

Ask HN: What are you working on (hacking)? - samratjp

Thought it would be helpful for HN'ers to see what others are up to and potentially find cool projects to collaborate on.<p>Bonus points for keeping it under a tweet + demo (or github,etc).
======
njl
My Django hosting service. I looked at Heroku and thought, "I want that for
Python." Yesterday, I got most of the http request path finished. There is
some node.js work left, and I still need to do some more work on Varnish. I'm
hoping to get to the Postgresql stuff next week, then on to the website and
API...

~~~
maushu
Funny, I thought the same thing but with JavaScript instead.

~~~
nicholaides
Heroku has Node.js support.
[http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_experimental/)

------
matt1
I'm working on a web-based pixel perfect mockup tool called jMockups, which is
built on top of HTML5's canvas element. Most web designers use Photoshop to do
this right now, but Photoshop makes it much harder than it should be (the UX,
lack of common HTML elements, difficult to share, etc).

An early alpha version will be available in a week or two. If you're
interested in helping test it, shoot me an email: matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com or
leave a comment below.

~~~
wdewind
i've been thinking about doing something like this, would def be interested in
testing - contact info in profile.

------
vosper
My ongoing quest to make money predicting horse races. So far I've not made a
dime, and don't really expect to, but the faint hope of future monetary
rewards keeps me going.

The real payoff has been that in the process I've learned all sorts of things:
about Python, data mining, working with large datasets, machine learning...

~~~
user24
I've been thinking of trying to write a machine learning app to do just that.
Any hints?

~~~
vosper
I didn't implement the machine learning algorithms for myself, because there
are some really good packages out there and I know I don't have the smarts to
better them.

Keep in mind that I didn't really have any success:

There seem to be two main ML packages, Weka and Orange. I personally preferred
Orange, it has a nice graph-based UI for linking various components together;
when you've figured that out it can script in Python. Also Orange makes it
easy to test your data set against various different learning systems, and
compare the performance. Standard testing procedures like n-fold cross-
validation are built-in and really simple to use.

Also you need data. I'm pretty sure more is always better. I actually started
with greyhounds* and skimmed mine (in Python use BeautifulSoup) from a
website. I tried to come up with various statistics about the recent
performance of the dogs. Unfortunately nothing I tried made the ML algorithms
predict better than a random choice. A friend who's into gambling suggested
greyhound racing was quite random by nature, so I've switched to horses
recently. I'm still building that dataset, now trying out MongoDB just for
fun.

I think the trouble is that you can have as much raw data as you like, but
generating the predictive statistics requires a lot of knowledge of the
problem domain. I'm not actually into gambling at all so I don't know if the
track conditions are important, how much breeding or the age of the animal
really matters etc... This made it hard to pick likely stats (and rebuilding
datasets and retraining learners can take some time).

For horses there's a lot more information in forums and racing guides etc, so
I'd start with horses. Just make sure you've tested your predictions with
pretend bets before you commit any real money :)

Good luck!

*I began with greyhounds because of a dissertation posted on reddit where the authors suggested they'd had some success with a neural network and gave quite a lot of detail. That piqued my curiosity, and my initial version just re-implemented their work.

EDITED: For clarity

~~~
user24
Thankyou for the detailed reply.

Yeah I hated using weka at uni. I'll look into Orange.

"I don't know if the track conditions are important, how much breeding or the
age of the animal really matters etc."

Yeah, feature selection is a tough one. I'd thought that the system would pick
up on good indicators by itself, but it might well be that that has to be a
manual decision.

"Just make sure you've tested your predictions with pretend bets before you
commit any real money"

haha, yeah absolutely. My plan was to train/test until the accuracy seemed
good enough (using monte carlo) and then run the system on live data with
pretend money for a few months to see what the actual performance is like,
before actually investing real cash.

Do you have a link to the greyhound topic? I searched on google but couldn't
find it.

~~~
noizd
Genetic algorithms can be used to determine the (close to) best combination of
features from all the features you have access to.

~~~
vosper
I don't have a problem so much with having myriad statistics and picking the
right ones, but not knowing which stats to generate in the first place from my
database of results.

For example, I assume that a dogs past performance must be some indicator of
its chances in the next race, but how do I account for the chances of dogs who
didn't complete their last race? What weighting is the last race worth,
compared to the ones before (perhaps it had a bad race, but on the whole is
running well).

I just don't know how to optimise for those sort of things. I have a rough
idea that some combination of genetic programming and GA could help - it would
be an interesting challenge to builds software that knew how to apply a
selection of mathematical functions to my data, and then breed the results
like a GA. But it's tricky, I'd have thought.

