Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool? - superbaconman
======
adrianh
Soundslice ([http://www.soundslice.com/](http://www.soundslice.com/)) --
animated guitar tabs / sheet music.

Demo: [http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-
so...](http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-solo-guitar-
tab/)

It's cool because:

* The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: [http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta...](http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_tab.htm)). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement.

* It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new song, you generally listen to a recording of it, and it's a pain to cross-reference the recording with the sheet music/tab.

* It's one of the most advanced HTML5 apps on the web. Almost everything is done in <canvas>, and it has dozens of UI details ([http://www.soundslice.com/help/](http://www.soundslice.com/help/)). I did a tech talk about the various JavaScript/HTML5 stuff if you're interested: [http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice](http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice)

* Proudly bootstrapped and made by two people.

~~~
natural219
This is amazing. Awesome work. How much trouble have you ran into licensing /
obtaining tabs for popular copyrighted songs? I think a legitimate tab
database itself would be incredibly valuable and could power awesome services
like this.

I look forward to hearing more about this project, I think this is absolutely
great.

~~~
adrianh
We sell tabs as part of our Pitch Perfect program
([http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/](http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-
perfect/)), and for that we deal directly with the artist to clear copyrights.

The YouTube (free) part of the site is meant to be a loss leader / tech demo
for Pitch Perfect and our technology licensing. We haven't run into any
licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, as I
don't believe in putting ads on the site, and I'd like to keep a free version
and a pay-for version.

------
carleverett
A high performance, affordable personal airplane:
[http://www.skycraftairplanes.com](http://www.skycraftairplanes.com)

It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118
mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS,
collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod.
They sell for $55k.

Here's the HN post I made a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062)

~~~
mililani
That's awesome. I was thinking about buying a personal plane to fly back and
forth from Canada to California. I came across this, though:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis)

It's called the Synergy plane, and I think it will supposedly the most fuel
efficient personal plane. Thoughts?

~~~
carleverett
That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat.

Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be
extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're
using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1]
and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will
still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreasonable to think that this
plane could make it to the market for under $200,000, and its hourly
operational costs when you factor in engine overhaul will be around $50. Ours
is less than $15.

The frustrating thing however is that since this plane is still in early
development stages, it will be several years at least until it they are ever
able to deliver an aircraft. The nature of the industry is that everything
takes a tremendous amount of time. We were able to avoid this for the most
part by using an airframe design that was created in the Czech Republic a few
years ago, but before this our plane took 7 years to develop. Even given this
huge head start, we've been working almost 2 years on SkyCraft and are still a
few months from being able to deliver a plane. Flight testing, certification,
and setting up production are all enormous tasks, and unlike a lot of
technology startups, you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation
since any product defect will mean death.

There are a lot of things keeping flying very expensive, but I laugh when I
hear people in the industry talking about how General Aviation is dying. The
fact that the GA industry even exists right now when it is so absurdly
expensive is a testament to the fact that people will do pretty much whatever
it takes to fly. We're one of the few companies right now actively pursuing
the goal of making a safe, high quality airplane affordable for a middle-
income person, and when this goal is achieved, General Aviation will explode.

[1][http://www.deltahawkengines.com/Firewall%20prices.shtml](http://www.deltahawkengines.com/Firewall%20prices.shtml)

[2][http://www.deltahawkengines.com/econom00.shtml](http://www.deltahawkengines.com/econom00.shtml)

~~~
Zak
_you can 't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product
defect will mean death._

Do you think the increasing popularity of whole-aircraft parachute systems
(which I note is an option on the SD-1) will improve the situation? It's my
impression the Cirrus gets away with being hard to recover from a spin by
making parachute deployment the standard recovery procedure.

~~~
bengyusf
I think the whole parachute system affords the pilots, and in my case the
family, a better assurance of safety. My fiancé has a fear of flying and the
parachute does help qualm those fears a bit.

Side note, have you ever tried to put a cirrus into a spin? It's difficult,
iv'e tried. I think that has more to do with Cirrus passing the regulation
than anything else.

~~~
Zak
The only thing I've flown is a hang glider, but I have some interest in
aviation and I read a bit about the things I might be able to afford some day.
I find these especially appealing:
[http://velocityaircraft.com](http://velocityaircraft.com)

I've read that the Cirrus is designed to resist spins by essentially having
the outer third or so of the wings, where the ailerons are fly at a lower
angle of attack. I've also read a couple reports online by pilots claiming
they didn't have much trouble getting a Cirrus to spin intentionally. In
online discussions about the Cirrus, I saw it claimed that very few pilots
successfully recover from accidental spins, so designing an aircraft to resist
spins and including instructions to use the parachute strikes me as very
reasonable.

------
rolleiflex
I'm building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to
create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It's fully
encrypted. Take a look at [http://www.getaether.net](http://www.getaether.net)

It's cool because:

* It's anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin.

* It's encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suite using 2048bit RSA keys. The connections most likely cannot be eavesdropped.

* It gives people an unfiltered, unmodified feed of information directly from the sources, with no intervention or censorship.

* It's unmoderated, so there is nobody that's deciding what you should and should not see. You can block people, however. Every client has a threshold of blocks for each node after which it stops showing that node to the user.

* Zero infrastructure.

This is a tool that can be used to either experience / exercise full free
speech here in the west, or can be used for more essential two-way mass
communication purposes where other venues are blocked, banned or self-
censoring.

~~~
scottlilly
I was thinking about doing something similar. One of the things I wanted to
incorporate was an reputation ability (beyond just blocking). It would be
similar to a referral engine in Netflix or Amazon.

So, I'm user A. I mark user B as a high-value poster. User B marks user C as a
high-value poster. When I run across a post by user C, I see they have a good
reputation. If many people I ranked as high-value, also ranked user C as high-
value, then I see user C as having a very high reputation. The same, in
reverse, for low-value posters.

~~~
rolleiflex
This is cool, but you're making assumptions about information that is outside
of your immediate connections. This could work in a network where one could
trust that all the information one receives from immediate connections about
others is true, but that is not the case. In your case, user B could mark
_everybody_ as a high value poster, and it be successful in diverting your
attention. This causes problems even in the core stack, I cannot believe what
a node B will say about at what IP address node C is. A malicious node B could
overwrite everybody's node information to one single IP address to create a
massive DDoS.

So the solution I found is that there are separate degrees of trust for
derived and produced information. If you receive something over the network
about a third party, that's derived information, which might not essentially
be true. But if you have connected to that node personally, that's produced
information, and no derived information can overwrite that.

~~~
scottlilly
You're right, user B could make incorrect (to me) ratings about other users.

Similar to what you say about derived and produced information, I would have
"personal" and "external" ratings. My personal rating for user C (that I make
after reading some of their posts) would override all my other external
contacts ratings of user C.

Over time, if I have a high percentage of different personal ratings from user
B's ratings, then the system would apply less weight to his ratings for other
users.

------
michael_nielsen
A book that explains the core ideas of neural networks and deep learning. Cool
because:

* The book incorporates lots of running code for readers to explore and extend.

* The book's philosophy is to go deep into the core concepts of deep learning, not to superficially cover a long laundry list of ideas. This gives readers a solid foundation to build on, and makes understanding other material much easier.

* Deep learning is the most powerful approach known to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language. The book will help lots more people get quickly up to speed.

The book will be freely available online, and a beta site is coming soon. Pre-
beta mailing list here: [http://eepurl.com/BYr9L](http://eepurl.com/BYr9L)

~~~
mercuryrising
Awesome, signed up as well. Is your QC&QI book still accurate after 10 years
of being in the wild? Have there been any advances that verify / invalidate
the ideas you present?

~~~
michael_nielsen
Thanks!

The quantum computing book holds up okay, so far as I know. Of course, there's
been many new developments since we wrote it, and a text written today would
be somewhat different. But the core material in the field has changed only
slowly, so a book can be surprisingly durable.

------
possibilistic
Laser projection.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs)
(Pong on a 20 story building, billboards, etc.)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5_v2By3Ec](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5_v2By3Ec)
(Multiple laser projectors)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-A9LvPbmg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-A9LvPbmg)
(Canny edge detector)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-
ans](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans) (Asteroids on a 4 story
building)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OCvjq3ps](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OCvjq3ps)
(Reddit's Snoo on a 20 story building)

I've just added a second projector and a few more dacs (thanks to a very
generous donor). I'm doing multiprojection and rectification/distortion now.
I'm planning to get Skyscraper Tetris and Breakout going with some additional
hardware.

I need about ten projectors at 60kpps (or 80kpps at low scan angle) with a
combined wattage of 20W or so. I have endless ideas: I'll bring it online, do
live art/graffiti, turn buildings into twitter feeds, multiplayer gaming, and
NES emulator, etc.

I wish I could afford more hardware and the ability to work on this full time.
:(

~~~
mercuryrising
I'm a little confused - what exactly are you doing? Are you making the
projectors? Are you programming the game? What software are you using? Are you
sensing what it's being projected on?

~~~
possibilistic
Some of the hardware was built (one of the projectors), some of it is
purchased (a second projector due to time constraints, and all of the DACs).
The games, graphic engine, DAC comms, etc. are all programmed in a mix of
Python and C++. Most projection software available is commercial and
expensive, so I've rolled my own stack.

I'm working towards surface distortion mapping, which is increasingly
important in the umbrella concern of rectifying multiple projectors onto a
single coplanar/colinear surface. I'm going to project a series of grids and
have OpenCV automatically align all of the projectors. From there I'll be
working with a logical "frame buffer" (really coordinate/transform buffer)
that is relayed over the network to a graphics server that will dispatch the
drawing jobs and topologically sort objects unless they have preassigned
projector-affinity.

As far as I know, nobody else is building a beowulf cluster of laser
projectors for interactive display. That's my endgame. Really fluid, bright,
fast laser light with incredible geometric output capacity. It won't be
limited to 2D if I can get design a decent wireframe or clipping/culling
engine.

~~~
sbarre
There is a company in Montreal called VYV (I am not associated with them but a
friend works there) who are doing lots of projector/projection type work.. I
don't know if they work with lasers but they are definitely working on solving
the whole multi-projector and distortion mapping stuff that you're tackling..

They might be interested in talking to you, they're still fairly small and
startup-ish but they're doing big things..

[http://www.vyv.ca/](http://www.vyv.ca/)

~~~
possibilistic
I'll definitely look into these guys. I'm unable to relocate right now, but
there might be some future opportunity waiting.

Thanks for the heads up!

------
capnrefsmmat
I'm writing a book about the many ways well-intentioned scientists can (and
usually do) screw up statistics:

[http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/](http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/)

I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics
education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started
reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have
committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely
inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better.

Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000
words of explanation, which I promptly published online.

My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun
writing than figuring out what to _do_ with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious
publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a
proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it
up.

(happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)

~~~
sreejithr
Interesting. My statistics knowledge has become rusty lately. I want to re-
learn the basics before reading this. Can you tell me any resource (doesn't
necessarily have to be a book)?

P.S: I'm interested in knowing stuff like 'why square-root of variance is
standard deviation?". Concepts.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
You might find _OpenIntro Statistics_ helpful:

[http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php](http://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php)

It's a free online statistics textbook, also available in print. I haven't
used it extensively, so I can't vouch for its quality -- actually, I complain
about it a bit in _Statistics Done Wrong_. But I've never come across a very
good conceptual introduction to statistics, so this is roughly the best I
know.

There are also amusing variations, like the cartoon guide to statistics:

[http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-
Gonick/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-
Gonick/dp/0062731025)

If you find a useful resource, I'd like to hear what worked for you.

~~~
vdimarco
O'Rielly's 'Think Stats' is freely available in html/pdf online and is quite
good.

[http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/](http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/)

------
STRML
I'm working on a proxy / community-run fork[1] of Healthcare.gov. After all
the histrionics about the site's performance and bugs, and upon seeing that it
was a Backbone.js app (which I develop full-time), and with
unminified/commented source, I thought it might be worthwhile to pull as many
files from the repo as I could so that bugs could be reported and fixed in the
open.

As the product sits today, it is close to being a functional clone of the
site. Healthcare.gov relies on some very complicated and antiquated auth
systems, from multiple agencies. It is not enough to simply proxy a few
endpoints back to healthcare.gov, some requests need to be spoofed, state
saved, etc., in order to make it work properly. They often use absolute URLs
in their responses as well, which need to be rewritten. I can imagine this
application was an absolute bear to test properly.

I've been working through the login mechanism [2] and it's almost done. I'm
excited about the future of the project and it could really use some coders to
help out and find / fix bugs. If the project gets some real attention, I think
it would be a big help to the folks at QSSI and the nation in general - I
really want to help the project succeed because I very strongly believe in
universal health care and this is the only way I feel I can personally help
out.

[1] [https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace) [2]
[https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/issues/1...](https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-
Marketplace/issues/15)

~~~
coderzach
Someone, give this this guy $90mm.

------
dnautics
"open-source", IP-free anticancer drug candidate
([http://indysci.org](http://indysci.org))

We're launching in January (or possibly December)

It's cool, because we want to disrupt the way that pharma operates. Biotech
could learn a lot from the way that the software industry has been
revolutionized by the open-source philosophy. The world could stand to also
see tangible benefits if we succeed in (re)proving it's actually possible.
People have done this in the past (salk and sabin come to mind); sometimes the
global consciousness just needs a reminder.

~~~
jnbiche
Thank you and awesome! Although I've seen some great projects scrolling down,
this is the first that has elicited a comment. I wish you all the best in your
attempt to disrupt pharma -- it needs it.

~~~
dnautics
Thanks, I'm going to need a lot of luck! We're asking for a lot of money to
give a level of security that this will work out (the balance of the funds at
the end of the research term will be disbursed to city of hope - a hospital
with a cancer treatment specialization). So there's the trickiness of
fundraising, and figuring out the internet. The internet is a hard place. On
top of that, science is always risky, and as much as I can craft a plan B and
a plan C, and dynamically come up with plans, there's always the possibility
of total failure.

------
trey_swann
[https://www.truevault.com/](https://www.truevault.com/)

TrueVault is a HIPAA compliant data backend for apps, devices, and sites.
Developers use TrueVault so they can develop healthcare apps without building
out their own HIPAA compliant infrastructure. You access data in TrueVault via
our API and native clients. Think of TrueVault as Stripe for confidential
patient data. You use Stripe to store credit card data so that you are PCI
compliant. Our customers use TrueVault to store protected health information
(PHI) so that they are HIPAA compliant.

It’s cool because new healthcare applications are paring back their feature
sets so that they don’t have to be HIPAA compliant. TrueVault helps solve this
problem, and prevents legislation from hindering innovation. TrueVault will
handle HIPAA so that entrepreneurs can focus on improving the quality of care
for millions.

Also cool because TrueVault takes care of all of the technical requirements
mandated by HIPAA. HIPAA compliant hosting providers (AWS, FireHost,
Rackspace) only provide a HIPAA ready environment. You still have to spend the
dev time and money to build your own application stack in order to comply with
HIPAA.

~~~
bm98
So are you going to sign Business Associate Agreements with your customers?
They won't be HIPAA compliant otherwise, under the latest HITECH rules. That's
where the analogy to PCI breaks down.

~~~
trey_swann
Yes, TrueVault is signing Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with our
customers.

TrueVault is also the first to cover customers under a comprehensive
Privacy/Data Breach Insurance policy. As a result, TrueVault is able to
indemnify our customers for, from, and against regulatory fines and the cost
of breach remediation.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] - a
server, client, and various related things. The new Minecraft update released
this week and radically changed how networking works, so it's a bit tough to
get it all working again.

It's cool because it's a totally open source recreation of _everything_. It's
got a server, a client, terrain generation, physics simulation, level editing,
classic support... this is one of two _really big_ projects I've undertaken.

I'm also still working on MediaCrush [2][3], at least when my other half
decides to show up and write some backend code.

[1]
[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net)

[2] [https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh)

[3]
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

~~~
wfn
> Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft

Nice.

Are you aiming to implement a thread-safe plugin API, perchance? The current
problem with bukkit (and with vanilla minecraft server, of course) afaik is
that whenever a plugin needs access to global state, it uses an API that does
not do any locks of any sort; which means that usually, whenever one needs to
e.g. write to global state, one dumps these critical parts onto the main
thread. Solving this is nontrivial but rather important, I think.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It's just a library, so it doesn't handle plugins. However, the library is
thread-safe, and the server [1] I wrote on top of the library supports plugins
and is also thread safe. For anything dependent on a specific thread, there's
generally a queue to push things into.

[1]
[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft)

~~~
wfn
That sounds like a very nice and thought-through architecture/design.

What's your current status / how far away are you from a more or less complete
beta (e.g. in regards to the minecraft client) (if you don't mind me asking)?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Well, the design has been through a few revisions. I'm not afraid to make
breaking changes before version 1.0.0 (for example, I completely rewrote the
level handling system to improve level editing performance by an order of
magnitude).

The current status of the server is:

* Full support for Minecraft 1.6.4 networking (1.7.x networking is a WIP)

* Full support for editing Minecraft levels

* Implementations of all Minecraft data types (i.e. slots, metadata dictionaries, NBT, etc)

* Slightly buggy emulation of Minecraft physics

* Simple procedural terrain generation

Here's an incomplete list of things that aren't done:

* Lots of block interactions (like water emulation, or falling sand) were done, but were lost during the refactoring I mentioned above

* Redstone and all related logic

* Mob AI (work in progress, not very far along)

* More detailed world generation (missing ores, caves, biomes, villages)

Aside from the server, there's also a mature classic networking library, and a
fairly complete client library (no rendering).

The project is more than a year old now and is built on top of code that's
about three years old. It's a pretty big undertaking, and it's going to take a
while to finish. It'll be done faster if I get more third party help, though!

~~~
wfn
Thanks for your detailed response. I see quite a few people are involved, and
the project is a truly active one; I wish you luck. :)

One last inquiry: have you done any benchmarking / performance tests on your
code? I imagine that since the library is thread-safe, it should in theory be
able to handle significantly larger numbers of online users, etc.?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It's been a while since I've formally tested it, but it performs very well. I
don't have hard numbers handy, but CPU usage and memory usage is both well-
tuned (and better than vanilla/bukkit). I've tested with a few dozen
concurrent players and it didn't have any trouble. All players reported smooth
gameplay, far better than vanilla or bukkit.

------
mazumdar
SilverAir - An athletic shirt that doesn't smell and designed to be worn at
the gym and for everyday wear. demo@
[http://www.yathletics.com](http://www.yathletics.com)

It's cool because:

It's made using pure silver which kills the odor-causing bacteria in your
sweat, so you can -wear this shirt for your entire day and feel fresh, -reuse
the shirt more often (i do).

The fabric is completely new and something I made with my manufacturers from
scratch. Without letting cost be a factor, we sourced some of the best
performance yarns you can buy and achieved a feel that is super comfortable
while being lightweight and breathable. To manufacture, we use seamless
knitting machines meaning the body of the shirt does not have any stitches on
it. (trust me, the silver is what sells but the most loved feature by our test
customers is the material and how you feel as if you're not wearing anything -
in a good way)

I'm building this company single-handedly over the last 10 months, and I had
to teach myself bits n pieces of everything: apparel manufacturing, design,
coding, law, filmmaking & editing. The product is launching in 4 days on
kickstarter and I'm now in lockdown mode with tons of progress to make. Your
feedback on anything is welcome.

The online shopping experience for this brand will be fresh: there will be no
choosing from tens and hundreds of products because we make just one per
category with superb design, quality, and finish. Shoot me an email if you're
curious about anything.

~~~
babby
Well, I'm already sold on it, looks like a solid product; however my only
questions now are:

\- How much? \- International shipping? How much?

~~~
mazumdar
Thanks so much! The validation means a lot.

How much? $54 Retail, but when we open on kickstarter next week, we want this
to reach as many people as possible and are going to give it out at (almost)
cost:

1 shirt for $34.

2 shirts for $64.

3 shirts for $90.

US shipping included.

International shipping: Add $20.

Happy to answer any other questions you have.

~~~
Jack5500
Why so much for international Shipping? Seems a lot to me for such a little
package

~~~
mazumdar
Hey Jack. You'll be surprised how expensive international shipping can be.
We've done our research and it comes to a minimum of $25 for most countries.

Since domestic shipping is included in the shirt pricing, we've subsidized the
international shipping by $5 to be fair to all customers.

~~~
babby
Nice. I think the price you're charging for the shirts is overall quite
reasonable. Keep it up, ill keep my eye on the kickstarter.

------
nav
Seat 14A (www.seat14a.com)

a). Most men hate shopping. b). Sizes are never consistent and a number cannot
define a unique bodily shape.

Our solution: We simply send an email with a few complete looks every few
weeks, if you like a look - order it and we make it made to measure for you.
We ship globally for free. Each look is about $150-$175 (so won't break your
bank account). Each look is based off of heavy research around looks, textures
and trends that are currently in.

If you want to learn more:
[http://seat14a.co/1hcllid](http://seat14a.co/1hcllid)

Or signup here for free:
[http://seat14a.com/signup](http://seat14a.com/signup)

~~~
spindritf
They only have a few outfits but some
[http://seat14a.com/ensemble/the_valley](http://seat14a.com/ensemble/the_valley)
are really great.

~~~
mahyarm
It looks like a picnic!

------
ghc
I'm working on [http://algorithmic.ly](http://algorithmic.ly) \-- algorithms
as a service.

It's cool because I get to help startups who don't always have the resources
to hire someone like me who specialized in implementing and scaling certain
kinds of algorithmic features. These startups need help with everything from
geospatial search up to anomaly detection and predictive analytics.

It's bootstrapped, so while I'd love it if it was a public offering, at this
point it's still a hybrid consulting/data-services company. Eventually it will
be a public platform, and I hope we can help a lot more people!

~~~
tlarkworthy
I can build lots of specialised algorithms, I would love a market place to
sell them securely

------
mercuryrising
This thread needs more hardware.

I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in
March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T
intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the
intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls
forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the
hood, slide onto the ground. I'm lying there for a moment, trying to figure
out what just happened, wondering whether or not anything is broken. I wiggle
my fingers, wiggle my toes, don't feel any pain. I stand up, the guy gets out
of his car "Sorry man! I thought you were turning!" I say I think I'm fine...
I go look at my bike - it's still upright, the front tire got wedged in a rust
spot. I grab it out, hop on, and ride. I couldn't help but laugh the rest of
the way to class.

That's the day I decided that bikers and automobiles need better
communication. So I made a bike light that's easy to use, has front & back
blinkers, brake lights, turns on when you ride (so you can't forget), a bright
front light, USB rechargeable, 3400 mAh LiIon battery. I made a 3D printer to
print the parts, I did the PCB design, physical design, and software. It's
pretty damn cool. I ride pretty regularly and recharge it about once every
three weeks. It's surprisingly water resistance - I am a little scared of
selling this to people as I didn't know how it would handle water, but I've
taken it through two large storms, one with huge puddles splashing all over
the cases, and the light handled it all in stride.

Here's the images - [http://imgur.com/a/EUzXm](http://imgur.com/a/EUzXm)

I'm stalling on it a little bit right now - there's not a very good way of
bootstrapping into manufacturing. I could 3D print the cases and assemble the
boards, but each case takes about 20 hours to print (on my fiddly printer).
There's ~100 components too, which is a pain for manual placing and reflowing.
I have a couple other designs brewing that are simpler and lower cost, but
without all the fancy features. Speaking of which... I have to go get some
interrupts working.

~~~
DigitalJack
It is hard to tell from the photo, but it looks like the the turn signal
indication is the standard "blink on the side" style. When the lights are
close together like they are with this design (as is practical for bikes),
it's very hard to distinguish which side is blinking from even a short
distance.

Could I suggest that instead of blinking on one side or the other, you turn
the lights on in sequence heading toward the direction of the turn? For
example, for a turn, you could illuminate light #1, then #1 and #2, then #1
and #2 and #3, then off and repeat.

That seems to me a much clearer indication of intention from the point of view
of a vehicle some distance away looking through less than clean glass.

~~~
mercuryrising
Definitely possible, thanks for the suggestion. I'll consider it and do a
visibility test.

There's 5 LEDs on the back - three reds and two amber turn signals. When
blinking, the center red LED stays solid to provide a reference for the turn
signal.

