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

261–270 of 587 posts

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

#261

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…

FWIW, the site design is really nice. I like the brown, and the use of all-caps for the site name.

And of course 5 seconds is how fast it should be :P

EDIT: Wondered what constructive criticism I could add, in case it was useful.

I guess the one thing I'm thinking of that isn't there is a cert tree breakdown, showing the cert structure in an easy-to-read format (which can be done xD), showing the trust root used, etc etc. I'm also reminded of all the little incidents that have happened with different SSL providers, and wonder whether people would appreciate seeing "you're using XYZ cert provider, here are controversial things about them". A feature like this would require careful presentation to work at scale though. Now I understand why you took the "go/no-go" super-simple route!

I also discovered (after noticing the fun URL query approach you use when you type in a domain) that disabling JS results in a white screen. That's common nowadays, so no comment.

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

#262
post #3

The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me. But then somewhere along the line my projects s…

Hi, a software developer here. I also feel like you. Started coding very young, then uni, first job, first team leader position, then moved to Europe for 5 years working in big companies ( and saving as much as I could). Now I'm back home in Latin America. Built a couple of houses cash with savings, got married. But I'm bored so I spend my time playing with my 3d printer and home automation little projects in my spar…

What kind of home automation projects are you working on?

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

#263
post #90

I built a website which offers real-time statistics for Philadelphia's Regional Rail train system: https://www.septastats.com/ This lets public transit passengers answer questions like: - "My train is getting later and later, is it actually moving?" - "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly) - "Is it just my train, or are many trains running lat…

This is pretty cool.

My "project that doesn't make me money" is https://transitfeeds.com

Currently it archives a ton of static schedule data, and some basic GTFS-realtime archiving stuff.

My longer-term goal is to archive all the GTFS-rt feeds every 30 seconds to provide similar analysis to what you've done here.

Obviously this requires even more storage than I'm already using and a ton of data processing, which is probably above my pay grade.

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

#264
post #242

I 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.

You get my vote for most humorous! I'll be checking that url again one day, and hopefully there's dumbass parking photos up.

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

#267
post #12

Oh man, that describes all of them. http://ipfessay.stavros.io/ - Publish uncensorable essays on IPFS https://www.eternum.io/ - Pin IPFS files with a nice interface https://www.pastery.net/ - The best pastebin https://spa.mnesty.com/ - Fuck with spammers https://www.timetaco.com/ - Easily make nice-looking countdowns And this is just the last two months or so? Also, lots of hardware stuff: https://www.stavros.io/proj…

First: these are awesome, and thank you for sharing. (Esp. Spa.mnesty.com - that's hilarious and incredible at the same time)

I tried timetaco.com but it's not doing anything. I tabbed my way through the day (it filled in today's date - 2017, then 8, then 10). I select 5 : 10, which is about 3 minutes in the future, and then clicked 'Generate'. It just changes the date (all three parts) to red, and doesn't do anything. (I'm clearly missing something - what am I missing?)

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

#268
post #160

100 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

I use this, it's really cool. Thanks!

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

#269
https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/etcpak/wiki/Home - A very fast ETC texture compressor. Being 80x-500x faster than every other compression utility (with not that much quality difference) was quite fun.

https://bitbucket.org/wolfpld/usenetarchive - A set of tools to process and view large collections of usenet/mailing list messages. For example, an archive of polish usenet is 56+ million messages.

Post reply on HN