Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

[JNRowe]

Last February there was, in my opinion, a really uplifting thread with the same title¹. I'd like to see all the cool new things going on, and I'll steal the intro text from as89 to explain:

One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25992782

[Charlieholtz]

I built a satirical social network called shlinkedin. It started as a way for me to learn elixir and make fun of thought leadership with my roommate, and has gradually gotten bigger. It’s all open source and a ton of fun to work on. Everyone is an alter ego (think Beff Jezos or Office Spider), and it’s hilarious to see how much people commit to the characters they create. And I can’t say enough good things about working with elixir / phoenix liveview. Definitely a steep learning curve for me (I’d never used a functional language before), but payoff is huge.

https://www.shlinkedin.com

[jvanderbot]

HN hug of death. And well deserved, I had a great time with this one.

[nicbou]

I've seen it before. It's hilarious

[zlib]

I'm also starting to learn elixir/phoenix liveview and seeing shlinkedin's code is a great help for figuring out how you've done certain things, thanks!

[gcampos]

Love shlinkedin and I think you have a shoot of making it successful. Not "the next Google" kind of successful, but could be at least a life style business.

[sizzle]

Love the hilarious emoji post options: chili, glass of milk, slap

[WCityMike]

Wi-fi enabled hot sauce. I did not know so much satire could be packed into four words. That's satire-rich semantics, right there. SatiricWeb3.

[shrubby]

Thanks, had a blast there for a while. Nice alternative to trolling in LinkedIn, which I've done as well. A crapton of stiffies in the latter one.

[wswoodruff]

Hopefully they'll switch to Node soon so I can help too

[jawmes9]

So excellent, happy to see you're open to contributions too!

[mocmoc]

I love it and the people that I have share it with loved too

[jacob_rezi]

Shlinkedin is the best. Still yet to use our software tho :(

[wilsonjholmes]

This is awesome!

[throwawayHN378]

Aaaaaaaand you’re sued

[scarecrowbob]

I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it.

Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage.

If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.

I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a rehearsal for a string band last night.

Sunday I recorded a new track with my girlfriend, ambient techno (novation circuit, moog, girlfriend's esoteric warblings).

Monday I finished an EDM track.

I have a bunch of aspirational goals. I'd like to DJ at my local ecstatic dance. I'd like to front a Louis Prima style jazz band.

I've been playing trumpet and trombone every day for the last 2 months.

I don't care if I have any professional success. But hard to say all that is a hobby. Maybe I'll eventually be able to retire and just work as a musician, teaching and doing my little gigs and producing the records I engineer for other folks and running sound for the little parties we play out in the desert in Utah.

Don't care. My kids are raised, I've got a reasonable remote day job.

We'll see how it goes.

[franga2000]

I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convinced, so I've sunk countless hours into the project.

I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.

// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome

[mNovak]

https://bytebucket.co

I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks.

True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.

[mikemcquaid]

I’m the project leader for Homebrew and have been maintaining it for 12 years. I have no planned dramatic changes for it or expectations I’ll radically improve it in any way. I just try to keep all parts of the project ticking along and I still enjoy doing so, despite feeling no real obligation to continue.

[ryangittins]

https://siftrss.com/

I've been running siftrss for about five years now. It lets you enter an RSS feed, add a filter, and get a new RSS feed excluding the stuff you specify. I made it to scratch my own itch.

Originally it wasn't going to be public but I thought, "eh what the heck, it's only a bit more effort to put a simple interface on it." Since then more than 100k feeds have been created and donations have paid for the minimal hosting costs.

I do get feature requests from time to time,and I would like to fulfill them eventually, but for the most part I rarely work on it. I'd love to have richer, more powerful filters with boolean logic along with feed combining, rewriting of tags, proxies, all sorts of things... but I've been a software engineer long enough to know that the greater complexity would mean more people emailing me their demands and blaming me for their (mis)use of the tool. It just wouldn't be fun anymore. It'd be another chore.

I've thought about trying to monetize it but 1) it seems unlikely that it'd ever amount to anything substantial, 2) probably wouldn't be worth the effort, and 3) kind of feels against the spirit of RSS.

I guess in some sense it has succeeded, but in reality it succeeded on day one when I was able to use it myself.