------
emhart
X-Locks: [http://x.lock.gd](http://x.lock.gd) I'm trying to restore as many of
the security-related patents that were lost in the patent office fire of 1836,
and tell the stories of their creators. We've had some early successes and
intend to reproduce as many of the locks as possible for a potential physical
exhibition.

------
burntsushi
I'm working on a few projects.

Firstly, I've developed a suite of Python libraries to deal with NFL data,
including play-by-play statistics and slicing game footage into its play-by-
play components. A demo of my work is here:
[http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5](http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5)
(excuse the slowness, my web server is crappy)

Everything is on GitHub:
[https://github.com/BurntSushi/{nflgame,nfldb,nflvid,nflfan}](https://github.com/BurntSushi/{nflgame,nfldb,nflvid,nflfan})

Secondly, I'm also working on a small utility to produce Entity-Relationship
diagrams from a simple text description. Surprisingly, there were very few
tools that could do this. It's written in Haskell. Current progress here:
[https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd](https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd)

Thirdly, my PhD research involves finding proteins that are similar to other
proteins. Most of the infrastructure is written in Go:
[https://github.com/TuftsBCB](https://github.com/TuftsBCB)

~~~
x0xMaximus
Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project. I'm working
on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app
to annotate biomedical texts: [http://mark2cure.org/](http://mark2cure.org/)

~~~
burntsushi
> Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project.

Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable at how rare they are. There are lots of GUI
tools, or tools specific to a particular database system, but few that accept
plain text as input. (There is erwiz, but it's unmaintained and a giant mess
of Java code.)

> I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and
> relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts:
> [http://mark2cure.org/](http://mark2cure.org/)

That is so awesome. I can't wait to see it in action! I've added my email to
your list. :-)

------
spartango
I'm working on software that assists in cancer diagnoses.

We apply a healthy serving of computer vision and a touch of machine learning
to high resolution images (10Gpx) of cancer tissue.

Hopefully we'll be able to make diagnosis faster and more accurate, doing our
small part to save lives.

~~~
heyimwill
That sounds incredibly cool, but as someone who lost their sister to cancer I
wish this would've existed earlier.

~~~
spartango
I'm so sorry to hear it. This is why we're working in cancer.

We all work as fast as we can, but I've already seen too many cases with poor
prognoses. The hope is that in growing this technology, we can catch cancers
earlier when they are more treatable.

~~~
heyimwill
Thanks, she was five so a lot of stuff was going on in her body which meant
they couldn't really catch it in time.

Is there anywhere I can follow the project?

~~~
spartango
Currently we don't have that much to show publicly as we're working primarily
with doctors; we need to validate our technology properly before it gets
anywhere near patients or the public eye.

With that said, if you shoot me an email (see profile) I'm happy to answer
questions and perhaps more.

------
sunspeck
A biodiverse, edible forest garden in the center of an public high school. We
are breaking ground with a team of students in about an hour.

This is (very) cool because it will expose adolescents to a variety of
concepts, perspectives, and phenomena that are severely lacking from most
urbanized places.

~~~
conjecTech
I hope you've had them watch some of the amazing permaculture
videos/documentaries that are out there. I know those had a huge impact on me
when I watched them back in high school. Great project, though. Definitely a
very worthwhile feat.

~~~
sunspeck
Like the whiz-bang Lawton stuff? Any other good ones? Nice idea. I'm not much
of a videographer, but I'm trying to document this project with some footage
as well.

------
kpao
Infinite Flight: it's a flight simulator for mobile platforns I had been
working on on the side for almost 7 years before finally deciding on joining
forces with a friend to ship it on Windows Phone, then iOS and Android. What's
cool about it is that it's written entirely in C# while and we still get
decent performance on most devices. Also, we're slowly gaining traction with
users that prefer flying with us rather than with the established competitors
:) You can find more about the app here:
[http://flyingdevstudio.com](http://flyingdevstudio.com) and [http://infinite-
flight.com](http://infinite-flight.com)

~~~
gjulianm
You're just two developers? That's amazing, I thought there was a full studio
behind that game. I really love Infinite Flight, I didn't know it was C# on
every platform and one of the few games going Windows Phone first. Congrats
and keep up the great work :)

~~~
kpao
Thanks! Yep we're just a team of two, for now at least. It's starting to be a
bit too much and we need to bring in more people at some point.

------
mkramlich
Dead By Zombie: a Python Rogue-like about a zombie apocalypse. I first created
it several years ago as a commercial closed-sourced game and it actually sold
copies. Now I've open sourced it on GitHub, and am upgrading the engine and
giving it a facelift, transforming it into a more serious game of survival and
a sandbox for rebuilding civilization. Survivalists, anarcho-capitalists and
libertarians may like it. "Day is for the living. Night is for the dead."

links:
[https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie](https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie)
[http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html](http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html)

In theory I'm also writing a sequel to my sci-fi comedy novella The Dread
Space Pirate Richard.
([http://www.reddit.com/r/DSPR/](http://www.reddit.com/r/DSPR/)) And fleshing
out the outline and first chapters of my first attempt at a technical book,
tentatively titled Software Performance and Scalability.

I also solve challenging technical problems for clients around the world. I
make things. I ship.

~~~
vilva
thumbs up for you

~~~
mkramlich
thanks!

------
ronaldx
[http://xoxo.gl](http://xoxo.gl) (hugs and kisses, good luck) - a web app to
play family-friendly, traditional board games. Still prototyping for now.

My goal is wide in scope: to build a site that allows you to take a few
minutes to have a positive social interaction with friends and strangers. An
anti-Zynga, if you like.

I still have a lot to do. With a goal of universal accessibility, I am working
on progressive enhancement - making it work adequately for users with poor
connections and noscript, and excellently for users with fancy AJAX.

It's cool and I think it fills a gap for people who want social games without
spam viral marketing... as an anecdote: by playing Boggle online, I made
friends and ended up visiting a couple on a different continent. I'd like to
enable stories like that.

~~~
rtb
I like the sound of this, but there's nothing much on that site yet. Where can
I subscribe for updates?

~~~
ronaldx
Thanks for the compliment :)

If you sign up at [http://xoxo.gl/](http://xoxo.gl/) with an e-mail address
then I'll let you know when there's more to see.

Otherwise you can contact me for a chat ronald@xoxo.gl

------
dom96
Nimrod ([http://nimrod-code.org](http://nimrod-code.org)).

It's cool because it's a systems programming language which compiles to C with
generics, an awesome Python-like syntax, AST macros and other metaprogramming
features.

I am one of the core developers. I developed a lot of the standard library and
tools such as the Babel package manager, Aporia IDE and a build farm all
written in Nimrod.

~~~
girvo
Hey, we've chatted in IRC a couple of times. Just wanted to say I love Nimrod,
and I'm so thankful that it's being written. I'm currently learning C so that
I can play with Nimrod and Vala and have a better idea of how they work :)

------
city41
Metamorfus ([http://metamorf.us](http://metamorf.us)) -- a site to help
improve social skills

I have joined forces with my sister in law who has a Doctor of Psychology and
specializes in anxieties. We both are shy people who have suffered with social
anxiety, so we are working on new ways to help people overcome this. Combining
her expertise with my dev skills. As you can see from the landing page, we
don't have a designer :)

 __Why it 's cool __

* It 's a really fresh way to conquer anxiety

* There's nothing else out there like it, existing anxiety/shyness communties and websites are rather archaic and/or simple

* It will help people of all types, from just wanting to get better at public speaking, to those who suffer from debilitating anxiety

* It will be helpful for both those who suffer and for psychologists to use as a tool

------
younata
I have been building a (highly accurate) flight simulator.

Basically, I'm taking a geometric approach to the flight dynamics model
(similar to how x-plane works, except they're using... older
techniques/technology. I'm using much more advanced stuff [working on seeing
if I can simulate the airflow for the entire craft, as opposed to doing it by
sections and then integrating those together]). This is in contrast to things
like MS Flight simulator and FlightGear (though, flightgear does have a poorly
documented and rather inaccurate geometry based fdm - but most people use the
table-based one, which is far more accurate than the geometry-based fdm they
have implemented), which use lookup tables to guess how an aircraft would
perform.

The problem I actually originally set out to solve was that xfoil and xflr5
suck to use (importing/exporting plane data is... either you can't, or you
shouldn't), and fuck paying for the more expensive design testers. (this is
why I have the focus on accuracy - if this was just going to be a simple game,
I'd have spent far more time making it look pretty) However, I figured that I
could also make testing be more fun by adding an interactive mode (i.e. I want
to be able to do hardware-in-the-loop type stuff, as well as just manually
flying), and at that point, it just is a scriptable flight simulator.

I'm still working on the flight dynamics model, been teaching myself fluid
dynamics so that I somewhat understand what all is going on there (as much as
anyone who hasn't spent years studying this can understand...), and I've been
working on writing code to run on the gpu (yay, opencl) in order to do this.
It's been fun.

~~~
dombili
That sounds great. As someone who has a lot of interest in aviation and stuff
that's related to aviation, the lack of flight simulators on the market is
bothering. I tried almost every simulation that's out there, but none of them
fit to my needs (good, simple UI with extremely realistic controls. that's not
too much to ask, is it?). Hopefully you'll make something that's more
appealing than other products. Speaking of which, is there a website of sorts
to follow the updates of your work?

Good luck.

~~~
younata
Thank you for the interest! Right now, x-plane basically is the only player in
the flight sim market (MS has officially stated they've left - though I doubt
it's for good, FlightGear is the only other flight sim worth mentioning, and
it's nowhere near as good/accurate as what I need), which, as you (indirectly)
pointed out, is troublesome - the market is ripe for disruption. I'm aiming to
at least provide healthy competition to increase the quality of all flight
simulators (I'm also applying to get into this next YC batch... hopefully I'll
get an interview. I doubt I'll get in, because lack of a cofounder).

I actually just wrote a script to generate an atom feed for this (I mean, I
have some updates which are on my main index page, but, that's not a way to
easily enable people to follow me...), so you can follow my little self-
generated atom feed at
[http://younata.com/feed.atom](http://younata.com/feed.atom) right now, it's
just a single post that links to my above comment, but I'll try to write at
least once a week.

By the way, the datestamps on that feed are in UTC, which is localtime for my
server.

Feel free to send me an email so I can notify you when I have a prototype. My
email is listed in my profile.

~~~
cpncrunch
Yes, it's a shame. I still think FSX beats the pants off X-plane. I just find
that X-plane isn't as realistic as FSX (even though it should be in theory).
Anyway, good luck - it's a massive job :)

------
k4st
I'm working on
[https://github.com/Granary/granary](https://github.com/Granary/granary). It
is a Linux kernel dynamic binary translation framework. It's cool because it
lets you rewrite the Linux kernel (at different granularities) while it's
running. This is useful for analysis, debugging, etc. Right now I'm putting
together benchmarks for an upcoming paper deadline.

~~~
tihag
made an account after years of lurking, to say how awesome this is.

~~~
k4st
Thanks, that's really flattering! I would love to hear about potential use
cases that people might have for this.

------
davidw
I'm working on [http://www.liberwriter.com](http://www.liberwriter.com) \- and
it's not cool. But it makes money.

It's cool to work on something that's both cool and makes money, but I'm at a
point in my life where I'm happy to work on something that makes money even if
it's not cool. But getting paid regularly is pretty cool in its own way.

LiberWriter is a product/service to help authors, primarily by converting Word
files to eBooks, as well as providing cover design services.

~~~
jkestner
Solving a problem that people find valuable enough to pay you for is very
cool.

------
daeken
My weekend project for the last few weeks is a new Shader language. It's a
twisted version of Forth, with some APL-inspired pieces.
[https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth](https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth)

The macro facilities and compile-time arrays make many things super, super
compact and beautiful. A great example is a raymarcher:
[https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth/blob/master/examples/r...](https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth/blob/master/examples/raymarch.glf)

You can see it in action on Shadertoy here:
[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGWl](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGWl)
!Warning! Windows users have been reporting some problems, so be careful. (If
it crashes your browser, please let me know what your setup is!)

~~~
pavlov
PostScript for GPUs? Awesome.

------
martindale
Coursefork ([http://coursefork.org](http://coursefork.org)) -- github for
education.

We're trying to open-source the entire education system, starting with
creating an easy way for materials and processes to become "forkable".

\- Fork, for example, an MIT OCW course.

\- Make modifications.

\- Submit a pull request back to MIT with your changes, or, just teach from
your own fork.

~~~
mindcrime
This is amazingly cool. I was excited about this from the first time Elliot
mentioned it to me, and I'm thrilled to see how far you guys have come. Way to
represent the Triangle!

~~~
martindale
Thanks, Phil! Let's make sure to catch up between now and demo day. :)

~~~
mindcrime
Absolutely. I put a "todo" on my list to ping you as soon as I got home from
ATO the other day. Look for an email soon...

------
moultano
This is the best thread I've read on HN in months. We should do this
regularly.

~~~
bambax
Yes, me too!

------
drugcite-com
An easy way to enter the name of a specific drug or side effect to see its
effects as reported to the FDA. One of the primary ways that the United States
Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the
collection and analysis of reported adverse events (an event that was not the
intended outcome of the prescribed drug and has a negative impact on health)
through the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS). These reports are
submitted by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst others, and
then the FDA scientific staff will assess these events in the context of other
databases to determine if a particular safety concern is associated, and
possibly caused by, exposure to a particular drug. Since this is a public
database and useful to prescribers and patients alike to know if "has what I'm
experiencing been described in patients taking this drug before?" DrugCite has
created a more friendly interface to answer that question. The data can also
be sorted by Age and Gender in most cases giving a more detailed view.

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

We use several data sets including FAERS, Meddra, Medical Device Data,
UMLS/RXNORM and DAILYMED/Structured Product Labels to name a few.

~~~
robertk
Is the data set publicly available? I'd love to do some machine learning on
it.

------
flyinglizard
[http://sandsquid.com](http://sandsquid.com) \- A web app for quickly locating
and purchasing electronic parts, specifically entire BOMs (all the components
on one or more PCBs, instead of just a single part like other services out
there). It's bootstrapped, and we just recently launched. So far we had good
traction and virtually all positive responses. Notably, people report that we
save them hours every time they use our app, and I firmly believe that any
service capable of that, has a place ;)

~~~
mercuryrising
I was thinking about doing something similar for a bit :).

If I may make a couple of suggestions - I put in 24 ATMEGA328P-PU-ND. It found
where they were, it found the lowest price. They're $3.16 PU - total ~$76. If
I get one more, 25 of them, I hit the price break, and my order total come to
$50. Definitely a better deal. When I'm getting parts, the price breaks always
seem to make me spend more, but there's situations where it wouldn't (like
above). Adding in recognition for those would be good.

Another suggestion (this is what I was going to work on, but I've moved onto
other things) - create a package deal - PCB, parts, stencils, etc, all in one.
Have rolling part shipments (orders every Friday). Get reels of components,
fulfill some yourself - but charge the live lowest price (you make a little
bit from the reel discount, they save a little bit from your utility). You
handle the money in between, and disperse it out to the lowest combined cost.
Having a one stop shop where I could dump a schematic & board file and get
back a PCB, parts, and stencils would be pretty awesome.

~~~
flyinglizard
Hey, thanks for the feedback.

As for ATMEGA328P-PU-ND, did you try using the optimization slider? :) Drag it
all the way to its "Aggressive" setting, it will bump the quantity up to 25,
and the total down to $48 - just like you said.

As for package deals - you are right, this is what needs to be done. We're
thinking about that.

~~~
mercuryrising
Awesome, didn't see that before. Maybe turn it on by default, then have the
option to back it off? Why is the quantity bump represented as an error with
big warning signs? Shouldn't it be a good thing?

Is there any way to represent shipping as well? That seems like the killer -
sure something is $2 cheaper on Mouser than Digikey, but if I have to pay $5
for shipping, that breaks the deal.

Something else that would be cool - and this is a huge pain point for me when
developing PCBs, is let me tell you rough characteristics I want, you find me
the part. I want a 0805 10K resistor +- 10% @ quantity 100. Find me the
cheapest one! As long as I can use it as a pull up resistor, I don't really
care what it is. It's a huge pain in the ass to go through when I want to make
my BOM and have 10 different tabs open looking for a 1K, 5K, 10K, 22uF, 10uF
resistor and caps. Make that part easy.

You should increase the part lookup speed as well - it spins for quite a
while. Autocomplete after a few characters would be good too (I wouldn't
remember PU-ND, had to look it up, but I can get the first part).

Good stuff - do you have a mailing list or anything to get updates?

~~~
flyinglizard
There is indeed a mailing list! when you move onto the final step it'll ask
you (nicely and once).

The quantity bump gets shown as a warning because at some extremes the
optimizing algorithm may choose to increase the overall quantity even if it
costs you more than at a lower optimization level. Lets say you picked $100
worth of MCUs, and it knows it can get 30% more MCUs for 10% of additional
cost - it may go for it. In such cases we thought the user would like to know.

Unfortunately we have no way to calculate the shipping at present... but the
generic parts locator is a great suggestion, we'll do it!

------
dizzystar
Unnamed project, probably beta released sometime this week.

Have you ever wondered which of the 10 courses offered by Coursera / EdX / etc
to take, sign of up for 4, then dropped all but one and fell too far behind to
finish?

Classes offered by MOOCs vary greatly in quality. This isn't a judgement call
per se, just a question of "fit." Is this class up your alley, or maybe this
class is too elementary for your level, or maybe it is too difficult.

The goal of my project is to offer students a place to express their thoughts,
rank the courses (A, B, C, D, F), and rank difficulty. Other students can
upvote comments and the top-ranked comment gets the top spot on the page,
above the "official" review.

Another question often pondered is "what is the best path for the courses."
Although this section is primitive, students are able to offer prerequisite
sections.

Ideally, employers will have a place to look when people apply trumpeting up
their certifications. Were these classes really worthwhile or was it all easy
A.

Due to the anonymity of the site, students are offered the freedom to offer up
honest reviews, why they dropped the courses, and what could be improved.
Ultimately, MOOCs may have a place to see the real and raw opinions of the
masses they are attempting to teach.

Nerd points? Stack is Linux, PostgreSQL, and Clojure.

The IP address is in my profile. Please don't create any accounts you'd want
to keep since I am going to nuke the entire database soon. There are a few
bugs on this site.

------
sherm8n
A legit way to get more followers on social media. Helps you build high
quality one-to-one relationships with new people. Pick a keyword like "startup
school". Our system will detect when "startup school" type conversations are
going on in real-time and performs sentiment analysis. That's a highly
targeted opportunity for you to start engaging with that user. And we deliver
that user to you on a silver platter. It's up to you to keep the relationship
going (put them in your sales funnel).

It was a bitch to manually get followers on Tumblr to sell t-shirts to. I had
to seek users out, make sure they fit my target audience, and insert myself in
the conversation. All without it looking like self‑promotion. That's a lot of
mental energy just to reach out to one person. Once I built a fairly large
sized audience boat loads of t-shirts started selling. Then I figured startups
and businesses on Twitter would find it useful. And they did. Paying customers
tell me it works 100 times better than Twitter ads.

If you're interested:
[http://audience.goodsense.io](http://audience.goodsense.io)

~~~
ogreyonder
I signed up to check it out and created a campaign. I can't tell if it's doing
anything, though. Should I expect an email of some sort? Or do I need to check
back to look at your page later?

~~~
sherm8n
Sorry it's so confusing. If you created a campaign then it is already working.
There's nothing else for you to do inside the product.

Now all you have to do is interact with the people that are starting to engage
with you. It's not an instant thing. Our system detects when relevant
conversations are going on using fancy algorithms based around machine
learning, sentiment analysis and POS tagging.

~~~
chrisduesing
But what does it "do". What is causing these people to start engaging with me?
(I signed up and am completely bewildered)

~~~
sherm8n
Thanks for pointing this out. I do need more copy there stating exactly what
the system will do.

In case you didn't catch my response to someone else, the "social etiquette"
on each social media channel is different to begin a conversation. For
Twitter, it can be as simple as a "favorite".

------
jessepollak
Clef ([https://getclef.com](https://getclef.com)) — a replacement for
usernames and passwords on the web.

It's cool because it allows the 99% of people who aren't technical to use
public key cryptography to log in to websites.

~~~
lukaseder
I'm technical and I don't enjoy ordinary implementations of public key
cryptography!

Good job, and good luck!

------
cmyr
I'm moving to zambia for the winter to start an after-school program doing
basic computer and internet literacy skills with kids.

It has been really fascinating watching all of the tools and projects that
have popped up over the past few years attempting to make really high quality
educational resources widely available, but these tools remain generally out
of reach for those people that would most benefit from them.

~~~
mercuryrising
Awesome, good luck! Are you doing it with a program or going solo? Do they
have access to computers, or are you bringing some in?

~~~
cmyr
kind of realized on review that my OP was pretty dull. :)

I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I
was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I
will be working with computers at a few existing sites.

Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will
give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy
organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort
of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources
work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that
are now mostly sitting unused.

I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that
had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really
considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at
the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and
just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in
other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten
computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k
kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is
keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera.

So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do
iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things
they can do with computers.

0: [http://www.britishcouncil.org/](http://www.britishcouncil.org/)

edit: their/there =[

------
hcm
I'm working on CodeCube ([http://codecube.io](http://codecube.io)) - a
pastebin that allows you to run the code snippets and see the output live in
your browser.

It's built on Docker. I posted an article about how I built it here:
[http://hmarr.com/2013/oct/16/codecube-runnable-
gists/](http://hmarr.com/2013/oct/16/codecube-runnable-gists/)

The source is up on GitHub at
[https://github.com/hmarr/codecube](https://github.com/hmarr/codecube)

~~~
druska
I love this, very cool stuff. You should add a code format button to the
editor.

------
williamcotton
I'm working on a next generation programming environment for front-end browser
development that combines version control and dependency management. It is
called lit and the current alpha iteration is at
[http://www.corslit.com](http://www.corslit.com)

I just introduced static semantically versioned builds and started the process
of self-hosting.

The interesting thing about lit is that it allows for modern professional
development without any UNIX command line or file system dependencies.

I'll have more literature and a very exciting screencast demo very soon.

~~~
lukaseder
What??

Unless you have an express license or permission to make use of a derived work
of Coors's trademarks, I'd just say that this is not so cool. Specifically, I
doubt that you actually registered a "CorsLit" trademark, which completely
mimicks the one by Coors Light, by keeping the ® symbol in place. Any
trademark office would have rejected this registration.

I'm just an engineer, telling you this nicely. I'm sure, Coors will find other
words, should your tool become more popular.

------
rexf
GeoGraph - [http://geographapp.com/](http://geographapp.com/)

Like imgur for location. No sign up & 1 click to share your current location.
If you sign up, you can save your location privately (only you can see it).

Use cases are wide open. Save your parking spot. Share location to meetup with
a friend. Save a special spot in a forest. Etc.

If you use check-in services, GeoGraph may interest you. If you never share
your location online, you shouldn’t use this.

Working on new features to make location more useful.

Edit - Link to site.

~~~
adyus
I had the idea a while back, it's great to see it implemented so well!

One suggestion though, the fact that use cases are wide open could stifle
growth. I'd suggest a few different landing pages you could A/B test, each
covering a very specific use case.

You could have one page explain that you can save your parking spot and share
it with others. Another for sharing a meetup location. Another for saving your
favorite locations. Yet another (where you may win big) would be easy location
saving for photo and film location scouting.

~~~
rexf
Thanks for the great feedback!

I'm very interested in location and really trying to figure out what GeoGraph
can do to deliver the most usefulness to its users

------
tsumnia
Gingerbread and Candy Corn ([http://gingerbread-and-candy-
corn.appspot.com](http://gingerbread-and-candy-corn.appspot.com)) - A one-stop
spot for finding houses with holiday decorations. Sadly, I don't think it'll
be ready for Halloween :( Though it should be ready for a launch near Black
Friday :)

As a kid, I always loved driving around looking at Halloween/Christmas lights
and as I've gotten older and moved to a bigger city, its been a little
difficult knowing where to go to see good houses. The only real way to do it
right now is YouTube videos or hoping your local newspaper has it covered.

