (three months in China, rest of the time in Thailand, Malaysia,
HK) and it was a great experience. Already had an appreciation of it but grew
up with a massive appreciation of travelling to new places and seeing
different parts of our planet. Will always be thankful for my parents having
done that for us.

Have been back to China twice since, Thailand a few more times, etc.

~~~
rick_2047
My parents are totally opposite, I have only visited two states of my country
(excluding the state where I live i.e. the awesomest gujarat). So now I
totally lack any enthusiasm for traveling.

But I hadn't realized it till you pointed your enthusiasm out. Umm... don't
know whether to thank you or hate you from my guts.

------
Osmose
Currently working on a Super Nintendo Emulator in Java for my senior project
in college.

The intent is to make it easy to embed the emulator as an applet and link it
to a ROM, save states, etc. so visitors to your site can play an SNES game at
a point of your choosing (IE a blog post talking about the atmosphere of Zeal
in Chrono Trigger with accompanying demo).

We're also hoping to allow Javascript to receive information about what is
happening inside of the game, and possibly to interact with the emulator or
respond to certain events (IE someone makes a monitor for a specific game that
triggers events on, say, the player beating a level).

~~~
jluxenberg
FYI, there's a project called JSNES where someone ported a NES emulator to JS
/ canvas, complete with audio!

<http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/>

------
paulbaumgart
The control system for the automated Heat Exchange Recirculating Mash
System[1] my brother, my dad, and I are building. We're trying to introduce
some repeatability into our home beer brewing experiments.

The biggest surprise so far has been just how time-consuming and expensive it
is to source and buy food grade materials & equipment that can withstand up to
80 °C. Even with heat-resistent plastics instead of stainless steel, we're
still spending over $1000 on this part of the set-up alone.

Code is very early stage, but what I have so far is here:
<http://github.com/paulbaumgart/mash-lauter-control> (mostly I've been working
on the electrical components up to this point).

[1] An example of the type of system (and a strong influence on our designs)
can be found here: <http://powersbrewery.home.comcast.net/~powersbrewery/>

------
andywood
Today was my last day at Microsoft. I'm taking time off to work on an XBOX
indie game, and also the 3D engine I've been tinkering with on and off for 9
years.

------
ganjianwei
"What are you working on" was the standard conversation starter at the Startup
School mixers. It's amazing how there are so many makers; makes me feel like
the world's being improved every second.

~~~
Timothee
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noted that! That's one of the things that
struck me: in "regular" settings, the usual question is "what do you do?"; at
Startup School, it was always "what are you working on?".

Subtle but telling difference.

------
younata
Freshman CS.

"job": homework, trying to improve my grades. personal: implementation of
MIDAS [1].

[1] <http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html>

~~~
achompas
Looks like MIDAS has the party touch. :D

------
PStamatiou
Creating public profile pages for Notifo.com services and projects. We are
lucky to have an active developer community and unfortunately our current
system of having to manually link up ( <http://notifo.com/services> ) cool
projects and services we find is getting to be cumbersome. Service accounts
will be able to provide screenshots/video and detailed description/setup info
for their service. Developers that build projects (as we like to call them..
usually many notifo related things on github, cpan, etc) can setup a public
project profile as well.

As for why I'm doing that, it's to address a common FAQ - "how do I subscribe
to this service?" We want to give services a page to describe that and more.
Kinda like your typical Add-on/Extension Gallery found at the likes of
Mozilla, Chrome, et cetera.

------
dmpayton
I'm trying to get my side project launched for the November Startup Sprint
thing. I'm building an app to help make life easier for people with Diabetes
(my wife is a Type I): <http://diabeti.ca>

------
mrlyc
I'm learning C++ so I can get a job. I've been programming since 1976, doing C
since 1987 and embedded C since 2001 but there are more job ads for COBOL than
C programmers.

------
dpcan
Working on my next Android game, hopefully it will come out this week - maybe
Thursday ;)

Then going back to do some updates to my other games.

In my personal experiences in the Android market, the more polish I put on my
games, the more they sell. Hoping to keep the ball rolling.

~~~
GVRV
Awesome, could share your experiences regarding selling Android apps (Hours
put in to sales made)?

------
herrherr
Still:

<http://getmetricmail.com> \- An easy way to receive Google Analytics reports.