I've been treating the ML classifiers and learners as something of a black
box, perhaps a more rigorous approach is required.

~~~
user24
"software that knew how to apply a selection of mathematical functions to my
data, and then breed the results like a GA"

yeah, I'd envisaged using the accuracy of the neural net as the fitness
function for a GA that mutates input parameters. It's another layer of
complexity, and I've no clue how you'd start, but it seems like it would work.

In other words - use a GA to select features, using how well the NN trained on
that set of features performs as the fitness function.

------
transatlantic
Journalism, with a focus on early-stage technology companies. Entrepreneurs
are doing amazing things with small teams and relatively little capital, but
the stories and lessons seem mostly lost in the stream of tech news about
iPhones, the oldest Twitter user, or Facebook's privacy policies. I think
there's a small but significant market for passionate, well-researched,
educational content like this. I'll find out soon enough.

~~~
Concours
This sounds good, care to share your website url and may be the kind of
startups/tech area (ideal profile) you'd like to write about?

~~~
transatlantic
A simple version 1 comes out Sunday. I'll post it to HN then. The focus is on
companies no older than two years, and generally on those with consumer-
oriented products. But beyond that, they could be funded or bootstrapped,
located in Silicon Valley or Pittsburgh or anywhere else, and led by startup
veterans or total newcomers. Amazing stuff is happening everywhere; you just
need to look for it.

~~~
user24
Another reader right here. This is what I used to read techcrunch for.

------
Vivtek
[http://search.cpan.org/~michael/Class-
Declarative-0.06/lib/C...](http://search.cpan.org/~michael/Class-
Declarative-0.06/lib/Class/Declarative.pm)

A declarative framework for Perl that lets you set up complex data structures
and code in an easy-to-read format.

A complete _working_ example GUI program, using a not-yet-published set of
semantic classes:

    
    
      use Class::Declarative qw(Wx::Declarative);
    
      dialog (xsize=250, ysize=110) "Wx::Declarative dialog sample"
        field celsius (size=100, x=20, y=20) "0"
        button celsius (x=130, y=20) "Celsius" { $^fahrenheit = ($^celsius / 100.0) * 180 + 32; }
        field fahrenheit (size=100, x=20, y=50) "32"
        button fahrenheit (x=130, y=50) "Fahrenheit" { $^celsius = (($^fahrenheit - 32) / 180.0) * 100; }

~~~
cabalamat
I did something similar to that once -- a program that compiled GUI
descriptions into a runable Python class, which could then be subclassed to
provide functionality. The syntax looked like this:

    
    
      window @MyBigWindow "My Big Window" {
       menuBar {
          menu "File" {
             menuItem @New "New"
             menuItem @Open "Open..."
             menuItem @Save "Save"
             menuItem @Exit "Exit"
          }
          menu "Edit" {
             menuItem @Copy "Copy"
             menuItem @Cut "Cut"
             menuItem @Paste "Paste"
          }
       }
       rowLayout {
          button "Button 1"
          button "Button 2"
          button "Button 3"
       }
      }
    

Laying out GUI components was done with the rowLayout, colLayout and table
containers. The subclass would contain code to be executed for @New, @Open,
@Save, etc.

~~~
Vivtek
There's some similar stuff for wx in Perl and Python, too - I've just been
taking the time to (try to) be systematic about making things fast and easy to
specify. I really, really get tired of coding all that stuff by hand every
damn time - it's one of the major things that made me get out of GUI work in
the first place, back in the Stone Age.

I've got big plans, and since it's not expected to pay any bills for a while,
I can afford to think things through sufficiently. I just hope I won't drop it
entirely.

It's been fun so far, though.

~~~
cabalamat
> _I really, really get tired of coding all that stuff by hand every damn time
> - it's one of the major things that made me get out of GUI work in the first
> place_

Absolutely. Having sensible and configurable defaults for everything is the
way to go.

------
singular
<http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/terse.html>

A programming language where syntax and semantics are manipulable at run-time
as well as compile-time and where you can define grammars in-line and use them
immediately. I also intend to integrate the concepts of pattern calculus -
<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3695> \- to permit extreme levels of
flexibility in the language.

It's a huge project and I'm right at the start of it. But no matter how hard I
try I can't get away from the desire to work on language design and compiler
development. It's just my thing, and the wonderful thing about hacking is you
can just do it :-)

~~~
akkartik
I see you switched from racket to Go. Care to talk about your experiences?

