Ask HN: What are you currently building? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you currently building?

145 points_1tan234 comments

During my christmas break I started building an automatic investment system.

What did you start?

I've been having fun the last few months by creating and launching! The latest of which seems to have struck a chord: MailScope

http://www.mailscope.io adds profile data to your existing mailing list. Why? Well, if you don't ask for firstname and lastname on signup, you'll get increased conversion. But if you then want to get increased open and click rates when you actually send email, you should start personalizing (one way is to use firstnames in the body) and segmenting. That's where MailScope comes in. Each new subscriber you get, MailScope will automatically add firstname, lastname (and other profile data).

It's just the start and I've been having great fun expanding the possibilities - alerting you when an 'influencer' signs up so that you can reach out directly; auto-following subscribers on twitter when they signup. I've already got a dozen or so paying customers who use MailScope to enrich their mailing lists and increase their revenues. It's awesome to have learnt so much here on HN and finally be able to start offering something of real value back to business owners.

Interesting idea - but what are your pricing plans?

Interesting idea how do you get the names? My initial idea would be to crawl some social networks for the name.

Not the guy but on the site it says "We search hundreds of different data sources including public databases, private APIs and social networks. We can accurately match over one billion email addresses to firstname and lastname."

Clearbit could be one of the solutions to this.

Neat idea, good luck with it!

Why not list pricing?

Maybe pre-launch and pricing not figured out yet?

He mentions that he just started working on it, so he could be in some sort of private beta.

Interesting product. Good luck.

I had similar ideas about automatically enriching subscriber / profiler data but ended up not following them any further because behaviour like this is slightly creepy and might put subscribers off.

From your experience how do you alleviate such concerns? Is there a target audience? For instance, people subscribing to industry newsletters professionally might be less privacy-minded than say people interested in information technology subjects.

One way to alleviate this concern is to know your audience and not sign up for a product like Mailscope if your audience is privacy-minded.

Really cool project.

Which other data fields do you offer besides names if any? zip? gender? age?

And what would be the price difference between name and any other fields?

What did I start? An autonomous lawn mower. My goal is to get it done for under $1,000 USD using mostly snap-together hardware. My timeline is to have it mowing via RC by the end of January (shipping to New Zealand takes a while, especially when you're on a budget), while I'd like it to be capable of safely mowing autonomously by July or so - though I'm optimistic that it'll reach good-enough stage by March. I'll publish the build log on my website [1] as I hit major milestones.

What did I finish? I've been rebuilding my larger quadcopter and I finally got it up in the air and it flies well enough for my needs, though admittedly I did trim my friend's tree with it a bit. I'm chalking that up to pilot error, however. I hadn't flown anything in a few months and it turns out that line-of-sight orientation on quadrotors isn't just like riding a bicycle. It could still use a bit of tuning -- projects like those are never really finished.

I also have a few fairly interesting/exciting projects which I desperately need to write up. One such example is a wide field-of-view stereo head-mounted display for FPV flying which can be built in an evening for under $200 USD. Another is my as-of-yet fruitless efforts to build a very low latency HD digital video transmission system - also for FPV flying. If these are projects which you'd find useful, or which you'd simply like to read more about - leave me a comment or flick me an e-mail [2]. Encouragement always helps when it comes to getting things written up.

1: http://www.benjamincburns.com/

2: My username at gmail.

Awesome. What fail safes do you have?

The only real failsafes I have are overcurrent detection on the blade motor (when you hit something bad, current will spike) which triggers immediate shut-off, as well as a big red emergency stop button that will be on top of a pedestal at between knee and waist height.

Otherwise I intend to implement naive obstruction avoidance to start where I detect proximity to an obstruction and simply steer away from it when I'm too close. In the case where the distance to the obstruction decreases faster than warranted by vehicle velocity, I'll simply shut off the blade and stop moving until either the obstruction goes away, or some timeout expires.

Later on I'll add some smarts to this w/ a bit of mapping so that the static object "too close threshold" varies depending on whether or not the object is known in the current map - that way I can implement wall-following for close edging without that behaviour conflicting with the lower-level "don't turn the neighbour's cat into sausage" behaviour.

Edit 1:

My yard is quite private, and lawn mowers (even electric ones) make scary noises, so I don't really expect that much will want to interfere with it while it is running.

Edit 2:

It'll also have a camera and I'll be experimenting with various monocular SLAM and odometry algorithms. If nothing else, I'll use the camera to capture video for remote FPV control and for offline structure-from-motion mapping purposes. My hope is that if I can get decent enough pose estimation (likely from fusion of VSLAM + wheel odometry + AHRS/IMU data + GPS via an EKF), that I can compare the live camera image with one taken from the map at a similar pose to find and avoid dynamic objects in the scene. Of course, to do that well I'll actually need some sort of statistical map of the environment, as a single textured 3D mesh won't convey the expected variance of the scene (things blowing in the wind, etc).

Also think about something for shutting down if one of the wheels lose contact with the ground. Eg being lifted up (or flipped over)

Good point. Will definitely do this.

Are you looking at ROS?

I have been, yes. I don't know if I'll start off with ROS, but as soon as I start attempting to use the camera for nav purposes, I'll certainly go that way.

I'm rethinking the computer. The hardware, the software, the UI paradigms, everything. Xerox PARC 2.0.

- We must stop writing UI by hand

- We must adopt a new language that's less ambiguous

- We must prefer graphs to trees

- We must not build service-specific apps and websites

- We must stop thinking of computer hardware as a personal device, and make switching from a device to another completely seamless

- Local storage must be nothing but a local cache of sections of the ONE universal knowledge base

- Speech and text must not be the primary way to interact with a machine/AI

- Service providers must never have a say when it comes to UI/UX, as services must be completely decoupled from UI

- Everything is an agent, the system shouldn't make a distinction between human users, AI, smart contracts, APIs, etc.

- There must be no difference between creating software and using software

- Money shall be replaced by a social currency, a form of trust score (based on reliability, honesty and predictability)

- Businesses must adapt their practices and models to software, not the opposite

- Brands must be eliminated and replaced with a trust score

- We must allow for non-precise facts to exist (ranges, set of weighted values, conditional constraints)

- We must allow for non-universal facts (opinions, contradicting values, different weight/credibility based on the user's trust graph)

- "Undo" and "Predict next" functionalities must be ubiquitous and present everywhere

- Intentions and Predictions are communicated by logging events in the future (where the date doesn't need to be precise as allowed above)

- A cooking recipe, GPS directions, task dependencies, a playlist, IKEA directions, a tutorial, must all use the same model

- ...

Big and bold challenges.

Does the "no difference between creating and using software" not cover much/most of your considerations?

I'm curious where you've taken to the idea of things like graphs over trees, should a new system be so opinionated? or is there a way to develop something flexible enough that when the next thing after graphs comes along, your system will be able to adapt.

I have lost all motivation for lesser challenges. I can't be excited about a very specific project with a doman-specific purpose.

One could probably summarize my mission as to bridge the gap between consuming and creating software. Sometimes, I tell people that I'm creating a new language (which I am).

