I created a completely new branch of advertising, which basically superimposes advertisements directly over images in a way that actually benefits consumers: http://pleenq.com/.
Say you have a picture on a blog post showing a car engine, explaining how to fix something inside of it. You could highlight/link all the individual parts in that car to where your users can buy them on O'Reilly Auto Parts, and make a commission each time they make a purchase (affiliate marketing). I think this type of advertisement is 1) beneficial for users for its informative nature, 2) leads to bloggers being able to focus on content instead of worming offputting advertising into their blogs (such as banner ads), and 3) could lead to a more interactive internet where things in any image can be purchased or even just linked to for informative purposes[1].
Edit: I appreciate the support votes! Feel free to ask any questions you have. There's also a support forum at https://www.reddit.com/r/pleenq/ if you want to subscribe and follow the progress along as we grow.
The scenario I'm imagining is that I just want to click on the image to view a larger version, but when I click on it, instead of getting a larger version, I'm redirected through an affiliate link to buy a product. Not my desired outcome and seems like a frustrating scenario.
How does your platform account for this?
EDIT: When watching the video, I see that specific items are highlighted and not the whole image, but I still envision a lot of visitors who have no interest in determining where they should click on image in order to avoid affiliate links.
The interaction is dependent on the website's settings, but one of the available options (which is the default) is to show a popup that lets you know what you're navigating to, such as on http://girlpowder.net/ -- I'll be adding a store logo to this soon, so you know you're navigating to i.e. amazon.
Since some websites might want to make it only have the hover effect, I leave that up to the website to decide best for their users.
Edit: I see that you just might be referencing the main functionality of clicking on an image. If the user clicks on the image and doesn't click on a highlighted area, the functionality will default to whatever happens on that website when a user clicks on an image. A parent <a> tag, for instance, will bubble up to its href as normal.
This reminds me of VigLink and other players in the space that essentially sell link inventory to e-commerce companies. For example, you mention Microwave Model #3023 in a blog post, create a hyperlink, and then e-commerce companies selling Microwave Model #3023 bid on each new visit to point the destination URL to their product page.
Seems like your offering differs in that it caters to visual inventory and you can segment an image by its pixels to distinguish unique products, which is cool.
Blogs, a couple online forums, content sites (largest one we're testing on is worldlifestyle.com -- disabled currently) and a couple sites who are building their functionality based on PLEENQ (women's lookbooks, houzz-like functionality, etc.).
It's still impossible to search for a consumer good (say, a refrigerator, or a bicycle), and quickly see what brands are available in what stores in your town, and what they have in stock. Why are so many people in advertising trying to get people to buy stuff when they are just trying to read some article on the internet, while it is still hard to actually buy stuff when you want to and your wallet is wide open?
The vast majority of advertising is very active advertising that is designed to draw your eye to something. The difference between us and them is that this only does something when you interact with the image (hovering your mouse over it). If you don't do that...it's as if it doesn't exist on the page. The state of advertising I want to get to is one where it doesn't degrade the user experience and only enhances it.
While what you're talking about sounds logical, the implementation details of having a live inventory of stores that are local to you are so infeasible, as to be completely ruled out without a huge technology overhaul backing stores. Maybe in the future. But until then, we're here now.
Are you just going to use affiliate feeds or are you looking for advertisers. I am happy to test advertising for one of my clients (ecommerce home decor space).
Would love to test advertisers -- do they/you have a publisher available to test it on that makes sense? It could be a blog site that shows images about their products, or even their own home page linking to products within their catalog.
I'm always down to implement new ways to demonstrate the versatility of the product -- please email me when you get a chance (email in profile).
I actually have multiple interactions that I'm experimenting with, and the website owner chooses what interaction fits with their site design.
One of them is where the mobile user taps on the image, and all of the object highlights pop up one at a time. Tapping on a non-highlighted region hides the highlights.
We provide a drone to the (primarily aggregates/mining) industry that can create highly detailed survey quality maps. Our customers can use the data in measuring the volume of their material (stockpiles) and in planning a big project, construction, etc. Basically anything you can imagine someone would need information about a physical location from above.
We develop the full stack in house. In that I mean electronics (PCB board level), drone hardware (mechanical), low-level embedded software, and flight controller software. We also develop an iPad app that allows customers to easily operate the drone autonomously.
We also do all the data processing, using photogrammetry and open source mapping frameworks and tools (gdal) and provide users with a web interface via our Cloud platform for them to view, manipulate and download their data.
Surveying with drone fleets is going to be huge across many industries. Agriculture and animal husbandry, surveying hard-to-reach things like bridge structures, inside large engines and mechanical systems. Very neat
Hey that's pretty awesome have you thought about applications of this tech in agriculture? Perhaps keeping an eye out on crops and trying to predict yields or crop health?
My first thought was futures trading. I've heard of people using their own private satellites to do something similar. There was a company in SF building and launching small, shoebox-sized satellites inexpensively which could be used for it.
Yep, if you are able to gather data over near-infrared (NIR) as well as red channels, you can compute NDVI which is a kind of vegetation index. It's interesting stuff and I would look into using the tech for agriculture surveys, constant monitoring and automatic advisory compilation (where to water things etc.)
Holy crap this is so cool. So cool! I'm a JR full stack dev, mainly proficient in JS technologies, and I have a cheap drone with a wifi camera. What would you recommend that I study to start getting involved with autonomous drone programming for fun?
There are many open source flight controllers. My best advice would be to research and decide on one, then build a small fixed wing, helicopter, or multirotor. You'll learn a lot in the process of building vs. just buying something and while a longer project, it's certainly within the realm of hobbyist and there are huge communities to support you.
Most of open source flight controllers support MavLink, a communications protocol that you can use to send path commands and receive telemetry info over a WiFi link. There are wrappers for many languages, including node.
It's good to have a project in mind of what you want it to actually do in the end before you start that will help guide you through the process.
Basically, a very much work-in-progress pile of code to plan orbital trajectories and interplanetary travel. Its also quite handy when doing simple computations:
>>> # distance to the Sun, in light-seconds
>>> Earth.orbit.semi_major_axis / c
499.00650691887006
>>> # Martian year, in (usual Earth) days
>>> Mars.orbit.period / Earth.solar_day
686.9944644093075
>>> # ping to New Horizons (light roundtrip), in hours
>>> (Pluto.orbit.periapsis - Earth.orbit.apoapsis) / c / 3600 * 2
7.9167895224639375
The graphical interface does work though! (kinda) It's initially inspired from Kerbal Space Program, so it defaults to showing Kerbin and its universe. However, you can choose Earth instead. I like to just zoom in and out, and explore the Solar system; the vastness of that is so mindblowing!
Awesome! Pretty easy to get it up and running, not counting OpenGL. What would be really cool to see is an example of how you could use this to interactively calculate, say, the path of some of the satellites we've launched into the outer solar system that needed complicated orbital trajectories.
I know how much of a hassle it can be to handle even simple dependencies when you use a different system and workflow, so I tried to make it as seamless as possible.
There still is a lot of work to do. For now, I only implement patched conics (i.e. I only consider one planet/moon at once and ignore the influence of other celestial bodies on the trajectory), and it is not really easy yet.
Handling n-body physics would not be that hard, but I prefer to focus on having a simple model (patched conics) work well first.
Don't hesitate to contact me at either yoha@sinon.org or at the mail address on my Github profile, if someone have an issue installing. It should work on both Linux and Windows but I have not yet any nice packaging, so it might require some tweaking around (i.e. installing PyOpenGL on Windows manually).
Very cool! We're in the processing of building up an open-source stack for the space industry. Engaged with a few partners already. Would you be interested in having a chat?
Unlike 98% of the industry, we sell CPAP equipment for cash prices. This means that you, not the insurance company, are the respected and valued customer.
The "cash CPAP" space means:
1. A market incentive to build people first instead of billing code first products.
2. A market comfort items that would never be produced in a billing code world.
3. A system where it pays to pick up the phone and know all about the product you are selling, which is different from the model where I ship it, bill it and don't get paid to support it.
4. $189 CPAPs (way cheaper than your copay and deductible through insurance) and $1000 machines (way better than what an insurance provider could give you profitably). The best of both worlds, whatever you need it available.
Insurance is great for heart surgery and awful for OTC and sub $1000 medical products. We don't think that change is understood in our healthcare debate and we've built a sustainable market that is the change we want to see.
When we're done, people with Sleep Apnea will have access to buy CPAP stuff like they buy Amazon stuff and they won't think twice about it. It'll "just" work and be nothing special. That may not be as sexy as building a drone or going to Mars, but fixing a chunk of healthcare is difficult and worth it. If we can do it, and we will do it, we'll have a huge and lasting impact.
I have a suggestion that you replace the box+ basketball image with box + a product you sell, so that dumb people like me who look first then read later don't think it is a sports site. :-)
Just did a quick price comparison of provents and masks compared to my local supplier here in Australia, and even with the high shipping cost the prices are comparable.
While I would still get the machine itself from the local supplier for the ongoing support and biannual assessment, this looks like it could be pretty good for the consumables. Good work!
medical device insurance billing is crazy. Appears slanted toward covering unnecessary, overpriced equipment. Cannot get a $100 device covered, even though it may be the ideal treatment, so may as well buy this $1000 device that is covered, even though you don't need it.
I rewrote https://www.w3counter.com from scratch over the past month, and just put it online two days ago.
W3Counter was a 12-year-old website offering web stats reports and hit counters with 30-something-thousand users. I ditched all the old code, and the data model, and the business model, and started from scratch. New framework, new way of storing and analyzing stats that scales better and provides more value, and snazzy new design (I hope; design was never my strong suit).
The most awesome part for me was throwing out all the old code. Not having to continue developing in and supporting a framework that barely runs in a modern environment. It's going over well so far. The transition was pretty seamless.
Very cool man. I don't want to hijack this and just say that back in the day I used w3counter on my blog before google analytics was a thing and it was awesome and I just want to say thanks for that. Now I have nothing on my blog and work uses google analytics, but it's very cool to see w3counter still in use!
Old: Free web stats for one low-traffic website per user, in exchange for displaying a counter or badge on their site. Back when hit counters were more common, that wasn't a big ask, and seeing one was the way other people with websites found out about W3Counter. I included ads on the reports, and offered a paid subscription that would let you add multiple websites to the account and not display a counter on your site. All reports were based on a circular log of about 20000 page views per website.
New: Web stats reports for as many websites as you have for free, with no requirement to display a counter/badge, and no ads on the reports. It's no longer an ad-supported service, just freemium. Users can now upgrade individual websites in their account to paid plans while others remain free, like Cloudflare (I really like how their subscription model works). The per-website upgrade unlocks extended data retention so you can run reports further into the past (no more tiny logs), real-time dashboards, daily/weekly/monthly e-mail summaries of your stats, and conversion tracking features for businesses that sell things and want to track their advertising/promotions.
Was it worth it? From a business standpoint, I don't know if I'll make any more or less money this way. I take big risks that way sometimes. Time will tell. From a personal standpoint, I'll be much happier any time I need to dive into the code to add or change something. Old code needs to die eventually one way or another, just because you can't rely on old language/environment packages forever, lest they pass their EOL and stop getting security updates.
Old: Just PHP (Symfony 1.x from 2006ish) and MySQL.
New: Node.js for data collection, Redis for data caching, Amazon Aurora for data storage, Cloudflare/ELB/EC2 for frontend serving, and the web app rebuilt in modern PHP (with Silex).
No. It wouldn't be very practical, nor very useful. The overlap between people who could self-host it (node.js data collectors, Redis caches, EC2 and Aurora instances, background workers, etc) and whose analytics requirements aren't more advanced than what it offers, is probably nonexistent. There's already a bunch of good self-hosted options out there.
Well, fwiw there is no well-designed and useful self-hosted analytics solution out there at the moment. Piwik is useful but not exactly a pinnacle of good design. Pretty, but inconvenient. Mint is well-designed, but functionally it's next to useless for anything outside of basic vanity metrics (I used it extensively, have three licenses). So there is a niche. Though I hear you on not wanting to deal with related support issues.
I recently finished a graphic novel about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend and am procrastinating on the Kickstarter for the printed version. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
"Seriously folks, if you haven't looked at "Decrypting Rita" yet you really ought to. Innovative, fresh, interesting, and it does my head in." - Charlie Stross (Accelerando)
"Deliriously confusing and addictive... It’s kind of wonderful." - Peter Watts (Blindsight)
I'm also getting started on two new graphic novels; one is a fantasy story about smart people making very bad relationship decisions, and the other is about a girl slowly turning into a monster while elves invade New Orleans.
We made it free and fast to get browser-trusted certs and have already issued over 1,000,000 certs for over 2,500,000 domains, most of which have never had browser-trusted HTTPS before. Now many major hosting providers and platforms are in the process of making an HTTPS cert automatic and standard for every hosted site.
Let's encrypt is awesome. Thanks for making this awesome utility. I still have little idea how the ACME negotiation work, but its a pretty cool utility.
Bicycl is a calendar for your life's work. Record what you learn and accomplish each day (or week, month, etc). Organize these micronotes into stories of progress over time. See lots of cool data come to life.
Screenshots coming. I'm testing things out right now in beta, but if you want to give it a twirl, I can send out a few invitations to first comers.
A couple notes:
As someone who's struggled with depression, I built this because I found at the end of a day, my mind was putting very little stock in what I had actually accomplished. Fixating on futures constantly would degrade my self-confidence. It's harder to ignore your progress when it's all right there in front of you.
I still journal by hand and use Evernote daily. But found I also wanted somewhere to put my "nuggets", epiphanies, things I learn, etc.
As someone who's struggling to not fall into depression, I think this will do wonders for me. I've come to believe that the trigger-activity-rewards cycle[1] is the best for productivity and improving my focus.
Create a file, where each day you enter a list of positive things that occurred or that you did that day. Can be really anything like "got out of bed again :)", "didn't argue with my brother", "cleaned the dishes", "made a plan to get better".
I did it for about half a year, it does wonders for your self-efficacy.
I'm curious when you say "publish to the web", do you have a specific output/platform in mind?
One key difference with Bicycl from those other tools is that it's based on micronotes (think tweeting vs blogging). This is intentional. I use Evernote to go into detail about my work. But that makes serendipitous discovery more difficult, when the jewel of your content is buried...
Also, this allows you to focus on just what's important. As any good procrastinator know how easy it is to sidetrack yourself in details. Of course, sometimes that's wonderful and creative. But there are lots of tools out there already for that.
By "publishing to the web" I mean an easy and automated way to show the world what you have accomplished, so for instance if you are getting hired, one can look at your page and have a feeling of your work process, what you care about, what you have accomplished, what kind of experiments have you done...
I agree that micro notes are the way to start this, but give the users ways to be able to extend these notes in oder to be able to further document their work or whatever they have accomplished.
Realtime telemetry for race and street cars. Open source firmware, hardware and mobile app. https://github.com/autosportlabs . Our tech is used by many people, from car enthusiasts, to professional race teams to even race boats that go nearly 200mph.
I focus mainly on the website and telemetry infrastructure. It's awesome because we work with people who are passionate about racing, we truly do mean 'realtime' when we say it and we get to race and go to track days :)
Most of the incumbents are using 1990s tech and have 0 web presence. The next available realtime telemetry systems cost > $30k, and ours is $600.
