
Ask HN: What are you working on? - mlejva
I thought it would be interesting to see what are other people working on. Those projects of course might not be ready to be shown you can only describe them and the main problem though.<p>Project: I am building a neural network which should be able to generate few frames of the video given the preceding and following frames. Currently I am feeding the network with simple videos I have created where is only a single moving pixel. Since I do not have much experience with neural networks I thought this could be good start.<p>Problem: Up until now I have not realised how hard is to find simple video datasets.
======
scottbez1
As a hardware side project I've been designing and building an open source
split-flap display - the kind of electro-mechanical displays you used to see
in train stations and airports that loudly flip through letters and numbers as
they update.

[https://scottbez1.github.io/splitflap/](https://scottbez1.github.io/splitflap/)

Have a few working prototypes ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslkflVv-
Hw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslkflVv-Hw)), but I'm currently
redesigning the electronics/PCB to make it easier for hobbyists to build (i.e.
avoiding tight pitch surface mount components -
[https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/issues/12](https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/issues/12)),
and I'd still like to figure out how to make them cheaper to build in small
quantities.

~~~
enobrev
That looks great! I was about to comment that you can still see a large one in
use, but apparently NY Penn Station took theirs down earlier this year.

[https://nyti.ms/2kqiicj](https://nyti.ms/2kqiicj)

~~~
stingrae
They have one at the San Francisco Ferry building,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1gKvyghHsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1gKvyghHsk)
. They put it up in 2013. Apparently it weights 700 lbs.

------
joshuaheard
Scuba diving computers have become a necessary part of diving. Current models
have indecipherable interfaces that hang from dongles or are worn as bulky
wristwatches. I have developed a scuba diving computer HUD with a simple
graphical interface placed in the diver's mask and is easy to learn and use.

Also, scuba divers must maintain neutral buoyancy during the dive. The current
method is manual, making it a difficult skill to master, and creating a
dangerous risk for new divers. I have developed a physics-based automatic
buoyancy compensator for scuba divers which is a technological advance that
replaces the current manual systems.

With these two innovations, you would not need a certification course to dive
safely.

Finally, wetsuits are made with neoprene, an air-bubble infused rubber. These
highly buoyant suits force the diver to wear extra weight during the dive.
They also compress at depth so the diver must compensate for the changes in
buoyancy with the buoyancy compensator device. I have developed a wetsuit
material using silicone and an additive that is a better insulator than
neoprene and neutrally buoyant.

Eventually, I would like to put all three of these together into a complete
recreational diving system.

www.nautosys.com

~~~
jressey
This is cool stuff and I wan that HUD, but I take pause with the following
statement:

> With these two innovations, you would not need a certification course to
> dive safely.

There is a lot more to diver certification than learning how to control
buoyancy and how to read your computer. You need to be comfortable breathing
through your mouth, you have to know how to share air, you need to know how to
configure and connect your equipment, what materials are appropriate for what
kind of dive. You need experience with some trusted people. Most importantly,
there's only one way to learn that spit and baby shampoo are the only useful
defoggers for your goggles.

~~~
joshuaheard
It's true a big part of the certification program is acclimating to the
underwater environment and learning emergency procedures. I guess I should say
it would streamline the certification course. It would probably reduce the
all-day classroom portion to a one-hour video.

------
jessriedel
I have a project idea that might be useful for someone to learn about audio
processing (and maybe neural networks?). I like to listen to audio and watch
video of podcasts (and lectures and other human speech) at faster speeds.
Sometime, especially if I'm trying to "skim" to see if the media is worth
listening to carefully, I'd like to listen at 3x or faster. Very often, the
limiting factor is the intelligibility of the actual words rather than
mentally parsing them.

Some software already removes complete silences, but this is a 10% effect and
I think this could be taken much further. I would love audio software that
could manipulate high-speed human speech to improve intelligibility by
preferentially compressing parts with low information content (like vowels and
"ughs") and uncompressing, or even "repairing", info-dense parts like
sequential consonant sounds.

I've looked around and haven't been able to find anything like this. Could
make a nice stand-alone app, or a library to sell to a podcast player.

[http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-...](http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-
playback-that-smooths-speech-at-high-speeds)

~~~
srvlsct
Interesting idea. I used to watch Berkeley webcast videos at 1.5x to shave off
~30 minutes from a 90 minute lecture. Any faster wouldn't be intelligible.

~~~
dnautics
It is the case that you can teach yourself to understand faster and faster
speech. The blind often have human interface devices which speak at absurdly
high vocal acceleration.

~~~
JoshTriplett
This also depends heavily on information density. I can listen to some types
of content at 2x without issue; other content I can't accelerate more than
10-20%.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Some content I have to scrub and rewatch even at 1x speed.

Some content I can watch at 4x.

------
ncantelmo
Problem: The process of getting thoughts from your head into an organized,
written draft form isn't as fast or accessible as it could be.

Project: I'm building a conversational UI / bot
([https://writing.ai](https://writing.ai)) that helps people write faster. The
basic idea is that it asks you a series of questions about a topic, asks
follow-up questions for more detail as needed, and when it's done outputs a
completed draft. You're still providing the content, but the system
understands the structure of completed documents and knows what questions to
ask to get the actual writing done more easily.

I just quit my job and started working on this full time last week, so no
public version yet, but signups are very welcome.

~~~
drusepth
This is a really interesting project. I just signed up to get notified of
launch (andrew @ indentlabs.com) but if you want to shoot me an email with
what you're working on and where you're at, perhaps I could help out or give
you some feedback on the idea/implementation.

Either way, always good to have more eyes occasionally. :)

~~~
ncantelmo
Thanks, sent you an email!

~~~
mhdempsey
Echoing same sentiments as drusepth - would love to provide feedback and test
things out if helpful (michael (at) michaeldempsey(dot)me

~~~
ncantelmo
Thanks Michael, just sent you a note!

------
StephenCanis
Problem: My experience taking audio tours at various museums showed the use of
antiquated and expensive hardware. Most alternate solutions used mobile apps
which are inconvenient to download and take more time to release.

Project: I went about developing a web app that allows anyone to quickly
create an audio tour for free:

[https://www.youraudiotour.com/create](https://www.youraudiotour.com/create)

I also integrated Amazon Polly to automatically generate audio based on text
inputs. This further increases ease of use by eliminating the need to record
and edit audio.

It was a great learning experience since I learned rails from scratch and
don't have a background in programming. Now to see if I can get more people to
use it!

~~~
Entangled
I like this idea but extending it to the whole world based on geolocation. Use
an app and earphones to find voice/text descriptions of places and landmarks,
monuments, sculptures, buildings, etc. Everything can be geo-toured.

Of course in a museum is perfect but based on geolocation it doesn't have to
be linear, you can go anywhere in the museum and get voice/text about that
particular place/masterpiece and when they are changed then easily change the
audio/text for the place.

Love it!

~~~
StephenCanis
Really cool idea, I think people would love that! The biggest hurdle would be
getting enough interesting content. You would almost need to create a
Wikipedia for real world locations.

If you were able to get enough content I think that would be an incredible
app/service.

~~~
ajones05
I'm doing something similar for local news/events, called SeeAround.me, where
people can see/submit local news stories and their locations. But I could see
sort of a cross between that and Your Audio Tour as particular interesting for
people who want to do their own walking tours, for example.

~~~
natzar
I already made that for a client. Don't think users will write stories from
their mobile, at least good ones. It was difficult to start with no content,
too similar to twitter.

~~~
StephenCanis
I find that's the trouble with alot of good ideas I have. They work great if
you can get to scale but that's easier said then done!

Is your site still up? I would be interested to see it.

------
SnacksOnAPlane
Problem: I don't know when the optimal times to go to Krispy Kreme for hot
donuts are.

Solution: [http://hotdonuts.info/](http://hotdonuts.info/)

And yes, this is the most important problem in the world.

~~~
rb808
You have a problem with zip codes that start with 0 eg 07001.

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
Dammit, I didn't even know that they could start with 0. Thanks!

~~~
dublinben
New England, New Jersey and parts of New York start with a 0.

[http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/zipcodes/images/usa-zip-
code-...](http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/zipcodes/images/usa-zip-code-map.jpg)

~~~
mgkimsal
In high school - BASIC class - we had to build a program to let a user input
an address.

I took the input for the ZIP code as a string, and the teacher 'corrected' me
because ZIP codes were numbers, not letters. I said "if I starts with 0, that
would be lost".

"ZIP codes don't start with 0," she replied.

"Umm... yeah they do." I pull out a copy of my New Zork Times from Infocom,
located in MA, and their ZIP started with 0.

It was only years later I learned the ZIP code system didn't even start until
the 60s, and she'd likely grown up without it even being a thing, so I
(retroactively) cut her some slack. Really didn't think anyone in the US could
_not_ know that in 2017 but... I still run in to people who don't. And... it's
probably _less_ important today (what with email and ebills and whatnot), so
I'll cut everyone else some slack too... :)

~~~
aanm1988
> Really didn't think anyone in the US could not know that in 2017

Well I guess you are just much much smarter than us. That goodness you cut us
some slack. ;)

I don't know if I have ever seen a zero prefixed zip code.

~~~
mgkimsal
yeah... was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek (my tongue, my cheek).

I guess I just pay too much attention to addresses/formats, and have for
years.

You can have as much slack as you want, FYI :)

------
cstross
Prepping notes before I dive in to redraft and finalize _Ghost Engine_ , my
new space opera for July 2018 (UK publisher will be Orbit; US publisher TBA).

Also working on a Wild Cards short story for George R. R. Martin, and awaiting
the copy edits on _Dark State_ , the second Empire Games book (publication
scheduled for January 2018, by Tor).

And in the queue behind that, is the scheduled final rewrite of Empire Games
book 3, _Invisible Sun_ (due for publication in January 2019, from Tor).

This should keep me busy through to the end of the year!

------
westoncb
Project: I'm building an 'abstract visual debugger,' which aims at clarifying
the behavior of algorithms under execution by letting you watch the data
they're manipulating.

Screen:
[http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png](http://symbolflux.com/images/avdscreen.png)

Quite outdated video:
[https://youtu.be/sdEo4v2yivM](https://youtu.be/sdEo4v2yivM)

It works by monitoring data structures (and soon general objects!) in your
code, and sending operation data (e.g. element added/removed) to the server
app which does all the actual visualization. Different clients can be written
for different languages, though I've only written one for monitoring Java code
so far (but the clients are semi-trivial to build).

Problem: a lot of what's difficult in programming is that you can't watch the
'state' of your program as its running; we approximate it with print
statements etc.—but there is no easy way to view trees, graphs, tables, lists,
hashmaps, etc. especially when they are being actively modified by a program.

I'm hoping to have an alpha ready in a week or two. Back to work!

Edit: split into Project/Problem format.

~~~
loxias
This is a fantastic idea!! Do you have a github link or a project page I can
bookmark and periodically check on? How hard would it be to adapt to C and/or
C++?

~~~
westoncb
> How hard would it be to adapt to C and/or C++?

I don't think it would be particularly difficult. I can tell you more about
what the process would be like if you're curious.

Project page is here for now:
[http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd](http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd)
(Everything there is unfortunately quite out of date because my initial work
on it was ~2.5 years ago, and In the past 3 months I've picked it up again and
ran with it :) I'll update the page soon though.)

------
aswerty
I, along with my co-founder, are working on a shopping platform for furniture
and decor seen on the set of movies and TV shows:
[https://www.seenonset.com](https://www.seenonset.com)

Startups definitely like to deck out their offices with some of the nicer
high-end designs. Even Y Combinator's home page image carousel has the likes
of the Bertoia Diamond Chair and the Nelson Saucer Pendant Lamp on show!
Though a lot of startups go for the replica route - I know Airbnb went with
replicas in their Dublin office.

The show Silicon Valley ([https://www.seenonset.com/tvshows/174/silicon-
valley](https://www.seenonset.com/tvshows/174/silicon-valley)) is a great
example of what we do.

~~~
dharness
This is beautifully thorough. I can't say I'd purchase items based on their
appearance in TV shows. But, the idea of a catalogue of the items and the time
it must take to create this is beautiful in an artistic way to me.

~~~
aswerty
Thank for the kind words. We actually also try and cater for folks who are
doing a more typical approach to online shopping (e.g. a desk lamp). The set
design is a nice way of showcasing the product in use.

------
TaylorAlexander
I'm designing a 3D printed robot arm that doesn't suck.

It uses all brushless outrunner motors for at least the 4 large axes (final
two in wrist may be hobby servos for now).

The arm is similar dimensions to a human arm. Initial calculations show it
will be able to lift more than 2kg at full extension if I can make it strong
enough. Actually the (rough) calculations say more than 10kg but that would
break something. It's also 200 milliseconds for 90 degrees of shoulder
movement, supposedly.

All hardware and software is open source, including the brushless drivers.

It uses low cost 3D printers. I am currently using a $320 Monoprice Maker
Select modded with a 1.2mm nozzle and I will be adding a $450 TEVO Black Widow
modded with a 2.5mm dia nozzle to the mix. I may try a pellet feeder. The goal
with the large nozzles is to increase strength and reduce print time so it's
not maddening to print. This will make it easier to iterate.

My goal is to make an open source low cost arm that is useful for
manufacturing, and then design open source workcells for it and actually use
it for productive work.

You can look at the jumble of CAD BS right now.
[https://cad.onshape.com/documents/5b474270e4af0ef979e6fade/w...](https://cad.onshape.com/documents/5b474270e4af0ef979e6fade/w/815449c1d26f0334586ad7c3/e/49749250275e8f2733d8bb8d)

Find the tab with the assembly called "Arm3 Assembly".

Please fork it and contribute.

~~~
michaelspivey
Cool. The onshape link asks me to login right away. Without logging in, I
don't see your 3D item. You're invited to also upload the robot arm to
www.3dprintmakers.com.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Onshape is free and cloud based. It's good because you can easily create an
account and edit the file yourself, but a bummer because it's not free
software and you can't export raw files, only dumb solids.

Despite the drawbacks, I'm keeping it in OnShape though, where anyone can fork
and edit the file for free.

------
agentultra
A couple...

1\. Record one album a month. An album must consist of no less than four
songs. At least one song must be an original. I can only record on a 4-track
cassette recorder.

Problem: I'm getting older and find myself nostalgic for the days when I was
running my record label and playing in bands. A small, manageable project with
no expectations or demands to scratch that itch and get me away from computers
for a few hours a week is nice.

2\. [http://postgra.ph](http://postgra.ph) \-- Almost ready... just a landing
page to test an idea: _A GraphQL Backend as a Service powered by PostgreSQL_.
I just have to add the SSL certs tonight when I get home.

The MVP is based on ideas from PostgREST/PostGraphQL -- generating the API
from the public schema of the database. It'd be the bare-bones service that I
could throw together in a couple of weeks.

If it takes off then I'd look into integrations, adding PipelineDB support,
auto-scaling, etc.

Problem: I just wanted an API-as-a-Service that would give me full control of
the data schema but didn't require me to write yet-another-web-service-in-
dynamic-language-framework-foo. There are nice solutions out there for
different folks but I'm a big postgres fan and wanted something that didn't
require me to learn a new framework, interface, etc.

~~~
ruslan_talpa
It's going to take more then a couple of weeks, been working on it for more
then 1 year :) [https://subzero.cloud/](https://subzero.cloud/)

~~~
marktangotango
How do either of you plan to handle authentication and authorization? How will
you handle CORS? Just curious as I've worked in this realm as well.

~~~
ruslan_talpa
Authentication and especially authorization can be completely handled by
PostgreSQL. In front of it all sits OpenResty (nginx) so that is where you
would add whatever headers you would need

------
ambrop7
I am developing a new TCP/IP stack targeting embedded systems primarily. It is
being written in a restricted subset of C++14 (e.g. no dynamic memory or
exceptions, but virtual functions are great).

There is a LOT of things complete already, it pretty much works. ARP, IP(v4),
TCP (with NewReno congestion control), PMTUD, DHCP client. The design is
single-threaded around an abstract event loop that a user would generally need
to implement unless they found one of two provided implementations useful. The
focus is correctness and reliability rather than performance, hence no DMA
support for now and maybe forever.

Source code is here:
[https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/tree/ipstack/aipstack](https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/tree/ipstack/aipstack)

Actually this is currently in its testbed project (APrinter firmware for
3D-printers) where it supports the integrated web interface using a custom
HTTP server.

In addition to the one embedded platform where the firmware currently supports
Ethernet (Duet board), it is possible to run on Linux with a TAP interface
which is my primary testing setup.

If anyone is interested (in assisting development ;) I can help explain things
and show how to set it up.

~~~
roshi
How familiar should one be with networking? I know some C++ and know the low
level C apis for maintaining sockets but never implemented them. I also never
took a networking class.

~~~
ambrop7
It helps if you ever looked at the packets for example in Wireshark and have
at some understanding of how TCP works. But the most important thing is the
ability to read standards (RFCs).

------
schwag09
Project: R.I.P.Link - a tool for finding dead links on the web[0].

The inspiration for this project came from Wikipedia and the Internet Archive
partnering to fix broken links on Wikipedia[1]. After briefly searching around
I couldn't find any great tools for this, and I decided it would be an
interesting side-project. I was also looking for a good medium-size project to
improve my Go skills and understanding of concurrent programming.

From here I'd like to implement recursive searching functionality and depth
limiting. I think this would greatly improve the appeal of the tool.

* [0] [https://github.com/mschwager/riplink](https://github.com/mschwager/riplink) * [1] [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broke...](https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broken-links/)

~~~
cmahler7
aim it at SEOs if you want to make money, broken link building is a pretty big
strategy in the SEO world

~~~
soared
Yup. An old but probably still used grey-hat strategy was to identify
dead/forgotten websites with lots of 'seo juice' (had high rankings, google
associates them with keywords strongly, etc). Then you buy that domain and
host your new site on it, taking advantage of its history.

------
Grustaf
We're building a new type of wind turbine that generates energy using
significantly less material, making it cheaper to install. We do this using
huge fixed wing kites made of carbon fibre. Reqd more qnd follow our progress
on [http://kitex.tech](http://kitex.tech)

~~~
durkie
This is awesome! Are you hiring/accepting volunteers/do you need help? It's a
really interesting project.

~~~
Grustaf
Thanks! We like it too... We're not hiring at the moment, but if you drop a
line to "kugel at [companyname] dot tech" maybe we can find some common
ground! (Except that I've also briefly been a fruit picker in Japan, great
project btw!)

------
kbyatnal
Currently a student in college and I'm working on
[https://www.60secondseveryday.com](https://www.60secondseveryday.com), the
fastest way of keeping track of your memories.

You get a phone call every night and record your 60-second response to the
question "How did your day go?". From there, your response is archived into
your private online journal and displayed alongside your photos, twitter
posts, check-ins, etc from that day.

Soon, you'll start getting Flashback emails (ex. "Here's what you were doing 6
months ago") with all of those cool things so you can reflect on your past.

~~~
nickster
That's cool I've been kind of thinking building something like this. Are you
using Twilio? How are the transcriptions?

~~~
kbyatnal
Thinking of removing them since honestly, they aren't very good. Yep using
Twilio. Would love to chat more if you're interested.

~~~
nickster
Have you looked at IBM's Speech to Text? \-
[https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/speech-to-
text.htm...](https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/speech-to-text.html)

Not sure if there is a difference but might be worth trying a few different
services.

------
searchhn
Project: Hosted & On-Prem fast full-text search with faceting, filtering,
multiple ranking algorithms and plenty of other features.

Not yet ready for launch but built a simple demo trying to get into
startupschool ( failed unfortunately :( ), which lets you search every
hackernews post while letting you filter based on domain / user / story type.

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

~~~
ploggingdev
Cool project. Could you briefly talk about

* the backend you use and how it will scale to sites with large amounts of data across servers

* can third party sites integrate your search service?

* How is it different from eg- Algolia

Good luck with the project!

~~~
searchhn
Thank you !

Backend is custom built written in C and assembly. Supports sharding and
replication which is rack aware and data-center aware.

> can third party sites integrate your search service?

Yes of course.. that is the end goal.

Algolia is awesome.. but you end up paying a lot based on how many ways you
sort / rank data. This operates with an on-the-fly ranking model and rank on
any field in any direction. Also different ranking algorithms, extensibility
with Lua and a lot more when I officially do a showhn

~~~
ddorian43
You tried any open-source ones in c/rust ? Are you doing anything
differently/better (what/how) ? What are you using for replication/sharding ?
Possibility to split-shards ? What are you using for server-backend-framework
(ex seastar) ? Any libraries etc that you're using (i'm interested) ?

You have to write a really long blog post on why you've chosen this way.

~~~
searchhn
Yes.. this will take a very long blog post. This started many months ago as a
project to learn 'golang' and as a way to index my everygrowing collection of
music / movies / documents / subtitles / lyrics and everything on my servers.

Got hooked into it and became obsessed with speed and rewrote everything in
'C'. Replication is based on 'Raft', actually the multi raft variant proposed
by the amazing folks at Cockroach
([https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/scaling-
raft/](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/scaling-raft/))

It does not use a backend framework. It is a simple http/https server (epoll +
multi-threaded) which talks json. I use Jansson for json and utf8proc for
unicode handling. Index is custom built.

I have been working on low powered distributed systems for over 10yrs, which
certainly helped. Will definitely let you know when I get that blog post
written :)

------
kennycarruthers
In light of today's Apple Mac Pro announcements, I'll chime in...

Problem: Building macOS desktop applications as an indie-developer.

Project: Fileloupe for Mac and Videoloupe for Mac

Fileloupe is a lightweight media browser that I actually announced on Hacker
News a few years back. Videoloupe was just released and is a video
player/editor in the spirit of the older QuickTime Pro 7. I work on both of
these full-time and I'm currently in a coffee shop in Bangkok. The jury is
still out whether or not being a macOS indie developer is sustainable...

[https://www.fileloupe.com](https://www.fileloupe.com)
[https://www.videoloupe.com](https://www.videoloupe.com)

~~~
pmarreck
uh wait... _what_ Apple Mac Pro announcements?

~~~
kennycarruthers
Discussion on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031619)

Daring Fireball "The Mac Pro Lives":

[http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives](http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives)

~~~
pmarreck
So, a slight bump to the existing machines and a promise for a fully revamped
one next year.

I have the most recentish Mac Pro. It's a fantastic machine, I wish it had
sold better, but perhaps the proliferation of iDevices and laptops more or
less killed it except for special niches :/

------
jakosz
Grep for the internet.

What I often want is not a search engine, not a recommender, but a filter.
Something that would allow me to look at the distributions of content on the
Web rather than trying to answer my questions. I badly wanted to pay someone a
few quid for a service like this, but had to build it myself.

Feel free to piggyback on the next batch job; use
fBd7guQLDLx6RIm00GE7uH5h0Lk1CKKl as access key.

[https://alpha.crawlfilter.com/](https://alpha.crawlfilter.com/)

~~~
i336_
Cool.

Suggested secondary source:
[https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls?&sort=-publicdate&pa...](https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls?&sort=-publicdate&page=2)
(spotty; sometimes the crawls are dark and can't be read)

Also: when you get lucky with ACD:
[https://redd.it/5s7q04](https://redd.it/5s7q04) (I've heard other users
getting hard-capped at 100TB though)

------
abright
Project: An open source home automation solution. Currently, I have code for a
thermostat
([https://github.com/alittlebrighter/thermostat](https://github.com/alittlebrighter/thermostat)),
garage doors ([https://github.com/alittlebrighter/rpi-garage-
doors](https://github.com/alittlebrighter/rpi-garage-doors), android client:
[https://gitlab.com/igor-automation/garage-door-remote-
androi...](https://gitlab.com/igor-automation/garage-door-remote-android)),
and a bare bones webcam (code inside of the garage doors repo). Planned
features are a unified client for each service and then remote control via
encrypted configurations stored in Firebase.