~~~
djb_hackernews
Very cool. I may have missed this but is there a way to share the links? It
doesn't seem like I can add multiple recipient email addresses and the links
only seem to work for my google account as far as I can tell. I guess I'd have
to change the recipient to an inbox that forwards to multiple people?

~~~
herrherr
You can just share the link. Also, the "multiple recipient" feature is nearly
there.

------
ashscott
Working on startup <http://www.estate3d.com>, a place where anyone can have
their physical building/premises created in 3D for the Google Earth 3D
buildings layer and/or embedded on their site.

------
abraham
Current fun project is an RPG played over the phone. You can try it by calling
(415) 689-9751 (while my minutes last). It uses Twilio and static XML hosted
on GitHub. Adding to the story is as easy as forking and making a pull
request.

<http://github.com/abraham/audio-rpg/>

------
mathgladiator
Working on a new platform to crank out several new product prototypes.

Otto ( <http://github.com/mathgladiator/otto> ) = CouchDB replication to
node.js

WIN ( <http://github.com/mathgladiator/win> ) = overly simple node.js web
framework

Longbeard ( <http://longbeardstudios.com/> ) = simple UI framework for
engineers/scientists/longbeards like myself.

------
endlessvoid94
Djangy.com - Instant deployment and scaling for django apps. Currently in
private beta.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
sounds a lot like janky, which is slang for slipshod

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Currently working on synchronising information across a wide area network when
the updates are streaming in to all machines from various sources. Application
is soft real-time and semi-safety-critical.

Also working on an alternative to the (extended/unscented/whatever) Kalman
Filter the better to detect and track fast moving objects in cluttered
environments.

Also working on

\+ a web site for my local math association

\+ write-up of a 1800 dimensional optimisation problem

\+ write-up of a variant data structure

\+ write-up of P vs NP

\+ write-up of a real-world example of a fold catastrophe

\+ finishing the analysis of the routines people sent me (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404347> )

I've also got a dozen other projects mothballed, ready to be re-started when
the time is right.

But this week I'm mostly organising the MathsJam weekend. We've got 60 paid-up
delegates and now 20 submitted talks. We can accommodate 120 people (and
possibly stretch to 150) and need 30 to 40 talks. Money comes in, contracts to
sign, people to cajole, all in the name of a weekend of fun.

Hope it works ...

------
zdw
Document sorter, in perl, written with fuzzy searches, data extraction, and
Baysean filtering, along with various other tricks that I haven't seen used in
other document categorization systems. Should help with my paper load.

Also, and XML based (actively using namespaces/xpath/xslt, so json wouldn't
cut it) network documentation and configfile creation system, as everything
else I've seen out there sucks or is limited/nonextensible.

------
bd
Hacking on mrdoob's Three.js / WebGL:

<http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/three/three-obj-3.png>

[http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/three/examples/obj_convert_test...](http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/three/examples/obj_convert_test.html)

<http://github.com/alteredq/three.js>

------
clemesha
Improvements to my app <http://TheWikiGame.com>, making more "game types" like
"Speed Race", "Least Clicks", "5 Clicks to Jesus", etc. After that,
iPhone/Android apps for the game.

~~~
hyperbovine
This is so great! My siblings and I invented "5 Clicks to Jesus" (as I'm sure
many have) during some drunken family gatherings over the past two years. I
had been vowing to sit down and code it when I got some free time, but you
just saved me the trouble. Hats off!

PS Have you ever thought about analyzing the wikipedia graph to make the game
more interactive? (I study combinatorics.) I thought it would be fun to have
the game give you feedback ("Warmer! Colder!") as you muddle through.

~~~
clemesha
Awesome, thanks! I love hearing about people who invented the game - people
tell me all the time, "hey, I invented that!" :-) I certainly did not invent
the game, but I'm determined to make something awesome out of it.

------
RDDavies
I work for a telecom company as a web developer during the day.
(PHP/MySQL/Joomla/XHTML/CSS/JS/jQuery).

Finishing up some work for a side job now. If any of you guys need some
reasonably inexpensive web dev work, let me know, side work is my way of
drumming up $ to launch a side project and provides my traveling/leisure
budget as well :).

~~~
andrewtbham
can u give an idea what reasonably inexpensive means?

~~~
RDDavies
Send an email to ryandavies@gmail.com and I'd be happy to talk with you.

~~~
RDDavies
Any reason this was downvoted? Typically in the 40-60/per hour range depending
upon the work, if your objection was to me not posting this.

~~~
aberkowitz
It was probably downvoted because people like numbers and formulas upfront
versus having to email you.

------
dabent
<http://www.glancely.com/> Instant Etsy Search

Also: <http://www.bigcrumbs.com/> Cash Back Shopping

Oh, and I work at a bank. I don't sleep much.

~~~
code_duck
I can't express how much I despise Etsy. Good luck.

~~~
atomical
Why?

~~~
code_duck
There is a vast amount of discontent in the Etsy community, and this has been
the case as long as I've been involved (2006). The complaints of their
customers apply to nearly every area of the company and are well-founded.

~~~
robgough
Interesting. Etsy was the idea I had years before they actually did it, and
always regretted not following it up.

Hmm...

~~~
code_duck
A large number of Etsy imitators have sprung up (ArtFire, CraftIsArt, Cargoh,
Bonanza, SilkFair, Zibbet, Folksy, etc.) but none of them seem to be
particularly great to me.

Etsy is pissing off their best customers every month, and thousands have
already left in disgust. They have a large lead in terms of size and funding,
but they don't seem particularly capable of getting anything done. The market
is definitely ready for a polished craft market with decent management and
good marketing.

