
Ask HN: What are you working on? - jellisjapan
This question comes from a great thread from a while back that I really enjoyed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700662), so I thought with the new year here, it'd be a good time to ask again.<p>I'm still developing readthekanji.com, a site for helping Japanese students learn to figure out how to read kanji.  It's been one of the best learning experiences, and I'm loving every minute of it.<p>So what projects are you currently working on, or planning for the new year? Is it a startup, or research perhaps? And how's it going?
======
swolchok
Started yesterday: Lark, a toy Arc-like language implemented on top of Python
instead of Scheme. (<http://www.github.com/swolchok/lark>) I've never
implemented a Lisp or used it for anything serious, and I've been trying to
figure out for myself whether there really is anything to macros or if they're
just fancy compiler hacks, so I decided to write Lark as a way of learning
what precisely pg is so excited about. It's a direct, lazy translation of
ac.scm, except that I've written an evaluator instead of compiling to Python
ASTs or bytecode. I'll probably compile to Python ASTs after I have a
baseline.

I did cheat a bit and steal pieces from PyScheme and Lython as well as someone
else's S-expression parser, but it's capable of evaling ((fn (a) a) 1) as well
as Arc's "if" currently. I'm not certain whether it's Turing complete right
now, but I suspect that it is because I can create and call functions, branch,
and bind values to names. (IIRC, just being able to create and call lambdas is
enough because you can count, branch, etc. Is that right? I haven't taken PL.)

Big problems right now are:

1) Proper lexical scoping. The current model is broken (it might be dynamic
scoping), and Python 2.x's closures are broken so I can't just use Python
functions to punt the problem to Python.

2) The shortcuts for quote, quasiquote, complement, compose, etc. The
S-expression parser I stole doesn't have them. I don't want to use a parser
generator because that seems to defeat the point of Lisp's lack of syntax
(i.e., being easy to parse).

This is a toy that has nothing to do with my research interests (security), so
it's not going to be actively maintained or developed. pg will probably make
some breaking changes to Arc and kill the project.

~~~
DTrejo
_just being able to create and call lambdas is enough because you can count,
branch, etc. Is that right?_

♫ All you need is Lambdas ♫ :)

------
seiji
Released <http://runroot.com/> today. Give it some upvote love at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032688> (apparently "OMG! AMAZING UTF-8
CHARS!" is more popular than my paltry attempt at making something useful).

~~~
ivenkys
Love it - A great use of Solaris Containers.

------
abyssknight
Working on the house I just bought with my wife. It's the grandest hack I've
ever had to do. From crazy 22ft walls of glass that need replaced, a kitchen
from the 50's that needs a remodel to the shoddy wiring throughout the house.
There's tons to do, and little time to do it in.

This year I start a new position at the company I work for. Hopefully it'll
bring more visibility and access to the people who make decisions. There's so
much that needs fixing here, and with a little elbow grease I think I can fix
it all.

~~~
jeromec
Are you the HN member behind <http://big-old-house.blogspot.com>? I've been
enjoying lurking and following that site since it was mentioned here.

~~~
abyssknight
Can't say that's me, but it's a good idea. I'll have to bug my wife about
getting a blog up.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
I seem to have invented a new datastructure, so I'm analysing it to check its
performance before writing it up and announcing it. I've also invented a
variant of an existing data structure that has some nice features. That will
accompany it.

In the meantime I'm starting a re-write of my alpha 0.1 web service to help
connect people with friends and friends of friends. The existing one still
exists, and I'm still collecting comments, so if you'd like to know more, drop
me an email.

And I've got a full time day job, and 8 talks/presentations in the next four
weeks.

~~~
silentbicycle
If you don't mind me asking, what do you _do_ once you've invented new data
structure? I think I have recently, too, but (besides thoroughly documenting
it and posting a library based on it, soon), I'm kind of at a loss. I'm not in
academia, so publishing in an academic journal isn't the clear choice. I've
been trying to find prior art, but thus far haven't found anything similar.

My e-mail address is in my profile.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
To be blunt, I'm not sure. I've spoken with the head of computing at my
nearest university and he seems quite excited by it. We may publish a joint
paper - not least it will give him an Erdos Number of 3. Failing publication,
I'll just write it up, put it on my web site, and announce it in a few place.

What ever happens, I will announce it here for sure.

~~~
phaedrus
Haha funny I think I've invented a new fundemental data structure as well.
Hopefully we haven't all three invented the same one! Mine is going into
proprietary software; I don't know if I'll write a paper over it. It doesn't
allow you to do anything you couldn't do before, but it takes the best and
worst case performance of a well known data structure and reverses the two. So
it's useful in places where the other structure would perform poorly.

Good luck with yours, both of you.

------
PStamatiou
<http://skribit.com> \- helping bloggers cure writer's block and find things
to write about. @wycats (rails core, etc) recently started using us:
<http://skribit.com/blogs/katz-got-your-tongue>

and continually working on what pays the bills, <http://paulstamatiou.com>

------
koenbok
Making our e-commerce platform <http://www.enstore.com> available to everyone.
With a nice frontend built in Cappuccino/Atlas.

~~~
jellisjapan
Wow looks great! I really need to checkout Cappuccino...

~~~
teej
You can get a lot of the good looks on any platform by using 280North's open
source UI pack, Aristo. <http://github.com/280north/aristo>

~~~
DTrejo
Is there a way to use the UI pack and nothing more?

~~~
koenbok
Sure you can get the photoshop file here: <http://github.com/280north/aristo>

------
jay_kyburz
<http://np.ironhelmet.com>

"Neptune's Pride is a multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic
Conquest!

Neptunes Pride is real-time, but games are played over several weeks. Players
log in at any time of the day to check the progress of their fleets, view the
results of battles and issue new orders.

Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.

It's the game you know and love with a twist. A 4x Strategy game with it's
complexity striped away to reveal a sophisticated game strategic command and
diplomacy.

