28 ms·

Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

• roryisok 9y ago
  http://getpoe.com http://getpoe.com - distraction free / focus writing app for Windows, and soon Linux and macOS. It makes me nothing, but I love working on it. I built it to have a focus writer on windows 8 (there were none that played move with metro at the time) but I spend more time coding it than actually writing these days
• louisstow 9y ago
  https://walloftext.co https://walloftext.co I genuinely find it useful for note-taking and organising things.
• superasn 9y ago
  The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me. But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work. Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D [1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp3-playlist-into-a-video-playlist/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/songrefernce-turns-your-mp... [2] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extreme-article-marketing-convert-your-articles-into-cool-videos/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extreme-article-marketing-conve...
  • mysterydip 9y ago
    On the gamedev subreddit, it seems most questions are around how to market and get exposure for your game, SEO, making a successful kickstarter, etc. It's great to take a step back and just make something that people enjoy, even if it does not bring any income. Getting "fanmail" or seeing the # of hours someone has put into something you've made is a great feeling. As long as you have a day job that pays the bills, I say go for it.
    • Qwertious 9y ago
      I think /r/hobbygamedev was made in response to the whole "I don't want this marketing shit on my game development subreddit" .
  • caspercba 9y ago
    Hi, a software developer here. I also feel like you. Started coding very young, then uni, first job, first team leader position, then moved to Europe for 5 years working in big companies ( and saving as much as I could). Now I'm back home in Latin America. Built a couple of houses cash with savings, got married. But I'm bored so I spend my time playing with my 3d printer and home automation little projects in my spare time. I don't think I will last much longer working on something I don't enjoy. Every month I save enough for living at least 3 months (4.5k USD ) without working which is quite good, but on the other hand, I don't like what I do. It's tough to quit when you know other people are struggling to pay for basic needs in other areas. I guess my plan is to keep saving and at some point next year ( when I get around 2-3 years worth of expenses) do something about it. Anyways, at the moment my hobbies keep me going. That's my advice, a hobbie.
    • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      What kind of home automation projects are you working on?
  • sgentle 9y ago
    I think this is the worst thing about startup culture. Don't get me wrong, I like startups, but there's so much hype and so much money around them that it sucks all the oxygen out of anything else. I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all. Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".
    • bhnmmhmd 9y ago
      So what is the definition of startup from your perspective? I mean, if I have an idea and just build it, wouldn't someone else take the idea, build it, and look for VCs to make it profitable? In this case, isn't it better to always look for the possibility that my idea can actually catch on?
• wheresvic1 9y ago
  I recently created Ewolo, it's a web based workout tracker optimized for mobile as well - https://ewolo.fitness https://ewolo.fitness I did it mostly because the existing solutions were horrible and I thought that it would also be a great way to learn redux. The front-end is also open-sourced :)
  • thecolorblue 9y ago
    If you think about it, isn't all front end open source? :)
    • wheresvic1 9y ago
      Haha, yes definitely. There is something to be said about allowing people to get a full view of the structure vs letting them prettify the bundle however.
    • yakshaving_jgt 9y ago
      I've thought about it, and no, not really. I mean, try reading the source of http://elm-lang.org/ http://elm-lang.org/.
• atomashpolskiy 9y ago
  Yes, I've developed a full-featured BitTorrent library in Java: https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt/blob/master/README.md#----bt https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt/blob/master/README.md#-... . It was very warmly received by HN folks It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)
  • superasn 9y ago
    This is very cool. Being a Java lib I guess it can be compiled directly inside Android apps too(?) which is definitely a very big plus!
    • atomashpolskiy 9y ago
      I haven't checked myself yet, but probably yes, if a proper Android SDK with Java 8 de-sugaring support is used.
• pgsandstrom 9y ago
  I like to create small tools that are optimized for me and my families use case. For example we used Google Keep for shopping lists, but I found it too bloaty and slow. So I created bös.se (it got SSR and websockets, wohooo!) http://bös.se/test-note http://xn--bs-fka.se/test-note It's fun to just care about your own needs when developing. For me it becomes work when I get feature requests that I don't like myself, but I implement them to appease others.
  • davchana 9y ago
    Do you really use those 2700 lines of CSS code? Just asking, as I usually trim all the extra code, and use the one I actually need, in all my single page apps.
    • j_s 9y ago
      Ain't nobody got time for that! Do you have time to share any of your experience with the tools / process that enables you to get this done in a reasonable timeframe? I'm specifcally interested in how these have changed over time - how have changes to tools / process helped get this done faster?
• garysieling 9y ago
  https://www.findlectures.com/ https://www.findlectures.com/ This is a big enough project to can explore most programming subjects (e.g. machine learning, Javascript, databases, email), and I enjoy learning about history by watching old videos.
  • pul 9y ago
    Nice work on this site! I think I'll have something to do the coming time ;) How did you manage to find and index all these videos?
    • garysieling 9y ago
      The best thing for finding speakers is having a form on signup for the emails because I ask people for suggestions, and I've had hundreds. For the crawling part, this might be interesting (I have a talk coming soon too) http://findlectures.com/articles/2017/05/15/Building-a-Crawler-in-Node-JS/ http://findlectures.com/articles/2017/05/15/Building-a-Crawl...
• Usu 9y ago
  https://gitnotifier.io https://gitnotifier.io I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects. A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.
• nikivi 9y ago
  I am working on a community curated search engine to learn anything most optimally : https://learn-anything.xyz/ https://learn-anything.xyz/ Everything is open source and is MIT licensed, both the search engine and the entire database it searches over. There are however many things that we can still do to take this idea further. Hopefully more people join to help us with that. :)
  • syveen 9y ago
    This's really cool :) thank you for bringing this up
  • subhashp 9y ago
    Very interesting concept, nice presentation! It will be valuable when lots of experts start adding knowledge to it.
• alexanderson 9y ago
  Https://github.com/Thorium-sim/thorium - Starship simulator controls. Think Bridge Simulators (like Artemis) meet D&D. The controls facilitate doing space missions, where one participant is a game master and the others take various roles on the ship. I love working on the controls, and I’m learning a lot too. I’m going to start taking donations soon, but don’t plan on making a ton of money.
• StavrosK 9y ago
  Oh man, that describes all of them. http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS https://www.eternum.io/ https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface https://www.pastery.net/ https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin https://spa.mnesty.com/ https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers https://www.timetaco.com/ https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff: https://www.stavros.io/projects/ https://www.stavros.io/projects/
  • wheresvic1 9y ago
    Spamnesty is dope! How do you avoid getting blacklisted by the spammers though?
    • StavrosK 9y ago
      I don't, but there are plenty of spammers to go around :P
  • kzisme 9y ago
    Those are all pretty awesome! Since they don't really make you any money - do people use them often then - if so how do people find them?
    • StavrosK 9y ago
      Thank you! It depends on what you mean by "often", I guess often enough. I use Pastery all the time (especially the editor plugins), and all my developer friends love it too. I guess people use some of the other services too, for example I get lots of comments for Spamnesty. I don't really care enough to look, though, as I built them for myself or because I thought they'd be fun, or because I just wanted to make something with a friend.
      • kzisme 9y ago
        I was just curious because many developers enjoy (and want) people to use the stuff they write. I was just wondering if/how you tried to market it or show it to more people.
• sideshowb 9y ago
  http://www.tropic.org.uk/~crispin/quantum/ http://www.tropic.org.uk/~crispin/quantum/ Upside: it's got a quantum physics game engine, and can teach you quantum mechanics Downside: HN will continue to tear me apart for making them download a JAR file but you can grab the source and compile it yourself if you like
  • camtarn 9y ago
    Looks cool. I'd love to be able to see more screenshots of the game - at the moment they're faded out and placed in the background, and when you click them you end up just downloading the game itself. I actually don't mind the JAR file thing ;) but I'm unlikely to download and try it without knowing a bit more about the game concept.
    • sideshowb 9y ago
      There are more screenshots here http://www.indiedb.com/games/quantum-marble-maze http://www.indiedb.com/games/quantum-marble-maze Blog describing the physics here https://linkingideasblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/learning-quantum-mechanics-the-easy-way/ https://linkingideasblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/learning-q... I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape. One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)
• anfractuosity 9y ago
  A few of mine: https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-tree/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - 'painting' the LEDs on my christmas tree. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/optical-magnetic-stripe-reading/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/optical-magnetic-stri... - optically decoding data from magnetic stripe cards. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/zymeter-simple/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/zymeter-simple/ - a rather unsuccessful attempt at measuring specific gravity. https://github.com/anfractuosity/musicplayer https://github.com/anfractuosity/musicplayer - playing .wav files via RF emissions from a laptop.
  • atomashpolskiy 9y ago
    I dig it. Man, this is what real engineering is supposed to look like > I now have 57 GB of audio files of bubbles Sounds like.. FUN!
    • anfractuosity 9y ago
      Haha, cheers
  • tonetheman 9y ago
    The xmas tree is great. Good stuff.
• sunilkumarc 9y ago
  I have been developing side projects for fun since my Engineering days(from past 6 years). Below are the ones worth showing: 1. Track Courier - This was developed to learn the tech-stack Node.js + Backbone.js + PostgreSQL (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/track-courier https://github.com/sunilkumarc/track-courier) 2. Form Filler - This was developed to solve my own problem of having to type common fields like email id, username etc again and again on different web pages (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/form-filler https://github.com/sunilkumarc/form-filler) 3. Subtitle Corrector - This is a linux command line utility to correct subtitle files. Using this one can adjust the entire file by +x or -x seconds (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/subtitle-corrector https://github.com/sunilkumarc/subtitle-corrector) 4. 100 - This is a project I started to learn to solve Algorithms and DS problems for my interview preparations. The plan was to solve at least 1 problem everyday for 100 days. But I couldn't do it everyday. Still whenever I solve a problem I put it in this repository (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100 https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100) 5. Desktop Commentary - This is again a linux utility which shows Cricket scores every 10 seconds on your desktop as a Notification Bubble. The problem I was trying to solve here was to avoid going to Espncricinfo website every now and then to check scores when a match is going on (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary) 6. Alarm Manager - This is one more linux utility to set multiple alarms (up to 5) on your linux machine (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/alarm-manager https://github.com/sunilkumarc/alarm-manager)
• ivanceras 9y ago
  A few of mine. https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown https://github.com/ivanceras/curtain https://github.com/ivanceras/curtain https://github.com/ivanceras/rustorm https://github.com/ivanceras/rustorm I've spin up some semi-polish desktop app, but never get some revenue.
• golergka 9y ago
  Curious how no one mentioned kids yet.
  • daleroberts 9y ago
    Practicing to make kids == sheer joy?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • max0563 9y ago
    Kids? Do they have a Github repo?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• honestoHeminway 9y ago
  My game. Its still buggy, and has grown - very, very complex. It will never be on steam. Still work on it every day. https://github.com/PicassoCT/Journeywar https://github.com/PicassoCT/Journeywar
• yev 9y ago
  Making vue components: https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-modal https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-modal https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-toggle-button https://github.com/euvl/vue-js-toggle-button https://github.com/euvl/vue-notification https://github.com/euvl/vue-notification
  • iDemonix 9y ago
    I'm just getting started with Vue 2, these look great and I'll definitely be downloading to experiment with.
    • yev 9y ago
      Awesome! Feel free to ask questions in issue tracker if you'll get stuck :)
  • cdubzzz 9y ago
    Nice. We looked at vue-notification for Timestrap[0] and will probably use it whenever we get development rebooted. [0] https://github.com/overshard/timestrap https://github.com/overshard/timestrap
    • yev 9y ago
      Wow, great! Let me know if you will need anything, I'll be happy to help you out! :)
• titusblair 9y ago
  https://pitchpodcasts.com https://pitchpodcasts.com http://stockbrokergame.com http://stockbrokergame.com https://bookcelerator.com https://bookcelerator.com https://cakedomain.com https://cakedomain.com
• yogthos 9y ago
  http://www.luminusweb.net/ http://www.luminusweb.net/ and all my GitHub projects https://github.com/yogthos https://github.com/yogthos
  • christophilus 9y ago
    Well, even if it doesn't make you money, I hope you know how much you're appreciated in the Clojure community. Thanks for all the hard work!
    • yogthos 9y ago
      Thanks, it's great to hear. :)
  • syveen 9y ago
    wow.... keep up, I just followed you
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• wigrb23 9y ago
  https://collegecollections.co/ https://collegecollections.co/ - marketplace for artwork by art students
• SirHound 9y ago
  https://popmotion.io https://popmotion.io - JavaScript animation framework. Writing this over the last few years has probably done more to improve my career than my actual jobs. I really enjoy it but sometimes maintenance does come at the cost of doing other projects.
• kadirayk 9y ago
  http://apimockery.com/ http://apimockery.com/ - API Mocking as a Service I built it to learn React and brush up my Go skills. I occasionally add new features. It makes $0 now, but I plan to earn 10$ a month before my amazon free tier expires :)
  • shime 9y ago
    This is a great idea! Design could use some love, though.
    • kadirayk 9y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! The text below annoys a good deal of people as well, I should add 'improving design' to my big pile of todos :)
• kvz 9y ago
  I'm writing a bot for cryptotrading without having the proper knowledge for something like that. Learning as I go and I expect to lose some money on this (certainly won't give it a budget to manage that I can't afford to lose), but I'm having a ton of fun entertaining the fantasy that I could 'game the system' with my bot
  • NicoJuicy 9y ago
    EMA sounds familiar. I'm exactly in the same position with dot net as programming language. I'm interested in working together , i know other programming languages also
• aaronhoffman 9y ago
  https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/ https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/ - drag-and-drop d3.js visualization tool https://www.gmailcontactsync.com/ https://www.gmailcontactsync.com/ - sync gmail contacts between accounts
• sellislem 9y ago
  http://techexplicit.tk/ http://techexplicit.tk/ - a tech based news and review website that makes 0$
• deepakkarki 9y ago
  I built https://discoverdev.io https://discoverdev.io - just to refresh some basic web skills and learn some machine learning! Turned out pretty decent, and now I spend about 20 minutes everyday curating interesting engineering links. Don't think I'll make any money out of it, but is an interesting post dinner routine :D
• shime 9y ago
  https://github.com/shime/livedown https://github.com/shime/livedown - Realtime Markdown previews for your favorite editor https://zapsnap.io https://zapsnap.io - Temporary peer to peer screenshot sharing (MacOS only for now)
• eneve 9y ago
  FAQr - Android app for reading Gamefaqs (best for retro ASCII) - https://faqrapp.com https://faqrapp.com
• joelennon 9y ago
  https://programmingpodcasts.com https://programmingpodcasts.com - it's a directory of software dev and related podcasts. Haven't ruled out monetising it and to be honest maintenance is almost zero as it runs on autopilot. I'm it's biggest user, use it everyday.
  • j_s 9y ago
    Have you considered tracking the various programming live-streamers across all the different services?
• marcus_holmes 9y ago
  http://celtic-knotwork.online http://celtic-knotwork.online had to get that code out of my head and onto the web. There's more stuff I want to do to it when I get the time/passion
• viridian 9y ago
  I started a podcast with another Hacker News poster. We have no ads, make no money, but it's great fun just talking about big local events in Columbus Ohio, and also big tech news. It's obviously extremely niche and local, but there's always something new happening in urban development, politics, that sort of thing here. http://columbusthisweek.podbean.com http://columbusthisweek.podbean.com for the RSS feed, or itunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/columbus-this-week/id1260782318 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/columbus-this-week/id126...
  • ellius 9y ago
    I don't see a lot of Columbus, OH on HN so here's a shout out. I'll definitely try the podcast.
    • viridian 9y ago
      Cool, thanks for that. Eric and I are both pretty big Columbus evangelists and are pretty active in the startup weekend community.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dmitri1981 9y ago
  https://www.hnlondon.com https://www.hnlondon.com - been running it for about seven years and had some amazing speakers give talks. Sets me back a few grand a year in sponsorship shortfalls, but is an amazing experience when a great speaker inspires the whole room.
  • tugberkk 9y ago
    Hey, this looks pretty good! Nice work.