------
huwshimi
Trying to get a bunch of features released for <http://verbapp.com/>. Just
launched <http://hellohype.com/> and need to start getting the word out about
it. Also need to release an iPhone app I made. Rebuilding my blog (using HTML5
and a whole bunch of fun new things). Getting the plans together with a co-
founder for a secret new startup. Designing a whole new brand/site design for
a current startup (and sorting out some founder issues with it). Oh and my day
job (UI/UX designer). I think that's about it (apart from a bunch of tiny
projects, like a font I'm halfway through creating).

~~~
p4r4d0x
Hey, I looked at <http://verbapp.com> and couldn't help but notice the text is
generally a little small. I initially was struggling to read it. I opened up
inspector and started fiddling. Would you ever consider doing it a bit more
like this - <http://i.imgur.com/ic5F8.png> \- or is it intentionally neat?

~~~
huwshimi
I've been redesigning the homepage (one of the many new things that need to be
deployed). As monitor resolutions get higher I think font sizes will go up
(there's certainly a trend that way). I'll have a bit more of a think about
what's acceptable. Thanks for bringing that up.

------
saurabh
I am working on a CMS that is "data first, design next". There is a large
number of people saying people hate filling up forms. They hate wizards. But
existing apps compounded the problem instead of solving it. Applications like
Squarespace and Weebly are design first. This is where my app differs. I make
it mandatory to have a required minimum data like images and company profile
ready before they dive in to create a simple website.

I will be releasing this app in a few weeks. Thank you for asking. Bookmark
<http://getsetweb.in>

I am located in Mumbai, India.

------
hardik988
<http://Spojit.com> We're trying to make it easier to create and share your
online business card/identity when you meet people at events. We want to make
it more seamless than the two-handed exchanges of business cards that happen
at events - and you gotta do it and repeat with so many people ! Spojit is
about to go into alpha very soon. Do sign up for an invite if you wish to help
us test out the alpha version.

------
imack
<http://profquotes.feedladder.com> \- funny prof quote app

Similar to an idea I showed earlier on HN
(<http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com>), I'm basically trying to generalize this
as a "Reddit for tweets" to create a collaboratively made twitter feeds. Idea
being others could make a group-administered feed on a particular subject.

------
flyosity
I'm working on a series of tutorials that teach web designers how to take
their skills to the iPhone and iPad and start building native iOS apps. Each
tutorial will go through the full process of designing one screen of a
fictional app in Photoshop and then taking that mockup and building the
interface using UIKit. Both the PSD and Xcode projects will be included and
each tutorial will cost less than most computer books.

------
fug
K&Rv2! Since I had issues with University (got admitted into one, but had visa
constraints and missed the resumption date), I'm at home for a year (yet,
again).

So, I'm going to spend this time (against my mother's better judgement, until
she finds me some work or something when she's tired of me being in the house)
learning C properly, learning assembly, and so on.

But, so far, just K&R :)

------
prawn
Mostly doing client work but put up a personal site to summarise my side-
projects and also built this one afternoon the other week:

<http://languagesplit.com/>

Had never built a bookmarklet before and not sure if it's too embarrassingly
basic to try and promote, or worth doing more with. Would appreciate any
suggestions/feedback.

~~~
nimrody
While it looks nice, I'm not so sure about learning a language by using Google
Translate.

The results produced are not always examples of good writing.

~~~
prawn
Oh, it wouldn't really be a primary method of learning a language, more like a
supplement. e.g., take a course or online program at night, then at work you
run this on some news articles for practice just to extend yourself on certain
words.

I know very little Spanish but just by reading Cormac McCarthy books (which
have some dialogue in Spanish only) I have picked up a few extra words and
certainly enough to have a rough idea of what is being said in those books.

Thanks very much for taking the time to look at it though.

------
eel
Currently, I am working on homework: representing a sudoku puzzle instance in
a knowledge representation description language. Next I will study for a
midterm in another class until I can't manage to stay awake any more or 6 AM
arrives, whichever comes first.

At 6 AM, I will shower and go to work as a software developer where I'm
transitioning to building a Windows application in .NET after working in web
development (PHP, JS) in all of my previous professional experience.

After I get off work, I will meet with a professor before going to class and
taking the midterm.

The worst part is trying to cheer up and encourage a friend in a similar
situation, because I don't feel like I am helping. :(

In my spare time, I am solving the Google AI Challenge (<http://www.ai-
contest.com/>) and working with someone on a side project which helps groups
collaborate. If the side project goes well, then we will be co-founders in a
new venture.

------
c1sc0
Work: sports-related startup. Perso: trying to _swim_ (not just float around)
in open water every day all year round, essentially hacking my mind
(meditation) & body (gasp reflex) to withstand the cold temperatures.
Currently 12 deg C. [Edited to add: <http://www.coldwaterswimming.com>]

------
petewailes
1\. Working on two content management systems, currently trying to reduce the
code to the minimum possible, whilst still making it friendly towards new(ish)
developers.

2\. Storyboarding a short stop-motion film for a client

3\. Writing a book (will be somewhere around 80k when all's done)

4\. Studying for a taekwondo grading

I like to keep busy...

------
mattiask
A WPF application desktop search engine/launcher. A little like
Quicksilver/Ubiquity but with a new kind of interface and scope.