I've been playing with making the implementation of arc more timeless (e.g.
<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12057>,
<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11864>)

~~~
singular
I just found namespaces in Racket too painful (see [this blog post][1]), I
spent hours and hours trying to do something I felt ought to be very simple,
i.e. sharing a namespace between different files, yet Racket just utterly
refused to do it. I RTFM but found it utterly confusing and nothing I tried,
including their examples, worked. I asked on the freenode IRC channel, and
even then nobody could help me.

After a while I gave up, maybe I am simply not a good enough coder to
understand how Racket namespaces work, but either way I worried that if this
one aspect of the language is extremely difficult, what else am I going to
uncover in the course of the project? On that basis I decided it'd be wise to
switch.

Initially I was going to switch to C for portability as I am also working on a
parser generator, singular[2], which I thought could be useful to people even
before I write it in Terse (I intend to self-host and bring singular into that
too), however I worried that the many pitfalls that C brings to the party,
e.g. the ease of segfaulting, null pointers, etc. and its lack of abstractions
would overly slow me down, so I thought Go would be a better option,
especially as it seemed tastefully designed.

My experience of Go so far is one of great admiration and enjoyment, it really
is a lovely language, nicely low-level and low-key yet still providing many
useful abstractions including proper interfaces, i.e. by implementing the
methods of an interface you can treat it as that interface without having to
explicitly inherit from it.

To be honest my decision to switch to Go is probably not that defensible as
not many people are using it so the initial reason (portability) for switching
to a lower-level language is less of an excuse now, so if I'm being honest I
have to admit that I wanted a fast language that played nice with Linux (not
that Racket wasn't either of these), and I wanted to play with Go, which kinda
overrode other considerations.

Most recently I've been very interested in implementing [pattern calculus][3]
in the language somehow, as it provides enormous flexibility and offers a
formal underpinning to a more fundamental means of expressing abstractions
than oo, functional, etc. - in fact my ambition is to have an abstraction
which can encompass these paradigms in itself if you want, i.e. you can
implement oo or functional or whatever you want. Obviously I am very inspired
by lisp in this and many other regards.

The main thing is getting stuff done, this idea has been floating around in my
mind for at least a couple years and I've changed my mind about things many
times (and will carry on of course when necessary) causing me to throw away
work more than once, so obviously I am somewhat focused on actually writing
code and getting closer to actually having something rather than just the
idea.

Luckily I am pretty damn certain about the core ideas in the language
(flexible syntax, the use of pattern calculus, etc.) so that looks to be quite
likely.

Anyway, it's really early days, but I am utterly committed to getting this
done as I want the language for myself, want it to not be a toy language, and
want it to actually do these things I think would be awesome, even if (as is
most likely as with any personal language project) no one else uses it :-)

I know I'm digressing from your question, but have to say that I really think
one of the most wonderful aspects of programming is the ability to just hack
on stuff, no matter how crazy, with just a cheap computer, some coffee and a
willingness to put in the time. So glad I was born in a time where that was
possible.

[1]:[http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/2010/06/28/Racket-Namespaces-
Suck...](http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/2010/06/28/Racket-Namespaces-Suck.html)

[2]:<http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/singular.html>

[3]:<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3695>

~~~
akkartik
No defense necessary. All the best! Let me know if I can help. I find talking
to someone helps me avoid paralysis, that great obstacle to doing.

(email in profile)

------
Zak
I'm working on text classification. I have a decent classifier that's
especially suited to author identification. I can think of a few good uses for
it; the first one I'm trying to commercialize is academic anti-cheating.

~~~
tocomment
That sounds fascinating. How did you come up with the algorithms to use?

~~~
Zak
I experimented with existing text classification algorithms for an author
identification project I was doing for fun. What I'm currently using is
somewhere between KNN and SVM, but I'm not done tweaking it yet. I'm also
working on boosting results using different feature sets.

~~~
user24
you might try looking at the BLEU metric. It's designed to test similarity
between a machine-translated text and a human-translated one, but it could be
a good starting point for detecting plagiarism too.

------
herrherr
<http://www.getmetricmail.com>

In one sentence: Get your Google Analytics data straight to your inbox.

Build as part of my dissertation. Build on Google App Engine.

~~~
duck
Great looking site and very easy to use. Obviously the report is a lot nicer
than that Google one that you can get emailed in PDF format, but what other
advantages are there?

To me the "best" setup would be to avoid the PDF and get the report directly
in my mailbox. I know that would require unique graphics for each email, but
is that the only barrier from going with that approach?

~~~
herrherr
Thanks for the feedback. The email-only option is definitely on our list, it
will be a bit tricky due to the different mail clients but still doable.

~~~
pstinnett
I agree. I recently unsubscribed from Metric Mail because I didn't want to
look at PDFs of my analytics. I want them right in the email. Once you push
that feature I'll likely resubscribe!

------
sendos
<http://soundkey.com> : Will ideally become something like the Wikipedia of
sounds (i.e. a central repository/global reference about anything that has to
do with sounds)

~~~
photon_off
Really cool idea. I have some feedback after visiting your site. "wikipedia of
sounds" is not at all how I would describe it. It's more like "twitter for
sounds".

When I arrived at your site I was really quite confused as to what the hell
soundkey did. The main part of the site shows a big list of social networks,
and says "use soundkey here" ... Ok... but what exactly does soundkey do?

I would focus more on the aspect that you can record sounds and then link to
them (or embed them). It's really that simple, but you've managed to
overcomplicate it and it took me way longer than it should have to figure out
the following: Soundkey lets me record a sound, then link to it.

My suggestion: put the record tool right smack in the middle of the front
page. Make it the primary purpose of the site. That is, I should be able to go
to "soundkey.com" and conveniently record and share a sound, rather than
seeing a splash page. You don't visit bit.ly and see a whole page explaining
the benefits of short links, and where you can use shorter links. You see a
textbox that you can immediately use.

At any rate, this all might sound very critical, but I love your idea. Put
that recording thing front and center, emphasize "record sounds and share
them" [twitter for sounds], and your users will figure out the rest.