• jasoninprivate 9y ago
  I started a blog (this week) focusing on how retail investors can get exposure to startups and other private companies, which are normally reserved for VC and institutional investors. The ultimate goal is how can we, as startup employees and enthusiasts manage our own risk? Since we are heavily exposed to risk in ways other players in this space aren't (because we work for one company at a time, and they invest in many). Not sure where it's going to take me yet. https://jasoninprivate.com https://jasoninprivate.com
• mclemme 9y ago
  Built a few things to teach myself new stuff, the ones that are still online are: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitmasch.braintiles https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitmasch.b... - Wanted to learn a cross platform app framework. Built a simple game that would help my niece get better at basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Made with Apache Cordova. She only played it a few times, but her dad (my brother) ended up getting hooked on it for a while, beating other people's high score with 50-100 points every time someone beat his highscore. http://p2pool.jir.dk http://p2pool.jir.dk - Wanted to get some experience in building a crawler and was interested in p2pool cryptocurrency mining at the time, so I built a p2pool crawler. The site does have adsense, but it doesn't really make any money.
• mosselman 9y ago
  https://cadodo.nl/en https://cadodo.nl/en - Create wish lists for your next birthday/wedding/etc https://bookmarkify.it https://bookmarkify.it - Create javascript bookmarklets https://github.com/abuisman/freudjs https://github.com/abuisman/freudjs - Component library in JS for when view libraries like React are overkill
  • davchana 9y ago
    I typed simple Javascript codevas following in your bookmarkify.it alert(1); It gave output as: javascript:(function(){window.s0=document.createElement('script');window.s0.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');window.s0.setAttribute('src','https://bookmarkify.it/bookmarklets/6804/raw');document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(window.s0);})(); So every time this bookmarklet is clicked, a http request goes to your website, and then the code executed? I can see the possible use of this in super duper long javascript code, but why this trip even for simplest code?
• malgregator 9y ago
  I am collecting articles about the cybersecurity, and create weekly aggregated article about them. For example: https://www.malgregator.com/week-31-2017.html https://www.malgregator.com/week-31-2017.html
• viralpoetry 9y ago
  Alzheimer password generator - Chrome extension for domain dependent password generation https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password-genera/emclcafdgdeodlhpenmejdapecfgenof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password... https://github.com/viralpoetry/alzheimer-password-generator https://github.com/viralpoetry/alzheimer-password-generator
  • ghusbands 9y ago
    Looks good, but that's a really terrible name for it. Please consider changing it to something less insulting.
    • MoDu_HN 9y ago
      You do realize Alzheimer is a family name? Stop trying the make the world a safe space.
• TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
  I wrote a web e-mail client that pulled e-mail from three or four accounts into a single responsive UI, and filtered through a whitelist. It was really handy. Note to self, get that working again.
• zie 9y ago
  https://sexwork.us/ https://sexwork.us/ SexWork.us is aiming to be a reference guide all about sex work.
• jimaek 9y ago
  Definitely jsDelivr https://github.com/jsdelivr/jsdelivr https://github.com/jsdelivr/jsdelivr Billions of requests every month. Building the service is pure joy. I have lots of new features coming like a new website, stats per project and more.
  • aaomidi 9y ago
    How do you handle the traffic? How much does this cost you to run?
    • jimaek 9y ago
      All traffic is served by CDN sponsors for free. But I pay for most servers, services and freelancers like designers and developers. It costs a lot when I do changes requiring external help which is quite often.
• spajus 9y ago
  As someone who wants to be a gamedev some day, I'm building a community for indie game developers: https://www.gamehero.org https://www.gamehero.org
• overcast 9y ago
  https://kidisms.com https://kidisms.com Sharing funny kid quotes. Been going for years, not a whole lot of traffic, but the family loves it (that was the intention). Recently migrated from a severely aging kohana/mysql backend to express/rethinkdb.
  • jansho 9y ago
    This is great! My smaller siblings say the wittiest things (often without realising) that brighten my day, I often wonder if there's a platform to 'record' them. I hope that your project will eventually turn into that!
    • overcast 9y ago
      Thanks, that was the intent :) Kids say a lot of great stuff, and it's often just forgotten. I'll add a json export so users can save off at some point.
      • devdad 9y ago
        A week after my son found out Michael Jackson had died. He loves Michael Jackson. - Dad. Is Michael Jackson dead? - Yes... (Unsure if this will cause a meltdown) - That's OK. - It is? - Yep. There's two. Which one is dead? - How do you mean? - The white or the brown one?
        • overcast 9y ago
          That's a good kidism! :D
      • jansho 9y ago
        Hmm, I'm suddenly struck by a realisation that I check Instagram everyday for therapy purposes (mostly following art and whimsical stuff.) Sometimes the whole "world is going dystopian" thing is just overwhelming; I can imagine a lot of people loving some light-hearted reminders like your Kidisms :)
    • 9y ago
• kevinyen 9y ago
  https://sympost.com https://sympost.com To help you get heard on the internet instantly. Early beta.
• stefantheard 9y ago
  http://www.overseer.tv http://www.overseer.tv I built a show tracker just for me (it's not nearly where I want it to be, so I don't share it anywhere, eg. currently my show database is out of date I need to see what broke my cron tonight. no ssl cert, no optimization at all I don't even know if my js is minified tbh, etc). I am the only active user http://www.overseer.tv/user/smt http://www.overseer.tv/user/smt and I built this because I watch a shit ton of shows and I often forget when premieres come, or what episode I left off on. My site is basically one click to mark a show/season/episode "watched" and I have a calendar and upcoming section, which is all I wanted from many other sites I tried before creating my own. I host this on an EC2 instance for 29$ a month, and my own usage alone makes it worth it to me haha.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 9y ago
    That sounds really cool. Is it open source?
    • stefantheard 9y ago
      Sure is: https://github.com/smtheard/ShowTracker https://github.com/smtheard/ShowTracker It's not too pretty in there, but it is functional (arguably) haha.
      • WrtCdEvrydy 9y ago
        Doesn't matter, I'll just toss it into Flynn.
  • DKnoll 9y ago
    Either this is the worst-scaling web application ever made or you are massively overpaying/overspeccing your VPS. Going to assume the latter.
    • stefantheard 9y ago
      It's the latter. I don't know why it costs so much, this is the first time I have ever hosted anything so I didn't realize I was overpaying. The way it was phrased I thought I had a year free and then it would be 29$/month but they just started charging me immediately. I haven't had time to look into it. I'll investigate tonight, thanks for pointing it out.
• dogas 9y ago
  I built + maintain todolist[1] which is a GTD-style task management app for the command line. It's getting a bit of traction now which is pretty fun. It got a ton of upvotes on Product Hunt which was really cool to see[2]. I have very loose plans to monetize via a paid subscription for syncing with other devices / phones, but there will always bee a free / open source version as well. [1]: http://todolist.site http://todolist.site [2]: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/todolist https://www.producthunt.com/posts/todolist
  • sshasan 9y ago
    I have been looking for something like todolist for a while now to help me keep track of stuff. Very cool & Thank you for building this!
• TamDenholm 9y ago
  I'm grumpy, i dont like christmas: http://whychristmasisbullshit.com/ http://whychristmasisbullshit.com/
  • snickerbockers 9y ago
    That is the realest website I've ever seen.
  • NumberCruncher 9y ago
    >> Christmas is worse than a puppy because you cant put Christmas in a sack and drown it. I love this one.
  • exikyut 9y ago
    This is awesome. I'm very curious what sort of crazy amount of spam gets fed into that unprotected text box though.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • mdpopescu 9y ago
    > Before then, there multiple variations of his look. You're missing a "were" after "there".
• nfriedly 9y ago
  Everything to do with cryptocurrency! I wrote trading bot that was actually making a small profit - and then the exchange got hacked and took all of my coins & dollars with it :( I've started to get into Ethereum and Solidity recently, but mining even a few coins just to have gas money costs more in electricity than they're worth. I'm letting my desktop mine anyways, but when I reach my pools payout threshold in a week or two (it's got a 3-year-old GPU), I'll probably kill the mining. (I know I could just buy some ETH with USD, but that's probably even more expensive and somehow feels different.) (To be fair it hasn't been all negative - I bought a copy of the game Portal with the first bitcoin I ever earned, and a Kindle with the second bitcoin. But looking at it from a strictly money perspective, I'm definitely in the hole. In theory, it will be positive eventually.. but I'm still not sure exactly how.)
  • anfractuosity 9y ago
    The trading bot sounded fun. I was always curious about the bots that were apparently used on betting sites like betfair to perform arbitrage.
    • amingilani 9y ago
      I one quadrupled my capital with a betting bot running a martingale strategy. Then I made it run overnight and lost all the funds. Turns out there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run. With a martingale strategy the chances of losing are miniscule but if you play 10,000 rounds at a 0.01% of losing, you're going to lose once. And that's when you lose all your capital.
      • anfractuosity 9y ago
        This is the kind of thing I meant: http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/betfair-bots-and-opportunity-out-there.html http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/betfair-bots...
      • ssanders82 9y ago
        I don't think the fact that your coin-flip martingale strategy didn't work is evidence that "there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run".
• agentultra 9y ago
  Working on a proof of a modular exponentiation algorithm in Lean with a focus on performance. Hoping to be able to extract a low-level ASM or C implementation from the proof.
  • aneutron 9y ago
    Any chance you'd have a link to a repository where you publish your work ?
    • agentultra 9y ago
      I'm not working alone on it. Publishing my work at https://github.com/agentultra/lean-modexp https://github.com/agentultra/lean-modexp
• jordanrobinson 9y ago
  Making websites like this: http://javascriptbythekilogram.online/ http://javascriptbythekilogram.online/ Though I can't really take the credit on this one, I just had the idea.
• kehers 9y ago
  https://thefeed.press/ https://thefeed.press/ Built for personal use. Not currently making any money but hope to monetise sometime later.
• dkarp 9y ago
  I made and maintain https://transparentmetric.com/ https://transparentmetric.com/ I find it fascinating watching the changes made to news articles over time. It lets you get into the mind of the various journalists and editors at different news organisations and see how they react to things. I just wish I had more time to develop it further.
• vanderZwan 9y ago
  It doesn't have to be a full project, right? Do random drive-by PR-requests to open-source projects count? A few months ago I ended up scratching an optimisation itch for weeks, trying to figure out ways to make the lz-string[0][1] library faster and smaller. Near the end I went a bit nuts with trying out what works, methinks (nested trees built out of arrays and such), but I had a lot of fun. It's not even my library, nor did my PR request get accepted/rejected yet. It did however make the compression up to 2x to 10x faster, depending on how well the data compresses. And hey, I now have an intuitive understanding of LZ compression that I never thought I'd have! Since a few days I've been working on writing a component for idyll[2] that lets you embed p5js sketches[3]. Progress here[4][5]. [0] http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html [1] https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/pull/98 https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/pull/98 [2] https://idyll-lang.github.io/ https://idyll-lang.github.io/ [3] https://p5js.org/ https://p5js.org/ [4] https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/issues/117 https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/issues/117 [5] https://jobleonard.github.io/idyll-p5/ https://jobleonard.github.io/idyll-p5/
  • ovrdrv3 9y ago
    Do you like the coding train[1]? [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      I have commented many a time on Shiffman's twitter that we need more gifs of him dancing, so yes :)
  • exikyut 9y ago
    Interesting. I need to do some deep diving on LZ myself, to build a highly-compressible custom file format. Would benchmarks from a really old laptop be useful for #98 ?
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      Probably, because it's trying to be backwards compatible. LZ is really elegant once it clicks, and Pieroxy's approach of growing token size with alphabet is a very neat solution to the problem of the unicode alphabet being huge
• preinheimer 9y ago
  Global Ping Statistics - https://wondernetwork.com/pings https://wondernetwork.com/pings We have ~240 servers world wide, we get them all to ping each other every hour, and record the results. We've been generating them for years, they're a pain to store, we've made $0 with it. But I really like the data we're getting. We recently moved a lot of the legacy data into S3 to save our own backup & restore process ( https://wonderproxy.com/blog/moving-ping-data-to-s3/ https://wonderproxy.com/blog/moving-ping-data-to-s3/ )
  • iDemonix 9y ago
    What makes them a pain to store? This looks perfect for something like Graphite.
    • preinheimer 9y ago
      Well, we went with the datastore we knew, MySQL. So on the upside we've got full granularity forever. On the downside we were backing up the full dataset every night. Plus the large amount of data was slowing pages down (even on indexed queries). Now that we've moved the data older than two weeks over to S3, and query with Athena our site is faster, and we're not treating our backup infrastructure quite as poorly.
      • exikyut 9y ago
        I just did some back-of-the-envelope math. The biggest ping time I see is just under 4 seconds. With milliseconds, that translates into a 7-digit string if you pretend the first 4 digits are the integer part and the last 3 are the fraction. The caveat is that you must store "42.32" as "0042.032", someone more advanced may be able to suggest a better system. The maximum 22-bit value is 4194304, which is a tad small. 23 bits is 8388608 - and I suspect you'd consider an 8388 millisecond ping time a bug. :D 64-bit time is a fad just because it's easier to do multiples of 8 than bitpack. However, if you use 33-bit time, you can count up to 8589934592, which is the year 2242. I see you have 250 servers. Using a single int will only get you up to 255. Ouch. But using two bytes gives you space for 64000 servers you'll never use. Wat do? Well, if you're okay with calculating the avg and mdev in realtime, that's (23*2)+33 (min+max+date), which works out to 79 bytes. So you could prefix _9_ bytes for the server ID, which gives you 512 servers. So that's 9+23+23+33=88 bytes per ID. At 88 bytes per ID, one year's worth of records for 250 servers is 192720000, or 183MB per year. This is not a particularly fancy approach, and is likely inefficient in many ways. But it's definitely doable, both for long-term (full-resolution/granularity) archival and realtime querying. You could make a superfast server in Go that accepted simple queries and handled the on-disk format. You could export the Go server over the Web directly (Go is pretty concurrent, but requires 8K per goroutine, which adds if you have eg 10ks of connections...) or use a simple/low-level protocol from your existing Web framework.
• donald_the_game 9y ago
  I created https://donaldsbizarreadventure.com/ https://donaldsbizarreadventure.com/ because I always wanted to be a game developer.
• shalabhc 9y ago
  http://howl.io http://howl.io A lightweight, native, extensible text editor.
• bcruddy 9y ago
  https://github.com/bcruddy/taco https://github.com/bcruddy/taco - a create-react-app + redux + express boilerplate. It currently grabs pricing data for BTC, ETH, and LTC and I mostly put it together for myself about a month ago. https://github.com/bcruddy/GramLikeCam https://github.com/bcruddy/GramLikeCam - my Panthers' fan friends seem to enjoy it. Initially I wanted to write a bot that would grab new instagram posts from Cam Newton and translate the weird characters he uses into plain english and post it as the first comment but ended up going pretty much the opposite direction. https://github.com/bcruddy/tumbo https://github.com/bcruddy/tumbo - a very unpolished ascii video chat to play with websockets and string compression, I'll occasionally check out the website and see someone live streaming a day in the office.
• dmuth 9y ago
  I built a website which offers real-time statistics for Philadelphia's Regional Rail train system: https://www.septastats.com/ https://www.septastats.com/ This lets public transit passengers answer questions like: - "My train is getting later and later, is it actually moving?" - "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly) - "Is it just my train, or are many trains running late?" - "What was the on-time performance of this train like yesterday? 2 days ago? 7 days ago?" (Some trains tend to be chronically late) It may come as a surprise that the backend of the system is actually not a database, but Splunk (http://www.splunk.com http://www.splunk.com). DBs are nice, but Splunk is fantastic when it comes to data analytics and reporting. I'm currently waiting for Splunk to make some of their machine learning modules available for free so that I can start pulling in weather data, train the machine learning component against both that and the train data, and use that to predict the likelihood of any given train becoming late.
  • MadSax 9y ago
    Neat.
  • skykooler 9y ago
    As a Philadelphian, this is pretty awesome!
  • killahpriest 9y ago
    Nice! You should add it to https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit. There's another SEPTA perf related thing on the list: http://phor.net/apps/septa/ http://phor.net/apps/septa/.
  • qzervaas 9y ago
    This is pretty cool. My "project that doesn't make me money" is https://transitfeeds.com https://transitfeeds.com Currently it archives a ton of static schedule data, and some basic GTFS-realtime archiving stuff. My longer-term goal is to archive all the GTFS-rt feeds every 30 seconds to provide similar analysis to what you've done here. Obviously this requires even more storage than I'm already using and a ton of data processing, which is probably above my pay grade.
• tcash 9y ago
  https://github.com/mini2Dx/mini2Dx https://github.com/mini2Dx/mini2Dx - A simple API for writing 2D games in Java (originally inspired by Slick2D) I've been extending and updating the framework for a few years now. There's a tiny userbase but I like writing my games with it.