------
kaens
<http://github.com/jdodds/voussoir> a node.js app for generating Arch linux
livecds.

It'll sit behind a pylons app in the near future, most likely.

Making a website-as-service for making linux livecds is something I've wanted
to do for a while, and the few projects out there that do it do it poorly,
imo.

I had the start of something like this using Ubuntu a while ago, but frankly
there's not much more room on the Ubuntu isos, and it's kinda a pain to make
sure you're generating them correctly.

Arch is such a simple distro that it's easy to automate. The node.js app is
pretty much just a wrapper over mkarchiso, but if that didn't exist it
wouldn't be too hard to write.

Other than that, preparing for an interview at a sweet-looking company in
Cleveland tomorrow, and finishing up some stuff at my current place of
employment.

~~~
Mod_daniel
I've wanted to do this for so long, good luck, on the app and the interview

~~~
kaens
Thank you! The interview went well, just waiting on them to check my
references and do a background check.

Patches welcome ;) The frontend to it may get open-sourced when I'm done with
it, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to proceed with it yet.

------
bawigga
Just moved to Boulder, Colorado a few months ago to start working for an
agency. Doing lot's of frontend work as well as some PHP using Cake.

In my spare time, working on an implementation of the classic mac game bolo
using HTML5.

<http://hbolo.brianwigginton.com>

------
Groxx
Building / re-building in-house pages for a company, for which I'm making a
lot of entertaining utility code with APIs as simple as I can manage, which
I'm finding is woefully scarce in the .NET world. Studying AI for my capstone
essay. Learning on the side. Trying to figure out where the f&#@^ money goes.

------
daredevildave
I quit my job for PlayStation three weeks ago and now I'm working for the
company I've founded <http://codeamplifier.com>

I'm going to be creating tools that make game developers happier. First up is
a tool to help with localization woes.

------
p4r4d0x
<http://safariextendr.com> Working on polishing a safari extension community
site and attempting to draw traffic in between studying for my software
engineering uni exams. It's tough (on both fronts!) but I'm getting there.

------
Locke1689
Aside from the boring things like taking a full course load, preparing for the
ACM ICPC in November, being the ACM President, being the IT Chair of Phi Psi,
and having a social life, I am co-teaching Northwestern's "Network Security
and Penetration" course this quarter. The project which I'm leading a couple
groups on will be a generalized web attack framework written in Python that
will focus on identification of vulnerabilities, easy presentation and
analysis, and exploitation.

I'm hoping it will also operate using the event-based Twisted framework
instead of the standard multithreading network applications.
<https://bitbucket.org/agocke/attack.py>

------
i386
I work for Atlassian and I'm hacking away on Bamboo 2.7, a CI server.
Previously we only offered a way to execute a single build but through our own
dogfooding we thought a more powerful way of doing it would be to allow a
developer to have a single build that runs many distributed parellel builds.

The cool part: functional test runs for some of our products have gone from
about an hour to about 20 minutes because of this rewrite - so we are hoping
to shorten build times for our customers too :)

[http://blogs.atlassian.com/devtools/2010/10/bamboo-27-beta-p...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/devtools/2010/10/bamboo-27-beta-
parrallel-builds.html)

------
BarryKay
I'm working on coza robot: <http://cozarobot.co.za>

It's like Dotster for co.za domains. The current way to register co.za domains
is a real pain in the butt. Oh, and it has a DNS manager built-in.

~~~
richardw
+1. I always just register a .com. Even though they're harder to find, it's
less hassle. Having an easier co.za registration service is a win.

------
bretpiatt
I'm helping us build a common open cloud computing foundation so everyone can
focus on building applications that solve business problems.

Sure, this sounds like "marketing speak" but it isn't about that. People write
apps that solve problems and they want wide distribution of those apps.

The best way for that to happen is by having a common foundation layer for all
of them to run on. Is the project I'm working on the answer, I sure hope so.
If not I hope you help start a better project to do it.

Re-inventing the wheel is a waste of all of our time. Having to re-architect
or re-code an app to deploy it in different places is reinventing the wheel.

~~~
shotgun
Sounds fascinating to me. But that might be because I've already started that
better project to do it. :P

------
jhen095
Job: C++ and Java developer working on development tools in the data warehouse
and BI space.

Extra curricular: An AJAX site on a LAMPP stack for aiding in teaching
Computer Science. Students can create exercises and answer other students
exercises. Academic purposes only.

Also working on a start-up in the Rural/farming sector to help with the
sharing, transparency and analysis of information.

And planning out my next venture.. something to do with a service providing
templates, distribution and collection of vouchers/coupons for small and
medium businesses

------
joshkaufman
Teaching people the essentials of business and entrepreneurship at
<http://personalmba.com> \- an urgent need for many people, expensive
alternatives, and a huge market. My first book hits shelves on 12/30:
<http://book.personalmba.com>. Learning a lot about marketing and PR during
the launch - it's a whole new world. Next step: live seminars.

That, and my wife and I are expecting our first child around the time the book
comes out. Never a dull moment...

