Ask HN : What side project are you working on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN : What side project are you working on?

46 pointssideproject114 comments

Time flies! It's that time of the month again for HN'ers to share what they are working on. We've had some awesome projects shared in the previous threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696274

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A crossover between Google docs with OneNote:

- vector graphics/drawings created by freehand / writing http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934

- handles more complex drawings: (give it time to load) http://write-live.com/d/7fce10bb-bc39-43d4-a7f1-6bd0d60b9550 http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e

- unlimited* levels of zoom http://docs.write-live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=34...

- Drawings are stored in the cloud, and can be accessed by multiple devices simultaneously: co-drawing, draw on a tablet, view on tablet / web http://write-live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab

Looks great! Installed it and will check it out later!

Cross platform, open-source app for parenting. Initial plans are mostly for logging events: sleep tracking (manual entry), eating times, audio playback (for ambient noise and shushing), and diaper changes. No ads, no centralized servers, no trackers, no cruft. Parents will be able to import/export their data to sync between devices.

Admittedly, I have not done a ton of research into the different apps on the market, but there are a lot of crappy apps. From what I have seen though, there are plenty with annoying advertisements, absurd permission requests, steep prices for little functionality, and apps with an agenda. There is an app that plays a sound file on loop for 30 minutes and prompts you to purchase for indefinite looping for $3.99. There is literally no other functionality, and they want $3.99. Devs gotta eat, but that's ridiculous.

Two things:

1. A better wiki, especially for personal use or for small teams. I find wikis are really difficult to keep organized over time, so I'm making it "self-organize" using a few simple heuristics to define structure and relevance.

2. A podcast in which I interview local business leaders. I don't live in a big city, and the tech scene here is not very mature, but there is a lot to learn from brick-and-mortar folks and this is a neat way for me to meet them.

If anyone is curious about either, please don't hesitate to contact me! (Email in profile.)

Working on this at the moment: http://pimpanalytics.ga/ Make your Google Analytics stand out with Pimp Analytics. Put any 7 letter isogram in the input boxes below and create your own custom GA snippet. From Wikipedia's article on isograms: "An isogram (also known as a 'nonpattern word') is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter". Enter non-repeating alphabet [a-z] letters. Note: uppercase letters will be automatically transformed to lowercase. Note: Entering numbers will break your code as per the JS syntax. Inspired by this blogpost:

http://blog.higg.im/2015/03/17/tinkering-with-the-google-ana...

I even dogfood the service in the source code:

	 (function (m,a,c,k,i,n,g) {
     m['GoogleAnalyticsObject'] = i;
     m[i] = m[i] || function () {
         (m[i].q = m[i].q || []).push(arguments)
     }, m[i].l = 1 * new Date();
     n = a.createElement(c),
     g = a.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];
     n.async = 1;
     n.src = k;
     g.parentNode.insertBefore(n, g)
     })(window, document, 'script', '//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js', 'ga');
     ga('create', 'UA-66070213-3', 'auto');
     ga('send', 'pageview');

Check it: http://pimpanalytics.ga/

I'm working on a receipt-saving service for small businesses/freelancers: https://receiptron.com/

The goal is to make it the easiest way to save receipts. No app to install, no complicated expense report forms to fill out, just take a picture of the receipt with your phone camera, email it to our specially-trained robots, and it gets saved and sorted for you for later.

This is neat. Are you using OCR to extract data from receipts?

Nope, just a specially-formed subject line at this stage. OCR is a neat idea, but I'm trying to do the "launch quickly, figure out the market, build features based on actual customer interest" thing. OCR would be fun to do, but very error-prone, very hard, and not necessarily proven to add as much value as a whole bunch of other ideas that are on the backburner as well.

Sounds pretty cool actually!

This is absolutely brilliant! I might sign up just for my own personal use. That said, when I was a contractor, I would've paid double that for a service like this--if this works as well as it claims, the amount of time saved during tax season would more than justify $100 a year.

