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Ask HN: Share your projects and the stories behind them

40 points| cjbarber | 12 years ago | reply

From Show HN: Highlighting Efforts of Creation from Hacker News [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291348

Conditions:

- all posts must include a story explaining why you care about the project

- if you post, you should give feedback to 4-5 other posts

I'll start!

Me and a friend from Stanford built a tool so that you don't miss opportunities. Within gmail, it reminds you of emails you sent that weren't replied to.

The url: http://gmailunreplieds.meteor.com/

We are also building a site for full time meteor.js, node.js and golang jobs, comment or email me if you're looking :)

87 comments

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[+] ronilan|12 years ago|reply
I've built PlaceUnit. I'm sole developer/designer.

http://www.placeunit.com

http://AppStore.com/placeunit

It's an app that lets anyone build a mini-responsive website entirely from their iPhone/iPad.

I knew someone who needed a new site. So instead of giving him a fish, I got him a fishing rod.. :)

[+] zizee|12 years ago|reply
Looks pretty neat (don't have an ios device to try it for real). Not sure if is a problem with my browser, but the tour doesn't seem to work (can't click the iphone area down the bottom).

I liked the promo video, although I found the start camera clicking sounds a bit jarring (but could be because I am using earbuds). The music is great. Did you license that? Or is it creative commons? I'm curious to know if there is a good place to find such stuff?

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Amazingly useful. I'm going to shoot you an email in fact. Suggestion: add something that shows where the clickable areas of the iPhone on the website for the demo are. I was clicking the center and wasn't sure why it wasn't working.

Also a link to an example site would be great.

[+] imperialWicket|12 years ago|reply
I'll go too: I've been building a Hubot script for interfacing with Asgard from NetflixOSS.

https://github.com/imperialwicket/hubot-asgard

I think the chatbot mentality is a good one, as it forces you to script/automate things so that a chatbot can accomplish them. That level of automation is a good target imo. It's also a great way to be certain that you can solve many issues remotely - since you can generally provide a meaningful chatbot command via mobile device.

In terms of scaling and cloud (aws) management, Asgard is awesome (seriously - if you're on aws and haven't checked it out, go now: https://github.com/Netflix/asgard/wiki). The biggest complaint I have about Asgard as a tool, is it feels like more than most organizations need; because it is. My goal with the hubot-asgard scripts is to wrap some of the more essential features, and hide the bulk of the solution that many orgs just see as excess tooling.

There's also the Cloud Prize...

If anyone is interested and needs assistance or wants particular features that aren't wrapped yet (it's still very young) I'd love to know. And of course - all feedback is welcome and appreciated.

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Awesome stuff, I can see this being very useful.

I believe Airbnb has built an internal solution for this, I'm sure other people would be interested.

[+] ukoki|12 years ago|reply
I'm building general-purpose spaced-repetition (flashcard) software for the browser:

http://cardflashapp.com

It started with me wanting to learn Chinese characters and being annoyed at Anki's UI/UX (Oddly I also "accidentally" learned all US state capitals and World capitals while debugging the thing).

It's Meteor + Heroku + AWS S3 (user card review data via client-side signed uploads)

[+] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
I think it's great! Although I haven't used a flash card app before, so I'm not sure how qualified a judge I am.

My only comment is that on screen widths between about 780px and 1200px, the text and fields in the two side widgets of the main flash card view overflow from their white backgrounds.

[+] zizee|12 years ago|reply
I like it, I clicked on US State Capitals and it started a card. My first thought was "I don't know many US State Capitals, how do I see the entire list to get started". So perhaps add a way to present all the info in a set so a learner can quickly be exposed to the "question/answer" pairs before actually being asked to provide answers.

Also, not sure if it was something I did, but after I cancelled a session, I could no longer start a new card set. I'd click them and they'd go into "my decks" but clicking the deck would only launch a context menu thingy to edit the deck properties. How do you run them?

[+] colinm|12 years ago|reply
> I'm building general-purpose spaced-repetition (flashcard) software for the browser:

Me too! But I'm at pre-alpha. I'm using asp.net mvc & knockout.js

[+] otto12|12 years ago|reply
Looks great.

I signed up and tried to create a new deck to study as a test, but that doesn't seem to work yet?

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Incredible! I feel like meteor is so unbelievably perfect for this.

Feedback: once you've clicked on a deck, there's no way I can see to get back to the home page as shown when you refresh the page.

[+] jbaiter|12 years ago|reply
Looks nice, I submitted some patches to a similar project a few years ago (Mnemosyne, Python+PyQt). What algorithm are you using for scheduling the repetitions? The unmodified SM2 or Anki's derivate of it?
[+] PhilipA|12 years ago|reply
It looks well done. How was it with deploying Meteor on Heroku?
[+] victoriap|12 years ago|reply
I am working on Jobrupt, a job search and recruitment tool for discreet job interviews. It helps you to make the first step for a job interview to work with an existing connection. http://www.jobrupt.com

Show HN is the suggested way, but a monthly startup roundup would be interesting. Show HN does not bring enough attention somehow recently.