------
kjf
I'm trying to plan a wedding (a lot harder than any project I've started to
date!) and working on some new features for <http://onesentencereview.com>

------
aerique
Most of my current spare time goes into making a Common Lisp bot for the
current Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars. See <http://ai-contest.com>

------
jaxn
I am creating a business intelligence tool for franchises. Have some seed
funding from a local YC / TechStars inspired program.

Also doing some work for a company that makes international e-commerce easier
for US merchants (handles billing, shipping, and duties).

And wrapping up two mobile app projects for clients.

Also I am working on getting married. That part is pretty awesome :)

Edit: technically "right now" I am working on posting comments on HN. This is
not what I should be doing.

------
sebi
Improving some algorithms and calculations that predict future energy
scenarios. The prediction engine is programmed in Ruby, so performance is low
(we chose ruby because of inhouse knowledge and it makes it easy to discuss
with domain experts). Now, fine-tuning/micro-optimising the computation to
optimize speed, so that it's fast enough for a web-request (< 200ms).

<http://www.energytransitionmodel.com>

------
ImMike
Good post; very interesting to read these! I'm a mutual fund analyst by day,
returned to programming a couple of months ago after a long time away to bang
out an idea in Pylons. I've missed it! In hopes of getting out of my daily
grind to put more time into it, I'm selling custom acrylic displays and cases,
focusing on custom iPad display trees, because it's working! Will exit
securities analysis next year- so unfulfilling and statistically pointless.
Index your money.

------
bkrausz
GazeHawk GazeHawk GazeHawk

Sometimes I sleep, but not often.

------
rokamic
I'm building a contact import script for a hip hop artist's newsletter.
Essentially its what powers the "invite your friends" button on the
newsletter.

I am dealing with yahoo's contacts api at the moment. It seems that althought
yahoo! provides a php sdk, a direct fetch of email addresses from a user's
address book still requires a restful get request.

The yahoo php sdk makes the oauth stuff really easy though.

------
cparedes
For my day job, I work on technical improvements for our infrastructure at
Blue Box Group, and I help out in the support queue when there's especially
weird problems to debug. Most things I write are shell/Perl scripts and Ruby
code.

On the side, I'm always reading books on computer science and programming. One
of the projects I'm working on is a toy compiler written in Ruby.

------
happybuy
Primarily awareness building and PR for my recently launched startup -
<http://www.happybuy.com/>

One good lesson thats recently been reinforced as part of this is that
launching is really only the start of the journey. Gaining traction and
building a business once the product is available takes as much if not more
work.

~~~
jdee
the <http://www.fortiguard.com/> network protection we have here in work has
flagged your site as porn wont let me in. just FYI.

~~~
happybuy
Thank you for letting me know. I have requested that fortiguard correctly
reclassify my site.

------
davidmurphy
Building a "DailyCandy/Thrillist"* for luxury travel (email newsletter focused
on luxury resorts, aviation, etc).

<http://murphyonluxury.com> (it's free to sign up). website is very alpha
right now.

Bootstrapping but thinking of raising money.

* not affiliated with either company -- just inspired by their success

------
zck
My employment isn't worth mentioning.

A minesweeper implementation for Emacs:
<https://bitbucket.org/zck/minesweeper.el> . If anyone tries it, please let me
know what you think.

Also, I'm working on learning unicycling, juggling, becoming ambidextrous, and
finding a project to hack on next.

------
kevinburke
Two side projects, one that delays RSS feeds in your inbox until 5 PM - see
<http://rssafter5.appspot.com>, and one that only sends your email every 4
hours, which isn't online yet, as well as prepping for the ACM ICPC, where I'm
improving rapidly but still really far behind most other people.

------
flexd
I'm updating my CV so i can get a job for those days i am not in uni, also
working on a small app made around someone elses work parsing Civilization 5
replay files into HTML5/JS in-browser replays.
<http://github.com/flexd/civ5replays> \-- Too little time, so many ideas!

------
chegra
Rewriting my old site, <http://www.timeline-x.com/VST> formerly
<http://www.virtualstocktrading.com>

Make it Object Oriented. Follow a MVC pattern. Give it a new look and feel.
Not necessarily in that order.

------
vital101
At work: Trying to make our Google Search Appliance play nicely.

On the side: Email campaign analytics done right. There are already companies
in this sector, but I feel I can do better.

For fun: I run <http://www.re-cycledair.com> (PHP & Wordpress Articles).

------
davidmurphy
Building a "DailyCandy/Thrillist"* for luxury travel (email newsletter focused
on luxury resorts, aviation, etc).

<http://murphyonluxury.com> (it's free to sign up). website is very alpha
right now.

* not affiliated with either company -- just inspired by their success

------
aeden
I'm working on growing the customer base for my company,
<http://dnsimple.com/> while at the same time servicing multiple development
contracts that I have open and also maintaining the dotMP registry, registrar
and chi.mp services. Sometimes I also get out of the house. :-)

------
ptn
Job: SugarCRM customization for a client. Own: building a website for file
administration and sharing, to learn Rails 3

~~~
Shamiq
Day job here is making Dynamics CRM awesome...have you tried Dynamics?

