
Ask HN: What are you working on? - jessehorne
What do you spend most of your time on these days? Do you have a side-project you&#x27;d like to talk about? What is the community working on?
======
yjhoney
I'm writing a book that teaches people coding using JavaScript, the book that
takes you from 0 (no coding background) to getting a job as a JS engineer.

2 years I ago, I had a hypothesis to see if anybody could learn coding if they
tried. To test that, I reached out to random people with no coding background,
most of them from underprivileged backgrounds. I figured they have fewer
opportunities and are more likely to stay through the entire program. 17 of
them stayed.

As of today, 14 of them have gotten full time jobs (which was a high win for
them, going from minimum wage to 130k+ per year). The remaining 3 of them are
starting interview prep right now. I'm going for a 100% success rate.

Everybody learns at a different pace. The slowest student took 2 years and the
fastest around 6 months (I actively made them stay around to help out the
slower students for as long as I could).

I'm putting together a curriculum of all the pain points people face when
learning how to code and come up with a comprehensive book. It will be free to
all. The current rough draft is here:
[https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-
Contents-a83980f...](https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Table-of-
Contents-a83980f81560429faca3821a9af8a5e2)

To test the effectiveness of the book, I've just recruited a new student (my
dad), who spent the last 30 years doing manual labor and barely knows any
English. So far, so good.

~~~
fhbdukfrh
Is 130k realistic for someone with less than 2 years of not just experience
but total exposure? I'm not aware of any market supporting that sort of value
proposition; that's one hell of a book...

~~~
yjhoney
YMMV. I don't expect everyone to get 130k TC, but that has been the case so
far.

A few things that helps:

1\. Content must be lean. Learn foundations.

2\. Really drill down those foundations.

3\. Work experience: most of a student's journey is actually working together
as a team to build / launch products. I role play as a project manager and run
weekly sprints.

4\. Relevant Technologies: I work as an engineering lead during the day, I
make sure student's work experience covers all of industry trends (currently:
GraphQL, React, Apollo Client)

~~~
rmdashrfstar
In what way did you determine that GraphQL and React are industry trends?
Isn't GraphQL a fairly niche solution to relatively uncommon problems that
benefit from using a graph database?

~~~
yjhoney
> Isn't GraphQL a fairly niche solution

Everyone around me seems to be implementing a GraphQl layer, and most of them
don't have a graph database. I'm still not even sure what the `Graph` means in
`GraphQl`.

Here's an overview of how Airbnb uses GraphQL: [https://medium.com/airbnb-
engineering/how-airbnb-is-moving-1...](https://medium.com/airbnb-
engineering/how-airbnb-is-moving-10x-faster-at-scale-with-graphql-and-apollo-
aa4ec92d69e2)

------
emckay
I quit my job last month to work full time on (what I think is) an under-
explored area of climate change: how institutional investors block shareholder
proposals calling for firms to adopt more climate-friendly policies. I have
just published the first bit of research with data on how 500+ funds from the
big 3 fund managers voted on climate change-related proposals in 2018:
[https://voting.greengovernance.org](https://voting.greengovernance.org) .

Later this year, I'm planning to launch a "governance-first" ETF that gives
investors the same exposure as other funds but is much more aggressive in
fighting climate change.

I'd love any feedback! Feel free to email me at <hn-
username>@greengovernance.org

~~~
richajak
Some ideas

-Which consumer product companies still use a lot of plastic packaging vs those already use bio-degradable packaging?

-Which heavy-industry manufacturing companies use coal or diesel as the main source of energy in their factories vs those use renewable energy source?

-Any company forbid their executives to fly excessively whether in private jet or business/first class? How many miles per year they travel ? It's simply not environmentally friendly when video conferencing should be effective in 90% of the cases?

~~~
emckay
Thanks! Those are all interesting questions -- and also quite hard to answer
without a lot of research into each individual company.

One thing my fund will push for is more consistent and granular emissions
disclosures across firms so that shareholders have a better idea of where
firms are "spending" their emissions and identify inefficiencies.

------
geocrasher
Staying sane by staying busy. My wife is slowly dying and is a thousand miles
away at a hospital, hoping they can save her. Today I cleaned a workshop area
that I'd been using for storage so that I could use it as an actual workshop.
I have car parts to rebuild (Chevy 350 TBI at least) and I have things to
build, like a recumbent bicycle from scratch.

I am also working on learning CW (aka Morse code), learning to play bass
(already play guitar) and am trying to stay busy helping others too.

In addition to all that I do breakfix computer work on the side and a
freelance gig writin technical tutorials for a site that specializes in
selling small to medium sized, low budget VPSs. That has me learning things
like Nginx and Redis, which I've never really spent any time on. It's great
fun and my first professional writing job.

I also have a blog where I document my ham radio, automotive, and other misc
projects, although I'm woefully behind on it. I built a 20 meter CW
transceiver last week (from a kit) and have yet to post about that. I also had
to repair a cracked body on the bass I am learning to play, but didn't even
take pictures. Writing about things while you do them takes twice as long, at
least. I'm lazy.

Lastly I took a recent promotion. I work remotely, training new employees at
the web hosting company that I work at. I also develop training materials and
am revamping how we approach that stuff. I've never done that before. It's the
first time I've been off the front lines, and I like it. A lot.

Thankfully I have a lot to keep me busy so that my mind can focus on what I'm
doing rather than on the troubles that plague my wife. She'll either survive
or she won't, and my worrying won't affect it. All I can do is support her.
Our adult daughter is her full time caregiver (I am not cut out for that, and
we're all okay with it, I promise) and is with her, and that has to be good
enough.

I've been blessed with an amazing support network and a few extra bucks to let
me stay busy on projects. If I didn't have those to keep me going... eesh.

Lastly, I'm glad somebody asked this question. I had a lot to get off my
chest. And if this didn't make a lot of sense, I apologize. It's a bit of a
brain dump.

~~~
jessehorne
I ask a lot of questions here sometimes. None of them have been nearly as
rewarding at this. If you ever need a remote-buddy to discuss/hack on things,
let me know. I can't imagine what you're going through but it's good to remain
positive and productive. My email is j.horne2796@gmail.com

~~~
geocrasher
I appreciate your kindness :)

------
danShumway
Loop Thesis ([https://loop-thesis.com](https://loop-thesis.com)), a
multiplayer time traveling puzzle/arena shooter that allows players to
simultaneously travel to different points on the timeline.

In co-op/multiplayer this allows you to do things like send someone back in
time to open a door for another player in the future, or pull objects outside
of time to effect someone in the past.

There's a big focus on experimentation and discovery. To that end, I never
fake or script any of the gameplay systems -- so there's a completely
internally consistent time-travel simulation running all of the time, even
during menus and in lobbies. The goal with that is to make a world that is
_always_ predictable; Loop Thesis is about figuring out how the world works
and figuring out the subtle implications of its rules.

It's supposed to capture that feeling you had the first time you were
programming and a concept like pointers actually _clicked_ for you. It's about
these tiny cool moments where you suddenly realize all of the things you can
do with a mechanic, or you suddenly understand why this obscure interaction
you were dismissing three levels ago actually matters.

For that to work, there can't ever be a point in the game where you ask why
something happened, and the answer is, "oh, that's just a glitch, or a hard-
coded interaction." Literally everything, from menus, to how save files work,
to even how maps load in and out of memory, is consistent with the internal
mechanics of the time-travel simulation.

~~~
ultrasounder
This is god send for my Autistic son who singularly obsessed about space-time
continuum these days. He was even looking for games along the same theme. Do
you have a patreon or planning to have one? Perhaps we can have a side
conversation on ways to support your effort. Last question, any definitive
resource you can point to for a 11 year old to grok the concept of space-time
mechanics and other fundamentals concepts before tackling the concept of time
travel. Cheers!

~~~
danShumway
You're maybe the second or third person to mention to me now that this might
be something that Autistic kids might be into.

I'm not super-familiar with the Autistic community, so I haven't been
consciously pushing in that direction, but I am _definitely_ interested in
making sure that the game is accessible for Autistic players, in no small part
because the few Autistic kids I've playtested with have so far been really
good at latching onto the emotional core of the game -- which is to try and
build this puzzle-box of a world that just feels very safe and contained,
where the more you learn about it and the more that you dissect it, the more
the disparate systems start to fit together and make sense as a cohesive
whole.

On the resource side of things, take both of these with a grain of salt
because I'm not an expert here, but I do have two recommendations. The first
is that there are a few child-friendly movie-adaptations of Flatland out
there, and my niece watched one of them in first grade and was _really_ into
it. Flatland indirectly inspired some of the mechanics in Loop-Thesis --
particularly this idea of time being a spacial dimension that you can hop
around in and move objects into and out of, rather than the strict line of
cause-and-effect that's more common in other games.

Flatland was also partially the inspiration for meta-meta-time, which is how I
reconcile the player being able to insert themselves into the game. The
physical player exists in meta-meta-time, and is projected via their computer
into meta-time, which is the actual game engine running on their computer.
Then the game engine projects their avatar into the regular level timeline.

The other recommendation I'll make is the game "Baba is You", which is not
related at all to space-time, but is probably the closest example of the kind
of mechanical consistency that I'm trying to hit with Loop Thesis, and it
might scratch some similar itches.

~~~
ultrasounder
Thanks for the recommendations to Flatland and Babaisyou. I will playtest the
game in the next few days and provide some user feedback to you. Keep
GameThesis awesome and I am glad you are open to Patreon.

------
bjelkeman-again
Indoor vegetable and fish farm, i.e. aquaponics, in a fully circular
production system.

We are building our pilot installation right now. Additionally we got two
government grants: one to set it up monitored with sensors, and a production
management system, for future automation, traceability and transparency for
the food chain; the other to start taking in food waste and converting into
fish food via insect larvae, closing the circle.

Sweden has recently adopted a food strategy which puts a lot of emphasis on
local, circular food production, and there is a lot of interesting stuff
happinging right now.

~~~
lwansbrough
I'm an absolute beginner in all things botany/agriculture related, and don't
have much experience in electrical engineering. However this idea is something
I find really interesting and I've started researching it more.

I've been playing with the idea of using existing physical infrastructure for
building farms. Specifically, server farms.

I'm imagining isolated racks with individually, fully controlled environments
down to temperature, pressure, humidity, light, etc. What are your thoughts on
the efficiency of a system like that? Is it outside the realm of commercial
viability?

Do you think such a system is still worth pursuing outside of commercial
contexts (say, in the case where we _NEED_ such systems? ie. space, deserts,
extreme cold, etc.)

~~~
bjelkeman-again
We live in Stockholm, Sweden, where the average winter temperature is -1.5 C.
The coldest days it drops down to -25 C (maybe one or two days a year). We
want to have delivery of vegetables 365 days a year from our facilities, which
means some type of indoor facility.

To me the smallest size which makes economic sense here is from one hectare
and up (10000 m2). The bigger the better. We compete with the average
greenhouse grower in the Netherlands, among others, which has four hectares.

For desert coastlines, check out Seawater Greenhouse. I know the founder well.
[https://seawatergreenhouse.com](https://seawatergreenhouse.com)

Other extreme environments are very interesting to me, but I don’t foresee
anything in rack size that makes economic sense. Food requires quite a lot of
space to produce. But I could be wrong.

------
samcrawford
As a side project, I'm working on a route planning app for running. I'm a long
distance runner and travel for work a lot, so I frequently find myself
planning a run on one of the many existing apps at 5am in a new city whilst
jetlagged.

My bugbear is that all the existing apps suck. I want a way to say "give me a
running route that lasts approximately 10km and is as scenic (greenery, water,
mountains, etc) as possible, with few road crossing and is as safe as
possible". Maybe I can even pick from the top 3 options. Existing apps can't
do any of this.

This data is readily available (or can be derived) for many countries using
the wonderful openstreetmap and other public sources (e.g. national hiking
trail routes).

I've adapted the brilliant Graphhopper routing engine to handle the routing
algorithm and alternative routes selection. PostGIS (with OSM + other data
loaded) is used under the hood to generate weights for each of the "ways"
(edges in OSM-speak) for each of my variables (e.g. greenery). I'm using
Leaflet and leaflet-routing-engine on the frontend currently, but would like
to make it into a native Android/iOS app in the future.

~~~
bartkappenburg
Try imaginerun.com. Imagine run wants to inspire people to start walking or
running. The free app creates (three) possible routes via gps based on the
distance and pace you set. All routes start and end at your current location,
no matter where you are. The app is navigating you, so you can’t get lost at a
place you are not familiar with.

~~~
samcrawford
Thanks, this is the best one I've seen by far! The fact that they let you
build round-trip routes is a first.

That said, the app would timeout if I tried to build a route over 15km long.
Also, it doesn't seem to prefer scenic routes - it has me running on busy
streets in London when there's the Thames very close by.

------
jandrewrogers
After a decade of R&D, I am (finally) building the first, true multi-model
database kernel. All traversable data relationships (relational, polygon
intersection, graph data models, time series, etc) are directly represented in
a singular data structure that is nearly optimal and extremely parallel. No
secondary indexing required whatsoever to access these relationships, so ideal
for mixed workloads. Built on top of a new high-performance storage engine
that has some neat computer science in it and brilliant performance specs
compared to my prior designs (which were pretty damn fast).

This is likely my last database kernel design. I can’t think of many ways to
materially improve the algorithms and design, and there are some other
computer science research domains I previously went deep on that I want to get
back to once I am finished with this.

~~~
_bohm
Fascinating. Have you written at all about this elsewhere? Is it open source?
Would love to learn more!

~~~
jandrewrogers
I have not written about it publicly at any length. Much narrower versions
targeting specific data models have been used in production and I've licensed
bits and pieces to big tech companies. The data structures and algorithms are
non-obvious, and the join mechanics that enable arbitrary relationship type
traversals on the representation hurts the brain (it really isn't
visualizable). It is just an elegant instantiation of adaptive information
theoretic embeddings in very high dimensionality spaces, reduced to fast
database algorithms. My previous startup was based on related but very early
and incomplete computer science, which was written about.

The storage engine is extremely fast but the only unusual capabilities it has
are architectural: the ability to continuously, in the background, reshard
data (many tens of thousands of times per second per inexpensive server) and
shift shards between storage engines. If you think about it, all this really
requires from a storage engine is the ability to concurrently create and
destroy logical files at an extremely high rate, much higher than a typical
file/operating system allows. Some of the internal algorithms are novel but it
is still just a storage engine. It is tuned for petabyte storage densities per
server -- it was originally designed for exabyte-scale sensor data models.

None of my database work has ever been open sourced AFAIK, though many
companies have older designs. The biggest practical hurdle to open sourcing is
that it would require many man-months of tedious unpaid work and I have zero
desire to do that. It is also a production-grade research project; I currently
have no obligation, explicit or implied, to maintain any kind of compatibility
if I feel like redesigning some aspect of it. That said, I also want to get
away from the current reality that every company wants someone to build their
own slight variation of these designs.

~~~
kindkid
Andrew, everything you reveal publicly has been tantalizing! (See
[https://www.jandrewrogers.com/](https://www.jandrewrogers.com/) for those who
haven't stumbled upon his posts yet)

"There is virtually no literature on practical representations of topological
spaces, never mind parallel algorithms using those representations. A thorough
exposition of both the theory and practice is on the order of a few hundred
pages of dense technical literature that no one has had time to write, despite
multiple implementations. Watch this space." \- October 2015, J. Andrew
Rogers.

I emailed you back in 2016 to inquire about your work and wondered what had
become of SpaceCurve. (Thank you for replying!) You mentioned recent work then
on a "modality architecture." Is that related to the work you mentioned in
your post above?

Obviously, you're a busy man with a desire and the potential to change the
world with your creations. But perhaps also a drive to withhold your creations
from public display until only after you have them distilled to their purest
elegance?

If it is your intention to eventually share, I encourage you to do the world a
great favor and just share what you've got so far (with a "no guarantees; no
support" reminder in your README), even if some corners are unpolished,
inscrutable, or built on shifting ideas. With an appropriate license, you'll
at least get the benefit of easily taking bits of your implementations with
you between projects, even without supporting anyone else who consumes it.

Do you have any peers who are familiar enough and excited about your work to
start writing up some posts laying out the conceptual ground-work? Have there
been any relevant research papers or books published that would be
foundational to understanding? Maybe start with links to those? I'd devour
them!

