Ask HN: Show us your abandoned (and probably incomplete) side projects

[fotcorn]

I think most of us have some abandoned projects collecting dust on Github. Post them here so others can work on it or you even get enough motivation to start working on it again.

For example, I started an user mode network stack in Python: https://github.com/fotcorn/pynetworkstack which responses to ping requests, but nothing more.

[api]

Command-line n-dimensional plot tool-- it works, but haven't touched it in ages:

http://adam.ierymenko.name/flatland.shtml

https://github.com/adamierymenko/flatland

An evolvable code artificial life engine that I wrote while in college-- its quite sophisticated and still runs:

https://github.com/adamierymenko/archis

Nanopond is another, an attempt to condense the above into its smallest possible essence and in C. A number of folks have ported it to other languages, and I got one e-mail a while back that they were using it for burn-in testing on some supercomputing hardware at Lawrence Livermore:

http://adam.ierymenko.name/nanopond.shtml

Java n-dimensional array library-- also works but haven't touched in a long time:

https://github.com/adamierymenko/hyperdrive

[zackbloom]

When Flickr announced 1TB of free storage, I thought it'd be funny to build a way of mounting it as a filesystem which encoded your files as pictures. It reliably stores files and trees, I just never finished up the FUSE binding:

https://github.com/zackbloom/flickrfs

[kngspook]

That is pretty funny. :P

[saryant]

FlightSight: https://github.com/ryantanner/flightsight

Used Google Maps, FlightAware and the USGS database of named places to provide Google Street View for flights.

Essentially, you could look up any flight in real time and get a map showing points-of-interest viewable (ideally) from the plane. I had everything working but then racked up about $200 in FlightAware API calls so I shut it down.

[joslin01]

For my first go project, I decided to emulate Perl's popular Params::Validate library: https://github.com/joslinm/validate

Honestly though, I got sick of go and sick of writing the library. I'm not much of a fanboy of anything, but ya generics. They woulda been nice. I operated on the blank interface type a lot, and it's honestly just annoying doing all those case statements checking what type it is when I coulda just wrote a polymorphic method for the types I support. I always read on here though that you gotta adapt to the go style.. so maybe there's some more elegant way to go about it than I was, but meh, not worth diving into for me personally.

Now I'm writing my first Scala library and I looove Scala! I'm taking this library very seriously and expect to have a Show HN within a month or two.

[kimh]

Ballen: Parallel cucubmer tests runner powered by Docker https://github.com/kimh/baleen

I had issues to run cucumber tests. There are many tests and they are slow. Some tests are randomly fail affected by the state of other tests. That's why I made baleen. It runs cucumber tests parallel and independently on Docker containers. Unfortunately, I couldn't use in real env because my tests are dependent on Oracle database and running oracle database in each container are slow which defeats the first goal of baleen. Here is also a post about how it works. http://kimh.github.io/blog/en/docker/running-docker-containe...

[peter_l_downs]

Summarizing / skimming tool: http://bookshrink.com. I wanted to write a browser extension that took advantage of the tech, never got around to it. Even a nice "enter any website URL and get the text of that page summarized" would be better than the current "paste things into this text box" approach. Considered building a speed-grading tool for teachers, too. All open source at https://github.com/peterldowns/bookshrink if you're interested in the code.

[boyter]

Very nice. I tried it against some of my blog posts and I really like the snippets it produced.

What licence is the code under? I would like to take some sections of it.

[DDR0]

Open Pixel Platformer: https://github.com/DDR0/open_pixel_platformer A sample game using a custom engine. However, the organizer, Hapiel iirc, got busy. I got busy and couldn't take over, but it had some nice support from the artists at Pixel Joint, and I'd be willing to continue implementation work on it. I don't feel I have the time at the moment to organize it, though. Currently, you can walk around, and ctrl-e gets you an editor.

Editabled, the editable pixel editor: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/138485812/editabled/full... (live demo) Broken on chrome, because they effed around with web workers. So I need to look at that. It's basically a JS-based rendering engine. If you look closely, you'll note the lines you draw aren't antiailiased, which lines drawn with the canvas2d API are. Fast compositing engine using typed arrays. Async rendering using Web Workers. Infinite canvas, you can scroll with the arrow keys and no matter how large it gets it never seems to slow down. ^_^ Potential, might have the time to pick it up again, but that was before I was properly employed. Very technical atm, but I might get back around to it in a bit. :/ That's about it here. There's also http://ddr0.github.io/cube%20trains/index.html, my attempt at an indie game, which is downloadable from Github. I am no marketer, so I only sold a handful of units. (ie, I can count sales on one hand) Also available on http://ddr.itch.io/cube-trains. There's more potential here, and I think it's pretty easy to extend. The game comes with an editor, so you can make and share your own maps. Sort of cute, really pushing my graphics abilities, and ended up with it's own pathing algorithm which I never did add the people for. It was scheduled for v2, but I was pretty tired of the project by then.