The reason I think its cool is I'm learning to use Google App Engine on a
responsive HTML5 style page. Since I'm not too graphic oriented, I'm learning
how to use Flat UI to my advantage (as you can see in the nowhere near done
demo). I'm going to get to learn a lot of web hosting stuff, like the official
webpage currently is hosted with Dreamhost, but how do I get GAE to play nice
with that, managing/handling requests, how to appropriately display houses
without killing my GAE free package. If it generates enough success this
Christmas, I'm hoping to spend next year learning mobile development for an
app that does the same thing, but also gives you directions.

~~~
mercuryrising
Have you used your AWS free tier up yet? If not, you should consider jumping
on it. Free 24/7 micro server for a year - and you host the webserver, so you
can install Apache, Nginx, whatever you want. I used it for a while, and the
most I got charged was a couple quarters for going over on disk usage (DB was
doing unnecessary reads / writes).

Also - this is a cool idea. As I've grown up in the same area, it seems like
fewer and fewer people go all out for decorations around Halloween and
Christmas, it who does with minimal effort. I can't find any examples (none in
my area), but does it support pictures of the decorations?

~~~
tsumnia
I'm going to try to, video too; right now I ask for a link, but since I missed
out on this big weekend I have time til Christmas to work on it. Obviously I
can't add every house myself, but I've made it really easy to add a house and
remove a house, all with a buffer to avoid spammers.

I have not touch AWS before, so I'll look into it. I went GAE because I'd used
Udacity's Web Development course and in it they talk about how Udacity
actually runs off GAE, so I thought if they did it, its do-able.

------
tynan
Sett ([http://sett.com](http://sett.com))

It's a new blogging platform that helps people build audiences. Our oldest
users (1 year) have seen roughly 100% increase in daily traffic, twice as many
comments, etc. My personal blog has doubled daily visitors and growth rate for
subscribers went from 1% to 10%.

~~~
alecsmart1
On a very off topic, how much do you have to pay for a four letter domain like
yours and whats the process like. Did you use something like sedo/godaddy?
I've always wondered how difficult is it to acquire one.

~~~
tynan
I forget exactly what we paid, but it was ~$7500, I think. Expensive, but we
figured that it would build some trust and wouldn't be an embarrassing domain
to have in your blog title (sett.com/alec vs superblog9000.com/alec). I think
we bought it through Sedo, where prices vary wildly.

In searching, we also found this seller on ebay (no affiliation) that had a
bunch pretty cheaply. I sort of liked omot.com, but not enough to buy.
[http://stores.ebay.com/Short-Domains/LLLL-com-4-Letter-
dot-c...](http://stores.ebay.com/Short-Domains/LLLL-com-4-Letter-dot-com-/)

~~~
alecsmart1
Thank you for your answer. For sedo, is there some strategy or did you just
pay what they asked for?

------
mindcrime
I'm working on a two products:

1\. [https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick](https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick)
\- Neddick, a private "reddit like" for the enterprise. Very much inspired by
Reddit, but has some additional features - triggers & filters for content, RSS
consumer, some additional "share" options (XMPP, ActivityStrea.ms via REST,
etc.)

2\. [https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy](https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy) \-
an "enterprise social network" product that has some wicked cool features
compared to most other ESN offerings, including: ESB integration for
subscribing to real-time business events, iCal feed integration, integration
with workflow/BPM engines, etc.

Why is this stuff cool? Well, they're both OSS (ALv2), written in Groovy, and
have some really nifty features. And what we're working on now is semantic
concept extraction, automatic correlation/linking of Named Entities to related
resources, and semantic query support. Coming down the pipe will be some rad
visualizations and just generally more support for different ways to navigate
the "knowledge space" that is entailed by related content, people, events and
tasks.

For me, this is a classic "win win" because I get to have fun working with
cool tech: machine learning / big data (Mahout, Hadoop, etc.), Event Stream
Processing, Semantic Web stuff (Stanbol, Jena, Fuseki, etc.) and because we're
building some stuff that I think we're going to be able to monetize.

Build awesome tools AND make money from it? That sounds like my idea of fun.
:-)

------
suresk
I've been slowly working on a few things, and hopefully can finish them during
the winter:

1) Shared Places

The idea is that you can have public or private lists of locations that can be
shared with other people, and would be integrated with mapping software on
your phone so it is easy to navigate to them.

Some private lists that may be useful:

a) A family one that keeps track of extended relatives, friends houses, soccer
fields, etc

b) A small business that works at, delivers to, or services fixed locations.

Some public ones might be:

a) Places in this area that are related to US Civil War history.

b) Gas stations in this area that have a drive-thru (this sounds silly, but
was actually where I got the idea - my sister has small children and it is a
pain to get them out of the car and into a store to just pick up a few
convenience items, so knowing where she can go that has a drive-thru is really
handy)

2) Insomnia Tracker

An app/website to log things related to sleep (beverages consumed, medication
taken, notable social situations, what time you try to go to sleep, what time
you wake up, etc). Hopefully having it available on a phone will make it
easier to keep track of things more fully than if you had to remember to write
it down in a paper log, since you usually have your phone with you.

Then this data can be used to find trends such as how, say your coffee
consumption affects your sleep, or maybe how stressful arguments at work are
keeping you up at night.

I don't have anything up for either of them yet, and I'm not sure either could
actually make enough to be more than a hobby, but they are both useful to me
and kind of fun to build.

~~~
nickler
take a look at placeling, sounds a lot like your first idea.

~~~
suresk
Thanks, but it looks like it has been shut down?

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

------
vitorbaptistaa
Shellshare ([http://shellshare.net](http://shellshare.net)) -- live streaming
of your terminal

Demo:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCXnIgsEqK0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCXnIgsEqK0)

It's cool because: * It lets you share your terminal session, read-only, using
just one command. Easy to get (or give) help.

* Many people can watch the same session. If you pair it with Hangouts OnAir, you could do live trainings.

* It's not as powerful as tmux or screen sharing (as it's readonly), but it's much simpler: there's no need to open ports in your firewall, configure your router, or create users. Being read-only also is an advantage in its use-case.

I haven't launched it yet (I'm finishing some performance tuning), but it's
usable. Its only dependency is on Python and Script. If you're on Linux, you
just need to run:

    
    
      python -c "`curl -sL http://get.shellshare.net`"
    

This will download the client and run it, automatically sharing your screen
and giving you its URL.

Feedback welcome :)

~~~
n1ghtmare_
Awesome ! :)

------
SolarUpNote
I'm working on a JSON based website layout and component system.

For example: a component that lists blog posts could be represented by:

    
    
      {
        options:{
          elements:[image, title, author, date]
        },
        criteria:{
          sort:date.desc, 
          published:true, 
          limit:10
        },
        request_vars:{page:3}
      }
    

That would show the last 10 posts that are published, ordered by date, on page
3 of the results.

That's a simple example, this site: volumeone.org is built almost entirely
this way.

Since it's in JSON format, JavaScript can be used to build UIs that build the
components and layouts.

~~~
meowface
I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete
replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without
any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able
to parse it exactly the same.

~~~
SolarUpNote
I tried that too, but sometimes the nesting level is too deep for YAML. There
were also some difficulties when escaping special characters in YAML.

~~~
meowface
In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any
technical limit on the nesting depth.

As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it
is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines.

So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user
templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple
postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and
a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only
has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer
commas), and what they write "just works."

------
ihenriksen
SparkleDB NoSQL database server is a horizontally distributed, real-time,
performance-critical, highly available, and large-scale software solution
capable of handling Big Data. Fast. Transactional. Both ACID and in-memory (we
let you choose). Acts as a single logical database unit, even though it may
consist of hundreds of physical computers located in the same physical
location-or dispersed over a network of interconnected computers. Autonomous
horizontal scaling. No single point of failure. Concurrent access, crash
recovery & repair. Federated queries. Semantic schema-less data model and a
powerful declerative semantic query language that are both international
standards. Remotely connect to the database using a built-in RESTful API over
HTTP or use our JDBC or ODBC drivers. Works on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. We're
based out of Sunnyvale, California. Learn more at
[http://www.sparkledb.net/](http://www.sparkledb.net/)

~~~
turbojerry
The query language for RDF is called SPARQL[1] pronounced "sparkle" which
might cause some confusion in conversation.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/](http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-
query/)

~~~
ihenriksen
Hi Jerry. SPARQL is the SparkleDB query language.

------
jaibot
Powershame: Publicly precommit to being productive; your friends will get a
timelapse of screenshots when you're done.

It's cool because I'm using the pre-alpha version to get myself to work on
Powershame, sending out timelapses to my wife and facing shame when I break it
and it fails to send.

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

------
markmassie
Nuclear reactor startup
([http://transatomicpower.com](http://transatomicpower.com)) designing a
molten salt reactor to turn nuclear waste into clean energy at prices
competitive with natural gas.

~~~
smoyer
Any plans for personal (home) sized units? I'd love to get off our power grid
as we have daily outages and brown-outs that kill electronics happen a couple
times a year. (And yes, I'm in the US, and in the middle of a hefty power grid
but according to the power company, we have problematic squirrels).

------
Jasber
I recently started doing more freelance development and didn't find any
solutions that I thought did the following really well:

\- I hate tracking my time, so the app should make this very easy & compelling
to do (dare I say fun?)

\- Should work well with lots of different contract types (hourly, daily,
weekly, retainer)

\- Should earn me more money using best practices (minimum billing increments,
etc...)

\- Should get me paid faster & with the lowest fees possible (client payment
details on file & using ACH or something)

\- Should make managing sub-contractors a breeze. Think of managing sub-
contractor invoices & time like a pull-request on GitHub.

So I decided I'm going to work on this and try to make something that people
will really love using.

If you're interested, get notified when it launches:
[http://bradjasper.com/timetracker/](http://bradjasper.com/timetracker/)

~~~
welder
Have you tried [http://wakatime.com](http://wakatime.com)?

------
garraeth
Terra Ex ([http://www.terraexgame.com/](http://www.terraexgame.com/))

* Terra Ex is a 4x (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), online game.

* We are raising money for STEM education from the game's profits (see our foundation: [http://www.odinfoundation.org/](http://www.odinfoundation.org/)).

* We've got 20+ years of experience in making games and wanted to leverage this expertise to make a game that will help fund our charity.

* We're a completely new and indie company.

* Our team worked on World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Mercenaries 2, and several others.

* Professionals from NASA/JPL and USC are helping out so we can make the game educational, and scientifically correct (see the video on our site). But not so "educational" as to ruin the fun in the game.

* 100% bootstrapped in our free time.

edit: formatting

~~~
imdsm
Looks interesting. You say you're a group who brought us WoW, SC, C&C and
more, but no names. Would be interesting to see the actual team behind the
game, portraits and brief blurbs etc!

------
timmclean
[http://www.timmclean.net/json-editor/](http://www.timmclean.net/json-editor/)

A code editor that uses knowledge of a programming language's grammar. It's
cool because it should be significantly more efficient than working in
vim/emacs, and will allow powerful scripting capabilities and macros to
transform code structurally, instead of as text.

~~~
nathanathan
I experimented with using cfgs in a code editor before but with the aim of
making it easier to code on touch screen devices where curly braces and the
like are difficult to type. Here's a prototype I started for writing Json.
[http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/](http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/)

~~~
timmclean
Neat!

------
philbo
Currently I'm working on a few different developer tools, as part of my
continuing mission to make my own life easier. I figure they're probably cool
because if I'm scratching my own itch then I should be scratching itches for
other devs too.

* GitHubReminder - serendipitous email reminders about your starred repos on GitHub. [https://githubreminder.org/](https://githubreminder.org/)

* JSComplexity - code complexity metrics for JavaScript. [http://jscomplexity.org/](http://jscomplexity.org/)

* CoffeeComplexity - code complexity metrics for CoffeeScript projects (still in development).

* GrepSrc - regex-based source code search engine (still in development).

~~~
mercuryrising
For JScomplexity, you should round your complexity values :).

Halstead difficulty: 4.666666666666666 Halstead volume: 55.506595772116384
Halstead effort: 259.0307802698764

Do you do storage on the back end? Can you target a particular open source
project to analyze it? Can you target languages other than JS?

Make a Github bot that makes pull requests that analyze a project's
complexity, areas where it's more complex (refactor), areas where there's
fluff, projects that don't follow 'standards'. That'd be cool if it was an
opt-in thing, like I add a "ComplexityBot.MD" blank text file, complexity bot
comes by, analyzes my project, pull requests the complexitybot.MD file, gives
me some nice data, comes by again whenever it gets some down time and updates
the analysis.

~~~
philbo
Yeah I should, you're right. I'm working through a huge to-do list on that and
CoffeeComplexity right now, but I'll add that on the pile too. :)

There is no storage on the back-end, it just calls a little node library that
I wrote and spits out the result.

The work to target other languages is underway, I've split out the AST walking
to a separate repo, so it just requires writing a walker implementation for
the target parser and you're done. The CoffeeScriptRedux walker is currently
in development, with LiveScript planned for after that.

So I met a guy recently who is building something similar to the ComplexityBot
idea you describe. It's called sidekick and looks pretty awesome from my
initial play around with it.

* [https://www.sidekickjs.com/](https://www.sidekickjs.com/)

------
Achshar
A local media player in the browser. I mean to make it full media player with
video support but for now it's audio only. I also want to make it web app
instead of chrome app but some apis are not available anywhere else. And
background running is a key feature. It has about 7k users, which is more than
I expected TBH. Also the occasional support email is the best thing to happen
to me that day. It shows that people actually use what I made.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-
player/fdd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-
player/fddboknafkepdchidokknkeidnaejnkh)

------
sakai
A friend and I are developing a new fast, space-efficient (read:
probabilistic) key-value store. We're using it for some computational biology
applications.

It's cool because: * It scales to really large data sets: We store ~10 billion
keys in memory on a single, not-too-ridiculous machine, and the design
supports sharding trivially * It's fast: we have a lot of optimization still,
but can do ~1M lookups/sec (O(1) lookups) * It's a data structure! (Which as
non-formal-CS people we find fun)

Would be very interested to hear other applications that people would find the
above attributes useful for!

------
psobot
Currently building out [http://forever.fm](http://forever.fm), an
automatically-beatmatched radio stream of popular music from around the web.
Built out the real-time music streaming backend in a mix of Python, C++ and
Golang, just submitted the iOS client to the App Store, and am currently
finishing up the Android client. (Along the way, I also built my own
distributed, persistent version of Unix pipes on Redis:
[http://github.com/psobot/pressure](http://github.com/psobot/pressure))

~~~
cyberfart
Nice to stumble upon forever.fm on this thread. I like it a lot and been
listening to it for some time.

------
dan335
A simple algorithmic stock trader. [https://green-machine.us](https://green-
machine.us)

Give it a set of rules and it will buy and sell stock for you. I got
interested in algorithmic trading and built this site to find out if it works.
If it does I'll add real money trading.

~~~
mercuryrising
You should add a demo or something - that landing page is a bit ominous, and I
don't really want to sign up for something that I haven't seen yet.

~~~
dan335
Next on the todo list is to add a tutorial and do the front page.

------
kunai
I'm working on a POSIX-ish OS in Brainfuck.

I'm working on it because brainfuck is awesome and writing a kernel in it is
even moar awesome. I'm currently trying to figure out how to port several
basic GNU coreutils to the system.

The kernel boots and hangs in QEMU. That's good for now; at least it boots.
Now, the important thing is actually getting it to run bash, and a few basic
coreutils, specifically cat, mkdir, echo, ls, and cd.

Once it's done, I'm pushing to github (commented extensively, of course ;)

~~~
AsmMAn
What compiler are you using? and will this be open source?

~~~
kunai
I wrote my own in C++. It's intermediary, so it first translates BF code to C
and then uses gcc to compile the intermediary C code.

I'm working on getting it to compile straight to assembly. Yeah, yeah, I could
have used [https://github.com/ahorn/bf-
compiler/blob/master/bfc.c](https://github.com/ahorn/bf-
compiler/blob/master/bfc.c), but eh, what the hell. It's supposed to be a
hobby project.

------
jedireza
Drywall - A website and user system for Node.js
[http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/](http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/)

Recent cool news: got word from the hosts of Node Knockout that submissions
are allowed to use it in the competition.

------
asiekierka
I'm going to be rewriting my image booru engine (
[https://github.com/asiekierka/boorushy2](https://github.com/asiekierka/boorushy2)
\- all demos are down ).

It's not cool. Nothing I make is cool. It never was. All I seem to make are
boring, niche ideas... and not even I care about them. Since half a year, I
haven't found anything that would interest me. I'm a man with low standards, I
guess.

~~~
mercuryrising
If you aren't liking what you're doing, pick something else up. Go try out a
different hobby, get into painting, cooking, meditating, whatever. Don't burn
yourself out grinding teeth on something you don't enjoy doing. Make sure you
enjoy what you're doing. Go on a vacation to a state park, take a break for a
while.

------
sensecall
[https://loseproof.com](https://loseproof.com) \- a little side-project we
launched a couple of weeks ago.

It's a low-cost, secure and simple way to protect things that are important to
you.

We've started with stickers for now, but are looking to offer item-specific
protection soon e.g. keyrings, luggage tags and pet tags. The concept is well-
founded but, until now, has been really poorly executed.

~~~
vinchuco
[http://www.thetileapp.com/](http://www.thetileapp.com/)

~~~
sensecall
Yep, but Tile costs $20 a piece. LoseProof is much simpler, cheaper & allows
people to protect items of low physical value, but high personal worth –
forever :)

------
SamBoogie
Betathegame.com - Beta is a game that teaches players programming, game
design, and facilitates synergistic learning.

I think it's super cool because it's one of the few games I've played that has
a heavy educational component while also being fun. It's also cool because
it's extremely open. Through the use of the in-game terminal, players are able
to build intricate levels and puzzles, then share them with others.

Due to the extremely customizable nature of the game, I foresee teachers being
able to create homeworks/tests/assignments within. That's the synergistic
learning part :)

We've done workshops with Black Girls Code, DIY Days, The Village, and the
Grace Hopper Convention in places like NYC, Sheffield (UK), Philly,
Minneapolis, and most recently Toronto. With each iteration we are seeing more
and more excitement, from kids and adults as well.

If your interested and located in NYC, we're doing a game demo this Monday
night (10/28) at Microsoft HQ (www.meetup.com/gaming/events/139786752/). stop
by, play our game, chat with us, play other cool indie games and have fun!

------
drakeandrews
I'm reimplementing the SQLite virtual machine in RPython, in the hopes that
RPython's tracing JIT will speed up query execution. RPython (the toolkit
behind PyPy) is cool because it allows you to build a JIT-enabled virtual
machine with very little effort.

I'm also writing a comedy horror roleplaying game and getting to grips with
all the less fun aspects of running a kickstarter campaign.

------
cj
Localize.js ([https://localizejs.com](https://localizejs.com)) automatically
localizes websites. No backend integration required.

It's a client side Javascript library that handles phrase detection and the
injection of translations. Machine and human translations can be ordered via
our web interface.

Why is this cool? It generally takes an engineer at least 1-2 weeks to fully
localize a website (go through all template files, replace all text with
string keys, build a workflow for updating phrases, ordering translations,
etc), and once the system is in place, editing template files and adding new
text to your app is a pain. Localizejs automates this with a copy and paste js
snippet. And it works surprisingly well -- I had my doubts about this approach
before building it as well, but you'll be surprised that it doesn't hurt page
performance very much at all.

It's still in development, but shoot me an email if you'd like to test it out.
It'll be production ready within a month. bp@brandonpaton.com

~~~
ateeqs
Neat

------
arethuza
Just started working on something to attack SharePoint that is based on
sensible standards (REST, JSON, etc.) with the front end completely in
something like AngularJS or Ember.

This is cool as, in my opinion, SharePoint Must Die.

~~~
n1ghtmare_
Open source it, I'd gladly jump on board in the war against SharePoint.
Arghhhh, I have to put up with this junk every single day !

------
BruceM
Maybe too late to the party ...

I work on [http://opendylan.org/](http://opendylan.org/) and have been working
to revive it for the last couple of years. We've done new releases, improved
usability of the compiler and some of the libraries, new website, updated all
of the documentation to modern formats, including a couple of books.

We've also been creating a new IDE via a plugin to IntelliJ that is rapidly
changing how I go about writing Dylan.

I think it is cool because it is a great substrate for experimenting with some
features in programming languages and runtimes, like coroutines and numerics.
It is great to start from a working and industrial strength system.

I think it is great to prevent things from being lost to history (and to
hopefully have them be useful again). Dylan is a great combination of ideas
from Common Lisp, Smalltalk but with a focus on creating native executables
and libraries.

I've also got something that I'm building in Dylan that takes advantage of
Dylan's strengths, but it is in very early days.

------
rooster8
Happy Scale ([http://happyscale.com](http://happyscale.com)) - A moving-
average weight tracking app for iOS

It's cool because it changes your relationship with the scale. Your weight
fluctuates up and down naturally during a diet, and seeing a high number in
the morning after you worked so hard the day before can be so demoralizing.
With this app, that number is just a data point. You can enter a high number
into the app and find out that your overall weight trend is still headed in
the downward direction, so there's no need to freak out!

On a personal level, it's cool because I actually SHIPPED and because I've
gotten to learn so many new things like design and marketing. And getting an
email from someone who tells you that it's helping them in a way that no other
system has ever helped them before feels incredible.

PS- Reading Hacker News has been a huge inspiration for working on this and
persevering during the rough times. Love you guys.

------
eudox
A statically-typed, JIT-compiled dialect of Lisp. I felt that there was a spot
between performance and low-level control, and high-level metaprogramming that
no language right now occupies (Except possibly Rust, which looks pretty
promising).

[https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp](https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-
Lisp)

~~~
AsmMAn
Great job! Very interesting it's even written in lisp! Do you have any book
list you have read before wrote this compiler?

~~~
eudox
I learnt the basics of compilers from _Game Scripting Mastery_. I wasn't
trying to write a compiler for game scripts, I'd just read it was a very
practical (Light on theory) book, and my naive younger self thought this would
be a good thing.

I'd also recommend Ghuloum's _An Incremental Approach to Compiler
Construction_ , and the specially the accompanying tutorial:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20091005152403/http://www.cs.indi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20091005152403/http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/compilers-
tutorial-2006-09-16.pdf)

I never got far in _Lisp in Small Pieces_ or the _Essentials of Programming
Languages_ , I mostly figured things out as I went along.

------
ronilan
PlaceUnit ([http://www.placeunit.com/](http://www.placeunit.com/)) -- an iOS
app to build a mini-responsive website.

Download here:
[http://www.appstore.com/placeunit](http://www.appstore.com/placeunit)

Just the video: [https://vimeo.com/68029789](https://vimeo.com/68029789)

Demo: [http://fantastic-vancouver.placeunit.com/](http://fantastic-
vancouver.placeunit.com/)

It's cool because:

* It is very very simple to use. Any person with an iPhone/iPad can build something in minutes.

* It's a PhoneGap app (HTML5/JavaScript) which integrates Open Source components with a hand rolled framework.

* It uses a no-password pattern. It supports offline work. You can use bidi-languages. It has CSS based themed "filters". Mini-sites are customizable and embedable.

* Bootstrapped. I'm sole developer/designer.

~~~
jph
Superb demo video and product. Your MVP is solid, business proposition is
strong, and UI is terrific. You've got a home run on your hands.

------
shravvmehtaa
[http://www.hshacks.com](http://www.hshacks.com). Introducing hacking to the
younger generation. Our goal is to introduce as many people to computer
science as possible with our hackathon, and promote computer science education
to as many females as possible. Companies are looking for more computer
science talent and want more to see more females in their company ranks. There
are almost 30% less females in computer science compared to males. We are here
to provide the mentorship and training needed to become a great developer. We
aim to teach students the basics of computer science by holding workshops,
teaching the basics of web development, developing iPhone and Android
applications, and integrating third party products (APIs) into applications.

------
stephen_mcd
[https://kouio.com](https://kouio.com) \- RSS reader we built to replace
Google Reader.

It's cool because it's been an amazing ride keeping it nice and snappy in
spite of an ever growing data set - over 50 million feed items retrieved so
far and still growing :-)

~~~
stephen_mcd
Also drawn from kouio, a nice little library I've called Hot Redis.

We use it for working with local Python objects like lists, sets, queues and
multisets, which are then backed by Redis.

