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

I think this is the worst thing about startup culture. Don't get me wrong, I like startups, but there's so much hype and so much money around them that it sucks all the oxygen out of anything else.

I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all.

Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability.

Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".

Very interesting. Keep up the good work.

I have a largish open-source portfolio, including a markdown parser, a regex engine, some music synthesis, and some more researchy stuff like a font renderer and a prototype of concurrent text editing using CRDT's. I'm lucky to be working at Google where I get paid 20% time to work on this, but the motivation is definitely not money.

The biggest item in my portfolio is xi-editor, and I confess I'm wrestling with some of the questions raised in this thread. I think it has the potential to be a serious player in the editor space, with extremely high performance goals (including fast startup and low RAM usage) yet a modern feel. It also has a great little open-source community around it who have been contributing significant features.

Yet it's at the point where it's _almost_ done enough to use for day-to-day editing, and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. It's also the case that I'm very interested in the engine and the core of the UX, but the complete product needs a plugin ecosystem and along with that ways to discover, upgrade, and curate the plugins (including making sure they are trustworthy, lately a fairly significant concern). That's potentially a huge amount of work, and it doesn't really line up with my interests.

I'm wondering if it's possible to focus on the parts I care about and try to foster the community to take care of the rest, but I'm not quite sure how that would work.

If this were a business and I had some way of making a few coins from every user, then my incentives would be lined up to make the best overall product possible, including the less fun parts. But that's off the table; among other things, there are a number of good free editors out there, and the niche for a better but non-free editor is also well occupied.

Maybe the HN crowd has some ideas?

http://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html is a site to learn programming (using either Python or Javascript).

However, unlike other similar sites, the focus is equally on making it easy for students to use AND making it easy for teachers/mentors to use, adapt and create their own learning material. To this end, I am currently writing an online book as a "Teacher's Guide":

https://aroberge.gitbooks.io/reeborg-s-world-advanced-world-...

This is a project that started out 13 years ago as a free desktop application (http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/) and which I have been working, on and off, during all that time just for the joy of it and knowing that people have found it useful.

Neat projects! I'm curious, have you seen very much interest in eternum? I have an idea for a similar project, but I am not sure how many people are really interested in IPFS.