A tree is just a unidirectional graph. Most file systems use the tree structure which is crippling. I'd like to know what's better and more flexible than a graph.

I think we can build the trust system using a hypergraph. There's also a couple special kinds of nodes that will shorten the walk between seemingly disconnected items. I've been thinking about this for a while too.

> A simple graph can be considered a special case of the hypergraph, namely the 2-uniform hypergraph.

Hypergraph it is.

We have surprisingly identical ambitions. BVic's "Future of Programming" is particularly relevent to several of your points and really puts how terrible our current system is in context.... https://vimeo.com/71278954

I feel like this sentiment (of "everything is wrong") is gaining traction recently (last year/two). Maybe it's just wishful thinking though...

Although some people seem to share our understanding that things must change, it usually stops there.

I haven't seen anyone present a radically new paradigm for computing (especially consumer UI) in the last decade.

I intend to change that.

I intend to do that too. Why don't we all get on a chat room and work at it?

Let's do this.

Feel free to join: https://bettercomputer.slack.com

yes. invite me if you've already set up one?

Please add me as well

joelg [at] mit [edu]

Me and a fellow student are working on such a system: https://github.com/Symatem/Symatem. We are interested in joining the Slack group: Alexander.Meissner at student.hpi.de and Niklas.Riekenbrauck at student.hpi.de

I've been pondering how to attack the problem of making better UIs for going on 10 years now. Half the time I think I'm completely out of touch and that my ideas are irrelevant (with good reason), the rest of the time I wonder what would happen if I actually tried to implement some of the stuff I've come up with. (I strongly suspect I'd get a rude shock and realize how much iteration would be needed to make it usable, heh.)

I'd love to bounce ideas back and forth, but... agh, a Slack URL. I tried Slack once, felt too stifled, and bolted. The poor team I joined still has no idea where I went or why I left.

I'm torn between asking for an invite and just passing because, ironically, the software being used grates too much (XD)... maybe you could enable the IRC gateway?

One thing at a time though; if you're using Slack, so be it. My public email is in my profile. The private email I'd want to sign up under is different.

I started, and because of this post will now resume, working on Automata: https://github.com/theideasmith/Automata.

Add me to the Slack, aclscientist[AT]gmail[DOT]com

I would also love to be a part of this.

Please add me! william [at] williambernoudy [dot] com

Let's get together and work on this. There's nothing more important at this time and era of technology.

beep me at sethjgore@gmail.com

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.

I started in a few years ago, but over the Christmas break I put a lot of time into it and it's growth has spiked quite well as a result. I need to upgrade my servers now :/

It's been a really fun break!

I'm getting interested in super low frequency signals so I looked up the E202 Very Low Frequency (<10kHz) receiver[1] and laid out/built a variation of it.[2] Right now the whole thing is a broadband receiver with no antenna (obviously) and the whole circuit board assembly is functionally acting like a microphone. I can hear when I touch any component or move my hand around in the air. I'm going to add a 60Hz notch file and then take it out to the middle of nowhere.

I think it would be awesome to go find a pipeline to use as an antenna...

Next project is to take my BlueROV[3] and build a hydrophone array[4] for it so a friend and I can see if a underwater acoustics engineer friend and I can use it to track other objects (like a remote-controlled toy boat) in the water. I've been doing some Kivy visualization of an accelerometer and gyro (MPU9255) and I think we could use matplotlib's interactive mode or something in Kivy (maybe) to visualize it all in realtime.

There's nothing cutting edge here but I've done a bunch of radio frequency (RF) stuff like GPS and WiFi and I'm really enjoying how tangible audio seems in comparison. Just having fun with low frequencies, basically.

[1] http://www.vlf.it/romero2/explorer-e202.html

[2] https://github.com/wicker/e202var-natural-radio-receiver

[3] https://www.bluerobotics.com/store/rov/bluerov-r1/

[4] http://www.dosits.org/files/dosits/hydrophone_instruc_w_imag...

FWIW, you may wish to add a 50Hz notch filter as well. If you're in North America 50Hz noise won't be as much of an issue, but if your receiver is sensitive enough there's likely still enough of it floating around from various DC-AC inverters and the like. Of course, if you've got a good enough tuner you can likely just measure the noise in that "band" yourself.

Re: using a pipeline as an antenna - I wonder how difficult (or illegal) it would be to use mains power lines. My RF-foo is only marginally above white-belt, but I'd imagine that a fair amount of low frequency signal would make it through the transformers.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that! I posted partly in hopes that somebody would reply and solve problems I didn't know I had. That's the joy of being totally new to this stuff. I don't know what I don't know. :D

Re: using mains power lines... I actually have a friend who might be able to answer that, so I'll ask him. We were also considering transmission towers, since plenty of the hikes I know will take me across a clearcut for the transmission lines, and I can get some altitude with good, unobstructed views.

On Dec 30th, I built http://bucket52.com, a simple app which asks the question "what did you do in the last week that was memorable/remarkable?"

The idea being that even if we do great things and are very active in different areas of our life, we actually end up doing the same thing again and again. If we track the things we do, and look for something that was different and special, will that entice us to do more diverse and interesting things, and get outside of our comfort zone?

It's very MVP, just seeing where it goes at the moment, but so far, it seems people like the idea.

I also built it in Meteor, which I only tried for the first time on Dec. 30th, and I have to say, for prototyping something basic like this, it's been really great. Some of the poor quality of the site (like slow load time) is probably due to my inexperience with Meteor.

A prototype peer-to-peer caching proxy that uses socket.io to turn web pages into etherpad-like canvases[0]

It currently requires something akin to EigenTrust++ implementing in the DHT namespace, except EigenTrust++ requires information about the amount of successful downloads peer nodes have made, so it's going to require minor adjustments for decentralised HTTP.

On the frontend it requires a way to insert arbitrary elements into the DOM using something akin to Mediums' impressive little editor.

Also missing RPC_EDIT, so there's no inter-instance web page editing /just/ yet.

[0] https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony

I'm building micro - a microservices toolkit https://github.com/micro/micro. I was part of the platform team at Hailo which built a global microservices platform and before then spent some time at Google. I think with the shift to cloud and docker, being able to build distributed systems is becoming ever more important but the tooling hasn't caught up yet. The goal of micro is to simplify building and managing distributed systems.

hello ... i am building archiejs (a mircorservices framework - please do a CTRL+F on this page) ... it would be good to connect.

Hi. Come join the slack channel https://micro-services.slack.com if you would like to chat. Self invite here http://micro-invites.herokuapp.com

For the past month or so I've been building a notes app as I wanted to move away from Evernote and couldn't find a good replacement. It has been really fun building something that I use every day and building it exactly as I want to use it.

http://github.com/timdavies/trunk

An experimental, proof-of-concept, distributed forum built on top of Ethereum[1].

This means all the posts are cryptographically signed and stored in the blockchain.

[1] https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/etherforum

That's awesome! I tried signing up, but it's lagging out my browser a little bit and it doesn't look like any forums are up yet. I'll definitely keep an eye on this though.

Did you post it to /r/ethereum yet? Cuz you totally should.

Thank you, I removed the version that was online because I'm planning to setup automatic deployment for it.