------
haikuginger
My main current project has to do with my home media system.

Any sufficiently complex media system needs either more than one IR or RF
remote, or it needs a universal remote.

The best universal remotes are activity based, and maintain information about
the state of the overall system.

However, it's been my finding that many of them (looking at you, Logitech)
focus on the software at the expense of high-quality hardware that's pleasant
to use.

So, what's a person to do? Implement customizable command logic for a variety
of command output formats (serial, IR, HDMI-CEC) state management (power on,
power off, muted, projector screen open, lights on or off, etc.), and logic
(power button does this if we're in state 1; otherwise do that and shift to
state 3) in a webapp interface that runs on a Raspberry Pi and that can learn
your favorite dumb remote's buttons via LIRC.

I'd love for anyone with an interest or a possible use case to reach out;
right now, I'm just writing for myself.

Code:
[https://github.com/haikuginger/riker](https://github.com/haikuginger/riker)

------
dheera
Everyone is writing about their startups. My startup makes self-driving
delivery robots ([http://robby.io](http://robby.io)).

But that aside, one of the things I'm working on is trying to use RNNs to
create a better digital piano. Even the best digital pianos out there are far
inferior to a even a YouTube recording of a concert grand piano. One of the
biggest problems I notice is the complete decoupling of resonances between
strings; most digital pianos treat notes independently and just sum up the
audio signals. In reality it's a giant, heavily interconnected physical system
with tons of resonances and nonlinearities, and I want to see if some signal
processing combined with backpropagation can be used to abuse a neural network
to simulate the energy transfer in a physical system of that complexity.

I haven't been terribly successful yet, but it would be amazing if there
existed an open source digital piano that performed spectacularly and could be
plugged into an el cheapo weighted keyboard for decent piano sound.

~~~
bergberg
Do you know pianoteq?

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

~~~
dheera
Thanks! This is interesting.

~~~
loxias
Pianoteq is without a doubt the best sounding piano synth on the market today.
Uses all sorts of interesting physical modeling algorithms (including string-
to-string resonances, with a more-than-first order model...), unfortunately,
unpublished. ;)

If you're interested in chatting about sound generating software and
algorithms, feel free to shoot me a line. "Also, do I remember you from ec-
discuss?"

~~~
dheera
Yep I used to live at EC :)

------
wink
Surely you mean "What should you be working on?"

Too many projects, nothing is ever finished :(

I envy the people who a) have some creative ideas and b) manage to ship them.
More than once an offhand remark of "wouldn't it be nice if we had X" made me
write the damn thing in a much better way than I could have ever described a
project of mine. Maybe that's also the reason I'll probably never start a
company again (and if, it would be consulting again, not a product)

To not completely derail the topic, I recently launched a small microblog at
[http://f5n.org/nano/](http://f5n.org/nano/) \- mostly to test a web framework
and also to not clutter my blog with small blurbs. As you can see I
immediately stopped using it after the launch :)

~~~
meesterdude
funny enough, the service i'm building is to help people with such problems of
nothing getting finished.

I believe in you, indeed in everyone, a great potential of skill and
creativity that is waiting to be unleashed with the right words at the right
time. I think a lot of people could use just a little help, and it can unblock
them in huge, life changing ways.

------
durkie
currently making low-cost and low-powered tree cameras that will hang from
Atlanta-area fruit trees and send us once-a-week tree photos.

The idea is that we can hang them in trees all over the metro area and keep an
eye on when they ripen. This is mostly powered by the Twilio programmable data
service and the Ai-Thinker A20 ([https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIYmall-
ESP8266-A20-Wifi-GPR...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIYmall-
ESP8266-A20-Wifi-GPRS-Module-Adapter-Board-Camera-ESP8285-SMS-Voice-Wireless-
Quad-band-GSM/32785870839.html)) -- WiFi and 2G cell radio for $14!

We can likely get battery life in the range of several months, so we can put
the sensors up at the beginning of the season and then take them down when we
harvest.

~~~
owenversteeg
I was thinking of doing something similar actually! That looks pretty cool.

Do you know roughly how big the images that the camera takes are slash do you
happen to have any example images?

I have a few more questions that I can't think of at the moment, but I'd be
happy to give you a hand with any battery-related stuff (a specialty of mine)
if you'd like! My email's in my profile, feel free to reach out even if you
don't have any battery questions yet.

~~~
durkie
Haven't received this camera yet, but it advertises as 0.3MP, which I assume
is 640x480 (640x480 = 307,200). We might have to play some with camera
placement too in order to actually get relevant images.

I'll drop you a line!

------
dzenos
Problem: We believe document versioning is broken for most people: writers,
attorneys, academics, journalists, etc. We engineers have Github, but others
don’t. So, we decided to solve this problem and create Tuiqo

Project: Document versioning for humans

We built a prototype: [http://tuiqo.com](http://tuiqo.com) (video demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBj8ezqLCOs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBj8ezqLCOs)).
We are accepted to YC Startup school founders track.

~~~
ColanR
Quick note - your homepage says 'try without registering', but clicking on the
editor button prompts for a login.

~~~
dzenos
Hey, thanks for replying! This definitely shouldn’t be happening, would you
mind sharing which browser/OS you’re using? Do you maybe have
cookies/javascript disabled? You can send a quick mail to dzeno at tuiqo.com
if you want.

~~~
ColanR
Looks like you fixed it. :)

------
tpush
I'm working on a programming language. Just as a hobby, not commercially. :-)

Design-wise it's really just how my ideal language would work: functional,
compiled, statically typed(higher-ranked, impredicative, but type-level
functions are first-order, and no effects system), mutable refs that are _not_
GCed, first class delimited continuations, equi-recursive _and_ iso-recursive
types, implemented in C so the compiler itself has a good performance
baseline, etc...

It has been really fun so far and an amazing learning experience. I
intentionally didn't read up on type theory, so implementing the type checker
was a huge challenge.

Amazing feeling when I finally got it to (correctly) work, though :-).

~~~
paxcoder
What do you mean you didn't read up on type theory? I'm guessing ypu've
studied it at a university?

~~~
tpush
No, I really didn't know much about type theory. (And I don't think I can
study that at my university actually).

I had an intuition of how parametric polymorphism worked because of my
experience with Haskell, but I didn't know a type inference algorithm works,
how that integrates with checking against an assumed type (and the whole
unification shebang that comes with it); how universal quantification plays
into that, the amount of pit falls that come with certain design
decisions(impredicativity etc.).

I personally gain the most insight into something when I'm trying to think
about it from first principles, so I avoided extensive research about type
theory beforehand so that I wasn't "tainted" by preconceived ideas :-).

Of course I got stuck quite a few times. I would then look how Haskell does
something and trying to understand why and how etc.

------
conorgil145
Project: I am working on improving the 2 factor authentication (2FA) user
experience for end users.

Problem: 2FA is an east way to drastically improve one's security posture with
many sites (e.g. AWS, Github, Google, Stripe, etc), but it is still an
incredibly annoying user experience that gets worse the more sites you use it
with.

\- When I pick up my phone to enter a 2FA code, I often get distracted by an
email, text, or other notification. I'll put my phone down a minute later and
think "what was I doing? Oh right, I need that 2FA code".

\- It is also annoying to visually identify the correct site/account combo in
my list of 2FA codes because I use many online services and may have multiple
accounts at each one (e.g. AWS).

\- Though some apps have a better UI presentation of 2FA codes, the classic
Google Authenticator app shows all of the codes in a single list and I would
often put in the incorrect code from a row above/below what I intended because
it was difficult to visually keep track of the correct row as I transcribe the
2FA code into my desktop browser.

\- It is annoying when the 2FA code changes while I am entering it in my
desktop browser. Often, sites will accept the previous 2FA code as well, but
if I only entered the first 3 digits and don't recall the last 3 digits, then
I have to start over entering the new 6 digit 2FA code.

I am working on a new user experience which replaces these pitfalls and
annoyances with the ability to simply click a button on your phone as your
second factor of authentication. This workflow is compatible with any site
that currently implements 2FA (e.g. AWS, Github, Stripe, etc, etc) and
provides the same level of security as using another 2FA app such as Google
Authenticator, Authy, etc.

It would be really encouraging/useful if you could leave a comment explaining
why you might find this new 2FA UX useful or not! Thanks.

~~~
wmichelin
Just curious, how are you planning on approaching this problem in a way that
apps like Authy aren't doing?

~~~
johnmaguire2013
It sounds like he's going to support OTP 2FA, likely through a browser
extension? That's my guess anyway.

~~~
conorgil145
Yup, you nailed it. That is exactly the plan. Any thoughts on that approach?
Do you think you might be willing to update your current 2FA workflow to the
one described above?

~~~
johnmaguire2013
I think it's a very cool idea! The other big UX issue with 2FA (in my opinion)
is backup & restore -- nail both and you'll have a pretty solid product.

For disclosure, I work for Duo, so I'm a big believer in push-based 2FA.
(Consider applying if you're interested in usable security!)

~~~
conorgil145
Ah! Duo is definitely one of the incumbents in the space that we looked at
during our competitive analysis. As far as I understand it, your push based
2FA solution only works for sites which use Duo as the 2FA provider. Is that
correct?

I am hoping to build a solution which has a similar sounding UX to Duo Push,
but works for any site that currently implements 2FA without requiring the
site to make any changes at all. I think that this will provide more
comprehensive coverage of sites that developers and other users interact with
on a regular basis. For example, Github will not update their backend to use a
2FA service that I write because they already have a good solution in place,
but by using a browser extension I can build the UX that I want without any
changes required on Github's end.

Admittedly, I had some trouble getting started with actually trying out Duo to
get a feel for the UX, but I will definitely have to check out the features
that you provide to see what competitors in the space are already doing.

I agree that Backup & Restore is another prime part of the 2FA UX that needs
some TLC. We've got some thoughts on improving that as well, but the first
step is to nail the UX of actually being productive with 2FA and then come
back to add enhancements.

Here is to some healthy competition! :)

~~~
johnmaguire2013
Yep, we have integrations for many services, but software must integrate or
support SAML (as Github Business/Enterprise does) for us to do 2FA. Our core
product isn't really 2FA however, and we have different target markets: Duo
primarily targets businesses looking to protect the services their employees
access, while it sounds like you're trying to provide better UX for any
consumers of 2FA.

I completely understand your approach and think it's a really neat idea.
Looking forward to seeing it. :) Feel free to connect with me via email, I'd
love to beta your product.

~~~
conorgil145
Thanks for the background on Duo.

I'll definitely reach out once we have a beta to demo. We'd love to get some
feedback from folks outside our immediate team!

------
noahsark769
I'm working on an Amazon Alexa app that can send your phone arbitrary push
notifications.

Ever since I bought a dot, I've been frustrated with the relatively high
friction of sending data from the dot to my phone (why do I have to open the
Alexa app to see the full weather forecast? why can't Alexa send me a link to
a full Wikipedia article? why can't Alexa start composing a text for me? etc).
The solution is to build an app which can route you from an Alexa request
(e.g. "Send me the Wikipedia article on X"), to your phone, to the appropriate
app.

There are relatively few use cases that I've found so far, but I think the
Alexa -> Push interface is a cool one to explore, and it's been really cool to
work with the platform and finally get to the point where my app receives a
notification from the Alexa cloud. Open to suggestions for this if anyone has
any as well!

~~~
aakram
check this
[https://alexa.devpost.com/?ref_content=featured&ref_feature=...](https://alexa.devpost.com/?ref_content=featured&ref_feature=challenge&ref_medium=discover)

------
kieranr
We're building an SMS chatbot for the Canadian cannabis market. It allows you
to purchase marijuana directly from dispensaries and licensed producers in a
few messages. We’re adding NLP and a basic recommendation engine to help
increase retention and drive purchases.

We built out the infrastructure in a hackathon and are grinding away at an
MVP. Starting to demo for dispensaries soon. I think we’re really on to
something! People have been texting their drug dealer since.. well, the advent
of cell phones, so we aren’t changing behaviour. It’s just nicer to chat with
a friendly bot (with dispensary to doorstep delivery) than exchanging goods
from a blacked-out Malibu in a Walmart parking lot.

Landing page here: [http://hicanna.io/](http://hicanna.io/) Super happy to
discuss our stack or anything else if you’re interested in the project.

~~~
napoleond
Hey, not sure if this is helpful but I have a side project that might save you
some work: [https://www.smsinbox.net](https://www.smsinbox.net)

~~~
kieranr
Very cool - I'll look into it

------
jmstfv
Project: A website containing programming projects accompanied by
explanations, unit tests and etc.. (a la tutorials) to help beginners to get
off the ground quickly.

Audience: It is aimed at learners who already know the syntax of a language,
but are unsure/unable to start a project of their own.

More info: I have written more about it on Reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/62r1wr/i_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/62r1wr/i_would_like_to_create_programming_projects_and/)

~~~
e12e
This looks like a nice fill-in between "How I start":

[http://howistart.org/](http://howistart.org/)

and the aosa-book "500-lines or less":

[http://aosabook.org/en/500L/introduction.html](http://aosabook.org/en/500L/introduction.html)

(and maybe with a hint of rosettacode in the mix:
[http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code)
)

I'd love to see some collaborative projects like this - idiomatic/recommended
setups of editing/debug/release, as well as approach to coding.

I notice that Python is still absent from the "How I start"-series - something
like
[https://github.com/pypa/sampleproject](https://github.com/pypa/sampleproject)
might form part of a starting point (also the Flask "flaskr" tutorial sets up
a bare-bones python package, but needs minor adjustments for windows, as I've
noticed using it for a small course on web programming - I'll have to find the
time to file an issue and patch).

The great thing about such projects being open to contribution, is that aside
from the bike-shedding, one of the best ways to get a correct answer to a
problem quickly, is to post the wrong answer on the Internet.

------
wcchandler
I'm building a 21st century farm.

I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only
8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the
fun stuff. Right?

~~~
contingencies
Possible issues: capital, interest, land acquisition, zoning, weather, water,
climatic region, crop seed availability, need for supplementary transportation
(seeds, equipment, fertilizer, etc.), unpredictable transport overheads, etc.

The fact that you are sharing hard figures before a method really shows that
you haven't advanced your thinking very far. Plants don't need technology to
grow, they grow anyway. I'm not a farmer either but I can tell you the
expensive part of farming is not the growing, it's the capital acquisition,
land acquisition, transportation overheads, preparation, crop selection,
harvesting, getting to market, and venture risk mitigation.

The most expensive part is often harvesting. The traditional US solution is
"industrial scale farming and industrial scale harvesting equipment". The
problem is that monocultures really suck in terms of biological efficiency
(you start to need pesticides, fertilizers, machines and fuel for their
deployment, crop rotation, wind breaks, etc). Better is inter-cropping, where
you have different plants together in the same field. A smarter, robotic
harvesting system to effectively harvest these naturalesque "mixed" fields
could really be a game changer. Then again you could just employ Mexican
immigrants like everyone else...

Another option would be an automatic guerilla farming drone to avoid paying
for land. You see this done manually a lot in China. Something that can
identify an area, clear it, plant it, potentially monitor or water it, and
harvest it semi-autonomously. You would probably need a very high value crop
to make this work, security would be a problem, and only certain types of
unused land would function (legally, proximity-wise, security and visibility
wise).

~~~
wcchandler
Thanks for all the advice. If I wasn't on mobile I'd try to respond to
key/valid points. A lot of these are very real issues and it's going to be
interesting discovering what are the limitations and bottleneck for a lot of
these activities? Is there a viable, small-scale solution?

You mentioned harvesting and this is what I'm actually looking forward to
most. Immigrant labor is getting more and more expensive, costly, and risky.
Entry-level farm hands will always have a place, but we're going to see a lot
of growth in automation equipment. I'm planning for it in my designs and once
the costs reach near parity it'll basically be my solution and catalyst for
scaling.

------
web007
@mlejva [https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/announcing-
youtube-8...](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/announcing-
youtube-8m-large-and-diverse.html) \- half a million hours of video, with item
bounding box metadata to boot. Or if "simple" is the hard part, just YouTube
and your favorite keyword - "animation", "minimalist", "simple", etc. The
advantage of your problem space is that any video will provide a TON of input
data, since you get 1500-3600 frames for every minute of video.

I'm working on two different side-projects, and have been for far too long -
working may be a bit of a stretch. The first is a CRM for job searchers,
turning a must-have from the business world around. The second one is a
password/secret manager with audit as a first-class citizen, focused on
enterprise sharing and reporting.

I have a "fun" one too, to build a Google Moderator clone as a hosted service.
I'm doing that as my intro to Serverless, and will probably do a write-up of
how to build and launch on AWS with little/no fixed-cost.

------
calcsam
I'm building a stock option calculator for startup employees. It walks you
through how to collect the information you need to know about the stock
options you own, or have been offered, and figure out how much they would be
worth in various scenarios.

[http://www.optionvalue.io](http://www.optionvalue.io)

~~~
conorgil145
I would have found this incredibly useful when I was doing research to
understand stock options that I have had in the past. Sounds like a really
cool project. Keep at it!

Also, to get a more accurate estimation, you will have to know the amount of
investment in each round and the permissions that come with different classes
of shares. For example, liquidation preferences and investors deciding whether
they will convert to common shares or not, etc.

~~~
calcsam
Thanks! I'm definitely planning on adding liquidation preferences -- a lot of
people have been requesting it.

------
extr0py
Problem: It's hard to configure Vim/Neovim to work like an IDE, and the
terminal UI isn't the same as something like Atom, Sublime, or VSCode. Vim
plugins for those editors never quite hit the sweet spot for me in terms of
using the muscle memory I've built up.

Project: Oni
([https://github.com/extr0py/oni](https://github.com/extr0py/oni)), a Neovim
front-end with out-of-the-box IDE functionality (right now, supports
JavaScript & TypeScript).

Cool to see what everyone is building!

------
wnm
I'm working on [https://programmercv.com](https://programmercv.com), a résumé
builder with superpowers _:

\- import from linkedin, xing or stackoverflow \- multiple résumé versions \-
track your job applications \- export to any format you need (doc, pdf, html,
xml, json) \- publish on Github Pages \- No lock in: build on open source
tools

_(most features are still work in progress)

~~~
medwezys
Have you investigated linkedin profile import feasibility yet? Their API is
really restrictive and they're blocking most of the hosting provider IP
ranges.

Ridiculous that they restrict access to user profiles even if with the
explicit user permission (via OAuth).

Let me know if you find a solution :)

~~~
wnm
Yes, their API is useless, imo. At least at getting stuff out. They want their
users locked in.

I'm building a tool thats parsing .html files (your public profile), and
extracting relevant information. Build on nokogiri, and open source. More info
here: [https://programmercv.com/resume-
exporter](https://programmercv.com/resume-exporter)

~~~
medwezys
Nice, cashing out on the fact your audience is technical :)

------
projecteterna
Yesterday, I published a library for automatically generating 3D models. Input
is a simple list of unordered, undirected vertices and edges (soup). Output is
a triangulated mesh (as vertex, normal, and index arrays), with consistent
winding order, and per-edge weighted normals. When it's done the graph
analysis once, then you can give it any set of vertices with the same
topology, and it will instantly give you back adjusted normals. Or, you can
pass a deforming function or lambda, and it will apply it to the vertices, and
give you that mesh instead.

[https://github.com/andy-wood/AutoMesh](https://github.com/andy-wood/AutoMesh)

------
DanHulton
I'm working on a Slack-based RPG called Chat & Slash:
[http://chatandslash.com/](http://chatandslash.com/)

It's been interesting, trying to shoehorn popular RPG tropes and expectations
into Slack's interface. It's turned into something akin to a MUD, although the
multiple-user interaction isn't there. I guess it's more of a massively-
single-user-dungeon?

Anyhow, I have about 50 testers in right now and about a week's worth of
content. I'm just about to start working on the next major area, which should
hopefully add about a month's worth of content. I'm always happy for more
testers and more feedback!

------
ChuckMcM
Software defined radios that can work in extreme conditions (like during or
just after a giant disaster), an IoT kernel that does useful work in a mesh
network without a back haul, a personal 'internet radio' that can stream your
home market AM/FM stations to you anywhere, and computer system to teach the
mid-levels of computer science between programming and and database design.

~~~
thewarrior
Could you explain more about the computer system to teach computer science ?

Would it be like an iron python notebook ?

~~~
ChuckMcM
In my opinion, there is a gap between what you can learn on an Arduino type
environment and a Raspberry Pi type environment. When I started using Cortex-M
level processors (32 bit, very simple MMU (protection only) I realized that it
could be the basis for a "PC/AT" type system where you could explore
everything from a simple monitor based operating environment (think MS-DOS or
AmigaDOS like) through to a self hosted set of compilation tools. The hardware
is pretty easy (there are lots of different ideas in this space) but the
curriculum is currently still a bit weak. So with the addition of a simple
FPGA based frame buffer I've been building a system that can be used to teach
a student computer systems.

------
lexi-mono
Made this web app to help you figure out how your favorite language is doing
in the job market / what to learn next.

Every month I scan the previous months’ Hacker News 'Who Is Hiring' thread and
build these stats. Hope others find this useful. Constructive feedback
welcome.

This is only the first version. Next I'm planning to add more data for
previous months/years as well and show the evolution of individual languages
over time.

[http://langstats.azurewebsites.net/](http://langstats.azurewebsites.net/)

~~~
slm_HN
I like it.

A couple of little things:

    
    
        You've got both "Objective-C" and "Objective C"
    
        It would be nice to separate out the APIs, like Cocoa and QT, or make a different graph for APIs/Frameworks

~~~
lexi-mono
Thank you, hadn't caught that. Will definitely add more graphs for frameworks
and other things in future versions.

------
lloeki
Problem: unsatisfied with package management on OS X / macOS

Project: rekindle an old project of mine [0][1]

Caveat: definitely works (as in I'm using it daily), but not ready for real
public prime time as some meta+infra stuff still needs to be figured out. Will
post instructions to get things running if some daring folks are interested.

[0]: [http://www.arch-osx.org](http://www.arch-osx.org) /
[http://www.archmac.org](http://www.archmac.org)

[1]: [https://github.com/arch-osx](https://github.com/arch-osx) /
[https://gitlab.com/arch-osx](https://gitlab.com/arch-osx)

~~~
applecrazy
Not to be critical, but isn't Homebrew or Fink good enough? What features does
your package manager offer that are better than these active projects?

~~~
lloeki
A very valid question, I've been a Fink user, then MacPorts, then Arch OS X,
then Homebrew and now Arch OS X again, and I've got some more detailed writing
about this that I ought to publish one day. From the top of my head:

\- PGP-signed repo db + packages (Homebrew relies solely on git SHA1s)

\- package binary deltas

\- building new packages is very simple thanks to ABS (Fink and MacPorts are a
pain)

\- doesn't write everything as a single user in a possibly multi-user machine
(yes people sometimes still do share machines)

\- doesn't get clobbered by software that puts stuff in /usr/local (installs
in /opt/arch)

\- daemons such as postgresql can run as their dedicated user

\- uses sudo, so can do stuff Homebrew won't (like populate /etc/shells,
/Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/Extensions)

\- makepkg builds under user, "install" with fakeroot, only pacman needs root

\- synergy as an ArchLinux user, so have the benefit of a single way to manage
packages

To each his own, and Homebrew is awesome (I've contributed some stuff there
myself) but sometimes there are itches to be scratched: no one use case is
exactly the same as another.

~~~
biztos
Sounds interesting, I will check it out for sure.

I'm mostly happy with Homebrew but I have had trouble occasionally with the
multi-user thing. Because some people (at least one!) still use different user
accounts on the same Mac, e.g. "work" and "private."

------
cdiamand
Problem: software developers want to hear about software needs in other
industries.

Project: Opps Daily ([http://oppsdaily.com](http://oppsdaily.com)) interviews
people about the software they wished they had, and sends the interviews out
every day. We then connect interested devs to the interviewee when possible.

