Ask HN: Side project you're working on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Side project you're working on?

37 pointsstartupflix77 comments

View on HN

Concurrent Z80 emulators running inside Unreal Engine:

https://i.imgur.com/Q6307w3.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/K44GT1W.png

https://i.imgur.com/59RufvT.png

Already runs a lot of software including Wordstar, HiTech C compiler for Z80, Microsoft Basic etc.

Also have written a few applications for it including a telnet client with Zmodem support, some graphics utilities etc.

Please make a game with this. I would pay money for such a thing. There was a rather large hype over a game called 0x10c with mechanics like this that ended up being vaporware.

Yes, that's actually where this all started. I had a parody of 0x10c in mind and I originally started posting about this on the 0x10c subreddit.

It's on the backburner at the moment due to work/personal commitments but I hope to get back to it before too long.

My wife is a dog breeder in Canada. She was starting to get worried about her dependence on Kijiji as the only site to advertise her puppy litters. Kijiji is a de facto monopoly due to network effects and they have slowly been increasing the fee they charge to post. In addition all other alternative sites are terrible - filled with pet scams.

I built CanadaPups.com as an alternative. Free to post. Started a couple of years ago. Growing slowly but consistently. I pretty much spend my nights afterwork fighting pet scams. I wanted to hire a web designer but she prefers the site to look "hand-made" for a softer feel… ok dog brown color it is then :). Any constructive feedback is welcome! Trying to grow it.

https://canadapups.com

Really liked the idea. Best wishes!

I had a second episode of extremely high blood pressure in 2017. It's a long story, but I ended up being hospitalized in a cardiac surveillance unit. A big part of my cardiac issue was that I had allowed my overall fitness to drop quite dramatically.

So, I'm working on a fitness goal app. Essentially, I track my blood pressure/heart rate along with my diet, exercise, etc. And, I'm working on finding correlations, with my end goal being that my app will help me optimize my workouts and diet to help me achieve whatever my particular fitness goal is. In this case, my goal is blood pressure related, but soon, it will be long distance running related.

Having allowed myself to get so far out of shape when I know hypertension is a problem causes me to seriously doubt whether I'm intelligent enough to pull this off.

However, my end goal isn't to build an amazing product, rather it's that if I build it, I'll be motivated to beta test it to hell. When I was being wheeled in for my angiogram, I promised myself that if I ever need another one, they'd wheel me in in marathon shape.

I recorded hundreds of runs with a garmin forerunner and HRM. Aside from occasionally plotting avg pace vs avg hr over time and saying, "oh that's nice", I didn't find much value in recording.

Focus on what you'll do with the data once you get it and work back from there.

Good luck with lowering your blood pressure the natural way. Stay away from blood pressure meds as long as you can.

Quite impressive. So, have you launched the app yet?

Best wishes :)

Thanks for saying that! I'm not quite ready for public consumption, but when I am, I'll do a show HN.

Best wishes! :)

It's not quite as interesting as a lot of stuff here, nor is it something I can link to just yet, but I'm writing a book about interviewing for product management roles. I took a sabbatical recently and have just started interviewing, and already I've had very mixed experiences - some really well organized and thought out, and others that were clearly thrown together with no thought.

I started taking notes on what was good/bad, so I could ensure we have a good process wherever I end up. Then I started writing a book out of that. Then I realized there's not quite enough content for a book there, but I can still help improve the process by preparing interviewees. So that's what I'm doing now - about 20,000 words in so far!

What a fantastic idea! Given the value this could provide for interviewees I hope you're planning on charging appropriately. Where can I sign up?

Brilliant!

https://passed.pw/ - Mobile-friendly random password generator seeded based on your mouse or touch positions for better randomness.

Just wanted something simple to generate passwords/tokens and ended up building this two years ago.

https://tempd.link/ - Temporary file hosting with immediate automatic deletion when leaving the site.