I think I've posted it here [0], I will hopefully finish a better release soon, and I'll share it again.

Thank you!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ynznd/poll_what_...

BTW, I'm planning an Ethereum meetup in Asuncion, Paraguay this week (in the middle of South America), just in case there's some hacker around the continent/country :)

Contact me for details!

We're working on an automated financial management system for our business. I co-founded an ISP and so far we've found quickbooks to be terrible, banking to not be fun, and small tedious processes multiplied are starting to take out chunks of our time. Thus we're working to combine plaid.com + subledger + Dwolla + lob + stripe to create an automated billing and accounting system for credit, ach, and paper billing.

I was just going to suggest Subledger, only to see you're already on it! We're working on a Subledger integration as well for https://foldapp.com. We need to account for USD, bitcoin, and multiple gift card brands, and they've been a huge help so far.

Context for everyone else- Subledger is a double-entry accounting API that gives you the tools to implement your own accounting system.

Working on similar product for my full-time job. Contact me and we can chat more.

https://meetabit.com - an easier way to run tech and startup meetups

As the organizer of HelsinkiJS and a new dad I find it takes too much effort to organize monthly events. Meetabit makes this easier by letting companies offer sponsorship & speakers submit talk proposals. All that organizers need to do is pick a date. The service handles sending out invitations, handling registrations, providing a wait list and even getting speakers to add links to their slides after the event.

To see some of the features available, check out the HelsinkiJS community profile: http://helsinkijs.org. If you're an organizer yourself, it would be great to hear from you - just drop me a line via the feedback link in the footer.

A mashup of Mint.com's data and Simple.com's "Goals" interface[1], in a locally run web-app. I've used Simple's Goals interface as my primary budgeting tool for the past two years with a great deal of success, and want it for ALL my banking. Thus far, this has been the best way forward. It automatically imports my banking data from Mint, then allows me to apply "goals" to the transactions, along with some advanced filtering and matching to automate goal-matching, and "pulling" some of my available funds into goals on a daily basis. I'm sure I'll be tinkering with this throughout the year.

The interface is based on react.js, and it's allowed me to play around with jspm (not ideal - not awful), Baobab (fits me better than flux), react-dnd (confusing, but smart), Javascript es6/es7 (dig it), and localForage (which I already know and love).

Also started working on an Android app that talks to my Anova 1.0 (bluetooth-only) because I wasn't happy with the official Anova app. Was great to learn about controlling a device over bluetooth from Android, which was simultaneously a pain in the ass and easier than I expected.

1: Cheesy Example, but shows the basic premise of the goals interface: https://vimeo.com/58997158

I'm working on a SaaS project to eliminate all the burden with VPN tunnels.

I'm planning to mainly target developers that have resources spread among different providers and need a secure way to either connect to them or connect resources to each other.

It will be easy to setup and seamless to use. You'll just have your VMs connected between them on the same local network, so all your application will seamlessly work with it. This will potentially unlock other ways of architecting your apps.

E.g. you might have some VMs in Amazon and some other in Azure, Linode, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, bare metal in any other hosting provider (OVH?) or locally in your DC. Each of those providers might offer something different and it'll be great if you could just use them all together without opening your services to the whole world or without having to tinker with IPsec VPN tunnels or firewall rules. You just need to create your new network in our system and deploy the client with the provided config file on each of them. I'm making it as simple as providing you with a DHCP server already, so you're ready to go after launching the client. Every machine you join will be part of this virtual network in a completely transparent way.

The idea seems very interesting. Would you care explaining how you tackle these issues?

Basically I'm tunnelling on SSL.

I'm close to launch a first version of the service, it's got some already identified issues, but I'd like the customers to tell me what seems to be more pressing to them after using the service.

Anyway, when I launch I'll also write a guide on how do this yourself with open source software. My service would be aimed to those who can't or don't want to maintain their own deployment :)

Update: I made available the first public version of this --> https://wormhole.network

I write software in C# so I took on building an extension to make my life a little easier by allowing different background colors to be applied to methods in classes (Visual Studio) based on the kind of method that they are: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/91cb9cc4-13a3...

Wow, this looks really cool.

Two things.

1. Will this work in Express? I plan to get back into Windows at some point soon, Express is where I'd probably start.

2. Is the vertical function naming thing part of the engine, or did you add that?

I don't think the reference / date / change count thing is part of VS itself. That looks really awesome.

Playing around with neural networks to try to salvage my fantasy hockey season.

What exactly are you doing? I've been gathering data for few seasons in my league, going to use it to help me draft next year.

My first pass is actually attacking daily fantasy (i.e. given data about past NHL games, predict a player's performance in an upcoming game). I'm scraping some NHL stats sites to build input vectors based on a couple dozen manually-chosen features (e.g. "number of goals scored last game", "opposition goalie's save percentage in his last 5 games") and passing them through a neural network to see if there's any usable correlation between the input features and a player's eventual performance (goals, assists, +/-, etc.).

It's all in good fun -- mostly an excuse to take a look at TensorFlow and regain some of my machine learning knowledge from undergrad :)

I'd be curious to hear about anyone else mucking around with machine learning for fantasy sports!

Very cool. I'd check the fantasyhockey subreddit, I've seen a few people working on various analytic projects posting there.

I've been writing a wrapper around PostgreSQLs jsonb column type to make a somewhat mongo-a-like json document store: http://bedquiltdb.github.io

Not sure if it would actually be useful to anyone in the real world, but I've learned a lot about writing PostgreSQL extensions and such.

Great stuff. I would love to be able to use Mongoose.js with Postgres, it would massively accelerate my development process.

Not sure about mongoose, but I'm sure someone could write an ODM library around node-bedquilt.

I'm building a Flexible Editor - A Flex-Box based layout creator: http://briandiehr.com/#/layout-editor

Source: https://github.com/BDiehr/briandiehr

While basic, the tangibility and interactivity this provides would promote flexbox to a lot of people who would otherwise shy away from it.

Definitely a concept worth throwing at /r/css, /r/webdesign, places like that... after it's been tidied up a little. It's still rough around the edges: the thick dashed borders and color scheme could do with a little polish; text and image blocks (both customizable and lorem-ipsum/stock-image-based) would be great; adjusting margin/padding would be a good idea; and being able to add arbitrary CSS declarations (like font-family, color, background, etc) would be good too.

I am in the beginning stages of creating a web application to interact with Bitmessage (a theoretically totally anonymous messaging platform). I am modeling it after Mega.co.nz, which provides varying levels of ways to be confident that the JavaScript it is serving you is not compromised, and relies on you having a private key it never intercepts.

I think the biggest barrier to privacy online right now is how inaccessible applications like Bitmessage are to the average user. Having to install a local python code base and store gigabytes of data that takes potentially hours to download sucks.

A browser application like this is not a fool-proof method of privacy, but it's pretty darn good, and is leaps and bounds better than Facebook which stores your data in plain text and proceeds to sell it or whatever. It's also better than something like a zero-knowledge service such as SpiderOak's Kloak where your data is still owned (but encrypted) by some random person who can revoke your access at any time and track your usage, who you're communicating with, and possibly serve you malicious JavaScript.