~~~
contingencies
1\. How big is your list?

2\. How does one get interviewed?

~~~
cdiamand
Hey!

1\. ~3650 subs

2\. Email me - cory@oppsdaily.com and I can send you the questions!

------
dokument
Project: Distributed, trustless, anonymous, encrypted, messenger/mailer with
the goal of hiding senders and receivers of messages. Also can't be brought
down since it is distributed.

Problem: Limited time to work on it. I have a working prototype with one-to-
one, one-to-many, and many-to-many messaging/mailing working fully encrypted
over ipv4. Building out the transport methods is the next main task (ipv4
works, need ipv6/tor/i2p/file/qr/etc).

~~~
tuxxy
I'm curious about your cryptographic schema. Are you using encryption-by-proxy
to hide the sender/receiver?

How are you making them anonymous?

~~~
dokument
Elliptical curve asymmetrical keys for the actual encryption. No encryption by
proxy by default. Basically think of a shared database where you don't know
who inserts data or who selects data. Making all payloads the same size, and
constantly transmitting/receiving at a set rate ensures that even your isp
can't tell if you are the sender or receiver of a message. The
security/anonymity levels are adjustable so you don't have to use the features
if you'd rather not. Also with shared asymetrical keys, users can communicate
without having to sign/identify themselves within the message. This also
provides plausible deniability. There are a lot more layers, but I'll keep it
brief here.

------
heartsucker
I maintain a Debian packager for nodejs [0] & two Rust libs for CSRF
protection [1] [2], and contribute to SecureDrop [3].

[0] - [https://github.com/heartsucker/node-
deb](https://github.com/heartsucker/node-deb)

[1] - [https://github.com/heartsucker/rust-
csrf](https://github.com/heartsucker/rust-csrf)

[2] - [https://github.com/heartsucker/iron-
csrf](https://github.com/heartsucker/iron-csrf)

[3] -
[https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop](https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop)

------
abraham_o
[http://www.eathow.com/](http://www.eathow.com/) EatHow is a web app that
helps you plan your meals and gives you recipes you can make with the food you
already have.

Long term Id like to completely automate grocery shopping and meal planning so
all you have to do is a one-time setup where you set a budget and diet
preferences and Eathow takes care of planning everything else.

While anyone who cooks at home would find it useful, it would be particularly
cool for people who need to worry about diabetes, high cholesterol, weight
loss, etc.

Except for a coding bootcamp a couple of years ago, I have no experience with
building software so take it easy on me haha.

~~~
lutorm
My wife and I have talked about the need for a recipe search based on the food
we already have for a long time, so I like this idea!

Where do the recipes come from? I mean, do you add your own recipes?

~~~
abraham_o
I've been making all the recipes and adding them. Initially, I was using
recipes from a multitude of sites but that turned out to be pretty terrible
for user experience.

There are 80 now and I'm adding more every week.

------
contingencies
(1) Considering the problem of real time logistics for spoilable goods to
support our startup [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/). Interestingly in
nominal approach I am finding a lot of crossover with a previous
cryptocurrency-focused transaction system I conceived building a Bitcoin
exchange 6 years ago @ [http://www.ifex-project.org/our-
proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa...](http://www.ifex-project.org/our-
proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-partial-draft) ... basically each node within the
network becomes an independent agent with centralized reporting but also an
internal logistics and scheduling system. Many potentially useful related
fields exist like Supply Chain Management (SCM), Operations Research (OR),
Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing, high availability engineering, risk
management, game theory, etc.

(2) Learning mechanical engineering to build the
[http://8-food.com](http://8-food.com) machines. Many different sides from
HVAC to industrial magnetism to UVGI to exotic door hinges to available
materials and production processes to 3D modeling. Big job. Visiting
factories, speed-reading huge numbers of books.

(3) Relocating my family and company to Shenzhen. Getting buy-in, travel and
shipping, getting to know the city, projecting near and medium term
requirements, real estate hunting, etc.

(4) Determining and achieving the ultimate international legal structure for
the company. Obtaining advice, comparing different jurisdictions based upon
their legal and financial infrastructure, degree of precedent, multi-provider
fees, government fees, possible bottom-line benefit under disparate investment
scenarios, etc.

------
dalerus
Problem: Writing regular content for your product's blog is time consuming.

Project: We are working on automating the content writing process. Articly
([https://articly.me](https://articly.me)) is a automated content strategy and
writing platform. You give us your site or product and every week our platform
sends you a new article to post to your blog.

~~~
franzen
$40/post seems pretty low-end, no?

~~~
dalerus
We are still testing out pricing, but for now this seems to strike a good
balance for the types of customers we get, mostly small product builders with
one or two people.

We automate a lot of stuff to help lower costs for our writers and we have
writers on staff from our agency that fill in the gaps and do editing.

------
rocky1138
Potioneer: The VR Gardening Simulator.

I'm trying to combine Animal Crossing, Morrowind's Alchemy skill tree, and
Minecraft into one game. A core requirement is a personal goal to have no user
interface in the game. Everything you do must be using your hands, not through
menus, etc.

I recently released the Creative Crafting update, which you can read about
here:
[https://potioneer.focusonfungames.com/doku.php?id=news:creat...](https://potioneer.focusonfungames.com/doku.php?id=news:creative_crafting_-
_update_0.0.9_2017-03-27)

------
Brajeshwar
While working with clients and partners at Alaris Prime, my co-founder and I
realized a big under-served market. These are projects that are too large for
UpWorks, Freelancer, Gigster, Guru, Project4Hire but too low for IDEO, Leo
Burnett, Razorfish, and other digital agencies of the world.

When we work with our customers we make sure that their projects get done.
Even with the involvement of other partners, we make sure that we take the
responsibility of our customers’ project. Sometimes, our customers go on a
vacation while we execute the projects with highly qualified professionals
that has been vetted by our team.

[http://WorkSigma.com](http://WorkSigma.com) is an evolution of that pattern,
and we want to formalize it, make it big, and be able to help more customers.
We want to be a trusted place to get projects built - be it for the web or
connected mobile devices.

P.S. Minimum 20% discount for all HackerNews users for the year 2017. Use code
"HackerNews2017".

~~~
drusepth
FWIW, the product by Upwork Global Inc (formerly Elance-oDesk) is now
"Upwork", not "UpWorks". May want to adjust that if this is part of a pitch
elsewhere. :)

~~~
Brajeshwar
Got it. Thanks.

------
benibela
I have an app for hundreds public libraries. Such libraries have online
cataloges where you can search books, or renew books you have lend, and my app
connects to their webpages to show all catalogs in a common interface. Or do
things the catalogs do not support, like automatically renewing every due
book:
[http://www.videlibri.de/index_en.html](http://www.videlibri.de/index_en.html)

It takes an awful amount of time to maintain, since there are no APIs and I
have to parse the webpages. Every other week/month some webpage changes and I
need to adjust it.

It has been going on for years, and I need to update a lot of internal things,
too. It is all in German, I need to work on an English translation. Often
libraries have multiple copies of the same book. Then you want to search the
book, select one copy and order that copy. The current version only stores
these copies as strings, because each book is a list of string->string pairs,
which looks bad when the user is show the string "Copy 1, library building 1,
123456, orderable". (i.e. an index, building where you find it, the signature
of, and status). I just made a new version that would show that all such
copies in a 4-column table, but it needs more testing before a release. Each
library has different columns, and too many columns might not fit on the
screen.

And I made my own programming language to minimize the amount of time spend on
adjusting the webpage parsing:
[http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html](http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html)

It was just for small webpages, so speed did not matter and its evaluation
just interprets the syntax tree, but now I made it XQuery compatible. Someone
wrote a raytracer in XQuery, and when I run that in my implementation, it runs
quite slowly. I probably need to build a byte-code for it.

------
Datenstrom
Project: In early prototyping a IMSI-Catcher Detector.

Why another IMSI-Catcher Detector?

Mainly trying to address the problems with the current open source solutions
which is that they are tied to phones, the phones must be rooted. Given that
there is no such thing as a secure phone something that runs on other devices
using software defined radio would be better, it is also unreasonable to
expect everyone that would like the provided security to be comfortable
rooting their phone. It would also be of use to organizations to prevent
corporate espionage too as it could operate as a centralized security device.

Technologies have been carefully chosen so that it is as portable as possible.
Currently it runs across Linux, Mac, and Windows and everything should be
portable to Android also in the future.

Also it is completely absurd companies charge $40,000+ for a small embedded
computer with a SDR, I built a touchscreen ARM tablet for the prototype for
about $200, even with a amazing SDR it would have only been about $700.

~~~
rtb
Sounds interesting. Do you have a website or blog where I can look for
updates?

~~~
Datenstrom
It isn't presentable yet but the project is open on GitLab if you want to
watch it. No website yet but it is planned once the prototype is completely
functional. We plan on having having it functional within two months then to
clean it up before deciding if we are going to move forward with it.

* Project GitLab: [https://gitlab.com/finding-ray](https://gitlab.com/finding-ray)

* Documentation: [http://finding-ray.gitlab.io/antikythera/index.html](http://finding-ray.gitlab.io/antikythera/index.html)

It includes some support projects like dockerizing of GNU Radio for use with
the application, which is a beast to install.

------
callumprentice
I'm working on Dullahan - an open source, headless browser SDK that uses the
Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). It is designed to make it easier to write
applications that render modern web content directly to a memory buffer,
inject synthesized mouse and keyboard events as well as interact with web
based features like JavaScript or cookies.

Currently working on Windows 32/64 bit and macOS 64 bit although there is
still lots left to do on both platforms as well as pulling together the pieces
for a Linux version.

Source repository is here:
[https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/](https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/)

Some examples with screenshots are here:
[https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/src/default/example...](https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/dullahan/src/default/examples/?at=default)

~~~
j_s
What is the advantage of your project over regular headless Chrome? It appears
you have prioritized Windows + MacOS while the official version only supports
Linux.

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headle...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md)

I am also curious regarding the timeline of your decision to implement this on
CEF vs. the official headless support finally picking up steam around the same
time (October 2016).

Keep up the good work!

~~~
callumprentice
Thanks for the info j_s.

The project has been going for some time and as far as I know, headless Chrome
wasn't an option back then.

I've come across it in the past but I didn't realize it was as far-forward as
that page suggests - looks really neat and sadly, might render my modest
efforts obsolete.

Windows and macOS are the priority now since we are using it for rendering web
content inside my company's primary application and for us at least, the focus
is on those platforms. There is a working Linux implementation - it just needs
some love from someone who knows what they're doing.

I'll take a closer look. Thank you!

------
lmcd
* A pixel-perfect WebGL/JavaScript implementation of UIKit/QuartzCore that runs basic iOS apps in a web-based simulator at 60fps

* A Swift 3 -> JavaScript compiler with many language features, full type inference and more

* Many interesting ways of combining the above to form interesting new development/learning/prototyping tools

* One such tool/product has a full WYSIWYG app builder, with drag/drop UI components, auto layout, etc (think Interface Builder but with pluggable logic). I have a backend supporting this that can generate an .xcodeproj, compile, codesign, etc on the fly to a real, fully native app

Started as a browser-based version of Reveal
([https://revealapp.com/](https://revealapp.com/)), and spiralled out of
control from there.

One of the spin offs: [http://shopmo.co](http://shopmo.co) (not fully live)

~~~
i336_
> _A pixel-perfect WebGL /JavaScript implementation of UIKit/QuartzCore that
> runs basic iOS apps in a web-based simulator at 60fps_

That sounds really interesting. Do you have a demo URL or (60fps :D) video of
this in action?

~~~
lmcd
How's about this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD15ncn7KQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD15ncn7KQw)

Note: this video is 100% real, but I trimmed out some frames here and there
(during keypresses and Shopify auth) to make for a seamless pitch.

~~~
i336_
Now I kinda understand why no URL yet; this is _amazing_ , and I imagine you
don't want to leak how you're doing it quite yet. (How _ARE_ you doing it?)

Is the homescreen part of your system, or is that a synthetic simulation?

I wish I had a practical reason to ask to use this. I definitely want to learn
if there's ever a demo I can play with :D

~~~
lmcd
Thx, appreciate it! Pop me an email and I'll keep you in the loop:
lee@shopmo.co

------
pd0wm
Project: Designing my own cruise control

Currently I'm a MSc. student in Systems & Control. To put theory into practice
I'm designing a cruise control for my car. Eventually this should become an
open system to assist the driver. This allows for integration of things like
following distance, speed limit, traffic density to improve safety and
comfort.

Currently I'm working on parsing data from the GPS and other sensors. Read
more about this on my blog:
[http://willemmelching.nl/](http://willemmelching.nl/). Code:
[https://gitlab.com/pd0wm/open-driver-assist](https://gitlab.com/pd0wm/open-
driver-assist)

------
germinalphrase
Problem: in aggregate, k12 teachers spend enormous amounts of time creating
(redundant) curriculum content which in turn limits how effectively they can
personalize this curriculum for each student.

Project: starting with assessment - intending to move into lesson planning and
performance - our project allows teachers to curate assessment elements from a
collaborative library (on the subject area/school level initially) rather than
creating them from scratch. This saves teachers time up front while also
opening additional opportunities for iterative improvement of those resources
and personalization for students.

This is a young project, currently in the design/MVP stage of development.

~~~
sourc3
Interested in this due to my wife working in the space. Signup link?

~~~
codemati
Also interested!

~~~
germinalphrase
Too early for a sign up - but we will surely do a Show HN when the time comes.

Feel free to drop me an email (in profile) if you'd like to hear a little more
about what we're thinking.

------
smnscu
Working on my second encrypted email project. The first one got some traction
but ran out of money.

[https://oakmail.io/](https://oakmail.io/)

~~~
conorgil145
I worked for an encrypted email company for ~4 years and I'm pretty familiar
with the space.

How do you solve the user experience problem associated with PGP in terms of
sharing keys? You cannot send an encrypted email to someone you have never
communicated with before, right?

Do you have a blog or anything to follow?

~~~
smnscu
> How do you solve the user experience problem associated with PGP in terms of
> sharing keys?

Rely on keybase.io and keyservers to offer some potential matches + in the
future work on a better protocol for key discovery (e.g. key discovery as an
smtp extension). This was talked about before, and in the past our competition
showed interest in supporting it.

> You cannot send an encrypted email to someone you have never communicated
> with before, right?

Yes, unless you generate a keypair as the sibling comment suggests. That's not
something we're considering yet, I'm not sure yet how it would affect our
policy of "zero knowledge" (misappropriation of a cryptography term, meaning
that the server doesn't have access to unencrypted data at any time).

> Do you have a blog or anything to follow?

Subscribe to our mailing list ( [https://oakmail.io/](https://oakmail.io/) )
or hit me up at my username at google's email service.

------
venantius
Creating a new, technology-driven commercial and wholesale bank in the UK.

Fintechs in the UK need to partner with a bank or get a regulatory license to
do business. Bank partnerships move slowly - their technology and processes
are outdated and expensive. Similarly, getting a license takes time, people
and money.

This makes starting a fintech company hard and costly. We want to change this
by creating a new bank that's built to work with technology companies
(focusing on fintechs, but for general technology firms as well).

[https://griffin.sh](https://griffin.sh)

------
nkristoffersen
Project: Resume builder that is very opinionated. More focused on
underemployed and unemployed. Folks who don't know how to sell themselves
well. [http://jobhero.org](http://jobhero.org) It is open sourced on github.

Problem: Need more (good) resume template designs. Want to move to react to
learn react (angular 1.6 currently). Will move to JSON Resume standard for
storing the resume. Will include a login provider instead of the current
uuidv4 url as auth. Need to build a landing page and better on-boarding.

~~~
mistermann
What a great idea. If you're not charging, I wonder if craigslist would link
to you, there are so many people posting resumes on there that are just
hopeless, it makes you feel sorry for them. Some people just can't write well,
a service like this could really help.

------
cknight
Problem: Despite there being plenty of articles and discussion posts online,
I've not found a way of easily tracking how a given corporation is conducting
itself ethically.

Project: I started Suitocracy with a friend so we can log events as they're
reported in the media, and also get peoples' thoughts. We're essentially
trying to capture it in one place so we can see how companies improve (or not)
over time.

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

~~~
ColanR
That's cool. Is there any chance you're going to open source the code behind
it?

------
needz
Project: For over a year, I have been developing and maintaining a score-
tracking social network for pinball players. We recently broke 1k users who
have posted over 20k scores. I'm currently in the process of refactoring the
entire codebase and updating/testing dependencies. Once the mobile app is
polished I intend on making a web version as well. As a newer developer (~3
years), the scope of this app and the size of the target community are the
perfect challenge for me. I've learned about deployments, image uploads, CDN,
DBA, and community engagement.

Problem: I'm really struggling with deep-linking. I want to make sure that
links open in the app if the app is available and fallback on opening on the
site. Sharing to social media is also giving me a headache, but that's due to
my stack.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pindigo-your-pinball-
scores/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pindigo-your-pinball-
scores/id1027062831)
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascrewaske...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascrewaskew.pindigo2)

------
sp33k3rph433k
I'm working on building something that will incentivize site owners who have
some kind of creative content on their site to remove ads in favor of
donations to their site. It's a pretty unobtrusive widget they can add to
their pages and it makes it so the user doesn't have to leave the page to
donate. Still a WIP, but it's getting there!

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

~~~
bgaluszka
Not sure why but your link didn't work for me (Server not found) but that one
[http://www.trussapp.com/](http://www.trussapp.com/) did.

~~~
sp33k3rph433k
Interesting! I'll fix the DNS. Thanks a lot!

------
rfc
Problem: Researchers and scientists have to go to multiple vendors to get true
end-to-end genome sequencing performed.

Project: We created The Sequencer Center. We provide next generation
sequencing, bioinformatics, and data management all in one facility. No more
dealing with multiple labs, crazy file transfers, miscommunication between
labs on analysis, and increased cost and time.

Audience: Researchers and scientists at Academic, Pharmaceutical, and Clinical
research organizations.

Advantages: We've created a subscription sequencing model that bundles NGS,
bioinformatics, and data management into a monthly cost. This allows us to
reduce the cost between 3-5x normal sequencing rates (depending on sample). In
return, organizations get static pricing on high volume, recurring sequencing
of the same type of sample.

Tech Stuff: We utilize Docker + AWS for our bioinformatics pipelines. Some
pipelines leverage GPUs for acceleration. Also using Redshift + Glacier for
data storage (still building portions of this out). Next step is to automate
data from sequencer -> bioinformatics pipeline -> data storage.

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

------
aub3bhat
Project: I am building Deep Video Analytics, Currently there are several
libraries, models and datasets available for Computer Vision research. However
its still difficult to apply a model to your own dataset without writing a non
trivial amount of glue code. There is a need for a drop-in solution that comes
with UI, algorithms and pre-indexed dataset ready to use out of the box. Using
Deep Video Analytics you can quickly index images, videos for visual search,
detect objects, and recognize faces and incorporate large pre-indexed datasets
via fast approximate nearest neighbors.

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

Also regarding your project take a look at
[http://web.mit.edu/vondrick/tinyvideo/](http://web.mit.edu/vondrick/tinyvideo/)
which also tries to generate videos by predicting frames. It comes with
stabilized videos selected from Flickr YFCC.
[http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soundnet/](http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soundnet/)

------
a3n
_Problem_ : I write reStructuredText notes and essays to myself (and run
rst2html) about things I'm learning, exploring or have learned, e.g "Cool
shell tricks" or "How to manage my diabetes." Managing lots of rst and html
files becomes a mess, especially links to other pages if you refactor, or just
finding your stuff.

 _Project_ : Miki - Makefile Wiki. A small, personal wiki to manage the above.
No software written, just a makefile that coordinates tools you already have
or are easy to install. The README emphasizes using the navigation features
that your browser already has, rather than writing navigation pages.

[https://github.com/a3n/miki](https://github.com/a3n/miki)

You can use any or each of reStructuredText, Markdown or AsciiDoc.

It produces any or all of .html, .pdf and .txt.

Also produces a bare-bones book/media catalog in .json format. Because I
sometimes link to my books in my wiki pages.

The refactor problem is "solved" by "make badlinks", which prints out any bad
internal links it finds.

In your markup pages, you end your links in the markup suffix of the link's
destination (if it's to an internal page). This way you can easily use your
text editor's "go to file under cursor" feature to open the destination's
source (who wants to open a pdf in Vim?); Miki transforms that into a .html,
or .pdf or .txt suffix during output generation, as appropriate

Coincidentally, yesterday I decided that it's "done enough," barring bugs or
feature suggestions, and I recorded that observation in the Journal page in my
local Miki-based wiki. That feels very slightly like a self-hosting compiler.

------
arctangent
I'm working on the NHS.UK Transformation project:

[http://www.nhs.uk/transformation/](http://www.nhs.uk/transformation/)

"We are designing a service that better connects people to the health
information and services they need, when they need them. Our tools will help
people care for themselves and relieve pressure on frontline services."

------
rawrmaan
I'm working on a tool to help dating app users get more matches in an honest
and organic way: [https://www.picbot.co/](https://www.picbot.co/)

Problem: People are really bad a choosing the right dating app photos and
often end up frustrated thinking there's something wrong with them when they
just have awful photos.

Launching in a few days on iOS.

~~~
nercht12
Maybe you could have people peer-review each other's photos and help them pick
which one looks best. It could be based on a photo-liking mechanism whereby
the most liked photo is the one shown to people first in the organic search.
EDIT: I went to your site and saw what you're doing. Good job.

------
ErikAugust
Just for fun: [https://www.playnesta.com](https://www.playnesta.com)

100% JavaScript NES Emulator... loaded with about 35 games. USB Gamepad
support, Save Game/Load Game, etc.

------
iamwil
We're working on a bulk editing tool for data cleaning and of CSV files.

Currently, cleaning data and editing a few thousand rows one by one isn't much
fun. Excel, while magical, isn't made to clean data. With our tool, you can
format fields by example and find and replace in groups. And with validations
on fields, you can get feedback immediately on errors as you edit.

------
noughth
I'm working on a web application for tracking personal finances (think GnuCash
for the web or an open source mint.com). My main issue with GnuCash is that I
can't enter transactions from anywhere (if I eat out, I have to keep the
receipt until I get home instead of being able to enter it on my phone).

[https://github.com/aclindsa/moneygo](https://github.com/aclindsa/moneygo)

I'm currently sidetracked implementing a Golang library to request bank and
investment transactions from financial institutions using OFX. Automatically
pulling transactions from banks is important for any project like this and I
couldn't find a suitable library in Golang (or really at all - most open
source OFX parsers I could find only support parsing, not making requests, and
don't support investment transactions).

[https://github.com/aclindsa/ofxgo](https://github.com/aclindsa/ofxgo)

------
pattle
I'm working a platform that gives athletes advanced stats and analysis on
their activities by using their GPS data. Think Strava but aimed at the more
serious athlete.

[http://www.scinder.io](http://www.scinder.io)

I'm now learning React Native to launch a mobile app and working on segments
and routes functionality which is quite touch.