~~~
ptn
Nope, sorry.

------
spooneybarger
I'm working on a logicless & valueless templating system in ruby that also has
work going on for java and eventually python. In the process of using it to
see how the idea shakes out and getting examples that people can learn from in
the process.

Also working on a version of Smalltalk that runs on the jvm.

------
mtinkerhess
I went back to grad school this fall, so I'm working on programming
assignments, getting ready for midterms coming up, and making progress on an
Eclipse plugin for my lab. It's a great mix of work in C++, Lisp, Java, Soar,
and soon Prolog, but it's keeping me busy enough that I've put off side
projects for now.

------
maxniederhofer
<http://qwerly.com>, a people search for the social web. Currently works like
a whois for Twitter: put in a Twitter username, get back a page with links to
that person's other social web profiles.

(Tried to submit it as a Rate My Startup last week, but got nixed.)

------
Concours
I'm working on the new <http://www.mcsquare.me> UI and features.

------
gcheong
Trying to see what I can do to get the iPad app my wife and I made to
sustainable profitability (<http://www.bentomaster.com>). We did hit the front
page New and Noteworthy section for iPad apps in Japan a couple days ago but
I'm not retiring yet ;^).

------
pistoriusp
I'm playing around with nodejs, building <http://billable.co.za>

------
headsclouds
For the lack of a better word: I'm building better forum software. It's
something that teams and organizations will find useful for general
communication, idea exchange, even light project management.

We're testing the app at the moment in–house, hoping to get to private beta
before December.

------
jacobroufa
For work, I'm building websites with Drupal. My latest project is
<http://dateunknown.com> . As a side project, I've started to build a Drupal
wrapper for Phono, a jQuery front end for sip calling, sms and xmpp chat in a
browser.

------
Wilfred
I'm fixing the sorry state of Esperanto online dictionaries. My system allows
the user to use any of the major writing systems, tolerates spelling errors
and even does some stemming and morphology analysis. It's been interesting
because this has never been done before (AFAIK).

------
lukevdp
I'm building a results based website builder at <http://www.netmate.co> and
iterating photography shopping cart software
<http://www.photographyorders.com>

------
mswen
I am working on taxonomy development, and building a rule base in a NLP
framework in order to automatically identify taxonomy traits in raw text. Also
working on defining/optimizing a matching engine sitting on top of the
taxonomy extraction layer.

------
dmc
I'm starting work on a few university projects, the main one being a
multiplayer zombie game, turn based, online. see how it works out ;)

also a side project I want to have out before November, in rails. But I'm
keeping it mostly-hush for now =)

------
ekanes
I'm working on changing the way people approach personal development, from the
usual current approach of digesting a huge chunk of information via
book/tapes/DVDs/etc to helping people make little tiny changes that add up
over time to big changes.

------
RoyceFullerton
Trying to get a project launched that has been 80% completed for too long:
<http://chatroulettespy.com>

Does anybody still use Chatroulette? It should work on all Adobe Stratus based
apps.

------
james_ash
Trying to build the best resource out there for learning organic chemistry.
And tutoring online through Skype. Having a blast.
<http://masterorganicchemistry.wordpress.com>

------
shib71
Job: Improvements to the ORM in our framework.

Own: Crossword generator for latin words.

------
maresca
<http://www.openpoll.us>

An electronic direct democracy that will allow Americans to vote on state and
federals bills and elections. I'm shooting to have my MVP done beginning of
next year.

------
csomar
I'm working on an HTML5 video player. The special features that will
differentiate it from others are a sharing widget in the video and a gallery
that show up when the video ends pushing the user to watch more videos.

Any other ideas?

------
jonpaul
I'm working iPhone and Android sports apps: <http://reflect7.com> I also blog
about entrepreneurship and my experiences <http://techneur.com>

------
kranner
Adding Python support to my programming test platform <http://codeboff.in>.

Last week I added random hints that show up during a test session to let
people improve their code (and score).

------
user24
Work: A firefox addon which shows you latest horse racing odds on any website
(<http://oddsanywhere.com>)

Personal: Tweaking ads on my blogs, trying to become the next patio11 ;0)

------
kabuks
Working on <http://bettermeans.com> Open, democratic, project management for
social enterprises. Been coding for over 18 months now, launching November 1st

------
grigy
Working on my startup project <http://inspection2.com>. This is my first
project with Django and JQuery, so I'm mostly spending time learning things.

------
kingkilr
Literally right now? I'm coaching a friend of mine (high school sophomore) in
assisting another friend (college freshman) in his CS homework. I'm a college
junior, never written Java before this :)

------
danilocampos
I am working on learning Ruby/Rails to build a couple of projects I'm
imagining.

I'm coming from C, Objective-C and iOS work. It's a little tough, since the
framework is doing so much for me. It takes detective work and vigilance to
keep track of what's happening.

Getting through it, though!

Day job is consumed with UI prototyping and other product-centric adventures
at Aurora Feint.

------
maxhenderson
Full-time: Consultant to senior finance leadership @ Hitachi Global Storage in
the Bay Area.