In summary, an application that: * Provides completely anonymous, encrypted, untraceable, uncensorable messaging between people and groups (using Bitmessage as the data store) * Is accessible like any other web application and provides pretty good security in doing so * Can be used as a browser extension if you want virtually guaranteed security/privacy * Relies on a data store that no one owns, everyone can access, and everyone can forever contribute to

There are questions about the security of Bitmessage, but I know it will be improved over time.

It is a struggle to decide how much time to dedicate to this application, though. I'm a somewhat underpaid developer with aspirations of actually making money to support myself with side projects, but at the same time wanting to contribute with open source applications like this to make the web a better, more private, place.

I made an image upload site powered by Urbit around Christmas. It's currently very barebones (just image uploading and a feed), but I plan on adding voting and fun stuff like that. Being able to leverage Urbit's built-in identity system and having all messages between browser and server be strongly typed is awesome.

https://github.com/chc4/urporn (the name is tongue-in-cheek, please don't actually use it for porn)

For fun, check out https://github.com/chc4/urporn/blob/master/home/ape/porn.hoo... and see if you can actually figure out what the hell is going on :D

An infinite canvas library that I can use in my drawing application prototypes. It's working already, performance is good, only misses the ability to sync with a server now.

Cool idea! Is it open source?

Yeah, you can find it in my note-taking-experimentation github repo

https://github.com/Azeirah/note-taking-experimentation

It's in the infinite-canvas folder. Just open the index.html file and it should simply work, as there is no set-up needed yet.

Drag + left click = draw Drag + right click = pad the world

I'm not planning whatsoever to support or document this. It's open source, but I leave it at that.

Very interesting. For a while I've been meaning to explore the idea of infinite canvases within the context of UI engines - so you can eg have a scrollable region with infinite content in it that gets intelligently cached to disk etc. ("Been meaning to" and "while" are the key words here. :P)

One thing I noted with this is that window resizes seem to affect the stroke width. This is not a bug report, I'm just mentioning in case it's useful to you.

Have you seen https://www.madewithmischief.com/ ?

Absolutely. But as I said, it's for my own drawing program prototypes, I cannot build upon their application.

Parsing horse racing PDF charts into JSON and then visualizing the race as a motion chart using d3.js

http://dbheroapp.com - a GUI database app for PostgreSQL & MySQL, for Mac and Windows. Very early days (been actively working on for about a month).

Interesting. What technologies did you use here?

Go, React, es6. Swift for the mac app. .NET, Winforms and CefSharp for Windows app.

Thanks for this. So you are native on both platforms - the screenshots look really nice :)

I wonder if you and I are working on the same thing. ;)

I'm building infrastructure that I'm hoping will be needed to complete the Stockfighter trading puzzles.

(Hoping, because it's entirely possible that I will be lied too far less than the documentation leads me to believe, and I won't need all of this sanity checking.)

Good visualization is super helpful. The current levels don't require that much infrastructure. The level descriptions do deceive a little - just figure your own ways to the winning conditions.

(I finished level 6. Now building a limit order book in golang for the heck of it)

Urrgh. I should have put up a "Be dreadfully careful with your replies, lest they maybe contain spoilers." warning.

Mea culpa. :P

Zero spoilers in my replies, I think. The order book has nothing to do with winning the levels, just for fun.

For these sorts of things, I'm unreasonably sensitive to spoilers. The assertion that the current levels don't require that much infrastructure is on the spoilery side of the edge of spoiler territory for me.

Like I said, there was no way you could have known, as I didn't mention my opinions on spoilers. So, no worries. :)

Sort of.

Stockfighter is great and serves as a great introduction to the field. However I am building something aimed for "the real world".

The system will, after being backtested, trade Bitcoin and small amounts of $ & € to learn.

I'm writing a metroid-like game for Sega Genesis in C and 68k assembly. Probably nobody is going to play it.

It's the journey that counts sometimes. I'm yet to get to the assembly point myself.

/r/retrogaming would probably like it :P

You mean in between long sessions of Fallout 4? I built a new todo app (yeah I know!), because I could not find an existing one to support my simple daily work-flow: https://five.today/

Not exactly a product, but I worked on building a programming community in Berkeley and helped it grow to 1,200 members. We meet twice per week. Our 100th meeting was yesterday. If you like programming, feel free to stop by.

http://www.meetup.com/codeselfstudy/

http://codeselfstudy.com/edu

We're currently building a desktop based time tracking application for ourselves, later we will release to everyone. Our main goal is to bring us back on track on our personal projects. Also billing solution for our consulting work.

I'm really interested in this! I've basically strung together some text files but occasionally lose a couple of hours tinkering to see if there's a better way. What backend are you going for? If it's Linux-compatible I'd love to beta test for you when you're ready.

Nice to hear that you are interested in out application. We are making it compatible for all platforms. Application base is Electron/NodeJS and views using ReactJS. Sure we will send you the application once the beta is ready. Thanks. Peace

Out of curiosity, have you seen Toggl? We use it at work for time tracking and find it mostly quite good. Would be curious to know what's different about your use case.

I had seen Toggl, But not yet used. What's new in my app? that's a good question. Time tracking is one of the main features in the app. but the main focus of the app is to help and keep track of personal projects. Normally in our case, (me & my friends) we have a lot of personal projects. Some are finished, some in prototyping state, some in debt. Now the main problem we are facing is to track and measure the effort that we put in our personal projects. Also, we need to bring back the project to track if it slips away. We observed the reason why your personal projects slip away and we found some reasons. First thing is the issue regarding the management and you are not aware of the effort that you put for the project like the time you took to think, design, structure, code etc. So we thought of an assistance/motivator who take can take care of managing the projects and provide you with vital information which proves that you are progressing. This is purely an experimental project, but we are trying our best to bring good solutions.

This you can still achieve in other apps like toggl or freckle. But they lack the management and we are focusing on the managing part. Once the beta is ready i will send it to you. Happy to get your feedbacks.

peace

Atmospheric cube satellite kits for STEM programs: http://www.trimtab.space/ We 3D print a cube satellite, send them to the school, they fill it with their experiments (conditions are extreme at 100,000 ft.) and we send it up on a high altitude balloon. We've got a 3U launch planned a few weeks from now.

100,000ft isn't even close to Low Earth Orbit.

Isn't calling that a "satellite" mis-representation? :(

Good point, not really about altitude though (velocity).

We're calling it a 'cube satellite' because of the form factor. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

As an aside, I recently worked on an altitude control system for a weather balloon (like Project Loon) which is generally called an 'atmospheric satellite' even though it's not technically in orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite

Guess it depends on the target audience. If you're launching cube-sat's to 100,000 ft for some pre-testing purposes, then "satellite" might make sense.

  eg environment testing of cube-sat's at 100,000 ft, as part of their dev cycle prior to real (rocket) launch

Other than that though... "High-altitude balloon cube-sat", or "Atmospheric cube-sat" maybe? :)

I finished a project! A FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) client for OSX written in Haskell. http://www.macbeth-ficsclient.com/

Just finished a fun year off concentrating on creative code type projects (and travelling) -

Many improvements to shoebot - (A cairo port of nodebox). Experiments in graphics for python - started a midi mapper / OSC controller in kivy. - learned about bezier curves. - wrote various music vis experiments in shoebot and nodebox-gl. - wrote a couple of simple VJ apps and actually VJd with them. - Experimented with building native android apps using SDL. - Did numerous opengl + shader tutorials (and contributed fixes).