[joegibbs]

I've been making a proper survival strategy game. I made a few games before but they were only about a week's worth of work each, so I don't count them as "proper".

This time I wanted to make a full-on project with professionally-done models, art, music etc. It's a reverse of the 4X formula - rather than starting as a small country and becoming a vast empire over the course of the game you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.

I've never run a project with this kind of scope - I've been on them but when you're actually making the decisions it's a real change in perspective.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830290/Fall_of_an_Empire...

[mistursinistur]

I'm building wooden benches for bus and light rail stops in my neighborhood.

Lots of riders are elderly and find themselves sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, as they wait for transit. Studies suggest that perceived wait time increases by 30%+ when riders are forced to stand while they wait. There's no cheaper way to shave several minutes off of perceived trip time, for every trip.

Inspired by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam....

[spyke112]

I have such a hard time relating to this. In Denmark I feel like 95% of bus stops have some sort of bench, and a lot of them has like a small shed, to get out of the rain in bad weather. It's wild to think that citizens should be adding those themselves. But I guess there's no profit in adding benches to each stop as a bus company.

[nicbou]

I love this.

I've been through so many places where it's nearly impossible to find a place to sit for free. You just walk and walk and walk, until you're ready to spend 4-6$ to sit inside a business.

Benches have no economic value. You just sit there for free - you loiter - for as long as you want with no expectation of buying anything. Yet they provide undeniable value to their users.

I've made a habit of mapping benches on Open Street Map. Have you considered adding yours there, or updating the bus stops accordingly? StreetComplete lets you do it easily.

[JNRowe]

I really shouldn't ask and then pick favourites, but between you and me I love this.

Now that you've made me think about this, I can only place one bus stop with a half covered "perch" within a few kilometres of my house. All of the others are just a sign in the grass verge, or a wind exposed perspex cover in a couple of cases. Sadly, it hadn't even occurred to me how unhelpful that it is for many of the people that rely on busses.

[tsol]

I'm just curious about the logistics-- so are you allowed to just put a bench down at bus stops, legally? No one removes them?

[eb0la]

IMHO you succeeded the moment you installed the first bench.

[olek]

Good to know there are decent and kind people out there :-)

[bijection]

I posted this as a show HN a few weeks ago, I maintain a small, completely free html/js game. There's no chance of it ever making money in its current form, it's just a fun waste of time with a few hundred players[0].

[0] https://wallsmash.com

[screenbreakout]

I bought some land over 10 years ago, it's about 2 hectares, water runs through it and I wanted to make a garden, so I started digging, would sleep on site for a couple of weeks then return to civilization... eventually I planted it with fruit trees and comfrey and stuff and just left it to it's own devices... there's an inverted swastika like you see on some churches in india, an @, and a bunch of other motifs.. at one point I thought of selling it as land art, but no idea how to go about it... I'll give a cut to anyone who helps me though :-) :-) https://imgz.org/iRe6wg3Z/ https://imgz.org/i9UEvZca/ https://imgz.org/i8zESSAw/

[iljya]

Creating paper nautical maps. NOAA has stopped updating 15% of all their nautical charts and will discontinue the rest by Jan. 2025.

The proposed replacement for the beautiful maps they produce now is "print electronic maps yourself". Unfortunately the electronic charts are only usable with an interactive interface which paper is not, to say nothing about their aesthetic qualities.

There are data errors too in the new "custom charts" that are being offered for printing, one such error is that virtually all US water lots a foot of water according to the maps! I investigated this and it is due to rounding down when converting to meters and then rounding down again when converting back to feet.

Let me know if you care, or want to help.

[radiantexp21]

Believe it or not, I sell the following on Fiverr as radiantxp21: "I will special stocks and option picks lose all your money fast and intelligently"

I know, it sounds a bit, non-English, but in my defense: it was my first time using Fiverr and I had no clue how to use it. The ad is up for a few months already, and I had many laughs creating it, but yesterday I had my first client! I panicked, I realized that I am as bad at picking bad stocks as good ones. I felt like a fraud! And I was laughing so hard that I felt like a fraud.

I genuinely have impostor syndrome telling people how to pick the worst stocks of their lives that will lead them into financial ruin :') I feel there's something funny about the whole aspect of: you ask for a service where you lose your stuff, now you gained more stuff, you're happy as a person but probably not too happy with my service.