On the other hand, perhaps you are motivated not to share, while your skills
are highly marketable due to near exclusivity? If so, I certainly don't
begrudge you that! And like you said, you have no obligations. :)

~~~
kindkid
"In essence, you can only make money if you are doing hardcore R&D. This
strongly incentivizes the creation of new capabilities but also
disincentivizes publication of CS research.

"You see this in markets like databases, where open source has captured almost
the entire market for undifferentiated capabilities, and there is a lucrative
high-end market with unique product capabilities that don't exist in open
source or CS literature. The trend toward treating CS research as trade
secrets, originally started because algorithm patents were impractical to
enforce, turned out to be effective at maintaining profitability in high-end
software products if open source can't replicate capability."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20196610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20196610)

Ah drat, apparently my fears are confirmed. If you should someday have enough
money and not enough fame, I'll be eagerly looking forward to hearing the
lessons you're willing to share.

------
paganel
Up until a year ago I worked on a personal project that involved putting
online photos of old cars from my country as found on GoogleStreetView + some
photos of the same old cars personally taken by me [1], the reason being that
most of those cars will be totally gone in the next 10 to 15 years (many of
them are already gone since Google took most of the photos back in 2012 and
2014) and so I wanted to sort of preserve and make these images easily
searchable/browsable for existing and future car nerds.

I've also started a small project [2] where I'm posting photos of local flour
mills built before WW2. I find them very interesting from an industrial-
architectural point of view and by image-documenting as many of them as I can
I hope that somehow these buildings will stir the interest of people with some
more influence than me when it comes to architectural preservation so that
maybe not that many of them will be teared down. I suspect this will be an
"on-going project" for quite some time, as until now I've only taken photos of
about 30 of these mills, while I counted 500+ still existing in the whole
country (mostly using Google Maps/StreetView + Google Image searches + some
old topographic maps).

[1] [http://cars.maglina.ro/](http://cars.maglina.ro/)

[2] [https://mori-din-romania.blogspot.com/](https://mori-din-
romania.blogspot.com/)

~~~
bravura
I'm just curious, are any of these old cars known to be very reliable?

~~~
costcopizza
Lots of Eastern European brands that I’m not familiar with, but I venture yes:
relatively simple power trains that can be serviced and don’t rely on much
complicated technology.

~~~
markdown
> relatively simple power trains that can be serviced and don’t rely on much
> complicated technology.

In my part of the world people pay a higher price for 2nd-hand Toyota Hilux
4x4's from the 90's then they do for the more modern versions for just this
reason.

------
emeth
I've been working on a project called "HackTheCompany"
([http://hackthe.company/](http://hackthe.company/)) which lists historical
hacks that have occurred, with a brief description. It then offers a live CTF
for every single historical hack where you can do the same thing the attackers
did. Walkthroughs are offered for each as well, if you have no experience.
It's part of a larger project I'm working on, but even standalone I think it's
pretty neat. It's not complete yet, but is functional - would love any
thoughts and feedback.

~~~
dietervds
That’s amazing! Can I subscribe somewhere to stay informed on the project?

------
lunixbochs
I developed chronic hand pain a couple of years ago (probably from
overworking), so I quit my job and I've been making Talon [1] since, with the
goal of making it possible for anyone to efficiently do anything/everything on
their computer (general use, programming, games, niche apps) without their
hands.

Most recently I've been training acoustic models and writing a user frontend
for the wav2letter++ [2] speech recognition engine, and porting Talon from Mac
to cross-platform.

[1] [https://talonvoice.com](https://talonvoice.com)

[2]
[https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter)

~~~
bigmit37
This is pretty cool. I was actually thinking about doing something like this
as I don’t like typing.

I will follow along.

------
joshvm
I'm currently participating in Frontier Development Lab Europe (
[https://fdleurope.org/](https://fdleurope.org/)), an 8 week research
accelerator with the European Space Agency, Oxford University and a number of
tech organisations.

The idea is to bring together space scientists (domain experts) and machine
learning researchers to try and make a meaningful contribution to the field in
a very short period of time. It's a lot of fun, and a really interesting mix
of people taking part.

We've just finished week two, which means we're narrowing down our ideas and
are about to start the "real work". We're split into teams working on
different challenge areas (you can read more on the site). While I can't say
much about what we're doing specifically, the outputs from the teams are
usually published after the event at conferences/in journals.

There is an analogous program in the USA (NASA FDL) which is running in
parallel.

(and who knows, I'm pretty sure there are some other FDL'rs who read HN ;))

~~~
nl
This is really interesting.

A bunch of people I know are involved in the Australian space industry and a
separate bunch are involved in machine learning research.

Here in Adelaide we have the new Space Agency and the SmartSat CRC and the
Australian Institute for Machine Learning and the new Australian MIT Lab and
the new startup hub in the same compound (a former hospital) so I'm really
hoping we see similar programs.

------
namibj
Combining open-source photogrammetry software into a system that scales
reasonably to >100k images (with accelerometer/gyroscope data from the video
camera) and >1G vertices in a single, consistent, high-quality mesh. It later
computes a texture map based on the images, not smoothing them, but just
minimizing seams and using some seam carving and color interpolation to make
most seams invisible.

I want VR reconstructions that don't lack details to be feasible for <1k$/acre
flat area, not counting someone steering the camera. -

Places need to be archived like the rest of our culture.

[Current sub-part:]

I'm figuring out how [https://www.gcc.tu-
darmstadt.de/home/proj/tsr/tsr.en.jsp](https://www.gcc.tu-
darmstadt.de/home/proj/tsr/tsr.en.jsp) can be combined with
[https://igl.ethz.ch/projects/instant-
meshes/](https://igl.ethz.ch/projects/instant-meshes/) to get better meshes
(with less wasted vertices) and also how this can be made to scale Out-of-Core
or on a HPC cluster (the kind with lots of RDMA interconnect bandwidth and low
latency).

AMA (I won't respond for a few hours)

~~~
Leherenn
I was wondering why you choose to go with video data rather than photos. From
what I know, for a given feature point, you would rather have pictures with
really different point of views. It seems to me video would generate a lot of
redundant data, massively increasing processing times for very little gain.

What's your experience on this?

~~~
Xelbair
They probably are using drone/car/vehicle to capture the imaginery - at least
that's the only reason i can think of - i used to do that back at the
university.

We recorded a video from a drone, split it into frames, and built the mesh
using those frames.

When drone is competently flown it creates a nice stripe of overlapping frames
- and overlapping stripes(i don't know proper technical english translation
for that term) of overlapping imaginery are basis of aerial photogrammetry.

Worst case - you can keep every n-th photo, or use some more intelligent
approach and select the frames based on contrast, and other parameters.

Usually gathering data is the expensive part - in photogrammetry you try to
take as much imaginery as possible - especially in traditional aerial
photogrammetry.

~~~
namibj
I'm aiming for software to digest the output of a 300fps tethered camera on a
drone. Basically an Apertus Axiom beta with a fancier FPGA to use all 64 lanes
of the sensor to not have only 150fps, and being able to attach a 40G QSFP+
transceiver to it for data offloading.

Existing software makes hand-picked pictures worthwhile, but I want full-auto
behavior.

Near-term I want a construction worker to open the case with the hardware
after cleaning his hands, and then showing all insides of the building to the
camera, before swapping the storage and getting the data physically back to
base for processing.

Also, video capture gets you continuity of motion. Unordered picture
collections are horribly expensive to compute with.

I also prefer redundancy to holes in my textures or models ;)

My drone swirls around the buildings, btw. I want VR for walking, not google
earth.

~~~
Leherenn
Ok, so it's mostly a hardware issue then, a camera in burst mode continuously
shooting at a lower FPS should theoretically work just as well.

But indeed, if that works with a video, that's might be easier to use.

You're talking about imu data, do you do geo-referencing also? It might be
difficult having a GNSS fix if your target is inside buildings.

~~~
namibj
The point is that mechanical shutters in useful DSLRs have massive rolling
shutter artifacts. You can get video cameras with shutter skew in the low
microseconds or even sub-microsecond.

Remember, the exposure has to be short due to motion blur.

Concepts of resonant rotating camera heads that use torsion springs and
electronically controlled clutches with a torsion oscillator that advances the
camera in a few milliseconds were made, but apart from an ability to capture
~1 Gpixel effective 360° data in 2 seconds (there is overlap due to covering
the sphere with rectangles and not changing the horizontal number of images
per revolution (oscillation frequency) to reduce overlap at nadir and zenit),
the benefits were considered insufficient to warrant more time on it before I
actually _have_ the camera. And I'll probably have an fpga that is too bulky
to oscillate with it, so I need fatigue-resistant cabling for the 64 + 2
clocks high-speed LVDS lanes between them.

You can get e.g. the Blackmagic pocket cinema 4k that writes 30fps DCI4k DNG
with an electronic global shutter to an USB-C SSD.

I have no plans to rely on magnetic field sensors or GNSS. I plan to fuse
bundle adjustment with constraints from the raw sensor data. Offset and drift
correction for both will be done there, and thus I don't get the typical
drift-off issues from cumulating a sensor offset.

I _do_ plan to allow fixing feature markers in space, to handle geo-
referencing and potential un-curling at the same time. (Depending on lens
distortion you get variously strong tendencies for the area you scan to either
reconstruct as a small hollow earth or a small spherical earth (in both cases
the average surface curvature radius is up to a few km at most, often even
less).)

------
opticfluorine
In my free time I've been working on a 2D MMORPG engine in C#. I'm working on
the networking code right now, working toward being able to connect and move
around the game world. I'm enjoying the network code, but I'm really looking
forward to getting back to shader code and implementing dynamic lighting at
some point down the road.

Wanting to build an MMORPG was the main thing that got me interested in
software development over a decade ago, so it's been nice to be able to work
on this hobby project again.

~~~
bbbobbb
Nice!

I am somewhat surprised how there are no modern 2D MMORPGs. It seems like it
should be inherently easier to develop those, but there is nothing. I think
it's a pity because simpler engine / graphics should allows for more resources
to be spent on other areas regarding the gameplay.

Maybe those games just aren't popular enough to justify the development in
comparison to bland but flashy 3D games..

~~~
opticfluorine
I think you might be right about the popularity. Major commercial MMOs are
deriving revenue from either subscriptions or microtransactions, with the
latter becoming much more common (and requiring a far larger userbase to
maintain profitability). The trend toward "bland but flashy 3D" has been
around for a long time now, so it makes sense in my mind.

About ~ 15 years ago there were quite a few 2D MMO engines freely available,
mostly written in VB6. The two big ones were ORE (a very basic FOSS project
that didn't support much beyond logging in and walking around) and the Mirage
family of engines (closed source, but was licensed and forked quite a few
times, most notably into the Playerworlds engine). The various Mirage engines,
especially Playerworlds, really lowered the barrier to creating MMOs, and
consequently there were quite a few indie "MMOs" with userbases of ~ 50 - 100
regular players.

I know of at least one other FOSS engine project out there (Lunar Engine,
which is much further along than my own) besides mine. My hope is that if a
few easy-to-use engines are made available and promoted well, another
community will form around these 2D indie MMOs. So we'll see what happens.

------
adyer07
I make paintings about programming/code. Right now I'm developing a screen
print, and I wanted to build on the same abstract style I used with one-off
watercolor paintings.

I decided to make my first print about rubber duck debugging. I had a lot of
fun rendering a crazy hatch-mark pixelated rubber duck, but I keep going back
and forth on the final layout and composition. I spent an alarming amount of
time this week doodling thumbnails of ducks with different abstract
backgrounds.

You can see some of my stuff here :)
[http://amydyer.art/wp/index.php/portfolio/technology/](http://amydyer.art/wp/index.php/portfolio/technology/)

~~~
jeanlucas
I LOVE IT <3

------
PedroCandeias
As a solution architect visiting clients in Europe and North America, I
struggled to capture names and roles of people in meetings and workshops. That
led to lots of awkwardness and missed opportunities.

All meeting management apps I found assume participants always get calendar
invites, which I found to just not be the case.

So I wrote a small web app that uses qr codes to allow participants in
meetings and workshops to introduce themselves, using their phones, on the
spot and in a way that persists:
[https://quickintro.app](https://quickintro.app)

I thought I’d be laughed out of the room first time I asked a room full of
people to “check in” by scanning a qr code and filling out a form, but no. It
worked. So now I’m releasing it for others who might need it.

~~~
keyncoffee
This is very cool. As a sales person, the ability to set an upfront agenda and
make things interactive for prospects (within a first meeting especially) is
important. I have ways of doing this today but I'm always open to testing new
strategies and technologies.

I'm in the process of creating a few meetings in QuickIntro and keep hitting
the error of "[object Object]" when trying to save or "Create meeting."

Any guidance on a fix?

~~~
PedroCandeias
Thanks for checking it out and sorry about that bug! Do you mind shooting me a
quick email at pedro@quickintro.app so I can troubleshoot it with you?

~~~
keyncoffee
Awesome, I just shot you an email now. Thank you for the help.

------
spxdcz
Still a long way to go, but trying to make it easier (and cheaper!) to
research public companies / stocks - with both quantitative and qualitative
data. [https://docoh.com/](https://docoh.com/)

~~~
FailMore
One further thing, not sure how easy it would be to do, but it would be very
interesting to see (graph and/or table) a history of different financial
ratios - e.g. what is the historical P/E of the business etc...

------
anthony_doan
Thesis.

It's a proposed classifier algorithm that is suppose to be better than Random
Forest and XGBoost for classifying high dimensional data. The data sets are
cancer data (prostate and myeloma). Unfortunately it's not going to be publish
because I'd like to graduate sooner and that the software does not meet
certain criteria for the journal we were aiming for.

The proposed algorithm uses two technique:

1\. My forest consist of GUIDE decision trees by Dr. Loh. It is better than
CART and M4.5 and such because it does not have the selection bias problem.
CART and M4.5 are bias to selecting categorical predictor for node splitting.
They're also bias on variables that enable more splitting so decision trees
usually contain more levels. GUIDE is also aim at finding interactions
candidate to split if it is statistically significant.

2\. CERP by Dr. Moon. It makes the trees within the forest less correlated
among each other. Much more so than Random Forest. Accuracy takes a hit as
your correlation gets higher (obviously zero is the best). It also enabled
ensemble of ensembles (ensemble of forests). Of course some of you may state
that you can do ensemble of random forests but it is naive and won't help you.

I should be defending in this month or next month.

~~~
splittingTimes
Is there a public link to your thesis? Can your approach be used to do feature
segmentation of 3D (triangle mesh) data?

~~~
anthony_doan
> Is there a public link to your thesis?

Not until my advisor okay my paper. He wants to see it first.

> Can your approach be used to do feature segmentation of 3D (triangle mesh)
> data?

Sorry, I have no clue what this mean so I don't think this is my area of
expertise nor can I answer this properly. I'm an master student for applied
statistic, this seems to be a computer science machine learning question?

I can point toward papers regarding either GUIDE or CERP if you like.

~~~
dewy
I'd love to read those papers if you wouldn't mind recommending them.

~~~
anthony_doan
Selection Bias and GUIDE:
[http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/treeprogs/guide/wires.pdf](http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/treeprogs/guide/wires.pdf)

GUIDE definitive paper:
[http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/treeprogs/guide/aoas260.pdf](http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/treeprogs/guide/aoas260.pdf)

All other papers on GUIDE:
[http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/guide.html](http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/guide.html)

CT CERP:
[http://www.ams.sunysb.edu/~hahn/psfile/aiim_moon.pdf](http://www.ams.sunysb.edu/~hahn/psfile/aiim_moon.pdf)

------
ian0
Started a startup in early 2018. We help schools in Indonesia to manage their
money. Collect payments digitally, manage their finances, digitalise their
financial records.

Took us a long time to work through the practicalities (think driving
motorbikes over rickety bamboo bridges to get to a school who has a shipping
container of paper records). Very traditional industry. But doing quite good
now, well over 100 schools. And we really help them, which is pretty cool.
Maybe the first time ive worked on something that is genuinely productive.

Also, its given me a newfound respect for people who work in education, what
we in other industries do daily really does pale in comparison:

\- We find it hard to manage teams of actual professionals getting paid to be
there. They have to manage thousands of kids who would rather be doing
something else. And their parents, who arent easy "users" to deal with (to put
it mildly)

\- We measure most of our KPIs live. For them, it can take 15 years to measure
the impact (graduate employment rates, salaries). Such a ridiculously long
timeframe.

And of course theres the compensation. How you can stay motivated given all of
that is insane. But they do. Met some genuinely great people.

------
ltr_
working on my crippling depression / ADHD, unemployed (i don't want to work
anymore in anything) 6 months , 0 productivity. learned a lot of category
theory, functional programming and c++ tho.

~~~
abledon
are you lifting weights and exercising? If not get on it ASAP. Revert back to
the physical-activity-heavy lifestyle of our ancestors and you'll feel better

~~~
taneq
If you hate exercise, try physically-active VR games. You don't even feel like
you're exercising (although you sure feel it the next day!)

~~~
xchaotic
AFAIK that's not enough calories burned to get you into caloric deficit. You
need more intensive or longer exercise

~~~
taneq
It's not as simple as "X will make you lose weight or not." Caloric _deficit_
depends on both your intake and expenditure. You can out-eat almost any
exercise regime so a somewhat healthy diet and reasonable portion sizes are
always going to be important.

Active VR games are a legitimate cardio workout. Sites like
[https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/reviews/](https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/reviews/)
have real data if you don't believe me.

As for duration, I've seen people (including myself) happily play Beat Saber
for hours who don't last 10 miserable minutes on a treadmill.

------
sneilan1
I'm learning how to draw. Here's my latest drawing.
[https://www.instagram.com/p/BzZSo_bFtL6/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BzZSo_bFtL6/)

I really enjoy the challenge of learning to do something that isn't one of my
natural talents. As a programmer, obviously, I would be better suited to
learning music but I've always wanted to draw.

Becoming an artist as a part time job outside of writing code has been a
journey into time management, budgeting and discipline. It's taken me a lot of
work to get to a place where I create art on a regular basis.

Learning how to be creative is utterly different than building software. Even
though building software is an intensly creative job, making art requires
turning off a massive portion of your brain. You have to just let things flow.

I do not use any generative software in the creation of art. It's just me.
[https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt_gqSQAdcu/](https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt_gqSQAdcu/)

------
karterk
5 years ago, I had a crazy idea that there must be an open source engine that
had a really simple learning curve and worked out of the box.

The result:
[https://github.com/typesense/typesense](https://github.com/typesense/typesense)

It took me over 3 years to get the nuts and bolts right. It's now production
ready and being used in quite a few production environments. Of course, there
is more work to do and so it's still actively being worked upon.