How will you conquer the Galaxy?"

~~~
sga
I really like the artwork on the landing page. Love the style.

------
jasonlbaptiste
I'm interested/ been heavily exploring:

PCs in the living room (everything from custom linux distro, XBMC Live
modified, and windows 7). 140 million HDTVs sold in 2009 alone, hardware is
getting cheaper, and content is readily available.

Education space. ie- how do we provide easy access to all the materials that
exist out there? My hypothesis: everything we could ever want to learn exists
already on the net or can be taught to us by a person we can be connected with
in seconds. How do we easily organize it? think more of a directory than a
search engine.

Bringing local businesses into the 21st century. Most don't have a website and
still use yellow pages. The existing solutions out there suck and are filled
with slime.

Email newsletters. Why not create the weblogs inc of newsletters? Look at what
thrillist, dailycandy, etc. have done. Create a network of these around a
plethora of wide open niches along with building a strong advertising platform
for email newsletters (it doesn't exist yet).

Human powered purchasing decisions. How do we help people know what to buy
with specific criteria that transcends checkboxes and a search engine?
Something human powered is the way to go about it. As geeks, I'm sure you're
constantly asked- what phone should I get for price x, features y, etc.
Purchases such as these are expensive and spending a few bucks more to get a
personalized recommendation would be worth it.

------
redmage
I'm working on 0xCOFFEE, a compiler for a toy language implemented using Ruby,
TreeTop and LLVM.

<http://github.com/meqif/0xCOFFEE>

It's quite fun, but I had to fork llvmruby (the ruby bindings for LLVM), since
it lacked some things, like allowing access to part of the LLVM API and
raising RuntimeErrors instead of segfaulting (especially because of some code
mutations that heckle[1] generates).

Currently, this is just a little project to keep me busy during the past
holidays and the current university exam month, but I hope to create a nice
language.

[1] [http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/12/19/tormenting-your-
test...](http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/12/19/tormenting-your-tests-with-
heckle)

~~~
Dav3xor
You need some sort of related technology called 0xDEADBEEF.

~~~
silentbicycle
If you want a vegetarian port, there's also 0xFA1AFE1.

~~~
Dav3xor
That's a 0xFA1AFE1 lot for 4 bytes.

------
samdk
I'm working on a collaboration tool built to help government agencies and aid
organizations coordinate during emergencies. I helped start it this summer as
part of the Humanitarian FOSS Project (hfoss.org).

It was used successfully in beta for Thanksgiving-day feeding coordination and
we're getting very close to our first non-beta release.

<http://collabbit.org> <http://github.com/elitheeli/collabbit>

If you'd like a look around the demo or are interested in contributing leave a
comment or send me an email.

~~~
vinutheraj
Is it something similar to Sahana -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahana_FOSS_Disaster_Management_System)
?

~~~
samdk
It's related, yes. Both are classified as "Humanitarian FOSS Projects" and
Sahana has been worked on in previous years by people participating in the
HFOSS Project summer internship, which is where we started Collabbit.

I'm not intimately familiar with Sahana, but from what I understand it's a
fairly large system and can do a lot of specific things. Consequently, most of
its deployments have been at sites of major disasters or for very large
agencies.

Collabbit takes a different approach. Our goal is to facilitate communication
inside groups and between groups, rather than to provide a means of
accomplishing specific tasks. That means that Collabbit is quite simple and
broad right now. While our initial use case was volunteer organizations
communicating in New York City, we're hoping it can be a valuable tool for
smaller groups as well.

------
roschdal
<http://freeciv.net>

------
silentbicycle
I'm working on a distributed / fault tolerant network filesystem inspired by
plan9's Venti. Several of its internals (code for chunking data with rolling
hashes, a purely functional ADT for non-redundant storing of large strings,
and a coroutining / non-blocking server framework for Lua, somewhat like
Python's Twisted and Ruby's EventMachine) have been broken out into their own
libraries. I'm almost done with the first two and am working on the third, but
its design is being driven by the filesystem. They'll all be released at once
when they're done, no time frame yet though. Probably MIT license.

I've also been working an a utility to locate repeated groups of data
(particularly geared towards scanning for likely copy-and-pasted code), but
that's been put on the back burner due to the above project and lack of free
time.

------
nonrecursive
I've been putting together a web site, <http://www.learngrowdo.com> . It's
somewhat personal and came out of my struggles taking care of a loved one with
a chronic illness. On the site I also plan to sell related software as I
develop it.

I'm selling my iphone app on it, which was just approved yesterday. "Control
Time": itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/control-time/id348796242?mt=8

------
spencerfry
<http://www.carbonmade.com> \- The easiest way to display and manage your
portfolio online.

------
khandelwal
I'm working on a travel website:

"Planning a vacation is hard. You know where you want to go. But what should
you see once you're there? Which monuments, parks, cathedrals and museums
should you visit when you're there? How do you get around?

My website helps you plan your vacation by providing high quality itinerary
suggestions, contributed by travelers like you."

I hope to do a private release at the end of this month.

~~~
jaxn
I assume you have seen <http://offbeatguides.com>. If not, might want to check
it out.

~~~
khandelwal
What I'm trying to do is slightly different. A guide will tell about
everything that there is to do. So does wading through the forums at Trip
Advisor.

I'm trying to present itineraries that have already selected interesting
things to do. Essentially future travelers are going to benefit from past
travelers.

What's often important is: How much can I fit in a day? How do I get around?
What was my personal experience, and how can other travelers benefit from it?

In a near future, you'll be able to search on itinerary based on your travel
profile (age group, kids/no kids, fast, lazy etc.)

------
synnik
Brick and Mortar startup, with online enhancements:

Currently in the process of purchasing an art gallery space in Denver, which
we will renovate, and hopefully open in the fall of 2010. (Would be sooner,
but we are having a baby in the spring.)

I intend to have an exhibition every 3 months that will seek to blend
technology with a physical installation of some kind. Details TBD, based on
online collaboration -- The web site will spend the 2 months between
exhibitions working towards collaborating on the next exhibit. Each
collaborator will hopefully be able to visit in person, to create a true
blending of online and physical life.

~~~
nfnaaron
Where/when/how will you announce? I'm not in the art world, so I wouldn't
naturally see the announcement, but I would like to visit.

~~~
synnik
There is an organization in Denver that markets the Art District. I'll likely
join them, and therefore be included in their marketing. Otherwise, the
location I am working on gets a lot of traffic, and the sign in front will be
the major announcement.

