Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool? - anacleto
======
ankit219
I am working on Blubyn - an AI powered travel agent helping users book flights
and hotels quickly by personalizing results. Here is the link:
[http://onelink.to/blubyn](http://onelink.to/blubyn) (app only - available on
both iOS and Android)

Being an avid traveler, it has always bothered me that travel experience has
remained almost the same over the years. We scout 50 websites to figure out
where to go and what to do, where results/posts are something written with a
view of catering to everyone(and hence very little for my interests), then to
book I have to look at 100 different variables (and repeat the process almost
everytime), and not helped by 8-10 websites which all look and function the
same way - showing the most results, and not being upfront about anything. It
still takes me half an hour to book a flight or hotel - when I do the same set
of checks and actions everytime.

Once the booking is done, now again begins the anxiety of scouting trip
advisor and lonely planet and forums to get more knowledge about a place.
Altogether its a very inefficient experience, to say the least. Comparing that
to buying a product on Amazon, one click booking, personalization, one stop
shop, a seamless experience, and its fares really bad.

We want to bring that Amazon experience to travel. We have just started, long
way to go. Hoping to crack it.

~~~
nnd
Lots of people tried to tackle this problem before, what's your unique take on
it?

~~~
ankit219
A lot of solutions focused on building itineraries, and to me that is where
they missed the mark. Planning and itinerary building is not a hassle, its
part of the experience. People like an itinerary made for them, but they dont
follow it, cos it feels like work routine. The hassle part is the struggle in
finding the relevant information. All the blogs try to cater to everyone and
hence arent that relevant for one person (results and articles arent
personalized). Then the information is way too scattered so it takes time
finding it. Third, most blogs and articles are written from conversion
viewpoint so that decreases the reliability. We can solve all three.

------
graystevens
I’m working on a skin for developer laptops so that you can apply those sweet
conference and startup stickers. No more risking your resale value, or even
physically risking damage to your expensive MacBook.

I want the skins to be identical to the original laptop material so that they
are practically invisible. So for the MacBooks, a silver aluminium sticker (or
space grey etc.)

I’ve done a proof of concept and it worked brilliantly (in the process of
writing this up) and its allowed me to display my old ‘laptop’ as a keepsake,
whilst being able to sell the laptop on in almost perfect condition.

I’m thinking of going down the crowdfunding route, as a way of proving there
is a market, as well as helping to fund someone of the equipment needed.

Edit: Added they’d be a near identical match to the original laptop, rather
than just a plain ‘sticker’

~~~
admiralEyebrows
I'm interested! How did the proof of concept turn out? Any chance you could
make to order...

~~~
graystevens
I personally really liked how the PoC went – I plan on doing a full write up
in the next couple of days, which will outline what I did, start to finish.

Here is an example of the sticker/skin and the finish. Excuse the slightly
'off' cut on the corner – I'm looking to produce a highly accurate template
for each of the various models.
[https://imgur.com/FfQ3XQs](https://imgur.com/FfQ3XQs)

~~~
ecesena
If I can give you a recommendation, set up a waitlist before you publish your
blog post.

We just went through this process with Solo (mentioned in another comment):
blogging, waitlist, kickstarter. HN has been great, we hit the front page four
times. KS however is penalized on HN, so building a waitlist will be
increadibly useful.

Best of luck!

edit: grammar

------
mattbierner
I’m using an old paper tape punch machine to print out (5% of) the human
genome. The punches are from the early 80s, and it’s really neat to be able to
physically see each bit of data. The plan is to fill up a room with the
punched tape, sort of mirroring a strand of dna and giving you a sense of just
how large the genome actually is.

Unfortunately I’m having a hell of a time finding space to print in. May just
end up finding some commercial warehouse space on Craigslist

~~~
hazz99
Do you have any photos of it so far? It seems like a really cool project

------
joemanaco
I’m working on Tiny Thor:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrNjyV5PhE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrNjyV5PhE)

