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

Ask HN: What are you working on?

46 pointsstevenj95 comments

I'm curious to see what HNers are building/working on?

Particularly things in the consumer space.

* A robot that does gymnastics. http://fairlypre.posterous.com/robot-gymnastics It's a final project for a class on computational control of nonlinear underactuated dynamical systems.

* A system that automatically finds features in fly embryos and spatially aligns them. Once they are spatially aligned, one can build a model of how they develop, and map those dynamics back to the properties of the genome that caused them.

I'm a product designer that does graphic and interface design and HTML/CSS. But lately I've really wanted to build something that works, not just static stuff. So..

Installed node.js, the Express framework, and are now messing around in Jade templates. Also installed the mongodb driver via npm (node package manager), but have zero clue how to make a database and hooking it into my node app. Next step is to follow along a blog engine tutorial to learn some more.

Kudos for that! I wish the designers at my company had more curiosity about the code.

If you don't want to grok SQL you can always try NoSQL which is basically (for most engines) documents made of key-value pairs in collections.

I'd need a really basic tutorial, how to do something (like a blog engine), with Node, Express and NoSQL. Do you know of anything like that?

Just released a new version of beets, an open-source CLI music management tool for nerds: http://beets.radbox.org/

It's supposed to be an extensible and fast alternative to iTunes, MusicBrainz Picard, and other tools. It's getting there.

I'm working on a Flight Simulator for Windows Phone 7.

It's a civilian Flight Sim, build in C# with XNA. I've been working on the PC version for 7 years as a side project...

Release in a couple of weeks if we get rid of the last few bugs in time.

Working on a domain management tool for entrepreneurs, especially the domains that you own but are not using for a startup (yet). http://ParkedAvenue.com

Love it, will be parking my unused domains there now.

Thanks, I appreciate the support!

Making tablet computers the ultimate device for a kid:

Kongoroo (http://www.kongoroo.com)

This is the mvp but we will have a much nicer beta version in the coming weeks.

Groupie (www.groupie.mobi), social network that connects people who share interests. Currently on the iPhone, building out the web portal over the coming weeks.50k+ users, 15k+ groups

Well, let's see: - http://www.tether.com/ - http://www.compilr.com/ - http://www.wakeful.com/ - http://www.spyreveal.com/ - And a video game!

Yes, I'm still sane...

Wow - 5 things at the same time... makes me reevaluate my lethargy not to start working on a second project at the same time... How do you cope working on 5 different things? Any project that gets time priority?

http://deftserver.org/ tornado clone running on the JVM using raw java nio

Unscatter.com http://www.unscatter.com - A search site (not engine) still in major product development. My TODO list includes simple things like fixing a bug for blekko searches that return 0 results throwing an error page, all the way to build a realtime engine using zeromq and multiple tornado parsing engines to dump into mongodb for the tornado front ends.

What it will likely be is a process of fix the bug, make a new logo (got a great idea for one), add more apis for the raw search, then get to real time processing.

I'm also considering trying to write a caching reverse proxy using tornado and zeromq ( or maybe make it an opportunity to teach myself erlang ) while on vacation to replace nginx. Mainly to keep my mind busy as I'll be in location where I don't think I'll have internet access. Seems like a good time to write a proxy and possibly learn a new language.

A physically based renderer that will be able to calculate photosynthetically active radiation and usable radiation in aquariums. I'm into planted tanks. Currently I'm mostly programming the render part and decided that a stochastically progressive photon mapper is good enough and will make it easy to calculate the intensity and reflector efficiency and also get a photo realistic render of the tank. I'm using Java3D to grab/create the geometry and parts of pbrt in my own sppm-implementation. Here is the latest result: http://www.flickr.com/photos/defdac/5513265646/

Don't know if it is startup material though? It's a hobby but I would really love working with light calculations or combine my knowledge about plant physiology, electro magnetic radiation and graphics programming.

Putting the real Multiple Listing Service back in the hands (literally) of real estate professionals and combining it with tools that helps them make sense of the real estate market. It's part listing syndication, analytics and social networking.

It's all politics and people desperate to keep their cushy desk jobs. If you're already coding, I'd recommend getting out there now to find your hurdles, because there will be A LOT of them.

This is extremely true. It is all politics and there will be a lot of hurdles. It is what it is.

I'm actually doing something quite similar at the moment, though for a different MLS system in a different country...

Maybe we can connect and share ideas.

marco[at]marcomonteiro[dot]com

A real-time chan/anonymous community. We want to explore the potential in the privacy aspect that it does have. Chans are known to be hard to break-even(server cost wise) and they look... bad/ugly.

So using node/socket.io and with a nice execution, in that "adventure" we want to create one that can scale cost-wise and basically own the market. We are developing a lot of cool features(and useful) and it's looking good now. Beta in july/august.