Writing the order was a ton of fun! I just get so many questions. Why would one want to lose money? Why listen to me? Would he want to adopt me? What are they really expecting? How does one pick a horrible horrible stock? Should I inverse my own trades, or should I lose the money to feel a sense of comradery? How serious should I be?

The result is: I set up this persona that I feel is funny as hell, yet I try to analyze things as intelligently as possible and really show my real side as well.

Thinking the question through: how can I deliver the worst possible stock (that is not something synthetic, or an index)? Really having the same strong drive that I normally have when I want to buy a winning stock.

I can't put my words on it, but I feel it's splendidly beautiful if done in moderation.

And I am proud to now say at parties: I am a professional financial advisor, I make sure people lose all their money. I am so good at it, I need a place to crash, can I stay at your place tonight?

[sfilmeyer]

Are you licensed? Maybe the first candidate just intends to take your financial advice and then sue you into the ground afterwards.

[nescioquid]

> I know, it sounds a bit...non-English

Should one in 18th century verse himself be passingly versed

your crier's cry rings out artfully.

One fraud's earnest scheme to a knowing fraud's great mirth does bring

a wild-cat's prey; loss an LLC's bounty.

edit: s/knowing fraud/knowing fraud's/g; sorry for the typo

[ackbar03]

> I panicked, I realized that I am as bad at picking bad stocks as good ones. I felt like a fraud! And I was laughing so hard that I felt like a fraud.

Seems easy enough. Just tell them to give the money to you to buy them "special" stocks and options, keep the money, and make them do the New York Times crossword puzzle or something. You've then just "special stocks and option picks lose all [their] money fast and intelligently" and kept your end of the bargain. The original task is in such broken English anyways I doubt your legally liable for anything.

[exp1orer]

This is pretty funny, but in functioning financial markets, it's just as hard to pick losers as winners.

The beliefs of professional traders about whether a stock will go up or down is already baked into the price. If you believe a stock is going to go down, and you are right, you can make money by shorting it.

[leppr]

Maybe they mean to counter trade you, i.e. short the terrible stocks you recommend and become immensily rich.

[htrp]

Traditional finance theory says that the world's worst stock picker is just as valuable as the word's best stock picker.

[Rumudiez]

My day job. Personal projects get a little more heart, but "success" to me is usually intrinsic, not extrinsic. I'm probably a little weird when it comes to motivating factors, but not alone.

[kcbanner]

I built a Visual Studio extension that wraps ag (the silver searcher), because I was constantly flipping to the terminal to use it to search the UE4 codebase I work on. The built in MSVC text search is egregiously slow, and even tools like Visual Assist (which search via indexing symbols) take forever to run on the entire engine.

It can do a full regex search on the entire UE4 codebase in about ~6s on my SSD. Searching just the game's codebase takes ~200ms, enough to feel instant. The speed is all credit to the developers of ag, I just put a convenient interface on it.

I use it essentially as a navigation tool and it's a core part of my workflow, but haven't gotten any paying customers. I initially had hoped to sell a few copies, but since it has completely solved my own problem and probably saved me hundreds of hours of waiting for slow searches, I'm happy.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBan...

[thenerdhead]

Honestly everything I do. I used to have such high expectations of every side project I built, blogs I wrote, videos I made.

At the end of the day, I realized that the very fact of caring too much prevented me from creating more. The more I created, the more people would engage and those projects would succeed. Weird how that works.

[as89]

Glad to see this thread come back! I'll share something of my own, though it's not a tech project.

I've been working on translating Japji Sahib - which is the foundational prayer of the Sikhs - into English poetry. The original is a poem, but most of the existing translations are in prose and use Western religious terminology that's not really appropriate to the original.

I just wrapped up a first draft of the translation itself. Also working on putting together an essay on why I felt another translation was necessary and why preserving the form of the poem is important to understanding its contents. Planning on getting it published one way or another.

Been sharing snippets from my translation here, if you're interested in following along: https://twitter.com/verseofpunjab

[JNRowe]

Thanks for your original thread, obviously it stuck in my mind.

