31 ms·

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

• python27 13y ago
  programming, No need to explain more
• ossamaben 13y ago
  Followletter - no more newsletters in your inbox! http://www.followletter.com http://www.followletter.com It is cool because: - All your favorite newsletters are in one place and outside your email inbox. - Newsletters subscribtion is done with just one click (no more email confirmation) - You discover new newsletters based on your interest and you get to know are they worth subscribing to! You see their past issues and followers. - You connect to like-minded people and experts to see what newsletters they read and recommend. - You will be able to create and send interactive newsletters, whether you are a publisher, content curator or you want to build a base of followers.
• askar 13y ago
  This day and age people tend to get easily low on their morale for every little reason. I wanted to help them quickly recharge themselves with some great quotes that inspires and boost them up, most of the time. In that process I'm working on my iOS app Quotegram, which is now available in the AppStore. It's one of the best looking apps on the Quotes niche on the AppStore. AppStore Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846 It's cool because practically it has helped me recharge myself in a couple instances in the recent past and I'm sure it would help those in need of a quick recharge.
• jbobes 13y ago
  http://cloud306.com http://cloud306.com - private cloud solution also, considering going completely open source with this, coz open source sexy! :)
• superbaconman 13y ago
  I'm working on an OpenFlow controller in my spare time. There's nothing too cool about it other than, it's written in Go and GPLv3 licensed. It's useable but I have a big update in the pipes. Once that update is done I should be able to port some existing OpenFlow applications to Go. https://github.com/jonstout/ogo https://github.com/jonstout/ogo
  • iSloth 13y ago
    How are you testing the code/network?
    • superbaconman 13y ago
      Using mininet right now to do verification of message parsing and link discovery. Other than the latency calculations, link discovery seems to be working just fine. After I get this next iteration done I'll take it to the office (InCNTRE SDN Lab). We have a lot of 1.0 hardware to test against. Next I'd like to add path computation based on user defined weight functions.
• jb007 13y ago
  Working on a distributed document database. It's cool as it integrates a search and analytics engine, distributed file system and query language like SQL. Will be the first ever and will solve all database problems for the most part.
• jschrf 13y ago
  A real-time web interface for remotely scripting Android devices using TypeScript. It is cool because Android is great and TypeScript is great.
  • thecolorblue 13y ago
    I keep thinking javascript in android apps is a great idea but I can never get it to work in a way that simplifies development. Good luck! I hope you can figure it out.
• kylebragger 13y ago
  Just released a Q&A book about building community products. (I founded Forrst in 09.) Totally DIY effort, used ruby and the prawn gem to generate the PDF file. All questions were crowd sourced. Here's a discount if you're interested: https://gumroad.com/l/obcp-book/saturday https://gumroad.com/l/obcp-book/saturday
• spartango 13y ago
  I'm working on software that assists in cancer diagnoses. We apply a healthy serving of computer vision and a touch of machine learning to high resolution images (10Gpx) of cancer tissue. Hopefully we'll be able to make diagnosis faster and more accurate, doing our small part to save lives.
  • heyimwill 13y ago
    That sounds incredibly cool, but as someone who lost their sister to cancer I wish this would've existed earlier.
    • spartango 13y ago
      I'm so sorry to hear it. This is why we're working in cancer. We all work as fast as we can, but I've already seen too many cases with poor prognoses. The hope is that in growing this technology, we can catch cancers earlier when they are more treatable.
      • heyimwill 13y ago
        Thanks, she was five so a lot of stuff was going on in her body which meant they couldn't really catch it in time. Is there anywhere I can follow the project?
        • spartango 13y ago
          Currently we don't have that much to show publicly as we're working primarily with doctors; we need to validate our technology properly before it gets anywhere near patients or the public eye. With that said, if you shoot me an email (see profile) I'm happy to answer questions and perhaps more.
  • davedx 13y ago
    How did you get into this field, out of curiosity?
• pholes 13y ago
  I am working on multiple things at the moment, though with my first year of college, progress has been slow.. After challenging C and a multitude of "introduction to programming" classes, I got into CISP 401 (java), so in order to get ahead of the class, I wrote a toy interpreter in java (deemed KjuScript). It is extremely slow, but based off the ruby language with full OOP implementation. Also recently I have been working on something in C++ with a friend that converts sound to color (to teach my dad music (he really wants to learn) who lost most of his hearing at 20, and so my mother who was born deaf, may enjoy my concerts in real time) There is a prototype of it in python located on my github account: Http://www.github.com/pholey
• stephen_mcd 13y ago
  https://kouio.com https://kouio.com - RSS reader we built to replace Google Reader. It's cool because it's been an amazing ride keeping it nice and snappy in spite of an ever growing data set - over 50 million feed items retrieved so far and still growing :-)
  • stephen_mcd 13y ago
    Also drawn from kouio, a nice little library I've called Hot Redis. We use it for working with local Python objects like lists, sets, queues and multisets, which are then backed by Redis. https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-redis https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-redis
• TallboyOne 13y ago
  http://pineapple.io http://pineapple.io - I think it's cool because I don't know of any centralized locations for development tutorials and tools. Reddit is filled with mostly jaded posts and HN is filled with lots of news. Mine is only tutorials, tools, and assets. Here are some tags to start you off. I guarantee you will find hidden gems here :) http://pineapple.io/tags/all http://pineapple.io/tags/all
• cliveowen 13y ago
  Nothing, and it's cool because it gives me a ton of time to go out and meet people.
  • bbrian 13y ago
    Then you might like the app I made that maps the events your friends have been invited to: http://apps.facebook.com/sortonsevents http://apps.facebook.com/sortonsevents Which is tied in with a page tab app I'm working on that watches a list of other pages for events they've created or posted: http://www.facebook.com/UCDEvents/app_123069381111681 http://www.facebook.com/UCDEvents/app_123069381111681 Most of the work for that being on the admin end: http://imgur.com/f1BuKYA http://imgur.com/f1BuKYA And I've just started the android client. I'm using GWT on App Engine and trying to keep generic Facebook stuff in a separate project, which will some day be amazing: https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/GwtFBplus/ https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/GwtFBplus/
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• contextual 13y ago
  Self Experiments: Its mission is to make inhumane animal testing obsolete by using “open suffer” collaboration of volunteer testers from around the world. The first experiment is launching next month: http://selfexperiments.com http://selfexperiments.com What could be more cool than that?
  • cjbprime 13y ago
    Hey, this is an interesting idea. I have criticisms that are probably going to sound mean; but even though I don't like this idea, I like that you're thinking about these problems: * Human subjects research (which the selfexperiments are) is governed by IRBs; if the research did not pass IRB approval, it can't be used in academic publications. It doesn't matter that the research was done outside of academia, it still has to pass IRB approval to be usable. I don't think any IRB would approve this at the moment (though maybe they should!), so it wouldn't be able to be used to replace research in publications. * Of course, humans are not biologically valid testing replacements for animals if your goal was to test what happens in that other animal, so this can only replace research that was being done on animals because humans weren't available. * It looks like up to one million animals a year are used for research in the US, whereas several billion a year (mainly chickens, pigs, cows, with increased capability of suffering over the average testing animal) are raised for food in factory farms. Why does it make sense to work on animal testing instead of factory farming?
    • contextual 13y ago
      Thanks for your comment Chris. Since you don't have the benefit of knowing what the experiments are, I don't blame you for being sceptical. * Self Experiments isn't concerned with conforming to FDA specifications and obtaining IRB approval (yet). Also keep in mind this project is iterative. A lot of mistakes will be made along the way. Oh, and the experiments will be fun, or at least extremely interesting. * Animal testing is often a proxy for testing on humans. Self Experiments will attempt to reverse this on a case by case, experiment by experiment basis. I hope Self Experiments will be preemptive and anticipate experiments that may be conducted on animals in the future - and conduct them on humans first. The trickiest part is designing the protocols for these experiments. * One million? Try 19.5 million animals are killed each year in research in the U.S. alone. This does NOT include mice, which is probably numbered in the billions: http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing-statistics/ * Factory farming is deplorable, and I've mulled over how to solve the problem for several years now. I have ideas but that's all I'll say. In the meantime, I'm vegetarian and working towards vegan-ism (although it's harder than I thought).
• joetann 13y ago
  Http://ineedthatmug.com Fun side project to scratch an admittedly very small itch I've had for a while. I've collaborated with a local company who is handling all order fulfillment. Working on adding font chooser, image upload, and a more elegant customization form.
  • iSloth 13y ago
    Great idea, just doesn't work great with my black coffee and no sugar :)
• gphil 13y ago
  https://kwelia.com https://kwelia.com -- we are taking a quantitative approach to determining the market rental value of apartments. This has not been done accurately on a large scale in the past, and I think we are the first to do it well.
  • jsaxton86 13y ago
    I just signed up for an account, only after the fact to find out that you don't have data for the Portland, OR market, which is unfortunate since this is definitely a tool I'd like to use in my upcoming apartment search. Two things I wanted to mention about the sign up process: * Before giving you my email address, I'd like some reassurances that you won't spam me, etc. * It took 10-20 seconds to create my account. Not sure what's going on there, but you might want to investigate that. This doesn't appear to be a fluke. When I logged out, then logged back in again, it also took 10-20 seconds to log in after entering my credentials. Also, if I log in, then go to the Kwelia home page, then click on "Apartment Ratings", it brings up a login page stating that I'm already logged in, whereas I would expect it to take me to the Apartment Ratings page. This tool looks really promising. Let me know if you ever add support for Portland, OR.
    • gphil 13y ago
      Thank you for the feedback! We're rolling out our models as we acquire customers for our B2B product, and we have none in Portland yet, but hopefully it's only a matter of time. Sorry about the performance issues, I will be looking into them right away.
• triaged 13y ago
  We're working on an app for developers that collates all of your saas products into one mobile feed. It helps you stay current on what's happening at work, both what your team and your machines are doing. It also helps you quickly dig deeper into issues & triage important events. It's cool because you can keep track of a lot more than previously possible, communicate with your team, and act on it - from your phone. And it's damn good looking too (but we're biased :)
  • ninetax 13y ago
    Neat! Got a link or something? Mailing list?
• sherm8n 13y ago
  A legit way to get more followers on social media. Helps you build high quality one-to-one relationships with new people. Pick a keyword like "startup school". Our system will detect when "startup school" type conversations are going on in real-time and performs sentiment analysis. That's a highly targeted opportunity for you to start engaging with that user. And we deliver that user to you on a silver platter. It's up to you to keep the relationship going (put them in your sales funnel). It was a bitch to manually get followers on Tumblr to sell t-shirts to. I had to seek users out, make sure they fit my target audience, and insert myself in the conversation. All without it looking like self‑promotion. That's a lot of mental energy just to reach out to one person. Once I built a fairly large sized audience boat loads of t-shirts started selling. Then I figured startups and businesses on Twitter would find it useful. And they did. Paying customers tell me it works 100 times better than Twitter ads. If you're interested: http://audience.goodsense.io http://audience.goodsense.io
  • ogreyonder 13y ago
    I signed up to check it out and created a campaign. I can't tell if it's doing anything, though. Should I expect an email of some sort? Or do I need to check back to look at your page later?
    • sherm8n 13y ago
      Sorry it's so confusing. If you created a campaign then it is already working. There's nothing else for you to do inside the product. Now all you have to do is interact with the people that are starting to engage with you. It's not an instant thing. Our system detects when relevant conversations are going on using fancy algorithms based around machine learning, sentiment analysis and POS tagging.
      • ogreyonder 13y ago
        Sorry but I still don't quite understand. How are people going to engage with me? Does your system tweet / follow people for me?
• bitexploder 13y ago
  Toy project: an HTTP(S) brute forcing tool using Python as a templating language. Why is it cool: high performance using async IO, powerful templating for Python programmers, very easy to take HTTP requests and turn them into a fuzzing template that mutates request in a combinatoric fashion. Similar to features built into Burp proxy for those that are familiar with it. Real project: A system that will help organizations understand their overall, and application, security risk and manage it across time. Why is it cool: because security is hard and this will make it easier in a non-snake oil fashion. Many organizations are flying blind about their actual risk. A good view of your risk can help you prioritize security budgets.
  • meowface 13y ago
    In regards to the first one: Sounds like a cool idea. Might I also suggest an overall fuzzing engine? Sulley and Peach Fuzzer both have fairly ugly APIs and config formats, in my opinion. A pretty DSL that lets you describe a template, also with the ability to add custom Python functions and integrate them on the fly, would be great.
    • bitexploder 13y ago
      It, more or less, has a separate "Fuzzing Template" system which it uses to generate the brute force test cases. It was never meant to rise to the complexity of Sulley's fuzzing system. I wanted an in between complexity for the dumbest fuzzing and something completely flexible like Sulley and Peach. To solve that 80% problem of, "OK, I just grabbed an HTTP request, let's turn it into a quick and dirty fuzzing template." and from that, "And make sure it runs really fast on a single machine". In the time boxed assessment world you rarely have time to do all that you would like so this seemed to be a reasonable solution. I will put it up at http://github.com/bitexploder http://github.com/bitexploder soon (a week? Maybe two?). The beauty of the "fuzzing engine" I built is that there is nothing to it really. You put in "scriptlets", which are really just small bits of Python that generate lists or sequences, and it combines all of them. My goal was to just write up a lot of the common HTTP fuzzing scenarios (integer sequences, alphabetical sequences, demonstrate common encoding and other scenarios giving you a simple list of things you can copy/paste/modify into a template. And then it runs, logging it all into a SQLite database.
• yathern 13y ago
  Working on a js library to create an ASCII canvas, and have drawing functions much like an HTML5 canvas. It will have the ability to create canvasObjects as well, which can be drawn and interacted with.
• coreymaass 13y ago
  I just launched http://builtFromIdeas.com http://builtFromIdeas.com - my web app developement services as a package. It's cool because it automates most of the sales process. It generates an NDA, and work-for-hire, invoices, and accepts electronic signatures for approval. Customers can review and approve milestones, make payments through Stripe. It even schedules calls!
• tomasien 13y ago
  I'm working on http://wehighfive.com http://wehighfive.com because I think 2 things: 1. Remembering people you meet is hard 2. The iOS (and Android) Contacts apps are horrible.
  • zitko 13y ago
    Any plans for Android version?
    • tomasien 13y ago
      Really hope so!
• nrp 13y ago
  I'm working on making virtual reality as compelling and comfortable as it can be with mostly off the shelf components. It is cool because seeing virtual reality finally work puts a smile on the face of just about everyone we try it on.
• arethuza 13y ago
  Just started working on something to attack SharePoint that is based on sensible standards (REST, JSON, etc.) with the front end completely in something like AngularJS or Ember. This is cool as, in my opinion, SharePoint Must Die.
  • kaeawc 13y ago
    Indeed, it must die. Please kill it
  • n1ghtmare_ 13y ago
    Open source it, I'd gladly jump on board in the war against SharePoint. Arghhhh, I have to put up with this junk every single day !
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • arethuza 13y ago
      The idea that I am currently working on is very much to make the back end (i.e. the server part) do most of the heavy lifting (storage, security, searching etc.) and the UI to be completely decoupled in JavaScript. Ideally what I would like is to have some kind of "standard" well documented interface between the UI and the server - so that different implementations of both could be possible.
• adamzerner 13y ago
  http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ - better college reviews. Most websites just have a reviewer answer a few questions about their school. This doesn't work. I have a bunch of specific questions that reviewers answer. http://www.collegeanswerz.com/university-of-pittsburgh/ http://www.collegeanswerz.com/university-of-pittsburgh/ is the only school with answers right now. I'm working on getting other schools.
• ronaldx 13y ago
  http://xoxo.gl http://xoxo.gl (hugs and kisses, good luck) - a web app to play family-friendly, traditional board games. Still prototyping for now. My goal is wide in scope: to build a site that allows you to take a few minutes to have a positive social interaction with friends and strangers. An anti-Zynga, if you like. I still have a lot to do. With a goal of universal accessibility, I am working on progressive enhancement - making it work adequately for users with poor connections and noscript, and excellently for users with fancy AJAX. It's cool and I think it fills a gap for people who want social games without spam viral marketing... as an anecdote: by playing Boggle online, I made friends and ended up visiting a couple on a different continent. I'd like to enable stories like that.
  • rtb 13y ago
    I like the sound of this, but there's nothing much on that site yet. Where can I subscribe for updates?
    • ronaldx 13y ago
      Thanks for the compliment :) If you sign up at http://xoxo.gl/ http://xoxo.gl/ with an e-mail address then I'll let you know when there's more to see. Otherwise you can contact me for a chat ronald@xoxo.gl
• drugcite-com 13y ago
  An easy way to enter the name of a specific drug or side effect to see its effects as reported to the FDA. One of the primary ways that the United States Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the collection and analysis of reported adverse events (an event that was not the intended outcome of the prescribed drug and has a negative impact on health) through the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS). These reports are submitted by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst others, and then the FDA scientific staff will assess these events in the context of other databases to determine if a particular safety concern is associated, and possibly caused by, exposure to a particular drug. Since this is a public database and useful to prescribers and patients alike to know if "has what I'm experiencing been described in patients taking this drug before?" DrugCite has created a more friendly interface to answer that question. The data can also be sorted by Age and Gender in most cases giving a more detailed view. http://www.drugcite.com/ http://www.drugcite.com/ We use several data sets including FAERS, Meddra, Medical Device Data, UMLS/RXNORM and DAILYMED/Structured Product Labels to name a few.
  • robertk 13y ago
    Is the data set publicly available? I'd love to do some machine learning on it.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• stasy 13y ago
  I'm working on first startup as a sophomore in high school. It is basically a PHP login/registration system styled with all the bootstrap templates. (You can get the PHP login/registration system with any Bootstrap template. Coming soon. https://www.phpstrap.in/ https://www.phpstrap.in/
  • anandvc 13y ago
    Glad you're starting early! Keep going!
• Coval 13y ago
  I'm working on completely rewriting my app (Stamp Trader). It's the only native BitStamp client I know of but the UI needs a ton of work. Why it's cool - you can quickly buy and sell bitcoins with your phone, you can scan and generate a QR code for addresses to buy and sell bitcoins locally with ease. I plan to open source the rewrite when it's finished.
• sunspeck 13y ago
  A biodiverse, edible forest garden in the center of an public high school. We are breaking ground with a team of students in about an hour. This is (very) cool because it will expose adolescents to a variety of concepts, perspectives, and phenomena that are severely lacking from most urbanized places.
  • jph 13y ago
    A+ amazing project. Would love to know more, donate money if you need it, and tell people about your project.
    • sunspeck 13y ago
      Thanks. It was an exhausting and inspiring day, and your support builds the inspiration. I've slapped together a blog with some photos for now, and more info to come. http://growquad.tumblr.com/ http://growquad.tumblr.com/ I'll be documenting this project such that this sorta endeavor is more easily replicable at other secondary schools. Spreading the word would be awesome. If you're able willing to donate, it would be well appreciated. We are totally unfunded at this point: minor expenses thus far have been covered out of pocket by the organizers (schoolteachers and gardeners). But we will need need flora, irrigation equipment, and building materials in the near future... I've put a WePay link on the blog. You can find my email through my profile if you have any questions.
  • toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Have you thought about putting kits together to do this? And funding with Kickstarter?
    • sunspeck 13y ago
      If you're referring to physical/material kits, that'd be difficult, as the elements of life don't package well. If you're talking about packaging informational materials, that's an interesting idea, as I've been developing much of the design and theory on a voluntary basis. I don't see this as a commercial project, but Kickstarter funding might be appropriate. Interested to hear what you think such a kit would include? Regardless, I'll be documenting the project at http://growquad.tumblr.com/ http://growquad.tumblr.com/
• jedireza 13y ago
  Drywall - A website and user system for Node.js http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/ http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/ Recent cool news: got word from the hosts of Node Knockout that submissions are allowed to use it in the competition.
• gregdetre 13y ago
  Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope! My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own, mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk
  • nileshtrivedi 13y ago
    This sounds interesting. What kind of data structure do you use to represent a "pattern"?
  • mindcrime 13y ago
    I'm no AI expert, but after reading both Hawkins' On Intelligence and Kurweil's How To Create A Mind, I'm pretty sold on the idea that our minds are basically pattern-matching machines. Lately I've been trying to spend a lot of time "thinking about thinking" and recognizing how I form thoughts, relate to memories, etc. I am not super familiar with Hofstadter's ideas, since I haven't (yet) finished even GEB, but the general idea is very intriguing to me. I'd be happy to chat with you sometime and bounce ideas around. You're almost certainly way ahead of me in terms of technical knowledge in this domain though.
    • gregdetre 13y ago
      Cool! Drop me a line at greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies ch 4-6 are the best introduction to his modeling work. I can't recommend them highly enough.
      • mindcrime 13y ago
        Excellent, I'll look into getting a copy of that. I have several of his other books (GEB, I Am A Strange Loop, Metamagical Themas, etc.) but only got about 1/3rd of the way through GEB before setting it aside to focus on other stuff for "a while". Unfortunately "a while" has turned into over a year now, so I guess it's time to get back to it. :-)
• eudox 13y ago
  A statically-typed, JIT-compiled dialect of Lisp. I felt that there was a spot between performance and low-level control, and high-level metaprogramming that no language right now occupies (Except possibly Rust, which looks pretty promising). https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp
  • AsmMAn 13y ago
    Great job! Very interesting it's even written in lisp! Do you have any book list you have read before wrote this compiler?
    • eudox 13y ago
      I learnt the basics of compilers from Game Scripting Mastery. I wasn't trying to write a compiler for game scripts, I'd just read it was a very practical (Light on theory) book, and my naive younger self thought this would be a good thing. I'd also recommend Ghuloum's An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction, and the specially the accompanying tutorial: http://web.archive.org/web/20091005152403/http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/compilers-tutorial-2006-09-16.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20091005152403/http://www.cs.indi... I never got far in Lisp in Small Pieces or the Essentials of Programming Languages, I mostly figured things out as I went along.
• metral 13y ago
  I'm working on an aggregated information panel for the novice Bitcoin day trader. It's great for Bitcoin buyers & sellers because the panel is consolidated around the more popular exchanges & wallets, its cleaner & easier to read than most financial-type sites, & all the data is real-time. Also, I'm working on supplemental features such as a live balance & calculator page to help make more informed decisions without having to navigate to other pages. It's cool to me simply because its a site I myself want & need and mostly, its an excuse to play with technologies I've always wanted to learn & use so I'm glad I finally took the time to do so. i.e -Django as webapp front-end with Gunicorn & nginx in the mix, -Gearman as a background worker pulling data and storing it in a DB, -nodejs + socket.io pushing the DB data to Django, -supervisord controlling Gunicorn & Gearman processes And all of these living in their own VM environment for load/performance & decoupling of the usual silo of services. Ping me if you're interested in finding out more about it :)
  • mattmcegg 13y ago
    Sounds awesome! I'm not only interested in the day trading application, but your software stack sounds awesome as well. I couldn't find how to PM you on here, but you should email me at <my Hacker news username> at gmail. best of luck!
• bichiliad 13y ago
  I'm working on something of a responsive.io clone that uses Flickr as an image store. Not sold on the name yet, but I'm calling it Fittr in the mean time. It is mindful of retina displays, only requires that you know the flickr id of the image in question, and will optionally load a smaller image first, to make larger images appear to load quickly. https://github.com/bichiliad/Fittr https://github.com/bichiliad/Fittr
• cmyr 13y ago
  I'm moving to zambia for the winter to start an after-school program doing basic computer and internet literacy skills with kids. It has been really fascinating watching all of the tools and projects that have popped up over the past few years attempting to make really high quality educational resources widely available, but these tools remain generally out of reach for those people that would most benefit from them.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    Awesome, good luck! Are you doing it with a program or going solo? Do they have access to computers, or are you bringing some in?
    • cmyr 13y ago
      kind of realized on review that my OP was pretty dull. :) I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I will be working with computers at a few existing sites. Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that are now mostly sitting unused. I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera. So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things they can do with computers. 0: http://www.britishcouncil.org/ http://www.britishcouncil.org/ edit: their/there =[
• olegp 13y ago
  https://starthq.com https://starthq.com - a web app launcher & new tab replacement extension - like the old Chrome new tab page, but better. What makes it cool is that we are implementing a number of desktop and mobile OS features, like multiple, screens, fast shortcuts, cross app search, notifications etc. but for web apps.
