Ask HN: What are you building?
Got anything you've been working on in the last few weeks/months? Go ahead give us a short demo of it! What does it do? What problem does it solve? When will it launch?
It's my first Android or Java project and my first serious programming project. No programming experience apart from learning js/jQuery to build the web version. It looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/3vntZwL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wzdNdey.jpg
Features:
* mix together 10 different ambient sounds
* timers to stop, start or fade out sounds over arbitrary time
* save mixes
* share mixes via FB, twitter, SMS etc. and have them open in the app if the other person has it installed (or in the website if they don't)
I had planned to launch already, but life gets in the way. Hopefully launching in ~2 weeks.
I really had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I started this project. It's been really challenging but incredibly educational. Getting details right (like making the looping of samples genuinely seamless, or getting the background service to behave nicely) was difficult but really satisfying.
If you have any questions / suggestions, would love to talk.
If you'd like a reminder when this launches, there's a mailing in the top-right corner of [1]
Glassbreakers is focused on solving the problem of gender disparity in the global work force. Our platform is gender gated to insure women in business will have a safe place on the Internet to talk about work. Finding a female mentor is hard so we're automating the process of connecting women with other women who we know can help each other with their careers. Mentorship comes in many sizes. With Glassbreakers, we're facilitating mentorship both online via our forums and content as well as offline via our mentor matching service in an effort to make mentor relationships more casual and skill based.
We're applying to YC's winter batch so we can launch our product as soon as possible. We already have 1,000 women signed up for beta and enterprise customers interested in using our tool for their organizations. Tell your female colleagues and friends to sign up for beta at www.glassbreakers.co.
Be interesting to see if it works.
One of these trolls making threats of sexual violence was a woman: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/10595669/Twitt...
Want a new box on Digital Ocean with NGINX + Node.js + Redis? A few lines of YAML, git add/commit/push and you're done. You can use your EC2, Rackspace, Linode or Digital Ocean account, and you manage everything (servers and automation) in Git.
To illustrate my point:
- Adding a simple NGINX server using the Web UI: http://docs.devo.ps/how-to/add-a-server/
- The devo.ps button that allows you to do a one-click deploy of a full infrastructure (not unlike the Heroku deploy button, but we deploy your own servers and automated tasks): http://devo.ps/blog/one-click-deploy-of-your-infrastructure/
We' haven't officially launched but have already been signing up a few hundreds developers. At this stage we're mostly ironing out a few bugs and expanding on the documentation/tutorials (http://docs.devo.ps).
If there's anybody out there who want to come in and break stuff up, I'm happy to pay for some Digital Ocean/AWS/Rackspace/Linode credit.
We give you all the tools to manage your infrastructure: provisioning, configuration management, variable management and automation.
Our plan is to enable you to add a repo, define your infrastructure and be able to move anything to any type of cloud provider (move from Rackspace to AWS? Search and replace, git commit, git push and voila). The VM export should be in in the next few weeks and allows you to point at a server to be built as a VM and available on S3.
Come nag me in the chat: https://www.hipchat.com/gyHEHtsXZ. Happy to add you as a beta tester for this feature.
edit: we'll be pushing the roadmap on the site this week so that people know what's in the works.
We're reviewing the timeline with my co-founders and will update this in the coming days.
"It's done when it's done" is perfectly acceptable for any particular feature. Just chunk them roughly into 'releases' and only ever make firm commitments about the stuff you're working on now.
What does it do? Ideally, get J. Random Product Person at a software company up to the point where they can confidently A/B test the marketing site and increase sales of the company.
What problem does it solve? "We know we should be A/B testing but we don't know how to get started." and "So we did A/B tests, and had a few results, and we think the business is better off than it was before, but we're not sure, and we're not confident that 'throw stuff at the wall' is the best way to go about this. Do you have any suggestions?", which are the two most common pieces of feedback from software companies about A/B testing I've had in the last, oh, five years or so.