Edit: Never mind, I thought this worked using OCR. It's still a cool service, but I wrote this comment under that assumption, so unfortunately I'm a little less excited about it.

It's still early days. Do me a favour? Let me know: if it worked via OCR, what important information would you want it to pull out? And if I do get that in there, would you want me to let you know?

Yeah, that's totally fair, I just got overly excited.

Even just the total would be awesome. I don't mind entering metadata manually, and looking through a picture of the receipt for each line item if I need to do that, but I've love it to automatically capture the total so I can see those at a glance without manually inputting them. Maybe the date, too, but that's less important if I can just take the photo as soon as I get the receipt. (Getting the vendor would be doubly awesome, but I know that would be nearly impossible, so I wouldn't ever expect that.)

I wrote a web app to do this for myself when I was contracting, but I had to manually enter the vendor, total amount, and date for each receipt, which got really tedious. (The process wasn't fast enough that I would do it on the move, so I saved up receipts and did them in batches, which took a lot of time.) I'd love to just be able to take a picture and enter some metadata (probably just vendor and category) and have at least the total be pulled from the receipt, and the date either pulled or defaulted to today's date.

Yes, please let me know if you ever implement OCR! And feel free to contact me directly in general. My email is sasha1rus@gmail.com. In the meantime, I'm going to give this a try as-is. Thank you!

Ha, i've done something similar. It's dirt simple , you put total price and categories / tags in the subject of the email ( because you are much more accurate than any OCR, and doing 1 receipt at a time it's not even noticeable work ), and attach a picture/pdf or the expense.

then i have a ruby script which connect to the imap account, creates reports based on sender and tags, including attachments in the breakdown. Simple and effective.

A suite[1] of open source tools for organizational knowledge sharing / collaboration / communication that includes:

1. Quoddy[2] - An Enterprise Social Network that uses Semantic Web technology to automatically detect entities in content, and enhance the content and show related content. And much, much more. It's an ESN that is really meant to integrate with other enterprise applications and business events, as opposed to being a simple "facebook clone" dropped inside an organization. We just added OpenMeetings integration so you get audio/video chat and whiteboarding as well.

2. Neddick[3] - Think "Reddit for the Enterprise", but with a lot of features that aren't in Reddit.

3. Some other stuff, but those two are where the bulk of the focus is right now. :-)

[1]: http://fogbeam.github.io/Fogcutter

[2]: http://fogbeam.github.io/Quoddy

[3]: http://fogbeam.github.io/Neddick

I'm starting a web app that would function as a private space. Something like a combination of the facebook wall where you can post stuff that you want to remember, a journal, notes, to-do's, calorie counter plus some more stuff. It will be modular so you can add the stuff that you want to use and remove those that you don't use.

I was pretty far into building a platform for investors to buy portfolio insurance, then I read about Vest this morning(http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/18/hardware-demo-day/). It sucks to see I'm not the first, but their website reveals the idea still has a long way to go before normal investors adopt it. Most investors don't feel qualified to pick stocks for their own portfolio, so how will they know what type of insurance they need? What happens when this idea scales and option prices become far more expensive as a result? Option liquidity(or lack thereof) is the reason portfolio insurance in the 80's turned to futures for protection. It's a good idea, but I suspect it will take a few iterations :)

I do a few.

Tech related:

http://www.freecodecamp.com/ Because I never felt that comfortable with web development. The interface is super easy to use and I can't wait to start helping non-profits.

Non tech related: Write. I write and I write and I write. I have so much to say and I want to say it in the best way possible.

Also draw. I don't draw as much as I should because I am so bad at it. But sometimes things with terrible art can still take off so it keeps me going. example: https://twitter.com/KeLuKeLuGames/status/553404094958694400/...

I love your idea for Free Code Camp. I love it so much that I did the same thing a few years ago.