  • trey_swann 13y ago
    I use the StartHQ launcher. Pretty cool! Thanks guys!! I also like the weekly update emails. They email you news and posts about the apps you use.
    • olegp 13y ago
      Awesome! Let me enable some upcoming features like deep links and screens for you. I can also enable developer mode, if you want: https://github.com/starthq/search#starthq-search-api https://github.com/starthq/search#starthq-search-api
• SamBoogie 13y ago
  Betathegame.com - Beta is a game that teaches players programming, game design, and facilitates synergistic learning. I think it's super cool because it's one of the few games I've played that has a heavy educational component while also being fun. It's also cool because it's extremely open. Through the use of the in-game terminal, players are able to build intricate levels and puzzles, then share them with others. Due to the extremely customizable nature of the game, I foresee teachers being able to create homeworks/tests/assignments within. That's the synergistic learning part :) We've done workshops with Black Girls Code, DIY Days, The Village, and the Grace Hopper Convention in places like NYC, Sheffield (UK), Philly, Minneapolis, and most recently Toronto. With each iteration we are seeing more and more excitement, from kids and adults as well. If your interested and located in NYC, we're doing a game demo this Monday night (10/28) at Microsoft HQ (www.meetup.com/gaming/events/139786752/). stop by, play our game, chat with us, play other cool indie games and have fun!
• daeken 13y ago
  My weekend project for the last few weeks is a new Shader language. It's a twisted version of Forth, with some APL-inspired pieces. https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth The macro facilities and compile-time arrays make many things super, super compact and beautiful. A great example is a raymarcher: https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth/blob/master/examples/raymarch.glf https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth/blob/master/examples/r... You can see it in action on Shadertoy here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGWl https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGWl !Warning! Windows users have been reporting some problems, so be careful. (If it crashes your browser, please let me know what your setup is!)
  • pavlov 13y ago
    PostScript for GPUs? Awesome.
• hpvic03 13y ago
  A Pivotal and Trello hybrid for agile software development teams. Pivotal works but lacks the idea of "stages", which is very useful because it actually reflects the real world. Trello is cool but it isn't made specifically for software. For example, it doesn't have acceptance workflow. Combining ideas from both of these results in a very compelling and (I think) useful product. Version 1 will be ready next week.
  • cnorgate 13y ago
    hpvic - not sure if you're working this solo, or as a bigger team, but I'm a PM, I love Trello, haven't used Pivotal, and can't stand Jira. I've been considering building out a Jira-killer myself as a side project. Might be good to chat and hear more of what you're working on. If you want to connect my email is cameron.norgate at the gmail. Cheers!
• tosbourn 13y ago
  http://examtime.com http://examtime.com - it is cool because it is helping people (100,000 so far) study and pass exams.
  • AsmMAn 13y ago
    Great job guy. Sometime ago I was using a quiz-like site and I imagined how cool could be a page like this one.
• mgl 13y ago
  http://codedose.com http://codedose.com We are working on a small side project (codename: market colors) that will make daily analysis of stock price movements and trend discovery super easy. You will be able to analyze and compare literally thousands of stocks from US, European and Asian markets in a few minutes. AJAX frontend with interesting high volume batch processing in the back end. (if you are interested in more details, drop us a line!)
  • rraychaudhuri 13y ago
    Here is a Project I am working on : http://lovasz.cs.fsu.edu/stocks http://lovasz.cs.fsu.edu/stocks (My contact is given in the website) Please take a look, I think we are working on similar lines, if you are interested let me know.
• psobot 13y ago
  Currently building out http://forever.fm http://forever.fm, an automatically-beatmatched radio stream of popular music from around the web. Built out the real-time music streaming backend in a mix of Python, C++ and Golang, just submitted the iOS client to the App Store, and am currently finishing up the Android client. (Along the way, I also built my own distributed, persistent version of Unix pipes on Redis: http://github.com/psobot/pressure http://github.com/psobot/pressure)
  • cyberfart 13y ago
    Nice to stumble upon forever.fm on this thread. I like it a lot and been listening to it for some time.
• pagade 13y ago
  Side project, a small webapp, that would help me: 1. Learn Python, Django, HTML etc. 2. Track my yet-another-wake-up-early-attempt and (hopefully) motivate me.
• kpao 13y ago
  Infinite Flight: it's a flight simulator for mobile platforns I had been working on on the side for almost 7 years before finally deciding on joining forces with a friend to ship it on Windows Phone, then iOS and Android. What's cool about it is that it's written entirely in C# while and we still get decent performance on most devices. Also, we're slowly gaining traction with users that prefer flying with us rather than with the established competitors :) You can find more about the app here: http://flyingdevstudio.com http://flyingdevstudio.com and http://infinite-flight.com http://infinite-flight.com
  • gjulianm 13y ago
    You're just two developers? That's amazing, I thought there was a full studio behind that game. I really love Infinite Flight, I didn't know it was C# on every platform and one of the few games going Windows Phone first. Congrats and keep up the great work :)
    • kpao 13y ago
      Thanks! Yep we're just a team of two, for now at least. It's starting to be a bit too much and we need to bring in more people at some point.
  • teleclimber 13y ago
    Purchased! (on Android) Haven't flown it yet but as a real-world private pilot (inactive these days) and aerospace engineer (now developer), I'm already thankful and much impressed.
• jimaek 13y ago
  http://www.jsdelivr.com http://www.jsdelivr.com - A free public CDN for webmasters. It uses 2 enterprise CDNs and 14 hosting providers all load balanced with multiple failover features.
• nileshtrivedi 13y ago
  I have been working on a web-based interactive environment for creating 2-d mechanics problems (with bodies like particles,disks,boxes, forces like gravity, springs, linear & circular motors and joints like revolute joints and sticks etc.) and simulating them. Think Algodoo for the web. I think it's cool because nothing like this exists for the web. I recently gave a presentation at a Javascript conference in Bangalore on this: https://hasgeek.tv/jsfoo/2013-2/688-interactive-physics-simulation-in-the-browser-what-i-learned https://hasgeek.tv/jsfoo/2013-2/688-interactive-physics-simu... To see the demo, skip to 13:00 in the video. I haven't launched it yet because collision detection and response is pending. Hope to do it soon. :)
  • vinchuco 13y ago
    Maybe you'll be interested in this for some examples to try out http://507movements.com/ http://507movements.com/
• trey_swann 13y ago
  https://www.truevault.com/ https://www.truevault.com/ TrueVault is a HIPAA compliant data backend for apps, devices, and sites. Developers use TrueVault so they can develop healthcare apps without building out their own HIPAA compliant infrastructure. You access data in TrueVault via our API and native clients. Think of TrueVault as Stripe for confidential patient data. You use Stripe to store credit card data so that you are PCI compliant. Our customers use TrueVault to store protected health information (PHI) so that they are HIPAA compliant. It’s cool because new healthcare applications are paring back their feature sets so that they don’t have to be HIPAA compliant. TrueVault helps solve this problem, and prevents legislation from hindering innovation. TrueVault will handle HIPAA so that entrepreneurs can focus on improving the quality of care for millions. Also cool because TrueVault takes care of all of the technical requirements mandated by HIPAA. HIPAA compliant hosting providers (AWS, FireHost, Rackspace) only provide a HIPAA ready environment. You still have to spend the dev time and money to build your own application stack in order to comply with HIPAA.
  • jjsz 13y ago
    This is how I read this: HIPAA data backend as a service. Can also connect to Stripe for PHI and credit card storage. Most companies are not HIPAA. HIPAA API. Other companies are not HIPAA. We handle HIPAA. We know HIPAA. HIPAA (AWS, FireHost, Rackspace) is not enough. HIPAA. HIPAA! Visit truevault dot com: recent blog entries- Do I Need To Be HIPPA Compliant?
    • trey_swann 13y ago
      Pretty close. Stripe is really just used for comparison purposes. Using Stripe makes you PCI compliant, and using TrueVault makes you HIPAA compliant. Also it demonstrates that TrueVault is not a consumer facing document storage solution (not a HIPAA compliant Dropbox). You access data in TrueVault via our API and native clients. Bottom line, if your application needs to be HIPAA compliant it’s a pain. If you push your protected health information (PHI) to TrueVault, then you don’t have to spend months and months developing your own HIPAA compliant infrastructure.
  • jph 13y ago
• LouisSayers 13y ago
  Working on http://www.Driftrock.com http://www.Driftrock.com - it's a Marketing tools platform that connects to various paid marketing channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Adwords, Analytics. It's cool because it's designed to host lots of different marketing applications, and because it has the big data aspect to it. The other cool thing about is that it's designed to be easy to use, mobile responsive, and self service (which is quite a big plus when comparing to the competition!). The other cool thing is that it's my day job, and I get paid to build, design, and work on it :)
• timmclean 13y ago
  http://www.timmclean.net/json-editor/ http://www.timmclean.net/json-editor/ A code editor that uses knowledge of a programming language's grammar. It's cool because it should be significantly more efficient than working in vim/emacs, and will allow powerful scripting capabilities and macros to transform code structurally, instead of as text.
  • pshc 13y ago
    Hey there fellow UW alumni! I'm trying to write a similar kind of structured code editor. We should team up.
    • timmclean 13y ago
      Emailed!
  • nathanathan 13y ago
    I experimented with using cfgs in a code editor before but with the aim of making it easier to code on touch screen devices where curly braces and the like are difficult to type. Here's a prototype I started for writing Json. http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/ http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/
    • timmclean 13y ago
      Neat!
• computeloops 13y ago
  http://www.remotewaker.com http://www.remotewaker.com A tool to save computer power consumption. It is cool because, it could contribute to keep earth cool :)
  • dxm 13y ago
    Nice. But why have you added the horrible photoshop effect to those images?
    • computeloops 13y ago
      I bought the theme from Wrap Bootstrap and the images are supposed to be replaced. The site will be revamped soon. Thanks
• camperman 13y ago
  A Raspberry Pi-based multimedia display solution for SMEs, large corporates and municipalities. It displays nearly all video and image formats and real time news feeds at 50fps in almost any layout combination while using less than 20% CPU at full tilt. It's cool because most people are blown away at how fast and smooth it is when they first see it. A lot of the code is in C, the video decoder is in a thread (and it actually works which is impressive for me) and it's all controlled by Lua.
  • randomhunt 13y ago
    Any idea how you're going to release it? (productise/monetize or open source) I hacked up in the past a temporary solution using PowerPoint running on stripped down older laptops in the foyer and outside meeting rooms in my old company which worked well but I always thought it was a bit overkill and would like to see something like R-Pi in those kind of uses. I imagine yours is a lot more powerful but still think it would be a good use.
    • camperman 13y ago
      We have a lot of customers lined up already: two fast food outlets who want it as a digital menu system, a local council who want it as a digital signage product and some SMEs who want it for reception-based product display. So we're going to be supplying complete solutions with internet connections for updates and each customer will get their own content of course. Pis are incredibly cheap so we'll be highly competitive against other digital signage products. I will definitely release the framework as LGPLed code when its good enough for public consumption. It's nothing technically very special: a C API to create graphics elements using old style OpenGL behind the scenes, a video decoder pinched from hello_videocube.c and a LuaJIT wrapper around it all with ideas from Cocos-2D. Flash will never be supported on the Pi so this is my attempt at an open alternative.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    Make a demo and put it on online!
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• getdavidhiggins 13y ago
  http://jque.re/ http://jque.re/ Why is it cool? Lots of handpicked jQuery plugins all hosted on a CDN. http://devlinks.co.uk/ http://devlinks.co.uk/ Why is it cool? Lots of resources for developers & hackers to dive into.
• mamcx 13y ago
  A app similar to square (a point of sale for iPad), but with more features. I doing a real-time sync (based in firebase) for it. This is a upgrade, semi-rewrite of http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller (until now only useful for wholesale distributors with ERP + Sync server) to help small shops to sell and replace DOS based POS software that is very common in my country and elsewhere. Is a single-man operation ;) P.D: And I wish to have time/money to build a language based in FoxPro/Python...
• sensecall 13y ago
  https://loseproof.com https://loseproof.com - a little side-project we launched a couple of weeks ago. It's a low-cost, secure and simple way to protect things that are important to you. We've started with stickers for now, but are looking to offer item-specific protection soon e.g. keyrings, luggage tags and pet tags. The concept is well-founded but, until now, has been really poorly executed.
  • vinchuco 13y ago
    http://www.thetileapp.com/ http://www.thetileapp.com/
    • sensecall 13y ago
      Yep, but Tile costs $20 a piece. LoseProof is much simpler, cheaper & allows people to protect items of low physical value, but high personal worth – forever :)
• therobot24 13y ago
  building better graphical models for biometric image recognition
• Jasber 13y ago
  I recently started doing more freelance development and didn't find any solutions that I thought did the following really well: - I hate tracking my time, so the app should make this very easy & compelling to do (dare I say fun?) - Should work well with lots of different contract types (hourly, daily, weekly, retainer) - Should earn me more money using best practices (minimum billing increments, etc...) - Should get me paid faster & with the lowest fees possible (client payment details on file & using ACH or something) - Should make managing sub-contractors a breeze. Think of managing sub-contractor invoices & time like a pull-request on GitHub. So I decided I'm going to work on this and try to make something that people will really love using. If you're interested, get notified when it launches: http://bradjasper.com/timetracker/ http://bradjasper.com/timetracker/
  • welder 13y ago
    Have you tried http://wakatime.com http://wakatime.com?
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• martydill 13y ago
  http://reminderhero.com http://reminderhero.com - an email and SMS reminder service. Currently in beta. Unlike some of my previous projects (such as http://surveylitics.com http://surveylitics.com), it's cool because it's actually useful. I've been using it for the past month or two for everything and anything I need to remember.
  • sensecall 13y ago
    I prototyped something exactly like this a couple of years ago but I really struggled with converting human readable times (I'm not a programmer). Looks great! Subscribed.
    • martydill 13y ago
      Heh, thanks! It's definitely a challenge, and a work in progress. But it's coming along!
• prezjordan 13y ago
  I'm working on a program that allows you to make presentations in record time[0] because making slideshows sucks - and it shouldn't have to. Learning a lot about node modules, promises, and maintaining an open-source library. Loving every minute of it :) [0]: http://jdan.github.io/cleaver/ http://jdan.github.io/cleaver/
• kirualex 13y ago
  http://alexiscreuzot.com/apps/nice-weather-2/ http://alexiscreuzot.com/apps/nice-weather-2/ That's the last app I'm working on. It's quite a challenge to go for a Weather app as there are bazillions of them on the AppStore, but I really enjoy the challenge of it. The feedback have been great for now (it just launched 2 days ago), and I hope to make it even better !
• adrianh 13y ago
  Soundslice (http://www.soundslice.com/ http://www.soundslice.com/) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music. Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-solo-guitar-tab/ http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so... It's cool because: * The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_tab.htm http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta...). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement. * It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new song, you generally listen to a recording of it, and it's a pain to cross-reference the recording with the sheet music/tab. * It's one of the most advanced HTML5 apps on the web. Almost everything is done in <canvas>, and it has dozens of UI details (http://www.soundslice.com/help/ http://www.soundslice.com/help/). I did a tech talk about the various JavaScript/HTML5 stuff if you're interested: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice * Proudly bootstrapped and made by two people.
  • monsterix 13y ago
    Wow this looks nice! I wonder how complicated this would become for songs from Satriani, Malmstein or Steve Vai? Why did you choose tabs which is rather weak (correct me if I'm wrong) notation?
    • adrianh 13y ago
      Thanks! The software scales up to that stuff. There's a bunch of complicated stuff transcribed on Soundslice. Here's an arpeggio exercise in the style of Satriani et al: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/4976/electric-guitar-solo-crazy-sweep-picking-arpeggios-praxis-etude-no-2-tab/ http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/4976/electric-guitar-solo-cra... The slow-down feature helps. :) I chose tabs to start because (1) it's easier to implement than standard notation, (2) most guitarists use tab instead of notation, and (3) classic tab really needs to be brought into the 21st century. With that said, I'm working on a standard notation version now, and it's going to be amazing. It's a surprisingly tricky technical challenge to render sheet music in the browser -- there are centuries' worth of special cases!
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• kunai 13y ago
  I'm working on a POSIX-ish OS in Brainfuck. I'm working on it because brainfuck is awesome and writing a kernel in it is even moar awesome. I'm currently trying to figure out how to port several basic GNU coreutils to the system. The kernel boots and hangs in QEMU. That's good for now; at least it boots. Now, the important thing is actually getting it to run bash, and a few basic coreutils, specifically cat, mkdir, echo, ls, and cd. Once it's done, I'm pushing to github (commented extensively, of course ;)
  • pholes 13y ago
    I had a fun little project with brainfuck, wrote a rather slow interpreter in it. Was implementing BF natively in ruby before I was caught up with other projects.. Would love to have your project implemented!! https://github.com/Pholey/BrainRuck https://github.com/Pholey/BrainRuck
  • AsmMAn 13y ago
    What compiler are you using? and will this be open source?
    • kunai 13y ago
      I wrote my own in C++. It's intermediary, so it first translates BF code to C and then uses gcc to compile the intermediary C code. I'm working on getting it to compile straight to assembly. Yeah, yeah, I could have used https://github.com/ahorn/bf-compiler/blob/master/bfc.c https://github.com/ahorn/bf-compiler/blob/master/bfc.c, but eh, what the hell. It's supposed to be a hobby project.
• benblodgett 13y ago
  http://www.nkoso.org http://www.nkoso.org / http://www.hopsie.com http://www.hopsie.com - a crowdfunding api for non profits.
• flyinglizard 13y ago
  http://sandsquid.com http://sandsquid.com - A web app for quickly locating and purchasing electronic parts, specifically entire BOMs (all the components on one or more PCBs, instead of just a single part like other services out there). It's bootstrapped, and we just recently launched. So far we had good traction and virtually all positive responses. Notably, people report that we save them hours every time they use our app, and I firmly believe that any service capable of that, has a place ;)
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    I was thinking about doing something similar for a bit :). If I may make a couple of suggestions - I put in 24 ATMEGA328P-PU-ND. It found where they were, it found the lowest price. They're $3.16 PU - total ~$76. If I get one more, 25 of them, I hit the price break, and my order total come to $50. Definitely a better deal. When I'm getting parts, the price breaks always seem to make me spend more, but there's situations where it wouldn't (like above). Adding in recognition for those would be good. Another suggestion (this is what I was going to work on, but I've moved onto other things) - create a package deal - PCB, parts, stencils, etc, all in one. Have rolling part shipments (orders every Friday). Get reels of components, fulfill some yourself - but charge the live lowest price (you make a little bit from the reel discount, they save a little bit from your utility). You handle the money in between, and disperse it out to the lowest combined cost. Having a one stop shop where I could dump a schematic & board file and get back a PCB, parts, and stencils would be pretty awesome.
    • flyinglizard 13y ago
      Hey, thanks for the feedback. As for ATMEGA328P-PU-ND, did you try using the optimization slider? :) Drag it all the way to its "Aggressive" setting, it will bump the quantity up to 25, and the total down to $48 - just like you said. As for package deals - you are right, this is what needs to be done. We're thinking about that.
      • mercuryrising 13y ago
        Awesome, didn't see that before. Maybe turn it on by default, then have the option to back it off? Why is the quantity bump represented as an error with big warning signs? Shouldn't it be a good thing? Is there any way to represent shipping as well? That seems like the killer - sure something is $2 cheaper on Mouser than Digikey, but if I have to pay $5 for shipping, that breaks the deal. Something else that would be cool - and this is a huge pain point for me when developing PCBs, is let me tell you rough characteristics I want, you find me the part. I want a 0805 10K resistor +- 10% @ quantity 100. Find me the cheapest one! As long as I can use it as a pull up resistor, I don't really care what it is. It's a huge pain in the ass to go through when I want to make my BOM and have 10 different tabs open looking for a 1K, 5K, 10K, 22uF, 10uF resistor and caps. Make that part easy. You should increase the part lookup speed as well - it spins for quite a while. Autocomplete after a few characters would be good too (I wouldn't remember PU-ND, had to look it up, but I can get the first part). Good stuff - do you have a mailing list or anything to get updates?
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• jscottmiller 13y ago
  1dash1 - a browser-based game creation platform. Games are created using a custom toolset and programming language. Everything is centrally-run (games, content editor), making it easy to add multiplayer and collaboration features. Here's a video showing how to create a multiplayer platforming game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rgfEh_Ctc&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rgfEh_Ctc&feature=youtu.be
• mindcrime 13y ago
  I'm working on a two products: 1. https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick - Neddick, a private "reddit like" for the enterprise. Very much inspired by Reddit, but has some additional features - triggers & filters for content, RSS consumer, some additional "share" options (XMPP, ActivityStrea.ms via REST, etc.) 2. https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" product that has some wicked cool features compared to most other ESN offerings, including: ESB integration for subscribing to real-time business events, iCal feed integration, integration with workflow/BPM engines, etc. Why is this stuff cool? Well, they're both OSS (ALv2), written in Groovy, and have some really nifty features. And what we're working on now is semantic concept extraction, automatic correlation/linking of Named Entities to related resources, and semantic query support. Coming down the pipe will be some rad visualizations and just generally more support for different ways to navigate the "knowledge space" that is entailed by related content, people, events and tasks. For me, this is a classic "win win" because I get to have fun working with cool tech: machine learning / big data (Mahout, Hadoop, etc.), Event Stream Processing, Semantic Web stuff (Stanbol, Jena, Fuseki, etc.) and because we're building some stuff that I think we're going to be able to monetize. Build awesome tools AND make money from it? That sounds like my idea of fun. :-)
• kevando 13y ago
  Frameri (http://frameri.com http://frameri.com) Interchangeable Rx glasses. Buy your lenses once that work with multiple frames!
• leeoniya 13y ago
  i'm developing a mobile web interface & a SaaS architecture for my buddy's greenhouse & hydroponics controller business [1]. the backend comm is MODBUS/TCP (ethernet) or MODBUS/RTU (serial). he's currently in Long Beach at the Maximum Yield expo showing off the early alpha I ummm, "polished off" at 4am last night :) [2] it's cool because his customers and oems have been hounding him for some time for an Android and iOS app and for his software to work on OSX, Linux. (currently it's Windows only, C#/.NET). a web app + SaaS was the most natural choice. also, i don't think anything like this exists yet. [1] http://agrowtek.com http://agrowtek.com [2] http://i.imgur.com/e6E8Osw.png http://i.imgur.com/e6E8Osw.png
  • tsumnia 13y ago
    Is there any wireless communication? I've been building a similar pH monitor using XBee communication. If your buddy would like to someone else to work with, I've been doing this in my free time.
    • leeoniya 13y ago
      the controllers, the heart of which are industrial PLCs, do have ethernet modules but no wifi since the reliability is critical in automation. however with a wifi router and some quick config, you can get this fairly easily, assuming the client talks modbus/tcp and knows how to query the controller's register maps. i'm working on a plan to replace the ethernet module with a BeagleBone Black + Arch and a nodjs-based tcp->serial modbus proxy. lots to do, especially when you also have a 9-5 :)
      • tsumnia 13y ago
        Xbee isn't bad, provided you have good signal strength. Before I started teaching I worked for an HVAC optimization company that automated fast food restaurant chain air conditioning. It folded due to politics with the owners, but the product worked really well. One of our early adopters was actually a small Health Center. I've got some modbus scripts that were written in Python while we were working with one of our clients. Its nothing great, just a few read/write functions. If you want I'll send them to you.
• pauljz 13y ago
  A web-based IDE for automated testing [1] with real-time collaboration features. Pretty cool for a few reasons: First, it's actually making creating automated testing suites enjoyable. This is usually a pretty unenviable task. The IDE is something I actually like using though, and have found myself wanting to use it on just about every consulting gig or website I've touched since we started on it - even ones without an explicit automated testing requirement. Second, the technology to pull this off requires a lot of different pieces, in different environments and languages. It's been a really satisfying technical challenge to make everything work together seamlessly and automatically. [1] http://f14n.com/ http://f14n.com/
  • moosterv 13y ago
    god, please don't use autoplay videos! I open your link to read later, then I have to figure out where that damn noise is coming from.