[https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-redis](https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-
redis)

------
leeoniya
i'm developing a mobile web interface & a SaaS architecture for my buddy's
greenhouse & hydroponics controller business [1]. the backend comm is
MODBUS/TCP (ethernet) or MODBUS/RTU (serial).

he's currently in Long Beach at the Maximum Yield expo showing off the early
alpha I ummm, "polished off" at 4am last night :) [2]

it's cool because his customers and oems have been hounding him for some time
for an Android and iOS app and for his software to work on OSX, Linux.
(currently it's Windows only, C#/.NET).

a web app + SaaS was the most natural choice. also, i don't think anything
like this exists yet.

[1] [http://agrowtek.com](http://agrowtek.com)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/e6E8Osw.png](http://i.imgur.com/e6E8Osw.png)

~~~
tsumnia
Is there any wireless communication? I've been building a similar pH monitor
using XBee communication. If your buddy would like to someone else to work
with, I've been doing this in my free time.

~~~
leeoniya
the controllers, the heart of which are industrial PLCs, do have ethernet
modules but no wifi since the reliability is critical in automation. however
with a wifi router and some quick config, you can get this fairly easily,
assuming the client talks modbus/tcp and knows how to query the controller's
register maps.

i'm working on a plan to replace the ethernet module with a BeagleBone Black +
Arch and a nodjs-based tcp->serial modbus proxy. lots to do, especially when
you also have a 9-5 :)

~~~
tsumnia
Xbee isn't bad, provided you have good signal strength. Before I started
teaching I worked for an HVAC optimization company that automated fast food
restaurant chain air conditioning. It folded due to politics with the owners,
but the product worked really well. One of our early adopters was actually a
small Health Center.

I've got some modbus scripts that were written in Python while we were working
with one of our clients. Its nothing great, just a few read/write functions.
If you want I'll send them to you.

------
fudged71
Everyone is working on new 3D printing hardware but the software is still
years behind.

PrintToPeer ([http://www.printtopeer.com](http://www.printtopeer.com)) is
connecting 3D printers to the internet for remote control and analytics. We
have a web dashboard with a real-time connection to your 3D printer(s) for
queueing and monitoring, and we've built a printer driver that works on the
majority of current desktop 3D printers.

A hardware-agnostic API from the web serves as a platform for other developers
to create apps on top of. It's an abstraction layer above 3D printing.

Being able to create tangible things from software is the coolest thing I can
imagine, because of the social and environmental impacts. There are huge
challenges ahead that we are excited to face.

~~~
mercuryrising
How does this compare to Octoprint[0]? What makes PrintToPeer different?

[0] - [http://octoprint.org/](http://octoprint.org/)

~~~
fudged71
We've used Octoprint in the past and it just didn't meet our needs. We believe
in designing for the novice and giving configuration options for the
professionals; Octoprint just isn't user-friendly enough.

Out of the box, we support Makerbots (as well as ReRaps). Multiple printers
are managed from the same interface. You don't need to wrestle with firewall
settings to be secure. We offer multiple slicers in the cloud rather than one
slicer on the client. And we are starting with a Raspberry Pi client rather
than relying on other projects to provide that capability.

And again, by having the service hosted by us, we're able to provide an API to
3rd parties to tie their apps into. Marketplaces, design apps, games, sharing
economy services, etc.

Do you use Octoprint? Which printers do you have connected to the service?

~~~
mercuryrising
I have not used Octoprint. I actually use a homemade printer with LinuxCNC and
a HobbyCNC driver. It's a bit more fiddly than an off the shelf printer that's
fully scriptable, but I really like looking at something I made drive around
and make more things [0].

The way it sounds, at least from glancing at your website, is that the printer
becomes web connected (your printtopeer.com link on the tablet and printer
interface). I would never, ever pass control through a third party for
something as expensive and dangerous as a printer. Can you manually override
the endstops? Can you manually override the temperature controls? How about a
hacker?

Just my thoughts. Your interface looks very nice, good luck with the project.

[0] - [http://imgur.com/a/FZfp9](http://imgur.com/a/FZfp9)

~~~
fudged71
Yes, we are building in these protections. I will check if we support Linux
CNC, do you know what type of GCode it takes?

And thank you!

------
bedatadriven
ActivityInfo - allow non0technical humanitarian and other NGO workers to
define indicators, collect results, map, share, and overlay from dozens of
different sources. Open-Source AppEngine/GWT app with OLAP-ish database that
syncs to local WebSQL for offline usage.
[http://about.activityinfo.org](http://about.activityinfo.org), or
[http://github.com/bedatadriven/activityinfo](http://github.com/bedatadriven/activityinfo)

Renjin - new interpreter for the R language built on the JVM
([http://www.renjin.org](http://www.renjin.org)) - includes a gcc-based
Fortran/C to JVM compiler tool chain to leverage and transform existing
scientific code.

------
pauljz
A web-based IDE for automated testing [1] with real-time collaboration
features. Pretty cool for a few reasons: First, it's actually making creating
automated testing suites enjoyable. This is usually a pretty unenviable task.
The IDE is something I actually like using though, and have found myself
wanting to use it on just about every consulting gig or website I've touched
since we started on it - even ones without an explicit automated testing
requirement.

Second, the technology to pull this off requires a lot of different pieces, in
different environments and languages. It's been a really satisfying technical
challenge to make everything work together seamlessly and automatically.

[1] [http://f14n.com/](http://f14n.com/)

~~~
moosterv
god, please don't use autoplay videos! I open your link to read later, then I
have to figure out where that damn noise is coming from.

------
orthecreedence
Turtl! ([https://turtl.it](https://turtl.it))

It's a client-side encrypted Evernote replacement (with a much easier
interface). The goal is to eventually provide easy note-taking,
bookmarking/clipping, _and_ file storage (ala Dropbox) with a cloud service
that's surveillance/hacker resistant by only storing encrypted data. The
kicker is you can still share with others.

Right now it's a pretty small alpha, but we're hoping to get some of the
internals cleaned up and push out a new version with file storage in the next
few weeks.

Of course, it's open source (if it's not open source, it's not encrypted).
We're avoiding the word "secure" until we get some eyes besides our own
reviewing the code.

~~~
mahyarm
Really cool! Have you thought of making it a phonegap style app so we can use
it on our mobile devices too? I've been looking for a simple html note taking
app that does client side encryption and works on all major desktop and mobile
operating systems.

~~~
orthecreedence
Mobile is on the way! Right now Turtl is two guys working part time, unfunded.
We're going to be doing a fundraising round soon and if all goes well we'll be
able to work on it unfettered for a while, including mobile apps.

------
aoruclar
Neurio: A new home intelligence project that makes an ordinary home smart.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/energyaware/neurio-
home-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/energyaware/neurio-home-
intelligence/)

It's cool because we launched it on Kickstarter 11 days ago, and have raised
$101,000 so far... people really are excited about it!

Basically, it's a real-time energy sensor that can show you how much
electricity each appliance in the home is using from a central sensor. Also,
it has an open platform & can integrate with things like IFTTT, Spark Core,
and Smart Things.

Here's an example project we put together. =)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTBtnLbBnc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTBtnLbBnc)

------
solnyshok
I made private diaries for close friends (7 max). It is like post-it note on
the kitchen fridge. Not indexed by google. Honesty of content there is
amazing. Things that people would never trust to fb/twitter. Also, people that
never write anything on facebook, do post there. It is simple stuff, like " I
am doing that, I am feeling this, I am going to somewhere." If suddenly, all
of fb contacts would post such small things, you'd go crazy. However, there
are several people in my life, about whom I care deeply and want to know how
they are doing even if they are 1000km away. This solves my need to keep in
touch with chosen few souls. [http://www.osom.me](http://www.osom.me)

~~~
mct
That's an interesting concept. Am I missing something, though, or is there no
way to create an account on that website?

~~~
solnyshok
yes, we are invite only and tied to LV mobile numbers. Idea was that sms
access would make it simpler for elder people, but turns out that its not.
some people love it, esp in roaming, but most active use is still through
mobile browsers. I'm rewriting this for simpler email based signups, to open
international registrations, you can leave your email at
[http://this.is.osom.me](http://this.is.osom.me) to get invite soon

------
kylelutz
Boost.Compute
([https://github.com/kylelutz/compute](https://github.com/kylelutz/compute)) -
A C++ GPU Computing Library for OpenCL

It's cool because it offers C++ developers an easy path to running code on
GPUs and multi-core CPUs via an STL-like API. It's similar to NVIDIA's Thrust
library but supports all OpenCL compatible devices (including AMD GPUs and
Intel CPUs/accelerators).

Documentation is here:
[http://kylelutz.github.io/compute/](http://kylelutz.github.io/compute/)

P.S. It's still under active development and we're looking for more
contributors with an interest in parallel computing and C++. Send me an e-mail
if you're interested!

------
kevando
Frameri ([http://frameri.com](http://frameri.com)) Interchangeable Rx glasses.

Buy your lenses once that work with multiple frames!

------
bitexploder
Toy project: an HTTP(S) brute forcing tool using Python as a templating
language. Why is it cool: high performance using async IO, powerful templating
for Python programmers, very easy to take HTTP requests and turn them into a
fuzzing template that mutates request in a combinatoric fashion. Similar to
features built into Burp proxy for those that are familiar with it.

Real project: A system that will help organizations understand their overall,
and application, security risk and manage it across time. Why is it cool:
because security is hard and this will make it easier in a non-snake oil
fashion. Many organizations are flying blind about their actual risk. A good
view of your risk can help you prioritize security budgets.

~~~
meowface
In regards to the first one: Sounds like a cool idea.

Might I also suggest an overall fuzzing engine? Sulley and Peach Fuzzer both
have fairly ugly APIs and config formats, in my opinion.

A pretty DSL that lets you describe a template, also with the ability to add
custom Python functions and integrate them on the fly, would be great.

~~~
bitexploder
It, more or less, has a separate "Fuzzing Template" system which it uses to
generate the brute force test cases. It was never meant to rise to the
complexity of Sulley's fuzzing system. I wanted an in between complexity for
the dumbest fuzzing and something completely flexible like Sulley and Peach.
To solve that 80% problem of, "OK, I just grabbed an HTTP request, let's turn
it into a quick and dirty fuzzing template." and from that, "And make sure it
runs really fast on a single machine". In the time boxed assessment world you
rarely have time to do all that you would like so this seemed to be a
reasonable solution.

I will put it up at
[http://github.com/bitexploder](http://github.com/bitexploder) soon (a week?
Maybe two?).

The beauty of the "fuzzing engine" I built is that there is nothing to it
really. You put in "scriptlets", which are really just small bits of Python
that generate lists or sequences, and it combines all of them. My goal was to
just write up a lot of the common HTTP fuzzing scenarios (integer sequences,
alphabetical sequences, demonstrate common encoding and other scenarios giving
you a simple list of things you can copy/paste/modify into a template. And
then it runs, logging it all into a SQLite database.

~~~
meowface
Certainly sounds interesting. I'll be sure to check it out.

------
cwal37
Nothing to do with coding, but I recently started writing energy things at
www.btus.us It's just Wordpress for now, but I want to talk about energy
generation and consumption related things using EIA and other data sources in
ways people haven't seen before. Maps, charts, tables, I think there are a lot
of fun things to look at in the energy industry, and most people don't have a
strong grasp on it.

I'm working on a map series (36-48 maps in a .gif) of dominant generation
types by state and month right now that I think a lot of people are going to
find very interesting, as the seasonal disposition of hydro and the fast
uptake of natural gas by all the boilers that can use it will be kind of
visualized.

~~~
mercuryrising
If you haven't seen NPR's visualizing the grid, check it out -
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398)

~~~
cwal37
I have, it's quite nice, although a bit old. High-detail shapefiles of the
grid have become harder and harder to obtain over the years though (post 9/11
basically). So as an individual it kind of sucks to not be able to play with
the grid and population/generation shifts.

------
digisth
A friend and I have been working on building out a service to help connect
organizations looking for custom software development-related services with
organizations that provide them. At the time I first started on HN, I was
looking for a company to do additional dev work for the company I was working
for, so I posted this Ask HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364).
I got a few helpful responses (one of which I followed up with and hired) but
it made me think about what was missing, and that was a service that provided
comprehensive/well-organized listings (with all the stuff you would expect
like case studies, work examples, contact forms that weren't buried, the
ability to just "start a project" with one, etc.) of custom software
development companies/consultancies/shops/agencies/your favorite term here.

You can Google for all this stuff, but sifting through the mounds of results
takes way too much manual effort; you can ask on forums like this, but that's
not going to work for a lot of people; you can look through LinkedIn or the
ones that AdAge and friends use, but I didn't find anything I would consider
thorough/useful on the former (and I find the searching and filtering system
to be very poor), and the latter only really had advertising companies. I also
thought about things that companies I've worked for that have provided custom
software dev work would find useful (like having a single place to point
customers with examples of everything - for various reasons, so many companies
just can't/won't update it on their own web site - it even happens that the
people who work at the company have to send an email around asking for
examples of previous work.) So it's better than all that (we hope!) That's why
we'd consider it cool.

At the moment, we're pretty far in to initial development of what we consider
the MVP and hope to soft launch it in the next few months. Right now, we just
have a splash-type page up:

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

------
jmadsen
Aw, jeez - I knew my little weekend project wasn't such a big deal, but
absolutely dwarfed by the other ideas here.

But since I'd love to chat about it:

[http://tweetstart.me/](http://tweetstart.me/)

Simple little tool to let "unknown" but talented bloggers work together to
publicize their offerings.

Why's it cool?

\- aim to is help counteract the "Justin Beiber Affect" (gets 100,000 RTs for
saying, "Live life!")

\- try to encourage a more personal, hands-on sharing rather than today's
mindless "click to retweet" approach to life.

\- you can't earn any badges or rep points

That's it... best go finish it :-) It's at @tweetstartme if you are
interesting in knowing when it's done

------
btgeekboy
I'm working on a system to export users from one version & instance of our
SaaS application and import them into another.

The cool/interesting part of this is that I'm using a combination of
SchemaCrawler and our homegrown upgrade/migrations kit to naively (with the
only domain-specific knowledge being where to start) extract a single account
from a multi-tenant database and import it into another one, even if the other
one is a different version. (I only support upgrades, as downgrades would
cause data loss.) Because it all runs over JDBC, it also means that I can go
from one database to another - MySQL to PostgreSQL, for example.

------
c0lin
Notelab ([http://notelab.org](http://notelab.org)) - a way to take synced
notes alongside web videos.

It's cool because:

* It's really simple (paste a YouTube URL then take notes and they all sync up).

* At the moment there's no good way to capture, organise, export and share notes relating to online videos. You have to open a text editor next to your browser window, or (gasp) write on paper.

* It solves a pain point I have when teaching, as I often recommend videos as "recommended viewing" to my students, and I like to share my notes on the videos with them, and also see what they are writing.

* It's my first coding project, so I'm learning a lot :-)

------
cliveowen
Nothing, and it's cool because it gives me a ton of time to go out and meet
people.

~~~
bbrian
Then you might like the app I made that maps the events your friends have been
invited to:

[http://apps.facebook.com/sortonsevents](http://apps.facebook.com/sortonsevents)

Which is tied in with a page tab app I'm working on that watches a list of
other pages for events they've created or posted:

[http://www.facebook.com/UCDEvents/app_123069381111681](http://www.facebook.com/UCDEvents/app_123069381111681)

Most of the work for that being on the admin end:

[http://imgur.com/f1BuKYA](http://imgur.com/f1BuKYA)

And I've just started the android client.

I'm using GWT on App Engine and trying to keep generic Facebook stuff in a
separate project, which will some day be amazing:

[https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/GwtFBplus/](https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/GwtFBplus/)

------
theblueadept
[http://jaunt-api.com](http://jaunt-api.com)

It's a (free) headless browser API for web automation, creating web-bots,
scrapers, and talking to REST-ful web services. I just released Beta version
0.9.5 last night.

It's cool because it's far more lightweight than the most obvious
alternatives, which means (for example) that it's possible to run many, many
browser instances at once, such as one per thread. As an API, it's very
developer-friendly with extensive documentation and simple examples for every
concept, making it very easy to get started writing java-based
scrapers/bots/etc.

------
yesimahuman
I'm building Ionic Framework
([http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/)) to make HTML5
mobile app development awesome. Should have our first release out in a few
weeks!

------
zitko
I'm working on Event Discovery App.

It's cool because unlike other apps that fetch data from Facebook, we're
classifying events into categories using NLP algorithms and we're also working
on advanced event recommendation system, so we don't just provide a list of
things.

Also unlike other tech startups that try to make things easier to do at home
(delivery, social networks, etc etc) we're trying to encourage you to go out
and enjoy life.

It's for Android only at the moment. [http://olaii.com](http://olaii.com)

I'm always open for chat, suggestions, criticism so don't hesitate to contact
me/us :)

~~~
sloinfinity
Cool stuff, tried it on my friends phone, would love to see that on my iPhone
soon.

~~~
zitko
Thanks, we'll do our best to make it available for iOS as soon as possible.

------
ZeroMinx
Working on services that makes law firms and lawyers more efficient.

It's cool (to me) because I'm one of the co-founders, we started from 0 a few
years ago, and I like to see the growth.

(you didn't specify it had to be cool to other people)

------
LouisSayers
Working on [http://www.Driftrock.com](http://www.Driftrock.com) \- it's a
Marketing tools platform that connects to various paid marketing channels such
as Facebook, Twitter, Adwords, Analytics.

It's cool because it's designed to host lots of different marketing
applications, and because it has the big data aspect to it.

The other cool thing about is that it's designed to be easy to use, mobile
responsive, and self service (which is quite a big plus when comparing to the
competition!).

The other cool thing is that it's my day job, and I get paid to build, design,
and work on it :)

------
dzink
DoerHub ([http://www.doerhub.com](http://www.doerhub.com)) -- a place where
all of the things you are working on can attract not just likes but also
advice, collaborators, tools, tangible help, referrals and word-of-mouth. It's
a humanized GitHub, because no code is involved and non-hackers can contribute
in little or big ways to your tech or non-tech projects and initiatives.

Here is mine: [http://doerhub.com/of/diana](http://doerhub.com/of/diana) ,
showing the rest of the stuff I'm working on.

------
rglover
Proper ([https://properapp.com](https://properapp.com)) - Easy to understand
contracts for freelancers.

Cool because it makes the process of creating, sending, and signing freelance
contracts much less difficult.

Ultimate goal is to get it to a point where a freelancer can pick from a
series of pre-loaded templates related to their type of work (e.g. a brochure
website, developing an application, wedding photography, etc.) and send their
client a contract (that's viable) in minutes.

Also makes signing easy for clients by just using a single button click.

~~~
collyw
Just had a quick look at your site. I assume it is US only? (I like the idea,
I had a similar idea for flat rental contracts here in Barcelona).

How much lawyer time did you need to spend on setting it up?

One suggestion for the website, it clearly states the benefits for the
developer, but I assume the customer half of the deal would end up seeing it
as well. Point out the benefits to that party, make it seem more of a win-win,
rather than a developer covering their arse.

~~~
rglover
US only for now. I'm a solo dev/designer so really just as time allows me to
add in il8n.

Not much lawyer time. I had the fortunate position of having my dad as a
lawyer/a good friend who was a lawyer to pass the idea on to. The core idea
(save for storing signatures) doesn't have any legal implications, so building
it was pretty straightforward on that front.

Re: the site, thank you for this. I currently have an item on my to do list
labeled "guide for curious clients." On my radar for sure, but I'm more
concerned with getting the basic pieces in place before I invite that storm :)

------
defied
A Selenium Grid ([http://testingbot.com](http://testingbot.com))

I love working on this because I get to learn a variety of things. Right now
I'm switching from Amazon EC2 to my own setup with KVM/Qemu VMs.

It's been quite the experience prototyping with kvm/qemu, overall I'm really
happy with it. From tuning libvirt, to loading RAM images straight into the VM
in order to avoid boot-storms, learning about the various VM disk formats,
virtio drivers, ... there's plenty to learn!

~~~
kordless
Wonder if you could do it with OpenStack?

~~~
defied
Probably could, but at this point I don't want the overhead OpenStack brings
along.

------
vorador
I'm working on a gmail replacement to deploy on my own server. It's called
kite. It uses a lot of cool techs like vagrant, puppet, angularjs and of
course, postfix for mail handling.

For the moment, it doesn't do much besides displaying a list of emails in a
maildir but in a week or two I should have thread handling written.

The source is at:
[http://github.com/khamidou/kite](http://github.com/khamidou/kite) (sorry for
the lack of readme, I should get around to do this tomorrow)

~~~
bharad
Cool. A demo or screenshots would be really nice.

~~~
vorador
I know. They're the next thing on my todo list.

------
ibstudios
[http://www.reportsfortrello.com](http://www.reportsfortrello.com) \- Why it
is cool: It is only two months old, but it is cool because of I made it to be
free and private like no app. I did not want to be responsible for other
people's data. Because reports are just a glimpse at a moment of time, I
thought it would be best for both speed and privacy to store Trello activity
temporarily. So I get off the hook for security and reliability and you get
your data destroyed off the internet.

What does it do? It reports time from 3 different actions using Trello. When I
first used the Trello api I was amazed at what you can see. Today I can move
one card and inform my clients and track time at the same time. One bird...

I also don't require any signup. You use your Trello account to sign in. So I
guess another thing that I think is cool is that you can use my application
with little friction. In 3 clicks you can see a report of your Trello activity
the first time you use my app. I am proud of flow.

I also think it is cool that I can get sub 100ms responses off my tiny vps
using ruby/redis/apache/modrails/oj gem/jquery/bootstrap. I love the stack,
sure it's not the fastest/latest, but it was fun to code.

The tool is currently used by people in 88 countries. I did not expect this at
all and it is a happy surprise.

Best of luck to all!

Timers and pie charts are for bakers!

------
spleeder
I’m working on SongPane([http://songpane.com](http://songpane.com)) – an app
that helps musicians organize songs and put together set lists for live
performances.

Demo: [http://demo.songpane.com](http://demo.songpane.com)

It’s cool because:

* you can carry your entire song repertoire with you (chord charts) and easily combine songs to create set lists for worship services, concerts, practice sessions, etc.

* can transpose chord charts

* works on any device

* works offline

* can share set lists with other band members

* everything is synchronized in real-time

------
Prefinem
I am working on a new game I Invented. Called "The Game of Stones"
[http://thegameofstones.com](http://thegameofstones.com)

It will be a website along with a phone app.

Why it's cool? Because it is a tactical type game, like chess, checkers, or go
but instead of two players, up to five players can play meaning that there are
much more possibilities for winning. I am also developing a board game for it
as well to be able to play as a group at home, or where ever.

------
eliteraspberrie
I wrote a spectral analysis library called udsp:

[http://www.eliteraspberries.com/doc/udsp-user-
guide.html](http://www.eliteraspberries.com/doc/udsp-user-guide.html)

[https://code.google.com/p/udsp/](https://code.google.com/p/udsp/)

In the future it will include:

* support for more FFT libraries, like FFTW;

* some signals processing functions, such as basic frequency modulation/demodulation; and

* a NumPy-compatible Python interface.

