Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#161

Post by pedrokost » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

I have been making https://www.klubi.si/ sporadically over the past many months (it was meant to be a weekend project, but it never ends there...). It's a map of sports clubs in my country.

The idea is to help people find klubs nearby, as well as provide a basic internet presence to those klubs whore founders don't have the time or knowledge to create and maintain a website, or even a Facebook page.

The website works by volunteer revision of data, as well as twice a year email reminders to founders to review the data. This helps ensure that the data is the most up to date as possible.

Unfortunately, not all klubs even have a public working email address, so thinking of it, I could probably do something about as well.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#162

Post by ciro_langone » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

jimhefferon wrote: post #155

I write math texts that are Free. It is my creative outlet. My Linear Algebra ( http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra ) has gotten some traction (and I get a small amount of money from Amazon). I also have an Introduction to Proofs: an Inquiry-Based Approach ( http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs ) that I find helps my students, but is in quite a niche area. And I'm working on a Theory of Computation . If I didn't have som…

This is awesome! You should keep up with this - maybe develop a curriculum and host it all in one place one day?

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#163

Post by da02 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

avh02 wrote: post #140

built a slack slash command to spew out excuses (inspired bigtime by giphy) - mainly because I was unemployed and wanted to learn how the slack APIs work - https://xqz.es - I put a blog post together covering how it came to be [1] - also forced me to learn how to get Let's Encrypt certificates. Also built a twitter stream reading android app [2] - it's butt ugly but was super useful while I lived in Beirut and there…

Where did you move to after Beirut? Anything you miss about Beirut?

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#164

Post by pesfandiar » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:20 PM UTC

JavaScript Online: http://javascript.onl

A few JavaScript problems that you can solve and grade online (it's a static website). I haven't done any work on it recently. Added a few Amazon affiliate links originally, but they didn't make any money and Amazon has closed that account now.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#165

Post by heyok » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:20 PM UTC

http://heyokapp.co It was fun to code and it makes organizing with friends a breeze

Here's the facebook page - facebook.com/heyokapp About video - https://www.facebook.com/heyokapp/videos/460327694335849

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#166

Post by dchuk » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

Only launched recently, and the prospects of it making money one day are slim: https://engineered.at

Still fun to keep up to date with Rails with, and to just code in general (as a product manager now, don't get to code much).

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#167

Post by tomcam » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

Hope I don't get flagged or anything. I am astounded by the generosity of the amazing people on this page and have been upvoting like a madman. I probably look like a bot at this point

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#168

Post by ebbflowgo » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

heyok wrote: post #165

http://heyokapp.co It was fun to code and it makes organizing with friends a breeze Here's the facebook page - facebook.com/heyokapp About video - https://www.facebook.com/heyokapp/videos/460327694335849

Oh, what? This is great

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#169

Post by andywood » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/gaia-eternal

It's a big procedural crafting game. The long-term goal is to make a Civilization-like game set in a Minecraft-like world, with really good AI. It's also a testbed for a bunch of ideas I've developed about massive, virtualized simulation. What that means is that you could in principle have thousands of cities with millions of individual inhabitants going about their business. But it's sort of analogous to lazy evaluation in that things are only computed if they would be perceived by the player, or need to be consistent with past information the player already knows.

Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

#170

Post by bradbeattie » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

vijayr wrote: post #139

bradbeattie wrote: post #127

I'm working on collating as many sources of Canadian federal data into a single relational database, and exposing that data via a public API. https://api.iscanadafair.ca/ Given the sources of this data, I'm pretty sure I'm not even allowed to profit off of this. Not really a problem as I'd be doing this in my spare time anyway. The data-visualization side of it (e.g. https://iscanadafair.ca/data-visualization/example…

I did something similar on a much smaller scale for census, bea etc (only the DB part). Here in the US, federal gov data (census, bea, bls etc) can be used in commercial products as far as I know. Might be the same in Canada, worth looking into? Great idea

Yeah, I don't recall where I saw something that suggested fair use. https://lop.parl.ca/ImportantNotices-e.html#Copyrights doesn't speak directly to that issue, but it's probably easier to just cite my sources and not bother with the revenue side of things. It's more important to me that this data be freely and easily available than it is for me to turn any kind of meagre profit.