Our web site will also have an announcement -- it is currently just my wife's
blog, but is connected to her etsy shop, so we do have a small following.

If there is interest, I can post on HN as well. I wasn't sure if the community
here would have a strong interest in my project or not...

Finally, simply word of mouth - as my day job will pay the mortgage on the
property, I don't actually need to profit, so I can just work with my friends
on the first few shows, and get the world out gradually.

In terms of timing, I am hoping for August. Once we actually move in
(hopefully on the 31st), we need to physically prepare the location (needs new
floors, doors, drywall, lights, things like that). So there is quite a bit of
work to do yet.

------
steveklabnik
My startup, CloudFab, is doing well. I'll have more to say about that in a few
weeks.

In my spare time, Hackety Hack is coming along, got a release out for
Christmas, hoping for 1.0 early next month.

Then I have one more small project that's still secret.

------
jdrock
<http://www.80legs.com> \- web-scale web-crawling for everyone. Launched in
September and growing revenue now. We've solved a lot of big data store issues
in our back-end. Challenges have shifted from technical to business :)

Extractiv - web-listening and content-extraction that combines semantic
analysis and web-scale reach for a complete picture of what information is on
the web and what the web is discussing. The core technology is working,
currently turning it into a real product.

~~~
Tichy
While in principle I think the approach is great, I have recently learned that
some of your "volunteers" are in fact people infected with spyware. Can't find
the corresponding article atm, though :-(

~~~
jdrock
They're not infected with spyware. Some of the computing power comes from the
users of freeware applications, who are asked _during install_ if they want to
enable the grid system that powers us.

~~~
robryan
Have you thought about the economics of having a program where people earn
money from allowing use of there processing power vs paying for it regularly/
having your own processing power.

Even if it was barely worth it for the user after factoring in electricity
costs the novelty factor might attract people.

~~~
jdrock
We have thought about it.. there is a downloadable app an individual can use,
but it's not too likely they'll earn any significant money.

------
buckwilson
Working on <http://herefilefile.com>, an iPhone app that lets you access all
of your computer's files from anywhere.

Currently doing a UI refresh, planning a big marketing push including ads,
contacting interested journalists, designing a web site / blog, planning the
support workflow, and other fun stuff.

Things are going really well for us so far. Won a nice iPhone app competition,
getting some pretty good buzz building, and looking to launch to a decent
crowd of interested parties!

------
gridspy
I'm creating an online power monitoring system so you can see how your home or
office uses power. A web platform is great for this because we can centralise
the processing / graph generation and analysis and then put simple, cheap
devices into people's buildings to do the actual measurement.

See: <http://www.gridspy.co.nz/>

We offer live data (updated every second while you watch) and multiple
channels, all at a price that is cheap for a solution like ours.

------
dkuchar
<http://www.lendfriend.net> \- friends and family lending site built in
ASP.NET MVC & jquery. I wasn't the first one to come up with this, but I got
the idea after I funded my first startup on credit cards, had some friends
with money, but didn't want to complicate things with a DIY loan.

We're launched, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. If anyone has any
ideas/suggestions/criticisms please let me know.

------
ivenkys
Developing a generic price arbitrage engine making it easier for sellers to
track price movements of their products vis-a-vis their competitors. The first
release will target sellers selling on Amazon.

I should have a private beta by the end of the month.

~~~
ivenkys
Just wanted to add , there are 2 features that i am most excited about (at
least for the first release):

a) Speed The web front-end and the back-end processing engine have been
written keeping in mind processing time, everything is optimised to get data
quickly in front of the user.

b) Scripted Rule-based pricing A user can script the pricing engine by
specifying rules written in a custom-DSL. My first attempt at doing a proper
DSL.

------
mtinkerhess
I'm writing an iPhone musical instrument with an emphasis on just intonation
(as opposed to equal temperament).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Intonation>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament>

~~~
paulreiners
I wrote a just intonation library in Java, if you're interested:

<http://sourceforge.net/projects/leipzig/>

------
mtrichardson
Just sold Bac'n ( [http://blog.bacn.com/2010/01/bacn-acquired-by-baconfreak-
com...](http://blog.bacn.com/2010/01/bacn-acquired-by-baconfreak-com/) ).

Focusing 100% on Urban Airship ( <http://urbanairship.com/> ) now, which is
fantastic fun.

~~~
jellisjapan
I'd love to read that book once it's published.

------
bjelkeman-again
Fixing poverty through water and sanitation: <http://akvo.org/>

Which is also becoming an open source platform for development aid.

~~~
hnhg
This is great. I remember having to endure a few days without running water in
my apartment thanks to burst pipes and wondering how I would cope - then I
realised how lucky I was to be having it return eventually. I've had a few
conversations with Mexican colleagues who told me how it is common to find
people getting sick in some poor coastal towns because they don't know how to
build latrines properly. It's such a big issue. I hope you find every success
with this.

------
forkandwait
Building support for matrix datatypes and operations (arithmetic, eigenvalues,
and factorization) in PostgreSQL. I think I will use the Gnu Scientific
Library, but I am still looking around at options with looser licenses.

~~~
timr
Try LAPACK. Incredibly fast, and a minimal license. You'll have to deal with
FORTRAN, though.

~~~
forkandwait
I don't want to write my own binary dataformats, and I don't want to deal with
FORTRAN.

~~~
repsilat
Eigen doesn't help with the first problem, but it does with the second -
written in C++ with some nice expression template magic for efficiency.
Comparable performance to LAPACK and LGPL licensed.

------
wooster
<http://tweeteorites.com/> \- builds timelines of what your friends are
favoriting on Twitter

<http://amid.st/> \- social placemarking app

------
michael_nielsen
A book called "Reinventing Discovery", about how collective intelligence is
transforming science. The manuscript is due to the publisher (Princeton
University Press) in a couple of months.

------
akeefer
Compiling our JVM language (Gosu) down to bytecode. It's slow going; the
bytecode side isn't hard, but the language has been evolving for 7 years or so
and has all sorts of obscure edge cases, as well as some looseness in the
semantics that has to be tightened up in bytecode, so getting every little
detail right so all the existing code still runs 100% correctly is difficult.
We're still hoping for an initial open source release some time between
probably June and September.

------
Perceval
I'm working on a dissertation linking the international balance of power to
the characteristics of civil wars during three periods: pre-Cold War, Cold
War, and post-Cold War.

------
wensing
Working on an update to <http://stormpulse.com> that will give us city-level
maps and general/severe weather forecasts.

------
spokey
I'm starting to think my project seems mundane compared to some on this
thread, but I'm bootstrapping a cycling reference site at
<http://brightspoke.com/>. Our mission is to put more people on bikes by
creating informed consumers.

We're not quite ready for a "Rate my Statup" post, but you can be sure we'll
have one. In fact, I've just been working on a milestone plan for 2010 and
that's one of the milestones.

------
fuelfive
<http://frogmetrics.com/> \- YC summer 2008.

In my spare time, researching how to catalyze mass behavior change to improve
society.