Its best feature at the moment is convolution and correlation.

~~~
GrumpySimon
Awesome. I'll keep an eye on this, thanks.

------
rograndom
WPCmdCtrl ([http://wpcmdctrl.com](http://wpcmdctrl.com)) - Simplifying
managing multiple WordPress installs.

It's cool because:

* It takes the headache out of maintaining multiple WordPress sites.

* The main plan is that everything is "set and forget". Install one plugin and that site is covered:

* Automatic updates for both point (3.7.1, 3.7.2, etc) and major releases (3.8, 3.9). The point releases should actually happen 1-2 days sooner than the 3.7 auto updates from Wordpress.

* Automatic plugin updates

* Automatic file and DB backups that are stored in S3

* Uptime and response time monitoring.

* "white screen of death" alerts

* Malware / blacklist scans and comparisons of core and plugin files against WordPress.org versions.

This was built for my own internal uses. I had one consulting client that
managed around 600 sites and could not get their heads around the other
management tools on the market, but could work from a Excel sheet that had the
urls / usernames / passwords for all of their sites. When an update was ready,
their procedure was: downloading all of the files via FTP, downloading a SQL
dump, pressing the "update" buttons, looking at the home screen to make sure
it loads, updating the excel sheet with the date and install version and
moving on to the next site. They averaged 4 sites per hour. I'll let you do
the math on how long that took to get through all of their sites.

------
eddyparkinson
Spreadsheet forumlas that build a Web Application

Story: When a business needs custom software to solve a particular business
problem, such as a special inventory management issue, a recruitment process,
expense management or whatever is custom for their company. Normally they
would have to go out and hire a custom programming company to use a very high
level technology to create a solution. This is very time intensive,
complicated and because the programmers don't understand your business, often
there is a massive communication gap and projects often fail. Cell Master is a
much easier way for business owners and people inside of your business to
create custom business software. It is effective because you understand the
business, you understand what the software needs to do and how it needs to
work. All you need is just some basic excel skills, knowing how to use excel
formulas, and you can have the same potential as the expert programmer. So
this means you are going to be able to create the software faster, you will be
able to modify and adapt the software, it will be a lot more cost efficient
and you will be able to create the solution that you want, not the solution
that the programmers think you want. You will be able to create an interactive
web application that solves your business problem with your own custom
software. You will be able to do it with only excel skills, you don't need
HTML skills, web server skills etc. With only spreadsheet skills, you can
create your own custom web application.

Hello world:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oogKKfbRyMQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oogKKfbRyMQ)

------
math
backrecord.com - a tool for tracking opinions and predictions (opinions about
what is going to happen in the future) of people in the public spotlight. Our
goal is to help people form better opinions by providing easy access to the
ideas in the first place alongside tools for assessing credibility. Our focus
is very much on opinion, not news.

It's cool because I think it's an interesting and difficult problem and I
don't know of anyone tackling it well. I still don't know how feasible it is
to create an automated / crowd driven system that provides a measure of
credibility that is reliable enough to be useful, but we are certainly giving
it our best shot and I would love to use such a tool if it existed.

I also think it's cool because I think both our user credibility system and
topic hierarchy concepts have aspects that are quite nice that I haven't seen
elsewhere.

We are currently focused on finance because it is clear how to score
predictions about things that trade in a market (though the problem is much
trickier than you might first imagine). Also, it is clearly valuable if we can
succeed, even in a small way which is the most likely outcome if we do.
However, we are playing with features that have broader applicability as well.

------
julien421
We are working on HNWatcher.com, a tool for everyone (community managers,
growth hackers, devs, devops...) to track keywords and users on Hacker News.

It is cool because you can be alerted on:

\- any mention of your name, company, product or competitors on Hacker News
and join the conversation.

\- any submissions or comments of users you like

This way you can upvote while it's still time and join conversations on
subjects that matter to you.

[https://www.hnwatcher.com/](https://www.hnwatcher.com/)

------
sparktree
QuietThyme([http://www.quietthyme.com](http://www.quietthyme.com)) is like
DropBox for your ebooks.

We let you access your eBook library anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Its great because we allow our users to convert their ebooks from one format
to another with ease, its simple enough that my mother and father could do it.
We also let you keep complete control over your library, if you want, by
allowing you to store it on Dropbox or Google Drive

------
michaeldunworth
snapcard - Allows people to spend their bitcoins on any website at anytime,
regardless of whether the merchant has it integrated.

Like Amazon 1 click, except it works on every website and requires no merchant
integration.

Video Demo - [https://vimeo.com/76122291](https://vimeo.com/76122291)

It's cool because \- Spend bitcoins anywhere you want \- No merchant
integration \- 1 click checkout so you don't flood a million websites with
your personal data.

~~~
taroth
Very cool!

~~~
michaeldunworth
Thanks so much :) I appreciate it!

------
awdraper
DrumLog.com ([http://www.drumlog.com](http://www.drumlog.com)) - Analytics for
your practice sessions. It's a web app for drummers to track what and how much
they are practicing.

It's Cool because:

* Creates analytics from an offline activity

* Built with Backbone.js, Node.js (Express.js), hosted on Heroku, and uses Parse to store data. (all great free services)

* Is being actively used by over 100 drummers who have logged over 3200 practice sessions in about 3 months.

------
iM8t
HMW: [http://hmworship.com/](http://hmworship.com/) \- on offline WEB App for
song lyrics/chords.

It's really cool because most of the current chord sites lack the one critical
feature for the mobile age: offline usage.

And also it's amazing because it's built entirely by volunteers and the users
are evangelizing it themselves. We have never spent a dime on
salaries/marketing or anything else. 100% bootstrapped.

------
jonmrodriguez
Epiphany Eyewear smart glasses:
[http://epiphanyeyewear.com](http://epiphanyeyewear.com)

It's cool because these glasses are stylish enough that they are a fashion
item, and have appeared on the runway at New York Fashion Week:
[https://yougen.tv/video/beddc3d4-784f-40ab-8066-652ac8e3f694...](https://yougen.tv/video/beddc3d4-784f-40ab-8066-652ac8e3f694/)

It's cool because you can record two-handed activities such as kayaking:
[https://yougen.tv/video/9b406d41-8e68-43fc-904f-f12ce688f610...](https://yougen.tv/video/9b406d41-8e68-43fc-904f-f12ce688f610/)

It's cool because everyone from Miss California
[https://yougen.tv/video/db0c3dd0-846c-458c-8d53-cd2802b00534...](https://yougen.tv/video/db0c3dd0-846c-458c-8d53-cd2802b00534/)
to my barber
[https://yougen.tv/video/92f9308b-d6a9-46a4-95f9-39da0700f9cb...](https://yougen.tv/video/92f9308b-d6a9-46a4-95f9-39da0700f9cb/)
instantly sees the appeal of recording and sharing your memories with your
friends

------
ChrisNorstrom
[http://60lbgloss.com](http://60lbgloss.com) (alpha stage) - database,
community, and marketplace for magazine cutouts. ("60 lb gloss" is the type of
paper that magazines are printed on) At the moment it's really bare, only I
can add and sell the ads. So far I made a working site in 5 days. Next will be
the community features like adding an Ad to your favorites.

I don't know why but I always thought fashion ads in Vogue were beautiful.
They were art. And it pissed me off that others didn't see what I saw. I also
love and admire Milla Jovovich and try to collect as many of her
fashion/fragrance ads I see. I get really pissed when I can't have one. It's
my collector's mindset. Even if the site fails as a marketplace and instead
becomes the Pinterest of Magazine Ads, I don't mind. I just love scanning the
ads in and organizing them.

So I thought why not have a marketplace where people can buy and sell their
favorite ads of models and celebrities. There's tons of people who are
obsessed with celebrities and collect whatever has their favorite celeb's face
on it.

------
mambodog
BeatStash: a Git/GitHub for music production (using git-annex)

In other words, keeping every version and branch of a musical idea, with
rollback and merging (eg. merge bassline track from version A into different
branch), and collaboration through these same tools.

I know people have approached this idea a few times, and just this month a
startup called Splice popped up with some funding to do almost exactly what I
had planned to in a previous iteration of the idea. However I've moved on to
an approach which would make this awesome capability available to more people.
Ultimately though, I'd like to extract as much as possible into a generic
foundation for apps for other media such as video production, a low-end, self-
hosted LayerVault alternative etc.

Also, out of interest in personal computer history, I ported the PCE classic
Mac/PC emulator to the browser with Emscripten.

Demo: [http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

Rationale: [http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-
browser](http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser)

------
martydill
[http://reminderhero.com](http://reminderhero.com) \- an email and SMS
reminder service. Currently in beta.

Unlike some of my previous projects (such as
[http://surveylitics.com](http://surveylitics.com)), it's cool because it's
actually useful. I've been using it for the past month or two for everything
and anything I need to remember.

~~~
sensecall
I prototyped something _exactly_ like this a couple of years ago but I really
struggled with converting human readable times (I'm not a programmer).

Looks great! Subscribed.

~~~
martydill
Heh, thanks! It's definitely a challenge, and a work in progress. But it's
coming along!

------
coreymaass
I just launched [http://builtFromIdeas.com](http://builtFromIdeas.com) \- my
web app developement services as a package.

It's cool because it automates most of the sales process. It generates an NDA,
and work-for-hire, invoices, and accepts electronic signatures for approval.
Customers can review and approve milestones, make payments through Stripe. It
even schedules calls!

------
thibpat
I've built GifIt ([http://gifit.nodejitsu.com/](http://gifit.nodejitsu.com/))
this week. It allows you to add a gif with your tweets.

It's cool because:

\- Gifs are cool

\- It uses getUserMedia() to capture the gif from the browser

\- Coded in node.js with the MEAN boilerplate
([https://github.com/linnovate/mean](https://github.com/linnovate/mean))

\- It's a 15-hours one-person project

------
metral
I'm working on an aggregated information panel for the novice Bitcoin day
trader.

It's great for Bitcoin buyers & sellers because the panel is consolidated
around the more popular exchanges & wallets, its cleaner & easier to read than
most financial-type sites, & all the data is real-time. Also, I'm working on
supplemental features such as a live balance & calculator page to help make
more informed decisions without having to navigate to other pages.

It's cool to me simply because its a site I myself want & need and mostly, its
an excuse to play with technologies I've always wanted to learn & use so I'm
glad I finally took the time to do so.

i.e -Django as webapp front-end with Gunicorn & nginx in the mix, -Gearman as
a background worker pulling data and storing it in a DB, -nodejs + socket.io
pushing the DB data to Django, -supervisord controlling Gunicorn & Gearman
processes

And all of these living in their own VM environment for load/performance &
decoupling of the usual silo of services.

Ping me if you're interested in finding out more about it :)

~~~
mattmcegg
Sounds awesome! I'm not only interested in the day trading application, but
your software stack sounds awesome as well. I couldn't find how to PM you on
here, but you should email me at <my Hacker news username> at gmail. best of
luck!

------
hpvic03
A Pivotal and Trello hybrid for agile software development teams.

Pivotal works but lacks the idea of "stages", which is very useful because it
actually reflects the real world.

Trello is cool but it isn't made specifically for software. For example, it
doesn't have acceptance workflow.

Combining ideas from both of these results in a very compelling and (I think)
useful product. Version 1 will be ready next week.

~~~
cnorgate
hpvic - not sure if you're working this solo, or as a bigger team, but I'm a
PM, I love Trello, haven't used Pivotal, and can't stand Jira. I've been
considering building out a Jira-killer myself as a side project. Might be good
to chat and hear more of what you're working on. If you want to connect my
email is cameron.norgate at the gmail. Cheers!

------
Coval
I'm working on completely rewriting my app (Stamp Trader). It's the only
native BitStamp client I know of but the UI needs a ton of work. Why it's cool
- you can quickly buy and sell bitcoins with your phone, you can scan and
generate a QR code for addresses to buy and sell bitcoins locally with ease. I
plan to open source the rewrite when it's finished.

------
dxm
I have a limited company incorporated in the United Kingdom, and I am working
on three projects that I hope will turn into profitable products.

* Main focus: Transactional and marketing SMS application, it's a little boring and lots of companies do it, but none are truly self-service, and none make it super-easy.

* Back burner: Digital asset management, again it's done by many companies already, but there UIs are mostly upload, tag and try to retrieve. I have a background in AI (B.Sc) and I want to make it a little smarter than what's currently out there, with uploads that detect previous revisions of digital assets, etc – finally putting to an end file naming conventions such as x_final.ai, x_final_2.ai, x_final_final.psd (something I have seen used by every company I have worked for.)

* And later: I'm into brewing beer, and I have been working on recipes for a few years – Ambition is to make enough money to survive with the two projects above, and to begin investing in building a microbrewery and brew pub.

------
rudolfosman
Zazler - seamless API creation, [http://www.zazler.com](http://www.zazler.com)

Why it's cool:

1) Instead of building an API for your project, you can start using Zazler as
a ready-made API. It acts as a web server that can be installed locally and
configured directly to a SQL database (a legacy database or a new one, we're
currently supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and MSSQL), so that makes it
cross-platform. (ofcourse you can also build a proxy with node or nginx on the
server's port if that's necessary)

2) Database queries are defined as URLs per HTTP request, using a query syntax
very similar to SQL. This allows the user of an app to write necessary
queries, hence extend the app on the client-side. Complex joins, filters and
similar stuff is supported.

3) Zazler comes bundled with many technical formats, data visualizations and
app templates. And they are extendable, meaning the app's users themselves can
decide how to view the data, even write their own formats and templates.

4) The feedback we've received from backend developers is that it will save
them many, many hours of boilerplate coding. So it can also serve as a
development platform that can be used to write database queries using URLs
instead of writing boilerplate backend code. You can basically set it up and
let the frontend technician take over the work from there.

5) We've used similar architecture for the last 6 years in our projects, so
it's pretty mature. Now we're releasing Zazler as a beta for public and
planning to launch it as a separate product in 2014.

I've written a blog post where I describe Zazler's approach in more detail:
"API Creation – the Missing Link in API Management"
[http://www.zazler.com/?p=115](http://www.zazler.com/?p=115)

------
hippich
SMS Neighbors ([http://smsneighbors.com/](http://smsneighbors.com/))

Cool, because I am trying to bring social networks to people using "dumb
phones". By sending text to one number all your neighbors will receive it.
Perfect for reporting suspicious person or lost dog, or announcing garage sale
or neighborhood event.

------
olegp
[https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com) \- a web app launcher & new tab
replacement extension - like the old Chrome new tab page, but better.

What makes it cool is that we are implementing a number of desktop and mobile
OS features, like multiple, screens, fast shortcuts, cross app search,
notifications etc. but for web apps.

~~~
trey_swann
I use the StartHQ launcher. Pretty cool! Thanks guys!!

I also like the weekly update emails. They email you news and posts about the
apps you use.

~~~
olegp
Awesome! Let me enable some upcoming features like deep links and screens for
you.

I can also enable developer mode, if you want:
[https://github.com/starthq/search#starthq-search-
api](https://github.com/starthq/search#starthq-search-api)

------
mcherry
I'm working on Revision Path
([http://www.revisionpath.com](http://www.revisionpath.com)), which showcases
black web designers, web developers, and graphic designers. Right now, that's
in the form of interviews, and I've got 28 done (10 audio, 18 text) with about
a dozen more in the queue.

Why is it cool?

Well, whenever the mention of race and technology get mentioned together,
people get extremely bent out of shape. Instead of going that doomed route of
asking why the industry isn't more diverse and arguing statistics (on it's
visible edge, I mean), I decided to showcase the people who ARE actively
working in this industry.

The site is just a few months old, and the reaction has been mixed (as you can
imagine since I'm only interviewing Black folks), but I'm definitely
interested in telling these people's stories who love this industry, love the
work they do, and are interested in telling their stories.

------
benmorris
Cloud Imaging API [http://ionapi.com](http://ionapi.com) \- A lot of software
I write faciltates design online, web to print type stuff, and I noticed a
real void in a robust image manipulation API. This restful API makes it pretty
easy to get images generated of text with lots of effects.

Why it is cool: -supports obvious features rotation, resizing, etc of images,
but that isn't really the important parts

-Vector first, text is generated as vector then converted to raster if needed (for client side previews). An API request you can access the underlying point data or request a vector file(eps,pdf) in response rather than raster (png).

-Robust Text features - load fonts on the fly,shear, vector outlines (offset path), texture support, gradients, warps, shadows, etc

-Object structure allows complex images to be built from other canvas objects previously saved or pulled from the net, canvas can be built from vector or raster sources, or through the API.

-Ultimately the API will make it painfully simple to overlay designs on objects such as pens, mugs, koozies, shirts, vehicles, etc.

What is not cool: it isn't done :( Unfortunately it isn't ready for open
access yet. I have a few customers using parts that are done, but mainly
documentation is not done and there is no front end developed yet for sign
ups/ registration. If you are interested in using this please let me know or
use the notification form on the site.

Where is it being used? Several places, one of my clients you can checkout
that uses it [http://bandegraphix.com](http://bandegraphix.com) (lettering
tool, rclogo/decal tool) another one Dynamic Product Image placement
[http://boatdecals.biz/lake-swag/](http://boatdecals.biz/lake-swag/) (canvas
creation, masking, warping)

------
stasy
I'm working on first startup as a sophomore in high school. It is basically a
PHP login/registration system styled with all the bootstrap templates. (You
can get the PHP login/registration system with any Bootstrap template. Coming
soon. [https://www.phpstrap.in/](https://www.phpstrap.in/)

~~~
anandvc
Glad you're starting early! Keep going!

------
nercury
I have _started_ working on a library to simplify exposing C++ classes to
various languages that can be "embeded". A link to the second attempt [1], my
current attempt is to expose things to V8 Javascript [2]

It is cool because in addition of exposing and sharing objects, it can be used
to output the documentation for them, or even ease embeding such languages as
C# (to generate interop library automatically).

Note that this is my second attempt (recently started), the first one worked
but relied on some overcomplicated third party libraries for V8, I could not
understand them fully, therefore a reboot.

[1] [https://github.com/key-tools/key-machine](https://github.com/key-
tools/key-machine)

[2] [https://github.com/key-
tools/key-v8-machine/blob/master/key-...](https://github.com/key-
tools/key-v8-machine/blob/master/key-v8-machine/DriverBuilderV8.cpp)

------
shuzchen
Recommendation engine as a service ([http://savant-api.com/](http://savant-
api.com/)) -- absolutely nothing public yet, except a fancy d3 powered widget
that has nothing to do with the service.

It's cool because I'm hoping to make collaborative filtered recommendations
easy to obtain for small outfits.

~~~
Deejahll
Will your recommendation algorithm be public or secret? Will it be
customizable by your users?

You mention a bulk import. Will you provide a bulk export, or will I have to
keep my own backup database to avoid lock-in?

I see in your API example a bucket, a source, and a target. Would you consider
a "value" field, for graphs with weighted edges? (The question is moot if I
can't modify the recommendation algorithm to employ it.)

~~~
shuzchen
It'll use standard algorithms, although the MVP will only have one available
(using pearson currently). My goal is to make various alogrithms eventually
available, and perhaps some mechanism to select the best automatically (e.g.,
selecting the best method based on how sparse or dense the graph is).

As for bulk export, yes in the sense of "download all the calculated
recommendations" (perhaps you want to dump that to a local db to access that
data directly, rather than rely on hitting my api every time you need
something), but not "download all the data exactly as I put it in". For the
most part, the data you put into my service should already exist in your own
database (what products your users have purchased, what products your users
elected as liking). In addition, you'll likely want to use a one-way hash to
hash sources (especially if you use usernames or email addresses to uniquely
identify users).

I probably won't launch with the ability to add weights to edges, although
that's probably one of the first post MVP features on my todo list.

------
SubuSS
I work on AWS DynamoDB Storage Engine. AWS DynamoDB is an infinitely scalable
/ infinitely provisionable / hosted low latency key value store. It is growing
beyond the basic key value store definition rapidly with indexing etc.

Building and keeping a storage engine that runs on a ton of machines with high
performance requirements / changing hardware / a bunch of new feature work
etc. is truly hard. Add in other complexities such as live deployment of new
software, monitoring for issues, testing the upgrade downgrade scenarios etc.
you are looking at a super complex and fluid system. Very few people in the
world get to be in the middle of such massive e-machinery, So it is a great
place to be. Tough, but great.

If that sounds interesting to you, and you are looking to work on the bleeding
edge of database technology used by a lot of customers, PM me! We are hiring
in Palo Alto, Seattle and Dublin!

------
spencerfry
I'm working on [https://www.uncover.com](https://www.uncover.com) (an easy way
to offer perks and rewards for your employees) with a few other people. We're
bootstrapped and making decent revenue in our 6th month. We've got a huge
update coming (hopefully) before Thanksgiving.

------
hyperion2010
I'm building a tool (using python) that helps scientists (me) plan and
automate repetitive experiments of pretty much any kind. The amusing part is
that by using a database as a back end one can--guess what--query data based
on experimental conditions and streamline and automate analysis.

Many scientists I have talked to (who collect their own data and do their own
analysis) simply store their data sets on the file system and keep track of
any relations or conditions in an ad hoc manner. I personally don't trust my
memory, my handwriting, or my ability to do EXACTLY the same complicated set
of things over and over enough to do that.

Hopefully using a tool that makes the relationships between different pieces
of data explicit and automates or at least systematizes how data is collected
I and others can generate more and better data and communicate what we did and
what we found more effectively.

~~~
emdonahu
Sounds cool. Is there any extant code/docs/blog posts/publicly viewable
material of any sort?

------
lukaseder
Making my strongest software engineering beliefs a business with
[http://www.jooq.org](http://www.jooq.org)

It's cool because two of the oldest and most popular technologies in the
software ecosystem (Java from the 90s and SQL from the 70s) are still
integrated like it's 1997, through the awkward JDBC API. Meanwhile, everyone
else has since been trying to hide SQL away (e.g. JPA).

While jOOQ doesn't help everyone ([http://http://www.hibernate-
alternative.com](http://http://www.hibernate-alternative.com)), most DBA /
SQL-centric developers who have stumbled upon jOOQ found the idea very
intriguing, and it certainly beats SQLJ in user acceptance.

What's really cool as well is that I can help the Java folks remember how
awesome actual SQL can be. Today's junior developers hardly even know the SQL
language.

------
egypturnash
Decrypting Rita:
[http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/)

It's a graphic novel about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by
her ex-boyfriend. She's got to pull herself together across four parallel
worlds before a hive mind can take over the planet.

------
mikeurbanski
Shut Up & Sit Down ([http://shutupandsitdown.com](http://shutupandsitdown.com)
& [http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down](http://penny-
arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down))

A board game review show and a few secret projects.

Cool because: Very funny.

------
praxeologist
I want to build a marketplace for electronic cigarette vendors/individuals.
I've been a vendor for almost 3 years and have a unique product which is even
more effective than others in helping people quit smoking (even though we are
not allowed to market it this way). I think that looming regulation will
destroy a lot of small businesses, so I am trying to find a way to respond to
that.

Getting someone to take payments is really hard though. Balanced just changed
their terms, so I am really demoralized but still keeping at it. My options
seem to be to become a payment processor myself (expensive and I have no clue
what to do) or wait until a similar service comes along and make sure to get
in quick so I can get grandfathered in before they change the terms.

If anyone has some insight on payments and wants to help me learn the industry
or if you smoke and want to quit, let me know.

~~~
yabbadabbadoo
Your contact info?

~~~
praxeologist
My email is in my profile, 9nine9//gmail

(302) 990-8273 and my name is Ethan if you prefer to call.

~~~
yabbadabbadoo
Don't see an email in your profile -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=praxeologist](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=praxeologist)

------
pawelkomarnicki
LikeMind ([http://getlikemind.com](http://getlikemind.com)) -- an easy and
friendly way to meet likeminded people around you.

Demo: [http://getlikemind.com/discover](http://getlikemind.com/discover)

It's cool because: * it's not a dating social network, so if you won't get
spammed with people telling how beautiful your body is or how much they want
to sleep with you (unless you make a profile with this purpose in mind) * it's
about _doing stuff_ , so you can finally meet a running buddy you wanted or
fellow foodies to cook together, or just talk and share ideas, no pressure! *
our iPhone app is beautiful and delightful to use, because we keep our users
in mind, _always_ * our team is super small (we have basically 4 permanent
workers, an intern and a... dog :D)

------
keven25
A bookmarking tool that tracks progress of webpages/videos

I've been using this app to bookmark all my webpages:
[http://alittleapp.com/](http://alittleapp.com/)

It is especially helpful for unfinished long articles and long videos, which I
have to come back for. What makes ALittle unique is, it actually saves the
play progress of the video (in the case of articles, it saves the scroll
position), so that next time you can come back to the exact same spot. No more
writing down the time manually. No more time spent trying to remember the spot
you left off at.

ALittle makes this possible with a Chrome extension. It adds a cute little
button next to your browser's address bar. With just one click, you can save
the progress of any webpages. Furthermore, the progress can be synced across
computers, as long as you have Chrome browsers.

------
chris_va
(neat Ask HN!)

Maybe the software guys here will find this cool :).

I'm working on an open source build tool (similar to Ant, etc). Github code:
[https://github.com/chrisvana/repobuild](https://github.com/chrisvana/repobuild)

It's cool because:

* It makes it really easy to integrate new open source code. Want to compile against boost? Add one line. Want an ML library? Add another.

* Everything gets automatically pulled in.

* It makes it really easy to share your open source code with others.

* Works with a bunch of languages.

