Ask HN: When do you stop working on a side-project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When do you stop working on a side-project?

I've been working on a side project (see http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2199591 for the HN post) for the past couple of months, and I've reached a point where all of my major concerns about it have been answered. I'm not sure whether or not try to monetize it, or to incorporate it into a new project, or just to leave it alone to slowly die a lonely death. Has anyone else run into this problem? Is it worth paying the cost of hosting a finished side-project just to occasionally show it off to people you know?

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hah this is really interesting. If you built it you might as well publish it. I think a monetization strategy is to find crappy sites on the web and help them to simplify their marketing message. We do software requirements and we receive hundreds of pages of documentation that we have to filter through. An algorithm that worked to help prioritize what we read first would be worth $$ to us and our clients.

Your system is also possibly a solution to tl;dr

I ran your program on your why section (which is too dense to read) and this is what it came up with:

1 (1.000000): The project started out as a simple text generator using Markov Chains, but I wanted to do something more useful.

2 (0.974359): After looking around, although it seems that a lot of people have tried using compling to detect plagiarism, summarizing is something relatively few people have done.

3 (0.611111): It's interesting to consider what exactly makes a sentence important, and if it's even possible to find an objective measure of 'meaningfulness'.

4 (0.222222): I'm interested in computational linguistics.

Thanks for the feedback! If you show the advanced options, there's a way to see your input with the important sentences highlighted inline. You might want to try that on one of your software requirements docs! If you do, please send me an email (in my profile) and let me know if it helped at all.

Should you decide the site is defunct.... Can you reasonably easily modify it so it can run as a free Python web app hosted by Google? That would at least allow you to keep it running without paying for hosting. Releasing the code that does the summarizing as a Python library on GitHub would be another way of keeping something online as a portfolio piece.

One other thing, if this can summarize articles down to their essence, you could create a site which takes HN articles and distills them down to the key points.

Again, solution to tl;dr

Market it to students. Insta-spark notes

I would, but it doesn't summarize well. It's more useful for trying to skim documents; actual summarization is far beyond it.

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