We want to change that narcissist/egocentric facebook culture that the web is built upon. Contributing to something and not getting credit for it is good. Altruism is awesome. We want to change the "crazy/sick" reputation that chans do have today.

That's a great idea, hope it goes well.

I'm making a game for Android that's Tamagatchi meets the Sims meets Civilization. I'm using libgdx as the foundation and building off of there.

Initially the game will be available in two modes, "Challenge" and "Freebuild"; the challenge mode will be time-limited or resource-limited challenges to take your tribe through. The Freebuild mode will just let you grow your tribe in a set environment like a tamagotchi/sims game - get them foraging/hunting for food, building shelter, etc,.

Ultimately I want to add a third mode, "PvP" where you will play in a large world populated with other players and you'll need to cooperate and coexist or crush them depending upon your play style.

I'm working on an open-source framework, and a series of command line tools built on top of the framework, for symbolically manipulating context-free grammars, non-deterministic pushdown automata, and non-deterministic finite automata. All of it is implemented in C++. I have done some neat things like implement CFG production pattern matching using an EDSL that lets me express foreach loops in C++. I'm currently looking for people interested in contributing / using the code.

The project page is http://www.grailplus.org.

Working with FAMiLab on creating a low cost sensor battery for classrooms as part of the Element-14 Great Global Hackerspace Challenge.

Otherwise, trying desperately to get out of a recent spout of burnout, loss of motivation, and chronic perfectionism. I have, arguably, one of the best job situations in the world right now but I'm not enjoying it. The work I do is just not profoundly satisfying, despite being able to do weeks of it in a couple hours with minimal error and rework. Taking suggestions on that if anyone has any.

I feel your pain in just about every respect. Having personal projects can help. From what others have said having a solid non-programming hobby and getting back some balance is a key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Interesting and somewhat related blog article: http://heycarsten.com/employment-the-hard-parts/

Also, another article i found really interesting on the topic: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelChristiansen/20110110/6763/Pa...

Thanks. Hit me up off HN if you ever need someone to share your frustration. :)

http://getrunrate.com. Better double-entry bookkeeping software for small businesses. Collecting beta invites and validating features.

I am working on my start-up: http://pagekite.net/

PageKite aims to make it super-easy for people to self-host websites or other servers by solving all the problems caused by IP address shortages and unfriendly firewalls.

At the current early stage it's mostly useful for making prototype web apps or web designs visible to coworkers or customers without having to go through a deployment step, but there are numerous ways this could develop into a consumer product as it matures.

We're building a new music discovery/sharing service for iOS and web (eventually Android too :). Features new songs in an HN-style ranking for each genre, with recommendations based on your saved favorites, and the ability to browse/share favorites between friends.

Our basic website is up, but we're still a couple months from launch and working with artists and labels now to get some initial content in place.

http://www.band-o-rama.com/

Edit Room: http://editroom.splatcollision.com

Visual CSS Animation Design Web App, with pre-launch access to my development prototype. It's going to be the best way to build CSS animated websites! No more building keyframes by hand in a text editor, and no more web layout and design using desktop photo manipulation applications. Design and animate directly in the browser*

*requires CSS3 Animation support, for now...

I'm learning Ruby and I'm working on an app that gives you email alerts on CrunchBase updates, my first taste of Rails. And I'm also working through SICP, albeit slowly.

I'm also waiting to get my Firefox add-on fully reviewed by Mozilla, which I built a while ago. Check it out, the Web Startup Toolbar - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-startup-t...

TweetHit (http://www.tweethit.com) - Tracking the most popular products on Twitter

And PerformanceEngine, the layered storage library (local instance cache, memcache,datastore) that powers TweetHit. (https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine)

I'll probably submit it as a Show HN thread but until then, any early feedback would be helpful.

Recently I've found twitter to be a drag because I'm following way too many people.

I want to start following less people so I'm writing a web app that will tell you who tweets the most out of the people you follow.

I'd have it finished but I was going around in circles trying to solve a problem that I just realized I don't really need to solve yet.

I keep thinking of other features I could add, such as who retweets the most and who talks to other people I follow the most which doesn't help.

I would totally use this app.

I would especially like to be able to check potential new people to follow against my current list of followers to see what I'm getting into. Sorry, not helping :-)

Dammit you're not. This is a great idea. :)

Are you aware of http://proxlet.com/ - similar but not the same - trying to cut down "twitter noise"

I wasn't. Finding twitter apps is really difficult, I never know what to search for.

This looks interesting. I'm going to try this out. It may replace the need for my app but I'll be finishing it anyway.