Eh, hardly an impressive folder compared to some of this stuff (nanopond), but oh well.

[DDR0]

Update: Both hands. This week in emails, some people bought it off of the itch.io site.

[jasonkester]

Here's a few days work attempting to clone Master of Orion in javascript:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/orion/orion.html

It's quite playable (though save/load don't work), and surprisingly hard to beat the AI. Sadly, it seems completely useless on a mobile device since it relies on the mousewheel for zooming. [Edit: mousewheels are things people used to scroll and zoom with back in 2009 before they realized they could just pinch the screen.]

Give it a big galaxy with lots of planets then let the various AIs fight each other at full speed.

[eccp]

I created a free mini-book (in Spanish) about development and packaging of desktop applications for Ubuntu, including examples in C, Python, C# (using Mono) and Java. It's outdated now, probably easy to update to cover some of the latest changes.

https://github.com/dfuenzalida/desarrollo-ubuntu/

Also, long ago I used to download files which were too large to be transfered to another PC over the network, some even didn't fit the USB thumb drives I had at hand; so I created this desktop app which splits large files into smaller volumes, which you can copy around easier and then use the same program to join the pieces and get the original file.

I was very happy to receive requests from other people who contributed with traslations to the UI messages.

It's written in Python (not very elegantly) and I haven't touched it in ages:

https://github.com/dfuenzalida/gtkfilesplitter

Finally, another small project: a plugin for the gEdit text editor which shows the git branch of the file being edited (if any). It should still work in the most recent GNOME desktops, but I do most of my editing in other text editors now.

https://github.com/dfuenzalida/gedit-git-branch-statusbar

[keerthiko]

SwarmCombat http://swarmcombat.herokuapp.com/ - coding strategy game inspired by swarm robotics AI. The concept hasn't been abandoned, but the existing version has been. Ideally it should allow you to face any existing bots, but right now it's designed for 1v1 matchups because one AI is really not suited to any situation.

Slice Station https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slicestati... - abandoned Android music exploration app when our provider fell through. Not going to lie, this is pretty outdated given the foundation was built in 2010 on Android 1.6. But the exploration concept is still very good and worth trying to revive.

PyKRP Engine https://github.com/keerthik/KRPEngine - A python game engine dependent on pygame targeted at rapid prototyping 2D game mechanics. Provides easy menus, game loop, screen setup, etc. Abandoned when I broke up with Python 3 years ago.

I have a couple of Unity game projects lying around on hard drives, someday I'll push them to github and share next time this Ask HN comes around...

[Navarr]

Google Voice OMS https://github.com/navarr/Google-Voice-OMS - Allows you to send Google Voice SMS through the old Outlook SMS interface.

Sockets https://github.com/navarr/Sockets - Wrapper around PHP socket classes to turn them OOP, and I don't mean like some crappy HelperClasses, I mean treating sockets as objects you read and write from.

TwCLI https://github.com/navarr/TwCLI - A browser-based twitter "command line interface." Abandoned long ago, written in PHP and fairly terrible. Not at all newish work.

Hanafuda https://github.com/navarr/Hanafuda - Hanafuda libraries in PHP for maintaining a game state for a variation of Hanafuda and Koi-Koi. Don't think I got very far

PHP-Shogi https://github.com/navarr/PHP-Shogi - Library for handling a game of Shogi in PHP (maintaining rules, enforcing game state)

[mrsteveman1]

https://github.com/infincia/TokenTools

A small bit of python built to use the (hopefully true/reliable/trustworthy) hardware RNG in most cryptographic tokens/smartcards, to feed the Linux kernel entropy pool (which /dev/random pulls from, etc). I built it to replace an older, (now completely unusable) C program for the same purpose called CardRand, which is mentioned and linked to in the project. TokenTools uses standard PKCS#11 libraries (even binary, proprietary ones) to handle talking to smartcards, so it should be broadly compatible and non-fragile, whereas CardRand wasn't.

TokenTools isn't strictly "abandoned", and it does work pretty well I've been using it for a long time but I haven't touched the code in a while and it could probably use some testing with different cards and PKCS#11 libraries.

https://github.com/infincia/NetRNG

A client/server python system that uses the (again, hopefully trustworthy) hardware RNG found on inexpensive ARM boards like the Raspberry PI and Beaglebone to provide entropy samples to other machines on a LAN, and again feed them into the Linux kernel entropy pool there. I've been using this one for a long time too. However there are 2 branches, one based on ZeroMQ which I use, and the other which directly uses sockets. The socket branch has some issues directly related to the socket communication, which is why I'm not using it myself but I'd like to go that route and drop ZeroMQ for a variety of reasons.