• khc 9y ago
  goofys - https://github.com/kahing/goofys/ https://github.com/kahing/goofys/ - like s3fs except a lot faster catfs - https://github.com/kahing/catfs/ https://github.com/kahing/catfs/ - generic disk cache for fuse filesystems
• codeplea 9y ago
  I have a lot of projects like that! https://f5bot.com https://f5bot.com - Social media monitoring. It can email you when your keyword (e.g. company name) appears on Hacker News or Reddit. I don't have any plans to monetize it. I just made it as a small fun project. Also, like many here, I've made a bunch of open source software for no reason other than the joy of it. Don't ever see that changing. https://github.com/codeplea https://github.com/codeplea https://github.com/tulipcharts https://github.com/tulipcharts
• LikeAnElephant 9y ago
  A friend and I run https://www.brewnotice.com https://www.brewnotice.com It started as a project for us and a handful of friends, now we have around 2,000 users. All running on a $5 / mo Digital Ocean server. We're not planning to ever charge for it. Right now it's just fun to work on, and it gets us into a handful of beer events. Win win!
  • anfractuosity 9y ago
    That looks very nifty. I sometimes browse untappd to find people reviewing beers in pubs to see what's probably on tap, but that seems to require going to each specific pubs page on the app to check what might be on. So your site looks very handy! (I'm in the UK though alas so I assume I can't use your app?)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nara_s 9y ago
  As a sport enthusiast, I run a website for athletes to tell stories based on activity data http://storyteller.fit http://storyteller.fit Doing it out of passion is a great source of motivation and continuous learning, plus you get in touch with a lot of people.
• fergie 9y ago
  https://github.com/fergiemcdowall/search-index/ https://github.com/fergiemcdowall/search-index/ - its a lib for making embedable, torrantable, load-into-the-browserable search indices. Pretty modest downloads so far, but I love hacking on it.
• guaka 9y ago
  Hitchhiking guide http://hitchwiki.org http://hitchwiki.org dumpster diving guide http://trashwiki.org http://trashwiki.org social network https://www.trustroots.org https://www.trustroots.org
  • literallycancer 9y ago
    Hitchwiki is very useful. There's been something wrong with downloading the point of interest lately though (timeouts with large datasets like the one for Germany).
• vasusen 9y ago
  I have my take on moon-phase based messaging app that I continue for fun - http://moonletter.com/ http://moonletter.com/
• max0563 9y ago
  Didn't make too much progress yet, but I am making a PHP web framework inspired by the one file codebase that Bottle.py uses and the structure (loosely) of Flask. I am a Python programmer that recently had to use PHP for work, if you haven't noticed :P https://github.com/Max00355/Feather https://github.com/Max00355/Feather
• calebsurfs 9y ago
  I need coastal weather data to find the best waves for surfing so I built http://www.swellmatrix.com http://www.swellmatrix.com I would start other projects with money- making potential but there are always features to add to the site that can get me more waves...
• t0mek 9y ago
  Yet another Game Boy Color emulator, written in Java: https://github.com/trekawek/coffee-gb https://github.com/trekawek/coffee-gb It's quite compatible and brought me a lot of fun. Blog post describing it: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/ http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/
  • Insanity 9y ago
    Wow, that is really cool! I did not have the idea of creating an emulator, but some time ago I got curious as to how games were made for the GBA, so to try that I made a small Pong game [0]. It's really fun to play with 'old' technology from our childhoods. [0]: https://github.com/DylanMeeus/GBAPong https://github.com/DylanMeeus/GBAPong
    • devotedtoneu 9y ago
      Very cool. I wonder why you disqualify your multiplayer mode? Sure on the SP it would be unrealistic but I see no reason two players couldn't share an original model GBA, holding one end each.
      • Insanity 9y ago
        Thank you :-) I suppose it could work indeed
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• geuis 9y ago
  https://jsonip.com https://jsonip.com Been running it for years and supports millions of requests a day. Started off as a simple experiment with node.js years ago but turned into a utility thousands of people use every day. * Ignore jsonip.org. Some Trump troll set that up in June. I made the mistake of not registering all of my domains. Oh well.
  • davchana 9y ago
    You can't and don't need to register all the domains, as now there are literally 100sof extensions.
• kgabis 9y ago
  A JSON library in C: https://github.com/kgabis/parson https://github.com/kgabis/parson
• mcone 9y ago
  I made an API that allows you to programmatically monitoring the status pages of hundreds of web-based applications: https://statusbot.io/ https://statusbot.io/ Hoping to add a bunch more services and webhooks soon.
• dhpiggott 9y ago
  I built https://www.liquidityapp.com/ https://www.liquidityapp.com/ over the summer of 2015: "Liquidity is a smartphone based currency built for Monopoly and all board and tabletop games.", and I actively maintain it. I have enhancement ideas too, but I barely have any time to put into it these days so it is primarily just maintenance. It's one part Android client and one part Scala backend (though there's some Scala in the client too). While I'm fairly pleased with the UX and UI I was able to create (given that I really don't consider them my speciality), the backend is the bit that keeps my interest now. That uses Akka, Akka Persistence (i.e. it's event sourced), and Akka HTTP among other things. The clients communicate with it via websockets. The details aren't exposed to users but it uses public key authentication so as to not burden users with passwords/PINs. Each app generates a keypair when first used, and QR codes are used to make changing account ownership simple.
  • vegasje 9y ago
    This is a really cool idea. Nice job!
• bradbeattie 9y ago
  I'm working on collating as many sources of Canadian federal data into a single relational database, and exposing that data via a public API. https://api.iscanadafair.ca/ https://api.iscanadafair.ca/ Given the sources of this data, I'm pretty sure I'm not even allowed to profit off of this. Not really a problem as I'd be doing this in my spare time anyway. The data-visualization side of it (e.g. https://iscanadafair.ca/data-visualization/example-usage/ https://iscanadafair.ca/data-visualization/example-usage/) isn't my strong-suit, but it's fun to muck around in regardless.
  • vijayr 9y ago
    I did something similar on a much smaller scale for census, bea etc (only the DB part). Here in the US, federal gov data (census, bea, bls etc) can be used in commercial products as far as I know. Might be the same in Canada, worth looking into? Great idea
    • bradbeattie 9y ago
      Yeah, I don't recall where I saw something that suggested fair use. https://lop.parl.ca/ImportantNotices-e.html#Copyrights https://lop.parl.ca/ImportantNotices-e.html#Copyrights doesn't speak directly to that issue, but it's probably easier to just cite my sources and not bother with the revenue side of things. It's more important to me that this data be freely and easily available than it is for me to turn any kind of meagre profit.
  • allengeorge 9y ago
    This is absolutely awesome! Makes it so much easier to source data, as opposed to trying to trawl various websites, etc. etc.
  • dflock 9y ago
    You should talk to these guys: https://twitter.com/CDS_GC https://twitter.com/CDS_GC
• PizzaPete 9y ago
  Together with an old study pal I've built a platform for students in the Netherlands to find housing: https://www.roombase.nl/ https://www.roombase.nl/ We've never made any money with it, it's only costing us money. Learning new techniques and seeing the site being used makes up for that.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• vitomd 9y ago
  I couldn´t find a good online site to discover new nonfiction books based on selected great quotes so I made http://arandomquote.com http://arandomquote.com Another project is gDriveSync.js: Javascript wrapper library for Google Drive API v3. You can list, save, read documents just using html and js https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js https://github.com/vitogit/gDriveSync.js Another one Sorter: https://github.com/vitogit/sorter https://github.com/vitogit/sorter is a webapp to organize ideas, tasks and information using bullet points and hashtags.
• lawrencewu 9y ago
  I created Juicebox, which lets you listen to youtube/soundcloud songs with other people: https://www.juicebox.dj/ https://www.juicebox.dj/ I have made no money off of this. In fact, I've probably paid hundreds in hosting/domain fees. But I love what I've built so far and use it everyday with my friends. Please check it out, I'd love to hear any feedback!
  • kermittd 9y ago
    This is random but I saw you on reddit, great product!
• rayalez 9y ago
  I occasionally create digital art: https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez and make video tutorials about it: https://www.youtube.com/digitalverse https://www.youtube.com/digitalverse Computer graphics is still by far the most fun hobby I've ever had, I absolutely love it, it's like the most engaging computer game you can imagine times 100. There's not much profit in making art(unless you want to do it professionally), but it's an awesome way to spend my free time, and sometimes it generates some ideas I like to share on youtube. If you want to get into it, I highly recommend checking out SideFX Houdini. It's a bit technical, but extremely powerful and well designed 3D software, kinda like emacs of CG applications.
  • tonetheman 9y ago
    beeeeeeeeee-youtiful stuff. Keep doing it!
    • rayalez 9y ago
      Thank you! =)
• rsync 9y ago
  "Oh By" https://0x.co https://0x.co I continue to believe this is a useful tool even though we've sold fewer than 100 of them ...
• avh02 9y ago
  built a slack slash command to spew out excuses (inspired bigtime by giphy) - mainly because I was unemployed and wanted to learn how the slack APIs work - https://xqz.es https://xqz.es - I put a blog post together covering how it came to be [1] - also forced me to learn how to get Let's Encrypt certificates. Also built a twitter stream reading android app [2] - it's butt ugly but was super useful while I lived in Beirut and there was the occasional bomb going off (at the time, that's kind of settled for now, and I no longer live there) - there was a lot i intended to do with it but just sort of... stopped. [1] - https://arahayrabedian.github.io/writing-a-slack-application/ https://arahayrabedian.github.io/writing-a-slack-application... [2] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rollingblackout.twittarium https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rollingbla...
  • da02 9y ago
    Where did you move to after Beirut? Anything you miss about Beirut?
    • avh02 9y ago
      as cliche as this answer often is: I miss the food and drink most - never quite had anything like it since i left (e.g: bartending just doesn't seem the same on average anywhere else I've been). so I last 'permanently' lived there in 2013, worked in Dubai for almost 3 years after that and now finishing off my MSc in the UK for the past year. (edit: to add: I'm from there - so i go back often and get my food fix)
• apankrat 9y ago
  A networking IO abstraction library in C - https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper Based around an idea of IO pipes with minimal semantics (duplex, reliable, ordered) that they can then extend to implement other traits like IO buffering, atomic send, packetization, compression, encryption, etc. [1] This then allows merging together pipes of different types (by attaching the output of one to the input of another), which combines their traits and yields, for example, a reliable datagram carrier with in-flight compression. With this it also becomes possible to write a simple IO bridge [2] that relays both data _and_ operational state between two pipes. The bridge in turn can be used to implement all sorts of interesting things, e.g. proper TCP relay, SSL tunneling proxy, TCP trunking proxy, etc. [1] https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/inc/libp/io_pipe.h https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/i... [2] https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/inc/libp/io_bridge.h https://github.com/apankrat/tcp-striper/blob/master/src/io/i...
• makapuf 9y ago
  I created the bitbox console, a DIY console for which I and a few others develop random games, which is starting to get some traction. The console is based on baremetal ARM cortex m micro. And then I ported a few 8bit emulators. Edit: added url http://github.com/makapuf/bitbox http://github.com/makapuf/bitbox
• tejas1mehta 9y ago
  1. imse.co - internet movie search engine. Its google for movies. Allows for search queries like: - johnny depp fantasy movies on netflix - english scifi movies on netflix - english movies about lawyers on netflix or hulu - movies similar to the pursuit of happyness 2. activify.org - search engine for movies, shows & music.
• billforsternz 9y ago
  I've been working on my chess GUI for over seven years now http://triplehappy.com http://triplehappy.com. I've made a few hundred dollars in donations, but maybe 10 cents an hour is not why you work on something like this, it has to be a labour of love. I do wonder if I am going to be working on this for the rest of my life, there's always more to do....
• uncled1023 9y ago
  I make a bunch of different little services for others to use. Started for just friends, but has grown a bit. I use it a lot to test out new ideas, and learn from it. https://www.teknik.io/ https://www.teknik.io/ Also, I work on a lot of little projects: https://git.teknik.io/Uncled1023 https://git.teknik.io/Uncled1023
• khedoros1 9y ago
  That's...everything that I program that isn't part of my job. A near-universal trait of my hobby projects is that they're basically things that I don't think I could sell. The two that I've put the most time into over the years are an NES emulator and an attempted reimplementation of the Ultima Underworld game engine. There are also things like a C++ port of some Python code to control a PWM-generating chip (inside the skeletal codebase that will eventually control a quadrupedal robot), and a collection of utilities that mostly have to do with things related to DOS-era games.
• Willfire19 9y ago
  I've spent about a year building out AmaranTime (http://store.steampowered.com/app/566800/AmaranTime/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/566800/AmaranTime/), mostly working on movement mechanics. I actually just made a breakthrough, so soon players will be able to run in place to move without having to press and hold a button. While it is for sale, I haven't made much money. Besides, I do this for fun!
• cknight 9y ago
  I built https://suitocracy.com https://suitocracy.com very slowly over the last few years. It is for collating information on the ethical conduct of large corporations, as well as rating and ranking them on various criteria. It'll never make money, but it has been a good project for me to modernise my web development skills which had gone rusty over the preceding decade. I also took the opportunity to learn NGINX and a few other things that I hadn't really been exposed to beforehand.
  • TimJRobinson 9y ago
    Nice work! I've always wanted something like this but as a browser extension for Amazon. On each product it would insert a box that shows how ethical the company behind this product is. Could also show things like how sustainably it was made and if it wad made in a sweatshop etc.
• raybb 9y ago
  I built a tool to schedule Gmail messages to be sent later but without any 3rd party, messy spreadsheets, or self hosting. I just did it for fun and because I wanted a tool like it. https://github.com/RayBB/easy-gmail-scheduler/ https://github.com/RayBB/easy-gmail-scheduler/
• jimhefferon 9y ago
  I write math texts that are Free. It is my creative outlet. My Linear Algebra (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra) has gotten some traction (and I get a small amount of money from Amazon). I also have an Introduction to Proofs: an Inquiry-Based Approach (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs) that I find helps my students, but is in quite a niche area. And I'm working on a Theory of Computation. If I didn't have some creative work I would be much less happy.
  • ciro_langone 9y ago
    This is awesome! You should keep up with this - maybe develop a curriculum and host it all in one place one day?
  • cthulhu0 9y ago
    I'm sure I read your linear algebra book in my undergrad to help me get a grasp on it. I probably still have it on my computer. Thanks for all your work.
  • Buttons840 9y ago
    Didn't expect to see you on HN. I also read your book for self study (not for a class) and really appreciated all the exercises with solutions. Thank you.
• grecy 9y ago
  I created, run and maintain http://wikioverland.org http://wikioverland.org, the community encyclopedia of overland travel It's a wiki of all the info you need to drive your own vehicle around a country, continent or the world. Border crossings, paperwork, insurance, gas prices, camping, drinking water, safety... it's all in there for a massive number of countries in the world. I'm driving around myself, and it occured to me there is so much info out there but it all slides off the front pages of blogs and forums or is buried in facebook posts. Every three months people re-write and re-post the same stuff because they couldn't find it in the first place. The idea is not for WikiOverland to contain all the info, but at least link directly to it.
• jjjensen90 9y ago
  I run/develop/manage a private MMOARPG game server for a dead game called Hellgate: London that we call London 2038. You can see more about it here http://london2038.com http://london2038.com Not only do I not make money on the project, it actually costs me money! :) I have seemingly undying motivation to work on it, knock out bugs, release patches, catch cheaters, etc. The community being so active and excited helps keep me going. I probably spend 30-40 hours of week on the project. Edit: grammar
  • abledon 9y ago
    That was an awesome game! Great work maintaining this
• jqbx_jason 9y ago
  Makes no money but it does helps me discover new music and I really enjoy the community :) Also the development challenges are super fun (real time chat, multi platform, AI). https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm Come join the fun!
  • jqbx_jason 9y ago
    Sorry- should also point out: It's a platform that lets you listen to music in sync with others through Spotify (like tt.fm). You can be a DJ, vote on the track, or star it for later. Has been super useful for music discovery and making internet friends.
• m52go 9y ago
  100 Million Books -- mission is to promote intellectual diversity. It's a Chrome extension/homepage that shows you a new book every time you open a new tab, plus a special hand-picked idea that teaches you a new perspective/fact/concept. I'm evaluating a couple different paths to make it profitable, but it's not currently making anything since Amazon cut me off its affiliate program. http://www.100millionbooks.org http://www.100millionbooks.org
  • imsd 9y ago
    Would you be open to sharing why this was cut from Amazon's affiliate program? Seems to be a pretty cool tool that they would want placement on.