Side: Web Development Consultant

Past: Serial Entrepreneur

Next: Looking to join a new startup!

------
benologist
I'm working on the new high score tool for <http://playtomic.com/> since I
moved the leaderboards over to mongodb/mongohq.com the other day.

------
binomial
My main thing: <http://jellly.com/>

Also, a real-time multi-player browser game built on node.js and socket.io,
but this is just for fun.

------
mrduncan
Lately I've been spending as much time as I can working on
<http://milechaser.com> \- lots of really interesting problems to solve.

------
rakkhi
Working on a security risk assessment application: <http://bit.ly/9jKMR9>

Login and subscribe still need a lot of work....

~~~
petewailes
Privacy Policy, not Private :)

Nice design though

~~~
rakkhi
Thanks, spelling is not a strong point! :)

------
TomK32
Database migration. meh. But also some startup i freelance for, a webgame I've
started Saturday and my own startup. I tend to switch between them all week
long.

------
atomical
I'm working on a tool for journalists and researchers to help them archive all
the information they read. Private beta coming up soon if anyone is
interested.

~~~
dmc
Sounds like something I could use. Very interested

------
momotomo
Illustration on an electric guitar and a few submissions for national / local
art competitions. Also designing an org structure for a local Roller Derby
team.

------
mmb
A ruby framework for hosting your own url sharing / archiving site.

<http://github.com/mmb/murlsh>

------
vanelsas
Integrating Buzz into PinkelStar, a free platform for mobile app developers.
Its driving us nuts. Can't get the final redirect to hit our servers, aaargh

------
iworkforthem
I am working on <http://tradesalerts.com> \- email notifications of stocks to
buy in Asian markets.

------
chris_atwood
I'm working for a robotic toy startup and on the side designing an efficient &
flexible radiant floor heating distribution & control system.

~~~
owkaye
Let me know when you have the rfhd&cs done. I'm designing a house that will
use radiant floor heating and I'd be interested to see your system. My email
is in my profile.

------
znt
I'm working on a social caption application which creates the captions
dynamically. There's no image manipulation, everything happens on the fly.

------
Dramatize
Working on a logo (you can see it at the dragthelake.org coming soon page).

The site will be my take on curating interesting content.

------
mrschwabe
iPhone app design for a startup. They don't have a full time designer, so
outsourcing it all to me has been working good for them.

------
acctng
Day job with oil and gas company. Stupidly trying to build a double entry
accounting app in spare time. Learning way too much.

~~~
shareme
try doing it on a dos machine using Lotus-123 macros..:)

------
kaylarose
Remote admin web app for an multi-server "Enterprise" system. Unfortunately
the client-side uses ExtJS, which makes me sad.

------
webgambit
Day Job: custom erp type system for manufacturing/aviation

Startup: personal finance/buget webapp... with a twist.

------
hendler
Tonight: Upgrading MySQL server on AWS.

------
markkat
<http://gokode.com> a tagging platform for conversations.

------
code_duck
Learning Scala, losing weight and wasting time. Oh, and avoiding emails and
actual work.

------
jackvalentine
A complete translation of all the 'Spot does X' children's books.

Yes. I am a student.

------
kurokikaze
Currently working on cooperative game for programmers and a sophisticated web
crawler.

------
jiganti
Wikipedia for ordinary people.

~~~
peteforde
Sort of like <http://simple.wikipedia.org/> ?

~~~
jiganti
Somewhat. We've been working on it for about a month, should have something to
show by next week if all goes well.

------
wushupork
Working on ShelfLuv - adding some features that were requested from the HN
crowd

------
gscott
contact.ly which will use twillio, dropbox, and other services to build a more
modern contact, calendar, file storage system (and for marketing to ride on
the hype of other companies).

~~~
andrewtbham
what makes it more modern?

~~~
gscott
Importing a csv list of contacts defines the contact mangers intial setup. You
can then setup additional fields and group fields together into "sections"
from an administrative interface. Each field can be further defined by purpose
(email, text, phone number) so can group email's together by contact and soon
you could do other things based upon type of field, you can also have sub-
contacts and then the sub-contacts are further defined by contact types so you
can group together emails of all contacts by a certain type.

It took me longer then expected to make (about a month) but now I have a
totally customizable contact manger that is more like a database in itself, it
is searchable and very flexible (no predefined fields).

On the contact list display where you see few fields from each contact you can
define what fields are displayed on that list and each user can change that to
there own preference. This way the data is out front and may save users an
extra click to go see some piece of contact data they use the most.

I am working on building a billing system for the twillio api, keeping track
of all of the sms messages sent, phone calls made, etc. Once I am done with
that then I can add to the contact manager functionality, let's say you have a
non-profit and you have 500 contacts that are going to be doing your charity
"fun run" you can send them out a reminder via a phone call and sms to
remember to show up, etc. Once you have your contact in the system, you can
make "lists" and so your contacts here would be on the "fun run 2010" list for
example. Then next year you can send them an email inviting them to do the
2011 fun run...

I feel this is more modern at least in what I am doing as this can be as big
as or small as a person needs. If a company has 100 fields (like the cw tv
network does they easily have 100 fields which is who I designed this for)
then it will work for that and if a company only has a few fields they can
grow out to the number of fields they need but without having that overhead
right away.

------
thibaut_barrere
I'm working on a site that will be useful to all of you, hopefully.

------
tectonic
I'm writing a web application in coffeescript.

------
SteveMoody73
Writing firmware for an RFID reader/writer

------
sam26880
this is interesting. I had a similar idea. How much is your pricing point for
this send message site.

------
rokhayakebe
google anlaytics for business phone calls. <http://contexium.com>

~~~
tron_carter
Is this built on the twilio platform? Or did you roll your own?