It’s cool because it’s the game I always wanted to make since I was a
teenager. What’s even cooler is that two heroes of my youth are doing it
together with me: Henk Nieborg (Pixel Artist) and Chris Hülsbeck (Music).

~~~
wingerlang
Looks nice, the throwing looks a bit stiff.

How did you get together to work with those people? Do you have a nice track
record and reached out, hired them or how does it happen? Mostly interested
because you referred to them as your 'heroes' so the path towards them might
be interesting.

------
barryrandall
I’m tinkering with combining liquid cooling with waste heat electricity
generation as a way to cut down on datacenter energy use. I think it’s cool
because datacenters consume 1-2% of all electricity generated worldwide, and
roughly half of that goes to air conditioning. If it’s viable, it might make a
measurable dent in CO2 emissions.

~~~
roryisok
That's amazing. I had no idea data centers used so much!

~~~
barryrandall
Here’s some more info if you’re interested.

[https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-
center-e...](https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-
energy)

------
rickbutton
I'm working on a tiling window manager for Windows:

[https://workspacer.org/](https://workspacer.org/)

In another life I worked in a mostly linux environment, and developed on
linux, where I used xmonad as a window manager. Switching to windows for a new
job several years ago made that super painful. I use workspacer every day at
work, and sometimes at home, and it mostly works! It crashes sometimes, and
super DOES NOT LIKE IT if you reattach monitors (think laptop), but a restart
of the application usually solves it.

The cool part: the configuration file is actually just C#, so you can
configure it with a similar level of power that you would configure xmonad (or
dwm) with (like implementing custom layouts, etc). I have not solidified the
configuration API yet though, and have some plans to switch some major things
up, so the road is a bit rocky for the time being.

~~~
Jemm
Your site could really use a picture of the product in action.

~~~
rickbutton
my plan is to add some GIFs of the window manager actually managing windows,
but I haven't had any spare time in the last few weeks. maybe this weekend
though!

------
ccantana
I’m working on a satirical newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry:
[https://techloaf.io](https://techloaf.io)

I’d like to think it’s cool because a) it articulates and ridicules a lot of
nutty things that most of us in tech recognize, but refuse to talk about and
b) it’s fun and makes people laugh each week.

Life’s too serious, so it’s fun to make something that lightens the load.

~~~
LaikaF
I like that you give a preview before making me sign up.

~~~
ccantana
Thanks! Have always disliked it when people request an email without showing
the value first

------
cjen
I’m making a permissively licensed json/whatever encoding you’d like English
dictionary by parsing Wiktionary. There’s a beta demo type thing at
[https://www.mostaccioli.club](https://www.mostaccioli.club) if you’re
interested.

~~~
roryisok
Nice, been looking for an open source dictionary!

------
GaryNumanVevo
I'm working on getting better at cooking. My partner loves to cook with me,
but I kind of suck at it. It's cool because we can spend some quality time
together making a meal.

~~~
matt_the_bass
This is great! One hint I find useful is paying attention to eating. Try to
decompose the taste of a dish. Then try to identify what makes those tastes.

Enjoy!

------
jozi9
I’m working on [http://www.apilope.com](http://www.apilope.com) \- I think
it’s cool for monitoring rest apis with test cases, which was kind of a
scratch my own itch thingie.

~~~
mandeepj
This is really great. I see a lot of potential in this. I'm sure it has taken
a lot of your time. I'll definitely try it. Thx

------
p0d
What am I working on? I just replaced a resistor in my car’s aircon to fix it.
Feeling mighty pleased with myself.