    • m52go 9y ago
      Sure, straight from their email: - Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors - Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed Now does any of that really matter, if the service is moving books? No. But there's no appeal process, and no one to discuss this with. So I'm not glad it happened, but I'm glad it happened early. I've always been hesitant about affiliate programs because of the lack of control (e.g., I didn't launch with it; only integrated it after many users said they wanted it so I could devote more time to it), and now that my concerns have been verified, I know I need to be more creative.
      • alexkavon 9y ago
        Honestly there could be a better way by reaching out to other companies that work with you and form some sort of partnership agreement. Then you could give amazon "the finger" simultaneously...if you so desire.
        • m52go 9y ago
          There are other book vendors who've reached out to offer their affiliate programs, but I'm not sure any of them are worth it. From the short time I was on Amazon, the lion's share of my affiliate revenue came from items other than books that were purchased using cookies that my app had set. Without those non-book items, I would've made very, very little money (e.g., ~$5 instead of ~$300). Books don't cost very much, but Persian rugs do! And there aren't many other booksellers out there who also sell Persian rugs...
• pedrokost 9y ago
  I have been making https://www.klubi.si/ https://www.klubi.si/ sporadically over the past many months (it was meant to be a weekend project, but it never ends there...). It's a map of sports clubs in my country. The idea is to help people find klubs nearby, as well as provide a basic internet presence to those klubs whore founders don't have the time or knowledge to create and maintain a website, or even a Facebook page. The website works by volunteer revision of data, as well as twice a year email reminders to founders to review the data. This helps ensure that the data is the most up to date as possible. Unfortunately, not all klubs even have a public working email address, so thinking of it, I could probably do something about as well.
• pesfandiar 9y ago
  JavaScript Online: http://javascript.onl http://javascript.onl A few JavaScript problems that you can solve and grade online (it's a static website). I haven't done any work on it recently. Added a few Amazon affiliate links originally, but they didn't make any money and Amazon has closed that account now.
• heyok 9y ago
  http://heyokapp.co http://heyokapp.co It was fun to code and it makes organizing with friends a breeze Here's the facebook page - facebook.com/heyokapp About video - https://www.facebook.com/heyokapp/videos/460327694335849 https://www.facebook.com/heyokapp/videos/460327694335849
  • ebbflowgo 9y ago
    Oh, what? This is great
• dchuk 9y ago
  Only launched recently, and the prospects of it making money one day are slim: https://engineered.at https://engineered.at Still fun to keep up to date with Rails with, and to just code in general (as a product manager now, don't get to code much).
• tomcam 9y ago
  Hope I don't get flagged or anything. I am astounded by the generosity of the amazing people on this page and have been upvoting like a madman. I probably look like a bot at this point
  • superasn 9y ago
    Yes people here are just awesome. When i made this thread i never expected so many responses. It's a huge motivation for me to see how so many people are doing so many awesome things just for the joy of doing it.
• andywood 9y ago
  https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/gaia-eternal https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/gaia-eternal It's a big procedural crafting game. The long-term goal is to make a Civilization-like game set in a Minecraft-like world, with really good AI. It's also a testbed for a bunch of ideas I've developed about massive, virtualized simulation. What that means is that you could in principle have thousands of cities with millions of individual inhabitants going about their business. But it's sort of analogous to lazy evaluation in that things are only computed if they would be perceived by the player, or need to be consistent with past information the player already knows.
• CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
  Virtually everything in the paragonie namespace on Packagist generates zero revenue, but we built and maintain them because we want to make the PHP ecosystem more secure by default. https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie
• ioddly 9y ago
  I wrote and use meditations ( https://github.com/ioddly/meditations https://github.com/ioddly/meditations ) to help me organize my day using the principles of habit formation. It's been pretty immensely helpful to me. Funnily enough although I never thought of monetizing it, assuming there wouldn't be much interest, there are several similar apps that seem to be pretty popular and doing well. I keep working on my own because it's a good learning exercise and I can keep my data encrypted, locally.
• expertentipp 9y ago
  Dead simple personal website in Python and plain JavaScript with contact form, URL shortener, private bookmarks, etc. It's my own territory and I do what I want! fuck unit tests, fuck linters, fuck commit messages length limit, fuck your newest web framework, fuck transpilers, fuck pull requests.
• mslate 9y ago
  A video podcast of guests sharing their career advice for folks coming into software engineering from unconventional backgrounds: http://theaccidentalengineer.com/ http://theaccidentalengineer.com/ It's an absolute joy, I am making $0 at this point in time.
• kryptogeist 9y ago
  I made an app to help me study guitar scales: https://www.coolfretboard.com/ https://www.coolfretboard.com/ Basically it's a guitar/bass fretboard where you can select a scale and a root note, then it displays the notes of that scale on the fretboard. It also has a bit of info about the scale, like the intervals used to build it. Initially I didn't plan to publish it, but since it was barely decent I tried to put it online. I just spent a few bucks to buy the domain, but it don't cost me anything to keep it online, since it's just a static page and I use Netlify to host it. Btw, Netlify is awesome! Highly recommended!
• pottersbasilisk 9y ago
  Im working on a small project to have ai learn to paint scenes based feeding in styles and objects that I personally classified. Its been very interesting and almost parental joy to see when the right logical connections are made and the art looks good.
• nitramm 9y ago
  I was surprised how many different types of prime numbers exist. So I am building - https://prime-numbers.info https://prime-numbers.info - to find out which one belongs to most of them. Current winner is 5 - https://prime-numbers.info/number/5 https://prime-numbers.info/number/5 - but still lot of types is missing.
  • StefanKovachev 9y ago
    I'm inlove with primes... Great work!!
• reagent 9y ago
  I built this dead-simple "image enhancing" app (http://en.hance.me http://en.hance.me) to focus in on potentially embarrassing details in photos. It allows you to specify a zoom area and create a 4-panel stacked image that progressively "zooms in" on your target area.
  • joshschreuder 9y ago
    Seems like something you could possibly make money off with ads given it's a pretty popular meme
• sir 9y ago
  Com-Phone: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ac.robinson.mediaphone http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ac.robinson.med... An Android app for putting photos/text/sounds together into videos, with the key aim being to have an interface that is as simple as possible. Started as part of a research project many years ago, but now mainly a labour of love for the ~30k users.
• chubot 9y ago
  I'm building a new Unix shell called Oil: http://www.oilshell.org/ http://www.oilshell.org/ It's definitely not making me any money. I would say the motivation is a little bit "joy" / learning, but also frustration that shells are so old, unintuitive, and work so poorly. I've been going for about 16 months and it's still fun, so that's good. I think that seeing progress is what make things fun.
  • wodenokoto 9y ago
    I agree that shells need a great overhaul. But how it should look and how the path towards the "better shell" can realistically happen I have no clue. I applaud your courage!
    • chubot 9y ago
      Thanks! I have a very clear idea, but it's a huge amount of work. I think it's going to get there though :) One thing that blows up the amount of work is the "realistically happen" part... For it to happen, it needs to be compatible, and compatibility is hard (or at least tedious).
  • Qwertious 9y ago
    I'm starting to wonder how the hell anyone decided shellscripts were a good idea.
    • chubot 9y ago
      I think it started the same way batch files did -- although of course shell came earlier. "Hey let me put the stuff I type in a text file": mkdir foo cp myfile foo/ ls foo "Then I don't have to type it over and over". The "interpreter" was probably a 20 line function inside the interactive shell, or maybe just a single if statement to redirect stdin from a file and not a terminal. That started sometime in the early 1970's. Along the way, people added loops, conditionals, functions, various hacky expression languages (test/[, find), many external utilities like sed/grep, full-fledged languages like awk/make, etc. And today we have on perhaps 50 million+ machines an unbroken chain from 45+ years ago. It's kind of amazing... If you can somehow score languages by how old they are plus how widely used they are, shell is probably #2 behind C. C has had a ton of effort that has gone into cleaning it up, deciding upon semantics, standardizing it, evolving it. Shell has had POSIX, which was like 30 years ago, and that's about it. In summary, nobody "decided" -- it's an amazing and horrible instance of evolution :)
• acabal 9y ago
  I'm working on Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org https://standardebooks.org) in my spare time. Not only is it not-for-profit but the work is released under CC0 too, where applicable. We got on HN a month or two ago--people really seemed to like the project and we got a lot of great new contributors. If anyone else is interested in contributing, drop me a line :)
• rmb81 9y ago
  I built an interpreter for the pseudocode language my uni uses to introduce programming. It´s in Spanish, you can give it a try here: https://pl-lang.github.io/playground/ https://pl-lang.github.io/playground/ There´s an example program here: https://github.com/pl-lang/jsplint https://github.com/pl-lang/jsplint My goal is to help students who might be struggling with the assignments.
• dumbfounder 9y ago
  Twicsy (Twitter picture search) still gets around 1.5 million visitors per month, but nets no money. But I wouldn't call it sheer joy though, maybe sheer stubbornness? http://twicsy.com http://twicsy.com
  • Insanity 9y ago
    Looks cool though! ;-) What are the costs associated with that if you don't mind me asking?
    • dumbfounder 9y ago
      Servers are about $1200 per month. (I have about 12tb of SSD on 5 servers). Then there are some misc costs (business costs) that are maybe $200/month.
      • Tajnymag 9y ago
        Wow, that's rather a lot of money for a non-profit project :-o
        • Insanity 9y ago
          Indeed, damn. That is a lot of money to spend each month
• bherms 9y ago
  Working on a project for connecting fans of the band Phish and allowing them to share and curate their stories... Paying out of pocket for minimal hosting costs, donation buttons all go to Mockingbird Foundation... Hoping to launch in the next month or so. Doing it because I am a huge fan of the band and the community and it's a huge part of my life I'd like to give back to.
• snickerbockers 9y ago
  For almost a year, I've been writing a SEGA Dreamcast emulator called WashingtonDC. It's slow and it doesn't play any games yet, but it can boot the firmware menu and display the animated "spiral swirl" logo. https://github.com/washingtondc-emu/washingtondc https://github.com/washingtondc-emu/washingtondc
  • kevinschumacher 9y ago
    How'd you name that?
    • snickerbockers 9y ago
      DC is the acronym fans usually use to refer to the Dreamcast.
  • futhey 9y ago
    Great name.
• yangyang 9y ago
  Porting an ancient 6502 Forth to Z80. Nobody will ever use it and there are already loads of Z80 Forths around, but it's fun and forces me to learn exactly how a language that's always interested me works. Not on Github yet.
• msquitieri 9y ago
  I created a site as a poetry project that generates random poems from sentences in Craigslist Missed Connections. Some of the poems are actually really poignant and funny. https://craigslistpoetry.com https://craigslistpoetry.com https://twitter.com/craigslistpoems https://twitter.com/craigslistpoems
  • tortoise_face 9y ago
    I. Love. This. It's genuine emotional revelations mixed with mundanity mixed with outrageous sexual deviancy.
    • msquitieri 9y ago
      Haha thanks!!
• CM30 9y ago
  Wario Forums and absolutely anything else associated with it: https://warioforums.com https://warioforums.com Yeah, I know it's not particularly fancy, nor does it involve any clever coding tricks or interesting features. However, it's literally the only community on the internet dedicated to the series, and one I've decided to run for a minimum of two decades to make sure said franchise finally builds a decent fanbase. Is it going to make money? Probably not, given how the franchise it's based on sells about 2 million copies worldwide at most, and hasn't gotten a new game since either 2013 (WarioWare) or 2008 (Wario Land). But it's one with a passionate audience that up until recently had nowhere online to discuss the series nor anywhere specifically dedicated to their favourite franchise. So I decided to change that by setting up and promoting a community based on it, with the guarantee I'd keep it open for decades in the hope that eventually a community at least the size of the Earthbound one comes about here. With the hope that eventually I won't need to run the forum because there'll be enough sites about it to sustain a decent fandom.
  • sgspace 9y ago
    This is awesome I love Nintendo thank you!
  • iwebdevfromhome 9y ago
    Awesome! But looks like it's down now :(
    • CM30 9y ago
      Seems my hosting is having problems at the moment. I host Gaming Reinvented (https://gamingreinvented.com https://gamingreinvented.com) on the same server, and that's been going down a fair bit today as well. Which is weird, given how even after being linked from the home page of Eurogamer, Destructoid, Nintendo Life and various others all the same time, it didn't move an inch. Huh, guess LiquidWeb must be having a bad day or something. Sorry about that!
  • jonmb 9y ago
    That's cool. I can admire a dedicated Nintendo fan site. I ran Mario-Kart.net for a decade. In its most popular days it was #1 on Google for "mario kart". I let the domain expire recently since the site was outdated and I don't play anymore but it was a good long run. We had a dedicated forum base for a while too.
• gwintrob 9y ago
  I run a newsletter all about APIs called GET PUT POST (https://tinyletter.com/getputpost https://tinyletter.com/getputpost). Each edition features a Q&A with a company about their API and killer app ideas for developers. Here's a recent example with a YC S16 company called Nova: https://getputpost.co/an-api-that-unlocks-global-credit-data-aef5ef47f481 https://getputpost.co/an-api-that-unlocks-global-credit-data... A few people have reached out about sponsoring it, but just for fun right now :)
• cbeach 9y ago
  http://www.caption.me http://www.caption.me I built it 12 years ago and have fostered a small but hugely loyal community of caption writers ever since. Automatically loads three funny photos every day from a Flickr group, and is an ongoing caption competition. For fun I wrote a real-time collaborative mind mapping feature (node.js / D3) so people could brainstorm caption ideas for upcoming photos.
• kovrik 9y ago
  I'm writing R5RS Scheme _interpreter_ implementation in Kotlin (previously in Java): https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin/ https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin/ It is a hybrid of R5RS Scheme + some things from Kawa, Racket and Clojure. It doesn't have a proper name and documentation yet. I'm writing it as a hobby sandbox project, for learning purposes and fun. Trying to keep it simple and easy to understand (some things are not perfect though). Features: - full numerical tower - lists, vectors, maps, sets, arrays - symbols, keywords, strings (mutable/immutable), patterns (regexes), chars - one-shot upward continuations - Java interop - futures, promises, delays, boxes (atoms) Not implemented yet: - macros - persistent data structures - compiler - bugfixes :) PS: it is a pleasure to write it in Kotlin. Great language!
  • kristianp 9y ago
    Cool. You probably already know this, but note that R7RS-small [1] is the most recent small scheme (the spec is not too much larger that r5rs). There are enough similarities that it might be worth supporting it. [1] http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/R7RSHomePage http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/R7RSHomePage
    • kovrik 9y ago
      Honestly, didn't know that! Looks great, thank you very much! I will check it out!
• jetti 9y ago
  All of my Elixir open source projects: * Plsm - https://github.com/jhartwell/Plsm - which is an Ecto model generator based on existing schemas * Taex - https://github.com/jhartwell/Taex - A technical Analysis library for Elixir. I'm also in the process of writing a GDAX (https://gdax.com https://gdax.com) Elixir library but won't open source that until it is more complete. I'm using that and Taex in a cryptocurrency algo trading platform I'm developing.
• moasda 9y ago
  I made a wiki engine: http://moasdawiki.net/ http://moasdawiki.net/ I started working on it during my PhD as I was missing a wiki engine to organize my knowledge that run on a USB stick without installation, supports images and stores the content in simple text files for easy backup and restore. Now I am using it every day in office for my personal notes on projects, running inside a TrueCrypt container. Meanwhile I added an Android App to sync the content on my mobile phone.
• showhndaily 9y ago
  https://twitter.com/showhndaily https://twitter.com/showhndaily Created a simple Twitter bot back in 2013 that auto-tweets every post marked "Show HN". Updated to HN API (Firebase) in 2014 or 2015. Small claim to fame: Had a daily email newsletter for the first year or so. Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt) was on my initial subscriber list, before PH launched. Now if only I had just pivoted to feature new wow-ness for the world PH-style, hmmmm ...
• weddpros 9y ago
  I built https://sslping.com/ https://sslping.com/ to help monitor website TLS/SSL security and certificates. It has 300 users and checks almost 7000 servers every day for TLS problems. It's a little like SSLlabs server test, only much faster (5 seconds instead of 2 minutes), plus the tests are recurring every day, and you receive the diff if any. It's always been a joy to receive thank you emails from users, or adding new features for users. SSLping also allowed me to learn React and Redux. I'm still working on it, adding new features and refactoring what I don't like. If I ever have to stop hosting it, I'll open source the whole thing. Or maybe I'll open source it anyway. If I could find a deal with a security company, I would work on it fulltime. I consider it's a success, even if the numbers are not as high as I'd like.
  • andruby 9y ago
    Thank you for this! I have a post-it note for sideproject ideas and wanted to build exact system. I'm glad you already built it :) Also glad I found out about it before building it myself.
