* It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new song, you generally listen to a recording of it, and it's a pain to cross-reference the recording with the sheet music/tab.
* It's one of the most advanced HTML5 apps on the web. Almost everything is done in <canvas>, and it has dozens of UI details (http://www.soundslice.com/help/). I did a tech talk about the various JavaScript/HTML5 stuff if you're interested: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice
One of the things I enjoy about traditional tabs, though, is that I can sit down and review them at my own pace. In your demo, I didn't see a way to view the entire tab at once. Also with ASCII tabs, I can repeat a section over and over at the speed I want.
I've played with Rocksmith, which is a video game similar to Soundslice, and it has the same drawbacks for me. It's really, really hard to play a song when you're seeing the tabs for the first time as you're performing it.
Is there a way in Soundslice to do an A-B repeat of a section, or view the entirety of the tab at once?
Totally understand. We're pretty close to launching a "stacked" display that shows the tab in rows, with vertical scrolling instead of horizontal scrolling. I suspect this will address that for you nicely.
To answer your questions: you can repeat/loop stuff by dragging on the timeline (or clicking annotations). You can view the whole tab by using the zoom UI in the lower left corner.
Dude, I love you! I started playing guitar again after a 10 year break and I'm learning new songs via youtube mainly nowadays. Just the other day I was thinking about how cool it would be if there was an app available just like yours. That slow-mo thing is a killer feature for sure, I always wanted that.
You may want to check these guys called Cifra Club over youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLZUuCyyQe0 , they pretty much are doing the best of whats possible to do on youtube in terms of animated tabs.
This is really cool. I could see another application for it - Teachers delivering music lessons to students. As a drum teacher this would be a perfect platform for me to deliver my lessons, assuming you could support drum music (but there's probably a market for this among guitar tutors). I'm imagining a billing system where students pay to subscribe to my lessons and you guys take a slice of the pie.
Thanks. We're definitely interested in making something for music teachers. I teach gypsy-jazz guitar at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and I've used Soundslice with my students a teeny bit but so much more is possible.
Could you and I connect via email so that I can get more thoughts? Contact info in my profile.
This is amazing. Awesome work. How much trouble have you ran into licensing / obtaining tabs for popular copyrighted songs? I think a legitimate tab database itself would be incredibly valuable and could power awesome services like this.
I look forward to hearing more about this project, I think this is absolutely great.
We sell tabs as part of our Pitch Perfect program (http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/), and for that we deal directly with the artist to clear copyrights.
The YouTube (free) part of the site is meant to be a loss leader / tech demo for Pitch Perfect and our technology licensing. We haven't run into any licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, as I don't believe in putting ads on the site, and I'd like to keep a free version and a pay-for version.
Ethically speaking, I don't care if a database has "legit" tabs or not. (I downloaded 1000's of tabs in a zip a lot of years ago, that was definitely helpful as far as learning songs goes.) It's one thing if a it is a song that a band has actually recorded themselves, but an "illegitimate" tab is often the labor of the listeners. You could say that it is plagiarism, but I'd argue that it isn't as long as it doesn't pretend to be something that it is not ("my new cool song!"). It seems comparable to transcribing a video presentation (the video presentation might be copy righted).
Artists don't owe it to give out tabs of their songs, but listeners don't owe it to artists to not lay out what it was that they heard.
Did you think about adding the feature of producing a combined video with the original video plus the overlaid tabs? That'd be nice so that people that transcribe can post back to YouTube.
I guess a lot of people will just search in YouTube and it'd be nice if those searchers could discover the content that the people at Soundslice are creating.
Thanks! A few people have suggested that idea -- creating a new YouTube video with the tabs overlaid -- but it's a low priority for us, given everything else we want to do.
I appreciate that your app is web-based, personally. And to have done it all in canvas is crazy impressive-- especially considering the slickness of the interface. Kudos!
love it, im a huge music fan but i've barely started doing web development and making something related to music would've been one of those projects i wanted to try. along with these interactive guitar tabs, i wish there was just some way i could just grab guitar tabs from ANY song i liked...ill keep dreamin.
The vast majority of guitarists still use those ASCII tabs, not Guitar Pro -- but, fair point!
The biggest problem with Guitar Pro is that the playback is synthetic/MIDI. Our philosophy is that learning from a real recording is the best (only?) way to catch subtleties of music like phrasing, timing and feel.
I've been using Guitar Pro for most the time that I've been playing guitar and bass, and the fact that the playback is Midi has not been much of an issue (and I wasn't sold on Guitar Pro 5 "real sound engine" or whatever it was called). Though I've been playing bass which has less subtleties in my main genre (rock/metal). Even with guitar the heavy lifting for me is to learn what fingers goes where on the fretboard. After that, I can listen to the actual song and polish whatever nuances I feel that I need, without referring to the tab (since I know where the fingers goes on the fretboard at this point).
I chose tabs to start because (1) it's easier to implement than standard notation, (2) most guitarists use tab instead of notation, and (3) classic tab really needs to be brought into the 21st century.
With that said, I'm working on a standard notation version now, and it's going to be amazing. It's a surprisingly tricky technical challenge to render sheet music in the browser -- there are centuries' worth of special cases!
Yes, definitely looked into Lilypond. It produces beautiful sheet music, but I can't use it because (1) it's GPL and I intend to license the technology, (2) I'm generating the notation client-side (for responsive design) and (3) I need the ability to highlight certain notes in real time to show the user which notes are being played.
It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118 mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS, collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod. They sell for $55k.
That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat.
Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreasonable to think that this plane could make it to the market for under $200,000, and its hourly operational costs when you factor in engine overhaul will be around $50. Ours is less than $15.
The frustrating thing however is that since this plane is still in early development stages, it will be several years at least until it they are ever able to deliver an aircraft. The nature of the industry is that everything takes a tremendous amount of time. We were able to avoid this for the most part by using an airframe design that was created in the Czech Republic a few years ago, but before this our plane took 7 years to develop. Even given this huge head start, we've been working almost 2 years on SkyCraft and are still a few months from being able to deliver a plane. Flight testing, certification, and setting up production are all enormous tasks, and unlike a lot of technology startups, you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death.
There are a lot of things keeping flying very expensive, but I laugh when I hear people in the industry talking about how General Aviation is dying. The fact that the GA industry even exists right now when it is so absurdly expensive is a testament to the fact that people will do pretty much whatever it takes to fly. We're one of the few companies right now actively pursuing the goal of making a safe, high quality airplane affordable for a middle-income person, and when this goal is achieved, General Aviation will explode.
Thanks for the response! Yeah, after doing more research, I realized that the Synergy plane would guzzle way more gas than your plane. However, I think it's a dual seater vs. the Sky Craft plane. I would need a dual seater to haul me and my wife across the country.
It looks like they're actually talking about making it a 5 or 6 seater. There is a strong direct relationship between maximum weight of a plane and the cost/fuel consumption of the engine required to power that plane. A plane as affordable as ours is only feasible right now as a single seater, but hopefully one day with enough volume we can get a 2-seater out in the same price range.
you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death.
Do you think the increasing popularity of whole-aircraft parachute systems (which I note is an option on the SD-1) will improve the situation? It's my impression the Cirrus gets away with being hard to recover from a spin by making parachute deployment the standard recovery procedure.
I think the whole parachute system affords the pilots, and in my case the family, a better assurance of safety. My fiancé has a fear of flying and the parachute does help qualm those fears a bit.
Side note, have you ever tried to put a cirrus into a spin? It's difficult, iv'e tried. I think that has more to do with Cirrus passing the regulation than anything else.
The only thing I've flown is a hang glider, but I have some interest in aviation and I read a bit about the things I might be able to afford some day. I find these especially appealing: http://velocityaircraft.com
I've read that the Cirrus is designed to resist spins by essentially having the outer third or so of the wings, where the ailerons are fly at a lower angle of attack. I've also read a couple reports online by pilots claiming they didn't have much trouble getting a Cirrus to spin intentionally. In online discussions about the Cirrus, I saw it claimed that very few pilots successfully recover from accidental spins, so designing an aircraft to resist spins and including instructions to use the parachute strikes me as very reasonable.
Great question! I'll try and go over all the costs for you here:
Annual Inspection: ~$400
Insurance: $17/mo. for just liability, $130/mo. for full coverage.
Hangar Fees: $0-$500/mo. (varies greatly on location. Our plane has removable wings and can be stored in a trailer, and is small enough where you can rent 1/2 or 1/4 of a hangar)
General Maintenance: ~$50/mo. There are maintenance procedures at 25 hours, 50 hours, 75 hours, etc. that are pretty simple on our plane and all called out in the maintenance manual. At 500 hours the engine needs a top-end overhaul, which we do for free, and the 1,000 hour complete overhaul is factored into the hourly operational cost.
By aviation standards these are pretty low costs. In comparison, a bigger plane can have a $1000+ annual inspection, and an older plane can easily cost hundreds a month in maintenance (this is the big drawback to buying used, which is a popular way of getting a plane at an affordable price). It's hard to give a confident number for monthly costs with price variables such as insurance and hangar fees, but these are all things pilots need to think about and plan for.
One of the coolest and most unexpected things I've seen on HN! Excited to see what you guys do in the future - a two seater at a similar price-point would be real game changer.
Unreal. I never thought that I'd have enough "fun money" in my life lying around to actually be able to buy a plane in my lifetime but I apparently do now. You are tapping into a pretty healthy market at this price point I think.
Very cool! I can't believe how cheap that is. And being able to store it in a trailer is a big deal.
Also - you have a solid, usable website, but I think it could use a little visual improvement. If y'all are ever considering a redesign, give me a shout. I build WordPress sites in my spare time and work with a couple of good, affordable designers.
In India Tata developed a car called Nano for only $2000 (the prize of a motobike) that failed to meed expectations. Since you seem to be on the same path there are some tips that you could consider from the consumer perspective which caused people not buying. Why failed?. Though it is cheap should have not looked cheap. The effort on engineering made Nano am affordable $2000 car but less efforts on design and finishing made it fail. My suggestion, put your eyes on design and make it look nice and modern before flying. Congratulations!.
Damn. I really wish you had this for sale already. I've seen too many awesome things like this "a few months from market" for half a dozen years until they quietly disappeared.
You're in "shut up and take my money" territory here. I'm a GA pilot who rents at the moment. 55k? That's less than my freakin car.
I won't let you down! We are very much out of the concept phase and into production mode. Our factory is currently set up to be able to produce 50 aircraft in 2014. The waiting game right now is with Certification with the FAA, which will not be a problem for us since our plane meets all Light Sport standards - it will just take a few months because the FAA is slow.
Nice. The 2-stroke engine puts me off a little bit, although I guess you won't do yourself much damage at 40mph if you have a shoulder harness (I assume that's CAS rather than IAS).
I'm building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It's fully encrypted. Take a look at http://www.getaether.net
It's cool because:
* It's anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin.
* It's encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suite using 2048bit RSA keys. The connections most likely cannot be eavesdropped.
* It gives people an unfiltered, unmodified feed of information directly from the sources, with no intervention or censorship.
* It's unmoderated, so there is nobody that's deciding what you should and should not see. You can block people, however. Every client has a threshold of blocks for each node after which it stops showing that node to the user.
* Zero infrastructure.
This is a tool that can be used to either experience / exercise full free speech here in the west, or can be used for more essential two-way mass communication purposes where other venues are blocked, banned or self-censoring.
The thing that you're working on falls within the area of 'truly relevant and important [to our times, etc.] software', IMO. Very nice and interesting indeed.
How transport-agnostic is the system aiming to be? Could it be used in combination with Tor/I2P/etc. (as an underlying transport/anonymization mechanism)? (cf. http://syndie.de/)
Adversary model is pretty simple: If you have a computer that's not compromised (your keys are not copied, there is no keylogger), you should be anonymous at the point you post. A global passive adversary would be able to pinpoint the origin of posts if they had access to the wire-level data if posts were sent in cleartext, but all the connections are encrypted with TLS, so that's impossible. With no physical access, Aether should be pretty much unbreakable (I hope I won't have to eat this later) barring external vectors (keyloggers, rootkits etc).
If they have access to your computer, there are two possibilities, depending on your settings. If you have left locally flagging own posts as such enabled (the default setting), it will identify the posts you have created. But if you explicitly disabled that option, even that does not incriminate you: your node is just another node that might have been touched by that post.
The reason I have that 'own post' flag is that it is the only way I can show or notify the user about the replies he / she receives. This is kind of an important ability, otherwise I wouldn't have even given the option to flag. It's a tradeoff between user experience and security: I am trying to protect proper citizens from eavesdropping, but I'm not interested in protecting criminals in case of computer seizure. The only reason I have protections against that kind of threat also is the possibility of people in less fortunate countries (where bar for seizure is low) getting their computers seized because of their exercise of free speech.
For the transport: so long as you have an IP address that the remote node can contact you back, it will work. It does not matter if it's Tor, I2P or whatever. Granted, I did not try actually doing this yet, but there is no reason it should not work.
Adversary model makes sense. I think security/privacy folk like reading up on them for a given project they might be curious about, perhaps consider putting this on the site?
> A global passive adversary would be able to pinpoint the origin of posts if they had access to the wire-level data if posts were sent in cleartext, but all the connections are encrypted with TLS, so that's impossible.
How about timing correlation attacks, etc.? (Basically, all the attack vectors Tor people should be afraid of?) Do the posts have timestamps attached to them? If yes, wouldn't a GPA (or, for that matter, a local ISP) be able to correlate certain node activity with posts?
> If you have left locally flagging own posts as such enabled (the default setting), it will identify the posts you have created. But if you explicitly disabled that option, even that does not incriminate you: your node is just another node that might have been touched by that post.
This seems like a very nice feature / piece of design, cool.
> The reason I have that 'own post' flag is that it is the only way I can show or notify the user about the replies he / she receives.
Have you considered abstracting this to 'subscribe to this post/thread and be notified of any replies' functionality? (anyone could subscribe to posts, then (presumably with read access / however it works.))
> The only reason I have protections against that kind of threat also is the possibility of people in less fortunate countries (where bar for seizure is low) getting their computers seized because of their exercise of free speech.
As far as I'm aware, there are indeed instances when people get their equipment seized, and upon detection of sensitive (to the regime/power/$thing) data, bad things may happen. That's why Tor is very careful about what it writes to disk, etc.
Overall, thanks for your work, I'll try and follow the news and maybe take a look at the code. Good luck!
> Adversary model makes sense. I think security/privacy folk like reading up on them for a given project they might be curious about, perhaps consider putting this on the site?
I probably should put this out, yes. I'm the only person to have ever worked on Aether, I'm the architect, the builder, the designer and the coder (lately trying to be also the cheerleader, too) so I have a long list of stuff to do at all times! Currently I'm working on getting Windows version to work (it's working, I just need to make it work without asking administrator privileges), then I need to have some stability improvements on synchronization process—there are some subtle bugs and sync process sometimes gets stuck at indeterminate intervals, so I absolutely have no idea what's going on. I need to test for this. The app recovers from such errors, but it shouldn't happen in the first place. I'll eventually come up to start writing blog posts.
> Have you considered abstracting this to 'subscribe to this post/thread and be notified of any replies' functionality? (anyone could subscribe to posts, then (presumably with read access / however it works.))
This might be a little bit too much for large threads, but it might be a good surrogate for missing reply notification functionality.
Thanks for the encouragement, I would love to hear what you think after you used it!
I was thinking about doing something similar. One of the things I wanted to incorporate was an reputation ability (beyond just blocking). It would be similar to a referral engine in Netflix or Amazon.
So, I'm user A. I mark user B as a high-value poster. User B marks user C as a high-value poster. When I run across a post by user C, I see they have a good reputation. If many people I ranked as high-value, also ranked user C as high-value, then I see user C as having a very high reputation. The same, in reverse, for low-value posters.
This is cool, but you're making assumptions about information that is outside of your immediate connections. This could work in a network where one could trust that all the information one receives from immediate connections about others is true, but that is not the case. In your case, user B could mark everybody as a high value poster, and it be successful in diverting your attention. This causes problems even in the core stack, I cannot believe what a node B will say about at what IP address node C is. A malicious node B could overwrite everybody's node information to one single IP address to create a massive DDoS.
So the solution I found is that there are separate degrees of trust for derived and produced information. If you receive something over the network about a third party, that's derived information, which might not essentially be true. But if you have connected to that node personally, that's produced information, and no derived information can overwrite that.
You're right, user B could make incorrect (to me) ratings about other users.
Similar to what you say about derived and produced information, I would have "personal" and "external" ratings. My personal rating for user C (that I make after reading some of their posts) would override all my other external contacts ratings of user C.
Over time, if I have a high percentage of different personal ratings from user B's ratings, then the system would apply less weight to his ratings for other users.
I made a site a while ago that acts this way. Basically when a person vouches for another person or post it creates a metaphorical one-way electrical resistor from the person to the other person or post. Then it ranks posts by connecting you to one end of a battery and all posts to the other end of the battery and ranking posts by how much current flows through them. It is at thoughtocean.com. Pretty dead now though.
I'm aware of this, unfortunately. This is a bug in Qt's Webkit. The font rendering on Mac OS changed in Mavericks, and it apparently does not work well with versions of Webkit prior to Mavericks release. I have to wait until this issue gets resolved. Here's the issue, if you want to take a look: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-34332
Thanks! If there is no motion from Qt's side till this Friday, I will release a no-webfonts version that fixes most of the glitches. The bug only happens when webfonts are used.
I do appreciate their existence, but Aether is something different: it requires no configuration, and it tries to do one thing, and do it well. This is not a darknet. There is only two things you can do in Aether, to read and to write text. This is an intentional restriction that shapes all the design decisions. This is closer to BitTorrent than Tor.
You get this kind of forums with http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ - it's a part of the "encrypted and distributed communication suite". Quickly growing community.
This is cool. One difference is that I am not making any assumptions about your peers being your friends. Aether is designed to face you with strangers.
Sorry to hear that. Your iPad is running out of memory because of retina imagery, my iPad 3 works fine. I'll change it to serve non-retina assets to mobile devices, thanks for the notification.
A book that explains the core ideas of neural networks and deep learning. Cool because:
* The book incorporates lots of running code for readers to explore and extend.
* The book's philosophy is to go deep into the core concepts of deep learning, not to superficially cover a long laundry list of ideas. This gives readers a solid foundation to build on, and makes understanding other material much easier.
* Deep learning is the most powerful approach known to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language. The book will help lots more people get quickly up to speed.
The book will be freely available online, and a beta site is coming soon. Pre-beta mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/BYr9L
Awesome, signed up as well. Is your QC&QI book still accurate after 10 years of being in the wild? Have there been any advances that verify / invalidate the ideas you present?
The quantum computing book holds up okay, so far as I know. Of course, there's been many new developments since we wrote it, and a text written today would be somewhat different. But the core material in the field has changed only slowly, so a book can be surprisingly durable.
Python. I wanted to make the underlying ideas as transparent as possible, so I chose a language which many people will find accessible, and I've tried to use simple, easily understandable idioms. I hope it will also be easily accessible to people who use Python rarely.
Translation rights for books in human languages are a well established thing.
I wonder if there's any analogue for technical books using a particular computing language, ie the base explanatory text is kept the same (as much as possible) but the code samples are "translated" to another computer language ?
For example, if I didn't know Python, it would be great to be able to pick up a "translation" of your book with the code written in a similar language such as Ruby.
Obviously, only a subset of tech books could be treated in this fashion, but a way for authors to license their existing content for uses like this would be interesting.
The idea you describe seems like it would also work for learning new languages. If you already understood the subject matter in the book, you could pick up a copy for a different programming language and compare it to the copy in a language you know; comparing examples 1-to-1 would make it significantly easier (in my opinion) to understand the new language's syntax and style, and the applicability of specific features of the new language.
Dr. Andrew Appel (of Standard ML fame) wrote a compiler book, Modern Compiler Implementation in ML, in the way you're suggesting. After the ML version of the book was published, he went back and "translated" it to both C and Java to produce two new books.
I've just added a second projector and a few more dacs (thanks to a very generous donor). I'm doing multiprojection and rectification/distortion now. I'm planning to get Skyscraper Tetris and Breakout going with some additional hardware.
I need about ten projectors at 60kpps (or 80kpps at low scan angle) with a combined wattage of 20W or so. I have endless ideas: I'll bring it online, do live art/graffiti, turn buildings into twitter feeds, multiplayer gaming, and NES emulator, etc.
I wish I could afford more hardware and the ability to work on this full time. :(
I'm a little confused - what exactly are you doing? Are you making the projectors? Are you programming the game? What software are you using? Are you sensing what it's being projected on?