~~~
taneq
Note, _search_ engine. That looks very cool!

------
neilvictorgrey
Been spending 4+ hours per day studying languages for the last year and a
half.

It started as a challenge to learn German, and now it's spiraled into going to
polyglot conferences and doing "learning challenges".

Right now, my main focus is on Swedish, but I've joined a 3-month language
challenge, where I'm trying to learn as much of Inuktitut as I can.

Since 2 weeks ago, I study most days on Twitch as personal motivation; I think
most people would find this boring, but I've had a few people show up semi-
regularly, so here's the link if that's something that floats your boat:
[https://www.twitch.tv/letsstudylanguages/](https://www.twitch.tv/letsstudylanguages/)

~~~
dorchadas
Come join us on Reddit r/languagelearning and on 'A Language Learners' Forum'
[1]

[1][https://forum.language-learners.org](https://forum.language-learners.org)

~~~
neilvictorgrey
I spend a solid chunk of time on r/languagelearning haha :p... it's that curse
of spending as much time talking about language learning as doing the actual
studying :|. can find me under u/ninjarobotdino

Thanks for the reminder re: language learners forum ... I was on there a year
or two ago. I'll make sure to check it out again and try to stay active! :D
The polyglot community is such a cool group of eclectic people.

------
mrieck
Working on a desktop version of my webdev tool SnipCSS:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcma...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcmapfbngbodpppofgagiclicf?hl=en)

The current version is a Chrome Extension that extracts every CSS rule needed
to rebuild the DOM subtree of a selected element. Unlike other tools it never
uses computed styles and uses the actual DevTools protocol to get the CSS. The
current extension doesn't handle CSS specificity or inheritance correctly, so
I'm waiting until I fix those things before promoting it. Actually this
comment is the first time I've told anyone about it.

~~~
peteforde
Hey, just so you know... I went to snipcss.com and attempted to sign up for a
lifetime membership, only to be informed that the payment processing was in
dev mode. I went back and entered the standard test numbers, and it worked.

You might want to lock this down.

Also: take my money, please.

~~~
mrieck
Thanks for letting me know!

The homepage doesn't have a link to the pricing page so I didn't think anyone
would find that. I'll let you know when it's ready!

~~~
peteforde
I installed the Chrome plugin, and then it prompted me to create an account...
so I did. That took me to your dashboard.

I loved the little animation with the critter coming to inspect the DOM
element, but as of right now the plugin doesn't seem to actually _do_
anything. It doesn't appear to emit any css nor is my css being transmitted to
the site. It could well be that you're between iterations, but right now if I
didn't know you were working on it, I'd be tempted to remove it.

~~~
mrieck
Do you mind me asking which site you tried it on?

I haven't had it crash in a while where it produces nothing while snipping.
Maybe you found a new way to crash it. What if you try it on this site?
(HackerNews as a test)

Also your Chrome version and OS might help me debug it.

~~~
peteforde
I ran it against a dev site I have up at localhost:3000... it does seem to
work great on HN's homepage, so perhaps the page has to be publically
addressable?

Running Chrome 74 on Ubuntu

Can this do media queries? eg if I have 5 responsive ranges, do I have to snip
5 times or is it smart enough to grab all of it?

~~~
mrieck
I never tested a url with a port number so that could be it. I'll have to look
at that this weekend.

It will be smart enough to grab everything but I'm still working out the
issues. The extension version only runs once, but for the desktop version it
has a list of Device Resolutions to run through (typical Desktop, iPad, Mobile
is default) and for the extra resolutions adds more styles to the list of
rules by iterating through all the elements again. That seems to get almost
all media queries so hopefully I can release that soon.

------
mromanuk
Erudito Keyboard for iPhone ([https://erudito.io](https://erudito.io)) It's a
mini game in an iPhone keyboard, you play from any App, just by writing.

Common words give you little or no points, infrequent words give you points.
You get bonus points when you write a sequence of words with points.

There is a leaderboard where you can compare your "skills" against other users
and friends. Still need to implement a feature to segregate each leaderboard:
general and friends.

The keyboard has realtime notifications and bidirectional communication with
websockets, so you can know what other users are doing, this will be useful to
have "death matches".

As you can see It's an experimental App. Currently is available on the
Appstore (since last week) but I didn't promote it yet, I'm looking for users
to iterate it more :) and crush few bugs along the way.

~~~
tomcatfish
That's kind of cool, but I immediately ask myself what kind of security
measures are in place. What happens so that every word I type isn't
automatically uploaded somewhere where I do not know how it is handled?

~~~
mromanuk
Thank you @tomcatfish! Regarding security, yes that's an issue. At the end of
the day as a user, all you can do is trust. So the company is incorporated in
UK, your data is protected under the GDPR, we use the minimum amount of data
necessary to make the game work, we use SSL, authentication is done by Apple
or Facebook (whichever user prefers).

We don't sell information, nor we plan to use Ads, because of that there is a
pay subscription.

Anyhow every time you need to type something sensitive you can disable or
switch to iPhone's native keyboard and go back whenever you are ready to play
again :). (by Apple's design 3rd party keyboard get disabled when typing on a
sensitive/password/etc input)

------
Waterluvian
My family. Got a two year old and 7 month old. Bought our first and hopefully
only house a month ago. Work remotely doing some really interesting
programming.

I reflected early this week during Canada Day fireworks that I have literally
everything I wanted out of life. Now I just have to learn how to live in the
moment and enjoy it all. That's proving to be a small struggle.

~~~
truebosko
Good on you. I have a family as well and prior to it spent much of my free
time coding side projects. Now, it's been tough to find the energy to do that
in my limited time.

Of course, one can prioritize the projects, but find joy in other aspects of
life once the little ones asleep.

Trying to get back into a side project though, mainly because I'm feeling the
itch.

~~~
tmaly
Back when I only had 1 child, I use to say you can have exactly one hobby.

With two children, you can have a hobby once in a blue moon.

------
mathnmusic
I'm building [https://learnawesome.org](https://learnawesome.org) \-
essentially, a stumbleupon-equivalent for learners with richer data. The idea
is to make it easy to answer queries like:

"Show me podcasts about architecture that are less than an hour long."

"Show me books about abstract algebra that are visual."

"Show me MOOCs on machine-learning that are challenging."

Just last week, I released browser add-ons for Chrome/Brave/Firefox to make it
super easy to use. Eventually, we'll implement unidirectional relationships so
you see recommendations only from people you trust/admire.

------
grwthckrmstr
Oh jeez, I'm reading everyone's posts and I'm feeling shy to post mine since
I'm not doing anything cool. Here goes nothing...

I quit my job in January this year with no business but the thought that I
must start, I can't work jobs anymore.

I built and marketed a simple micro-saas for Shopify ecosystem together with
my co-founder. He handles tech, I do design and marketing. We both do customer
support. App was launched on April 24.

June was my first month of revenue and we hit ~$450 MRR which I'm very happy
about. Expecting large churn figures though.

This is the app -- [https://apps.shopify.com/whatsapp-chat-
button](https://apps.shopify.com/whatsapp-chat-button)

Here's a post I wrote a month back chronicling the journey thus far --
[https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/shopify-micro-saas-
growth](https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/shopify-micro-saas-growth)

Currently I'm learning how to code (Frontend, React) so that I can contribute
to the app development, as currently our biggest bottleneck is development
speed of new features.

~~~
flarco
Really cool. Can you share on what lib/3rd party tool you use on the backend
to send WhatsApp messages (such as the automated cart abandoned message)?

------
Arun2009
My list keeps changing, but I have three main "projects" these days.

\- I will complete the final level of a beginner's Sanskrit course this
August. This has been an intermittently executed project for me. I can follow
uncomplicated spoken and written Sanskrit now, and can mostly understand
Sanskrit at the level of Gita or the Indian epics. My long term aim is to be
able to read Indian philosophical works in their original.

\- I am teaching a few neighborhood kids Mathematics, Physics, and
occasionally, Computer Science. This is immense fun!

\- I am trying to learn at a deeper level some of the topics that I learned
during my undergraduate studies. On this front, right now I am working on
understanding operating systems and compilers a bit better.

~~~
neuralk
Besides the course you are taking (is it an in-person class, or online
perhaps?), are there any resources for learning Sanskrit that you'd recommend?
I have the same long term goal as you! I'm looking to self-study the language
since there aren't local courses where I live.

~~~
Arun2009
My course is the famous one by Samskritabharati
([https://www.samskritabharati.in/](https://www.samskritabharati.in/)). It's a
correspondence program, but they do conduct introductory contact classes as
well. They also deliver materials overseas. Samskritabharati also has online
video lectures
([http://www.samskritashikshanam.in/](http://www.samskritashikshanam.in/)),
but they are in Hindi.

I have audited a few introductory courses from vyoma samskrita pathashala
([https://sanskritfromhome.in](https://sanskritfromhome.in)).

There's also the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan in India
([http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/](http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/)) who have a two
year introductory correspondence course. I believe they deliver overseas as
well. I did the first year of their course with the help of a tutor I hired
from urbanpro.com, but (as with all things GoI) I found the experience to be
far less satisfactory than Samskritabharati's.

If you can read Hindi, you can also look at the school textbooks by NCERT as
well, which are available for free
([http://ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm](http://ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm))

Two "Western"-style books that I would recommend are:

* Devavanipravesika (An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language) by Robert Goldman

* Samskrita-SubodhinI (A Sanskrit Primer) by Madhav Deshpande.

One thing I want to do is to work through these books once I am done with
Samskritabharati just to cement the things I have learnt.

The nice thing about Samskritabharati's course is that it doesn't just teach
the language, but it also introduces you in a gentle (but unapologetic!) way
to the whole tradition that flourished through it's medium. They also publish
books in Sanskrit, which may also help you in your education.

Good luck!

------
refset
Since stepping into a new role in the world of full-time Clojure earlier this
year I have been almost entirely focussed on launching an ambitious new open
source graph database that uses Kafka as the "unbundled" transaction log and
provides bitemporal Datalog queries:
[https://github.com/juxt/crux](https://github.com/juxt/crux)

Before I made this move, tinkering with Clojure and thinking about databases
was just a hobby.

I wasn't around when Crux was initially designed and built, but my primary job
so far as the product manager for Crux has been to figure out how we make the
most of all the ingenuity and effort that's already gone into it. I also wear
many additional hats at the moment: leading the development team, managing
community interactions, speaking at events/conferences, creating the
marketing, and working on sales & strategic partnerships.

This all keeps me incredibly busy but it is fun and it feels like the right
thing for me to be working on and thinking about at this point in my life. I
think of it like the perfect side-project that I am very fortunate to be able
to work on all day long (and surrounded by excellent & talented people!).

------
jamesponddotco
Working on a few projects right now as I recently left my job, but the one I
am working today is "Allons-ip!", a free and open source IP address API that
uses pure NGINX to work.

Right now there is one dedicated server in Germany (AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper
2950X with Hetzner) and all it does is display your IPv4 address, but once I
am done it should work with both IPv4 and IPv6, and have servers around the
globe to decrease latency as much as possible.

The API returns all data in plain text — or JSON/JSONP —, without any
advertisements or extra data. Server has full disk encryption enabled and a no
logging policy.

Usage is quite simple. There are no secrets here, just call the URL for the
API and it should return the IP address of the machine you used to make the
call.

Clear Text: curl -s [https://api.allonsip.sh/](https://api.allonsip.sh/)

JSON: curl -s [https://api.allonsip.sh/json/](https://api.allonsip.sh/json/)

JSONP: curl -s
[https://api.allonsip.sh/jsonp/](https://api.allonsip.sh/jsonp/)

There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to the need to improve my
resume, as most of the work I done in previous companies are their propriety
now. I also needed to get the public IP address of servers I deploy
programmatically, and wanted to have control over how that was done, so I
decided to turn it into a public project.

Since I did not want to reinvent the wheel and NGINX is so damn powerful,
there was no need for anything other than pure NGINX.

------
robhawkes
A few weeks ago I started Spatial Awareness, a curated newsletter for the maps
and spatial community. The idea was to scratch a personal itch – to do
something with all the interesting links and maps I collect – though it's gone
down amazingly well with the community. It's less than a month old – with 3
issues so far – and it's already surpassed 1,000 subscribers. Check it out if
you're interested in maps!

[https://www.getrevue.co/profile/maps](https://www.getrevue.co/profile/maps)

~~~
shanecleveland
This begs the question about audience ... how did you get to 1,000 subscribers
in a month? Were you part of an existing community you launched to? Marketing
it in some way?

Sounds like a cool passion project! Thanks.

------
soneca
A 1:1 meeting software:
[https://www.oneononemeeting.com](https://www.oneononemeeting.com)

It was a for-profit side-project, but since I moved to another country
(following my wife's Masters) it became full-time.

If you lead a team and have 1:1s, take a look :)

~~~
ticmasta
I'm in your target market and will take a look. What I really need is covered
partially by 1:1's but I need some sort of CRM for my direct reports. I want
dossiers that include the action plans out of our meetings plus more general
stuff like work anniversaries, other dates and information all tied into a
calendar with ideally alerts that give me a heads-up. Right now I use
PerformYard, Outlook, random documents and part of an in-house app. Yuck.

let me know if you have any questions.

~~~
soneca
I would love to exchange ideas in order to build the roadmap based on what you
need because that's exactly the path I want to go with my product.

My idea is to create a tool that the manager uses, but also the team members
use - and is actually more useful and actionable for the team members, helping
them achieve their professional goals.

Currently, you can create "Long Term Goals" and "Short Term Commitments" for
your team members. And they have their own account to check and edit their own
Goals and Commitments.

What I am working on now is to create some sort of "Steps" to achieve a Goal
and frequent "Status Updates" on how is it going. With it, email notifications
- sent to the Team Members - so they report their status updates.

Future integration with Slack for those notifications is in the plan too.

EDIT: You (or anyone reading this) can contact me through the email on my
profile

"Important dates" added to your calendar of choice would be neat.

------
logicalshift
Been working on a piece of 2D animation/vector editing software called
FlowBetween for a while now:

[https://flowbetween.app](https://flowbetween.app)

Seemed like a good way to combine my interest in building software with my
other interest in creating art.

I've been spinning off the various components needed to build it as separate
rust crates: interesting ones are flo_curves, desync and flo_binding.

~~~
chris_st
Cool! It'd be great to have some videos of what it looks like... yeah, I can
download it, but it'd be nice to see first.

------
treyfitty
Skincare line for men. I just turned 30 and I wanted an easier way to take
care of my skin. One of the things I noticed was that there weren't a lot of
skincare geared towards men that I "trusted." So, I threw myself all-in to see
if I can bootstrap a brand focused on using natural ingredients myself. It was
supposed to launch June 1, but early impressions suggested the "brand" sucked.
Yes, I rebranded before I sold a single product, which was an expensive
lesson, but it taught me a valuable lesson: Feature creep will always exist if
you don't reign it in.

Anyway, I'm welcome to advice- if you want to check out the basic site, it's
[https://www.mendskin.co](https://www.mendskin.co) password: mendskin.

If you subscribe at the bottom (I'm a one man shop... I don't have the
capacity to set up effective MailChimp campaigns, so you can trust me when I
say I can't spam your inbox), I'll follow up with a personal hackernews offer
once I launch.

~~~
imnotreallynew
Where/how are you sourcing product? Do you have any experience in cosmetics?

A brand called “War Paint”, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, recently created
some buzz and quickly attracted a lot of negative media. Did you learn
anything from the negative feedback they received?

~~~
treyfitty
I source the ingredients from a private labeler. They work with all the major
cosmetic brands and sell what brands like L’Oreal don’t buy. Sure, we get
leftovers, but it’s still top quality.

------
grardb
I've been doing work with the Vegan Hacktivists.
[https://veganhacktivists.org/](https://veganhacktivists.org/)

Basically, we code up apps that we hope will help promote veganism. In some
cases, we lend engineering help to organizations that need something built
(e.g. Meat The Victims, Rancher Advocacy, etc.).

Currently, I'm working on the website for Meat the Victims as well as a
platform for education on the "why" and "how" of becoming vegan.

If anyone is interested, please reach out (my email is on the website under
Gerard O'Neill). We're currently recruiting for experienced developers,
ideally with PHP experience.

------
caseysoftware
I've built a thing called the Tech Events Network:
[https://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/](https://techeventsnetwork.com/cities/)
which aggregates and publishes tech events - meetups, conferences, workshops,
hackathons, etc - across 50+ cities in the US.

After being an evangelist at Twilio and running a number of my own meetups, I
realized that that the biggest problem most groups had was getting the word
out. This pulls data from Meetup, Eventbrite, and other places, uses some
light ML to choose hashtags, company names, etc, and then tweets the day
before and about a week before a given event. There's also a weekly pre-cap
email that goes out.

If you're running a tech event in a major city in the US, we help you get the
word out.

If you're near a major city in the US - or even just visiting - you can find
out what's going on.

* _We explicitly exclude job fairs, etc to make it SFW._

------
kareemm
Am working on [https://www.savio.io](https://www.savio.io)

We help product teams centralize their customer feedback from tools like
Intercom, Help Scout, and Slack, and then use it to make data-driven decisions
about what features to build.

My business partner and I have sold two SaaS businesses (we started one and
bought the other). Savio is our third. It was born from the frustrations we
had at the first two. We'd get lots of customer feedback from support, sales,
customer calls, surveys, chat, etc. But we never had a good process or tool to
keep track of it and use it in a way that gave us confidence we were building
the right features.

We soft launched a few months ago and are very much figuring out positioning,
feature set, acquisition, activation... the whole shooting match.

Customer funding as we did with the previous two businesses. We like
optionality!