~~~
nudist
How does one catalyze mass behavior change to improve society?

~~~
fuelfive
That's the question I'm trying to answer. I see the answer as having two
parts:

1\. More rigorously define what "improve" means. Beliefs about what an ideal
world would be varies drastically between people and cultures. To avoid the
"colonize the savages / white man's burden" problem, we need a framework for
discussing and evaluating goodness in a more rigorous way, especially one that
is viewer independent, cultureless, and timeless. In the 14th century, people
lit dogs and cats on fire for amusement. This sort of thing would be greeted
with horror by many people today. I wonder what we're doing now that people
from the future will view with similar disgust.

2\. Identify the behaviors / beliefs / etc that prevent such a world from
existing now. It seems likely to me that this will involve formulating a
scientifically falsifiable model for how people adopt and change beliefs and
behaviors. It's not clear how much precision will be attainable for a model
this. It could be that we are only ever able to understand very generally
which stimuli or environmental conditions will give a higher probability of
shifting individuals towards certain behaviors and traits (eg, empowered
analytical altruism). We can then identify the levers that cause this shift to
occur, eg altering what children are taught at school.

In a nutshell:

1\. [if possible] More rigorously define what good world(s) would look like.

2\. [if possible] Figure out a model for belief and behavior selection that
can be applied to causing / raising people to come to adopt behaviors and
beliefs that bring about this better world.

------
covercash
Last month my mom emailed me asking if I knew of any new/good places she could
take her friend to eat in Philadelphia. I went on Yelp and found a few
suggestions for her. Had my mom known about Yelp, she could have done that
herself. I went over the next day and showed her Yelp and now she uses it
every time she wants to go out to eat.

I'm tired of my mom treating technology like it's a chore so I'm working on
something that will introduce her to new tech that can really make a
difference in her every day life. Like most of you, I'm immersed in the latest
and greatest technology every day but she's too intimidated and too busy to
discover it herself. I find that once I get her past those two bumps in the
road, she actually enjoys the benefits of whatever it is I introduced her to.

Right now I'm compiling a list of awesome sites, services, gadgets, etc. that
I think my mom would actually like and benefit from... if she only knew they
existed.

Then I'll send her a weekly email with a 2-5 minute video showing basic use of
a new piece of technology and explaining how it can benefit her.

My gift to my mom.

------
chrischen
I'm working on Flixa.tv, a digital distribution platform for independent
filmmakers as well as other indie video content.

There's a bit more information and a long interrogation of the idea here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028673>

Still looking for a co-founder, so contact me at chris.chen@flixa.tv if you're
interested!

------
dangrover
Sheet music reader for the iPhone: <http://www.wonderwarp.com/opus>

------
EGF
I have been working on a health\food tracking site www.eat.ly as well as one
other unlaunched project.

A simple blog project that has been going well is www.multiplayergames.com
which is in need of some buddypress\wordpressMU and design help, but since it
continues to perform well I am hesitant to change anything.

Outside of those a handful of other smaller projects:)

~~~
bemmu
How well?

------
jrgnsd
I can't stop trying to dev my own PHP framework. I must say that this one is
the best by far: <http://backend-php.net>

I love the community of Hacker News, and I'd like to create something similar
but for a South African community: <http://zacoders.net>

------
thesystemis
I just finished editing documentation of this outdoor projection / interaction
project we did in new zealand:

<http://vimeo.com/8525186>

I'm working on an open source eye tracker:

<http://eyewriter.org>

and a c++ toolkit for creative coding:

<http://openframeworks.cc>

~~~
covercash
that looks like so much fun. nice work!

------
yellowbkpk
Trying to find ways to attract more US-based mappers to OpenStreetMap.

First stop: support my buddy Lars' map rendering to get this beautiful map
<http://toposm.com/ma/> to cover the entire United States. Anyone out there
have some spare CPU cycles and/or memory to donate for the next couple weeks?

~~~
cullenking
I am a co-founder of <http://ridewithgps.com> and we have been intending on
integrating OSM support into our route planner, as well as figure out a way to
funnel mapped routes back through to you all. We were thinking a cool way to
vette cycle routes would be a heat map of sorts.

We have some more business related priorities (payed accounts and the like),
but this is up there; I'd love to see those map tiles cover the entire US.

------
scotje
Although the holidays clobbered my productivity on it, I've been working on a
management app for WoW raiding guilds: <http://srsguild.com/>

But I did start hacking on a fully email based todo/reminder system over the
break that I hope to have functional in another week or so.

------
arctangent
I am writing a maze generator in Haskell.

------
camccann
I'm working (slowly) on an interpreter for a minimal, non-strict, pure untyped
lambda calculus. Bonus features include syntactic whitespace, some basic
optimizations, simple tracing/debugging features, and support for "compiling"
multiple source files into a single program.

No, it's not supposed to be useful.

------
timcederman
<http://www.tripadvisor.com/restaurants>

~~~
khandelwal
Very cool - I've used Tripadvisor for international restaurant recommendations
plenty of times.

~~~
timcederman
Happy to hear it! Any feedback on the recent redesign is greatly appreciated.

------
rjurney
I'm doing website user-session/click flow analysis, developing a graph/network
visualization library in processing suitable for these purposes. Crunch data
in Hadoop, output to interactive graph visualization web app. One step, 'just
works.'

Hoping to open source this work later this year.