Currently finishing off a sort of 'leaderboard' of chapters for a book writer (to choose the order of the chapters).

A bunch of other things - vext - a way to use libs like Gtk from virtualenv) - time learning about 'boring' stuff, testing, packaging etc.

It's been quite a bit of fun ... hopefully when I start back at work can use some of this knowledge and not be just 100% back on the backend work.

Doing all this has been really good, and if you are a contractor and have the chance I'd recommend doing something similar, have been very lucky !

https://botwiki.org - a "Wikipedia" of online bots

Is there a "random bot" link I missed when perusing the site? I would love to click on such a thing a few times

That would be great, see https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org/issues/35

Also, I only saw the title, not realizing the OP only asked about projects started in December O:-)

A new web browser with a smarter search bar, DuckDuckGo integration, and a design that makes it easier to focus on the webpage.

Building a "how bloated is this website?" service / browser extension.

Great idea - include a function so you can email the CTO automatically telling them to remove the 22 tracking scripts that their site just has to have.

Nice idea. I am thinking on having some way for the company to "claim" a site to be able to knock it off the hall of shame, and so there should easily be a way to contact them automatically also!

SwipeyTunes - Swipe left or right and clean up your iTunes music library.

https://medium.com/@Duj/swipeytunes-or-how-i-fell-in-love-wi...

An implementation of hyperorthogonal (aka ZigZag) data structures in Scheme [0], that respects the bottom-up, dynamic extensibility envisioned by T. Nelson.

[0] https://www.github.com/jpt4/chanadu

I'm working on a related project that uses hyperorthogonal data structures to create better bookmarks:

https://github.com/ixtechnology/z-mark

Full disclosure: nalck and I (jpt4) are both members of Ix Technology.

I'm building a new controller board for Apple Wireless Keyboard (A1314) so that I could have complete control on what each button does and add new functionality (e.g. switch b/w devices quickly, fast blutooth connect/reconnect, longer battery life, mouse control).

Sounds interesting. Would it be applicable to laptops too? I was thinking it'd be great if I could add functionality to my built in kb

I presume it'd be a lot harder since the builtin one hooks straight onto the main board. One could perhaps turn the builtin keyboard into a USB one and hooks it up to an unused port.

There's nothing like big blocks of time to get some writing and coding done. Full Stack Python (https://www.fullstackpython.com) got some major updates with new pages, additional sections on current pages and new links to resources. The change log [1] and commit log [2] capture what's new.

[1] http://www.fullstackpython.com/change-log.html [2] https://github.com/makaimc/fullstackpython.com/commits/gh-pa...

Realday. "A tool that helps you plan your real day"[1]

I got frustrated with GTD a long time ago. I was super frustrated that my todo apps would eventually be full of useless information. I loved the ideas of some bloggers to basically just pick a few tasks for the day and do them. I thought: "Why not mix the calendar events and tasks in such a way that you have software that actually encourages you to focus only on the tasks you have time for?" Hence, you have your "real day" as opposed to the day you thought you'd finish 20 huge tasks and end up with none attempted.

realday.co (Had MVP up like a few years ago but scraped in favor of current Golang/ReactJS version I'm building now)

1: Work in progress

I started a fork of Chrome(Blink) DevTools to enhance developer experience with ClojureScript: https://github.com/binaryage/dirac

Now struggling to get REPL working properly.

I am currently building a new nodejs+go/polyglot framework (known as ArchieJS - work in progress and on github https://github.com/archiejs/) which makes it specially easy to build web APIs that can scale using microservices in the backend.

I was quick to build the Nodejs part of the framework. I have been taking a longer time building the Go part. Mostly because I am new to Go and am trying to figure out whats the best way to go about it.

These days I am reading a bit into Dagger, and trying to figure out if I can put some learnings from Dagger into Archiejs (or particularly the Go part of ArchieJS).

A couple of Twitter bots:

* https://twitter.com/hn_frontpage displays Hacker News top 30 (to deal with ranking volatility, an article is tweeted once a day) and has both article link and discussion link. Haven't found an existing one that is both the front page and the discussion link.

* https://twitter.com/tic_tweet_toe for people to play games of TTT. It remembers each person's W/L/D record.

Working on a web version of cribbage that isn't a Java applet.

Researching idea for my next bootstrapped company.

I started working on getting my private Wordpress plugin and theme update service out of beta. It's getting closer! Maybe by the end of the month.

https://kernl.us - Come check us out!

Dealing with private, or non-repo updates myself recently, I've been exploring what it takes to do these. Currently I'm using Freemius, but I'm sure at some point I'll have to make this work. I'm excited to see another option out there!

We make it pretty easy to do with Kernl. It also supports "push to build" from GitHub or BitBucket if that interests you. If you have any questions send me an email: jack at kernl dot us

I have been writing a FAT32 driver to understand the FAT32 file system. It is very exciting as this is my first time I am dabbling with file systems. I will be porting this to my baremetal firmware for the MINI2440 SBC.

That's a pretty cool project

The idea to write a tiny modular driver came to me because of need. Sometimes developers do not need a write and simply need to read a file. Sometimes they want a very minimal read and then would like to write. This would be in case of storing ADC samples and then transferring it via a wireless interface or if a USB is connected they would want to mount the space as a drive.

This tiny thing may be interesting: https://gist.github.com/ryancdotorg/9f557d3513710ce91aed

I stumbled on it randomly several months ago. I suspect that a) it might be interesting to read through and b) might help add resiliency.

A Raspberry Pi/Toggl button-board - where each button represent a client. Press it and time starts tracking in Toggl.

I was planning on building something similar for my homegrown time tracking system. Then I realized that I almost always start or switch projects by going to an email from the client. I setup a hotkey to run some AppleScript that grabs the current client from the from address in the email.

A Hacker News for Books!

http://www.vivalabooks.com/

Cool! I tried to sign up and keep getting an error about my password not meeting your requirements.

You can email me if you're still having issues, otherwise it requires one of the following classes A-Z, a-z, 0-9.

Helping America's inmates reach the outside world.

I used to be one.

Interesting! Have you seen https://pigeon.ly/?

I have, but briefly. This is solving a different problem.

I was told today in discussing it with a peer that it's a "marketers dream."

But I am not a marketer. Yes, this is me welcoming intros. :)

Do you have a landing page or signup thing yet?

How are you going about achieving this?

In know its a crowded space but I really wanted to "build my own lightsaber" and design a productivity tool to my custom needs

It's based on the google calendar api. It serves the purposes of a calendar, todo list, evernote and emacs org-mode as well as being a really pretty time visualizer. The idea is to be able to visualize your time, from the scale of minutes to decades. It also tracks your "focus", that is- which activity held your attention and for how long.

This sounds very very interesting.