~~~
sendos
Thanks for the feedback!

We are currently working with a UX expert to help us re-design the look & feel
and the functionality of the website, and the issues you bring up have been
brought to our attention and will be addressed in the next iteration of the
website.

(We currently do have a "How this Works" section on the front page that says
"Record Sound, Get SoundKey, Use Anywhere" with an explanation of what that
means, but I guess it's not clear enough because lots of people complain about
it. Hopefully the updated website will make things much more clear in much
less time)

------
Derferman
Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard. More at
<http://www.stashboard.org>. Also hacking on some small App Engine sites.

------
iuguy
In my spare time, working on a game for the 8-bit ZX Spectrum.

~~~
SteveC
How do you do your development? Do you work on the actual hardware or use an
emulator?

------
nir
SMS gateway running on an Android device. Lets you setup an SMS service
without messing with hardware/software installations.

Particularly useful in developing regions with no Twilio/Textmarks/etc and
strong need for SMS apps.

* _Looking for beta testers_ * (anywhere in the world...)

<http://wiki.github.com/niryariv/txtgate/>

------
bonquesha99
<http://madlibber.com/> \- Anonymous user generated madlibs. I can't stop
working on this [adjective] app!

<http://webchiever.com/> \- Web achievements

<http://inquiryapp.com/> \- Hosted FAQs for your apps

~~~
photon_off
madlibber.com is such an awesome idea. You need to take some time to populate
(or copy) good mad libs and artificially vote them up so that it's not a ghost
town when people arrive.

Here's my contribution: <http://madlibber.com/madlibs/21>

Update: I just created an account with inqueryapp -- I cannot add a category.
The AJAX response is a 500, you might want to check that out. Up to that, the
experience was rather enjoyable and I was really looking forward to creating a
FAQ page using your service.

~~~
bonquesha99
That's a good idea, I'll throw a bunch of samples up there. Now, I need to
figure out how I should display a tag list or cloud on the homepage to
navigate. Probably should make a little "syntax help" link when creating
madlib stories too.

Weird, I can't reproduce that inquiry error and Hoptoad didn't catch anything.
Let me know if you run into that again.

Thanks for your feedback and contribution!

------
ezl
<http://quotesentinel.com> \-- Text message alerts for stocks.

I used to not want to leave my desk for lunch because I'd need to come back if
the market moved. I wrote a script that would tell me if the market moved past
a certain threshold and would text me to come back.

I was sort of shocked that it didn't exist in the wild (or at least wasn't
easy to find) so I decided to see if I could make a web app of it.

Hoping to "launch" in the next 2 weeks. Would love testers.

------
jwoodbridge
a small note site. Pages are written in markdown, and then displayed in HTML.
It exports to plain text, and syncs with Simplenote. The goal is a super low
barrier to entry. I want it to be a middle ground between my thoughts and my
hard drive.

I'm also working on my first iPad app.

------
zephyrfalcon
A little rule engine (in Scheme), on top of which I can then build interactive
fiction, card games, etc.

------
Vindexus
<http://vaginagame.com>

I know it's stupid but I can't stop working on it. Apparently my 7 year old
mind finds it hilarious.

~~~
sandipagr
it's hilarious! am sure it's something that can get tons of social buzz.

------
cabalamat
I am designing a language I call ShowMe.

The main idea behind ShowMe is "viewability", by which I mean that every
object in a running ShowMe program can be navigated and displayed (and
potentially altered) in a Viewer. By object I mean every entity within the
system; ShowMe will be a pure object-oriented language.

There will be multiple Views, so the user can view the same data in multiple
ways (for for example a table of numbers could be displayed as ascii text, or
as an HTML table or as a graph). One of the views will be a low-level ascii
string, from which the object can be re-created; this format can therefore be
used for serialisation. User-defined classes will be able to define their own
views, or re-implement existing views for the new class.

Like Clojure, a lot of data structures in ShowMe will be immutable.

ShowMe will not be a pure functional language, but it will be possible to
program in it in a functional style.

There will be 2 syntaxes for writing ShowMe programs: one based on Lisp, the
other similar to C. The C-like syntax will be compiled into the Lisp-like
syntax.

------
kno
I’m working on building a better Business search service with a strong
emphasis on mailing list.