It has been great to read all the responses again. I've probably spent a few years worth of upvote budget, assuming I haven't tripped some upvote spam detector ;)

[linksnapzz]

Very nice!

[aaronbrethorst]

I built a website to help me track my Apple Fitness+ workouts. Specifically, I needed several features that Apple doesn't offer today:

- A chronological history of the workouts I've completed.

- Notes and like/dislike tracking on the workouts I've completed.

- Real search capabilities to let me find particular types of workouts (e.g. filter to yoga workouts and search for "pigeon")

And, if people actually use it, then that'll be a big win, because I'd love to be able to see others' thoughts on workouts, find out what's popular in a category, etc.

I have an 'invitation only' system in place on the site today to help mitigate the risk of spam, but I've been sending out invitations to people who sign up pretty much immediately.

https://myworkouts.xyz

p.s. in case anyone's curious about the tech stack: it's a completely boring Rails 7 website with a Tailwind-based UI, backed by Postgres, and running on Render (https://www.render.com).

[fraetor]

Wodscribe is a danish startup doing something similiar.

They use AI to determine what workouts you do, with logging and other features.

https://wodscribe.com/

[FailMore]

Hey, this looks really cool. Saved!

[slhomme]

https://getgumball.com

My wife and I started an online/offline shop last year. When our very first orders came in, it was the best feeling ever! I wanted some kind of celebration device that would turn on and play some celebrating music each time this happened. So I started learning IoT / hardware and build a cool retro-looking police light that I can plug into our WooCommerce/Shopify/Zapier accounts (or really anything else with webhooks). This was such a fun project and people wanted to get some for their own. So I'm working on making it a "real" product. I don't care if it becomes a "success" or not, I'm already so happy to use it for my own and my friends.

[fredleblanc]

I’ve been making mint-tin tabletop games. I’m aiming for a new game every other month. Being a web person for like 20 years now, everything I make disappears in months-to-years. As someone I worked with once described it, we’re digital ice sculptors.

So as a change of pace, physical games! I’ve released 2 so far, next one coming in March.

One is a set-collection competition called Come to Call where players are royal PR people. You’re trying to win the favor of rich patrons without seeming too desperate. Your goal is to send the least interest delegate that will still steal the show. It’s a game of kings, queens, fools, and way too many butlers.

The second game is a push-your-luck dice-rolling egg hunt called Egg Roll! You’ve only got time to make 6 stops to find eggs. Roll the dice to find eggs. If you find some, you can move those to safety or roll to find more. Find nothing and score nothing for the round instead. Works well with kids and adults alike! And comes with 6 variants to change the game up.

You can see both at my little corner of the web, https://fredandfun.com

If you use the coupon codes on my site, I make less than 50¢ per game sold. I’ll never recover what I spent on art. But I dob’t care. As long as someone anywhere has fun with either of them, it’s all worthwhile.

[byecancer21]

I am taking down the corrupt top judge of a leading Western nation, for fun.

A first instance judge had committed a serious criminal offense. Her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer then bribed the presiding appeals court judge. So I made the assumption he would also influence the ensuing constitutional court case.

The case had been accepted by the court and assigned a case number. I waited for a month then caused the husband to panic with a morning fax sent to his law firm making fun of his felonious wife and mentioning the case. Without thinking, he used his close connections to the court, trying to save his wife I suppose. Apparently unaware I had caused this in a provable way, the top court decided the very same day to not take the case and gave no reason whatsoever. Such decisions are supposed to be scheduled ten days ahead by law, which did not occur here. The case was also objectively valid since one of the appeals court judges had refused to be on the panel, so the assignments were wrong, a severe procedural error. The judge assigned to fact-finding in the case was the President of this court, the number five in the diplomatic ranking of this nation.

My intent is to end his judicial career and thus alter the course of his nation a little bit.

I am only doing this for fun and don't care if this succeeds.

E-Mail in profile if you are a lawyer or journalist and want to see something interesting happen. There is already a public website with all case materials that caused further drama within the judiciary.

A tech connection: a false claim of immediate threat to the life of the felonious judge had been made to obtain an IP address from Cloudflare, bypassing due process.

Another tech connection: The legal entity operating the website is a DAO on Ethereum, the (minimal) costs are paid with funds originated from a tech billionaire...