This was just a weekend project to test out openresty and using redis as an in-memory storage location for uploaded data that will get destroyed without writing to disk. Would be very expensive to scale something like this though.

Clean design. Impressive! Liked the idea behind passed.pw :) Looking for more. so, I am literary going to use tempd.link to host files of my college projects in order to allow my batch mates to download them!

I've been working on a replacement for Apple's Reminders app: https://www.betterremindersapp.com

https://github.com/ioddly/meditations - Daily organizer based on habit formation.

It actually needs a little bit of TLC which I'm hoping to give it once I finish up my current gig.

I'm still the only user, as far as I know, but I use it daily so it's fun to work on.

I found a while back and gave it a whirl. I thought it was awesome. I am happy to see you have continued to put time into it. Thanks!

I'm trying to centralize the 2-3 todo/misc apps I use daily by using a bujo/bullet journal. The other day, I was telling my bujo using coworker that I was going to commit to using your app if I didn't dig the bujo.

Thanks again for making meditations. I think the UX flows well for habit tracking.

Well shucks, this comment made my day :)

Feel free to use the GH issues or email me (in profile) if you run into any issues.

Great idea! But I am unable to access the demo.

Sorry about that! I broke the deployment a few weeks ago and forgot to fix it. It should work now: https://meditations.upvalue.io/

Thank you :)

https://sendnoodz.io

Solving big picture problems ....

Send pictures of noodles via MMS when someone asks for nudes.

Built because I wanted an excuse to setup twilio/stripe and thought goat attack was great.

I like the text comments on your sample screenshot.

http://www.ternaryplot.com

Some courses required me to make these kind of charts and the quickest options were Excel templates or drawing them by hand. There are some Python and R libraries that are pretty good but they were a little too cumbersome for most of my relatively simple charts. So I made this simple page with d3.js to quickly make pretty ternary plots.

Do you have any examples with values?

Because I had to look it up:

> A Ternary Plot ... [is a] plot on three variables which sum to a constant

It's a neat way of plotting (A + B + C) = 1

Looks great!

Utility that lets you select the best plot for your data. Simple website at http://plotfor.me/picker.html

The side project I'm currently working on is trying to get my sleep schedule under control. I'm finding that worrying about the "competition" at all hours is preventing me from getting enough sleep at night. So I put a hold on a lot of my programming problems in order to get my real world problems squared away first.

https://oneminutefax.com - Send free faxes online without having to create an account.

Nice one, just wondering, how would you deal with spam/abuse?

hey there,

Show HN will come soon (the next days).

I have finished my side project (SaaS/PaaS) called triggerFS.

triggerFS is a distributed, realtime message passing and trigger system. triggerFS enables you to build distributed systems and do high-speed realtime messaging in a service-oriented fashion. What really powers triggerFS is the gigantic amount of plugins you can use to do any kind of task.

Check out https://github.com/triggerfsio/packages for an overview, features, use cases and more.

I am about to launch the next days after I have finished writing the documentation. I am super excited and hopefully will get the attention of the HN folks when doing my Show HN.

Looks cool. Waiting for the Show HN! Best wishes!

hi. you can find my Show HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16993511

testing and feedback is appreciated :)

I’ve just started selling art-piece wordclocks:

https://www.finewordclocks.com

Making wordclocks has been a hobby of mine. For a few years I’ve been developing various designs, fabricating them at a local hacker space, and giving them as gifts.

People keep asking if I would sell them. So I finally made a high end design and put together a simple web store.

My first production design is a limited run of 100. I recently sold my first one.

I just bought my own cnc router (still in the crate). The plan is to set up low run production in my basement rather than the time-sink of a hacker space. Plus a good excuse to get the kids interested in creating stuff when we have cool tools in the basement.

Wow. :)

Thanks! I really enjoy the process of figuring out how to fabricate them.

Any critique, comments or suggestions are welcome.