------
cdibona
I work at Google running open source compliance, code release, outreach and on
public sector engineering management. Management, meaning, I don't code much
anymore, although I added a totally trivial constant (1729, Hardy Ramanujan's
number) to the calculator recently :-)

------
tsiki
Working on an general game playing artificial intelligence. Nothing grand, I
just have a few ideas I'd like to test in real life. It can theoretically play
any game, but it's interesting to see if it's actually feasible, since it's
turning out to be quite a resource hog.

~~~
tectonic
Can you tell me any more about this?

~~~
tsiki
I guess my explanation sounded more awesome than it actually is - general game
playing has been around for a while now (see for example games.stanford.edu
and the wikipedia article on general game playing), mine's a stab at it with
some homegrown techniques, largely out of personal interest. As I said, I have
no idea if my techniques are feasible or actually work yet, but if they do
(and I have the time), the general game playing competition at the 2010 AAAI
conference isn't out of the question.

~~~
jpwagner
Is that happening this year?

------
Ixiaus
I recently finished a decentralized content API for my own personal website
and for a future community that is planned to be an article publishing portal.
It is only a private console with an API, so there isn't much to look at.

I tied up a number of loose ends with my own personal website, integrated the
API from my decentralized content web application and my google books library.

My current project is to finish reading _The Little Schemer_ and doing the
exercises alongside it. I've been learning a lot and thoroughly enjoying it.
My next programming project will probably be to move my decentralized content
API from PHP+MySQL to an Erlang backed key-value store and a Scheme powered
content API; I may still use PHP for the web interface.

------
newy
<http://www.optask.com> \- outsourcing (research and admin assistance) at the
drop of an email. We're working to open up the world of task-based work, just
helped some customers with file conversion and compiling a spreadsheet of
apartments on the Upper East Side. Just linked up with our first socially-
responsible BPO. Really sweet that we can create fair-paying digital work for
folks around the world.

Currently also interested in live video streaming (how will this space be
impacted by the iSlate? Is there room to innovate beyond Justin?), mobile
surveys, eBook readers (Kindle's way too expensive. I want a cheaper, more
open product).

Will be @ CES, let's link up if you're around.

------
chewbranca
I'm building an open source rails framework to create sub-communities on
facebook that are focused on a particular interest, but also providing other
views into the app, such as a standard web interface, phone interface, and
iphone/android native apps. Facebook connect provides you with some
interesting options for taking elements out of facebook and using them in
other places, and really allows you to build one application and treat
facebook as a view format rather than a completely separate entity.

I'm also building in some cool functionality to bring widgets into the app,
where you can build out your pages based on what widgets you are interested
in, similar to widgets in wordpress admin or igoogle.

------
Caligula
Working on web based speech recognition. Have a demo at
<http://www.speechle.com> but its buggy. I learned a lot making it but it gets
frustrating at times. Decoding is done using Sphinx.

~~~
abstractbill
Flash's "allow" button is hidden for me (FF3.5, OS X):
[http://abstractnonsense.com/Screen_shot_2010-01-05_at_1.11.1...](http://abstractnonsense.com/Screen_shot_2010-01-05_at_1.11.11_PM.png)

~~~
Caligula
Thank you. I was not aware that could happen. Can you please try again?

~~~
abstractbill
No problem - it works now.

------
carterschonwald
I'm working on some mathematical models of the flirting signaling process and
some other social phenomena. I'm hoping to get some interesting / nontrivial
existence and/or impossibility results with cool qualitative interpretations
out of it

------
jgrahamc
I am working on making 500 of these:
[http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/building-temperature-
probe-f...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/building-temperature-probe-for-
olpc-xo.html) for schools in Uruguay.

~~~
jacquesm
You can possibly get rid of the pair of 9V batteries by using a floating
ground that you make with two resistors.

~~~
jeromec
But then what would he use for the voltage source, + and - 4.5V? It appears he
wants the + and - 9V available for the amplifier. But my EET is extremely
rusty.

~~~
jacquesm
The 5 V from the USB.

Leave the opamp with it's ground connected to the joint between the two
resistors, choose the bias so it drives the output from the -2.5 V the opamp
sees (which really is the 0 from the computer) to the +2.5V (which is the +5
of the computer).

~~~
jeromec
I'm only giving the circuit a cursory look, but I thought he wanted a 9V
reference voltage added to the sensor voltage going into R7. But I guess a
lower reference voltage may be adequate too.

~~~
jacquesm
The midpoint voltage of the voltage divider used for the reference is 0.45V,
well within the -2.5 to +2.5 swing.

The reason why I think it matters is that batteries are a nuisance, they run
empty and will cause a problem with long running experiments, so it's worth
the extra time to engineer them out of the circuit.

From what I can see they're only used to power the op-amp.

The 'floating ground' trick is s.o.p. when designing op-amp circuitry that
needs to be fed from a single supply.

~~~
jeromec
I said reference voltage, but I meant the voltage for the summing amp would
need to be 9V if that's the step up range he's going for. I totally agree
about eliminating the batteries if possible; I just wasn't sure how to get
adequate voltage available to the amp without the 9V batteries. But again,
it's been many years since I've even looked at a schematic. The floating
ground idea looks extremely cool though.

~~~
jacquesm
Reading the post again he might be able to completely get rid of the whole
circuit by placing two Ge diodes in series with the 0 terminal of the LM35,
that will raise the 0 by 0.4 V, just enough to get over the threshold.

~~~
jeromec
Wow, now I know where to look the next time I have a hardware project. Nice.

------
vlucas
<http://www.invoicemore.com> \- online billing and invoicing system
(bootstrapped startup)

At $15/month for unlimited invoicing, it's currently one of the cheapest on
the market.

------
bemmu
I'm making a phone party line similar to Omegle/ChatRoulette using Twilio.

------
kungfooey
Working on an ultra-light mashup to help track books that I've read. It's my
first Rails project, hosted on heroku, mashes up Amazon+Facebook Connect.