Some suggested ideas for next steps, in ascending order of responsibility and burden:

- Release screenshots for educational/inspirational/as-is purposes (yes please yes please :D I need ideas for exactly this)

- Do a code dump in the style of "Have at it. Updated when I add/fix features I want. I praise PRs and ignore all else. Wanted: maintainer, apply within"

- Reach the point where you're ultimately answering GitHub issues and closing tickets at 2:15AM

I started http://percht.com recently. I'm tired of searching multiple sites to find the lowest price for what I want. Percht aggregates top retailers and finds the same products across them using neural networks. You can also get price alerts and filter products by specifications.

It's still early so i only have cameras listed, and things may break. I'm adding tvs next. Let me know if you have any requests.

I tried a similar thing once for my country but the market was too small. I'm interested in knowing how you're using NNs.

Over winter break I made a multiplayer online Connect 4 game.

The twist is, it's a single page app that doesn't use any JS tags.

You can play it on my test server here [1]. Consider it a puzzle to figure out how it works.

If you want to see the source, it's on GitHub here [2].

[1] http://45.55.194.211/ [2] https://github.com/pimlu/connect4

I see what you did there; very cute. :D

Also, kudos for sharing it via mysterious IP address. That kinda thing just isn't done that much any more :(

I'm writing http://codecaster.io, a tool for teachers to help students in software development classes. Been working on it for over a year and been using it in my classes. I'm looking for other teachers interested in using it so I can get feedback.

I have plans for pricing, but before I can approach that, I need more data on how people will use it.

For technical folks, it uses Phoenix and Elixir, and a lot of JS.

I've been having a great time the last few weeks working on a niche product database website for flashlights. Since my new operations engineering job has me moving away from doing web development full time, it's been a nice break and a good way to stay sharp on the application development side of things.

https://github.com/flashlightdb/flashlightdb

I'm getting NXDOMAIN. :(

I've been writing a self-hosted Rails application where a company can upload their binaries/product-files for their customers. Having accounts, their customers can privately comment or bring up issues on what releases/products they purchased from the company.

It's somewhat like the "Releases" feature of Github, without everything else. A minimalistic selfhosted-internal-appstore-slash-customer-service-desk if you will.

I finished up the first round of my side project: PeerGym

http://www.peergym.com let's you search for quality gyms in your area by membership price and amenities - the kinds of things services like Google Maps and Yelp don't do. Most people do a particular kind of workout (running, weights), and need special equipment (treadmill, barbells), and you can't always guarantee you'll know what you're getting just by the name and a few pictures.

It was mostly an excuse for me to learn Elixir and Phoenix. I've tackled auth, uploads, geolocation/geospatial DBs, SSL and more, so it's been a lot of fun and hopefully I can turn this into some sort of tutorial series on building out a real-world app.

For the future I want to add reviews, community edits, and advanced filters to make them easier to search and populate. And hopefully, accept payments if people want to buy passes to their gyms online (or automatically renew their memberships.

I am working on a VR editor for Aframe https://aframe.io/

https://thewishler.com a site to create online wish lists. The "about" page covers the reason (mainly it was a need I had personally) but it also gave me a reason to play with some new things. Next on the list is learning how to write a chrome add-on to interact with the site :)

Robojar.

A microsubscription (cf. Spotify, Google Contributor, Apple Music etc) system that works on the open web while remaining robust to attempts to siphon payments through fake visits.

As is typical of an engineer, I spend entirely too much time running down technical rabbit holes. Thanks a lot, ADHD. My current rabbit hole is getting everything into Concourse CI.

Just started it this weekend, but a git remote + LFS proxy for Perforce designed around ease of collaboration without requiring a central 'git-to-Perforce' gateway. Yes, it's a fairly large project, but the time spent implementing it should be small by comparison to the years it'll add to my life.

This isn't something I just started, but I'm going on my third year of building a browser snail simulation.

http://whentoexchange.com - Know the right time to exchange your money.

Added a bunch of new features, Bitcoin support, etc. over the break.

It’s a website that calculates the best time to exchange one currency for another accounting for the various exchange rates involved.

Site looks great! I am saving it and will definitely be using it. I've wanted something like this for years.

I started building an instant messaging system based on Tor's anonymity model while taking advantage of NaCL and Rust for type safety, speed, and modern crypto. Have gotten most of the crypto functional, now I just have to figure out my DHT implementation so you can find the person you want to chat with :-)

I've been building a fun concept that I've had to deal with as a product manager.

A product update timeline (change log) that you can quickly add to your website: http://productmap.co/

Will be ready for a beta launch at the end of this week!

A translation service for large foreign documents (mostly PDFs). There's a first pass reproducing the PDF in html and a second that machine translates it into English. Users can then gist a document and select any section to get professionally translated. It's live at OneDossier.com.

Just finished my Raspberry Pi 2 -> Macintosh Plus DIY HW project: https://medium.com/@trm42/raspberry-pi-2-macintosh-plus-rasp...

^____^

A substitute for the conky part in my $ conky | dzen status bar. It's practically a learning exercise.

I was inspired by posts like this one [1] to give the free monad a spin and after ~300 lines i'm almost done. But then I found other posts that talk about free and cofree [2] that I still can't really understand so I guess there still is some room for improvement.

[1] http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented... [2] http://dlaing.org/cofun/posts/free_and_cofree.html

I'd say try and finish before making further improvements.

I've been keeping busy with re:search, an Amazon product review search, mining and insights, http://research.oneiros.cc

An interface on top of a learning algorithm that would alert users when certain conditions are met (certain word mentioned for example) as part of an Amazon customer review.

POC version would allow users to subscriber to products sold on Amazon and search through its reviews, as well as get some basic statistics about lexic patterns in reviews (positive or negative, most common words...). Based on the initial adoption the learning algorithm would come into play and provide suggestions and insights based on customer reviews.

Finished a lot of stuff:

- First blog post, benchmarking AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure storage, http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2015/12/29/cloud-storage-perfor...

- MongoDB driver for Mathematica, https://github.com/zbjornson/MongoDBLink

- Started packaging bioinformatics tools for Mathematica (a la Bioconductor), https://github.com/zbjornson/BioTools

Over Christmas I open sourced Lingo. A tool to manage code quality at scale. Here's the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832511

I'm building a website for managing personal budgets for my girlfriend (existing applications do not meet her needs). I'm using Node and React for the frontend; this is giving me a chance to learn React, which I've never used before.

I've been working on a web-scraping tool for API documentation, scrape-to-swagger

https://github.com/bobby-brennan/scrape-to-swagger

A tool to guide you when optimizing a piece of Sql. It will rerun it and tell your if your results have changed from the original Sql.

It will give you tips on what to change and let you time your query and see other resource info.

Anyone interested in being a beta tester?

Experimental scraping tools in Clojure.

Right now I'm focused on what we need for https://foldapp.com, supplementing what we've already built (first Python, then Scala).

I've been slowly working on a new UI toolkit designed to provide first class mruby support, provide linear programming constraints for layout, use openGL rendering via nanovg, and use a variant of qml (dsl using reactive properties) for widget definitions. Qt was nice for some initial prototyping, but given the scope of some user interfaces that I'm developing a new toolkit seemed justifiable. The old pain points mainly included ease of scripting, performance, and easier custom widget definitions (mainly for data visualization).