When will it launch? Last August ^H^H December ^H^H May ^H^H July ^H^H I'm really hoping to ship it before Halloween.
I think apparel brands offer too many choices so I'm creating a brand that keeps it simple but at the same time invests in making very high quality products. For ex: the first product we launched is our athletic shirt - SilverAir. It's made using silver which kills the odor-causing bacteria in your sweat, so you can wear the shirt for the entire day and feel fresh, or reuse the shirt more often (i do).
The fabric is completely new and something we made from scratch. Without letting cost be a factor, we sourced some of the best yarns you can buy and achieved a feel that is super comfortable while being lightweight and breathable. To manufacture, we use seamless knitting machines so the body of the shirt does not have any stitches on it. (trust me, the silver is what sells but the most loved feature by our customers is the material and how you feel as if you're not wearing anything - in a good way)
2) Men and women shop differently and I feel as if women want more choices so the model does not necessarily work for them. That said, I've received a lot of interest from women for the first product we launched so plans may change in the future.
I am working on an iOS app that lets hackers meet up with each other and have lunch.
I moved to San Francisco from Bangladesh last year and found it tough to meet other hackers. Being rather introverted, tech meetups didn't really work for me. I felt that a one-on-one meetup would be ideal. So that's what I'm building.
I'm hoping to launch within a few weeks. If it sounds interesting to you, you can sign up for an email notification when I launch, just go to hackerlunch.com. I'll probably do a Show HN once I launch as well.
I initially tested out this idea by creating a simple form that asks users for their name, email and zipcode and manually pairing them up myself via email. I limited that to San Francisco zipcodes only, since I figured it not doing so would mean that I would have a bunch of users who may not have anyone nearby to get paired with.
A lot of people who weren't in SF actually emailed me and expressed their disappointment in not being able to try it out. So this time I'm opening it up to everyone.
If you are the only one in your city, you'll get a message telling you so and you'll be paired whenever a new user in your city signs up.
If anyone has any better ideas, I'm open to suggestions regarding this.
It seems like a good suggestion, since the app wouldn't be too useful until there's a least a few users nearby. Focusing my attention on one city would definitely help with that.
I'm still considering the best strategy, so if you have any advice, comment here or email me at ashrafulsf@gmail.com
I believe this would make the experience much more natural and fun.
Also it solves the problem, where a large number of users are only interested in having lunch with a few people (VIPs on LetsLunch).
I'm hoping this will make HackerLunch more about meeting interesting people and less about "networking".
Any thoughts or advice on HackerLunch? I'm sure you have a lot of interesting insights into the space since you guys have been doing it so long.
We're building a marketplace where chefs buy local ingredients directly from purveyors.
Our complementary back-of-the-house app for iOS has 500+ MAU and we're adding ordering functionality to it this month!
We'll also open our API once we have enough restaurants and purveyors onboard that will allow developers to mine our growing dataset.
Looking for help and also would love to hear how developers want to use our data! Shoot me an email if you're interested in chatting at kirill@[projectname].com.
I've been working (and still am) on an Android puzzle game using libgdx. The puzzle requires to fill a board with Xs and Os while obeying the no-three rule (no three Xs or Os in a row) and the same number rule (same number of Xs and Os on each line and column).
The puzzle turned out to be quite challenging and addictive, similar to sudoku. The most difficult part of development was that I would start the game to see check a new feature and I wouldn't get back to development until I finished filling the board.
The most interesting part of development was writing the algorithm that generates the board in order to ensure a unique solution and account for the various levels of difficulty.
I've already published a version of the game and I'm currently working on adding some features to it.
I initially wrote it in python but when I needed to write a query language and saw Rob Pike's talk on a lever for the Go template language, I rewrote it in Go. It was/is a good way to learn Go!
It borrows a few ideas from couchdb and mongodb and I'm in the process of changing the architecture so it can use other storage engines such as rethinkdb or tiedot for the json docs and couchdb for the BLOBs.