• williamcotton 13y ago
  I'm working on a next generation programming environment for front-end browser development that combines version control and dependency management. It is called lit and the current alpha iteration is at http://www.corslit.com http://www.corslit.com I just introduced static semantically versioned builds and started the process of self-hosting. The interesting thing about lit is that it allows for modern professional development without any UNIX command line or file system dependencies. I'll have more literature and a very exciting screencast demo very soon.
  • lukaseder 13y ago
    What?? Unless you have an express license or permission to make use of a derived work of Coors's trademarks, I'd just say that this is not so cool. Specifically, I doubt that you actually registered a "CorsLit" trademark, which completely mimicks the one by Coors Light, by keeping the ® symbol in place. Any trademark office would have rejected this registration. I'm just an engineer, telling you this nicely. I'm sure, Coors will find other words, should your tool become more popular.
• michael_nielsen 13y ago
  A book that explains the core ideas of neural networks and deep learning. Cool because: * The book incorporates lots of running code for readers to explore and extend. * The book's philosophy is to go deep into the core concepts of deep learning, not to superficially cover a long laundry list of ideas. This gives readers a solid foundation to build on, and makes understanding other material much easier. * Deep learning is the most powerful approach known to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language. The book will help lots more people get quickly up to speed. The book will be freely available online, and a beta site is coming soon. Pre-beta mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/BYr9L http://eepurl.com/BYr9L
  • sheepz 13y ago
    +1 really cool, signing up.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    Awesome, signed up as well. Is your QC&QI book still accurate after 10 years of being in the wild? Have there been any advances that verify / invalidate the ideas you present?
    • michael_nielsen 13y ago
      Thanks! The quantum computing book holds up okay, so far as I know. Of course, there's been many new developments since we wrote it, and a text written today would be somewhat different. But the core material in the field has changed only slowly, so a book can be surprisingly durable.
  • pla3rhat3r 13y ago
    Signed up!
  • doctoboggan 13y ago
    What language are the examples in?
    • 13y ago
• carleverett 13y ago
  A high performance, affordable personal airplane: http://www.skycraftairplanes.com http://www.skycraftairplanes.com It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118 mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS, collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod. They sell for $55k. Here's the HN post I made a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062
  • mililani 13y ago
    That's awesome. I was thinking about buying a personal plane to fly back and forth from Canada to California. I came across this, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis It's called the Synergy plane, and I think it will supposedly the most fuel efficient personal plane. Thoughts?
    • carleverett 13y ago
      That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat. Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreasonable to think that this plane could make it to the market for under $200,000, and its hourly operational costs when you factor in engine overhaul will be around $50. Ours is less than $15. The frustrating thing however is that since this plane is still in early development stages, it will be several years at least until it they are ever able to deliver an aircraft. The nature of the industry is that everything takes a tremendous amount of time. We were able to avoid this for the most part by using an airframe design that was created in the Czech Republic a few years ago, but before this our plane took 7 years to develop. Even given this huge head start, we've been working almost 2 years on SkyCraft and are still a few months from being able to deliver a plane. Flight testing, certification, and setting up production are all enormous tasks, and unlike a lot of technology startups, you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death. There are a lot of things keeping flying very expensive, but I laugh when I hear people in the industry talking about how General Aviation is dying. The fact that the GA industry even exists right now when it is so absurdly expensive is a testament to the fact that people will do pretty much whatever it takes to fly. We're one of the few companies right now actively pursuing the goal of making a safe, high quality airplane affordable for a middle-income person, and when this goal is achieved, General Aviation will explode. [1]http://www.deltahawkengines.com/Firewall%20prices.shtml http://www.deltahawkengines.com/Firewall%20prices.shtml [2]http://www.deltahawkengines.com/econom00.shtml http://www.deltahawkengines.com/econom00.shtml
• garraeth 13y ago
  Terra Ex (http://www.terraexgame.com/ http://www.terraexgame.com/) * Terra Ex is a 4x (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), online game. * We are raising money for STEM education from the game's profits (see our foundation: http://www.odinfoundation.org/ http://www.odinfoundation.org/). * We've got 20+ years of experience in making games and wanted to leverage this expertise to make a game that will help fund our charity. * We're a completely new and indie company. * Our team worked on World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Mercenaries 2, and several others. * Professionals from NASA/JPL and USC are helping out so we can make the game educational, and scientifically correct (see the video on our site). But not so "educational" as to ruin the fun in the game. * 100% bootstrapped in our free time. edit: formatting
  • imdsm 13y ago
    Looks interesting. You say you're a group who brought us WoW, SC, C&C and more, but no names. Would be interesting to see the actual team behind the game, portraits and brief blurbs etc!
• burntsushi 13y ago
  I'm working on a few projects. Firstly, I've developed a suite of Python libraries to deal with NFL data, including play-by-play statistics and slicing game footage into its play-by-play components. A demo of my work is here: http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5 http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5 (excuse the slowness, my web server is crappy) Everything is on GitHub: https://github.com/BurntSushi/{nflgame,nfldb,nflvid,nflfan} https://github.com/BurntSushi/{nflgame,nfldb,nflvid,nflfan} Secondly, I'm also working on a small utility to produce Entity-Relationship diagrams from a simple text description. Surprisingly, there were very few tools that could do this. It's written in Haskell. Current progress here: https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd Thirdly, my PhD research involves finding proteins that are similar to other proteins. Most of the infrastructure is written in Go: https://github.com/TuftsBCB https://github.com/TuftsBCB
  • creativeone 13y ago
    Very impressed with your NFL data tool, check out this company, they may be interested in your technology: http://www.hudl.com/ http://www.hudl.com/
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    Hey thanks for NFLgame! I've been using it to make a stat tracker to watch live feeds of Sunday's action.
  • knes 13y ago
    awesome work, keep up the good work!
  • minouye 13y ago
    Great stuff! Where do you get the game footage from?
    • burntsushi 13y ago
      Here's a rough breakdown: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflvid/blob/master/notes https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflvid/blob/master/notes Any gaps should be easily filled by looking at the source of nflvid. It's pretty small and should be fairly straight-forward (even if you don't know Python). TL;DR - NFL's content delivery network (Neulion) hosts the game footage and it is publicly accessible.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• cwal37 13y ago
  Nothing to do with coding, but I recently started writing energy things at www.btus.us It's just Wordpress for now, but I want to talk about energy generation and consumption related things using EIA and other data sources in ways people haven't seen before. Maps, charts, tables, I think there are a lot of fun things to look at in the energy industry, and most people don't have a strong grasp on it. I'm working on a map series (36-48 maps in a .gif) of dominant generation types by state and month right now that I think a lot of people are going to find very interesting, as the seasonal disposition of hydro and the fast uptake of natural gas by all the boilers that can use it will be kind of visualized.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    If you haven't seen NPR's visualizing the grid, check it out - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...
    • cwal37 13y ago
      I have, it's quite nice, although a bit old. High-detail shapefiles of the grid have become harder and harder to obtain over the years though (post 9/11 basically). So as an individual it kind of sucks to not be able to play with the grid and population/generation shifts.
• d0m 13y ago
  Hacking Health We try to break down the barriers to innovation in healthcare. We bring together doctors, nurses, developers and designers so they can hack without all the bureaucratic bullshit.
• kirk21 13y ago
  Tool for academic researchers: beta.bohrresearch.com It is cool because it helps academic researchers to spend more time on their research.
  • sycren 13y ago
    Seen Write Latex? www.writelatex.com Seems like an ideal partnership opportunity.
    • kirk21 13y ago
      Thanks, will check it out!
    • blueblob 13y ago
      also www.sharelatex.com is almost the same and there is an open source project called flylatex that is trying to provide something similar: http://alabidan.me/2012/07/31/flylatex-a-real-time-collaborative-environment-some-screen-shots-of-the-app/ http://alabidan.me/2012/07/31/flylatex-a-real-time-collabora... This is not the github link because people always want screenshots, but has a link to it.
• digisth 13y ago
  A friend and I have been working on building out a service to help connect organizations looking for custom software development-related services with organizations that provide them. At the time I first started on HN, I was looking for a company to do additional dev work for the company I was working for, so I posted this Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364. I got a few helpful responses (one of which I followed up with and hired) but it made me think about what was missing, and that was a service that provided comprehensive/well-organized listings (with all the stuff you would expect like case studies, work examples, contact forms that weren't buried, the ability to just "start a project" with one, etc.) of custom software development companies/consultancies/shops/agencies/your favorite term here. You can Google for all this stuff, but sifting through the mounds of results takes way too much manual effort; you can ask on forums like this, but that's not going to work for a lot of people; you can look through LinkedIn or the ones that AdAge and friends use, but I didn't find anything I would consider thorough/useful on the former (and I find the searching and filtering system to be very poor), and the latter only really had advertising companies. I also thought about things that companies I've worked for that have provided custom software dev work would find useful (like having a single place to point customers with examples of everything - for various reasons, so many companies just can't/won't update it on their own web site - it even happens that the people who work at the company have to send an email around asking for examples of previous work.) So it's better than all that (we hope!) That's why we'd consider it cool. At the moment, we're pretty far in to initial development of what we consider the MVP and hope to soft launch it in the next few months. Right now, we just have a splash-type page up: http://www.gildedox.com/ http://www.gildedox.com/
• Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] - a server, client, and various related things. The new Minecraft update released this week and radically changed how networking works, so it's a bit tough to get it all working again. It's cool because it's a totally open source recreation of everything. It's got a server, a client, terrain generation, physics simulation, level editing, classic support... this is one of two really big projects I've undertaken. I'm also still working on MediaCrush [2][3], at least when my other half decides to show up and write some backend code. [1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net [2] https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh [3] https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush
  • mindcrime 13y ago
    Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] Sweet! Looking forward to playing with this. :-)
  • wfn 13y ago
    > Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft Nice. Are you aiming to implement a thread-safe plugin API, perchance? The current problem with bukkit (and with vanilla minecraft server, of course) afaik is that whenever a plugin needs access to global state, it uses an API that does not do any locks of any sort; which means that usually, whenever one needs to e.g. write to global state, one dumps these critical parts onto the main thread. Solving this is nontrivial but rather important, I think.
    • Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
      It's just a library, so it doesn't handle plugins. However, the library is thread-safe, and the server [1] I wrote on top of the library supports plugins and is also thread safe. For anything dependent on a specific thread, there's generally a queue to push things into. [1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft
      • 13y ago
• mkramlich 13y ago
  Dead By Zombie: a Python Rogue-like about a zombie apocalypse. I first created it several years ago as a commercial closed-sourced game and it actually sold copies. Now I've open sourced it on GitHub, and am upgrading the engine and giving it a facelift, transforming it into a more serious game of survival and a sandbox for rebuilding civilization. Survivalists, anarcho-capitalists and libertarians may like it. "Day is for the living. Night is for the dead." links: https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html http://synisma.neocities.org/deadbyzombie.html In theory I'm also writing a sequel to my sci-fi comedy novella The Dread Space Pirate Richard. (http://www.reddit.com/r/DSPR/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DSPR/) And fleshing out the outline and first chapters of my first attempt at a technical book, tentatively titled Software Performance and Scalability. I also solve challenging technical problems for clients around the world. I make things. I ship.
  • vilva 13y ago
    thumbs up for you
    • mkramlich 13y ago
      thanks!
• davidw 13y ago
  I'm working on http://www.liberwriter.com http://www.liberwriter.com - and it's not cool. But it makes money. It's cool to work on something that's both cool and makes money, but I'm at a point in my life where I'm happy to work on something that makes money even if it's not cool. But getting paid regularly is pretty cool in its own way. LiberWriter is a product/service to help authors, primarily by converting Word files to eBooks, as well as providing cover design services.
  • jkestner 13y ago
    Solving a problem that people find valuable enough to pay you for is very cool.
  • notdrunkatall 13y ago
    You know what's cool about working on something that makes money? Eventually it allows you to work on something that's cool.
• sparktree 13y ago
  QuietThyme(http://www.quietthyme.com http://www.quietthyme.com) is like DropBox for your ebooks. We let you access your eBook library anytime, anywhere, on any device. Its great because we allow our users to convert their ebooks from one format to another with ease, its simple enough that my mother and father could do it. We also let you keep complete control over your library, if you want, by allowing you to store it on Dropbox or Google Drive
• possibilistic 13y ago
  Laser projection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs (Pong on a 20 story building, billboards, etc.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5_v2By3Ec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5_v2By3Ec (Multiple laser projectors) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-A9LvPbmg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-A9LvPbmg (Canny edge detector) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans (Asteroids on a 4 story building) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OCvjq3ps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OCvjq3ps (Reddit's Snoo on a 20 story building) I've just added a second projector and a few more dacs (thanks to a very generous donor). I'm doing multiprojection and rectification/distortion now. I'm planning to get Skyscraper Tetris and Breakout going with some additional hardware. I need about ten projectors at 60kpps (or 80kpps at low scan angle) with a combined wattage of 20W or so. I have endless ideas: I'll bring it online, do live art/graffiti, turn buildings into twitter feeds, multiplayer gaming, and NES emulator, etc. I wish I could afford more hardware and the ability to work on this full time. :(
  • billmalarky 13y ago
    Curious, are there any safety implications? What happens if the light shines directly into someone's eyes? Like if you projected on a building and the laser light went through a window and hit someone in the eye.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    I'm a little confused - what exactly are you doing? Are you making the projectors? Are you programming the game? What software are you using? Are you sensing what it's being projected on?
    • possibilistic 13y ago
      Some of the hardware was built (one of the projectors), some of it is purchased (a second projector due to time constraints, and all of the DACs). The games, graphic engine, DAC comms, etc. are all programmed in a mix of Python and C++. Most projection software available is commercial and expensive, so I've rolled my own stack. I'm working towards surface distortion mapping, which is increasingly important in the umbrella concern of rectifying multiple projectors onto a single coplanar/colinear surface. I'm going to project a series of grids and have OpenCV automatically align all of the projectors. From there I'll be working with a logical "frame buffer" (really coordinate/transform buffer) that is relayed over the network to a graphics server that will dispatch the drawing jobs and topologically sort objects unless they have preassigned projector-affinity. As far as I know, nobody else is building a beowulf cluster of laser projectors for interactive display. That's my endgame. Really fluid, bright, fast laser light with incredible geometric output capacity. It won't be limited to 2D if I can get design a decent wireframe or clipping/culling engine.
• ronilan 13y ago
  PlaceUnit (http://www.placeunit.com/ http://www.placeunit.com/) -- an iOS app to build a mini-responsive website. Download here: http://www.appstore.com/placeunit http://www.appstore.com/placeunit Just the video: https://vimeo.com/68029789 https://vimeo.com/68029789 Demo: http://fantastic-vancouver.placeunit.com/ http://fantastic-vancouver.placeunit.com/ It's cool because: * It is very very simple to use. Any person with an iPhone/iPad can build something in minutes. * It's a PhoneGap app (HTML5/JavaScript) which integrates Open Source components with a hand rolled framework. * It uses a no-password pattern. It supports offline work. You can use bidi-languages. It has CSS based themed "filters". Mini-sites are customizable and embedable. * Bootstrapped. I'm sole developer/designer.
  • jph 13y ago
    Superb demo video and product. Your MVP is solid, business proposition is strong, and UI is terrific. You've got a home run on your hands.
• hcm 13y ago
  I'm working on CodeCube (http://codecube.io http://codecube.io) - a pastebin that allows you to run the code snippets and see the output live in your browser. It's built on Docker. I posted an article about how I built it here: http://hmarr.com/2013/oct/16/codecube-runnable-gists/ http://hmarr.com/2013/oct/16/codecube-runnable-gists/ The source is up on GitHub at https://github.com/hmarr/codecube https://github.com/hmarr/codecube
  • druska 13y ago
    I love this, very cool stuff. You should add a code format button to the editor.
• Achshar 13y ago
  A local media player in the browser. I mean to make it full media player with video support but for now it's audio only. I also want to make it web app instead of chrome app but some apis are not available anywhere else. And background running is a key feature. It has about 7k users, which is more than I expected TBH. Also the occasional support email is the best thing to happen to me that day. It shows that people actually use what I made. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-player/fddboknafkepdchidokknkeidnaejnkh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/achshar-player/fdd...
• tommoor 13y ago
  Sqwiggle https://www.sqwiggle.com https://www.sqwiggle.com - It's cool because we're making peoples lives genuinely better by enabling them to work from wherever they want. We're also doing our part to rid the world of commuting and grey cubicles.
  • imtu80 13y ago
    Cool! Its amazing what we can do with WebRTC. I create this site (https://github.com/imomin/videoChat https://github.com/imomin/videoChat) just for fun. Are you guys trying to replace Skype? Because, that is what most freelancers and contractors are using it.
    • tommoor 13y ago
      We definitely see people swapping for Skype, yes. We're not trying to replace it for general communication - as an internet phone Skype is excellent - but for collaboration, not so much :-)
• skwp 13y ago
  http://reverb.com http://reverb.com - a musician's marketplace. It's cool because we're putting the care into hand curating our listings so that we have really cool collections (you can check em out here: http://reverb.com/handpicked-collections http://reverb.com/handpicked-collections). It's also cool because we're experimenting with machine learning (poking at prediction.io currently) to see if we can give people more of what they want. And we're building Ruby services and we have an iPhone app. And all this with only two developer, a UX designer and an intern. And it's cool because we're actually making money. And, we're hiring ;)
• amac 13y ago
  Octopus - http://www.octopus.org http://www.octopus.org - a Marketing app directory and community blog/forums. I think it's cool because Marketing in my opinion is the most important aspect of business - particularly on the web.
• michaeldunworth 13y ago
  snapcard - Allows people to spend their bitcoins on any website at anytime, regardless of whether the merchant has it integrated. Like Amazon 1 click, except it works on every website and requires no merchant integration. Video Demo - https://vimeo.com/76122291 https://vimeo.com/76122291 It's cool because - Spend bitcoins anywhere you want - No merchant integration - 1 click checkout so you don't flood a million websites with your personal data.
  • taroth 13y ago
    Very cool!
    • michaeldunworth 13y ago
      Thanks so much :) I appreciate it!
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• aabalkan 13y ago
  I've just completed Dailybbble http://dailybbble.herokuapp.com/ http://dailybbble.herokuapp.com/ it sends you emails with best Dribbble designs of the day. It's cool because I always visited dribbble.com to see populars, now they're at my inbox at every 9am. There are already hundreds of subscribers in the list. That excites me.
• tsumnia 13y ago
  Gingerbread and Candy Corn (http://gingerbread-and-candy-corn.appspot.com http://gingerbread-and-candy-corn.appspot.com) - A one-stop spot for finding houses with holiday decorations. Sadly, I don't think it'll be ready for Halloween :( Though it should be ready for a launch near Black Friday :) As a kid, I always loved driving around looking at Halloween/Christmas lights and as I've gotten older and moved to a bigger city, its been a little difficult knowing where to go to see good houses. The only real way to do it right now is YouTube videos or hoping your local newspaper has it covered. The reason I think its cool is I'm learning to use Google App Engine on a responsive HTML5 style page. Since I'm not too graphic oriented, I'm learning how to use Flat UI to my advantage (as you can see in the nowhere near done demo). I'm going to get to learn a lot of web hosting stuff, like the official webpage currently is hosted with Dreamhost, but how do I get GAE to play nice with that, managing/handling requests, how to appropriately display houses without killing my GAE free package. If it generates enough success this Christmas, I'm hoping to spend next year learning mobile development for an app that does the same thing, but also gives you directions.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    Have you used your AWS free tier up yet? If not, you should consider jumping on it. Free 24/7 micro server for a year - and you host the webserver, so you can install Apache, Nginx, whatever you want. I used it for a while, and the most I got charged was a couple quarters for going over on disk usage (DB was doing unnecessary reads / writes). Also - this is a cool idea. As I've grown up in the same area, it seems like fewer and fewer people go all out for decorations around Halloween and Christmas, it who does with minimal effort. I can't find any examples (none in my area), but does it support pictures of the decorations?
    • tsumnia 13y ago
      I'm going to try to, video too; right now I ask for a link, but since I missed out on this big weekend I have time til Christmas to work on it. Obviously I can't add every house myself, but I've made it really easy to add a house and remove a house, all with a buffer to avoid spammers. I have not touch AWS before, so I'll look into it. I went GAE because I'd used Udacity's Web Development course and in it they talk about how Udacity actually runs off GAE, so I thought if they did it, its do-able.
• theblueadept 13y ago
  http://jaunt-api.com http://jaunt-api.com It's a (free) headless browser API for web automation, creating web-bots, scrapers, and talking to REST-ful web services. I just released Beta version 0.9.5 last night. It's cool because it's far more lightweight than the most obvious alternatives, which means (for example) that it's possible to run many, many browser instances at once, such as one per thread. As an API, it's very developer-friendly with extensive documentation and simple examples for every concept, making it very easy to get started writing java-based scrapers/bots/etc.
• sailE 13y ago
  https://github.com/EliasZ/breakingthetower https://github.com/EliasZ/breakingthetower A clone/rewrite of Notch's Breaking The Tower game in Javascript (Canvas 2D API). Cool because it's not Java?
• rexf 13y ago
  GeoGraph - http://geographapp.com/ http://geographapp.com/ Like imgur for location. No sign up & 1 click to share your current location. If you sign up, you can save your location privately (only you can see it). Use cases are wide open. Save your parking spot. Share location to meetup with a friend. Save a special spot in a forest. Etc. If you use check-in services, GeoGraph may interest you. If you never share your location online, you shouldn’t use this. Working on new features to make location more useful. Edit - Link to site.
  • mpwn 13y ago
    dig the simplicity and saving seems useful. any plans to let a user tag the location and maybe get their history via json.
    • rexf 13y ago
      Thanks, glad you're digging it. Yes, I want to have a simple, powerful tagging interface for providing more context. Getting data out via JSON is easy, just have to build a secure API endpoint.
      • mpwn 13y ago
        One other small piece of feedback. It would be cool if it automatically copied the link to your clipboard when clicking the button. Would save a whole step. :)
        • rexf 13y ago
          Great, thanks for the continued feedback :) I'll add that to the list. It makes sense for desktop usage, whereas I'm curious how iOS & Android clipboard-ing works.
  • adyus 13y ago
    I had the idea a while back, it's great to see it implemented so well! One suggestion though, the fact that use cases are wide open could stifle growth. I'd suggest a few different landing pages you could A/B test, each covering a very specific use case. You could have one page explain that you can save your parking spot and share it with others. Another for sharing a meetup location. Another for saving your favorite locations. Yet another (where you may win big) would be easy location saving for photo and film location scouting.
• leoplct 13y ago
  A data-driven analysis looking for what users are interested in when they are on Facebook http://successful-facebook.herokuapp.com/ http://successful-facebook.herokuapp.com/
• moj 13y ago
  An ios app to make roadtrip timelapse movies (video + gps = fun). This idea has been on my mind for ages so I finally sat down and built it. This video, the very first upload, shows it in action. Bonus if you can guess where it is: http://youtu.be/-sFu7xAxt5c http://youtu.be/-sFu7xAxt5c The in-app playback has map route, speed, & direction overlays, not yet present in the video export. It's not ready for the store yet, contact me if you'd like to beta test.
• dan335 13y ago
  A simple algorithmic stock trader. https://green-machine.us https://green-machine.us Give it a set of rules and it will buy and sell stock for you. I got interested in algorithmic trading and built this site to find out if it works. If it does I'll add real money trading.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    You should add a demo or something - that landing page is a bit ominous, and I don't really want to sign up for something that I haven't seen yet.
    • dan335 13y ago
      Next on the todo list is to add a tutorial and do the front page.
• asiekierka 13y ago
  I'm going to be rewriting my image booru engine ( https://github.com/asiekierka/boorushy2 https://github.com/asiekierka/boorushy2 - all demos are down ). It's not cool. Nothing I make is cool. It never was. All I seem to make are boring, niche ideas... and not even I care about them. Since half a year, I haven't found anything that would interest me. I'm a man with low standards, I guess.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    If you aren't liking what you're doing, pick something else up. Go try out a different hobby, get into painting, cooking, meditating, whatever. Don't burn yourself out grinding teeth on something you don't enjoy doing. Make sure you enjoy what you're doing. Go on a vacation to a state park, take a break for a while.
