Making a robot. It's fun, I look forward to making it every day and log my progress. So far it has depth perception and I have a goal in mind for it. It's an expensive side project though, I underestimated the price but you learn a lot about electronics in the process.
Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
241–250 of 587 posts
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#242I started working on iparklikeadumbass.com. The idea is for me to upload pictures of people parking like idiots, blur the license plate and just have it out there. I know I wont make any money of it but it is a good way of preventing road/parking raging.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#243I built MockREST - http://mockrest.com/ - to create REST APIs from JSON content.
I've only spent 9€ to buy the domain as the application (django application) is on a shared server. I'm making 0 €$ from it, as it was made to solve a problem that I had while teaching mobile development where I teach.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#244http://botoform.com | Architect infrastructure on AWS using YAML
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#245I wrote a children's picture book "The ABCs of Programming" to explain what I do to my toddler. Previously I was telling him "Daddy talks to robots". Hasn't made much money yet, but I launched only this week.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#246For almost a year, I've been writing a SEGA Dreamcast emulator called WashingtonDC. It's slow and it doesn't play any games yet, but it can boot the firmware menu and display the animated "spiral swirl" logo. https://github.com/washingtondc-emu/washingtondc
How'd you name that?
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#247100 Million Books -- mission is to promote intellectual diversity. It's a Chrome extension/homepage that shows you a new book every time you open a new tab, plus a special hand-picked idea that teaches you a new perspective/fact/concept. I'm evaluating a couple different paths to make it profitable, but it's not currently making anything since Amazon cut me off its affiliate program. http://www.100millionbooks.org
Would you be open to sharing why this was cut from Amazon's affiliate program? Seems to be a pretty cool tool that they would want placement on.
Sure, straight from their email:
- Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors
- Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed
Now does any of that really matter, if the service is moving books? No. But there's no appeal process, and no one to discuss this with.
So I'm not glad it happened, but I'm glad it happened early. I've always been hesitant about affiliate programs because of the lack of control (e.g., I didn't launch with it; only integrated it after many users said they wanted it so I could devote more time to it), and now that my concerns have been verified, I know I need to be more creative.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#248http://www.arabicreference.com
I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research".
It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on:
- fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs
- cleaning up the UI/display
- moving onto a "real" server framework
- writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data
- making an API?
Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#249I built https://mypost.io which I technically did as a learning opportunity and was planning on charging, but I'm keeping it free. I built it to teach others how to code.. using HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with hints of BB Code.
It is being used around the world.. never advertised it ever, except for the few times I posted on here and twitter.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#250http://libretaxi.org
libre uber alternative, lot of fun, users, traction, no money