Over the holidays I built a site which returns foods with the highest amount of a given nutrient. So for example you can get all the foods highest in potassium, vitamin d, iron, etc.

http:/www.getnutrient.com

Why not using WolframAlpha? For example: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=food+ranked+by+potassiu...

I'm building a website and API which presents stats and data for millions of domains: http://domainstats.io/

I started building a personal dashboard app that centralizes a few things I do all the time in one place: task management, note-taking, GitHub assigned issues/PRs, etc. Health tracking is next on my list of features to implement. Then I'll probably do a design pass.

It's not really intended for use by anyone but me, but the code is open source anyway. https://github.com/BenOvermyer/kettle-dashboard

A pushd / popd like utility except that it works globally. You aren't restricted to having each terminal with its own stack; it's a global stack. I found this to be a much quicker way to navigate the terminal.

It uses shared memory to store the stack, thus making it "global". Still needs some polishing.

Check it out. feel free to give feedback, pull request, whatever.

https://github.com/christarazi/global-pushd-popd

Finished big milestones for couple of projects and on going development:

- Snub: Manage .gitignore files from the terminal or from the status menu bar. Free and open source: https://github.com/ashokgelal/Snub

- LightPaper: Finished rebranding, just released 1.2 alpha and continuing the development: http://lightpaper.42squares.in/

An iOS (Swift + SpriteKit) game my 8yo designed late last year. I started on it late last year, but I didn't get very far. During the break, I started fresh using Tiled.

Bitcoin + fantasy sports

Started making a 1200 piece, 5k resolution jigsaw puzzle app.

A mithril server-side render for Go, another project is a socket.io-like websocket framework which focused on horizontal scaling written in Go.

[1] https://github.com/samuelngs/go-mithril [2] https://github.com/samuelngs/go-sphere

Qt, and it's taking forever.

Over the Christmas break, I got macros working in Full Metal Jacket. There's one more thing I need to do to make the language easier to program in, and a few loose ends to tidy up. I'll update my web page (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html) soon to reflect this.

building a brand new Learning Management System (LMS) or simply call it Course Builder. Planning to make it open source for self hosted but not quite ready to put it online yet. Building it with API first in mind so technically you can build your own interfaces on top of it. Backend including API portion built in PHP Laravel. Default Front end in Angular 1.4 but lets see how it turns out overall.

Would love to know more about this...

sure. how can I reach you ?

Do you have a website or something I can look at? I can send you my email. I just don't want to post it publicly.

sure. see my website on my profile. you can contact me through there.

A saas performance testing tool that lets you run real-browser load tests and reuse your functional tests for load testing.

http://browserup.com/signup

The idea is that machine-hours are cheaper than man-hours, and the hardware to run real browsers is cheap enough that for non-trivial apps, it often makes more sense to run real browsers.

I am working on an AWS <-> Slack integration (https://dev.aws2slack.com/), which allows you to interact with your AWS accounts from inside Slack using CLI commands.

Additionally you get Trusted Advisor checks and CloudTrail event notifications, which you can e.g. use to get alerted on unauthorized API access.

Doing http://hapii.co a web app for continuously getting feedback whether people are happy at work.

Intro here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTYcCjYo2g

https://bestfoodnearme.com

a different take on finding food dishes by your location. I launched a rough version a few months back, but I am in the process of adding picture support and making it look better.

I have family with food allergies, and I have also wanted to eat better when I eat out, so those two cases are going to be my focus.

I've been building Markdown-UI, a framework that uses the Semantic-UI framework to write responsive and beautiful websites and UI's in Markdown syntax. It comes with a REPL.

https://jjuliano.github.io/markdown-ui - Create Beautiful and Responsive Websites in Markdown Syntax

I am building an app that helps Canadian homebuyers research and get more information on neighbourhoods. It's still in the early stages but I am looking to overlay more information.

Would love your feedback on the usability of the app. Also looking for help to continue growing the website.

http://getinsightico.com

I was looking for a free car buying and selling site. Couldn't find one in my geographic location so I decided to build one myself. http://www.hulucars.com/ is just the start and hope to continue growing. I have decided to take the MVP online and continue developing.

I released a short book on unit test. I am focusing it towards embedded software, and try to be agnostic to any particular unit testing tool.

I started it about 6 months ago on Leanpub and iterated it openly. Interesting journey so far.

https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest/

A networking and chapter "history documentation" site for alumnus of my fraternity. There's a facebook page for alumni, but since many of them are older people, it rarely sees use and many alumni don't even have a facebook page.

The biggest hurdle in the design right now is figuring out a mechanic to encourage people to visit the site regularly

I'm working on side project to lessen the pain of people who have got parking tickets. Involves Meteor, iOS + android app.

I am working https://www.ticketscale.io out of pure frustration of the current state of ticket selling solutions/platforms. They either can't handle the volume and go down or they put users into a queue. Ticketscale aims to address this.

SocksJS, Lmax Disruptor, scylladb

http://www.cravecoffee.co.nz

Coffee subscription service based in New Zealand.

Tech wise it's all Go on Google App Engine with a dash of jQuery and I had to extend the library for Braintree payments to work with GAE.

Anyone interested in using/testing/anything please drop me a mail: nsglynn at gmail

Spent the last 3 months building Tasktopus (https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus).

Tasktopus is a lightweight, task manager for the desktop (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux).

Tasks are managed on a Kanban-style board with Backlog, Doing, Done and Archived columns.

Built using Qt.

Every week we'll do a family dinner with my in-laws. We love to eat and stingy so I'm building a web scraper using Scrapy to scroll through Groupon & Qoo10 and save all the deals to a Postgres database. Then, I'll schedule a cronjob query this database daily for food deals.

I'm working on a C# self-hosting HTTP server library for standing up restful/websocket based services. Managed code only, with focus on Linux(Mono) deployment.

https://github.com/joongonn/mHttp

I'm also building a data driven (mostly NLP) portfolio optimizer, based on expected utility theory! It's a naive model, but it also has statistical bounds on its efficiency relative to the regret, which is an interesting bonus.

Out of curiosity, what kind of model (loss function) are you using?

Still very early.

Currently I am planning combining quantitative and qualitative data (mainly NLP and sentiment analysis). The main goal is to build a robust system.

Therefor I am working on implementing Minimax and Tail-Risk-Hedging as a Spiking Neural Network.

I am building an app for our agile work method called TimeBlock - a method that helps makers and managers communicate better and more clearly thereby helping them to a less stressed and more fun work enviroment.

http://timeblock.com

http://fictionhub.io - the best place to share and discuss fiction.

http://orangemind.io - my personal project, comics series(started only recently).

Over the past few months we worked on a simple web tool that allows anyone to create visual interactives on the spot.

http://www.vuzum.com/case-studies/widgetic/

Continuing work on adding more OS support for https://sysward.com - patch management and security notifications for a range of linux OSs ( Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, OpenSUSE )

1.An application that helps healthcare workers make better decisions.