We have some big plans for the future, if you're interested in racing check us out!
It can, as long as it has power. By default RaceCapture/Pro and RaceCapture have built-in GPS (location, speed, altitude) and a 6 axis accelerometer (x/y/z accel, roll/pitch/yaw). So all you'd need is power to get that data.
RaceCapture/Pro has 7 analog inputs, timer inputs, digital I/O and PWM inputs. Also it has 2 CANbus connections and a serial connection. So if you want to hook up more stuff directly you can. RaceCapture/Pro can be a little big depending on the motorcycle.
It's a wave-powered, autonomous sensor platform built for longevity at sea. We do things like monitor salinity in the arctic, circle oil platforms looking for leaks, track tagged mammals on migration, and do coordinated fleet maneuvers for ocean floor mapping and exploration.
Those are pretty cool. I suggested an idea to James Gosling that about 25,000 of them could be used to greatly remediate the Pacific Gyre[1] of its plastic. Sure the initial cost would be high but they would work autonomously day in and day out gathering and compacting plastic and dropping it off at a central collection unit where it could be decomposed into carbon with a solar powered incinerator.
The initial cost of 25K gliders would be 7.5 Billion dollars, and unfortunately, most of the plastic in the gyre isn't of a size you could pick up with anything more porous than a coffee filter. 25K gliders pulling nets would be amusing, but that's a lot of money for a partial solution!
Expensive yes, although I have it on good authority that I could get a discount on that quantity :-) Also in discussing this briefly with some folks the entrapment systems would be more complex than nets or coffee filters. But lets say your investment was, all in $10B over 10 years and you remediated 60 - 70% of the problem. Would that be, in your opinion, a waste of money? Understand the alternative is to live with existing fish stocks absorbing material as they feed in the area and to have the problem get worse. Seems like, if nothing else, it would make for a good NSF grant to understand the question better.
It definitely merits study, but I imagine the best ideas are going to be in plastic-digesting microbes, and measures to reduce the amount of new plastic that gets into the system. I'm afraid we're going to have a layer of microscopic plastic sediment on our crust, just as we have a layer of radioactive soil from atomic testing in the 50s and 60s. It will be one of the geological landmarks of our era.
Wow, your ASW platform is great. I'm assuming it's passive sonar? People definitely do not appreciate the fact that a single boomer sub could effectively end a country on 30 minutes notice.
We're researching a number of different ideas in that space, with a couple of different high profile customers, so I can't say much in public at the moment!
It started as HN's "Who is hiring" thread but on the map and with better search. Mainly to solve the mess with suff like: SOMA, SF, valley, San Francisco, there is way too many ways to describe this one location ;) Also there not much of a difference when you are looking from Europe if it's Palo Alto or San Francisco.
Although right now it is more than that, I've wrote parsers for 8 major IT related job websites, and more in progress.
At some point I was extremely annoyed by the fact that I have to visit many sites to see all interesting job offers.
"SOMA, SF, valley, San Francisco, there is way too many ways to describe this one location ;) Also there not much of a difference when you are looking from Europe if it's Palo Alto or San Francisco."
I would venture that the lifestyle is far different from one or the other, and that "valley" is distinct from the other three terms you list. Similarly if I'm looking at Dublin or Kildare there's a pretty substantial difference.
However, your site is AWESOME and I use it often. Thanks for making it!
Melbourne, Florida shows 299 jobs, beating out Seattle's 214 jobs. Probably caused by a bug that's confusing Melbourne, Australia with Melbourne, Florida.
I'm working on an incentivized mesh network. Basically, routers pay each other to forward packets. A routing protocol takes price into consideration and tries to get packets over the cheapest routes. Intermediary routers pay each other over payment channels. End users pay backbone connections with multihop (lightning) payments over the payment channels of the intermediary nodes.
End result is that last-mile ISP's are replaced by individuals with network equipment on their roofs, "mining" the airwaves.
I'm not sure banking can get away from the traditional. I like the idea of a blockchain (or some version of it) being implemented to assist in interbank communication.
Banks will probably only jump on BTC way down the line, if they ever do.
I got tired of googling "Dr Who episodes" whenever I wanted to know if the next half-season was starting soon, or to see whether any more episodes remained before a hiatus.
So I built a thing which monitors the data from Wikipedia episode list pages, normalizes it, and lets you easily view what's airing recently / soon. Also sends an (optional) email each week listing the upcoming week's schedule of my shows, plus a list of new / resuming shows.
Generally the only thing I need to do manually is to add primary network feeds. The show and episode feeds are scraped from there, with noise filtered out.
One of the coolest things is that it almost entirely heals itself -- canonical URLs and redirects are used to ensure consistent feed resolution, deprecated feeds are auto-removed after X time so long as it's a clear deprecation scenario, renamed shows are auto-updated, and an admin dashboard shows me stats about expected categories and outliers, so that I can easily investigate logic gaps from time to time.
There is followshows.com, I've been using it for over a year now and it has quite some features including an Android app. Do you wanna pitch your site vs them?
Yeah, we solve slightly different problems -- they focus on feature breadth and syndication coverage, I prefer data breadth (lots more anime in particular) and original airings only.
Personally I'm not really a fan of watching TV on my computer, or of trying to track online what episodes I've seen (ends up being more anal-retentively stressful than helpful)... so those features end up being just noise overhead for my tastes.
Ah, thanks. I need tracking what I watched because I watch way too many shows (and barely any anime). And I have to watch stuff on my computer as I'm not in the country those shows are aired.
> They've got a really pretty site for sure. :-)
Well… I'd prefer your design with their features :D
Let me know if you have any feedback! Issues/PRs welcome.
Note that Android is still a bit finnicky about connecting MIDI devices (using USB-OTG); After accepting the permission request, you might have to go through some permutation of refreshing the page and unplugging/replugging the cable to get it to work.
Better layout for larger displays is something I want to work on, but you're right - it's an afterthought for my personal use case. Until then, scaling the page via your web browser does a pretty decent job.
PuPHPet: A web-based GUI that allows developers to quickly and easily create a highly customized virtual machine for local development as well as deployment to any SSH-enabled host in the world.
Instead of having to learn the ins and outs of virtualization, Vagrant and Puppet, you simply fill in some form fields, click a few buttons and download a zip archive containing your choices. A simple `vagrant up` and a few minutes later you have your virtual machine up and running, either on your local machine or on a remote host.
Helps eliminate the tired "it works on my machine" excuse by allowing a team to share exact replicas of a VM. Any changes made on one VM can easily be shared with others because it's all driven through a single, simple YAML file. Just check it into your repo and push, and everyone else can then replicate your changes themselves.
I work on the 1km short range and on the 2km medium range probabilistic weather model at MeteoSwiss that is scheduled to go operational this month.
It is awesome because MeteoSwiss is the first national forecaster that is going GPU for their full forecast.
See: http://www.cscs.ch/publications/press_releases/2015/meteoswi...
My line of work mainly consists of porting Fortran code of the Dynamical part of the model to our C++ DSL (STELLA) and maintaining said port.
Before that I developed the Apple Homekit protocol for the OberonHAP devkit (http://oberonhap.com/ ). This is THE HomeKit Bluetooth implementation if you want to use really small and low-cost solutions.
GreatSchools has a monopoly in this space but their 1-10 ratings scale is opaque and their website hard to navigate. EdScore has a more granular 50-100 rating scale, modern search, better mapping, and soon will feature search filters by distance and home price so parents can evaluate, say, top schools within a 1hr commute of SF with a median home price under $1m.
I think it's a good idea. One thing I worked on in the past was being able to link school scores for my residential real estate startup. However, there's always been the question of "How credible are these scores" - are you guys doing the rating yourselves?
Yes these are proprietary ratings. This is typically the first question we get: how credible/accurate are these scores. Since this is HN I can dive into this a bit more than with a typical parent:
-There are fundamentally two data sets in play here, a national one, NCES, that provides basic school information: name, # of students, demographics, etc. And a State data set.
- Each state administers their own state assessment tests for most, not all, grades. So for example, Massachusetts does tests for grades 3-8 and grade 10. Other states do a different mix. To assign a "score" to an Elementary, Middle, or High School you combine the grades, but there is judgement around, for example, what constitutes a middle school? Grade 6? Grade 8? It varies by school district, let alone state.
-The subjects covered are typically Math and English. Some sites, especially for high school, also test Science or additional subjects. In our case, we include ALL available tests in the score calculation. GreatSchools provides no insight into whether they do this or not. SchoolDigger used to just use Math/English but recently added all tests to their rankings.
-The "results" for, say, Grade 3 English are typically broken out by Advanced, Proficient, Not Proficient, Failing. But this, too, varies by state, some include 5 buckets.
- Special needs students. This could be a really active community for you.
- Arts/Music/Theater programs and participation rates.
- Innovative educational programs. One of the HS I attended had an on-campus fish hatchery that was almost entirely student run, it also had a professional choral program--as in, students in the "varsity chorus" got paid professional rates for a summer show series. Another that I attended had a pretty unique combined history/literature and later math/science program. I could imagine parents being interested in finding those kinds of things.
- University affiliation. Many colleges/universities are affiliated with K-12 schools where they are involved in applying the latest in educational practices.
- Early college programs. My wife managed to get her first 3 semesters of her Mech-E degree paid for through an innovative relationship between her HS and the local Community College. The local CC also has a great direct-to-university relationship (all credits transfer) with two local Universities. Allowed her to graduate undergrad a year early and with half the student loans she otherwise would have.
- Proximity to cultural institutions. Friends Select in Philadelphia is located on the Ben Franklin Parkway... walking distance to the Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, Phila Art Museum, Barnes Foundation, Rodin Museum... It's almost embarrassing.
Standardized test scores are important, but they aren't necessarily the only thing parents are looking for.
I completely agree that standardized test scores aren't the only thing parents are looking for. The main issue is: What other data set is there that exists state/nationally given we're working with 100,000+ schools?
-Special needs: Hadn't considered this, but the data is there to break out numbers and performance of special needs students. Are there other factors we should consider?
- Arts/Music/Sports etc: Yes, would LOVE to include data on this. I'm not aware of a dataset that contains it. Manually it'd be tough to do for 100,000+ schools.
- Innovative/college programs: Yup, great idea. As we expand the site we want to find ways to highlight features like this. A simple example we can do now is Language Immersion programs. But we want to extend it in the future.
- Another "problem" with the education data in general is that there's no way to compare schools across states. Common Core might have addressed this but currently you can only say, This is a top high school in Massachusetts. What if I live across the border in New Hampshire? How do 2 schools compare?
The two main issues when we've thought of this are:
1) how do you ensure the data is accurate/up-to-date?
2) the graveyard issue where you don't want to show what's NOT on your site. As an example (and I know I'm probably picking on them unfairly) check out GreatSchool's crowd-sourced photos here: http://www.greatschools.org/search/search.page?q=boston%20ma)
Run contests for schools/clubs to incentivize people. Try scraping their websites to come up with guesses. Maybe go state by state initially, merge the data as it grows.
I think you're right that contests are the way to get reviews, at least, from parents/students. Niche is taking this approach actually, largely through FB I believe. It provides some interesting data. There is the same issue of timing--how relevant is a review from years and years ago--but it's interesting data.
Scraping sites is probably more of the way to go or just using Wikipedia as Google does, for example, in their school info boxes.
It's definitely something that, longer term, would be good to seriously look into.
You could possibly also try to partner with organizations that are focused on different special interest areas to get them to help coordinate getting the data.
Yes, I think for special needs students or subsets of that, this would be a good way to add supplemental data. For example, a parent wants to do a search of public schools with resources for autistic children near Boston. That's a good use case and there probably is an organization with that data.
Honestly, you might even be able to get some grant money or financial support if you commit to helping them include whatever data they have in a user-friendly manner.
It might not be the full-scope of what you are trying to do, but it might be a way to help bootstrap part of your development.
Awesome. It'd be a huge value if you can really help parents understand the scores and how to interpret them instead of giving a flat result with no explanation.
Thanks for this feedback. We will add info on this. Perhaps a high-level overview and then a detailed one for parents that are interested in delving deeper.
When a user clicks on a map indicator, the school name (at minimum) should be a link to open the full description
It would be nice to have either a search next to the filter (so searching only within the city) or have the main site search maintain location. I expect a very significant % of your users will be looking at a single location, or at least one at a time.
It is a bit weird to start with a zoomed out view of a city and only have a few schools marked. Perhaps having lots of small indicators?
Might be interesting to hook in say sity or zip code demographic info from the census bureau
'Average household income' and other stats like it... I see a place for them on the site, but probably don't need to dedicate the screen real estate to them.
* Yup, about to add a bigger hit radius on map indicator
* City zoom...we're working on some ways to improve this.
* Interesting about city demographic data...certainly have it. I can see how it would help. We display it on the school page a bit, but can do so here as well.
The Illinois Report Card is a great resource. If every state had such a tool, I agree you probably wouldn't need EdScore, GreatSchools, SchoolDigger, etc.
I built EdScore out of frustration that this data is all public but buried in disparate state/federal databases and not accessible to parents, even though we're paying for it to be compiled/collected.
I think ratings (controversial as they are no matter what methodology you use) help parents do a quick sort of local options. And our goal with EdScore is to add search filters like commute distance, home price, school size, special ed offerings etc so that parents can search for the "right" school for their individual child based on various inputs, not a simple "best" rating or 1-10 scale that, absent other factors, is not very informative.
Automatically detects breaking news through social media (Twitter). Breaking news, before it breaks.
We're often able to beat the mainstream media by several minutes (sometimes hours), and we're particularity good at natural disasters, bombings, explosions, shootings and celebrity deaths. There's no human in the loop, no key word lists, just real-time algorithms figuring out what was unexpected.
Unfortunately no, we have a sample at the moment. The majority of the time, if we're slow to pick something up, it's because the first tweets weren't in our sample.
There's a bunch of clever tricks going on, so even if we miss something we can still get the majority of content once we've picked up that something is happening, and of course, we'll use the search API to go back and get any content we missed.
These turtles use a raspberry pi + webcam to turn to a face, recognize "flash cards" via QR cods, and chase a ball. All parts are open source, so if you have a 3D printer, you can pretty much build one yourself. (The pcb you would need to order from dirtypcbs, though I have a few spare if needed).
Yup, well aware, I had originally started this idea before Dan Shapiro came out with his excellent game. I haven't however bothered to change the name of the project yet... If you have a good alternative name do let me know ;)
Speech recognition and search API: https://app.loverino.com/ Highest quality engine out there.
Personalized radio: https://loverino.com/beta/ everyone should have their own radio channel that they listen to.
I've been wanting to make something like this for a while. Really nice product you have!
I think this kind of service will really take off in the future. Imagine having an app that constantly records everything and allows you to search it later. Questions like "What did James tell me last November about traveling to Europe?". It would also eliminate hearsay, since you would no longer have to trust one person's word against another — you could simply search the transcript of that moment in the past. In the very long run, I almost wonder if such a tool would make lying obsolete.
Yes however there are laws in some states such as California that disallow the recording of conversations without consent. I like the idea though, I once thought what we might discover if we just put a mic in every coffeeshop.
ClickRouter - because it allows me to use all my affiliate accounts (CJ, Skimlinks, Viglinks, shareasale, etc) at once. This has nearly doubled my affiliate revenue.
At first it was an internal tool I ran for a long time, but been working to make it a service.