Primarily a notifier (heating on, Smoke or CO emergency etc), it also gives you thermostat temperature and home/away control.
You can see the status of your Nest devices at-a-glance by means of a series of icons (one for each device) down in the taskbar notification area (aka system tray).
Currently seeking beta testers!
More details at http://richardeverett.com/Nest
All feedback (good and bad) as well as feature suggestions welcomed.
I can't get such a CPU in the right package anymore, so I'm writing an emulator for it which will run on a more modern, much faster MPU. That alone replaces the CPU, RAM, and ROM. The remaining stuff on the board is lots of I/O both analog and digital which I'm planning to replace with something more modern, like a DAC with 32 channels instead of the many chips and opamp sample-hold circuits that are on the original board.
* Aiming for instantaneous(ish) transaction confirmations.
* Much easier and safer to develop against the protocol than Satoshi clients.
* New consensus algorithm that doesn't require paying $2 million per day in electricity and hardware to secure the network.
http://getcredits.io https://github.com/CryptoCredits/credits
Instead of fixed images and positioning, it uses CoreGraphics and Autolayout, making it adaptable to portrait/landscape of any size. (It's really slow on device ATM, but hopefully that will be fixed shortly.)
In the end, I intend for it to have most of the looks and functionality of the existing iPhone keyboard (when possible) except for iOS8 suggestions. Release date for beta-ish 1 should optimistically be a week or two after the iOS8 release date.
Also, unrelated, I had an idea for a human-readable passphrase generator, in the vein of diceware, but I need to find a good algorithm for generating grammatical sentences and correctly conjugating verbs, etc. Also, I have yet to limit my wordlist to the most commonly used words. Right now, it's... silly: http://archagon.github.io/grammatical-passphrase-generator/
Possible future features: arbitrary length, rhyming schemes, other mnemonic features.
(Give it 30 seconds or so to load — everything is done in JS, including wordlist parsing.)
I was fed up having to continually check conference sites for new entries, so I automated the collection process and wired it up to a weekly newsletter and a Twitter account.
My hope is that it becomes the authoritative source for CFPs, so we can all check one site instead of hunting around the web.
After trying a few existing solutions over the years, I decided to build my own to keep track of the various copies of emails, pictures etc. that are spread across my computers and external drives.
The approach is:
- append information to a single metadata file, recording where a file was seen, what priority it was given etc.
- when starting, load all the information, building efficient in-memory data structures
- allow backups into any dir in a transparent format
It avoids the need of a dedicated server, treats existing copies of a file as de facto backups and is suitable for heterogeneous storages.
I have only compiled and tested it for Linux (Debian wheezy, AMD64), but it should build on other POSIX systems which have the Haskell platform installed. It's currently in beta and I have a long TO-DO list, but I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's been doing its job keeping track of over 200k unique files.
Feedback would be really welcome. I set up no issue-tracking interface yet, but you can contact me at the email address reported on the website and I'll be happy to help.
wrinq allows landlords to collect rent online from their tenants and issue rent slips once it has been received. Besides that it allows the landlords to keep a track of their expenses (on the property) and see how much they profits they earn monthly ,yearly etc. Admittedly this would be much more useful for people who manage more than one tenant.
It will also keep a track of tenants who pay on time so in case if wrinq ever gets successful I would have an opportunity of doing a spin off that "hooks" potential landlords with good tenants (but that is distant future)
Target audience : Landlords who don't live in the same house as the tenants and who possibly have more than one tenant to manage.
Launch Date: Well I want to collect a few emails this time around before launching. See if there is any interest for what I am doing. Right now I am working about 25% on the product (technology wise it is pretty simple) 75% on it's marketing (haven't started actively yet).
But I am thinking December should be a good time to launch.
Trivia:
wrinq is an acronym
Wield Rent and Issue Normative Quittance.
To be honest I only made it up after I decided wrinq sounded cool and got the domain for it :)
Tech stack :
I am using openresty and couchdb on the server side.