  • lukaseder 13y ago
    Wow, REALLY? Everything great has once been a niche idea. As a matter of fact, everything highly disruptive was niche at first. Some examples: - photography - the light bulb - combustion engine - air plane - radio - tv - Internet Do you think that any of the above was anything except niche when they were invented? Doing something great means trying hard, spending a lot of time on it, not giving up and believing that it can succeed. This involves both research & development, and a lot of sales. And if one idea fails, the other might work, but only if you're passionate about it.
• dxm 13y ago
  I have a limited company incorporated in the United Kingdom, and I am working on three projects that I hope will turn into profitable products. * Main focus: Transactional and marketing SMS application, it's a little boring and lots of companies do it, but none are truly self-service, and none make it super-easy. * Back burner: Digital asset management, again it's done by many companies already, but there UIs are mostly upload, tag and try to retrieve. I have a background in AI (B.Sc) and I want to make it a little smarter than what's currently out there, with uploads that detect previous revisions of digital assets, etc – finally putting to an end file naming conventions such as x_final.ai, x_final_2.ai, x_final_final.psd (something I have seen used by every company I have worked for.) * And later: I'm into brewing beer, and I have been working on recipes for a few years – Ambition is to make enough money to survive with the two projects above, and to begin investing in building a microbrewery and brew pub.
• LeicaLatte 13y ago
  Updated my app today. A geeky stopwatch - http://logwatch.co http://logwatch.co
• antoniuschan99 13y ago
  Tools to help people who are located far away from each other to collaborate in rich and interactive ways just as if they were together in the same room. http://www.teamchat.me http://www.teamchat.me
• Goopplesoft 13y ago
  GAuthify (http://www.GAuthify.com http://www.GAuthify.com), Aims to make two factor authentication dead simple for the masses. I love two factor authentication and want to see everyone else use it too :)
  • pla3rhat3r 13y ago
    I'm confused about this one. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use a solution like Twilio to do all this?
    • Goopplesoft 13y ago
      Very very doubtful. The base plan is $24 and covers 5000 users (a fairly large amount). If it saves 1 hour of developer time a month to maintain the code/infrastructure/bugs/issues/scaling you're already looking at a 50% price savings. Through building this I can guarantee that it will save way more than 1 hour a month. Source: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/13/silicon-valley-salaries-developers-make-big-bank-in-2012-infographic/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/13/silicon-valley-salaries-de...
      • pla3rhat3r 13y ago
        But you could create a very simple response and add numbers pretty easily. And at .075 cents per message I gotta think, in the long run, Twilio is a cheaper alternative. I should add that I work for Twilio so I'm a bit biased. However, I love your idea. Just trying to do the math. :)
        • Goopplesoft 13y ago
          Twilio is the SMS/Voice provider so the bias doesn't really apply :) Thats why I kept the SMS/Voice rate the same as twilio. Not trying to make money of SMS/Voice just trying to implement a service over it so its easy to use. Have you tried out ezGAuth? Love to know what you think. I'll probably try to seek out someone from twilio soon for some sort of relationship since it helps their sales too. There are also the added benefits of doing your 2FA independently. Furhter, should the long run come, we give you full read/delete perms on all the data so you can implement it yourself.
• itsosman 13y ago
  BusyConf (http://www.busyconf.com http://www.busyconf.com) -- Conference planning SaaS It's cool because conferences are great of networking and learning (especially in the tech industry), but current event planning tools don't handle a lot of the things that conference organizers need.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• be5invis 13y ago
  I'm making a orthogonal code generation library for JavaScript called Patrisika: http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika. Also I'm creating an amazing high performance computer in small form factor with my friends. It will be able to contain 24 CPU cores, seriously.
  • solnyshok 13y ago
    can you tell more about the 24-CPU thingy?
• podviaznikov 13y ago
  Communi.st(https://communi.st/ https://communi.st/) - app for sharing outdoor equipment. It's cool because it promotes sharing and written in Clojure.
• emhart 13y ago
  X-Locks: http://x.lock.gd http://x.lock.gd I'm trying to restore as many of the security-related patents that were lost in the patent office fire of 1836, and tell the stories of their creators. We've had some early successes and intend to reproduce as many of the locks as possible for a potential physical exhibition.
• orchdork10159 13y ago
  Prismoquent is a package written for Laravel that allows users to easily access their Prismic.io repositories. Check out my blog on the package at http://blog.enge.me http://blog.enge.me, and stay tuned for a new update and a new website dedicated to Prismoquent.
• rl12345 13y ago
  I'm working on https://mytraining.pro/ https://mytraining.pro/ It's cool because it's one of the few brazilians startups that have a really unique proposition and are aiming high (instead of just copycating a proven american startup to serve the local market - that's too lazy for us). It's a fitness app and social network by the way.
• sheepz 13y ago
  Greenhouse CI (http://greenhouseci.com http://greenhouseci.com) A continuous integration platform for iOS and Android apps. Our goal is to create a CI environment which is focused on mobile applications, no more, no less, without the hassles of setting up and maintaining something like Jenkins. Live Demo: http://try.greenhouseci.com/ http://try.greenhouseci.com/ (for iOS and Android Gradle projects) If you have a open source iOS or Android project, I'd really appreciate if you tried to build it. It's cool because: * I get to work on cool technology. We are currently using Node.js, Python, Go, Mongo in the backend, and AngularJS in the front end * I get to be part of the whole design process: the actual programming, devops stuff, UI design and copywriting * It is technically challenging
• spleeder 13y ago
  I’m working on SongPane(http://songpane.com http://songpane.com) – an app that helps musicians organize songs and put together set lists for live performances. Demo: http://demo.songpane.com http://demo.songpane.com It’s cool because: * you can carry your entire song repertoire with you (chord charts) and easily combine songs to create set lists for worship services, concerts, practice sessions, etc. * can transpose chord charts * works on any device * works offline * can share set lists with other band members * everything is synchronized in real-time
• fudged71 13y ago
  Everyone is working on new 3D printing hardware but the software is still years behind. PrintToPeer (http://www.printtopeer.com http://www.printtopeer.com) is connecting 3D printers to the internet for remote control and analytics. We have a web dashboard with a real-time connection to your 3D printer(s) for queueing and monitoring, and we've built a printer driver that works on the majority of current desktop 3D printers. A hardware-agnostic API from the web serves as a platform for other developers to create apps on top of. It's an abstraction layer above 3D printing. Being able to create tangible things from software is the coolest thing I can imagine, because of the social and environmental impacts. There are huge challenges ahead that we are excited to face.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    How does this compare to Octoprint[0]? What makes PrintToPeer different? [0] - http://octoprint.org/ http://octoprint.org/
    • fudged71 13y ago
      We've used Octoprint in the past and it just didn't meet our needs. We believe in designing for the novice and giving configuration options for the professionals; Octoprint just isn't user-friendly enough. Out of the box, we support Makerbots (as well as ReRaps). Multiple printers are managed from the same interface. You don't need to wrestle with firewall settings to be secure. We offer multiple slicers in the cloud rather than one slicer on the client. And we are starting with a Raspberry Pi client rather than relying on other projects to provide that capability. And again, by having the service hosted by us, we're able to provide an API to 3rd parties to tie their apps into. Marketplaces, design apps, games, sharing economy services, etc. Do you use Octoprint? Which printers do you have connected to the service?
      • mercuryrising 13y ago
        I have not used Octoprint. I actually use a homemade printer with LinuxCNC and a HobbyCNC driver. It's a bit more fiddly than an off the shelf printer that's fully scriptable, but I really like looking at something I made drive around and make more things [0]. The way it sounds, at least from glancing at your website, is that the printer becomes web connected (your printtopeer.com link on the tablet and printer interface). I would never, ever pass control through a third party for something as expensive and dangerous as a printer. Can you manually override the endstops? Can you manually override the temperature controls? How about a hacker? Just my thoughts. Your interface looks very nice, good luck with the project. [0] - http://imgur.com/a/FZfp9 http://imgur.com/a/FZfp9
• chanon 13y ago
  I'm working on Dragomancers ( http://www.facebook.com/Dragomancers http://www.facebook.com/Dragomancers ) a Facebook (and later iOS) RPG game. It's cool because it features online player vs. player turn-based combat and it's built using Node.js on the server side.
• lowglow 13y ago
  If anyone is in the bay area we'd love to interview you on Techendo (shameless plug: http://techendo.co/ http://techendo.co/) We're always looking to interview people who are passionate and doing something awesome. My email is dan at techendo dot co
• darkFunction 13y ago
  Objective-C class visualisation: http://notes.darkfunction.com/DFGrok http://notes.darkfunction.com/DFGrok It's good for code reviewing changed classes, or getting a structural overview.
• defied 13y ago
  A Selenium Grid (http://testingbot.com http://testingbot.com) I love working on this because I get to learn a variety of things. Right now I'm switching from Amazon EC2 to my own setup with KVM/Qemu VMs. It's been quite the experience prototyping with kvm/qemu, overall I'm really happy with it. From tuning libvirt, to loading RAM images straight into the VM in order to avoid boot-storms, learning about the various VM disk formats, virtio drivers, ... there's plenty to learn!
  • kordless 13y ago
    Wonder if you could do it with OpenStack?
    • defied 13y ago
      Probably could, but at this point I don't want the overhead OpenStack brings along.
• kranner 13y ago
  An iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com http://velocireaderapp.com) for ebooks. I have a day job so this is an after-hours side project. It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its users like it too!
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    That's pretty cool. When you're reading, at any point did you feel 'choppiness' of what you were reading, or do you get used to it? When looking at the trailer, I was finding my inner voice was more robotic than reading normally.
    • kranner 13y ago
      I find that the subjective choppiness goes away when I speed it up. For me the sweet spot is about 500 words per minute, with up to 3 words at a time (I say 'up to' because sentences are chopped up based on punctuation marks, and then smoothed out to leave about an equal number of words in every segment. This is a rough description). The sweet spot also depends on the sort of book being read. I guess it's like watching a movie on a suboptimal screen, or at an suboptimal angle, etc. After a while you're mindful only of the movie, not of the viewing experience.
• gfodor 13y ago
  http://babygra.ms http://babygra.ms Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a successful iOS app myself.
  • nkg 13y ago
    I like your idea very much, but don't forget the Droid legion. I would definitely pay for it.
    • gfodor 13y ago
      Yeah if I can get to the point where this thing makes good cash on iOS I'll build/contract a Android version, don't worry :)
• krishnasrinivas 13y ago
  I am working on https://nutty.io https://nutty.io - share terminals using browser. If you use tmux/screen tools you will find this useful.
• seeingfurther 13y ago
  https://psychsignal.com/ https://psychsignal.com/ Quantifying crowd psychology. Initially our granular sentiment technology is focused on financial sentiment. We plan on changing the way real time news is sourced and reported on.
• mikeurbanski 13y ago
  Shut Up & Sit Down (http://shutupandsitdown.com http://shutupandsitdown.com & http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down) A board game review show and a few secret projects. Cool because: Very funny.
• lfittl 13y ago
  pganalyze (https://pganalyze.com/ https://pganalyze.com/) - Performance Monitoring for PostgreSQL databases. Its cool because: We visualise the metrics & counters that are usually hidden away in PostgreSQL internal tables. Plus we check that your database is fast and configured correctly. Also: I'm a techie with a UX hat, and data visualisation and pattern matching is fun :)
  • smoyer 13y ago
    We use PostgreSQL for a lot of our applications, but I was hoping for a Paul Graham analyzer.
• goyalpulkit 13y ago
  Shyahi (http://shyahi.com http://shyahi.com) - Your Social Homepage. Its like about.me with extended information about social profiles beautifully summarized on your profile. Its free, easy to set up and pulls in your stats directly from Dribbble, Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and your blog feed which means that your Shyahi profile is always up to date. This is something that's really cool about Shyahi, you set it up once and then its automatically updated based on your social activity. It provides the most precise and relevant information to your audience at one central online location. And its bootstrapped and made by two people.
• k4st 13y ago
  I'm working on https://github.com/Granary/granary https://github.com/Granary/granary. It is a Linux kernel dynamic binary translation framework. It's cool because it lets you rewrite the Linux kernel (at different granularities) while it's running. This is useful for analysis, debugging, etc. Right now I'm putting together benchmarks for an upcoming paper deadline.
  • tihag 13y ago
    made an account after years of lurking, to say how awesome this is.
    • k4st 13y ago
      Thanks, that's really flattering! I would love to hear about potential use cases that people might have for this.
• philbo 13y ago
  Currently I'm working on a few different developer tools, as part of my continuing mission to make my own life easier. I figure they're probably cool because if I'm scratching my own itch then I should be scratching itches for other devs too. * GitHubReminder - serendipitous email reminders about your starred repos on GitHub. https://githubreminder.org/ https://githubreminder.org/ * JSComplexity - code complexity metrics for JavaScript. http://jscomplexity.org/ http://jscomplexity.org/ * CoffeeComplexity - code complexity metrics for CoffeeScript projects (still in development). * GrepSrc - regex-based source code search engine (still in development).
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    For JScomplexity, you should round your complexity values :). Halstead difficulty: 4.666666666666666 Halstead volume: 55.506595772116384 Halstead effort: 259.0307802698764 Do you do storage on the back end? Can you target a particular open source project to analyze it? Can you target languages other than JS? Make a Github bot that makes pull requests that analyze a project's complexity, areas where it's more complex (refactor), areas where there's fluff, projects that don't follow 'standards'. That'd be cool if it was an opt-in thing, like I add a "ComplexityBot.MD" blank text file, complexity bot comes by, analyzes my project, pull requests the complexitybot.MD file, gives me some nice data, comes by again whenever it gets some down time and updates the analysis.
    • philbo 13y ago
      Yeah I should, you're right. I'm working through a huge to-do list on that and CoffeeComplexity right now, but I'll add that on the pile too. :) There is no storage on the back-end, it just calls a little node library that I wrote and spits out the result. The work to target other languages is underway, I've split out the AST walking to a separate repo, so it just requires writing a walker implementation for the target parser and you're done. The CoffeeScriptRedux walker is currently in development, with LiveScript planned for after that. So I met a guy recently who is building something similar to the ComplexityBot idea you describe. It's called sidekick and looks pretty awesome from my initial play around with it. * https://www.sidekickjs.com/ https://www.sidekickjs.com/
• harpb 13y ago
  Webapp for organizing code snippets as pages: http://harpb.com/static/snipp-t/index.html http://harpb.com/static/snipp-t/index.html Watch video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPL-7-XTmDs&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPL-7-XTmDs&feature=youtu.be The editor is very much work in progress and the video highlights base concept for the editor.
• Udo 13y ago
  I'm building a community-based startup and project incubator with the goal of forming "classes" of founders who support and advise each other. It's called http://launchway.net http://launchway.net - though it's been difficult to get people on board I'll keep trying. As an aside, I think we should have threads like this one more often, I'd love to learn what everone's been up to periodically.
  • pla3rhat3r 13y ago
    Where is this based out of?
    • Udo 13y ago
      Europe, but in theory it shouldn't matter (except for RL meetups).
• vorador 13y ago
  I'm working on a gmail replacement to deploy on my own server. It's called kite. It uses a lot of cool techs like vagrant, puppet, angularjs and of course, postfix for mail handling. For the moment, it doesn't do much besides displaying a list of emails in a maildir but in a week or two I should have thread handling written. The source is at: http://github.com/khamidou/kite http://github.com/khamidou/kite (sorry for the lack of readme, I should get around to do this tomorrow)
  • bharad 13y ago
    Cool. A demo or screenshots would be really nice.
    • vorador 13y ago
      I know. They're the next thing on my todo list.
• Ettolrahc 13y ago
  I'm teaching myself JavaScript so this weekend I'm working on a basic app using Express, Node and the Twilio API. Learning on each little bit and will write about to help others too.
  • mercuryrising 13y ago
    If you learn well with books, check out "Javascript: The Good Part" by Douglas Crockford. I don't usually learn well with books, but that one really clicked with me.
• SolarUpNote 13y ago
  I'm working on a JSON based website layout and component system. For example: a component that lists blog posts could be represented by: { options:{ elements:[image, title, author, date] }, criteria:{ sort:date.desc, published:true, limit:10 }, request_vars:{page:3} } That would show the last 10 posts that are published, ordered by date, on page 3 of the results. That's a simple example, this site: volumeone.org is built almost entirely this way. Since it's in JSON format, JavaScript can be used to build UIs that build the components and layouts.
  • meowface 13y ago
    I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able to parse it exactly the same.
    • SolarUpNote 13y ago
      I tried that too, but sometimes the nesting level is too deep for YAML. There were also some difficulties when escaping special characters in YAML.
      • meowface 13y ago
        In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any technical limit on the nesting depth. As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines. So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer commas), and what they write "just works."
  • solnyshok 13y ago
    How do you implement it in browser?
• shuzchen 13y ago
  Recommendation engine as a service (http://savant-api.com/ http://savant-api.com/) -- absolutely nothing public yet, except a fancy d3 powered widget that has nothing to do with the service. It's cool because I'm hoping to make collaborative filtered recommendations easy to obtain for small outfits.
  • Deejahll 13y ago
    Will your recommendation algorithm be public or secret? Will it be customizable by your users? You mention a bulk import. Will you provide a bulk export, or will I have to keep my own backup database to avoid lock-in? I see in your API example a bucket, a source, and a target. Would you consider a "value" field, for graphs with weighted edges? (The question is moot if I can't modify the recommendation algorithm to employ it.)
    • shuzchen 13y ago
      It'll use standard algorithms, although the MVP will only have one available (using pearson currently). My goal is to make various alogrithms eventually available, and perhaps some mechanism to select the best automatically (e.g., selecting the best method based on how sparse or dense the graph is). As for bulk export, yes in the sense of "download all the calculated recommendations" (perhaps you want to dump that to a local db to access that data directly, rather than rely on hitting my api every time you need something), but not "download all the data exactly as I put it in". For the most part, the data you put into my service should already exist in your own database (what products your users have purchased, what products your users elected as liking). In addition, you'll likely want to use a one-way hash to hash sources (especially if you use usernames or email addresses to uniquely identify users). I probably won't launch with the ability to add weights to edges, although that's probably one of the first post MVP features on my todo list.
• ZeroMinx 13y ago
  Working on services that makes law firms and lawyers more efficient. It's cool (to me) because I'm one of the co-founders, we started from 0 a few years ago, and I like to see the growth. (you didn't specify it had to be cool to other people)
• praxeologist 13y ago
  I want to build a marketplace for electronic cigarette vendors/individuals. I've been a vendor for almost 3 years and have a unique product which is even more effective than others in helping people quit smoking (even though we are not allowed to market it this way). I think that looming regulation will destroy a lot of small businesses, so I am trying to find a way to respond to that. Getting someone to take payments is really hard though. Balanced just changed their terms, so I am really demoralized but still keeping at it. My options seem to be to become a payment processor myself (expensive and I have no clue what to do) or wait until a similar service comes along and make sure to get in quick so I can get grandfathered in before they change the terms. If anyone has some insight on payments and wants to help me learn the industry or if you smoke and want to quit, let me know.
  • yabbadabbadoo 13y ago
    Your contact info?
    • praxeologist 13y ago
      My email is in my profile, 9nine9//gmail (302) 990-8273 and my name is Ethan if you prefer to call.
      • yabbadabbadoo 13y ago
        Don't see an email in your profile - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=praxeologist https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=praxeologist
• pla3rhat3r 13y ago
  I've been working on PLUNK. It's a Technology Consultant Firm which specializes in helping the entertainment industry. I've been going to a lot of conferences where the reoccurring theme is the tremendous divide in technology and the entertainment world. Either they don't know, don't care, or are too overwhelmed to know where to begin. PLUNK will help them build applications that will deliver meaningful experiences with their audience. Whether it's simply helping to improve upon their social network to building a fully customizable application. Their audience is already engaging them, it's time to talk back. http://www.plunkus.com http://www.plunkus.com
• rglover 13y ago
  Proper (https://properapp.com https://properapp.com) - Easy to understand contracts for freelancers. Cool because it makes the process of creating, sending, and signing freelance contracts much less difficult. Ultimate goal is to get it to a point where a freelancer can pick from a series of pre-loaded templates related to their type of work (e.g. a brochure website, developing an application, wedding photography, etc.) and send their client a contract (that's viable) in minutes. Also makes signing easy for clients by just using a single button click.
  • guru1206 13y ago
    You have an almost 1 megabyte image on the homepage (the octopus). On my internet the image alone took about 4 seconds to load. You should consider optimizing it
  • collyw 13y ago
    Just had a quick look at your site. I assume it is US only? (I like the idea, I had a similar idea for flat rental contracts here in Barcelona). How much lawyer time did you need to spend on setting it up? One suggestion for the website, it clearly states the benefits for the developer, but I assume the customer half of the deal would end up seeing it as well. Point out the benefits to that party, make it seem more of a win-win, rather than a developer covering their arse.
    • rglover 13y ago
      US only for now. I'm a solo dev/designer so really just as time allows me to add in il8n. Not much lawyer time. I had the fortunate position of having my dad as a lawyer/a good friend who was a lawyer to pass the idea on to. The core idea (save for storing signatures) doesn't have any legal implications, so building it was pretty straightforward on that front. Re: the site, thank you for this. I currently have an item on my to do list labeled "guide for curious clients." On my radar for sure, but I'm more concerned with getting the basic pieces in place before I invite that storm :)
• jaibot 13y ago
  Powershame: Publicly precommit to being productive; your friends will get a timelapse of screenshots when you're done. It's cool because I'm using the pre-alpha version to get myself to work on Powershame, sending out timelapses to my wife and facing shame when I break it and it fails to send. http://powershame.com http://powershame.com
• martindale 13y ago
  Coursefork (http://coursefork.org http://coursefork.org) -- github for education. We're trying to open-source the entire education system, starting with creating an easy way for materials and processes to become "forkable". - Fork, for example, an MIT OCW course. - Make modifications. - Submit a pull request back to MIT with your changes, or, just teach from your own fork.
  • mindcrime 13y ago
    This is amazingly cool. I was excited about this from the first time Elliot mentioned it to me, and I'm thrilled to see how far you guys have come. Way to represent the Triangle!
    • martindale 13y ago
      Thanks, Phil! Let's make sure to catch up between now and demo day. :)
      • mindcrime 13y ago
        Absolutely. I put a "todo" on my list to ping you as soon as I got home from ATO the other day. Look for an email soon...
  • zarify 13y ago
    This looks awesome, I hope it's successful. Are you planning on keeping it slide-based or incorporating other types of media in there as well?
    • eah13 13y ago
      Hey there- cofounder of coursefork here. Other types of media are very important to successful teaching, so they're very important to us. We're rolling out updates soon that will support not just other media types but nested organization of courses so you can have multiple sessions. All part of refining that alpha :)
  • 13y ago
• glazskunrukitis 13y ago
  I am working on a side-project in my spare time - GetSSL.me [1]. The idea is to sell inexpensive certificates and offer friendly support. All certificates are hand picked and we only offer the best of them. [1] https://getssl.me/ https://getssl.me/
• rolleiflex 13y ago
  I'm building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It's fully encrypted. Take a look at http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net It's cool because: * It's anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin. * It's encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suite using 2048bit RSA keys. The connections most likely cannot be eavesdropped. * It gives people an unfiltered, unmodified feed of information directly from the sources, with no intervention or censorship. * It's unmoderated, so there is nobody that's deciding what you should and should not see. You can block people, however. Every client has a threshold of blocks for each node after which it stops showing that node to the user. * Zero infrastructure. This is a tool that can be used to either experience / exercise full free speech here in the west, or can be used for more essential two-way mass communication purposes where other venues are blocked, banned or self-censoring.