~~~
ultrasounder
Hi, Embarking on my own sass journey. Would love to connect with you to hear
about your thought process I sass pricing strategies. Thanks Ananth

~~~
tomashertus
Hey guys, working on [https://openroll.io](https://openroll.io)

Would like to connect and discuss my idea!

------
AlchemistCamp
I'm working on Alchemist Camp, a site with screencasts and tutorials for web
devs learning Elixir and the Phoenix framework. I believe that in terms of
free content in this niche, nobody on the web has put out more.

I've also been sporadically recording podcasts on topics near and dear to my
heart—learning, mental models, code and bootstrapping.

[https://alchemist.camp](https://alchemist.camp)

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-and-
bootstrapping...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-and-
bootstrapping/id1448157275)

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learning-
machine/id144...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learning-
machine/id1448157446)

------
tyleo
I’m working on Devev, a visual programming language which integrates with
TypeScript and JavaScript:
[https://m.imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t](https://m.imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t)

I’ve been working on this on the side for awhile and hope to launch an MVP by
the end of the month. I transitioned to full time on the product 2 months ago
and I’ hoping to make money by providing domain specific visual programming
products. I’m currently thinking about a visual build system for example.

------
dkthehuman
I'm teaching myself music (guitar and singing)! After casually dabbling for
many years and not really getting better, I decided to devote at least 30
minute a day to practice to see how far I can get in a year.

I'm making videos to track my progress
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1ytq5cTCDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1ytq5cTCDE))
and creating tools to accelerate the learning process.

Some examples:

\- Chord Bunny (to learn chord transitions): [https://dkthehuman.com/chord-
bunny/](https://dkthehuman.com/chord-bunny/)

\- Interval Trainer (to learn intervals by ear):
[https://dkthehuman.com/interval-trainer](https://dkthehuman.com/interval-
trainer)

~~~
person_of_color
Why guitar and not synths?

~~~
dkthehuman
Because John Mayer. :)

I do intend to learn synths but not now since I don't want to spread myself
too thin (the trap I usually fall into).

------
brailsafe
I'm just trying to have a productive day. It's hard most of the time.

Less dreadful answer: Professionally I'm working on an Open data portal based
on the python library CKAN for the University of Manitoba. Money isn't
brilliant, but it's satisfying and has some odd challenges. In the upcoming
month I'm taking an academic trip to Norway to explore undergrad thesis
opportunities in the areas of Neural Networks and Remote Sensing, to which
I'll hopefully be playing around with before-hand.

------
superasn
[https://www.snapnews.win](https://www.snapnews.win) \- a new way to binge on
latest Hacker news stories.

This was my weekend project but I'm still working on it in my spare time.

The concept is simple: All news stories have a ticking timer. After it expires
the news story is gone forever. There is also a clear now button at the bottom
that destroys all the stories on the screen if you want to binge even faster.

Once the story goes away, it's gone forever. You will never see it again! So
it's like the HN homepage that never shows you the same story twice.

Made with Vuejs and hosted on Aws lambda (serverless)

There aren't many options because I just uploaded the first version and
everything is still pretty rough. It's just a concept site I made for my own
amusement :)

------
mamcx
My side project is create a relational language (not a RDBMS!):

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

I wish to resurrect the "spirit" of the fox/dbase family where operate on data
was much more natural. This lang also mix some ideas of array langs like kdb+.

If my bet is correct, this will erase the need of ORMs yet make it work as
easy.

Is build on rust, a lang I also learning along the way (making it even MORE
slow to progress!!!) but I start to get the gist of it.

~~~
nudpiedo
sounds interesting. Considering posting updates when you design or evaluate
concepts or ideas about the internals, designs, and philosophy behind its
abstractions (I guess there is more than tables related to tables and some
syntactic sugar on top)

------
spacial
I'm working on a authorization protocol for IoT (ABAC+ReBAC and a little of
RADAC). The main idea is to make it easier for non-tech people and secure
(yes, everybody wants that), made the threat model and stuff - was my master's
thesis, want to do a PoC to see if it sees sunlights ;)

Also working on a DataScience crash course with basic statistics, R, Python
(Basics), Dataviz and webscraping (for journalists, biologists - for
everybody).

Last, but not least, we have a music's group that is doing some visual +
electroacoustic music (using supercollider and instruments). Our next step is
to use Arduino and some other stuff.

resumes pretty much it.

(help wanted `:D )

------
MuffinFlavored
Reverse engineering a handheld device that is used to flash the Bosch ECU
memory region related to engine tuning

It features:

* master/slave paradigm

* public + private key encryption

* XOR ciphers

* hardware tokens

* server-side validation

* .NET obfuscation

* Themida/WinLicense DLL packing/obfuscation

* Debugger detection

Car tuning is an industry where if your car costs $60k, tuners can charge you
$999. If your car costs $120k, they know you are a wealthier client, so they
blatantly charge you $3k for the same amount of effort on their end. Gross.

~~~
jessehorne
Hell yeah!

------
mtlynch
What Got Done, a minimalist tool for teammates to share weekly status updates
with each other.

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

I'm a solo developer and find it gratifying to set aside a half hour at the
end of each week to write down what I did. Otherwise all the work just becomes
a blur. I wrote a longer blog post about the motivation behind it here:
[https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/](https://mtlynch.io/status-
updates-to-nobody/)

~~~
splittingTimes
I have a "lab book", but I stopped writing into it. It mostly contains
information i gathered about a particular section of the code base or how a
solution might work or what I learned about our business domain. But over time
the constant context switching of topics I had to work on made me stop it.

I would like to revive it. However, i want the information in there (the
lessons learned this week) to be less project/issue specific, but more
transcending and transferable to new problems/environments.

Do you have a set of questions you pose yourself whose answers guide the
write-up and make it a worthwhile knowledge vault?

===

Not sure if I expressed myself in a coherent way.

~~~
mtlynch
Oh, that's interesting. I do some introspection when I'm writing my weekly
updates[1], but not to the depth that you're describing. But What Got Done
should work as a lab book, although I haven't implemented search yet, and it
sounds like that might be important to you.

The time when I do deeper reflection is when I write my monthly
retrospectives. [2] I don't have a standard set of questions that I ask
myself, but that's a good idea. My method so far has been to state what
lessons I learned, evaluate how I did against my goals for the month, and
define goals for the subsequent month.

[1] [http://whatgotdone.com/michael](http://whatgotdone.com/michael)

[2] [https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/](https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/)

------
atlasunshrugged
I'm spending the summer researching the implications of raising taxes on
tobacco in low and middle income countries (basically to see how big of an
opportunity it is for saving lives/earning additional govt revenue that can be
funneled to useful areas)

------
glacials
I left my silicon valley job and am building a speedrunning analytics startup
out of a side project I started 6 years ago.

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

~~~
mtlynch
This is really cool! I quit my big tech job a year ago, too, so I can
definitely relate to the joy of focusing on software centered around something
you're passionate about.

------
AdenFlorian
I’m working on my side project which is building a broswer based multiplayer
DAW. It’s been about a tyear since I started working on it. Started with a
keyboard that had a simple built in synth. It’s been a lot of fun to make,
learning stuff from building sequencers, polyphonic synths, and web socket
stuff :D. I hope to use it as my main DAW eventually, and will still finish up
tracks in Ableton probably. I hope it will be a useful tool for people to get
songs started and do it with other people.

------
Moggie100
Whenever I have any breathing room after my thesis work, I'm working on an
electric motorcycle build based on an the chassis of an old Honda H100-S2 as a
challenge in hardware, software, fabrication, and well, everything really.
Shooting for actual road certification, so doing everything by the book.

~~~
jessehorne
That's something I've wanted to do as well. Keep us up to date on how it goes!

~~~
Moggie100
Will try! It's slow going because everything tends to start with some
variation of 1. Get/buy new tool. 2. Learn entirely new skill. 3. Make
mistakes. 4. Goto 3.

The documentation lags quite far behind the actual build (really need to
update these pages...) but can be found at
[https://johnvidler.co.uk/mechanical-engineering/electric-
mot...](https://johnvidler.co.uk/mechanical-engineering/electric-motorcycle)
if you're interested.

------
LBarret
I am finishing a procedural generation pixel-art editor, aka you connect nodes
to get a rectangles of colour. The cool part is the nodes you use are often
other graphs also built with the tool. It is a bit like Houdini but for pixel-
art.

It is close to be a niche but solid product. I can reproduce with it a
reasonable amount of the pixel-art I see daily. I am currently writing the
tutorials for it.

[https://lbarret.itch.io/rectitude](https://lbarret.itch.io/rectitude)

The underlying engine is a restricted functional language and the architecture
is based on streams of values. I am quite proud of the architecture because so
far, I had very little accidental complexity to manage and that's key for me
to stay motivated/productive on the project.

------
westoncb
Whenever I get free time I work on my 'abstract visual debugger' project.

I've been doing that since late 2014 though, so recently I'm trying a new tack
to free up some time for myself: I've been building a little desktop utility
with three.js + Electron + Rust, that I'm going to sell in the Microsoft store
(eventually elsewhere too):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ANWHLvARM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ANWHLvARM)

I'll start beta testing in about a week--definitely excited :D I'll probably
do a write-up of the project and post it here as well.

Edit: just fyi, 'Lucid Disk' is a placeholder name (my bigger debugger project
I mentioned is called 'Lucidity').

~~~
dh-g
This looks nice, I use GrandPerspective for this task currently but your UI
looks beautiful and useful.

~~~
westoncb
Thanks! I came across this kind of app for the first time in January
(GrandPerspective, WinDirStat, DiasyDisk, TreeSize, etc.), and I've spent a
lot of time thinking about/working on making interactive/visual trees in the
past, so I really wanted to take a crack at making the best one I could.

Here we are many months later and I'm finally starting to be pretty happy with
the results. It's taken many iterations, but it is quite effective from a
usability perspective now.

I'm starting to put a little thought into what other kinds of hierarchical
data it might be useful for exploring...

------
quelsolaar
Working on a fully automated UV unwrapper for 3D meshes. Its basically the
process of flattening a 3D object down to a square. used mainly for texturing.
[http://www.ministryofflat.com](http://www.ministryofflat.com)

~~~
peteforde
This looks really cool, but I don't understand when this process is required
in an artistic pipeline. Do people who work in Maya/ZBrush have to export a
texture map in order to paint in tools like Substance? Surely it's easier to
work directly on a 3D object that can be rotated in space than an unwrapped
map of cutout segments. Otherwise, how could you ever line anything up?

Don't get me wrong: I understand that the ultimate output of a 3D mesh
reshaping and painting process is an obj + jpg + mapping file, as I've worked
extensively with systems that output files like this:
[https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-
walk-a55d807de1...](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-
walk-a55d807de14a4ba7bdb9977600e7c412)

We did all of the image packing ourselves, but every tool I've used will
output a map based on its own algorithm.

So, given that my process is admittedly very different than a character
artist, where does the UV unwrapping stage come in for most artists? I feel
like I'm missing something obvious.

~~~
quelsolaar
Polygons are 3D and textures are stored in images (2D). So you need to have
each polygon in 3D space correspond to a polygon in 2D image space. One way to
think of this is to take a 3D model and unwrapping it on to a 2D sheet. Very
much like you would do if you would design paper-craft.

A 3D artist usually starts by doing the 3D shape, then they create the UV
unwrap, and then finally they paint the 3D model in a 3D paint program. Yes
its sort of a invisible part of 3D graphics, but its very tedious, and
therefor costly and doesn't contribute anything to the artistic to the asset.

A big part of automating the process, is also using it ins situations where no
artist is even involved in the process, like when you do 3D scanning, and want
to produce good 3D models with textures.

~~~
namibj
I got great results with mvs-texturing. It's not as efficient with texture
area or the number of textures, however. Does your approach scale to large
meshes, at least in theory? I.e., what is the limit you deem feasible with 1TB
RAM and a 3GHz dual socket, 14 cores each? Say, within 2-5 hours or so.

~~~
quelsolaar
I have tried it with meshes in the 300-400 meg range and it works fine. Time
depends on the kind of geometry.

------
CarrotCodes
I'm working on a charitable project around animal adoption in the UK:
[https://www.adoptanimals.io/](https://www.adoptanimals.io/)

Other aggregators exist, but often have commercial ties, paid listings, and
such. We're building something to give shelters a really nice website, and
native apps, to list their animals, as a free public service :)

------
knowingathing
I'm building an animated SVG icon library:
[https://motionicons.com/](https://motionicons.com/)

There are many icon packs out there but they are almost all static. You can
help users by communicating additional meaning using an animated icon. I think
this is a gap in the icon market landscape.

It is still early days so any feedback would be appreciated!

------
ernsheong
I'm building a kanban workflow tool. Think of it as Trello + Google Forms +
Process Street. Check it out at [https://kanrails.com/](https://kanrails.com/)
Would appreciate your feedback!

~~~
halfjoking
Some screenshots or muted video of using the product on the homepage might
demonstrate why using this workflow tool is superior.

There are a lot of kanban tools out there and I'm not sure people will sign up
if there isn't some screenshot that looks compelling. (and not just generic
images)

------
chmielewski
Automated deployment systems where solar powered mesh network repeaters with
two camera channels each (SBCs) come online and handshake/pair then push auto-
configurations, SSH, lighttpd for IP camera images, etc. Then go to secure
mode to lock it all down and configure it for operating mode.

Edit: think in trees, weatherproofed with solar panels

~~~
zxcmx
What hardware do you use? I’ve looked into this and found power management
really challenging.

~~~
chmielewski
[https://www.solar-electric.com/me-sbc.html](https://www.solar-
electric.com/me-sbc.html) These are nice and I like weatherproofing them
rather than buying a pricier marine-grade solution

Power HARVESTING and having a downtime/idle hours is key in my experience.

I like the Banana Pi Pro because it has onboard wireless and two camera
channels built in. People often get third party bolt-ons that further
complicate power consumption issues.

~~~
zxcmx
Hey this is great, thank you!

------
acpm
Grid engine - [https://www.planimeter.org/grid-
sdk/](https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/)

I'm working on Grid engine 9, which should release some big improvements to
out-of-the-box multiplayer support. It's the only source code-based Lua game
engine that I know of with first-class multiplayer support that has a dogfood
project. Everything else out there is roll-your-own w/ LuaSockets. I've been
writing it for the last few years due to not being able to find a solution
that fit my needs.

~~~
jessehorne
I used to use Lua all the time. It's the language I learned after QBASIC and
what I spent most of my teenage years writing. I'm definitely going to stay up
to date on Grid. This looks neat!

------
lacampbell
A declarative, minimalist testing library for javascript.

There's one method, 'run', that takes a simple data structure that _is_ the
test suite. No need for special setup, teardown etc methods when you have
objects and closures already. It can automatically run on the browser after
webpack is done rebuilding, so it's good for running tests on phones.

I'm refactoring it now so it works on the console for server side stuff as
well. I think I will release, but I will keep using it myself regardless of if
anyone else cares because it works so well for me.

~~~
MH15
I'm interested in using this.

------
maxencecornet
I'm working on the v2 of the UX/UI for my side-project
[https://batgrowth.com](https://batgrowth.com)

Basically, the site is just a listing of content creators that accept tips in
the form of Basic Attention Token sent through the Brave browser

I'm pretty happy with the project and the site is getting some decent traffic
([https://simpleanalytics.com/batgrowth.com](https://simpleanalytics.com/batgrowth.com)),
but I think the current UI/UX is not good enough

~~~
iNate2000
Looks good!

~~~
maxencecornet
Thank you!

This is the draft for the next version (The texts are placeholders, it's just
a UI/UX draft) :

[https://twitter.com/MaxenceCornet/status/1144929703058399232](https://twitter.com/MaxenceCornet/status/1144929703058399232)

EDIT: Direct links to the draft:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-OberFXYAA3dMR.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-OberFXYAA3dMR.jpg)

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-ObfgRWwAA9m0O.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-ObfgRWwAA9m0O.jpg)

------
mysterydip
Game development, most recently getting a collection of 80s arcade-inspired
games polished up and on steam. In the past several months also worked on a
few boardgame ideas, and learned a ton about the industry and best practices,
which I've carried with me back to videogame development as well.

------
rorykoehler
Bibimapp

We're a personal recommendation social network. We're the antidote to
crowdsourced averaged algorithmic recommendations. We started with map based
personal recommendations of places and will expand once we have traction.
We'll be doing a ShowHN shortly.

We're on iOS and Android.

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

*we've soft launched on both appstores so if you want to check us out just type "Bibimapp" into the appstore search.