The idea is to give small to mid size businesses a tool to generate
geographically and/or category based well targeted mailing list for their
marketing campaign.

Mailing list are generally huge files pretty much unusable by a small business
owner with a constant contact account, we are looking to change that.

~~~
mleonhard
A friend of mine runs <http://www.doorknobads.com/>, selling physical adverts
by neighborhood. Your geographically targeted email marketing service sounds
very promising. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with it.

------
vyrotek
Working on the Rule Engine and API for our Achievements Service -
<http://www.IActionable.com>

------
jeffclark
Mobile photo scavenger hunt: <http://www.playlookit.com>

One topic a day, one pic per day.

~~~
mdolon
This is a cool project, throw in an iPhone app and improve the design/UI a bit
and I can see it getting even more traction.

~~~
tannerburson
It's funny you should say that... <http://www.playlookit.com/how-to-play-
lookit#j-mobileapps>

------
malyk
At work...a sinatra api for an existing app that is currently a horrible mess
of java and xml configuration files (more "code" is in xml than java, ugh!)

After hours...working on features toward the launch of
<http://www.wanderphiles.com> (teaser site...sign up!). So much to do and only
a couple hours a day to work on it.

~~~
user24
wanderphiles is a lovely idea. I didn't sign up because I decided I really
didn't need one more distraction, but I wish you luck.

------
dannyr
I'm working on a new version of my app, <http://www.launchset.com>.

It is actually inspired by HackerNews particularly threads like this and
'Review my app/startup'.

I have several HN guys on the site. If you are interested in being one of the
early users, email me at hackernews -at- launchset.com.

~~~
photon_off
What does it do?

~~~
user24
seems to be something like twitter for projects, but it's giving me errors for
a lot of things.

~~~
dannyr
fixed it. there was some invalid tag.

------
chrisrhee
Working on a design refresh for Tender's (<http://tenderapp.com>)
admin/supporter area. Got some snapshots on Dribbble
(<http://dribbble.com/players/chris>) and a blog post with design decisions in
the works.

------
csomar
Photo Tagging script. Just published in Code Canyon
(<http://codecanyon.net/item/imgtag-easy-photo-tagging/116536>)

Review is down right now, so you may not be able to get a look.

------
c-oreills
A Mafia game (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)>) webapp that
allows real time games between strangers.

Because there just isn't enough shady intrigue on the web!

------
agentultra
Adding support for JSON-RPC in Pylons.

Eventually this will lead to integrating pyjamas as an alternative to
templating for pure-AJAX applications. This will mean adding a setuptools
plugin for compiling the pyjamas client before packaging the application,
creating a paster template for generating the project structure, and extending
the test framework to support functional tests.

It might mean creating yet another framework built on pylons, but I'm hoping
it will get folded into Pylons proper so that I don't have to maintain a
separate project.

<http://bitbucket.org/agentultra/pylons/overview>

------
buro9
Reporting for SharePoint... trying to federate multiple instances and make
sense of the fact that every site/list has a different schema of potentially
the same data. So it's a foray into reporting against federated semi-
structured data.

------
reduxredacted
I'm working with a friend on a text based bulletin board system written in C#
that uses SSH rather than Telnet or a modem and supports many of the features
of an early 90's -ish DOS based Dial-up BBS.

... I and a few of my friends miss the old days so we'll probably be the only
ones to make reasonable use of it, but it's a fun hack project for me and I'm
learning a lot about SSH in the process. It's not OpenTG and I'm not that
developer (he's doing one in Ruby so his project is probably more interesting
to folks around here). Still in the very early stages so nothing works yet and
I don't have a code repo setup.

------
jtchang
An online tool to do business intelligence and analytics that doesn't require
a team of consultants to setup.

Should add that I am looking for a cofounder so post/msg if interested.

Edit: E-mail is jeff.tchang (at) gmail

~~~
mleonhard
Please tell us more.

~~~
jtchang
I have been working on it by myself for a few months (so have a working proof
of concept).

The idea is a data aggregation service that helps small to medium online
businesses analyze common sources of ecommerce data.

Most small businesses do not have the time or manpower to implement complex
business intelligence solutions such as SAP, Cognos, or Actuate (the big
players in this space).

My product serves to bridge this gap by providing an easy way to gather both
traditional and non-traditional metrics. By traditional I mean gross sales,
volume, margins, site traffic etc. Non traditional would be a lot of the "Web
2.0" metrics (tweets, buzz, etc).

I'm at a point right now where a proof of concept is built but I need a lot of
help in the marketing/business development department.

~~~
sandipagr
you should think of launching soon if you have a working proof of concept. I'd
love to see it.

------
wbond
Noted (<http://notedwiki.com>), a wiki that will be easy to use, attractivelly
designed, simple to theme and have functionality focused on small business and
freelancers.