    • weddpros 9y ago
      It's good to hear! Feel free to use it and tell me if you have any suggestions, or anything really
  • exikyut 9y ago
    FWIW, the site design is really nice. I like the brown, and the use of all-caps for the site name. And of course 5 seconds is how fast it should be :P EDIT: Wondered what constructive criticism I could add, in case it was useful. I guess the one thing I'm thinking of that isn't there is a cert tree breakdown, showing the cert structure in an easy-to-read format (which can be done xD), showing the trust root used, etc etc. I'm also reminded of all the little incidents that have happened with different SSL providers, and wonder whether people would appreciate seeing "you're using XYZ cert provider, here are controversial things about them". A feature like this would require careful presentation to work at scale though. Now I understand why you took the "go/no-go" super-simple route! I also discovered (after noticing the fun URL query approach you use when you type in a domain) that disabling JS results in a white screen. That's common nowadays, so no comment.
• eejdoowad 9y ago
  I've been building a keybinding Chrome extension like Vimium for about half a year now. It started when I struggled to add a feature to Vimium and figured I could do it better myself. From my biased perspective, my extension is better. User uptake has been negligible, but I think the lessons I've learned have made it worth the time invested. https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key
• enoch_r 9y ago
  https://agh.io/about https://agh.io/about / TicTag is a passive time tracking tool that randomly samples your time to get a statistically accurate picture of your life. It's like RescueTime except that randomness allows it to be for everything, offline and on. For example, this is how much time I spend reading: https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-10_15.05.51.png https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-1... This is how much time I spend riding my bike: https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-10_15.09.50.png https://jds.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/screenshots/2017-08-1... (How it works: every 45 minutes, on average, it'll send you a slack message. You respond with tags for what you were doing right at that moment, like "job dev" or "bike" and it compiles your responses.)
• lcall 9y ago
  I created this system which I've mentioned before (AGPL): http://onemodel.org http://onemodel.org ...because it tracks all my thoughts, plans, & resulting to-dos, and I mark them off when done ("archived") in a few keystrokes. Then there is a simple feature for displaying the ~"journal" for a date range which defaults to starting yesterday at midnight: everything created or archived in that time is shown, so I've basically stopped keeping track in any other way, of what I have done, as I can always look it up. I used to use org-mode, "inspiration" (an old windows program for collapsible outlines and mind maps), and various text editors, but this is the most efficient and flexible I have found. In my use, it is like a textual, ever-expanding comprehensive mind map that is highly efficient to use from the keyboard, uses postgresql, and can handle large amounts of data, having the same thing linked in more than one place, etc etc, so you can organize all possible stuff in arbitrary ways to suit yourself: I tend to use a few hierarchies and some frequent categories go in multiple places, for convenience. I use it to keep lists of gift ideas, calendar, personal journal, and it just gets the job done with the lowest impedance of anything i have tried or heard of. It has an auto "journal-generation" feature, some finicky import/export features to html or to/from text, searching, somewhat limited file storage, and more. It has no mouse or mobile support yet, but it is the best thing I've found for any kind of note-taking (I'm the author). It needs simpler installation and added features but is stable and works really well, really efficient once you get familiar, and everything is on the screen. I hope to add anki-like features in the future. Contributions welcome. I'm told it needs an introductory screencast, which I plan to put up eventually, but for now there is a tutorial at the web site, on which feedback is welcome. The latest code is in github, where I am working (very slowly) on an infrastructure for linking or exchanging info between instances.
• hoppyluke 9y ago
  I made some Android games a few years back https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=hoppyluke https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=hoppyluke There's one I still play every now and again, fairly sure I'm my most active user.
• evantahler 9y ago
  actionherojs.com I've spent far more than I've made on this... but it's how I think API frameworks should work!
• jesses 9y ago
  https://gigalixir.com https://gigalixir.com After falling in love with Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, etc I built this to help increase Elixir adoption by solving the biggest pain point I saw: deploying.
  • samcodes 9y ago
    This is great! I've looked for exactly this in the past.
• StefanKovachev 9y ago
  https://inwhy.net https://inwhy.net Means "Inside the question 'why?'" still working on my idea...
• rock_hard 9y ago
  I am running a Burning Man camp with 200 people on the side. We have developed our own modular solar electric grid...that powers the whole camp...trying to prototype carbon neutral living...it's a lot of work...and a lot of fun :)
• purescript 9y ago
  I work on the PureScript (http://purescript.org http://purescript.org) compiler, tools, libraries and book in my spare time (along with many other unpaid contributors), because it's the programming language I wished had existed when I started creating it. It's still the closest thing to a perfect environment for web development, at least as far as I'm concerned :)
  • ves 9y ago
    Thank you for all your work!
  • christophilus 9y ago
    PureScript is amazing! Thank you for making it.
  • mikekchar 9y ago
    Another big thank you from me. I used PureScript to learn functional programming. For me, being able to read the resultant Javascript made a big difference. Also, I have to say that your code is lovely (both the PureScript code and the Javascript). Every time I think, "I wonder how this works/should work" I take a quick glance and within a few minutes I have my answer. I will start reading the compiler code when I get some time.
• jtruk 9y ago
  130 Story - a daily microfiction challenge. https://www.130story.com/ https://www.130story.com/ I started this as a Twitter game a few years ago; it felt like a compact idea with a good hook. Earlier this year I automated it- so it picks its own words and collates the stories on the website itself (mostly successfully). It doesn't have a big following, but the people who play are passionate about it. Some people play every day, and the most prolific author has written ~650 of them. I've seen people get better as writers, some experimental stuff (like an improvised longform story built over many daily prompts), and occasionally I see a microstory that knocks it out the park. That makes it worthwhile.
  • cdelsolar 9y ago
    This is really cool. Some awesome little stories in there. I'm sure you're aware of "The Red Wheelbarrow" - such imagery in fewer than 100 characters.
    • jtruk 9y ago
      Thanks! I've had a few people trying to submit the classic six word story over the years.
  • biztos 9y ago
    Great idea! I just contributed one. :-)
  • open_bear 9y ago
    Nice idea! This reminded me of 750words.com. I tried it for a while, but writing 750 words every day was too much. I think 130 characters will better suit my ability to write.
• brian-armstrong 9y ago
  I've been working to fill what I see as a gap in free software. My library encodes data into sound and works cross-platform. As far as I can tell it may be the most robust, cross-platform freely licensed library that does this, though there is still much I need to improve on https://github.com/quiet https://github.com/quiet
• kaundur 9y ago
  I built Cmdo, a command line todo list written in python. Still in its early stages, but it’s been fun to create https://github.com/Kaundur/cmdo https://github.com/Kaundur/cmdo
  • MoDu_HN 9y ago
    You are the devil. It's worse than pizza with salty pineapple and peas. Keep going :D
• jonotime 9y ago
  https://github.com/jonocodes/envoy https://github.com/jonocodes/envoy Docker Envoy Encapsulates a kind of different Docker workflow. One where your Dockerfiles live in a separate area from your project. Includes a bunch of bash helper functions for common things the containers need to do like wait for other services. It also provides a little Dockerized testing system using pytest - which I might eventually separate out. I am working more on the testing part these days. And I'm writing a book about some of this.
• adnanh 9y ago
  https://github.com/adnanh/webhook https://github.com/adnanh/webhook Incoming webhook server
• krisives 9y ago
  hashes.download a Bitcoin Cash API one of the first
• edumucelli 9y ago
  http://eazy.bike/ http://eazy.bike/ - Always find a bicycle or empty slots on bikesharing systems Eazy.bike picks best bicycle stations considering real-time information of how many bicycles and free bicycle stands are available in more than 400 cities in 48 countries. Behind it uses machine-learning to predict what will be the availability of empty slots so that you can maximize the probability to find a place to park your bicycle. It took me a huge work to write the whole stuff, API, Android, iPhone and web application, but I really like it.
• lecarore 9y ago
  I built a super lightweight web app to draw on images. It targets mainly cheap android phones that don't have storage for a proper app. It's called https://minimage.tk https://minimage.tk, and I use it all the time to annotate screenshots now. It was a nice pet project to build a progressive web app in full vanilla.
• gbl08ma 9y ago
  I have a bit of a obsession with the Lisbon Metro, even though I don't use it very often. I started by building this: https://github.com/gbl08ma/disturbancesmlx https://github.com/gbl08ma/disturbancesmlx This started as more of a statistics page for the service interruptions published by the Metro on their website, which I scrape. The slight tongue-in-cheekiness of my website, which opens up with a large text saying something like "XX days since the last disturbance", where XX is usually a single-digit number, made it become mildly popular (at least in terms of what I'm used to). This particular subway system doesn't operate on a fixed schedule and doesn't show the ETA for the next train outside of the platforms nor on any app or website. (Google thinks there's a schedule, but they've been fooled.) They also don't publish usage stats for each station, which would be of great interest to everyone who likes daydreaming of expansions, network reorganization and the like. Furthermore, I read and heard multiple reports of delays and interruptions that never made their way to the website. So I decided to build a Android app to unobtrusively crowd-source data and communicate the service status back to the users... https://github.com/gbl08ma/underlx https://github.com/gbl08ma/underlx ...and the very ambitious goal is to, one day, be able to calculate train positions and ETAs based on real-time data reported by the smartphones of people riding the subway. Pretty much "Waze for the Lisbon Metro". Yeah, I've put months of work into this and there's absolutely no business plan; it perpetually feels 5% complete. But it's been fun putting together my second Android app, playing around with Postgres (after many years using MySQL), designing the REST API and writing the server in Go. I plan to use this big project as my sandbox for experimenting with machine learning and other AI techniques, as well as data analytics and visualization. There's already a small but extremely interested group of users, which really motivates me to keep working on this.
• thexa4 9y ago
  I work on Empires Mod, a 10 year old real time strategy and first person shooter hybrid. It's playable for free and still has an active playerbase. It's very satisfying to fix bugs that have been around for more than 5 years. We're currently looking for someone that can do UX design, if you're interested in making an impact on a live game send me a message. https://empiresmod.com https://empiresmod.com
• FigBug 9y ago
  http://socalabs.com/ http://socalabs.com/ I just started a few days ago, I'm making VST plugins that emulate sound chips from old consoles / computers. (There is also a weird vocal synth in there). Currently working on a C64, hope to have it done tonight.
• salutis 9y ago
  I work on a simple 4-7-8 breathing relaxation app for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/essence/id768594011 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/essence/id768594011 Great for practicing and exploring — architecture, value types, test-driven development, etc.
• pboutros 9y ago
  I've been doing this for years - it's my favorite. www.cheeseand.beer
• netsec_burn 9y ago
  Making a robot. It's fun, I look forward to making it every day and log my progress. So far it has depth perception and I have a goal in mind for it. It's an expensive side project though, I underestimated the price but you learn a lot about electronics in the process.
• jrm2k6 9y ago
  I started working on iparklikeadumbass.com. The idea is for me to upload pictures of people parking like idiots, blur the license plate and just have it out there. I know I wont make any money of it but it is a good way of preventing road/parking raging.
  • brett40324 9y ago
    You get my vote for most humorous! I'll be checking that url again one day, and hopefully there's dumbass parking photos up.
    • jrm2k6 9y ago
      Will probably create a Show HN thread as it would definitely be a hit.
  • pablo98 9y ago
    Unable to reach it
    • jrm2k6 9y ago
      Yeah I just bought the domain name a while ago impulsively, still working on it. :D
• jventura 9y ago
  I built MockREST - http://mockrest.com/ http://mockrest.com/ - to create REST APIs from JSON content. I've only spent 9€ to buy the domain as the application (django application) is on a shared server. I'm making 0 €$ from it, as it was made to solve a problem that I had while teaching mobile development where I teach.
• foxhop 9y ago
  http://botoform.com http://botoform.com | Architect infrastructure on AWS using YAML
• arthurjj 9y ago
  I wrote a children's picture book "The ABCs of Programming" to explain what I do to my toddler. Previously I was telling him "Daddy talks to robots". Hasn't made much money yet, but I launched only this week. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074FVWDYJ/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074FVWDYJ/
• ztravis 9y ago
  http://www.arabicreference.com http://www.arabicreference.com I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research". It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on: - fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs - cleaning up the UI/display - moving onto a "real" server framework - writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data - making an API? Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!
  • abusaidm 9y ago
    hi, great project. any idea if you plan to release the code or article of how you built the similar matching? Thanks
    • ztravis 9y ago
      Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much of it would be of general interest).
      • abusaidm 9y ago
        Great, I would be interested on how you built the dataset/database. Please share when you have the post.
• mattbgates 9y ago
  I built https://mypost.io https://mypost.io which I technically did as a learning opportunity and was planning on charging, but I'm keeping it free. I built it to teach others how to code.. using HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with hints of BB Code. It is being used around the world.. never advertised it ever, except for the few times I posted on here and twitter.
• RomanPushkin 9y ago
  http://libretaxi.org http://libretaxi.org libre uber alternative, lot of fun, users, traction, no money
• donohoe 9y ago
  https://article.rocks https://article.rocks This is my swipable curated news feed. I only tested it on my iPhone 6, bookmarked to Homescreen. Outside of that your experience might vary. I've been redoing it every few months for the past 3 or 4 years. At one point it included summation text and opened inline AMP links for articles that had them. It's an automated curation of content I like and includes some basic sentiment analysis and popularity metrics. The content is interspersed with a custom ad template just for fun. When there is enough content it includes mediative looping gifs/video. It scrapes content, rewrites headlines, throws images through random filters to good/bad/artful effect. This is my entire morning subway commute. (Feedback always welcome)
• iwebdevfromhome 9y ago
  SuperMovies Rank: https://movies.teslark.pw https://movies.teslark.pw Just posted this a couple of days before! Not much notice but still it was worth a try. It's a tool to help people create their list of favorite superhero movies and share them with everyone. It was a fun way to get myself more familiar with React
• gadgetoid 9y ago
  https://pinout.xyz https://pinout.xyz A somewhat interactive GPIO pinout for the Raspberry Pi. Not so much out of sheer joy, but because I needed it. It started as a basic way to explore each pin and its available alt-functions. Listings of add-on board pinouts were added later for people who want to use multiple boards- or perhaps connect them to a different host.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    Cool, I've used that site, nice reference.
  • kruffin 9y ago
    Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site. I used it when trying to figure out how to hook up an RFID reader to the Pi. It was suprisingly hard to find the pinout, but finally found your site. This is what I put together: https://bitbucket.org/kruffin/rfid_play https://bitbucket.org/kruffin/rfid_play
  • LongTermBond007 9y ago
    This site is a great reference, thanks for all your work!
  • stryk 9y ago
    Oh, wow! I used this website as a reference fairly heavily when getting started with RPis, and still use it quite often (the WiringPi diagram in particular came in handy many, many times as there a whole lot of pins to it)
• spondyl 9y ago
  I'm building a wiki for a little known South Korean mobile game I enjoy and it's fun both learning how to manage and build a Mediawiki install. It's also a great excuse to suck up all the lore and properly analyse character conversations and what not! Now I just gotta see if I can get some official looking art renders authorised for release from the devs since a press kit was never released
• viiralvx 9y ago
  socialmuter.com, pageunliker.com, fade.pics. All are pure JS, haven't modified them, they work fine.
• the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  serious, measured tone "all of these projects are of no benefit or value to anyone, otherwise they would be earning money."
• epx 9y ago
  Morse code player: https://epxx.co/morse https://epxx.co/morse Koch method to learn Morse: https://epxx.co/morse/koch.html https://epxx.co/morse/koch.html
  • audiometry 9y ago
    nice. I tried to use another (pay) site's koch method, but the website worked terribly. The "tech support" was awful, so I abandoned the effort.
• wolfpld 9y ago
  https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/etcpak/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/etcpak/wiki/Home - A very fast ETC texture compressor. Being 80x-500x faster than every other compression utility (with not that much quality difference) was quite fun. https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/usenetarchive https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/usenetarchive - A set of tools to process and view large collections of usenet/mailing list messages. For example, an archive of polish usenet is 56+ million messages.
• rahulshiv 9y ago
  http://www.notematics.com http://www.notematics.com - AI Note-taking assistant for sales calls. Learning AI & building this has resulted in a lot of fun & personal growth!
• lchsk 9y ago
  https://github.com/lchsk/xstarter https://github.com/lchsk/xstarter Never planned to make any money out of it, I've made it because I needed it, and to play around with building a unix tool in C. It's pretty simple but it's definitely one of the projects I've had the most fun working on and I still have plenty of things I want to add.