Some of the hardware was built (one of the projectors), some of it is purchased (a second projector due to time constraints, and all of the DACs). The games, graphic engine, DAC comms, etc. are all programmed in a mix of Python and C++. Most projection software available is commercial and expensive, so I've rolled my own stack.
I'm working towards surface distortion mapping, which is increasingly important in the umbrella concern of rectifying multiple projectors onto a single coplanar/colinear surface. I'm going to project a series of grids and have OpenCV automatically align all of the projectors. From there I'll be working with a logical "frame buffer" (really coordinate/transform buffer) that is relayed over the network to a graphics server that will dispatch the drawing jobs and topologically sort objects unless they have preassigned projector-affinity.
As far as I know, nobody else is building a beowulf cluster of laser projectors for interactive display. That's my endgame. Really fluid, bright, fast laser light with incredible geometric output capacity. It won't be limited to 2D if I can get design a decent wireframe or clipping/culling engine.
There is a company in Montreal called VYV (I am not associated with them but a friend works there) who are doing lots of projector/projection type work.. I don't know if they work with lasers but they are definitely working on solving the whole multi-projector and distortion mapping stuff that you're tackling..
They might be interested in talking to you, they're still fairly small and startup-ish but they're doing big things..
Curious, are there any safety implications? What happens if the light shines directly into someone's eyes? Like if you projected on a building and the laser light went through a window and hit someone in the eye.
I started when I was an undergraduate physics major. My entire statistics education consisted of thirty minutes being told not to use R^2. I started reading about statistical abuses and realized that I would probably have committed most of them had I published research -- my training was entirely inadequate. Most scientists do only slightly better.
Combine this with a bit of unhealthy obsession and I ended up with 14,000 words of explanation, which I promptly published online.
My current draft is at 28,000 words and climbing, but I'm having more fun writing than figuring out what to do with it. I'm quietly hoping a serious publisher will notice and approach me, saving me the effort of writing a proposal and getting it rejected however many times before someone picks it up.
(happy to share a draft with anyone interested! Email is in my profile)
Interesting. My statistics knowledge has become rusty lately. I want to re-learn the basics before reading this.
Can you tell me any resource (doesn't necessarily have to be a book)?
P.S: I'm interested in knowing stuff like 'why square-root of variance is standard deviation?". Concepts.
It's a free online statistics textbook, also available in print. I haven't used it extensively, so I can't vouch for its quality -- actually, I complain about it a bit in Statistics Done Wrong. But I've never come across a very good conceptual introduction to statistics, so this is roughly the best I know.
There are also amusing variations, like the cartoon guide to statistics:
At the time the website was done, I hadn't sufficiently hacked Sphinx to make good PDFs. My current draft has a nice PDF but it's still incomplete -- a couple half-finished chapters and such.
I am also wondering whether I should release the PDF at all, if I could publish or self-publish it later.
I'm working on a proxy / community-run fork[1] of Healthcare.gov. After all the histrionics about the site's performance and bugs, and upon seeing that it was a Backbone.js app (which I develop full-time), and with unminified/commented source, I thought it might be worthwhile to pull as many files from the repo as I could so that bugs could be reported and fixed in the open.
As the product sits today, it is close to being a functional clone of the site. Healthcare.gov relies on some very complicated and antiquated auth systems, from multiple agencies. It is not enough to simply proxy a few endpoints back to healthcare.gov, some requests need to be spoofed, state saved, etc., in order to make it work properly. They often use absolute URLs in their responses as well, which need to be rewritten. I can imagine this application was an absolute bear to test properly.
I've been working through the login mechanism [2] and it's almost done. I'm excited about the future of the project and it could really use some coders to help out and find / fix bugs. If the project gets some real attention, I think it would be a big help to the folks at QSSI and the nation in general - I really want to help the project succeed because I very strongly believe in universal health care and this is the only way I feel I can personally help out.
It's cool, because we want to disrupt the way that pharma operates. Biotech could learn a lot from the way that the software industry has been revolutionized by the open-source philosophy. The world could stand to also see tangible benefits if we succeed in (re)proving it's actually possible. People have done this in the past (salk and sabin come to mind); sometimes the global consciousness just needs a reminder.
Thank you and awesome! Although I've seen some great projects scrolling down, this is the first that has elicited a comment. I wish you all the best in your attempt to disrupt pharma -- it needs it.
Thanks, I'm going to need a lot of luck! We're asking for a lot of money to give a level of security that this will work out (the balance of the funds at the end of the research term will be disbursed to city of hope - a hospital with a cancer treatment specialization). So there's the trickiness of fundraising, and figuring out the internet. The internet is a hard place. On top of that, science is always risky, and as much as I can craft a plan B and a plan C, and dynamically come up with plans, there's always the possibility of total failure.
Also the mechanism of action is baroque (although the compound class has fewer side effects), standard pharma is mostly interested in flashy new types of anticancer mechanisms.
TrueVault is a HIPAA compliant data backend for apps, devices, and sites. Developers use TrueVault so they can develop healthcare apps without building out their own HIPAA compliant infrastructure. You access data in TrueVault via our API and native clients. Think of TrueVault as Stripe for confidential patient data. You use Stripe to store credit card data so that you are PCI compliant. Our customers use TrueVault to store protected health information (PHI) so that they are HIPAA compliant.
It’s cool because new healthcare applications are paring back their feature sets so that they don’t have to be HIPAA compliant. TrueVault helps solve this problem, and prevents legislation from hindering innovation. TrueVault will handle HIPAA so that entrepreneurs can focus on improving the quality of care for millions.
Also cool because TrueVault takes care of all of the technical requirements mandated by HIPAA. HIPAA compliant hosting providers (AWS, FireHost, Rackspace) only provide a HIPAA ready environment. You still have to spend the dev time and money to build your own application stack in order to comply with HIPAA.
Excellent. Two of my clients need exactly this service. We have the pain point you describe, i.e. needing to build out AWS, Rackspace, etc. Currently we build custom AWS images, however we'd much rather pay for a HIPAA stack. Kudos!
We offer a 30-day free trial, so you can play around with our API without entering a credit card. Caveat -- don’t send us any real PHI until we sign a BAA.
Please feel free to test it out, and if you have any questions shoot me an email. trey@truevault.com
We get to see a wide variety of use cases, happy to share our experiences.
So are you going to sign Business Associate Agreements with your customers? They won't be HIPAA compliant otherwise, under the latest HITECH rules. That's where the analogy to PCI breaks down.
Yes, TrueVault is signing Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with our customers.
TrueVault is also the first to cover customers under a comprehensive Privacy/Data Breach Insurance policy. As a result, TrueVault is able to indemnify our customers for, from, and against regulatory fines and the cost of breach remediation.
This is how I read this: HIPAA data backend as a service. Can also connect to Stripe for PHI and credit card storage. Most companies are not HIPAA. HIPAA API. Other companies are not HIPAA. We handle HIPAA. We know HIPAA. HIPAA (AWS, FireHost, Rackspace) is not enough. HIPAA. HIPAA! Visit truevault dot com: recent blog entries- Do I Need To Be HIPPA Compliant?
Stripe is really just used for comparison purposes. Using Stripe makes you PCI compliant, and using TrueVault makes you HIPAA compliant. Also it demonstrates that TrueVault is not a consumer facing document storage solution (not a HIPAA compliant Dropbox). You access data in TrueVault via our API and native clients.
Bottom line, if your application needs to be HIPAA compliant it’s a pain. If you push your protected health information (PHI) to TrueVault, then you don’t have to spend months and months developing your own HIPAA compliant infrastructure.
Another use case: apps/sites/devices that offer tools to help people track various health-related statistics.
Consumer-originated data, even though it is health data, is not protected health information (PHI) as covered by HIPAA. But, when that health data is shared with a Covered Entity (a doctor, hospital, insurance plan, or other HIPAA-defined CE) then it becomes PHI. And, the app handling the PHI needs to be HIPAA compliant.
People want information, not data. When an app takes health data and feeds it up to a doctor for diagnosis, analysis, advice, or treatment, then that data becomes PHI and your app needs to be HIPAA compliant.
You said that TrueVault will "handle HIPAA" and that "using TrueVault makes you HIPAA compliant."
I don't see how those claims are true. If the developer is a business associate, they're still required to have a risk analysis, policies, and training. If they're not a business associate, they don't need to be compliant.
So I guess I'm not seeing how TrueVault helps a developer avoid becoming a business associate. jph's case is marginal - if the covered entities all sign BAAs with TrueVault, maybe the developer can argue that they do not "create, receive, maintain, or transmit" PHI. Good luck arguing that with the covered entity, btw.
The steps you will need to take to comply with HIPAA when using TrueVault will vary based on your implementation.
If you use our JavaScript widgets so that you never actually touch PHI, then you may be able to avoid the Administrative Safeguards. But, if you handle PHI and then send it to TrueVault you will need to comply with the Administrative components of HIPAA.
The HIPAA Security Rule requires appropriate Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and security of electronic protected health information.
HIPAA compliant hosting handles the Physical Safeguards, a set of rules and guidelines that focus on the physical access to protected health information (PHI).
TrueVault handles both the Physical and Technical Safeguards (Encryption and Decryption, Key Management, Key Rotation, Access Control, Unique User Identification, Emergency Access, Automatic Logoff, Audit Controls, Mechanism to Authenticate Electronic PHI, Person or Entity Authentication, Transmission Security, and Integrity Controls). This is all stuff that you would have to build yourself if you use AWS, FireHost, or Rackspace.
You’re right; Administrative Safeguards should not be ignored. The administrative components are really important when implementing a HIPAA compliance program; you are required to assign a Privacy Officer, complete a risk assessment, implement employee training, review policies and procedures, and execute Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with partners you share protected health information (PHI) with. I think that Accountable does a great job with the Administrative Safeguards. Accountable offers HIPAA compliance management tools that keep your business legal. Checkout -- http://www.accountablehq.com/
Again, the steps you will need to take to comply with HIPAA when using TrueVault will vary based on your implementation. I’m happy to jump on the phone and answer any questions that you may have. We can go over the use case that you have in mind and the HIPAA implications. Feel free to email me directly at trey@truevault.com.
To clarify, a Business Associate is any entity that uses or discloses PHI on behalf of a Covered Entity. Furthermore, a Business Associate is any person who, on behalf of a Covered Entity, performs (or assists in the performance of) a function or activity involving the use or disclosure of PHI.
My client's use case: we have multiple hospitals that need to share confidential information, for example a patient intake survey that is essentially a typical web form. We need somewhere to store that data.
Building the AWS site to do this took upwards of 1000 person-hours to figuring out HIPAA-compliance issues. This will continue to be an ongoing cost for us, because HIPAA is an ongoing law and it changes sometimes. It takes substantial auditing time and money.
Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft [1] - a server, client, and various related things. The new Minecraft update released this week and radically changed how networking works, so it's a bit tough to get it all working again.
It's cool because it's a totally open source recreation of everything. It's got a server, a client, terrain generation, physics simulation, level editing, classic support... this is one of two really big projects I've undertaken.
I'm also still working on MediaCrush [2][3], at least when my other half decides to show up and write some backend code.
> Currently working on an open source implementation of Minecraft
Nice.
Are you aiming to implement a thread-safe plugin API, perchance? The current problem with bukkit (and with vanilla minecraft server, of course) afaik is that whenever a plugin needs access to global state, it uses an API that does not do any locks of any sort; which means that usually, whenever one needs to e.g. write to global state, one dumps these critical parts onto the main thread. Solving this is nontrivial but rather important, I think.
It's just a library, so it doesn't handle plugins. However, the library is thread-safe, and the server [1] I wrote on top of the library supports plugins and is also thread safe. For anything dependent on a specific thread, there's generally a queue to push things into.
That sounds like a very nice and thought-through architecture/design.
What's your current status / how far away are you from a more or less complete beta (e.g. in regards to the minecraft client) (if you don't mind me asking)?
Well, the design has been through a few revisions. I'm not afraid to make breaking changes before version 1.0.0 (for example, I completely rewrote the level handling system to improve level editing performance by an order of magnitude).
The current status of the server is:
* Full support for Minecraft 1.6.4 networking (1.7.x networking is a WIP)
* Full support for editing Minecraft levels
* Implementations of all Minecraft data types (i.e. slots, metadata dictionaries, NBT, etc)
* Slightly buggy emulation of Minecraft physics
* Simple procedural terrain generation
Here's an incomplete list of things that aren't done:
* Lots of block interactions (like water emulation, or falling sand) were done, but were lost during the refactoring I mentioned above
* Redstone and all related logic
* Mob AI (work in progress, not very far along)
* More detailed world generation (missing ores, caves, biomes, villages)
Aside from the server, there's also a mature classic networking library, and a fairly complete client library (no rendering).
The project is more than a year old now and is built on top of code that's about three years old. It's a pretty big undertaking, and it's going to take a while to finish. It'll be done faster if I get more third party help, though!
Thanks for your detailed response. I see quite a few people are involved, and the project is a truly active one; I wish you luck. :)
One last inquiry: have you done any benchmarking / performance tests on your code? I imagine that since the library is thread-safe, it should in theory be able to handle significantly larger numbers of online users, etc.?
It's been a while since I've formally tested it, but it performs very well. I don't have hard numbers handy, but CPU usage and memory usage is both well-tuned (and better than vanilla/bukkit). I've tested with a few dozen concurrent players and it didn't have any trouble. All players reported smooth gameplay, far better than vanilla or bukkit.
SilverAir - An athletic shirt that doesn't smell and designed to be worn at the gym and for everyday wear.
demo@ http://www.yathletics.com
It's cool because:
It's made using pure silver which kills the odor-causing bacteria in your sweat, so you can
-wear this shirt for your entire day and feel fresh,
-reuse the shirt more often (i do).
The fabric is completely new and something I made with my manufacturers from scratch. Without letting cost be a factor, we sourced some of the best performance yarns you can buy and achieved a feel that is super comfortable while being lightweight and breathable. To manufacture, we use seamless knitting machines meaning the body of the shirt does not have any stitches on it. (trust me, the silver is what sells but the most loved feature by our test customers is the material and how you feel as if you're not wearing anything - in a good way)
I'm building this company single-handedly over the last 10 months, and I had to teach myself bits n pieces of everything: apparel manufacturing, design, coding, law, filmmaking & editing. The product is launching in 4 days on kickstarter and I'm now in lockdown mode with tons of progress to make. Your feedback on anything is welcome.
The online shopping experience for this brand will be fresh: there will be no choosing from tens and hundreds of products because we make just one per category with superb design, quality, and finish. Shoot me an email if you're curious about anything.
How much? $54 Retail, but when we open on kickstarter next week, we want this to reach as many people as possible and are going to give it out at (almost) cost:
Hey Jack. You'll be surprised how expensive international shipping can be. We've done our research and it comes to a minimum of $25 for most countries.
Since domestic shipping is included in the shirt pricing, we've subsidized the international shipping by $5 to be fair to all customers.
This definitely looks awesome, I'm in for a couple for sure.
How long does a shirt stay non-stinky? The video said silver is weaved into the fabric, but I'm assuming it doesn't coat the entire thing. So eventually bacteria will start to collect, correct?
How long a shirt stays non-stinky varies between person to person. Most of our test customers have worn it for between 3-5 days without any problem. Needless to say, they were impressed.
The other benefit is that it keeps your shirt fresh for its lifetime. You'll notice that in regular synthetic shirts, there is a permanent smell after a few months of wear. That problem goes away with the silver.
And yes, you are correct that silver is knitted into the shirt. But it's actually not a coating at all because the silver is inside some of the yarns; so it's permanent and the bacteria will not collect over time.
You should market the environmental factor also. I saw a youtube thing a while back that pointed out the majority of energy usage in clothing is from washing, not from manufaturing. If this shirt neds washed half as often, that should be a major bonus.
We mention this in the detailed description/features of our product page (it's not on our website as yet). For the video, we tried to focus on some key features instead of all.
This sounds good, there should be more shirts like this around. I'm curious if you are aware of Silverescent fabric, which is much the same idea, and if your have made additional unique improvements?
Hey Robert. I definitely know Silverescent as that's made using the same technology. I really admire Lulu because they make some great products.
The improvements we have made are in the feel, finish, and performance areas. You'll find a slightly higher percentage of silver in our fabric, it is lighter in weight, and the feel of the fabric is improved.
If you like Silverescent, you'll love what we're making.
Cool concept. The video mentions musty smell persists after washing clothes. Wrong detergent choice or washing habits? I've never had that problem even after running 24KM in gym clothes.
Thanks! The first batch will be produced in either V-Neck or Crew-Neck. When we launch our kickstarter, we will see which one is more popular. But If we exceed our initial funding goal, we will offer both options.
As for the musty smell, that's a problem I personally face and I've validated that problem with a lot of my friends, peers, and customers. It doesn't happen on cotton but it happens mostly on the 100% polyester athletic clothing (which is the majority of all sportswear).
You're right though. Not everyone has this problem and maybe wrong detergent choice or washing habits play a part in that phenomenon. We just wanted to make sure we have the best anti-odor performance and the silver technology is the best in the industry. If you end up getting a shirt from us though, what you'll find to be the best feature is the feel and performance of the material we developed with the anti-stink part being the cherry on the top. That has been the case with 100% of our users so far.
a). Most men hate shopping.
b). Sizes are never consistent and a number cannot define a unique bodily shape.
Our solution: We simply send an email with a few complete looks every few weeks, if you like a look - order it and we make it made to measure for you. We ship globally for free. Each look is about $150-$175 (so won't break your bank account). Each look is based off of heavy research around looks, textures and trends that are currently in.
Are the pieces in the outfit generally specific to that outfit?
This is an interesting idea, but the value proposition to buyers is much higher if you're selling a few pieces that can go together, but are also very versatile in that you can use them in any number of combinations.
I don't want to spend money on 'one-offs'. Can you speak to the quality of the pieces?
On our blog we try to show how these outfits can be combined with other wearables. I think we need to step this up a bit more (so thanks for the feedback here). The quality is good (feedback has been positive but again it's always relative especially in fashion). We hand source all the fabrics and own our process end-to-end - so that helps wrt quality assurance. Hope that helps!
This is a really great idea. Just some feedback: The product photos, on my screen, look pretty low quality. I imagine this is because they are being scaled to the size of the browser. It also makes it a little hard to use as the photo takes the entire screen and requires scrolling for the information and site navigation.
Thanks ON. We intentionally kept the photos full-screen to give it a more magazine feel. WRT quality - def. going to up our game soon. Recently set up our own photo studio in the office (psyched!)
It's cool because I get to help startups who don't always have the resources to hire someone like me who specialized in implementing and scaling certain kinds of algorithmic features. These startups need help with everything from geospatial search up to anomaly detection and predictive analytics.
It's bootstrapped, so while I'd love it if it was a public offering, at this point it's still a hybrid consulting/data-services company. Eventually it will be a public platform, and I hope we can help a lot more people!
very very cool! I'm doing a similar sort of consultancy, and one of the challenges is actually building the reputational capital needed to actually have that sort of deal flow. So props on getting that working!
I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the hood, slide onto the ground. I'm lying there for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened, wondering whether or not anything is broken. I wiggle my fingers, wiggle my toes, don't feel any pain. I stand up, the guy gets out of his car "Sorry man! I thought you were turning!" I say I think I'm fine... I go look at my bike - it's still upright, the front tire got wedged in a rust spot. I grab it out, hop on, and ride. I couldn't help but laugh the rest of the way to class.
That's the day I decided that bikers and automobiles need better communication. So I made a bike light that's easy to use, has front & back blinkers, brake lights, turns on when you ride (so you can't forget), a bright front light, USB rechargeable, 3400 mAh LiIon battery. I made a 3D printer to print the parts, I did the PCB design, physical design, and software. It's pretty damn cool. I ride pretty regularly and recharge it about once every three weeks. It's surprisingly water resistance - I am a little scared of selling this to people as I didn't know how it would handle water, but I've taken it through two large storms, one with huge puddles splashing all over the cases, and the light handled it all in stride.
I'm stalling on it a little bit right now - there's not a very good way of bootstrapping into manufacturing. I could 3D print the cases and assemble the boards, but each case takes about 20 hours to print (on my fiddly printer). There's ~100 components too, which is a pain for manual placing and reflowing. I have a couple other designs brewing that are simpler and lower cost, but without all the fancy features. Speaking of which... I have to go get some interrupts working.
It is hard to tell from the photo, but it looks like the the turn signal indication is the standard "blink on the side" style. When the lights are close together like they are with this design (as is practical for bikes), it's very hard to distinguish which side is blinking from even a short distance.
Could I suggest that instead of blinking on one side or the other, you turn the lights on in sequence heading toward the direction of the turn? For example, for a turn, you could illuminate light #1, then #1 and #2, then #1 and #2 and #3, then off and repeat.