Looks interesting. I'm curious why you built this. Prosper202 is the canonical approach used by most affiliates. It's got both self-hosted and hosted options.
From your landing page, I can't tell what missing features led you to roll your own.
Maybe I don't get Prosper202 but it seems quite different.
ClickRouter makes a realtime decision where to send your clicks based on your affiliate accounts.
Say you have a forums with thousands of posts which have thousands of links. "Affiliatizing" them all would be a huge and nearly insurmountable task.
With ClickRouter, you install a piece of javascript in your footer. Every click is intercepted and sent to the best Affiliate account you have. It also tells you what affiliate accounts you SHOULD create because you're losing revenue.
The issue for me was just that, trying to affiliatize thousands of links that users put on my site. Now it's done automatically and if I signup with a new affiliate network, it knows automatically those affiliates are available.
It's a map of sport clubs (gyms, karate dojos, swimming pools, etc) in Slovenia.
Why I made it?
After moving back to Slovenia I started looking for a traditional Karate dojo. My choice would be constrained by hour of training and dojo philosophy (traditional karate vs sports karate). It turned out to be really difficult to find all the dojos nearby, as they neither on Google Maps, and many have very poor website (and terrible SEO). I spend two days Googling for all the possible hits, and I had created a list of Karate dojos. After selecting one (which turned out to be great), I thought that other people would be able to benefit from the list. So I made this website, where all the karate dojos were plotted on a map. Later, I started adding more categories.
Why it's awesome?
It's a time saver, and I am trying to convert it to a community maintained website. And it's all open source. To exist it requires zero maintenance, and hosting costs 0.30 EUR per month.
Going forward
1) I want to expand it to more categories
2) I am looking for partnerships with sport organizations who would like to place a Zatresi map on their website for their visitors to more easily find related klubs (e.g. a the karate organization could show the map of all karate klubs in Slovenia)
3) Even more brand awareness - this requires more time investment, so it's tricky. I am trying to identify clusters where I could have the most impact (sport forums, etc)
You're using Mapbox map tiles with an API key of another company (that's costing them money). You're also not showing the Mapbox and Openstreetmap copyright which you are required to do. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
That's about 4USD per year, which is about the cheapest you can get a VPS with its own IPv4 address: http://lowendstock.com/
You can even get cheaper than that. Although LowEndSpirit does not offer a dedicated IPv4 address, they use haproxy to send requests to the correct VPS based on the host header.
I use the free Heroku plan for the backend. Given I am limiting myself to just 1 country, the sleeping rules don't bother me, and the 14k row limit is good enough for now.
So the cost comes from serving the JS and CSS files from S3. And that's 0.30 per month
A boat & fleet tracking solution, tailored fit for chartering companies.
What is it?
The device, once installed on a boat, starts tracking the GPS position (high frequency measurements) as well as all the sensors which are connected to it (bilge, battery voltage, motion sensors, etc. All this data is presented to the charter owner on web and mobile dashboards. Additionally, the service sends push notification if anything unusual occurs (like the battery voltage being too low). It also offers virtual anchoring and locking functions, which add an additional layer of safety to boats.
Why is it cool?
It improves safely on board. You are instantly notified of anything bad happen, like the battery depleting rapidly. Who wants to get stuck in an island without replacement battery?
It helps resolve conflicts between charters and guests in the case of an accident. If a guests damages the boat (for example by cruising in shallow waters), the charter can quickly find this out by glancing on where the boat was travelling.
It produces beautiful data (trip history maps which can be shared by the charter/guest on social networks) and enables services previously impossible to imagine.
As a boat owner, it helps you keep a peaceful mind while you are away. You are notified of the bilge operation, so you know it was working correctly during a heavy storm.
We are soon releasing a B2C boat monitoring solution - stay tuned (bookmark the website)
Reddit.tv was an app to watch videos posted to reddit but shut down back in January. Haven't been able to find a replacement that I liked, so I built my own. Made the videos full-screen by default and added extra stuff like support for Soundcloud embeds (so you could listen to music subreddits), a directory of video-posting subreddits, multireddits, keyboard shortcuts.
Neat, now I can browse /r/listentothis and discover new music easily! Thanks for sharing this, I'll be using it today. :)
UX idea: I'd make the subreddit list alphanumerical. I had to look through it a few times to find the subreddit I wanted.
Another UX idea: If a video/soundcloud fails to load, is it possible to detect that the tab isn't playing audio (say after 10-15 seconds) and skip to the next item in the list?
The subreddit list definitely needs some attention. The aim was to bucket them into categories, so I either need to flesh that out or sort them.
Skipping media that doesn't load is doable. Some content won't play or advance automatically because a lack of an api to control the api (gifs, Liveleak, Basecamp, iTunes, spotify) but I didn't automatically filter them out because a lot of it is good content. Probably a good option to add to a settings page.
Yea, my goal was to make something closer to the original reddit.tv ui. Also, in addition to youtube and vimeo, rddt.tv supports playback for content from soundcloud, instagram, vine, vidme, sendvid, streamable, dailymotion and a few others.
That seems to be the general case, a lot of people never knew about it. I used it just as much as the homepage and it was a great way to just sit back and absorb content.
Election Runner - https://electionrunner.com
The idea came to me after my wife (a High School teacher) told me about how her students complained that the school's election software (Voting4Schools) was hard to use. After doing more research I found that every single competitor in this space sucked (ElectionBuddy, VoteNet), so I decided to build Election Runner. It started as a fun side project, but has taken off A LOT faster than I anticipated. Next step is to hire someone to handle sales to K12 Schools and Universities, but I'm not sure how to start that process.
Edtech startups are #7 on the list of "requests for startups" YC published a few months ago [1]. From what I hear it's a good space to be in right now.
Very cool! I had no clue. I had been wanting to launch a SaaS company for the last few years and realized that it's easier to get people (school administrators) to spend other people's money (district, university, tax payers, etc), than to spend their own money.
Personally: http://pentacular.com - Draw/paint a song. I think it's fun to play with.
Professionally: https://tailorbrands.com - Algorithmically designed logos and branding assets. It's great for side projects, inspiration, or any other situation where you want something quick and usable.
I'm working on BankBotsBank (https://github.com/bankbotsbank/bankbotsbank), an open effort to develop a collection of open-source bots that provide API access to accounts on any bank.
I developed the first bot, which can be used as a sample, with JavaScript (ES6, and ES7's async/await) and Nightmare (based on Electron, so on Chromium).
It's awesome because free API access to this data for any bank in the world may enable new and interesting fintech apps (actually, for me this project is a stepping stone towards another project that I plan to build on top of it), and I think that the open-source approach is the most effective way to achieve that (i.e. free and comprehensive API access to accounts data on any bank of the world).
I've actually been thinking about such an effort because I was sick of Mint being more geared at selling me loans than giving me the tools that others and I have requested, and none of the other services that automatically pull in bank data are much better.
Have you thought of making some sort of framework that can handle security and aggregate the data, and have developers plug in the bank specific bots?
My idea is to keep it simple: just a collection of bots that accept any required credentials and return accounts data in a common JSON format. Storing credentials and aggregated data is not in the scope of this project. If that's needed (not all applications may need it), it has to be handled by the client app.
I'm currently experimenting with classifiers to make semi-automated expenses classification. My bank don't offer API access (of course. Because they still live in the dark ages), but they do have an "usable" CSV export. What would be really awesome is a raspberry pi running a bot once a day to grab a fresh CSV, then parse, classify, aggregate and historize it.
The funny thing is, they do have mobile/tablet applications and other "new" stuff, but they just completely sucks.
I'm working on a new paradigm for creating generative content for 3D displays (at the moment with LEDs). I'm also working on real-time, single-angle virtual reconstruction and registration of 3D LED structures using computer vision techniques.
I saw that Symmetry Labs did the Generate music video! I honestly thought that was CGI! Do you have any tips of getting started with the type of LED display work you do, with regards to the control software?
They both provide good starting points to working with LEDs arranged in arbitrary 2D and 3D configurations.
You can also check out the code for 2 different LED art projects I've worked on, both built on top of LX.
Tabula - https://github.com/squaredproject/Tabula
LED fins on the side of a building in Palo Alto, visualizing earthquake data. Construction starts later this year
It's basically an iPad sequencer with the UI of a drawing app. You're given a canvas that can be panned and zoomed like any scroll view, with a grid indicating time on the horizontal axis and pitch on the vertical axis. You draw notes with your finger, and although you can snap to the grid like in most sequencers, you can also choose to start your notes at any point and bend them to any pitch. This makes it simple to experiment with things like guitar solos and complex rhythms. Usability was my primary goal through and through: I wanted almost anyone to be able to pick up my app and start making music in an instant. In a way, I see it as a kind of modern take on sheet music!
Nice, will have to check it out soon! Always on the lookout for similar projects; also recently discovered Stephen Stephen Malinowski's Music Animation Machine[1] and the Piano Roll toy[2] from Google's Music Lab. (Though I don't think either one actually lets you create music.)
I also have a dream of building a youtube competitor, video hosting platform with a better design, functionality, and discovery system. MVP is almost ready but not online yet.
We are setting up a trailer at 7th & Red River for SXSW doing cell phone repairs and selling external batteries, cables, chargers and cases.
Why it is awesome: I have done a lot of things as an entrepreneur, but I've never street hustled before. As an introvert, this is pretty intimidating, but I think it will be good practice for doing more sales in the future. Plus, it gets me out from behind the computer and into the real world, talking face-to-face with folks! :)
Wow, great idea for the personal growth aspect! It certainly tickles the brain on my end, being in much of a non-sales/people person! Here's to wishing you great success on both fronts!
It right now supports batch processing via local files as well as streaming through FIFO files, but the architecture is extremely open, and connectors for docker containers, mesos etc are planned.
What is awesome with SciPipe IMO is that half of it is not even a framework or engine, but rather a pattern of how to use the concurrency primitives in the Go language to build a dataflow network which also becomes an implicit workflow scheduler.
This means that there is not an aweful lot of code, and since it is mostly just Go language primitives it will fit in nicely with basically anything else. Great orthogonality you could say. That is, as long as you can accept to read and write on Go channels or write wrapper that does that for you. But who wouldn't?
It is a bit rough yet but we are just starting work on putting it in production later this month, so things should improve fast.
Yeobot, a Slackbot that's a SQL interface to the Amazon API and soon a whole lot more.
It's cool because it works across accounts and across regions, which their API doesn't do, and it adds new information like cost, so you can do stuff like 'select instance_id, monthly_cost from ec2.instances order by monthly_cost desc'.
It's a simple way to send any document (form, letter, receipt, invoice, tax document) via USPS mail, right from your browser.
We built it because we're too lazy to go to the post office at times, and we've since realized that most documents sent in the mail begin as a PDF on a computer, so now we're working on bringing down the cost (currently we have to pay both Lob and stripe for every mailing, which means lots of fixed costs).
Our next step will be enabling you to automate sending physical mail, the same way you can automate sending emails (for invoices, thank you notes, receipts, mailers etc, which lots of small businesses still use)
You can use the promo code "LIFEHACKER" to get 20% off. Would love your feedback!
I'm spending some time creating a logo generator tool targeted at idea/early stage products and companies, or for side projects, open source projects, etc.
Logocaster is meant to help you explore a huge universe of logo designs when brainstorming your brand/logo. It makes it quite easy to scan a bunch of style/font/palette options and then "drill down" and see designs which only incorporate the features you like.
Right now it's a playground for testing out fonts, colors and a few logo styles. I'm planning on incorporating graphics from the Noun Project and giving a bit more of a rich experience around tweaking a specific design.
You can explore the functionality without registering, and save/download your favorites as SVG if you do register (edit: for free, at least until I've incorporated Stripe).
I'm looking for any feedback on the direction the project is headed, or interesting use cases where the API that powers this whole thing could be put to use, cheers!
Dude, that is perfect timing! We need a logo for NeuralObjects (see my other thread here), so this is great for us.
I'd totally pay for this if you had your Stripe integration going. But since you don't, I can offer this: if you plan to use Machine Learning for anything, shoot me an email and I can offer up a discount or something once NeuralObjects is live, or maybe some free consulting or something.
Do you have a feel for how the pricing is going to work yet? Will you charge per logo, or will it be a monthly subscription, etc? FWIW, I'd definitely be willing to pay a monthly fee if it came with unlimited (or a large number) of downloadable logos. I say that not because I need zillions of logos, but because I think you'll always want to iterate and experiment with a lot of different permutations until you find the "Just right" fit.
Thanks! Glad you can put it to use, hope you find something that works for NeuralObjects. Pro tip: all of your saved logos as well as SVG downloads are found on your profile page.
Re: pricing. Not quite sure about details yet. But the high level is that 1) the design page and functionality (https://logocaster.com/logo-design/) will always be free to use and explore, 2) I'll sell one-off logos at a price point that is competitive with anything out there, 3) as you mentioned, offer a monthly option for people who want to use the tool regularly and produce logos at some moderate volume and 4) offer up the API for other interesting use cases.
Re: (4) it's quite easy to see the API in action, eg.
Very cool stuff! Was just playing around with it for a while, saw (and saved) some nifty compositions! Better yet, what I noticed is that, not being a designer, it had palette options/varieties with the logos! YAY!
Sadly, after saving a few to my profile, the only thing available is the SVG of the logo itself, but none of the details. I was hoping for at least the palette too, so to have some to toy around with. I know this pushes it from a logo generator to more of a brand/identity, but that's not necessarily a bad thing!
Ultimately, not an issue, and still very cool stuff!
I plan to surface the font, palette, etc info for each logo just as you've described. Specifically so that you can use it to drive design/branding decision further in your product/company/site.
For now (and seeing that you're a "code jedi") I'd recommend just scoping out the X-Logo and X-Meta HTTP headers for the logos you've saved, eg:
Thanks for posting this- it's really neat. I'm not much of a designer (or developer for that matter!) I used one of your logos on a site that I put together with wordpress. It's my own little link aggregator. Instead of bookmarking something, I post it on my link site for future reference.
http://geekymug.com (re-used domain name, not relevant to what it is) if you'd like to see your work on my site :)
Great, and thanks for the link back. I like the idea of a public personal bookmark site, especially if it serves to help you level up your design and dev skills.
Thanks for letting me know, I hadn't tested names with anything beyond alphanumerics.
Certainly some of the fonts in the system are lacking those glyphs but this seems more related to the application logic than font issues. It's especially odd that it intermittently discards the text to the right of the bracket (eg. https://logocaster.com/logo-design/less+%3C+more?seed=784036...)
Sequiturs is a platform for rigorous and civil discussion. Discussion revolves around arguments, which consist of a series of premises and conclusions. This argument format requires coherence, which improves the quality of the views asserted, and makes it easier to identify where one might disagree.
I think I've seen a few attempts at this before -- do you have some awareness of the previous ones and a comparison of how yours is similar or different?
The name is clever; as a Latin-speaker I keep wanting it to be "sequuntur".
Thanks for your comment! And for the suggestion of sequuntur. My experience thus far does suggest remembering spelling is an issue. Relatedly, I've registered misspellings (sequiters, sequitors, sequitirs) and am redirecting those to sequiturs.com.