Not the answer you were expecting but javascript wasn’t going to fix this bad
boy ;-)

~~~
jakobegger
Was it the resistor that regulates fan speed?

That resistor usually burns out because the bearing of the fan doesn't work
properly anymore, causing the fan to draw too much current. So if you don't
replace the fan, that resistor will burn out again soon.

------
grawprog
A toy 24-bit virtual machine and assembler. It has 16MB of addressable memory
split into 256 64KB banks. 8 specialized and 8 general purpose 16 bit
registers. An address stack and a register state stack and memory mapped I/O.

Most of the opcodes have been written, apart from interrupts. It has built in
function calls, near and far jumps, a bunch of different branching operations
and basic looping based on flag States. Comparisons, unsigned and signed
addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. Most opcodes support
direct, indirect and relative addressing.

I tried to keep the assembly language fairly simple and straightforward. So
far I have a two pass assembler that supports labels, named variables,
subroutines, 8 and 16 bit numbers in decimal or hexadecimal format, 24 bit
addresses in hexidecimal, character literals and zero terminated strings.

At this point the next steps are to finish doing interrupts and work on input
and ouput. Right now, it will read an assembled binary and spit out a new
binary with any modified memory addresses and a register dump so there's still
a bit of work yet to making something interactive.

I'm thinking of using bearlibterminal(though I wouldn't mind keeping it
dependency free...i'm just not sure if I can) and making it pseudo
text/graphical terminal based I was thinking of maybe having different modes
that could be switched so data stored in vram memory would be treated and
displayed differently depending. I'd also like to keep the display and input
fairly separate so it would be possible to write a different display frontend
if people wanted. My hope is to eventually have keyboard, mouse and maybe
other inputs, graphics and basic audio all as separate modules.

I'd like to eventually release it all open source with full documentation. I
dunno I was inspired after trying to learn assembly and finding it was either
fairly complex and more for compilers in the case of modern processors or you
had to deal with weird hardware limitations and strangeness with old
processors. So I tried my hand at making something similar to an older
processor without having to deal with the frustrations of old hardware. My
goal was to make it as fun to program in as possible while still giving the
feeling of working directly with memory and registers.

Personally, i've learned tons from working on this and I figure if I was
looking something like this, there's probably others that could benefit.

------
timdavila
I'm working on a personal organization app - basically integrating a to do
list, habit tracker, and notes app into one. I think it's cool because it's
useful to me and a "scratch your own itch" app.

If you're curious it's at [https://www.nominal.net](https://www.nominal.net)

~~~
ioddly
I find it amusing how this seems to be a very common response to this sort of
Ask HN question. If you want something right, you gotta do it yourself!

Here's mine:
[https://github.com/upvalue/meditations](https://github.com/upvalue/meditations)