Unfortunately, after approaching and talking to dozens of nonprofits, we gave up. The Boards of NPOs tend to be highly egotistical, highly possessive morons. I can't tell you how many times we weren't allowed to fix an awful website because it had been a Board member's pet project done by one of their friends or relatives. Or, in many cases, the Managing Director just wouldn't give up control.

I hope you have better luck. I've now worked with two industries I'll never work with again -- restaurants and nonprofits.

Wait, did you do freecodecamp.com or a similar idea on your own? The camp sets me up with the nonprofits.

http://www.freecodecamp.com/nonprofits/directory

Similar idea on my own. My understand was that you started Free Code Camp.

When we actually did projects, they would accept the work, semi-cooperate, and then bury the finished product because the Board wouldn't approve it.

Even if we didn't have someone hovering over the project, trying to micromanage it, we always ended up with a committee-based feedback system. No matter what we did, someone would hate some part of it and demand it be changed.

I am using this site Hamburger Menu as a sort of browser 'acid test' and trying to get it displaying correctly on as many devices as I can. It turned out to be hard getting this to display in different browsers. I tried using a polyfill for the emoji like Twemoji and Emojify, but they break under different conditions. The site is more or less a browser acid test right now and a learning experience if anything. I will be importing what I learned about this site into future projects for sure. It originally started out as a bit of fun, but mushroomed a bit as more time was allocated to it. https://www.hamburgermenu.xyz/

Still working on the same uninteresting projects.

Working on making Space Invaders in C++/SDL. Since the last thread i've added vector motion (with terrible "physics"), sound, gotten enemy fire to work and a basic game state running. Currently i'm working on string rendering and UI so I can have buttons, then the first game state transitions (title screen to play screen.)

Also, a threaded forum which is turning out to be an anonymous Hacker News clone in PHP: https://imgur.com/Yojr7Dv (I'm not actually calling it Slacker News though, I just thought it was funny.)

http://www.botwiki.org -- an open-source collection of tutorials, articles, datasets and other resources for creating useful/interesting/artistic online bots.

Meal Planning Recommendations - suggests what you should eat this week.

The second stage will be to pre-order the food from a Supermarket API, so all the food will already be in your house.

If I can figure out how to make an app that actually cooks my food, I'm done :)

I have recently built an app which exposes a web interface through which you can add youtube songs. And the app will play them from the queue.

The context is that we have a big hall room and we wanted to play songs from anywhere in the house without being connected to the speaker. Of course, we decided against buying a bluetooth speaker and create something of our own !

Check out the source here -https://github.com/agnivade/youremote. Its built with React + material design UI + golang.

A democratically run publication with no central ownership, built on Ethereum.

Members can propose an album, article or gallery based on a theme/description. Anyone can fund that proposed release, and should if they like the idea and want to see people participate. Any member can submit content to a proposed release. Members can vote on which submissions are the best. Once a deadline is reached, the highest voted content is published. All funds are distributed to the winning content creators. Ownership tokens are created and distributed to all participants.

I've been working on a news aggregator since last year that pulls news articles and photos from major news sources, determines which stories are related, and sorts them in a timeline fashion. That allows you to go back and see what the top news stories were on any day in the past, or even month in the past.

http://tracket.com

http://tracket.com/2015/01 (Top stories in January 2015)

A SaaS to make sending (transactional) emails from your (web)app easier. It handles wysiwyg editing, styling, testing across clients, online viewing, attachments, translations and much more for you.

No need to do this in code anymore :)

I just put the landing page online (still needs a bit of work): https://attraction.email

I actually have too much functionality planned - so much is possible once you have a dedicated app for this stuff, I need to scope it down for version 1.

intro-bg.png is 12.8 Mb. killing the browser and taking time to load.

Oops, thanks for pointing that out. Should be fixed in a minute.

http://www.Tinykernel.com a platform that connects (new) programmers together to work on toy projects. The reason I am working on this is because I see post like "I want to build something, but don't know where to start" all the time. Currently, I am still trying to pinpoint the core features of the site so any feedback is welcome. I am probably going to release something within 3 weeks.