<http://readit.me/>

------
samuraicatpizza
I'm working on a website with my Mom! - <http://www.wordsonthefly.com>

The aim of the site is to provide tools and tips for communication and
writing. She's a veteran in marketing and publishing and I've been in the
software field for a couple of years now so we decided to collaborate. The
site's pretty basic at the moment, a blog and a tool for templating short
pieces of writing, but I am looking forward to upgrading to a VPS and possibly
producing some more interactive features.

------
leftnode
Some great projects in here, I'd love to see a thread like this more often.

I'm working on a new eCommerce shopping cart - IONCart. Check everything out
at GitHub - <http://github.com/leftnode/ION-Cart> or on my blog -
<http://leftnode.com/category/ioncart/>

I want to release the minimum viable product as soon as possible, which will
be open source, or you can pay for it and get all future commercial releases
for free.

------
Mongoose
I'm working as an undergrad research assistant for a distributed systems
ploject within UW's CSE department.

<https://seattle.cs.washington.edu/>

------
terryjsmith
Been working on open sourcing a PHP framework I created a while back. Uses
MVC, but the primary goals are to be lean and schemaless. It pulls columns
from the database and assigns them to variables dynamically so you don't have
to update the schema and then worry about the database (most frameworks
require you to flush and rebuild). More to come in the next week. It can be
found here if you're interested:

<http://github.com/terryjsmith/jaxified>

------
aneesh
I'm working on my cricket blog Against the Spin (<http://againstthespin.com>),
trying to apply sabermetric-style analyses to cricket.

~~~
paulreiners
Does anyone know whether this has been done with hockey?

------
thibaut_barrere
<http://www.learnivore.com> \- (programming screencasts aggregator) is my main
side project currently. I'm learning a lot (audience building, iphone web app
programming) in the process of running it.

This year I plan to bootstrap 2 or 3 similarly-sized sites with my wife
(including one brick-and-mortar business with a site most likely), and work on
a largish project for the pharmaceutical industry in association with one of
my customers.

------
utku_karatas2
Same answer with the old thread. I'm working on a Python IDE for Windows.
Recently released an alpha indeed. <http://pfaide.com>

------
SeanOC
I'm working on <http://wtales.com/>. Think collaboratively authored choose
your own adventure books. So far wtales is just a side project and is just
getting off the ground. To kick things off, I am running a kick start program
where people can earn amazon gift cards for posting stories (more info on that
at <http://wtales.com/kick-start-landing/>).

~~~
tectonic
Hey Sean, I've been musing about automatic story generation / dynamic choose-
your-own-adventure games recently. I'd love to chat with you about this stuff
if you're interested. You can contact me from my webpage from my profile if
you'd like to chat.

------
lefstathiou
Groupie

An app that allows you to create join and manage social groups on the iPhone.
Every group has a message board, live chat room, gps-enabled map and member
directory.

Thus far we have over 70 groups and 300 users. Many thanks to members of HN
that helped make it possible. You know who you are.

Url: www.groupie.mobi Video: www.groupie.mobi/whatisgroupie App Download:
<http://www.groupie.mobi/images/Apple_BTN.png>

------
bliss
I'm working on my dream requirements management tool, it's basically just a
big graph visualisation tool <http://blissapp.wordpress.com/>

Back to the data warehousing day job tomorrow though, so lets hope that the
development of Bliss doesn't slide another year...

Also, trying to get my head around the ycombinator concept, wondering if the
recursive magic that i've seen might be useful for fast graph traversals.

------
draegtun
Just got official go-ahead from client today to produce a MIS & reporting
extranet app written in Perl/Catalyst/DBIx::Class with jQuery and Flash
charting.

~~~
pmikal
Woo-hoo. Go perl!

------
barmstrong
<http://www.UniversityTutor.com> Online tutor directory

<http://BuyersVote.com> StackOverflow for product reviews

<http://FeedmailPro.com> Email newsletters for your blog

And my personal blog, <http://www.StartBreakingFree.com>

Yes, I have too many projects :)

------
onebluebrick
Working on a simple, private, short-term mobile group communication tool
called Fast Society.

It automatically connects friends who are going to a concert, on vacation, or
just out for a night of drinking over SMS and has a ton of cool functions to
communicate during and share content after the event.

Launching soon at <http://www.fastsociety.com/> (still waiting on carrier
approval)

~~~
lefstathiou
I just launched a mobile group communication tool recently. A fun yet grueling
process. I am eager to see yours in action. Will it be available on the
iPhone?

feel free to reach out to me to chat. lefstathiou@gmail.com

my app is called groupie. www.groupie.mobi

------
ericclemmons
Besides a small SaaS (that I use internally, but making public to gauge
interest), I've been having fun with namespacing Mootools
(<http://github.com/ericclemmons/mootools-namespace>) and using Rhino to
generate dependency maps for simple concatenation (which works on most
frameworks' dependency scripts so far).

------
rebelvc
mobile coupon site for local merchants. It will be live in two weeks on
<http://dealbk.com>

~~~
mrtron
I considered building a similar app - good luck!

------
koningrobot
I'm working on a realtime strategy game in the browser using "full-duplex"
AJAX. I started working on it about a year ago but I had to take a
considerable timeout after burning out at my former boring job. It's slowly
getting somewhere, though.

So why in the browser? Because that makes it instantly hackable! No more bad
pathfinding or shitty interfaces to put up with!

~~~
tectonic
Have a demo?

~~~
koningrobot
Unfortunately, no. I've been getting the plumbing together; a layer that
abstracts the ajax and session stuff so that all I'm left with on the server
side is a file descriptor (one per session) to read from and write to.

I have some JavaScript code that allows you to select "units" (I made some
ugly debugging sprites in Gimp) and move around with them, and scroll around
and stuff like that. But I have yet to bridge it with the mostly to-be-
implemented server-side logic. The client-side part is just for "dead
reckoning" and generally making things flow between game state updates from
the server. So both sides will share some logic, and I'm still thinking about
how to centralize this.

It might take me as much as half a year to get unit movement working across
the network; once that is in place, the rest should be relatively easy.

Luckily it's all hobby. ;)

------
michaelfairley
A lightweight Python implementation of MapReduce.

