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

Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

20 pointskkoppenhaver35 comments

Doesn't even have to be anything profitable (but hopefully covering your hosting costs at least). I'm just interested to know what others are working on in their free time.

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I've been dabbling with the idea of taking Awk style patterns and translating them to JavaScript to run in Node.js (with the intent of allowing Awk style programs that also allow higher-order programming constructs). At this point I've got the translation working for some simple cases.

I've been pondering whether to trying to generalize the concept to work on http requests instead of just files, at which point I think a fairly elegant micro web framework could be made that applies Awk style pattern / action pairs to the incoming http requests.

http://linkthing.co

A delicious replacement that uses twitter syntax to organize stuff - i.e.: hashtags and @people. App integrates with twitter for both tweeting bookmarks that you add, and importing links you've tweeted previously as bookmarks.

Not at all complete (both features and fixes to be done), but solid enough that I use it every day for myself to organize links that I use for references, collect things that I'm researching, to create a "to-read" list, and so on.

It was learning foray into bootstrap and jquery, and has gone pretty well.

Right now, its sign in through Twitter only. I'll add native account creation at some point, but you're more than welcome to try it out in the meantime.

Edit: Screengrab of Linkthing in action http://imgur.com/Rrr0g

Oh yeah, if you do try it, there's a "Delete Account Data" option under the account name dropdown so you can clear your stuff if you decide not to stay.

Love the look and the concept. I'll have to check it out.

Right on - thank-you! Be warned - its incomplete! You'll probably bump into what you consider to be missing key functionality, broken things, etc.

If you do go in and try it out, I would love to hear your feedback!

I've been working on tubalr for 2 years this september. It's allows you to take advantage of all the great music content on YouTube.

I'm out of features for now, been improving on UI and design lately.

http://www.tubalr.com

Writing a program that analyzes traditional Scottish music and composes new tunes in the same style. Right now I'm in the careful planning phase--reading up on LSTM recurrent neural networks and such, but I should be able to start coding shortly (at the very least I can do all the software engineering parts while I figure out what the best algorithm to use is).

I'm not deluding myself about its long-term non-profitability...I'm just doing it because I find it fascinating. At least there's no hosting cost--I already have a laptop running SBCL and Emacs, which is all I need.

As a former music composition major, I find this fascinating. Exploring where creation as humans ends and what can be composed using a set of rules is an interesting boundary to me. Best of luck to you!

That's really interesting. Will you be open-sourcing this?

Thanks. I am planning to open -source it once I start coding.

In my free time I'm writing an alternative firmware for chumby devices (and possibly similar devices, if I ever get my hands on a Raspberry Pi or alike) that focuses solely on streaming radio services (ones which have usable open APIs) with no dependence on the chumby backend servers.

All of the app layer is written in Go with a custom widget set and pure Go rendering right out to an mmaped /dev/fb (the rest of the firmware is a lightly customized openembedded build).

This won't make any money but it is teaching me a lot of Go.

C# / Asp.net pays my bills, but I've been playing with node.js lately. Just to kind of see what the hubbub was.

I took Ryan Dahl's chat room demo and added a database for validating users & message logging. I've added a couple commands that allow users to change their nicknames on the fly and some other feeble functionality.

I think eventually i'd like for users to be able to run javascript across all sessions, which could be a complete mess or kind of cool.

I've been looking into node myself and this seems like an interesting application. I'm hoping for the "kind of cool" option for you when it's all said and done!

A "daily photo challenge" iOS app. For those not in the know, it's sort of a sub-community of Instagram with over 1 million users (my wife is big on it). (see https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23photoadayjuly)

So, for kicks, I thought I'd try and build an Instagram-like app that is just for a daily photo challenge.

If anyone wants to be a tester, let me know.

Been working on and off on http://mtransit.herokuapp.com/ -- a mobile optimized site for looking up transit schedules for the Minneapolis / St. Paul bus system. It's built with Flask and a sprinkling of JQuery. I am hoping to factor out some code into a standalone lib for others to build competitor apps with.

I've been looking to do something like this myself. I go to school in Bloomington, IL, and for the large amounts of students and their tech savvy, the bus system is still very low tech. Would love to hear how the development turns out.

Hmm - the example "24 st" doesn't return anything.

http://VentingPost.com and http://Nurdology.com and http://QuasiPreneur.com

Gotta spend more time and energy into Nurdology.

And I have more but.. realizing.... stupid me.. I'm spreading myself too thin...quantity != quality! :(

I'm building a platform where non-profits can host virtual garage sales, so their members can buy/sell stuff and donate a portion of the proceeds back to the NPO. Think of it as an Ebay for Charities. It's a side project as of now. Would love your feedback :) http://shruffle.com

Love the idea and the launch page/video. Your site is very well done. The concept is interesting to me too, as an Economics major. Any plans to monetize at this point or would it be entirely donation based? A non-profit of sorts in and of itself?

Yes. Thinking of adopting a 6% transaction markup. So if someone lists a TV for $100, we list it for $106, and keep $6 as our fee.

Do you realize that all your "poor third world kids" are asian/brown/black and the donors/buyers are white? Maybe there is some correspondence with reality, but this just reinforces the streotype IMO.

Being South Asian myself, I can strongly say that is purely a coincidence. Good observation though, I didn't catch that myself.

There is almost complete correspondence with reality...

I'm working on http://callmemae.be - originally built it at an 8-hour Hackathon in SF and now working on turning it into something a bit more robust so it can be properly used for introductions and a demonstration of my technical abilities.

Before I log in, can you explain the service a bit more?

Improving the landing page is high on the list of priorities. Have an incredible designer onboard now, so look for improvements and a ShowHN soon :) Non-FB login will come at that time as well.

Essentially, It lets you share a virtual business card via email or SMS (see: http://callmemae.be/nb). Essentially it was created because I can never remember my cards when I go to events, but always have my phone.

Some of the features I'm in the process of writing are:

* Bump two phones together to exchange contact info (all JS/HTML5) * Share contact info with an entire group at once * Customize your card background and choose your own fields * Analytics surrounding sharing (who's opened your card, clicked the mailto:, etc...)

Isn't this what Bump is doing too? Or am I wrong?

bump requires a native app, we're all HTML5 - someone can navigate to our site and be sharing in two clicks, not 10

I am writing a search engine. The main purpose was to work on a large project to give myself exposure and polish as a programmer (sysadmin by trade). The crawling and indexing systems are done now. I am finding the ranking to be the most challenging part but it is quite fun overall.

http://secretify.herokuapp.com/ it's like the iPhone app Snapchat. It's used to send images in a more secured fashion. Working on making it more secure but it's fully functional as it is .

http://deductivepolitics.com/ Not making any money off of it, just an experiment I'm doing. I try to predict who people will vote for in November based on Facebook likes.

http://www.mappyhealth.com - tracking disease trends on Twitter (more data sources including CDC reports coming eventually) and trying to make sense of it all.

I'm currently at the validation stage of a social analytics and monitoring tool http://twitcherhq.com - undecided whether to take it further yet.

I'm working on the One Platform.

One platform to rule them all One platform to find them One platform to bring them all And in the darkness bind them.

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