Just finished a long article[1] on a fascinating new breed of CRDTs. Already implemented a proof-of-concept demo featuring real-time text collaboration over iCloud as well as arbitrary simulated network topologies[2]. Now I'm working on a Swift framework to help me create CRDT-ified document formats for my next iOS app.

[1]: http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/

[2]: https://github.com/archagon/crdt-playground

This was a fantastic write-up. Learned a lot! Thanks for documenting your process like this!

Everything should be on git.captnemo.in (on phone, can't give links)

- Writing code to manage my home server using Docker, Terraform and some glue (nebula)

- reviving the Hindustan Time hatetracker, which was a newspaper project tracking hate crimes, but was shut down after some government pressure.

- zomato tracker that keeps track of restaurants that open or close in Bangalore every week. Plan is to make a twitter it

- hn classics ebook. I scraped and converted a lot of the articles from the HN Classics post into a Jekyll website. Plan to get a PDF/EPUB

- board game implementations for 2 player games with special consideration on making them scriptable. Starting with MCTS but want to make a generic framework

> Hindustan Time hatetracker

I am curious why this was shut down. If you need any volunteers, sign me up.

> zomato tracker

I was working on something similar to that for San Francisco using SF's OpenData APIs for new businesses :)

> Hindustan Time hatetracker Why they shut it down? And when you expect to launch this?

> hn classics ebook Really excited about this!

Hate Tracker: Want to check with a few folks and get confirmation from my lawyer friends.

It was shut down after the editor handling it left the publication: https://thewire.in/190869/hindustan-times-hate-tracker/

Help is welcome for HN Classics EBook (there are 2k articles and I don't want to publish something that doesn't look/print well): https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/hn-classics

https://theaccidentalengineer.com/

Interviewing my friends (and strangers) about their jobs in software engineering

Great project, subscribed. How do you create those catroonified images of your interviewees?

I’m using an iPad Pro, using the ProCreate app-—the animations are created using ImageMagick/ffmpeg

Cool thanks

Great one! What tools you're using to make that cartoon image of interviewees?

I’m using an iPad Pro, using the ProCreate app—-I use ImageMagick for the animations

emojicrypt.com – encrypt messages into emoji using scrypt and aes-gcm!

https://aurorabbit.github.io/emojicrypt.com/

Unfortunately hackernews doesn't seem to support emoji properly, so I've put my message here:

https://gist.github.com/aurorabbit/fdab58373cb7a57bfc621c2f4...

The passphrase is the Ask HN submission id :)

https://www.aliasbot.com/ - Define aliases and type less in Slack

https://atlas.patmurray.co

A small app to create pretty wallpapers for iPhone and iPad out of various map designs. Has become quite popular in Germany.

It started after I tweeted a screenshot of my iPhone home screen and people wanted me to make them a similar wallpaper of their city, so I built an app for it. Took exactly one week from tweet idea to App Store!

Cool idea! :)

Thanks :)

Scheme R5RS implementation in Kotlin: https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin

But the development has stalled recently: can't figure out (read as 'too lazy') how to implement macros and how to fix some issues with lazy sequences.

But overall, really love this hobby project, very enlightening.

https://github.com/kwiwk/lru-cached-getter - Building out some utilities with first-tier TypeScript support. Nothing big.

Been working more with Arduinos and lower level stuff to offset the high level work I do during normal work hours.

Personal assistant/home automation system/car software. Which is to say it started as the second of those, added the first, and then the third. And I should just call it a personal assistant at this point.

I also contribute to Sandstorm.io in various mostly non-code ways when I have a little time lying around.

https://www.finbuckle.com/MultiTenant

Multitenant support for ASP.NET Core 2.0. The previous popular solutions all went out of date with the release of .NET Core 2.0.

Which 'popular solutions' did you review? We used aspnetboilerplate.com for our multi tenancy SaaS app

Mainly Saaskit. aspnetboilerplate.com looks awesome but it is an entire application framework built on asp.net.