~~~
fiftyacorn
Interesting project

I think the focus on analysis is more important that the statistics - i mean
there is so much training data out their, and hardly any of its used. Ideally
I would want the application to highlight the area of the quickest gain - and
factor in training sessions off the back of this?

~~~
pattle
Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. Completely agree with your
point on focusing on analysis. Making sense of an athletes training data is
where the real value is going to come from. Rest assured it's in the pipeline
:)

------
wonjun
I've recently launched [https://pingtiger.com](https://pingtiger.com) I now
have some free trial users who are helping me with figuring out features they
need the most. There are a lot of existing solutions for the same problem, but
I'm trying to make the user experience simpler and more pleasant.

------
mosaic
We believe that information is meaningless until we connect it. So we built a
network that helps people put their research in Context. We map the
connections between different pieces of information and describe how they are
connected. Check it out @ [http://mosaic.network](http://mosaic.network)

------
thomastjeffery
Problem:

Text editors like Emacs, Vim, Atom, etc. all have designs that are too tightly
coupled.

Project:

A text editor (similar to Emacs) where _every_ aspect of the editor is defined
via user configuration. One or more sane default configurations can be
provided, but the user can always redefine any behavior.

Main features:

Decoupled UI: The editor runs as a daemon in the background. Any frontend uses
IPC to interface with the editor. When a frontend process starts, it sends a
table of compatible features (mouse support, colors, fonts, etc) for the
editor to use as an API. Input events are sent directly to the editor daemon.

Modular runtime:

Every piece of functionality exists in a distinct module. Every module defines
its API in a global table (associative array) of attributes. Any configuration
is accomplished by changing the attributes in the global table.

The user can pick from a predefined runtime that emulates his/her favorite
editor, a unique runtime, or even an empty runtime, and make whatever changes
he/she wants.

------
johngummadi
I'm working on a Uber like service for home-made food in my spare time (apart
form having a day job).

[http://crave.yorker.me](http://crave.yorker.me)

~~~
biztos
I love this idea. I recently saw a documentary about the home-cooked lunch
business in India -- basically women, often single mothers, cooking great food
at home and then middlemen selling it on a subscription level to office
workers.

But how do you reconcile "home-made" (as opposed to restaurant-made) with
whatever Health Department equivalent operates in your area?

Are you just planning an end-run around regulations[0] a la Uber/AirBnB?

As far as I can tell, in most of the US (and probably many other countries)
this isn't quite legal[1], for a combination of bad and good reasons.

[0]: [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/licenses-need-home-cooking-
bu...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/licenses-need-home-cooking-
business-3038.html) [1]: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3061498/the-food-
sharing-economy...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3061498/the-food-sharing-
economy-is-delicious-and-illegal-will-it-survive)

~~~
johngummadi
Thanks for the feedback.

1\. Reconciling the "home-made" food with restaurant food is not really
necessary. It just gives home chefs to compete with restaurants regardless of
whether or not they use this service. It is like Airbnb where regular folks
like us can list our homes, but they don't stop commercial properties listing
either.

2\. As for regulations, yes for now run around the regulations until it gets
really noticed. If it does, that means we already gained some traction.
Recently many states introduced "cottage food laws", where they allow limited
amount of food selling considered non-commercial, but I believe the food items
are limited as well. We have to see how this goes. This is indeed an area of
concern.

3\. This type of business if not quite illegal. Most of it falls under gray
area with "collage food laws".

------
loarabia
Two Projects

1st Problem: Went through a round of interviews a while back and was talking
with friends about the feedback or lack thereof and thought, wouldn't it be
cool if you could practice and get feedback from someone who actually does
this and made . . .

Project:
[http://site-1146624-6257-8128.strikingly.com/](http://site-1146624-6257-8128.strikingly.com/)

2nd Problem: Grew up playing Star Control 2 which was open-sourced as the
urquan masters. However, the project seems to have lost some momentum and I
feel like (on Windows at least) finding all of its exact dependencies is not
easy.

Project: I've been porting a fork of UQM
([http://sc2.sourceforge.net/](http://sc2.sourceforge.net/)) to Windows 10 and
SDL 2 (still private) and playing with VCPKG at the same time.

------
kevinwang
I'm trying to make a search engine that gives you the opposite of what you
search for: this is what I've got so far [http://sample-env.wk77znpmqm.us-
west-1.elasticbeanstalk.com/](http://sample-env.wk77znpmqm.us-
west-1.elasticbeanstalk.com/)

~~~
benji-york
I registered the domain "duckduckno.com" a while ago for reasons that have now
passed. How about I point it at your search engine?

~~~
kevinwang
That would be really cool! Let me know if you do it!

------
azaydak
I have zero experience in web development so I decided to start a self project
to learn some of the basics of front-end and back-end development and server
management. So I created a home server to host machine learning capabilities.

I set up a Linux web server with an Angular front end that users can create an
account and log in. From there they can use the web UI to design and create
deep neural networks. Currently it supports autoencoder, fully connected,
convolution, and a host of other network layers. The user can also upload data
and train the network. The server hosts a nVidia GTX1080 GPU to train and run
the network. The website was served using Flask and Tensorflow was used to
create the networks. Successful models could also be deployed as an API
endpoint.

My final solution wasn't very scalable but I learned a lot from it!

------
adamqureshi
I am working on this: [https://onlyusedtesla.com/](https://onlyusedtesla.com/)

A marketplace to buy / sell a used tesla.

My opinion is that Tesla is doing EVERYTHING differently. It would be highly
likely that the Tesla on-board vehicle super-computer (currently made by
Nvidia - leader in AV tech) could easily handle selling the used vehicle per
the owner's request automatically online. All Tesla vehicles are connected to
the web via LTE 24/7.

I hypothesize that a Tesla owner or Tesla could automatically upload vehicle
mileage, age, options, etc. on to a dedicated used tesla website. Perhaps
onlyusedtesla.com can be an exclusive website to Tesla (the company) through a
strategic partnership. (know a guy who know's a guy?) can you get me an intro?
anyone have elon musks email?

~~~
jpangs88
Are you making it so tesla cars literally​ sell themselves?

~~~
adamqureshi
Tesla owner needs to cash out and sell his tesla. Opens my app and gets an
offer OR uploads to get offers from buyers. I am not sure. What do you think?

~~~
jpangs88
Could be helpful to people. Not sure how often it would be used though, since
tesla also sells there own used cars. You could also try to scope outside of
Tesla's as well. Tesla may have a great computer in it, but alot of cars have
computers in it. I'd says start with tesla definitely (since you seem to have
already started :) ) but don't be afraid to Branch out!

~~~
adamqureshi
Yeah so i am working on a dealer side. A dealer gets a tesla and can upload
thier inventory. I found a few examples and have to figure out what is the
value prop for a tesla owner who can upload his ad to cardotcom/ craiglist /
autotrader and the likes. I want make it STUPID easy for a user to post an ad
and get value from his $100. I am listing ( develop the market) 100 for free.
I am doing it manually right now. But improving and a friend is calling all
the used car dealers around here in NY to see if they want to list their used
tesla inventory and we find them a shopper / send them a lead do the PPC FOR
them etc....

------
khc
[https://github.com/kahing/goofys/](https://github.com/kahing/goofys/)

I've been spending what free time I have on this. It started out as a curious
project to learn Go and to prove that a useful and good s3fs like project can
be done relatively quickly. These days it's used by companies moving PBs of
storage into S3 to research labs trying to analysis RNA sequences with 100s of
machines.

A couple things I hope to get done this year:

* a reasonably easy way to use it in conjunction of docker

* a reasonably easy way to expose this over NFS/CIFS (for devices/OSes that don't support fuse)

* a reasonably easy way to do caching

A bigger vision is to build more things on top of relatively commoditized web
services so free software can adapt to the 21st century without a large
operating budget.

~~~
AsyncAwait
This is neat, I'll certainly give it a try!

------
digitalsanctum
As a hobby, I'm working on a project that allows you to run a subset of the
AWS infrastructure on your local machine. Yes, there are related projects such
as Serverless and more recently LocalStack from Atlassian but my intent is to
focus solely on Lambdas written in Java and I'm learning a lot about the AWS
APIs and orchestration semantics along the way. I try to leverage existing
open source projects (DynamoDBLocal, Kinesalite, etc.) running in Docker
containers and provide the glue to do things like spin up an entire system
locally while being able to debug Lambdas, etc. I'm working on it in the open
here:
[https://github.com/digitalsanctum/lambda](https://github.com/digitalsanctum/lambda)

------
unlimit
A personal bookmarking site [1]. Wanted to learn nodejs and thought building
something useful to me would be nice and useful.

But after I built a workable site I realised I just did not like nodejs at
all. Its a bit of a PITA.

[1] - [https://pagebank.in](https://pagebank.in)

------
tomaspollak
I'm working on a tabbed console-based editor that _doesn 't_ want to be vim.
Like micro, only lighter and with a few extras like multiple cursor support.

[https://github.com/tomas/eon](https://github.com/tomas/eon)

I like to restore old (90's) computers for fun, and realized that if I wanted
to actually use them for something, at the very least I needed a decent code
editor that would run on them -- i.e. use at the very most 5-10 megs or RAM.

It's not 100% yet, but it's quite usable right now and works both in Linux and
macOS. I actually had to fork the termbox library in order to get keybindings
working correctly across different terminal emulators (xterm, urxvt,
gnome/xfce term, OSX, etc).

------
paulgb
After wishing for years for a better way to get an overview of Twitter
conversations, I decided to give it a go myself. One problem is that the
Twitter API is very limiting, so I built an extension that sits on top of the
existing UI. It's been a fun toy project. I'm not a UI designer by trade so a
lot of this was new to me.

GitHub:
[https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/](https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse/)

Chrome extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/treeverse/aahmjdad...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/treeverse/aahmjdadniahaicebomlagekkcnlcila)

------
alehul
Project: A city marketplace of local retailers of all kinds, listing their in-
store products for 1 hr delivery facilitated by our couriers, which offers
more quality assurance and quicker delivery times, and it'll be cheaper than
shipping. We're starting in NYC and would love any input/suggestions.

Problem: It's been frustrating to wait days after a purchase to receive the
item from major retailers; also, everybody here has complained about Amazon
recently, whether it's counterfeits or unreliability, but it's still commonly
used due to avoiding a store visit. It'd be great to combine the conveniences
of receiving the item quickly and avoiding a visit to the store for it.

------
faragon
As a hobby project I'm writing a VM based on VLIW opcodes, so an interpreter
written in C (and in assembly for few popular architectures) could run
reasonably fast without requiring JIT (i.e. instead of fetching one
instruction per iteration, a big instruction containing many instructions with
its respective parameters is fetched). On top of that will run a scripting
language optimized for fast string processing (I'm not sure about the
viability of the compiler, yet -I guess I'll have to put customized opcode
combinations for most frequent load/alu/store combinations, for the specific
need of the scripting language on top of that, i.e. not academia stuff-).

------
joeblau
I'm trying to make an alternate resource to [https://git-scm.com](https://git-
scm.com) called [https://www.gitdvcs.com](https://www.gitdvcs.com). I've spent
the previous 4 weekends building it. The goals were to simplify the
architecture by creating it as as static site that can be hosted on GitHub
rather than a RoR site. I also want to help provide better resources for the
Git community in general.

This is an _extreme_ side project and it's very much a WIP, but my goal would
be to eventually buy git.com and see if I can become the authoritative source
for git information.

------
jasonkester
Problem: My SaaS trialers either convert or expire without me really knowing
why.

Solution: Collect data on every action that anybody does during a trial,
Bucket finished trialers by "Converted" and "Expired". Visualize that data to
find out what motivates trialers to convert. Run crazy ML magic on it to
predict outcomes for individual trialers. Act on that information.

About half a day into building, it occurred to me that this is not in any way
specific to the one product I was building it for, so I moved the API endpoint
out to its own domain. There's a general purpose product there in beta now:

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

~~~
dharness
Looks really nice but, Youch - the pricing seems kind of steep.

I'm not sure what a participant is, since it only appears in the pricing and
nowhere else on the page - but if it is a new user (new signup) then 200 seems
a bit large for a hobbyist.

I'd consider a tiny $10 - 20/mo one, sans "Assisted onboarding"

~~~
jasonkester
Ah, but consider the value of a 1% uptick in conversion rate.

Imagine you have a little $10/month SaaS, with 100 trial signups a month, for
which the service in question is outrageously expensive.

Assuming one of your users sticks around for a year, his Lifetime Value (LTV)
is $120. And assuming there exists some low-hanging fruit optimization that
can get you a tiny 1% uplift in conversions. That translates to (0.01 * 100 *
120) = $120 in extra revenue for your startup each month. So even if you spend
the rest of your days just looking at our pretty charts and graphs, you're
still doubling your investment.

So yeah, it's priced high because it makes you a lot of money.

------
wkoszek
I'm building myself a publishing platform which I'd like to make available to
others for $12/yr. It'd be a GUI for static-code generators, where you can
write markdown in a browser, hit "publish", and Jekyll/Middleman will generate
content for you + push the newly generated article to the GitHub repo. I'm
spitting out tools, as a side-effect of that:

[https://github.com/wkoszek/lastpass-
ansible](https://github.com/wkoszek/lastpass-ansible)

[https://github.com/wkoszek/ruby_packages](https://github.com/wkoszek/ruby_packages)

~~~
laktek
I'm also working on something similar, check
[http://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-
pragma/](http://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/)

------
yjlim5
I’m working on an open source verb conjugator for different languages,
currently in Korean and Hindi. The conjugator will take in a verb and a
grammar form and output the conjugated word. For example, the future form of
‘하다’(to do) should return ‘할꺼야’(will do). This API will come handy for people
who are learning a new language or, if you’re like me, building a language
learning app. It gives us the flexibility to create learning materials like
flashcards. The project is still in its early stage, available at
[https://github.com/llipio/conjugator](https://github.com/llipio/conjugator).

~~~
lappet
Hi, this looks very interesting. I signed up at
[https://llip.io/](https://llip.io/), but how do I choose Hindi? I am not able
to switch from Korean

~~~
yjlim5
Hi, thanks for checking out our app! We are currently working on the Hindi
lesson contents. We'll be sure to email you when it's ready. In the meantime,
please feel free to ping us about our progress or contributing to our
conjugator project.

------
stephengillie
Problem: Track players on an ARK: Survival Evolved (Steam) server, to better
manage inter-tribe aggression. (When does another tribe have more players
online - at what hours should we be diplomatic, and when can we be
aggressive?)

Project: ARKData has been an ongoing project since mid-2015, when it began as
copying player names from the arkservers.net page into an Excel spreadsheet.
Having transformed this into a static site generator has taught (and retaught)
me a great deal about front-end technologies and application architecture -
from data ingestion to browser rendering.

I'm currently working on 2 upgrades - first, porting the SteamQuery
application from PHP to Powershell, to natively use it instead of having to
depend on another data source. Steam servers reply with a blob of information,
when given the correct command over UDP. Arkservers.net just runs a PHP
application called SteamQuery that queries a server with UDP and parses that
into JSON. I rewrote my port yesterday - output is only missing a few data
items - player play times, & server name/map/filename since these are not
delineated. It's a series of pre-parsers, parsers, and post-parsers - Valve,
why do your servers not speak JSON directly?

Second, using SQLExpress as a back-end. I'm currently using numerous CSVs and
JSON flat files as a data store. Hopefully, this will improve application
performance somewhat, and allow for better statistical analysis. With flat
files, it takes several seconds to build a list of players seen in the past
24h.

The application isn't currently running - I only run it when I'm playing,
against the server I'm playing on, and I'm not currently playing on any
servers. There's a demo site still up, from the last time the application was
operational:
[http://gilgamech.com/ARKData/_Wiped_2_4__NoobFriendly_8xT_3x...](http://gilgamech.com/ARKData/_Wiped_2_4__NoobFriendly_8xT_3xAll__ORP2_S__Wyverns___More_____.html)

Github (Slightly out of date):
[https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape](https://github.com/Gilgamech/ARKScrape)

~~~
cosinetau
This looks real baller! I'll have to look into ARK...

------
IdleChris
[http://bsnip.com](http://bsnip.com) \- A screenshot and annotation utility. I
wasn't happy with any of the available options, either the price was too high,
or the feature set was lacking so I decided to make my own.

I believe BetterSnipper stands out in its ability to dock to the side of the
screen, making it especially good at taking/editing/uploading multiple
screenshots.

I've been working on this side project for a few years now and it's starting
to become more mature, but still a lot of work left and features to add, but a
ton of fun to learn and see it come together.

I'd love to get any feedback or suggestions :-)

~~~
j_s
Nice. I've enjoyed putting animated GIFs into presentations lately as a not-
quite-video lightweight animation tool (I use ShareX).

I didn't see whether or not your program supports capturing/creating these or
not.

~~~
IdleChris
Thanks for the feedback! Gif recording isn't supported yet, but definitely on
my ToDo list.

(ShareX seems good, but I've always been confused about some of the random
stuff they include in the 'tools'. (DNS Changer, Hash Check, Directory
indexer). It never felt like a good tool for an 'everyday user', more for
power users.)

------
milansm
I am working for data engineering consultancy company and I noticed that we
often need large datasets for various reasons, but it's hard to find those. So
we started building open source tool which allows us to quickly generate large
volumes of data. The idea is to create DSL for describing the data and allowed
values and the generator should generate the data set based on that.

[https://github.com/smartcat-
labs/ranger/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/smartcat-
labs/ranger/blob/master/README.md)

Any help and ideas are more than welcome.

~~~
mistermann
I could see this becoming a popular website (assuming there isn't something
out there already). Including a bunch of standard (countries, cities,
provinces, etc etc) datasets and whatnot, links to other sources.....like a
one-stop directory for online datasets. Again, if there isn't already
something (I don't think there is!?)

------
meesterdude
I'm working on a service, WillYou DidYou, two brothers to help people think
about and follow up with their goals, like going for walks, or doing laundry.
Will asks in the morning if you will (go for a walk, for example) and did asks
in the evening if you actually did it.

It's not a technically amazing app - it's purposefully boring on that front. I
think i have, 6 DB tables. I've put a lot of focus on making it enjoyable and
useful. It's in beta right now, but it's helped me improve myself, and I hope
to have it available for sale soon. Getting public info going is my next todo.

~~~
provoprofile
Is this an open beta? Sounds interested I'd love to give it a spin.

------
frankus
A compact way of encoding nutrition information so that it can be transmitted
via a data URI or 2D barcode.

The idea is you could include it in a menu or cookbook or recipe website and
scan/click it to add to a food-tracking app.

~~~
tmaly
cool idea!

------
franksup2
Project: Building an ML model (in an iOS app) that detect different fitness
movements, count the reps and indicate if the user used a proper form.

It's mostly a fun side project I am building to improve my ML knowledge.

~~~
Denzel
I'm interested in this. Whats your progress so far? What techniques are you
using; can you point me to any research papers? Best of luck on your project.

------
forzo
Currently working on LeadMine
[https://www.leadmine.net](https://www.leadmine.net) \- Find new prospects and
their email address.

LeadMine is lead generation software for any type of business. With their
powerful and flexible tools users can now find qualified leads along with
their respective email addresses in seconds.

Using the capture feature, you can add and track all your prospects with a
simple interface - will eliminate the use of spreadsheets. Once list is
generated, users can then begin to contact leads and convert sales!

------
jrm2k6
I am working on iheartreading.co. I Heart Reading is an easy-to-use platform
that allows students to track their reading, submit responses to reading and
start a conversation, through comments, with their teacher about a book they
are reading. Making reading a habit can be difficult for students. I Heart
Reading helps students build regular reading habits by allowing them to add
books, update their progress (number of pages read, books finished) and write
reviews about books they have enjoyed. All of the responses to reading,
reviews and progress the student inputs into the site are accessible to their
teacher, making it a simplified and streamlined solution to independent
reading. It is targeting K12 school in the US. I am working on getting new
schools to use it (I have only two schools right now). It was mainly to help
my wife, and to learn React/Redux. I have a lot of ideas on how to make it
better. I see it as a private goodreads.com, and I am excited on working on
gamification.

Second project I want to work on is an automatic answer generator for
/r/cscareerquestions, as most of the questions are duplicated, I think it
would be fun to work on a program that would give the most ironic response
possible to some of those threads. I would like to work on NLP problems and
that would be a good introduction to it.

Note: I am looking for design help for iheartreading.co, I did the best I
could but it could be much prettier.

------
seahonky
I'm attempting to take e-commerce UX design to the next level with my cheap
e-liquid brand: [https://www.suchvape.com](https://www.suchvape.com)

------
AsyncAwait
I've been working on [http://calmbird.io](http://calmbird.io) for some time
now.

As a freelancer, I've had my fair share of miscommunications and various forms
of unnecessary distractions. This tool is designed to solve this by giving you
the tools to better manage feature planning and client communication.

Basically, I am trying to build a tool, which will largely automate having to
send mundane emails to clients with status updates or having to respond to
slack every couple of minutes.

------
stevejohnson
Summertunes, a usable web interface for playing a beets music library:
[https://github.com/irskep/summertunes](https://github.com/irskep/summertunes)

This year I switched from streaming to MP3s for at-home listening, and I got
fed up messing with 3.5mm audio cables, bluetooth, and switching between
devices in general. So now I just run Summertunes and Spotify on an old Mac
laptop hooked up to the speakers, and I'm happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.

------
ajones05
Project: SeeAround.me - an app to see and share hyperlocal news by location
(like Waze for what's happening nearby). All content is user generated, with
most of it in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley for now.

Frustration: It's hard to see what's happening near you based on your location
(hyperlocal news, events, restaurant openings/closures, construction, etc.)
Local news is distributed across so many sources, and it's not easy to see
where exactly stories are taking place.

------
iampuero
As a side project I have a reddit chrome extension which I like working on
every couple months, but I recently have been working on a node service that
screenshots and compares the landing pages of different news sources, think
(Huffington Post vs Breitbart) which is endless fun with the new
administration

extension:
[http://iampueroo.github.io/rComments/](http://iampueroo.github.io/rComments/)
news differ isn't finished

------
hardcore96
I'm currently working on a webpage that describes central topics in digital
communications, via short python programs and their generated plots, rather
than stuffing one equation after the other. I'd like to extend it to more more
simulations of wireless systems and in general write more content. Eventually,
if people like it I can imagine creating an eBook out of it.

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

------
donniefitz2
I am working on a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling used camera
gear. Currently, the only way to do this is via Craig's List, Ebay or forums.
We're creating dedicated marketplace and we'll be facilitating secure
transactions among buyers and sellers. It's going to be a long road. If
interested, you can sign up for early access here:
[http://gearoffer.com](http://gearoffer.com)

~~~
nedwin
Love the idea. Are you building the marketplace from scratch or building on
something existing?

How long until you launch?

------
mglauser
I'm working to build a coding school that makes up for the weaknesses of other
coding schools. You can read about what it does better here:
[https://medium.com/@michelleglauser/this-is-the-coding-
schoo...](https://medium.com/@michelleglauser/this-is-the-coding-school-of-
every-managers-dreams-773030b0b1ae)

Basically, it's a nonprofit called Techtonica.org that works with tech
companies to provide free tech training, living stipends, and job placement to
low-income women and non-binary adults locals. We're in the San Francisco Bay
Area for now—did you know there are areas in the Bay Area with income
disparity worse than Rwanda's? You can read more about my reasons here:
[https://blog.techinclusion.co/techtonica-how-to-diversify-
te...](https://blog.techinclusion.co/techtonica-how-to-diversify-tech-and-
help-neighbors-in-need-837d5f0b40bc)

We've picked our first full-time students and they are seriously amazing—I
can't wait to help them succeed! Just working out the sponsors and space now.
See more info at [https://techtonica.org](https://techtonica.org).

------
ifend
Problem: Kickstarter et al founders not communicating shipping information.
I'm looking at you Antsy Labs!

Project: Crowdsourced backer shipping data. A backer can share their order
date, delivery date, and optionally their order number. This allows other
backers to see when (if!) orders are being shipped and delivered. We can then
estimate when backers should get their order.

Audience: Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers.

Stack: Rails 5 API on Heroku+PostgreSQL, S3 hosted React client.

Launching: This week.

