Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

Here's a demo: https://coinbase.onsites.co/o/aurora-h

I also redesigned the onsite experience. Demo here as well: https://airbnb.onsites.co/joe-zadeh

[1] As with many things in design, I think I should attribute the source of inspiration, which is Carta. They wrote about a new offer letter format back in 2016. I'm basically taking their Apple Keynote slides and moving them to the web.

http://ripplescan.com - A website to visually explore the Ripple XRP network, lookup accounts, and transactions, and subscribe to XRP news in your inbox every day.

https://exponentialbackoff.substack.com - A newsletter where I write about the soft skills side of software engineering that I've learned throughout my career. Hopefully it's helpful to some younger engineers that are just starting out in their careers.

I've done this probably a dozen times over the last couple of years as a demonstration of the technology.

It always ends the same: Every party fights for ownership of the data, but nobody can figure out what to do with the data once they have it. Nobody wants to pay for it, much less support a subscription model. The free sites are held together with duct tape and chewing gum. Nobody wants to support it in the field. There are too many variables in network infrastructure. You can't use the network in the store because the cashier system is on there and PCI says no way. Getting a solid 802.11 signal in a room full of sheet metal is a nightmare. Customers want to use off-the-shelf cellular hotspots that are pieces of garbage and couldn't hold a TCP packet if it was covered in crazy glue.

But the demonstrations always go well. The customers think it's cool.

So on we go, boldly onward into the IoT future. I just pushed the next release up.

The goal is to be able to say things like "give me a header element at the top - height 250, width 100%", and it'll inject it immediately.

Combined with mouseover inspection and positional guidance (e.g. moving the mouse to a particular spot and saying "put a folder icon here").

http://ObservableHQ.com

Why is it cool?

* Every cell is live, reactive code that re-evaluates automatically whenever any of its inputs do. This includes awaiting promises and yielding new values from (potentially async) generators.

* A notebook can import and reuse any cell from any other published notebook.

* You have access to all of the computational goodies that the web platform gives you: graphics capabilities with <canvas> and <svg>, the GPU, the world's largest open source library with npm, and web APIs.

It's been interesting thinking about what it would mean to have a read/write medium for the web — where you're working with live values, and not in a "dead code" text editor. For just a teeny hint of some of the possibilities, check out Tom's autocompletion gif: https://twitter.com/tmcw/status/966073331207233536

It's cool because I as well as many others got tired of spending time...logging time. A lot of us live inside our Calendars so why not build on top of that behavior?

Very much in listening and feedback mode right. If TimeShark is interesting to you, please reach out (contact details in my profile).

It's cool because programmers should be able to easily watch their algorithms transforming the data they operate on.

I think this is an area with a lot of potential for seriously improving computer programming: we need better instruments for making observations of dynamic program state (or dynamic database state, etc.). It's kind of an inverse problem to what we've needed in the sciences, though, with microscopes/telescopes etc.: (one of) our problems is that we have too much data, and we need ways of automatically abstracting and presenting just the relevant parts—something like 'abstractoscopes'. This is my attempt at making one.

It takes designs for mobile apps (from Sketch files), and tries to convert those into React Native components. It's still early days, but it's a promising start.

It's cool because if I can get it working fully, it can replace a large chunk of my consulting projects (taking designs and converting them to the initial code)

I’ve been spending the past couple years kicking around a massive space opera. I’m finally starting to finish pages of its comic-book incarnation. It’s good to start moving forwards on a story again, wrapping up all the loose ends on my previous graphic novel took far too long.

http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax - very much a placeholder right now, just the last iteration of the pitch bible and some links; once I have enough pages drawn I’ll start having them show up there. Right now they’re just on the Patreon.

I used to work at Amazon Web Services (6 years), then VMware (2 years), then at a startup as an early employee/CTO (1 year). My job satisfaction decreased at every step.

I feel so lucky and blessed to be able to work on something that I truly care about, without the usual corporate BS.

https://ytradio.xyz/

It started with only live streams (24/7 youtube music channels)

I enjoy lofi youtube mixes when coding, and theres a lot of them.

Currently im adding functionality for users to curate the mixes

I think its cool bc its kind of like a shared youtube playlist for a particular niche, with nice ui, and soon with curation

Vue front end, back end will be Laravel!

Some tiles have multiple labels. A picture of a cat can be rhymed with bat or hat, buy it can also be a "pet" and rhyme with net, etc.

I think this new operational take on CRDTs (which is not my original idea) has the potential to be quite revolutionary, combining all the benefits of CvRDTs and CmRDTs and allowing brand new replicated data types to be created rather intuitively—all while maintaining near-optimal time and space complexity and providing a common interface for things like past revision viewing and garbage collection.