As for other attempts in this space, I've encountered argüman [0], TruthMapping [1], debategraph [2], and Rationale [3]. I like a lot about those projects, and Sequiturs certainly shares with them the idea that there's enormous room for improvement in the way we discuss ideas online, and that structure is key to that. They all have an important difference with Sequiturs, though, which is their emphasis on mapping. I see the format they use as attempting to generate a sense of what the 'argument space', so to speak, looks like: the format is basically saying, "Here are all these different claims someone could make around this topic and here's how they could feed into each other or conflict with each other".
By contrast, Sequiturs' format emphasizes logical coherence in the series of steps that comprise an argument. It highlights the reasoning that leads from starting point to conclusion. By putting the reasoning in focus, the platform facilitates iterative refinement of an argument into its strongest form. Here's how that works.
What emerges from discussion on Sequiturs is an argument for some position boiled down to its essence--to its most digestible, shareable form. If I want to convince you that backdoors are a bad idea, I can send you a link to my argument on Sequiturs, and it's immediately clear what I think you should believe and why. That's not the case with the other, mapping-based tools, because they are more about charting the space of possible points and counterpoints, and less about yielding rigorous sequences of reasoning (you could call them proofs or syllogisms, but those terms connote a bit too much formality and strictness for my taste).
I'd love to know if you know of other attempts in this space. And I'd love to know what you think about Sequiturs!
Right now everything is open source, but I've started work on a replacement user interface which would be temporarily released under a proprietary license. I think the project is awesome as understanding workflow in a complicated application is a challenging task and at some stage all work will be released back to the open source version.
The table uses break beam sensors, an Arduino, and a Raspberry Pi to send score events to Node-RED instance running in Bluemix. A StrongLoop server in Bluemix acts as the app server, and a Cordova/AngularJS app allows users to identify themselves as the game players, follow the leaderboard, and monitor game scores remotely.
We're using this to get better acquainted with various technologies so that we can make the right decisions for our project work.
Every project includes a notebook alongside your manuscript, where you can organize all your character notes, plot outlines, etc. It's especially great for scifi or fantasy authors who do a lot of world-building.
Everything is stored in the cloud and synchronized between devices, and we keep a version history of all your edits, so that you never lose any of your work (even if you change your mind).
It keeps track of your daily word-count, so that you can set daily writing goals and stay motivated, and it lets you export your writing projects to HTML for publication (epub & kindle export are coming soon).
All the data is stored in the cloud and synchronized between multiple devices, with version histories of everything you write.
As we flesh out the software, we'll also be building realtime collaboration, writing groups, etc... So in the long run, philosophically, it's more of a service than a single piece of software.
We're a brand-new startup, and we're iterating the product fast. It's better for the customers, and for us, if we offer frequent updates to all subscribers, rather than releasing one big new version per year, and hoping our users upgrade.
One thing that I didn't see and would be easy to implement is a map of connections between objects such as characters with the chapters etc. It'd be great for the writer to see such connections in a visual way.
This is an idea in progress, but the idea is that by using the observable pattern (ReactiveX implementation) you can describe a sort of 'meta' program that breaks down function boundaries to automatically run your code in parallel. Here is my initial paper describing the idea:
http://rixianopentech.github.io/MonadSharp/Documents/Computa...
It's a personal photojournalism project to learn more about different occupations and the people who work in them.
"We spend about 30% of our waking adult lives working. During that time, many of us experience only a small fraction of the available varieties of work. We may have some understanding of the occupations held by our friends, family, and coworkers. Outside of this subset of jobs, we likely have little insight into the work lives of millions of other people.
Why do we work? How did we choose our occupations? Are we happy with our jobs? I created The Work Explorer to answer questions like these through interviews and photos. I hope to find interesting stories, jobs, and people along the way."
Stacktical, a Scalability Prediction platform! https://stacktical.com - Awesome because to be able to accurately fit the increasing and decreasing computing needs of your digital services, you must nail down your capacity planning strategy.
But making informed capacity planning decisions involves repeated cycles of defining, collecting and interpreting load testing campaigns until you get actionable results.
That's exactly where we can help: Stacktical uses predictive technologies to generate a scalability report of your infrastucture within seconds, using just a dozen load testing metrics.
We're currently in beta, and our penny-pinching startups and DevOps love it so far!
We still have a couple seats left if you're interested.
This is awesome because attic (and the more polished successor, borg) is quickly becoming the new de facto standard for remote, encrypted, you-hold-the-keys backup:
Best of all, we provide these remote server-side functions on our cloud platform without adding any new attack surface or complications to our platform: there is still no python interpreter on our platform.
I'm working on a new Machine Learning Platform as a Service offering. We will be providing an easy to use, API driven platform for quickly and easily spinning up an environment for ML based on Spark and (in the first version) SystemML. Eventually we'll add support for working with TensorFlow, Warp-CTC, etc. I also envision having APIs for OCR, NLP, etc. as we develop.
One thing about this: everything will be Open Source. Obviously all of the "back end stuff" (Spark, SystemML, TensorFlow, etc.) is already open source, but even our provisioning code and API's will be OSS as well. The idea is to put the customer in control. So if you don't like our service, or decide you can do it cheaper running your own hardware on premises, whatever, you can deploy the entire stack yourself.
There's nothing at the URL right now but a (very) primitive landing page, but if any of you guys want to take a look, here ya go:
Everything is hidden behind a (temporary) login page right now, since this isn't really public yet. The login is 'user123' with password 'realitybomb40'
Also, ignore the video that's there, it's a placeholder to mark out where our explainer video will go when it's recorded.
We plan to eventually offer both "pre canned" routines that you can use out of the box as well as the ability to deploy your own models. There a lot of other stuff on the roadmap as well, but it's probably too early to talk about any of it just yet.
A heart-rate monitor for ecommerce conversion rate.
Most small-to-mid size ecommerce companies throw up their hands in frustration trying to use Google Analytics.
Bassoon rescues them by slicing off their most important metric (conversion rate) and emailing it to them every day, or alerting them when conversion rate drops suddenly for any reason.
We integrate with Shopify and Magento, making it one-click easy for merchants to get started.
https://github.com/shuber/owners - Take ownership of your code!
Knowing who owns a project or section of a code base is very helpful when asking questions or requesting feedback. This gem allows developers to define OWNERS files throughout their repository to provide a human and machine readable way to determine who the maintainers are for specific files of code.
https://github.com/shuber/vim-promiscuous - Instant context switching built on git and vim sessions!
It basically takes a snapshot of the following and let's you rollback to previous states:
- All of your vim tabs, buffers, splits, and folds along with their sizes and positions
- The location of your cursor for each buffer
- The actively selected tab/buffer
- Your undo history (each branch's undo history is saved separately)
- Your git stage with all tracked/untracked files and staged/unstaged hunks
Your monolith project seems very interesting to me, because I have 3 repos for components of a common project that leaded to duplicated code. But I also regret to have added some assets code that lead to a massive and slow repo, so it seems it is also possible to filter the history from some directories but I am not quite sure from your description.
Nice, we had a similar issue which is why we decided to merge the repositories. It makes sharing code, extracting shared dependencies, and reviewing PRs so much easier when you can see changes across all projects in one diff!
You can absolutely filter the history from some directories by specifying a script to run after the repositories have been cloned. In your monolith.yml you can add something like:
# Optional list of commands to run right after
# all of the repositories above have been cloned.
#
# These are handy for things like rewriting history
# to remove large unused files or sensitive information.
after_clone:
- ./remove_large_assets
Then define the `remove_large_assets` script in whatever language you want and have it run the appropriate git commands to filter that history!
After the files are filtered, the monolith repository will be generated without all that junk that was bloating your git history.
We wanted to make a website where people could give back to charity without having to make a direct financial contribution. So we are using sponsored content to see if people can find something they want to read, and support good causes in this manner. Our end goal will probably not involve using links from Outbrain, or Taboola, unlike our current product.
Weather forecasts generated using sensors in smartphones.
We use both crowdsourced reports of the current weather conditions and barometric pressure data from iPhones to create more accurate and local weather forecasts.
Thanks! And yes absolutely, we are building our Android app right now (I'm the Android developer actually). If you send an email to android@thesunshine.co I'll add you to the Beta list!
I sold my internet marketing company in December last year to work fulltime on a community for farmers. I made the website http://www.tractorfan.nl as a hobby, 8 years ago and I need to modernize the website or accept that it's going to die by a thousand cuts. I started working an a new version that's rebuilt from the ground up. 2 more weeks before it's released for a focus group of passionate users.
My goal is to make it the world's #1 website for users and fans of agricultural equipment.
This is the best project I have ever done because I have the chance to do everything better. I now have the time to read up on best practices, new technologies and am not afraid to throw away a couple of days of design or coding work. Best decision I ever made (so far).
A JS library for the mobile web. Originally a fork of famo.us, where I was Chief Architect.
Check it out if you're interested in bringing complex 60fps animation, physics, gestures and 3D rendering to a website.
It's awesome because, you can push UI on the web further without sacrificing on performance. Moreover, it sets a path to decentralize apps. No app stores, distribute your app with a link. No install/uninstall. Index apps with pagerank. Deep linking for free. App updates on refresh. Etc etc.
Currently it's a "pingdom for ports", and emails you if a new port opens up on your server. I'm working on making it a fuzzer for basic web vulnerabilities that automatically scans your site on deployment. Basically, ScriptCat will be your script kiddie in the cloud.
https://DNSFilter.com - DNS-Based content filtering and Threat protection; designed to meet the needs of managers of multiple networks.
We're focused on entities that manage 20-100+ networks representing retail, restaurants, hotels, chains, public spaces, etc.
These networks also need protection, and can benefit from centralized management that a cloud-based solution brings over on-premise boxes. Our biggest competitor is OpenDNS, but especially since being acquired by Cisco, they're focused on the enterprise, pricing these users out of the solution.
We're utilizing a small subset of cloud providers who can support our BGP anycast network (12 POPs next week!), and have built out amazing infrastructure, an easy-to-use management interface with the stats these providers need, comprehensive categorized domains and up-to-date threat sources. We're in private beta right now and negotiating partnerships in the space.
High quality screencasts that teach open source technologies. Instead of having blogposts where you blindly copy/paste and pray it works, this aims to really teach you how it works and show the why of each configuration, instead of just the how.
A set of email extensions that make it possible to run a PKI over SMTP, making email privacy easy to achieve.
And, besides the extra privacy, the PKI needed shared data and access control, what led me to create a DAV-like system, that lets you grant other people permission for querying your maildir (ok, not really a maildir, but very alike), and let you do stuff like let a group of people work on a document you hold on your email.
As a daily user from my phone, I've come to expect the HackerWeb UI to be the default HN look/feel, and need to mentally adjust to the official look and feel! The collapsing comments -> killer feature!
Interactive music discovery. Amplitude tries to get a feel for your current mood and then gives you a 30 song playlist that you can save to Spotify.
Spotify's discover weekly is great, but you only get one playlist a week. The radios are a great idea, but I found them to far to repetitive and playing very mainstream music I'v already heard. Amplitude sits somewhere in the middle.
Started as a collaborative email client, but expanding to offer chat and general team communication features. Your inbox already acts as a todo list, so it’s the best foundation to build a powerful and unified collaboration platform. We’ll ultimately become your one true todo list. One that gathers tasks from all channels: email, chat, etc. This pretty much makes us competitors to email clients, Slack, Basecamp, help desks, CRMs… name it. Big ambitions! ;)
I ported parts of the gnarly old Windows Live Writer / Open Live Writer codebase to the Windows 10 UWP platform. WLW now available on mobile essentially. Adding features almost every week.
Some Feedback on the site:
"Free demo" makes you register and the description makes it sound like you have to link your account to Stripe right aways. This is quite misleading, imo. "Demo" in my mind doesn't even include registration, it should be a demo of how the service would operate.
"Sample Menu" is something that looks like a demo, but it is quite worthless, because it's not a bit interactive. You can't even add menu items to the basket.
If I was a restaurant owner I wouldn't be very impressed by the "Sample Menu" and I would be very reluctant to register because a "Free demo" doesn't entail signing up for Stripe in my opinion. This sounds more like a trial than a demo.
The registration description was inaccurate, you don't need to sign up for Stripe right away to look around the members area, thanks for pointing that out. Also, I agree with the free demo comment, I'll change the button to "Sign Up".
The add to cart functionality on the sample menu should work, what browser are you using?
A self hosted, distributed, secure communication "protocol" (server/app) for exchanging messages. Think of it like a distributed, platform agnostic, self-hosted iMessage. MMXP differs from email and other chat systems by encrypting both the message and the metadata. Messages are encrypted and signed using user public keys for verification. The server and application components are open source for transparency.
Pavlok -- (http://buy.pavlok.com) --- a wearable device to change behavior. We just integrated with IFTTT and now it has become a haptic feedback platform. The device can vibrate, beep, and send electric shocks.
And we are releasing a developer API later this month :)
This is the perfect device for an internet of things horror story.
"
And then my phone got hacked, and then my Pavlok started shocking me over and over again. When I tried to remove it, it locked on tighter. 'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you've asked me not to allow that, Dave'
"
Friendship Bracelets that teach kids how to code. Currently working on the firmware for our production bracelets, and then will be working on the Arduino API and bootloader to allow our Jewelbots to run Arduino based code.
I'm working on a programming language which will allow fully automatic distributed computing by having everyone using the language participate in a SETI@HOME-style p2p network. I'm under no illusions about it being fast, but it's certainly fun.
Not really ready to share the URL yet, things are still coming together.
Very delayed response: I'm focused on first building it assuming the trustworthiness of the actors on the network; extending to trustless distributed computing is an even bigger tangle than I've already gotten myself into. Have you written about it anywhere? I'm always interested to hear how other people think about these things.
Working on v2 of http://www.dnsperf.com/
Opened an office in Krakow and hired a team. Its going to have synthetic and RUM data for every provider, plus the ability to test your own.
Even more data will be available for free!
I am working on ReadBoard (https://www.readboard.io) - a new way to converse on the Web. And why do I think it is awesome? Because I believe it will really change the way we converse on the Web.
I recently posted three different articles on medium explaining my thought process but I would like to mention one article here.
To summarise, ReadBoard lets you (the readers) own your conversations on the Web.
And when I say “owning a conversation”, that means…
1. I, as a reader, will decide on which part of the article I want to start a conversation and with whom.
2. I, as a reader, want all my conversations at one place.
3. I, as a reader, want to know what others are discussing on the same article.
ReadBoard is still in private beta but if this thinking intrigues you, here is a special link to sign up for all HackerNews users.
Opening up doctor data. Building a massive doctor database, first US, then internationally. Building out new search tools never seen before: eg, search by publications, awards, or fellowships.
Our property is getting full of small (10'x10'ish) sheds, greenhouses, and the like. It's so soothing to be able to just make and follow a plan and have concrete solutions to straight forward answers.
That being said, building the old-fashioned pole barn (36'x54') using logs, sawmill, and kiln to make the lumber, almost killed me. There needs to be some sort of limit to everything.
Felt good to read that. I started an 8x12 shed two years ago and really need to get it done this spring so we can actually use it. I kinda have the same plan: just keep erecting outbuildings when I get bored.
I decided, against my better judgement, that I should teach myself Hack (because why not), and by extension, how to set up a Vagrant box (since I'm using Windows and the tutorials I found for that assume Vagrant.) As an experiment, I'm porting over a HN clone I had written in PHP to it.