~~~
nedwin
Nice! I saw someone spin up something very adhoc but similar when the Mavic
drone was released and delayed.

I can imagine something similar being helpful when the Tesla 3 launches but
not sure how to get the shipping data...

~~~
ifend
For Kickstarter I'm accepting shipping data from founders but other than that
it's going to all be crowdsourced. It will be tricky to keep the data
reliable. If anyone has ideas I'd love to hear them.

I'll add the Tesla when we launch. Should be fun to see what happens!

------
cloverich
I'm working on a journaling app.

Basically I wanted:

\- Evernote \- with Private data \- In a journal style (infinite scroll, no
selecting single notes) \- With powerful search and filtering \- and some
simple todo handling

They are a dime a dozen, but I already use it every day (for the last several
months) and am slowly motivating myself to get it over the hump. I want to
ultimately make a suite off app's that are similar to existing services, but
let you control all the data.

------
postgrescompare
Postgres Compare, a Postgres schema comparison tool.
[https://www.postgrescompare.com](https://www.postgrescompare.com)

There are many many businesses using SQL Server, Oracle or similar that would
like to switch to Postgres but face the challenge of not only moving the
database but also the tools they use for managing those databases. One such
tool is a solid schema comparison product so I'm building it!

------
bussiere
An app to let people tell their mind ... You download the app , and there is
two role one listener and one that talk. Then a meeting is arranged beetween
the two and one can tell what he have on his mind and the other listen.

Then they will never meet again.

And each time , listener and talker are randomise.

It s just to let people talk what are on their mind with a total stranger.

problem :

A lot with server side problem , and app developpement and mainly time and
money.

I would love to be on full time on this but it's a free project ...

------
jingwen
Learning Haskell via implementing a type system and type inference on a simple
functional language.

[https://github.com/jin/hindley-milner](https://github.com/jin/hindley-milner)

Typeclasses were surprisingly easy to grasp. Got tripped up for a couple of
days trying to implement a way to generate fresh variables ("a", "b", ...) and
ultimately grokked the State monad to implement it.

------
a3camero
A search engine for the world's laws: global-regulation.com. It has over
800,000 machine translated laws.

Two person company in Toronto. One dev (me). Lots of big universities are
clients, currently trying to expand to more corporate clients.

We charge customers according to the purchasing power of their country so it's
cheap for developing countries. We are trying to aggregate all world
legislation, convert it to English, and make it available to everyone.

------
japaw
I am working on a website where GitHub users can see how they rank compared to
other users.

The site analyses GitHub profiles and commit history to make a more extensive
summery then GitHub does. I made it mostly to learn more about ranking
algorithms and automatic text generation.

If you have GitHub profile you can look your self up here:
[https://www.findsosial.com/search](https://www.findsosial.com/search)

------
mindcrime
Right now I'm mostly focused on building NeuralObjects, an open source
"Machine Learning As A Service" platform, and the associated hosted service
offering to go with it.

The idea is to simplify the provisioning of compute clusters and the
installation and configuration of various F/OSS platforms and toolkits for
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and then provide convenient APIs
for common operations. For the first release (coming Real Soon Now, really)
we'll have engines based on DL4J, probably SystemML, and a very simple engine
based on Apache Commons Math (for doing simple stuff on a small scale). We
also bundle Apache Zeppelin as part of the stack, for interactive analysis in
a workbook format.

We'll have a REST API for operations like - defining models, training models,
working with model versions, and making predictions with models. We'll
probably also offer an RPC based API for predictions, likely based on gRPC.

Long-term, the vision is to serve as a one-stop-shop for all of the popular
(and maybe some not-so-popular) F/OSS tools in the ML/AI space. Some things
are are on the roadmap include Tensorflow, Caffe, Keras, Mxnet, SK-learn, and
MLLib.

The first cut is using clusters based on Hadoop/Spark, but we'll probably also
add the ability to provision MPI clusters. We'll also be exploring how to
possibly take advantage of the Amazon FPGA instances down the line.

And since the whole thing will be OSS, anybody who wishes to install it
locally will be able to do that as well. To that end, we plan to eventually
add support for provisioning with OpenStack. We'll also add support for other
cloud environments besides AWS at some point.

------
lukaszkups
Currently I'm working on Rakun.js
([https://github.com/lukaszkups/rakun.js/tree/dev](https://github.com/lukaszkups/rakun.js/tree/dev))
(but as You can see I didn't push code to dev branch recently <oops>) - it's
an un-opinionated JavaScript framework.

The idea behind Rakun.js is to create framework that doesn't require any
additional dependencies but at the same time provides all the modern framework
features (router, state management, components).

My main objective is to create tool, with a bit old-school'ish feeling (e.g.
front-end devs, who worked till now only with jQuery etc. should feel like at
home during work with Rakun.js) but at the same time powerful as other modern
frameworks.

If I should compare Rakun.js to something, that will be Vue.js, but without
templates method - it will be up to developer which render solution he will
choose and how components will behave when their state updates.

You can read more about Rakun.js on my website:
[http://lukaszkups.net](http://lukaszkups.net).

------
godot
My brother runs a movie web site in Chinese, that has some traffic. He's a
writer, not a developer, but he learned some basic HTML some 15 years ago and
has been publishing articles in raw HTML files since then.

The site is as web 1.0 as it can get, and he wants to modernize it. I'm a
developer.

My side project currently is to help with this. It's actually fun to work on.

There's no breakthroughs or interesting science/engineering problems being
solved. It's just a mix of things that make it fun. Everything from picking a
proper CMS with a list of interesting requirements (easy to use, as attack-
proof as possible [i.e. not Wordpress], as few moving pieces as possible but
easy content authoring), converting old pages from HTML to some markdown
format for future-proofing, making sure old URLs work and redirect to new URLs
with better SEO formats, converting old Chinese encoding (Big5!) to Unicode,
responsive design of pages/mobile focus, adding AMP and FB Instant Articles
features, and so on. It's a mixture of building a CMS in 2017 and rethinking
how a modern content site should be.

------
tgrundmanis
Myself and a technical partner are working on a linting SAAS project that
comments on style issues right on the PR in GitHub. As the non-technical
partner I am working on optimizing conversion and prioritizing product work.
We check style for 11 languages and looking for feedback on what to tackle
next, or fix in the current product. Here is the page if you want to check it
out: www.stickler-ci.com.

~~~
kevinwuhoo
How do you guys plan on competing with Hound besides on price? In my
experience Hound is fast and from thoughtbot, but a little bit pricy for what
it does.

~~~
tgrundmanis
We have to added more languages, and give it more functionality. For example,
ensure it works with GitLab and add auto correcting linters.

------
fest
I have a project to get to know something about ML in computer vision. The
project I'm doing that with is OCR of a noisy, low-resolution image (~32x16)

Main problems:

* Since the resolution is very low, I found it hard to use traditional CV approaches to segment individual characters and classify those (for example: is this rectangular blob a few pixels diagonal a dash symbol or just noise)

* End to end CNN approach on artificially generated dataset is approaching usefulness. Training dataset is completely artificially generated, test dataset comes from manual labeling (~2k samples, ~50 classes). This approach is almost usable (96.8% accuracy on test dataset), but it is still not acceptable performance. Next thing I'm going to try is first train the CNN on training data as best as I can (have had >99.9% during training, but that could be overfitting) and then do another training run just on a part of my test data to "fine tune" the weights from first run and use remaining test data for cross-validation.

All existing OCR engines I tried could not handle such inputs: abby,
tesseract, google cloud vision.

~~~
aub3bhat
Have you tried this. Convolutional recurrent network in pytorch.
[https://github.com/meijieru/crnn.pytorch](https://github.com/meijieru/crnn.pytorch)

I think this is the current state-of-the-art (or close to it) for OCR on noisy
low-res images.

Here is a broader list of resources/papers for scene text recognition
[https://github.com/chongyangtao/Awesome-Scene-Text-
Recogniti...](https://github.com/chongyangtao/Awesome-Scene-Text-Recognition)

~~~
fest
No, I have not- thanks for the pointer!

I guess by this time, there really is an "Awesome-<insert ML topic here>" list
for everything :)

------
pmkary
I'm working an a visual-language that compiles to RegEx that let's you write
scalable and readable long regexes.

[https://github.com/karyfoundation/orchestra](https://github.com/karyfoundation/orchestra)

It gives you 2 compilers and one IDE that let's you edit Orchestra code and
then compile it to RegEx or compile RegEx to Orchestra...

------
gympulsr
I built a mobile app for fitness enthusiasts to connect with like minded
people around the world.

Mark your gym on a map and send messages to people that are working out near
you. Post funny gym stories and pictures to motivate others.

Website: [https://gympulsr.com](https://gympulsr.com)

The biggest problem during development was the framework itself. As there
aren't many people out there that are using Qt for mobile app development, it
was sometimes a little bit difficult to find help. In case you are interested,
here is a lengthier post about my experiences with Qt for mobile app
development: [https://gympulsr.com/blog/qt/2017/02/23/working-with-qt-
mobi...](https://gympulsr.com/blog/qt/2017/02/23/working-with-qt-mobile.html)

The biggest problem now: Get people to use the app.

I honestly didn't thought this would be that hard, but unfortunately it's
really tough to get some traction and create a solid userbase.

~~~
j_s
"If you build it, they will come" only works in the movies.

There are several devs turned marketers here on HN that have taken the time to
document what's currently working for them. The most recent I'm aware of is
Austen Allred:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877509)
Some of his stuff he made freely available (apparently a bit dated per
discussion): [https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-get-press-for-
your-s...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-get-press-for-your-startup-
the-complete-guide-b79c57318113) |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438634)

As seen on: _PR 101 for engineers_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169309)

------
moron4hire
Problem: the Metaverse should fundamentally be a web application: open to
everyone, based on open standards, uncensored. But tools like Unity and Unreal
don't play nicely with the web. Their emphasis on proprietary editors causes
vendor lockin for anyone who puts in the time to learn them, and presents a
barrier to entry for anyone who isn't interested in learning yet-another-
platform-when-the-ones-we-have-are-just-fine-thanks. And their compile-to-
webgl stories are a joke. A "metaverse" of siloed applications living as
gigantocorp platform exclusives is not a metaverse at all.

Project: [https://www.primrosevr.com](https://www.primrosevr.com) is a web-
oriented, immersive environment for building applications. In Primrose, you
write idiomatic ES2015 JavaScript code to define interactive objects and let
the framework manage the VR-ness for you.

I've been a web developer for 20 years, and I've been building VR and AR apps
in browsers for almost a decade now. Primrose started as a collection of my
habits for building browser-based VR apps to become the first WebVR framework
in the world.

I've built a few apps using the framework, including this one for a client
([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/goldman-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-06/goldman-
sachs-alum-turns-to-virtual-reality-to-sell-57-million-mansion)). Y-Combinator
was interested in us, but I most emphatically do not want to leave DC (y'know,
cuz the metaverse isn't just one city).

Definitely open to taking on collaborators. I'm open to taking on motivated
beginners, even open to mentoring people, so long as I don't need to
constantly chase you down to see how you're doing or spoon-feed you answers.

------
joshmanders
Problem: Heroku is great, but can get costly for small projects that need
things like SSL certs, and more than 3 rows in a database.

Project: [https://www.stackforge.co](https://www.stackforge.co) an alternative
for those who love the ease of Heroku but don't want to pay $100/mo for a
basic site. Built on Open Source to cut costs.

------
diegorbaquero
Working on a realtime library to share state and events in the most simple way
ever, using pure JS. This is all thanks to ES6 Proxy. socket.io with no
servers, firebase with no config, cloud persisted variables for free:
[https://github.com/DiegoRBaquero/V](https://github.com/DiegoRBaquero/V)

------
dvirsky
I'm working on an open source search engine as a Redis module, written in C.
[http://redisearch.io/](http://redisearch.io/)

More specifically, right now I'm working on making it work on a multi-node
cluster, so it can scale beyond a single node. This is not a trivial task even
working on top of redis cluster.

------
yakshaving_jgt
Problem: Finding newly-registered companies (to market services to them) in
the UK is hard. The government releases an updated registry of all four
million UK companies once every month, but they come in a huge five-part
spreadsheet. It's difficult and painful to sort and filter through this data.

Project: I constantly poll the UK government's databases for newly-registered
companies. I also geocode each company's registered office address. I can send
you details of the newest UK companies by email every day (or week, or month),
and you can choose to only see companies of a certain type (hospitality,
technology, etc.), and/or companies in a certain area (within 10 miles of
London, etc.). You can also log in to the dashboard and view historical
company data at any time if you prefer.

Built with Haskell, Elm, Redis, and PostgreSQL, if you're interested :)

[https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/](https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/)

~~~
garagemc2
nice. Have you had much traction? b2b sales can be hard.

~~~
yakshaving_jgt
I haven't opened it up for people to use yet, but that should happen within
the next couple of weeks. I have about 30 people on a waiting list to start
using it. Of course, I'll know more when people start paying.

------
silverlight
I'm working on building an indie room-scale VR MMO.

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

It's pretty ambitious for a small team, but we did a successful Kickstarter
campaign previously and we're keeping the scope reasonable. We've held a few
successful stress tests already and Closed Alpha starts in a couple of weeks.

------
config_yml
Project: I've built a small app that assists in efficient, timecoded note
taking, like "03:25 - doesn't recognise the download button (unhappy)"

Problem: when doing interviews and usability tests/walkthroughs, it's hard to
keep track of time, take notes, observe the persons emotions and have it in
sync for reviewing the recording later.

------
gunnihinn
It's that time of the year when I dust off my math project of six or seven
years running and have another go at it. It's a research problem in Riemannian
geometry I've been tinkering with since my thesis. This time I've managed to
see some interesting things I hadn't spotted before, but the general pattern
they conform to doesn't permit me to prove anything attention-grabbing. For
the first time I wonder if I've taken the project as far as it can go. It
might be time to do a (nice, cleaned up) core dump to the arXiv and move on.

I've gotten an offer to do contract work in web development for the company my
wife works for, so I'm considering language and/or framework options. I've
only done backend stuff so far, so it might be a nice change of pace, given
that I properly communicate to everyone involved what to and not to expect.
Plus the extra money would be nice with the baby on the way.

------
Diaznash
Several things around VR. Creating 360 degrees content that can be viewed
using HMDs. Creating a website that is a directory of any fun place that
people can go to. I though of this after I realized I hardly have any fun and
I couldn't get one place that had a list of outdoor activities. The directory
can be monetized by doing 360 photography and videos for all the listed
businesses, e.g bungee jumping, safari walks, etc. And finally, merging all
that by creating a commercial vr showcase. This will be done by syncing
several devices (preferably samsung gear vrs because of quality) and use this
to do product showcases and demos at events and trade fairs. Yeah! Its a lot
and maybe am getting over my head with how much impact VR can be. I'd love to
hear thoughts. My location is Kenya (Africa) by the way. So all this is
completely very new in the market and experimental and am in it full time.
Zero competitors.

------
amelius
> I am building a neural network which should be able to generate few frames
> of the video given the preceding and following frames.

You might be interested in the links provide at the bottom of this page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inpainting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inpainting)

------
cl0wnshoes
I'm sure this will be poopoo'd, but after performing countless phone screens I
decided to make a software engineer screening service. I'm using Azure ML to
adapt the screens in real-time as the candidates work through the assessments.
It will decide if we should stick with a topic a bit longer and if we should
dive a bit deeper into a certain subject. Right now it is just academic and
code reading multiple choice questions. I'm currently working on the code
editing portion.

There are other services that are similar, but I'm specifically targeting the
screening market and offering more detailed reporting. Also as a bonus,
candidates receive a "study guide" based on the questions they missed.

As for pricing, I'm forgoing the subscription for a "credit" based system
where you trade 1 token for a screen (buy in bulk or on demand). No contracts,
nothing to cancel, just purchase what you need.

------
pravj
I'm working on an open source "interactive time series forecasting app"[0]
powered by Prophet[1] and Plotly[2].

I aim to make it a fully featured front-end to the Prophet forecasting tool
released by Facebook's Data Science group.

I loved Prophet at first sight and thought it can be a goto solution to the
problem, so I have decided to use Plotly's interactive charting and React's
declarative programming for the performance.

It's still in the development phase for now, my next task is to enable
installation through NPM or PIP.

[0]
[https://github.com/Prophetly/Prophetly](https://github.com/Prophetly/Prophetly)

[1]
[https://facebookincubator.github.io/prophet](https://facebookincubator.github.io/prophet)

[2] [https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js](https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js)

------
crisanionel
I'm building a ML model that will understand interior design. Currently I
indexed 5k images for 8 concepts. I need a lot more train data. I developed a
mobile webapp to train/test the model
[https://marketio.co/experiments/](https://marketio.co/experiments/)

------
DJN
My team and I are working on solving the 3 biggest problems in mobile app
management - distribution, monetization, and enterprise mobility.

Our idea is to build a platform for discovering, managing, and monetizing
apps. Kinda like a Spotify for Apps.

So essentially, we've built a mobile app that lets you run embeddable apps
(applets) in containers (i.e. webviews with native hooks), and developers can
hook the applets up to a mobile backend-as-a-service similar to Firebase.

Businesses can also use it to manage and setup shared workspaces that contain
private, work-related apps, and get all the benefits of enterprise mobility
(BYOD, security, etc) without all the complexity.

We've just finished a successful private beta and are gearing up for a limited
public beta. Check it out - [https://formelo.com](https://formelo.com)

If anyone is interested in participating in our beta run, shoot me an email -
niyi @ formelo . com

------
d_burfoot
I am working on an NLP sentence parser (and other related NLP tools), that is
trained with using human-generated parse data like the Penn Treebank. It works
at some level, not quite state of the art, but I am making steady progress.
You can see the demo version here:

[http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView....](http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView.jsp)

Because I'm not tied to a specific training data set, I can define (and must)
my own grammar formalism. I wrote a blog post against the standard PCFG
formalism that has been widely used in the field:

[https://ozoraresearch.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/chuckling-
a-b...](https://ozoraresearch.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/chuckling-a-bit-at-
microsoft-and-the-pcfg-formalism/)

------
cheapwx
I created an API (that is still a WIP) to provide forecast data pretty
cheaply. Last fall I was working on another side project(that got shelved)
that needed weather data, and I was blown away by how expensive most of the
other APIs are if you need quite a lot of data.

Shoot me a message if you'd like a trial token to do some tire kicking.

www.cheapweather.com

~~~
godot
Just curious, what's your data source? I'm not a potential consumer or
competitor, just wanted to know where one would go about getting something
like weather forecast data to provide as an API.

If you feel that information is part of business secret, you don't have to
answer.

~~~
cheapwx
No secrets here. I pull the data raw data from the NWS and put a prettier
interface in front of it. I had high hopes to pull from other public data
sources... but you know, priorities.

------
ekblom
Problem: no note taking app suited my needs. Solution: write your own

[http://github.com/ekblom/noterium](http://github.com/ekblom/noterium)

Write notes with CommonMark, save where you want (dropbox, disk), notebooks,
etc.

Two years and counting, just open sourced it, why charge for it when its built
with OS-libs. :)

------
roadrunnerfreak
I'm working on [http://chatwoot.com](http://chatwoot.com).

Problem: Customer support still depends on age-old channels like email and
phone while the world is moving fast ahead. People want instant replies to
queries and all the brands have an online/phone presence. But none of them are
leveraging these channels for effective customer support.

Solution: Chatwoot.

It's an app for multi-channel customer support. You can connect your brand's
Facebook Page or your Telegram bot. You will get all the messages on Chatwoot,
and from here you can reply, assign conversations to agents and get reports on
how your agents are performing.

I will be launching beta soon with Facebook Pages as a channel. Soon to be
followed with WeChat, Line, Telegram and possibly Whatsapp as soon as they
release their business API.

For the technically inclined: Built on RoR + Vuejs. Completely on AWS.

