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Ask HN: What are you working on?

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381–390 of 560 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#381
post #336

I quit my job last month to work full time on (what I think is) an under-explored area of climate change: how institutional investors block shareholder proposals calling for firms to adopt more climate-friendly policies. I have just published the first bit of research with data on how 500+ funds from the big 3 fund managers voted on climate change-related proposals in 2018: https://voting.greengovernance.org . Later…

No feedback, but thank you for doing this!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#383

I'm writing a book that teaches people coding using JavaScript, the book that takes you from 0 (no coding background) to getting a job as a JS engineer. 2 years I ago, I had a hypothesis to see if anybody could learn coding if they tried. To test that, I reached out to random people with no coding background, most of them from underprivileged backgrounds. I figured they have fewer opportunities and are more likely to…

Is 130k realistic for someone with less than 2 years of not just experience but total exposure? I'm not aware of any market supporting that sort of value proposition; that's one hell of a book...

Depends where you live... where I live, that is a lot. Makes me want to move but my family is here

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#384
I've been working on a web app to help political campaigns scale and manage an exploding volunteer network. Helping the campaign delegate tasks, helping the volunteers connecting to constituents, and see statistics along the way.

I've seen too many campaigns attempt to run hundreds of volunteers, do crazy tricks with Google Sheets (just to have volunteers accidentally delete critical information), and I've been a volunteer waiting to be told what to do.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#385

After a decade of R&D, I am (finally) building the first, true multi-model database kernel. All traversable data relationships (relational, polygon intersection, graph data models, time series, etc) are directly represented in a singular data structure that is nearly optimal and extremely parallel. No secondary indexing required whatsoever to access these relationships, so ideal for mixed workloads. Built on top of a…

Fascinating. Have you written at all about this elsewhere? Is it open source? Would love to learn more!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are still constructing it. Total area in building is 300 m2. Active growing area in Deep Water Culture (DWC) system is about 100 m2. 25 m2 packing room, 25 m2 people facilities etc. Estimated production, 600 lettuce plants per week (6000 growing positions). About 9 m3 for fish, rainbow trout, max 200 kg in the system. Total amount of water in the system is about 30 m3. The insect facility isn’t even on the drawing…

This is amazing. I've been devouring aquaponics setups on youtube with the ambition to eventually have a huge space for plant growth. The trouble is that I'm in Nepal and quite a lot of the equipment is difficult and expensive to import. Is there anywhere we can read about your project?

It will be published here (currently Swedish only): http://cirkularodling.se

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#387

I developed chronic hand pain a couple of years ago (probably from overworking), so I quit my job and I've been making Talon [1] since, with the goal of making it possible for anyone to efficiently do anything/everything on their computer (general use, programming, games, niche apps) without their hands. Most recently I've been training acoustic models and writing a user frontend for the wav2letter++ [2] speech recog…

This is pretty cool. I was actually thinking about doing something like this as I don’t like typing.

I will follow along.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get up early and go to bed early. I have no energy after work, so I study in the morning from 4a-8a'ish. It took a little life-hacking to get used to, but I feel a lot more accomplished each day, before I even get into the nitty-gritty meetings and pushing code.

Guessing you're married with kids and have a relatively routine life after work then.

Married. No kids.

I usually go out with coworkers on Friday evenings and on Saturdays/Sundays I find myself at a local brewery or event with friends. Certainly not out drinking every night.

There was definitely a conscious decision to prioritize this learning time and turn it into a routine. It also didn't happen all at once... it started at 45 min a day, then 90ish, etc.; I invested more as I saw the return on investment piling up. There's certainly days where I get little to no studying done and others where I get loads, but I try to get a minimum in.

At the beginning, I'd mostly just got tired of telling myself "someday" and registered for a class. From there it's kinda snowballed. Once I found out there were other people doing this and that they had meetups and conferences, it was that much more motivating to spend time on.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds interesting. How would you compare it to something like ShopLocket? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtsDPgOkQ-0

Good question. The biggest difference is that we're not relying on specific embeds, particularly iframes, to display products. We've tried to go a step above generating one off "Buy now" buttons, and instead you get a fully baked e-commerce system - a shopping cart, user account system, configurable taxes, live shipping quotes, etc.

I'm excited to see how this gets manifested - it's a tall order. Best of luck with your launch!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#390
Oh jeez, I'm reading everyone's posts and I'm feeling shy to post mine since I'm not doing anything cool. Here goes nothing...

I quit my job in January this year with no business but the thought that I must start, I can't work jobs anymore.

I built and marketed a simple micro-saas for Shopify ecosystem together with my co-founder. He handles tech, I do design and marketing. We both do customer support. App was launched on April 24.

June was my first month of revenue and we hit ~$450 MRR which I'm very happy about. Expecting large churn figures though.

This is the app -- https://apps.shopify.com/whatsapp-chat-button

Here's a post I wrote a month back chronicling the journey thus far -- https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/shopify-micro-saas-growth

Currently I'm learning how to code (Frontend, React) so that I can contribute to the app development, as currently our biggest bottleneck is development speed of new features.

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