Finbuckle.MultiTenant is just focused on supporting multitenant scenarios in asp.net core and integrates into a standard asp.net core project.

Looks like we both support data isolation via automatic filtering in Entity Framework Code (I almost have this documentation ready to post).

I also support tenant-scoped options which allows you to have different authentication options (any option really) per tenant. aspnetbiolerplate.com looked like it had its own auth system--I didn't see anything on the site about how multi-tenancy applied to its auth system.

Yeah, I remember coming across SaasKit[1] also but their github project hasn't been maintained in years. Aspnetboilerplate does .net core[2] in addition to their free front-end[3]. When working with them, they responded fairly quickly in github and stackoverflow so you could get more info there instead of the docs.

[1] https://github.com/saaskit/saaskit

[2] https://aspnetboilerplate.com/Pages/Documents/AspNet-Core

[3] https://aspnetboilerplate.com/Templates

https://github.com/paulknysh/blackbox - a tool for optimization of expensive black-box functions (numerical simulations etc)

https://www.teamcalapp.com - to do employee scheduling/planning directly on existing Google Calendar data.

This time i only used “old” technologies so that I can spend the least amount of time on actual development work. Uses Python/Django/Postgres under the hood and all is running on Heroku. Frontend built with Angular 1.

The biggest issue for me is always to find enough time next to work/family. What worked well is to split tasks into tiny work units (e.g 15min) and making sure to finish one each day.

Developing low-cost wireless soil moisture sensors for agriculture. It's old technology but the proven benefit is huge, and adoption has been really poor (mostly) because of the cost.

Wow! Great idea! So, how are you panning to overcome the problem of adaption?

https://getdevour.com (marketing site and old app)

https://app.getdevour.com (new app I'm slowly migrating users over to)

This is incredibly niche at the moment, but people who follow Renaissance Periodization nutrition templates can upload their template and turn a complex spreadsheet/PDF into a simple, filterable app experience. Soon expanding to more nutrition plans.

a utility to automatically turn my email threads into a todo list of emails I need to follow up on.

Cool!

iPerf but for Ethernet/MPLS/layer 2. This is at the more serious end of the scale and something I've been working on for a while now. I use it to test a link or device speed at different frame sizes, check that different Ether-types are parsed correctly, CoS values match into the correct QoS queue etc:

https://github.com/jwbensley/Etherate

At the less serious end of the scale an Arduino powered, life sized cardboard cut out of me with an SD-CARD full of my daily sayings, and a GPS battery backed clock. Like most people here, I like to tinker with hardware/electronics as a change from coding. My friend on the other side of the world is turning 30 soon, I can't be there, so I'm making and posting him a life size me which plays recordings of me (that are time of day relevant!) when you walk past. Not much on the GH page yet, I'll try and get some more up-to-date code and designs uploaded at the weekend:

https://github.com/jwbensley/Life-Sized-James

https://www.superteam.io/

I've been working on it for a while, gaining momentum with customer and freelancer base. We're at ramen profitability at the moment, still trying to grow.

If anyone has a project or wants to work on other people's projects for money, let us know!

1. Meli, a docker-compose alternative.

2. kshaka, a Go implementation of the CASPaxos consensus protocol.

1. https://github.com/komuw/meli.

2. https://github.com/komuw/kshaka

Blu-ray interactive graphics stream editor, because paying thousands of dollars to change an image is kinda dumb

If every programmer working on a side project were to collaborate on a single project together, just for a full day one weekend, I wonder what could be achieved..

If selection of the project were democratic, would you participate?

probably not much. Just on coordination you would spend a huge amount of time. Only one day commitment is too short. Maybe a week distributed in a month might be better. Or even better a 2 week sprint distributed in a month (10 "work days").

The weekend would be over and we would still be arguing about what language to use.

https://github.com/aaronduino/jay -- an encrypted replacement for jrnl.sh

A c99 library that implements various exotic binary based number systems and I'm calling it Hanoi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com