* Proven model from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

My main project is using large scale computing (data from millions of CPU
hours) to change how drug discovery is done. Drugs are very expensive because
98% of them fail. This hopefully changes that, and makes it profitable for
companies to go after much smaller diseases that do not currently get
attention. Papers forthcoming.

------
iamwil
Cubehero ([https://cubehero.com](https://cubehero.com)) It's cool because:

* host 3D printed projects with version control (based on git) * generate previews of STL and OpenSCAD design files * can make commits through web uploader, so you don't need to know command line git.

------
tommoor
Sqwiggle [https://www.sqwiggle.com](https://www.sqwiggle.com) \- It's cool
because we're making peoples lives genuinely better by enabling them to work
from wherever they want. We're also doing our part to rid the world of
commuting and grey cubicles.

~~~
imtu80
Cool! Its amazing what we can do with WebRTC. I create this site
([https://github.com/imomin/videoChat](https://github.com/imomin/videoChat))
just for fun. Are you guys trying to replace Skype? Because, that is what most
freelancers and contractors are using it.

~~~
tommoor
We definitely see people swapping for Skype, yes. We're not trying to replace
it for general communication - as an internet phone Skype is excellent - but
for collaboration, not so much :-)

------
alex-s
JamHive ([http://beta.jamhive.com](http://beta.jamhive.com)) -- a service for
musicians to collaborate regardless of physical distance and time constraints.

Back Story

I love music and would love to do a jam session with old friends, but it is
difficult to schedule a time or we live too far away (ie: SF & Amsterdam &
Tokyo).

Why Cool

* Musicians work together on a single jam (up to 5 instrument/vocal tracks)

* Record directly into browser or upload a pre-recorded audio file

* Basic editing and filtering of sound waves

And I am looking for feedback & advise!

* @Musicians, how is the recording & editing experience?

* @Engineers, currently, this is built with RoR, Bootstrap, Heroku, AWS and a huge mishmash of the Web Audio API - how can I make this scale better for smartphone, tablets, more browsers (currently only Chrome and Firefox)?

* @Engineers, advice on improving (speed & security) data upload / download

------
dysbulic
I'm trying to design an alternative to the investment economy. I would like to
digitize cost information and use computers to determine fair prices. I want
do it by keeping metadata about bitcoin transactions.

By making the system of production computer accessible we can run businesses
at cost.

I'd like to start with the information systems for the One Acre Cafe. They are
a pay-how-you-can restaurant opening in Johnson City, TN. (I wish it was pay-
what-you-can rather than volunteer for food, but that's something to worry
about later.)

[http://www.oneacrecafe.org](http://www.oneacrecafe.org)

Their initial need is for a volunteer management system. Apart from three
people, the entire staff is volunteer. I've not done any coding on it yet, but
it will almost certainly be a rails app.

[https://github.com/wholcomb/volunteer_schedule](https://github.com/wholcomb/volunteer_schedule)

Eventually I'd like to integrate this with an inventory and pos system, so you
get a bill that tells you what the meal cost the cafe to provide based on the
accumulated cost information associated with the business.

You get a receipt that includes a QR linking to a profile for your server. You
are able to give feedback by entering adjectives and ranking them -1–1.

There is also the ability to give a tip in bitcoins. I'd like to have a
service where the money can be conditionally given. I'm interested
particularly in housing.

I want people to be able to give specifically for shelter and they get it back
if it isn't used.

Phase two would involve mortgaging a house and then renting the space at cost
and payable in bitcoins. What I'm trying to work toward is the ability to
sustainably travel. A chain of restaurants that accepted each others'
electronic work reputations combined with easily accessible housing could
allow a new sort of nomadic life.

------
calineczka
Developers oriented project management ebook (
[http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-
manageme...](http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-management/)
). It's cool because it teaches you practices that can be applied to your
current IT project to make it more developers friendly. The goal is to make
the work on a project more smooth and everybody more happy, as well as help
the developers team to transition into remote work. The content of the book is
similar in form to [http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/story-of-
size-1/](http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/story-of-size-1/) and other blog
posts linked inside. I hope some of you might find it interesting.

------
nileshtrivedi
I have been working on a web-based interactive environment for creating 2-d
mechanics problems (with bodies like particles,disks,boxes, forces like
gravity, springs, linear & circular motors and joints like revolute joints and
sticks etc.) and simulating them. Think Algodoo for the web.

I think it's cool because nothing like this exists for the web. I recently
gave a presentation at a Javascript conference in Bangalore on this:
[https://hasgeek.tv/jsfoo/2013-2/688-interactive-physics-
simu...](https://hasgeek.tv/jsfoo/2013-2/688-interactive-physics-simulation-
in-the-browser-what-i-learned) To see the demo, skip to 13:00 in the video.

I haven't launched it yet because collision detection and response is pending.
Hope to do it soon. :)

~~~
vinchuco
Maybe you'll be interested in this for some examples to try out
[http://507movements.com/](http://507movements.com/)

------
fiatjaf
DocsBlogger ([http://www.docsblogger.com/](http://www.docsblogger.com/)) --
blog from Google Drive.

Because: * Google Docs is the best WYSIWYG on the internet; * blogging can be
just about writing on a cool interface, without having to setup blog platforms
AND go on their messy interface to write; * regular people can use this; * the
written content stays on Google Drive, so you can delete your blog and keep
everything without dealing with strange database backups; * almost-compatible
with Jekyll-Octopress themes (some changes on the code have to be made, and
for now only I can add themes to the pool of themes, but we will see what
happens); * custom CSS (tomorrow javascript) files (automatically fetches from
Google Drive) embedding.

~~~
karangoeluw
As a visitor: Show me a sample post, or a video walkthrough so it entices me
into clicking the sign in button.

------
danpat
Automated ski trail reporting:

[http://skitrails.info/](http://skitrails.info/)

Using GPS trackers to watch where grooming equipment goes, then update the
"what's been groomed" report automatically and (where there's sufficient
connectivity) in near realtime.

------
sheepz
Greenhouse CI ([http://greenhouseci.com](http://greenhouseci.com))

A continuous integration platform for iOS and Android apps. Our goal is to
create a CI environment which is focused on mobile applications, no more, no
less, without the hassles of setting up and maintaining something like
Jenkins.

Live Demo: [http://try.greenhouseci.com/](http://try.greenhouseci.com/) (for
iOS and Android Gradle projects)

If you have a open source iOS or Android project, I'd really appreciate if you
tried to build it.

It's cool because:

* I get to work on cool technology. We are currently using Node.js, Python, Go, Mongo in the backend, and AngularJS in the front end

* I get to be part of the whole design process: the actual programming, devops stuff, UI design and copywriting

* It is technically challenging

------
AKluge
Interactive visualizations and instruction in mathematics and physics. We can
do so much more than what is usually presented for online learning. For
example a catalog of visualizations,
[http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/catalog/](http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/catalog/),
and a more complete lesson experiment
[http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/gausslaw/](http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/gausslaw/).

The goal is for the student to interact with, to play with, the models. Of
course almost all of this is open sourced :) The visualizations can even be
easily embedded in any online content with just a few lines of HTML provided
in the catalog.

------
gphil
[https://kwelia.com](https://kwelia.com) \-- we are taking a quantitative
approach to determining the market rental value of apartments. This has not
been done accurately on a large scale in the past, and I think we are the
first to do it well.

~~~
jsaxton86
I just signed up for an account, only after the fact to find out that you
don't have data for the Portland, OR market, which is unfortunate since this
is definitely a tool I'd like to use in my upcoming apartment search. Two
things I wanted to mention about the sign up process:

* Before giving you my email address, I'd like some reassurances that you won't spam me, etc.

* It took 10-20 seconds to create my account. Not sure what's going on there, but you might want to investigate that. This doesn't appear to be a fluke. When I logged out, then logged back in again, it also took 10-20 seconds to log in after entering my credentials.

Also, if I log in, then go to the Kwelia home page, then click on "Apartment
Ratings", it brings up a login page stating that I'm already logged in,
whereas I would expect it to take me to the Apartment Ratings page.

This tool looks really promising. Let me know if you ever add support for
Portland, OR.

~~~
gphil
Thank you for the feedback! We're rolling out our models as we acquire
customers for our B2B product, and we have none in Portland yet, but hopefully
it's only a matter of time.

Sorry about the performance issues, I will be looking into them right away.

------
pholes
I am working on multiple things at the moment, though with my first year of
college, progress has been slow.. After challenging C and a multitude of
"introduction to programming" classes, I got into CISP 401 (java), so in order
to get ahead of the class, I wrote a toy interpreter in java (deemed
KjuScript). It is extremely slow, but based off the ruby language with full
OOP implementation. Also recently I have been working on something in C++ with
a friend that converts sound to color (to teach my dad music (he really wants
to learn) who lost most of his hearing at 20, and so my mother who was born
deaf, may enjoy my concerts in real time) There is a prototype of it in python
located on my github account:

Http://www.github.com/pholey

------
mafuyu
I'm working on a credit card sized e-paper device. It has an Arduino, USB,
Real Time Clock, and a battery, and fits in your wallet. Still doing hardware
designs.

Some potential applications:

* Replace all the barcodes in your wallet (loyalty/membership)

* Google Auth TOTP

* QR Codes (links/BTC wallets)

* Interactive nametag

* e-book/text display

* date/time display with wireless phone sync over BTLE

* act as a USB device and display text/notifications from your computer

I'm not completely sure if the use cases are convincing enough - would you buy
such a device? This revision won't have any wireless and instead will be
focused more towards electronics/Arduino enthusiasts - dead simple to program
over USB with provided libraries and documentation. You can use it as an
Arduino/e-paper dev board and code neat apps for it that you can actually use.

~~~
collyw
I don´t see why you would use one if those when almost everyone has a phone in
their pocket these days. Usually with and app or NFC chip that will do those
things.

~~~
mafuyu
Indeed, smartphones can do a lot of things, but not one thing particularly
well. My original goal with this design was to replace the 'card wallet' apps
for phones, as the barcodes never seemed to scan very well through the glass
screens. I've narrowed it down since then to be more for toying around with
Arduino/e-paper development, at least for this iteration.

------
tempestn
SearchTempest ([http://www.searchtempest.com/](http://www.searchtempest.com/))
-- Search multiple craigslist cities, eBay, Amazon, etc., in a single search.
Cool because it's all based on Google Custom Search, so we can do it without
scraping craigslist (or indeed, accessing them at all).

AutoTempest ([http://www.autotempest.com/](http://www.autotempest.com/)) --
Similar idea, except searches multiple used car classifieds sites: craigslist
(via SearchTempest), AutoTrader, Cars.com, eBay Motors, Oodle, CarsDirect...
We're affiliated with some of the sites, and for the others we use Google
Custom Search, and/or link to their results pages in new windows.

------
megablast
Not that cool, but I haven't had a chance to talk about my work:

Spreadsheet Pro, is a spreadsheet app for the iPad. Lots of fun to write,
features lots of formulas and graphs as well. I finished this last week.

[https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/spreadsheet-pro-
hd/id7274466...](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/spreadsheet-pro-
hd/id727446626?mt=8)

Also, Scrum smart is easy to use Scrum management software for the iPad. It is
actually a lot easier to use on the iPad than on a laptop. Finished 2 weeks
ago. And a new version coming out soon with a lot more features.

[https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/scrum-
smart/id726640328?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/scrum-
smart/id726640328?mt=8)

------
skwp
[http://reverb.com](http://reverb.com) \- a musician's marketplace.

It's cool because we're putting the care into hand curating our listings so
that we have really cool collections (you can check em out here:
[http://reverb.com/handpicked-collections](http://reverb.com/handpicked-
collections)).

It's also cool because we're experimenting with machine learning (poking at
prediction.io currently) to see if we can give people more of what they want.
And we're building Ruby services and we have an iPhone app. And all this with
only two developer, a UX designer and an intern. And it's cool because we're
actually making money. And, we're hiring ;)

------
jed_watson
I'm working on a web app framework / cms for node.js built on express.js and
mongo called KeystoneJS, and have been for a few months.

Keystone makes it easier to get a blog / website / web app up and running
without a lot of the module research or boilerplate code node.js usually
requires. It also provides a beautiful, useful admin UI (think activeadmin for
rails).

It's open source (MIT), and cool because...

* There isn't really anything like this for node.js yet (that we've found). There are a so many great modules and you can plug in almost anything, but getting projects off the ground requires a lot of boilerplate compared to frameworks like rails or django.

* It makes sophisticated things trivial by providing drop-in patterns - like session management and auth, and clever fields for your models, e.g. location fields and image fields (which make for a better admin UI but don't abstract too heavily the underlying data the fields represent).

* We're trying to build an "out of the box" system that doesn't keep you in the box. You can use what you like and swap out what you don't. You can use Jade or Handlebars. Plug in any express middleware you like. Use the built in auth system or provide your own.

* It's all based on the best practices my team have come up with in over a year of node.js web app development and we're using it to power several commercial, production projects. So it's got real-world usage and solves real problems.

* Quite a few people have said this is a gap in the node.js ecosystem, and ultimately if Keystone is just useful for us and a handful of others that's fine, but it would be really exciting if we could start something that helps node.js grow or helps other web developers use the platform. Especially for projects where rapid development is important, and having a great admin UI available would be the difference between using node.js and not.

If you're interested check out [http://keystonejs.com](http://keystonejs.com)

~~~
jed_watson
There's also a demo online at
[http://demo.keystonejs.com](http://demo.keystonejs.com) \- it's very simple
but you get the idea of how to structure an app, the source code is on github.

If you want to check out the admin ui, you can sign in to the demo at
[http://demo.keystonejs.com/keystone](http://demo.keystonejs.com/keystone)
with the username _demo@keystonejs.com_ and the password _demo_.

------
fbnt
I'm working on a news reader that works in the opposite way of traditional
news reading apps. It uses Twitter as a sort of enhanced RSS feed and ranks
news based on how much they are shared in real-time, and lays them down in a
newspaper-like format specifically designed for mobile devices.

It allows you to find what's important for people rather then what matters to
newsroom's editors, and put you in a whole different point of view. I belive
it's extremely interesting, and I'm trying to make the reading experience as
enjoyable as possible.

The first raw version is available for iOS:
[http://newspo.st](http://newspo.st)

I'm in the process of adding categorization and custom topic search as well.

~~~
Unnatural_Log
Not available in the app store in Canada.

It puzzles me why people do this, because it is just as easy to make the app
available everywhere as it is to limit it to a particular country.

Anyway, interesting idea. Pity about the gunshot wound in your foot. Hope it
heals.

~~~
fbnt
Simply put, I did it because what is interesting for Canadians or Australians
is slightly different from what matters to people in US. I'm working to open
it to other countries as well, but that requires some work on my side. At the
moment is only available in US, UK and Italy. I should've mentioned it.

------
nakodari
Jumpshare ([https://jumpshare.com](https://jumpshare.com)) - Real-time file
sharing service that allows you to view over 200 file formats right inside the
browser.

It's cool because:

* People can now share and view the contents of the files online without having to download and view them using 3rd party desktop apps.

* People can collaborate around content while on the go.

* No need to sign up for multiple services to upload multiple file types, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Flickr, etc. Just upload any file on Jumpshare and view it online, beautifully.

* Files shared can be viewed by the recipients without having to sign up for an account.

* Kills folder hierarchy and introduces a new type of folder organization to speed up file sharing.

* Bootstrapped and developed by 8 people.

~~~
hmsimha
That sounds like a brilliant idea. Also, if you bake in 'previewing'
capabilities (like thumbnails for images, bpm/quality descriptions and
waveform sketches for audio files, or whatever the equivalent would be for
each type of media), you could potentially lease the technology to social
media sites that typically already do this for popular image formats.

------
sahillavingia
Gumroad ([https://gumroad.com](https://gumroad.com)) — enabling any type of
creator to earn a living selling what they make directly to their audience.

See: [https://gumroad.com/demo](https://gumroad.com/demo)

It's cool because I got started really seriously making stuff when I realized
that there was not nearly as much of a difference between making stuff and
making a living as I thought there was.

It was only getting cheaper and easier to make software. Making software
(products!) has been democratized.

This has happened to software/startups, but not really to music nor film nor
comedy nor photography nor publishing (yet!).

But it will soon and I'm happy to that Gumroad can contribute.

~~~
ericingram
What was the hardest part about getting this off the ground, and how did you
get passed it?

------
netpenthe
InputFarm ([http://www.inputfarm.com](http://www.inputfarm.com))

\- Input Farm provides quick website design reviews from expert designers for
$75 (but we're giving them away to HN users now - see here:
[https://medium.com/p/8a87429d26cb](https://medium.com/p/8a87429d26cb) )

It's cool because: \- I've been a web developer for 10+ years and quite often
i get 'stuck' on making a website better. I don't need a designer to do a
'full re-design', i just need a few pointers on how to make my website better.

\- I need 'fresh eyes' on my website

\- I need confirmation that i _don 't need_ to start over and waste a bunch of
time!

------
askar
This day and age people tend to get easily low on their morale for every
little reason. I wanted to help them quickly recharge themselves with some
great quotes that inspires and boost them up, most of the time.

In that process I'm working on my iOS app Quotegram, which is now available in
the AppStore. It's one of the best looking apps on the Quotes niche on the
AppStore.

AppStore Link:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846)

It's cool because practically it has helped me recharge myself in a couple
instances in the recent past and I'm sure it would help those in need of a
quick recharge.

------
vbsteven
[http://cyclingplanner.com](http://cyclingplanner.com) \-- a season planner
and training/results tracker for competitive cyclists.

It's cool because:

* A lot of cyclists are still planning on paper or spreadsheet, including me before I started working on this. It scratches my own itch and I believe I can make the experience a lot better.

* It collaborates instead of competes with services like Strava and Garmin Connect. Because it's using their API's cyclists can keep logging their workouts on those services and view detailed analytics on cyclingplanner.

* It's my first serious attempt at bootstrapping a software product and I've learned a ton of interesting stuff aside from coding so far.

------
jaredsohn
I have been working on a couple of projects.

The first is software that automatically pauses/mutes your music when you
watch a video and restores it afterward by looking at process volumes. It is
called mute.fm but only available for Windows at the moment.
[http://www.mute.fm/](http://www.mute.fm/)

The second is a location-based pasteboard called near.im that lets you share
{contact information, addresses, links, text} with people who are nearby who
don't necessarily have a particular app installed. I've recently discovered it
can also be used as an appless Chrome-To-Phone.
[http://www.near.im/](http://www.near.im/)

------
pla3rhat3r
I've been working on PLUNK. It's a Technology Consultant Firm which
specializes in helping the entertainment industry.

I've been going to a lot of conferences where the reoccurring theme is the
tremendous divide in technology and the entertainment world. Either they don't
know, don't care, or are too overwhelmed to know where to begin.

PLUNK will help them build applications that will deliver meaningful
experiences with their audience. Whether it's simply helping to improve upon
their social network to building a fully customizable application. Their
audience is already engaging them, it's time to talk back.

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

------
joetann
Http://ineedthatmug.com

Fun side project to scratch an admittedly very small itch I've had for a
while. I've collaborated with a local company who is handling all order
fulfillment.

Working on adding font chooser, image upload, and a more elegant customization
form.

~~~
iSloth
Great idea, just doesn't work great with my black coffee and no sugar :)

------
nihaar
BabyDigest ([https://www.getbabydigest.com](https://www.getbabydigest.com)) -
Share baby pictures safely

My baby's timeline/Demo:
[https://www.getbabydigest.com/timeline/santiago](https://www.getbabydigest.com/timeline/santiago)

It's cool because:

* It solves a key problem for parents: How do I easily share my baby's pictures & videos privately without requiring my friends and family to sign up or install something?

* It automatically finds pictures of your baby on your Facebook feed and pulls them into your baby's timeline, so that your grandmother can see them.

* Built in SF with my buddy and I using Django/Python, MongoDB, AngularJS

~~~
dsschnau
Very cool! My wife and I have this issue. We and my parents want to share
pictures without posting our child's life for facebook to control, but still
have that convenience.

------
goyalpulkit
Shyahi ([http://shyahi.com](http://shyahi.com)) - Your Social Homepage. Its
like about.me with extended information about social profiles beautifully
summarized on your profile.

Its free, easy to set up and pulls in your stats directly from Dribbble,
Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and your blog feed which means that your Shyahi
profile is always up to date. This is something that's really cool about
Shyahi, you set it up once and then its automatically updated based on your
social activity. It provides the most precise and relevant information to your
audience at one central online location. And its bootstrapped and made by two
people.

------
meerita
I am working on Notegraphy ([http://notegraphy.com](http://notegraphy.com))
it's a writing app for iOS and Web.

It's cool because:

The idea is simple: write stuff, short or long, multipage and then style it as
you want. Then you can either publish to your own gallery of notes or, share
it on your favorites social networks.

You can download it from here
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notegraphy/id669094298?ls=1&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notegraphy/id669094298?ls=1&mt=8)
any comment will be appreciate it.

On the first two weeks we've got around 100k users and we're growing like
crazy.

------
howlett
I'm working on Taniger [https://www.taniger.com](https://www.taniger.com)
which is a real time Facebook chat encryption service. Quick demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0)

Why it's cool: It's open source. It provides REAL real-time encryption without
the hassle of "choosing a password", "copy pasting text" etc. Also same logic
can be applied to _any_ web chat service.

Code available at:
[https://github.com/sadreck/taniger](https://github.com/sadreck/taniger)

------
filpen
In my spare time I am working on Seatbelt
([http://seatbelt.io](http://seatbelt.io)), a web app to help developers find
pair programming partners.

It's cool because I think we need to bring developers together and share the
knowledge, and I am convinced that pair programming is a powerful way to do
it. There is much we can learn from working with people from different
backgrounds.

Right now there is only a landing page with some copy, I work on the code when
I find time. It's taking a while since I use this project to teach myself
node.js (I am a .NET backend guy in my day job) but it's a fun side project.

------
chadzawistowski
Quickbeam
([https://github.com/ChadSki/Quickbeam](https://github.com/ChadSki/Quickbeam))
and Halolib
([https://github.com/ChadSki/halolib.py](https://github.com/ChadSki/halolib.py))

Together, these comprise a Halo modding tool which can edit the game _while it
's running_, which is also why it's cool.

Additionally, whereas previous editors have usually hardcoded functionality
into the editor, all of Quickbeam's functionality is implemented in the fully-
scriptable Halolib, written in Python.

Ultimately I would like Quickbeam to become the Emacs of Halo editors.

------
thecolorblue
I am working on a food discovery app that works something like Waze. Users
post where they get their favorite foods, either groceries or restaurants.
This data is aggregated and used in the search tool that lets users search
nearby, popular and in season. I haven't gotten it online yet but I have it
running locally. Its important because there is no food information online.
Every online food ordering website is closed off, and finding great food still
requires people to ask around. This could open up a whole new market for small
food producers who are producing great stuff but can't get awareness.

------
ossamaben
Followletter - no more newsletters in your inbox!
[http://www.followletter.com](http://www.followletter.com)

It is cool because:

\- All your favorite newsletters are in one place and outside your email
inbox.

\- Newsletters subscribtion is done with just one click (no more email
confirmation)

\- You discover new newsletters based on your interest and you get to know are
they worth subscribing to! You see their past issues and followers.

\- You connect to like-minded people and experts to see what newsletters they
read and recommend.

\- You will be able to create and send interactive newsletters, whether you
are a publisher, content curator or you want to build a base of followers.

------
NicoJuicy
Creating a non-intrusive task management application.

For example, you mail what the guy has to do and add this mail in cc:
in_15_days@maildo.me . When the task is finished, he responds to you and adds:
finished@maildo.me in CC.

You can set up options for a weekly overview of tasks with their current
state.

Still developing the system though, but if your interested just add your mail
to this form [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Im08qadrAvOv0LHVq-
rNFPIlpPA...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Im08qadrAvOv0LHVq-
rNFPIlpPAqxQllCVySJ5W6T58/viewform) and i'll notify you with more information
:)

~~~
thejash
Followupthen.com recently added support for tasks, which is basically this, I
think?

~~~
NicoJuicy
Not exactly, i'm working with a employer - employee relationship.

Followupthen seems to be personal

Edit: Grmbl, you're right :(

------
danielmunro
I've been working on a mud implemented in python. For the uninitiated, mud
stands for multi-user dungeon, and they are usually text-only multi-player
games run over telnet. The first MMOs. It's cool because it is a modern
project, using twisted for networking, it's event-driven and scripted, as
opposed to hard coded and tightly coupled. The whole project is still highly
in development and may not actually be in a working state but it's a labor of
love.
[https://github.com/danielmunro/mudpy](https://github.com/danielmunro/mudpy)

------
darkFunction
Objective-C class visualisation:
[http://notes.darkfunction.com/DFGrok](http://notes.darkfunction.com/DFGrok)

It's good for code reviewing changed classes, or getting a structural
overview.

------
arek2
5000 Best Things ([http://5000best.com/](http://5000best.com/)) - feature-rich
lists of best movies, books, websites, Youtube videos, web tools & services,
Imgur pictures.

------
benblodgett
[http://www.nkoso.org](http://www.nkoso.org) /
[http://www.hopsie.com](http://www.hopsie.com) \- a crowdfunding api for non
profits.

------
vuzum
Blogvio ([http://www.blogvio.com](http://www.blogvio.com)) - add beautiful
widgets to your website.

It's cool because you don't need to do any coding to add beautiful and custom
galleries, video players, mp3 players, and any other types of widgets to your
website. Just copy/paste an embed code and you're done.

This helps you a lot especially if you're an agency or freelancer, or if
you're using a publishing tool such as Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, etc - where
you don't have access to a server to upload files.