  • wfn 13y ago
    The thing that you're working on falls within the area of 'truly relevant and important [to our times, etc.] software', IMO. Very nice and interesting indeed. I didn't notice any mention of an adversary model, do you have one? (cf. e.g. http://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/27/how-does-tors-threat-model-differ-from-i2ps-threat-model/277#277 http://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/27/how-does-tors-thre...) How transport-agnostic is the system aiming to be? Could it be used in combination with Tor/I2P/etc. (as an underlying transport/anonymization mechanism)? (cf. http://syndie.de/ http://syndie.de/) Overall, this is very interesting indeed.
    • rolleiflex 13y ago
      Adversary model is pretty simple: If you have a computer that's not compromised (your keys are not copied, there is no keylogger), you should be anonymous at the point you post. A global passive adversary would be able to pinpoint the origin of posts if they had access to the wire-level data if posts were sent in cleartext, but all the connections are encrypted with TLS, so that's impossible. With no physical access, Aether should be pretty much unbreakable (I hope I won't have to eat this later) barring external vectors (keyloggers, rootkits etc). If they have access to your computer, there are two possibilities, depending on your settings. If you have left locally flagging own posts as such enabled (the default setting), it will identify the posts you have created. But if you explicitly disabled that option, even that does not incriminate you: your node is just another node that might have been touched by that post. The reason I have that 'own post' flag is that it is the only way I can show or notify the user about the replies he / she receives. This is kind of an important ability, otherwise I wouldn't have even given the option to flag. It's a tradeoff between user experience and security: I am trying to protect proper citizens from eavesdropping, but I'm not interested in protecting criminals in case of computer seizure. The only reason I have protections against that kind of threat also is the possibility of people in less fortunate countries (where bar for seizure is low) getting their computers seized because of their exercise of free speech. For the transport: so long as you have an IP address that the remote node can contact you back, it will work. It does not matter if it's Tor, I2P or whatever. Granted, I did not try actually doing this yet, but there is no reason it should not work.
• hiburo 13y ago
  We are working on a fun & cozy team management web app - https://hiburo.com https://hiburo.com. Try the one-click demo on front page to get the feeling.
• AndyKelley 13y ago
  libgroove[1] - a generic music player backend C library. The goal is to provide a powerful yet simple API for building a music player app. It's the backend for Groove Basin[2], a music player app written in Node.js with a web interface. It's cool because everybody who uses it as the backend for their music player app benefits from the shared maintenance burden and increased robustness. [1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove [2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin
• younata 13y ago
  I have been building a (highly accurate) flight simulator. Basically, I'm taking a geometric approach to the flight dynamics model (similar to how x-plane works, except they're using... older techniques/technology. I'm using much more advanced stuff [working on seeing if I can simulate the airflow for the entire craft, as opposed to doing it by sections and then integrating those together]). This is in contrast to things like MS Flight simulator and FlightGear (though, flightgear does have a poorly documented and rather inaccurate geometry based fdm - but most people use the table-based one, which is far more accurate than the geometry-based fdm they have implemented), which use lookup tables to guess how an aircraft would perform. The problem I actually originally set out to solve was that xfoil and xflr5 suck to use (importing/exporting plane data is... either you can't, or you shouldn't), and fuck paying for the more expensive design testers. (this is why I have the focus on accuracy - if this was just going to be a simple game, I'd have spent far more time making it look pretty) However, I figured that I could also make testing be more fun by adding an interactive mode (i.e. I want to be able to do hardware-in-the-loop type stuff, as well as just manually flying), and at that point, it just is a scriptable flight simulator. I'm still working on the flight dynamics model, been teaching myself fluid dynamics so that I somewhat understand what all is going on there (as much as anyone who hasn't spent years studying this can understand...), and I've been working on writing code to run on the gpu (yay, opencl) in order to do this. It's been fun.
  • carterschonwald 13y ago
    very very cool! At some point i want to dig into how to write physics simulations, in the mean time i'm slowly working on trying to make better numerical computing tools, which is sort of a precondition to playing with simulation.
    • younata 13y ago
      Oh, man. My previous experience in building simulators is a spaceflight simulator I wrote at the beginning of the year, because space, life is easy and I didn't have to really write hard numerical computing code. This is easily the most challenging thing I've ever written (but it's also easily the most fun thing I've ever written). Good look getting into writing physics simulations!
• deleted 13y ago
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• thibpat 13y ago
  I've built GifIt (http://gifit.nodejitsu.com/ http://gifit.nodejitsu.com/) this week. It allows you to add a gif with your tweets. It's cool because: - Gifs are cool - It uses getUserMedia() to capture the gif from the browser - Coded in node.js with the MEAN boilerplate (https://github.com/linnovate/mean https://github.com/linnovate/mean) - It's a 15-hours one-person project
• nav 13y ago
  Seat 14A (www.seat14a.com) a). Most men hate shopping. b). Sizes are never consistent and a number cannot define a unique bodily shape. Our solution: We simply send an email with a few complete looks every few weeks, if you like a look - order it and we make it made to measure for you. We ship globally for free. Each look is about $150-$175 (so won't break your bank account). Each look is based off of heavy research around looks, textures and trends that are currently in. If you want to learn more: http://seat14a.co/1hcllid http://seat14a.co/1hcllid Or signup here for free: http://seat14a.com/signup http://seat14a.com/signup
  • MAGZine 13y ago
    Are the pieces in the outfit generally specific to that outfit? This is an interesting idea, but the value proposition to buyers is much higher if you're selling a few pieces that can go together, but are also very versatile in that you can use them in any number of combinations. I don't want to spend money on 'one-offs'. Can you speak to the quality of the pieces?
    • nav 13y ago
      On our blog we try to show how these outfits can be combined with other wearables. I think we need to step this up a bit more (so thanks for the feedback here). The quality is good (feedback has been positive but again it's always relative especially in fashion). We hand source all the fabrics and own our process end-to-end - so that helps wrt quality assurance. Hope that helps!
  • spindritf 13y ago
    They only have a few outfits but some http://seat14a.com/ensemble/the_valley http://seat14a.com/ensemble/the_valley are really great.
    • deleted 13y ago
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• inconshreveable 13y ago
  Public Hidden Services These are services that have a secure, public URL that can be accessed by any web browser. The server hosting the traffic, however is completely anonymous and cannot be traced.
  • meowface 13y ago
    How is this different from the .onion.to and tor2web clearnet-to-onionnet services?
• julien421 13y ago
  We are working on HNWatcher.com, a tool for everyone (community managers, growth hackers, devs, devops...) to track keywords and users on Hacker News. It is cool because you can be alerted on: - any mention of your name, company, product or competitors on Hacker News and join the conversation. - any submissions or comments of users you like This way you can upvote while it's still time and join conversations on subjects that matter to you. https://www.hnwatcher.com/ https://www.hnwatcher.com/
• ghc 13y ago
  I'm working on http://algorithmic.ly http://algorithmic.ly -- algorithms as a service. It's cool because I get to help startups who don't always have the resources to hire someone like me who specialized in implementing and scaling certain kinds of algorithmic features. These startups need help with everything from geospatial search up to anomaly detection and predictive analytics. It's bootstrapped, so while I'd love it if it was a public offering, at this point it's still a hybrid consulting/data-services company. Eventually it will be a public platform, and I hope we can help a lot more people!
  • ChargingWookie 13y ago
    This seems like a great service but it needs more info! The site explains what you do in too general terms but not how you do it.
  • reconbot 13y ago
    I'd really like to understand this more too. More info!
  • carterschonwald 13y ago
    very very cool! I'm doing a similar sort of consultancy, and one of the challenges is actually building the reputational capital needed to actually have that sort of deal flow. So props on getting that working!
  • arb99 13y ago
    This sort of thing looks like it could be quite handy, not seen a service like this marketed before.
  • mansigandhi 13y ago
    Really cool! I can see how even we would use it with our startup. Signed up to know more!
  • tlarkworthy 13y ago
    I can build lots of specialised algorithms, I would love a market place to sell them securely
• bedatadriven 13y ago
  ActivityInfo - allow non0technical humanitarian and other NGO workers to define indicators, collect results, map, share, and overlay from dozens of different sources. Open-Source AppEngine/GWT app with OLAP-ish database that syncs to local WebSQL for offline usage. http://about.activityinfo.org http://about.activityinfo.org, or http://github.com/bedatadriven/activityinfo http://github.com/bedatadriven/activityinfo Renjin - new interpreter for the R language built on the JVM (http://www.renjin.org http://www.renjin.org) - includes a gcc-based Fortran/C to JVM compiler tool chain to leverage and transform existing scientific code.
• jessepollak 13y ago
  Clef (https://getclef.com https://getclef.com) — a replacement for usernames and passwords on the web. It's cool because it allows the 99% of people who aren't technical to use public key cryptography to log in to websites.
  • lukaseder 13y ago
    I'm technical and I don't enjoy ordinary implementations of public key cryptography! Good job, and good luck!
  • n1ghtmare_ 13y ago
    Wow, this is awesome ! :) Good job, mate.
• tynan 13y ago
  Sett (http://sett.com http://sett.com) It's a new blogging platform that helps people build audiences. Our oldest users (1 year) have seen roughly 100% increase in daily traffic, twice as many comments, etc. My personal blog has doubled daily visitors and growth rate for subscribers went from 1% to 10%.
  • alecsmart1 13y ago
    On a very off topic, how much do you have to pay for a four letter domain like yours and whats the process like. Did you use something like sedo/godaddy? I've always wondered how difficult is it to acquire one.
    • korussian 13y ago
      I bought a 4-letter domain (edofo.com) on Namecheap for the standard .com price but now don't know what to do with it. It just sounded like a good company/product name.
      • boyers 13y ago
        That's 5 letters?
    • tynan 13y ago
      I forget exactly what we paid, but it was ~$7500, I think. Expensive, but we figured that it would build some trust and wouldn't be an embarrassing domain to have in your blog title (sett.com/alec vs superblog9000.com/alec). I think we bought it through Sedo, where prices vary wildly. In searching, we also found this seller on ebay (no affiliation) that had a bunch pretty cheaply. I sort of liked omot.com, but not enough to buy. http://stores.ebay.com/Short-Domains/LLLL-com-4-Letter-dot-com-/ http://stores.ebay.com/Short-Domains/LLLL-com-4-Letter-dot-c...
      • alecsmart1 13y ago
        Thank you for your answer. For sedo, is there some strategy or did you just pay what they asked for?
• shravvmehtaa 13y ago
  http://www.hshacks.com http://www.hshacks.com. Introducing hacking to the younger generation. Our goal is to introduce as many people to computer science as possible with our hackathon, and promote computer science education to as many females as possible. Companies are looking for more computer science talent and want more to see more females in their company ranks. There are almost 30% less females in computer science compared to males. We are here to provide the mentorship and training needed to become a great developer. We aim to teach students the basics of computer science by holding workshops, teaching the basics of web development, developing iPhone and Android applications, and integrating third party products (APIs) into applications.
• sm01 13y ago
  Working on an Android app to communicate with dolphins, )s) Dolphin Communicator http://goo.gl/7H6wh http://goo.gl/7H6wh - it's cool because it works and it could help setup first-aid stations in the oceans for dolphins, once we learn how to refer to body parts and ailments, and it may help us understand ourselves better by showing that there are other sentient beings here. Understanding ourselves is required for us to survive this century.
• suresk 13y ago
  I've been slowly working on a few things, and hopefully can finish them during the winter: 1) Shared Places The idea is that you can have public or private lists of locations that can be shared with other people, and would be integrated with mapping software on your phone so it is easy to navigate to them. Some private lists that may be useful: a) A family one that keeps track of extended relatives, friends houses, soccer fields, etc b) A small business that works at, delivers to, or services fixed locations. Some public ones might be: a) Places in this area that are related to US Civil War history. b) Gas stations in this area that have a drive-thru (this sounds silly, but was actually where I got the idea - my sister has small children and it is a pain to get them out of the car and into a store to just pick up a few convenience items, so knowing where she can go that has a drive-thru is really handy) 2) Insomnia Tracker An app/website to log things related to sleep (beverages consumed, medication taken, notable social situations, what time you try to go to sleep, what time you wake up, etc). Hopefully having it available on a phone will make it easier to keep track of things more fully than if you had to remember to write it down in a paper log, since you usually have your phone with you. Then this data can be used to find trends such as how, say your coffee consumption affects your sleep, or maybe how stressful arguments at work are keeping you up at night. I don't have anything up for either of them yet, and I'm not sure either could actually make enough to be more than a hobby, but they are both useful to me and kind of fun to build.
  • nickler 13y ago
    take a look at placeling, sounds a lot like your first idea.
    • suresk 13y ago
      Thanks, but it looks like it has been shut down? http://www.placeling.com/ http://www.placeling.com/
  • maoyang 13y ago
    I've implemented most those features in your description, Please refer to http://www.golater.me http://www.golater.me , GoLater integrated with Evernote , You could create note then add a GeoTag for place , You will see this note's map location in your iPhone after sync to GoLater iOS App. So With GoLater , Evernote become your Places content management system, The places content is fully controlled by yourself. The most cool thing is GoLater's note could be search by Map region, Drag your map and see your interesting places collection, Especially GoLater's map function also implement 'filter by Notebook', you could collect places related to US Civil war history in a Notebook named "US Civil war", Open the map in GoLater then switch to "US Civil war", Drag the map region and all information related with "US Civil war" will show up around map region GoLater also implement Places Sharing by way of Evernote share notebook , Your places is private list in your notebook, but you could share your places notebook to your family , Your family could pick up which place is interesting then save to their own map
• c0lin 13y ago
  Notelab (http://notelab.org http://notelab.org) - a way to take synced notes alongside web videos. It's cool because: * It's really simple (paste a YouTube URL then take notes and they all sync up). * At the moment there's no good way to capture, organise, export and share notes relating to online videos. You have to open a text editor next to your browser window, or (gasp) write on paper. * It solves a pain point I have when teaching, as I often recommend videos as "recommended viewing" to my students, and I like to share my notes on the videos with them, and also see what they are writing. * It's my first coding project, so I'm learning a lot :-)
• kylelutz 13y ago
  Boost.Compute (https://github.com/kylelutz/compute https://github.com/kylelutz/compute) - A C++ GPU Computing Library for OpenCL It's cool because it offers C++ developers an easy path to running code on GPUs and multi-core CPUs via an STL-like API. It's similar to NVIDIA's Thrust library but supports all OpenCL compatible devices (including AMD GPUs and Intel CPUs/accelerators). Documentation is here: http://kylelutz.github.io/compute/ http://kylelutz.github.io/compute/ P.S. It's still under active development and we're looking for more contributors with an interest in parallel computing and C++. Send me an e-mail if you're interested!
• keven25 13y ago
  A bookmarking tool that tracks progress of webpages/videos I've been using this app to bookmark all my webpages: http://alittleapp.com/ http://alittleapp.com/ It is especially helpful for unfinished long articles and long videos, which I have to come back for. What makes ALittle unique is, it actually saves the play progress of the video (in the case of articles, it saves the scroll position), so that next time you can come back to the exact same spot. No more writing down the time manually. No more time spent trying to remember the spot you left off at. ALittle makes this possible with a Chrome extension. It adds a cute little button next to your browser's address bar. With just one click, you can save the progress of any webpages. Furthermore, the progress can be synced across computers, as long as you have Chrome browsers.
• derwiki 13y ago
  CameraLends (https://www.cameralends.com https://www.cameralends.com) -- AirBnB for cameras, rent cameras and lenses from local photographers. It's cool because: - sharing feels good - if you have camera gear, you're probably not using it all the time - it's a way earn back cash from lending out gear - it's a side project that I've bootstrapped this year :)
  • imtu80 13y ago
    I like your idea, I was thinking about it other day. I am working on my private pilot license and in a month or so, I will be doing my first solo. I want to record it but then I don't want to spend too much buying a new goPro. It would be nice, if I could rent it for few days for fraction of cost. I am sure there is a market for it.
    • derwiki 13y ago
      Hi imtu80! We already have GoPros in the San Francisco market (which is this one we're actively growing). Feel free to email me (adam at cameralends.com) if you have any other feedback!
• spencerfry 13y ago
  I'm working on https://www.uncover.com https://www.uncover.com (an easy way to offer perks and rewards for your employees) with a few other people. We're bootstrapped and making decent revenue in our 6th month. We've got a huge update coming (hopefully) before Thanksgiving.
• egypturnash 13y ago
  Decrypting Rita: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It's a graphic novel about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. She's got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive mind can take over the planet.
• filpen 13y ago
  In my spare time I am working on Seatbelt (http://seatbelt.io http://seatbelt.io), a web app to help developers find pair programming partners. It's cool because I think we need to bring developers together and share the knowledge, and I am convinced that pair programming is a powerful way to do it. There is much we can learn from working with people from different backgrounds. Right now there is only a landing page with some copy, I work on the code when I find time. It's taking a while since I use this project to teach myself node.js (I am a .NET backend guy in my day job) but it's a fun side project.
• awdraper 13y ago
  DrumLog.com (http://www.drumlog.com http://www.drumlog.com) - Analytics for your practice sessions. It's a web app for drummers to track what and how much they are practicing. It's Cool because: * Creates analytics from an offline activity * Built with Backbone.js, Node.js (Express.js), hosted on Heroku, and uses Parse to store data. (all great free services) * Is being actively used by over 100 drummers who have logged over 3200 practice sessions in about 3 months.
• hippich 13y ago
  SMS Neighbors (http://smsneighbors.com/ http://smsneighbors.com/) Cool, because I am trying to bring social networks to people using "dumb phones". By sending text to one number all your neighbors will receive it. Perfect for reporting suspicious person or lost dog, or announcing garage sale or neighborhood event.
• joshontheweb 13y ago
  Robot Audio (http://robotaudio.com http://robotaudio.com) - An online DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). The app itself is not ready yet, but you can play with the synthesis engine on the signup page. It's cool because: * You can now make something like Ableton Live or Garage Band directly in the browser. * You will have all of you work and assets available from any computer and won't need to worry about license keys. * It will be much easier to share and collaborate with others. * It will be affordable (between $5 - $20/mo) as opposed to $600 - $1200 for Ableton Live.
• sakai 13y ago
  A friend and I are developing a new fast, space-efficient (read: probabilistic) key-value store. We're using it for some computational biology applications. It's cool because: * It scales to really large data sets: We store ~10 billion keys in memory on a single, not-too-ridiculous machine, and the design supports sharding trivially * It's fast: we have a lot of optimization still, but can do ~1M lookups/sec (O(1) lookups) * It's a data structure! (Which as non-formal-CS people we find fun) Would be very interested to hear other applications that people would find the above attributes useful for!
• sakai 13y ago
  A friend and I are developing a new fast, space-efficient (read: probabilistic) key-value store. We're using it for some computational biology applications. It's cool because: * It scales to really large data sets: We store ~10 billion keys in memory on a single, not-too-ridiculous machine, and the design supports sharding trivially * It's fast: we have a lot of optimization still, but can do ~1M lookups/sec (O(1) lookups) * It's a data structure! (Which as non-formal-CS people we find fun) Would be very interested to hear other applications that people would find the above attributes useful for!
• dnautics 13y ago
  "open-source", IP-free anticancer drug candidate (http://indysci.org http://indysci.org) We're launching in January (or possibly December) It's cool, because we want to disrupt the way that pharma operates. Biotech could learn a lot from the way that the software industry has been revolutionized by the open-source philosophy. The world could stand to also see tangible benefits if we succeed in (re)proving it's actually possible. People have done this in the past (salk and sabin come to mind); sometimes the global consciousness just needs a reminder.
  • mtdewcmu 13y ago
    Great cause. Why is industry not interested in developing 9-deoxysibiromycin as a drug?
    • dnautics 13y ago
      unpatentable. Check the date: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390171 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390171 Also the mechanism of action is baroque (although the compound class has fewer side effects), standard pharma is mostly interested in flashy new types of anticancer mechanisms.
  • jnbiche 13y ago
    Thank you and awesome! Although I've seen some great projects scrolling down, this is the first that has elicited a comment. I wish you all the best in your attempt to disrupt pharma -- it needs it.
    • dnautics 13y ago
      Thanks, I'm going to need a lot of luck! We're asking for a lot of money to give a level of security that this will work out (the balance of the funds at the end of the research term will be disbursed to city of hope - a hospital with a cancer treatment specialization). So there's the trickiness of fundraising, and figuring out the internet. The internet is a hard place. On top of that, science is always risky, and as much as I can craft a plan B and a plan C, and dynamically come up with plans, there's always the possibility of total failure.
• gio 13y ago
  Blimp http://getblimp.com http://getblimp.com Project management software for creative teams with no managers. It's cool because: * We help you automate a workflow for your tasks (Plan -> Do -> Review ->Done) * Beautiful and easy to use * You can see the status of all projects on a single page (no more status meetings) * You can see who is doing what in any moment * Conversations are task centric, no need to read long messages to figure out what to do * Google Drive, Dropbox Integration * Proudly bootstrapped and made by three guys from Puerto Rico.
• rooster8 13y ago
  Happy Scale (http://happyscale.com http://happyscale.com) - A moving-average weight tracking app for iOS It's cool because it changes your relationship with the scale. Your weight fluctuates up and down naturally during a diet, and seeing a high number in the morning after you worked so hard the day before can be so demoralizing. With this app, that number is just a data point. You can enter a high number into the app and find out that your overall weight trend is still headed in the downward direction, so there's no need to freak out! On a personal level, it's cool because I actually SHIPPED and because I've gotten to learn so many new things like design and marketing. And getting an email from someone who tells you that it's helping them in a way that no other system has ever helped them before feels incredible. PS- Reading Hacker News has been a huge inspiration for working on this and persevering during the rough times. Love you guys.
• madoublet 13y ago
  http://respondcms.com/ http://respondcms.com/ I know "why do we need another CMS?" It's cool because it makes it really easy to deploy Bootstrap sites. Plus, it has a full API and a great UI (well, at least I think so).
• dc_ploy 13y ago
  An interactive food recipie application for the gov
• iamwil 13y ago
  Cubehero (https://cubehero.com https://cubehero.com) It's cool because: * host 3D printed projects with version control (based on git) * generate previews of STL and OpenSCAD design files * can make commits through web uploader, so you don't need to know command line git.
• jaredsohn 13y ago
  I have been working on a couple of projects. The first is software that automatically pauses/mutes your music when you watch a video and restores it afterward by looking at process volumes. It is called mute.fm but only available for Windows at the moment. http://www.mute.fm/ http://www.mute.fm/ The second is a location-based pasteboard called near.im that lets you share {contact information, addresses, links, text} with people who are nearby who don't necessarily have a particular app installed. I've recently discovered it can also be used as an appless Chrome-To-Phone. http://www.near.im/ http://www.near.im/
• ihenriksen 13y ago
  SparkleDB NoSQL database server is a horizontally distributed, real-time, performance-critical, highly available, and large-scale software solution capable of handling Big Data. Fast. Transactional. Both ACID and in-memory (we let you choose). Acts as a single logical database unit, even though it may consist of hundreds of physical computers located in the same physical location-or dispersed over a network of interconnected computers. Autonomous horizontal scaling. No single point of failure. Concurrent access, crash recovery & repair. Federated queries. Semantic schema-less data model and a powerful declerative semantic query language that are both international standards. Remotely connect to the database using a built-in RESTful API over HTTP or use our JDBC or ODBC drivers. Works on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. We're based out of Sunnyvale, California. Learn more at http://www.sparkledb.net/ http://www.sparkledb.net/
  • turbojerry 13y ago
    The query language for RDF is called SPARQL[1] pronounced "sparkle" which might cause some confusion in conversation. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
    • ihenriksen 13y ago
      Hi Jerry. SPARQL is the SparkleDB query language.
• nihaar 13y ago
  BabyDigest (https://www.getbabydigest.com https://www.getbabydigest.com) - Share baby pictures safely My baby's timeline/Demo: https://www.getbabydigest.com/timeline/santiago https://www.getbabydigest.com/timeline/santiago It's cool because: * It solves a key problem for parents: How do I easily share my baby's pictures & videos privately without requiring my friends and family to sign up or install something? * It automatically finds pictures of your baby on your Facebook feed and pulls them into your baby's timeline, so that your grandmother can see them. * Built in SF with my buddy and I using Django/Python, MongoDB, AngularJS
  • dsschnau 13y ago
    Very cool! My wife and I have this issue. We and my parents want to share pictures without posting our child's life for facebook to control, but still have that convenience.
