Ask HN: What did you build in March?

[amoore]

I've enjoyed reading these in the past, and I think some folks who have recently built or launched something have enjoyed the brief publicity and chance to get some early feedback.

So, If you built or launched something in March, let us know, and maybe even show it off with a link.

[ComputerGuru]

Working literally every waking hour (22 hour+ coding sessions) for two weeks, I've created a replacement for our WinPE-based Windows repair CDs [1] in Linux, in anticipation of Microsoft's non-renewal of all WinPE licensing agreements to 3rd parties, and made them fit on an ISO that (GUI desktop environment, all kinds drivers and binary blobs, web browser, partition editor, custom repair tools, and all) is only 40MiB. CDs will (hopefully, DV) fix any and all boot-related issues, attempt to repair registry, and perform various sanity checks to get your PC booting once more for Windows XP - 7.

Now for the testing phase! (anyone interested in trying it out, drop me an email [email protected] and I'll send you a copy for free)

[1]: http://systemdiscs.com/

[mappu]

Could you elaborate on the licensing change for Windows PE?

Sorry, this is the first i've come across it, and it looks like it's affecting other vendors as well (Paragon?) but i havn't found a useful source or summary.

[AngryParsley]

I took the month off work and traveled around Japan, Chile, and Argentina.

During my travels, I managed to do quite a bit of work on The Silver Searcher: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher . It's a clone of ack[1], but written in C instead of Perl. I've done a decent amount of profiling[2] to find slow parts and improve the speed. For literal searches it uses a version of Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr[3]. For regex searches it uses the new JIT compiler in PCRE[4].

Depending on the search, it can be 3-5x faster than ack. And thanks to some contributors this past month, it's now in homebrew and Gentoo portage.

Well, back to the grind tomorrow.

1: http://betterthangrep.com/

2: Using gprof, valgrind, and Instruments.app. See http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/01/23/making-programs-faster-prof...

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string_sear...

4: http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html

[piranha]

Add ability to replace and I'm your fan. :) Until then I'm using my own http://github.com/piranha/goreplace (built in March a year ago :)).

[jgrahamc]

Not quite what you were looking for, but I built this: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-monitor-from... and this: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/home-made-iphone-scanner-stand.h...

[cperciva]

I built a high performance 99.999999999% durable key-value data store: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-03-27-adding-durability...

[pestaa]

Just so you know, kivaloo (or, more precisely, kiváló) means `excellent` in Hungarian.

Good luck with the project!

[there]

I released Pushover, a mobile notification service with clients for Android and iOS.

https://pushover.net/

How I built it: http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/03/16/on_building_pushover/

[jurre]

Very cool project and I enjoyed reading your notes. I'm going to look into using this for the project I'm currently working on.

[kaolinite]

there, wow. Really nice service. I will get your Android app in a few days time. It would make me more confident in your service however if you could open-source the server software, and allow the client to connect to other servers. As there's no monthly charge, as far as I'm aware this shouldn't affect you negatively, but your call of course :-)

[patio11]

New redesign of BCC, complete with obligatory A/B test. Scroll way to the bottom and click the link if you can't see it. (Might need to click twice.) http://www.bingocardcreator.com

[caw]

I'm not entirely sure that BCC's new redesign is rendering correctly. From the computer image it looks like your blue top area should be further down. Then in Firefox the effect is even more extreme.

Chrome (latest, Win7): http://tinypic.com/r/2vdpfd1/5 Firefox (latest, Win7): http://tinypic.com/r/1zbs09/5

I like the design, but I feel as though BCC lost some of its "uniqueness." The design looks like a lot of other designs these days. Then again, your customers probably don't know or care, and it's just us who read about BCC.

[bertm]

Patrick, have you tried a large thematic change to the BBC site in the past? It is pretty neat to see the changes for optimization to the site over the years. Still, I can't help but think the "loud" colors lead to less optimal performance. Disclaimer --> Not a mom or teacher.

[Raphael]

The underlined menu links sure are weird. I suppose they mysteriously bring in more money.

[jazzychad]

I built a Posterous export tool that backs-up all your Posterous data (posts, images, video, audio) after the Twitter acquisition announcement.

http://exportmyposts.com/

How I built it: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/03/21/launching-exportmyposts...

[bootload]

"... If you are looking for a free solution, you can read the Posterous API documentation to create your own backups. ..."

Love this, because the pain point costs way more than the cost of your service.

[pbjorklund]

I built my first complete rails app interacting with a remote API. http://www.tweepsmanager.com and then I put the repo up on github https://github.com/pbjorklund/Tweepsmanager for everyone to see and judge.

Some day im going to come back to it and walk through the commit history and see if I ever made any progress in my rails skillset.

It's one of those everlasting work-in-progress projects, right now I'm not sure what functionality I want to provide. Right now im thinking about collecting data and drawing some conclusions. But that will probably be another app.

It also made me realize that something like Sinatra + backbone would be a better fit. So I guess thats something atleast.