~~~
Cblinks
It's a cool tool! I used it a few weeks ago to create some slick picture
widgets.

~~~
vuzum
Cool, can you share some feedback?

We'll be new widgets and improvements soon. :)

------
mamcx
A app similar to square (a point of sale for iPad), but with more features. I
doing a real-time sync (based in firebase) for it.

This is a upgrade, semi-rewrite of
[http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller](http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller)
(until now only useful for wholesale distributors with ERP + Sync server) to
help small shops to sell and replace DOS based POS software that is very
common in my country and elsewhere.

Is a single-man operation ;)

P.D: And I wish to have time/money to build a language based in
FoxPro/Python...

------
joshontheweb
Robot Audio ([http://robotaudio.com](http://robotaudio.com)) - An online DAW
(Digital Audio Workstation). The app itself is not ready yet, but you can play
with the synthesis engine on the signup page.

It's cool because:

* You can now make something like Ableton Live or Garage Band directly in the browser.

* You will have all of you work and assets available from any computer and won't need to worry about license keys.

* It will be much easier to share and collaborate with others.

* It will be affordable (between $5 - $20/mo) as opposed to $600 - $1200 for Ableton Live.

------
mide765
Never-Bored ([http://mide765.com](http://mide765.com)) - An iOS app you use
when you have some time to kill. It's cool because you can choose between four
topics depending on your mood and environment. You can read short-stories,
watch interesting videos, learn facts and basic phrases for ten languages or
play some games such as Pong.

On a personal level, I've started using Xcode for the first time on third of
September. This is the final product of my first try on doing an iOS app.

Any feedback is appreciated.

~~~
Madsn
NICE! Would love an android version of this!

------
adamzerner
[http://www.collegeanswerz.com/](http://www.collegeanswerz.com/) \- better
college reviews. Most websites just have a reviewer answer a few questions
about their school. This doesn't work. I have a bunch of specific questions
that reviewers answer.

[http://www.collegeanswerz.com/university-of-
pittsburgh/](http://www.collegeanswerz.com/university-of-pittsburgh/) is the
only school with answers right now. I'm working on getting other schools.

------
kranner
An iOS speed-reading app
([http://velocireaderapp.com](http://velocireaderapp.com)) for ebooks. I have
a day job so this is an after-hours side project.

It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so
effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so
I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to
experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its
users like it too!

~~~
mercuryrising
That's pretty cool. When you're reading, at any point did you feel
'choppiness' of what you were reading, or do you get used to it? When looking
at the trailer, I was finding my inner voice was more robotic than reading
normally.

~~~
kranner
I find that the subjective choppiness goes away when I speed it up. For me the
sweet spot is about 500 words per minute, with up to 3 words at a time (I say
'up to' because sentences are chopped up based on punctuation marks, and then
smoothed out to leave about an equal number of words in every segment. This is
a rough description). The sweet spot also depends on the sort of book being
read.

I guess it's like watching a movie on a suboptimal screen, or at an suboptimal
angle, etc. After a while you're mindful only of the movie, not of the viewing
experience.

------
radkiddo
[http://apbox.co](http://apbox.co)

it is cool because it allows businesses to become more profitable by allowing
companies to negotiate discounts on supplier and service provider invoices.

basically sellers can get paid early (adding liquidity to their business) and
buyers can profit on discounts, adding thousands to their cashflow (which they
will never get from a bank).

you can think of it as twitter meets dropbox meets ebay for the supply chain.

checkout our blog too: [http://blog.apbox.co](http://blog.apbox.co)

------
pornel
Modern JPEG encoder ([https://github.com/pornel/jpeg-
compressor](https://github.com/pornel/jpeg-compressor)) and lossy PNG
compressor
([http://pngmini.com/lossypng.html](http://pngmini.com/lossypng.html))

Everybody uses encoders for these formats that are as old as the formats
themselves, but today's hardware is about 2000 faster than it was back then,
so a modern encoder can use expensive techniques that were previously
unthinkable.

------
Ave
Hiresync ([http://hiresync.io/](http://hiresync.io/)) -- collaborative coding
interview tool / tool to send out screening questions to candidates, record
their response, and being able to pass that recording to your team to review
at a later time.

Currently pretty early in development, alot of features are incomplete, but it
feels nice to have something deployed online.

Mostly feeling like I'm stagnating at my day job so this was a good chance for
me to learn some new skills.

------
mgl
[http://codedose.com](http://codedose.com) We are working on a small side
project (codename: market colors) that will make daily analysis of stock price
movements and trend discovery super easy. You will be able to analyze and
compare literally thousands of stocks from US, European and Asian markets in a
few minutes. AJAX frontend with interesting high volume batch processing in
the back end. (if you are interested in more details, drop us a line!)

~~~
rraychaudhuri
Here is a Project I am working on :
[http://lovasz.cs.fsu.edu/stocks](http://lovasz.cs.fsu.edu/stocks) (My contact
is given in the website)

Please take a look, I think we are working on similar lines, if you are
interested let me know.

------
inconshreveable
Public Hidden Services

These are services that have a secure, public URL that can be accessed by any
web browser. The server hosting the traffic, however is completely anonymous
and cannot be traced.

~~~
meowface
How is this different from the .onion.to and tor2web clearnet-to-onionnet
services?

------
steveridout
[http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com) \- an online eReader for language
learners.

I've been working on this full time, completely solo, for nearly 11 months
now. It's lets you import any content to read, provides low friction
translations so you can concentrate on enjoying the content, and has a spaced
repetition system to learn words and phrases with flashcards.

It's getting some early traction now with 2300 users, 45 of whom are paying,
and really good feedback.

------
TallboyOne
[http://pineapple.io](http://pineapple.io) \- I think it's cool because I
don't know of any centralized locations for development tutorials and tools.
Reddit is filled with mostly jaded posts and HN is filled with lots of news.
Mine is only tutorials, tools, and assets.

Here are some tags to start you off. I guarantee you will find hidden gems
here :) [http://pineapple.io/tags/all](http://pineapple.io/tags/all)

------
triaged
We're working on an app for developers that collates all of your saas products
into one mobile feed. It helps you stay current on what's happening at work,
both what your team and your machines are doing. It also helps you quickly dig
deeper into issues & triage important events.

It's cool because you can keep track of a lot more than previously possible,
communicate with your team, and act on it - from your phone. And it's damn
good looking too (but we're biased :)

~~~
ninetax
Neat! Got a link or something? Mailing list?

------
nathanathan
I'm working on a game based on memorizing Chinese characters. It's cool
because it uses the qualities that motivate people to play farm sims to
encourage players to study a language. Players plant character-flowers and
must pass quizzes in order to pluck them. This website has more information
and a download link for the beta, which only works on android at the moment:
[http://zhongwengarden.com/](http://zhongwengarden.com/)

------
Jemaclus
a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby.

It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a
language I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't really consider myself an
expert on (as opposed to PHP and Javascript, both on which I do consider
myself to be an expert). I figured that building a Ruby project from scratch
would be the best way to learn the language. So far, so good.

Thoughts: \- No framework yet. Decided to just build it and see what happens.
I'm not trying to learn Rails -- I'm trying to learn Ruby. They're not quite
the same, obviously. \- It's harder than I thought. It took quite some time
for me to figure out how to mix together sockets and threads to keep track of
multiple players \- It's more fun than I thought. I've used Ruby in the past
but have never really been impressed. (I think that's mostly Rails.) But this
project is full of far more epic wins than my usual ideas. \- Ruby probably
isn't the best language to do a MUD in. I initially started with C and I got
pretty far, but I decided I wanted to learn a new language, not build a MUD in
a language I already know. \- The old school Merc/Diku muds out there are
based on flat files. All data, such as character files and area files, are
stored in a custom flat format. I'm using JSON for my test data, since it's
pretty easy for Ruby to consume, but I'm thinking I may switch to a DB-based
setup. But then again, the flat file thing is working just fine...

I guess I'll publish the source some day, when I get to the point where it's
playable.

~~~
moreoutput
Another MUD lover here; I have a full JS MUD (WebSockets) engine I hack on
from time to time for fun. Generally speaking its modeled after a flavor of
diku.

I have another big commit planned with some significant refactoring but was
holding off for nodejitsu to update their supported node version (you can try
an early version of the mud with the link on the github page) and for
socket.io to move to 1.0.

See:
[https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD](https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD)

------
d0m
Hacking Health

We try to break down the barriers to innovation in healthcare. We bring
together doctors, nurses, developers and designers so they can hack without
all the bureaucratic bullshit.

------
moj
An ios app to make roadtrip timelapse movies (video + gps = fun). This idea
has been on my mind for ages so I finally sat down and built it.

This video, the very first upload, shows it in action. Bonus if you can guess
where it is: [http://youtu.be/-sFu7xAxt5c](http://youtu.be/-sFu7xAxt5c)

The in-app playback has map route, speed, & direction overlays, not yet
present in the video export.

It's not ready for the store yet, contact me if you'd like to beta test.

------
schreiaj
This week I've been making:

3D Printed sprockets for a local high school robotics team.

Building a small quadcopter for learning the technology so I can do aerial
photography.

Started developing the materials for a course I'm teaching at the local
hackerspace nominally titled - Building your own autonomous ground vehicle. I
just took delivery of the parts for my first cut at a kit.

I also just finished teaching free classes to local students about 3D
Printing, Git, and Project Management. Not sure it counts as making though.

------
harpb
Webapp for organizing code snippets as pages:
[http://harpb.com/static/snipp-t/index.html](http://harpb.com/static/snipp-t/index.html)
Watch video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPL-7-XTmDs&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPL-7-XTmDs&feature=youtu.be)
The editor is very much work in progress and the video highlights base concept
for the editor.

------
bichiliad
I'm working on something of a responsive.io clone that uses Flickr as an image
store. Not sold on the name yet, but I'm calling it Fittr in the mean time. It
is mindful of retina displays, only requires that you know the flickr id of
the image in question, and will optionally load a smaller image first, to make
larger images appear to load quickly.

[https://github.com/bichiliad/Fittr](https://github.com/bichiliad/Fittr)

------
Udo
I'm building a community-based startup and project incubator with the goal of
forming "classes" of founders who support and advise each other. It's called
[http://launchway.net](http://launchway.net) \- though it's been difficult to
get people on board I'll keep trying.

As an aside, I think we should have threads like this one more often, I'd love
to learn what everone's been up to periodically.

~~~
pla3rhat3r
Where is this based out of?

~~~
Udo
Europe, but in theory it shouldn't matter (except for RL meetups).

------
psathvik
Tharunopayam ([http://upayam.tharuni.org/](http://upayam.tharuni.org/)), a
laravel/android-powered SMS helpline for adolocent girls, women and the aged
in Warangal, India.

It uses an android device as an SMS server and a laravel based responsive
front-end which allows our experts in various fields like nutrition,
psychology, law, etc to answer peoples' queries from wherever and whenever
they find it most comfortable.

------
gio
Blimp [http://getblimp.com](http://getblimp.com)

Project management software for creative teams with no managers.

It's cool because:

* We help you automate a workflow for your tasks (Plan -> Do -> Review ->Done)

* Beautiful and easy to use

* You can see the status of all projects on a single page (no more status meetings)

* You can see who is doing what in any moment

* Conversations are task centric, no need to read long messages to figure out what to do

* Google Drive, Dropbox Integration

* Proudly bootstrapped and made by three guys from Puerto Rico.

------
secfirstmd
Currently working on a mobile security application to help easily teach,
implement and manage the physical security of human rights defenders,
activists and journalists. Right now there is nothing out there that does
this, so hoping it will get a lot of use.

I'm not the best in terms of technical ability so if anyone wants to donate
time - especially app developers, LAMP stack guys, UI/UX or testers then
please drop me a mail to secfirstmd@gmail.com

------
quinto_quarto
Pitch Me ([http://www.pitchme.org](http://www.pitchme.org)) -- we're building
a marketplace for buying and selling quality journalism.

We vet our writers and we have hundreds of stories from them from all over the
world. If you're an (aspiring?) editor, you could commission a magazine full
of original stories, edit them and pay the writers in one place. Get in touch
at hello@pitchme.org if you're interested.

------
psobko
New login flow for the next version of the Qriket iPhone app
([http://www.qriket.com/](http://www.qriket.com/)) - earn cash for scanning QR
codes

Here's what it looks like:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73335831/QriketLoginFlow...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73335831/QriketLoginFlow.mov)

It's cool because it makes signing into our app a little bit easier :)

------
jscottmiller
1dash1 - a browser-based game creation platform.

Games are created using a custom toolset and programming language. Everything
is centrally-run (games, content editor), making it easy to add multiplayer
and collaboration features.

Here's a video showing how to create a multiplayer platforming game:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rgfEh_Ctc&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rgfEh_Ctc&feature=youtu.be)

------
tosbourn
[http://examtime.com](http://examtime.com) \- it is cool because it is helping
people (100,000 so far) study and pass exams.

~~~
AsmMAn
Great job guy. Sometime ago I was using a quiz-like site and I imagined how
cool could be a page like this one.

------
krapp
So many awesome projects...

I made something to format the outbound links on a page into an expandable
list that I think is kind of cool. It's probably way too early to be posting
it since I just started it though but what the heck.

[http://precis.gopagoda.com/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com...](http://precis.gopagoda.com/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617551)

(no one will be very impressed but I like it...)

------
kirualex
[http://alexiscreuzot.com/apps/nice-
weather-2/](http://alexiscreuzot.com/apps/nice-weather-2/)

That's the last app I'm working on. It's quite a challenge to go for a Weather
app as there are bazillions of them on the AppStore, but I really enjoy the
challenge of it. The feedback have been great for now (it just launched 2 days
ago), and I hope to make it even better !

------
superbaconman
I'm working on an OpenFlow controller in my spare time. There's nothing too
cool about it other than, it's written in Go and GPLv3 licensed. It's useable
but I have a big update in the pipes. Once that update is done I should be
able to port some existing OpenFlow applications to Go.
[https://github.com/jonstout/ogo](https://github.com/jonstout/ogo)

~~~
iSloth
How are you testing the code/network?

~~~
superbaconman
Using mininet right now to do verification of message parsing and link
discovery. Other than the latency calculations, link discovery seems to be
working just fine. After I get this next iteration done I'll take it to the
office (InCNTRE SDN Lab). We have a lot of 1.0 hardware to test against. Next
I'd like to add path computation based on user defined weight functions.

------
ghinda
I'm working on Business Card
Maker([http://bizcardmaker.com/](http://bizcardmaker.com/)), a very simple
client-side business card generator that can quickly export PDF or JPEG.

It's definitely not as cool as most of the stuff here, but it's real easy to
work with, that's why I'm hoping it will be helpful for people with no
technical skills and small businesses.

------
juanuys
My 1Password replacement using the shell:

[https://github.com/opyate/1Bashword](https://github.com/opyate/1Bashword)

Suggestions very welcome!

------
eddyparkinson
Please post this question every month, see what happens.

------
brackin
We're trying to fix urban parking with Spot (starting in San Francisco),
connecting homeowners with parkers when they're not using their spot.

They can drag to set their schedule or set it based on days and we let them
start earning morning and do all of the legwork. Our parkers can open up the
app and book a spot on an hourly basis instantly.

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

------
boyter
[http://searchcode.com/](http://searchcode.com/)

Its a source code search engine with experimental regex support. Why is it
cool? For me its because search is something I am interested in and indexing
the web is cost prohibitive. This way I get to play with indexing hundreds of
gigabytes of code without breaking the bank. Its also useful to show off when
doing job interviews.

------
jbandela1
cppcomponents at
[https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents](https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents)

With C++, it is hard to use code from 1 compiler with another compiler. In
windows, it is even worse in that versions of visual c++, and even
debug/release can't use the same binary. cppcomponents, allows code to be
written in 1 c++11 compiler and used in another compiler, without giving up
C++ features. You can use exceptions, and std:: string, vector, tuple,
pair,chrono::timepoint.

I am hoping this makes it easier for people to create more c++ libraries.
Currently, if you have anything other than a header-library, you either have
to require the user to build the library, or else create a binary for every
compiler (maybe even compiler version). With cppcomponents, you can create
just 1 binary per platform that all the compilers can use.

Some of the libraries I have worked on are a libuv wrapper, a implementation
of async/await in c++ (based on boost.coroutine), and currently working on
libcurl wrapper. All these libraries are on github.

------
guycook
Working on a QML runtime for browsers. It's cool for all the reasons QML on
the desktop is for describing UIs. Still early days but there's a prototype at
[http://ivorydungeon.net/HQML](http://ivorydungeon.net/HQML) and code at
[https://github.com/guycook/HQML](https://github.com/guycook/HQML)

~~~
capisce
How are you planning to do animations?

------
shaunrussell
Upbeat ([https://www.upbeatapp.com/](https://www.upbeatapp.com/)) --
hackernews meets soundcloud.

It's cool because:

* Users can democratically decide which music is popular.

* Music is browseable by genre, and filterable by sub genre.

* Users can save songs and add them to a queue for later listening.

* Powered by Angular.js, Node.js, Redis.

* Average server response time: 9ms

* Bootstrapped by 3 friends, in less than 1 month, only working nights and weekends.

* Already profitable.

~~~
lukaseder
How is it profitable? Do you get a commission from Amazon?

------
jschrf
A real-time web interface for remotely scripting Android devices using
TypeScript. It is cool because Android is great and TypeScript is great.

~~~
thecolorblue
I keep thinking javascript in android apps is a great idea but I can never get
it to work in a way that simplifies development. Good luck! I hope you can
figure it out.

------
kylebragger
Just released a Q&A book about building community products. (I founded Forrst
in 09.) Totally DIY effort, used ruby and the prawn gem to generate the PDF
file. All questions were crowd sourced. Here's a discount if you're
interested: [https://gumroad.com/l/obcp-
book/saturday](https://gumroad.com/l/obcp-book/saturday)

------
jermaink
[http://moviegalaxies.com](http://moviegalaxies.com)

We're working on visualizing the social network within movies. :)

~~~
hmsimha
Awesome! The social network analysis course taught by Lada Adamic on Coursera
used your site as a case study.

~~~
jermaink
Yes, thanks for the remark! Some people of that course sent us really nice
feedback. The list of universities and courses using MG grows, which is really
cool.

------
aabalkan
I've just completed Dailybbble
[http://dailybbble.herokuapp.com/](http://dailybbble.herokuapp.com/) it sends
you emails with best Dribbble designs of the day. It's cool because I always
visited dribbble.com to see populars, now they're at my inbox at every 9am.

There are already hundreds of subscribers in the list. That excites me.

------
rl12345
I'm working on [https://mytraining.pro/](https://mytraining.pro/)

It's cool because it's one of the few brazilians startups that have a really
unique proposition and are aiming high (instead of just copycating a proven
american startup to serve the local market - that's too lazy for us).

It's a fitness app and social network by the way.

------
callmeed
I built a sports trivia app for iOS:
[http://bit.ly/winahat](http://bit.ly/winahat)

The cool thing about it is I built an engine to scrape the web and APIs and
keep generating thousands of new questions. Trivia games are fun but can get
repetitive fast. I'm hoping to avoid that.

In progress is an android version, then venturing outside of sports.

------
lfittl
pganalyze ([https://pganalyze.com/](https://pganalyze.com/)) - Performance
Monitoring for PostgreSQL databases.

Its cool because:

We visualise the metrics & counters that are usually hidden away in PostgreSQL
internal tables.

Plus we check that your database is fast and configured correctly.

Also: I'm a techie with a UX hat, and data visualisation and pattern matching
is fun :)

~~~
smoyer
We use PostgreSQL for a lot of our applications, but I was hoping for a Paul
Graham analyzer.

------
derwiki
CameraLends ([https://www.cameralends.com](https://www.cameralends.com)) --
AirBnB for cameras, rent cameras and lenses from local photographers. It's
cool because:

\- sharing feels good

\- if you have camera gear, you're probably not using it all the time

\- it's a way earn back cash from lending out gear

\- it's a side project that I've bootstrapped this year :)

~~~
imtu80
I like your idea, I was thinking about it other day. I am working on my
private pilot license and in a month or so, I will be doing my first solo. I
want to record it but then I don't want to spend too much buying a new goPro.
It would be nice, if I could rent it for few days for fraction of cost. I am
sure there is a market for it.

~~~
derwiki
Hi imtu80! We already have GoPros in the San Francisco market (which is this
one we're actively growing). Feel free to email me (adam at cameralends.com)
if you have any other feedback!

------
bjpless
Real-time Office Hours for top Open Source Library Authors/Contributors.

It's Google Hangouts but with a focus on expressing coding concepts.

Looks like this [http://www.enginehere.com/stream/312/programmatically-
disabl...](http://www.enginehere.com/stream/312/programmatically-disabling-
open-tracking-pixels-with-sendgrid/)

------
sycren
Currently in an Edutech hackathon in London -
[http://hackathoncentral.com/](http://hackathoncentral.com/)

Working on a project in conjunction with the British Library to crowd source
tagging for illustrations found in 19th Century Literature. And further down
the line to provide descriptions of what the images actually are.

------
huragok
Hyperglot
([http://tmcnab.github.io/Hyperglot](http://tmcnab.github.io/Hyperglot)) - a
language experimentation platform.

Basically, gives you the tools to make languages that compile to JS in one
nice, neat package. I've already written a lisp-like language and a python-
like language this week which is pretty rad.

------
prezjordan
I'm working on a program that allows you to make presentations in record
time[0] because making slideshows sucks - and it shouldn't have to.

Learning a lot about node modules, promises, and maintaining an open-source
library. Loving every minute of it :)

[0]: [http://jdan.github.io/cleaver/](http://jdan.github.io/cleaver/)

------
poissonpie
I'm tinkering Click or Treat with [http://clickortre.at](http://clickortre.at)
a silly little halloween themed game with absolutely no point. Has got a
halloween soundboard though :)

It's cool I've used it to start learning AngularJS. It's also cool because my
daughter enjoys clicking the little ghost.

------
be5invis
I'm making a orthogonal code generation library for JavaScript called
Patrisika:
[http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika](http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika).

Also I'm creating an amazing high performance computer in small form factor
with my friends. It will be able to contain 24 CPU cores, seriously.

~~~
solnyshok
can you tell more about the 24-CPU thingy?

------
photorized
1) Data discovery and social analytics:

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

Extremely minimal interface, fast (everything is precalculated/precached).

2) tech accelerator: [http://www.colodesk.com/](http://www.colodesk.com/)

All about rapid prototyping, idea to MVP within weeks.

------
gregdetre
Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition
algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope!

My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own,
mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at
gregdetre dot co dot uk

~~~
mindcrime
I'm no AI expert, but after reading both Hawkins' _On Intelligence_ and
Kurweil's _How To Create A Mind_ , I'm pretty sold on the idea that our minds
are basically pattern-matching machines. Lately I've been trying to spend a
lot of time "thinking about thinking" and recognizing how I form thoughts,
relate to memories, etc. I am not super familiar with Hofstadter's ideas,
since I haven't (yet) finished even GEB, but the general idea is very
intriguing to me. I'd be happy to chat with you sometime and bounce ideas
around. You're almost certainly way ahead of me in terms of technical
knowledge in this domain though.