It also supports habits and notes, but in mine the tasks and habits are
combined. I'd like to go further like you have in combining the notes and task
interfaces (right now it's basically two separate apps that happen to be in
the same codebase + database).

~~~
timdavila
I like it. I use both approaches, so there's individual task/habit/notes
modules like you have that let you dive deeper and edit and tweak things, and
then the general dashboard which is more of an overview that combines them
into one and lets you get common tasks done quickly. The dashboard is date
based (defaulting to today) while the modules aren't.

------
Arqu
I'm working on [https://www.datagekko.com](https://www.datagekko.com). It's a
passion project of mine that came from a scratch your own itch situation.
Working on it for the past 6 years or so a couple hours every day on average
(spent a ton of time). As it matured I decided to push it from a hobby project
to a product. Super close to launching it, but constantly keep delaying it as
I always have something to improve.

Learned a ton on it and literally helped me shape my career in the past 5
years.

A short description would be a large scale metrics/telemetry system. But I'm
aiming to make it available for small-scale use as well so that small guys
(like me) can leverage those benefits.

------
sfusato
I'm working on a tourism portal about Ravello, a jewel town of the Amalfi
Coast: [https://www.ravello.com](https://www.ravello.com)

Right now I'm re-writing it using Elixir & Phoenix. It's currently running on
Wordpress after first being a static site served from Amazon's Cloudfront &
S3.

This way I'm also transitioning away from PHP & Laravel, my previous stack, to
Elixir & Phoenix and learning its ropes along the way. I'm super excited about
this new stack.

It's cool because I get to work and learn more about places I like using
awesome tools.

------
jeffstephens
I'm working on a service that texts you when one of your preloaded accounts
sees a change in balance - for example, public transit or toll roads. I've got
three services supported so far:
[https://balancebeamapp.com/](https://balancebeamapp.com/)

I think it's cool because I login to these accounts very infrequently and
months later I have no idea what balance I'm carrying, whether I'll be able to
board the bus in a city I'm visiting, etc. Also, the websites are usually not
great to use especially on mobile.

------
thecodingmonk
We are working on Doqume ([http://doqume.com](http://doqume.com))

It is an enterprise search engine which departs from traditional keyword-based
search in order to provide an easier way to run complex, semantic queries on
huge collections of text documents.

Why it's cool: image a pharmaceutical research task, where you need to find
all documents mentioning drugs that interact with a specific class of
diseases. In a normal setting, you would need to first research which drugs
satisfy your condition and then either build a boolean OR query or probably
query them one by one. Doqume saves you this hassle, because it allows to
express conditions like "drugs that interact with infectious disease" with a
simple user interface. As a result, you can get both the items that match your
conditions (i.e., in the example, all the drugs that we know interact with the
class of diseases that you specified) and the documents that match the query
(e.g., recent research articles mentioning those items). The approach is not
specific to pharma and you can easily build queries that span across several
domains (e.g., "cities with more than 1M inhabitants", "USA companies with
more than X employees", "singers who are born in Chicago", etc...).

If you want to give it a try you can see a demo with this query building
capability at [http://doqume.com/search.html](http://doqume.com/search.html)

~~~
sgondala2
I think even google does this right? If I say - 'Drugs that interact
negatively with so and so', I get the result

~~~
thecodingmonk
Well, you can obtain these results with Google, but not really in most
scenarios. For example, if you search "cities in Palestine with more than 1000
inhabitants" you will get lists of cities in Palestine and things like that,
but not that New York Times article talking about Hebron (and not even a
complete list of cities that match your criteria). This happens with lots of
queries, where in the best case scenario Google will just return you a list of
items (and not actual content talking about those items) and in the worst case
scenario you will just get random results because it failed to parse the
query.

------
ecesena
Solo, an open source security key. Think of the open source counterpart of a
Yubikey or Google Titan. Just a few hours ago we've been featured by
Kickstarter:
[https://solokeys.com/kickstarter](https://solokeys.com/kickstarter)

What makes Solo special is that it's the first security key:

1) open source + FIDO2:
[https://github.com/SoloKeysSec/solo](https://github.com/SoloKeysSec/solo)

2) NFC + USB-C

3) in many colors, i.e. "customizable" also by non-tech people

~~~
hazz99
I love this! Thank-you for your venture. Is there any way I can subscribe to
updates? Do you know what your final pricepoint will be? (Often changes from
the Kickstarter promises)

~~~
ecesena
It’s in the KS, 5th image (the one with Solo / Solo Tap columns, and the
features).

Solo will sell for $17.5, and Solo Tap for $35. On KS you’re getting really
good deals. :)

------
bitshaker
I’m working on a new training to help people have better social interactions,
aka charisma.

Whether they use it to get ahead at work, enhance their relationship with a
partner, relate to their kids, gain new friendships, sell something important,
or just be able to be in their own company, that’s something that enhances
everything they do.

I think it’s cool because it’s my small way of connecting a world that has
been slowly drifting apart and is in need of coming together to solve huge
divides and problems that are to come.