It will be a software product sold for a one-time fee and will be compatible
with pretty much any environment that has PHP. The syntax will be based on the
cross-wiki WikiCreole standard, but it will also support WYSIWYG. We have some
great ideas and are gathering feedback from people who are interested in wikis
or an easy way to store their information.

------
avalore
A crowd sourced checklist/todo app.

Just a small extension of a little iPhone app I made for myself. Realized that
most of my 'todo lists' are more like checklists... for launching a new site,
compiling a distribution build of an iPhone app, etc. So I have a little app
for myself that let's me quickly re-use these checklists.

So now I'm building in a web based back end to allow everyone to share their
checklists for other people to use.

It would be a good place to store, and use, the 100's of different checklists
i've seen on blogs, hackernews, etc.

------
benjamind
Putting the finishing touches on an Canvas based LED Matrix animation editor
for a Burning Man 2010 art project. <http://cwd.co.uk/illuminatrix>

~~~
samratjp
That's awesome!What did you use for your microcontroller?

------
mrlyc
I'm working on a program that uses the Advanced Configuration and Power
Interface to stop charging my netbook battery to 100%, thus shortening its
life. Instead, it will start charging at 40% and stop at 60%. There will be an
option to charge to 100% in case I need a full charge to work off the grid.
There will also be an option to turn off the charging as sometimes the dual
load of charging the battery and running the computer trips the circuit
breaker of the power supply at an airplane seat.

------
woid
<http://totalfinder.binaryage.com>

Also playing with the idea of using Google Docs as ad-hoc CMS for simple
client projects.

------
resudne
Currently working on setting up a high-quality content providing company. The
business plan is just about complete but this is really just a work of love
and the result of my general hate of content farms (yes I have a day job).

Other than that I've been slowly putting together a site about bad dates for a
friend of mine, maybe someone here will enjoy it enough to add a story ;)
<http://www.runawayscreaming.com>

------
maushu
Currently coding <http://www.graphnode.com/> a cloud based hosting/prototyping
web service powered with JavaScript.

~~~
nhnifong
This looks promising

------
sonnym
I have been working on and off on a web-based (C#/.NET) front end for MSSQL to
make working with the beast easier.

<http://github.com/sonnym/csmsadmin>

Runs on IIS >= 5, and Mono on Apache. It does most of what I have needed for
daily tasks, so it has been some time since I have worked on it; should
probably get back to it in the near future . . .

------
owkaye
In light of its recent meltdown I'm hacking the real estate industry to help
stabilize the market, re-establish lost value, and avoid future foreclosures.

------
brlewis
I'm drastically simplifying the setup process for OurDoings Dropbox
integration. If you use Dropbox, just share a folder with box@ourdoings.com to
try it.

------
nbrochu
<http://hnrecap.com> \- Daily, Weekly and Monthly HN Summaries (Has: Its own
point system, Instapaper support, Treemap visualisation and Archives).
Thinking of maybe starting a weekly podcast!

Also a project in the early stages which aims to make it _easy_ to find great
available domain names for projects/startups. A lot of hackery going on here.
:)

------
zck
Minesweeper for Emacs. It's a pain, 'cause I'm new to programming elisp, which
has some rough edges, and I haven't found great references for it.

~~~
swah
The other games are good references.

~~~
zck
Yeah, I'm using gomoku extensively. But there are some questions that are more
about the langauge -- for example, it took me a while to figure out you can't
have a default value for an optional argument.

------
nico_h
I'm working on an app that allows you to (smoothly, quickly) see full
resolution images on your iPhone, by reading png tiles of the original image.
The tiles are created on your pc using a java app that stores the tiles in a
sqlite db, it can also rasterize pdf to images using the java.net pdf-
renderer.

Anyone knows a better pdf renderer that works well with java ?

------
al1
I'm working on Plexibase, a database platform that makes it easy to create a
knowledge base. Please try it out at <http://plexibase.com>. It's a work in
progress; I welcome your thoughts. Smaller companies could use this to make
data available to customers quickly without having to develop a web
application or CMS.

------
samps
An (open source) music library manager and automatic tag corrector.
<http://beets.radbox.org/>

It's Python and all command-line. I'm trying to make something that's both
better than iTunes for managing music (not that hard) and smarter than
MusicBrainz Picard for correcting tags (a little harder).

------
pierrefar
Online education startup. MVP in a few weeks time hopefully. Join mailing list
if you're interested: <http://eepurl.com/MVat> (previously people asked about
this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561599> ).

------
tocomment
Something like the Django admin feature but for MS Sql Server and more
generic; to sell to companies. I figure a lot of companies have databases for
internal purposes but don't have programmers to make CRUD apps for them.

I'm still not sure how to locate potential customers or how much to charge.
Any advice on that?

------
mleonhard
<http://www.restbackup.com/> \- Backup Web Service for Mobile & Native Apps

I'm working hard to get the website and api ready for Private Beta. Tomorrow
I'm coding the final api feature and more functional test cases to iron out
problems with unicode filenames.

