sideproject

My previous startup worked with parsing PDFs, trying to apply NLP to the texts within PDFs - extracting titles, paragraphs, tables, bullet points etc. Oh my that was a nightmare. Sure we were doing difficult things, so that made us unique, but it was a slog. Working with different dimensions, pages upside down, sentences spanning across multiple pages etc etc.

I've also recently worked on a small tool called scholars.io [1] where I had to work with PDFs. I wasn't doing anything like parsing, but I just used existing PDF tools and libraries, which were much more pleasant, but still working on top of PDF is a challenge.

[1] - https://scholars.io (a tool to read & review reearch papers together with colleagues)

I think it's important to define what it means for you to "finish the project".

Is your project "finished", when you see an MVP that you can release to the world? Your project now has a minimum set of features that delivers the initial value you thought it would deliver?

Is it worthwhile to do a Show HN on it? (and risk no one clicking on it because HN receives so many submissions? :)

Is it worthwhile to release on PH? (and so many products launched in PH thesedays are... pretty much well-polished, revenue ready - if not funded etc)

What comes after you "finishing" your projects? Will you continue? or move on to something else?

For me, one of the ways to define "finishing" was to make sure that it launches with some type of payment plan. It is an MVP, but it also has monetization in it so that should anyone else wish to pay for it and use it, they can do so immediately.

Sure, not all projects are about payment and those projects are fine (which is why I said 'one of the ways'...) but if I know that this is something that I'd like to continue to work on because I enjoy it and I know it has legs, I try to find some way of generating revenue to see what the response would be.

Thoughts?

I read research papers often and I found reading it together with other peers quite helpful when I did research.

So I recently created a small tool to read research papers together with other people with annotations and comments.

https://www.scholars.io

Learning how to talk well sounds.. simple but it was a big eye-opener for me. A more formal way of putting it would be "How to communicate effectively".

That's a big topic. But one of the key things I learned is when to stop talking. Get to the point, deliver it and then stop. Enjoy the awkward silence and let others fill the space.

I have met so many countless people who couldn't stop or know when to stop but just kept waffling, diminishing the effect that they could have otherwise.

Nice set of tools!! I recently launched a PDF-related project.

https://www.scholars.io

It's a tool for reading research papers (PDFs) together with your colleagues. You can read, annotate, comment etc.

Needless to say, it led me down quite deep into the PDF world and it.. was interesting.

Joined as employee #2 of a startup. Over the years, accumulated about 1.9% of the company shares. At one stage, the company was valued at ~$300M. Several buyers approached over the years, the chairman only wanted to sell at a ridiculous near $1B. So it never got sold. Several in-fightings, layoffs and a few years later, we exited with $18M acquisition.

I was going to say.. what a great domain name you got there…

Nice tool! I'm sure you're thinking of it, but are you planning on a Chrome extension for this? :)

Speaking of articles and annotations, I've also recently launched a project (a little different) which allows annotate and read research papers (PDFs) easily if anyone is interested.

https://scholars.io

Simplicity wins in many cases and it is with K-Means clustering. There are so many clustering algorithms, far superior to K-Means, but its simplicity and easy-to-apply approach to most of the datasets available allow pretty much anyone with programming skills to understand and implement quickly to get results and gives you that feeling of "oh, hey, that's my first data science thingy". Simplicity is very powerful.

I frequent ProductHunt to see what new products are launched. I usually click on every link. That takes time and hurts my fingers clicking. So I automated it and created an app called Rockmelon.

https://www.rockmelon.app

It became a tool that opens multiple links all at once. Once I had the basic foundation, I created a daily ProductHunt link, which opens all the links at once. You can subscribe to daily product hunt links here.

https://www.rockmelon.app/rc/Cg08Y06Vu9#/

Now my fingers are happy. Hopefully yours too.

You can create your own mega link with API as well.

Hey HN!

Scratching my own itch here - I frequent many of StackExchange sites and wanted to collect the best questions each day from all the sites to see what questions are raised.

Clickable link!

https://scholars.io

Thanks for the feedback! Yes definitely, will fix and implement those immediately!

Yep - working on notifications soon! (configurable, so you can opt-out and in)

I want you to sign up! :)

5 per user per 24 hours. Most likely will adjust as I monitor the usage.

Browser extension is a great idea!

Yes - definitely - I will add that. Thanks.

Apologies for not being clear and no, you cannot sign up as anyone - that would be silly :)

When you sign up, we give you a unique code which you will have to add to your HN about section then we check that to verify your account.