Hope to publish the article for real in the next few days.

I want to know if you can take a small group of strangers, make them use an app together, and then 5 minutes later have them be best friends.

It's cool because despite how complex people are, our relationships, behaviors, and thoughts follow well-defined patterns.

Also updates every Monday, rated T+, and published through Hiveworks which is a neat indie publisher that probably hosts that other webcomic you love. Since I'm the creator (and a designer/illustrator by trade), I'd be happy to answer any questions about getting a foot in this sort of business. Can be incredibly demanding, but creating your own stories is almost always worth it.

The software runs on an industrial controller (basically an Intel Atom with a proprietary bus to connect tons of I/O modules), driving a bunch of electrical and hydraulic gear, and logging data for analysis.

I like Albatern's idea for a wave power array based on lots of small, easily-deployed modules, and I'm hoping that their tests pan out and get them to production readiness.

While I have just spent 2.5 days freezing my ass off coding in an unheated industrial shed in a Scottish winter, it was a shed full of massive wave power components - hydraulic hoses as thick as your arm, man-height generators, and so on - so that's pretty fun! When I wasn't coding, I also got to make myself useful by stripping cables and wiring an emergency stop box.

In previous client work, I scrambled around wiring up sensors and programmed control code and UIs while standing in a small shipping container floating on a tidal platform in the middle of a Scottish estuary ( https://sustainablemarine.com/plat-i ); and more recently, learned how to do mean-time-between-failure analysis for an industrial Ethernet network that needed to live at the bottom of the sea with ten-year maintenance intervals and a >£10,000 bill to bring it up for component replacement.

You pick distracting sites/apps to block, and then you choose when to pause the block and access them. I've found that little extra bit of friction in checking FB/HN/Twitter is enough to keep me far more concentrated and present throughout the day. Would love feedback from other HN users!

Simple stuff, some scraping

The best way I can describe it is: imagine Python but statically-typed with type inference, proper concurrency support (via greenthreads), sum types (like enums in Rust), and immutable data structures in the standard library (like Clojure). I may even add optional checks that a function is pure.

The stage I'm at right now is learning how type inference works well enough to be able to implement a correct type inference engine for it.

Outside list is cool because it (hopefully) encourages people to travel and get outside more.

Hollaback is cool because it's sort of an "about" page as a service, and lets people know you made the thing they're looking at, not a team, not a company, you.

It's cool because it can change the way we all communicate; instead of interacting with 3rd parties, you always interact with your AI that handles everything for you.

Just coming out of stealth, launch posts and whatnot coming soon :)

It's also an interactive map, to view published 360 photos and videos, called moments. Use the token for storing moments, viewing moments, giving tips to moment creators, and paying for professional services in VR.

https://get3dtours.com - a SaaS product that makes it super easy to add virtual tour experiences to any site.

https://vrinrealestate.com - a comparison site of existing VR virtual tour products.

I do have a question. I'm using urllib.request instead of using requests to download normalize and I found conflicting information regarding if it was safe or not.

Finally, can I get feedback on my website. Gotta lose the fear.

https://www.talescript.com

Edit: for the life of me I can't find how to solve a full height div on mobile, specifically in Firefox. It happens regardless if I use 100vh or 100%. It seems that it can only be solved in JavaScript (which I'm still searching for a practical solution), tough, I would rather avoid a js solution.

In my spare time I'm working on a console-based mail-client, scriptable with lua, some golang-based projects (object-storage, puppet-dashboard replacement, and similar things)

Beyond that this year I'm mostly relaxing and pushing a pram in the snow. Fun times :)

Some of this has to do with solving the problem of the deluge of information I consume, through psychological 'intervention' as well as some way to store all this stuff and make it easy to filter and find the useful bits.

Some of it is journalling-related, and vaguely in the Quantified Self area.

A significant portion is about finding ways to actually use this amazing, powerful computer that I have in my pocket for things that actually, quantifiably, provably improve my life (and hopefully, eventually, that of others). This is mostly in the direction of autism-related issues, anxiety, maintaining social connections, and so on. Applying the (relatively) well-supported lessons from psychology to the bafflingly advanced technology that is part of my daily life, and that of most people around me.

Mostly it's a vanity project though, that I can currently afford indulging in. I figure that after years of working and making money off building stuff I don't care about much, it's time to let my more creative side express itself in ways that might prove useful somehow. I'm not an painter, or a musician, or a poet, but I can code, I love to code (when it's on my own terms), and I'm still amazed that for less than five bucks I can have a server running that does whatever I want it to do, and as a 'full-stack developer', that's quite a lot!