Also we're fully bootstrapped

------
matkoniecz
Easy to use way for improving OpenStreetMap.

It is an Android application called StreetComplete.

Minimal user requirements are following:

Person who can \- read and write \- use smartphone \- use maps

Obviously, there are still many things to improve.

------
SamWhited
I've been working on starting a DIY garage that's operated as a consumer-owned
co-op. The goal is to have a place where you can go take a class in car care
or maintenance, or just rent a lift and have a place to wrench on your car and
recycle fluids. I'm hoping that eventually we'll be able to open it in Austin
or Atlanta: [https://cornergarage.coop/](https://cornergarage.coop/)

~~~
jessehorne
Bring it to Des Moines, Iowa! I'd be there every day.

------
ScottFree
I'm learning C and x86 ASM from scratch all over again. I want to get away
from the dumpster fire that web development has become and do something
meaningful with my life.

Now, if I can only figure out what that is. Embedded development for medical
devices, maybe?

~~~
lacampbell
I feel like getting into embedded programming would be trading one dumpster
fire for another.

I try and limit my exposure to too much web dev crazy ness, usually by
avoiding any 'framework' that requires its own command line tool.

~~~
tluyben2
Personally I find embedded (actual embedded as in having 20-100kb to work
with, not 4gb Pi’s) far less dumpster fire than web dev; it is constrained and
there are only so many options once you studied the specsheets and assembled
your circuit. It is often like codegolf but for a lot of money and you cannot
have bugs because you cannot (easily) send updates. At least I like that kind
of thing.

I hope to find time and tech to advance for me to help the dumpster fire: if
you see projects like GuiLite it definitely is possible to make things
efficient and solid. So that is me hoping for enough advances in webassembly.

For now, embedded I find a lot more fun.

~~~
opticfluorine
Embedded development is fascinating. I work in embedded professionally and
what I've always enjoyed about it is working closely with the hardware
engineers (this for a project where the hardware is designed and built in-
house). It's a different perspective and I've learned a lot from working with
them.

------
zacssite
I work ~12 hours a day, but in my free time, I like to work on a lightweight,
full-featured blog engine. It’s fast, easy to use, platform-agnostic, and I’m
pretty proud of it. I ported it to Python 3 last month, and I have some big
plans soon. [https://zacs.site/blog/first-crack-release-
notes-0619.html](https://zacs.site/blog/first-crack-release-notes-0619.html)

------
maddy1512
I am quite frustrated and fed up of the traffic congestion problems in my city
(Pune, India) and so I have decided that I will try and solve this problem.

~~~
justusthane
Maybe you could say a little bit more about what you plan to do?

------
nemo1618
I'm writing a GitHub CI bot specifically for Go.

There are so many ways you can improve on existing CI if you integrate deeply
with a specific language. You can cache test results for packages whose source
code hasn't changed; you can run a specific test n times; you can run a
benchmark and block a merge if the geomean regressed; you can run a linter and
suggest it's fixes in GitHub comments; etc.

It's a little bizarre to me that existing CIs don't even bother to parse the
test output and display it nicely. Go has a -json flag that makes the test
output dead-simple to consume, but it's certainly not infeasible for other
languages. Wouldn't it be cool to see individual histories for each test,
showing how many times they've failed, or how much total time has been spent
executing them?

So my goal is to make a Go-specific CI that's 10x better than existing
language-agnostic CIs, and then shop it around to high-profile Go projects.
Those developers would also make for ideal contributors, so hopefully I can
source some external contributions that way too.

~~~
epage
Some thoughts I've had along these lines (but for Rust)

\- Open issues in the review for compiler / lint / format errors \- Gather
coverage per test and use that to determine which tests are needed for a given
change

------
fallingfrog
Adding hdr rendering to my fluid simulation flames

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KcLz3yAqqyI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KcLz3yAqqyI)

And my volumetric lightning effect too

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DdUve22wlvg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DdUve22wlvg)

(Both on the unity asset store as “physics based flames” and “physics based
lightning”)

------
mcthrowaway123z
Well I've been working on a general-purpose way to see one week into the
future for the past 3 years, but everyone thinks I'm joking.

~~~
jessehorne
I don't think you're joking. I'd be super happy if you gave us more
information.

------
buboard
I just posted about it. a community/social network for remote workers. I 'm
looking to add a chat feature next.
[https://reworkin.com](https://reworkin.com)

------
cjblomqvist
Fixing sourcing of footwear - i.e. helping brands find new footwear factories
in a modern way.

Check out www.findsourcing.com to learn more. We believe we can be a magnitude
better on all metrics (time, cost, effort, quality) and believe in
transparency and opening up this industry which still work by handshakes (if
you don't know the right people you are screwed).

------
thrifter
Going from zero musical ability and knowledge of music theory to composing and
playing jazz, classical and hymn. I've given myself a year to do it and
documenting my progress every day: [https://write.as/poseur-to-
composer/about](https://write.as/poseur-to-composer/about)

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Cool, it takes time. I picked up the electric guitar, again, I am aiming to be
a decent guitarist in ten years. I currently play bass in a hobby metall band
which is fun.

~~~
person_of_color
How did you stop your fingers hurting?

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Practise. Short sessions often. Better 15 minutes every day than 2 hours on
the weekend.

------
flipcoder
I'm working on a project that maps the steam controller as a synthesizer and
midi controller, called couchsynth. I'm also working on a textfile-based music
sequencer called textbeat
([https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat](https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat)).

~~~
bravura
I want a couchsynth, how can I get one?

------
nikivi
Trying to build the next version of Learn Anything. A platform for learning
anything via curated study guides as well as a knowledge tree of topics and a
platform for ideas. All open source.

[https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything](https://github.com/learn-
anything/learn-anything)

------
rozenmd
I'm building a service to effectively "integration test" GraphQL services each
time a deployment occurs (via Webhook).

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

At the moment it tests GraphQL queries at given intervals, but I've been
struggling to find people (other than me) who need the service.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
We may be interested in that. thomas@johannas.org

------
blensor
I am working with the people at cleverpet and the small hackerpet community on
making this pet training device acessible for DIY additions and new ways to
train your dog/cat

[http://hackerpet.com](http://hackerpet.com)
[http://clever.pet](http://clever.pet)

------
anteater_alex
We're drowning in emails and Instant Messages and need AI to help make sense
of it all. As a former CTO for a fast growing startup I was struck by how
often everybody was asking the same questions about connections and skills,
and how much time and efforts were wasted in mid-size organizations because of
lack of transparency and visibility.

I'm building AntEater (www.anteateranalytics.com) with my team to bridge this
gap and empower everyone who uses Gmail and Slack to be more knowledgeable -
and as smart as the entire team, using AI. This is a radical shift in terms of
information flow in organizations but I truly believe a more transparent
workflow will lead to less work and less frustrations.

You can check out the project here - it's free for small teams
[https://try.anteateranalytics.com/](https://try.anteateranalytics.com/)

~~~
nihonde
Mercari has an internal tool that does something similar.[1] I think it’s a
brilliant product. Your marketing site turns me off, though. It lacks the
polish I want from something that I’m granting permission to spy on my
internal corporate comms. I want to feel very certain that the trade off of
privacy vs convenience will pay off.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/girlie_mac/status/1143693961069916161](https://twitter.com/girlie_mac/status/1143693961069916161)

------
t34543
I feel overwhelmed by the ambition here - I’m burnt out. I’m working on mental
health.

~~~
jeanlucas
Feel for you, not everyone here is over ambitious (even looking at this
thread), and I hope you get better. It's not the same, but when I get
overwhelmed by HN or too much online exposure to entrepreneurship, I go do
offline things like taking care of plants.

------
nsainsbury
I'm working on a new chapter for my course Mastery with SQL
([https://www.masterywithsql.com](https://www.masterywithsql.com)) covering
query performance and indexing with PostgreSQL.

I want to really allow everyone to see first-hand the impact of re-writing
queries to be more performant and adding the right indexes so I've been
spending a lot of time to create great exercises where you get to optimise
poorly performing queries over some very large and interesting data sets.

I launched the course on HN a bit over a week ago and had a really great
response
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260292))
so has been great motivation to continue working hard! Really enjoying myself
at the moment.

~~~
aldoushuxley001
Sounds awesome, good work!

------
tmamic
[https://denther.com](https://denther.com) Using game theory to extract the
correct dental diagnosis from multiple dentists.

------
CosmicShadow
For concert ticket stub collectors, I'm working on
[https://Stubforge.com](https://Stubforge.com), a site where you can design
and print custom memorabilia tickets that look and feel just like real
TicketMaster style tickets.

The site is ready for people to start designing tickets with live preview and
helpers (although still need to fill in a lot of info bubbles), and you can
order as well. Still a few things I'd like to fix up/improve before I really
launch it.

The site won't really make much money, it's made to be cheap and affordable
and to help out fellow stub collectors who hate having missing tickets in
their collections due to loss, having bought at the door, or only having the
option of digital or print-at-home tickets.

Would love feedback!

------
gradschool
I recently finished writing a book about asynchronous circuit design and set
up the landing page for it [1]. It's my first crack at modern-ish web
technologies, using bootstrap for the front end and making it serverless on
AWS S3 with a couple of lambda functions written in go for the back end [2]
[3]. I'm getting to grips payment processing and book printing but giving the
ebook away free.

[1] [http://www.delayinsensitive.com](http://www.delayinsensitive.com)

[2]
[https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota](https://github.com/gueststar/s3quota)

[3]
[https://github.com/gueststar/lumberjack](https://github.com/gueststar/lumberjack)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Just wanted to say that I took a look at your book and it is really
fascinating. I'm glad you took the time to write it and thanks for giving the
ebook away. I'm a self taught FPGA designer (started out in software and
switched to hardware because I like it more), so a lot of what you cover is
totally new to me. I'll definitely be working my way through the material as
my schedule permits.

------
yitchelle
[https://mailchi.mp/8e0622427dd5/prjmgrwkly](https://mailchi.mp/8e0622427dd5/prjmgrwkly)
\- Newsletters around Project Management topics.

I feel most of the newsletters that aggregate stories and articles have too
links. The reader gets overwhelm with what to read and what to skip.

I am taking a different strategy and aggregating only four links per week. The
reader could quickly scan the four links. If any of them is interesting, click
and read. Otherwise, hit the delete and move on for the day. I don't want to
reader to be captive if he finds the links do no add value for them. Their
time is to valuable and I respect that.

Also I am using this side project as motivation to consume the various
articles for my day job.

------
JeremyReimer
I'm working on a 2.0 release for newLISP on Rockets:
[http://newlisponrockets.com](http://newlisponrockets.com)

It's a rapid development web framework written in newLISP, with inspiration
(and many many ideas) taken from Dragonfly.

I had stopped working on it for a few years while I worked on other projects,
but I wanted to make a new and updated personal website, so I've updated the
framework to also include a basic blog with comments and a discussion forum,
and some simple customization options for administrators.

Eating my own dogfood (as it were) has been an interesting and fun experience.
I now have three sites running on the latest version of Rockets 2.0.

I really missed working with LISP and it's a lot of fun to get back to it!

------
codefined
A simple file uploader - [https://femto.pw/](https://femto.pw/)

We're upto 460TB of data being transferred, :)

~~~
the_pwner224
How do you make / not lose money?

~~~
codefined
We don't make any money, but all the hardware is just making use of unspent
resources. E.g. The storage is a GlusterFS cluster across all of my machines,
encrypted and replicated three times in case anything goes wrong. The cpu
usage and memory usage is negligible and bandwidth is free from my provider.

Until it gets to about 32TB of used storage it won't cost me anything, and at
the current rate of growth that is going to take decades.

------
bdibs
Thanks for asking!

I’m working on a podcast community site to give a place for listeners to get
together and connect.

It’s not too far along but the basics are there, feel free to check it
out/give me feedback:

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

~~~
raghavtoshniwal
Hey, looks pretty good. I made
[https://www.podwhat.com](https://www.podwhat.com) , it allows you to make
podcast lists of the shows you like. Are you using the iTunes API for search?

------
mcjiggerlog
I've been working on a web app for discovering backpacking (as in hostels, not
trails) destinations and planning trips -
[https://waystops.com](https://waystops.com).

I'm a very visual person and for a long time wished there was a browseable map
of interesting places to visit and things to see and do when planning
backpacking trips. I couldn't find anything that quite did what I wanted so
thought I'd have a go myself.

The data itself is sourced from a combination of Wikivoyage and Wikipedia. The
biggest features I'm looking to develop next are search and a way to leave
reviews/comments on places and listings.

Still very early days but would love to hear any feedback.

------
toymachine
Been geeking out about ZIP code data at
[https://incomedata.org](https://incomedata.org) . I never realized how cool
ZIP code data is, just how important the census is, or how much fun working
with geo data is.

------
cdaringe
[https://informedcitizen.me/](https://informedcitizen.me/)

Automatically analyze online content for credibility.

Barebones alpha launch last night, 4 July 2019 :)

Improve credibility in social networks. Long term plan is to detect when
social shares are trending upwards, analyze the shared articles' contents, and
submit an automated reports into threads.

Currently the heavy lifting of the system is done via fakebox, supported by a
small suite of services you can see in the docker compose configurations.
[https://github.com/dino-dna/informed-citizen](https://github.com/dino-
dna/informed-citizen)

I'd love for others to get involved and help out!

~~~
cdaringe
Looks like my analysis-card's min-width a tad too big on mobile :). Will patch
soon!

------
drankula3
I'm making a website aggregator currently on
[https://feldot.com](https://feldot.com). Most people are increasingly siloed
into small portions of the internet. The idea of this site is to provide tools
to a small portion of content creators that make discovery of new websites
easier, then have them post on a reddit-like main page to introduce those
sites to the masses.

Only the reddit-like portion of the site is ready right now, but there will be
new tools released soon that will make the discovery of new sites trivial. It
has been really fun to make, and I really look forward to making a Show HN
post when it's ready for a growth phase.

------
arbuge
I'm working on ReferDigital, an affiliate partner network with no monthly or
startup fees, subscription tracking (monthly commissions for the life of the
customer), and some other features currently in beta.

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

My side-project is Classient.com, a class booking system / marketplace. My
wife has been using it for several months now to teach a weekly class to kids
in the neighborhood. A class could be simply watching kids and keeping them
entertained (group baby-sitting) so no formal teaching experience is required:

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

------
noir_lord
Continuing my deep dive into TypeScript and particularly its type expressions.

I keep running head first into terms I’ve only loosely heard before and having
to wander off to find out what they mean before coming back, it’s been
absolutely fascinating though.

------
yamalight
New version of Exoframe -
[https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe](https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe)

It's a self-hosted one command deployment tool that makes running CD to your
own VPS quite trivial.

Current version allows to deploy any dockerized apps quite easily, but I
really wanted to have a simple way to deploy Node.js functions (be it HTTP,
background process, or trigger/reaction). So Exoframe v5 includes is exactly
that (and nearly ready!).

Create index.js, run `exoframe init -f` and then `exoframe` is all it'll take
to deploy a function once I'm done. I'm quite happy with the result :)

------
gremlinsinc
A saas boilerplate with the fastest build out I can possibly muster and least
code. Stack is hasura, graphql, stripe for the API, quasar framework for
initial frontend to get easy mobile, native, electron, pwa, ssr, etc.

API has teams, users, roles, permissions, subscriptions and plans, following
the paradigm that a user can belong to or own multiple teams and easily switch
without logging out, users can be invited or request access to teams, admins
can set and change features per plan... Etc...

The idea being minimal changes needed to go to market with an idea. Add a few
services or features the 'what's it do' and everything else is ready to go.

------
Shorn
[https://kopi.cloud](https://kopi.cloud)

It's an email forwarder that lets you hand out burner addresses so
companies/sites don't have your real email address. Kopi supports replying to
messages too - so you can have whole conversations without giving out your
real address.

Not just useful for website signups etc. - it can also be part of a strategy
for de-googling yourself.

You can re-direct specific mail forwarders to publish mail as an RSS feed
(useful for Github, StackOverflow, etc.)

Just finished implementing "bring your own domain" functionality, so you don't
have to be locked in to the Kopi domains.

------
jessehorne
I've been working on the site for Overpowered Mats, day in and day out. It's
been a challenge but I'm very happy that I was able to work on such a cool
idea. The "Custom Mat Designer" for it is going to be soooo cool. We're super
close! There will be room for improvement when the project is launched, for
sure, so hang tight! Feel free to check it out and let me know if there's any
improvement that could be made or bugs to fix! You can pre-order now, by the
way.

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

------
gxx
Developing the first completely new class of wind instrument mouthpiece
introduced in recorded history. For wind instruments there are reed
mouthpieces, double reed, jet reed, lip reed, etc. These have all existed in
various forms for millenia. My design, based on over 15 years of research uses
optical sensing to very precisely measure multiple dimensions of the
embouchure.