That seems to me a much clearer indication of intention from the point of view of a vehicle some distance away looking through less than clean glass.
Definitely possible, thanks for the suggestion. I'll consider it and do a visibility test.
There's 5 LEDs on the back - three reds and two amber turn signals. When blinking, the center red LED stays solid to provide a reference for the turn signal.
I've thought about Kickstarting a bit. I guess my hesitation is that I'm terrified of pulling the trigger to get something injection molded. I don't trust my 3D modeling abilities enough to know that when I get something injection molded it will work. And injection molding is a lot money, so if I mess it up, I might not have enough money for a redo. That scares me, a lot. I'm not sure, I guess I'm scared of actually making something people would use - I want it to be perfect, and I know it isn't yet.
I actually went to the local university - they said that you can't use university resources for personal gain (I was trying to print a case on their 3D printer). I'm sure there would be some people in the engineering department willing to give me some pointers, there's also a local prototyping company (I've emailed them a few times). Nothing too serious though - I guess I don't really have much of a plan yet, and didn't want to rush into getting roped into sticky situations.
Thanks for asking the questions - I just reached out to a friend who said he'd help me before, maybe this thing will start rolling :).
That sounds nice actually. It might not be for a little bit yet (got some more design to do first), but send me an email (in my profile) to touch base.
Hey I'm working on the same thing. Right now I only have two rear blinkers hooked up to an arduino and a couple of sensors but I'm slowly building and planning more functionality.
It's a bit sad the lack of attention the rear of the bike receives with current product marketing.
Let me know if you want to develop together (totally understand this is a solo project and you're much further ahead!)
Can you explain a bit more about how this is improving communication between bikes and cars? Auto-on is nice, but we have lights that last a long time already. You mention brake lights. Are you actually riging this up to the bikes breaks? How about turn signalling? Stuff like that?
Clearly, it appears you've hit a thread here, maybe you can share more.
So auto on / off is engaged with a reed switch and spoke mounted magnet. Auto on is more of a user convenience than a battery saver - you never need to think about turning your back lights on again. You will be seen when you ride. The reed switch doubles as a way of determining velocity. When the wheel velocity changes by a certain set amount, the brake lights will engage (three red backlights flash solid, then stay solid). It waits for either an increase in velocity or a time duration to turn the running lights back on. Turning is signaled with front mounted switches (teal switches in the pictures). One on either side of the front light. Currently, they turn on for about 5 seconds then shut off. There's a couple improvements that could be done with it (if stopped, keep blinking until a speed increase), but I haven't done that yet. When blinking is engaged the back lights stop running, the center light stays solid, and the amber LEDs blink at a frequency similar to that of cars. The front light has three modes - on, solid, flashing. Holding down one turn switch will engage the front light, holding down the other turn switch will cycle modes (flashing, solid).
Originally - I wanted it to be accelerometer based, but as you may know, the roads are not very smooth, so any bumps will affect the measurements significantly. The reed switch offers silky smooth data - as the data gets integrated over one wheel rotation, it's extremely noise resistant.
Ah and your main point - communication between cars and cyclists - turn signals allow cars to know where I'm going, the brakes will let them know when I'm slowing, and the automatic lights will make sure they can see me. Be seen, be safe, be smart. It's not a perfect solution, but I think it's a step in the right direction. There's a lot of aggression between cyclists and drivers, this might be something that can allow the driver to anticipate the actions of the cyclist.
Cool! How do you plan to deal with theft? Most bike lights are trivial to steal. I tend to avoid the fancy ones since in my experience lights disappear immediately as soon as the bike's parked (unless I remove them and put them in a bag every time I park, but that's a pain). Curious how you're addressing that.
That's something I only put a little bit of thought into, as I'm not very worried about my bike getting stolen.
It would be non-functional if someone stole it without stealing the magnet and reed switch as well, but they wouldn't know that.
There's a bit of a trade off, as you're going to want to remove the light to charge it up, in that if you want it to remove easy, it will be easy to steal, and if you want it to be hard to steal, it will be a pain to charge. I don't have any solutions for that yet.
That wasn't intended to be the final one, but I made it and it worked. It was printed with support material that peeled off a little too strongly, exfoliating the back surface. The orientation is kind of tricky as there's a lip/groove interface between the front and back of the case which needs to be cosmetically clean to ensure a snug fit, so the only way to get that to work well is to print it with the back down, but there's a 'hood' over the ethernet connector that disallows printing directly onto the back. Slicing with slic3r.
X-Locks: http://x.lock.gd
I'm trying to restore as many of the security-related patents that were lost in the patent office fire of 1836, and tell the stories of their creators. We've had some early successes and intend to reproduce as many of the locks as possible for a potential physical exhibition.
Firstly, I've developed a suite of Python libraries to deal with NFL data, including play-by-play statistics and slicing game footage into its play-by-play components. A demo of my work is here: http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5 (excuse the slowness, my web server is crappy)
Secondly, I'm also working on a small utility to produce Entity-Relationship diagrams from a simple text description. Surprisingly, there were very few tools that could do this. It's written in Haskell. Current progress here: https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd
Thirdly, my PhD research involves finding proteins that are similar to other proteins. Most of the infrastructure is written in Go: https://github.com/TuftsBCB
Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project. I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts: http://mark2cure.org/
> Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project.
Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable at how rare they are. There are lots of GUI tools, or tools specific to a particular database system, but few that accept plain text as input. (There is erwiz, but it's unmaintained and a giant mess of Java code.)
> I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts: http://mark2cure.org/
That is so awesome. I can't wait to see it in action! I've added my email to your list. :-)
Any gaps should be easily filled by looking at the source of nflvid. It's pretty small and should be fairly straight-forward (even if you don't know Python).
TL;DR - NFL's content delivery network (Neulion) hosts the game footage and it is publicly accessible.
I'm so sorry to hear it. This is why we're working in cancer.
We all work as fast as we can, but I've already seen too many cases with poor prognoses. The hope is that in growing this technology, we can catch cancers earlier when they are more treatable.
Currently we don't have that much to show publicly as we're working primarily with doctors; we need to validate our technology properly before it gets anywhere near patients or the public eye.
With that said, if you shoot me an email (see profile) I'm happy to answer questions and perhaps more.
Somewhere between my main interests in molecular+systems biology and my work in microscopy and software(building and using), I gained an appreciation for biomedical imaging techniques.
From there, much hard work learning from oncologists, radiologists, pathologists, and technicians to figure out what we could do to enhance their work with imaging technologies.
A biodiverse, edible forest garden in the center of an public high school. We are breaking ground with a team of students in about an hour.
This is (very) cool because it will expose adolescents to a variety of concepts, perspectives, and phenomena that are severely lacking from most urbanized places.
I hope you've had them watch some of the amazing permaculture videos/documentaries that are out there. I know those had a huge impact on me when I watched them back in high school. Great project, though. Definitely a very worthwhile feat.
Like the whiz-bang Lawton stuff? Any other good ones? Nice idea. I'm not much of a videographer, but I'm trying to document this project with some footage as well.
Thanks. It was an exhausting and inspiring day, and your support builds the inspiration. I've slapped together a blog with some photos for now, and more info to come. http://growquad.tumblr.com/
I'll be documenting this project such that this sorta endeavor is more easily replicable at other secondary schools. Spreading the word would be awesome.
If you're able willing to donate, it would be well appreciated. We are totally unfunded at this point: minor expenses thus far have been covered out of pocket by the organizers (schoolteachers and gardeners). But we will need need flora, irrigation equipment, and building materials in the near future... I've put a WePay link on the blog.
You can find my email through my profile if you have any questions.
If you're referring to physical/material kits, that'd be difficult, as the elements of life don't package well.
If you're talking about packaging informational materials, that's an interesting idea, as I've been developing much of the design and theory on a voluntary basis. I don't see this as a commercial project, but Kickstarter funding might be appropriate.
Interested to hear what you think such a kit would include?
I just slapped together http://growquad.tumblr.com/ with some photos from today's first work day. Will be posting more updates about design, implementation, and progress.
Infinite Flight: it's a flight simulator for mobile platforns I had been working on on the side for almost 7 years before finally deciding on joining forces with a friend to ship it on Windows Phone, then iOS and Android. What's cool about it is that it's written entirely in C# while and we still get decent performance on most devices. Also, we're slowly gaining traction with users that prefer flying with us rather than with the established competitors :)
You can find more about the app here: http://flyingdevstudio.com and http://infinite-flight.com
You're just two developers? That's amazing, I thought there was a full studio behind that game. I really love Infinite Flight, I didn't know it was C# on every platform and one of the few games going Windows Phone first. Congrats and keep up the great work :)
Purchased! (on Android) Haven't flown it yet but as a real-world private pilot (inactive these days) and aerospace engineer (now developer), I'm already thankful and much impressed.
Dead By Zombie: a Python Rogue-like about a zombie apocalypse. I first created it several years ago as a commercial closed-sourced game and it actually sold copies. Now I've open sourced it on GitHub, and am upgrading the engine and giving it a facelift, transforming it into a more serious game of survival and a sandbox for rebuilding civilization. Survivalists, anarcho-capitalists and libertarians may like it. "Day is for the living. Night is for the dead."
In theory I'm also writing a sequel to my sci-fi comedy novella The Dread Space Pirate Richard. (http://www.reddit.com/r/DSPR/) And fleshing out the outline and first chapters of my first attempt at a technical book, tentatively titled Software Performance and Scalability.
I also solve challenging technical problems for clients around the world. I make things. I ship.
http://xoxo.gl (hugs and kisses, good luck) - a web app to play family-friendly, traditional board games.
Still prototyping for now.
My goal is wide in scope: to build a site that allows you to take a few minutes to have a positive social interaction with friends and strangers. An anti-Zynga, if you like.
I still have a lot to do. With a goal of universal accessibility, I am working on progressive enhancement - making it work adequately for users with poor connections and noscript, and excellently for users with fancy AJAX.
It's cool and I think it fills a gap for people who want social games without spam viral marketing... as an anecdote: by playing Boggle online, I made friends and ended up visiting a couple on a different continent. I'd like to enable stories like that.
It's cool because it's a systems programming language which compiles to C with generics, an awesome Python-like syntax, AST macros and other metaprogramming features.
I am one of the core developers. I developed a lot of the standard library and tools such as the Babel package manager, Aporia IDE and a build farm all written in Nimrod.
Hey, we've chatted in IRC a couple of times. Just wanted to say I love Nimrod, and I'm so thankful that it's being written. I'm currently learning C so that I can play with Nimrod and Vala and have a better idea of how they work :)
I have joined forces with my sister in law who has a Doctor of Psychology and specializes in anxieties. We both are shy people who have suffered with social anxiety, so we are working on new ways to help people overcome this. Combining her expertise with my dev skills. As you can see from the landing page, we don't have a designer :)
Why it's cool
* It's a really fresh way to conquer anxiety
* There's nothing else out there like it, existing anxiety/shyness communties and websites are rather archaic and/or simple
* It will help people of all types, from just wanting to get better at public speaking, to those who suffer from debilitating anxiety
* It will be helpful for both those who suffer and for psychologists to use as a tool
I have been building a (highly accurate) flight simulator.
Basically, I'm taking a geometric approach to the flight dynamics model (similar to how x-plane works, except they're using... older techniques/technology. I'm using much more advanced stuff [working on seeing if I can simulate the airflow for the entire craft, as opposed to doing it by sections and then integrating those together]). This is in contrast to things like MS Flight simulator and FlightGear (though, flightgear does have a poorly documented and rather inaccurate geometry based fdm - but most people use the table-based one, which is far more accurate than the geometry-based fdm they have implemented), which use lookup tables to guess how an aircraft would perform.
The problem I actually originally set out to solve was that xfoil and xflr5 suck to use (importing/exporting plane data is... either you can't, or you shouldn't), and fuck paying for the more expensive design testers. (this is why I have the focus on accuracy - if this was just going to be a simple game, I'd have spent far more time making it look pretty) However, I figured that I could also make testing be more fun by adding an interactive mode (i.e. I want to be able to do hardware-in-the-loop type stuff, as well as just manually flying), and at that point, it just is a scriptable flight simulator.
I'm still working on the flight dynamics model, been teaching myself fluid dynamics so that I somewhat understand what all is going on there (as much as anyone who hasn't spent years studying this can understand...), and I've been working on writing code to run on the gpu (yay, opencl) in order to do this. It's been fun.
That sounds great. As someone who has a lot of interest in aviation and stuff that's related to aviation, the lack of flight simulators on the market is bothering. I tried almost every simulation that's out there, but none of them fit to my needs (good, simple UI with extremely realistic controls. that's not too much to ask, is it?). Hopefully you'll make something that's more appealing than other products. Speaking of which, is there a website of sorts to follow the updates of your work?
Thank you for the interest! Right now, x-plane basically is the only player in the flight sim market (MS has officially stated they've left - though I doubt it's for good, FlightGear is the only other flight sim worth mentioning, and it's nowhere near as good/accurate as what I need), which, as you (indirectly) pointed out, is troublesome - the market is ripe for disruption. I'm aiming to at least provide healthy competition to increase the quality of all flight simulators (I'm also applying to get into this next YC batch... hopefully I'll get an interview. I doubt I'll get in, because lack of a cofounder).
I actually just wrote a script to generate an atom feed for this (I mean, I have some updates which are on my main index page, but, that's not a way to easily enable people to follow me...), so you can follow my little self-generated atom feed at http://younata.com/feed.atom right now, it's just a single post that links to my above comment, but I'll try to write at least once a week.
By the way, the datestamps on that feed are in UTC, which is localtime for my server.
Feel free to send me an email so I can notify you when I have a prototype. My email is listed in my profile.
Yes, it's a shame. I still think FSX beats the pants off X-plane. I just find that X-plane isn't as realistic as FSX (even though it should be in theory). Anyway, good luck - it's a massive job :)
very very cool! At some point i want to dig into how to write physics simulations, in the mean time i'm slowly working on trying to make better numerical computing tools, which is sort of a precondition to playing with simulation.
Oh, man. My previous experience in building simulators is a spaceflight simulator I wrote at the beginning of the year, because space, life is easy and I didn't have to really write hard numerical computing code. This is easily the most challenging thing I've ever written (but it's also easily the most fun thing I've ever written).
Good look getting into writing physics simulations!
I'm working on https://github.com/Granary/granary. It is a Linux kernel dynamic binary translation framework. It's cool because it lets you rewrite the Linux kernel (at different granularities) while it's running. This is useful for analysis, debugging, etc. Right now I'm putting together benchmarks for an upcoming paper deadline.
It's cool to work on something that's both cool and makes money, but I'm at a point in my life where I'm happy to work on something that makes money even if it's not cool. But getting paid regularly is pretty cool in its own way.
LiberWriter is a product/service to help authors, primarily by converting Word files to eBooks, as well as providing cover design services.
My weekend project for the last few weeks is a new Shader language. It's a twisted version of Forth, with some APL-inspired pieces. https://github.com/daeken/Shaderforth
You can see it in action on Shadertoy here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGWl !Warning! Windows users have been reporting some problems, so be careful. (If it crashes your browser, please let me know what your setup is!)
This is amazingly cool. I was excited about this from the first time Elliot mentioned it to me, and I'm thrilled to see how far you guys have come. Way to represent the Triangle!
Cool idea! So many teachers "fork" course material already, but are limited by location, copyright, and inconvenience. The idea has huge potential; good luck!
Other types of media are very important to successful teaching, so they're very important to us. We're rolling out updates soon that will support not just other media types but nested organization of courses so you can have multiple sessions. All part of refining that alpha :)
An easy way to enter the name of a specific drug or side effect to see its effects as reported to the FDA. One of the primary ways that the United States Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the collection and analysis of reported adverse events (an event that was not the intended outcome of the prescribed drug and has a negative impact on health) through the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS). These reports are submitted by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst others, and then the FDA scientific staff will assess these events in the context of other databases to determine if a particular safety concern is associated, and possibly caused by, exposure to a particular drug. Since this is a public database and useful to prescribers and patients alike to know if "has what I'm experiencing been described in patients taking this drug before?" DrugCite has created a more friendly interface to answer that question. The data can also be sorted by Age and Gender in most cases giving a more detailed view.
http://sandsquid.com - A web app for quickly locating and purchasing electronic parts, specifically entire BOMs (all the components on one or more PCBs, instead of just a single part like other services out there). It's bootstrapped, and we just recently launched. So far we had good traction and virtually all positive responses. Notably, people report that we save them hours every time they use our app, and I firmly believe that any service capable of that, has a place ;)
I was thinking about doing something similar for a bit :).
If I may make a couple of suggestions - I put in 24 ATMEGA328P-PU-ND. It found where they were, it found the lowest price. They're $3.16 PU - total ~$76. If I get one more, 25 of them, I hit the price break, and my order total come to $50. Definitely a better deal. When I'm getting parts, the price breaks always seem to make me spend more, but there's situations where it wouldn't (like above). Adding in recognition for those would be good.
Another suggestion (this is what I was going to work on, but I've moved onto other things) - create a package deal - PCB, parts, stencils, etc, all in one. Have rolling part shipments (orders every Friday). Get reels of components, fulfill some yourself - but charge the live lowest price (you make a little bit from the reel discount, they save a little bit from your utility). You handle the money in between, and disperse it out to the lowest combined cost. Having a one stop shop where I could dump a schematic & board file and get back a PCB, parts, and stencils would be pretty awesome.
As for ATMEGA328P-PU-ND, did you try using the optimization slider? :) Drag it all the way to its "Aggressive" setting, it will bump the quantity up to 25, and the total down to $48 - just like you said.
As for package deals - you are right, this is what needs to be done. We're thinking about that.
Awesome, didn't see that before. Maybe turn it on by default, then have the option to back it off? Why is the quantity bump represented as an error with big warning signs? Shouldn't it be a good thing?
Is there any way to represent shipping as well? That seems like the killer - sure something is $2 cheaper on Mouser than Digikey, but if I have to pay $5 for shipping, that breaks the deal.
Something else that would be cool - and this is a huge pain point for me when developing PCBs, is let me tell you rough characteristics I want, you find me the part. I want a 0805 10K resistor +- 10% @ quantity 100. Find me the cheapest one! As long as I can use it as a pull up resistor, I don't really care what it is. It's a huge pain in the ass to go through when I want to make my BOM and have 10 different tabs open looking for a 1K, 5K, 10K, 22uF, 10uF resistor and caps. Make that part easy.
You should increase the part lookup speed as well - it spins for quite a while. Autocomplete after a few characters would be good too (I wouldn't remember PU-ND, had to look it up, but I can get the first part).
Good stuff - do you have a mailing list or anything to get updates?
There is indeed a mailing list! when you move onto the final step it'll ask you (nicely and once).
The quantity bump gets shown as a warning because at some extremes the optimizing algorithm may choose to increase the overall quantity even if it costs you more than at a lower optimization level. Lets say you picked $100 worth of MCUs, and it knows it can get 30% more MCUs for 10% of additional cost - it may go for it. In such cases we thought the user would like to know.
Unfortunately we have no way to calculate the shipping at present... but the generic parts locator is a great suggestion, we'll do it!
Wow - this is pretty awesome - I just ran a sample BOM and it worked very well. How do you plan to monetize this?
Some feature requests (I m sure you have heard these before):
1) Don't require exact part numbers for common passives (100nF 0603 25V X7R 20%) should get me to say the 10 cheapest results across suppliers.
2) Better information if part numbers are out of stock (Digikey and Mouser both allow you to see projected ship dates) - This also allows for another optimization slider, "Lead time"
Unnamed project, probably beta released sometime this week.
Have you ever wondered which of the 10 courses offered by Coursera / EdX / etc to take, sign of up for 4, then dropped all but one and fell too far behind to finish?
Classes offered by MOOCs vary greatly in quality. This isn't a judgement call per se, just a question of "fit." Is this class up your alley, or maybe this class is too elementary for your level, or maybe it is too difficult.
The goal of my project is to offer students a place to express their thoughts, rank the courses (A, B, C, D, F), and rank difficulty. Other students can upvote comments and the top-ranked comment gets the top spot on the page, above the "official" review.
Another question often pondered is "what is the best path for the courses." Although this section is primitive, students are able to offer prerequisite sections.
Ideally, employers will have a place to look when people apply trumpeting up their certifications. Were these classes really worthwhile or was it all easy A.
Due to the anonymity of the site, students are offered the freedom to offer up honest reviews, why they dropped the courses, and what could be improved. Ultimately, MOOCs may have a place to see the real and raw opinions of the masses they are attempting to teach.
Nerd points? Stack is Linux, PostgreSQL, and Clojure.