So far, I'm able to get the box working, get the database up and get everything running, and a basic XHP based layout, but the actual application barely exists. I do not guarantee the quality of anything since this project is still just days old but here is a repo[0] if anyone wants to take a look. It's awesome because I personally think it's awesome, or at least likely to be awesome in the future. You are welcome and, knowing HN, likely to disagree.
I'm also... three months into my first one game a month project[1]. It started as a Berzerk clone but will probably end up being some bog standard shooter. I recently got state machines and a quadtree working.
I started a new podcast called "Love Your Work." I'm trying to make it free of posturing about "killing it" and such – just people who have defined success for themselves.
https://fixparser.targetcompid.com/
FIX parser allows users to paste FIX protocol snippets into the app, which parses the log and displays the results in a nice, human readable format. This app is for a very niche segment of technologists who work on financial trading system.
This is a side project of mine and has been for a few years. It is very gratifying to get emails from random users telling me how much they love the app (and asking for additional features). Just a couple of weeks ago I added an important feature: the ability to securely share FIX logs.
I'm pretty proud of the fact that the interface is pretty simple, yet hides lots of functionality the users probably don't even notice. For example, the logs you paste can be surrounded by other garbage, such as timestamps or log4j noise and the correct message will still be extracted. It will guess delimiters. Users can drag and drop a file on to the text field. Click on a message (very subtly) highlights related messages. I'm sure I'm forgetting many more.
There is plenty (plenty!) more I could add. Just a small matter of having no time :)
Rinocloud https://rinocloud.com/ - makes it easy to handle all your research data. You can save data with metadata and integrate Rinocloud with your instruments so that all the data can be curated automatically.
Our hosted load testing service which uses real browsers, driven by javascript, ruby or java code the same way you'd write your usual selenium/webdriver tests.
It is awesome because it will make load test script creation/maintenance just like anything else. It will also be the first "opinionated" load testing tool.
Open source hardware for communicating on CAN buses, which are the main network used in today's automotive systems. Hardware has been around for about a year, but I'm currently working on new open source software for visualizing and communicating on CAN buses. Hoping to demystify automotive electronics and make them more accessible!
Professional - I'm a generalist with Vivvo Application studios. Right now, I'm mainly doing deployment, but that is subject to change.
Personal - My girlfriend and I recently had a baby - Lauren turned 48 hours old at 01:15 local time this morning. When I'm not at work, I am changing diapers, holding the most incredibly cool thing I have ever helped create, and feeling the most incredible awe that I have ever experienced.
A downloadable self hosted version of searchcode. I had gotten a lot of requests for something like this and after getting a largish mailing list went ahead and implemented. Slow uptake right now but hopefully in time and with improvements will become more useful for more people.
I built a product that attempts to re-engineer how we interact with actionable information at work by introducing a "meta" layer of intelligent shortcuts (menu items are objects, not just links). The objects store meta data needed to streamline access to information in databases, LOB web sites, etc.
It's awesome because it saves time.
It's awesome because you can use it to quickly access a large group of information resources.
Want to open 4 Hacker News sections with one click? Can do that. Spanning all monitors? Can do that.
Want to open four different files with four different apps needed to work on a project with one click? Can do that.
I saw pieces of this work at Microsoft when I took an early version of my product and customized for specific teams. I've created the ability to do the customization without any programming, except for the SQL Server menu options.
Trying to googlize personal and enterprise knowledge (i.e. making it as easy to find as with google on the web). IOW, trying to eliminate the need to look for actionable information on your PC or company network using a single universal keyword driven information portal. The enterprise version uses a simple SQL Server "meta" database.
Have no marketing budget. Wife about to kill me. Can also publish MenuSets to cloud and have integrated cloud knowledge base about to go into beta. Yes the current version works with Azure database.
Let me know if you see any value or if you think this is stupid and why.
Our son was born about a month ago and after tracking some feeding, peeing, pooping and sleeping data manually, I decided to write my own tool. This project is using Firebase to store data.
I think that Devops is too hard and it shouldn't be.
IMHO the main reason it's happening is that there are many tools and no framework to consolidate them, and a lot of the "cookbooks" or "recipes" out there are missing a production-ready bullet proof version.
The way I try to solve it with the-startup-stack is to bring all the tools under one roof with an easy step-by-step way to get your stack bootstrapped.
You can get started with terraform, chef-server and mesos in minutes.
I am writing a simple note/journaling app. It has blogging feature, sharing journals with friends and private (client-side encrypted) journals. Currently it is web-only but I am planning hybrid apps for Android/iOS and the desktop:
Record the screen of every visitor to your website. Helps you see exactly what users are doing and understand where they're having trouble.
Works on every website including Angular, React, AJAX, and private user pages.
Syndient is a way to aggregate, curate, and share RSS / Atom feeds with a wider community. Users create Digests (collections of RSS / Atom feeds and keywords) and Syndient scans and tags content automatically. Digests can be public or private and ultimately be used as Atom feeds themselves. Additionally, Syndient provides thumbnails and descriptions of the links and displays them in a simple and familiar UI. You can try it without creating an account at https://syndient.com/find/.
It is awesome because it gives,you more power than AWS Lambda and because you have a sane way to manage it via effe-tool (http://github.com/siscia/effe-tool), also it is written in go which should make it faster than competitor...
A JSON document store built on PostgreSQL's jsonb columns.
These days I have client libraries done for Python, Clojure and NodeJS, so I've been focusing on getting deb packages ready and gearing up for a 1.0 release.
Easy Office phonebooths
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I've found lots of startups want more private spaces for individuals to work and do calls, but most solutions cost thousands of dollars or require builders.
Does anyone want to test and give feedback on a better office phone booth?
ontolo.com : a fast, customizable search engine for marketing opportunities.
Written entirely in C, except for the front-end. Took 18 months. Didn't know C before and was a hack programmer. Just released a major update yesterday.
The crawler, parser, and indexer can process over 250,000 web pages per minute on commodity hardware and a gigabit connection. The parser is unlike any other I've seen, in that it parsers a document into about 200 sections.
This allows you to search for very specific things like "web pages that mention Donald Trump in the comments, where Bernie Sanders is mentioned in the main article, and there are Adsense ads on the page."
the parser is all hand-written c. the only library i use outside of libc, is xxhash.
documents are read and parsed byte by byte, where "sections" (e.g. side nav) and "contexts" (e.g. comment author) are maintained in a stack of states. part of the speed comes from writing a custom hashing tool that creates compact, very fast hash tables with few or no collisions. so identifying html tags, etc, is very fast and keeps everything as close to l1 as possible.
data is stored exclusively in sphinx. i don't know if it's a secret or not, but i've seen no one talk about it: elasticsearch crumbled horribly under this kind of load. sphinx performs beautifully.
depending on the path i take from here, creating my own index and engine is becoming a serious consideration.
nope. it's all in sphinx. sphinx has its own sort of data store called 'attributes', which are analyzed after a full-text match is performed.
this doesn't work well for relational searches (e.g. sql), where you might look for results that match a specific location or metric (e.g. star-rating) first. but if the text-based search query is the most important part of the query, attributes can then be used to refine the results even further. fortunately for ontolo, this is the case. and it lets me eliminate managing another software package and data store. though that might change in the future, depending on how the complexity and amount of data evolves over time.
properly designing the index here for size and speed was one of the biggest challenges i faced; deciding what to keep in ram, what to keep on disk (attributes), and how to organize so much data that it didn't kill the disk, but still allowed everything you could want to be retrieved and searched against. this might have been the most time-consuming part of the entire project, in terms of thinking-time.
as for xxhash, it's amazing in a ton of ways. i've taken a sort of special interest in hash functions, designed my own suite of testing tools, and written many of my own. for every metric i've put xxhash up against, it has performed beautifully. the only time i'm ever able to write anything faster is when the quality of the hash is severely compromised in order to make a very customized hash for a very specific and narrow set of data. and compared to other 64-bit hashes out there, it consistently outperforms them in terms of speed and distribution, across many hardware architectures. yann collet really made something amazing there (in addition to several of his other projects).
[edited to add]: i forgot to mention that part of storing data in sphinx as attributes is that you can store plain text data (or json, etc) that is returned in the query result. this is how we return urls, page titles, etc to the user in the browser and exports, thus eliminating the need for a raw data store.
Scoper is awesome because instead of watching a random stream, you can request one anywhere, for whatever reason.
An example use case would be if you were going to be moving to a new city that's far away. Instead of making a deposit for an apartment based on pics you find online, you could send a request on Scoper to someone nearby the area you want to move to, get a live interactive stream, where you can talk back and forth with streamer.
We create integrated hardware, software, and user interfaces that examine your eye movements to figure out your intent and allow you to control computers hands-free, using only your eyes.
It's clear that eye tracking is going to be a key feature of future VR headsets. The only question is whether it will be introduced in generation 2 or 3.
AirLoop is a fully customizable digital loyalty platform that provides the tools you need to optimize and enhance your customer engagement, to create repeat business and increase revenue.
We are on a mission to change the way our merchant partners think about customer loyalty and customer engagement. We help you understand and influence your customers, and help you turn every single customer interaction into an enduring relationship.
We believe that small businesses should be able to capture customer data without breaking the bank. Our loyalty program is completely free -- all you need is an iPad (Android coming soon), download our app, configure your rewards and off your go.
[iOS + Android] Tally counter mobile app with timelines, graphs and averages. Count/track anything and see how you're doing over time. You can even export your data to CSV.
There is no single solution that integrates warehousing, inventory control, order management, customer relations, email ticketing, shipping, and channels management.
The goal is to build a system that is fast, accurate, and minimizes mouse-clicks. Most other solutions I've worked with and evaluated were slow, couldn't properly -1, and were a UI maze.
This system is awesome because it simply does not exist anywhere (Odoo is the closest approximation), it is targeted to small and medium businesses, and it has infinite customization in mind. Last but certainly not least, it is FLOSS, and I plan to offer off-contract support for the open source users.
Interactive diagrams for the web, built with HTML Canvas (and export to SVG). Very customizable with a big foundation of node/link logic, undo/redo, data-binding, and much more.
Currently working on a little tool to create a "repeating" texture of triangular tiles. More or less an implementation of the "Image Quilting" paper but for triangles.
No URL yet (it's on github but not fit for human consumption yet), but you can see progress on my twitter: https://twitter.com/joeld42
When it's done (next week or so) I'll write up a full blog post.
You can find other projects I've worked on (like tk_objfile) on my website http://www.tapnik.com, there's a mailing list signup thinggy at the bottom if you want to get updates when I release things.
I made something small to help me debug colors on android and people told me it was dumb. :( I thought it was helpful because there are no ARGB converters online.
I'm making internal honeypots a thing. I'm making statically compiled binaries that make deploying a honeypot super super easy.
Right now, I've built an HTTP honeypot.
The idea is that if anything ever talks to these services you have an instant alert you NEED to respond to and actionable information about it. I have support for sending you a text message.
It has support for whitelisting certain IPs that you would be doing your scanning from, and post all information to a second URL for logging, as well as a lightweight dashboard to view logs generated by the binaries and more. Next up I need to build an SSH honeypot, FTP, etc.
I posted this as a "Show HN" a few months ago. It's awesome because for the vast majority of commercial games, there is no way to customize the art, since the Developer doesn't provide an end-user art pipeline. There are older programs that allow texture customization, but as far as I know, ModelMod is the first program that lets you snapshot models, edit them, and the reload the edited version in game.
Currently I'm working on CoreCLR support (a lot of the code is F#) and experimenting with pixel shader transplants.
BlurrrSDK: Write native cross-platform 2D games in C, Lua, JavaScript or Swift. (iOS, Android, SteamOS/Linux, OS X, Windows, Raspberry Pi).
I just posted a demo video yesterday of Swift development for Android. I think this could be the very first video of a (cross-platform) Swift program running on Android.
https://youtu.be/w6FY_qSi8yY
I'm working on a platform backing the existing desktop app for users to create, share, and explore lightroom presets - kinda like a package manager for photography presets.
The Flux overview video seemed convincing. It's a web app architecture that lets you ask "How did my app get into this state?" and always have a straightforward path to an answer. It turns out Mithril fits the architecture as well or better than React does, and for me mobile-friendliness is important so I really like Mithril's size.
Taskforce makes life easier for people who need to get real work done directly from Gmail. It's a Chrome extension that lets you add notes to emails, convert emails into to-dos, and schedule emails for later, all without leaving your inbox. It makes email triage a breeze, and saves you from forgetting to handle to important emails from clients, customers, etc.
I've been working on this as a side project for the past year, but it started life as a YC company back in 2011, so some people have been using it for over 5 years now!
A kanban board plugin for WordPress https://kanbanwp.com it's awesome because it brings simple project management to WordPress. It's also awesome because it's my first big WordPress product, and it's already been more successful than most of my other projects. I wrote some thoughts about my experience so far http://gelwp.com/articles/a-few-months-after-launching-a-wor...
We have videos on how to apply clean coding principles. I'm really hopeful that every coder learns these principles and how to apply them, because when more people write clean code, everyone benefits. Plus Bob is just hilarious. I'm really enjoying working on it because it's a pure-Clojure backend. We have in only 80 lines of code a Clojure -> CSS generator that replaced Sass and Less for us. Stuff like that just makes me really love this job.
Super simple form processing that starts attacking spam the moment a user (or bot) hits your page. Captchas, no matter how "smart" are no longer necessary with Hook Forms.
Just generate a form, copy the id into your own <form> tag, embed the JS and it starts working.
See all form submissions in one place, and have people emailed any time a form submission passes our crazy spam checks.
We're in beta for a very short time and almost going live, so TRY IT FOR FREE and let us know what you think!
Still a work in progress but with Scat you will be able to use Slack commands to create and manage issues. The command will respond with a bot to list out issues based on the initial prompt. The goal is to have nearly everything related to an issue built into Slack commands and off load some of the editing to a lightweight web UI.
I'm sure something like this already exists but it has been a blast so far playing around with the Slack API.
Record a process on Linux and save an exact copy of the program's execution; replay it later on a different machine, and step backwards and forwards through the recording at the source level to figure out where it went wrong.
There are a few main things that make this possible:
- lightweight copy-on-write process snapshots
- re-executing (rather than recording) code we know to be deterministic
- a lot of time spent on handling corner cases to create a mature product
Snapzu innovates on all the things that Reddit is lacking, such as:
1. Your home feed provides all raw/live posts and activity from tribes you join, people you follow, and/or posts you save. This is similar to how twitter does it.
2. You can post links and content into more than one tribe (community) at a time which helps keep 're-posts' at a minimum.
3. You can post images without using a 3rd party service like Imgur, and you can embed Youtube and Vimeo videos directly.
4. Instead of link/comment karma (yes, of the "karmawhoring" variety), you earn Experience Points (XP) for participation used for leveling up your profile, and Reputation, a percentage score based on how other users vote on your posts.
5. All members can contribute to your posts by adding "related links", which add value to the post and are voted on by other members, just like comments.
6. Each member has a limit on how many tribes (communities) they can operate, based on XP level reached. No "power mods" here.
7. A Partnership Referral Program (http://snapzu.com/referralprogram) provides additional tools and incentives to help you grow your tribes (if you have a blog, website, forum, or other social influence)
Toolwatch ! https://toolwatch.io
It helps watch freaks measure the accuracy of their timepieces.
