

Ask HN: Ideas for weekend projects? - CGamesPlay

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any idea pools for weekend projects, or if anyone has any small projects that they haven't implemented yet. I have a lot of down time over the next two weeks, and I would love to put the time to good, creative use. Note, I'm not looking for startup ideas, although the two are obviously not mutually exclusive.
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bobds
Try this:

"A home for ideas by people who lack time, money, or skills."

<http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/>

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noahc
What is your goal?

Is it to learn a new technology?

Pick up chicks?

Be featured on RWW, Wired, HN, Reddit, etc, etc?

It seems like a good formula for hit and run success is popular new
feature/gimmick from facebook, twitter, google, youtube add your own twist to
it and then watch the traffic come in for 2 days and then die off.

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photon_off
I've got 2 ideas for you, which I would absolutely do if I had the time to do
them.

1) Feedback Loop: Users submit URLs and ask for feedback on them. Each time
they provide a feedback for an other submission, they get to view a feedback
provided on theirs (hence the loop).

You can fine tune the system by having feedback receivers rate the feedback
they've recieved (better feedback = more points for the person who wrote it =
they get to see more feedback on their post or their post gets pushed to top).

I think it's a beautiful and self-enforced "you scratch my back, I'll scratch
yours" idea.

2) Graffiti: This is a bookmarklet that allows a user to draw on top of a
webpage (probably requires transparent flash). Of course, they can view other
people's graffitis as well.

This would be pretty awesome, and has a lot of game aspects to it that would
make it extremely addictive. For example, you could notify a user if anybody
writes over their graffiti (eg, starting turf wars), and you could keep a
record board for "most pages graffiti'd" and "most area covered", etc.

I feel like there's a very real possibility this could go viral and stay
popular. And, I've got an awesome domain name for it. E-mail me if you're
interested.

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thesystemis
for (2) you might want to checkout webmarker:

<http://webmarker.me/>

<http://vimeo.com/10427062>

a firefox addon that allows you to draw on top of web pages in a persistant
manner.

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datageek
Build a better chess rating system and enter your system into the following
competition: <http://kaggle.com/chess>.

You may want to use machine learning techniques, which you can learn using the
Andrew Ng's Stanford lectures
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&feature=channel)).

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iamgabeaudick
Reverse Craigslist - Allow a user to enter an anonymous Craigslist email
address (that they had previously replied to) and their city, and then return
the post that contained the email.

The reason being: When looking for something on Craigslist, I often send
similar emails to several potential sellers. But then, when they reply, I have
no way of knowing which posting was theirs (and the link to it). (Of course,
you could contain the link to the posting you're referring to in each email,
but that's a hassle that I'm sure most forget to do.)

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vbhavsar
You can just enter the url of the Craigslist post at the end of your mail.

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retroafroman
I've got lots of little ideas I haven't had time to implement (most of them
are pretty goofy). Tell us more about your skills and what you'd like to work
on if you have any ideas-games, webapps, open source stuff, whatever.

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CGamesPlay
My skills are pretty typical: I'm versed in the web technologies, C++, and
.NET. Notably I'm not familiar with XNA or Flash, but the underlying
technology isn't really important to me.

I just want to do something creative that is "interesting". If there's a novel
idea for a game, or a utility, or a visualization, or something else entirely;
I'd like to hear it.

~~~
dkarl
Visualization for C++ code metrics, specialized for C++, would be interesting.
The C++ code metric visualizations I've seen have hooked into visualization
front-ends designed for Java code.

P.S. This probably isn't a weekend project, but you might get something useful
done in a week.

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d4ft
Sidebar for gmail that recommends quora responses based on email content