The IP address is in my profile. Please don't create any accounts you'd want to keep since I am going to nuke the entire database soon. There are a few bugs on this site.
A legit way to get more followers on social media. Helps you build high quality one-to-one relationships with new people. Pick a keyword like "startup school". Our system will detect when "startup school" type conversations are going on in real-time and performs sentiment analysis. That's a highly targeted opportunity for you to start engaging with that user. And we deliver that user to you on a silver platter. It's up to you to keep the relationship going (put them in your sales funnel).
It was a bitch to manually get followers on Tumblr to sell t-shirts to. I had to seek users out, make sure they fit my target audience, and insert myself in the conversation. All without it looking like self‑promotion. That's a lot of mental energy just to reach out to one person. Once I built a fairly large sized audience boat loads of t-shirts started selling. Then I figured startups and businesses on Twitter would find it useful. And they did. Paying customers tell me it works 100 times better than Twitter ads.
I'd be interested too! Why not just put up some screenshots on the website? For the time being (and for future readers of this thread), you could just use a temporary URL, such as
I signed up to check it out and created a campaign. I can't tell if it's doing anything, though. Should I expect an email of some sort? Or do I need to check back to look at your page later?
Sorry it's so confusing. If you created a campaign then it is already working. There's nothing else for you to do inside the product.
Now all you have to do is interact with the people that are starting to engage with you. It's not an instant thing. Our system detects when relevant conversations are going on using fancy algorithms based around machine learning, sentiment analysis and POS tagging.
No, I'm sorry! The "social etiquette" on each social media channel is different to begin a conversation. For Twitter, it can be as simple as a "favorite". The system doesn't tweet or follow people.
Ah! I can see it at work now. I sure have favorited a lot of stuff recently :)
One thing I noticed is that it favorites some things that don't make a whole lot of sense. For example, I have a 'bitcoin' campaign. It favorites Russian spam links and random BTC arbitrage "results" along with some more reasonable type stuff. Is there any way for me to tailor these results a bit?
For example, does it recognize my behavior and favorite similar items? Or if I add keywords to the campaign, will it limit results a bit more?
Thanks for pointing this out. I do need more copy there stating exactly what the system will do.
In case you didn't catch my response to someone else, the "social etiquette" on each social media channel is different to begin a conversation. For Twitter, it can be as simple as a "favorite".
I'm moving to zambia for the winter to start an after-school program doing basic computer and internet literacy skills with kids.
It has been really fascinating watching all of the tools and projects that have popped up over the past few years attempting to make really high quality educational resources widely available, but these tools remain generally out of reach for those people that would most benefit from them.
kind of realized on review that my OP was pretty dull. :)
I'm going on my own. I have a friend who has been there for three years, and I was there briefly in the spring to sort of get a feel for things. Initially I will be working with computers at a few existing sites.
Basically, there's this really common phenomenon where western donors will give things like computers or e-readers to a school or other worthy organization in a country like zambia, but will not be prepared to do the sort of sustained support work involved in actually seeing that those resources work. My sort of general idea is to try to make use of those resources that are now mostly sitting unused.
I guess my go-to anecdote was a visit I made last year to a computer lab that had been set up and funded by the british council[0]. They'd done a really considered job, involving creating a full-time support/sysadmin position at the school, sending that person to nairobi for special training seminars, and just generally working pretty hard to avoid the kinds of pitfalls I'd seen in other places. When I visited the room, two of the ten computers (the only ten computers with internet access in basically a public school board serving 300k kids) were in use, and they were in use by teachers. The admin, whose job is keeping a computer lab running, had never heard of wikipedia. Etcetera.
So I'm going to go live there for five months, bring some freelance work (I do iOS stuff, a bit) and see if I can't show some kids some of the neat things they can do with computers.
I'm working on a next generation programming environment for front-end browser development that combines version control and dependency management. It is called lit and the current alpha iteration is at http://www.corslit.com
I just introduced static semantically versioned builds and started the process of self-hosting.
The interesting thing about lit is that it allows for modern professional development without any UNIX command line or file system dependencies.
I'll have more literature and a very exciting screencast demo very soon.
Unless you have an express license or permission to make use of a derived work of Coors's trademarks, I'd just say that this is not so cool. Specifically, I doubt that you actually registered a "CorsLit" trademark, which completely mimicks the one by Coors Light, by keeping the ® symbol in place. Any trademark office would have rejected this registration.
I'm just an engineer, telling you this nicely. I'm sure, Coors will find other words, should your tool become more popular.
Like imgur for location. No sign up & 1 click to share your current location. If you sign up, you can save your location privately (only you can see it).
Use cases are wide open. Save your parking spot. Share location to meetup with a friend. Save a special spot in a forest. Etc.
If you use check-in services, GeoGraph may interest you. If you never share your location online, you shouldn’t use this.
Working on new features to make location more useful.
I had the idea a while back, it's great to see it implemented so well!
One suggestion though, the fact that use cases are wide open could stifle growth. I'd suggest a few different landing pages you could A/B test, each covering a very specific use case.
You could have one page explain that you can save your parking spot and share it with others. Another for sharing a meetup location. Another for saving your favorite locations. Yet another (where you may win big) would be easy location saving for photo and film location scouting.
One other small piece of feedback. It would be cool if it automatically copied the link to your clipboard when clicking the button. Would save a whole step. :)
Gingerbread and Candy Corn (http://gingerbread-and-candy-corn.appspot.com) - A one-stop spot for finding houses with holiday decorations. Sadly, I don't think it'll be ready for Halloween :( Though it should be ready for a launch near Black Friday :)
As a kid, I always loved driving around looking at Halloween/Christmas lights and as I've gotten older and moved to a bigger city, its been a little difficult knowing where to go to see good houses. The only real way to do it right now is YouTube videos or hoping your local newspaper has it covered.
The reason I think its cool is I'm learning to use Google App Engine on a responsive HTML5 style page. Since I'm not too graphic oriented, I'm learning how to use Flat UI to my advantage (as you can see in the nowhere near done demo). I'm going to get to learn a lot of web hosting stuff, like the official webpage currently is hosted with Dreamhost, but how do I get GAE to play nice with that, managing/handling requests, how to appropriately display houses without killing my GAE free package. If it generates enough success this Christmas, I'm hoping to spend next year learning mobile development for an app that does the same thing, but also gives you directions.
Have you used your AWS free tier up yet? If not, you should consider jumping on it. Free 24/7 micro server for a year - and you host the webserver, so you can install Apache, Nginx, whatever you want. I used it for a while, and the most I got charged was a couple quarters for going over on disk usage (DB was doing unnecessary reads / writes).
Also - this is a cool idea. As I've grown up in the same area, it seems like fewer and fewer people go all out for decorations around Halloween and Christmas, it who does with minimal effort. I can't find any examples (none in my area), but does it support pictures of the decorations?
I'm going to try to, video too; right now I ask for a link, but since I missed out on this big weekend I have time til Christmas to work on it. Obviously I can't add every house myself, but I've made it really easy to add a house and remove a house, all with a buffer to avoid spammers.
I have not touch AWS before, so I'll look into it. I went GAE because I'd used Udacity's Web Development course and in it they talk about how Udacity actually runs off GAE, so I thought if they did it, its do-able.
It's a new blogging platform that helps people build audiences. Our oldest users (1 year) have seen roughly 100% increase in daily traffic, twice as many comments, etc. My personal blog has doubled daily visitors and growth rate for subscribers went from 1% to 10%.
On a very off topic, how much do you have to pay for a four letter domain like yours and whats the process like. Did you use something like sedo/godaddy? I've always wondered how difficult is it to acquire one.
I forget exactly what we paid, but it was ~$7500, I think. Expensive, but we figured that it would build some trust and wouldn't be an embarrassing domain to have in your blog title (sett.com/alec vs superblog9000.com/alec). I think we bought it through Sedo, where prices vary wildly.
I bought a 4-letter domain (edofo.com) on Namecheap for the standard .com price but now don't know what to do with it. It just sounded like a good company/product name.
Can I just use sett to syndicate my Wordpress blog posts, the way I'm currently doing with DZone, JCG (as an affiliate) or StumbleUpon, GetPrismatic, Tech.Pro (manually)?
Or is sett intended to compete with (hosted) Wordpress directly?
Hmm, that's gonna be tough. I find the Wordpress+GetPrismatic or even Disqus kind of combination quite competitive to get traffic, and in a tech area, as I said, there are lots of great syndicators. I agree that your USP is subtly better though. Are you already profitable?
Also, why did you call it Sett? The metaphor isn't very obvious from your website.
1. https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick - Neddick, a private "reddit like" for the enterprise. Very much inspired by Reddit, but has some additional features - triggers & filters for content, RSS consumer, some additional "share" options (XMPP, ActivityStrea.ms via REST, etc.)
2. https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" product that has some wicked cool features compared to most other ESN offerings, including: ESB integration for subscribing to real-time business events, iCal feed integration, integration with workflow/BPM engines, etc.
Why is this stuff cool? Well, they're both OSS (ALv2), written in Groovy, and have some really nifty features. And what we're working on now is semantic concept extraction, automatic correlation/linking of Named Entities to related resources, and semantic query support. Coming down the pipe will be some rad visualizations and just generally more support for different ways to navigate the "knowledge space" that is entailed by related content, people, events and tasks.
For me, this is a classic "win win" because I get to have fun working with cool tech: machine learning / big data (Mahout, Hadoop, etc.), Event Stream Processing, Semantic Web stuff (Stanbol, Jena, Fuseki, etc.) and because we're building some stuff that I think we're going to be able to monetize.
Build awesome tools AND make money from it? That sounds like my idea of fun. :-)
I've been slowly working on a few things, and hopefully can finish them during the winter:
1) Shared Places
The idea is that you can have public or private lists of locations that can be shared with other people, and would be integrated with mapping software on your phone so it is easy to navigate to them.
Some private lists that may be useful:
a) A family one that keeps track of extended relatives, friends houses, soccer fields, etc
b) A small business that works at, delivers to, or services fixed locations.
Some public ones might be:
a) Places in this area that are related to US Civil War history.
b) Gas stations in this area that have a drive-thru (this sounds silly, but was actually where I got the idea - my sister has small children and it is a pain to get them out of the car and into a store to just pick up a few convenience items, so knowing where she can go that has a drive-thru is really handy)
2) Insomnia Tracker
An app/website to log things related to sleep (beverages consumed, medication taken, notable social situations, what time you try to go to sleep, what time you wake up, etc). Hopefully having it available on a phone will make it easier to keep track of things more fully than if you had to remember to write it down in a paper log, since you usually have your phone with you.
Then this data can be used to find trends such as how, say your coffee consumption affects your sleep, or maybe how stressful arguments at work are keeping you up at night.
I don't have anything up for either of them yet, and I'm not sure either could actually make enough to be more than a hobby, but they are both useful to me and kind of fun to build.
I've implemented most those features in your description, Please refer to http://www.golater.me , GoLater integrated with Evernote , You could create note then add a GeoTag for place , You will see this note's map location in your iPhone after sync to GoLater iOS App. So With GoLater , Evernote become your Places content management system, The places content is fully controlled by yourself.
The most cool thing is GoLater's note could be search by Map region, Drag your map and see your interesting places collection, Especially GoLater's map function also implement 'filter by Notebook', you could collect places related to US Civil war history in a Notebook named "US Civil war", Open the map in GoLater then switch to "US Civil war", Drag the map region and all information related with "US Civil war" will show up around map region
GoLater also implement Places Sharing by way of Evernote share notebook , Your places is private list in your notebook, but you could share your places notebook to your family , Your family could pick up which place is interesting then save to their own map
It's cool because:
* It lets you share your terminal session, read-only, using just one command. Easy to get (or give) help.
* Many people can watch the same session. If you pair it with Hangouts OnAir, you could do live trainings.
* It's not as powerful as tmux or screen sharing (as it's readonly), but it's much simpler: there's no need to open ports in your firewall, configure your router, or create users. Being read-only also is an advantage in its use-case.
I haven't launched it yet (I'm finishing some performance tuning), but it's usable. Its only dependency is on Python and Script. If you're on Linux, you just need to run:
python -c "`curl -sL http://get.shellshare.net`"
This will download the client and run it, automatically sharing your screen and giving you its URL.
I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able to parse it exactly the same.
In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any technical limit on the nesting depth.
As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines.
So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer commas), and what they write "just works."
It's server-side. There's a record for each page/component in a database where the JSON is stored. It converts the "criteria" part into SQL, and the "options" part into HTML, and returns the resulting HTML for each component.
SparkleDB NoSQL database server is a horizontally distributed, real-time, performance-critical, highly available, and large-scale software solution capable of handling Big Data. Fast. Transactional. Both ACID and in-memory (we let you choose). Acts as a single logical database unit, even though it may consist of hundreds of physical computers located in the same physical location-or dispersed over a network of interconnected computers. Autonomous horizontal scaling. No single point of failure. Concurrent access, crash recovery & repair. Federated queries. Semantic schema-less data model and a powerful declerative semantic query language that are both international standards. Remotely connect to the database using a built-in RESTful API over HTTP or use our JDBC or ODBC drivers. Works on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. We're based out of Sunnyvale, California. Learn more at http://www.sparkledb.net/
Powershame: Publicly precommit to being productive; your friends will get a timelapse of screenshots when you're done.
It's cool because I'm using the pre-alpha version to get myself to work on Powershame, sending out timelapses to my wife and facing shame when I break it and it fails to send.
Nuclear reactor startup (http://transatomicpower.com) designing a molten salt reactor to turn nuclear waste into clean energy at prices competitive with natural gas.
Any plans for personal (home) sized units? I'd love to get off our power grid as we have daily outages and brown-outs that kill electronics happen a couple times a year. (And yes, I'm in the US, and in the middle of a hefty power grid but according to the power company, we have problematic squirrels).
This sounds very interesting, I'd love to know more. Specifically: have you made a plant yet? If not, how far off are you?
There seem to me to be a lot more designs for revolutionary new nuclear plants than ever get built. Can you share any thoughts on why that is, and why yours will be different?
* We've got 20+ years of experience in making games and wanted to leverage this expertise to make a game that will help fund our charity.
* We're a completely new and indie company.
* Our team worked on World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Mercenaries 2, and several others.
* Professionals from NASA/JPL and USC are helping out so we can make the game educational, and scientifically correct (see the video on our site). But not so "educational" as to ruin the fun in the game.
Looks interesting. You say you're a group who brought us WoW, SC, C&C and more, but no names. Would be interesting to see the actual team behind the game, portraits and brief blurbs etc!
A code editor that uses knowledge of a programming language's grammar. It's cool because it should be significantly more efficient than working in vim/emacs, and will allow powerful scripting capabilities and macros to transform code structurally, instead of as text.
I experimented with using cfgs in a code editor before but with the aim of making it easier to code on touch screen devices where curly braces and the like are difficult to type. Here's a prototype I started for writing Json.
http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/
Currently I'm working on a few different developer tools, as part of my continuing mission to make my own life easier. I figure they're probably cool because if I'm scratching my own itch then I should be scratching itches for other devs too.
* GitHubReminder - serendipitous email reminders about your starred repos on GitHub. https://githubreminder.org/
Do you do storage on the back end? Can you target a particular open source project to analyze it? Can you target languages other than JS?
Make a Github bot that makes pull requests that analyze a project's complexity, areas where it's more complex (refactor), areas where there's fluff, projects that don't follow 'standards'. That'd be cool if it was an opt-in thing, like I add a "ComplexityBot.MD" blank text file, complexity bot comes by, analyzes my project, pull requests the complexitybot.MD file, gives me some nice data, comes by again whenever it gets some down time and updates the analysis.
Yeah I should, you're right. I'm working through a huge to-do list on that and CoffeeComplexity right now, but I'll add that on the pile too. :)
There is no storage on the back-end, it just calls a little node library that I wrote and spits out the result.
The work to target other languages is underway, I've split out the AST walking to a separate repo, so it just requires writing a walker implementation for the target parser and you're done. The CoffeeScriptRedux walker is currently in development, with LiveScript planned for after that.
So I met a guy recently who is building something similar to the ComplexityBot idea you describe. It's called sidekick and looks pretty awesome from my initial play around with it.
It's still pretty early days with it at the moment so things are liable to change, but I have elastic set up right now. I'm completely new to search though, so I don't really know the ins and outs of different solutions. Plenty of time to learn though, as I'm still working on the crawler part right now.
Google wrote a regex code search engine based on trigrams, and you can download it[1]. I don't think Lucene supports regexes, but it can do some somewhat simpler pattern matches, and I don't necessarily see why regexes are necessary for searching code. Lucene does a lot more for search than match strings, and I don't necessarily see why searching code is fundamentally unlike searching other kinds of documents, so a lot of those features might help you get much better results.
A local media player in the browser. I mean to make it full media player with video support but for now it's audio only. I also want to make it web app instead of chrome app but some apis are not available anywhere else. And background running is a key feature. It has about 7k users, which is more than I expected TBH. Also the occasional support email is the best thing to happen to me that day. It shows that people actually use what I made.
A friend and I are developing a new fast, space-efficient (read: probabilistic) key-value store. We're using it for some computational biology applications.
It's cool because:
* It scales to really large data sets: We store ~10 billion keys in memory on a single, not-too-ridiculous machine, and the design supports sharding trivially
* It's fast: we have a lot of optimization still, but can do ~1M lookups/sec (O(1) lookups)
* It's a data structure! (Which as non-formal-CS people we find fun)
Would be very interested to hear other applications that people would find the above attributes useful for!
Currently building out http://forever.fm, an automatically-beatmatched radio stream of popular music from around the web. Built out the real-time music streaming backend in a mix of Python, C++ and Golang, just submitted the iOS client to the App Store, and am currently finishing up the Android client. (Along the way, I also built my own distributed, persistent version of Unix pipes on Redis: http://github.com/psobot/pressure)
Give it a set of rules and it will buy and sell stock for you. I got interested in algorithmic trading and built this site to find out if it works. If it does I'll add real money trading.
I'm working on it because brainfuck is awesome and writing a kernel in it is even moar awesome. I'm currently trying to figure out how to port several basic GNU coreutils to the system.
The kernel boots and hangs in QEMU. That's good for now; at least it boots. Now, the important thing is actually getting it to run bash, and a few basic coreutils, specifically cat, mkdir, echo, ls, and cd.
Once it's done, I'm pushing to github (commented extensively, of course ;)
I had a fun little project with brainfuck, wrote a rather slow interpreter in it. Was implementing BF natively in ruby before I was caught up with other projects.. Would love to have your project implemented!!
It's not cool. Nothing I make is cool. It never was. All I seem to make are boring, niche ideas... and not even I care about them. Since half a year, I haven't found anything that would interest me. I'm a man with low standards, I guess.
If you aren't liking what you're doing, pick something else up. Go try out a different hobby, get into painting, cooking, meditating, whatever. Don't burn yourself out grinding teeth on something you don't enjoy doing. Make sure you enjoy what you're doing. Go on a vacation to a state park, take a break for a while.
Everything great has once been a niche idea. As a matter of fact, everything highly disruptive was niche at first. Some examples:
- photography
- the light bulb
- combustion engine
- air plane
- radio
- tv
- Internet
Do you think that any of the above was anything except niche when they were invented?
Doing something great means trying hard, spending a lot of time on it, not giving up and believing that it can succeed. This involves both research & development, and a lot of sales. And if one idea fails, the other might work, but only if you're passionate about it.
It's a low-cost, secure and simple way to protect things that are important to you.
We've started with stickers for now, but are looking to offer item-specific protection soon e.g. keyrings, luggage tags and pet tags. The concept is well-founded but, until now, has been really poorly executed.
Yep, but Tile costs $20 a piece. LoseProof is much simpler, cheaper & allows people to protect items of low physical value, but high personal worth – forever :)
Betathegame.com - Beta is a game that teaches players programming, game design, and facilitates synergistic learning.
I think it's super cool because it's one of the few games I've played that has a heavy educational component while also being fun. It's also cool because it's extremely open. Through the use of the in-game terminal, players are able to build intricate levels and puzzles, then share them with others.
Due to the extremely customizable nature of the game, I foresee teachers being able to create homeworks/tests/assignments within. That's the synergistic learning part :)
We've done workshops with Black Girls Code, DIY Days, The Village, and the Grace Hopper Convention in places like NYC, Sheffield (UK), Philly, Minneapolis, and most recently Toronto. With each iteration we are seeing more and more excitement, from kids and adults as well.
If your interested and located in NYC, we're doing a game demo this Monday night (10/28) at Microsoft HQ (www.meetup.com/gaming/events/139786752/). stop by, play our game, chat with us, play other cool indie games and have fun!