It will be available in the form of a hands-free music controller supported on
what we call the "neck unit" or on a variety of hand-held units of different
fingering styles that we call "finger units".

~~~
ScottFree
Very interesting. It sounds like you'll be able to get more variety of
expression out of the instrument. I'm assuming it's entirely digital?

Are there any videos of it in action?

------
jdsully
KeyDB: a multi-threaded fork of Redis.
[https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB](https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB)

It seemed crazy to me Redis was still single threaded in 2019. Sometimes the
rationale was one thread was enough to saturate a machine (it is not). Other
times it was justified by the fact that you could create a local cluster - but
I thought that was needlessly complex. Eventually I went ahead and just did
it.

The project has since expanded to include Active Replication and a bunch of
other new features.

------
datdatdat
After 10 years of development, My AI is "commercial ready";offering
Alternative data for hedge funds.

------
eivarv
I'm currently working on a macOS application that allows users to save and
load their working context, by which I mean sets of open applications and
their internal states.

It has helped me reduce information overload, and allowed me to switch between
tasks more efficiently - and I hope other people will find value in this as
well.

It's an idea I've been toying with and prototyping in different forms on and
off for about four years now.

I'm finally releasing an open Beta this summer/fall, as soon as I implement
delta updates and the license validator.

~~~
ScottFree
I look forward to using this! Have you given any thought to being able to sync
a working context between computers?

~~~
eivarv
I've thought a little about it, but as it won't exactly be trivial to
implement (internal app states will depend on specific files with specific
contents existing at specific paths, and so on) it's not on top of my TODO-
list, at the moment.

------
peteforde
I have two excellent passion projects right now.

The first is working with my friend on remote pair programming in service of
levelling her up faster than would otherwise be possible for the average
graduate of a coding bootcamp program. She got a job as a junior dev almost
immediately out of the program, and I spend sometimes many hours a day screen
sharing and talking through problems. It demands patience and good
communication, but the results have been one of the most incredible
investments I've ever made. It's also one of the most intimate connections
I've ever experienced. We both have a ton of gratitude, and I've learned an
amazing amount in the process.

I've also been working on my own Rails project, which I've been converting
from ad hoc jQuery to Stimulus and Turbolinks. One of the things I've learned
from working with my friend is that when it comes to the whole React/JS-for-
everything ecosystem, the inmates are running the asylum. In this case,
inmates are a critical mass of relatively new devs in an echo chamber that
thinks React is the default choice for every project and have little practical
experience to base this on. Sadly, Stimulus/Turbolinks is not the hipster
choice and part of the problem is a lack of visible examples of how amazing
these libraries actually are. I'm excited to publish a series of posts about
how warm the water is on our side of the debate.

------
devtanna
Trying out a hardware side project this time. Figuring out a way to track your
surf board or kite board once it's lost at sea during a session. It's a pretty
interesting challenge.

~~~
jessehorne
I've got a number of things I would like to work on that are more into the
realm of hardware. One thing I'm really wanting to work on is a way for me to
manage and interact with my cars ECU through a web interface. Would be useful
for a number of things, such as keeping a better maintenance schedule, useful
statistics, maybe even tuning...Seems pretty fun.

As far as tracking goes, I can't think of a need for it with my idea, but I
know it's used a lot commercially already.

~~~
icebraining
For cars is pretty easy, you just plug into the OBD port. There are quite a
few Bluetooth, Wifi and even 4G dongles out there.

------
awfulaxolotl
I’m spending much of my free time experimenting with tech which augments the
creative process.

\- Creating variants on the fly [1]

\- WebGL shader composition [2]

\- Plug n’ play wireless mesh devices for sensing and control

My goal is to properly test them with absurd interactive art projects :D

[1]:
[https://github.com/awfulaxolotl/tastes](https://github.com/awfulaxolotl/tastes)
[2]:
[https://github.com/awfulaxolotl/lucida](https://github.com/awfulaxolotl/lucida)

------
nrmn
Working on research for my thesis, which will be wrapped up by years end. The
current project focuses on improving sample efficiency in deep reinforcement
learning. I am researching how best to merge the options framework with the
adaptability of meta-reinforcement learning.

In my spare time I write and research algorithmic trading strategies. I’ve
been sticking to the traditional techniques, with a small toe into statistics
for modeling.

With whatever time is left, I’ve been learning rust and have enjoyed it quite
a bit so far.

------
ivelostn
A fun thing I’ve been putting together is growing Oyster mushrooms on wood.
There’s actually a lot that goes into getting it to work. The mycelium has to
fully inhabit the log before it can produce fruit. That can take 6-12 months.
That, and the log has to stay very moist so you have to soak it for awhile
before you can put the plugs of mycelium into the wood. Then you seal it with
a wax and water it every couple of days. Apparently, a single piece of wood
can fruit multiple times.

------
pgt
I spent the last year bootstrapping Wallfly: Smart Volume Control.

Ever been to a bar where the music was too loud?

Wallfly is cruise control for sound. The sonic control system measures the
ambient audio levels in every room using your device's microphone or Wallfly
Sonic Sensor (coming Q4 2019) and modulates amplifier gain to keep the levels
_just right_...because you can't tell someone you love them when they can't
hear you.

[https://wallfly.app](https://wallfly.app)

------
critnal
I've recently put this up: [https://iamwfh.com/](https://iamwfh.com/)

A lot of the people in our office work from home on any given day. A joke
emerged where we come up with funny alternative words for 'WFH', like
'Worshipping Foreign Horizons'. Anyway I quickly ran out of original
combinations, so I made something to generate some. I figure there are
probably others out there who would get a kick out of it.

------
ChrisRackauckas
We have optimized neural ODEs, neural SDEs, neural DDEs, and neural DAEs quite
a bit in Julia, and have some experimental results with neural jump SDEs and
neural PDEs. But we can really do more with the neural PDEs, especially neural
PDEs with constraints (i.e. partial differential-algebraic equations) and
neural stochastic PDEs (SPDEs). It's all working with DiffEqFlux.jl (you can
see a blog post of experiments here:
[http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/neural-jump-sdes-jump-
dif...](http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/neural-jump-sdes-jump-diffusions-
and-neural-pdes/)), and it works with GPUs, but we really need to make a few
of the overloads like mapslices have better GPU kernels to really capture the
neural SPDE applications well.

I'm also spending quite a bit of time looking into the ability for these
neural differential equations to understand phase space. What exactly do they
learn, and why? Can you predict beforehand how well you can learn the
equations directly from data? Of course, this is intertwined with the previous
part, because to understand how well you can auto-learn neural SPDEs you need
the ability to quickly solve neural SPDEs, along with all of the implicit
solvers and GPU support.

~~~
wespiser_2018
This stuff is really awesome! Three cheers for Julia + Autodifferentiation +
DL

------
adreamingsoul
I moved to Norway with my wife and son from the USA. As part of the move, I
ended my employment at a FAANG company and joined a small Norwegian software
company.

On the side, I'm working on a feature documentary and I'm also exploring some
ideas with a friend of mine who is a talented film director.

Most of my spare time is spent with my son and wife. I'm recovering from
burnout and as part of the Scandinavian mindset I'm relearning how to have a
healthy work life balance.

------
planert41
The food photos on your phone are an untapped treasure trove of verified legit
food recommendations.

I'm building an IOS app that uses your food photos to create a social food
diary, which when aggregated with posts from your friends, also creates this
communal food brain of legit food. I call it friend-sourcing instead of crowd-
sourcing.

An example use case is going to Tokyo and trying a bunch of ramen places. You
take photos and upload the ones you like onto a geotagged list (called Tokyo
Trip).

Your friends are going to Tokyo soon and ask you for ramen recommendations.
Instead of creating a google map with pins or a long email lists with no
pictures or geo-capabilities, you show/send them the list with the app and it
will show them all your ramen photos on a map.

We want to help answer "What is the closest legit food my friends have tried
around me?" wherever you are.

We are looking for beta test users and will be launching this year. You just
have to love food and like telling your friends where they should go eat (like
me). Feel free to reach out at weizou@legitlist.me

Here is the beta test link if anyone is interested:
[https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Ho5creV](https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Ho5creV)

------
timothylevi
Working on making knowledge sharing, onboarding, and development easier for
organizations. The focus is on enabling team members to capture small chunks
of knowledge (checklists, definitions, explanations, short updates).

Each chunk can be tagged and searchable (so that they’re easy to find),
versioned (so there aren’t duplicates of the same information), and composable
(so that they can be reused in different pieces/versions of training
materials).

------
imnotreallynew
I (we) are building a challenger bank in the U.S., focusing on checking and
savings accounts that expose a full API.

On a personal level, I have been doing a deep dive into the Napoleonic Wars,
and spend most of my free time reading. I had an idea the other day to attempt
to build some sort of battlefield/timeline visualizer using the newly realized
Google Earth Studio. Has anybody used it for anything other than simple
flyover animations?

------
dietervds
Im a bit late to the party, but outside of work I spend most of my
professional time on a curated newsletter for infosec news:
[https://securitynewsletter.co/](https://securitynewsletter.co/).

Two years running, just crossed 5700 subscribers. MRR between $600 and $1000.
Most successful thing I ever started and still love doing it. Kinda scary to
have an “audience” of that size :)

~~~
abrichr
Cool! How do you monetize?

~~~
dietervds
Thanks! Through sponsorships, there's two slots per issue.

------
bobowzki
A software defined radio app optimized for raspberry pi 4.

~~~
walkingolof
What language do you use ?

~~~
bobowzki
C++ on the Pi side. VHDL on the FPGA.

------
ElFitz
Currently building some serverless automation platform, as a SaaS, with an
associate.

Something similar to Zapier, but appropriate for heavy workloads, with
separate dev & production environments, which handles throttling (you don't
want to accidentally DDOS a third-party API) and doesn't structure an array of
objects into arrays of their properties, etc

The goal is to be handle to handle all non-crud backend workflows.

It's quite challenging really.

------
dmichulke
An automatic time series model finder.

The idea is to find a good model for predicting a time series given a set of
other time series. Input is basically an excel file and output is a CSV file,
expected to be delivered within a minute.

I mostly test it on power load and supply data but it should work on anything.

Also, it's free.

[http://ausblick.cryptoport.net/en/index](http://ausblick.cryptoport.net/en/index)

------
wheresvic1
Professionally, I'm really lucky as I am working in R&D at a university
hospital and I have a couple of cool projects going:

\- The current medical application used in our hospital does not have a way to
track if a case is a re-admission or not. This information is very important
in surgery and urology. The doctors are using an excel file to track this
information at the moment and we are building an app so that this information
gets put into a database and will also later be integrated into the main
medical system.

\- Currently, students in radiology do not get very many chances to actually
look at images to practice so we are building a crowdsourcing platform for
radiology images. This will also be useful for interviewing or general
practice for professionals.

On the side, I've been working on
[https://ewolo.fitness](https://ewolo.fitness) \- a workout tracking app that
also has running and weight tracking built-in. I found all existing solutions
too gimmicky and annoying - a workout tracker should be as flexible as
possible and let you add your data and get out of your way...

------
masiulis
Creating a visual tool to replace CSS
[https://github.com/masiulis/Ugnis](https://github.com/masiulis/Ugnis)

So that anyone could create a nice UI by drag’n’drop, without writting a
single line of CSS. It also works as a design system, so companies can create
their own component library quickly.

After 3 years of trial and error, finally getting really close to beta
version.

~~~
halfjoking
I couldn't find how to drag and drop components. I was expecting a "grid view"
and then just to drag components from the left to the gridview and put them in
cells.

I've actually had this same idea since grid is so flexible and the order of
components don't matter for the container grid, so the structure of the HTML
doesn't have to change by moving things around in a grid, just the CSS rules
generated. Anyway good luck on launching the Beta version.

------
acutesoftware
I am working on moving the interface of my notes app to Javascript (so it can
be a PWA). To do this, I need to learn Javascript, so I am learning javascript
by writing little games.

I present to you, the worst game in the entire world -
[https://www.lifepim.com/apps/LifeSIM/battle](https://www.lifepim.com/apps/LifeSIM/battle)

~~~
vinitagr
This is really cool. Not bad for your first game :)

~~~
acutesoftware
Thank you! The mechanics sort of work ok, but it needs graphics and animation
now. It is definitely good Javascript practice - I look at the early code when
starting it, and think _Ugh_

------
bichiliad
I'm trying to get back into writing. I wrote a lot as an intern cuz that's
what you do when you're an intern in SF, but recently I'm realizing that a lot
of stuff I have a lot of first-hand experience is stuff that other engineers
even within my own company don't have a ton of knowledge about (for context, I
do a lot of frontend performance work).

------
secfirstmd
Umbrella App.

It's a free, open source app with best practice advice on how
activists/journalists/aid workers/travellers can learn about and manage their
own digital and physical security.

It covers stuff like travel safety, staying safe at protests, dealing with
arrest, surveillance, sending a secure mail or communication etc. Our
background is working with activists and journalists to keep them safe, so we
wanted an all-in-one guide for anyone who needs help. You can read more about
it at [https://www.secfirst.org](https://www.secfirst.org) or try it

iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/umbrella-
security/id14537153...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/umbrella-
security/id1453715310)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella)

------
eswat
Working on my macOS image viewer app, VoidView. I hadn’t been serious about
polishing it but now I’m adding some simple quality of life improvements,
especially for making artists that use apps like Bridge or PureRef for
displaying references happier.

[https://github.com/ESWAT/voidview](https://github.com/ESWAT/voidview)

------
mukeshsoni
I wrote a workflowy clone in draftjs, to see if it's possible to do it -
[https://dumpster.netlify.com/](https://dumpster.netlify.com/)

It keeps data in local storage and has an option to back it up to your dropbox
account.

Nowhere as smooth and bug free as workflowy, but it was a fun experiment.

Warning - Has a lot of bugs in mobile. Leads of loss of data.

------
mcarrano
When I have down time, I am working on updating a passion project that I have
not touched in 3+ years.

The idea is to be able to scan Android apps installed on your device and see
which libraries/SDKs were used to develop them.

[https://github.com/michaelcarrano/detective-
droid](https://github.com/michaelcarrano/detective-droid)

------
c-smile
I am working "sharing note books" in Sciter.Notes.

This feature will allow

1\. to share notes using cloud of your choice 2\. and so to access notes on
mobiles and in browser.

More on this: [https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-
coming/](https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/)

------
carapace
Stalled a bit recently but I've been working on/with a programming language
called Joy[1].

It's stack-based, "concatinative" and Categorical. It's a little like
Forth+LISP.

I had just implemented some type inference[2] when Warren's "Logic Programming
and Compiler Writing" went by here on HN[4] and I got into a very rewarding
Prolog rabbithole.

So now I'm writing a compiler in Prolog for Joy.

[1] [http://joypy.osdn.io/](http://joypy.osdn.io/)

[2]
[http://joypy.osdn.io/notebooks/Types.html](http://joypy.osdn.io/notebooks/Types.html)

[3]
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220280364_Logic_Pro...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220280364_Logic_Programming_and_Compiler_Writing)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17674859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17674859)

------
yboris
Working to release version 2 of _Video Hub App_ \-
[https://videohubapp.com](https://videohubapp.com) (browse and manage videos
on PC, Win, Linux)

Original discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992)

------
dinoso92
I'm trying to validate an idea/app for modularising and streamlining internal
and external business communication (mainly email).

At the moment it's just an application to create some reusable templates and
snippets, and extend and share them with colleagues. My next step would be to
create a browser extension that allows to easily injected the content from the
application into other websites directly while typing (for example into any
web email client, google docs, any website form, etc.).

The main benefits of the application would be to save time, reduce errors, and
potentially to standardize a company's business communication thought a
collective effort (document, template and snippet creation) where also
employees that generally don't like to write emails can benefit (as a
developer I find myself in this category).

Still in alpha, feedback is greatly appreciated:
[https://getlimpid.com](https://getlimpid.com)

------
WrtCdEvrydy
I'm currently attempting to bootstrap taxammend.com (a service to send your
1040X IRS tax form easily) and gearing up for amiaccessible.com (a service to
run automated accessibility checks against your website, enabling good-faith
efforts are improving internet accessibility).

I am also currently working on my Master's in Cybersecurity and Info
Assurance.

------
kaishiro
I've been building out a product with two other developers for over a year now
- and we're finally just a couple of weeks from launching.

It's a drop in e-commerce system that allows people to start selling products
on an existing site very quickly (a similar space as Snipcart).

Now just building out the marketing and wondering if anyone will want to use
it.

~~~
peteforde
That sounds interesting. How would you compare it to something like
ShopLocket?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtsDPgOkQ-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtsDPgOkQ-0)

~~~
kaishiro
Good question. The biggest difference is that we're not relying on specific
embeds, particularly iframes, to display products. We've tried to go a step
above generating one off "Buy now" buttons, and instead you get a fully baked
e-commerce system - a shopping cart, user account system, configurable taxes,
live shipping quotes, etc.

~~~
peteforde
I'm excited to see how this gets manifested - it's a tall order. Best of luck
with your launch!

------
crorella
I'm working on implementing a few optimizations for our DWH, in particular I
want to automatically find the best partition and bucketing schema for tables
based on their access patterns. This is actually part of a much bigger project
that I want to do to further increase the performance and efficiency of our
data analytics systems.

------
nevster
I've recently set up this blog :
[http://www.dndchronologically.com/](http://www.dndchronologically.com/)

I'm reading through all of TSR's D&D products in chronological order. Part of
this project is to compile the most accurate chronological list on the net.

------
wiseleo
When not procrastinating...