[+] colinm|12 years ago|reply
Not a big fan of the name to be honest :(
[+] sideproject|12 years ago|reply
I'm building a market place for side projects

http://sideprojectors.com

I thought it would be great to not let many of the interesting side projects done by developers, entrepreneurs be abandoned like so many, but let them find home in the hands of others. It's early days and we are learning and figuring out our ways.

[+] imperialWicket|12 years ago|reply
This feels pretty polished for an early days project. My few initial nit-picks:

The Help/Support feels a little buried within the FAQ section - "support" is in the menu, but Seller's Guide and Buyer's Guide seem important, and I wouldn't have thought to look under FAQ.

Also when money is involved, even if you're clear about not handling the monetary exchange, I tend to look for an About, or more concrete contact details. Favorites icon would be nice, too.

[+] jane_portman|12 years ago|reply
Looks like a fantastic marketplace that's actually very usable, and already quite populated. Finding a co-founder is a really tough task, any instruments are welcome that can ease that.

Hope you gain great traction with this project!

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Nice work, and I really like the theme of the site. And this is definitely the perfect place to be promoting it :)
[+] 6thSigma|12 years ago|reply
Have any projects been purchased yet? If so, you should market the hell out of that fact.
[+] PhilipA|12 years ago|reply
Excellent, I have been looking for this. I might use it for www.recovermywebsite.com
[+] zizee|12 years ago|reply
I've built Authic with a friend (http://authic.com). Authic is a SASS User Authentication, Management, Plans and Payments. Our aim is to make as service that is as easy to integrate with as Facebook Connect, but will allow you to authenticate your users, reset their passwords, configure payment plans and setup recurring billing with ease.

We really want this tool to make it much easier/quicker to let devs release and launch their own SAAS products, concentrating on their unique functionality and not waste their time with the boring stuff.

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Very nice. I think your value prop/statement on the homepage should be something along the lines of "Saving you the time and stress required to reimplement user account tiers and auth."

The main value will be people who are doing plans and payments - because they are the ones with money, so focusing on them in the value statement might be good.

Also I'd say mention it's for rails and node.js on the front page, I almost left the site because I wasn't sure if it was for anything other than rails (also explicitly state rails, obviously most people know that gem == rails but still worth being explicit).

[+] znt|12 years ago|reply
Do you support Stripe?
[+] ghc|12 years ago|reply
I built http://algorithmic.ly, a company that helps you add intelligence to your applications by providing algorithms as a service.

I mentor a lot of startups in Boston. Between the Harvard Innovation Lab, CIC, Lean Startup Machine, Youth Cities and others, I've heard a lot about what problems early tech startups face. A big one I see with a lot of startups is that they have some idea that requires a relatively simple or at least well known algorithm, but they have neither the expertise nor infrastructure to implement it themselves or even install Mahout.

In an effort to help these companies, I created a service to help startups run algorithms without having to worry about the details. You just choose the algorithm you need and build a data model appropriate to your project, and then Algorithmic.ly generates an API for you to interact with your model and continuously runs the algorithm you need on your data. Then all you need to do is query Algorithmic.ly for the algorithm results whenever you need them.

This makes everything from spatial search to netflix-style recommendations within the reach of small startups who only have web developers or iOS developers and can't afford hiring data scientists to do it for them. Right now we're in a limited beta with several startups as we figure out how to scale, but we're looking for more companies we can help, especially in the Boston startup ecosystem.

[+] 6thSigma|12 years ago|reply
This is awesome. I worked a bit on a recommendation system and it was so much more complex than I originally anticipated.
[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Wow. Unbelievably cool. Best of luck - I can see this doing very well. I'll shoot you an email: [email protected]?
[+] colinm|12 years ago|reply
http://www.fret1.com

A tool for seeing the relationship between chord & scales on the guitar. I built this a few years back to sharpen my Silverlight skills. (stop chuckling). Just rewrote it in HTML & JS, with help from teoria.js.

[+] covgjai|12 years ago|reply
Please have a look at,

http://www.bugscore.com/ and let me know your feedback & suggestions.

You can use Bugscore to score a product you have used or seen, a business you have worked at or one that has served you and finally, people you have met or seen. It's a platform for you to express your opinion on almost anything on Earth! Similarly, you can see what others think about products. The same goes for businesses (including schools and colleges).

[+] dpapathanasiou|12 years ago|reply
I created a wikipedia-style language learning site[1] starting with Japanese and English.

It was inspired by a trip to Japan last year[2] after having been away for a while and seeing how badly my reading comprehension had deteriorated.

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://denis.papathanasiou.org/2012/06/10/yokaben-read-write...

[+] imperialWicket|12 years ago|reply
This is a nice solution for motivated individuals, and serves as a good practice tool for translators.

I'm not sure which OS's come with Japanese characters installed these days, but I ended up here pretty quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Installing_Japanese_chara... , a link or similar instructions might save a couple searches (unless it's just me who didn't have them installed already).

[+] sideproject|12 years ago|reply
I remember seeing this awhile ago - http://www.coffeestrap.com/ - similar, but maybe a different approach to the whole language learning industry. Thought you might find it useful!
[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Very well done - though I'd suggest refining the value statement/homepage tagline (maybe look at Duolingo.com for inspiration), and also changing the font color, the orange feels a bit strong.