Sounds interesting.

Maybe get rid of "toy" as a qualifier? What does that actually, specifically mean, as far as the terms of service are concerned?

Also, posting Github repo data using their API would be a really nice feature to see.

Looks interesting, and I'll definitely keep an eye on it. However as feedback I prefer it if webpages (especially aimed at devs) work at least to some degree without JavaScript , currently I get a blank page until I enable JavaScript.

How do you plan on solving the "showing of your work" part, linking to github or some more generic solution not depending on a specific service?

A few months ago I launched an email newsletter that features one fantastic piece of journalism each day: http://readthisthing.com/

I just launched it for fun, and have had fun working on it. The list has grown to more than 5000 subscribers, which is pretty cool.

Not totally sure what I plan to do with it, but I really enjoy working on it and have found lots of people who like it, so that's good enough for now. :)

I'd love to subscribe but I'm using a screen reader so can't get past your captcha!

Working on Recurvoice, a recurring invoicing system for freelancers: https://www.recurvoice.com

SixBets Predictor - https://sixbets.co.uk

Trying to make a profitable predictor for the English Premier league. Currently, the predictor is profitable on the whole season, but not on the weekly basis.

I've train it on data from the 1992/1993 to 2011/2012 season, and tested it on the 2012/2013, 2013/2014, and 2014/2015 season. In tests, it shows profitability from 4.12 to 8.40%.

I'm working on the inverse of Yelp, appropriately called Pley. Instead of a public service where users rate local companies, it's a private service where local companies rate their users. The only ones who would be allowed access are the owners and workers of service oriented companies.

It's meant to be a joke and to have something of mine I can actually throw up on github, but I plan on making it actually work anyway, just out of curiosity.

I thought of a similar idea, which you can feel free to take if you want to make the pivot. I thought a rating system for employees would be great. If an interviewer or agency or previous job has had a great or had experience with an employee, they can leave a rating for future employers whom may be interested in the same employee. Very similar to Amazons system. After all, we are all products to them. It can be linked to LinkedIn as well.

I'm making a bent wood bike basket with integrated elastic straps http://bentbasket.com

These look great. Nice website too. Shared with bicycle-riding friends.

I was thinking about getting a new bike, this might be the first accessory that I buy for it. I like the simplistic yet versatile design. Something that I can actually use and looks nice.

Toolkit for high-productivity web-development in Go language [1]. Inspired by the concepts of Revel Framework but is implemented in a form of small independent utilities (and relies on `go generate`). Key aspects: No runtime reflection, type safety, compatibility with the standard library, 100% customizability.

[1]: https://github.com/anonx/sunplate

If you've ever used elasticsearch and needed monitoring and alerting for your cluster without the overhead of running tools in the cluster itself, you'll realize there's not many options. So came up with the idea to separate monitoring and alerting for elasticsearch clusters to create Pulse. Close to launch. https://www.espulse.com/

I've been working on an app for reading email newsletters - http://mlist.io/. When you sign up you choose a username that you use as an email address (username@mlist.io) when subscribing to newsletters.

Part of the project is creating is also list of high quality newsletters across a wide range of topics. Feel free to provide any newsletter suggestions!

hey i have been working on something similar with bit more ideas around it.. working on it alone sucks..i would love to have a chat with you .. pm meif you would be interested ..?

I love Mlist! Keep up the great work.

Thanks awwstn! :) you too!

I'm a webservice purist, do I absolutely have to download the app to sign up? Lol because I really don't like doing any long reading from my phone...

I've been building a program that plays Yahoo! Fantasy sports. http://fantasybots.com. It updates your roster every morning in case you forget or have too many teams to keep track of. Also great when you only care about the draft party and don't want the grind of actually coaching. Currently looking for beta testers!

Coincidentally, I have been roped into an office fantasy sports pool that starts next week, which I have no time to manage. I would love to be your beta tester!