I'm trying to learn more about RoR and it's ecosystem by modifying the twitter example to be a neighborhood social network using GMaps, etc. It's a WIP with no effort put into the front-end yet ( http://neckowoods.heroku.com )

It seems that a lot of folks have attempted to capture this space without anyone being dominant. If you'd like to help out with whatever, let me know :)

Digital Signage with a focus on local events and information. It will be a centrally managed network of LCD TVs that are playing local news feeds, weather, realtime updateable ads. The host business will also be able to add content of their own. All of it is played back in glorious 1080. I'm also planning to incorporate SMS coupons and advertising as well.

My am installing my first display on Friday at the local bowling alley.

"Which one will I buy"? How many times do you go though a review or read recommendations of someone before it gives you the final push to buy something? ... We are making a product + marking app based on consumers + twitter feed .. but not like others star rating product review.. people can see how many users are happy , sad , angry .. People's emotions with any product that can help you :)

The saying that a picture says more then a 1000 words is true. In our case our pie chart alone says more then 100 000 words if you look at reviews like of Twillight. Feel what 1500 reviwers on amazon felt in 1 button press and share this with your friends

I'm helping build a new search interface and implementation for a casual game company based on Apache Lucene/Solr. I always wanted to participate in a Solr implementation, and I was really gratified to work on this project. I think marketing had given up on improving search, so this was a grassroots engineering effort that releases officially later this month.

We are building web iPhone & Android apps that consume and filter the social media content bars/restaurants are pushing. Ultimately we'll be combining this with a bunch of location based services, recommendations and group communications. --> http://www.barbird.com (also free on iPhone/Android)

I'm working on an iphone/ipad app for kids. It's a silly thing just a coloring book but we're trying to make it better than anything else out there interface-wise and we're experimenting with in-app purchases and a bunch of other ios features. It's my first app that i've worked on from concept to execution so its pretty exciting to me.

Dell Stage: http://www.dell.com/us/p/stage/pd

It's very much a consumer-facing product, built on technology somewhere between a game engine and Flash.

edit: Also working on learning Google Go and OpenCL in my spare time, as well as recovering from a burnout phase and trying to get my programming mojo back.

I'm building a SaaS offering to develop test data and validation tools for the ediscovery market. There are no mechanisms in place at present to show that an ediscovery process worked as expected. Courts require testing of all sorts of other processes that produce evidence, but not so ediscovery. We think we've got this solved.

I'm making an application for small businesses to select, edit and print their own gift certificates:

http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com

I'm spending an awful lot of time writing content as a SEO strategy. It does take time to climb up the ranks of Google but it's a worthwhile investment!

I am working on my first RoR's page. We have 2 admins that post weather related questions, and users vote on which will option will be correct. monthly totals and question voter break downs, etc. I work for a weather company so this is a small, very niche website. But a fun way to get my hands dirty in Rails.

I'm working on a new-car research site that's intended to make researching new-model-year vehicles suck less. Right now, it sucks. Sifting through MFR sites looking for info / styles / colors that set vehicles apart is time consuming and boring.

The site is http://autoswatch.com

I posted it up here a few weeks back, but my current project is http://resumatic.net/

It's a(nother) online resume-hosting app influenced by about.me and such, with an emphasis on presentation and individuality. I hope. Basically, it's a pretty frontend for LinkedIn.

I am working on an MVP for a staff scheduling application to help small-to-medium businesses schedule and communicate with their employees and I am looking for a collaborator or cofounder

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2417022

I'm working on a literature community, I have an alpha copy deployed at http://beta.singleforest.com/ Not sure if I'm going to bother trying to make money off it. (It doesn't have ssl yet, so careful with your passwords)

Work: Making www.iegallery.com more functional.

Personal project: Tinkering with the Emotiv headset & emokit's hack. ( https://github.com/daeken/Emokit ) (If there are any other emotiv hobbyists here, email me!)

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_207474292616003...

We as applicants have thought be cool to set up a FB Group to stay in touch. So click above and feel free to join

Reading Bruner's "Toward a Theory of Instruction" and Piaget's "The Child's Conception of Number." Sawyer's "Vision in Elementary Mathematics" is next.

Trying to get over my distaste for Objective-C so I can translate some of these ideas to the iPad.

Teaching Scratch in Oakland.

I'm currently working on my startup's first product, Interstate (www.interstateapp.com) :)

Let me help you there: http://interstateapp.com

It looks great and I can't wait it to try it out myself (hint).

Thanks :) Hint understood and invite sent ;)

Trying to figure out if a metagame is more important or transparency to increase competition and sharing.

Also trying to find vendors to sign up and create triviatisements (have 5 in the works).

Also adding stats for admins so we can see what people are actually doing

Emulsion ( http://emulsion.me ), which will allow photographers to create beautiful, simple portfolios in about 15 minutes.

We felt someone needed to kill the slow, Flash slideshows everyone was using.

