Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 587 posts

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

#221

Post by jtruk »

130 Story - a daily microfiction challenge.

https://www.130story.com/

I started this as a Twitter game a few years ago; it felt like a compact idea with a good hook. Earlier this year I automated it- so it picks its own words and collates the stories on the website itself (mostly successfully).

It doesn't have a big following, but the people who play are passionate about it. Some people play every day, and the most prolific author has written ~650 of them.

I've seen people get better as writers, some experimental stuff (like an improvised longform story built over many daily prompts), and occasionally I see a microstory that knocks it out the park. That makes it worthwhile.

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

#222

Post by ves »

purescript wrote: post #220

I work on the PureScript ( http://purescript.org ) compiler, tools, libraries and book in my spare time (along with many other unpaid contributors), because it's the programming language I wished had existed when I started creating it. It's still the closest thing to a perfect environment for web development, at least as far as I'm concerned :)

Thank you for all your work!

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

#223

Post by brian-armstrong »

I've been working to fill what I see as a gap in free software. My library encodes data into sound and works cross-platform. As far as I can tell it may be the most robust, cross-platform freely licensed library that does this, though there is still much I need to improve on

https://github.com/quiet

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

#225

Post by andruby »

weddpros wrote: post #203

I built https://sslping.com/ to help monitor website TLS/SSL security and certificates. It has 300 users and checks almost 7000 servers every day for TLS problems. It's a little like SSLlabs server test, only much faster (5 seconds instead of 2 minutes), plus the tests are recurring every day, and you receive the diff if any. It's always been a joy to receive thank you emails from users, or adding new features for us…

Thank you for this! I have a post-it note for sideproject ideas and wanted to build exact system. I'm glad you already built it :) Also glad I found out about it before building it myself.

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

#226

Post by jonotime »

https://github.com/jonocodes/envoy

Docker Envoy

Encapsulates a kind of different Docker workflow. One where your Dockerfiles live in a separate area from your project. Includes a bunch of bash helper functions for common things the containers need to do like wait for other services.

It also provides a little Dockerized testing system using pytest - which I might eventually separate out. I am working more on the testing part these days. And I'm writing a book about some of this.

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

#228

Post by literallycancer »

guaka wrote: post #109

Hitchhiking guide http://hitchwiki.org dumpster diving guide http://trashwiki.org social network https://www.trustroots.org

Hitchwiki is very useful. There's been something wrong with downloading the point of interest lately though (timeouts with large datasets like the one for Germany).

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

#230

Post by edumucelli »

http://eazy.bike/ - Always find a bicycle or empty slots on bikesharing systems

Eazy.bike picks best bicycle stations considering real-time information of how many bicycles and free bicycle stands are available in more than 400 cities in 48 countries. Behind it uses machine-learning to predict what will be the availability of empty slots so that you can maximize the probability to find a place to park your bicycle.

It took me a huge work to write the whole stuff, API, Android, iPhone and web application, but I really like it.

Post reply on HN