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

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

#331

Post by raphlinus »

Mz wrote: post #326
raphlinus wrote: post #325

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…

and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. A) What is "lots" of users? (Give me a number) B) What makes you think you would suddenly have lots? Cuz most things seem to struggle to get any traction.

A) I'll toss out 1M because you asked for a number.

B) Because if I build out my full ambition, it would be better by most objective metrics (speed, features, integration with IDE-like capabilities) than all the free editors out there, and I think there is a real demand for a better editor.

I know what you mean about the struggle for traction. It is of course possible I'm massively mis-estimating the potential userbase.

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

#332

Post by palerdot »

I have hotcold typing - http://hotcoldtyping.com, a fun way to learn touch typing with instant feedbacks. I'm proud of this tool even though it doesn't bring me money.

Also, remindoro - http://remindoro.com, a chrome extension to have recurring reminders to help me take breaks.

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

#333

Post by garysieling »

pul wrote: post #24
garysieling wrote: post #8

https://www.findlectures.com/ This is a big enough project to can explore most programming subjects (e.g. machine learning, Javascript, databases, email), and I enjoy learning about history by watching old videos.

Nice work on this site! I think I'll have something to do the coming time ;) How did you manage to find and index all these videos?

The best thing for finding speakers is having a form on signup for the emails because I ask people for suggestions, and I've had hundreds.

For the crawling part, this might be interesting (I have a talk coming soon too) http://findlectures.com/articles/2017/05/15/Building-a-Crawl...

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

#336

Post by fibonachos »

http://www.proggyfonts.net/

I didn't create any of the fonts. When I discovered the original .com domain had been lost to squatters, I decided to grab the .net domain and go about hunting down and re-hosting as much of the original content as possible.

The original site was later restored at a different domain (linked in the sidebar).

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

#337

Post by thesquib »

I dabble a bit: Http://playerpart.com - for Shakespeare play reading groups, helps distribute parts on a play fairly and with as few adjacent speaking parts as possible. Still in development!

https://ranktracker.squib.co.nz - a tool to track an in game characters stats for a very old game called Clan Lord from Delta Tao. In development.

I seem to end up working on stuff with a very limited user base!

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

#338

Post by exikyut »

preinheimer wrote: post #131
iDemonix wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes them a pain to store? This looks perfect for something like Graphite.

Well, we went with the datastore we knew, MySQL. So on the upside we've got full granularity forever. On the downside we were backing up the full dataset every night. Plus the large amount of data was slowing pages down (even on indexed queries). Now that we've moved the data older than two weeks over to S3, and query with Athena our site is faster, and we're not treating our backup infrastructure quite as poorly.

I just did some back-of-the-envelope math.

The biggest ping time I see is just under 4 seconds. With milliseconds, that translates into a 7-digit string if you pretend the first 4 digits are the integer part and the last 3 are the fraction. The caveat is that you must store "42.32" as "0042.032", someone more advanced may be able to suggest a better system. The maximum 22-bit value is 4194304, which is a tad small. 23 bits is 8388608 - and I suspect you'd consider an 8388 millisecond ping time a bug. :D

64-bit time is a fad just because it's easier to do multiples of 8 than bitpack. However, if you use 33-bit time, you can count up to 8589934592, which is the year 2242.

I see you have 250 servers. Using a single int will only get you up to 255. Ouch. But using two bytes gives you space for 64000 servers you'll never use. Wat do?

Well, if you're okay with calculating the avg and mdev in realtime, that's (23*2)+33 (min+max+date), which works out to 79 bytes. So you could prefix _9_ bytes for the server ID, which gives you 512 servers.

So that's 9+23+23+33=88 bytes per ID.

At 88 bytes per ID, one year's worth of records for 250 servers is 192720000, or 183MB per year.

This is not a particularly fancy approach, and is likely inefficient in many ways. But it's definitely doable, both for long-term (full-resolution/granularity) archival and realtime querying. You could make a superfast server in Go that accepted simple queries and handled the on-disk format. You could export the Go server over the Web directly (Go is pretty concurrent, but requires 8K per goroutine, which adds if you have eg 10ks of connections...) or use a simple/low-level protocol from your existing Web framework.

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