Would love to know your thoughts.

~~~
chaostheory
A lot of customer support platforms already started offering chat features a
few years ago. (I used to work in the industry.) The same can be said for
Facebook and Twitter integration.

------
mks40
Working on a deep reinforcement learning library that can be used in practical
applications and not just simulations. The idea is that there might be many
developers/ml enthusiasts interested in deep reinforcement learning, but
existing research code is often tightly coupled with simulations like OpenAI
Gym, somewhat brittle and requires a lot of know-how to adjust for a new
problem. The goal is to have a library that allows to create and configure
different deep RL agents with just a few lines, so they are easy to play
around with.

Development is going slowly because there is a lot of research output that is
difficult to integrate into one consistent architecture (also a weekend
project), but working prototype with example usage is here:

[https://github.com/reinforceio/tensorforce](https://github.com/reinforceio/tensorforce)

------
ianleeclark
Two things:

First, my torrent tracker, "Notorious"
([https://github.com/GrappigPanda/notorious](https://github.com/GrappigPanda/notorious)).
This has been a constant project of mine for at least 7 months now. There's
still a lot of improvements which can be done, but this brings up the second
project I'm working on: "Olivia"
([https://github.com/GrappigPanda/Olivia](https://github.com/GrappigPanda/Olivia)),
a distributed KV store. I'm currently reading through Paxos papers and
geearing up to implement Paxos, Raft, Epaxos, or something (by myself because
I like difficult things) so that the KV store has consensus.

I plan to have a horizontally scalable torrent tracker, for no other purpose
than to have said I did it.

------
m52go
A "Codecademy" for effective writing.

There are plenty of books & lectures teaching this, but nothing interactive.

I got the idea from running a game that makes effective writing competitive:

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

Training section will be up soon. Getting format, design, and approach has
been tricky.

------
garysieling
I'm working on a search engine for talks -
[https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com)

Currently working on converting the backend from Node to Scala Play. Also in
the background, working on indexing slides in videos for talks and books
speakers have written.

------
RoboTeddy
A mobile app for grassroots groups that are resisting Trump:
[https://getamplify.org](https://getamplify.org)

Currently spread thin between building features for group admins and improving
the end user experience--- get in touch if you want to lend your skills to the
country :)

------
jeffwilder
I've recently launched [https://reservv.com](https://reservv.com) a platform
for facilitating online appointment booking. Not the first to try and tackle
the problem but I'm trying to make the UX simpler and the whole process better
for both sides.

------
srvlsct
Outdoor survival guides

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

------
NetOpWibby
I'm working on V2 of my domain portfolio management system (you can check it
out here: [https://beachfront.digital](https://beachfront.digital)). It'll be
free during beta, after which it'll be $11/year.

I have CSV import/export working for those currently keeping track of their
domains in a spreadsheet. When adding new domains into Beachfront, there's a
WHOIS search run on the backend and the registrar/expiration fields are
automatically filled in. Price is manual entry but when you do, you'll begin
to see how much money you spend per month/year and by TLD on domains.

I'm just trying to add value any way I can while also eliminating friction
points. I'm hoping that domain management and personal analytics will be
appealing to people.

------
siddharthgdas
Project: I am developing a platform that lets people try _any_ products before
buying them. Its free if they buy one of the products they try on the spot or
else they shell out a tiny flat fee for the trial.

[https://dais.me](https://dais.me) (it's not live yet)

------
LeanderK
i am a student and i recently started an organisations that provides short
bootcamps (1 to 3 days), tech-talks and hackathons for other students at our
university[1]. While i think my university provides a very challenging
education, it's short on teaching practical skills (like python, react etc.).
This is ok, the university should focus on what they are good at and not
"waste their time" with teaching frameworks etc. We don't have any experiences
with these bootcamp-style formats yet, maybe one can chime in and give us
advice how to best approach it. We want to provide it for free and rely on
other students who want to share their knowledge.

[1] beware, german! also we are reworking the website:
[https://hackundsoehne.de](https://hackundsoehne.de)

------
chuhnk
Micro - simplifying distributed systems development

Started in late 2014 with an idea and a very fuzzy prototype. Today the open
source development is sponsored by an enterprise company and it's no longer
just a project but my full time focus.

[https://micro.mu](https://micro.mu)

------
tuacker
Egg Inventory - a record keeping software for poultry layer farmers:
[https://egginventory.com](https://egginventory.com)

It allows farmers to record daily production of their chickens, manage orders
and customers and view available inventory/stock at any time.

------
zzzzz_
I'm building a football management game:
[http://footballpresident.net](http://footballpresident.net).

It's an Electron front end (Angular) which connects to a bunch of micro-
services for messaging, fixture generation etc.

Sort of like a tycoon mixed with a simulation game.

------
fgandiya
School work for one. I'm really behind on that.

Also, I'm working on my blog/YouTube channel. Honestly, the blog is more
beneficial to me rather than the random individual to decides to look at it
since it's so bad.

I'm working on improving my presentation and research skills, video editing,
SEO etc.

------
kureikain
I'm working on an uptime monitor system[1] and a color palleter[2]

My issues with existing tools is they doesn't support phone call alert and
have to integrate with pagerduty. I just want something that's simple with
phone alert.

I also want to config check use a chatbot because at the end of the day, I
only want to get alert when my site is down, that's ll. All nice UI is just an
add-ons.

I also want to have better control on interval checking time. Spend around
4months on it until now and probably public launch this week.

During the time, I have a hard time to chooese a color scheme. So I think why
not generating color pallete from popular sites.

Both of open sources project but no one contribute except me haha.

\---

[1] [https://noty.im](https://noty.im)

[2] [https://kolor.ml](https://kolor.ml)

------
foopod
I get bogged down super easy, so only pick up really small personal projects.

I have been working on tutorials for the newly released Construct 3 beta. The
kids I teach at codeclub have been begging for Construct 2 tutorials, but now
that all of them can participate (some are on chromebooks/macbooks and
Construct 2 was windows only).

[https://jonoshields.com/tutorials/construct-3/](https://jonoshields.com/tutorials/construct-3/)

Also working on making the shadows more realistic in my procedurally generated
mountainscape thing.

[https://jonoshields.com/2017/03/29/creating-procedurally-
gen...](https://jonoshields.com/2017/03/29/creating-procedurally-generated-
scenes/)

------
bartvk
Problem: the 2016 MacBook Pros exclusively came with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.
It's a big hassle to find out which cables and chargers are decent and don't
fry your laptop. Plus the ecosystem isn't really mature yet so some devices
work straight away, and some don't.

Project: we've blocked a couple of hours every week to work on our site
[http://usb-c.today/](http://usb-c.today/) All it really is, is a simple
Wordpress site, listing what products we found to be working. We either test
them ourself, or look for reviews from independent people like Benson Leung,
Nathan K. or in-depth technical reviewers like GTrusted.

Audience: anyone who has a laptop with USB-C ports and wishes to use them in
an controlled manner.

~~~
thesmok
1st impression after opening your website: you need to show more/bigger
pictures on the front page. Add an image to every post, so visitor can see a
picture before clicking the post title.

------
graystevens
Problem: most businesses find out they've have a data breach at the same time
as everyone else, which reflects very poorly on their brand.

Project: Putting together a SaaS which will scrape a large number of sources
for evidence of a unique canary which we supply them with. Each businesses
canary can be triggered in a number of ways; being found on the internet,
receiving any type of email, or even receiving a phone call. Currently it's in
development but I've put together the classic landing page to try and get a
list of potential early adopters to help shape the project once it's in closed
beta. You can see it here [https://breachcanary.com](https://breachcanary.com)

Any feedback would of course be greatly appreciated!

------
kris-s
I'm working on a large collection of short stories called the Daily Story
Project (guess how frequently I write the stories).

It's intended to be listened to as a podcast but I also publish the recordings
as YouTube videos.

Not really "on topic" for HN but I did write a script to do the video to mp3
conversion!

If you're looking for a representative sample of my writing style I would say
Ghost Squad is a good one:
[https://youtu.be/zzMOK86J7IE](https://youtu.be/zzMOK86J7IE) (113).

Podcast: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-
story/id1212062965...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-
story/id1212062965?mt=2) Youtube: youtube.com/krisshamloo

------
dmuth
My current side project: I am working on an app to go through my social media
accounts, pull down the text of every URL I have ever posted (2,000+), and do
natural language processing on the content of each URL retrieved.

Reasons I am doing this:

\- I wanted to brush up on my Python and get acquainted with the request and
BeautifulSoup modules

\- I wanted to use Sqlite for a project and try out some new database design
ideas in a non-production environment (immutable rows and JSONifying all data
that's not indexed, for example)

\- I wanted to get familiar with natural language processing in Python (NTLK
module).

Been working on it on and off over the last month or so, and am trying to make
some sort of measurable progress each evening. When completed, I'll put the
code up on GitHub along with any interesting results I obtained.

------
BillBohan
I am designing a Single Instruction Set Computer and working to take it beyond
the 'that's interesting but useless' stage and make it very useful.

[https://github.com/BillBohan/NISC](https://github.com/BillBohan/NISC)

------
clocksrightwice
Project: Build an easy to use tool for backtesting ETF portfolio combinations
that you see recommended all over investment blogs. Let users have a shareable
link to send around so others can easily see and tweak the portfolio. Start a
blog around critiquing recommendations I find around the web.

App: [http://app.mytradelab.com](http://app.mytradelab.com) Blog:
[http://mytradelab.com](http://mytradelab.com)

Problem: Would like to include details about holdings inside ETFs and how they
change through time, but havent found a good data source yet. Would be cool to
build in functionality to compare ETFs based on their fees and what they hold,
but current holdings is just a snapshot in time.

------
pastelsky
Problem: I'm making a tool that'd help web developers and javascript library
authors cut down bloat in the websites and libraries they make. This is done
by helping them visualize the real world performance impact of adding a new
dependency on the end users.

WIP here: [https://cost-of-modules.herokuapp.com](https://cost-of-
modules.herokuapp.com)

Motivation: Maybe if I were to tell you the gzipped + min size, download times
and the parse times of that ridiculously heavy react/ jQuery plugin _before_
you add it to your site, you'd think twice?

Problem: It's tricky to arrive at a configuration for webpack/rollup that
would successfully bundle all npm packages.

Parse times are device specific, so calculating those reliably can be tough.

------
cjhdev
I have been improving a Ruby gem that I think would be useful for building web
connected sensor applications (IoT stuff) in a hurry.

The tool implements a serialisation spec called The Blink Protocol. The spec
is similar to Google Protobufs with a few differences, mainly:

\- It's more compact on the wire (important for LPWAN)

\- It's minimalistic and has a proper specification document

The gem implements a schema parser, a dynamic message class generator, and an
extensible codec generator.

The idea is you can use the tool for both ends of your application:

\- Use the codec generator to generate C source for your device

\- Use the dynamic message class in your web app to consume messages

On the Ruby side it should be as easy to use as JSON.

[https://github.com/cjhdev/slow_blink](https://github.com/cjhdev/slow_blink)

------
jqbxfm
I'm working on JQBX, an app that lets you listen to music in sync with friends
or strangers on real time.

The app hooks into your Spotify account so you get access to a huge library of
high quality music. You can also save things directly to your playlists so you
keep all the cool stuff you discover in one place. If you're more hands on you
can be a DJ, play your favorite stuff and get real time feedback from the
crowd. If you're more of a hand's off kind of person it's great for getting
high quality hand picked music for long stretches at a time (eg the 8 hour
work day).

[https://www.jqbx.fm](https://www.jqbx.fm)

It's totally free, I wanted the product so I built it- has been a great
learning experience!

------
Jemaclus
I'm building a MUD[1] in Go. It's _basically_ a port of the merc/diku mud, but
I went in different directions on a couple of things. It's basically feature
complete at this point, so my next step is to build a bunch of areas and flesh
out the a world and play with it for a bit. Add some mobs, some spells, some
items. Create a few quests and storylines. If it works out and I think it's
enjoyable, I'll stick it on a server somewhere and real people can access it.

I mostly did this because I've always wanted to build my own MUD, and I've
also been dying to get really into Go.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD)

------
MaulingMonkey
Project: I'm learning to (ab)use nuget packages and micro libraries as a means
of increasing my motivation and completion rate on personal projects.

I've had a tendency to (re)start new personal projects from scratch instead of
continuing old ones. I'm up to around 300 dead and abandoned projects.
Compounding the problem: "I don't want to manage #include paths, library
names, paths, and deal with other build errata - for multiple platforms no
less - just to escape a lousy JSON string!". A native nuget package can reduce
this to a few clicks, which is much more palatable. I've been doing a lot of
_reusable_ build automation to make creating .nupkg s a no-brainer. So far
I've figured out how to make decent nuget packages for C++, C#, and Typescript
projects.

I'm applying this approach to the creation of a native C++ library for
sentry.io (because I'm tired of unreported assertion failures within a company
being a problem, ever). I've spun off a lot of terrible v0.0.0 junk:
[https://www.nuget.org/profiles/MaulingMonkey](https://www.nuget.org/profiles/MaulingMonkey)
(follow the "Project Link" for the corresponding Apache 2.0 licensed github
repositories)

So far I this includes libraries for unit testing, formatting JSON,
enumerating the callstack, and a snprintf wrapper. (I've been muttering
"always be shipping" to coworkers and friends - taking the piss out of the
phrase "always be closing". A former coworker suggested something even better,
which I'm trying to embrace: "always be _shipped_ ", hence my willingness to
put even v0.0.0 stuff out there.)

Problem: My makefiles for linux builds are absolutely horrific - and I'm not
just talking about my propensity to use tabs for non-indentation purpouses:
[https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/libMmkJsonWriter/blob/dc26d...](https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/libMmkJsonWriter/blob/dc26d5d40c820345c497cc88099452905cdb419a/Makefile)

------
mherrmann
A cross-platform dual-pane file manager [1]. It made the front page and top 10
on Product Hunt last month. I'm busy implementing feature requests and
figuring out a way to grow it sustainably.

[1]: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

~~~
joshuaheard
Feature requests (windows): a right-click context menu, remove confirmation
dialog box on drag and drop.

~~~
mherrmann
Thanks for the requests. The first is already captured by an issue [1]. If you
thumbs-up there it will be moved up in priority. For the second, I'd ask you
to file a new issue.

Thanks, Michael

[1]: [https://github.com/fman-users/fman/issues/43](https://github.com/fman-
users/fman/issues/43)

------
redRanger72
It's nothing amazing but I'm in my final year of college so I'm finishing up
my final year project at the moment on a CMS that focuses on passive security.
It's mainly centred around two-factor social authentication, user roles and
automatic form CSRF protection.

The CMS part was tough because it had to be one codebase to host multiple
sites as well as the security stuff. But I think I've sorted out a good design
pattern which is nice :) It mainly uses JSON to layout the CMS backend per-
site and then you get to override everything else using Classes within each
site's "theme" folder.

Not spectacular to look at atm but here is the Github repo:
github.com/thejokersthief/GraniteCMS

------
nl
Defining, detecting and ultimately stopping fake news.

~~~
jacquesm
That sounds very interesting. Tea?

~~~
xchaotic
That sounds very generic too. How do you even define fake? How do you know
it's not fake?

~~~
gnode
I think a better question to ask is: how do we structure discourse around
content to make our society better immune to the proliferation of low-value
content? (Whether that be fake news, clickbait, disguised advertising, etc.)
Also, how do we do this without creating political silos, each with their own
propaganda?

~~~
nl
I think that this is a really good question too.

------
tmaly
I am working on version 2 of my side project bestfoodnearme
[https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com)

It is a side project I am doing for fun in my spare time to solve a problem I
have when deciding where to eat out.

~~~
lappet
hi, I am working on something similar with
[https://samosasnearme.com](https://samosasnearme.com).

I am unable to sign in to your website using FB.

~~~
tmaly
Thanks for the heads up, it appears something has changed in the social login
code since I put it up in 2015.

I am working on version 2, so I hope to have this fixed soon. I am doing a
complete redesign and moving from a custom database engine I build over to a
well know open source db. It has been slow going.

~~~
lappet
Ok. May I ask what your source of data is? I am using Yelp's API currently.

~~~
tmaly
just a few users inputting data as they come across food.

I have not really done any major marketing for this as its a side project
right now. I may in the future

------
heathjohns
Project: A webapp for teaching people FPGAs from the ground up:
[https://www.blinklight.io](https://www.blinklight.io)

Problem: Right now I'm looking for a hardware partner to manufacture the
accompanying "dev board"

------
deegles
Problem: too many bot and voice app platforms are emerging and writing
apps/skills/actions for each one won't scale.

Project: I'm developing an SDK for building conversational apps that has
pluggable "frontends" for different platforms. It's based around the AI
concept of "frames" to organize your code and an MVC-style template renderer
for building responses.

Challenges right now are learning more about Typescript and NPM modules,
refactoring, writing tests, and getting it documented for release.

I also would like to build a business around it (already doing consulting
building Alexa skills), but I'm not sure if it would be better to keep it
closed source or dual license. Any advice?

------
GrinningFool
Two projects recently started that I expect to have available in the coming
weeks:

* a MUD-style game to teach the principals of Erlang concurrency and the actor model.

* Take the half-dozen blog drafts I have, clean them up and publish them. Fix my broken personal site in the process.

------
carlmungz
Project: Monitoring cheap weekend and midweek flights from the UK to Europe
and sending e-mail alerts to subscribers. You can check it out at
[https://citybreakflights.com](https://citybreakflights.com)

------
orblivion
I'm working on packaging Kiwix
([http://www.kiwix.org/](http://www.kiwix.org/)) for Sandstorm
([https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)).

I am not otherwise affiliated with either of these projects. My motivation was
to promote the idea of trying Sandstorm on mesh networks. Having Wikipedia on
your mesh sounds like a useful thing. Making it easy to deploy along with the
other Sandstorm apps makes it more attractive.

I'm decently far along. I got over my biggest hurdles. Still a handful of
things left, but it'll be in the marketplace soon I hope!

------
jonatron
ProtoAPI - A tool for people building apps to get functional APIs in minutes,
while they are sorting out the backend properly.
[https://www.protoapi.net/](https://www.protoapi.net/)

------
Risse
Project: I am creating a database of all Finnish Instagram users. It's been a
long and hard task to do, but it's currently looking pretty good, I have over
250k accounts that are considered Finnish and their posts data. Now to
actually think what I will do with this data...

More info: I am currently building a website to showcase the data, but in the
mean time I have a Instagram account where I for example once a weekly update
what are the most popular hashtags in the Finnish Instagram community.
[https://www.instagram.com/iigeesuomi/](https://www.instagram.com/iigeesuomi/)

~~~
carlmungz
You could probably do something like this:
[https://www.dataminr.com/about/](https://www.dataminr.com/about/). Actionable
alerts for people/businesses interested in the Finnish market.

------
triplee
At my day job, I'm working on a project moving retirement and pension data out
of a 30+ year old mainframe system into a replacement system that is still
being built in .NET/Angular.

As a side project, I'm working on building a class to teach people ETL using
whatever data integration tool we choose (currently Talend, but want to keep
it agnostic). It's meant to be tailored to complete newbies as well as people
coming from other backgrounds (software, BI, etc.) as part of a bootcamp.

Note that I'm a full stack dev. who got pulled into the data world as I've
done so much of it, and am currently interested in bridging the gap.

------
jlcx
I'm working on CauseGraph, a set of tools for analyzing cause/influence
relationships between people and events over time.
[http://causegraph.org](http://causegraph.org)

------
patwalls
I'm building a wholesale order sheet that is shareable with a link.

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

Businesses are purchasing millions of dollars of product through paper order
sheets or PDFs passed through email. Delite takes out the hassle for the buyer
- they can fill out quantities and submit the order right on the form rather
than download, scan, fax, send back, etc.

The vendor can share these orders through text, email, or on an in-person
basis. The forms can be created and customized with a form builder, and also
come with a backend to manage orders and customers.

~~~
swalsh
It would be cool if you added data feeds, for product and inventory to it, and
made "giving out" those feeds easy. And then had a system for "consuming" the
feeds that was "easy".

As a small eCommerce site, i'd LOVE to have feeds from all my suppliers, but
unless you're selling millions a year for them few suppliers bother with the
effort. Most suppliers create feeds by having an FTP server, and they
periodically throw a csv file on it.

Then as a consumer of the feed, since so many of these solutions are "home
grown" you learn to not trust the data. So you have to build up really
sophisticated systems. For example if a supplier tells me in a feed he had 10
widgets, and I got that feed 2 hours ago. My algorithm might tell me he only
has a reliable supply of 2.

I've thought about building something like this, but I didn't want to get into
the business of selling software to suppliers (they're notorious cheap
skates).

------
diamondlovesyou
I'm working on a same-source MIR to "HSA IR" for Rust, allowing full use of
generics and closures. The first target will be for SPIR-V, but it'll be easy
enough to leave the door open for other targets, including FPGAs, so I'll be
writing code to allow that.

This project is in it's early stages; I've finished the research in the Rustc
compiler and figured out how I'm going to provide new "primitive" (ie a 4 by 4
matrix, a 16bit float type, etc) types to the framework (and work closures
in), and have started writing code, but I have nothing working as of yet.

------
drusepth
Project: I'm hard at work on a "smart" worldbuilding tool[1] for authors, game
designers, and roleplayers to flesh out detailed worlds in a structured,
semantic way.

[1] [https://www.notebook.ai](https://www.notebook.ai)

I'm still deciding on the best ways to crunch world data to benefit all users
feature-wise (and what other worldbuilding features to expand into), but I'm
working on an infographic of common tropes seen across genres now (did you
know that ~2% of the population has green eyes, while nearly 60% of YA
protagonists have green eyes? Fun!).

~~~
e12e
For anyone else not familiar enough with the term to get the reference without
some googling, that's: "Young Adult", as in media and fiction targeted at
young-ish readers/viewers. (eg: the Maze Runner)

~~~
drusepth
Oh right, thanks for the clarification. Spending a morning neck-deep in jargon
makes you feel like everyone is familiar with everything already!

------
neurocroc
I am building a search engine for a mind map I am working on.

([https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-
map](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map))

I want to make a collaborative mind map where one can see all the knowledge of
the world at a glance and be provided with the resources on learning any of
the topics there.

I really dislike the black box nature of Google/DuckDuckGo where you first
have to know the question before getting an answer. It would be amazing to
actually visualise everything and let users explore rather than search and
wander around.

~~~
mezod
really cool stuff!

PS: damned, I had already starred it on gh :D

------
hankewi
We built a simple web app which helps plan group activities which normally end
in chat hell (find a date, a place to meet, how brings what etc) and
discovered that the mechanisms required solve a problem of current
collaboration tools just as well:

No more searching for important info, URLs or whatnot - a simple mix of Slack
Group Chat and Post-Its get the job done for us.

URL: [https://jaypad.de/](https://jaypad.de/)

Screencast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLQxPaM5Jao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLQxPaM5Jao)

------
k2052
I'm working on a few things;

1\. A bunch of dev books, tutorials and content for
[https://getGood.at](https://getGood.at)

2\. A zero config JS dev tool, you can see the prototype for it on GitHub
[https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar](https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar).
Currently working on a major rewrite using Reason.

3\. A JS bundler and ES7 compiler in Reason. Think webpack and babel but
ridiculously fast (compile times measured in ms instead of seconds) and with a
massively simplified developer experience.

------
tcgv
P2P file transfer in the browser: [http://directsend.co](http://directsend.co)

Did this web app out of fun, with no intention of turning it into a service.

I use it to transfer files between my Phone and my PC when I'm feeling lazy to
search for the Phone cable.

Works for most Android and Desktop browsers, but doesn't for iOS because it
depends on RTCDataChannel[1]

[1]
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/RTCDataChannel](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/RTCDataChannel)

------
joshdotsmith
Code Corps is intended to be a place to find and volunteer for open source
projects you think are worth whatever free time you have. For maintainers,
we'd like to make scaling your community trivial: acquire and retain
volunteers, onboard newcomers, recommend the right tasks to the right people,
and fund your operations.

[https://www.codecorps.org](https://www.codecorps.org)

As an aside, I'm kind of curious how others feel they fare on building new
projects. Do you feel slow? I worry constantly about how quickly I'm moving
relative to peers.

~~~
valgor
I don't like that I cannot browse projects without signing up. I like looking
into things before acquiring more spam mail.

~~~
joshdotsmith
You can definitely browse projects without signing up.

------
skulquake
I'm working on terms of service, and legal agreements API for websites, mobile
apps, & SaaS products called CoContract.

You can track user acceptance, profile data, and versioning of your website's
most common & critical legal documents all from one dashboard.

It's required to be legally compliant when doing business online and then to
track and manage this over a long period of time can be tedious and
disorganized.

We're making it easy for developers to easily add legal compliance in their
software offerings.

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

------
jdiscar
I've been working on a bookmarking app with a feature that reminds you to
revisit bookmarks (either algorithmically or manually via a schedule.) It also
has built-in wishlisting and a bunch of other stuff I always wanted out of a
bookmark app. Bookmark apps are a really crowded space and I have no idea how
to advertise something with so many alternatives, I built this app because I
always wanted these features I couldn't find elsewhere.

[https://www.mochimarks.com/landing](https://www.mochimarks.com/landing)

~~~
shanecleveland
I can appreciate the reminder feature. I always thought that something like
that would be useful if combined with an archiving tool for short notes,
quotes or text snippets: Here's the quote you saved last year on this day ...

------
_pdp_
At the moment I am working on the next iteration of the secapps market with
the intention to make information security testing simpler and more accessible
for developers of all kinds.

The last iteration, an appstore-style application, failed to achieve the grand
vision, hence why the remodel.

You can find the new work here:

[https://market.secapps.com](https://market.secapps.com)

All tools are free to use with the caveat that in the future there will be
some sort of licensing model while still allowing to take advantage of all
tools for free as long as not for commercial use.

I hope that helps.

------
DrNuke
I act as an advisor for DronesBench from Italy,
[http://www.dronesbench.com](http://www.dronesbench.com) , we are currently at
the pre-commercialisation stage and in the Drone Community contest from
Commercial UAV Expo, Brussels, 20-22 June. We would be very happy to have your
vote! Video here (the one with the "Light Training" screenshot)
[http://www.dronecommunity.eu/vote.html](http://www.dronecommunity.eu/vote.html)
. Thanks in advance.

------
navalsaini
Most recently, I built www.halfchess.com (a personal project using React.js,
Node.js and google cloud).

It is targeted at chess lovers who find it difficult to keep their chess
skills sharp, as a game requires a continuous commitment of 20-30 mins.
Halfchess is played on half of the board and a game completes in 1-3 mins.

Lately I am experimenting (while spending 15-20% of my time) on a new
interface for wallet - that just works by taking pictures (an OCR library) and
is useful for bill payments. It is targeted at digitally novice users to pay
their bills by simply taking pictures.