Accuracy has always been the holy grail of watchmaking. Throughout the ages, watchmakers have been competing for building the most accurate and precise watch movement but the consumers do not have the tools to appreciate that effort.
With Toolwatch you can measure your watches for free and see how they compete versus other measured watches !
Can you please show a demo/screenshots without me having to sign up? I'm interested but I have no idea how it works (do I need a microphone? iphone? etc), and I won't sign up until I know I can actually use it.
Hi, you are right, we should be able to see a demo before sign up.
Let me explain the process, it's pretty simple: you do not need any microphone or device, just your watch! You will be asked to press a button when your watch reached a certain time, this will synch your watch with our accuracy system. 24hours later, an automatic mail is sent to you asking you to come back and synch again. After this second synch, we are able to determine the accuracy of your watch.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
I've been using it for batch data transformation tasks at Embedly. It's still early and things can still change, but it's starting to stabilize. Tell me what you think about the gross abuse of the __or__ operator. I love it, but if I'm alone, I can remove it, or at least remove it from example code.
Needs an introductory paragraph. Had to read the whole page before I started to understand what it is, and even then it is a bit vague. Looks like piping of data like the shell in python.
Things that make it so awesome: it is open-source, real-time, fully distributed, and offline-first. It's also highly modular and easy to use, so our community is growing, which of course makes it even more awesome!
Secure, secret ballot, fully auditable, universally verifiable electronic elections. It has been used twice in the Spanish parliament, it scales up to millions of votes per election etc.
It's quite interesting if you are security oriented. Of course nothing is 100% secure, but the problem probably won't be on the server side, which is fully verifiable.
I talk about how I make money writing online. It helps give ordinary people a leg up on developing portable income that pays decently so that "the little people" can benefit from new realities of the modern economy instead of being victims of it.
Static site generator that you manage from the browser. Currently publishes to S3 or a zip file. No help from servers.
The load time is currently slow because I am pushing unminified code and all the transpiling happens in the browser. With JSPM I can hot load applications but sadly github doesn't allow cross origin requests.
These are largely coded in Processing and leverage the Minim audio library. I'm doing this for several reasons: To get used to showing my work to other people (vulnerability) and to be able to mentally move on from a piece that I've finished so I can be more prolific.
A retro inspired computer, based on a 40 Mhz DLX/MIPS CPU, it got 640x480 1 byte per pixel graphics, Blitter, Sprites, DMA sound, raster co-processor. SD card as storage.
Written in VHDL, running a simple DOS like "OS" based on Lua. GCC cross compiler on Linux for writing demos/games and other fantastic software, for the Amiga killer of yesteryear :)
Hopefully with a 3D printed case and open source plans, everyone can build one in a few years :)
Protoship converts designs into code and generates full-blown web application front-ends. HTML, CSS, SASS, React, the works. And not the typical auto-generated crap, but real clean code as good as what we'd painstakingly write ourselves. No absolute positioning; no mindless repetition of CSS; no slicing and dicing.
I used to write business software in old-school tech like Visual Basic, Clipper, and dBase, but have been building for the web for the past several years. If you have ever worked on one of these technologies, you'll remember how fast we could bang out database software and user-interfaces that gets stuff done, compared to the boilerplate of modern front-end development. The ever-shifting landscape, writing reams of HTML, CSS, DRY-ing up stuff with SASS mixins, wiring up React components and props and `import`s... The sheer tedium is mind-numbing to build even the simplest of applications.
We're building a recurring funding platform for adult content creators. Think of Patreon but ONLY for adult, erotic, or pornographic content. We are looking to cater to models, artists, game developers, and more.
An example use case would be an adult model creating a campaign with different reward tiers such as $5/mo and $10/mo. $5/mo subscribers would receive exclusive nude pictures whereas $10/mo subscribers would receive in addition nude or special kinky pictures.
Our mission is simple: "To empower creators in the adult industry with the freedom to pursue their passion". PledgeX is simply part of the movement that is seeing more and more of those in the adult industry becoming more independent and homegrown. And in a world where porn is thought of as free, we feel that there are those of us who will actually pay for high quality content.
We've just soft-launched but will be signing up our initial creators soon!
Programs looks cooler than text, and are easier to work with (once you learn it). Project current status is prototype under construction.
XoL is a programming language where code elements are designed icons. This makes code flow and meaning easier to read than text. I have put a lot of work to optimize the design as best as possible. The design shown in the page is an earlier version. The current design has been improved greatly. I don't want to reveal it until it is actually working. I find programs in xoL are beautiful and engaging to look at. And are easier to understand than text. The user interface is designed aiming to make writing and editing programs, easier than editing text.
The actual language has been designed specially to work well with the icon design. One key point is that xoL is statically typed. The type system aims for simplicity -it is very easy to use-. The types are represented with icons. This helps to make easier to understand the meaning of programs.
fedger.io (https://fedger.io) - We continuously feed our machine intelligence tech with massive amounts of web data and provide easy access via simple to use micro APIs.
I'm finishing up a retooled build for our primary product Ignition (quick info https://inductiveautomation.com/scada-software/). The build itself is only 'awesome' to those of us who need to work on our product. Nearing the final stretch of the project, but so far we've cut build times by 80+%, and added in a bunch of tools/processes that will improve quality, not to mention greatly ease onboarding for new devs. Been a fun little project.
Our product itself pretty awesome (IMO) for a number of reasons: performance, flexibility, extensibility, easy of use (relative to other SCADA/HMI/Industrial Automation platforms), secure, highly connectable. We're one of the only companies (as far as I know) actually delivering real "Industrial IoT" (ugh, that term) solutions that are able to support the scale and scope that we do. There are definitely others attempting similar things, but not in such open and interconnected ways, and certainly nowhere near the same value. Our technology is pretty innovative, but just as innovative is our business transparency: We've done away with industry-standard artificial pricing schedules that relate to how many data points you have. The result has been adoption by many customers who simply couldn't afford to implement automation in the past.
Anyway, as a developer, I really like being a part of a platform that touches so many industries, in hugely varying ways. It's a fun challenge to build things that are easy to use, yet abstract, powerful and scalable.
Now that I have met my "sound like someone from marketing" quota for the year, I need to go wash it off with some code.
We're a Techstars Seattle '16 company. We're making it possible for anyone to embed gorgeous data visualizations in their apps or services for data they've already got.
I just had my first novel released this month! It combines gaming and literacy for kids. It's themed around the idea of "becoming a player character in your own life." The main character, Josh, uses the ideas of experience points, quest hooks, and allies to get ahead in his life.
A visual tool to create SPARQL queries and browse SPARQL endpoints.
Plus a Linked Data search engine of all the resources available in SPARQL endpoints.
One more thing : queries created in the visual tool are, when relevant, displayed under each search result, and can be run upon it.
It's a 50K display that wraps two levels of a football stadium (the MCG in Melbourne, Australia). Everything can be rendered in real-time. Control is handled handled by an on-site operator, or can be handed over to an autonomous system that links into game stats feeds, umpire systems and a host of other triggers.
Content is generated at 60Hz and pushed to the physical displays at ~3600Hz to provide smooth visual during broadcast and during slow motion playback. Being ~1KM long and outside individual sections of the display can also have smoothed, real-time image adjustments adding to account for variation in environmental conditions (shadowing etc) and provide continuous visual quality across the full image.
It's a static website hosting service for making hosting jekyll/hugo/etc. sites way easier in terms of setup and updating. It's coming out of beta soon, but if you want to try it out sign up for the beta list and I'll let you in ASAP.
I have seen even large companies with big marketing budgets have difficulty getting eyeballs on their social content. Short lived sponsored ads fail them with lack of virality, personal touch and being expensive. Why not utilize employees’ social networks to spread the word. But, it’s painful to share company posts regularly. So, I created Advo.Ninja to make it extremely effortless to share content by ZERO-CLICK (auto posting) of company posts on multiple social networks instantly. Set up and forget! or choose to share every time.
This is proving to be a win-win situation - employees get to improve their thought leadership and help companies ace branding by their best advocates - employees!
Startups and mid-size companies are realizing the highest value with their small marketing teams spending just a few mins every week and proud employees sharing content.
An incredibly fast, real-time file sharing app. You drag and drop your files to the menu bar (in Mac) / system tray (in Windows) and a link is automatically copied to your clipboard, ready to be shared. If you're looking for a more personalized way of sharing, you can send the files via email directly from the app with advanced sharing options, such as, expire link after x number of days, views or downloads, or simply disable downloading for recipients.
The app comes with a slew of built-in tools, such as, capture and annotate screenshots, record screen, bookmark, compose notes, and record audio clips. You can upload "any content" from your clipboard using a simple hotkey.
We've built the product in such a way that we can offer the most advanced enterprise level file sharing features to professionals and small businesses at a very affordable price, while also making sharing dead-simple and easy!
I want this to be the swiss army knife for all your data analysis/grunt work. Key features are (1) work on small data set then repeat operation on the full dataset so you can work faster, (2) query by doing what you would do in Excel and (3) make loading and moving data super easy and fun to do!
It's a free, entirely manually curated, database of research organisations around the world with associated metadata and other linked IDs (wikidata/geonames/NUTS/crossref/fundref/ucas/ukprn...). Everything has a persistent ID so it doesn't matter if a university changes name.
It's awesome because this is the kind of thing you assume exists but actually doesn't, and is really quite hard to build yourself. If you want to aggregate data from multiple sources you need IDs. We built it because that's what we do and it's what we need. Then we released it CC-BY :)
It's not glamorous, but I think it's pretty important. It lets you analyse things far more easily than you would have been able to do before. I wrote a blogpost about pay in universities vs regional averages in the UK [0] and the analysis itself was really just a case of joining a few things together.
On the business side of things, we work with people to get their data cleaned up & linked to GRID as well as offering other bits with . Please do get in touch if you either want some help using it or just want to talk about these kinds of things :) i.calvert@digital-science.com
Edit - We're continually adding stuff, so get in touch if you think something is missing or incorrect, you can raise a ticket here: http://gridac.freshdesk.com
We tend to release once a month, so it might be a few weeks before you see the fix go out.
Smart image CDN. Process images on-the-fly, store and serve with CDN of your choice. No need to setup any imaging infrastructure (storage, processing and CDN delivery) for web/mobile apps.
Developers get started within 5 mins to signup, point us to where your original images are and replace the <img src=""> from your domain to the new origin you just created.
One of the features is to serve the right image format which can reduce image bandwidth on a page anywhere between 40% to 400%, or more.
Manuscript.
What if instead of pain-stakingly coding an API backend while having to chose the web framework, language, libraries etc, we could just describe the API and its routes as a set of operations that could be implemented by any language, any framework, using any set of libraries.
What if you could build an API free of bugs on the first try? What if instead of using a laptop or a desktop, you could build a custom API from your smartphone? What if you could just build your API once and it could get faster automatically as implementations improve performance?
I believe all of the above is possible and manuscript is my attempt to bring this dream to life.
If this sounds awesome to you, help me build manuscript and let us change how we create APIs forever.
Just launched this app. Daily round of cocktails curated by professional bartenders from around the world. Swipe right to save the ones you like and build you personal drink library and boozy shopping list. Share favorites via iMessage and Facebook Messenger.
It's a web application that generates the astrological interpretation of a person's chart using traditional astrology methods. I hope next week to start selling the Temperament analysis.
StateBook aggregates data from a wide variety of governmental and proprietary sources to provide a geovisual platform that companies use to decide where to launch businesses and create new jobs. We have great customers and are looking forward to addressing a broader market.
It's a simple game where I show you two images from Reddit (SFW of course) and ask you to guess which was more popular. I'm using the data from the site as part of my research into the dynamics on internet popularity.
It's awesome because it's showing that Reddit is a pretty random/fickle thing. In the first iteration of the experiment (we're on the second now), people couldn't really do much better than randomly guessing. If one image had 10,000 upvotes and the other 10, people could only guess the popular one about 55% of the time. I wrote up some quick results in this blogpost: https://medium.com/@gregstod/guess-the-karma-2-0-82a224a691f...
I'd very much appreciate it if you played the game and donated a few data points :-)
Thanks for the suggestion. If you click on them, they'll pop out to the full size. Otherwise, I couldn't figure out how to get it to appear OK on both desktop and mobile (because I"m not really a web developer).
A simple, plugin-based system for monitoring systems on a small scale. The idea is to make it super fast to make plugins that either monitor something or send data about what monitor plugins said through another service. It's not intended to be a full-fledged monitoring application, just a "send me a push notification if x breaks" sort of deal.
I use it myself since for my personal things I don't need a full fledged application like Nagios, I just want to get told if something like a hard drive fails. Right now there's plugins for checking systemd services, drives, IP address, sending data to/from other heartbeat instances (super janky), sending notices through pushbullet, dweet.io, blinkstick, and pulling URLs.
I'm 19 and I launched in January a productivity app Proud (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/proud/id891726847?l=pl&ls=1&...) My main mission is just simply help people organize their life, goals in the easiest way.
Proud contains all the best tools in one place.
- through reminders we teach people how to create habits and routines.
- timer lets you track your time workflow and remind you about the breaks.
- destress superpower lets you be present for a while, tibetan bowls influence your thoughts and emotions.
- weekly performance dashboard shows you how many tasks you did in the last 7 days.
I believe that our greatest asset is time, so we have to learn how to manage it to grow day by day.
Connectomo - smarter marketing automation for startups and small businesses (http://connectomo.com)
It's awesome because we're building a marketing automation platform that learns from customer preferences and behaviours to build a better customer experience.
I'm working on Shuffl, a virtual jukebox which allows you to start a collaborative music station for your party where your guests can see the current playlist, vote on the tracks and add their own track. Here : http://shuffl.in
How do you create the virtual jukebox? I take that a lambda user has to have the necessary software to play the music and this is 'just' a voting system.
Once you create a hub, it fetches top songs from iTunes and starts playing from YouTube. All the songs added by users from their devices are then added as song meta data. I'm planning on making the YouTube player visible and adding soundcloud as well.
It's awesome because it provides phishing simulation/training to everyone for free. Traditional solutions cost $$$$$, so gophish makes this type of training available to anyone regardless of security budget.
DashFlow is a simple cloud-based web app launcher enabling fast and one-click access to frequently used apps, websites, software, shortcuts and bookmarks.
Simply select all the popular apps you use, add any custom shortcuts, re-arrange and group the icons and set as your homepage!
With the growth of SaaS Apps and shift of software to become web-based, we want to build a better way to stay organised and productive.
A useful planned feature is the ability to automatically set the apps for all employees or users of the same domain name, saving the need for everyone to create bookmarks individually.
Note: the web-app is not ready yet but you can register for early access once we launch!
We're trying to give developers a better look at dev teams & answer their most common questions about dev process, benefits, who else works there, what it's great, etc -- before they apply.
I'm working on Cruiseable, a new platform for cruise discovery.
It's awesome because it is the only service to grab all cruise line data, normalize it, use tagging criteria and provides the best cruise experience for you depending on preference (not just price/date dropdown).
I'm building a fancy schmancy word tracker for writers. I love NaNoWriMo's tools, but they limit its use to just the month of November, which doesn't help me for the other eleven months of the year! I originally built a simple app in December when I was still trying to finish my novel after November was over, and I wound up using my app up to today. In mid February, I tossed a fancy Bootstrap theme or two on it.