I'm reimplementing the SQLite virtual machine in RPython, in the hopes that RPython's tracing JIT will speed up query execution. RPython (the toolkit behind PyPy) is cool because it allows you to build a JIT-enabled virtual machine with very little effort.
I'm also writing a comedy horror roleplaying game and getting to grips with all the less fun aspects of running a kickstarter campaign.
Localize.js (https://localizejs.com) automatically localizes websites. No backend integration required.
It's a client side Javascript library that handles phrase detection and the injection of translations. Machine and human translations can be ordered via our web interface.
Why is this cool? It generally takes an engineer at least 1-2 weeks to fully localize a website (go through all template files, replace all text with string keys, build a workflow for updating phrases, ordering translations, etc), and once the system is in place, editing template files and adding new text to your app is a pain. Localizejs automates this with a copy and paste js snippet. And it works surprisingly well -- I had my doubts about this approach before building it as well, but you'll be surprised that it doesn't hurt page performance very much at all.
It's still in development, but shoot me an email if you'd like to test it out. It'll be production ready within a month. bp@brandonpaton.com
Just started working on something to attack SharePoint that is based on sensible standards (REST, JSON, etc.) with the front end completely in something like AngularJS or Ember.
This is cool as, in my opinion, SharePoint Must Die.
I work on http://opendylan.org/ and have been working to revive it for the last couple of years. We've done new releases, improved usability of the compiler and some of the libraries, new website, updated all of the documentation to modern formats, including a couple of books.
We've also been creating a new IDE via a plugin to IntelliJ that is rapidly changing how I go about writing Dylan.
I think it is cool because it is a great substrate for experimenting with some features in programming languages and runtimes, like coroutines and numerics. It is great to start from a working and industrial strength system.
I think it is great to prevent things from being lost to history (and to hopefully have them be useful again). Dylan is a great combination of ideas from Common Lisp, Smalltalk but with a focus on creating native executables and libraries.
I've also got something that I'm building in Dylan that takes advantage of Dylan's strengths, but it is in very early days.
It's cool because it changes your relationship with the scale. Your weight fluctuates up and down naturally during a diet, and seeing a high number in the morning after you worked so hard the day before can be so demoralizing. With this app, that number is just a data point. You can enter a high number into the app and find out that your overall weight trend is still headed in the downward direction, so there's no need to freak out!
On a personal level, it's cool because I actually SHIPPED and because I've gotten to learn so many new things like design and marketing. And getting an email from someone who tells you that it's helping them in a way that no other system has ever helped them before feels incredible.
PS- Reading Hacker News has been a huge inspiration for working on this and persevering during the rough times. Love you guys.
A statically-typed, JIT-compiled dialect of Lisp. I felt that there was a spot between performance and low-level control, and high-level metaprogramming that no language right now occupies (Except possibly Rust, which looks pretty promising).
I learnt the basics of compilers from Game Scripting Mastery. I wasn't trying to write a compiler for game scripts, I'd just read it was a very practical (Light on theory) book, and my naive younger self thought this would be a good thing.
* It is very very simple to use. Any person with an iPhone/iPad can build something in minutes.
* It's a PhoneGap app (HTML5/JavaScript) which integrates Open Source components with a hand rolled framework.
* It uses a no-password pattern. It supports offline work. You can use bidi-languages. It has CSS based themed "filters". Mini-sites are customizable and embedable.
http://www.hshacks.com. Introducing hacking to the younger generation. Our goal is to introduce as many people to computer science as possible with our hackathon, and promote computer science education to as many females as possible. Companies are looking for more computer science talent and want more to see more females in their company ranks. There are almost 30% less females in computer science compared to males. We are here to provide the mentorship and training needed to become a great developer. We aim to teach students the basics of computer science by holding workshops, teaching the basics of web development, developing iPhone and Android applications, and integrating third party products (APIs) into applications.
It's cool because it's been an amazing ride keeping it nice and snappy in spite of an ever growing data set - over 50 million feed items retrieved so far and still growing :-)
i'm developing a mobile web interface & a SaaS architecture for my buddy's greenhouse & hydroponics controller business [1]. the backend comm is MODBUS/TCP (ethernet) or MODBUS/RTU (serial).
he's currently in Long Beach at the Maximum Yield expo showing off the early alpha I ummm, "polished off" at 4am last night :) [2]
it's cool because his customers and oems have been hounding him for some time for an Android and iOS app and for his software to work on OSX, Linux. (currently it's Windows only, C#/.NET).
a web app + SaaS was the most natural choice. also, i don't think anything like this exists yet.
Is there any wireless communication? I've been building a similar pH monitor using XBee communication. If your buddy would like to someone else to work with, I've been doing this in my free time.
the controllers, the heart of which are industrial PLCs, do have ethernet modules but no wifi since the reliability is critical in automation. however with a wifi router and some quick config, you can get this fairly easily, assuming the client talks modbus/tcp and knows how to query the controller's register maps.
i'm working on a plan to replace the ethernet module with a BeagleBone Black + Arch and a nodjs-based tcp->serial modbus proxy. lots to do, especially when you also have a 9-5 :)
Xbee isn't bad, provided you have good signal strength. Before I started teaching I worked for an HVAC optimization company that automated fast food restaurant chain air conditioning. It folded due to politics with the owners, but the product worked really well. One of our early adopters was actually a small Health Center.
I've got some modbus scripts that were written in Python while we were working with one of our clients. Its nothing great, just a few read/write functions. If you want I'll send them to you.
Everyone is working on new 3D printing hardware but the software is still years behind.
PrintToPeer (http://www.printtopeer.com) is connecting 3D printers to the internet for remote control and analytics. We have a web dashboard with a real-time connection to your 3D printer(s) for queueing and monitoring, and we've built a printer driver that works on the majority of current desktop 3D printers.
A hardware-agnostic API from the web serves as a platform for other developers to create apps on top of. It's an abstraction layer above 3D printing.
Being able to create tangible things from software is the coolest thing I can imagine, because of the social and environmental impacts. There are huge challenges ahead that we are excited to face.
We've used Octoprint in the past and it just didn't meet our needs. We believe in designing for the novice and giving configuration options for the professionals; Octoprint just isn't user-friendly enough.
Out of the box, we support Makerbots (as well as ReRaps). Multiple printers are managed from the same interface. You don't need to wrestle with firewall settings to be secure. We offer multiple slicers in the cloud rather than one slicer on the client. And we are starting with a Raspberry Pi client rather than relying on other projects to provide that capability.
And again, by having the service hosted by us, we're able to provide an API to 3rd parties to tie their apps into. Marketplaces, design apps, games, sharing economy services, etc.
Do you use Octoprint? Which printers do you have connected to the service?
I have not used Octoprint. I actually use a homemade printer with LinuxCNC and a HobbyCNC driver. It's a bit more fiddly than an off the shelf printer that's fully scriptable, but I really like looking at something I made drive around and make more things [0].
The way it sounds, at least from glancing at your website, is that the printer becomes web connected (your printtopeer.com link on the tablet and printer interface). I would never, ever pass control through a third party for something as expensive and dangerous as a printer. Can you manually override the endstops? Can you manually override the temperature controls? How about a hacker?
Just my thoughts. Your interface looks very nice, good luck with the project.
very cool!
- is it just a monitoring app or can you actually launch printings like in octoprint?
- Is there a way to encrypt the code sent so that the owner of the printer couldn't grab not even the G-code and reproduce the file once it's on his printer?
More than just monitoring! You can upload an STL to print, choose the slicer, and send to a queue that multiple printers can print from. All remotely via the web.
We can encrypt the transmission, but technically you could read the GCode straight from the serial input at the printer.
Yeah I thought so. Do you see any solutions to that? like putting a piece of hardware at the very end overriding or substituting the printer's control board, that would be able to decrypt the gcode and directly control the motors and extruders or the final electronics. I'm imagining this piece of hardware would work like the horrible hardware keys: the 3d file or gcode wouldn't be sent if it doesn't detect this hardware at the end of the process.
How hard do you think that would be? I imagine that for open source 3d printers that would kind of easy...
There is a business in there if you solve this ;)
I'm not sure if it would be possible, unless we replaced the printer's control board, but I will look into it. It's probably more worthwhile to just embed our software in upcoming printers.
ActivityInfo - allow non0technical humanitarian and other NGO workers to define indicators, collect results, map, share, and overlay from dozens of different sources. Open-Source AppEngine/GWT app with OLAP-ish database that syncs to local WebSQL for offline usage. http://about.activityinfo.org, or http://github.com/bedatadriven/activityinfo
Renjin - new interpreter for the R language built on the JVM (http://www.renjin.org) - includes a gcc-based Fortran/C to JVM compiler tool chain to leverage and transform existing scientific code.
A web-based IDE for automated testing [1] with real-time collaboration features. Pretty cool for a few reasons: First, it's actually making creating automated testing suites enjoyable. This is usually a pretty unenviable task. The IDE is something I actually like using though, and have found myself wanting to use it on just about every consulting gig or website I've touched since we started on it - even ones without an explicit automated testing requirement.
Second, the technology to pull this off requires a lot of different pieces, in different environments and languages. It's been a really satisfying technical challenge to make everything work together seamlessly and automatically.
It's a client-side encrypted Evernote replacement (with a much easier interface). The goal is to eventually provide easy note-taking, bookmarking/clipping, and file storage (ala Dropbox) with a cloud service that's surveillance/hacker resistant by only storing encrypted data. The kicker is you can still share with others.
Right now it's a pretty small alpha, but we're hoping to get some of the internals cleaned up and push out a new version with file storage in the next few weeks.
Of course, it's open source (if it's not open source, it's not encrypted). We're avoiding the word "secure" until we get some eyes besides our own reviewing the code.
Really cool! Have you thought of making it a phonegap style app so we can use it on our mobile devices too? I've been looking for a simple html note taking app that does client side encryption and works on all major desktop and mobile operating systems.
Mobile is on the way! Right now Turtl is two guys working part time, unfunded. We're going to be doing a fundraising round soon and if all goes well we'll be able to work on it unfettered for a while, including mobile apps.
It's cool because we launched it on Kickstarter 11 days ago, and have raised $101,000 so far... people really are excited about it!
Basically, it's a real-time energy sensor that can show you how much electricity each appliance in the home is using from a central sensor. Also, it has an open platform & can integrate with things like IFTTT, Spark Core, and Smart Things.
I made private diaries for close friends (7 max). It is like post-it note on the kitchen fridge. Not indexed by google. Honesty of content there is amazing. Things that people would never trust to fb/twitter. Also, people that never write anything on facebook, do post there. It is simple stuff, like " I am doing that, I am feeling this, I am going to somewhere." If suddenly, all of fb contacts would post such small things, you'd go crazy. However, there are several people in my life, about whom I care deeply and want to know how they are doing even if they are 1000km away. This solves my need to keep in touch with chosen few souls. http://www.osom.me
yes, we are invite only and tied to LV mobile numbers. Idea was that sms access would make it simpler for elder people, but turns out that its not. some people love it, esp in roaming, but most active use is still through mobile browsers. I'm rewriting this for simpler email based signups, to open international registrations, you can leave your email at http://this.is.osom.me to get invite soon
It's cool because it offers C++ developers an easy path to running code on GPUs and multi-core CPUs via an STL-like API. It's similar to NVIDIA's Thrust library but supports all OpenCL compatible devices (including AMD GPUs and Intel CPUs/accelerators).
P.S. It's still under active development and we're looking for more contributors with an interest in parallel computing and C++. Send me an e-mail if you're interested!
Toy project: an HTTP(S) brute forcing tool using Python as a templating language. Why is it cool: high performance using async IO, powerful templating for Python programmers, very easy to take HTTP requests and turn them into a fuzzing template that mutates request in a combinatoric fashion. Similar to features built into Burp proxy for those that are familiar with it.
Real project: A system that will help organizations understand their overall, and application, security risk and manage it across time. Why is it cool: because security is hard and this will make it easier in a non-snake oil fashion. Many organizations are flying blind about their actual risk. A good view of your risk can help you prioritize security budgets.
It, more or less, has a separate "Fuzzing Template" system which it uses to generate the brute force test cases. It was never meant to rise to the complexity of Sulley's fuzzing system. I wanted an in between complexity for the dumbest fuzzing and something completely flexible like Sulley and Peach. To solve that 80% problem of, "OK, I just grabbed an HTTP request, let's turn it into a quick and dirty fuzzing template." and from that, "And make sure it runs really fast on a single machine". In the time boxed assessment world you rarely have time to do all that you would like so this seemed to be a reasonable solution.
The beauty of the "fuzzing engine" I built is that there is nothing to it really. You put in "scriptlets", which are really just small bits of Python that generate lists or sequences, and it combines all of them. My goal was to just write up a lot of the common HTTP fuzzing scenarios (integer sequences, alphabetical sequences, demonstrate common encoding and other scenarios giving you a simple list of things you can copy/paste/modify into a template. And then it runs, logging it all into a SQLite database.
It will be. It has languished for a very long time, but I have resolved to get it out the door soon. I will put it up on a github repo (https://github.com/bitexploder) so watch there.
Nothing to do with coding, but I recently started writing energy things at www.btus.us It's just Wordpress for now, but I want to talk about energy generation and consumption related things using EIA and other data sources in ways people haven't seen before. Maps, charts, tables, I think there are a lot of fun things to look at in the energy industry, and most people don't have a strong grasp on it.
I'm working on a map series (36-48 maps in a .gif) of dominant generation types by state and month right now that I think a lot of people are going to find very interesting, as the seasonal disposition of hydro and the fast uptake of natural gas by all the boilers that can use it will be kind of visualized.
I have, it's quite nice, although a bit old. High-detail shapefiles of the grid have become harder and harder to obtain over the years though (post 9/11 basically). So as an individual it kind of sucks to not be able to play with the grid and population/generation shifts.
A friend and I have been working on building out a service to help connect organizations looking for custom software development-related services with organizations that provide them. At the time I first started on HN, I was looking for a company to do additional dev work for the company I was working for, so I posted this Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364. I got a few helpful responses (one of which I followed up with and hired) but it made me think about what was missing, and that was a service that provided comprehensive/well-organized listings (with all the stuff you would expect like case studies, work examples, contact forms that weren't buried, the ability to just "start a project" with one, etc.) of custom software development companies/consultancies/shops/agencies/your favorite term here.
You can Google for all this stuff, but sifting through the mounds of results takes way too much manual effort; you can ask on forums like this, but that's not going to work for a lot of people; you can look through LinkedIn or the ones that AdAge and friends use, but I didn't find anything I would consider thorough/useful on the former (and I find the searching and filtering system to be very poor), and the latter only really had advertising companies. I also thought about things that companies I've worked for that have provided custom software dev work would find useful (like having a single place to point customers with examples of everything - for various reasons, so many companies just can't/won't update it on their own web site - it even happens that the people who work at the company have to send an email around asking for examples of previous work.) So it's better than all that (we hope!) That's why we'd consider it cool.
At the moment, we're pretty far in to initial development of what we consider the MVP and hope to soft launch it in the next few months. Right now, we just have a splash-type page up:
I'm working on a system to export users from one version & instance of our SaaS application and import them into another.
The cool/interesting part of this is that I'm using a combination of SchemaCrawler and our homegrown upgrade/migrations kit to naively (with the only domain-specific knowledge being where to start) extract a single account from a multi-tenant database and import it into another one, even if the other one is a different version. (I only support upgrades, as downgrades would cause data loss.) Because it all runs over JDBC, it also means that I can go from one database to another - MySQL to PostgreSQL, for example.
Notelab (http://notelab.org) - a way to take synced notes alongside web videos.
It's cool because:
* It's really simple (paste a YouTube URL then take notes and they all sync up).
* At the moment there's no good way to capture, organise, export and share notes relating to online videos. You have to open a text editor next to your browser window, or (gasp) write on paper.
* It solves a pain point I have when teaching, as I often recommend videos as "recommended viewing" to my students, and I like to share my notes on the videos with them, and also see what they are writing.
* It's my first coding project, so I'm learning a lot :-)
It's a (free) headless browser API for web automation, creating web-bots, scrapers, and talking to REST-ful web services. I just released Beta version 0.9.5 last night.
It's cool because it's far more lightweight than the most obvious alternatives, which means (for example) that it's possible to run many, many browser instances at once, such as one per thread. As an API, it's very developer-friendly with extensive documentation and simple examples for every concept, making it very easy to get started writing java-based scrapers/bots/etc.
I'm building Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com/) to make HTML5 mobile app development awesome. Should have our first release out in a few weeks!
It's cool because unlike other apps that fetch data from Facebook, we're classifying events into categories using NLP algorithms and we're also working on advanced event recommendation system, so we don't just provide a list of things.
Also unlike other tech startups that try to make things easier to do at home (delivery, social networks, etc etc) we're trying to encourage you to go out and enjoy life.
Working on http://www.Driftrock.com - it's a Marketing tools platform that connects to various paid marketing channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Adwords, Analytics.
It's cool because it's designed to host lots of different marketing applications, and because it has the big data aspect to it.
The other cool thing about is that it's designed to be easy to use, mobile responsive, and self service (which is quite a big plus when comparing to the competition!).
The other cool thing is that it's my day job, and I get paid to build, design, and work on it :)
DoerHub (http://www.doerhub.com) -- a place where all of the things you are working on can attract not just likes but also advice, collaborators, tools, tangible help, referrals and word-of-mouth. It's a humanized GitHub, because no code is involved and non-hackers can contribute in little or big ways to your tech or non-tech projects and initiatives.
Cool because it makes the process of creating, sending, and signing freelance contracts much less difficult.
Ultimate goal is to get it to a point where a freelancer can pick from a series of pre-loaded templates related to their type of work (e.g. a brochure website, developing an application, wedding photography, etc.) and send their client a contract (that's viable) in minutes.
Also makes signing easy for clients by just using a single button click.
Just had a quick look at your site. I assume it is US only? (I like the idea, I had a similar idea for flat rental contracts here in Barcelona).
How much lawyer time did you need to spend on setting it up?
One suggestion for the website, it clearly states the benefits for the developer, but I assume the customer half of the deal would end up seeing it as well. Point out the benefits to that party, make it seem more of a win-win, rather than a developer covering their arse.
US only for now. I'm a solo dev/designer so really just as time allows me to add in il8n.
Not much lawyer time. I had the fortunate position of having my dad as a lawyer/a good friend who was a lawyer to pass the idea on to. The core idea (save for storing signatures) doesn't have any legal implications, so building it was pretty straightforward on that front.
Re: the site, thank you for this. I currently have an item on my to do list labeled "guide for curious clients." On my radar for sure, but I'm more concerned with getting the basic pieces in place before I invite that storm :)
You have an almost 1 megabyte image on the homepage (the octopus). On my internet the image alone took about 4 seconds to load. You should consider optimizing it
I love working on this because I get to learn a variety of things. Right now I'm switching from Amazon EC2 to my own setup with KVM/Qemu VMs.
It's been quite the experience prototyping with kvm/qemu, overall I'm really happy with it. From tuning libvirt, to loading RAM images straight into the VM in order to avoid boot-storms, learning about the various VM disk formats, virtio drivers, ... there's plenty to learn!
I'm working on a gmail replacement to deploy on my own server. It's called kite. It uses a lot of cool techs like vagrant, puppet, angularjs and of course, postfix for mail handling.
For the moment, it doesn't do much besides displaying a list of emails in a maildir but in a week or two I should have thread handling written.
http://www.reportsfortrello.com - Why it is cool: It is only two months old, but it is cool because of I made it to be free and private like no app. I did not want to be responsible for other people's data. Because reports are just a glimpse at a moment of time, I thought it would be best for both speed and privacy to store Trello activity temporarily. So I get off the hook for security and reliability and you get your data destroyed off the internet.
What does it do? It reports time from 3 different actions using Trello. When I first used the Trello api I was amazed at what you can see. Today I can move one card and inform my clients and track time at the same time. One bird...
I also don't require any signup. You use your Trello account to sign in. So I guess another thing that I think is cool is that you can use my application with little friction. In 3 clicks you can see a report of your Trello activity the first time you use my app. I am proud of flow.
I also think it is cool that I can get sub 100ms responses off my tiny vps using ruby/redis/apache/modrails/oj gem/jquery/bootstrap. I love the stack, sure it's not the fastest/latest, but it was fun to code.
The tool is currently used by people in 88 countries. I did not expect this at all and it is a happy surprise.
* you can carry your entire song repertoire with you (chord charts) and easily combine songs to create set lists for worship services, concerts, practice sessions, etc.
Why it's cool? Because it is a tactical type game, like chess, checkers, or go but instead of two players, up to five players can play meaning that there are much more possibilities for winning. I am also developing a board game for it as well to be able to play as a group at home, or where ever.