~~~
abledon
Are you a genius at social interaction. ? How have you gauged your own advices
value ?Perhaps consider publishing a book

~~~
bitshaker
I wouldn’t say genius.

The value of the advice has been tested over the last 15 years with many happy
students returning over and over again.

We’ve got people in the UN doing good work.

We’ve had people find love.

Entrepreneurs get funding and lead their own companies.

We’ve got a book in the works. It seems better though to teach things live
with this kind of experiential skill.

------
corobo
I am working on a podcast called Would You Like to Restart[1], it's
essentially a single player DnD (Player and GM).

It's cool because unlike all my other failed projects it's for fun rather than
an attempt at profit. Even if nobody listens we're doing it because it's a
laugh - and people seem to be listening to it, so bonus!

[1]
[https://www.wouldyouliketorestart.com/](https://www.wouldyouliketorestart.com/)

------
bashit
I'm creating an interactive presentation on Git for my company who has been
using SVN since the dawn of time. Many might consider this a boring project
but it also happens to be a wide sought out skill. Very few really dive in to
becoming power users of Git which is why I think it's a cool project for me.
Teaching any topic to someone else almost always resolves in a considerable
skill enhancement for the teacher.

~~~
hazz99
Would you mind sharing it publically? I've only ever used for, but wouldn't
consider myself a power user. I don't know how to rebase, for example. I'm
sure there's value showing it online!

~~~
ILikeConemowk
These two very detailed posts deal exactly with how to get started with git
and how to become proficient with it:

[https://sentheon.com/blog/easy-git-guide-and-reference-
for-t...](https://sentheon.com/blog/easy-git-guide-and-reference-for-the-
busy.html)

[https://sentheon.com/blog/git-cheat-
sheet.html](https://sentheon.com/blog/git-cheat-sheet.html)

Thought you and your parent could find them useful as well.

~~~
hazz99
Damn, that is a very well designed git tutorial! Thanks for the
recommendation, this is just what I need.

------
codegeek
I am working on an "All-in-one Client Management" Software that allows our
company to track everything about our clients in one place which includes:
Onboarding, Registration, Subscriptions/Billing, Emails/Communications,
Helpdesk, Projects etc. This will solve an internal problem we have at our
SAAS company. Not sure about the "cool" factor but it surely will make our
lives easier.

------
jho406
I'm working on an experimental tool to simplify React Redux app development.
Inspired by the simplicity of Turbolinks, and powered by Rails. You can
develop React and Redux SPAs without any APIs.

[https://github.com/jho406/Breezy/](https://github.com/jho406/Breezy/)

------
risto1
A KISS replacement for react + redux. It comes in two flavors:

\- callbag-html + callbag-store

or

\- callbag-element + declaredom + callbag-store if you're planning on using
web components

Benefits:

\- It uses morphdom for fast diffing, which is as fast as virtual-dom

\- It's lack of parochiality -it just uses plain HTMLElements. It makes using
3rd party libs seamless because you don't have to wrap them. It also means
that you can batch things into animation frames to avoid unnecessary layout
thrashing

\- Callbag is used because it's a stupidly simple streaming library, easy to
understand. Things like cold/hot observables, or what gets updated in a tick,
can make streaming libs pretty complicated. Callbag fights that with it's
extreme simplicity.

In general the entire toolset is easy to understand in terms of how it works,
and that's important

------
100-xyz
We just started sales for our product. Distributed about 30 flyers to
restaurants and hair salons yesterday. Because it was the first time for us,
it was quite a learning experience. Sales requires a much thicker skin and
open ears. Also, because I am an American living in China, I had to learn some
new technical words.

Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages. Its a
captive portal plus a local web server.
[http://www.100-xyz.com](http://www.100-xyz.com)

Looking for ideas on how to get customers/users. Suggestions, comments
appreciated.

~~~
Rjevski
> Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages

Aka the thing nobody ever asked for and why I don't even bother with public
Wi-Fi anymore.

Your users are just looking for Wi-Fi _and_ are already in your venue; your
best interest is to _not_ piss them off by wasting their time and instead
offer a good, seamless Wi-Fi experience so they can move on and enjoy whatever
they planned to do at your venue.

~~~
100-xyz
Our product is designed for people who ARE LOOKING for local info. For those
who arent, the business can set it up so that it works seamlessly - the way
you stated it.