------
devonrt
Harvesting as much sheet music as possible from free sources (Icking,
Petrucci, etc) converting it to MusicXML and LilyPad and then doing...
something with it. I have a few ideas, but harvesting it all is a start. I'd
like to put it online wiki style since it will most likely need editing after
being run through OMR.

~~~
hnote
Sounds very interesting! How do you want to do the OMRing? It will probably
take a lot of resources...

------
paulsingh
MailFinch: on demand direct mail (www.mailfinch.com)

NotaryCRM: simple software for mobile notaries (notarycrm.com)

------
duck
<http://www.hackernewsletter.com>

The past week I have been working on a back end tool to fully automate the
creation of the newsletter (the selection of content is done by me). It has
been fun working with the MailChimp API.

------
iworkforthem
I am working on a few finance/trading gigs;

\- something similar to timothy sykes' timalerts, with iphone/androoid
email/sms option. much coding need to get data out to these platform.

\- my trading algorithm for forex and stock. working to translate all these
algorithms to codes.

~~~
arthurdent
i've been working on trading algos for stock. interested in collaborating?

------
rcavezza
Recipe Website that emails you healthy recipes based on food you like to eat.
Love burgers, pasta, and string beans, but hate hot peppers and anchovies?
We'll give you personalized recipes in your inbox to keep you fit.

Started yesterday, want to finish it tonight.

------
user24
computer vision JSON webservice - you supply image, it returns tags/keywords
super fast. Spare time project.

Hoping to build a freemium model out of it for image libraries to use. Happy
to speak to anyone with any kind of CV / object detection knowhow.

~~~
paulgeo
A company in Berkeley is doing this: www.iqengines.com (see Developer API),
and demonstration app www.omoby.com. HTML Post image and JSON/XML return label
(also face, barcode, ocr, etc).

~~~
user24
thanks! Hopefully I can kick their asses ;)

edit: which doesn't seem like it'll be too difficult. On their developer test
I just get {"data": {"error": 0}} back for any image I try to upload.

------
maserati
I'm working on my social networking site where users can share music playlist,
photos, exchange messages, real- time chat ala Facebook, and schedule their
daily task. <http://www.jamafriend.com>

------
tialys
Working on an iPhone/iPad application that uses data from NASA's SDO/SOHO
satellites to display hi-res images/movies of the sun based on 'solar events.'

Sadly, no preview available yet, but the app should be out in a few weeks.

~~~
nhnifong
What will it be called?

~~~
tialys
Helioviewer. I'm currently working with the backend team to get stuff pushed
out on 8/20 and should be able to submit the app to Apple after that. This is
my first app, so I suspect it may take me a little while to get it up there.
If you do download it, please review :D

Also, it will be free.

------
MLnick
Masters project on using bandit algorithms for optimising CTRs on website
content. Also involves some search engine / text mining / dimensionality
reduction stuff.

A little bit of messing around with Android SDK too...

~~~
equark
You're doing better than 90 percent of everybody else just by expressing this
as a bandit problem rather than an AB testing problem.

~~~
MLnick
Hopefully! It is great to work with some real world customer click data...

If anyone is interested in a technical intro to the setting there is a set of
slides from John Langford at Yahoo Research (many good and standard reference
papers cited in it): <http://hunch.net/~exploration_learning/>

A/B testing could be thought of as a sort of epsilon-Greedy strategy
(particularly if such testing is carried out at regular intervals initially).
While not enjoying the optimality characteristics of other algorithms, such an
approach can in fact outperform in many practical cases :)

------
binarymax
Reality Remixing

Here is a sample low quality upload, working on getting somewhere cheap to
host 1080p: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7CrlzVeCs>

------
tomotomo
Working on a site to help name all of you guys's projects, by making it free
and fun to crowdsource names: Needanym (<http://www.needanym.com>)

Beta testers welcome!

------
reynolds
I've been working on some Chicken Scheme stuff lately. Also playing with epoll
and libevent some more. I'd like to eventually get scheme and mongrel2 working
together rather than writing my own web server.

------
noarchy
I'm messing around with a Javascript text editor. Mostly it is to improve my
chops with JS. By day, I am a Java developer, and don't get many chances to
mess with other things, except during my free time.

------
wadner
<http://www.startupweekly.com> \- Aggregating tweets based on topic hashtags.
Find other people interested in your hashtag and other analysis.

------
fortes
Paged, multi-column layouts for in-browser publications using HTML/CSS/JS

~~~
user24
<http://960.gs> might be helpful to you.

------
nirav
Writing MS-PST parser to centralize all my emails over the years in a single
database: <http://github.com/niravthaker/slibpst>

------
davidsantoro
I'm working on a little social network for developers
<http://www.superdevs.com> I'm not sure in what direction I want to go yet
though :(

~~~
swah
IMHO you could try doing something for the "hacker" public, to contrast with
something like Linkedln, where (I guess) people take it very seriously.