• AKluge 13y ago
  Interactive visualizations and instruction in mathematics and physics. We can do so much more than what is usually presented for online learning. For example a catalog of visualizations, http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/catalog/ http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/catalog/, and a more complete lesson experiment http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/gausslaw/ http://www.vizitsolutions.com/portfolio/gausslaw/. The goal is for the student to interact with, to play with, the models. Of course almost all of this is open sourced :) The visualizations can even be easily embedded in any online content with just a few lines of HTML provided in the catalog.
• nakodari 13y ago
  Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com https://jumpshare.com) - Real-time file sharing service that allows you to view over 200 file formats right inside the browser. It's cool because: * People can now share and view the contents of the files online without having to download and view them using 3rd party desktop apps. * People can collaborate around content while on the go. * No need to sign up for multiple services to upload multiple file types, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Flickr, etc. Just upload any file on Jumpshare and view it online, beautifully. * Files shared can be viewed by the recipients without having to sign up for an account. * Kills folder hierarchy and introduces a new type of folder organization to speed up file sharing. * Bootstrapped and developed by 8 people.
  • hmsimha 13y ago
    That sounds like a brilliant idea. Also, if you bake in 'previewing' capabilities (like thumbnails for images, bpm/quality descriptions and waveform sketches for audio files, or whatever the equivalent would be for each type of media), you could potentially lease the technology to social media sites that typically already do this for popular image formats.
• arek2 13y ago
  5000 Best Things (http://5000best.com/ http://5000best.com/) - feature-rich lists of best movies, books, websites, Youtube videos, web tools & services, Imgur pictures.
• juanuys 13y ago
  My 1Password replacement using the shell: https://github.com/opyate/1Bashword https://github.com/opyate/1Bashword Suggestions very welcome!
• SubuSS 13y ago
  I work on AWS DynamoDB Storage Engine. AWS DynamoDB is an infinitely scalable / infinitely provisionable / hosted low latency key value store. It is growing beyond the basic key value store definition rapidly with indexing etc. Building and keeping a storage engine that runs on a ton of machines with high performance requirements / changing hardware / a bunch of new feature work etc. is truly hard. Add in other complexities such as live deployment of new software, monitoring for issues, testing the upgrade downgrade scenarios etc. you are looking at a super complex and fluid system. Very few people in the world get to be in the middle of such massive e-machinery, So it is a great place to be. Tough, but great. If that sounds interesting to you, and you are looking to work on the bleeding edge of database technology used by a lot of customers, PM me! We are hiring in Palo Alto, Seattle and Dublin!
• danielmunro 13y ago
  I've been working on a mud implemented in python. For the uninitiated, mud stands for multi-user dungeon, and they are usually text-only multi-player games run over telnet. The first MMOs. It's cool because it is a modern project, using twisted for networking, it's event-driven and scripted, as opposed to hard coded and tightly coupled. The whole project is still highly in development and may not actually be in a working state but it's a labor of love. https://github.com/danielmunro/mudpy https://github.com/danielmunro/mudpy
• btgeekboy 13y ago
  I'm working on a system to export users from one version & instance of our SaaS application and import them into another. The cool/interesting part of this is that I'm using a combination of SchemaCrawler and our homegrown upgrade/migrations kit to naively (with the only domain-specific knowledge being where to start) extract a single account from a multi-tenant database and import it into another one, even if the other one is a different version. (I only support upgrades, as downgrades would cause data loss.) Because it all runs over JDBC, it also means that I can go from one database to another - MySQL to PostgreSQL, for example.
• et1337 13y ago
  chefdash - a realtime dashboard for launching and monitoring Chef[1] runs. http://i.imgur.com/yLRduJt.jpg http://i.imgur.com/yLRduJt.jpg You can run Chef simultaneously on all your machines and monitor their output in realtime. We're using it to deploy most of our infrastructure. Look for it on GitHub soon! [1] http://www.opscode.com/chef/ http://www.opscode.com/chef/
• psobko 13y ago
  New login flow for the next version of the Qriket iPhone app (http://www.qriket.com/ http://www.qriket.com/) - earn cash for scanning QR codes Here's what it looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73335831/QriketLoginFlow.mov https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73335831/QriketLoginFlow... It's cool because it makes signing into our app a little bit easier :)
• megablast 13y ago
  Not that cool, but I haven't had a chance to talk about my work: Spreadsheet Pro, is a spreadsheet app for the iPad. Lots of fun to write, features lots of formulas and graphs as well. I finished this last week. https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/spreadsheet-pro-hd/id727446626?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/spreadsheet-pro-hd/id7274466... Also, Scrum smart is easy to use Scrum management software for the iPad. It is actually a lot easier to use on the iPad than on a laptop. Finished 2 weeks ago. And a new version coming out soon with a lot more features. https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/scrum-smart/id726640328?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/scrum-smart/id726640328?mt=8
• mide765 13y ago
  Never-Bored (http://mide765.com http://mide765.com) - An iOS app you use when you have some time to kill. It's cool because you can choose between four topics depending on your mood and environment. You can read short-stories, watch interesting videos, learn facts and basic phrases for ten languages or play some games such as Pong. On a personal level, I've started using Xcode for the first time on third of September. This is the final product of my first try on doing an iOS app. Any feedback is appreciated.
  • Madsn 13y ago
    NICE! Would love an android version of this!
• dizzystar 13y ago
  Unnamed project, probably beta released sometime this week. Have you ever wondered which of the 10 courses offered by Coursera / EdX / etc to take, sign of up for 4, then dropped all but one and fell too far behind to finish? Classes offered by MOOCs vary greatly in quality. This isn't a judgement call per se, just a question of "fit." Is this class up your alley, or maybe this class is too elementary for your level, or maybe it is too difficult. The goal of my project is to offer students a place to express their thoughts, rank the courses (A, B, C, D, F), and rank difficulty. Other students can upvote comments and the top-ranked comment gets the top spot on the page, above the "official" review. Another question often pondered is "what is the best path for the courses." Although this section is primitive, students are able to offer prerequisite sections. Ideally, employers will have a place to look when people apply trumpeting up their certifications. Were these classes really worthwhile or was it all easy A. Due to the anonymity of the site, students are offered the freedom to offer up honest reviews, why they dropped the courses, and what could be improved. Ultimately, MOOCs may have a place to see the real and raw opinions of the masses they are attempting to teach. Nerd points? Stack is Linux, PostgreSQL, and Clojure. The IP address is in my profile. Please don't create any accounts you'd want to keep since I am going to nuke the entire database soon. There are a few bugs on this site.
• mercuryrising 13y ago
  This thread needs more hardware. I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the hood, slide onto the ground. I'm lying there for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened, wondering whether or not anything is broken. I wiggle my fingers, wiggle my toes, don't feel any pain. I stand up, the guy gets out of his car "Sorry man! I thought you were turning!" I say I think I'm fine... I go look at my bike - it's still upright, the front tire got wedged in a rust spot. I grab it out, hop on, and ride. I couldn't help but laugh the rest of the way to class. That's the day I decided that bikers and automobiles need better communication. So I made a bike light that's easy to use, has front & back blinkers, brake lights, turns on when you ride (so you can't forget), a bright front light, USB rechargeable, 3400 mAh LiIon battery. I made a 3D printer to print the parts, I did the PCB design, physical design, and software. It's pretty damn cool. I ride pretty regularly and recharge it about once every three weeks. It's surprisingly water resistance - I am a little scared of selling this to people as I didn't know how it would handle water, but I've taken it through two large storms, one with huge puddles splashing all over the cases, and the light handled it all in stride. Here's the images - http://imgur.com/a/EUzXm http://imgur.com/a/EUzXm I'm stalling on it a little bit right now - there's not a very good way of bootstrapping into manufacturing. I could 3D print the cases and assemble the boards, but each case takes about 20 hours to print (on my fiddly printer). There's ~100 components too, which is a pain for manual placing and reflowing. I have a couple other designs brewing that are simpler and lower cost, but without all the fancy features. Speaking of which... I have to go get some interrupts working.
  • michaelmior 13y ago
    This is awesome! Hope you figure out a way to manufacture it :)
  • amwelles 13y ago
    Whoa, this sounds really awesome! Are you keeping updates on your progress anywhere? I commute every day, and I'd love to have something like this.
• yesimahuman 13y ago
  I'm building Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com/ http://ionicframework.com/) to make HTML5 mobile app development awesome. Should have our first release out in a few weeks!
• city41 13y ago
  Metamorfus (http://metamorf.us http://metamorf.us) -- a site to help improve social skills I have joined forces with my sister in law who has a Doctor of Psychology and specializes in anxieties. We both are shy people who have suffered with social anxiety, so we are working on new ways to help people overcome this. Combining her expertise with my dev skills. As you can see from the landing page, we don't have a designer :) Why it's cool * It's a really fresh way to conquer anxiety * There's nothing else out there like it, existing anxiety/shyness communties and websites are rather archaic and/or simple * It will help people of all types, from just wanting to get better at public speaking, to those who suffer from debilitating anxiety * It will be helpful for both those who suffer and for psychologists to use as a tool
• solnyshok 13y ago
  I made private diaries for close friends (7 max). It is like post-it note on the kitchen fridge. Not indexed by google. Honesty of content there is amazing. Things that people would never trust to fb/twitter. Also, people that never write anything on facebook, do post there. It is simple stuff, like " I am doing that, I am feeling this, I am going to somewhere." If suddenly, all of fb contacts would post such small things, you'd go crazy. However, there are several people in my life, about whom I care deeply and want to know how they are doing even if they are 1000km away. This solves my need to keep in touch with chosen few souls. http://www.osom.me http://www.osom.me
  • mct 13y ago
    That's an interesting concept. Am I missing something, though, or is there no way to create an account on that website?
    • solnyshok 13y ago
      yes, we are invite only and tied to LV mobile numbers. Idea was that sms access would make it simpler for elder people, but turns out that its not. some people love it, esp in roaming, but most active use is still through mobile browsers. I'm rewriting this for simpler email based signups, to open international registrations, you can leave your email at http://this.is.osom.me http://this.is.osom.me to get invite soon
• vitorbaptistaa 13y ago
  Shellshare (http://shellshare.net http://shellshare.net) -- live streaming of your terminal Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCXnIgsEqK0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCXnIgsEqK0 It's cool because: * It lets you share your terminal session, read-only, using just one command. Easy to get (or give) help. * Many people can watch the same session. If you pair it with Hangouts OnAir, you could do live trainings. * It's not as powerful as tmux or screen sharing (as it's readonly), but it's much simpler: there's no need to open ports in your firewall, configure your router, or create users. Being read-only also is an advantage in its use-case. I haven't launched it yet (I'm finishing some performance tuning), but it's usable. Its only dependency is on Python and Script. If you're on Linux, you just need to run: python -c "`curl -sL http://get.shellshare.net`" This will download the client and run it, automatically sharing your screen and giving you its URL. Feedback welcome :)
  • n1ghtmare_ 13y ago
    Awesome ! :)
• dom96 13y ago
  Nimrod (http://nimrod-code.org http://nimrod-code.org). It's cool because it's a systems programming language which compiles to C with generics, an awesome Python-like syntax, AST macros and other metaprogramming features. I am one of the core developers. I developed a lot of the standard library and tools such as the Babel package manager, Aporia IDE and a build farm all written in Nimrod.
  • yuchi 13y ago
    I love nimrod. Just waiting the right time to {learn,use,play with} it.
  • girvo 13y ago
    Hey, we've chatted in IRC a couple of times. Just wanted to say I love Nimrod, and I'm so thankful that it's being written. I'm currently learning C so that I can play with Nimrod and Vala and have a better idea of how they work :)
• huragok 13y ago
  Hyperglot (http://tmcnab.github.io/Hyperglot http://tmcnab.github.io/Hyperglot) - a language experimentation platform. Basically, gives you the tools to make languages that compile to JS in one nice, neat package. I've already written a lisp-like language and a python-like language this week which is pretty rad.
• steveridout 13y ago
  http://readlang.com http://readlang.com - an online eReader for language learners. I've been working on this full time, completely solo, for nearly 11 months now. It's lets you import any content to read, provides low friction translations so you can concentrate on enjoying the content, and has a spaced repetition system to learn words and phrases with flashcards. It's getting some early traction now with 2300 users, 45 of whom are paying, and really good feedback.
• hyperion2010 13y ago
  I'm building a tool (using python) that helps scientists (me) plan and automate repetitive experiments of pretty much any kind. The amusing part is that by using a database as a back end one can--guess what--query data based on experimental conditions and streamline and automate analysis. Many scientists I have talked to (who collect their own data and do their own analysis) simply store their data sets on the file system and keep track of any relations or conditions in an ad hoc manner. I personally don't trust my memory, my handwriting, or my ability to do EXACTLY the same complicated set of things over and over enough to do that. Hopefully using a tool that makes the relationships between different pieces of data explicit and automates or at least systematizes how data is collected I and others can generate more and better data and communicate what we did and what we found more effectively.
  • emdonahu 13y ago
    Sounds cool. Is there any extant code/docs/blog posts/publicly viewable material of any sort?
• VaedaStrike 13y ago
  Octopart style product search as a service. Any data or product space at your disposal.
• guycook 13y ago
  Working on a QML runtime for browsers. It's cool for all the reasons QML on the desktop is for describing UIs. Still early days but there's a prototype at http://ivorydungeon.net/HQML http://ivorydungeon.net/HQML and code at https://github.com/guycook/HQML https://github.com/guycook/HQML
  • capisce 13y ago
    How are you planning to do animations?
• tihag 13y ago
  showlister.net kinda like padmapper for shows i guess. github.com/karabijavad/showlister if you would like to contribute ;P
• moultano 13y ago
  This is the best thread I've read on HN in months. We should do this regularly.
  • bambax 13y ago
    Yes, me too!
• mazumdar 13y ago
  SilverAir - An athletic shirt that doesn't smell and designed to be worn at the gym and for everyday wear. demo@ http://www.yathletics.com http://www.yathletics.com It's cool because: It's made using pure silver which kills the odor-causing bacteria in your sweat, so you can -wear this shirt for your entire day and feel fresh, -reuse the shirt more often (i do). The fabric is completely new and something I made with my manufacturers from scratch. Without letting cost be a factor, we sourced some of the best performance yarns you can buy and achieved a feel that is super comfortable while being lightweight and breathable. To manufacture, we use seamless knitting machines meaning the body of the shirt does not have any stitches on it. (trust me, the silver is what sells but the most loved feature by our test customers is the material and how you feel as if you're not wearing anything - in a good way) I'm building this company single-handedly over the last 10 months, and I had to teach myself bits n pieces of everything: apparel manufacturing, design, coding, law, filmmaking & editing. The product is launching in 4 days on kickstarter and I'm now in lockdown mode with tons of progress to make. Your feedback on anything is welcome. The online shopping experience for this brand will be fresh: there will be no choosing from tens and hundreds of products because we make just one per category with superb design, quality, and finish. Shoot me an email if you're curious about anything.
  • babby 13y ago
    Well, I'm already sold on it, looks like a solid product; however my only questions now are: - How much? - International shipping? How much?
    • mazumdar 13y ago
      Thanks so much! The validation means a lot. How much? $54 Retail, but when we open on kickstarter next week, we want this to reach as many people as possible and are going to give it out at (almost) cost: 1 shirt for $34. 2 shirts for $64. 3 shirts for $90. US shipping included. International shipping: Add $20. Happy to answer any other questions you have.
      • jreed91 13y ago
• len 13y ago
  hyperloop. http://github.com/leonidkozhukh/hyperloop http://github.com/leonidkozhukh/hyperloop
• capnrefsmmat 13y ago
  I'm writing a book about the many ways well-intentioned scientists can (and usually do) screw up statistics: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better. Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000 words of explanation, which I promptly published online. My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun writing than figuring out what to do with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it up. (happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)
  • scaphandre 13y ago
    Looks interesting. I don't see a prominent link to a full pdf version of the draft of the website. Any reason why not?
    • capnrefsmmat 13y ago
      At the time the website was done, I hadn't sufficiently hacked Sphinx to make good PDFs. My current draft has a nice PDF but it's still incomplete -- a couple half-finished chapters and such. I am also wondering whether I should release the PDF at all, if I could publish or self-publish it later.
  • mkmkmmmmm 13y ago
    Why not self-publish? There are quite a few distribution sites.
  • sreejithr 13y ago
    Interesting. My statistics knowledge has become rusty lately. I want to re-learn the basics before reading this. Can you tell me any resource (doesn't necessarily have to be a book)? P.S: I'm interested in knowing stuff like 'why square-root of variance is standard deviation?". Concepts.
• Prefinem 13y ago
  I am working on a new game I Invented. Called "The Game of Stones" http://thegameofstones.com http://thegameofstones.com It will be a website along with a phone app. Why it's cool? Because it is a tactical type game, like chess, checkers, or go but instead of two players, up to five players can play meaning that there are much more possibilities for winning. I am also developing a board game for it as well to be able to play as a group at home, or where ever.
• sycren 13y ago
  Currently in an Edutech hackathon in London - http://hackathoncentral.com/ http://hackathoncentral.com/ Working on a project in conjunction with the British Library to crowd source tagging for illustrations found in 19th Century Literature. And further down the line to provide descriptions of what the images actually are.
• vanwilder77 13y ago
  Downloader for Dropbox http://boxmydownloads.com/ http://boxmydownloads.com/ Because conventional file-system is being replaced with Cloud storage and so should your downloader.
• aespinoza 13y ago
  iKnode (http://iknode.com http://iknode.com) - Automation/Integration Backend Platform. Demos: https://www.youtube.com/user/iknode https://www.youtube.com/user/iknode It is cool because: * it reduces the time to market of backend applications and makes it extremely easy to deploy with just one button. * It uses an uncool (uncool in HN) language (C#) to create very cool and amazingly easy functionality in the cloud. * apps scale automatically with you knowing anything about Capacity planning or scaling. * You can store your data internally with an easy to use interface. * Mind blowingly easy to use task Scheduling.
• Ave 13y ago
  Hiresync (http://hiresync.io/ http://hiresync.io/) -- collaborative coding interview tool / tool to send out screening questions to candidates, record their response, and being able to pass that recording to your team to review at a later time. Currently pretty early in development, alot of features are incomplete, but it feels nice to have something deployed online. Mostly feeling like I'm stagnating at my day job so this was a good chance for me to learn some new skills.
• spiritplumber 13y ago
  A thing to stop malaria. It is cool because it may save lives.
• Zolmeister0 13y ago
  Insignia (https://github.com/Zolmeister/insignia https://github.com/Zolmeister/insignia) A Personal project showcase and landing page My page: http://insignia.zolmeister.com/ http://insignia.zolmeister.com/
  • yuchi 13y ago
    My 2 cents: add padding around the top left image/icon/logo so it matches the columns padding of the layout.
• montag 13y ago
  Gifcast: a tool to share screen captures (like Droplr, etc.) as animated GIFs. It's silly compared to the cool stuff shared here, but I'm having fun learning Go and Objective-C.
• pedalpete 13y ago
  A so far un-named hardware development framework which makes hardware programming more expressive and programs more shareable. No more "gpio -g write 17 1".
• enriquepablo 13y ago
  I am working on a knowledge representation and reasoning system. It is cool because of the simplicity and expressiveness of the languaje it uses to represent knowledge. http://terms.readthedocs.org http://terms.readthedocs.org
  • albertzeyer 13y ago
    That is very cool. Is this just-for-fun/-learning or do you have any real applications for it?
    • enriquepablo 13y ago
      I'm working on an real application [1] but it is undocumented, you can look here [2] for the Terms part. 1.- https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server 2.- https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server/tree/master/terms/server/app/ontology https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server/tree/master/ter...
• roryreiff 13y ago
  Fleck: getfleck.com/download (link to iTunes app) Why it's cool: We give you access to creatives all around the world for topic based photo sharing. No more #selfies or #burritos when you just want to see Street Art or Typography photos. We have been touted as "Pinterest for the real world" by a few of our users.
• drakeandrews 13y ago
  I'm reimplementing the SQLite virtual machine in RPython, in the hopes that RPython's tracing JIT will speed up query execution. RPython (the toolkit behind PyPy) is cool because it allows you to build a JIT-enabled virtual machine with very little effort. I'm also writing a comedy horror roleplaying game and getting to grips with all the less fun aspects of running a kickstarter campaign.
• bjpless 13y ago
  Real-time Office Hours for top Open Source Library Authors/Contributors. It's Google Hangouts but with a focus on expressing coding concepts. Looks like this http://www.enginehere.com/stream/312/programmatically-disabling-open-tracking-pixels-with-sendgrid/ http://www.enginehere.com/stream/312/programmatically-disabl...
• eliteraspberrie 13y ago
  I wrote a spectral analysis library called udsp: http://www.eliteraspberries.com/doc/udsp-user-guide.html http://www.eliteraspberries.com/doc/udsp-user-guide.html https://code.google.com/p/udsp/ https://code.google.com/p/udsp/ In the future it will include: * support for more FFT libraries, like FFTW; * some signals processing functions, such as basic frequency modulation/demodulation; and * a NumPy-compatible Python interface. Its best feature at the moment is convolution and correlation.
  • GrumpySimon 13y ago
    Awesome. I'll keep an eye on this, thanks.
• AshFurrow 13y ago
  Working on a book about functional reactive programming on iOS using ReactiveCocoa: https://leanpub.com/iosfrp https://leanpub.com/iosfrp It's cool because there's a lot of information out there, but little to show developers how to build a whole app.
• ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  http://60lbgloss.com http://60lbgloss.com (alpha stage) - database, community, and marketplace for magazine cutouts. ("60 lb gloss" is the type of paper that magazines are printed on) At the moment it's really bare, only I can add and sell the ads. So far I made a working site in 5 days. Next will be the community features like adding an Ad to your favorites. I don't know why but I always thought fashion ads in Vogue were beautiful. They were art. And it pissed me off that others didn't see what I saw. I also love and admire Milla Jovovich and try to collect as many of her fashion/fragrance ads I see. I get really pissed when I can't have one. It's my collector's mindset. Even if the site fails as a marketplace and instead becomes the Pinterest of Magazine Ads, I don't mind. I just love scanning the ads in and organizing them. So I thought why not have a marketplace where people can buy and sell their favorite ads of models and celebrities. There's tons of people who are obsessed with celebrities and collect whatever has their favorite celeb's face on it.
• photorized 13y ago
  1) Data discovery and social analytics: http://signup.itrendcorporation.com/ http://signup.itrendcorporation.com/ Extremely minimal interface, fast (everything is precalculated/precached). 2) tech accelerator: http://www.colodesk.com/ http://www.colodesk.com/ All about rapid prototyping, idea to MVP within weeks.
• tmilard 13y ago
  free-visit ( http://www.free-visit.net http://www.free-visit.net ) It's cool because, I wana see 3d engine inside web browsers. I mean, at last...
• chris_va 13y ago
  (neat Ask HN!) Maybe the software guys here will find this cool :). I'm working on an open source build tool (similar to Ant, etc). Github code: https://github.com/chrisvana/repobuild https://github.com/chrisvana/repobuild It's cool because: * It makes it really easy to integrate new open source code. Want to compile against boost? Add one line. Want an ML library? Add another. * Everything gets automatically pulled in. * It makes it really easy to share your open source code with others. * Works with a bunch of languages. * Proven model from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. My main project is using large scale computing (data from millions of CPU hours) to change how drug discovery is done. Drugs are very expensive because 98% of them fail. This hopefully changes that, and makes it profitable for companies to go after much smaller diseases that do not currently get attention. Papers forthcoming.