But in some instances, such as restaurant ordering system - it may be more
convenient to order from your smartphone directly. In that case its useful.

Another use case that we are already having is - event translation. The
attendees WANT the live streaming - so they join the wifi, go to the local
webserver and get the streaming. If the local server is not there, the sound
quality is sometimes poor because the same signal is coming in parallel to all
the users from a remote server.

In short, its designed for people who ARE LOOKING for local information.

------
tardismechanic
Working on a project that uses Chrome Puppeteer - a Node.js API that uses
Chrome DevTools Protocol to control a (possibly headless) Chrome. Its very
cool because now the phenomenal power of DevTools is accessible
programmatically and can be run on CI systems and stuff!

~~~
jamieweb
Also check out Headless Chrome Crawler if you want to crawl a site.

[https://github.com/yujiosaka/headless-chrome-
crawler](https://github.com/yujiosaka/headless-chrome-crawler)

------
matt_the_bass
I’m working on fabricating interactive art pieces/clocks. I’ve been making
these ask gifts for a few years. A big part of the gift is my time and effort.
I think that is invaluable.

People always ask if I sell them. So I’ve come up with a wordclock design I
really like and am working on some basement manufacturing.

For my day job I’m in charge of making physical products. So this is a hobby
extension of that skill set.

Right now I’m hoping to ramp up production enough to sell a few of these for
the holiday season. Hopefully this weekend lead time will change from 3-5
weeks to 1 week. Moderator Dan suggested I post a Show HN about this. I plan
to once I get through this production hurdle.

Www.finewordclocks.com

------
PeOe
I'm working on Zenkit. It's a collaborative project and task management
software which is meanwhile a great alternative to Trello, Wunderlist and
other tools on the market. The flexibility it gives us in the office (yes we
use it ourselves in every department) is awesome and we have so many ideas on
how to improve it that we sometimes not know what to do first. The potential
is high and I'm curious about where we are going with that.

------
devxpy
Working on my multiprocessing library, ZProc

[https://github.com/pycampers/zproc](https://github.com/pycampers/zproc)

It's cool because it tries to bring some creativity into the rather standstill
multitasking world :)

------
Random_Person
A simple reporting tool for tracking and reporting project/task activity.

It's cool because work requires me to submit an activity report each week and
I wasn't about their terribly inefficient form, so I built a web-service to
track my activities.

It's nothing special per-se, but it's significantly less complicated than
other free options I've found for this sort of reporting and I like things
that don't require me to learn how to use them.

------
tnolet
I’m working on [https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com), an API
monitoring and site transaction monitoring SaaS. The coolest thing about it is
discovering the many subtleties in the product offerings in the pretty huge
and abundant monitoring market and how customers value them.

The technical stuff is cool too, and actually much trickier than many would
expect, but I find customer development and support much more rewarding as I’m
signing up the first customers.

------
phakding
Not work related, but I am working on my body. Trying to run faster marathon
at the same time building muscles to look good. It's hard after 40, but I was
a 123 lb weakling at 24, now a 145 lb with good muscle tone.

------
bwb
I am working on Execution.com - We are showing businesses what meetings cost
in terms of time/money at their organization, as well as a lot of analytics to
help them improve meeting culture. And, we are trying to see what the best
companies are doing so that we can give companies the tools to improve the
effectiveness of meetings.

[https://execution.com/free-meeting-stats/](https://execution.com/free-
meeting-stats/)

------
hazz99
I'm working on a self-hosted, automated testing service for universities. I'm
designing it to be distributed and fault-tolerant, which I've never done
before! Structuring the application around producers, consumers & queues has
decoupled it immensely, and (so far) has made the codebase extremely easy to
grok. I've just go to figure out docker-compose, so I can throw up a new
instance in a few seconds ;)

Does anyone have any recommendations for a newbie to the distributed
architecture space?

------
androidgirl
In my freetime I have been working on learning React, and more generally
modern javascript. After dragging my feet for so long because of bias, I took
the plunge a few weeks ago and I love it! It's very cool, in my opinion,
because the web ecosystem really has grown a lot as an app platform, and
honestly I like it. The "old" web and an app web can exist side by side, I see
now.

At work, still just connecting API to API, test to test, pipe to pipe. I feel
like a plumber, but I guess that's "backend".

------
Immortalin
KloudTrader - A commission-free (flat-rate) algorithmic trading platform.
Think of it as the Netlify or Heroku for computational finance. We provide a
datafeed and a commission-free brokerage, not to mention server hosting.
Basically everything you need to get started. Push to deploy.