* It takes the headache out of maintaining multiple WordPress sites.
* The main plan is that everything is "set and forget". Install one plugin and that site is covered:
* Automatic updates for both point (3.7.1, 3.7.2, etc) and major releases (3.8, 3.9). The point releases should actually happen 1-2 days sooner than the 3.7 auto updates from Wordpress.
* Automatic plugin updates
* Automatic file and DB backups that are stored in S3
* Uptime and response time monitoring.
* "white screen of death" alerts
* Malware / blacklist scans and comparisons of core and plugin files against WordPress.org versions.
This was built for my own internal uses. I had one consulting client that managed around 600 sites and could not get their heads around the other management tools on the market, but could work from a Excel sheet that had the urls / usernames / passwords for all of their sites. When an update was ready, their procedure was: downloading all of the files via FTP, downloading a SQL dump, pressing the "update" buttons, looking at the home screen to make sure it loads, updating the excel sheet with the date and install version and moving on to the next site. They averaged 4 sites per hour. I'll let you do the math on how long that took to get through all of their sites.
Story: When a business needs custom software to solve a particular business problem, such as a special inventory management issue, a recruitment process, expense management or whatever is custom for their company. Normally they would have to go out and hire a custom programming company to use a very high level technology to create a solution. This is very time intensive, complicated and because the programmers don't understand your business, often there is a massive communication gap and projects often fail. Cell Master is a much easier way for business owners and people inside of your business to create custom business software. It is effective because you understand the business, you understand what the software needs to do and how it needs to work. All you need is just some basic excel skills, knowing how to use excel formulas, and you can have the same potential as the expert programmer. So this means you are going to be able to create the software faster, you will be able to modify and adapt the software, it will be a lot more cost efficient and you will be able to create the solution that you want, not the solution that the programmers think you want. You will be able to create an interactive web application that solves your business problem with your own custom software. You will be able to do it with only excel skills, you don't need HTML skills, web server skills etc. With only spreadsheet skills, you can create your own custom web application.
backrecord.com - a tool for tracking opinions and predictions (opinions about what is going to happen in the future) of people in the public spotlight. Our goal is to help people form better opinions by providing easy access to the ideas in the first place alongside tools for assessing credibility. Our focus is very much on opinion, not news.
It's cool because I think it's an interesting and difficult problem and I don't know of anyone tackling it well. I still don't know how feasible it is to create an automated / crowd driven system that provides a measure of credibility that is reliable enough to be useful, but we are certainly giving it our best shot and I would love to use such a tool if it existed.
I also think it's cool because I think both our user credibility system and topic hierarchy concepts have aspects that are quite nice that I haven't seen elsewhere.
We are currently focused on finance because it is clear how to score predictions about things that trade in a market (though the problem is much trickier than you might first imagine). Also, it is clearly valuable if we can succeed, even in a small way which is the most likely outcome if we do. However, we are playing with features that have broader applicability as well.
We let you access your eBook library anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Its great because we allow our users to convert their ebooks from one format to another with ease, its simple enough that my mother and father could do it. We also let you keep complete control over your library, if you want, by allowing you to store it on Dropbox or Google Drive
It's cool because
- Spend bitcoins anywhere you want
- No merchant integration
- 1 click checkout so you don't flood a million websites with your personal data.
DrumLog.com (http://www.drumlog.com) - Analytics for your practice sessions. It's a web app for drummers to track what and how much they are practicing.
It's Cool because:
* Creates analytics from an offline activity
* Built with Backbone.js, Node.js (Express.js), hosted on Heroku, and uses Parse to store data. (all great free services)
* Is being actively used by over 100 drummers who have logged over 3200 practice sessions in about 3 months.
It's really cool because most of the current chord sites lack the one critical feature for the mobile age: offline usage.
And also it's amazing because it's built entirely by volunteers and the users are evangelizing it themselves. We have never spent a dime on salaries/marketing or anything else. 100% bootstrapped.
http://60lbgloss.com (alpha stage) - database, community, and marketplace for magazine cutouts. ("60 lb gloss" is the type of paper that magazines are printed on) At the moment it's really bare, only I can add and sell the ads. So far I made a working site in 5 days. Next will be the community features like adding an Ad to your favorites.
I don't know why but I always thought fashion ads in Vogue were beautiful. They were art. And it pissed me off that others didn't see what I saw. I also love and admire Milla Jovovich and try to collect as many of her fashion/fragrance ads I see. I get really pissed when I can't have one. It's my collector's mindset. Even if the site fails as a marketplace and instead becomes the Pinterest of Magazine Ads, I don't mind. I just love scanning the ads in and organizing them.
So I thought why not have a marketplace where people can buy and sell their favorite ads of models and celebrities. There's tons of people who are obsessed with celebrities and collect whatever has their favorite celeb's face on it.
BeatStash: a Git/GitHub for music production (using git-annex)
In other words, keeping every version and branch of a musical idea, with rollback and merging (eg. merge bassline track from version A into different branch), and collaboration through these same tools.
I know people have approached this idea a few times, and just this month a startup called Splice popped up with some funding to do almost exactly what I had planned to in a previous iteration of the idea. However I've moved on to an approach which would make this awesome capability available to more people. Ultimately though, I'd like to extract as much as possible into a generic foundation for apps for other media such as video production, a low-end, self-hosted LayerVault alternative etc.
Also, out of interest in personal computer history, I ported the PCE classic Mac/PC emulator to the browser with Emscripten.
Unlike some of my previous projects (such as http://surveylitics.com), it's cool because it's actually useful. I've been using it for the past month or two for everything and anything I need to remember.
It's cool because it automates most of the sales process. It generates an NDA, and work-for-hire, invoices, and accepts electronic signatures for approval. Customers can review and approve milestones, make payments through Stripe. It even schedules calls!
I'm working on an aggregated information panel for the novice Bitcoin day trader.
It's great for Bitcoin buyers & sellers because the panel is consolidated around the more popular exchanges & wallets, its cleaner & easier to read than most financial-type sites, & all the data is real-time. Also, I'm working on supplemental features such as a live balance & calculator page to help make more informed decisions without having to navigate to other pages.
It's cool to me simply because its a site I myself want & need and mostly, its an excuse to play with technologies I've always wanted to learn & use so I'm glad I finally took the time to do so.
i.e
-Django as webapp front-end with Gunicorn & nginx in the mix,
-Gearman as a background worker pulling data and storing it in a DB,
-nodejs + socket.io pushing the DB data to Django,
-supervisord controlling Gunicorn & Gearman processes
And all of these living in their own VM environment for load/performance & decoupling of the usual silo of services.
Ping me if you're interested in finding out more about it :)
Sounds awesome! I'm not only interested in the day trading application, but your software stack sounds awesome as well. I couldn't find how to PM you on here, but you should email me at <my Hacker news username> at gmail. best of luck!
hpvic - not sure if you're working this solo, or as a bigger team, but I'm a PM, I love Trello, haven't used Pivotal, and can't stand Jira. I've been considering building out a Jira-killer myself as a side project. Might be good to chat and hear more of what you're working on. If you want to connect my email is cameron.norgate at the gmail. Cheers!
I'm working on completely rewriting my app (Stamp Trader). It's the only native BitStamp client I know of but the UI needs a ton of work. Why it's cool - you can quickly buy and sell bitcoins with your phone, you can scan and generate a QR code for addresses to buy and sell bitcoins locally with ease. I plan to open source the rewrite when it's finished.
I have a limited company incorporated in the United Kingdom, and I am working on three projects that I hope will turn into profitable products.
* Main focus: Transactional and marketing SMS application, it's a little boring and lots of companies do it, but none are truly self-service, and none make it super-easy.
* Back burner: Digital asset management, again it's done by many companies already, but there UIs are mostly upload, tag and try to retrieve. I have a background in AI (B.Sc) and I want to make it a little smarter than what's currently out there, with uploads that detect previous revisions of digital assets, etc – finally putting to an end file naming conventions such as x_final.ai, x_final_2.ai, x_final_final.psd (something I have seen used by every company I have worked for.)
* And later: I'm into brewing beer, and I have been working on recipes for a few years – Ambition is to make enough money to survive with the two projects above, and to begin investing in building a microbrewery and brew pub.
1) Instead of building an API for your project, you can start using Zazler as a ready-made API. It acts as a web server that can be installed locally and configured directly to a SQL database (a legacy database or a new one, we're currently supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and MSSQL), so that makes it cross-platform. (ofcourse you can also build a proxy with node or nginx on the server's port if that's necessary)
2) Database queries are defined as URLs per HTTP request, using a query syntax very similar to SQL. This allows the user of an app to write necessary queries, hence extend the app on the client-side. Complex joins, filters and similar stuff is supported.
3) Zazler comes bundled with many technical formats, data visualizations and app templates. And they are extendable, meaning the app's users themselves can decide how to view the data, even write their own formats and templates.
4) The feedback we've received from backend developers is that it will save them many, many hours of boilerplate coding. So it can also serve as a development platform that can be used to write database queries using URLs instead of writing boilerplate backend code. You can basically set it up and let the frontend technician take over the work from there.
5) We've used similar architecture for the last 6 years in our projects, so it's pretty mature. Now we're releasing Zazler as a beta for public and planning to launch it as a separate product in 2014.
I've written a blog post where I describe Zazler's approach in more detail: "API Creation – the Missing Link in API Management" http://www.zazler.com/?p=115
Cool, because I am trying to bring social networks to people using "dumb phones". By sending text to one number all your neighbors will receive it. Perfect for reporting suspicious person or lost dog, or announcing garage sale or neighborhood event.
https://starthq.com - a web app launcher & new tab replacement extension - like the old Chrome new tab page, but better.
What makes it cool is that we are implementing a number of desktop and mobile OS features, like multiple, screens, fast shortcuts, cross app search, notifications etc. but for web apps.
I'm working on Revision Path (http://www.revisionpath.com), which showcases black web designers, web developers, and graphic designers. Right now, that's in the form of interviews, and I've got 28 done (10 audio, 18 text) with about a dozen more in the queue.
Why is it cool?
Well, whenever the mention of race and technology get mentioned together, people get extremely bent out of shape. Instead of going that doomed route of asking why the industry isn't more diverse and arguing statistics (on it's visible edge, I mean), I decided to showcase the people who ARE actively working in this industry.
The site is just a few months old, and the reaction has been mixed (as you can imagine since I'm only interviewing Black folks), but I'm definitely interested in telling these people's stories who love this industry, love the work they do, and are interested in telling their stories.
Cloud Imaging API http://ionapi.com - A lot of software I write faciltates design online, web to print type stuff, and I noticed a real void in a robust image manipulation API. This restful API makes it pretty easy to get images generated of text with lots of effects.
Why it is cool:
-supports obvious features rotation, resizing, etc of images, but that isn't really the important parts
-Vector first, text is generated as vector then converted to raster if needed (for client side previews). An API request you can access the underlying point data or request a vector file(eps,pdf) in response rather than raster (png).
-Robust Text features - load fonts on the fly,shear, vector outlines (offset path), texture support, gradients, warps, shadows, etc
-Object structure allows complex images to be built from other canvas objects previously saved or pulled from the net, canvas can be built from vector or raster sources, or through the API.
-Ultimately the API will make it painfully simple to overlay designs on objects such as pens, mugs, koozies, shirts, vehicles, etc.
What is not cool: it isn't done :( Unfortunately it isn't ready for open access yet. I have a few customers using parts that are done, but mainly documentation is not done and there is no front end developed yet for sign ups/ registration. If you are interested in using this please let me know or use the notification form on the site.
Where is it being used? Several places, one of my clients you can checkout that uses it http://bandegraphix.com (lettering tool, rclogo/decal tool)
another one Dynamic Product Image placement http://boatdecals.biz/lake-swag/ (canvas creation, masking, warping)
I'm working on first startup as a sophomore in high school. It is basically a PHP login/registration system styled with all the bootstrap templates. (You can get the PHP login/registration system with any Bootstrap template. Coming soon. https://www.phpstrap.in/
I have started working on a library to simplify exposing C++ classes to various languages that can be "embeded". A link to the second attempt [1], my current attempt is to expose things to V8 Javascript [2]
It is cool because in addition of exposing and sharing objects, it can be used to output the documentation for them, or even ease embeding such languages as C# (to generate interop library automatically).
Note that this is my second attempt (recently started), the first one worked but relied on some overcomplicated third party libraries for V8, I could not understand them fully, therefore a reboot.
Recommendation engine as a service (http://savant-api.com/) -- absolutely nothing public yet, except a fancy d3 powered widget that has nothing to do with the service.
It's cool because I'm hoping to make collaborative filtered recommendations easy to obtain for small outfits.
Will your recommendation algorithm be public or secret? Will it be customizable by your users?
You mention a bulk import. Will you provide a bulk export, or will I have to keep my own backup database to avoid lock-in?
I see in your API example a bucket, a source, and a target. Would you consider a "value" field, for graphs with weighted edges? (The question is moot if I can't modify the recommendation algorithm to employ it.)
It'll use standard algorithms, although the MVP will only have one available (using pearson currently). My goal is to make various alogrithms eventually available, and perhaps some mechanism to select the best automatically (e.g., selecting the best method based on how sparse or dense the graph is).
As for bulk export, yes in the sense of "download all the calculated recommendations" (perhaps you want to dump that to a local db to access that data directly, rather than rely on hitting my api every time you need something), but not "download all the data exactly as I put it in". For the most part, the data you put into my service should already exist in your own database (what products your users have purchased, what products your users elected as liking). In addition, you'll likely want to use a one-way hash to hash sources (especially if you use usernames or email addresses to uniquely identify users).
I probably won't launch with the ability to add weights to edges, although that's probably one of the first post MVP features on my todo list.
I work on AWS DynamoDB Storage Engine. AWS DynamoDB is an infinitely scalable / infinitely provisionable / hosted low latency key value store. It is growing beyond the basic key value store definition rapidly with indexing etc.
Building and keeping a storage engine that runs on a ton of machines with high performance requirements / changing hardware / a bunch of new feature work etc. is truly hard. Add in other complexities such as live deployment of new software, monitoring for issues, testing the upgrade downgrade scenarios etc. you are looking at a super complex and fluid system. Very few people in the world get to be in the middle of such massive e-machinery, So it is a great place to be. Tough, but great.
If that sounds interesting to you, and you are looking to work on the bleeding edge of database technology used by a lot of customers, PM me! We are hiring in Palo Alto, Seattle and Dublin!
I'm working on https://www.uncover.com (an easy way to offer perks and rewards for your employees) with a few other people. We're bootstrapped and making decent revenue in our 6th month. We've got a huge update coming (hopefully) before Thanksgiving.
I'm building a tool (using python) that helps scientists (me) plan and automate repetitive experiments of pretty much any kind. The amusing part is that by using a database as a back end one can--guess what--query data based on experimental conditions and streamline and automate analysis.
Many scientists I have talked to (who collect their own data and do their own analysis) simply store their data sets on the file system and keep track of any relations or conditions in an ad hoc manner. I personally don't trust my memory, my handwriting, or my ability to do EXACTLY the same complicated set of things over and over enough to do that.
Hopefully using a tool that makes the relationships between different pieces of data explicit and automates or at least systematizes how data is collected I and others can generate more and better data and communicate what we did and what we found more effectively.
Making my strongest software engineering beliefs a business with http://www.jooq.org
It's cool because two of the oldest and most popular technologies in the software ecosystem (Java from the 90s and SQL from the 70s) are still integrated like it's 1997, through the awkward JDBC API. Meanwhile, everyone else has since been trying to hide SQL away (e.g. JPA).
While jOOQ doesn't help everyone (http://http://www.hibernate-alternative.com), most DBA / SQL-centric developers who have stumbled upon jOOQ found the idea very intriguing, and it certainly beats SQLJ in user acceptance.
What's really cool as well is that I can help the Java folks remember how awesome actual SQL can be. Today's junior developers hardly even know the SQL language.
It's a graphic novel about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. She's got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive mind can take over the planet.
I want to build a marketplace for electronic cigarette vendors/individuals. I've been a vendor for almost 3 years and have a unique product which is even more effective than others in helping people quit smoking (even though we are not allowed to market it this way). I think that looming regulation will destroy a lot of small businesses, so I am trying to find a way to respond to that.
Getting someone to take payments is really hard though. Balanced just changed their terms, so I am really demoralized but still keeping at it. My options seem to be to become a payment processor myself (expensive and I have no clue what to do) or wait until a similar service comes along and make sure to get in quick so I can get grandfathered in before they change the terms.
If anyone has some insight on payments and wants to help me learn the industry or if you smoke and want to quit, let me know.
It's cool because:
* it's not a dating social network, so if you won't get spammed with people telling how beautiful your body is or how much they want to sleep with you (unless you make a profile with this purpose in mind)
* it's about doing stuff, so you can finally meet a running buddy you wanted or fellow foodies to cook together, or just talk and share ideas, no pressure!
* our iPhone app is beautiful and delightful to use, because we keep our users in mind, always
* our team is super small (we have basically 4 permanent workers, an intern and a... dog :D)
It is especially helpful for unfinished long articles and long videos, which I have to come back for. What makes ALittle unique is, it actually saves the play progress of the video (in the case of articles, it saves the scroll position), so that next time you can come back to the exact same spot. No more writing down the time manually. No more time spent trying to remember the spot you left off at.
ALittle makes this possible with a Chrome extension. It adds a cute little button next to your browser's address bar. With just one click, you can save the progress of any webpages. Furthermore, the progress can be synced across computers, as long as you have Chrome browsers.
* It makes it really easy to integrate new open source code. Want to compile against boost? Add one line. Want an ML library? Add another.
* Everything gets automatically pulled in.
* It makes it really easy to share your open source code with others.
* Works with a bunch of languages.
* Proven model from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
My main project is using large scale computing (data from millions of CPU hours) to change how drug discovery is done. Drugs are very expensive because 98% of them fail. This hopefully changes that, and makes it profitable for companies to go after much smaller diseases that do not currently get attention. Papers forthcoming.
* host 3D printed projects with version control (based on git)
* generate previews of STL and OpenSCAD design files
* can make commits through web uploader, so you don't need to know command line git.
Sqwiggle https://www.sqwiggle.com - It's cool because we're making peoples lives genuinely better by enabling them to work from wherever they want. We're also doing our part to rid the world of commuting and grey cubicles.
Cool! Its amazing what we can do with WebRTC. I create this site (https://github.com/imomin/videoChat) just for fun.
Are you guys trying to replace Skype? Because, that is what most freelancers and contractors are using it.
We definitely see people swapping for Skype, yes. We're not trying to replace it for general communication - as an internet phone Skype is excellent - but for collaboration, not so much :-)
JamHive (http://beta.jamhive.com) -- a service for musicians to collaborate regardless of physical distance and time constraints.
Back Story
I love music and would love to do a jam session with old friends, but it is difficult to schedule a time or we live too far away (ie: SF & Amsterdam & Tokyo).
Why Cool
* Musicians work together on a single jam (up to 5 instrument/vocal tracks)
* Record directly into browser or upload a pre-recorded audio file
* Basic editing and filtering of sound waves
And I am looking for feedback & advise!
* @Musicians, how is the recording & editing experience?
* @Engineers, currently, this is built with RoR, Bootstrap, Heroku, AWS and a huge mishmash of the Web Audio API - how can I make this scale better for smartphone, tablets, more browsers (currently only Chrome and Firefox)?
* @Engineers, advice on improving (speed & security) data upload / download
I'm trying to design an alternative to the investment economy. I would like to digitize cost information and use computers to determine fair prices. I want do it by keeping metadata about bitcoin transactions.
By making the system of production computer accessible we can run businesses at cost.
I'd like to start with the information systems for the One Acre Cafe. They are a pay-how-you-can restaurant opening in Johnson City, TN. (I wish it was pay-what-you-can rather than volunteer for food, but that's something to worry about later.)
Their initial need is for a volunteer management system. Apart from three people, the entire staff is volunteer. I've not done any coding on it yet, but it will almost certainly be a rails app.
Eventually I'd like to integrate this with an inventory and pos system, so you get a bill that tells you what the meal cost the cafe to provide based on the accumulated cost information associated with the business.
You get a receipt that includes a QR linking to a profile for your server. You are able to give feedback by entering adjectives and ranking them -1–1.
There is also the ability to give a tip in bitcoins. I'd like to have a service where the money can be conditionally given. I'm interested particularly in housing.
I want people to be able to give specifically for shelter and they get it back if it isn't used.
Phase two would involve mortgaging a house and then renting the space at cost and payable in bitcoins. What I'm trying to work toward is the ability to sustainably travel. A chain of restaurants that accepted each others' electronic work reputations combined with easily accessible housing could allow a new sort of nomadic life.