* Doing some IT work through field service platforms like Fieldnation. About to start writing some software to auto-bid on some preferred assignments while I sleep. ;) This is a more involved task than you might think because it involves parsing free-form text and data mining email notifications. These sites have an annoying habit of not notifying when an offer is declined. Many projects post a ton of boilerplate with some relevant text in the middle. It also has to figure out if the city is close enough to other assignments so I don't wind up driving 30+ miles. * Working on my main software project, but really not. * Working on a new project related to helping people work on their cars.

It feels like I am level capped at an RPG. I need to raise my programming
skill, which I want to do right, so I want to raise my math skill.

------
philipkiely
I finally finished writing the CMS that I was using as an excuse to delay the
start of writing online, I just started publishing to
[https://philipkiely.com/essays](https://philipkiely.com/essays) and I have
dozens more that I want to write.

------
twodave
1\. API to extract and store metadata about an uploaded PDF (images, relevant
field locations, signature boxes, etc.)

2\. Tool that shows an image of each field to the user and allows them to
enter human readable prompts (title, description, input style).

3\. A PWA that uses the prompts to help an end user complete the form,
collects signatures, etc.

4\. Add the ability to link/upload some tabular data and tie fields from the
data source to fields on a PDF.

5\. Communications—email a unique short link to somebody to request they
complete a form, pre-filled with data.

6\. Build an example web site that consumes 1-4 and shows off e.g. completing
a legal contract. Notifications when a form is completed.

7\. Multi-party forms

8\. Start figuring out how to charge people and who to sell to, build more
niche wrappers around the product, stand up an auth/billing service, etc.

~~~
richajak
That's cool. I was working on something similar, extracting tabular data from
PDF for the last 2 weeks.

Curious about your method, as the process (e.g. to detect the coordinate of
the header/footer fields, etc) is very manual and specific for each PDF
template. Do you happen to encounter the same challenge? If yes, how do solve
it, use machine learning? heuristics? etc?

~~~
twodave
Well for now it is only attempting to read FDF or XFA forms, for which the
metadata is pretty readily accessible. The tool will probably include a way to
manually add/remove fields as well, but detecting form fields from basically
an image is a level of awesomeness I have not yet set as a goal haha.

------
dbremner
My side project is a fork[0] of an old Java Swing app. I have been updating
the code to use newer Java features and rewriting portions of it in Scala.

[0] [https://github.com/dbremner/JavaPH](https://github.com/dbremner/JavaPH)

------
tluyben2
Working on a new version of hardware, firmware and app[0] for new payment
features for AU client.

Together with a local friend; garden & home automation/security with Pi’s and
Arduino’s.

[0] [https://scramcard.com/](https://scramcard.com/)

------
_frkl
Currently I'm working on documentation, trying to explain (and sort of figure
out for myself) why I spent the last 2 years developing a declarative
scripting framework called 'freckles' (
[https://freckles.io](https://freckles.io) ).

The code is at a state now that I'm happy enough with (at least to prove the
concept), but I realized that it is not as obvious to other people why a thing
like it should exist than it has been to me.

I was working as programmer as well as a sys-admin-type years before DevOps
became a thing, and I always thought there was something missing. We are
automating a lot of stuff, but not up to the 'last mile', there is always some
manual requirement install or preparation necessary. And I always thought that
once we can wrap _every_ single one of the tasks 'around' a software project
into a re-usable, formalized structure, it would make a lot of things easier,
and open up lots of possibilities that are hidden from our views for now.

Basically, I think we should be able to create any desired state in a specific
computational environment (physical machine, VM, container, filesystem,
infrastructure, ...) using a single instruction, and one (optional)
dictionary-type structure for arguments. Be it trivial (like make sure a
folder exists) or fairly involved (setup a complete Wordpress instance incl.
reverse proxy, Letsencrypt cert, firewall, ...).

There are technologies that help with some of the issues I have (Docker, K8s,
Terraform, config-management ...), but it feels like they all have a slightly
off-target focus and priority for what I have in mind.

I'm still struggling to find the right words (as you can probably see) to
explain the what and why, but it's an interesting experience working on
basically reverse-engineering something I think is important but can't express
(it's like trying to explain a color). Gaining a lot of understanding about
the problem too. And the funny thing is, I don't think I could have done all
that before I went ahead and actually implemented the/my solution to the
problem itself.

------
fakefoobar
Practicing on leetcode for AC solution to work on FANG

~~~
jessehorne
This is my first time seeing FANG used, anywhere.

------
neckardt
Nothing too crazy, just got done setting up OpenWRT this week, but am having a
few issues getting ipv6 working properly.

Also setting up a mediawiki server for the family, mainly so I can get all of
my mom's great recipies and share them with the rest of the family :)

~~~
kingo55
Perhaps this isn't what you're looking for to share with family, but there's
an open source project I help with a little, called grocy.

It allows you to define recipes and track the stock you have in your
fridge/pantry so you know what recipes you can cook at any point in time.

------
leozhi
Connecting a heart rate monitor to a linux system and attempting to study the
impact of different activities on my heart rate.

Context: I train for endurance events, and that's seen my resting heart rate
fall by about 13 beats per minute. On some days this goes lower during
training, and some days it doesn't. The idea is that certain kinds of foods,
and certain activities might help me make my training more effective. Also, a
part of the inspiration comes from here - [https://a16z.com/2019/06/13/ai-
doctor-deep-medicine-topol/](https://a16z.com/2019/06/13/ai-doctor-deep-
medicine-topol/)

------
louisstow
Been working on a weekly security newsletter customized to the subscribers
software stack. It includes vulnerabilities and security news and it's 100%
free: [https://secalerts.co](https://secalerts.co)

~~~
wale
Interesting stuff. Just subscribed.

~~~
louisstow
Thanks! If you have any suggestions feel free to get in touch
(info@secalerts.co)

------
freeradical13
I've become bored with software. I just started a masters degree in Biology
and have a vague and naive plan of becoming a cardiologist and running a lab
with the primary goal of reducing human suffering, rather than money (been
there, done that).

~~~
bigmit37
I’m actually interested in biology as well. I wish research equipment was
cheaper for independent experiments.

~~~
freeradical13
There are some periodic auctions of equipment (usually from busted companies):
[http://www.biosurplus.com/](http://www.biosurplus.com/)

~~~
bigmit37
Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

------
vikramkr
A cell therapy manufacturing device that uses micro injection to genetically
modify cells.

------
lkrubner
I'm trying to clean up the app I wrote, that pulls data out of a PostGres
database and denormalizes the data based on a simple config file and then
pushes the denormalized data into ElasticSearch, so that the frontend code can
query the data. I'd like to eventually release the app as Open Source, as I
think it is a more practical way of doing some of the things that GraphQL is
supposed to do. I wrote a little bit about it here:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/caches-are-cheap-
buil...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/caches-are-cheap-build-a-lot-
of-them-for-the-frontend)

------
osi1647
I am working on a whisky app called Drammer
[https://drammer.com](https://drammer.com) Where users can manage their
collection, search by taste and use a barcode scanner to find a whisky
quickly.

------
ericb
I'm working on a way to re-use your Selenium page objects for load testing.

Thesis: The reason, instead of automating browsers, that we collectively
started making HTTP-level load scripts and investing expensive labor hours in
"correlation" was because hardware was really expensive.

Around Y2K, A single server might cost 500 a month in hardware and rack costs.
Now a 72 core machine can be rented for an hour for under a dollar.

So I'm making a real-browser load testing service that _lets you use the same
integration test code you already maintain_. Fewer tools, fewer specialties,
CI/CD ready.

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

------
notamy
Maintaining some marginally-novel open-source projects, and looking for a new
side-project idea. I burned out and ended up shutting down my previous side-
project the other day; just taking a break before starting up a new one.

------
dmcswain
I'm working on Photo Recall an Amazon Alexa skill and Google Assistant app
that let's you play photo slideshows by voice: [https://bit.ly/photo-
recall](https://bit.ly/photo-recall)

I've also been working on Custom Voice Commands an Android app and web app
that let's you load web content like YouTube video playlists, Google Drive or
OneDrive documents, manage lists and reminders by voice plus ask Alexa
questions: [https://bit.ly/custom-voice-commands](https://bit.ly/custom-voice-
commands)

------
siddboots
I'm teaching myself graduate mathematical analysis using Rudin and whatever I
can find online. It's a really beautiful subject, and I'm finding myself look
forward to the little time I have in the day for it.

~~~
xelxebar
Nooooice! I went to grad school in math, and remember how much Rudin changed
my life. Keep it up!

------
frading
Since I couldn't find a good tool to make 3D experiences for the web, I
created one that so far it made my clients very happy.

It's node-based, which allows you to try different ideas very quickly within
the same scene. You can process models and geometries, or even create your own
glsl shader with just nodes. And if you're not a coder, it can also be a good
way to learn.

[https://polygonjs.com/](https://polygonjs.com/) and some tutorials:
[https://vimeo.com/polygonjs](https://vimeo.com/polygonjs)

------
tmaly
I took a break from straight coding in my side projects. I had this domain
since 2003, and I always wanted to make an educational project. I decided to
try to make a course on how to teach kids how to program using Scratch.

Its been an interesting challenge making this. I had to learn about how to
structure lessons, how to setup lighting, and a whole host of other things. My
5 year old daughter is helping me make it. She does some of the video and she
helps me iron out the lessons.

Its slow going, but its a lot of fun.

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

------
nadermx
[https://pdf.to](https://pdf.to)

~~~
jessehorne
How's that working for you? Are you profiting from it yet?

------
dotnwat
Been happily hacking away on zlog [0] a distributed shared-log that runs on
top of software-defined storage like Ceph. I've been working on it for a
couple years, steadily getting closer to something stable. It's a lot of fun
working through all the many supporting aspects of a project like this:
ci/jenkins/cloud-hosting, marketing/promotion, packaging for distributions,
learning about tools for communities, etc...

[0]: [https://github.com/cruzdb/zlog](https://github.com/cruzdb/zlog)

------
kingo55
I'm building a lightweight framework for A/B testing on sites.

It's like Optimizely except it weighs just 5kb, is self hosted and allows you
to build and launch split tests from inside your IDE or via CD.

~~~
vinitagr
How do you build that. I mean, what goes into building an A/B Testing system.
Does it involve a bunch of statistics and maths?

~~~
kingo55
It's surprisingly simple. Split testing tools are really just feature toggles
with RNG and a little tracking.

The stats and maths are mostly on the reporting side. We just rely on a bunch
of Chi-squared hypothesis tests - that's about the hardest part to an A/B
testing system.

------
seanmcdirmid
I’ve been working on a visual programming language to explore red black trees
(actually just using RB trees to explore a new way of programming, but...).

RB tree insert:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ArDMmfbOxi4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ArDMmfbOxi4)

RB tree rebalance:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-8uEEtvso](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2-8uEEtvso)

I previously did the same thing for quicksort (see my YouTube channel for lots
of videos), and am currently thinking of way to generalize this approach.

------
abledon
100 pushups in a row

~~~
carlosr2
I just recently got it, I set it to be a challenge and it's been much easier
than expected.

I started doing pushups everyday before shower, started with 10 and less than
a month after i'm up to 110. And to be honest, even in something that simple
as pushups are, you develop a sense of the nuances in the mechanics. Amazing.

------
adamcharnock
I’m working on Lightbus, a Python framework for RPCs and eventing. I’ve been
working on it for a couple of years now, and I’ve been trying to get the API
as clean as possible. It’s currently running in production with a couple of
companies.

The project came about because I was using Celery to communicate between
Django projects, but it felt like a kludge.

I’m getting close to an official release soon, but there are already extensive
docs at [https://lightbus.org](https://lightbus.org)

Code is in GitHub, linked to at the above address.

------
Ingon
Since most of my side projects don’t end up seeing light, so somebody could do
it before me:

A photo app that lets me view (and make galleries to share) of my photos
uploaded to s3, that is self/locally hosted.

~~~
halfjoking
If you didn't mind Wordpress you might be able to find a plugin that pulls all
objects from an S3 bucket and then allows you to make posts from that data in
your media library.

Not sure if that exists, but it sounds like someone should have made that.

------
chandureddyvari
I am planning to build a business card scanner like
[https://dev.camcard.com](https://dev.camcard.com). Not that nothing like it
exists. I am currently working on finishing deep learning courses from fast.ai
and wanted to build a cool open source project to apply my learnings. Also
wanted to release iOS app which does this on the device without server
intervention using MLKit for iOS (I have worked with React native but not on
swift - so personally challenging on many fronts).

------
melenaos
I am refactoring the report designer from one of my projects,
[https://apps.shopify.com/export-orders](https://apps.shopify.com/export-
orders).

The report designer is iimplemented using Datatables.Net library (demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ-
viTQARTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ-viTQARTk)) and I am implementing
the same functionality and some more features (column renaming, custom column
expressions) using VueJS.

------
adamnemecek
I'm working on an IDE for music composition
[http://ngrid.io](http://ngrid.io).

Ive mentioned this many time but I'm close to being done. Fall of this year.

------
zaiste
I'm teaching programming for beginners & non-programmers on YouTube with
Flutter and JavaScript. I'm trying to expose my pupils to slightly lesser
known concepts, paradigms with the focus on functional programming, Reactive
extensions etc. I have plans to do Clojure or Common Lisp next.

I'm also doing some Emacs related videos, presenting a single concept each
time. I'm a big fan of Doom Emacs.

[https://www.youtube.com/zaiste](https://www.youtube.com/zaiste)

------
victorbojica
Working on a enterprise training planning solution and we are celebrating our
first two customers. Yay!!

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

~~~
asdfzalsd
How did you get those enterprise customers if you don't mind me asking? :)

------
ashiban
[http://www.QuickCut.io](http://www.QuickCut.io) \- I built it because of the
frustration I have editing courses I make for fun (
[https://www.udemy.com/beginner-programming-intro-python-
self...](https://www.udemy.com/beginner-programming-intro-python-self-driving-
car/) ). It blew my mind that we're still editing video the same way we have
in the 90's - so quickcut was born

------
XERQ
SSD Nodes is a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider I've been working on since
2011. Our servers are 90% lower cost than DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode when
you commit to 1 or 3 years in advance.

We recently launched a Performance line of servers leveraging NVMe technology
that boasts millions of IOPS and up to 6,400MB/s disk throughput, while still
being 75% lower cost than what you would pay with at competitors.

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

------
codr7
After writing a number of Forth/Lisp-like interpreters [0] in different
languages, I felt like it was time to attempt an extraction of lessons learned
into a flexible C++ framework [1] to use as foundation for future projects.

[0] [https://github.com/codr7/g-fu](https://github.com/codr7/g-fu)

[1] [https://github.com/codr7/cidk](https://github.com/codr7/cidk)

------
dbetteridge
Commemini [1], It's a bookmarking/view this later site with tag based search,
mostly a side project to better learn Postgres.

Still to come

\- Full text search

\- Capturing a snapshot of the site to allow Full text search, offline view,
'saving' pages incase they go offline.

\- Learning tags based on page contents

Pricing on the main page is a template at this point and signup is still
free/unlimited as i'm not 'releasing' it yet.

[1] [https://commemini.xyz](https://commemini.xyz)

------
blparker
Working on a book/guide for developers about the mathematics behind machine
learning with an aim towards intuition. All of the concepts are implemented in
Python.

------
spondyl
I took the week off work to plow through Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers so
that's been most of my time, haha

I'm going to see how viable it is to host a Matrix/Riot server from my house.
Looks like there's going to be a hard time with SSL given that my router has
its hook into Port 80 regardless of DMZ. Perhaps I can just use a self signed
cert.

I would host it in a VPS but I'm looking to use the bridges for Whatsapp/FB
Messenger/Telegram

------
cedricium
Working on (and have been for far too long) a side project I call "unearth".
It is a web app that lets users easily navigate and rediscover their Reddit
saved things. There are a couple other projects that scrape the surface of
saved things management (Reddit Manager and Savvit to name a couple), but
being a developer I wanted to make my own version that was a bit more elegant,
both in terms of engineering and UI/UX.

------
agscala
I've been spending time working on my board game accessories business
[https://burgertokens.com/](https://burgertokens.com/)

It's been an awesome experience so far. I have enough customers now that I can
go to pretty much any board game event and find people who are fans of my
business.

I'm working on editing a video for an upcoming kickstarter that we're about to
run. Super excited :)

~~~
truebosko
Love this! Dreamt of this idea once but never ran with it, and look at you.
Awesome work!

------
Aeolun
I’m not actively working on anything any more after my son was born, but I’ve
spent some time trying to build
[https://resumedrone.com](https://resumedrone.com) to more easily update my
resume whenever I need to do that.

I’m playing with the idea of making it export into several agencies formats
and then sell that to them so they don’t keep formatting stuff by hand, but
it’s not quite there yet.

------
miccah
An Android client to control mpv (media player) remotely. It is actually both
the server (written in python) and client.

I started it because I didn't want to get up to control the movie playing on
my laptop, and it has turned into a fun experiment in UX and network security.

[https://github.com/mcastorina/mpv-remote-
app](https://github.com/mcastorina/mpv-remote-app)

~~~
screaminghawk
I did a similar thing to control VLC remotely but using Node and React. Not as
comprehensive as yours but does everything the kids need to watch a show
without touching the PC.