It's still very much in early stages, with not a lot of features. The only action you can really take is to update your word count, which should refresh the charts and graphs and stats. I personally find it incredibly motivating, but if you're not a writer... then maybe it's not for you.
Feedback: "fancy charts and stuff" is already putting me off as it implies that the charts are simply eye candy without any practical use. Likewise "built in a weekend" but also "made in many many hours with love" doesn't really sound serious.
You also can't see the example charts at a bigger size, and since this is one of the "selling points", there should definitely be examples.
It's a simple configurator for generating a script that sets up a Tor node on your server. I hope that way people with who are less proficient in Tor and Linux can support the network.
The data is collected from currently six different bloodstock auctioneers in Europe and covers the years 2009 - 2015. Future plans include additional auctioneers around the globe.
The goal is to provide improved data analysis to the bloodstock industry. Starting with a simple Jekyll based website (barebones found under the gh-pages branch at the moment), reports will be written in RMarkdown, so R code can be included directly, then "knitted" with the knitr package to vanilla markdown.
It's awesome because I love horse racing and bloodstock. Combining a personal passion with my data analysis skills should hopefully mean a stellar service.
Monitors the status pages of cloud services and sends you alerts in Slack, email, SMS, web hook, etc. You can even query the status of a service via a slash command in slack:
I've been enjoying doing literate programming using org-babel inside of Emacs.
Writing literate programs allows me to easily keep my code and documentation synchronized. I make a update in one place and generate my "README.md" and project files from that one document.
Managed NOC services:
https://goo.gl/15QA3Z
We provide live technicians to actively watch and troubleshoot problems with network devices and web services during specified times of the day, up to 24x7. (Basically to let you and your employees get some sleep knowing someone's watching things.)
We are launching in a niche that has a need for constant supervision of a large number network devices but are often too small to justify the expense of hiring internally. (WISPs, if you're familiar with that) but we believe are services can be generally useful to a broader customer base.
We are still taking on beta customers at very reduced rates. Hit me up at the link above or at the email in my profile.
It's awesome because youtube is (intentionally) annoying,
plus, it's nice to give back bugfix/feature patches when
someone else (jwz) is kind enough to give their code to
the public.
EDIT: Thanks detaro. Link removed. I didn't know it was an issue, and obviously, couldn't see it.
The second link you posted '/20160127052944/' is bad. It links to an old
version, 1.681, and the current version is 1.711 as of an hour or two
ago. The version number matters.
The url I posted and removed still works fine, so long as
it's not originating from HN (i.e. 'referer' checking). If you do a
quick web search on 'youtubedown' you'll find it.
Thanks for letting me know the latest archive version was already outdated!
If jwz is trying to avoid the HN-effect, then sending people via another route won't completely mitigate the problem.
I went ahead and updated the archive.org link. Providing that means HN users don't need to do yet another search and his site shouldn't get hammered nearly as much.
You know what's even more annoying? Someone with a public website who breaks links in such an overtly antagonistic way. I've seen other people do this by simply having a text message that kindly asks people not to link to them.
Anyway, it seems to be a static website, and it should be able handle HN traffic for a fairly small amount of effort and/or money.
A modern version of Karel the robot with different programming methods (a Scratch-like interface, a function-based approach, or an OOP based approach) with support for either Python or Javascript. A combination of tutorial and documentation for a previous "stable" version can be found at http://reeborg.ca/docs/en (French and Korean versions also available). This is slow on-going work that started first in 2004 with a desktop program (rur-ple) used by many in formal settings to teach programming.
I've just recently launched a bartering website where users can exchange goods and services without using money. Users can create profiles listing out what they have to offer and what they may be looking to get in return, search other users, and leave reviews detailing their experiences with other users.
In todays economy, sometimes it can be difficult obtaining certain necessities in life, and ExchangeTree offers people an alternative platform from the financial system that is so deeply rooted in todays society.
I urge anyone interested to check it out and ask any questions you may have :)
Developing a library to build p2p webapps with that runs in the browser and on nodejs using transport/connector adapters, ecdh/aes encryption, ractivejs templating/prerendering and js-data orm. Not near alpha quality yet. What I like about the project is the potential to easily connect users/systems to each other, without the need of a centralized webrtc sdp message broker and the fun of writing one codebase that runs simultaneously on the 'server' and the browser.See https://github.com/jvanveen/high5 for more info
Thriot is an open source IoT platform.
There are no real usages yet, but since it's open anybody can make use of it.
The main advantage of this platform is that it has configurable and extendable storage system so you can store the configuration, telemetry data and M2M messages where you wish besides the fact that it has been tested on Windows and Linux, as well.
Its a set of 3 plugins ( chrome plugin, atom plugin and Babel plugin) that allow you to jump to the right JS file in your editor directly from chrome. I was thinking how would View Source look if it was implemented in this new world of Front End JS. . This should provide a more seamless experience of going from the Browser to your editor. Would love any feedback on the experience or any enhancement requests.
It's a tool for organizations to fight corruption their community. Our main deterrents are rating/ranking of public officials (think teachers & tax collectors), responsibly controlled crowdsourcing of corruption reports, and campaign pages to raise money and awareness to litigate a case or assist victims.
Currently active in Uganda, talking with organizations in Ukraine, Kenya, Nigeria, and Liberia and with major global anticorruption organizations.
If you're reading this and you know about network security and/or I2P & onion server provisioning, leave a comment, I could use your help.
Online reviews for ecommerce products are the only way that potential customers knows if they should purchase something.
This strategy is one-dimensional and fading; just ask Yelp. People need more than a 3-, 4-, or 5-star gesture before punching in their credit card and feeling good about it.
So I'm working on a new kind of "social proof as a service," currently live and integrated with Shopify. It's called Notify (https://apps.shopify.com/notify).
Notify shows recent orders as they occur on a storefront, compelling future visitors to make a purchase.
Allows newcomers to jump into the best parts of Clojurescript development, and lets those who understand Clojure{script} share their questions and examples.
http://codehappy.info - awesome because it's trying to help people find information about a company that you can't easily get anywhere else so they can code happy.
The tool is built off a set of revenue benchmarks I built up over the past couple of years; this version looks at the expected performance for different market niches and revenue strategies (for ad-supported sites). It guides the audience towards the best options to improve their current results.
Future version of the tool will have additional features to help dial in targets for SAAS and E-commerce businesses.
BTW, I'd like to thank my lazy clients for the inspiration.
One of them decided that product managers shouldn't have to study performance reports and draft an analysis of what was happening in their P&L. So.... here's an automated analyst.
<not that I endorse PM's that can't explain their own P&L>
I have been working on a product called Smartly (https://smart.ly) for a couple of years now. It's an interactive learning platform aimed at teaching in short, mobile-accessible, "bite-sized" chunks. While the platform itself is novel in several aspects, the real value is in the content, which centers around a business / career development curriculum. We've landed on a business model which makes this content entirely free to individual learners, which is pretty awesome, I think! Please feel free to check it out.
Been working on a linearly constrained minimum variance beamformer with decorrelation filtration available any given sample data matrix from acquisition sensors[0] that I'll probably merge into a fork of the OpenEphys project I created to add neurofeedback functionality (only temporal filtering implemented now)[1].
We are looking into a new video storage and streaming service and are looking for feedback. We are creating a cloud service to store all your movies and allow you to stream them from anywhere. There will be both free and paid tiers available depending on how much storage is required.
Its a bit like Plex however you don’t need a server at home and not have to rely on your home upload speed.
Link to concept site: www.streamlyapp.com
We also have a way that you can scan the barcode of your DVD’s and we add it to your account to save upload.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated
A YouTube Drum Machine / Beat Prototyper / VJ Tool
I just noticed that pressing hotkeys (1-9) on a YT video at one point was really responsive, and you could play with them like on a drum machine. I also like how many YT videos look, when played next to each other. Now I'm thinking of a way of how to package that feeling into something less experimental, more consumable.
Precipice allows you to plug in a variety of metrics to collect result and latency information about tasks (http requests, runnables, writes to a socket, etc) that your application executes. You can pick mechanisms of back pressure (rate limiters, semaphores, circuit breakers, etc) that can pause execution depending on what your metrics indicate is going on.
There are no assumed threading or execution models.
I plugged this before, but https://commencepayments.com, which basically acts as a server for a Stripe integration which is pretty neat for people who don't have access to their server-side code. Total Processed volume has exploded over the last couple months (Jan did 4x Dec, and Feb did 2x Jan, with March looking on track to beat Feb).
So with the new growth, looking to add a bunch of cool new features, like iOS / Android library, ACH support, and once Braintree opens the necessary API, Braintree support.
My first (iOS, very simple) game. Got to learn Swift and some basic game dev principles - was fun (save for encountering this issue: http://stackoverflow.com/q/24223572/548170). Thanks for trying and please hit me with any feedback if you got it.
We've been hacking on hitting the sweet spot between the simplicity of Trello and the power of JIRA.
It integrates deeply with github & bitbucket, as well as slack/hipchat/irc, so you don’t have to spend a ton of time keeping the data in Cadence relevant or accurate. This bottom-up approach allows us to help map your development process and how work gets done on your team.
Sorry for the sparse page, we're slowly opening beta access to interested teams.
I am working on GitMonitor which is a tool for developers to watch over their GitHub repositories, and setup custom rules. Like "No merging pull requests without an LGTM" or "No force-pushing to any of these branches: "
It has worked well in my experience when junior and even mid-level developers join a team, helping expose them not only to git best practices, but to the custom rules of their development team as well.
I'm working on a new social media app called With. It's about who you're with. You physically tap phones with the people around you to tell the world you're with them. On your profile page it shows everyone you've met... so let's say you tap phones with Jay-Z, everyone will know you're a pretty big deal because you've met Jay-Z!! Check it out. http://apple.co/1SdYMhV
Nearley is fast, expressive, convenient, streamable, battle-tested, bootstrapped(!), has a "standard library", and has an error handling API. You specify grammars in BNF and compile it to a JS (node/browser-compatible) file.
Nearley also has fun tools like "output json.org-style railroad diagrams from my parser" and "use this parser as a fuzzer that creates strings that match the syntax".
We're making high-end fixed wing surveying drones with custom autopilot, the best RTK GPS that money can buy, an excellent camera (that we modify) and an excellent flight planning software. We're making the whole package in-house to keep the whole toolchain under our control, up until Agisoft Photoscan which we heavily script. Surveying engineers seem to love the system, and rely on it working perfectly every day!
OneModel - "atomic knowledge", or a new way to manage knowledge by looking at it differently. The vision subsumes essentially all KM & notetaking etc products, and the current iteration is a text-mode bare AGPL3 app that I use every day (no mobile support yet, other features still in the pipeline...).
Hopefully explained at the site "About" link and its links (if not let me know!): http://onemodel.org
Very interesting tool. Are the content pieces usually just a link back to someone else's trending piece? Is there a way for me to understand my own content pieces?
It's a free tool for creating AWS architecture diagrams in an isometric style. You can snap together AWS services as if they were LEGO blocks. The latest development is that you can now scan an actual live environment and import your real resources.
Right now (when not reading HN...) I'm working on making the grid infinite, adding zoom & pan, so it becomes usable for really large architectures. It's a lot of fun.
That's all kind of awesome - I'd pay some good money for a more generic version of the tool allowing me to draw out infrastructure for my clients that self host.
Thanks! There's generic blocks and icons in different colors and sizes available too, and more networking gear coming up, but right now I'm still trying to stay focused on AWS. With the massive service catalog AWS has, I feel something like this is required to make sense of it.
- built this completely from scratch
- gives you the right amount of text to read about a news article
- custom algorithm to pick the best news phrases
- iOS & Android
Latest News in Short.
All the news in short bits
Updated frequently
Artificially Intelligent News Engine picks only the important phrases
8 CATEGORIES
- TOP - ENTERTAINMENT - SPORTS - TECHNOLOGY -
- BUSINESS - POLITICS - LIFESTYLE - SCIENCE -
World News / Choose your country. - Australia - India - USA - UK
I build a digital signage platform based on the Raspberry PI. It started as an open source "for fun" project (https://github.com/dividuum/info-beamer) but has now evolved into the most powerful software to build animated, hardware accelerated visualizations on the PI. As using the software on its own can be complicated (if you're not a programmer) I built a complete SaaS around it (https://info-beamer.com/hosted) which allows you to get your first screen running in a few minutes without any knowledge of Lua, Linux or even the PI. The software running on the PI is written in C/Lua and uses OpenGL/OMX to do its hardware acceleration. The hosted service is built using Python and includes a complete readonly and custom built Linux distribution that runs on the PI. On top of that it's possible to control the hosted service using the API so you can build your own digital signage around the technology. It's so much fun developing on all different parts of the product that I'll never get bored.
My current side project is Vcardme. It's a service for hosting your contact information at a URL where it can be accessed or saved. Idea being you should put your Vcardme URL in your email sig.
For me, what really makes it awesome, is the iOS app that allows you to save Vcardme links to your iOS phone book and also subscribes you to updates for the contacts you saved. So your iOS Contacts would stay up to date, automagically.
An iOS framework where UI is designed in Interface Builder and all functionality is defined in blocks that are automatically run asynchronously on a background thread.
This allows developers to avoid creating massive view controllers by never creating any view controllers at all.
Still a WIP and TableViewControllers and most of the view controller lifecycle events are not yet supported.
Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) is a private journal that can be done all through email. It emails you daily, you reply. As you build up entries it will start sending you past entries in the daily emails.
Some of the better use cases include:
* Keeping a developer journal (I see a few others here are working on something along those lines as well)
* New parenting journal
* Daily journaling
A database that you can use as a JSON document store or a graph database - or even both data models combined - within a single query.
Why it's awesome?
I can use one technology for so many different use cases, I'm not limited to one data model and can use a single query language that supports graph traversals and document JOINS.
It's designed to support modern microservice architectures and orchestration - e.g. via Mesosphere DCOS.
A very simple, quick movie rating app. Functional but not quite production ready.
Basically I wanted a list of every movie I've ever watched along with a quick star rating, and it was taking too long to go through the other sites or collect in a spreadsheet. I wanted something that I could browse through and very quickly say whether I've watched it.
TMk is a replacement for UNIX `make` powered by Jim Tcl. It's awesome because it's very portable (written in ANSI C) and provides all the features you expect from `make` and then some: because it's backed by a fully-featured, general-purpose programming language, you can customize your build with procedures (functions, but in Tcl they can be made to behave much like Lisp macros), loops, conditionals, etc. You can even write a loop that generates new rules at (build script) runtime. It also has support for packages, where commonly-used procedures can be collected (for example, we have plans to provide a package to make writing TMakefiles for C projects more convenient, etc.). TMk was originally called TMake, but when we googled that we found at least two other projects already called "TMake", thus we renamed it "TMk", but it's still pronounced the same. As an added bonus, it's got some pretty good documentation, if I do say so myself.
Tiny7 is a fork of TinyScheme that I'm updating to support the R7RS-small Scheme standard. It's implemented as a library that can be embedded into applications to provide Scheme as a scripting/extension/glue/configuration/... language, but it also comes with an (optional) REPL. It's awesome because it's tiny! The REPL weighs in at under 150KB when compiled with debugging information, and uses about 10KB of RAM on startup. The downside to being so tiny is that the speed situation isn't great (it's been bearable for my usage so far, but it won't be suitable for everything). However, I have plans to implement a bytecode compiler, which should speed it up a bit. It has virtually no documentation at the moment (outside of the outdated TinyScheme documentation), but I'm working on a comprehensive manual.