Developers oriented project management ebook ( http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-manageme... ). It's cool because it teaches you practices that can be applied to your current IT project to make it more developers friendly. The goal is to make the work on a project more smooth and everybody more happy, as well as help the developers team to transition into remote work. The content of the book is similar in form to http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/story-of-size-1/ and other blog posts linked inside. I hope some of you might find it interesting.
I have been working on a web-based interactive environment for creating 2-d mechanics problems (with bodies like particles,disks,boxes, forces like gravity, springs, linear & circular motors and joints like revolute joints and sticks etc.) and simulating them. Think Algodoo for the web.
I think it's cool because nothing like this exists for the web. I recently gave a presentation at a Javascript conference in Bangalore on this: https://hasgeek.tv/jsfoo/2013-2/688-interactive-physics-simu... To see the demo, skip to 13:00 in the video.
I haven't launched it yet because collision detection and response is pending. Hope to do it soon. :)
Because:
* Google Docs is the best WYSIWYG on the internet;
* blogging can be just about writing on a cool interface, without having to setup blog platforms AND go on their messy interface to write;
* regular people can use this;
* the written content stays on Google Drive, so you can delete your blog and keep everything without dealing with strange database backups;
* almost-compatible with Jekyll-Octopress themes (some changes on the code have to be made, and for now only I can add themes to the pool of themes, but we will see what happens);
* custom CSS (tomorrow javascript) files (automatically fetches from Google Drive) embedding.
Using GPS trackers to watch where grooming equipment goes, then update the "what's been groomed" report automatically and (where there's sufficient connectivity) in near realtime.
A continuous integration platform for iOS and Android apps. Our goal is to create a CI environment which is focused on mobile applications, no more, no less, without the hassles of setting up and maintaining something like Jenkins.
The goal is for the student to interact with, to play with, the models. Of course almost all of this is open sourced :) The visualizations can even be easily embedded in any online content with just a few lines of HTML provided in the catalog.
https://kwelia.com -- we are taking a quantitative approach to determining the market rental value of apartments. This has not been done accurately on a large scale in the past, and I think we are the first to do it well.
I just signed up for an account, only after the fact to find out that you don't have data for the Portland, OR market, which is unfortunate since this is definitely a tool I'd like to use in my upcoming apartment search. Two things I wanted to mention about the sign up process:
* Before giving you my email address, I'd like some reassurances that you won't spam me, etc.
* It took 10-20 seconds to create my account. Not sure what's going on there, but you might want to investigate that. This doesn't appear to be a fluke. When I logged out, then logged back in again, it also took 10-20 seconds to log in after entering my credentials.
Also, if I log in, then go to the Kwelia home page, then click on "Apartment Ratings", it brings up a login page stating that I'm already logged in, whereas I would expect it to take me to the Apartment Ratings page.
This tool looks really promising. Let me know if you ever add support for Portland, OR.
Thank you for the feedback! We're rolling out our models as we acquire customers for our B2B product, and we have none in Portland yet, but hopefully it's only a matter of time.
Sorry about the performance issues, I will be looking into them right away.
I am working on multiple things at the moment, though with my first year of college, progress has been slow.. After challenging C and a multitude of "introduction to programming" classes, I got into CISP 401 (java), so in order to get ahead of the class, I wrote a toy interpreter in java (deemed KjuScript). It is extremely slow, but based off the ruby language with full OOP implementation. Also recently I have been working on something in C++ with a friend that converts sound to color (to teach my dad music (he really wants to learn) who lost most of his hearing at 20, and so my mother who was born deaf, may enjoy my concerts in real time)
There is a prototype of it in python located on my github account:
I'm working on a credit card sized e-paper device. It has an Arduino, USB, Real Time Clock, and a battery, and fits in your wallet. Still doing hardware designs.
Some potential applications:
* Replace all the barcodes in your wallet (loyalty/membership)
* Google Auth TOTP
* QR Codes (links/BTC wallets)
* Interactive nametag
* e-book/text display
* date/time display with wireless phone sync over BTLE
* act as a USB device and display text/notifications from your computer
I'm not completely sure if the use cases are convincing enough - would you buy such a device? This revision won't have any wireless and instead will be focused more towards electronics/Arduino enthusiasts - dead simple to program over USB with provided libraries and documentation. You can use it as an Arduino/e-paper dev board and code neat apps for it that you can actually use.
E paper is a pretty cool technology that's tough to adapt to use cases.
Have you thought about potentially replacing office or grocery store signage? Those displays typically need to be changed by hand daily,.monthly, or yearly and could benefit from auto or remote updates.
I don´t see why you would use one if those when almost everyone has a phone in their pocket these days. Usually with and app or NFC chip that will do those things.
Indeed, smartphones can do a lot of things, but not one thing particularly well. My original goal with this design was to replace the 'card wallet' apps for phones, as the barcodes never seemed to scan very well through the glass screens. I've narrowed it down since then to be more for toying around with Arduino/e-paper development, at least for this iteration.
I'm just playing around with designs/dev boards and building the concept privately at the moment. However, I've gotten some funding for it, and the goal is to get a working prototype out by Spring. If there's enough interest then, I'll work on it full-time over the summer to get a product out.
SearchTempest (http://www.searchtempest.com/) -- Search multiple craigslist cities, eBay, Amazon, etc., in a single search. Cool because it's all based on Google Custom Search, so we can do it without scraping craigslist (or indeed, accessing them at all).
AutoTempest (http://www.autotempest.com/) -- Similar idea, except searches multiple used car classifieds sites: craigslist (via SearchTempest), AutoTrader, Cars.com, eBay Motors, Oodle, CarsDirect... We're affiliated with some of the sites, and for the others we use Google Custom Search, and/or link to their results pages in new windows.
Also, Scrum smart is easy to use Scrum management software for the iPad. It is actually a lot easier to use on the iPad than on a laptop. Finished 2 weeks ago. And a new version coming out soon with a lot more features.
It's cool because we're putting the care into hand curating our listings so that we have really cool collections (you can check em out here: http://reverb.com/handpicked-collections).
It's also cool because we're experimenting with machine learning (poking at prediction.io currently) to see if we can give people more of what they want. And we're building Ruby services and we have an iPhone app. And all this with only two developer, a UX designer and an intern. And it's cool because we're actually making money. And, we're hiring ;)
I'm working on a web app framework / cms for node.js built on express.js and mongo called KeystoneJS, and have been for a few months.
Keystone makes it easier to get a blog / website / web app up and running without a lot of the module research or boilerplate code node.js usually requires. It also provides a beautiful, useful admin UI (think activeadmin for rails).
It's open source (MIT), and cool because...
* There isn't really anything like this for node.js yet (that we've found). There are a so many great modules and you can plug in almost anything, but getting projects off the ground requires a lot of boilerplate compared to frameworks like rails or django.
* It makes sophisticated things trivial by providing drop-in patterns - like session management and auth, and clever fields for your models, e.g. location fields and image fields (which make for a better admin UI but don't abstract too heavily the underlying data the fields represent).
* We're trying to build an "out of the box" system that doesn't keep you in the box. You can use what you like and swap out what you don't. You can use Jade or Handlebars. Plug in any express middleware you like. Use the built in auth system or provide your own.
* It's all based on the best practices my team have come up with in over a year of node.js web app development and we're using it to power several commercial, production projects. So it's got real-world usage and solves real problems.
* Quite a few people have said this is a gap in the node.js ecosystem, and ultimately if Keystone is just useful for us and a handful of others that's fine, but it would be really exciting if we could start something that helps node.js grow or helps other web developers use the platform. Especially for projects where rapid development is important, and having a great admin UI available would be the difference between using node.js and not.
There's also a demo online at http://demo.keystonejs.com - it's very simple but you get the idea of how to structure an app, the source code is on github.
If you want to check out the admin ui, you can sign in to the demo at http://demo.keystonejs.com/keystone with the username demo@keystonejs.com and the password demo.
I'm working on a news reader that works in the opposite way of traditional news reading apps. It uses Twitter as a sort of enhanced RSS feed and ranks news based on how much they are shared in real-time, and lays them down in a newspaper-like format specifically designed for mobile devices.
It allows you to find what's important for people rather then what matters to newsroom's editors, and put you in a whole different point of view. I belive it's extremely interesting, and I'm trying to make the reading experience as enjoyable as possible.
Simply put, I did it because what is interesting for Canadians or Australians is slightly different from what matters to people in US. I'm working to open it to other countries as well, but that requires some work on my side. At the moment is only available in US, UK and Italy. I should've mentioned it.
My guess would be avoiding legal headaches. It is easy to know what is allowed or not in your own country, but you have no idea in other parts of the world. That and less maintenance.
Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com) - Real-time file sharing service that allows you to view over 200 file formats right inside the browser.
It's cool because:
* People can now share and view the contents of the files online without having to download and view them using 3rd party desktop apps.
* People can collaborate around content while on the go.
* No need to sign up for multiple services to upload multiple file types, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Flickr, etc. Just upload any file on Jumpshare and view it online, beautifully.
* Files shared can be viewed by the recipients without having to sign up for an account.
* Kills folder hierarchy and introduces a new type of folder organization to speed up file sharing.
That sounds like a brilliant idea. Also, if you bake in 'previewing' capabilities (like thumbnails for images, bpm/quality descriptions and waveform sketches for audio files, or whatever the equivalent would be for each type of media), you could potentially lease the technology to social media sites that typically already do this for popular image formats.
It's cool because I got started really seriously making stuff when I realized that there was not nearly as much of a difference between making stuff and making a living as I thought there was.
It was only getting cheaper and easier to make software. Making software (products!) has been democratized.
This has happened to software/startups, but not really to music nor film nor comedy nor photography nor publishing (yet!).
But it will soon and I'm happy to that Gumroad can contribute.
- Input Farm provides quick website design reviews from expert designers for $75
(but we're giving them away to HN users now - see here: https://medium.com/p/8a87429d26cb )
It's cool because:
- I've been a web developer for 10+ years and quite often i get 'stuck' on making a website better. I don't need a designer to do a 'full re-design', i just need a few pointers on how to make my website better.
- I need 'fresh eyes' on my website
- I need confirmation that i don't need to start over and waste a bunch of time!
This day and age people tend to get easily low on their morale for every little reason. I wanted to help them quickly recharge themselves with some great quotes that inspires and boost them up, most of the time.
In that process I'm working on my iOS app Quotegram, which is now available in the AppStore. It's one of the best looking apps on the Quotes niche on the AppStore.
It's cool because practically it has helped me recharge myself in a couple instances in the recent past and I'm sure it would help those in need of a quick recharge.
http://cyclingplanner.com -- a season planner and training/results tracker for competitive cyclists.
It's cool because:
* A lot of cyclists are still planning on paper or spreadsheet, including me before I started working on this. It scratches my own itch and I believe I can make the experience a lot better.
* It collaborates instead of competes with services like Strava and Garmin Connect. Because it's using their API's cyclists can keep logging their workouts on those services and view detailed analytics on cyclingplanner.
* It's my first serious attempt at bootstrapping a software product and I've learned a ton of interesting stuff aside from coding so far.
The first is software that automatically pauses/mutes your music when you watch a video and restores it afterward by looking at process volumes. It is called mute.fm but only available for Windows at the moment. http://www.mute.fm/
The second is a location-based pasteboard called near.im that lets you share {contact information, addresses, links, text} with people who are nearby who don't necessarily have a particular app installed. I've recently discovered it can also be used as an appless Chrome-To-Phone. http://www.near.im/
I've been working on PLUNK. It's a Technology Consultant Firm which specializes in helping the entertainment industry.
I've been going to a lot of conferences where the reoccurring theme is the tremendous divide in technology and the entertainment world. Either they don't know, don't care, or are too overwhelmed to know where to begin.
PLUNK will help them build applications that will deliver meaningful experiences with their audience. Whether it's simply helping to improve upon their social network to building a fully customizable application. Their audience is already engaging them, it's time to talk back.
Fun side project to scratch an admittedly very small itch I've had for a while. I've collaborated with a local company who is handling all order fulfillment.
Working on adding font chooser, image upload, and a more elegant customization form.
* It solves a key problem for parents: How do I easily share my baby's pictures & videos privately without requiring my friends and family to sign up or install something?
* It automatically finds pictures of your baby on your Facebook feed and pulls them into your baby's timeline, so that your grandmother can see them.
* Built in SF with my buddy and I using Django/Python, MongoDB, AngularJS
Very cool! My wife and I have this issue. We and my parents want to share pictures without posting our child's life for facebook to control, but still have that convenience.
Shyahi (http://shyahi.com) - Your Social Homepage. Its like about.me with extended information about social profiles beautifully summarized on your profile.
Its free, easy to set up and pulls in your stats directly from Dribbble, Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and your blog feed which means that your Shyahi profile is always up to date. This is something that's really cool about Shyahi, you set it up once and then its automatically updated based on your social activity. It provides the most precise and relevant information to your audience at one central online location. And its bootstrapped and made by two people.
I am working on Notegraphy (http://notegraphy.com) it's a writing app for iOS and Web.
It's cool because:
The idea is simple: write stuff, short or long, multipage and then style it as you want. Then you can either publish to your own gallery of notes or, share it on your favorites social networks.
Why it's cool:
It's open source. It provides REAL real-time encryption without the hassle of "choosing a password", "copy pasting text" etc. Also same logic can be applied to any web chat service.
In my spare time I am working on Seatbelt (http://seatbelt.io), a web app to help developers find pair programming partners.
It's cool because I think we need to bring developers together and share the knowledge, and I am convinced that pair programming is a powerful way to do it. There is much we can learn from working with people from different backgrounds.
Right now there is only a landing page with some copy, I work on the code when I find time. It's taking a while since I use this project to teach myself node.js (I am a .NET backend guy in my day job) but it's a fun side project.
Together, these comprise a Halo modding tool which can edit the game while it's running, which is also why it's cool.
Additionally, whereas previous editors have usually hardcoded functionality into the editor, all of Quickbeam's functionality is implemented in the fully-scriptable Halolib, written in Python.
Ultimately I would like Quickbeam to become the Emacs of Halo editors.
I am working on a food discovery app that works something like Waze. Users post where they get their favorite foods, either groceries or restaurants. This data is aggregated and used in the search tool that lets users search nearby, popular and in season. I haven't gotten it online yet but I have it running locally.
Its important because there is no food information online. Every online food ordering website is closed off, and finding great food still requires people to ask around. This could open up a whole new market for small food producers who are producing great stuff but can't get awareness.
Creating a non-intrusive task management application.
For example, you mail what the guy has to do and add this mail in cc: in_15_days@maildo.me .
When the task is finished, he responds to you and adds: finished@maildo.me in CC.
You can set up options for a weekly overview of tasks with their current state.
I've been working on a mud implemented in python. For the uninitiated, mud stands for multi-user dungeon, and they are usually text-only multi-player games run over telnet. The first MMOs. It's cool because it is a modern project, using twisted for networking, it's event-driven and scripted, as opposed to hard coded and tightly coupled. The whole project is still highly in development and may not actually be in a working state but it's a labor of love. https://github.com/danielmunro/mudpy
It's cool because you don't need to do any coding to add beautiful and custom galleries, video players, mp3 players, and any other types of widgets to your website. Just copy/paste an embed code and you're done.
This helps you a lot especially if you're an agency or freelancer, or if you're using a publishing tool such as Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, etc - where you don't have access to a server to upload files.
A app similar to square (a point of sale for iPad), but with more features. I doing a real-time sync (based in firebase) for it.
This is a upgrade, semi-rewrite of http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller (until now only useful for wholesale distributors with ERP + Sync server) to help small shops to sell and replace DOS based POS software that is very common in my country and elsewhere.
Is a single-man operation ;)
P.D: And I wish to have time/money to build a language based in FoxPro/Python...
Robot Audio (http://robotaudio.com) - An online DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). The app itself is not ready yet, but you can play with the synthesis engine on the signup page.
It's cool because:
* You can now make something like Ableton Live or Garage Band directly in the browser.
* You will have all of you work and assets available from any computer and won't need to worry about license keys.
* It will be much easier to share and collaborate with others.
* It will be affordable (between $5 - $20/mo) as opposed to $600 - $1200 for Ableton Live.
Never-Bored (http://mide765.com) - An iOS app you use when you have some time to kill.
It's cool because you can choose between four topics depending on your mood and environment. You can read short-stories, watch interesting videos, learn facts and basic phrases for ten languages or play some games such as Pong.
On a personal level, I've started using Xcode for the first time on third of September. This is the final product of my first try on doing an iOS app.
http://www.collegeanswerz.com/ - better college reviews. Most websites just have a reviewer answer a few questions about their school. This doesn't work. I have a bunch of specific questions that reviewers answer.
An iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com) for ebooks. I have a day job so this is an after-hours side project.
It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its users like it too!
That's pretty cool. When you're reading, at any point did you feel 'choppiness' of what you were reading, or do you get used to it? When looking at the trailer, I was finding my inner voice was more robotic than reading normally.
I find that the subjective choppiness goes away when I speed it up. For me the sweet spot is about 500 words per minute, with up to 3 words at a time (I say 'up to' because sentences are chopped up based on punctuation marks, and then smoothed out to leave about an equal number of words in every segment. This is a rough description). The sweet spot also depends on the sort of book being read.
I guess it's like watching a movie on a suboptimal screen, or at an suboptimal angle, etc. After a while you're mindful only of the movie, not of the viewing experience.
it is cool because it allows businesses to become more profitable by allowing companies to negotiate discounts on supplier and service provider invoices.
basically sellers can get paid early (adding liquidity to their business) and buyers can profit on discounts, adding thousands to their cashflow (which they will never get from a bank).
you can think of it as twitter meets dropbox meets ebay for the supply chain.
Everybody uses encoders for these formats that are as old as the formats themselves, but today's hardware is about 2000 faster than it was back then, so a modern encoder can use expensive techniques that were previously unthinkable.
Hiresync (http://hiresync.io/) -- collaborative coding interview tool / tool to send out screening questions to candidates, record their response, and being able to pass that recording to your team to review at a later time.
Currently pretty early in development, alot of features are incomplete, but it feels nice to have something deployed online.
Mostly feeling like I'm stagnating at my day job so this was a good chance for me to learn some new skills.
http://codedose.com We are working on a small side project (codename: market colors) that will make daily analysis of stock price movements and trend discovery super easy. You will be able to analyze and compare literally thousands of stocks from US, European and Asian markets in a few minutes. AJAX frontend with interesting high volume batch processing in the back end. (if you are interested in more details, drop us a line!)
These are services that have a secure, public URL that can be accessed by any web browser. The server hosting the traffic, however is completely anonymous and cannot be traced.
I've been working on this full time, completely solo, for nearly 11 months now. It's lets you import any content to read, provides low friction translations so you can concentrate on enjoying the content, and has a spaced repetition system to learn words and phrases with flashcards.
It's getting some early traction now with 2300 users, 45 of whom are paying, and really good feedback.
http://pineapple.io - I think it's cool because I don't know of any centralized locations for development tutorials and tools. Reddit is filled with mostly jaded posts and HN is filled with lots of news. Mine is only tutorials, tools, and assets.
We're working on an app for developers that collates all of your saas products into one mobile feed. It helps you stay current on what's happening at work, both what your team and your machines are doing. It also helps you quickly dig deeper into issues & triage important events.
It's cool because you can keep track of a lot more than previously possible, communicate with your team, and act on it - from your phone. And it's damn good looking too (but we're biased :)
I'm working on a game based on memorizing Chinese characters.
It's cool because it uses the qualities that motivate people to play farm sims to encourage players to study a language. Players plant character-flowers and must pass quizzes in order to pluck them.
This website has more information and a download link for the beta, which only works on android at the moment: http://zhongwengarden.com/
a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby.
It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a language I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't really consider myself an expert on (as opposed to PHP and Javascript, both on which I do consider myself to be an expert). I figured that building a Ruby project from scratch would be the best way to learn the language. So far, so good.
Thoughts:
- No framework yet. Decided to just build it and see what happens. I'm not trying to learn Rails -- I'm trying to learn Ruby. They're not quite the same, obviously.
- It's harder than I thought. It took quite some time for me to figure out how to mix together sockets and threads to keep track of multiple players
- It's more fun than I thought. I've used Ruby in the past but have never really been impressed. (I think that's mostly Rails.) But this project is full of far more epic wins than my usual ideas.
- Ruby probably isn't the best language to do a MUD in. I initially started with C and I got pretty far, but I decided I wanted to learn a new language, not build a MUD in a language I already know.
- The old school Merc/Diku muds out there are based on flat files. All data, such as character files and area files, are stored in a custom flat format. I'm using JSON for my test data, since it's pretty easy for Ruby to consume, but I'm thinking I may switch to a DB-based setup. But then again, the flat file thing is working just fine...