2.An app for salespeople. It helps track prospects, keep sight of targets and communicate with home office staff and other members of the team. You could say I'm a SalesForce competitor.

https://hashbang.sh - An (intentionally) cryptic free shell service, network, and community for the curious to learn shell/unix/security with like minded people.

Updating my website which provides services for students in Australia http://www.studentbees.com.au I've added the voat portal to replace the old forums.

I am working on different things:

- some newsletter + different API wrappers in Laravel

- a widget easy to integrate on your website, fetching your contributions from Github and Bitbucket to display them in a calendar.

- A reading companion for a middle school in San Diego.

I built a simple priority queue, the idea is to use it as microservice, now it works only in memory, but if people likes the idea I can improve the software and add features...

It is open source at github.com/siscia/numerino

I'm playing around with some of the various ways that dot/graphviz-like functionality is workable (for some level of "workable") on javascript. Currently fiddling with dagre-d3 and angular.

Would be very curious to see what you come up with if you're willing to flick me an e-mail when it's done (see profile).

http://www.workplay401k.com - automated financial planning and budgeting software for 401(k) providers to offer their participants.

Bootstrapping Business #2. Well, actually bringing in revenue, since I started this a few months ago. Within about $200 of break-even at this point.

In summary, buy reliable used cars that are rough around the edges and with low asking prices. Spend leisure time doing necessary repairs to ensure reliability, safety. Spend time doing detailing work, which in the future may include repainting panels, and basic underbody rustproofing. Use as a car for 2 to 3 weeks as a burn-in to ensure I have something that meets my quality standards. Sell for 125-140% of cost. Limit yearly sales to keep under the transaction limits for a non-dealer.

-----

Pros:

* Excluding first car, cost me ~$2500 for good tools and safety/disposal equipment.

* Usefully leverages my vast knowledge of the automotive landscape.

* Improves my sales and negotiation skills, which will benefit Business #1

* Improves car repair skills and detailing skills, which is useful since I'm a hardcore car-nut.

* Turns a hobby into something that makes money. I'm having a blast and making money doing it.

-----

Risks:

* Unable to move a car, reducing profit, which means time not well spent.

* Poor assessment of a car I purchase for resale. Risk eating all profits or taking a loss.

* Losing interest. Though I'd have all the tools I'd ever need for my existing toy.

* My spare time I could spend on other things.

* Fraud, which I'm taking precautions against. This includes things like payment issues, or buyers not completing title transfer and doing terrible things.

-----

Where it goes next:

* Nothing exciting for a while. Sticking to things like Corollas, Civics, Camrys, Accords, CR-Vs, RAV-4s, F-150s, etc. Known quantities with easy parts availability and consistently strong demand that are easy to refine my process on (assessment/inspection, negotiation/paperwork, repair, pre-sale QA), and learn how to properly do bodywork at an acceptable level in a private garage.

* In 2 years the hope is to move into still easy-to-move cars with a higher profit-per-vehicle. Lexus ES, Lexus RX, Acura TL, Acura MDX, Mazda MX-5, etc.

* In 4 years the hope is to start going after cars people really desire on the used market. "Affordable dreams." Things like older BMW M cars, AMG Mercedes, Subaru WRX/STis. Late 90s Japanese sport coupes. This has the potential to bring in enough money to cover rent, utilities, health insurance/care, and groceries in full.

Business #1 will always bring in 4-5x as much money, but having a hobby pay the bills 5 or 6 years from now? I'm stoked. Since there's no pressure for this to pay the bills, I get to enjoy it too.

been working on a node/angular/react static site generator (graffiti engine) https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-engine and now a complimentary HTML template/fragment editor (graffiti composer) https://github.com/greengrowtech/graffiti-composer

Just a week before Christmas I started working on a SaaS project to help organisations keep track and provide useful information on visitors. Involves an app and a desktop client

Playa - Open service exchange for autonomous intelligent agents.

https://getplaya.com/

iOS Safari 9 doesn't like your SSL setup and throws a certificate warning. This is usually due to a missing intermediate and/or chained certificate file.

Actually, it's because the DNS name doesn't match that of the cert.

My current side project tells me:

Hostname/IP doesn't match certificate's altnames: "Host: getplaya.com. is not in the cert's altnames: DNS:www.baqqer.com, DNS:baqqer.com"

I spoke too soon! This happened to me last week because of a missing intermediate cert.

I hope to update my old ios app from the ios 6 era to swift. I also want to write a drawing app for ipad pro and apple pencil.

An interpreter for metabolic like computing to produce cell like structures as a mechanism to create machine consciousness.

A web app for comparing different energy suppliers and finding the cheapest one all based on your current consumption.

A private messaging webapp that uses webrtc p2p connections and onion routing amongst facebook friend circles

Is any of this publicly accessible? Links?

I'm studying FreeBSD, C, C++, SDL2 and CMake. I'd love to highlight some of the open source projects I pitched in with as well as some of my own:

- aseprite (http://www.aseprite.org/) is a cross-platform animated sprite editor by David Capello. I got FreeBSD support working [1] and added a shortcut to center the canvas [2]. This was my first C++ commit.

If you like retro game art, definitely stop by and check it out. It's GPLv3 and you can build it for free, check out their [github](https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/).

- uMario (https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski) is an NES Mario clone in C++ and SDL2. Check out the youtube video [3]. I got it building on Linux, FreeBSD and OS X [4]

- Then a couple of tiny C projects with CMake that are sort of boilerplate ATM, but they're my first C programs. The cool thing is they use permissive licensed libraries and build across platforms since they use CMake. https://github.com/tony/sdl2-playproject / https://github.com/tony/reST-lex-byacc / https://github.com/tony/ncurses-example.

On that front, I'm reading a book called "Compiler Design Using FLEX and YACC" by Vinu V. Das, which has been going good. As well as Lazy Foo's SDL tutorial (http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/).

- Another thing to mention is automatically rebuilding / reloading scripts when a file is saved. I started using entr(1) for that, http://entrproject.org/. Previously on projects like tmuxp and vcspull I've used sniffer (and looked into watchman) but have found this works best cross-platform. FreeBSD has file watching a bit trickier since we don't have inotify or fsevents.

- On the dot-config front (https://github.com/tony/.dot-config / https://github.com/tony/vim-config) got virtualenv + python 3 + vim working together [5], as well as neovim fully compatible with my standard vim-config. I'm now using neovim full time and all my plugins without any problems. They loads asynchronously with NeoBundleLazy and the autocompletion is async thanks to Shougu's deoplete.nvim [6].

[1] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/893

[2] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/pull/892

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jya5He7KFsE

[4] https://github.com/jakowskidev/uMario_Jakowski/pull/1

[5] https://github.com/klen/python-mode/pull/609 (https://github.com/klen/python-mode/compare/develop...tony:p...)

[6] https://github.com/Shougo/deoplete.nvim

A tutorial for learning automated deployment with SaltStack.

Another idea that no-one will use.

Will you?

Actually yes. Useful for me.

I always start out thinking others will LOVE my idea until I release it and no-one uses it.

You're a fool until you're a genius. One day I'll be a genius.

What are you actually building?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com