Great site though, I can see the value it provides.

[+] captn3m0|12 years ago|reply
I built a leaderboard application for teams that lets you track your & your team's progress on various "scorable" services such as HN(karma), project euler (problems solved), spoj(score), stackexchange(points) and lots other services. It was meant to be used as a game-board for all of us, so we can track everyone.

Its open-sourced at github.com/sdslabs/leaderboard and uses github organizations for authentication (anyone in your org can login).

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Sounds great, the demo appears down for me:

http://score.sdslabs.co.in/

Any plans to show the movers and shakers/those who are improving fast? Or maybe the top players at the end of each week? I could see this being repurposed to company metrics like tickets closed and such to gamify certain aspects of productivity.

[+] shearnie|12 years ago|reply
I'm building a business process modelling and workflow automation tool. https://flowplane.com

I tell my wife I'm obsessed with models.

[+] 6thSigma|12 years ago|reply
A directory for APIs: http://www.apiforthat.com/

It's been getting pretty good traction thanks to decently high Google search rankings for API related queries. A decent amount of large companies have submitted their APIs or requested to claim their page.

I haven't been able to spend a lot of time on it recently to add features but I have a lot of cool stuff in mind.

[+] imperialWicket|12 years ago|reply
This is a good idea. I seem to remember a couple similar directories, but am having trouble digging up links this morning.

From an API-consumer perspective, things like verified user ratings, verified implementations/testimonials, updates, and library/wrapper details would be awesome. That said, I see how these features wouldn't make it into an early cut, or why they'd be avoided; just my 2 cents.

[+] cjbarber|12 years ago|reply
Nice job! Have you monetized the companies contacting you to claim their page?
[+] jbaiter|12 years ago|reply
I built a tool to help with scanning books in a more efficient manner:

http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads

http://spreads.readthedocs.org

With it, going from a physical book to a digitized, postprocessed and OCRed PDF takes around 30-40 minutes for an average 300-400pg book with no pictures/illustrations.

My (rather lofty, I ad mit) motivation was to make it as easy as possible for people to free printed information from their pyhsical shackles and enable them to share it (I'm currently working on a plugin that allows the user to directly upload a scanned book to the Internet Archive).

The inspiration for it came after I purchased a kit for Daniel Reeds' incredible DIYBookScanner[1] and built it on a free weekend. Upon toying with it, I realized that, while there was a lot of great software available for helping with the scanning and postprocessing, using it required a lot of often tedious manual interactions that could easily be automated.

The tool basically handles all communication with the capture devices (cameras, but the code is kept rather general as to allow for the usage of mobile phones or flatbed scanners) and calls a bunch of 3rd party applications to deal with postprocessing and output generation.

I learned a lot about multithreading/multiprocessing in Python, got to brush up my PySide knowledge and am currently learning AngularJS by developing a webinterface for it, to allow the headless control of Raspberry Pi-connected scanners.

[1] http://www.diybookscanner.org/

[+] PhilipA|12 years ago|reply
I once lost a website, no backup or anything. There is a saying that "Real men don't do backups, they cry", well I guess I learned my lesson.

I had to crawl the search engine to restore some of the pages, which led to the free service www.recovermywebsite.com.

I don't have much time to develop this further, so if anyone are interested in buying it, contact me at [email protected].

[+] aleksandrm|12 years ago|reply
I launched http://bootcamper.io 9 months ago. BootCamper is a database for all the technology bootcamps/workshops/schools out there. I myself was trying to get into a bootcamp but realized that there was no single place where I can make my research on them, information was scattered all over the net and Quora didn't cut it. Thus my project was born - it was a perfect opportunity for me to build something that I knew would help others, in addition to being able to show my work to prospective bootcamps. Initially, it was very slow to pick up, but today I am getting some sensible traffic and a lot of praise, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. To this day I am keeping it up-to-date and have future plans to improve it.
[+] apapli|12 years ago|reply
I built http://www.aquarium-manager.com to: a) teach myself to code and b) give a little back to society.

I don't have plans to commercialise it, and keeping in mind the costs to run it are low (less than $30 per month) I'm happily resisting the temptation to place advertisements all over it.

It's been live for about a year and a half, in the tens of unique visitors per day (hundreds of page views, 5+ minute avg session times) and certainly keen to get it more publicised.

I thoroughly enjoyed making the application (and enjoy supporting it still), and learning about all the cool tools/tech most people on HN get to use in their jobs full time!

Feedback welcome - and if you have an aquarium be sure to keep doing you water changes, your fish will thank you for the effort ;)

EDIT: fixed url

[+] chrisdew|12 years ago|reply
I built http://www.virtsync.com to allow me to backup sparse virtual machine disk images to other servers across the internet.

I've only sold around $1,000 of licenses so far, so maybe this post will help...

[+] tommy_|12 years ago|reply
I built a reddit client on the iPhone for viewing image posts. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flippit-reddit-pics-client/i... Image posts are really popular and I've found that about 70% of the posts on the front page are image posts. Sometimes I just want to look at some funny images for a quick laugh and read some witty comments.