I guess I'll publish the source some day, when I get to the point where it's playable.
Another MUD lover here; I have a full JS MUD (WebSockets) engine I hack on from time to time for fun. Generally speaking its modeled after a flavor of diku.
I have another big commit planned with some significant refactoring but was holding off for nodejitsu to update their supported node version (you can try an early version of the mud with the link on the github page) and for socket.io to move to 1.0.
We try to break down the barriers to innovation in healthcare. We bring together doctors, nurses, developers and designers so they can hack without all the bureaucratic bullshit.
3D Printed sprockets for a local high school robotics team.
Building a small quadcopter for learning the technology so I can do aerial photography.
Started developing the materials for a course I'm teaching at the local hackerspace nominally titled - Building your own autonomous ground vehicle. I just took delivery of the parts for my first cut at a kit.
I also just finished teaching free classes to local students about 3D Printing, Git, and Project Management. Not sure it counts as making though.
I'm working on something of a responsive.io clone that uses Flickr as an image store. Not sold on the name yet, but I'm calling it Fittr in the mean time. It is mindful of retina displays, only requires that you know the flickr id of the image in question, and will optionally load a smaller image first, to make larger images appear to load quickly.
I'm building a community-based startup and project incubator with the goal of forming "classes" of founders who support and advise each other. It's called http://launchway.net - though it's been difficult to get people on board I'll keep trying.
As an aside, I think we should have threads like this one more often, I'd love to learn what everone's been up to periodically.
Tharunopayam (http://upayam.tharuni.org/), a laravel/android-powered SMS helpline for adolocent girls, women and the aged in Warangal, India.
It uses an android device as an SMS server and a laravel based responsive front-end which allows our experts in various fields like nutrition, psychology, law, etc to answer peoples' queries from wherever and whenever they find it most comfortable.
Currently working on a mobile security application to help easily teach, implement and manage the physical security of human rights defenders, activists and journalists. Right now there is nothing out there that does this, so hoping it will get a lot of use.
I'm not the best in terms of technical ability so if anyone wants to donate time - especially app developers, LAMP stack guys, UI/UX or testers then please drop me a mail to secfirstmd@gmail.com
Pitch Me (http://www.pitchme.org) -- we're building a marketplace for buying and selling quality journalism.
We vet our writers and we have hundreds of stories from them from all over the world. If you're an (aspiring?) editor, you could commission a magazine full of original stories, edit them and pay the writers in one place. Get in touch at hello@pitchme.org if you're interested.
Games are created using a custom toolset and programming language. Everything is centrally-run (games, content editor), making it easy to add multiplayer and collaboration features.
I made something to format the outbound links on a page into an expandable list that I think is kind of cool. It's probably way too early to be posting it since I just started it though but what the heck.
That's the last app I'm working on. It's quite a challenge to go for a Weather app as there are bazillions of them on the AppStore, but I really enjoy the challenge of it.
The feedback have been great for now (it just launched 2 days ago), and I hope to make it even better !
I'm working on an OpenFlow controller in my spare time. There's nothing too cool about it other than, it's written in Go and GPLv3 licensed. It's useable but I have a big update in the pipes. Once that update is done I should be able to port some existing OpenFlow applications to Go.
https://github.com/jonstout/ogo
Using mininet right now to do verification of message parsing and link discovery. Other than the latency calculations, link discovery seems to be working just fine. After I get this next iteration done I'll take it to the office (InCNTRE SDN Lab). We have a lot of 1.0 hardware to test against. Next I'd like to add path computation based on user defined weight functions.
I'm working on Business Card Maker(http://bizcardmaker.com/), a very simple client-side business card generator that can quickly export PDF or JPEG.
It's definitely not as cool as most of the stuff here, but it's real easy to work with, that's why I'm hoping it will be helpful for people with no technical skills and small businesses.
We're trying to fix urban parking with Spot (starting in San Francisco), connecting homeowners with parkers when they're not using their spot.
They can drag to set their schedule or set it based on days and we let them start earning morning and do all of the legwork. Our parkers can open up the app and book a spot on an hourly basis instantly.
Its a source code search engine with experimental regex support. Why is it cool? For me its because search is something I am interested in and indexing the web is cost prohibitive. This way I get to play with indexing hundreds of gigabytes of code without breaking the bank. Its also useful to show off when doing job interviews.
With C++, it is hard to use code from 1 compiler with another compiler. In windows, it is even worse in that versions of visual c++, and even debug/release can't use the same binary. cppcomponents, allows code to be written in 1 c++11 compiler and used in another compiler, without giving up C++ features. You can use exceptions, and std:: string, vector, tuple, pair,chrono::timepoint.
I am hoping this makes it easier for people to create more c++ libraries. Currently, if you have anything other than a header-library, you either have to require the user to build the library, or else create a binary for every compiler (maybe even compiler version). With cppcomponents, you can create just 1 binary per platform that all the compilers can use.
Some of the libraries I have worked on are a libuv wrapper, a implementation of async/await in c++ (based on boost.coroutine), and currently working on libcurl wrapper. All these libraries are on github.
I keep thinking javascript in android apps is a great idea but I can never get it to work in a way that simplifies development. Good luck! I hope you can figure it out.
Just released a Q&A book about building community products. (I founded Forrst in 09.) Totally DIY effort, used ruby and the prawn gem to generate the PDF file. All questions were crowd sourced. Here's a discount if you're interested:
https://gumroad.com/l/obcp-book/saturday
Yes, thanks for the remark! Some people of that course sent us really nice feedback. The list of universities and courses using MG grows, which is really cool.
I've just completed Dailybbble http://dailybbble.herokuapp.com/ it sends you emails with best Dribbble designs of the day. It's cool because I always visited dribbble.com to see populars, now they're at my inbox at every 9am.
There are already hundreds of subscribers in the list. That excites me.
It's cool because it's one of the few brazilians startups that have a really unique proposition and are aiming high (instead of just copycating a proven american startup to serve the local market - that's too lazy for us).
The cool thing about it is I built an engine to scrape the web and APIs and keep generating thousands of new questions. Trivia games are fun but can get repetitive fast. I'm hoping to avoid that.
In progress is an android version, then venturing outside of sports.
I like your idea, I was thinking about it other day. I am working on my private pilot license and in a month or so, I will be doing my first solo. I want to record it but then I don't want to spend too much buying a new goPro. It would be nice, if I could rent it for few days for fraction of cost. I am sure there is a market for it.
Hi imtu80! We already have GoPros in the San Francisco market (which is this one we're actively growing). Feel free to email me (adam at cameralends.com) if you have any other feedback!
Working on a project in conjunction with the British Library to crowd source tagging for illustrations found in 19th Century Literature. And further down the line to provide descriptions of what the images actually are.
Basically, gives you the tools to make languages that compile to JS in one nice, neat package. I've already written a lisp-like language and a python-like language this week which is pretty rad.
I'm tinkering Click or Treat with http://clickortre.at a silly little halloween themed game with absolutely no point. Has got a halloween soundboard though :)
It's cool I've used it to start learning AngularJS. It's also cool because my daughter enjoys clicking the little ghost.
Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope!
My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own, mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk
I'm no AI expert, but after reading both Hawkins' On Intelligence and Kurweil's How To Create A Mind, I'm pretty sold on the idea that our minds are basically pattern-matching machines. Lately I've been trying to spend a lot of time "thinking about thinking" and recognizing how I form thoughts, relate to memories, etc. I am not super familiar with Hofstadter's ideas, since I haven't (yet) finished even GEB, but the general idea is very intriguing to me. I'd be happy to chat with you sometime and bounce ideas around. You're almost certainly way ahead of me in terms of technical knowledge in this domain though.
Excellent, I'll look into getting a copy of that. I have several of his other books (GEB, I Am A Strange Loop, Metamagical Themas, etc.) but only got about 1/3rd of the way through GEB before setting it aside to focus on other stuff for "a while". Unfortunately "a while" has turned into over a year now, so I guess it's time to get back to it. :-)
Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a successful iOS app myself.
It is cool because:
* It has all features to stay updated about your college courses in a very easy user experience.
* It has game elements that keep students engaged and have fun while learning.
New version of Fitto[1]. The current version works well for people who, so to say, live in the gym, but not for others. So we are adding a ton of features to make it work well for the more casual gym-goer!
It's cool because of the many new hardware devices we are integrating.
RoyalCMS. It's an extremely flexible content management system, which focusses on creating functionality by using plugins. It's like an platform for websites. It is not quite done yet, but we have a (kind of) working beta: http://royalcms.net/
Let's you find rail connections using Google Maps and directly buy the tickets on the rail site.
Currently only in Germany, but other countries to come, and also cross-country tickets using each relevant rail provider.
It's cool because conferences are great of networking and learning (especially in the tech industry), but current event planning tools don't handle a lot of the things that conference organizers need.
Why it's cool: We give you access to creatives all around the world for topic based photo sharing. No more #selfies or #burritos when you just want to see Street Art or Typography photos. We have been touted as "Pinterest for the real world" by a few of our users.
Prismoquent is a package written for Laravel that allows users to easily access their Prismic.io repositories. Check out my blog on the package at http://blog.enge.me, and stay tuned for a new update and a new website dedicated to Prismoquent.
Am currently just in the conceptual stages but some sort of device where you plug in a bunch of ipods and then can select a song from any of them to play as well as queuing music etc.
Is cool because at parties etc. means you don't have to continually switch ipods to put on 'That song'
I'm building Konfect (http://www.konfect.com) because it annoys me that at every social network I sign up I need to refind those I usually connect with. With Konfect I can manage my connections accross networks.
Can you give some more details? Can I easily get the data and safe it on my disk? Can I add further metadata to each contact?
Is the software Open Source?
Will there be plugins/extensions such that when I'm on Facebook or in GMail or whereever, that it can easily show me more contact details? (A bit like rapportive for GMail.)
Octopus - http://www.octopus.org - a Marketing app directory and community blog/forums. I think it's cool because Marketing in my opinion is the most important aspect of business - particularly on the web.
I am working on a side-project in my spare time - GetSSL.me [1]. The idea is to sell inexpensive certificates and offer friendly support. All certificates are hand picked and we only offer the best of them.
https://psychsignal.com/ Quantifying crowd psychology. Initially our granular sentiment technology is focused on financial sentiment. We plan on changing the way real time news is sourced and reported on.
A platform to auto-deploy and sells web apps on different IaaS providers, helping small-medium business to delivery their software without api/pay-per-use/provisioning troubles.
I've been at a Hackathon for the last 15 hours and we've cobbled together a text message service that you can ask questions to and it responds in the style of Yoda.
It's imaginatively called "Ask Yoda"
Pretty useless, but pretty cool and hella fun to make :)
I know "why do we need another CMS?" It's cool because it makes it really easy to deploy Bootstrap sites. Plus, it has a full API and a great UI (well, at least I think so).
writing a sci-fi novel dealing with p vs np, quantum computing, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the future of civilization and culture, and hipsters.
it's cool because it's also about my personal life and struggles with bipolar disorder.
I am working on a knowledge representation and reasoning system. It is cool because of the simplicity and expressiveness of the languaje it uses to represent knowledge.
GAuthify (http://www.GAuthify.com), Aims to make two factor authentication dead simple for the masses. I love two factor authentication and want to see everyone else use it too :)
Very very doubtful. The base plan is $24 and covers 5000 users (a fairly large amount). If it saves 1 hour of developer time a month to maintain the code/infrastructure/bugs/issues/scaling you're already looking at a 50% price savings. Through building this I can guarantee that it will save way more than 1 hour a month.
But you could create a very simple response and add numbers pretty easily. And at .075 cents per message I gotta think, in the long run, Twilio is a cheaper alternative.
I should add that I work for Twilio so I'm a bit biased. However, I love your idea. Just trying to do the math. :)
Twilio is the SMS/Voice provider so the bias doesn't really apply :) Thats why I kept the SMS/Voice rate the same as twilio. Not trying to make money of SMS/Voice just trying to implement a service over it so its easy to use. Have you tried out ezGAuth? Love to know what you think. I'll probably try to seek out someone from twilio soon for some sort of relationship since it helps their sales too.
There are also the added benefits of doing your 2FA independently. Furhter, should the long run come, we give you full read/delete perms on all the data so you can implement it yourself.
I'm working on making virtual reality as compelling and comfortable as it can be with mostly off the shelf components. It is cool because seeing virtual reality finally work puts a smile on the face of just about everyone we try it on.
Working on a distributed document database. It's cool as it integrates a search and analytics engine, distributed file system and query language like SQL. Will be the first ever and will solve all database problems for the most part.
libgroove[1] - a generic music player backend C library.
The goal is to provide a powerful yet simple API for building a music player app. It's the backend for Groove Basin[2], a music player app written in Node.js with a web interface.
It's cool because everybody who uses it as the backend for their music player app benefits from the shared maintenance burden and increased robustness.
I am quite late to this thread, but what the heck, I'll give it the ol' college try. :)
HashPix: Search for images tagged with the same hashtag across Twitter, TwitPic, Instagram and Flickr. Create public/private albums of these pics and share the albums with anyone and everyone. Anonymous albums allowed but are made public by default.
2. @updt_me: (RSS/Atom) Feed updates via Twitter DM. Follow @updt_me and send a tweet @updt_me with the keyword START followed by a URL, e.g. "@updt_me START https://news.ycombinator.com/rss". You'll receive feed updates via Twitter DM (hence, the need to follow) when they happen. I'm currently using it to subscribe to xkcd, smbc and a few others.
Good for:
- Avoiding RSS inbox pile-ups due to procrastination/lethargy
- Ensuring authors get the page-views their blogs/sites deserve
- Following 'thoughts' rather than 'people', i.e. no more "I just ate broccoli. I #WIN." when you just want to read, "The 7 habits of highly-successful techpreneurs that you must cultivate before bedtime."
Coming soon:
- Ability to subscribe to feeds via DM - for those subscriptions that you'd rather not announce to the world. winkwinknudgenudge
- (Almost)instant PuSH updates using Superfeedr. (Still trying to figure this one out, actually.)
Because a year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to make a comment like this. I was (and still am) an utter newbie with no knowledge of any kind of programming. Deep-dived into Python/Django and the results are up there for you to peruse. Granted they aren't awesome like most others in this thread but hey, it's a start. :)
Tools to help people who are located far away from each other to collaborate in rich and interactive ways just as if they were together in the same room.
Working on a js library to create an ASCII canvas, and have drawing functions much like an HTML5 canvas. It will have the ability to create canvasObjects as well, which can be drawn and interacted with.
we're working on a live party visualizer using raspberry pi's deployed as iBeacons. We're writing an iPhone app that detects the user's location (based on the ibeacon) and updates a server. We're writing a d3 visualization that renders the user's location graphically in real-time based on the aggregated server data.
doesn't exactly cure cancer, but it's pretty cool. Obvious uses for retail, etc (but all that stuff is lame.. it's more fun to use at a party)
I'm teaching myself JavaScript so this weekend I'm working on a basic app using Express, Node and the Twilio API. Learning on each little bit and will write about to help others too.
If you learn well with books, check out "Javascript: The Good Part" by Douglas Crockford. I don't usually learn well with books, but that one really clicked with me.
I am pleasantly surprised to see lots of really innovative ideas. Usually speaking to "entrepreneurs" their innovative idea is a new social network "like facebook but..."
I am working on an android app which broadcast messages to the app users in the same geo loaction. Its cool cause its new and its not cool cause it can cause some problems.
A so far un-named hardware development framework which makes hardware programming more expressive and programs more shareable. No more "gpio -g write 17 1".
also www.sharelatex.com is almost the same and there is an open source project called flylatex that is trying to provide something similar: http://alabidan.me/2012/07/31/flylatex-a-real-time-collabora... This is not the github link because people always want screenshots, but has a link to it.
Self Experiments: Its mission is to make inhumane animal testing obsolete by using “open suffer” collaboration of volunteer testers from around the world.
Hey, this is an interesting idea. I have criticisms that are probably going to sound mean; but even though I don't like this idea, I like that you're thinking about these problems:
* Human subjects research (which the selfexperiments are) is governed by IRBs; if the research did not pass IRB approval, it can't be used in academic publications. It doesn't matter that the research was done outside of academia, it still has to pass IRB approval to be usable. I don't think any IRB would approve this at the moment (though maybe they should!), so it wouldn't be able to be used to replace research in publications.
* Of course, humans are not biologically valid testing replacements for animals if your goal was to test what happens in that other animal, so this can only replace research that was being done on animals because humans weren't available.
* It looks like up to one million animals a year are used for research in the US, whereas several billion a year (mainly chickens, pigs, cows, with increased capability of suffering over the average testing animal) are raised for food in factory farms. Why does it make sense to work on animal testing instead of factory farming?
Thanks for your comment Chris. Since you don't have the benefit of knowing what the experiments are, I don't blame you for being sceptical.
* Self Experiments isn't concerned with conforming to FDA specifications and obtaining IRB approval (yet). Also keep in mind this project is iterative. A lot of mistakes will be made along the way. Oh, and the experiments will be fun, or at least extremely interesting.
* Animal testing is often a proxy for testing on humans. Self Experiments will attempt to reverse this on a case by case, experiment by experiment basis. I hope Self Experiments will be preemptive and anticipate experiments that may be conducted on animals in the future - and conduct them on humans first. The trickiest part is designing the protocols for these experiments.
* Factory farming is deplorable, and I've mulled over how to solve the problem for several years now. I have ideas but that's all I'll say. In the meantime, I'm vegetarian and working towards vegan-ism (although it's harder than I thought).
You'll never make animal testing obsolete, nor would it be a good idea to do so as the benefits from using animals in research are so immense, and most such experiments are not transferable to humans (e.g. genetically modifying humans is not viable.)
But it sounds like an interesting idea nonetheless - what experiments are you considering running?
I understand that you must have invested a lot of your time and energy into this idea, so it may be difficult to accept criticism of its base concept. However by posting about it on a public discussion board you are implicitly inviting others to discuss and critique it, so I don't really see how that can be considered impolite.
Saying flatly "this could never work" is impolite, arrogant, and possibly wrong. "I don't see how this could ever work" suffers from none of these failings.
And unless it becomes ethically acceptable to genetically modify human embyros for testing rather than mouse embyros, then this is not going to change.
This isn't arrogance or impoliteness, it's just how it is.
A Raspberry Pi-based multimedia display solution for SMEs, large corporates and municipalities. It displays nearly all video and image formats and real time news feeds at 50fps in almost any layout combination while using less than 20% CPU at full tilt.
It's cool because most people are blown away at how fast and smooth it is when they first see it. A lot of the code is in C, the video decoder is in a thread (and it actually works which is impressive for me) and it's all controlled by Lua.
Any idea how you're going to release it? (productise/monetize or open source)
I hacked up in the past a temporary solution using PowerPoint running on stripped down older laptops in the foyer and outside meeting rooms in my old company which worked well but I always thought it was a bit overkill and would like to see something like R-Pi in those kind of uses. I imagine yours is a lot more powerful but still think it would be a good use.
We have a lot of customers lined up already: two fast food outlets who want it as a digital menu system, a local council who want it as a digital signage product and some SMEs who want it for reception-based product display. So we're going to be supplying complete solutions with internet connections for updates and each customer will get their own content of course. Pis are incredibly cheap so we'll be highly competitive against other digital signage products.
I will definitely release the framework as LGPLed code when its good enough for public consumption. It's nothing technically very special: a C API to create graphics elements using old style OpenGL behind the scenes, a video decoder pinched from hello_videocube.c and a LuaJIT wrapper around it all with ideas from Cocos-2D. Flash will never be supported on the Pi so this is my attempt at an open alternative.
Cool! I was experimenting on something similar with BeagleBoneBlack and libVLC. However, the 3.8 kernel doesn't have drivers for onboard SGX GPU; and I couldn't get decent resolution with software decoding.
Are you using OMX libs on Pi? With hardware decoding?
Yes - I decode a raw stream in a thread using OMX. I don't need sound so I don't have to worry about a demux library, it's just a raw H264 stream I hand off to the hardware.
Thank you - definitely something to try when I have more time to experiment. I should move my C up a gear, grab the mplayer source and write a Pi driver for it as well.
Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so...
It's cool because:
* The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta...). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement.
* It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new song, you generally listen to a recording of it, and it's a pain to cross-reference the recording with the sheet music/tab.
* It's one of the most advanced HTML5 apps on the web. Almost everything is done in <canvas>, and it has dozens of UI details (http://www.soundslice.com/help/). I did a tech talk about the various JavaScript/HTML5 stuff if you're interested: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice
* Proudly bootstrapped and made by two people.