• domainkiller 9y ago
  Nomie! https://nomie.io https://nomie.io The easiest way to track any aspect of your life.
  • boundlessdreamz 9y ago
    Thank you for nomie! This was the only app on Android which ticked all my requirements
  • dgavey 9y ago
    This is really impressive. Too good to be free in my opinion.
  • megamindbrian 9y ago
    How does this work?
• TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  http://pictoswap.ajf.me/ http://pictoswap.ajf.me/ It's a note-drawing messaging single-page web app for the Nintendo 3DS, in homage to the long-since defunct SpotPass (i.e. Internet) functionality of Nintendo Swapnote/Letter Box. (Also, every open-source contribution of mine ever.)
• happybuy 9y ago
  I'm about to release Magic Lasso – a free ad blocker for the iPhone, iPad and macOS simply because I think advertising on the web has gone too far. http://magiclasso.co/ http://magiclasso.co/ Won't make money but hopefully will help make the web better.
• MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  https://github.com/MikeTheGreat/GLT https://github.com/MikeTheGreat/GLT I wrote "GLT", which stood for 'GitLab Tool'. It was going to enable me to manage a classroom's worth of git repos, 1 per student per homework assignment. I chose GitLab because you can set up your own server, and then lock down stuff so it's harder for students to copy homework within the system (obviously they can still copy it offline). Then I got busy with other stuff. Then I found out about GitHub Classroom, which is the same thing just hosted by GitHub. I haven't retooled it to work with GitHub, but I'm hoping it's not too tough. (I started off idly wondering whether to pronounce it "Guilt", like "Why haven't you done more of your grading?" or "gelt", like the candy.)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• kyletns 9y ago
  https://www.groupmuse.com https://www.groupmuse.com now envelopes my entire life :) We have starting making a bit of money, finally, but not much and it sure ain't why we've been at it for 5 years!
  • sbuccini 9y ago
    I love Groupmuse! Great idea, and execution. If you're in the Bay Area I'd love to buy you a coffee/beer!
• qwerty2020 9y ago
  https://www.mescale.co https://www.mescale.co Simple online weight logging app with pretty charts, first web app I've actually pushed out into the public. It doesn't make a dime, but I love tweaking it and seeing the user number slowly climb.
• kaivi 9y ago
  I'm hoarding profile data diffs from a well known social network. Been crawling every single user for the past 2 years and saving the changes. Had to stop doing it last month, after storage costs became too much.
  • SIRHAMY 9y ago
    Woah, do you have an end goal with this. Willing to let people get their hands on it?
    • kaivi 9y ago
      I'd like to set it up as a subscription service like Domaintools. I'm also crawling and storing user's comments, friends, posts and links to media published in other groups. It will make a great tool for profiling a person, but I'm not sure on how (il)legal it will be.
  • j_s 9y ago
    Can you share any of the techniques you use to avoid being blocked for scraping? Interesting to hear that storage was too expensive. I'm sure you could find personal sponsors here who would help with funding in exchange for access to the data - even with a 'no commercial use' type of restriction!
• dunstad 9y ago
  A program that allows you to control robots in Minecraft from a web browser: https://github.com/dunstad/roboserver https://github.com/dunstad/roboserver
  • bpchaps 9y ago
    Super cool! I wrote something that converts png files to OpenComputer 3dprint .3dm files. Next time I play, I'll try to combine your code with my own for easy portraiting :).
• carc1n0gen 9y ago
  https://weelnk.com https://weelnk.com little link shortener I built. Been a while since I revisited it
• chaostheory 9y ago
  Late to the game again =/ I'm working on https://theymadethat.com https://theymadethat.com It's an IMDB for everything, not just movies. It does show you who built what but it does more: theymadethat can show you what they used to build it, what those things are made of (parts, ...), their evolutionary history, who they worked with, and so on I can't say that I'm building it out of sheer joy; it's more out of obligation. There are so many people who's contributions to mankind should never be forgotten. Wikipedia is great (and I see it being complimentary to theymadethat in the long term), but we need something more. I could be wrong but I strongly feel that theymadethat is the answer.
  • tenaciousDaniel 9y ago
    This is super interesting to read through, and was very happy to see the Pentax K1000 mentioned! That was my first camera and I used it all the time during my teenage years. The thing was a beast, you could own the same one for 30 years and it would never die on you.
    • chaostheory 9y ago
      Thanks man - Pentax K1000's entry is actually a stub that needs work; still - glad you liked it =) This is a slightly better entry in terms of cameras https://www.theymadethat.com/organizations/slx/polaroid-corporation https://www.theymadethat.com/organizations/slx/polaroid-corp... On a related note, if you happen to know anyone related to the the K1000's design and manufacture, feel free to add it
  • zapperdapper 9y ago
    One of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Wonderful!
    • chaostheory 9y ago
      Thanks - let me know if you feel that there's anything I can fix or improve
• Spien 9y ago
  Cat chasing raspi car using a CNN.
• typpo 9y ago
  I built this 3d visualization of the upcoming Perseids meteor shower! https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Perseids https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Perseids
  • tenaciousDaniel 9y ago
    wow, very impressive! do you use a public api for the data?
    • typpo 9y ago
      Thanks! The data is publicly available at http://cams.seti.org/ http://cams.seti.org/
• mimming 9y ago
  http://dinopacks.com http://dinopacks.com I fill out those 'other comments' on order forms with a request for a dinosaur drawing.
• is0tope 9y ago
  http://randomport.io http://randomport.io My first attempt to create something using create-react-app. Generates a random ephemeral port if you can't think of a port for a service.
• albahk 9y ago
  Free OpenStreetMap Data extracts (be kind, it is a rushed POC at the moment) http://propdata.io http://propdata.io I have created a free site containing extracts from OpenStreetMap data. Unlike the metro extracts sites (Geofabrik, Mapzen), my goal is to extract specific datasets such as buildings, schools, hospitals, fast food restaurants etc from OSM rather than standard map/gis data. My overall goal is to make the extracts available, and then to encourage people who use them and get value to actively update OSM to improve the quality of the data they are interested in. By doing this, the overall quality and coverage of data in OSM should (in theory) be improved.
• stanislavb 9y ago
  http://emojihomepage.com http://emojihomepage.com
• rytill 9y ago
  https://www.poltr.com https://www.poltr.com Clean quick polling website
• orblivion 9y ago
  Host Wikipedia on Sandstorm.io: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/5uh349d0kky2zp5whrh2znahn27gwha876xze3864n0fu9e5220h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/5uh349d0kky2zp5whrh2znahn27gwh... Kiwix itself is not my project, I just packaged it for Sandstorm. I saw Sandstorm as a great potential tool for the off-the-grid, mesh networking, etc world. Being able to easily host a local copy of Wikipedia was one missing piece. I hope to work on the next piece soon. (Kixix also supports Project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Ted Talks, and much more)
• cozuya 9y ago
  My web adaptation of the social deduction board game Secret Hitler: https://secrethitler.io https://secrethitler.io Pretty fun, don't get to do much back end stuff so its a learning process. Its creative commons so can't make $ off it but the $10/month digital ocean box is doing fine. About 100 players on at peak and always games going.
  • j_s 9y ago
    This sounds similar to https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3955/bang https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3955/bang
  • 0xcoffee 9y ago
    Looks pretty cool, but is it possible to mute spammers? http://i.imgur.com/vwLkukw.png http://i.imgur.com/vwLkukw.png
• RealityNow 9y ago
  I'm at a point where money doesn't matter to me anymore except in the sense of retirement. I'm not rich by any means, I'd just rather live a life working on the most important problems in life, which these days I believe are mostly political/economic. http://www.endwageslavery.org/ http://www.endwageslavery.org/
  • lhuser123 9y ago
    Very interesting. Keep up the good work.
  • zapperdapper 9y ago
    Keep it going - this is important work. p.s. South Korea does not sound like a nice place!!!
• Windson 9y ago
  www.thankyouopensource.com Write a thank you letter to your favor open-source project
• jhy 9y ago
  I created and hack away on jsoup, a HTML parser/scraper for java. https://jsoup.org https://jsoup.org I created it initially just to scratch a personal itch (to make another project, https://alterslash.org https://alterslash.org, more resilient to upstream changes in HTML), and now get a lot of satisfaction just in knowing how much it's used around the world for all sorts of use cases I hadn't really imagined when I started writing it. And it's great fun finding new areas to benchmark and micro-optimize.
• Lerc 9y ago
  Sheer joy is an interesting term. I like making things but I don't think that is my primary motivater for _what_ I make. Most of my free stuff is because I think the things should exist and they are things that shouldn't have to be paid for. Some things are just plain geek fun https://github.com/Lerc/stackie https://github.com/Lerc/stackie - Makes textures using a very compact stack machine language https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8 https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8 - Emulator for an 8-bit computer that never existed Some things I wanted to have exist https://github.com/Lerc/smallcalc https://github.com/Lerc/smallcalc - A compact pop-up calculator for the Cinnamon Desktop https://github.com/Lerc/plops https://github.com/Lerc/plops - (old) A lightweight Desktop widget engine that I made when I developing for 256-512mb boxes/ https://github.com/Lerc/whio https://github.com/Lerc/whio - A Javascript canvas rendering lib for beginner programmers using Globaly avalilable functions + mediaWiki plugin to run in a worker. http://fingswotidun.com/code http://fingswotidun.com/code - A wiki usisng the plugin from the entry above. Has some introduction to programming javasctipt tutorials. And the mad project that I come back to every couple of years to push a bit further along. https://github.com/Lerc/notanos https://github.com/Lerc/notanos - A html/js login deskop for Linux. And a lot of games. Here's a silly one http://screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD13.html http://screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD13.html Here's a really hard one http://www.screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD14.html http://www.screamingduck.com/Lerc/LD14.html And here's one that might give your browser a hernia http://fingswotidun.com/ld21/ http://fingswotidun.com/ld21/
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• raphlinus 9y ago
  I have a largish open-source portfolio, including a markdown parser, a regex engine, some music synthesis, and some more researchy stuff like a font renderer and a prototype of concurrent text editing using CRDT's. I'm lucky to be working at Google where I get paid 20% time to work on this, but the motivation is definitely not money. The biggest item in my portfolio is xi-editor, and I confess I'm wrestling with some of the questions raised in this thread. I think it has the potential to be a serious player in the editor space, with extremely high performance goals (including fast startup and low RAM usage) yet a modern feel. It also has a great little open-source community around it who have been contributing significant features. Yet it's at the point where it's _almost_ done enough to use for day-to-day editing, and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. It's also the case that I'm very interested in the engine and the core of the UX, but the complete product needs a plugin ecosystem and along with that ways to discover, upgrade, and curate the plugins (including making sure they are trustworthy, lately a fairly significant concern). That's potentially a huge amount of work, and it doesn't really line up with my interests. I'm wondering if it's possible to focus on the parts I care about and try to foster the community to take care of the rest, but I'm not quite sure how that would work. If this were a business and I had some way of making a few coins from every user, then my incentives would be lined up to make the best overall product possible, including the less fun parts. But that's off the table; among other things, there are a number of good free editors out there, and the niche for a better but non-free editor is also well occupied. Maybe the HN crowd has some ideas?
  • Mz 9y ago
    and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. A) What is "lots" of users? (Give me a number) B) What makes you think you would suddenly have lots? Cuz most things seem to struggle to get any traction.
    • raphlinus 9y ago
      A) I'll toss out 1M because you asked for a number. B) Because if I build out my full ambition, it would be better by most objective metrics (speed, features, integration with IDE-like capabilities) than all the free editors out there, and I think there is a real demand for a better editor. I know what you mean about the struggle for traction. It is of course possible I'm massively mis-estimating the potential userbase.
• aroberge 9y ago
  http://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html http://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html is a site to learn programming (using either Python or Javascript). However, unlike other similar sites, the focus is equally on making it easy for students to use AND making it easy for teachers/mentors to use, adapt and create their own learning material. To this end, I am currently writing an online book as a "Teacher's Guide": https://aroberge.gitbooks.io/reeborg-s-world-advanced-world-creation/content/ https://aroberge.gitbooks.io/reeborg-s-world-advanced-world-... This is a project that started out 13 years ago as a free desktop application (http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/ http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/) and which I have been working, on and off, during all that time just for the joy of it and knowing that people have found it useful.
• palerdot 9y ago
  I have hotcold typing - http://hotcoldtyping.com http://hotcoldtyping.com, a fun way to learn touch typing with instant feedbacks. I'm proud of this tool even though it doesn't bring me money. Also, remindoro - http://remindoro.com http://remindoro.com, a chrome extension to have recurring reminders to help me take breaks.
• misra8 9y ago
  www.zemneo.com Wanted to solve the problem of information overload and product discovery , not making any money because I am not passionate about marketing. Do you think this is worth pursuing?
• jakehilborn 9y ago
  Speedr - Free Android app that calculates how much time (or how little time) you save speeding in your car. https://jakehilborn.github.io/speedr/ https://jakehilborn.github.io/speedr/
• fibonachos 9y ago
  http://www.proggyfonts.net/ http://www.proggyfonts.net/ I didn't create any of the fonts. When I discovered the original .com domain had been lost to squatters, I decided to grab the .net domain and go about hunting down and re-hosting as much of the original content as possible. The original site was later restored at a different domain (linked in the sidebar).
• thesquib 9y ago
  I dabble a bit: Http://playerpart.com - for Shakespeare play reading groups, helps distribute parts on a play fairly and with as few adjacent speaking parts as possible. Still in development! https://ranktracker.squib.co.nz https://ranktracker.squib.co.nz - a tool to track an in game characters stats for a very old game called Clan Lord from Delta Tao. In development. I seem to end up working on stuff with a very limited user base!
• rocky1138 9y ago
  Potioneer: The VR Gardening Simulator http://store.steampowered.com/app/544410/Potioneer_The_VR_Gardening_Simulator/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/544410/Potioneer_The_VR_Ga...
• beenBoutIT 9y ago
  Chromium for Android is an amazing open source browser. I made getChromium so that everyone can run Chromium for Android. https://github.com/andDevW/getChromium/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/andDevW/getChromium/blob/master/README.md
• xeo84 9y ago
  Touchboard: http://www.timelabs.io/touchboard http://www.timelabs.io/touchboard Open source app for iPad to send keys to your pc / mac. I use it for gaming, I really find it useful, here is a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KOUj9SK_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KOUj9SK_c I've also made CbrConverter: https://github.com/timefrancesco/cbr-converter https://github.com/timefrancesco/cbr-converter Coverts pdf to cbr and vice versa. And then there are a bunch of other small projects like: - Ebay Search Scheduler (schedule Ebay searches with custom parameters) - Twitter Time Machine (download and browse your twitter timeline) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweet-time-machine-2/id832124891?ls=1&mt=8&at=1001lpzu https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweet-time-machine-2/id83212... - windows version also available - Autosleep (put the windows down for good) https://github.com/timefrancesco/autosleep https://github.com/timefrancesco/autosleep And many others I really enjoyed making and using.
• fernly 9y ago
  I discovered the historic CHIP-8 architecture and decided to write the mother of all CHIP-8 apps, including an interactive dev environment for it: https://github.com/tallforasmurf/CHIP8IDE https://github.com/tallforasmurf/CHIP8IDE
• biztos 9y ago
  In addition to some random, minor bits of free software and one larger bit that's nowhere near finished, I have for years kept a goofy little minimalist thing going just to have it in the world: http://thislikethat.com http://thislikethat.com It costs me almost nothing, I check in on it a few times a year, and once in a while I find something fun there.
• amorphic 9y ago
  I co-founded and run a makerspace called SparkCC (http://sparkcc.org http://sparkcc.org). It's not-for-profit but I've met lots of amazing people. I've been able to use my skills and knowledge to help many of them and many of them have used their skills and knowledge to help me. It's fantastic...:)
• yourduskquibble 9y ago
  I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you. My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. social share bars, cookie notices, etc) through a filter list that works with uBlock Origin. I update the list often, and admittedly am probably entering into an arms race but I'm just really sick of websites hijacking (what I think) the web was built for (information). Feel free to subscribe to the filter list by pasting the URL below[1] into the 'Custom' section under the '3rd-party filters' tab of uBlock Origin. This filter list also works on mobile Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin installed. [0] Project Homepage https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances/master/ultralist.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoya...
  • illnewsthat 9y ago
    This is fantastic, thanks! I started using this "Kill Sticky Headers" [0] I saw on HN once and I find it very useful. I'll give the ublock list a try. [0] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
    • yourduskquibble 9y ago
      > Finally, I just don't care right now about navigating your website, or following you on Twitter. I'm trying to read. Let me focus on that for now, please. Your link is exactly right!