Jquery and simple grid[1] on the client side.
Problem: Up to 61.5 percent[1] of website visitors are bots, of which 30.5% are malicious. The presence of bots lead to content theft, malware injection, server hijacking, spam links and DDoS attacks. Website owners are often unaware of their existence and the extent of their effects.
Solution: A platform to monitor and analyse bot traffic. We alert you to attacks, pinpoint affected pages and identify and analyse all bots. To retrieve traffic data we use pixel tracking & JavaScript tracking code. To detect bots we look for abnormalities in a series of traffic data such as HTTP header fingerprinting, JavaScript footprint, timestamps, IP reputation etc.
With the results from our platform you can better implement methods of prevention such as blocking IP addresses/user agents or go about including CAPTCHAS or similar where necessary.
If this is something you would be interested in I’d love to hear what you think :).
[1] http://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2013.html
All programming languages are horrible in certain crippling ways. It's my hope that this one will be slightly less bad in some areas (undoubtedly with the expense of some glaring deficits). It's pretty cool to have first-class functions, type extension methods, PHP-like vectors/maps, and still end up with a sub-4KB exe.
http://mangarecs.herokuapp.com
explanation and writeup:
first writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/2eejdt/rmanga_heres_...
second writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/2fhlfl/rmanga_mangar...
There's definitely been some changes since then, so a third writeup is in the works. I know this project isn't very polished or professional, but it's something that I've wanted to work on for a long time and I feel that it solves a very niche problem in an interesting way.
The idea is to provide a simple API that allow you to store data with timestamp (event) and calendars, handling all the plumbing that comes with timezone and date time in general. While providing simple utility like web hook and cron job, or simple calendar html widget.
It's not ready yet, and we're aiming to be launching at the end of this year. But I'd love to hear what features you would be interested in using, or what kind of use cases we could provide value for. My email is in profile if anyone want to talk about it.
If you're interested, please leave your email on http://plaid.launchrock.com/ , and I will let you know when the API is ready!
Storytella (http://storytel.la/) is a tool for writers and self publishers. It makes it easy to manage novels you're working on, has an online editor, has an entity system (variable insertion in the text) and can save everything to a couple of different formats. I've been working on it for a while and have just got a payment process in place (thanks Stripe!).
Sunstone (http://sunstone.stoogoff.com/) is a map making tool aimed mainly at roleplayers. It's a bit restricted at the moment. I'm planning on adding different themes, more stamps, and a means to store different maps.
My friend and i have been working on this for 18 months, contending with family and our day to day job, it's been a bit of struggle to finish it. Just released a week or two ago, still working on polishing the website (outsourced but that was a disaster), and video. Once that's done we're going to do marketing a litte more aggressively. I'm currerntly working on an android port.
edit: Forgot video link: http://youtu.be/DW6TWF1_QUE
Outside of that, I'm working on a screencast series for the Meteor JavaScript framework:
http://meteortips.com/screencasts
Launches in a few days. Then I'll start working on the next update to my (free) book about Meteor:
:)
Rush is Spritz powered speed reading app for iOS. I've always been fascinated with speed reading. Decided to build this a couple of months back.
Dev work is finished. Getting ready for launch.
Feedback most definitely welcome!
(also sneakily available in the App Store if you feel like checking it out: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slipper-find-your-missed-con...)
What is this exactly?
So it uncovers lost connections between the user and other people, where do the stories come into this?
I have a landing page up at http://seedlng.net
And I'll be starting to "seed" content in a week or so. Then hopefully within a month or so I'll be opening up access for the first few modules.
As an American living in Berlin, I've found the online tools for improving your conversational skills in German to be seriously lacking. So I'm building this for myself first :)
The key differentiating features right now are super easy importing of data from web apps and doing joins between sheets.