• jbandela1 13y ago
  cppcomponents at https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents https://github.com/jbandela/cppcomponents With C++, it is hard to use code from 1 compiler with another compiler. In windows, it is even worse in that versions of visual c++, and even debug/release can't use the same binary. cppcomponents, allows code to be written in 1 c++11 compiler and used in another compiler, without giving up C++ features. You can use exceptions, and std:: string, vector, tuple, pair,chrono::timepoint. I am hoping this makes it easier for people to create more c++ libraries. Currently, if you have anything other than a header-library, you either have to require the user to build the library, or else create a binary for every compiler (maybe even compiler version). With cppcomponents, you can create just 1 binary per platform that all the compilers can use. Some of the libraries I have worked on are a libuv wrapper, a implementation of async/await in c++ (based on boost.coroutine), and currently working on libcurl wrapper. All these libraries are on github.
• MarkPNeyer 13y ago
  writing a sci-fi novel dealing with p vs np, quantum computing, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the future of civilization and culture, and hipsters. it's cool because it's also about my personal life and struggles with bipolar disorder.
  • turbojerry 13y ago
    It sounds excellent, like a cross between PKD and Charles Stross, please let us know when it's published.
• schreiaj 13y ago
  This week I've been making: 3D Printed sprockets for a local high school robotics team. Building a small quadcopter for learning the technology so I can do aerial photography. Started developing the materials for a course I'm teaching at the local hackerspace nominally titled - Building your own autonomous ground vehicle. I just took delivery of the parts for my first cut at a kit. I also just finished teaching free classes to local students about 3D Printing, Git, and Project Management. Not sure it counts as making though.
• wololo 13y ago
  http://bugchecker.net/ http://bugchecker.net/ It's cool because: we analyze paths taken in binaries to find bugs.
• cj 13y ago
  Localize.js (https://localizejs.com https://localizejs.com) automatically localizes websites. No backend integration required. It's a client side Javascript library that handles phrase detection and the injection of translations. Machine and human translations can be ordered via our web interface. Why is this cool? It generally takes an engineer at least 1-2 weeks to fully localize a website (go through all template files, replace all text with string keys, build a workflow for updating phrases, ordering translations, etc), and once the system is in place, editing template files and adding new text to your app is a pain. Localizejs automates this with a copy and paste js snippet. And it works surprisingly well -- I had my doubts about this approach before building it as well, but you'll be surprised that it doesn't hurt page performance very much at all. It's still in development, but shoot me an email if you'd like to test it out. It'll be production ready within a month. bp@brandonpaton.com
  • ateeqs 13y ago
    Neat
• mafuyu 13y ago
  I'm working on a credit card sized e-paper device. It has an Arduino, USB, Real Time Clock, and a battery, and fits in your wallet. Still doing hardware designs. Some potential applications: * Replace all the barcodes in your wallet (loyalty/membership) * Google Auth TOTP * QR Codes (links/BTC wallets) * Interactive nametag * e-book/text display * date/time display with wireless phone sync over BTLE * act as a USB device and display text/notifications from your computer I'm not completely sure if the use cases are convincing enough - would you buy such a device? This revision won't have any wireless and instead will be focused more towards electronics/Arduino enthusiasts - dead simple to program over USB with provided libraries and documentation. You can use it as an Arduino/e-paper dev board and code neat apps for it that you can actually use.
  • samweinberg 13y ago
    This sounds pretty cool. Would the hardware be open source so that other people can build their own?
    • mafuyu 13y ago
      Yeah, definitely. The whole point would be to have a completely open hardware design and software library so that people can build off of it.
      • samweinberg 13y ago
        I'm interested in the idea for sure. Is there any way I can get updates on the project (github, website, newsletter)?
        • mafuyu 13y ago
          I'm just playing around with designs/dev boards and building the concept privately at the moment. However, I've gotten some funding for it, and the goal is to get a working prototype out by Spring. If there's enough interest then, I'll work on it full-time over the summer to get a product out. If you want to follow the project, this repo will have more in the future: https://github.com/Hylian/arducard https://github.com/Hylian/arducard
• markmassie 13y ago
  Nuclear reactor startup (http://transatomicpower.com http://transatomicpower.com) designing a molten salt reactor to turn nuclear waste into clean energy at prices competitive with natural gas.
  • rtb 13y ago
    This sounds very interesting, I'd love to know more. Specifically: have you made a plant yet? If not, how far off are you? There seem to me to be a lot more designs for revolutionary new nuclear plants than ever get built. Can you share any thoughts on why that is, and why yours will be different?
  • smoyer 13y ago
    Any plans for personal (home) sized units? I'd love to get off our power grid as we have daily outages and brown-outs that kill electronics happen a couple times a year. (And yes, I'm in the US, and in the middle of a hefty power grid but according to the power company, we have problematic squirrels).
• danpat 13y ago
  Automated ski trail reporting: http://skitrails.info/ http://skitrails.info/ Using GPS trackers to watch where grooming equipment goes, then update the "what's been groomed" report automatically and (where there's sufficient connectivity) in near realtime.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• orthecreedence 13y ago
  Turtl! (https://turtl.it https://turtl.it) It's a client-side encrypted Evernote replacement (with a much easier interface). The goal is to eventually provide easy note-taking, bookmarking/clipping, and file storage (ala Dropbox) with a cloud service that's surveillance/hacker resistant by only storing encrypted data. The kicker is you can still share with others. Right now it's a pretty small alpha, but we're hoping to get some of the internals cleaned up and push out a new version with file storage in the next few weeks. Of course, it's open source (if it's not open source, it's not encrypted). We're avoiding the word "secure" until we get some eyes besides our own reviewing the code.
  • mahyarm 13y ago
    Really cool! Have you thought of making it a phonegap style app so we can use it on our mobile devices too? I've been looking for a simple html note taking app that does client side encryption and works on all major desktop and mobile operating systems.
    • orthecreedence 13y ago
      Mobile is on the way! Right now Turtl is two guys working part time, unfunded. We're going to be doing a fundraising round soon and if all goes well we'll be able to work on it unfettered for a while, including mobile apps.
• mambodog 13y ago
  BeatStash: a Git/GitHub for music production (using git-annex) In other words, keeping every version and branch of a musical idea, with rollback and merging (eg. merge bassline track from version A into different branch), and collaboration through these same tools. I know people have approached this idea a few times, and just this month a startup called Splice popped up with some funding to do almost exactly what I had planned to in a previous iteration of the idea. However I've moved on to an approach which would make this awesome capability available to more people. Ultimately though, I'd like to extract as much as possible into a generic foundation for apps for other media such as video production, a low-end, self-hosted LayerVault alternative etc. Also, out of interest in personal computer history, I ported the PCE classic Mac/PC emulator to the browser with Emscripten. Demo: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ Rationale: http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser
• tehwebguy 13y ago
  Magic Shop (http://www.magicshop.io http://www.magicshop.io) - crazy easy way to set up a shop on any website Demo account: demo@magicshop.io / demo View demo at http://magicshopdemo.tumblr.com http://magicshopdemo.tumblr.com
• edna_piranha 13y ago
  http://chat.meatspac.es http://chat.meatspac.es because apparently people feel more human than human.
  • brianloveswords 13y ago
    I signed into the wasteland that is HN to approve this message.
    • sneakyness 13y ago
      same
  • sneakyness 13y ago
    This is amazing. I can't look away
• lcasela 13y ago
  An app that will track my sleep on stuff.
• psathvik 13y ago
  Tharunopayam (http://upayam.tharuni.org/ http://upayam.tharuni.org/), a laravel/android-powered SMS helpline for adolocent girls, women and the aged in Warangal, India. It uses an android device as an SMS server and a laravel based responsive front-end which allows our experts in various fields like nutrition, psychology, law, etc to answer peoples' queries from wherever and whenever they find it most comfortable.
• sahillavingia 13y ago
  Gumroad (https://gumroad.com https://gumroad.com) — enabling any type of creator to earn a living selling what they make directly to their audience. See: https://gumroad.com/demo https://gumroad.com/demo It's cool because I got started really seriously making stuff when I realized that there was not nearly as much of a difference between making stuff and making a living as I thought there was. It was only getting cheaper and easier to make software. Making software (products!) has been democratized. This has happened to software/startups, but not really to music nor film nor comedy nor photography nor publishing (yet!). But it will soon and I'm happy to that Gumroad can contribute.
  • iambateman 13y ago
    Everything I've ever heard about Gumroad has been amazing.
  • ericingram 13y ago
    What was the hardest part about getting this off the ground, and how did you get passed it?
• webjay 13y ago
  I'm building Konfect (http://www.konfect.com http://www.konfect.com) because it annoys me that at every social network I sign up I need to refind those I usually connect with. With Konfect I can manage my connections accross networks.
  • albertzeyer 13y ago
    Very cool, this is on my own TODO list of things I would like to build for myself at one point. I just posted it on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622332 Can you give some more details? Can I easily get the data and safe it on my disk? Can I add further metadata to each contact? Is the software Open Source? Will there be plugins/extensions such that when I'm on Facebook or in GMail or whereever, that it can easily show me more contact details? (A bit like rapportive for GMail.)
• dasmithii 13y ago
  Javascript + Cleverbot + Facebook Chat --> ?
• aoruclar 13y ago
  Neurio: A new home intelligence project that makes an ordinary home smart. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/energyaware/neurio-home-intelligence/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/energyaware/neurio-home-... It's cool because we launched it on Kickstarter 11 days ago, and have raised $101,000 so far... people really are excited about it! Basically, it's a real-time energy sensor that can show you how much electricity each appliance in the home is using from a central sensor. Also, it has an open platform & can integrate with things like IFTTT, Spark Core, and Smart Things. Here's an example project we put together. =) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTBtnLbBnc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTBtnLbBnc
• jonnydark 13y ago
  I've been at a Hackathon for the last 15 hours and we've cobbled together a text message service that you can ask questions to and it responds in the style of Yoda. It's imaginatively called "Ask Yoda" Pretty useless, but pretty cool and hella fun to make :)
  • crolek 13y ago
    I'd totally use this to respond to my co-workers emails. If you post it to github or somewhere send me a link please. :)
• ateeqs 13y ago
  vegnos (http://www.vegnos.com http://www.vegnos.com) -- A (Windows) desktop search engine (can also recover files in NTFS volumes).
• dzink 13y ago
  DoerHub (http://www.doerhub.com http://www.doerhub.com) -- a place where all of the things you are working on can attract not just likes but also advice, collaborators, tools, tangible help, referrals and word-of-mouth. It's a humanized GitHub, because no code is involved and non-hackers can contribute in little or big ways to your tech or non-tech projects and initiatives. Here is mine: http://doerhub.com/of/diana http://doerhub.com/of/diana , showing the rest of the stuff I'm working on.
• math 13y ago
  backrecord.com - a tool for tracking opinions and predictions (opinions about what is going to happen in the future) of people in the public spotlight. Our goal is to help people form better opinions by providing easy access to the ideas in the first place alongside tools for assessing credibility. Our focus is very much on opinion, not news. It's cool because I think it's an interesting and difficult problem and I don't know of anyone tackling it well. I still don't know how feasible it is to create an automated / crowd driven system that provides a measure of credibility that is reliable enough to be useful, but we are certainly giving it our best shot and I would love to use such a tool if it existed. I also think it's cool because I think both our user credibility system and topic hierarchy concepts have aspects that are quite nice that I haven't seen elsewhere. We are currently focused on finance because it is clear how to score predictions about things that trade in a market (though the problem is much trickier than you might first imagine). Also, it is clearly valuable if we can succeed, even in a small way which is the most likely outcome if we do. However, we are playing with features that have broader applicability as well.
• krapp 13y ago
  So many awesome projects... I made something to format the outbound links on a page into an expandable list that I think is kind of cool. It's probably way too early to be posting it since I just started it though but what the heck. http://precis.gopagoda.com/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617551 http://precis.gopagoda.com/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com... (no one will be very impressed but I like it...)
• feint 13y ago
  Saved.io (http://saved.io http://saved.io) It's cool because it's solves a problem I was having in a really simple and elegant way.
• dysbulic 13y ago
  I'm trying to design an alternative to the investment economy. I would like to digitize cost information and use computers to determine fair prices. I want do it by keeping metadata about bitcoin transactions. By making the system of production computer accessible we can run businesses at cost. I'd like to start with the information systems for the One Acre Cafe. They are a pay-how-you-can restaurant opening in Johnson City, TN. (I wish it was pay-what-you-can rather than volunteer for food, but that's something to worry about later.) http://www.oneacrecafe.org http://www.oneacrecafe.org Their initial need is for a volunteer management system. Apart from three people, the entire staff is volunteer. I've not done any coding on it yet, but it will almost certainly be a rails app. https://github.com/wholcomb/volunteer_schedule https://github.com/wholcomb/volunteer_schedule Eventually I'd like to integrate this with an inventory and pos system, so you get a bill that tells you what the meal cost the cafe to provide based on the accumulated cost information associated with the business. You get a receipt that includes a QR linking to a profile for your server. You are able to give feedback by entering adjectives and ranking them -1–1. There is also the ability to give a tip in bitcoins. I'd like to have a service where the money can be conditionally given. I'm interested particularly in housing. I want people to be able to give specifically for shelter and they get it back if it isn't used. Phase two would involve mortgaging a house and then renting the space at cost and payable in bitcoins. What I'm trying to work toward is the ability to sustainably travel. A chain of restaurants that accepted each others' electronic work reputations combined with easily accessible housing could allow a new sort of nomadic life.
• fiatjaf 13y ago
  DocsBlogger (http://www.docsblogger.com/ http://www.docsblogger.com/) -- blog from Google Drive. Because: * Google Docs is the best WYSIWYG on the internet; * blogging can be just about writing on a cool interface, without having to setup blog platforms AND go on their messy interface to write; * regular people can use this; * the written content stays on Google Drive, so you can delete your blog and keep everything without dealing with strange database backups; * almost-compatible with Jekyll-Octopress themes (some changes on the code have to be made, and for now only I can add themes to the pool of themes, but we will see what happens); * custom CSS (tomorrow javascript) files (automatically fetches from Google Drive) embedding.
  • karangoeluw 13y ago
    As a visitor: Show me a sample post, or a video walkthrough so it entices me into clicking the sign in button.
• brackin 13y ago
  We're trying to fix urban parking with Spot (starting in San Francisco), connecting homeowners with parkers when they're not using their spot. They can drag to set their schedule or set it based on days and we let them start earning morning and do all of the legwork. Our parkers can open up the app and book a spot on an hourly basis instantly. http://parkwithspot.com http://parkwithspot.com
• lukaseder 13y ago
  Making my strongest software engineering beliefs a business with http://www.jooq.org http://www.jooq.org It's cool because two of the oldest and most popular technologies in the software ecosystem (Java from the 90s and SQL from the 70s) are still integrated like it's 1997, through the awkward JDBC API. Meanwhile, everyone else has since been trying to hide SQL away (e.g. JPA). While jOOQ doesn't help everyone (http://http://www.hibernate-alternative.com http://http://www.hibernate-alternative.com), most DBA / SQL-centric developers who have stumbled upon jOOQ found the idea very intriguing, and it certainly beats SQLJ in user acceptance. What's really cool as well is that I can help the Java folks remember how awesome actual SQL can be. Today's junior developers hardly even know the SQL language.
• jed_watson 13y ago
  I'm working on a web app framework / cms for node.js built on express.js and mongo called KeystoneJS, and have been for a few months. Keystone makes it easier to get a blog / website / web app up and running without a lot of the module research or boilerplate code node.js usually requires. It also provides a beautiful, useful admin UI (think activeadmin for rails). It's open source (MIT), and cool because... * There isn't really anything like this for node.js yet (that we've found). There are a so many great modules and you can plug in almost anything, but getting projects off the ground requires a lot of boilerplate compared to frameworks like rails or django. * It makes sophisticated things trivial by providing drop-in patterns - like session management and auth, and clever fields for your models, e.g. location fields and image fields (which make for a better admin UI but don't abstract too heavily the underlying data the fields represent). * We're trying to build an "out of the box" system that doesn't keep you in the box. You can use what you like and swap out what you don't. You can use Jade or Handlebars. Plug in any express middleware you like. Use the built in auth system or provide your own. * It's all based on the best practices my team have come up with in over a year of node.js web app development and we're using it to power several commercial, production projects. So it's got real-world usage and solves real problems. * Quite a few people have said this is a gap in the node.js ecosystem, and ultimately if Keystone is just useful for us and a handful of others that's fine, but it would be really exciting if we could start something that helps node.js grow or helps other web developers use the platform. Especially for projects where rapid development is important, and having a great admin UI available would be the difference between using node.js and not. If you're interested check out http://keystonejs.com http://keystonejs.com
  • jed_watson 13y ago
    There's also a demo online at http://demo.keystonejs.com http://demo.keystonejs.com - it's very simple but you get the idea of how to structure an app, the source code is on github. If you want to check out the admin ui, you can sign in to the demo at http://demo.keystonejs.com/keystone http://demo.keystonejs.com/keystone with the username demo@keystonejs.com and the password demo.
• tempestn 13y ago
  SearchTempest (http://www.searchtempest.com/ http://www.searchtempest.com/) -- Search multiple craigslist cities, eBay, Amazon, etc., in a single search. Cool because it's all based on Google Custom Search, so we can do it without scraping craigslist (or indeed, accessing them at all). AutoTempest (http://www.autotempest.com/ http://www.autotempest.com/) -- Similar idea, except searches multiple used car classifieds sites: craigslist (via SearchTempest), AutoTrader, Cars.com, eBay Motors, Oodle, CarsDirect... We're affiliated with some of the sites, and for the others we use Google Custom Search, and/or link to their results pages in new windows.
• vbsteven 13y ago
  http://cyclingplanner.com http://cyclingplanner.com -- a season planner and training/results tracker for competitive cyclists. It's cool because: * A lot of cyclists are still planning on paper or spreadsheet, including me before I started working on this. It scratches my own itch and I believe I can make the experience a lot better. * It collaborates instead of competes with services like Strava and Garmin Connect. Because it's using their API's cyclists can keep logging their workouts on those services and view detailed analytics on cyclingplanner. * It's my first serious attempt at bootstrapping a software product and I've learned a ton of interesting stuff aside from coding so far.
• shaunrussell 13y ago
  Upbeat (https://www.upbeatapp.com/ https://www.upbeatapp.com/) -- hackernews meets soundcloud. It's cool because: * Users can democratically decide which music is popular. * Music is browseable by genre, and filterable by sub genre. * Users can save songs and add them to a queue for later listening. * Powered by Angular.js, Node.js, Redis. * Average server response time: 9ms * Bootstrapped by 3 friends, in less than 1 month, only working nights and weekends. * Already profitable.
  • lukaseder 13y ago
    How is it profitable? Do you get a commission from Amazon?
• jonmrodriguez 13y ago
  Epiphany Eyewear smart glasses: http://epiphanyeyewear.com http://epiphanyeyewear.com It's cool because these glasses are stylish enough that they are a fashion item, and have appeared on the runway at New York Fashion Week: https://yougen.tv/video/beddc3d4-784f-40ab-8066-652ac8e3f694/ https://yougen.tv/video/beddc3d4-784f-40ab-8066-652ac8e3f694... It's cool because you can record two-handed activities such as kayaking: https://yougen.tv/video/9b406d41-8e68-43fc-904f-f12ce688f610/ https://yougen.tv/video/9b406d41-8e68-43fc-904f-f12ce688f610... It's cool because everyone from Miss California https://yougen.tv/video/db0c3dd0-846c-458c-8d53-cd2802b00534/ https://yougen.tv/video/db0c3dd0-846c-458c-8d53-cd2802b00534... to my barber https://yougen.tv/video/92f9308b-d6a9-46a4-95f9-39da0700f9cb/ https://yougen.tv/video/92f9308b-d6a9-46a4-95f9-39da0700f9cb... instantly sees the appeal of recording and sharing your memories with your friends
• SuperChihuahua 13y ago
  #blog100 which is not a "project" but the idea is to produce 100 blog posts in 100 days. Hopefully will it increase traffic to my real projects.
• iM8t 13y ago
  HMW: http://hmworship.com/ http://hmworship.com/ - on offline WEB App for song lyrics/chords. It's really cool because most of the current chord sites lack the one critical feature for the mobile age: offline usage. And also it's amazing because it's built entirely by volunteers and the users are evangelizing it themselves. We have never spent a dime on salaries/marketing or anything else. 100% bootstrapped.
• ghinda 13y ago
  I'm working on Business Card Maker(http://bizcardmaker.com/ http://bizcardmaker.com/), a very simple client-side business card generator that can quickly export PDF or JPEG. It's definitely not as cool as most of the stuff here, but it's real easy to work with, that's why I'm hoping it will be helpful for people with no technical skills and small businesses.
• poissonpie 13y ago
  I'm tinkering Click or Treat with http://clickortre.at http://clickortre.at a silly little halloween themed game with absolutely no point. Has got a halloween soundboard though :) It's cool I've used it to start learning AngularJS. It's also cool because my daughter enjoys clicking the little ghost.
• calineczka 13y ago
  Developers oriented project management ebook ( http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-management/ http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-manageme... ). It's cool because it teaches you practices that can be applied to your current IT project to make it more developers friendly. The goal is to make the work on a project more smooth and everybody more happy, as well as help the developers team to transition into remote work. The content of the book is similar in form to http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/story-of-size-1/ http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/story-of-size-1/ and other blog posts linked inside. I hope some of you might find it interesting.
• jmadsen 13y ago
  Aw, jeez - I knew my little weekend project wasn't such a big deal, but absolutely dwarfed by the other ideas here. But since I'd love to chat about it: http://tweetstart.me/ http://tweetstart.me/ Simple little tool to let "unknown" but talented bloggers work together to publicize their offerings. Why's it cool? - aim to is help counteract the "Justin Beiber Affect" (gets 100,000 RTs for saying, "Live life!") - try to encourage a more personal, hands-on sharing rather than today's mindless "click to retweet" approach to life. - you can't earn any badges or rep points That's it... best go finish it :-) It's at @tweetstartme if you are interesting in knowing when it's done
• jermaink 13y ago
  http://moviegalaxies.com http://moviegalaxies.com We're working on visualizing the social network within movies. :)
  • hmsimha 13y ago
    Awesome! The social network analysis course taught by Lada Adamic on Coursera used your site as a case study.
    • jermaink 13y ago
      Yes, thanks for the remark! Some people of that course sent us really nice feedback. The list of universities and courses using MG grows, which is really cool.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• rudolfosman 13y ago
  Zazler - seamless API creation, http://www.zazler.com http://www.zazler.com Why it's cool: 1) Instead of building an API for your project, you can start using Zazler as a ready-made API. It acts as a web server that can be installed locally and configured directly to a SQL database (a legacy database or a new one, we're currently supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and MSSQL), so that makes it cross-platform. (ofcourse you can also build a proxy with node or nginx on the server's port if that's necessary) 2) Database queries are defined as URLs per HTTP request, using a query syntax very similar to SQL. This allows the user of an app to write necessary queries, hence extend the app on the client-side. Complex joins, filters and similar stuff is supported. 3) Zazler comes bundled with many technical formats, data visualizations and app templates. And they are extendable, meaning the app's users themselves can decide how to view the data, even write their own formats and templates. 4) The feedback we've received from backend developers is that it will save them many, many hours of boilerplate coding. So it can also serve as a development platform that can be used to write database queries using URLs instead of writing boilerplate backend code. You can basically set it up and let the frontend technician take over the work from there. 5) We've used similar architecture for the last 6 years in our projects, so it's pretty mature. Now we're releasing Zazler as a beta for public and planning to launch it as a separate product in 2014. I've written a blog post where I describe Zazler's approach in more detail: "API Creation – the Missing Link in API Management" http://www.zazler.com/?p=115 http://www.zazler.com/?p=115
• zitko 13y ago
  I'm working on Event Discovery App. It's cool because unlike other apps that fetch data from Facebook, we're classifying events into categories using NLP algorithms and we're also working on advanced event recommendation system, so we don't just provide a list of things. Also unlike other tech startups that try to make things easier to do at home (delivery, social networks, etc etc) we're trying to encourage you to go out and enjoy life. It's for Android only at the moment. http://olaii.com http://olaii.com I'm always open for chat, suggestions, criticism so don't hesitate to contact me/us :)
  • sloinfinity 13y ago
    Cool stuff, tried it on my friends phone, would love to see that on my iPhone soon.
    • zitko 13y ago
      Thanks, we'll do our best to make it available for iOS as soon as possible.