~~~
gregdetre
Cool! Drop me a line at greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk

Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies ch 4-6 are the best introduction to his
modeling work. I can't recommend them highly enough.

~~~
mindcrime
Excellent, I'll look into getting a copy of that. I have several of his other
books (GEB, I Am A Strange Loop, Metamagical Themas, etc.) but only got about
1/3rd of the way through GEB before setting it aside to focus on other stuff
for "a while". Unfortunately "a while" has turned into over a year now, so I
guess it's time to get back to it. :-)

------
gfodor
[http://babygra.ms](http://babygra.ms)

Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people
like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order
processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a
successful iOS app myself.

~~~
nkg
I like your idea very much, but don't forget the Droid legion. I would
definitely pay for it.

~~~
gfodor
Yeah if I can get to the point where this thing makes good cash on iOS I'll
build/contract a Android version, don't worry :)

------
apoorvnarang
A gamified course management system for colleges
([http://www.usebackpack.com](http://www.usebackpack.com))

It is cool because: * It has all features to stay updated about your college
courses in a very easy user experience. * It has game elements that keep
students engaged and have fun while learning.

------
tluyben2
New version of Fitto[1]. The current version works well for people who, so to
say, live in the gym, but not for others. So we are adding a ton of features
to make it work well for the more casual gym-goer!

It's cool because of the many new hardware devices we are integrating.

[1] [http://fitto.co](http://fitto.co)

------
superice
RoyalCMS. It's an extremely flexible content management system, which focusses
on creating functionality by using plugins. It's like an platform for
websites. It is not quite done yet, but we have a (kind of) working beta:
[http://royalcms.net/](http://royalcms.net/)

------
jbkkd
[http://www.omerkorner.com/rail/](http://www.omerkorner.com/rail/)

Let's you find rail connections using Google Maps and directly buy the tickets
on the rail site. Currently only in Germany, but other countries to come, and
also cross-country tickets using each relevant rail provider.

------
itsosman
BusyConf ([http://www.busyconf.com](http://www.busyconf.com)) -- Conference
planning SaaS

It's cool because conferences are great of networking and learning (especially
in the tech industry), but current event planning tools don't handle a lot of
the things that conference organizers need.

------
LeicaLatte
Updated my app today. A geeky stopwatch -
[http://logwatch.co](http://logwatch.co)

------
roryreiff
Fleck: getfleck.com/download (link to iTunes app)

Why it's cool: We give you access to creatives all around the world for topic
based photo sharing. No more #selfies or #burritos when you just want to see
Street Art or Typography photos. We have been touted as "Pinterest for the
real world" by a few of our users.

------
chanon
I'm working on Dragomancers (
[http://www.facebook.com/Dragomancers](http://www.facebook.com/Dragomancers) )
a Facebook (and later iOS) RPG game.

It's cool because it features online player vs. player turn-based combat and
it's built using Node.js on the server side.

------
orchdork10159
Prismoquent is a package written for Laravel that allows users to easily
access their Prismic.io repositories. Check out my blog on the package at
[http://blog.enge.me](http://blog.enge.me), and stay tuned for a new update
and a new website dedicated to Prismoquent.

------
AshFurrow
Working on a book about functional reactive programming on iOS using
ReactiveCocoa: [https://leanpub.com/iosfrp](https://leanpub.com/iosfrp)

It's cool because there's a lot of information out there, but little to show
developers how to build a whole app.

------
edh649
Am currently just in the conceptual stages but some sort of device where you
plug in a bunch of ipods and then can select a song from any of them to play
as well as queuing music etc.

Is cool because at parties etc. means you don't have to continually switch
ipods to put on 'That song'

------
Zolmeister0
Insignia
([https://github.com/Zolmeister/insignia](https://github.com/Zolmeister/insignia))
A Personal project showcase and landing page

My page: [http://insignia.zolmeister.com/](http://insignia.zolmeister.com/)

~~~
yuchi
My 2 cents: add padding around the top left image/icon/logo so it matches the
columns padding of the layout.

------
vpsingh
[http://99tests.com](http://99tests.com) \- a marketplace for getting the most
skilled manual testers to find bug in your software.

Idea is that you can set a price for each bug ($10-$500) that you would like
to see, then pay our testers based on accepted bugs.

~~~
boksiora
Nice, i will probably try it soon

------
webjay
I'm building Konfect ([http://www.konfect.com](http://www.konfect.com))
because it annoys me that at every social network I sign up I need to refind
those I usually connect with. With Konfect I can manage my connections accross
networks.

~~~
albertzeyer
Very cool, this is on my own TODO list of things I would like to build for
myself at one point.

I just posted it on HN here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622332)

Can you give some more details? Can I easily get the data and safe it on my
disk? Can I add further metadata to each contact?

Is the software Open Source?

Will there be plugins/extensions such that when I'm on Facebook or in GMail or
whereever, that it can easily show me more contact details? (A bit like
rapportive for GMail.)

------
amac
Octopus - [http://www.octopus.org](http://www.octopus.org) \- a Marketing app
directory and community blog/forums. I think it's cool because Marketing in my
opinion is the most important aspect of business - particularly on the web.

------
glazskunrukitis
I am working on a side-project in my spare time - GetSSL.me [1]. The idea is
to sell inexpensive certificates and offer friendly support. All certificates
are hand picked and we only offer the best of them.

[1] [https://getssl.me/](https://getssl.me/)

------
seeingfurther
[https://psychsignal.com/](https://psychsignal.com/) Quantifying crowd
psychology. Initially our granular sentiment technology is focused on
financial sentiment. We plan on changing the way real time news is sourced and
reported on.

------
tehwebguy
Magic Shop ([http://www.magicshop.io](http://www.magicshop.io)) - crazy easy
way to set up a shop on any website

Demo account: demo@magicshop.io / demo

View demo at
[http://magicshopdemo.tumblr.com](http://magicshopdemo.tumblr.com)

------
gionn
A platform to auto-deploy and sells web apps on different IaaS providers,
helping small-medium business to delivery their software without api/pay-per-
use/provisioning troubles.

[http://cloudesire.com](http://cloudesire.com) (public beta soon)

------
lowglow
If anyone is in the bay area we'd love to interview you on Techendo (shameless
plug: [http://techendo.co/](http://techendo.co/))

We're always looking to interview people who are passionate and doing
something awesome.

My email is dan at techendo dot co

------
jonnydark
I've been at a Hackathon for the last 15 hours and we've cobbled together a
text message service that you can ask questions to and it responds in the
style of Yoda.

It's imaginatively called "Ask Yoda" Pretty useless, but pretty cool and hella
fun to make :)

~~~
crolek
I'd totally use this to respond to my co-workers emails. If you post it to
github or somewhere send me a link please. :)

------
madoublet
[http://respondcms.com/](http://respondcms.com/)

I know "why do we need another CMS?" It's cool because it makes it really easy
to deploy Bootstrap sites. Plus, it has a full API and a great UI (well, at
least I think so).

------
getdavidhiggins
[http://jque.re/](http://jque.re/)

Why is it cool? Lots of handpicked jQuery plugins all hosted on a CDN.

[http://devlinks.co.uk/](http://devlinks.co.uk/)

Why is it cool? Lots of resources for developers & hackers to dive into.

------
johnmurch
2 projects: 1) Easily save jobs -
[http://bucketjobs.com/](http://bucketjobs.com/) (live) 2) SAAS Dashboard -
[http://helicopter.io/](http://helicopter.io/) (closed beta)

------
MarkPNeyer
writing a sci-fi novel dealing with p vs np, quantum computing, the many
worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the future of civilization and
culture, and hipsters.

it's cool because it's also about my personal life and struggles with bipolar
disorder.

~~~
turbojerry
It sounds excellent, like a cross between PKD and Charles Stross, please let
us know when it's published.

------
enriquepablo
I am working on a knowledge representation and reasoning system. It is cool
because of the simplicity and expressiveness of the languaje it uses to
represent knowledge.

[http://terms.readthedocs.org](http://terms.readthedocs.org)

~~~
albertzeyer
That is very cool. Is this just-for-fun/-learning or do you have any real
applications for it?

~~~
enriquepablo
I'm working on an real application [1] but it is undocumented, you can look
here [2] for the Terms part.

1.-
[https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server](https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server)
2.-
[https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server/tree/master/ter...](https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server/tree/master/terms/server/app/ontology)

------
Goopplesoft
GAuthify ([http://www.GAuthify.com](http://www.GAuthify.com)), Aims to make
two factor authentication dead simple for the masses. I love two factor
authentication and want to see everyone else use it too :)

~~~
pla3rhat3r
I'm confused about this one. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use a solution like
Twilio to do all this?

~~~
Goopplesoft
Very very doubtful. The base plan is $24 and covers 5000 users (a fairly large
amount). If it saves 1 hour of developer time a month to maintain the
code/infrastructure/bugs/issues/scaling you're already looking at a 50% price
savings. Through building this I can guarantee that it will save way more than
1 hour a month.

Source: [http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/13/silicon-valley-salaries-
de...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/13/silicon-valley-salaries-developers-
make-big-bank-in-2012-infographic/)

~~~
pla3rhat3r
But you could create a very simple response and add numbers pretty easily. And
at .075 cents per message I gotta think, in the long run, Twilio is a cheaper
alternative.

I should add that I work for Twilio so I'm a bit biased. However, I love your
idea. Just trying to do the math. :)

~~~
Goopplesoft
Twilio is the SMS/Voice provider so the bias doesn't really apply :) Thats why
I kept the SMS/Voice rate the same as twilio. Not trying to make money of
SMS/Voice just trying to implement a service over it so its easy to use. Have
you tried out ezGAuth? Love to know what you think. I'll probably try to seek
out someone from twilio soon for some sort of relationship since it helps
their sales too.

There are also the added benefits of doing your 2FA independently. Furhter,
should the long run come, we give you full read/delete perms on all the data
so you can implement it yourself.

~~~
pla3rhat3r
Nice. Yeah I've heard of ezGAuth. If you ever need a contact at Twilio hit me
up. joshua (at) twilio (dot) com

------
sailE
[https://github.com/EliasZ/breakingthetower](https://github.com/EliasZ/breakingthetower)

A clone/rewrite of Notch's Breaking The Tower game in Javascript (Canvas 2D
API). Cool because it's not Java?

------
nrp
I'm working on making virtual reality as compelling and comfortable as it can
be with mostly off the shelf components. It is cool because seeing virtual
reality finally work puts a smile on the face of just about everyone we try it
on.

------
jb007
Working on a distributed document database. It's cool as it integrates a
search and analytics engine, distributed file system and query language like
SQL. Will be the first ever and will solve all database problems for the most
part.

------
hhaidar
Let's Chat, our little private campfire alternative:
[https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat](https://github.com/sdelements/lets-
chat)

It's cool because we get to keep our chats to ourselves.

------
AndyKelley
libgroove[1] - a generic music player backend C library.

The goal is to provide a powerful yet simple API for building a music player
app. It's the backend for Groove Basin[2], a music player app written in
Node.js with a web interface.

It's cool because everybody who uses it as the backend for their music player
app benefits from the shared maintenance burden and increased robustness.

[1]:
[https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove](https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove)
[2]:
[https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin](https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin)

------
DjangoReinhardt
I am quite late to this thread, but what the heck, I'll give it the ol'
college try. :)

HashPix: Search for images tagged with the same hashtag across Twitter,
TwitPic, Instagram and Flickr. Create public/private albums of these pics and
share the albums with anyone and everyone. Anonymous albums allowed but are
made public by default.

Good for:

\- Events, e.g. #MySuperAwesomeHalloweenParty

\- Contests, #TweetLikeAGhostAndWin

\- Festivals #HalloweenHaunts

...anything where you can use a hashtag, really!

Link: [http://hashpix.herokuapp.com](http://hashpix.herokuapp.com)

2\. @updt_me: (RSS/Atom) Feed updates via Twitter DM. Follow @updt_me and send
a tweet @updt_me with the keyword START followed by a URL, e.g. "@updt_me
START [https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss").
You'll receive feed updates via Twitter DM (hence, the need to follow) when
they happen. I'm currently using it to subscribe to xkcd, smbc and a few
others.

Good for:

\- Avoiding RSS inbox pile-ups due to procrastination/lethargy

\- Ensuring authors get the page-views their blogs/sites deserve

\- Following 'thoughts' rather than 'people', i.e. no more "I just ate
broccoli. I #WIN." when you just want to read, "The 7 habits of highly-
successful techpreneurs that you must cultivate before bedtime."

Coming soon:

\- Ability to subscribe to feeds via DM - for those subscriptions that you'd
rather not announce to the world. _wink_ _wink_ _nudge_ _nudge_

\- (Almost)instant PuSH updates using Superfeedr. (Still trying to figure this
one out, actually.)

Links:

[http://update-me.herokuapp.com](http://update-me.herokuapp.com)

[http://twitter.com/updt_me](http://twitter.com/updt_me)

Why do these make me happy?

Because a year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to make a comment
like this. I was (and still am) an utter newbie with no knowledge of any kind
of programming. Deep-dived into Python/Django and the results are up there for
you to peruse. Granted they aren't awesome like most others in this thread but
hey, it's a start. :)

------
antoniuschan99
Tools to help people who are located far away from each other to collaborate
in rich and interactive ways just as if they were together in the same room.

[http://www.teamchat.me](http://www.teamchat.me)

------
aespinoza
iKnode ([http://iknode.com](http://iknode.com)) - Automation/Integration
Backend Platform.

Demos:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/iknode](https://www.youtube.com/user/iknode)

It is cool because:

* it reduces the time to market of backend applications and makes it extremely easy to deploy with just one button.

* It uses an uncool (uncool in HN) language (C#) to create very cool and amazingly easy functionality in the cloud.

* apps scale automatically with you knowing anything about Capacity planning or scaling.

* You can store your data internally with an easy to use interface.

* Mind blowingly easy to use task Scheduling.

------
jimaek
[http://www.jsdelivr.com](http://www.jsdelivr.com) \- A free public CDN for
webmasters.

It uses 2 enterprise CDNs and 14 hosting providers all load balanced with
multiple failover features.

------
tomasien
I'm working on [http://wehighfive.com](http://wehighfive.com) because I think
2 things:

1\. Remembering people you meet is hard 2\. The iOS (and Android) Contacts
apps are horrible.

~~~
zitko
Any plans for Android version?

~~~
tomasien
Really hope so!

------
yathern
Working on a js library to create an ASCII canvas, and have drawing functions
much like an HTML5 canvas. It will have the ability to create canvasObjects as
well, which can be drawn and interacted with.

------
leoplct
A data-driven analysis looking for what users are interested in when they are
on Facebook

[http://successful-facebook.herokuapp.com/](http://successful-
facebook.herokuapp.com/)

------
hiburo
We are working on a fun & cozy team management web app -
[https://hiburo.com](https://hiburo.com). Try the one-click demo on front page
to get the feeling.

------
cmollis
we're working on a live party visualizer using raspberry pi's deployed as
iBeacons. We're writing an iPhone app that detects the user's location (based
on the ibeacon) and updates a server. We're writing a d3 visualization that
renders the user's location graphically in real-time based on the aggregated
server data.

doesn't exactly cure cancer, but it's pretty cool. Obvious uses for retail,
etc (but all that stuff is lame.. it's more fun to use at a party)

..and that's what we're working on.

------
Ettolrahc
I'm teaching myself JavaScript so this weekend I'm working on a basic app
using Express, Node and the Twilio API. Learning on each little bit and will
write about to help others too.

~~~
mercuryrising
If you learn well with books, check out "Javascript: The Good Part" by Douglas
Crockford. I don't usually learn well with books, but that one really clicked
with me.

------
eli_gottlieb
On a good week I still manage to get some coding time in on my systems-
programming language, Deca.

[http://code.google.com/p/decac](http://code.google.com/p/decac)

------
roycehaynes
Building: Chrrp - alerts you using Stripe events when a new customer or
payment is made to your app.
[http://moneybags.chrrp.io](http://moneybags.chrrp.io)

------
collyw
I am pleasantly surprised to see lots of really innovative ideas. Usually
speaking to "entrepreneurs" their innovative idea is a new social network
"like facebook but..."

------
jbobes
[http://cloud306.com](http://cloud306.com) \- private cloud solution also,
considering going completely open source with this, coz open source sexy! :)

------
vanwilder77
Downloader for Dropbox

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

Because conventional file-system is being replaced with Cloud storage and so
should your downloader.

------
krishnasrinivas
I am working on [https://nutty.io](https://nutty.io) \- share terminals using
browser. If you use tmux/screen tools you will find this useful.

------
podviaznikov
Communi.st([https://communi.st/](https://communi.st/)) - app for sharing
outdoor equipment.

It's cool because it promotes sharing and written in Clojure.

------
computeloops
[http://www.remotewaker.com](http://www.remotewaker.com)

A tool to save computer power consumption. It is cool because, it could
contribute to keep earth cool :)

~~~
dxm
Nice. But why have you added the horrible photoshop effect to those images?

~~~
computeloops
I bought the theme from Wrap Bootstrap and the images are supposed to be
replaced. The site will be revamped soon. Thanks

------
abbiya
I am working on an android app which broadcast messages to the app users in
the same geo loaction. Its cool cause its new and its not cool cause it can
cause some problems.

------
montag
Gifcast: a tool to share screen captures (like Droplr, etc.) as animated GIFs.

It's silly compared to the cool stuff shared here, but I'm having fun learning
Go and Objective-C.

------
spiritplumber
A thing to stop malaria. It is cool because it may save lives.

------
pedalpete
A so far un-named hardware development framework which makes hardware
programming more expressive and programs more shareable. No more "gpio -g
write 17 1".

------
feint
Saved.io ([http://saved.io](http://saved.io))

It's cool because it's solves a problem I was having in a really simple and
elegant way.

------
SuperChihuahua
#blog100 which is not a "project" but the idea is to produce 100 blog posts in
100 days. Hopefully will it increase traffic to my real projects.

------
et1337
chefdash - a realtime dashboard for launching and monitoring Chef[1] runs.
[http://i.imgur.com/yLRduJt.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/yLRduJt.jpg)

You can run Chef simultaneously on all your machines and monitor their output
in realtime. We're using it to deploy most of our infrastructure.

Look for it on GitHub soon!

[1] [http://www.opscode.com/chef/](http://www.opscode.com/chef/)

------
wololo
[http://bugchecker.net/](http://bugchecker.net/)

It's cool because: we analyze paths taken in binaries to find bugs.

------
kirk21
Tool for academic researchers: beta.bohrresearch.com It is cool because it
helps academic researchers to spend more time on their research.

~~~
sycren
Seen Write Latex? www.writelatex.com Seems like an ideal partnership
opportunity.

~~~
blueblob
also www.sharelatex.com is almost the same and there is an open source project
called flylatex that is trying to provide something similar:
[http://alabidan.me/2012/07/31/flylatex-a-real-time-
collabora...](http://alabidan.me/2012/07/31/flylatex-a-real-time-
collaborative-environment-some-screen-shots-of-the-app/) This is not the
github link because people always want screenshots, but has a link to it.

------
pagade
Side project, a small webapp, that would help me:

1\. Learn Python, Django, HTML etc.

2\. Track my yet-another-wake-up-early-attempt and (hopefully) motivate me.

------
edna_piranha
[http://chat.meatspac.es](http://chat.meatspac.es)

because apparently people feel more human than human.

~~~
brianloveswords
I signed into the wasteland that is HN to approve this message.

------
rst
Positronic Net, a Scala toolkit for Android programmers, with UI and data-
management helpers.

------
novaleaf
phantomjs.cloud: (phantomjs as a service)
[http://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html](http://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html)

it's cool because: my first web project, needed subsystem of my next web
project ;)

------
tmilard
free-visit ( [http://www.free-visit.net](http://www.free-visit.net) ) It's
cool because, I wana see 3d engine inside web browsers. I mean, at last...

------
VaedaStrike
Octopart style product search as a service.

Any data or product space at your disposal.

------
therobot24
building better graphical models for biometric image recognition

------
ateeqs
vegnos ([http://www.vegnos.com](http://www.vegnos.com)) -- A (Windows) desktop
search engine (can also recover files in NTFS volumes).

------
dc_ploy
An interactive food recipie application for the gov

------
dasmithii
Javascript + Cleverbot + Facebook Chat --> ?

------
len
hyperloop.

[http://github.com/leonidkozhukh/hyperloop](http://github.com/leonidkozhukh/hyperloop)

------
tihag
showlister.net

kinda like padmapper for shows i guess. github.com/karabijavad/showlister if
you would like to contribute ;P

------
lcasela
An app that will track my sleep on stuff.

------
python27
programming, No need to explain more

------
contextual
Self Experiments: Its mission is to make inhumane animal testing obsolete by
using “open suffer” collaboration of volunteer testers from around the world.

The first experiment is launching next month:
[http://selfexperiments.com](http://selfexperiments.com)

What could be more cool than that?

~~~
cjbprime
Hey, this is an interesting idea. I have criticisms that are probably going to
sound mean; but even though I don't like this idea, I like that you're
thinking about these problems:

* Human subjects research (which the selfexperiments are) is governed by IRBs; if the research did not pass IRB approval, it can't be used in academic publications. It doesn't matter that the research was done outside of academia, it still has to pass IRB approval to be usable. I don't think any IRB would approve this at the moment (though maybe they should!), so it wouldn't be able to be used to replace research in publications.

* Of course, humans are not biologically valid testing replacements for animals if your goal was to test what happens in that other animal, so this can only replace research that was being done on animals because humans weren't available.

* It looks like up to one million animals a year are used for research in the US, whereas several billion a year (mainly chickens, pigs, cows, with increased capability of suffering over the average testing animal) are raised for food in factory farms. Why does it make sense to work on animal testing _instead_ of factory farming?

~~~
contextual
Thanks for your comment Chris. Since you don't have the benefit of knowing
what the experiments are, I don't blame you for being sceptical.

* Self Experiments isn't concerned with conforming to FDA specifications and obtaining IRB approval (yet). Also keep in mind this project is iterative. A lot of mistakes will be made along the way. Oh, and the experiments will be fun, or at least extremely interesting.

* Animal testing is often a proxy for testing on humans. Self Experiments will attempt to reverse this on a case by case, experiment by experiment basis. I hope Self Experiments will be preemptive and anticipate experiments that may be conducted on animals in the future - and conduct them on humans first. The trickiest part is designing the protocols for these experiments.

* One million? Try 19.5 million animals are killed each year in research in the U.S. alone. This does NOT include mice, which is probably numbered in the _billions_ : [http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing-statistics/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing-statistics/)

* Factory farming is deplorable, and I've mulled over how to solve the problem for several years now. I have ideas but that's all I'll say. In the meantime, I'm vegetarian and working towards vegan-ism (although it's harder than I thought).

------
camperman
A Raspberry Pi-based multimedia display solution for SMEs, large corporates
and municipalities. It displays nearly all video and image formats and real
time news feeds at 50fps in almost any layout combination while using less
than 20% CPU at full tilt.

It's cool because most people are blown away at how fast and smooth it is when
they first see it. A lot of the code is in C, the video decoder is in a thread
(and it actually works which is impressive for me) and it's all controlled by
Lua.

~~~
randomhunt
Any idea how you're going to release it? (productise/monetize or open source)

I hacked up in the past a temporary solution using PowerPoint running on
stripped down older laptops in the foyer and outside meeting rooms in my old
company which worked well but I always thought it was a bit overkill and would
like to see something like R-Pi in those kind of uses. I imagine yours is a
lot more powerful but still think it would be a good use.

~~~
camperman
We have a lot of customers lined up already: two fast food outlets who want it
as a digital menu system, a local council who want it as a digital signage
product and some SMEs who want it for reception-based product display. So
we're going to be supplying complete solutions with internet connections for
updates and each customer will get their own content of course. Pis are
incredibly cheap so we'll be highly competitive against other digital signage
products.

I will definitely release the framework as LGPLed code when its good enough
for public consumption. It's nothing technically very special: a C API to
create graphics elements using old style OpenGL behind the scenes, a video
decoder pinched from hello_videocube.c and a LuaJIT wrapper around it all with
ideas from Cocos-2D. Flash will never be supported on the Pi so this is my
attempt at an open alternative.