    • werber 9y ago
      I am doing a redesign right now and they wanted one and I had to fight against it. Sure in the office we all have a few external monitors, but I'm a MBA user irl and they kill me
  • brobinson 9y ago
• quangv 9y ago
  Sweet post bait. I'm working on an online notes organizer. I have ADHD-PI and I've been creating one for myself for the last few years. (I recently found out I might have ADHD) HTTPS://OrgNote.com
• notgoodrobot 9y ago
  http://sharethewub.com http://sharethewub.com A music player made from URLs pulled from sub-reddits. Its a work in progress.
• monkey_slap 9y ago
  Working on a GitHub iOS app to make managing GitHub projects easier. Fun part is now that it's shipped I'm using it to manage itself. https://github.com/rnystrom/Freetime https://github.com/rnystrom/Freetime Turning this into more of a social experiment now, seeing where he community wants to take this. Publishing download reports and stuff. Even made a landing page. http://freetime-app.com/ http://freetime-app.com/
• wingworks 9y ago
  I run a tv show countdown/tracking site with no ads, because I hate ads. https://tvdown.co/ https://tvdown.co/ It's rather basic at the moment, (I wrote most of the code about 10 years ago) but I'm working on an update.
• beilabs 9y ago
  Late arrival to this thread. One of my projects involve working with local female co-operatives in Nepal and help them sell their hand made products around the world. Paypal doesn't operate here, merchant services for international cards are impossible to get. They don't understand technology in any way and there is a lot of hand holding. The site is https://www.pasatrade.com https://www.pasatrade.com We make no money off of this, I operate it at a loss, but each and every sale gets more money back to the women who really need it; a few extra dollars here and there can really make a huge difference in Nepal. The interesting part is they make more money on each sale through us than they do locally or selling through Fair Trade channels.
  • jeromegv 9y ago
    I have a similar website with similar concept (for Filipino products). However, I would strongly suggest you find a way to make it a sustainable business for you as well. It sounds nice that you do not take a profit from it but the reality is that your life will change and one day you won't have time for a project that makes no money/operates at loss. Those women will start to rely more and more on the income from your website and this would be really unfortunate if one day this revenue totally stops because it was just a volunteer project for you. The more sustainable it is for you, the safer it is for them.
    • beilabs 9y ago
      Yeah; I need to really put some processes in to make it more sustainable. We're quite strict with who can come on board as we're really only looking for non-profits or co-operatives.
      • jeromegv 9y ago
        That's awesome it's in the plan. The initiative is great! All the best from Cambio Market.
• cdelsolar 9y ago
  https://www.aerolith.org https://www.aerolith.org - My pet project for the last 10 years, a Scrabble word study app. I love working on this thing.
• na_ka_na 9y ago
  Two projects on github currently: Run SQL queries over JSON / Protobuf objects https://github.com/na-ka-na/object-query https://github.com/na-ka-na/object-query Compare Excel sheets via command line https://github.com/na-ka-na/ExcelCompare https://github.com/na-ka-na/ExcelCompare
• aroc 9y ago
  http://www.get-jumper.com/ http://www.get-jumper.com/ A way to motivate people (including myself) to exercise with a chat bot that tracks your progress. Originally built it to track how often I worked out, and if I didn't, what the reason was and have that reported back to me regularly. Now I have a bunch of people using it, but as you can imagine, makes me zero dollars. Well, technically it costs me money so it makes me negative dollars.
  • longnguyen 9y ago
    Great job. Thanks for sharing. It doesn't recognize me though > Hey undefined! Interested in exercising more? Great! I'm here to help! I'm following _kaizen_ technique to improve my reading skills (eg. reading 20-30 pages, everyday). Would be interested if your bot support more than exercise
• kovsky 9y ago
  I'm making a browser extension so that when users buy online with it installed, portion of the money goes to research-backed charities (no costs for user). It's a nice feeling to build something that has a possibility of improving someone's life. And 13 GBP raised so far! :)) URL: https://altruisto.com https://altruisto.com Github: https://github.com/Altruisto/altruisto https://github.com/Altruisto/altruisto
• cromulent 9y ago
  The Helsinki Foundation - land conservation through direct action. https://www.helsinkifoundation.org https://www.helsinkifoundation.org
  • abraae 9y ago
    Such a great idea. It raises lots of questions (can I visit my space? pest control? etc.), but kudos to you.
• empressplay 9y ago
  We built an Apple II emulator that renders pixels as OpenGL voxels so you can play games in 3D to encourage younger people to explore classic software http://octalyzer.com http://octalyzer.com
• dmjio 9y ago
  Rewriting Elm in Haskell. [0] Project Homepage: https://haskell-miso.org https://haskell-miso.org [1] Github: https://github.com/haskell-miso/miso https://github.com/haskell-miso/miso
• reviewmon 9y ago
  Mapduel.com GoogleBattle.com
• redbluething 9y ago
  Yep. I have been working on mapping the Patrick O'Brian age of sail novels for the last 11 years. http://www.cannonade.net http://www.cannonade.net
• maehwasu 9y ago
  Getting reasonably complex front-end programs running in a purely functional (Purescript) was really fun, and made me like the front-end for the first time. Been meaning to do a writeup of my experience when I have time.
• davepeck 9y ago
  A little website for people who want to play a (casual) game of Go: http://go.davepeck.org/ http://go.davepeck.org/
• sideproject 9y ago
  https://www.sideprojectors.com https://www.sideprojectors.com Been running it for good 4 years now. Do a little bit of maintaining here and there. I first did it in a hackathon and won a 2nd prize, thought I'll run with it and it's fun. :)
• laktak 9y ago
  I started http://hjson.org http://hjson.org as a JSON for humans interface but I constantly run into the "I love it but I'll wait until it's used by more people" problem.
  • thasaleni 9y ago
    I see myself using this
• germinalphrase 9y ago
  The potential of AR is very exciting as I imagine it. I have been considering how I would like to see it implemented as an assistive instrument in my profession - k12 teaching. Teachers largely make traditional use of traditional tools in their lesson design and - especially - lesson performance. Sketching out needs and affordances is a fun kind of daydreaming for what-could-be, but it's not as serious a project as what others here are sharing.
• jv22222 9y ago
  I created ezSQL way back. It's a database abstraction layer for PHP. https://github.com/ezSQL/ezSQL https://github.com/ezSQL/ezSQL It ended up being used by Wordpress and I got a kick out of that. Edit: It has been far surpassed by modern query builders such as Laravel Eloquent. However, it might be useful for hardware projects or other micro codebases that use sqlite, for example.
• GenKali 9y ago
  NextTrain: https://www.nextrain.co.za https://www.nextrain.co.za We have a fledgling train system in the Gauteng area of South Africa (this area includes Johannesburg and Pretoria). However, the only way to see train schedules is via a PDF (2MB) buried deep on their website. This was a quick weekend hack to show when the next train is for each of the stations, and some additional info.
  • thasaleni 9y ago
    Is this for the GauTrain? or normal MetroRail service?
    • GenKali 9y ago
      GauTrain only
• whataretensors 9y ago
  My brother and I work on a generative adversarial network(deep learning) with pip package and API: https://github.com/255BITS/HyperGAN/ https://github.com/255BITS/HyperGAN/ It's meant for artists, developers, and researchers who are interested in this new tech.
  • futhey 9y ago
    Thanks!
• markwatsonatx 9y ago
  I started minienv (don't really like the name) a few months ago: http://minienv.com http://minienv.com Trying to make it easier to deliver sample applications that run in your browser and include backend databases, jupyter notebooks, etc. It basically allows you to run Docker Compose environments in your own little sandbox + adds an online editor for modifying code/etc. I can see it either going towards more guided tutorials or something more like glitch. Honestly, it's just been super fun to build.
• iokarr 9y ago
  Currently I am building a self hosted push notifications application[0] which is using emqttd[1] as a message broker. I am writing it in Elixir using Phoenix framework[2]. In the beginning the driving force was my need for a solution like that, but in long run I started to feel in love with Elixir and Phoenix. [0] https://github.com/7-iris/iris_server https://github.com/7-iris/iris_server [1] http://emqtt.io/ http://emqtt.io/ [2] http://phoenixframework.org/ http://phoenixframework.org/
• teapot7 9y ago
  I guess I do ask for money for this, but it's pretty overengineered and I wrote it knowing that nobody wanted or needed it: Long ago, when Sun workstations were new and exciting, I wrote a simple Roman numeral digital clock, which just showed the time in Roman numerals. My friend, instead of admiring my cleverness, said "But that's not how the Romans told the time" - which is true. The Roman day started at dawn and finished at sunset, which meant that day and night length were different every single day, as well as in cities at different latitudes. Several decades later I did something about it, and wrote it up as a mobile app which showed either the modern time or optionally the Roman time. Then I made it use the Roman calendar, where you don't have individually numbered days of the month, but count instead how many days until the next Kalends (start of the month), Nones (fifth or seventh day) or Nones (thirteenth or fifteenth day), even if it occurs in the next month. Then I thought I might as well go all the way, and spent more money than I would ever earn from it on having the help text translated into Latin, just in case any ancient Roman time travellers wanted to use it. A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy. http://www.teapot7.com/roman-clock-app/ http://www.teapot7.com/roman-clock-app/
  • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > A waste of time and money, but one which made me happy. Reads like the best kind of waste of time and money!
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• apancik 9y ago
  I made Plain Email [0] just because I couldn't find any email client with clean work flow without distractions. I use it pretty much every day. Thinking about open sourcing it - just can't find the time to refractor it nicely. I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity. [0] http://www.plainemail.com/ http://www.plainemail.com/ [1] http://10hn.pancik.com http://10hn.pancik.com
  • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Is anything beyond professional embarrassment stopping you from open-sourcing Plain Email as-is? It looks really nice. I'm not on a Mac currently so I can't test it. What does 'defer' do? I also do 'inbox zero' but I don't really find Gmail to be too distracting. The one thing I keep wishing for tho (in any email client) is a default ordering/sorting of unread emails by date-time received, but in a descending order. I'd love to see how hard that would be to implement with your project!
• armis 9y ago
  Many small and bigger adventures like: https://github.com/ziogas/cmdwrap https://github.com/ziogas/cmdwrap - Command line/shell wrapper to a web interface. Basically forward any shell command to a nodejs-bootstrap powered web input and track its output. https://github.com/ziogas/easyembed https://github.com/ziogas/easyembed - Micro framework optimized for embedding small independent apps into legacy php systems. https://github.com/ziogas/PHP-Redis-implementation https://github.com/ziogas/PHP-Redis-implementation - Php redis wrapper focused into simplicity with almost zero abstractions and future-proof. https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro-must https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro-must - Google Chrome extension helping you to stay in pomodoro mode. https://www.statsglitch.com/ https://www.statsglitch.com/ - Receive notifications from Google Analytics whenever happened statistically significant spike or drop in your traffic.
• kapuru 9y ago
  Created Unfollow (https://www.unfollow.io https://www.unfollow.io) because I wanted to know who unfollowed me on Twitch. Not a noble reason. But now that I don't stream anymore I just do it because it's so much fun and I don't care about unfollowers anymore. Lots of people use it which motivates me. It's free, but I'm looking for monetization strategies.
• neya 9y ago
  This is my current project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209. It's too long to describe in a sentence, but, it's essentially what I call it the mother of all software (internally). I created it out of pure annoyance towards many of the popular services such as Wordpress, MailChimp, Hubspot, Shopify, Unbounce who had screwed up some aspect of their tools. So, in essence this is a combination of all those softwares under one roof. Here are some things you can do with this software: 1) Research your market, find out your target audience 2) Integrate with analytics tools and understand your users 3) Automate your marketing strategies 4) Maintain a central data warehouse 5) Maintain multi-domain content properties such as blogs, websites, news portals, etc. 6) Host online trainings, build a student list 7) Etc. (read the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209) I've been working on it over 3 years now, while trying to jump from one web framework to another. Finally, I've settled down on Phoenix. This project alone has helped me learn so many programming languages and also helped me gain more experience as a programmer in general, while simultaneously being able to integrate new tools and platforms into my pipeline - This is how I learned React, VueJS, Brunch, Google Cloud, etc. At the moment, I've built this only for myself, just to support and test out my startup ideas. I am thinking of open-sourcing it at some point, at least the core functionality. But as of now, there's nothing else I enjoy doing on a weekend than working on this project :) (also why I'm still single)
  • Kevin_S 9y ago
    This is so damn cool. Can I get on a list to hear more when you're interested in opening it up to the public?
• kureikain 9y ago
  I have two project which make zero money but I love doing them. I learn so much from writing code for them and use them as a playground to try out and apply new technology in a production environment, Yes, they are production environment because they are severving real customer, just that no one pays me so far. https://noty.im https://noty.im An uptime monitoring tool https://betterdev.link https://betterdev.link a news letter and from there, I spin up a link sharing service https://one.betterdev.link https://one.betterdev.link with full text search for content of link as well.
• pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
  I have a cooking/recipes website http://cookarr.com http://cookarr.com — it doesn't make any money, and I didn't even want to put advertisements there, because it's my stress-reducing project :-) And kind of a recipe book I made for myself (and others)
• somid3 9y ago
  You Exec - http://youexec.com http://youexec.com
• robin_reala 9y ago
  I contribute nice versions of free ebooks to the public domain via https://standardebooks.org https://standardebooks.org . Working on a complete Keats collection and Crime and Punishment at the moment.
  • chanux 9y ago
    The library seems to be down.
    • robin_reala 9y ago
      Oops! I’ll ping the project lead. Edit: back up
• rawoke083600 9y ago
  https://www.fibretiger.co.za https://www.fibretiger.co.za - In South Africa we got more than 10 fibre networks and almost double the amount of isps. I've put together this site to compare all the packages on all the networks.
  • koosjan 9y ago
    If only more s.a ppl can get fibre ! Its like the new goldrush in s.a... who can lay the most fibre !
• djadmin 9y ago
  I built a CLI for reading medium.com stories. https://github.com/djadmin/medium-cli https://github.com/djadmin/medium-cli
• negativ0 9y ago
  I build simple products that helps my daily computer interaction, i never bother to publish them, the only one i published is a Chrome Extension to have an easy managing solution for tabs opened in Chrome. Published it only because some friends wanted to use it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bettermarks/dknlgomcobofpglkfalhibgpeandjmie https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bettermarks/dknlgo...
• ankitank 9y ago
  Heimdall: HTTP request logger for Vapor Web Framework http://github.com/himani93/heimdall http://github.com/himani93/heimdall
• chenshuiluke 9y ago
  For me, it's this HN clone I started working on the other day: https://ng-hackernews.lukecs.com/ https://ng-hackernews.lukecs.com/ The advantages of using it include: 1. No need to open a new tab just to view comments 2. It loads a lot more stories at once than HN does, so you don't need to keep going to the next page
• ichik 9y ago
  https://sqncbrk.com https://sqncbrk.com isn't going to make any money any time soon.
• eviaac 9y ago
  i made a website where i sell unused data that has been harvested from digital trash bins. http://binlover.net http://binlover.net
• eviaac 9y ago
  i made a website for selling unused files that have been harvested from digital trash bins. http://binlover.net http://binlover.net
• eviaac 9y ago
  and another project for some software piece i made, http://zer0berung.philippteister.com http://zer0berung.philippteister.com install, and get your entire hdd occupied with zeros
• LukeB42 9y ago
  1. http://index.psybernetics.org http://index.psybernetics.org A news archival service. Built on a Golang implementation of another project. Intending to open source the backend once it's mature. It's been running in production for around a year but the underlying httpd now either needs vendoring or the code sat on top of it needs updating. 2. https://github.com/lukeb42/emissary https://github.com/lukeb42/emissary The first news archival service I wrote. Went through a couple of iterations. Not too happy with the multi-process model under the hood though. 3. http://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd http://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd This has been running in production for a couple of years. The scripting system was recently overhauled and we're using it instead of Consul or NATS for message bussing and service discovery at work (I technically get paid to make sure this is production-quality but it's not consuming time at the moment). It'd be nice to use the plugin system to implement a MUD as a channel mode that generated the world via numpy-based LSTM network. 4. https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony A peer-to-peer caching proxy. Currently working towards a C implementation of this before dedicating time to the other projects in this post.
• raphaelrk 9y ago
  https://summerplaybook.com https://summerplaybook.com :) Essentially a map of where college students are over the summer, run by me and my friend. I work on it because I really love working with my friend, love that it connects people, use it myself, and enjoy programming in itself.