Here's a clickable

https://fro.app

Another one - https://www.sideprojectors.com

I've been working on Newsy this year

https://www.newsy.co

It's a tool that lets you create content sites based on your unused domain names. It's been growing steadily.

Heya!

There was a hackathon back in October called Larajam. The theme was "Productivity" and my idea was to create a tool to open multiple links with one click.

Why?

I visit HN, ProductHunt, Reddit a lot and most of the time, I'm clicking links. For PH, since I'm clicking every project each given day, I thought, heck why can't I just open them all at once?

It was a fun project and Rockmelon.app was born! Also got to win a few prizes! The link that opens many links - I call it "Rockmelon Link (RL)"

Some features

- You can create a collection (called Rockmelon Collection RC)! Create a collection (e.g. Daily ProductHunt Projects) subscribe to it and you get an email each day with one link that opens them all (here's an example - https://www.rockmelon.app/rc/Cg08Y06Vu9#/)

- Also created daily Show HN link - click and it will open all the links on today's Show HN page (https://www.rockmelon.app/rc/kS0OMT0vdw#/)

- You can create RLs and RCs using API!

Well, that's the gist. Hope you enjoy it!

I've been running Newsy myself to host all of my unused domain names.

https://www.newsy.co

Newsy takes an unused domain name and turn it into a content-aggregator (i.e. Reddit clone) with lots of features built in including membership, automated newsletters, HTTPS, using GMail for your domain etc.

I built Newsy because I had close to 50 unused domain names but had no time to develop them.

Newsy lets me quickly build sites for my domains and make use of them while waiting for (hopefully) one day that I turn them into a product.

Not sure how directly related, but I've been using Pyro to build my own video gallery site.

https://www.pyro.app

Here's an example site that I built

https://flyn.app/

I watch a lot of swimming videos and it's hard to curate and collect them all in one single place. Pyro has features that let me do that. But it also lets you upload videos directly.

I created Newsy - it's a different way of parking domains. I'd say it's the "modern" way and it's way better (but I'm biased).

https://www.newsy.co

Newsy turns your unused domain name into a content aggregator (think of Reddit-clone).

But it's completely automated so you set it up once and you can leave it running. It comes with all the features you'd expect from a Reddit-like content site (e.g. membership, newsletters, comments, social sharing). Contents are discovered based on the keywords you specify.

Monetization is also built in. You can add your own ads, get paid for sponsored posts or even charge membership fee.

Would love for you to try it out.

I use BitBucket, because it's free and I've been using it for a long time. Maybe GitHub is faster, but I don't access BitBucket enough to justify migrating ~50 repos I have. Can't be bothered. Its UI/UX? meh. I got used to it.

I use Confluence and Jira because, again, we use them at work. So I guess I'm using them because I have to. I also understand it's a pain to move our company from one to another (oh we've had discussions to move to Coda and others) but again, I'm not taking on that project. Again, UI/UX, search - all meh - they are working and I got used to it.

The inconvenience of using them does not justify the amount of time I need to spend to overcome my inconvenience. Some things, you just have to let them slide.

gethub.co

parkings.co (and many more)

I have collected over ~60 domain names over the years. And while I really hate traditional domain parking sites, I also did not like the fact that my domains were sitting there idle, doing nothing.

For those interested, I scratched my own itch by building Newsy

https://www.newsy.co

It turns your un-used domain names into an automated content aggregator (i.e. Reddit clone).

I connect my domain (HTTPS enabled), I give a few keywords that are relevant to the domain name or idea that I have which I would eventually want to use with the domain and Newsy finds and displays contents based on those (e.g. News, Videos etc).

We've built various features like comments, membership, votes, automated newsletters, integration with Twitter that help your site build traffic over time.

A few examples

https://www.getinfosec.news https://www.heystartup.com

Would love for anyone else to give it a try.

I have ~60 domains - I've been using Newsy as a tool to scratch my own itch for my domains that have been idle.

https://www.newsy.co

It turns your un-used domain names into a fully automated content aggregator (think of Reddit, but automated) - for those who might be interested.

I run Newsy - https://www.newsy.co It turns your un-used domain names into a Reddit-like content aggregator.

I use

- Laravel - Vue - Postgres - Tailwind - Hosted on Vultr

This has been my go-to stack for quite some time. Very happy with it. Perfect combination for a mostly CRUD app.