My brother and I work on a generative adversarial network(deep learning) with pip package and API: https://github.com/255BITS/HyperGAN/ It's meant for artists, developers, and researchers who are interested in this new tech.
Thanks!
Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
401–410 of 587 posts
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#402For 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
Great name.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#403[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#404I'm building a new Unix shell called Oil: http://www.oilshell.org/ It's definitely not making me any money. I would say the motivation is a little bit "joy" / learning, but also frustration that shells are so old, unintuitive, and work so poorly. I've been going for about 16 months and it's still fun, so that's good. I think that seeing progress is what make things fun.
I agree that shells need a great overhaul. But how it should look and how the path towards the "better shell" can realistically happen I have no clue. I applaud your courage!
Thanks! I have a very clear idea, but it's a huge amount of work. I think it's going to get there though :)
One thing that blows up the amount of work is the "realistically happen" part... For it to happen, it needs to be compatible, and compatibility is hard (or at least tedious).
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#405I'm building a new Unix shell called Oil: http://www.oilshell.org/ It's definitely not making me any money. I would say the motivation is a little bit "joy" / learning, but also frustration that shells are so old, unintuitive, and work so poorly. I've been going for about 16 months and it's still fun, so that's good. I think that seeing progress is what make things fun.
I'm starting to wonder how the hell anyone decided shellscripts were a good idea.
I think it started the same way batch files did -- although of course shell came earlier. "Hey let me put the stuff I type in a text file":
mkdir foo
cp myfile foo/
ls foo
That started sometime in the early 1970's. Along the way, people added loops, conditionals, functions, various hacky expression languages (test/[, find), many external utilities like sed/grep, full-fledged languages like awk/make, etc.
And today we have on perhaps 50 million+ machines an unbroken chain from 45+ years ago.
It's kind of amazing... If you can somehow score languages by how old they are plus how widely used they are, shell is probably #2 behind C.
C has had a ton of effort that has gone into cleaning it up, deciding upon semantics, standardizing it, evolving it. Shell has had POSIX, which was like 30 years ago, and that's about it.
In summary, nobody "decided" -- it's an amazing and horrible instance of evolution :)
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#406I made Plain Email [0] just because I couldn't find any email client with clean work flow without distractions. I use it pretty much every day. Thinking about open sourcing it - just can't find the time to refractor it nicely.
I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#407I 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…
I love it, way to go! You should submit it as a "Show HN"
1. You should charge for it. Maybe after a month of monitoring or something.
2. Give more actionable responses. Maybe some links or directions on how to fix the issues.
3. Can you make any money on affiliate links to paid certificates? If not, direct people to Letsencrypt when their cert expires.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#408Many small and bigger adventures like:
https://github.com/ziogas/cmdwrap - Command line/shell wrapper to a web interface. Basically forward any shell command to a nodejs-bootstrap powered web input and track its output.
https://github.com/ziogas/easyembed - Micro framework optimized for embedding small independent apps into legacy php systems.
https://github.com/ziogas/PHP-Redis-implementation - Php redis wrapper focused into simplicity with almost zero abstractions and future-proof.
https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro-must - Google Chrome extension helping you to stay in pomodoro mode.
https://www.statsglitch.com/ - Receive notifications from Google Analytics whenever happened statistically significant spike or drop in your traffic.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#409Created Unfollow (https://www.unfollow.io) because I wanted to know who unfollowed me on Twitch. Not a noble reason. But now that I don't stream anymore I just do it because it's so much fun and I don't care about unfollowers anymore. Lots of people use it which motivates me. It's free, but I'm looking for monetization strategies.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#410This is my current project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209. It's too long to describe in a sentence, but, it's essentially what I call it the mother of all software (internally). I created it out of pure annoyance towards many of the popular services such as Wordpress, MailChimp, Hubspot, Shopify, Unbounce who had screwed up some aspect of their tools. So, in essence this is a combination of all those softwares under one roof.
Here are some things you can do with this software:
1) Research your market, find out your target audience
2) Integrate with analytics tools and understand your users
3) Automate your marketing strategies
4) Maintain a central data warehouse
5) Maintain multi-domain content properties such as blogs, websites, news portals, etc.
6) Host online trainings, build a student list
7) Etc. (read the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209)
I've been working on it over 3 years now, while trying to jump from one web framework to another. Finally, I've settled down on Phoenix. This project alone has helped me learn so many programming languages and also helped me gain more experience as a programmer in general, while simultaneously being able to integrate new tools and platforms into my pipeline - This is how I learned React, VueJS, Brunch, Google Cloud, etc.
At the moment, I've built this only for myself, just to support and test out my startup ideas. I am thinking of open-sourcing it at some point, at least the core functionality.
But as of now, there's nothing else I enjoy doing on a weekend than working on this project :) (also why I'm still single)