• return0 9y ago
  A directory of opensimulator virtual worlds ("open source second life") http://opensimworld.com http://opensimworld.com
• thewhitetulip 9y ago
  https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo... Stopped making money for me a long time ago. I don't have a computer to update the tutorial sadly, since my macbook crashed, screen flickering after 1.5yrs. But I love the project. I also have a youtube channel which gives me sheer joy.
• Insanity 9y ago
  All of my side-projects, and my blog. None of the side projects are that popular (few github stars, max is like 19 stars and that is technically just a blogpost..) But I don't mind, I am doing them for the sheer fun of it. I get to hack around with fun things and feel good about solving some problem. I get much of the same joy from the job I am doing now, so I feel less guilty about not having as much time for side projects as I used to. Some things I've done/am-doing for for the sheer joy of it: - Pong for the Gameboy Advance - Java Swing 'framework' (Just started to be honest) - Python text editor For my blog I mess around with other things such as: - Sending keystrokes to Minecraft to 'cheat' (this was years ago) - Dynamically building a GUI based on Model classes in Java (reflection hacks) - Scraping webcomic sites to store the comics locally But, as long as you are having fun, what does it really matter what you do :-)
• victormours 9y ago
  For the past year and a half, I've been organizing the Paris Ruby Workshop with a friend of mine. It's a monthly meetup where everyone is welcome to come and pair program on small katas, and chit chat over some pizza. It's free to attend so we don't make any money out of it. It's always fun to meet people that we might not have talked to otherwise, since a lot of attendees are beginners who come from non-engineering backgrounds. And it's also a pretty good feeling at the end of the evening when people tell you they had a good time and learned of to program a little bit better. I also found it surprisingly easy to setup : grab a few katas from exercism.io, create a group on meetup.com and find a local startup willing to host and provide free pizza in exchange for a bit of visibility in the community, and you're good to go.
• pablo98 9y ago
  I built a very accurate value estimator for properties en Amsterdam for the sake of it. Then put it here amsterprice.com . It is slowly starting to pick up, but as itnis for free I am only watching hosting bucks go. Still proud of it! :)
  • sisoytuceo 9y ago
    cool tool dude! Good luck
    • pablo98 9y ago
      Thanks! Now with an actual link: https://amsterprice.com https://amsterprice.com
  • xcubic 9y ago
    There's a bit of Machine learning behind it right? What algo did you use?
• edhelas 9y ago
  Movim, a social network project built on XMPP https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/. I'm working on it for 9 years already and starting to have a nice little community using it daily. I'm really enjoying developing Movim on my free time because I'm still motivated to show the world that we can have decent social-networks and IM solutions by using existing standard protocols (and not proprietary silos like today).
• logikblok 9y ago
  I made a things while back using IFTT and Reddit very low maintenance but it brings me joy. http://www.putyouinabettermood.com/ http://www.putyouinabettermood.com/
• martin_drapeau 9y ago
  Been working on https://www.findyourtennis.com https://www.findyourtennis.com since 2011. Amateur tennis league/tournament management. 3 leagues have been using it recurrently for 3 years here in Montreal. The managers, volunteers, save dozens of hours every season. Started off as a 'find a tennis partner' forum however getting traction was difficult. Chicken and egg problem. Slowly migrating to solving problems of league and tournament management. Will drop the forum one day. Long transition to do part time. Now working on a mobile version with cordova. Testing it on the league I am managing. Saves us a lot of time since it automates lots of tasks and avoids the use of Excel. I don't expect to make money. Market is small and problem is tough to solve. UX intensive. However fun to do on spare time. My objective is to launch on the app store in 2018. Then I hope lots of leagues around tue world will use to simplify their lives.
• everling 9y ago
  Film nerd, want to trace inspiration between different works. Some find it useful, but I haven't bothered monetizing it in any way. Currently reworking the scoring algorithm, will probably replace the awful UI at some point too. http://www.cinetrii.com http://www.cinetrii.com
• dzenos 9y ago
  Building https://tuiqo.com https://tuiqo.com to try and solve a document versioning problem. We realized that even though we created a new way to do document version control and avoid "v1.doc, v2.doc, final_final.doc" problem; people won't switch to it because of lack of options such as formatting tools or any other pure editor features. We are thinking of possible pivots we could try out and we obviously don't have a product-market fit.
• kroltan 9y ago
  http://atmosphir.com/ http://atmosphir.com/ Atmosphir is a 3D platformer where users create levels and play levels created by others, with diverse assets and tools. We made a community game server that aims to restore playability to the game, since most of it required online to properly function. (user profiles, equipment and sharing levels). It is even endorsed by the devs, who kindly redirected the original domain name to our website.
• thsealienbstrds 9y ago
  I've been working on `moncat`, a tool that concatenates e-mails. It's very 'Unix-y' in the sense that it's supposed to do this and only this. I created it because I wanted to have a way to make notes without being dependent on apps. With moncat, I can use any e-mail client to incrementally create larger text files. Currently, I'm using it to write a journal in Markdown that is automatically converted to HTML. How that works: I e-mail journal entries to myself, put them in a mailbox folder, and periodically compile the journal using a cronjob. moncat accepts some basic commands that you can put in the subject line of the e-mail. For example, you can reorder items to be concatenated. It also handles attachments and nested folders. ... Yeah.. so there is no documentation and the code is pretty shit, since I'm the only one using it. The upside is that the code is also pretty small (around 350 LOC Python in total). So, just in case anyone is looking for a tool like this... here you go! ;) https://www.pastery.net/xysbyq+juprcp/#xysbyq https://www.pastery.net/xysbyq+juprcp/#xysbyq
  • koliber 9y ago
    Ha! I love it. I just recently created a tool for personal use that does something similar to this. I use Evernote notes with bullet lists as my TODO list. I created a tool that takes each line of a received email and adds it to my TODO list at the top. It is very convenient. My wife can email me things that need to get done!
    • thsealienbstrds 9y ago
      Nice! I like that basically now you have an e-mail interface to Evernote. What I like about that is that you get all operating systems for free and crazy robustness in terms of forwards compatibility (at least, on the client-side).
• JulianLoehr 9y ago
  "HID Wiimote" [0] a Windows device driver for the Nintendo Wii Remote & Wii U Pro Controller. Started as my Bachelor's thesis and am still working on it every now and then. [0] https://www.julianloehr.de/educational-work/hid-wiimote/ https://www.julianloehr.de/educational-work/hid-wiimote/
• xiaq 9y ago
  A Unix shell that hopefully sucks less than more traditional shells: https://github.com/elves/elvish https://github.com/elves/elvish
• swimmadude66 9y ago
  I built a small website for some old groovshark buddies once that site died where we could meet up, chat, and listen to music together. Its a collaborative radio, where users queue up songs in playlists, then rotate playing a song off the top of their list for everyone to hear. It was originally built as a stopgap until we found something similar but better, so we called it lifeboat radio. But it's kinda become our permanent home now... Here's our hosted instance: https://lifeboatradio.com/ https://lifeboatradio.com/ And here's the repo if you want to host your own! https://github.com/swimmadude66/YTRadio https://github.com/swimmadude66/YTRadio Join us in our hosted instance on fridays for "Fuck it Friday" where we play (preferably musical) shit we found from deep in youtube!
• megamindbrian 9y ago
  Working on managing Angular code using jupyter notebooks similar to Airbnb and their react-atom design flow? I think I got that right, they blogged about it but I never saw any code from it.
• abhisuri97 9y ago
  A chrome extension to help visually impaired individuals see images http://abhinavsuri.com/aat http://abhinavsuri.com/aat
• shove 9y ago
  I'm now a partner in a barcade. No chance of making any money any time soon :)
• justinholmes 9y ago
  https://mixmatic.io/ https://mixmatic.io/ The site focus is about discovery and listening to music together. Built by a remote team trying to find the best mixes in each genre from SoundCloud data. But given SC current status will have to be shutdown.
• yumaikas 9y ago
  I work on https://pisc.junglecoder.com https://pisc.junglecoder.com as an exercise in building a stack based language that is a little less arcane than most that exist at the moment. It was inspired by Factor, Lua and Javascript, and is built in Go. I like using it for little tasks of generating bits of boilerplate code, and have some long term ideas around IRC bots, shells, and the like.
• nexus-uw 9y ago
  I have been working on https://ammobin.ca https://ammobin.ca: a meta search site for ammo prices across canada for the past 4 months. It is completely opensource and has gotten some nice love from /r/canadaguns .
• MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
  A web radio / bluetooth speaker for the ESP32: https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_MP3_Decoder https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_MP3_Decoder An Alexa smart speaker implementation, also for the ESP32: https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_Alexa https://github.com/MrBuddyCasino/ESP32_Alexa Made them to learn C and embedded stuff. Exhausting, but rewarding.
• jaden 9y ago
  https://shortmarks.com https://shortmarks.com - Keyword bookmarks across browsers (I started using them in Firefox, and it was a pain to keep them in sync). It has about 1,400 users, much fewer active. I keep thinking I should rebuild it and figure out a way to make money from it.
• andrewdryga 9y ago
  My open source API gateway - http://github.com/nebo15/annon.api http://github.com/nebo15/annon.api. We built it for a specific purpose since then I've added lots of features and tools. Right now meditating to find out what should be the next big step for it :).
• jconcilio 9y ago
  http://www.penginsforeveryone.com http://www.penginsforeveryone.com - giving away stuffed penguins. Just because we can. (Hoping to actually register this as a nonprofit, but right now it's basically a completely unprofitable business venture.) ETA: On the development end this has been a pretty great project for my fiance and I. He built (and I'm learning from his efforts) a database for processing requests, filtering by priority, etc., and then an integration that allows those we want to send to be exported to a file we can pull into our stamps.com account, and that creates drafts of the Wordpress posts that power our map of sent friends. The database is pretty big (we're sitting at about 21K requests right now on a shared hosting platform) so some of the work has been to load the requests asynchronously so you're not waiting for 21,000 rows before you can manage requests...
• kidproquo 9y ago
  See N Tell [1] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0 [1]: https://seentell.me https://seentell.me
• jonberk218 9y ago
  This is probably going to be buried but YES, my weekly newsletter The Random Roundup(https://tinyletter.com/randomroundup https://tinyletter.com/randomroundup) Granted, down the line I may be able to leverage the audience for something but right now sharing the gems I find while hitch hiking the internet is so awesome I'd probably even pay to do it.
• MoDu_HN 9y ago
  I keep developing LiveStickies, a UWP for simple notes, because all the existing ones were crap (for me). https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh4wm0q https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh4wm0q In the meantime, I've grown to 20k downloads and 200 daily users. I regularly receive e-mails and reviews from people telling they love the app and use it everyday, including someone's grandma, which is very encouraging. :)
• tripzilch 9y ago
  Related question to ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer hatred?
• rkuykendall-com 9y ago
  I wrote a Marvel comics reading-list app using their API, to help myself get caught up. It just runs locally right now, and I'm not sure I'll ever publish it, since I'm forbidden by Marvel from making any money on it, even for server costs, even by linking to their books on Amazon. It'll be on github as soon as I get around from un-hardcoding my keys.
• tmaly 9y ago
  I have been working on BestFoodNearMe https://bestfoodnearme.com https://bestfoodnearme.com I enjoy eating out and trying new food, but I really do not enjoy having to spend a lot of time reading through reviews to figure out what the best dish is at a restaurant or even what the best food dishes are in a city. So this is my attempt to solve the problem of deciding what to eat by allowing people to find and share food dishes.
• damirkotoric 9y ago
  I'm in the middle of building https://minihero.org/ https://minihero.org/ and hoping to ship next week. I hope that in the future volunteering will be as easy as hailing an Uber.
• ctw 9y ago
  Abbot, a build order tool for Age of Empires II - https://abbot.rocks https://abbot.rocks When I shared it to the Aoe2 community on reddit it was well received, but as you can see, practically no one actually used it.
• luked22 9y ago
  Well i'm hoping to turn them into money making projects but I enjoy just building in general so here is my list: https://techjobshtx.com https://techjobshtx.com https://www.jobcrate.io https://www.jobcrate.io http://www.bulgebomb.com http://www.bulgebomb.com http://www.technicalproductmanager.co/ http://www.technicalproductmanager.co/ Nothing special in these but I use it mainly to learn new languages and frameworks, especially in the backend
• alexweber 9y ago
  I really wanted a t-shirt that said "Ladies Love Cool JPEGs" so I made it, and made a quick website to sell them. Here's the website in case you also like 90s hip hop references mixed with image formats: https://ladieslove.cool/ https://ladieslove.cool/
• jakobegger 9y ago
  http://lupa.at http://lupa.at It's a database of roman stone monuments. We have 50000 photos of 27000 stones. The content is collected by two retired archaeologists who travel Europe in their Volkswagen bus driving from museum to museum. After funding for the project dried up, I volunteered to make the new website. The page is in german, but the pictures speak for themselves. For example, have a look at this query for my favorite mythical hero: http://lupa.at/queries/691886695 http://lupa.at/queries/691886695
• zacharynewton 9y ago
  Working on a pretty sick karaoke website as well as a jeopardy training application. I figured since both involve lots of copyright nonsense that it was best just to do these as personal labors of love.
• ClimbsRocks 9y ago
  auto_ml: Automated machine learning at production speeds. https://github.com/ClimbsRocs/auto_ml https://github.com/ClimbsRocs/auto_ml My dad keeps asking me how I plan on making money from this project, given the amount of effort I've poured into it. He grew even more confused once I told him that a company called DataRobot raised over a hundred million dollars to build essentially the same product. But it just brings me joy to make ML available to everyone. If you have any feedback, please let me know! I'd love to know how I can make automl better for you.
• ianopolous 9y ago
  Currently I spend most of my spare time working on Peergos [0]. The remaining spare time is spent on IPFS related libraries: java-ipfs-api [1], java-multibase [2], java-multiaddr [3], java-multihash [4], java-cid [5] I ported tweetnacl from the original c to Java: java-tweetnacl [6] Before that I wrote JPC [7], an x86 pc emulator. As well as an x86 disassembler: JayD [8] An implementation of a merkle-btree for use in IPFS: [9] A JS implementation of Reed Solomon erasure codes: [10] [0] https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos [1] https://github.com/ipfs/java-ipfs-api https://github.com/ipfs/java-ipfs-api [2] https://github.com/multiformats/java-multibase https://github.com/multiformats/java-multibase [3] https://github.com/multiformats/java-multiaddr https://github.com/multiformats/java-multiaddr [4] https://github.com/multiformats/java-multihash https://github.com/multiformats/java-multihash [5] https://github.com/ipld/java-cid https://github.com/ipld/java-cid [6] https://github.com/ianopolous/tweetnacl-java https://github.com/ianopolous/tweetnacl-java [7] https://github.com/ianopolous/JPC https://github.com/ianopolous/JPC [8] https://github.com/ianopolous/JayD https://github.com/ianopolous/JayD [9] https://github.com/ianopolous/merkle-btree https://github.com/ianopolous/merkle-btree [10] https://github.com/ianopolous/ErasureCodes https://github.com/ianopolous/ErasureCodes
• rpeden 9y ago
  http://stories.rpeden.com http://stories.rpeden.com It was never intended to make me any money - it's just a story aggregator I made to help me keep track of HN and my favourite subReddits all in one place. :)
• OkGoDoIt 9y ago
  I built an automated prank call system called Insultron a few years ago. You simply send a text message to 765-444-4442 and it will prank call your chosen friend with some randomly generated ridiculous insults. At one point a few years ago I used it on Steve Wozniak since he was a big fan of prank calling back in the day (pro tip for contacting Woz: his personal phone number is in his autobiography, but in order to get through you have to have a caller ID that’s in the same area code.) It used to cost me under five dollars a month using Twilio but its usage has taken off dramatically (completely organically) and now it cost me closer to $50 a month but I keep paying it because it’s fun. I also built and ran an implementation of Cat Facts several years ago until that was shut down by my provider because people are abusing it too much.
• phuson 9y ago
  https://fridgg.com https://fridgg.com - Fridgg lets you create a gallery to show off your own food photography, as well as discover other amazing food photography, delicious recipes, and great food bloggers.
• kral 9y ago
  I maintain a Mastodon instance for those who are interested in functional programming: https://functional.cafe https://functional.cafe
• hank808 9y ago
  I was oversharing pictures of dogs on Facebook, so I helped build https://puppy.pics https://puppy.pics where people can post as many dog pics as they want, because that's what people there want to see.
• niekutis 9y ago
  http://bugavuga.com/ http://bugavuga.com/