~~~
dcolkitt
Long-time HFT and stat-arb trader here. Not really your target market here,
but I have a few suggestions that you may or may not find useful.

\- Don't write the core platform in python. The lack of support for
concurrency is going to bite you in the ass down the line when you're trying
to trade at scale or deliver high performance. I'd stick to C++, Java, Rust or
Golang.

\- Don't send market data in HTTP/JSON. It's way too bulky and slow. Of
course, you can still expose JSON to the end-client if that's what they want.
But make sure to send internal messages in a fast, low-overhead, low-
bandwidth. Like ZeroMQ + fixed binary encoding.

\- Have very clear policies about when/where/why you throttle market data. If
you This is the biggest reason why most "algo-platforms-in-a-box" suck. (Using
fast market data encoding will help here.)

\- Make sure that paper trading isn't running against throttled or
consolidated market data. This is going to distort the results by assuming a
trader can hit a price that may already be stale.

\- Since it's comm-free, you (or your broker) is monetizing with payment-for-
order-flow. At the very least be transparent about your policies here. I'd
offer the ability to upgrade to smart or exchange specific routing for a
commission.

\- Since you're doing payment-for-order-flow, keep meticulous records of your
trades with microsecond time precision. You can use that dataset to shop
around for better deals on the order flow. If you wind up growing the business
where you're doing a significant amount of volume, a major wholesaler like
Citadel or Virtu can use that dataset to give you a very competitive offer for
your flow.

\- Be very careful with the market data licenses and make sure you're totally
in legal compliance. Exchanges do not mess around and frequently audit their
vendors to make sure they're in compliance.

~~~
rajacombinator
Python does just fine with concurrency. A lot of your other suggestions are
not relevant for this kind of product either.

-t. guy who built a HFT fund using python.

~~~
dcolkitt
> Python does just fine with concurrency.

Can you explain to me what the GIL is and how it works...

> guy who built a HFT fund using python.

I mean, maybe you and I have definitions of HFT. But I'd say the base minimum
to compete in HFT space is tick-to-trade latency from off-the-wire data packet
to on-the-wire order packet of 50 microseconds or less.

That's simply not possible in any python stack. Period.

I believe you're maybe doing something that turns over positions on an
intraday basis. But that's not HFT. HFT's typical characteristics are
colocation+DMA, very low latencies, full-scale analysis of the entire order
book, volumes of more than 1% of the ADV, and Sharpe ratios above 10.