I've got plans for a few more projects, like a fork of dwm that uses Tiny7 for configuration, but I haven't started working on them in earnest yet.
There are other things I'm working on, too, but they're classified for the time being ;)
http://www.dailyc.io
An RSS feed aggregator, that parses the articles and brings saves the 'meat' of it. Caches 20ish articles at a time, so you can flip through them, once loaded, even if there isn't service (on mobile). Also includes weather and train status (currently NYC,Chicago, Washington DC Supported).
Still working on formatting/parsing more feeds, but works for many.
Working on Market.Space (https://market.space): a competitive monitoring tool. We gather data from a lot of sources (news, social, youtube, apps, etc) and give high-level views of companies and their competition.
I spend nights/weekends working on Turtl (https://turtl.it) , an encrypted note-taking app (Evernote alternative).
An online writing tool aimed at authors who self-publish. It's awesome because of the database back which means you can store people / places / anything really and insert them into your document (think variable replacement / an IDE for writers). The one-click EPUB generation is also pretty sweet.
Working on a way to buy a new car online and skip all the dealership salespeople, haggling, upselling, etc.
You can build your car online (colors & options) and set your price, and your customization gets distributed to all of our dealerships (LA only currently) and see who accepts it. Cuts down on the dealer sales funnel as well so it's a win-win on both sides!
I am working on the "Fiera - Arouser for Her" product : http://fiera.com . It is awesome because it's an elegant product to enhance/jump-start arousal for women -- whether through stimulation or as a conversation starter between couples.
It has some very cool technology under the hood which, if we've done our job right, the user will never have to think about. :)
About a year ago, I finished my second novel, Oversight, about advertising, virtual reality, and terrorism. It got some recognition recently from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. It's awesome, if you accept a fairly flexible definition of the term. Mostly, it has affirmed that promoting books is as difficult as promoting apps.
I created http://www.get3w.com with golang and js, and just put it online couple days ago.
Get3W is Github for websites, combines site editor and web hosting. the vision is to build a creative community for discovering, sharing, and creating inspiring website.
The most awesome part for me was static page editor. Get3W can edit static page(html, css, js) WYSIWYG.
I work for a screen printing and embroidery company and the software to run the business is absolutely horrible and bad business model, but the alternatives aren't that great. We're building it for ourselves, and are going to open it up to other companies and offer a modern efficient approach to manage your whole business.
The idea is to bring back strong app/bundles namespacing for larger projects, while taking care of many of the boilerplate decisions for you. Everything is based on classes so thought it would be a smaller stepping stone for someone coming from PHP or C#
We're building a search engine for satellite parts. Sourcing satellite parts that meet your design requirements is really painful and leads to wasted man-hours and procurement errors. With the advent of the small-satellite industry and companies like Planet Labs, Spire, Skybox Imaging etc., there's an explosion of activity in the supplier market across the world.
We're aiming to be THE place to get accurate, up-to-date information about the state of the market. We're in the process of acquiring data by on-boarding suppliers. We strongly believe that the data wants to be free, so we're going to be offering an API so the data can be embedded in engineering, procurement and market analysis tools.
We are in the process of positioning ourselves within the exciting push to open-source the space industry. Given our expertise, we're focussed on building open-source spacecraft design tools, and satsearch is a vital asset for that. If you're interested in getting involved in building FOSS for the space industry, drop me an email.
https://gritt.io - anonymous job search. Focusing on IT field at the moment.
As developers ourself we want to change the way we get better jobs in IT: eliminating unimportant details such as age, gender, skin color, etc and only focusing on what is really important and what makes one a professional.
I'm working on PyWE, which is a set of batch scripts that help install and switch between multiple pythons, as well as manage virtual environments. It's inspired by pyenv, but it works in Windows. It's awesome because it's a heck of a lot easier than doing all this by hand
I'm working on an extensible notes platform for the web. Its called Saola: https://saola.in.
There are several platforms that you can store notes/text etc in. Saola differs from them in the fact that it provides you a scriptable environment also. You can write JavaScript scripts to create/update/delete notes/text.
It is awesome because it is rapidly becoming almost usable for simply tracking daily activities (think "Don't Break the Chain!") and will probably add a dash of microblogging soon. Since it is a one man spare-time project I am really glad about all the advice/feedback I can get.
I like this. I've thought about something similar that was more targeted at the high end market.
A woman comes in to your boutique clothing store and drops $10k in your store. In the process your sales associate working with her learns she likes opera and wine. You tell [SERVICE] and they source and deliver a personalized gift according to their tastes on your behalf to show appreciation for their business.
I like where you started. It might be interesting to "hire" a few expert gift givers that can find awesome gifts given a persons likes and a budget to get outside the flowers and chocolate options.
Thanks! Yes, I'm working with a few luxury brands as it's much easier to showcase the value of a $20-50 gift in comparison to a customer buying a $xK item
http://www.caption.me/ - an ongoing caption competition that pulls three photos from Flickr per day and ranks amusing captions. Featuring real-time collaborative mind-mapping of caption ideas (D3/Faye) and an occasional cash prize funded from advertising revenue originating from the SeedingUp marketplace
Got fed up with Dropbox creating conflicted copies of my keepass database, and decided there must be a better way. I expect the base KV store will be easy to use for other apps in the future as well.
I'm working on an online learning platform I'm calling Academiac. Teachers with some expertise can write and publish text-based courses which user then pay to enroll in.
Very similar to Udemy but really focused on text-based courses instead of videos. The goal is to create a high-quality alternative to regular ad-supported courses and tutorials
Not available yet but will be launching to course teachers soon!
CourseBuffet - http://www.coursebuffet.com Trying to have best search results of any aggregator of free MOOCs and we are only one to replicate bachelor's degree with our CourseBuffet Degree Paths. Take courses from different universities and providers but still have a focused learning path.
Online CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) program for helping people with stress / depression / anxiety. We've built these modules (videos, exercises, etc) & a community for everyone to interact and find ways to improve their mental health. Feel free to check it out.
Every day the country spends $55 million on sepsis and Sagitta is a tablet-based, bedside sepsis-screening app for acute care hospitals that aims to drastically reduce this problem!
The hardware is a device connected to your phone via the audio jack that can do different types of blood tests and plugs into a system that helps patients and health care providers improve health outcomes.
Find shoppable outfit ideas and street style inspiration to help you get dressed and out the door! Whether dressing for a wedding or a job interview – To Wear With has outfit ideas you can actually shop!
It's amorphous; just anything my roommate and I find useful for computers to automate. Latest feature is a way to share pictures and stories by email (with a way to unsubscribe).
It is an open source general-purpose feed reader (RSS/Atom). It attempts to be as fast and intuitive as possible, hiding complexity from the user as much as possible.
Just a little bit of feedback. I wanted to tried the demo version, but did not get that far and bounced out of feedbunch.
When I clicked on the "try a free demo" button, I would have expected to try it out immediately. Instead, I had to remember the login credentials for demo user and to enter it manually in the login screen. Would have loved to see a one click and stay using the demo version.
It's awesome because I get to work on fun technologies (MEAN stack), learn how to scale Node.js, and interact with a great community. Also, I have paying customers which makes it even better :)
redditq is an image browser for reddit. It features a minimal user interface and is designed to be controlled via keyboard shortcuts. This project was inspired by redditp[1], but I wanted to add support for image galleries and Flickr photo pages and experiment with a minimal UI. From a technical standpoint, I wanted practice using CommonJS modules for structuring my JavaScript, as well as using webpack for bundling static assets (including JS modules).
BookStorm: an awesome way to explore the world of books.
Why it's awesome: we're helping to maximize intellectual freedom in a world dominated by "smart" algorithms and "social" recommendations with old-fashioned serendipity.
I'd personally much rather get recommendation of books based on what people similar to me swiped.. This is how I discover new musics on streaming site (By searching for new playlists containing songs that I like). But I'm sure you know that already so what's the story behind the no "smart / social"? Is it because you feel those are too easily abused by marketers? Or that some books are just never suggested since they aren't yet recommended by friends?
Also, I see that you can rate books.. does that affect the algorithm? I.e. am I going to see lots of 5 star books or will it be random? E.g. I'll get to see lots of 1-3 star rated books. Again, I'd much rather have the rating of one person I trust than hundreds of people I don't know. For instance, SICP has a pretty amazing review by PG and a crap ton of 1 star reviews by students. I'd take the pg suggestion any day.
The recommendations are implicit...i.e., the book will only be in the app because someone felt strongly about it.
We're leaving out 'smart' because we feel that smart people are smart enough to decide for themselves what they should explore, and we're leaving out 'social' because there's already many solutions out there to find out what your friends are reading.
Personally, there are a LOT of books out there I a) wouldn't otherwise consider reading or b) never even know about unless someone placed it front of my face and told me why it was worth reading. That's the purpose of this app.
It's not meant to be the only place for one to discover books...it's the place you go to get lost. Sometimes you want that, and sometimes you don't.
Togethr.TV : https://togethr.tv
With our website, you can watch videos in real time with your friends. Audio chat is also supported. It is awesome because it makes it very easy to show specific part of a video to anyone! :)
I created a smartphone, smartwatch, web app that let's you tag photos with a voice command for easy retrieval later. I just published the iPhone / Apple Watch app and am looking for some early adopters.
Www.Writedown.co aims to be the immutable opinion archive. I hope it changes the way people express and lead to a better political system.
Anyone interested in participating can email me
Think of it as the yelp of the stock market, we get people to add projections on where a stock is headed and calculate a five-point star rating and a consensus target price.
PositiveEV - Using the latest and greatest in analytics, machine learning, and game simulation techniques to predict sports teams' performance. Hard work with big payoffs, reach out to me if you are interested and think you have something to contribute.
We're building merchant and consumer tools for using digital gift certificates on the bitcoin blockchain. Our first use case is to enhance crowdfunding by letting projects sell redeemable gift certificates to backers that can be traded or sold before the product exists.
When you crowdfund Oculus Rift, you get a secure OCULUSRIFT token instead of just a promise. If you change your mind you can sell it to someone else who wants it even before the product releases. Or you can buy 10 at the pre-order price and sell 9 at 80% of the retail price right before the product launches.
http://tinyvillages.org is a sustainable development concept that integrates a lot of ideas like tiny houses, urban farming, and net-zero construction.
Wizely: Social Wisdom App. I'd share a URL (wizely.net), but that's just a landing page. The app is still in development. It's essentially a marriage of quora, twitter, and a decision-tree format.
The really cool stuff can't be showed or discussed here unfortunately (so called 'black projects'). But I admit many of the projects posted here do seem quite interesting.
Hi! I'm wondering how Enchat is different from other open source projects that wrapped messenger.com into a Mac app with electron. What features does it have that these free and open source projects don't have?
Lots of desktop integration features! Custom chat notification bubbles, screenshot taking, file downloads and uploads, resizable font, various keyboard shortcuts, menu bar icon, and more.
It depends. A lot of farmers/landowners don't want random folks on their property but they'd love to have a little extra money. Just so long as the guest review system I'd say go for it.
Simple file sharing between devices that don't have to be in the same network. Awesome because it (should :o) work on pretty much any device with a somewhat recent browser.
Channels [ http://www.channelsapp.co ] is a simple app that lets you create posts about any topic (something for sale, event, trip, something funny, rant, etc) which is then automatically geo-tagged with your location or any location you choose on the map. Once it is created, users can scroll around the map and/or perform tag & category based search to find channels they're interested in, subscribe to that channel, and immediately group chat with you and all other subscribed users.
How is Channels different?
Most social apps require email, usernames, passwords and sometimes other information. This app is meant to be as anonymous as possible, so you only need to set an username, if and only if you wish to chat with others or subscribe. Channels was created to be simple and anonymous so there are no ads or hidden ways to make money; just 3 screens that you can swipe between.
Rather than stick with the norm of comment based communication like other social platforms, in this app each channel is actually a conversation. Just as if this was a messaging app, you can go between channels to chat with different people from all over the world anonymously about anything.
Main Features:
- Chat: Each channel has a group chat embedded in the channel, as a pull up view once inside a channel. For now the chats are only text based, but will improve to add other media support as we move forward. The chats are color coded to differentiate you as a user, the creator of the channel, and all other users.
- Create a channel anywhere: You can create a channel through the floating button, but can also go to any location on the map, hold the screen to create a marker, tap the marker and its pop up message to create a channel at that particular location. This way you can start conversations for places you are at and plan to go.
- Explore: The third screen of the app is our Explore section which allows users to explore channels by popularity. You can filter results to "Everything" which explores all channels, "Map Area" which explores whatever area is visible on the map screen, or by "My Location" which explores channels around you.
- Location search: From the Map view (second screen), you can search for a particular location, to then be taken to that location to perform a channel search. This option allows you to go to any particular area in the world, and search for or explore channels in that particular area at any time. Use this to plan talk to people about whats there is to do in an area you're about to visit or to talk about somewhere you visited already for instance.
- Navigate: For channels that show their exact location, there is also a navigate button which takes you to Google Maps and shows navigation options for that location. This is ONLY for channels that have chosen to show their exact location, and this can be changed at any time.
Channels is free and will always be free!
About us:
We've created Channels completely on our own, between just two guys who've never published apps previously but wanted to make something of value. We want this app to be something you as users would want to use, so we accept any and all feedback and incorporate it as quickly as possible. Feel free to contact us with any suggestions or if you like it feel free to write-up a review and publish it on your website - we highly appreciate it!
How are you defining user? Someone that clicks on a link in a Google search because you have SEO juice? Or is there some kind of deeper relationship you have with these users.
I'm working on UbNb (www.ubnb.com) which is "AirBNB for Uber" or "Uber for AirBNB" (not sure which is which).
Elevator pitch: UBNB.com lets you rent someone else's car to stay in for the night.
Optionally you can request food service and in this case the concept also ties in delivery hero in which the car you rent is being used for pizza delivery at the same time.
The company tag line is "UBNB, sleep well, travel well, eat well."
that's actually brilliant - possible way to stay somewhere cheap, but be safe and protected from the weather! could also help with the homeless problem
This one not so recent although I do plan on revisiting. Essentially it is a motivational tool by visually representing the number of days you have left to live with dots. A morbid motivational tool. I use it quite a lot personally, and the few number of dots never seizes to amaze me.
Here's a demo video (fairly old, have to still update with the latest look): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GfKBvs53Ss
Say you have a picture on a blog post showing a car engine, explaining how to fix something inside of it. You could highlight/link all the individual parts in that car to where your users can buy them on O'Reilly Auto Parts, and make a commission each time they make a purchase (affiliate marketing). I think this type of advertisement is 1) beneficial for users for its informative nature, 2) leads to bloggers being able to focus on content instead of worming offputting advertising into their blogs (such as banner ads), and 3) could lead to a more interactive internet where things in any image can be purchased or even just linked to for informative purposes[1].
[1] A video showing how my product could link to wikipedia items: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwmbBa3TPgg
Edit: I appreciate the support votes! Feel free to ask any questions you have. There's also a support forum at https://www.reddit.com/r/pleenq/ if you want to subscribe and follow the progress along as we grow.