Can it manage the draft and trades as well?

Yahoo's draft tools and auto-drafting is really great so I haven't messed with that. I'm working on trade stuff but it's not ready for beta testing yet.

I'm game for beta testing it.

Awesome! If you have any trouble with the signup on the site feel free to contact me through the link in the footer.

Working on a Chrome app for Asana, just so my tasks are accessible with a global keyboard shortcut, and I can see them all the time (and access them offline as well).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/asana-task-viewer/...

Hipment: Streamlined shipping for Big Cartel (http://hipment.com)

SERP Scan: SEO Rank tracker. Trying to get Heroku alpha users. (https://serpscan.com)

Eddie Pendergrass: Record label. (http://eddiependergrass.com)

Socialite - For keeping track of contacts: https://socialite.ooo/

The idea is that for each contact you can connect them to events and connect those events to locations. This way you can pivot off any piece of information about an acquaintance (where you met, when you met, etc.) to recall the details you know about them.

A twitter bot for HN, but stories are delayed for 24 hours and then must meet a score threshold. I use it to catch up on news after a few days away from the internet. Bot is hosted on Google within the free quota! I plan to post the source to github eventually...

https://twitter.com/icymihn

You might find this interesting too: https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news. I wrote http://serializer.io/ specifically for this purpose. I have 10 as a points limit.

I have 48 hours of Hacker news at http://skimfeed.com/news/hacker-news.html

Planning to add pagination soon for even more history.

I am working on my espresso PID controller ( https://mecoffee.nl ), which is actually a Bluetooth Arduino-like for the 120V/240V, 1-2kW realm.

To pay the bills I play barista once in while ( http://caffe-mobile.nl )

Working on a camera app for iOS that allows you to easily switch between manual and automatic control of exposure, focus, shutter speed, and ISO:

http://kickstandapps.com/prime/

I'm looking for beta testers, so if you're interested, sign up on the website.

I'm working on a exchange rate tracker, currently for Swedes working in Norway. Basically the idea is to setup alerts on favorable rates and deliver them via mail.

https://svenskpeng.nu/ (in Swedish) if it catches on I'll extend it to other currencies.

What is your data source? Does the exchange rate vary a lot across the sources?

Currently I am using http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/index...

And there is some degree of variation between different sources, for example this is the NOKSEK exchange rate from yahoo.

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from...

And since the variations between sources is limited I believe that getting a rough idea of the rate (which differs from bank to bank as well) Is beneficial especially in currencies like NOKSEK where the difference can vary between 0-10%

Hypervault (https://hypervault.github.io/) - a complete file encrytion web app contained in a single HTML file (so it runs totally client-side). It outputs a "locked vault" - the encrypted file data embedded in a copy of itself.

i just started http://www.projecttalk.io

it's messageboards for github projects.

mainly because a lot of projects use live chat (gitter, slack), which i think isn't always the best solution (time zones, discoverability of past discussions, ...).

PodcastParty – https://podcast.party/

It's a cloud-based podcast aggregator with a focus on discovery and social aspects (e.g. seeing what your friends are listening to, commenting on podcast episodes, sharing clips, etc.).

Working on some new features for a trivia game I released a couple of weeks ago: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.versuslabs...

I've recently updated http://serializer.io/, a newsreader project of mine from earlier in the year. Trying to settle on something new now though - currently thinking threejs and or electron.

I'm writing a quick frontend to search the AM leak database. And sticking some ads on it. /s

I was wondering how long it would take for one of those to crop up. Make sure you put a few ads for AM on the site for the irony.

Charge to reveal more than last initial?

I'm making virtual complications for smartwatches:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=thewatcher.ch....

Something like Netflix, but for your home

https://github.com/qq99/muvee

- rails, open source

- find & torrent movies and tv shows

- organize your media and enrich files with art, descriptions, ratings

- controls your Hue lights to match playback

Interactive tutorials to teach people things like SQL (http://sqlbolt.com) and Regular Expressions (http://regexone.com)!