I have a bit of an obsession with RNGs :)

[krapp]

https://github.com/kennethrapp/phasher - a perceptual hashing class for PHP, abandoned because I suck at algorithms. It's also old and badly written. But it works and for some reason people fork it so have fun.

https://github.com/kennethrapp/journalist - general purpose livejournal client (PHP), created so I could write my own blog client for my website and crosspost, but I no longer really care about livejournal so meh.

https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug - page crawler and attempt at an open souce embed.ly-ish plugin (PHP) - it does work but every project i've started which uses it has been abandoned because I don't have the time.

I've currently got a PHP/Laravel clone of Hacker News which kind of sort of works but not well enough that I'd want to push it to github unless people really want to dig into that. I barely work on it anymore and there's no documentation all.

Also i'm working on some c++ and C# projects, including a todo list based on my final project this semester. I'll probably either post it in a week or two or just forget it ever happened.

And this (https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/0ef17d2145f2a6e38cca) was going to be a general purpose Hacker News userscript. I got as far as getting the callbacks to work before just giving up and using other people's already working scripts. Someone might find it useful.

[Buetol]

Wow, I have a lot of stuff like that!

http://github.com/MDamien/publicdb : Create datasets and have an (ugly) API. The goal was for everyone to create a database on almost anything (recipes, photos, party, budgeting). Later I discovered that it's what firebase/parse are doing. But I'm happy with my solution because you don't even have to use JSON to store you things and the interface is really simple.

http://kioto.io/ : Would be cool if any group could have an anonymous "suggestion box" ? Maybe! So I made this. But at the end I'm gonna do better a online discussion system based on ideas from reddit/discourse/disqus.

https://github.com/MDamien/GifMyLife : Just an app to take of photo of you at regular intervals and then it makes a timelapse GIF of that (good to see how your face and your mood evolves with time).

Really nice idea from OP, people are posting really interesting stuff

[cks]

An ECMAScript to C compiler. Sort of the inverse of Emscripten. The goal was to compile ECMAScript to LLVM IR but it's not quite there yet. It currently implements version 5.1 and nearly has full test262 coverage: https://github.com/kindahl/descripten

[robert_tweed]

This one could actually be very useful for selectively optimising JavaScript modules by transpiling to C, optimising it, then transpiling it back with Emscripten.

For that kind of work it doesn't need to be perfect. The output doesn't even need to compile first time. It's just a way to save time by starting with a scaffold and refactoring, rather than writing from scratch.

Not sure if I'll get around to forking it anytime soon, but I've bookmarked it for future reference, as I could see myself using it in the not-too-distant future.

[to3m]

https://github.com/tom-seddon/yhs - embeddable no-dependency single-threaded HTTP server (debug use only! not for production!) with WebSockets support and a simple API. Written in C. I wrote this for use in an iOS project I was working on, intending to provide a browser-driven system for twiddling parameters at runtime. In the end, though, everybody preferred doing their tweaking on the device itself using some Cocoa Touch nonsense I cobbled together in an afternoon. So I saved myself some JavaScript coding and abandoned the web idea.

There's a few obvious things that it doesn't support (e.g., chunked encoding...), that make it hard to recommend as a general purpose solution. But for serving files and debug data it's OK, and it does promise never to call your callback on another thread.

[cynik_]

https://github.com/kunalb/PressTest - Unit testing framework for wordpress wrapping phpunit. It mocks out functions (by parsing the existing php files + plugin files you might have and generating stubs) unless you explicitly require them and makes it actually possible to write tests. Alpha a couple of years ago, not sure if it still works.

https://github.com/kunalb/PressTest/blob/master/screenshot-3... https://github.com/kunalb/PressTest/blob/master/screenshot-2... etc.

[atrus]

https://github.com/worldsproject/tellme-cat

Mark news stories, and when people say another news story is a follow-up to the one you marked, notify you.

https://github.com/atrus6/python-music

Composing MIDIs using n-grams and python. The music created is VERY monotonous and boring.

https://github.com/worldsproject/android-jigsaw-puzzle-libra...

I swear I'm going to add on to this soon, but this library cuts given images into jigsaw puzzles, which you can then put together. Was eventually going to be a multiplayer game called "Puzzles with Friends"

[andrewchambers]

Originally abandoned https://github.com/andrewchambers/pycc which is a C compiler in python.

Swapped work to this:

https://github.com/andrewchambers/cc A C preprocessor and a C parser, both partially complete.

All in Go. Want to finish this, but sometimes go a week or two with no work.

Various mips emulators:

https://github.com/andrewchambers/cmips (boots linux, I intended to compile it with emscripten)

https://github.com/andrewchambers/luamips (Not as complete as cmips, i intended for it to boot inside gmod)

[matiasb]

I had this Facebook tunnel idea but I switched to Mac, and the original code was intended for Linux/tuntap: https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel

[andrewchambers]

It would probably have been faster to code if you didn't use C++ for this type of project. But I guess if that's what you are comfortable with.