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Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

126 points| dholowiski | 15 years ago | reply

Release early, release often. Don't worry, be crappy. Fail fast. Iterate.

Show us your half baked, not really ready for prime time projects, HN. Is it ugly but interesting? I'll start with mine: http://smsul8r.com - a SMS message scheduler. Ugly, buggy, but it works. Come on... let's see your worst work!

304 comments

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[+] pg|15 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com
[+] dkokelley|15 years ago|reply
This was something that always impressed me with HN. Instead of using a robust, proven forum system, you created a new project that grew with the community, and opened the whole thing up for us to see and even hack ourselves.
[+] trizk|15 years ago|reply
Half baked and medium rare. Delicious.
[+] dools|15 years ago|reply
Gold.
[+] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
Ha ha. Comment of the year.
[+] patio11|15 years ago|reply
I actually didn't use source control back when I started, so I can't show you what it looked like on launch day, but this is what BCC looked like in February 2007. Static HTML, written in notepad. The web application wouldn't exist for another year yet, and the software shipped with less than 20 bingo card activities written (it now ships with about 1,000).

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/old-site/index.htm

Sales from February 2007 were about the same as my sales from today.

[+] die_sekte|15 years ago|reply
A classic case of worse is better.
[+] TheSOB88|15 years ago|reply
Hm - are you saying your sales haven't grown, or that they've grown 28x?
[+] daeken|15 years ago|reply
regvex.py -- http://gist.github.com/641688

Regvex is a proof of concept timing attack against regex engines. To make a long story short, the timing characteristics of regex engines make it perfectly suited to timing attacks, allowing you to (locally or remotely) create data that matches a given regex, and potentially even reconstruct the actual regex you're matching against.

The current version works locally against Python's sre, but I plan to take it further when I have time.

[+] greenlblue|15 years ago|reply
You will not be able to reconstruct the regex by a timing attack unless you make some assumptions on the input like maximum length and even then reconstructing the regex will be tough. If you don't make a maximum length assumption then the best you can do is create a string that will pass it because you will never be able to tell the difference between /a+/ and /a{1,10^99999999999999}/. Practically this might not make a difference but theoretically it does.
[+] tectonic|15 years ago|reply
Fascinating, could you explain how this works?
[+] michaelchisari|15 years ago|reply
Appleseed - An open source, distributed social networking framework.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

My Appleseed profile:

http://developer.appleseedproject.org/michael.chisari/

Most recent code:

http://gotham.appleseedproject.org/bruce/

(Yes, I use comic book characters for testing... Don't judge)

[+] nowarninglabel|15 years ago|reply
Nice, I was just telling some college students about Appleseed yesterday when I gave a presentation about securing your online profile. I expressed that Appleseed, along with other competitors, would be a viable contender to Facebook (a couple years down the road). Prove me right =)
[+] zaidf|15 years ago|reply
http://69.197.166.101:2261/ Helping freelancers find new work.

Going live tomorrow :)

Edit: if you want to know soon as it's live, add your email here: http://tekbob.wufoo.com/forms/notify-me-when-tekbobs-live/

[+] robryan|15 years ago|reply
I'm torn on the price display there, given the format unless you attract a very high quality buyer invariably the price is going to be a factor. But then if you don't have it makes it harder for the buyer.
[+] flacon|15 years ago|reply
How can I list on this?
[+] jonah|15 years ago|reply
Nice.

Have you thought about some integrated click-to-call?

(And add border:0; to your images.)

[+] flipp|15 years ago|reply
cool idea but the design looks really spammy.
[+] dinkumthinkum|15 years ago|reply
This is really not bad at all. Interesting idea with the extensions. I'm interested to see where you go with this.
[+] techbio|15 years ago|reply
Looks like a great system to white label for recruiters and networking types.
[+] rubyrescue|15 years ago|reply
cool idea. double "within within" 24 hours for each listing.
[+] geekam|15 years ago|reply
wow this is amazing
[+] jot|15 years ago|reply
http://digestly.com

A way for people overwhelmed by Twitter to ensure they don't miss tweets from a special someone. I use it to follow my wife.

A way for people underwhelmed by Twitter to follow someone without creating an account. My mother uses it to follow me.

[+] chime|15 years ago|reply
http://bulletxt.com - take notes/outlines easily (collapse indented text).
[+] tuacker|15 years ago|reply
This looks great. One minor problem I had while trying the demo:

  press [`] key (key to the left of #1) to hide/show subtasks
This doesn't work on a German keyboard layout where ^ is next to 1. Pressing the ` key doesn't work either.
[+] dkokelley|15 years ago|reply
Bookmarked. This reminds me of OneNote but brought online. Feature suggestion: annotations for your notes. I think students and 'paper-replacement' users might find something like that convenient combined with the regular note-taking tools.