[rfurmani]

It's been a good month: I'm about to launch http://workwolf.com : an online marketplace for parttime and odd jobs (which, for various reasons, I feel just does not exist)

I've also had a number of conversations recently on the state of academic publishing and how it can be improved, so I put together a reddit-based interface to the arxiv pre-print server, where hopefully people can now discuss up and coming papers and let the cream naturally rise to the top: http://arxaliv.org/

I'm also a developer on http://lmfdb.org/ but that's a rather technical site for research mathematicians.

[IanDrake]

Virtual dog fighting - http://PuppyShowdown.com - OK, more like puppy pillow fighting.

It's still rough around the edges and buggy, but I should have an update ready tonight or tomorrow to smooth things out.

[shpen]

I really wanted to use it, but I gave up as soon as soon as I realized that Facebook is the only way to log in. Not everyone will trust your website, and requiring Facebook limits the number of users you will receive.

[Lukeas14]

Just today finished building my web app search engine and directory http://www.iwaat.com (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784625). Still a ton of work and features left to build.

[adj]

I released my first solo app to help me capture and remind myself of my ideas. It’s called “Noted! and is available for iPhone - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noted!/id504164257?ls=1&m...

You can read about my success (or lack thereof!) here - http://atomyard.com/blog/How-not-to-market-an-iPhone-app/

[pcd]

Very cool. Just what I've been looking for

[nabilt]

I built http://www.likelist.ca over a weekend and a few days. (Free App Engine Account)

I built it to surface the likes, favorites, +1's, ... that tend to be hidden on most services. Basically about.me + Pinterest for your 'liked' content.

[edit]: If it is not clear enter your user name in the textbox

[edit]: source: https://github.com/nabilt/Like-List

[robinhouston]

An interactive animated cartogram ‘squishy map’ http://www.carbonmap.org/

[jmah]

This is great! Very impressive.

[dpritchett]

Built a Ruby-based web app skeleton for Heroku [1] and then built another for Python [2].

Followed that up by making a ticket sales web app using the SeatGeek affiliate API and my Python app skeleton [3]. I also demoed [2] and [3] to the Memphis Python user group [4].

I apologize for the javascript failure on Tickets of Memphis, it seems the SeatGeek API has stopped accepting my jQuery JSONP requests so I have a ticket in.

[1] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite

[2] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite-python

[3] http://ticketsofmemphis.com

[4] http://www.slideshare.net/dpritchett/quick-and-dirty-heroku-...

[ajtulloch]

Scratched an itch and built LaTeX2Markdown (http://tullo.ch/projects/LaTeX2Markdown) - a LaTeX to Markdown converter designed for converting AMS-LaTeX documents to webpages.

Offers compatibility with AMS-LaTeX (theorems, lemmas, proofs, etc), and drop-in integration with a Markdown/MathJaX blogging environment. Pandoc can't cope with these environments, so it seemed useful to build something that did.

The usage model is effectively:

1) Write your mathematic documents (lecture notes, blog posts, exercise solutions) in LaTeX using the full AMS-LaTeX suite.

2) Convert to PDF, Markdown, or another format.

3) Use Markdown/MathJaX for blog, use PDF for distribution, etc.

Full source available at https://github.com/ajtulloch/LaTeX2Markdown.

[rwmj]

In libguestfs (part of our open source virtualization tools suite):

- the ability to mount VM filesystems on the host via the API, which was a huge amount of work for a fairly small gain, mainly wrangling FUSE (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/libguestfs-mount-local...)

- a way to make it easier to use libguestfs from Linux distros other than our primary ones (ie. other than Fedora, Debian): http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/appliance/

So two deceptive features that are small, but involved a huge amount of work and wrangling behind the scenes, particularly the first one. Made much harder by the primary requirement to write most things in C.

[SeckinJohn]

Drawium.com - Website Tour Builder. Made a lot of improvements on our interactive tour builder and the tour viewers after we hit the front page on HN and got lots of constructive feedback. Build a tour for your website at http://drawium.com

[follower]

Do you intentionally ask for registering before trying out Tour creation?

[dmor]

I completely rebuilt http://refer.ly and learned just enough about the backend part to configure the entire box myself on EC2 (yay!). 350 people in the beta, and sending out the next batch of invites tonight. Yay!

[nfm]

Backbone based Firefox[1] and Chrome[2] extensions for our time tracking and invoicing app, Paydirt[3]. They prompt you to start a timer when they spot keywords related to your clients on the pages you visit.

This is our MVP into intelligent time tracking, seems to work well for people that spend all day in the browser. We'd love some feedback!

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paydirt-time-...

2. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clfnlkjacgohceabde...

3. https://paydirtapp.com

[amoore]

brilliant! I may "embrace and extend" this idea for my workplace. I'd build a browser extension that notices when I load a new trouble ticket and makes an entry in my timecard for it. If I used paydirt, I'd love the thing you just built.