~~~
scorchin
Are you planning on making this open-source or writing about this anywhere?
Would especially love to follow your progress if you have a blog.

~~~
michaelfairley
It will be open source (MIT license). I'll definitely post to HN when I make
the initial release (should be within the next month).

------
rabidgnat
<http://www.vocabdojo.com> : A website used to study vocabulary for the SATs,
GREs, etc. I made a Django app to do this after I discovered that making 900+
flashcards is a huge pain in the neck, and then decided to turn it into
something that everyone can use (after switching to Tornado, of course :D)

------
rman666
I have the following domains: <http://blackhatsystems.com>,
<http://bluehatlabs.com>, and <http://policyworkbooks.com>. Does anyone have
ideas for them or want to collaborate? Drop me an email.

~~~
mattyb
I'd like to contact you, but your email address isn't public. It needs to go
in the 'about' section of your profile, not just 'email'.

~~~
mattyb
Scratch that, I got it from WHOIS.

------
Kilimanjaro
A wave killer using node.js, xmpp and websockets

~~~
TheSOB88
How can you kill Wave when nobody knows what it's supposed to be used for?

------
Vindexus
<http://www.snapproofing.com> Proof reading service for college students.

Also working on my BreezyFAQ app for plugging in searchable Frequently Asked
Questions to your site.

Site is not live but it works fairly well at <http://www.snapproofing.com/faq>

~~~
dnsworks
Hah! I was just saying the other day that there needed to be a Mechanical Turk
like site for Proofreading!

------
jamii
Working through 'The elements of computing systems'. Just finished testing the
cpu and moving on to writing an assembler.

------
ErrantX
Still tinkering with <http://www.startupwiki.co.uk>

And on a server admin tool <http://hg.errant.me.uk/eventscripts-xa>

Cant find another "big" project to engage me :( Perhaps gonna have a go at
reinvigorating my blogging platform project.

------
bradbeattie
A stateless election web service for more complicated aggregate methods (like
Schulze STV): <http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com>

A simple illustration of a possible use for the service:
<http://www.modernballots.com>

------
RevRal
A novel about what it means to be a novel.

------
blownd
My first Mac app: <http://www.windowflow.com> \- it gives you keyboard
shortcuts for moving, resizing and tiling app windows. I'm getting ready for a
big new release today so if you try and it and it's not quite right for you,
give it another go later.

------
blhack
<http://www.gibsonandlily.com>

It is a place for me to play with python :).

------
rksprst
Working on my startup SocialBlaze - it helps companies do social media
marketing / brand monitoring, <http://www.socialblazeapp.com>

In private beta now; looking to launch a public beta in the next few weeks.
Some good feedback from beta testers so I'm excited :)

------
bengebre
<http://www.deptofnumbers.com/nyc/home-sales/new-york-city/> \- An analysis of
New York's property sales records by borough and neighborhood.

I'm trying to build a openly defined price index for residential sales across
the city.

~~~
lefstathiou
check out the publicly available figures from radar logic, they aggregate
residential real estate transactions in the boroughs and NYC and publish a
daily price per square foot. an interesting technology they havent figured out
how to capitalize on but relevant to you nonetheless.

------
SAHChandler
I'm currently working on a build system. I'm effectively scratching an itch.
It's my first serious project, where I actually plan to use it on a regular
basis. You can find the repo at <http://github.com/sahchandler/buildit> :)

------
_glass
Putting up boxes in the local area with free stuff to give away in it. This is
one of the projects of the SocialBar in Hamburg, Germany.

To separate this from my worklife no hacking is involved.

<http://www.zu-verschenken-kiste.org/search?lang=en>

------
javery
<http://adzerk.com> \- first beta customer starting this month.

------
Kaizen
I'm working on my browser-based game (kind of like Kingdom of Loathing, but
with cavemen) at <http://www.shinyrockhunter.com> and a more business-focused
product that needs a bit more work before it's a minimally-viable product.

------
tel
I'm working on a graphical model MCMC sampler for doing Bayesian statistics in
Haskell.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_model>

<http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/>

------
Gobiner
I've been working on a codepad.org clone for .NET languages:
<http://dotnetpad.net>

It's been a ton of fun. I do CMS development in my day job and it's nice to
build a site that actually does something instead of corporate brochure-ware
:)

------
notauser
Expanding my startup, <http://theplanis.com> , out to another hundred users -
although I'm facing a difficult decision between that and one which already
has a well-paying customer and angel funding on the table.

------
matthew-wegner
Off-Road Velociraptor Safari HD, an up-scaled version of our most popular game
from Blurst.com.

------
pavelludiq
Im thinking of building a few simple games using clojure. Im also building
some simple tools to help me learn calculus and linear algebra. Man,
university sucks, not enough time to hack, and they make you use C++ :D Still
better than high school though.

------
paulsingh
<http://www.snailpad.com> \- snail mail for small business and freelancers.
I'm hoping to find a way to meet someone from MailChimp, Aweber or other
places to see if they'd be interested in integrating.

------
daveungerer
<http://www.simplepay.co.za>

Online payroll system for South Africa. It's my startup. Just launched a while
ago. How's it going? Got a few trail users. Busy climbing the search engine
rankings.

------
tachibana
I'm working on an e-learning platform for low-income students in the United
States.

------
whatusername
For fun? --> <http://www.wotsummary.com> a full summary of the Wheel of Time
Series. (I'm working on a couple of design updates (and the summary for TGS)
this week)

------
schmidp
<http://invoiceapp.com>

small web app we built over the last few days to generate nice invoices and
track if they are overdue or paid.

(not finished yet, but open signup and core functionality working)

------
hajrice
Workflo - A microblogging platform for your company.

A "ask hn: rate my app" will be put up soon

------
rubyrescue
<http://www.buenacarta.com> \- Yelp for South America, in English and Spanish
(ruby on rails, alpha quality, and running on a slow slicehost instance)

------
adw
<http://timetric.com/>

We're building real-time data services. If you've got interesting data, we
want to talk to you ASAP. andrew at timetric dot com.

We're based in Clerkenwell, London.

------
brm
I'm a front end guy who's turning to physical products.