I have some iOS apps around and I'm working on some new... Most stupid one: https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id928383455

Working on Nuggets (http://www.nuggetsapp.com/): personal knowledge management to record, remember and share everything you learn. in 200 characters or less

http://mpiannucci.com/hackwinds

Small live surf condition application specifically for Rhode Island. Made/work on both iOS and Android versions in my free time.

GridLayout, a flexbox-alternative CSS grid with support for older browsers. Needs a small script for IE support.

https://github.com/ghinda/gridlayout

https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs.

this is brilliant. are you interested in doing the exact same thing for food in a refrigerator? I believe the market is larger and the potential impact is greater. Just to make it clear:

ingredients:recipes::legos:designs

it would be silly to track things inside a refrigerator, but we could track purchases on receipts, and then calculate the amount over time using some smart-decay-rate. Cant assume it's gonna be easy to be able to live query the contents of someone fridge in real time - but can do estimations. Then people could add their recipes to a central server, and well, you've pretty much coded everything after that if I get your gist.

email me: jay@pitel.co

I have no interest in food, so no :)

Dropshare

http://getdropsha.re

An attempt to build structural lisp editor (ClojureScript in this case): https://github.com/darwin/plastic

I'm building a REST API for project gutenburg book info, using flask. I haven't picked a backend database, but it's only ~50,000 records, so I don't know that it will matter hugely.

I recently started working on a web application that allows you to search through git commit messages. I plan to turn it into a SaaS once it's more polished. Maybe $5 a month or so, nothing crazy.

A todo list with dependencies, using webcola (http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/).

A high performance database-as-a-service platform that provides NoSQL and SQL access. http://www.amisalabs.com/

JackDB already does this?

JackDB from what I see does not store your data. They provide a browser based tool to connect to your SQL databases. Amisalabs platform on the other hand is a DBaaS where you can store any kind of data and run any kind of queries.

https://stashit.pw/

Stash It is a simple bookmarking tool. Find something interesting on the web? Stash It and come back to it later.

So Pocket? I'm confused?

Kinda, but more features on the way that will separate us more.

I've been messing around with Groomy, a dog grooming salon management application. It still has a ways to go.

http://groomy.io/

http://hasgluten.com (database of gluten-free ingredients in 5 languages) and its successor, not released yet.

I like the idea but my biggest problem isn't ingredients, it's eating out. Having this available on my phone when looking for a place to eat would be a real time saver.

You can save it on your home screen and... voilà :) We spent quite some time making it usable on mobile too.

If you really really want an app, you can get the code http://github.com/hasgluten/hasgluten and plug it in Cordova/PhoneGap.

Working on https://www.birdly.co -- Lets you create a poster from a twitter account and the avatar.

Working on providing contextual information to whatever you do online: https://cueb.io/

Working on a website to connect enthusiastic fans of TV shows, books and music to each other for fun, exciting conversations. Without all the creeps

I worked on javelinbrowser.com, but it's now lay to waste due to the focus I have to put into my startup.

Anyone wanna take it over? Send me a mail.

want to post it on http://sideprojectors.com ? :)

Looks great! Very elegant design. Probably the thing I liked most was the reading mode, that was a really good idea.

https://signupforms.com - event registration/management

Cohort analysis for your Stripe account - https://cohorts.co

I'm building a social network for scuba divers, mixed with some stackoverflow concepts (upvoting posted dive spots).

for building a community type, you can check out http://hellobox.co

Food loss tracking app for personal use. Put in perishable groceries and it alerts you when things are about to go bad.

h4ck1t

http://www.h4ck1t.com

a multiplayer strategy hacking game

Immersive sci-fi teambuilding experience - like Disneyland's star tours but for hours.

Freelance actuarial consulting - email me at the address in my profile if interested.

http://focusr.co

Working on a JavaScript Metroidvania using Phaser.

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