Part of me wants to work on things that are more directly beneficial to others, but 1) I have enough 'runway' to do that too, eventually, and 2) I've grown weary of always trying to make sure that what I do is 'useful' by some measure that doesn't quite feel like it originates from within. Many of the best things I've done started out as scratches to personal itches, so perhaps it's okay to 'indulge' for now.

- You install it with `npm install server` and use modern ES6+ including async/await very naturally.

- Node.js is the most popular "framework, library or tool" [1], but getting started with most of the current Node.js server frameworks has a really steep learning curve.

- Plugins are coming! They will be a really easy way to extend server in ways that middleware cannot by adding some lifecycle calls.

Feedback is welcome!

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-f...

http://intercoolerjs.org/

It's cool because REST/HATEOAS is the original and unique software architecture of the web, and building client/server apps in Javascript/JSON throws that architecture out:

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

Its cool because i get deep into data engineering/analytics, machine learning/AI. Its using latest Google Cloud tech and my customers are always pushing me to better the product, myself and have done lots of work in open source.

Its interesting seeing what the customer perceptions of data science/prediction systems are and dispelling some of the rumors and snake oil e.g. forecasts get less accurate with time so people shouldn't trust out of date forecasts that are forecasting a long way into the future.

http://pypy.org - Python interpreter with a just in time compiler. It's the only alternative python implementation out there, after failures of unladen swallow/pyston etc.

http://bloc11.co.za - Own climbing gym. It's cool to work directly with people and pursue own ideas in a small space.

The goal is to visualise all the different topics you can learn about and provide the best resources available for learning the topic.

It's also Open Source (https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything) so the cool part I think is that the users can actually be developers and submit changes they wish to see on the website.

Mostly it's a conceptual art piece that's meant to offer a different model of being social online — one that's wholly about ongoing presence and participation, not accumulation and curation. I think I'll try to sell it for a buck in the app store.

Fibery is work management platform that should replace all PM tools in the next 10 years :)

It supports MySQL and Postgres, supports organizations (invite your non-engineer colleagues), sharing to google sheets, JSON, CSV, email, and is secure (encrypted credentials, read-only transactions, etc).

I have much bigger plans, but for now I'm bootstrapping it and so far customers seem pretty happy! Give it a try!

It's cool because it makes her life better and I've had some great feedback from other people trying to manage their intake of sugars about how it makes their lives easier :)

It also enables organisations like schools, universities and missions get access to bulk food at a fraction of the usual price.

I never thought it’d be possible to affect this type of change using code, which is quite cool IMO!

It's a little music production community. You know how everyone on HN laments that small quirky websites have been eaten by bigger ones, so they don't exist any more? My website is cool because it has that sort of community - intelligent and good at music but also funny and super weird. We all kinda know each other, which makes it fun.

Also, a bunch of us have gotten a lot better at making music, which is another nice win. :)

https://conradj.co.uk/weeklydigest

It grabs what I've read from Pocket and makes a page for each week.

It's cool because what I read is better than what I can write, and I think this is true for others. I've got loads of ideas for it, it's going to be massive, as long as HN like it.

I think it's cool because it's almost definitely the most complex Slack bot out there (though I admit that's an arbitrary metric), but it's for sure the most advanced game on the platform.

It's an Ohm-inspired packrat parser for Emacs. It's cool because it uses the packrat cache to allow efficient incremental repairs, so your 20k line buffer doesn't have to be completely reparsed just because you added a one line function in line 7

I’m aiming to offer as many algorithms/candle intervals as I can and make them fully customizable. Also implementing a screener and the ability to test your alerts through papertrading with historical data.

Wanted to have a list of new episodes and a heads up about the next few days whats coming up so https://boldshows.com was born.

https://opensimworld.com/ bcause i feel like virtual worlds have greatly underappreciated potential and VR is not the best way to approach them

We value full and unreasonable transparency both in our internal and external communications. We believe a world with complete and open transparency is a better world. It has been very interesting to try to make the search engine data world more open.

It's cool because... well, it makes it easy for programmers to fill out and sign PDF forms. So it's not really a "cool" product, but I enjoy working on it, and it saves people a lot of time.

I think it would have been better if they had put their project in the comments like everyone else instead of giving themselves more visibility by putting it in the main question.

They may not have intended it this way - but it's possible.

It is cool because we have a serious stream of data to collect, stream, process and store, and provide users with very fast access to massive datasets.

It's great because we are not just made of minds and fingers. We perceive the world with our bodies and we shouldn't exclude them from interaction.

Also, it's fun.

An ICO (initial coin offering) listing site.

Https://getpublii.com