------
steveklabnik
Tons of stuff around Hackety Hack. It's got a new blog, <http://blog.hackety-
hack.com/> . I also started a blog for the Shoes project,
<http://blog.shoesrb.com/> . I've been working on wrapping up the 1.0 release
for Hackety, and tons of other bits that are currently a secret, but will be
reported soon. :)

The last 90% is the hardest 90% in any project.

------
toumhi
working on my first web app to keep track of travel expenses.

------
SteveMorin
Hacker News Repository

------
rick_2047
This is not your kind of start-up (I have found HN to mostly work on SaaS
applications), its more manufacturing based.

Right now working with another guy to make cheap mobile chargers to export to
the USA. So, any cheap charger you may purchase 4-6 months from now may be
from my design. But that's just helping a friend, I do not have any monetary
gain from it. Apart from that, whenever I will get time I a company is ready
to hire me as employee # 1 in there education department (its a software dev +
CS education startup).

But on my own home front I am finally starting to work towards my own idea
which has been appreciated by some industry people and entrepreneurs I have
met. Its a localized hobby kits shop. I provide them with hobby kits which are
cheap and have manuals which are in the customer's native language (right now
just english, hindi and gujarati as my target right now is gujarat). I know
its not that fancy, but hey you people gave me the bug to at least try
something before giving up on it (i.e. if its not obviously stupid). Anyways,
working on MVP kits for electronics, computer programming, robotics and (if I
can manage it) maths.

I have a few slides prepared if anyone wants to see.

EDIT: And btw, I am in second year of engineering

------
ahoyhere
Today I'm teaching for a few hours on DOM events (yesterday I taught for 4
hours on JS: The Language) for <http://jsmasterclass.com>

Finishing the launch & prep for my "build your own product, market and sell
it" course - <http://unicornfree.com/30x500> (about 65% sold out already, I'd
like to see 100% by Monday)

Working with an illustrator to create custom illustrations for my launch
concepts, & a duo of marketeers/illustrators to create fun promo materials to
help grow my profitable SaaS

Working with my biz partner (husband) and freelancers to create a system,
priorities, and workflow so we can all work together on bug fixes & new
features to grow that profitable SaaS - <http://letsfreckle.com>

(Delegating well is INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY hard.)

Wrapping up the last bits to get <http://charmde.sk> dogfood-ready

Sourcing the exact mid-century furnishings & art I want for our apartment -
cuz I'm superficial like that

Hacking on a fairly revolutionary (if I do say so myself) decision-making & pm
tool, with my husband & a friend

Suffice it to say: TOO. DAMN. MUCH. But that last project is just pure fun,
and it's really making everything else less burnout-y.

------
crizCraig
A craigslist reputations service <http://craigrep.com>. Although, I'm stuck
trying to figure out how to make it secure and user-friendly after realizing
that a referral URL was not enough to verify that a request from craigslist
came from where it said it came from due to referer spoofing proxies. A
browser plugin seems to be the only way to do this, and that won't reach
critical mass.

~~~
shotgun
Why can't it be done without a browser plugin?

~~~
crizCraig
Just because the only way I think it will take off is if the ratings are
displayed on the actual craigslist posts.

~~~
simantel
I would totally use that as a plugin. Why do you think that couldn't/wouldn't
take off?

~~~
crizCraig
Well, I was counting on the viral aspect where you saw a rating and said, I
want one of those. My gut says that most people who do that will not want to
install a browser plugin. Even if I made one for all possible browsers.

It's also hard for it to spread through the plugin directories because the
people who download it would be too geographically fragmented.

------
noverloop
I'm working on a remote control for Google TV based on computer vision and
gesture recognition.

This is my masters dissertation and I'm currently researching algorithms and
techniques that enable real-time detection and tracking of hands or objects.

A prototype will be made for the Logitech revue if I succeed :)

------
shareme
Hello, my real name is Fred Grott and I am an android developer with previous
exp in enterprise java and lamp and mobile java.

I am building some android applications and some sever side applications to
demo android integration via restlets and GoogleAppEngine.

Basically using this as a resume to obtain some development contracts so that
I can fully launch my startup.

Failed Startups thus far: -Xspot-same as Google Latitude but I did not execute
fast enough to get prototype out to obtain venture funding

Hopefully, I will have better luck this time.

------
gubatron
FrostWire for Android