(And no, nothing in crypto space is anything close to HFT, because the
infrastructure simply doesn't exist.)

~~~
rajacombinator
HFT is just something where latency is the primary factor. Your perspective is
a somewhat narrow one driven perhaps by limited experience or reading. The
things you listed are true but just part of the arms race at various venues.
Likewise, your reply to GP lacks perspective. Latency is likely almost totally
irrelevant to his business model. His target audience doesn’t require sub-
python latencies.

------
chrisfrantz
I’m working on a simple and free way to generate a press kit for your company.

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

The tech is cool and most of the early customers we have are realizing how
important it is to be able to describe and pitch their company in a succinct
and captivating manner.

------
nojvek
I am working on ORows. [http://orows.com](http://orows.com)

It enables teams to collaborate on structured data. Think of it as a fusion of
spreadsheet, git and a content management system.

Right now it’s in very early stages but I want to get to a stage where I can
quit my job and work on it full time.

------
freezegun
I'm working on [https://appreviewbot.com](https://appreviewbot.com), a tool I
made for myself to post iOS app store reviews to Slack. I'm still trying to
figure out what makes it cool though, having a hard time getting feedback from
users!

------
amirathi
I am working on Jupyter Notebook diff tool:
[https://reviewnb.com](https://reviewnb.com)

It's stimulating to write diff algorithms when textual diff is coupled with
images, markdown, html, and code syntax rendering. Also, it's super useful for
a lot of people in Data Science community.

------
atum47
Im half way in a algorithm that redraws pixel art image that have been
corrupted by scaling or compression. 1 step it analise the image to define the
"pixel size". Then it generates a pallet with all the colors needed to redraw
that image. The it redraws it.

------
jlizzle30
I'm working on an online debate mediation platform to settle Twitter flamewars
more thoroughly and amicably.

------
jstrebel
I bought the toy robot Cozmo from Anki and now I am trying to make him see
using openCV.

------
ai_ia
I am working on Primer. Basically a bot that makes it much easier to learn
"difficult things" on your own. Here is a screenshot :
[https://imgur.com/a/E5Kw54P](https://imgur.com/a/E5Kw54P)

The screenshot has changed a lot by now though.

I have been working on this, alone, for last almost two year. I have iterated
more than 15 times. One time, I was trying to do non-linear twine[0] based
interface. Was pretty complicated. Right now, this is the version I am most
satisfied and excited for. Also, it took some while to create a CMS from
scratch for this one.

Here is why it is cool.

0\. Primer teaches you in a conversational way. I understand video based MOOCs
are new norms, but conversational way makes user better focused towards
learning. It also makes it easier to revise, recall and resume from where you
last left.

1\. Primer will provide you notes in form of Tufte-Latex Books[1]. The way it
works is that there is already a template for each course and when the user
completes the course, his/her response accounts generates tex Code along with
the previous templates and results in personalized books. The books authors
name is the username.

2\. Primer enforces spaced repetition. Not only it teaches you something, it
also reminds you to revise after certain intervals. Although Anki export is a
desirable feature, I did not have the energy to look into it now, but it is
definitely in the roadmap. Primer takes responsibility of your learning.

3\. Primer tracks time spent on your courses. Good tool for homeschoolers.

4\. Primer courses are versioned. Primer courses improve based on feedback. If
you get stuck at a course, it is improved so that, next time it feels easier
to understand. And often times, we will screw up, so it is there for that too.
But importantly, courses should have pretty iteration times. This is a major
advantage of text based courses.

5\. Primer based courses take a fraction of time to complete than Video-based
courses.

6\. Last, my favorite. It makes difficult things easier to learn. Although,
achieving this feature to a practical extent will take another year or so, but
still feels good to have the potential. Suppose, you want to learn how to
build a spaceship. There is a ton of things you need to learn before you can
even begin to learn about spaceships and rockets. Primer ensures that you have
understood the prerequisites before you start doing something. All these
courses are present on Primer itself.

I am not good with deadlines. But I can assure that I am pretty close to
completion.

These are the initial courses to be offered by Mid 2019.

Tentative Tracks: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning,
Fantastic ML Papers and how to implement them, Teach yourself Computer
Science, Fantastic CS Papers and how to understand them, Computer Vision and
Natural Language Processing.

To follow updates:
[https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/](https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/)

[0]: [http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/) [1]:
[https://github.com/Tufte-LaTeX/tufte-latex](https://github.com/Tufte-
LaTeX/tufte-latex)

~~~
quickthrower2
It looks good. I noticed further down it does try to understand your answer,
and detects a wrong answer which is impressive.

~~~
ai_ia
Thanks Man. Well, it detects wrong / right answer when you use predefined
responses but when you use text reply then it just states what is correct, so
that you can figure out where you went wrong.