• edh649 13y ago
  Am currently just in the conceptual stages but some sort of device where you plug in a bunch of ipods and then can select a song from any of them to play as well as queuing music etc. Is cool because at parties etc. means you don't have to continually switch ipods to put on 'That song'
• nathanathan 13y ago
  I'm working on a game based on memorizing Chinese characters. It's cool because it uses the qualities that motivate people to play farm sims to encourage players to study a language. Players plant character-flowers and must pass quizzes in order to pluck them. This website has more information and a download link for the beta, which only works on android at the moment: http://zhongwengarden.com/ http://zhongwengarden.com/
• jbkkd 13y ago
  http://www.omerkorner.com/rail/ http://www.omerkorner.com/rail/ Let's you find rail connections using Google Maps and directly buy the tickets on the rail site. Currently only in Germany, but other countries to come, and also cross-country tickets using each relevant rail provider.
• STRML 13y ago
  I'm working on a proxy / community-run fork[1] of Healthcare.gov. After all the histrionics about the site's performance and bugs, and upon seeing that it was a Backbone.js app (which I develop full-time), and with unminified/commented source, I thought it might be worthwhile to pull as many files from the repo as I could so that bugs could be reported and fixed in the open. As the product sits today, it is close to being a functional clone of the site. Healthcare.gov relies on some very complicated and antiquated auth systems, from multiple agencies. It is not enough to simply proxy a few endpoints back to healthcare.gov, some requests need to be spoofed, state saved, etc., in order to make it work properly. They often use absolute URLs in their responses as well, which need to be rewritten. I can imagine this application was an absolute bear to test properly. I've been working through the login mechanism [2] and it's almost done. I'm excited about the future of the project and it could really use some coders to help out and find / fix bugs. If the project gets some real attention, I think it would be a big help to the folks at QSSI and the nation in general - I really want to help the project succeed because I very strongly believe in universal health care and this is the only way I feel I can personally help out. [1] https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace [2] https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/issues/15 https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace/issues/1...
  • coderzach 13y ago
    Someone, give this this guy $90mm.
• ibstudios 13y ago
  http://www.reportsfortrello.com http://www.reportsfortrello.com - Why it is cool: It is only two months old, but it is cool because of I made it to be free and private like no app. I did not want to be responsible for other people's data. Because reports are just a glimpse at a moment of time, I thought it would be best for both speed and privacy to store Trello activity temporarily. So I get off the hook for security and reliability and you get your data destroyed off the internet. What does it do? It reports time from 3 different actions using Trello. When I first used the Trello api I was amazed at what you can see. Today I can move one card and inform my clients and track time at the same time. One bird... I also don't require any signup. You use your Trello account to sign in. So I guess another thing that I think is cool is that you can use my application with little friction. In 3 clicks you can see a report of your Trello activity the first time you use my app. I am proud of flow. I also think it is cool that I can get sub 100ms responses off my tiny vps using ruby/redis/apache/modrails/oj gem/jquery/bootstrap. I love the stack, sure it's not the fastest/latest, but it was fun to code. The tool is currently used by people in 88 countries. I did not expect this at all and it is a happy surprise. Best of luck to all! Timers and pie charts are for bakers!
• quinto_quarto 13y ago
  Pitch Me (http://www.pitchme.org http://www.pitchme.org) -- we're building a marketplace for buying and selling quality journalism. We vet our writers and we have hundreds of stories from them from all over the world. If you're an (aspiring?) editor, you could commission a magazine full of original stories, edit them and pay the writers in one place. Get in touch at hello@pitchme.org if you're interested.
• rst 13y ago
  Positronic Net, a Scala toolkit for Android programmers, with UI and data-management helpers.
• fbnt 13y ago
  I'm working on a news reader that works in the opposite way of traditional news reading apps. It uses Twitter as a sort of enhanced RSS feed and ranks news based on how much they are shared in real-time, and lays them down in a newspaper-like format specifically designed for mobile devices. It allows you to find what's important for people rather then what matters to newsroom's editors, and put you in a whole different point of view. I belive it's extremely interesting, and I'm trying to make the reading experience as enjoyable as possible. The first raw version is available for iOS: http://newspo.st http://newspo.st I'm in the process of adding categorization and custom topic search as well.
  • Unnatural_Log 13y ago
    Not available in the app store in Canada. It puzzles me why people do this, because it is just as easy to make the app available everywhere as it is to limit it to a particular country. Anyway, interesting idea. Pity about the gunshot wound in your foot. Hope it heals.
    • collyw 13y ago
      My guess would be avoiding legal headaches. It is easy to know what is allowed or not in your own country, but you have no idea in other parts of the world. That and less maintenance.
    • fbnt 13y ago
      Simply put, I did it because what is interesting for Canadians or Australians is slightly different from what matters to people in US. I'm working to open it to other countries as well, but that requires some work on my side. At the moment is only available in US, UK and Italy. I should've mentioned it.
• BruceM 13y ago
  Maybe too late to the party ... I work on http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ and have been working to revive it for the last couple of years. We've done new releases, improved usability of the compiler and some of the libraries, new website, updated all of the documentation to modern formats, including a couple of books. We've also been creating a new IDE via a plugin to IntelliJ that is rapidly changing how I go about writing Dylan. I think it is cool because it is a great substrate for experimenting with some features in programming languages and runtimes, like coroutines and numerics. It is great to start from a working and industrial strength system. I think it is great to prevent things from being lost to history (and to hopefully have them be useful again). Dylan is a great combination of ideas from Common Lisp, Smalltalk but with a focus on creating native executables and libraries. I've also got something that I'm building in Dylan that takes advantage of Dylan's strengths, but it is in very early days.
• pornel 13y ago
  Modern JPEG encoder (https://github.com/pornel/jpeg-compressor https://github.com/pornel/jpeg-compressor) and lossy PNG compressor (http://pngmini.com/lossypng.html http://pngmini.com/lossypng.html) Everybody uses encoders for these formats that are as old as the formats themselves, but today's hardware is about 2000 faster than it was back then, so a modern encoder can use expensive techniques that were previously unthinkable.
• cmollis 13y ago
  we're working on a live party visualizer using raspberry pi's deployed as iBeacons. We're writing an iPhone app that detects the user's location (based on the ibeacon) and updates a server. We're writing a d3 visualization that renders the user's location graphically in real-time based on the aggregated server data. doesn't exactly cure cancer, but it's pretty cool. Obvious uses for retail, etc (but all that stuff is lame.. it's more fun to use at a party) ..and that's what we're working on.
• arunoda 13y ago
  I'm working on a guide on properly scaling meteor apps. Here's the content - http://goo.gl/a1eyYo http://goo.gl/a1eyYo
• NicoJuicy 13y ago
  Creating a non-intrusive task management application. For example, you mail what the guy has to do and add this mail in cc: in_15_days@maildo.me . When the task is finished, he responds to you and adds: finished@maildo.me in CC. You can set up options for a weekly overview of tasks with their current state. Still developing the system though, but if your interested just add your mail to this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Im08qadrAvOv0LHVq-rNFPIlpPAqxQllCVySJ5W6T58/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Im08qadrAvOv0LHVq-rNFPIlpPA... and i'll notify you with more information :)
  • thejash 13y ago
    Followupthen.com recently added support for tasks, which is basically this, I think?
    • NicoJuicy 13y ago
      Not exactly, i'm working with a employer - employee relationship. Followupthen seems to be personal Edit: Grmbl, you're right :(
• nercury 13y ago
  I have started working on a library to simplify exposing C++ classes to various languages that can be "embeded". A link to the second attempt [1], my current attempt is to expose things to V8 Javascript [2] It is cool because in addition of exposing and sharing objects, it can be used to output the documentation for them, or even ease embeding such languages as C# (to generate interop library automatically). Note that this is my second attempt (recently started), the first one worked but relied on some overcomplicated third party libraries for V8, I could not understand them fully, therefore a reboot. [1] https://github.com/key-tools/key-machine https://github.com/key-tools/key-machine [2] https://github.com/key-tools/key-v8-machine/blob/master/key-v8-machine/DriverBuilderV8.cpp https://github.com/key-tools/key-v8-machine/blob/master/key-...
• vpsingh 13y ago
  http://99tests.com http://99tests.com - a marketplace for getting the most skilled manual testers to find bug in your software. Idea is that you can set a price for each bug ($10-$500) that you would like to see, then pay our testers based on accepted bugs.
  • boksiora 13y ago
    Nice, i will probably try it soon
• roycehaynes 13y ago
  Building: Chrrp - alerts you using Stripe events when a new customer or payment is made to your app. http://moneybags.chrrp.io http://moneybags.chrrp.io
• benmorris 13y ago
  Cloud Imaging API http://ionapi.com http://ionapi.com - A lot of software I write faciltates design online, web to print type stuff, and I noticed a real void in a robust image manipulation API. This restful API makes it pretty easy to get images generated of text with lots of effects. Why it is cool: -supports obvious features rotation, resizing, etc of images, but that isn't really the important parts -Vector first, text is generated as vector then converted to raster if needed (for client side previews). An API request you can access the underlying point data or request a vector file(eps,pdf) in response rather than raster (png). -Robust Text features - load fonts on the fly,shear, vector outlines (offset path), texture support, gradients, warps, shadows, etc -Object structure allows complex images to be built from other canvas objects previously saved or pulled from the net, canvas can be built from vector or raster sources, or through the API. -Ultimately the API will make it painfully simple to overlay designs on objects such as pens, mugs, koozies, shirts, vehicles, etc. What is not cool: it isn't done :( Unfortunately it isn't ready for open access yet. I have a few customers using parts that are done, but mainly documentation is not done and there is no front end developed yet for sign ups/ registration. If you are interested in using this please let me know or use the notification form on the site. Where is it being used? Several places, one of my clients you can checkout that uses it http://bandegraphix.com http://bandegraphix.com (lettering tool, rclogo/decal tool) another one Dynamic Product Image placement http://boatdecals.biz/lake-swag/ http://boatdecals.biz/lake-swag/ (canvas creation, masking, warping)
• tluyben2 13y ago
  New version of Fitto[1]. The current version works well for people who, so to say, live in the gym, but not for others. So we are adding a ton of features to make it work well for the more casual gym-goer! It's cool because of the many new hardware devices we are integrating. [1] http://fitto.co http://fitto.co
• DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
  I am quite late to this thread, but what the heck, I'll give it the ol' college try. :) HashPix: Search for images tagged with the same hashtag across Twitter, TwitPic, Instagram and Flickr. Create public/private albums of these pics and share the albums with anyone and everyone. Anonymous albums allowed but are made public by default. Good for: - Events, e.g. #MySuperAwesomeHalloweenParty - Contests, #TweetLikeAGhostAndWin - Festivals #HalloweenHaunts ...anything where you can use a hashtag, really! Link: http://hashpix.herokuapp.com http://hashpix.herokuapp.com 2. @updt_me: (RSS/Atom) Feed updates via Twitter DM. Follow @updt_me and send a tweet @updt_me with the keyword START followed by a URL, e.g. "@updt_me START https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" https://news.ycombinator.com/rss". You'll receive feed updates via Twitter DM (hence, the need to follow) when they happen. I'm currently using it to subscribe to xkcd, smbc and a few others. Good for: - Avoiding RSS inbox pile-ups due to procrastination/lethargy - Ensuring authors get the page-views their blogs/sites deserve - Following 'thoughts' rather than 'people', i.e. no more "I just ate broccoli. I #WIN." when you just want to read, "The 7 habits of highly-successful techpreneurs that you must cultivate before bedtime." Coming soon: - Ability to subscribe to feeds via DM - for those subscriptions that you'd rather not announce to the world. wink wink nudge nudge - (Almost)instant PuSH updates using Superfeedr. (Still trying to figure this one out, actually.) Links: http://update-me.herokuapp.com http://update-me.herokuapp.com http://twitter.com/updt_me http://twitter.com/updt_me Why do these make me happy? Because a year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to make a comment like this. I was (and still am) an utter newbie with no knowledge of any kind of programming. Deep-dived into Python/Django and the results are up there for you to peruse. Granted they aren't awesome like most others in this thread but hey, it's a start. :)
• gionn 13y ago
  A platform to auto-deploy and sells web apps on different IaaS providers, helping small-medium business to delivery their software without api/pay-per-use/provisioning troubles. http://cloudesire.com http://cloudesire.com (public beta soon)
• howlett 13y ago
  I'm working on Taniger https://www.taniger.com https://www.taniger.com which is a real time Facebook chat encryption service. Quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0 Why it's cool: It's open source. It provides REAL real-time encryption without the hassle of "choosing a password", "copy pasting text" etc. Also same logic can be applied to any web chat service. Code available at: https://github.com/sadreck/taniger https://github.com/sadreck/taniger
• eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  On a good week I still manage to get some coding time in on my systems-programming language, Deca. http://code.google.com/p/decac http://code.google.com/p/decac
• collyw 13y ago
  I am pleasantly surprised to see lots of really innovative ideas. Usually speaking to "entrepreneurs" their innovative idea is a new social network "like facebook but..."
• radkiddo 13y ago
  http://apbox.co http://apbox.co it is cool because it allows businesses to become more profitable by allowing companies to negotiate discounts on supplier and service provider invoices. basically sellers can get paid early (adding liquidity to their business) and buyers can profit on discounts, adding thousands to their cashflow (which they will never get from a bank). you can think of it as twitter meets dropbox meets ebay for the supply chain. checkout our blog too: http://blog.apbox.co http://blog.apbox.co
• vuzum 13y ago
  Blogvio (http://www.blogvio.com http://www.blogvio.com) - add beautiful widgets to your website. It's cool because you don't need to do any coding to add beautiful and custom galleries, video players, mp3 players, and any other types of widgets to your website. Just copy/paste an embed code and you're done. This helps you a lot especially if you're an agency or freelancer, or if you're using a publishing tool such as Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, etc - where you don't have access to a server to upload files.
  • Cblinks 13y ago
    It's a cool tool! I used it a few weeks ago to create some slick picture widgets.
    • vuzum 13y ago
      Cool, can you share some feedback? We'll be new widgets and improvements soon. :)
• secfirstmd 13y ago
  Currently working on a mobile security application to help easily teach, implement and manage the physical security of human rights defenders, activists and journalists. Right now there is nothing out there that does this, so hoping it will get a lot of use. I'm not the best in terms of technical ability so if anyone wants to donate time - especially app developers, LAMP stack guys, UI/UX or testers then please drop me a mail to secfirstmd@gmail.com
• apoorvnarang 13y ago
  A gamified course management system for colleges (http://www.usebackpack.com http://www.usebackpack.com) It is cool because: * It has all features to stay updated about your college courses in a very easy user experience. * It has game elements that keep students engaged and have fun while learning.
• netpenthe 13y ago
  InputFarm (http://www.inputfarm.com http://www.inputfarm.com) - Input Farm provides quick website design reviews from expert designers for $75 (but we're giving them away to HN users now - see here: https://medium.com/p/8a87429d26cb https://medium.com/p/8a87429d26cb ) It's cool because: - I've been a web developer for 10+ years and quite often i get 'stuck' on making a website better. I don't need a designer to do a 'full re-design', i just need a few pointers on how to make my website better. - I need 'fresh eyes' on my website - I need confirmation that i don't need to start over and waste a bunch of time!
• thecolorblue 13y ago
  I am working on a food discovery app that works something like Waze. Users post where they get their favorite foods, either groceries or restaurants. This data is aggregated and used in the search tool that lets users search nearby, popular and in season. I haven't gotten it online yet but I have it running locally. Its important because there is no food information online. Every online food ordering website is closed off, and finding great food still requires people to ask around. This could open up a whole new market for small food producers who are producing great stuff but can't get awareness.
• Jemaclus 13y ago
  a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby. It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a language I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't really consider myself an expert on (as opposed to PHP and Javascript, both on which I do consider myself to be an expert). I figured that building a Ruby project from scratch would be the best way to learn the language. So far, so good. Thoughts: - No framework yet. Decided to just build it and see what happens. I'm not trying to learn Rails -- I'm trying to learn Ruby. They're not quite the same, obviously. - It's harder than I thought. It took quite some time for me to figure out how to mix together sockets and threads to keep track of multiple players - It's more fun than I thought. I've used Ruby in the past but have never really been impressed. (I think that's mostly Rails.) But this project is full of far more epic wins than my usual ideas. - Ruby probably isn't the best language to do a MUD in. I initially started with C and I got pretty far, but I decided I wanted to learn a new language, not build a MUD in a language I already know. - The old school Merc/Diku muds out there are based on flat files. All data, such as character files and area files, are stored in a custom flat format. I'm using JSON for my test data, since it's pretty easy for Ruby to consume, but I'm thinking I may switch to a DB-based setup. But then again, the flat file thing is working just fine... I guess I'll publish the source some day, when I get to the point where it's playable.
  • moreoutput 13y ago
    Another MUD lover here; I have a full JS MUD (WebSockets) engine I hack on from time to time for fun. Generally speaking its modeled after a flavor of diku. I have another big commit planned with some significant refactoring but was holding off for nodejitsu to update their supported node version (you can try an early version of the mud with the link on the github page) and for socket.io to move to 1.0. See: https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD
• alex-s 13y ago
  JamHive (http://beta.jamhive.com http://beta.jamhive.com) -- a service for musicians to collaborate regardless of physical distance and time constraints. Back Story I love music and would love to do a jam session with old friends, but it is difficult to schedule a time or we live too far away (ie: SF & Amsterdam & Tokyo). Why Cool * Musicians work together on a single jam (up to 5 instrument/vocal tracks) * Record directly into browser or upload a pre-recorded audio file * Basic editing and filtering of sound waves And I am looking for feedback & advise! * @Musicians, how is the recording & editing experience? * @Engineers, currently, this is built with RoR, Bootstrap, Heroku, AWS and a huge mishmash of the Web Audio API - how can I make this scale better for smartphone, tablets, more browsers (currently only Chrome and Firefox)? * @Engineers, advice on improving (speed & security) data upload / download
• abbiya 13y ago
  I am working on an android app which broadcast messages to the app users in the same geo loaction. Its cool cause its new and its not cool cause it can cause some problems.
• callmeed 13y ago
  I built a sports trivia app for iOS: http://bit.ly/winahat http://bit.ly/winahat The cool thing about it is I built an engine to scrape the web and APIs and keep generating thousands of new questions. Trivia games are fun but can get repetitive fast. I'm hoping to avoid that. In progress is an android version, then venturing outside of sports.
• boyter 13y ago
  http://searchcode.com/ http://searchcode.com/ Its a source code search engine with experimental regex support. Why is it cool? For me its because search is something I am interested in and indexing the web is cost prohibitive. This way I get to play with indexing hundreds of gigabytes of code without breaking the bank. Its also useful to show off when doing job interviews.
• novaleaf 13y ago
  phantomjs.cloud: (phantomjs as a service) http://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html http://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html it's cool because: my first web project, needed subsystem of my next web project ;)
• mcherry 13y ago
  I'm working on Revision Path (http://www.revisionpath.com http://www.revisionpath.com), which showcases black web designers, web developers, and graphic designers. Right now, that's in the form of interviews, and I've got 28 done (10 audio, 18 text) with about a dozen more in the queue. Why is it cool? Well, whenever the mention of race and technology get mentioned together, people get extremely bent out of shape. Instead of going that doomed route of asking why the industry isn't more diverse and arguing statistics (on it's visible edge, I mean), I decided to showcase the people who ARE actively working in this industry. The site is just a few months old, and the reaction has been mixed (as you can imagine since I'm only interviewing Black folks), but I'm definitely interested in telling these people's stories who love this industry, love the work they do, and are interested in telling their stories.
• superice 13y ago
  RoyalCMS. It's an extremely flexible content management system, which focusses on creating functionality by using plugins. It's like an platform for websites. It is not quite done yet, but we have a (kind of) working beta: http://royalcms.net/ http://royalcms.net/
• meerita 13y ago
  I am working on Notegraphy (http://notegraphy.com http://notegraphy.com) it's a writing app for iOS and Web. It's cool because: The idea is simple: write stuff, short or long, multipage and then style it as you want. Then you can either publish to your own gallery of notes or, share it on your favorites social networks. You can download it from here https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notegraphy/id669094298?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notegraphy/id669094298?ls=1&... any comment will be appreciate it. On the first two weeks we've got around 100k users and we're growing like crazy.
• chadzawistowski 13y ago
  Quickbeam (https://github.com/ChadSki/Quickbeam https://github.com/ChadSki/Quickbeam) and Halolib (https://github.com/ChadSki/halolib.py https://github.com/ChadSki/halolib.py) Together, these comprise a Halo modding tool which can edit the game while it's running, which is also why it's cool. Additionally, whereas previous editors have usually hardcoded functionality into the editor, all of Quickbeam's functionality is implemented in the fully-scriptable Halolib, written in Python. Ultimately I would like Quickbeam to become the Emacs of Halo editors.
• hhaidar 13y ago
  Let's Chat, our little private campfire alternative: https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat It's cool because we get to keep our chats to ourselves.
• pawelkomarnicki 13y ago
  LikeMind (http://getlikemind.com http://getlikemind.com) -- an easy and friendly way to meet likeminded people around you. Demo: http://getlikemind.com/discover http://getlikemind.com/discover It's cool because: * it's not a dating social network, so if you won't get spammed with people telling how beautiful your body is or how much they want to sleep with you (unless you make a profile with this purpose in mind) * it's about doing stuff, so you can finally meet a running buddy you wanted or fellow foodies to cook together, or just talk and share ideas, no pressure! * our iPhone app is beautiful and delightful to use, because we keep our users in mind, always * our team is super small (we have basically 4 permanent workers, an intern and a... dog :D)
• johnmurch 13y ago
  2 projects: 1) Easily save jobs - http://bucketjobs.com/ http://bucketjobs.com/ (live) 2) SAAS Dashboard - http://helicopter.io/ http://helicopter.io/ (closed beta)
• eddyparkinson 13y ago
  Spreadsheet forumlas that build a Web Application Story: When a business needs custom software to solve a particular business problem, such as a special inventory management issue, a recruitment process, expense management or whatever is custom for their company. Normally they would have to go out and hire a custom programming company to use a very high level technology to create a solution. This is very time intensive, complicated and because the programmers don't understand your business, often there is a massive communication gap and projects often fail. Cell Master is a much easier way for business owners and people inside of your business to create custom business software. It is effective because you understand the business, you understand what the software needs to do and how it needs to work. All you need is just some basic excel skills, knowing how to use excel formulas, and you can have the same potential as the expert programmer. So this means you are going to be able to create the software faster, you will be able to modify and adapt the software, it will be a lot more cost efficient and you will be able to create the solution that you want, not the solution that the programmers think you want. You will be able to create an interactive web application that solves your business problem with your own custom software. You will be able to do it with only excel skills, you don't need HTML skills, web server skills etc. With only spreadsheet skills, you can create your own custom web application. Hello world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oogKKfbRyMQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oogKKfbRyMQ
• eddyparkinson 13y ago
  Please post this question every month, see what happens.
• rograndom 13y ago
  WPCmdCtrl (http://wpcmdctrl.com http://wpcmdctrl.com) - Simplifying managing multiple WordPress installs. It's cool because: * It takes the headache out of maintaining multiple WordPress sites. * The main plan is that everything is "set and forget". Install one plugin and that site is covered: * Automatic updates for both point (3.7.1, 3.7.2, etc) and major releases (3.8, 3.9). The point releases should actually happen 1-2 days sooner than the 3.7 auto updates from Wordpress. * Automatic plugin updates * Automatic file and DB backups that are stored in S3 * Uptime and response time monitoring. * "white screen of death" alerts * Malware / blacklist scans and comparisons of core and plugin files against WordPress.org versions. This was built for my own internal uses. I had one consulting client that managed around 600 sites and could not get their heads around the other management tools on the market, but could work from a Excel sheet that had the urls / usernames / passwords for all of their sites. When an update was ready, their procedure was: downloading all of the files via FTP, downloading a SQL dump, pressing the "update" buttons, looking at the home screen to make sure it loads, updating the excel sheet with the date and install version and moving on to the next site. They averaged 4 sites per hour. I'll let you do the math on how long that took to get through all of their sites.