------
simonduponte
Im working on [http://www.OfShops.com](http://www.OfShops.com) I decided to
apply different organic growth techniques to an ecommerce project, to test out
the different maxims that are being taught in Digital Marketing nowadays. I
figured that if you're going to try to grow something, your best bet is to
grow something that can be monetized. In the long run, if it grows enough, it
could potentially become an interesting acquisition option for one of the
bigger players in the ecommerce business.

------
AldousHaxley
Building a social, collaborative creation platform. Starting with vector
images, with other media types coming soon:
[https://www.formgraph.com](https://www.formgraph.com)

Working on a market where users can sell prints of collaborated-on works. Also
in the process of building similar web based tools for composing music.

Also, I'm dangerously close to running out of money and having to go back to
getting a job, so if you have any full stack web or iOS work you want done on
contract, reach out to me! (jwatson@formgraph.com)

------
majewsky
I'm implementing a quota and usage tracking service for OpenStack:
[https://github.com/sapcc/limes](https://github.com/sapcc/limes)

We already have something like that in our own OpenStack web dashboard, but
it's a crude hack in many ways, so I'm now splitting it out into a proper
microservice with a properly defined API.

If you find this useful for your own OpenStack installation, please use and
fork it. I will happily accept contributions to expand the number of supported
OpenStack services.

------
feistypharit
I'm working on an automatic chicken coop door. Using a linear actuator and
ESP8266. A mix of Arduino c and HTML/JS for the interface. Playing with
flexbox, svelte, webpack, and fontello.

~~~
shanecleveland
Would love to see a future write-up on this. I've seen some similar things. So
far too involved to replace having to go out and close up the chickens myself
each night. For those that don't know ... chickens are very low maintenance,
and they do put themselves to bed each night before dark (very instinctual).
But they do need to have something between them and the other creatures of the
night, which usually means trudging out and closing their door after they have
decided to go to bed. And then letting them out again in the morning.

------
sne11ius
Problem: people don't want to have to enter the sms TAN manually when they do
online banking.

Solution: I'm creating an android app + webservice + chrome plugin to do it
automatically. So the app reads the tan from the sms, sends it to the webapp.
The webapp sends it to the browser plugin. Browser plugin enters the tan for
you. ... Huge win :)

User base: everyone who does online banking with sms TAN 2fa but can't be
bothered to enter the tan manually/doesn't care to much about security. ... So
basically just me I guess ;)

~~~
mchan
Other potential users: People who are overseas who need to make transactions,
but don't have cellular roaming available (whether by choice, or because the
carriers don't have a roaming agreement), but can get Wifi. This particularly
applies for travellers.

------
ppymou
[https://ohsloth.com](https://ohsloth.com)

Sloth is a modern day copy and paste manager that allows you to search
snippets by both content and context. Context here being what program you
copied from and the type of text (whehter it's an ip, python, or bash script,
etc.).

Right now I am working on a custom machine learning model to do better text
classification.

It's built on electron and I am adding slack integration to create a shared
clipboard. Essentially, slack would act as a cloud storage.

------
AkshayD08
Idea : Saving all the git and stackoverflow searches made during the day.

Thought : We hit Git or stackoverflow mainly to check up on something that we
don't know about. Saving all these searches is something to begin with .
Making sense of all the data by the end of a month is something which I have
work on next. Else it will all turn in to dumps of "never seen again" data.
Basically, having an overview of all new topics searched and digging in deeper
in to interesting topics is the idea.

------
sentinel
Working on a better way to manage songs and Spotify playlists through an
interface like Spotlight search. No more dragging and dropping songs in
playlists.

It's a Mac app, you bring it up by pressing CMD+SHIFT+SPACE and it adds the
currently playing song to a playlist you type in.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mick-tagger-spotify-
playlist...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mick-tagger-spotify-playlists-
organizer/id1219662825?mt=12)

------
lchsk
Mostly two things:

1) online platform for learning foreign languages via simple games, currently
trying to make it work on mobiles ([http://language-
monster.com](http://language-monster.com))

2) attempting to create a classic 2D real-time strategy game, although it's in
early development:
[https://github.com/lchsk/knights](https://github.com/lchsk/knights) I intend
to make it work on Linux & Windows

~~~
Lxr
I like the idea of gamifying language learning, and your first project is
cool.

Can anyone recommend good 'game' type apps to help learn Chinese?

~~~
lchsk
Thanks. Don't know of anything made specifically for learning Chinese
unfortunately, but I do hope to extend my project to include Asian languages
someday.

------
Liuser
Problem: I wanted some high quality mosaics that I could create and print out.

Project: Create a mosaic effect that can be applied to arbitrary photos. I
launched a MacOS version couple of months back but have been constantly
refactoring the algorithm. Since launch, I've brought down the processing of a
1024x768 photo from 40 seconds to under 20 seconds. Currently building out an
iOS version.

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

------
mobitar
Problem: notes app are increasingly complex and usually unencrypted. With all
thats going on in on the privacy front, there needs to be a universal notes
app that focuses on privacy, simplicity, and longevity.

Project: Standard Notes. Focuses on being as simple as can be, but gives power
to extensions and privacy. All notes are end-to-end encrypted. It's available
on all major platforms, and just works.

[https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)

------
tranvu
React-inspired framework for building CLI apps with JSX.

[https://github.com/vutran/wonders](https://github.com/vutran/wonders)

------
traverseda
StarshipHub

I'm going to be living on a sail boat, probably. I mean I own the boat.

StarshipHub is (going to be) my management console for dealing with the two
types of data.

* Live, real-time(ish) data about things like how much water you have, or the GPS co-ords of all the boats who's AIS transmitters you can hear.

* Static cache of files, mostly web sites.

For the former, I'm using rethinkdb. For the later, ipfs (because it's neat).
The frontend is going to be written in ember, and the server in
python/aiohttp/websockets.

------
7ero
Project: Building a custom email service allowing users to send emails from
their own domains, looking into eventually reinventing the modern modern email
UI.

I wanted to originally create my own private email server, but realize I had
the option to allow others to use this. I also got really frustrated with the
current way email UI worked so I'm working on revamping the UI to something
more modern.

[https://quantummail.io](https://quantummail.io)

~~~
fredsted
Sounds great. Are you using Roundcube with a custom skin (or similar), or is
it written from the ground up? Would be cool if you had some screenshots of
your UI in any case.

Which mail server software are you using? Are you doing anything to increase
deliverability? Do users get their own IP address, for example?

------
xj9
tracking user engagement on a federated social network. its an interesting
problem, because there isn't a central database i can ask for basic
information like: login time, recent activity timestamps, or even usernames. i
built a proof of concept using a bunch of huginn[1] agents, but i want to
build a more robust system using a gnu/social server and a statistics bot.

the goal is to have real-time statistics for the entire federated network,
tracking update volume, user activity, and user acquisition. i should also be
able to determine how much time people spend on the network per day.

[1]: [https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023396)
[https://source.heropunch.io/bbnet/fedstats](https://source.heropunch.io/bbnet/fedstats)
[https://loadaverage.org/fedstats](https://loadaverage.org/fedstats)
[https://social.heldscal.la/xj9](https://social.heldscal.la/xj9)

------
codegeek
I am working on an Open Source Online Learning Platform. Think of it as Ed-x
or Moodle alternative but technically more modern with focus on UI and UX. The
idea is that it should be able to cater to multiple audiences including more
traditional style LMS or simple entrepreneurs who want to setup courses and
sell them online. The core will always be simple and light while there will be
provisions for extensions if this thing becomes successful.

------
simonbarker87
Working on an iMessage App and new features for my Q&A site:
[http://www.oneqstn.com](http://www.oneqstn.com)

And version 2 of my inhouse factory production and stock management app
stockcontrollerapp.com, adding some features that I would have found useful
during this last season at work (we are winter based) and also overhauling the
data model and adding a cloud based backend and web app.

Also fixing a herniated lumbar disc

------
jonathanbull
At the moment I'm working on EmailOctopus, a cheaper alternative to MailChimp:

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

~~~
carlmungz
Interesting. I am using MailChimp for my
[https://citybreakflights.com](https://citybreakflights.com) project but will
keep an eye on this.

~~~
jonathanbull
Cheers Carl, give me a shout if you have any questions.

------
skeebuzz
Working on a location-based bulletin boarding system using React Native. Kinda
like a mashup of Craigslist and Tinder. Started as a project to keep my brain
from atrophying while I do some (long term) traveling, and a resume-builder
for when I decide to eventually go back to work, but I'm gonna see where it
goes. I'm calling it [http://www.puffboard.com](http://www.puffboard.com)

------
moflome
Problem: coordinating weekly carpools with N > 2 drivers

Solutions: [https://beta.snapridesapp.com](https://beta.snapridesapp.com),
React/iOS/Firebase app to basically coordinate user provision, group
membership, schedule, calendar synch & email/push/sms notifications. Had two
weeks between gigs to port to Firebase; so far so good, waiting on Apple to
approve and push the update.

------
andrewxhill
Just launched a new company with a few friends! We are creating predictive
algorithms that train and run directly on mobile devices. The idea is to give
mobile developers APIs that can predict users real-world behaviors (going home
in 20 minutes, will go for a run in 1 hour, about to sleep). Our goal is to do
it all on device so we can give users greater security (no stored data) and
also run in real-time no matter the connectivity.

~~~
andrewxhill
We released our MVP last week, [https://blog.set.gl/setsdk-pod-available-on-
cocoapods-484b60...](https://blog.set.gl/setsdk-pod-available-on-
cocoapods-484b60dcda8b)

------
pmerino
I'm building MediaSend ([https://mediasend.co/](https://mediasend.co/)). It's
a video CDN with built-in transcoding and video embedding (with plans to add
any kind of media to the CDN).

Currently it's on private beta, and I would appreciate some help launching it
as a side project! I'm good enough in backend and technical product
development, but suck at launching things.

------
brezelben
Problem: AWS Lambda cannot be used for high-traffic low-latency APIs over HTTP
right now, because of cold starts and high API Gateway costs.

Project: Keep AWS Lambda functions warm by calling them every so often, making
sure enough containers are provisioned concurrently. Currently working on a
prototype for an API Gateway replacement.

Prototype available on [https://lambdacult.com/](https://lambdacult.com/)

------
chad_strategic
Project: Build a website to teach myself nodejs and angular 2. Try to make it
profitable.

Problem: Code is very effective and learning objectives where achieved. (Will
be working on implimenting angular2 soon, right now just
Codeigniter/Bootstrap.) The problem has been making massive amounts of money
from the website.

[http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals](http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals)

------
Applejinx
I've been getting derailed into a game project based on Minecraft 1.11:
[http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-
madness/](http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-madness/)
[https://github.com/airwindows/SnowballMadness](https://github.com/airwindows/SnowballMadness)

Maybe it's lame but I like using that system to experiment with what happens
in gameplay, especially in an anarchistic mode where it's the system itself
that copes with entropy. Been playing with this particular toyset for a few
years now. The main feature is making available to players, VERY destructive
features on a persistent server. You can fire infinite TNT artillery just off
the hotbar, 'multipliers', pickaxes that remove terrain outright, very nasty
semi-tame mobs: the idea is to take lots of 'hacked client griefer' behaviors
and build them into the game in still grander forms.

Then the trick is, how do you resist entropy and allow for any sort of
constructive use? I came up with a system where the server (on unloading
chunks) checks for a diamond block at the very center of a region. If it
doesn't find one, it marks the region for deletion on restart, which
regenerates the area. The idea is that there will be random destruction, but
some of it will revert to normal: and you can't necessarily tell the
difference between normal, and protected/built on, in just surface gameplay.

A lot of the coding addresses challenges the plugin makes possible in the
first place: for instance, placing a giant sphere of fire is one thing, but
then if you multiply that times 16 times 16 per shot and begin spamming the
multiplied fire spheres, it's pretty obvious the server will grind to a halt.
So it turned into a more sparse placement, with a special 'fire spread'
handler to make spread die off a lot quicker so the server crunch would only
be a minute or so.

Next, since there's the capacity to empty water with an empty bucket, it seems
like a good idea to make an 'ocean filler' that fills back up areas that were
emptied. Seems like there is always a new concept to play with :)

Previous experiments showed me how easy it is to just get swamped in toys and
effects, so at some point it really became a 'generalize effects to create a
logical discoverable system' project…

------
rsync
Continuing to build "Oh By"[1].

I launched it last year and saw some initial traction and use - and was
surprised and delighted to see how some folks put this tool to use.

Right now, we are adding a "raw" output mode that will allow you to use twiml
code in an Oh By Code ... I like the idea of giving people a free, anonymous,
instant (and throwaway) address for twiml ...

[1] [https://0x.co](https://0x.co)

------
hexsprite
Problem: Making appointments with others is easy, making (and keeping)
appointments with YOURSELF is hard. Easy to get distracted, hard to get back
on track and make consistent progress.

Project: [http://Focuster.com](http://Focuster.com) \- automatically schedules
your todo list in your Google calendar, uses smart reminders to help you
manage your focus and recover from distractions.

------
nercht12
Working on an embeddable programming language (think Lua, ChaiScript, etc.
use-cases) with simple yet powerful syntax, NO null pointers, static typing,
and memory management WITHOUT A GARBAGE COLLECTOR (XD). It's not ready for
public eyes yet, but you can follow the details on the official blog:
[http://copperlang.wordpress.com](http://copperlang.wordpress.com)

------
beaconstudios
Project: I'm working on a visual web app designer that will enable non-
developers to build sites, and developers to build sites much faster. It
exports to Docker+React+Node.JS but could feasibly export to other platforms
too, and is automatically responsive and isomorphic.

Problem: cleanly representing different types of logic (positional/layout,
CRUD logic, maths, styling) in a cohesive GUI is challenging. Fun though!

------
StClaire
Project: I'm implementing several machine learning algorithms in (near) base-
python. I've almost finished the Naive Bayes classifier, then on to decision
trees (and boosting and random forests come almost free from that), linear and
logistic regression. I want to give a good depth of control and make it easy
to share classifiers by writing dictionaries and exporting them as JSONs

Problem: Validating inputs is tedious

------
NicoJuicy
Working on Tagly:
[http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/](http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/)

Something similar to HN but more advanced. Just finished the roles part.

Now finishing the automatic import of RSS feed ( and adding the appropriate
tag immediatly). Then adding "remote Actions" when posting through tags

And then i'll setup something usable. Now it's used as personal bookmarking
service.

------
elhalyn
==== When is your PRODUCTIVE HOUR ? ====

Started as a StartupWeekend Project ( still young )

[http://www.dailyhigh.co](http://www.dailyhigh.co)

~~~
hankewi
This is a nice way to check your CNS activity - which in turn is a very good
predictor of athletic performance. I think the crossfit world is very eager
for a cool solution.

------
jrgnsd
Project: I'm building a simple management interface on top of Elasticsearch. I
find their pricing model where you can only get some key enterprise features
(like security) when you take a support package somewhat restrictive. It's
still early days, but I'm getting there :)

[https://github.com/eagerelk/proxes](https://github.com/eagerelk/proxes)

------
chewxy
I'm porting over some CUDA-related code for Gorgonia
([https://github.com/chewxy/gorgonia](https://github.com/chewxy/gorgonia)),
which is like Theano/TensorFlow for Go. I can't seem to figure out why I'm not
as productive as I used to be

I'm also working on finishing up the design and implementation of some logical
form related stuff

------
shanecleveland
Weekly Google Search Console email reports:
[https://clickpost.io](https://clickpost.io)

I was usually only looking at my data if I thought there was a problem, and
then it wasn't always obvious to me what to look for. With this, I have
already found some proactive ways to improve individual site performance.

There's a lot I can improve on and add to it. I would love some feedback!

------
vkorsunov
We developing new search platform Bubblehunt
([https://bubblehunt.com](https://bubblehunt.com)), where every user can
create own search system and become independent information provider.

More info:
[https://medium.com/@bubblehunt/faq-9dd92c741b23da](https://medium.com/@bubblehunt/faq-9dd92c741b23da)

------
andersonmvd
Project: Gauntlet.io ([https://gauntlet.io](https://gauntlet.io))

Problem: it's tough to run multiple security tools and get a quick security
assessment of a web application.

Description: It runs multiple security scanners against your application and
consolidates the results. It's great to integrate to your delivery pipeline.
It's free forever for 1 target :)

------
thegandhi
I am working on an app to organize the passport information. Like visas
associated with it, expiration, date of leaving/entering a country. Idea is to
make it easy to get certain information of your passport when you need it
without having the passport handy. For now targeted towards immigrants in USA.
Using xamarin to build the app. Plan is to finish development by April end.

~~~
albemuth
Please be careful.

~~~
thegandhi
With xamarin or visas? ;)

------
clandry94
Problem: No way to virtualize surround sound in headphones exists without
paying a subscription fee or using expensive proprietary hardware (looking at
you Dolby..)

Project: A few friends and I are working on an open source project to
virtualize surround sound in stereo with any .mp4 movie with 5.1 channel
surround sound. Any CIPC HRTF can be used so that the user has the best
experience possible :)

------
onuryilmaz
Key/Value as a Service: Cloud Key/Value Store with REST API

[https://keyvalue.xyz](https://keyvalue.xyz)

------
lawrencewu
I've been working for about a year now on Juicebox, which is like turntable.fm
but better:

\- Can play from YouTube and SoundCloud

\- Autoplay makes a juicebox more like a radio station that plays your
favorite tracks

\- Allowing users to create and curate their own juicebox gives them a sense
of ownership

[https://www.juicebox.dj/](https://www.juicebox.dj/)

Use the invite code HN to create your own Juicebox!

------
prabhaav
[https://www.inphood.com](https://www.inphood.com)

Demo: [https://youtu.be/QwZFolZL_ZQ](https://youtu.be/QwZFolZL_ZQ)

Project: create free USDA standard nutrition labels

Solution: paste/type your recipe, we generate a label, share it on social
media/blog etc.

Current Audience: food bloggers/nutritionists

I would appreciate any feedback on the tool.

------
gmemstr
I'm currently working on a project for real-time server monitoring using
websockets in python. Might have been a mistake to use Python for this sort of
thing but regardless...

[https://github.com/gmemstr/platypus/tree/tornado](https://github.com/gmemstr/platypus/tree/tornado)
take a look if you want

------
dannyr
[https://usmnt360.com](https://usmnt360.com)

I'm a big fan of USMNT and just wanted to building something for it.

There's also an Android app:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.usmnt360.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.usmnt360.android)

~~~
j_s
SSL appears to be a problem. (Heroku domain; unable to load insecure content
for the schedule; etc.)

[http://www.usmnt360.com](http://www.usmnt360.com) works.

------
kovrik
I'm working on R5RS Scheme implementation in Java:
[https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-java](https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-
in-java)

There are only 2 major things TODO: macros and Java interop (currently working
on it). Almost everything else is complete.

It's just a one person hobby project, but that's a lot of fun!

------
nsarafa
Web app for making resumes. As of late I've been bombarded with individuals
and companies asking for me resume. But following several years of freelancing
and entrepreneurship, I don't have one. Thus, I'm making a web app with Vue,
and Mongodb to demonstrate my skills, and help others who find themselves in
similar situations make their own resumes.

------
loxs
Me and a friend are working on a load/stress testing framework. We intend to
sell this as a consulting service. We will test your website and identify weak
spots under load by writing "realistic" tests which simulate user activity.

We are searching for pilot clients who are willing to experiment with such a
thing (while we also test/tune our software).

My email is in my profile.

------
increment_i
I'm putting the final touches on a desktop app that will take audio files and
chop and recombine them into entirely new sound libraries. The end product has
been promising. But since a lot of it is node.js code calling GPL-licensed
binaries, it's difficult to see how I could ever monetize it.

Nonetheless, I think it's some of the coolest tech I've ever built.

------
kushan2020
Currently working on quering OpenStreetMap using graphql.

Working demo over here
[http://kushanjoshi.com/owesome/](http://kushanjoshi.com/owesome/) .

Github [https://github.com/kepta/owesome](https://github.com/kepta/owesome) .
Would love to talk more about it.:)

------
richardkeller
Currently working on RecruitDoor
([http://www.recruitdoor.com](http://www.recruitdoor.com)) - recruitment
software for recruitment agencies that's simple to use and looks good on the
eyes. Currently only targeting South African recruitment agencies, but will be
going international in the next 2-3 months.

------
antirez
A robust radix tree implementation to reimplement certain aspects of Redis. I
should hopefully be a couple of days from the release.

------
arbuge
I've recently been working on a simple-to-use birthday reminder service
(simple as in: no need to open any accounts, no need to ever login anywhere,
no passwords etc.):

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

Just finished working on v1 of this a few minutes ago, by sheer coincidence;
it should now be fully functional.

~~~
yitchelle
I like this idea where the service does not need any accounts, just an email
address. Do you have plans to monetise it?

~~~
arbuge
Family has a birthday party supplies business, so there might be some non-
intrusive ads for that with the birthday reminders.

Initially the plan was to partner with existing birthday reminder websites,
but I didn't like that they required logins, passwords, etc. for something as
simple as a birthday reminder.

------
secfirstmd
Umbrella App:

Open source, Android App to help high-risk travellers, journalists and
activists manage physical and digital security on the move. Take lessons to
learn about security, checklists to implement and keep up to date with feeds
from places like the Centres for Disease Control.

[https://secfirst.org/](https://secfirst.org/)

------
rattray
Project:

[http://lightscript.org](http://lightscript.org)

A concise dialect of JavaScript built on Babel (superset of ES7+JSX+Flow). Has
been a lot of fun to build, and a lot more fun to program with.

Problem: The moderately cluttered syntax of JavaScript (Python and Ruby have
cleaner syntaxes, while JS is the platform we're bound to use for many
things).

------
juanuys
I've sold two phones now and only realised after that I had valuable voice
recordings on there (e.g. my little one saying something cute; guitar riffs;
those million dollar ideas) and I plan on fixing it once and for all with
[https://getvoicecapsule.com/](https://getvoicecapsule.com/)

------
mosaic
We believe that information is meaningless until we connect it so we built a
network that helps people put all their research in Context. We map the
connections between different pieces of information and describe how they are
connected. Check it out at [http://mosaic.network](http://mosaic.network)

------
fogleman
Rendering ribbon diagrams of proteins using nothing but Go & its standard
library:

[https://github.com/fogleman/ribbon](https://github.com/fogleman/ribbon)

Also been plotting them with my AxiDraw v3 plotter:

[http://i.imgur.com/u6pN4G2.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/u6pN4G2.jpg)

------
camtarn
I'm building software for floating wave and tidal platforms - both to run on
the industrial computers on the device (PLC C89 with no prints or malloc) and
also Python logging/DB/analysis code. Currently I'm also speccing long range
wifi antennas and industrial networking gear - got to be a jack of all trades
in this job :)

------
bobwaycott
Project: An easy-to-use, all-in-one tool to help small service business owners
run and grow their businesses. Want to ultimately teach people how to run a
healthy business as a byproduct of using tools that help them do just that.
MVP was just launched 3 weeks ago.

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

------
tmilard
I am building a self-service Fps-Visit editor from photos. Here is one Fps-
visit, made in 2 hours : [http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-
positions-50/b...](http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-
positions-50/building-entrance-webgl-2)

------
oliv__
I'm working on a job board for designers/creatives with positions ranging from
UI/UX designers to Video Editors, Art Directors etc...

My next step is to incorporate a map, and pinpoint all of the jobs there so
you can browse visually too!