Hubski, a thoughtful content forum built on the HN code. Much more to do, but you can follow people and topics, and a bunch of other things. http://hubski.com

I'm making a program that can take any common kind of file and convert it into any other kind. I find this is a fairly common need for people I know, but there isn't any good simple answer right now.

A platform to address some of the most challenging problems in machine learning & artificial intelligence. Just started prototyping and don't want to be more specific at this point.

A collection of core machine learning and natural language processing modules. I still have a gig for nearly two years, and am using spare time to gear up for my first startup ;).

I am working on http://www.updatesitenow.com/ Updatesitenow helps you update your website using your phone.

http://twitter.com/YCnews

Tiny side project to get Hacker News over Twitter with comments. Click on a link in any tweet to see.

Neat work with the sidebar :)

Working on http://OneSong.me - an app that lets you describe your friends in one song, just like ThreeWords.me.

My next idea is one I'm going to work on for StartupWeekend.

It's killing me NOT working on it, but I don't want to 'cheat' by showing up with a previously-worked-on product.

Why don't you work on it now and work on something else at startup weekend?

I ask because I think you should take advantage of your eagerness.

It's what we (myself and a few friends) decided we'd do for SW, basically.

That isn't necessarily the best reason, but we're all on the same page with it, and think that it's the best app to pitch / demo for that particular occasion.

Work on it. It's not cheating. There's a good chance that you'll walk in with the idea of working on it and end up working on something completely different. When I did the DC Startup Weekend I walked in with a product and then ended up getting an idea from a comment someone made, went up, pitched it and ended up with a team to work on that.

In the end we didn't win, primarily because we were told to keep the pitch down and then the didn't do questions and only comments. Most of the comments were about things that we did have answers for but didn't have time to mention in our pitch so... There's a lesson in there too :)

But if you have idea, work on it. In the end I'm back to working on the product I was working on before the event anyway.

You may be right, but 1) if feels like cheating and 2) I specifically asked the event organizer, and he said:

"you should really just be bringing your ideas and not a product-in-development."

So that's why I'm holding off. I mean, on the one hand, I'd happily commit to the idea, whether StartupWeekend was on or not, but since I'm going, and my team agrees that it's a great idea, I really want to see how far we can get in the time allotted.

Gotcha.. either way be prepared for a fun high stress no sleep weekend. It's great. One other hint I can give you, bring something you can tether to for internet. Not sure if it was just the location where it was held here, but I ended up tethering my phone to get to the internet because the attendees pretty much swamped the wireless network where we were at.

Oh and if Stephen Douglas is at your startup weekend, ask him to do a one handed keg stand.

UpOut: Discover and share awesome things to do. Discover, post and follow stuff to do in your city.

http://www.upout.com

I'm creating an ebook and software combo for computer/technology educators. Hoping to market it to school districts, but individual teachers as well.

Fllix : http://fllix.com - Browse, build and share the movies you have watched and want to watch.

SaleLocator (http://salelocator.com) - A local retail sales aggregator and search engine.

Really cool idea! The homepage is immediately showing me sales around me. Will be using it more :)

Thanks!

Researching and playing with different crowd sourcing options like Mechanical Turk to see what all I can use them for school, work and life.

http://mavenn.com - collectively monitor, share and discover information.

im new to the hn forum; im building a website called Faceless, user-verified community posts, news, links, events aggregation. hopefully in real-time one day: here's the link to my little design work so far. http://faceless.com/qa; were going to launch to scu next week!

http://gethirely.com, getting ready to open up soon.

I'm working on solving how to make the Web serves families better.

We are working on Ad Serving and advanced metrics tracking.

a "classifieds" plugin for vanillaforums and a "motivational" ios app

I'm in the preliminary research stages of building a series of stock tools that allow users to do arbitrary searches on the intarwebs and then correlate the data with historical price data on equities. I registered tinystocktools.com but nothing is up there yet as I'm just tinkering with what sort of free API's I have available to me at the moment before I start seriously building it.

There will be social aspects to it but I'm so tired of "social" being the main focus so it's definitely going to be more of a research/monitoring tool that begrudgingly lets you tap into your FB and twitter networks as part of it.

There will be a consumer-facing interface but I'd also like to create a nice streamlined API so people can leverage my platform as well.

If anyone has any edge-case stock tools they'd like to see, let me know. I'd definitely like to create a "portfolio" of tools, hence the domain name.

So your tool correlates historical trends in search results with historical equity price trends?

That might be where it goes. I started out by looking at news alerts on stock charts and thinking that I'd like to be able to define my own search terms for certain equities instead of just looking for news stories that mention the company or the ticker symbol directly. If I actually manage to get something serious up and running it will eventually turn into more of a data-mining service.

You know, this is a nice idea I hadn't previously thought of. Naturally, Google never delivered on their "search trends" API. I have issued a suitably whiny tweet to Marissa Mayer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com