[https://github.com/screaminghawk/web-
vlc](https://github.com/screaminghawk/web-vlc)

~~~
miccah
That's awesome! I love the images and synopsis. One thing I have in the works
is a seekbar that stays in sync with the server, but it's actually a lot more
challenging than it sounds.

I like how you include the episode and season info. Do you search for that
online or have it locally?

Really cool project, thanks for sharing.

------
ryeguy_24
[https://www.deltatrail.io](https://www.deltatrail.io)

Working on a infrastructure change tracking service called Deltatrail.io. It
tracks changes both automatically (via API, Jenkins, AWS Cloudtrail, etc) and
also manually (via Slack, etc). It really helps us when trying to debug
outages or issues that arise. Most come from changes that have been
made/deployed.

------
amerf1
Working on a link aggregator for website while learning to code. Any rails
mentors out there feel free to reach out to me! I could use some help

------
Tharkun
I'm going through the formalities of shutting down my failed startup. We're
finishing up the few contracts we have, telling customers we're not extending
their service, and trying to figure out how to split what little assets we
have left.

This wasn't anyone's sole income, so it's not a disaster. It's certainly been
a learning experience, so there's that.

------
chris_st
On exercism.io, learning rust and mentoring people learning JavaScript.

Both sides are a lot of fun!

Please join in if you can on mentoring... there's a pretty big back-log.

~~~
jessehorne
That's awesome! Is there any open source parts of the project we could
contribute to, as well?

~~~
chris_st
Thanks! Their contribute[1] page has a list of things, including opening
issues on their github[2] page.

[1] [https://exercism.io/contribute](https://exercism.io/contribute) [2]
[https://github.com/exercism/exercism](https://github.com/exercism/exercism)

------
iNate2000
A puzzle game about binary encoding.

[https://youtu.be/pUkgeqV80m8](https://youtu.be/pUkgeqV80m8)

~~~
iNate2000
Updated gameplay video:

[https://youtu.be/JD-QZZwSPqE](https://youtu.be/JD-QZZwSPqE)

------
lettergram
Building the enterprise version of:

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

The goal is to help employees try to find an expert (or content) in a company
when you need to solve something. For HR we provide insights about employees
(satisfaction, influence levels, etc) in an attempt to reduce turnover (#1
cost to businesses).

------
codingbbq
Howdy! Happy Friday. I started putting up my own personal space @
[http://codingbbq.github.io](http://codingbbq.github.io)

I worked on setting up jekyll and made the site as per my like. I have plans
to continue writing and maintaining an online journey. Brings a smile
everytime I make some commits in the repository. :)

------
carmenbr
[https://noageismintech.com](https://noageismintech.com) \- Job board focused
on over 35s in tech Launched last week on HN and generated a massive
discussion around the subject. We're now working to get more companies onboard
and make their profile sharable.

I hope that will bring consistent users to the website

------
jekyllontime
I am working on [https://jekyllontime.top/](https://jekyllontime.top/) these
days. It is a service to publish jekyll+GitHub Pages blog posts at a given
time. This is a pain point I am having myself and that's why I decided to
create this service. So far it is in a MVP stage.

------
drannex
I'm building a new way to grow plants using electromagnetic water-vapor
distribution systems.

Had some successes, mostly failure, but getting there. Should be more
accessible, use less water, less expensive, and produce better/more food than
traditional hydroponic systems (and far more than traditional farming).

LPA grow system without needing any pumps.

------
KloudTrader
A better trading platform. We are currently building a system where you can
upload a model designed in a spreadsheet and it will turn it into a live,
real-time trading algorithm for you in the cloud (yes, there's a VBA-
compatible interpreter too).

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

------
gkrishna
I am working on my side project to monitor and alert SSH login and breach
attempts. Hopefully will be launching next month!

------
Kloppie5
Writing a process analyzer to find multilevel pointers to game data in order
to show additional information on an overlay.

------
mareko
You've probably heard of Libra. I've been working on a permissionless version
of Libra for the last two years. We are called Celo
([https://celo.org](https://celo.org)), and we are committed to advancing
financial inclusion using an open decentralized protocol.

------
decentralizer
Just writing code for open-source projects.

~~~
jessehorne
Got any screenshots or a demo?

------
msadowski
I'm working on Robotics Newsletter :
[https://weeklyrobotics.com/](https://weeklyrobotics.com/)

That has been going quite ok for the past few months.

Another side thing I'm working on is a set of tutorials for Robot Operating
System but that one I started just couple of weeks ago.

------
almostdigital
A decentralized Medium alternative

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

------
corprew
I have a side project that I've been working on which is re-implementing a
couple of old rails4 projects that old customers still use in Phoenix/Elixir.
It's been going pretty well.

I'm also working on a generative mobile game in react-native, which is fun but
is taking a while to do.

------
dustyreagan
A math practice website called
[https://studycounts.com](https://studycounts.com). I’m trying to combine
randomly generated math practice problems with addictive Skinner box-ish
gaming elements. Skinner box for self improvement is the idea.

------
soundMinded
I'm working on a travel agency website that integrates with global booking
systems, something like expedia but less complex. So far along the process
I've learned a lot specially about a wide range of Azure services. I just
learned Azure Search and wow, it works great!

~~~
truebosko
I work in this space. Curious of you to elaborate!

~~~
soundMinded
I'm adding the hotel booking engine to the website. The first hurdle I came
across was how to offer fast suggestions to the user when typing a location /
hotel name. That's when I found Azure Search ( which is extremely easy to set
up), and now I just have to complete the whole process. This whole thing is
extremely gratifying because I'm learning new stuff pretty much everyday.

~~~
richajak
Recently I read a similar example on CS50 course, to do fast search. It is
simply a json request everytime a keyboard event is activated. For storage,
either store it in memory for instant lookup table or use redis.

[https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2018/fall/weeks/7/notes/](https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2018/fall/weeks/7/notes/)
look for the example on WORDS

~~~
soundMinded
I ended up using Azure Table Storage and Azure Search on top of it as the
index. The azure auto suggester works great. it allows you to mark different
fields as Retrievable, searchable, filterable etc. pretty cool thing

------
spajus
For past 1.5 years I've been developing a game part time. The game is a 2D top
down racing with procedurally generated race tracks. It is the biggest and
most fulfilling pet project I have ever done.

You can find it on Steam or Reddit, search for "Bloody Rally Show".

------
FrankZappa42
I am working on a company that curates trial week at their potential job and
also help them find a job. I am really passionate about this. Doing this
alongside a full-time consultant agreement with a start-up, I am a bit
stretched but overall excited about this.

------
Qworg
Running a fintech startup - real time, 24/7 B2B settlement, and we're never in
the money. I only wish I had time for side projects!

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

------
x1ph0z
Building a budgeting app for Android. Pretty basic in terms of functionality,
but I'd like to at least bring a project to completion before moving on to
something more complicated. Been at it for 6+ months, and the end isn't in
sight yet...

------
postgrescompare
My side project is PostgresCompare
([https://www.postgrescompare.com](https://www.postgrescompare.com)), a
PostgreSQL schema comparison and deployment app. Evenings and weekends for a
couple years now!

------
krapp
Adding stuff to Anarki, random wheel-spinning gamedev BS in C and C++, and
Godot tutorials.

------
hjkl
Been working on a web service to convert JS apps to PWAs and host them:
[https://www.superweb.app](https://www.superweb.app)

Hoping that it makes it easier for folks to create native-like apps,
especially games.

------
majewsky
I'm working as the chairman of my hackerspace,
[https://www.c3d2.de/whois.html](https://www.c3d2.de/whois.html), to balance
order and chaos in the literal Chaos Computer Club.

------
chauhankiran
I'm writing a book on Crystal programming language in fun, dialogues way -
[https://chauhankiran.github.io/crystalie/](https://chauhankiran.github.io/crystalie/)

------
petethepig
I'm making a robot that makes string art.

I have an instagram if you want to check it out
[https://www.instagram.com/string.art.bird/](https://www.instagram.com/string.art.bird/)

------
jeanlucas
I'm a bit idle lately, so I'm doing a webapp for Mario Maker stages, where you
can create your profile and share with others easier (today you have to send a
string to share a stage or your profile on Mario Maker)

------
vinitagr
Working on my company TARS. We have built a non-AI non-NLP Chatbot Builder
product for last 3.5 Years.

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

I also wish I had time for some Side Projects.

------
aarreedd
I'm building a database + API with Trading Hours and Market Holidays for the
world's financial markets.

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

~~~
richk449
Awesome. My algo got confused yesterday (early close) and today, so I have to
clean things up manually. Was thinking of hard coding dates in. Will look into
this.

~~~
aarreedd
I'd love any feedback!

------
mceachen
I'm building (what I hope to be) your new home for all your photos and videos.
It's called PhotoStructure.

TL:DR; see [https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-
photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

In a nutshell, I've got 20 years of digital photos and videos, spread over
tens of hard drives, CDRs, crashed laptops and servers, and takeouts from
failed photo services.

Nothing I tried could sweep everything into one neat and deduped pile.

Nothing I tried scaled up to several hundred thousand files, with cross-
platform support (to minimize vendor lock-in).

And nothing I tried had a UX that made browsing that large of a library be
delightful and serendipitous.

So I'm making it.

I've currently got a build for Mac, Windows 10, and Ubuntu desktop. I've got a
preliminary snap and docker image, and look forward to trying it out on a
raspberry pi 4 soon.

I'm looking for more beta testers, if this sounds interesting and you'd be
willing to share feedback! Email signups are in the above link.

~~~
wheresvic1
This sounds pretty cool but tbh, if I'm willing to try out a beta product with
all my images (and the risk of losing them due to some bug or any other risk)
and provide feedback, I'd like to have a bigger carrot than just using the
product for free in beta only :)

~~~
mceachen
Fair enough. I've suffered from so many bugs in commercial software that I
made some design decisions at the beginning of the project, in an effort to
avoid more egregious faults.

Primarily, PhotoStructure doesn't touch, move, or delete any file that it
hasn't generated. It only copies _into_ your library (if you pick that
option). See [https://support.photostructure.com/why-doesnt-
photostructure...](https://support.photostructure.com/why-doesnt-
photostructure-move-original-files/)

------
tuckerpo
A bootloader that makes you win a game of pong before you get to your OS.

------
cbm-vic-20
* Writing a Lisp interpreter for a homebrew 6502 single board computer.

* Learning DEC PDP-11 assembly language, may "port" the above Lisp interpreter to it... The -11's instruction set is so nice.

------
bkmeneguello
For work: porting some infrastructure from the company I work to code
(ansible) and creating new ones. For fun: developing an ansible intellij
plugin for code completion and documentation lookup.

------
leth_dev
As a side project, I am creating a general purpose model-based testing
solution ([https://www.leth.dev/ao](https://www.leth.dev/ao)).

------
leekh
I'm on working on my masters with gaTech's OMSCS. Taking a summer class atm,
and will finish in the fall. Going to start on a new job search and maybe TA a
class too.

------
anteater_alex
We are drowning in emails and Instant messaging, esp. in our workplaces. As a
former CTO of a fast growing startup I was struck by how much frustration and
wasted time there was due to inefficient communication and lack of sharing
knowledge about who we know and who knows what.

I'm building AntEater to make every on teams as smart as the team - using AI.
It's free to try (for Gmail and Slack -
[https://www.anteateranalytics.com/](https://www.anteateranalytics.com/)) for
small teams and helps share knowledge and activity for truly transparent teams
to help individuals work less and work better.

------
pruthvishetty
An experimental model to predict the price of an individual stock (AMZN or
AAPL) for the next minute, based on the price of an index (SPY or NDAQ) during
the current minute.

------
gao8a
I am learning video editing (Da Vinci Resolve) and I just made this [1]

[1] [https://vimeo.com/346285447](https://vimeo.com/346285447)

------
Tommah
My most recent project is a chess training tool:
[https://www.checkmatechamp.net/](https://www.checkmatechamp.net/)

------
tixocloud
Trying to grow my company Orchestra, which is effectively DevOps for ML.
Hoping to complete a few proof of concepts and am building a founding team.

------
timothycrosley
[https://github.com/hugapi/HOPE/](https://github.com/hugapi/HOPE/)

Working on hug 3.0

------
abathur
Shaving the entire yak army, as usual.

Scatching my own itch on a shell history thing that isn't annoying. Baby steps
towards a releasable version.

------
phyalow
Writing my dissertation over summer on Asian Equity Risk Arbitrage. Nice long
summer days in Cambridge spent in front of a Computer ;)

------
lanrh1836
Leetcode

 _tears_

------
bszupnick
I've been working on a web app to help political campaigns scale and manage an
exploding volunteer network. Helping the campaign delegate tasks, helping the
volunteers connecting to constituents, and see statistics along the way.

I've seen too many campaigns attempt to run hundreds of volunteers, do crazy
tricks with Google Sheets (just to have volunteers accidentally delete
critical information), and I've been a volunteer waiting to be told what to
do.

~~~
atlasunshrugged
Really cool, I've also been kicking around ideas in this area - anywhere I can
see something and what type of campaigns are you targeting
(local/state/other)? I know it's not the same, but have you seen
[https://www.victoryguide.us/](https://www.victoryguide.us/)?

~~~
bszupnick
I haven't seen Victory Guide! Thanks for sharing!

I'm not currently living in the United States so I'm building a software with
my mind on Israeli left-wing politics. It had a pilot run and it was great,
and now I'm working on getting another customer!

~~~
atlasunshrugged
Ah sorry, ironically I'm not even living in the U.S. anymore but I just assume
everyone is building things for there. Very cool, good luck, feel free to drop
me a line if you ever want to get feedback. I'm joelburke2014 at gmail

------
ardit33
A native hacker news iOS app and more.... work in progress...

[https://ibb.co/KLCSsTy](https://ibb.co/KLCSsTy)

[https://ibb.co/RcHDwvN](https://ibb.co/RcHDwvN)

[https://ibb.co/25vX0hT](https://ibb.co/25vX0hT)

[https://ibb.co/gD89CG6](https://ibb.co/gD89CG6)

------
arooni
Marketing for my buy a press pass service (gets you in for free to all kinds
of events, concerts, museums, clubs, etc):
[https://www.magicpresspass.com](https://www.magicpresspass.com)

Marketing and recruitment for people who want to get paid consulting who have
done amazing adventures (like travelled around the world on a bicycle, climbed
Everest etc, please reach out if you have). Essentially I want to have a
consultancy for people who have done amazing things and want to get paid to
consult to people who have done those things before.
[https://www.adventurecopilot.com](https://www.adventurecopilot.com)

Also seeking suggestions on how to learn marketing, it's a skill I'm keenly
interested in acquiring.

And considering a Trump related merchandise business (not because I like
Trump, but I think it would sort of market itself). I love businesses where
people have strong opinions. Strong opinions travel, positive or otherwise.

Also writing about entrepreneurship and personal excellence at
[https://www.davidparkinson.com](https://www.davidparkinson.com) and polishing
up my 'find your phone, escape a boring meeting/date service'
[https://www.phonemyphone.com](https://www.phonemyphone.com) (fun fact,
launched this on Hacker News 10+ years ago :P).

Feel free to rip any of those ideas/concepts apart :P.

------
cckkoonnee
Freelancing and preparing for vacation!

~~~
frequentnapper
Me too! I'm freelancing out of Tokyo right now and will be in Vancouver next
month.

~~~
argo_
What you guys are freelancing on?

~~~
frequentnapper
My career is based on the microsoft .net/azure stack, and that's what I am
doing for my current client. A lot of it is just crud/batch import stuff for
collecting/validating data on various models which includes a lot of business
logic built around complex relationships in their data structures.

On the side, I am working on a sports web app with a friend as I find time
using the same stack.

Also, lately I have been trying to learn reinforcement learning. What about
yourself?

------
pcmaffey
Just starting on cannabis cultivation software. Partnering with one of the top
growers in the country.

------
zzo38computer
I have a few things I work on, including writing Free Hero Mesh (which is a
puzzle game engine).

------
guzik
aidlab.com - a wearable assistant to replace your Thermometer, ECG Holter and
Alexa!

~~~
jessehorne
Super cool.

------
smartplaya2001
im working on a way to automatically check gift card balances for various
brands.

------
samirsd
i'm working on a music streaming service for indie artists called .mixtape

[https://mixtape.ai](https://mixtape.ai) (in alpha and only works on chrome)

------
sharmi
We have reached alpha on
[https://sitefitnesshq.com](https://sitefitnesshq.com) , an early warning
service for website failures. We have just started reaching out to customers.

Wish us luck.

~~~
bbbobbb
Your certificate is expired. That's not exactly ideal for "early warning".

~~~
sharmi
Thanks for visiting our website. We have been using our service to check some
other websites and have been successful in providing early warnings.

Now we have added itself to the list of websites it should check. So it is
self secured.

Your feedback and validation certainly helps. Thank you again.

------
chantelles
modeling/growing cellulose for wound healing

------
samirsd
soundcloud but more retro (alpha) [https://mixtape.ai](https://mixtape.ai)

------
um304
Reading these books:

\- The Effective Engineer

\- Crime & Punishment

------
ronnier
I’m working on Snapchat.

~~~
jeanlucas
Nice :D

------
kartikdoraha
Amazing question i really liked that, Actually i m working on some ads and
that is my job to performe that. And I love to complete that.

------
before98today89
Ten Ask HN posts in the last four days? Is there not a limit on this sort of
thing?

~~~
grzm
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