Check it out @ [https://www.designerjobs.co](https://www.designerjobs.co)

------
vbsteven
I'm working on two projects in parallel (nothing public yet):

\- a blog centered around making programmers more effective at their job with
topics like editors, tools, automation, source control, learning new
technologies, writing documentation and more.

\- a self-hosted (possibly saas in the future) software licensing platform for
companies selling desktop software.

------
du_bing
I am working on a wonderful themes and templates collection site for Semantic-
UI: [http://semantic-ui-forest.com](http://semantic-ui-forest.com)

We are almost ready to release the first edition, and do some broadcasting to
those who may be interested in it.

It may help those who chooses Semantic-UI for building websites.

------
lappet
I recently created a web app to find restaurants nearby that would serve
samosas:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902445)

I am also working on this utility that would let people know when new
restaurants open up in the neighborhood

------
minhajuddin
I am working on a simple "Online form endpoint for devs"
([https://liveformhq.com/](https://liveformhq.com/)). I also do screencasting
on Elixir/Ruby and am planning to get more organized about it (something
similar to what railscasts did).

------
ptaffs
Music player not database. Browse visually by spines just like a CD shelf or
record crate. Curate albums and playlists as m3u.
[https://twitter.com/ptaffs/status/849313415810121733](https://twitter.com/ptaffs/status/849313415810121733)

------
abhpan27
A file downloader for Mac, like IDM for Windows. First version out.
[https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/idownloader-fast-and-
elegant...](https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/idownloader-fast-and-elegant-file-
downloader/id1220730126?mt=12)

------
zvanness
A messenger bot that aggregates data from 3,600 ski resorts, letting you setup
daily alerts to you favorite resorts and letting you pull up snow condition
reports and forecasts pretty fast whenever you need them -
[http://snowy.ai/](http://snowy.ai/)

------
arca_vorago
Right now I'm focused on understanding political issues and trying to come up
with realistic, pragmatic solutions to them. Most of my other projects (UE4
game project, stock-market research, etc) are on hold. Also, trying to finish
up my BS (quit in the middle of college to do an IT support startup)

------
kruhft
A tree structure editor for S-expressions.

~~~
planteen
My first CS class in college taught was in Scheme. I have a feeling this would
be a very useful instructional tool.

------
nickbauman
A Clojure template and libraries for developing server-side apps on Google App
Engine.

The aim is to make developing apps on GAE with Clojure easier. It uses the
Java SDK.

[https://github.com/nickbauman/cljgae-
template](https://github.com/nickbauman/cljgae-template)

------
Nilef
I've been toying with three ideas recently and it's time to take development
of one a bit more seriously - What does HN like best?

1) A better Mac App Store

2) Letterboxd, but for reviewing Music, Your interpretations of songs and
human-powered recommendations

3) A UK-staffed Charge-Per-Task Virtual Assistant service (Ala Fncy Hands)

~~~
AsyncAwait
> 1) A better Mac App Store

Depends on in what way, because there's already
[https://www.macupdate.com](https://www.macupdate.com) ,but I've been thinking
about a similar service for Linux, one that makes it easy to discover new apps
and find out how to get them easily for your particular distro.

------
jlmarquezg
I´m currently working in a website that shows most relevant political tweets
attending to favorites, rts and when were written. Currently I support 10
countries and I`m adding new people to monitor quite frequently.

[http://www.overt.news](http://www.overt.news)

------
andrewfong
I'm working on [https://esper.com](https://esper.com). It's a bunch of tools
to get rid of useless meetings like auto-cancelling meetings if no one
confirms they want to go, rating meetings, and tagging and charting calendar
events.

------
theaustinseven
I've been working on a new programming language mainly to be what I think Go
could have been. I think that it is important for us to have a compiled
language that feels like a dynamic language. Its taking a lot of influence
from ruby, erlang, and some assorted functional languages.

~~~
tmccrmck
Any example syntax?

Sounds like you're implementing OCaml with Ruby syntax.

~~~
theaustinseven
I don't really have much out there right now. I have some spec, but it's
really out of date. I have done some ML and I would say that while patten
matching/powerful type inference are important to the language, in a lot of
other ways my language won't feel as limiting as a purely functional language
like ML. One of the important things I think a modern programming language
needs are functional components that can be used when necessary. An example is
annotating when you want the compiler to verify that a given function is a
pure function(no side effects). This allows the compiler to make certain
optimizations in both removing computation when results are ignored, and
massively helps with concurrency(functions can be run in parallel when you
have the guarantee that they won't interfere).

------
sdoowpilihp
I've currently been working on
[https://www.interviewbreeze.com](https://www.interviewbreeze.com) in my spare
time as a resource for learning coding interview questions. I have hacked away
on it here and there for the last year or so.

------
ioddly
Creating a series of Android applications. Nothing available yet but I did
knock together a react-native alarms library:
[https://github.com/ioddly/react-native-
alarms](https://github.com/ioddly/react-native-alarms)

------
gregn610
A utility to sync PostgreSQL roles with Active Directory.

    
    
      http://padnag.io/
    

The closest thing I could find was a nightmare to deploy on linux, so I
decided to fix that. It's getting really close to finished, I just need a few
more hours in the day :p

------
k42b3
First I really like to see so many great projects. Iam currently working on:

Project: I am building an open source API management tool which should
simplify API development ([http://www.fusio-project.org/](http://www.fusio-
project.org/)).

------
Immortalin
A Newsletter for the Lua programming language:
[http://luadigest.immortalin.com](http://luadigest.immortalin.com)

Trading platform: [http://kloudtrader.com](http://kloudtrader.com)

Audiobook generation service (WIP)

------
theocean154
Two projects: An FPGA based database accelerator: paine.nyc/dau-site
paine.nyc/dau paine.nyc/ffpp

Along with this im designing a PCIe fpga board to interface host the
accelerator.

And,

A reactive algorithmic trading system for trading BTC/LTC/ETH across multiple
exchanges: paine.nyc/algo-coin

------
davidlee1435
To dive deep into React Native, I'm working on a crowdsourced playlist creator
called Jampot. Currently, it's super simple; you create a mix and send a form
to input a Spotify playlist URI to the friends you want to add to the mix.

Written with a Flask/Postgres backend.

------
uttpal
I am building open-source challenge platform where developers can find open-
source projects according to their skill level, favorite language, and
framework, domain.

Collecting data from challenges completed we will also build a profile with
rating, areas of expertise.

Please provide your suggestions.

------
tmilard
Self service virtual visit from photos.

[http://www.free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-
positions-...](http://www.free-visit.net/index.php/fr/23-modules-
positions-50/building-entrance-webgl-2)

------
kylebgorman
I am building libraries for predicting which pronunciation of a homograph to
use for in a text-to-speech application. E.g., when we go to synthesize
"bass", should we use the pronunciation that rhymes with "mace" or "pass"?

------
wingerlang
I am basically taking "notes" in the form of an iOS application from language-
learning material.

E.g. I needed a chart of some rules in the language, so I added it in the app.
Needed a way to search substrings in a wordlist, added it to the app.
Flashcards etc.

------
haraball
I'm building a quick feedback/correction web app for stuff you write. I'm also
building a nap/meditation app that tracks your heart rate.

Both projects are built with React, with a side goal of staying up to date on
the latest developments there.

------
jmakov
I was frustrated with Selenium community so I started selenium-utils and
selenium-components. The first deals with advanced Selenium acrobatics whereas
the last provides a set of components (page object) that are commonly used
(datepicker etc.).

------
jasonlfunk
I'm currently building an React Native app for my
[http://ForeignNumbers.com](http://ForeignNumbers.com) application. I have
experience with React but React Native is a pretty different beast.

------
natzar
Problem1: I want to travel, but I don't know where. Problem2: Skyscanner's
search-everywhere feature doesn't help 100% on that.

Project: Events + Flights + Airbnb. Events for now are Film festivals, music
festivals and sports events.

Check it out: www.natzar.co

~~~
trillf0rd
Nice work, cool project and I could see this being really useful planning
trips with friends / SOs. The first thing that comes to mind for me as a
consumer is wanting more filters for Airbnb room types, hotels, flight stops,
etc.

------
pierotofy
WebODM, a free, user-friendly, extendable application and API for drone image
processing.
[https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/WebODM](https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/WebODM)

------
marcocampana
I'm working on deeplearninghq.com a HN clone focused on Deep Learning with the
goal to be a (community driven) resource that helps people to be up to date
with the latest news, research, papers and discussions on DL. ETA ~2 weeks

------
liquidise
3 ongoing projects:

1: Write 1 blog post a week on blog.benroux.me

2: Continue to improve automatic spam moderation with detextion.io

3: Write an iOS dictionary app that tracks every word you look up and sends
you words every week from that list to help you remember them moving forward

------
sharp11
I'm building a very opinionated iOS app for learning Spanish. It teaches
primarily by ear and in context (rich conversations).
[http://supercocoapp.com](http://supercocoapp.com)

------
mandeepj
Building an online 3d try room -
[http://sensestyles.com/tryroom](http://sensestyles.com/tryroom)

Some minor issues are pending but besides that we are able to wire up end to
end flow

------
technothirst
Project: [http://upmilk.com/](http://upmilk.com/) app design microservice by
reusing UI elements to ship apps faster and cheaper.

Problem: design and dev cycle of an app is too long.

------
Odenwaelder
Improving the User Experience for Life Sciences:
[http://www.pistoiaalliance.org/projects/uxls/](http://www.pistoiaalliance.org/projects/uxls/)

------
drakonka
At work I am working on a video game; at home I am working on a snail
simulation.

------
ollerac
I'm building Artisfy, a marketplace where anyone can hire digital illustrators
for any project:

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

I'm a solo founder using the Meteor.js stack.

------
techaddict009
[https://docstub.com/](https://docstub.com/) \- Document/Presentation sharing
portal where people can share their content and earn money.

Kind of youtube for documents.

------
un-devmox
Project: an app that reads pdf table data from blood panels to better display
trends in values.

Problem: it sucks to have to flip around various labs to compare results.

Also, trying to make a better search engine for fine-art that is for sale.

------
fiftyacorn
Im currently trying to decide whether to scrap my gps heatmap website and move
on, or redesign it with better features -

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

------
Yahivin
Problem: Whimsical, web based, zine based, Windows 95 themed operating systems
just aren't what they used to be.

Project: [https://whimsy.space](https://whimsy.space)

------
hullsean
Setting up MySQL to redshift replication pipeline using Kafka. Debezium
provides a stream interface from binlogs to Kafka. Cool stuff.

Need to build a monitor or component to handle missing on delete cascade
records.

------
dbremner
I am writing an interpreter for Gedanken
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443298)).

------
dev1n
Working on a book to explain the history of Russian disinformation campaigns
and its effects on the 2016 election. Obviously still trying to figure out a
good title. Gladly taking suggestions!

------
ybv
A set of tools to engage citizens and make politicians aware of the biggest
issues in local neighborhoods.

[https://goo.gl/c61b9S](https://goo.gl/c61b9S)

------
justinzollars
Linear regression as a service with integrations to S3 and Salesforce.

------
lutorm
3d-printing new battery cases and replacing old batteries with new (Li-ion)
for my old electronics for which it is no longer possible, or at least not
cost effective, to buy new batteries.

~~~
biztos
I wonder if there might be a way to do this in a long-tail way, like maybe
people send you their old batteries and you 3D-scan and print them new ones.

Good luck with the project!

------
cjr
I'm currently working on a website screenshot API. It also converts webpages
to PDF.

You can check it out at [https://urlbox.io](https://urlbox.io).

~~~
NicoJuicy
I did something similar ( simple hack really), that uses phantom
[https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService](https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService)

It gives a screenshot of the url, with optional variables ( height, width and
onlyFrontPage)

How are you doing it?

------
christiangenco
The stuff under "up next", from the top down:
[http://christian.gen.co/projects](http://christian.gen.co/projects)

------
module0000
Working my day job, a side django project, but mostly... trading futures(ES &
ZB) for the past 3 months. Hopefully if you ask again in 3 months, only that
last answer is there.

------
nautical
Recetly launched [https://centi.in](https://centi.in) , alternative analytics
with "ask questions to your data" approach .

------
wordpressdev
Brushing up Python skills, did a scraping project where data was fetched from
semi-structured site and tabulated into Excel worksheet.

Doing keyword research for a niche site project on the side.

------
Luuseens
Working on my blog where I talk about C# in the AWS Cloud, and working on my
Python skills to try and land a remote job for a US company.. A man can dream
:)

------
abuzafor
I'am working on building a interactive Website with lots of JS and CSS3
animation and The platform built with Drupal 7.

Problem: I'am quite new in Drupal platform.

------
joshuakcockrell
A color palette generator that searches palettes from dribbble.com

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

------
purrcat259
Working on a video mosaicer. Gist of it is:

Extract frames from video

Replace each AxB tile in each frame with another frame which has the closest
average colour

Rebuild the video from each mosaiced frame

------
Mattlok
I had an idea for a deal aggregator, put together an MVP to test it out:

[https://www.swipe.sale](https://www.swipe.sale)

------
arypurnomoz
Tools to track shipping from Indonesian courier

[https://berdu.id/cek-resi](https://berdu.id/cek-resi)

------
widforss
I'm trying to write my own A* pathfinding implementation in PostgreSQL using
the Swedish Geological Surveys data as a graph.

------
kidproquo
Hardware project. Stream guitar and microphone via wifi to record on iOS and
Android. Kickstarter launch is planned for July 2017.

www.riffpod.io

------
tixocloud
Problem: Internet/phone access while travelling

Project: Building an Android-based cellphone that people can use while they
are travelling

------
visakanv
I'm working on a writing project to write 1,000,000 words, just for the sake
of it. Currently 66.2% of the way through.

------
losteverything
1\. Eisenhower Interstate System miniture sets

------
rubenrails
Working on a planner app focused in mindfulness for the modern-day worker and
how to slow down, simplify and de-stress.

------
clonq
Conformed microservices [http://microfabrik.com](http://microfabrik.com)

------
mezod
great initiative! Always great to see what people are building!

I am working on a minimalist habit tracker
([https://everydaycheck.com](https://everydaycheck.com))! Focus is on keeping
it as simple as possible while helping people form new habits, and basically,
get things done.

------
jeshwanth
I am working on a self balancing two wheeled robot, based on EduMPI, building
on top of my new Beaglebone blue.

------
AlexAMEEE
I'm currently writing a shitty CRUD job board, because we don't have enough
job boards already.

I ran out of ideas...

------
gm-conspiracy
Animatronic "face" for trees (primarily Christmas trees).

It sings Christmas songs and tells Christmas-themed jokes.

------
pomber
Two small projects:

\- A deck of planning poker cards as an offline PWA

\- An app that auto-generate tweets based on all the tweets from a user

------
Slaul
Working on a spend management tool geared toward understanding and managing
spend on SAAS services.

~~~
joshdotsmith
Do you have anything you can share about this? I'm very interested to see and
am happy to provide feedback.

~~~
Slaul
I'm only about 60% done my MVP, probably a few weeks more before I am ready to
put anything out there (just working evenings and the odd weekend atm).

If you are interested, send me an email and I'll forward you a link when I
have something a little more ready to go!

ben(dot)pottle(at)gmail.com

------
andersthue
I am working on validating a customer succes management tool for enterprise
customers.

------
koliber
Signupper.net, a a CMS for managing web application accounts signup forms.

------
Liron
24/7 Instant Personalized Dating Advice

[https://hermes.social](https://hermes.social)

A chatroom that instantly connects you to a dating expert for help with common
issues. E.g. getting your ex back, writing a Tinder message, or dating
anxiety.

------
conductr
Building an aquaponics greenhouse, wanted an outside hobby

------
grassfedcode
a browser-based frontend to gdb

[https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui](https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui)

------
idlewords
Trying to organize labor in the tech industry.

------
wito
Almost ready: postscriptum.co

sends messages after your death

------
wakkaflokka
I've had a project on my mind for a long time now. Just for my own
entertainment value.

I wrote a Python script a while back that would take two people's Google
Location data (from Google Takeouts), and find out where they've crossed
paths. I found out that my girlfriend and I were only a mile apart, within 5
minutes of each other, two years before we met (she was gracious enough to
download her location data and share it with me..). It was a horribly,
horribly, __horribly __written script, that I made when I was just learning
Python. But the results were pretty fun.

I've since wanted to rewrite things and extend this idea to an entire 'agent'
system, where you can import data from any source that lets you download it
(Facebook, LinkedIn, Mint, Google, etc.), so that you can 'recreate yourself'.
In other words:

me.photos(date='2016-01-01') would bring up all the photos I took on that
date. Or me.location(date='2016-01-01') would bring up all the places I was
that day. Or me.texts() would show all the texts I've sent via SMS or
Messenger, or Hangouts, or whatever source I've allowed importing of.

But the most exciting idea for me, would be to make this into a life story of
sorts. On a map, animate what places I went, who I sent texts too (and what
the contents were), what I spent money on, etc. And allow me to do analytics
on all of my data - where am I most likely to spend money on snacks (mint +
location)? How fast do I tend to walk when I'm at work (fit data + location)?
What's my favorite grocery store? Who do I text the most when I'm at the bars
(sms/messenger/hangouts + location)? What time of day do I write the most
angry emails (sentiment analysis + Google email data)?

Then if you have friends who don't care if you know everything about them, let
them import agents and somehow have them interact. Recreate an entire world.
Then somehow import this data into Unity or some other game engine, so you can
recreate your virtual self. Watch yourself move through life from a third
person view. Or first person. Whatever.

Given the sensitive nature of data like this, I figured I'd write code for
this and somehow do all the processing locally. But I'm not a software
engineer and really haven't been able to move forward with this idea. It'd
really be for nothing other than my own amusement.

It's funny how, after a long day at work, I'll sit down and be determined to
finally start materializing some of them, but then realize that all the
excitement I had about the ideas in my head isn't enough to overcome the RSI
in my wrists, or mental fatigue from working all day.

Maybe at some point I'll finally get a move on with it.

~~~
madamelic
I actually wrote a rough version of this for my fiance and I.

I never finished the analyzation but I had saved all the texts we had sent in
our 6 year relationship.

I would totally be on board with this. I was freaked when I saw what Google
was saving on me without asking them to (Everywhere I ever went with my phone.
Imagine what they _don 't_ show me)

------
jrkatz
Project: a lightweight budget app for my android device. I couldn't find
anything that didn't want to sync with my bank account, and I'm sure not going
to do that. Ideally, I open the app, it opens quickly, I punch in a $#, and
close it.

So far this is going pretty well and while it isn't ready for public
consumption I've been dogfooding dev versions for a month and successfully
built a habit of using it, so it will work, at least for me!

Three problems: 1. I am not an android developer (yet)

2\. there are difficult questions surrounding how to change a budget in the
middle of a running period, for example two weeks into a month, altering the
budget from $400/mo to $50/wk -- Those intervening two weeks must be handled
neatly. What about dealing with time zones? A user could set up a budget to
turn over on the first of every month, enter a neighboring timezone and spend
money on the 31st while it's already the 1st in their primary time zone. This
is tough, and how that is handled matters a lot to questions about what
happens if a user permanently changes their time zone after setting up a
budget. This is a fun data structures & UX problem.

3\. Getting home from a long day of programming at work and wanting to
continue programming is not easy.

Another project: Expression pedal router. Effects pedals that accept
expression input are nice, and if you have more than one and want to control
more than one with a single expression pedal in a live setting, you will be
doing a lot of crawling, plugging & unplugging in the middle of a set. Even in
a non-live setting this is a pain, especially if the pedalboard is crowded.
The solution is a routing box that all the pedals can be plugged into as well
as the expression pedal, and rout the signal from the expression pedal to an
effects pedal selected by a rotary switch.

Unfortunately it is not that simple, because having the expression jack filled
will alter the sound of the non-selected pedals, and with that circuit open
will have whatever setting is controlled by the expression pedal fully dry or
wet. The real solution is a much more crowded active circuit that drives a
network of SSRs to either pass any given effects pedal through to the
expression pedal or to a local potentiometer to replace whatever knob on the
pedal is being overridden by the expression input.

That's a lot more expensive and can't be effectively hand-wired in a
reasonably sized enclosure, so the problem I face is taking the dive and
ordering the prototype boards, but I'm afraid to waste the money if it turns
out I actually don't know what I'm doing laying out circuits with CAD systems.
Instead of having my nice expression pedal router I've been sitting on this
project for a few months for fear of throwing away $120 on (mostly) components
& PCBs.

------
syngrog66
a new Linux PAM login/sshd auth backend, in mostly C

------
tmilard
ff

------
tmilard
dd

------
demonshalo
Prime Factorization - Just as a fun side project. I do not expect that I will
ever be able to solve it but at least once a week I learn something new about
math!

I've Been working on it for 3 years now and It's getting more and more fun
every day. In fact, I have rediscovered so many things on my own that I
thought never existed. My biggest "Eureka" moment was when I discovered
factorization via the difference of squares method on my own by using 2D
geometry. I previously did not know that such a method existed nor that GNFS
is based on it. Later on I discovered that a composite number is actually a
perfect square less a function of a triangular number which lead me to develop
a method of factorization that is rather cool but unfortunately still not good
enough. I have had literally dozens of these moments where I find a certain
relationship between numbers that I later on find out is some sort of
rule/conjecture that was made hundreds of years ago by some mathematician!

To some of you these might be really trivial and well known facts that you
learned in school. For me however, it is something I take pride in as math was
by far my worst subject growing up and I actually dropped out of college
because of math. The last math course I took was in high school over 10 years
ago.

I have a new found love for mathematics and algebra in general and I would
encourage anyone reading this to pick a problem and try working on it just for
the fun of it :D

~~~
gavanwoolery
I used to spend a good deal of my time looking for patterns in prime numbers -
and similarly re-discovered many older theorems. It is an addictive activity
for certain :)

~~~
demonshalo
Indeed it is :D

------
0b01
I'm an undergraduate at UMD working remotely. As a side project, I am working
with a friend on [https://txtpen.com](https://txtpen.com)

txtpen provides highlights and context comments for websites. It is like
medium for non-medium sites. Most importantly it follows the W3C Annotation
Standard.

It is so close to finish. If you have a tech blog and would like to be test it
please email me at ricky@txtpen.com

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks in advance

~~~
jawrainey
How's your side project differ from
[https://hypothes.is](https://hypothes.is), and how come it's not possible to
highlight parts of another highlighted piece of text?

Good job for following the W3C Annotation standard!

~~~
0b01
Thanks for checking it out. txtpen differs from hypothesis in 2 aspects.

1\. Full publisher control. Publishers can moderate and pin highlights on
their sites. However, all annotations can be retrieved via RESTful API as per
W3C standards.

2\. Only pick the best highlights to value add the reader. Otherwise
annotation is nothing more than digital graffiti.

Also, we strive to be the best annotation service out there. The load speed is
within 150ms compared to 2080ms of hypothesis. And we plan to cut that by half
to within 60ms which is below perception threshold. The experience will be
magical.

------
bbcbasic
My side project is an app that will get transport data for my city and show
you the next buses for your stop. It is a nice excuse to use React Native
which I am quite enjoying learning.

------
brndnmtthws
I'm making YouTube videos, like this one:
[https://youtu.be/912WN4gUBCs](https://youtu.be/912WN4gUBCs)

~~~
darkstar999
Please wear a helmet.

------
azdev
[http://www.Reminde.rs](http://www.Reminde.rs) \- Recurring SMS and Email
Reminders

------
foundersgrid
4 years in and I'm still working on my daily newsletter curating the best tech
& startup guides: FoundersGrid.com

------
whatnotests
Money laundering via Bitcoin.

------
Findeton
Something something VR. Won't disclose what's about just yet.