I wouldn't recommend putting too much time into this. After thinking about it, I'm not sure how many of your users would find the feature useful. I have a tablet which includes a pen, but that makes me an outlier.

[+] hedgehog|15 years ago|reply
Awesome, especially the checklist feature (when it arrives).
[+] vito|15 years ago|reply
http://darcsden.com/

I fell in love with darcs (switched from git) and wanted a place to put my stuff, since github would no longer be of much use to me. So I made it. Right now I just add things as I need them, or think they'd be a good idea (like "ssh [email protected] init reponame"). Been meaning to get around to built-in issue tracking, but I'm busy working on other projects.

Source here: http://darcsden.com/alex/darcsden

[+] argon|15 years ago|reply
http://www.distobs.org/

Using the CCDs on Androids or iPhones to detect cosmic rays, and in the process making the world's largest cosmic ray telescope (see http://www.auger.org for the most similar big physics project). Unfortunately, this project has been dead for awhile now.

[+] benjoffe|15 years ago|reply
http://pocketodds.com/

Poker odds calculator (texas holdem), the plan is for the website version to get linked around and soon release a phone version for a couple of bucks (starting with iphone, not finished yet).

[+] bdr|15 years ago|reply
http://www.seddit.com/ -- Realtime chat using your Reddit identity. It works, there were just a couple more things I wanted to add (mostly room discovery, based on subreddits) before announcing it. Got caught up in something else...
[+] hedgehog|15 years ago|reply
It's awesome to see so many building so much cool stuff. I just got lost for 20 minutes in benjoffe's site. Here are a few of mine:

Track lunch debts (turns out I'd rather just buy people lunch but I got to play with some JS): http://lunchng.appspot.com/

Save clippings from web pages (2008, seems like someone builds one of these every six months, could use a refresh with ideas from http://pagestackandroid.appspot.com): http://www.clipng.com/

Make Myst-like walkthroughs with photos you took (2009, might be fun for someone outside of real estate): http://www.pictourist.com/

[+] rubyrescue|15 years ago|reply
http://inboxSEO.com - daily or weekly SEO emails - see where does your site rank, lots of little UI bugs but it works and we have some paying customers despite the poor UX...
[+] zach|15 years ago|reply
This is fantastic. I've also signed up and am glad you shared this. Something I've always wanted but figured it was out of reach.

This post is great, too. We should make this a regular feature because, how many frequent HN users end up launching a neat product like this and it languishes among blah-blah news links? Tragic.

I've never even posted a launch on HN, but I love seeing them -- it seems like they should be highlighted on the new page or something.

[+] dools|15 years ago|reply
o_O word!! This is what you call half-baked?

/me signs up and begins using it immediately

[+] ronnier|15 years ago|reply
http://viewtext.org

Pulls article text out of html pages

Populates RSS feeds

Save text to PDF

Extract text from PDF's

API to pull article text in XML, JSON, JSONP formats

[+] spiffworks|15 years ago|reply
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your service. Thank you.
[+] jcfrei|15 years ago|reply
doesn't seem to work 100% right now, but I really like the concept.
[+] decadentcactus|15 years ago|reply
http://oddalerts.com

Made it for my gf and I, but never got around to polishing it. It still tentatively works. Basically it sends reminders at odd times because I felt when you set a reminder, you automatically remember it anyway, and wind up staring at the clock. So this comes at different times.

Bit fuzzy around the edges and I haven't worked on it in months :(

[+] Inviz|15 years ago|reply
http://mootools.net/forge/p/lsd (Demos: http://inviz.github.com/lsd-examples/Demos/index.html http://jsfiddle.net/inviz/htmmv/)

New wave interface library that uses SVG to draw graphics, html as a templating language and a superset of css for theming. Already spent 1 year on this and have like maybe 5 months to go (add IE support, more polished features).

The thing is my very state of art code that i'm putting my soul into. Every day, even a small tweak makes me feel like I'm moving to the right direction.

Proud half baked product (not public production ready, but is used in several small projects) seeks for interested organizations and contributors, [email protected] :)

[+] yummyfajitas|15 years ago|reply
Half baked (it currently mostly works): http://github.com/stucchio/Idli

An attempt to make bug reporting more git-like, in terms of UI. Use the command line (not a browser) to file bug reports. Currently interfaces with github and trac, bugzilla support is next.

1/10 baked (command line part not yet written): http://github.com/stucchio/Sqlite-Diff

It will be exactly sounds like, a diff utility for sqlite databases. It's something I've wanted on a number of occasions, but had to hack around. Currently I compare table headers, not table contents yet. (Currently it's only a library and some tests.)