Working on a pretty sick karaoke website as well as a jeopardy training application. I figured since both involve lots of copyright nonsense that it was best just to do these as personal labors of love.
Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
561–570 of 587 posts
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#562The 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…
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 "a…
So what is the definition of startup from your perspective? I mean, if I have an idea and just build it, wouldn't someone else take the idea, build it, and look for VCs to make it profitable? In this case, isn't it better to always look for the possibility that my idea can actually catch on?
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#563I 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…
boo (it's neil)
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#564http://stories.rpeden.com
It was never intended to make me any money - it's just a story aggregator I made to help me keep track of HN and my favourite subReddits all in one place. :)
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#565I built an automated prank call system called Insultron a few years ago. You simply send a text message to 765-444-4442 and it will prank call your chosen friend with some randomly generated ridiculous insults. At one point a few years ago I used it on Steve Wozniak since he was a big fan of prank calling back in the day (pro tip for contacting Woz: his personal phone number is in his autobiography, but in order to get through you have to have a caller ID that’s in the same area code.)
It used to cost me under five dollars a month using Twilio but its usage has taken off dramatically (completely organically) and now it cost me closer to $50 a month but I keep paying it because it’s fun.
I also built and ran an implementation of Cat Facts several years ago until that was shut down by my provider because people are abusing it too much.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#566I am working on a community curated search engine to learn anything most optimally : https://learn-anything.xyz/ Everything is open source and is MIT licensed, both the search engine and the entire database it searches over. There are however many things that we can still do to take this idea further. Hopefully more people join to help us with that. :)
Very interesting concept, nice presentation! It will be valuable when lots of experts start adding knowledge to it.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#567https://fridgg.com - Fridgg lets you create a gallery to show off your own food photography, as well as discover other amazing food photography, delicious recipes, and great food bloggers.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#568I maintain a Mastodon instance for those who are interested in functional programming: https://functional.cafe
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
hi, great project. any idea if you plan to release the code or article of how you built the similar matching? Thanks
Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much of it would be of general interest).
Great, I would be interested on how you built the dataset/database.
Please share when you have the post.
Re: Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?
#570I'm working on collating as many sources of Canadian federal data into a single relational database, and exposing that data via a public API. https://api.iscanadafair.ca/ Given the sources of this data, I'm pretty sure I'm not even allowed to profit off of this. Not really a problem as I'd be doing this in my spare time anyway. The data-visualization side of it (e.g. https://iscanadafair.ca/data-visualization/example…
You should talk to these guys: https://twitter.com/CDS_GC