------
foxtrot
Simple online selling platform, Hosting Provider www.fusionservers.co.uk -
coding the backend stuff, trying to create an app for the iPhone (dont own an
iphone) and finding it very tricky.

------
johncoltrane
A persistent web-based todo list for 10K apart :
<http://10k.aneventapart.com/>

I needed a pretext to play with localStorage.

------
motters
I'm looking at RobotVision to see whether it's something I could use or adapt.
<http://openslam.org/robotvision.html>

~~~
mirkules
I'm playing with AForge (<http://www.aforgenet.com>) atm, and it's awesome.
I'll have to explore OpenSLAM too, now, thanks

------
sandis
Doing small bits of work on the Twitter client I started a while ago –
<http://tweetby.com/> (lots of features are currently disabled)

------
Kilimanjaro
<http://www.hackerblogs.com>

Working on hackers white pages, events, jobs, consulting, startups database
and stuff like that.

------
silas
<http://github.com/tidg/tyrion>

A lightweight systems management tool that uses XMPP for transport and is
written in C++.

------
bgrohman
I'm working on a nano-blogging platform that reduces posts to short, one-at-a-
time messages. Each user gets only one visible post at a time. Think twitter
minus all the clutter.

------
Rust
Getting a stable version of Noostr ready for release. Added multiple database
options, plugin support, better themeing and pagination (big one) this release
:)

------
shin_lao
I'm working on a high-performance persistent cache engine.

~~~
user24
what language? Sounds useful.

~~~
shin_lao
C++ with C API.

More information:

\- <http://wrp.me/about.html>

\- <http://www.facebook.com/wrpme>

\- <http://www.twitter.com/wrpme>

I've released two packages to play with one for Windows 64 and one for FreeBSD
8.x 64. More to come.

------
chrismoos
fastr - ruby web framework <http://github.com/chrismoos/fastr>

async-mysql - asynchronous mysql driver for ruby (native - no c extension)
<http://github.com/chrismoos/async-mysql>

moostrax.com - gps tracking (just released iphone app...working on new
version)

------
dangoldin
Working on some facebook integration for my social calendar site:
<http://www.scenepeek.com>

~~~
ritonlajoie
Hi, I'm interested in your website, is it live ? I have an error when trying
to access it : Solr service not responding.

~~~
dangoldin
Yea - had some random issues with Solr indexing. That's the startup life =)

It should be up and running now.

~~~
ritonlajoie
hm nop ! Good luck :)

------
anonified
Learning as much as I can about starting a startup. Scared and excited all
wrapped into one, but the pull to jump in is getting strong.

------
elmindreda
The 2.7 release of GLFW (sort of like GLUT but different).

<http://www.glfw.org/>

------
tbeseda
A Safari extension for my company for common operational tasks, should
increase efficiency and take a little load off our systems.

------
yv
An affiliation and cross-promotion network for mobile apps

<http://ovozo.com/>

------
eande
working on my startup for LED lighting products <http://www.lellan.com>

------
naba
am working on building an customizable online dispute resolution platform.
Using web services and a rule engine

------
Concours
mobile site maker webapp <http://www.gmbhnews.com/> , goes live next (or in 2)
weeks, working on the backend <http://www.gmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/>

------
jayrex
Camelot! <http://www.python-camelot.com/>

~~~
atomical
This looks a lot better than wxWidgets. Is there a clear advantage?

------
nhnifong
What a goldmine of cool projects!

------
tunaslut
i'm working on <http://coloringout.com> intermittently. a bit rough around the
edges at the moment and i'm in the middle of porting it to app engine just for
the hell of it :)

------
daralthus
I'm making a mashup of ebay and ustream, in node.js with a chat style ui.

------
corruption
Daftpunk suits. Go el wire!

------
k0ban
Security for online banking

~~~
smiler
Creating it or breaking it? :)

~~~
k0ban
It is similar things actually :) Once you know how to break it, you could
improve it.

------
sofuture
A URL shortening service (as a slightly non-trivial exercise in Erlang).

~~~
user24
hint: use base36 to convert numeric IDs to short strings. That's how I do it
on <http://gifexplode.com>

You can use base64 if you're happy with case sensitive URLs.

------
misterbwong
A personalized dashboard

------
mdolon
A new WordPress framework for a custom themes shop I'm building.

------
ashitvora
Flipboard like personalized, local, online newspaper.

------
knuckle_cake
a javascript/web worker/canvas/svg/heatmap toy

<http://github.com/xxx/heatmap>

------
ddemchuk
A CodeIgniter based Control Panel for ordering and managing SEO services. Has
mailing list management, task list generation, status updates. Pretty sweet.

------
klbarry
New recycled clothing line. Woo.