The basic free personal plan is live now, but I'll be adding paid plans for businesses over the coming weeks. Please give it a spin and share your feedback! - http://gini.io
A cool idea would be a really easy to use API as I know a lot of people have issues with the GDocs Spreadsheet APIs. Have methods such as 'appendRow' and make it super simple to push data there and share the sheets, and it has immediate value to lots of people.
Creating responsive CSS with flexible layouts is still ridiculously hard, mostly done by hand and I want to fix that with a GUI.
It's MIT licenced, repo https://github.com/buttscicles/xbox
I realised this summer how much I miss having something tactile to show for my labour. As a youngster I enjoyed working with wood but in the last 15 years I've given up everything to write web applications.
I'm really enjoying learning about different kinds of wood/plywood and making cardboard prototypes. My woodworking knowledge isn't great and I could do with some design advice - if you'd like to help please shoot me an email (in profile).
Website: http://wavesum.net
Here I tutorial for some of the video control stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02TU6ysHIW4 The DMX lighting part is in progress.
All feedback is welcome.
My immediate feedback would be adding a short, to the point, explanation of what it does on the homepage. Also the video looks cool but takes too long to begin showing the product in action, I think. If I arrived at the site I'd be unsure why I want to hear the AIs explain themselves before I understood what they did.
Good luck with it!
I started doing this, because I always liked Dart better than any other programming language and because at that time Dart didn't have any HTML5 game engines.
I also developing it, because I really like doing it and because I want to make a living out of this.
I use Amazon's route53 for the hosting, and have written a simple hook-receiver to massage public DNS repositories into the Amazon system. It's pretty neat. https://dns-api.com/
It's an Android to Mac/PC notification mirroring and device control app.
Still in some sort of public beta, accepting feedbacks, enjoying the engineering challenge behind it, figuring out what matters most to us in order to build it next.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quicktext-for-chro...
What would be awesome would be if the templates could have a bunch of {placeholders} within. So I type the initial prompt and press tab and it autofills the text, then I can tab through the placeholders filling them in.
It encrypts the message with PGP (client-side) and sends it on to the mail account. A user who does not use PGP can send fairly secure mails to PGP-users. A simple vanity-style URL can be given to such users for easy access to the secure contact form.
Uses a Python backend which I am very proud of, as it works very well and simply.
Its's a work in progress, but really excited to get it up and running.
It's pre-alpha quality but still fun.
The top GIFs right now: https://maythebestgifw.in/#/top
It's a conversion analytics and click fraud detection platform. The API will allow it to better support metrics for businesses with recurring bills, and bulk create tracking URLs for businesses with thousands of ads.
swamp - super web app monster pinger.
it's slow in the making. main things i focused on was ease of use and quickness to deploy. it's designed to be a quick and easy way to monitor a bunch of stuff via ping or port checks.
https://github.com/jakwings/Kaj-Markup-Language (demo including)
It is almost done, and has a JavaScript/Node.js implementation), but documentations are not ready.
If you are a seller and interested in selling with us, email me at info@pluginbag.com
It got a great reception on PH itself!
It's similar as to how HoundCI works, but it's for PHP and will provide repository owners with a lot more information regarding bad pull requests etc.
Its also open source https://github.com/microweber/Microweber
I did spend a few minutes on the site figuring this out.
imho the free trial is too close/similar looking to the download now and unless you know how wordpress plays, this can be confusing. Also, the fact that you can donate to the same site you have to pay for is a little weird.
Wordpress has a clear separation for a good reason.
I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong, I just think how it's presented can be improved upon.
Personal goal-setting / task management platform which is more in-depth and feautre rich than the typical to-do list app. Unlimited hierarchies, analytics, email/SMS reminders, etc.
I am writing a free ebook on Ionic Framework / Angular / Firebase. Check it out http://www.innovie.com/
I will post on Amazon soon but subscribe to get early preview.
APIs, REST, distributed, fault tolerance... Loving Netflix OSS!!
https://www.financejobs.co :)
Still early in development but hoping to get the basic function in a beta soon.
I am launching next week.