Building the world's coolest kitchen outfitter... Sign up here if you like:
<http://gastronautics.com>

~~~
wallflower
Products like this? Saw this the other day and I had a Pavlovian response.
Check out: <http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/>

------
jreposa
Still working on <http://www.MyBankTracker.com/> and loving it. Released our
iPhone app a couple weeks ago, which runs on MongoDB.

------
dimarco
turned <http://thatpoll.com> into a twitter only site to create/answer polls.
about to add a feature where if enough people respond to a poll with an answer
that isn't included in the original answer set, it automatically gets added.

the funnest part is the deployment method with git and capistrano. so fun that
now I have to create some deployment method for my real job. winscp'ing php
and swf's onto a production server doesn't feel like the best way to go about
things.

------
njay
<http://medaform.com>

------
JangoSteve
Still working on <http://www.RateMyStudentRental.com>, trying to improve
student rental housing one school at a time.

------
jsm386
<http://www.tellmycell.com> \- A simple, affordable, do it your self SMS
marketing platform targeted at small businesses

------
ErikDeBruijn
Assembing the parts for an open source 3D printer, which were 3D printed on an
open source 3D printer. See RepRap.org for general info and
www.erikdebruijn.nl for my blog.

------
YuriNiyazov
<http://www.playfirstlife.com> <http://www.badvideojoke.com>

------
paulreiners
Twisted Life, a video game written in Flex that uses cellular automata:

<http://www.automatous-monk.com/twistedlife/>

------
elrodeo
Remindum (iPhone App, <http://7mills.net/rem>) -- lets you to create reminders
in your Google Calendar fast and easy.

------
imgabe
I'm working on <http://greaterdebater.com> a social news and forum website for
link-sharing and debate

------
patrickmclaren
Developing an online platform for independent/unsigned musicians. Functioning
as a radio/library, store and ticket application.

Looks like some great projects on this page.

------
pshc
Right now I'm migrating a Django-based newspaper website to CouchDB. Much
nicer for storing articles.

And I'm always working on my secret toy programming language.

------
mschaecher
I moved back home and I am working 60 hours a week of manual, back breaking
labor :( Saving money to move to the SF Bay Area this spring :)

------
orblivion
I'm working on my (as of now) experimental debate site:

<http://argumentclinic.net> (see the about page)

------
sreitshamer
Backup software that just works <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

~~~
koenbok
This looks really nice!

------
slmbrhrt
I'm trying to get together all the right resources so I can start selling my
notebook scribbles as full-fledged games one day soon.

------
williamallthing
I'm working on Sup, the email client for nerds. <http://sup.rubyforge.org>.

------
talkeinan
<http://www.headup.com> \- connecting users with great content as they browse.

------
WalterGR
The Online Slang Dictionary - <http://onlineslangdictionary.com>

------
khill
A Java library for Tumblr API access with a focus on making it usable for
development of a Tumblr Android application.

------
Nycto
A PHP library built from the ground up for PHP 5.3:

<http://www.RoundEights.com>

------
nick-dap
"Crowdsourcing" for grassroots activism: <http://dreamact.info/>

------
csytan
<http://www.caterpi.com> \-- Crowdsourcing freelance translation

------
Mark_B
I'm working on <http://www.peekmaps.com/> Lots of fun!

------
tectonic
A quick toy: <http://projectsuggestions.com/>

------
david927
I've created a relational database that can horizontally scale and now I'm
putting it to use.

------
jbyers
Working on Wikispaces. Thinking about how to make it even better for teachers
and students.

~~~
baxident
I was recently shown this by a colleague. Will definitely be trying it out
with my students soon.

------
kylebragger
<http://done.io/> and a new thing called Forrst.

------
UncleOxidant
Writing a genetic programming system in OCaml to evolve minimal boolean logic
circuits.

------
epi0Bauqu
<http://duckduckgo.com/>

------
intellectronica
<https://launchpad.net/>

------
cool-RR
<http://garlicsim.org>

------
dawie
<http://docley.com>

------
dawie
<http://docley.com>

~~~
jellisjapan
Just wondering, do you ever get users/companies concerned about the
security/safety of their documents?

------
misterbwong
quick project/task tracking app. something easy & simple so we can replace the
current system we're using (sticky notes and excel ftl...). hoping to open
source it.

------
noodle
a novel poker-related web app. i say "novel" because i don't know if it will
end up being popular, awesome and profitable, or crash and burn, but i think
its neat.

------
mgrouchy
currently working on SWIX <http://www.swixhq.com>

We are a social media metrics company and we just entered public beta.

------
julsonl
Programming a library for interfacing GWT and MongoDB

------
chris100
multitasking: customer support, new customer development, writing copy

------
ddemchuk
Launching a digital marketing startup. I've had the opportunity to fully
immerse myself in the CodeIgniter framework and I love it. I have used it to
build a custom CRM and also an internal tool that will allow us to launch new
micro sites in 60 seconds, including buying the domain name, parking them on
the server, and spinning the content and publishing everything. Very fun.

Have learned a lot about linkbuilding and SEO as well. It's interesting to
play with different linkbuilding techniques and watch the results happen in
just a few days because of how low the competition is in our niches. Am
planning on developing a fully automated linkbuilding tool that will require
me to wear my gray hat while I work ;-)

~~~
clistctrl
How does the CRM compare with sugar? I've been looking to replace that for a
while.

~~~
ddemchuk
Well I had actually played with using Sugar initially, and while Sugar is
nice, it was a little too robust in some areas and lacking in others for our
needs. We have a certain sales model that is basically "hit and run" (We move
quickly from client to client with short sales loops instead of detailed and
long sales processes, just the nature of the product) so we needed something
that matched our model and was finely tuned for how we work.

I personally feel like CRMs are just like CMS systems for developers. Yes,
there are good solutions out there for your initial build, but eventually,
it's better to build your own to get exactly what you want. You shouldn't
compromise anything for your business in my opinion.

------
clistctrl
I'm making a Home Kitchen Inventory Manager complete with recipe suggestions.

still in dev, but just for you: <http://fridgereport.com> (its hosted on a
server in my closet... sorry if it is slow)

It is made with ASP.NET MVC Framework and C#

------
hockeybias
I am working on HockeyBias

<http://hockeybias.com>

It is a site that covers hockey news using a simple layout a la the
drudgereport and protoblogger. It is a startup I unveiled in late November and
it is attracting more visitors almost every day!

