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Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#61

Post by ericmarcos »

BjoernKW wrote: post #35
ericmarcos wrote: post #22

I'm woking on a AI/NLP interface to connect enterprises to customers through whatsapp and other messaging apps. I'm using Python/Django and Yowsup (a python lib that reverse engineered whatsapp's protocol) with PostgreSQL/Redis. I wonder what you guys think about building a company around this idea. I have a prototype and a couple of customers, so the market is there, but I don't know if whatsapp could sue me or some…

I wouldn't worry so much about WhatsApp suing you. If they don't like what you're doing (or others for that matter) they can more just change their protocol. The problem with building a company around such a solution rather is this: Is there a market? Sure, having a machine automatically answer customer requests is a nice parlour trick but what's the benefit for the customer? Just saving money on call centre agents?…

I don't think whatsapp will change their protocol too much, as they'll break millions of clients installed in old phones.

The benefit for the company looks obvious to me: save money on call centre / community management. Deliver a service to millions of mobile users without requiring them to download your app (just adding a phone number to the agenda).

The benefit for the end-user: having a conversational interface with a system is probably the lowest barrier entry to that system for a human. Everybody knows how to chat using whatsapp, but not everybody knows (nor is willing to learn) how to use your "user-friendly" GUI.

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#62

Post by aepearson »

lhnz wrote: post #42

Spokes http://spokesapp.co It's coffee networking with a twist and I should be launching towards the end of the year. Sign-up now and I'll let you know as soon as the beta starts. Tech used: Swift, Node.JS, Koa.js, Neo4j.

I REALLY like this idea. There are a number of times that I've wished something like this was out there (but not so meetup-esque). Is this planned to be a global/national/local type deal or what?

Also, just FYI, I had to resize my screen to make the submit clickable.

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#63

Post by Xephyrous »

lynaghk wrote: post #18

Full rewrite of The Weathertron iOS app ( http://theweathertron.com/ ) from Angular.js + ClojureScript to React.js + ClojureScript. The original Weathertron is still runnin' happily for about 40,000 iOS users from a single $5/month Digital Ocean VPS (backend server is written in Clojure). The motivation for the full rewrite is React.js and the latest Android OS inclusion of a decent WebKit. React's virtual DOM makes…

Are you using React.js directly through JS interop, or something like Om or Reagent to wrap it? What is your opinion of the various options available for React.js in ClojureScript?

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#65

Post by krapp »

- I decided to throw a pile of my stalled projects together and build a forum framework for PHP. Almost all current forums in PHP are pretty terrible, bloated, and non-modular, so I thought why not have a framework which is designed for building forums, imageboards, comment systems, etc?

stats: none, technology: currently Slim Framework and Composer, and that's about it. history: started it about a week ago.

- A threaded link aggregator. I posted it in these threads a couple of times, but it's been offline for a while for a complete rewrite. The basic gist is, you post a link, and you can open a 'thread' of outbound links from the page as well, with the idea of easily being able to follow a trail of references to an original source and discover a greater, context-specific set of links for a subject. I've rewritten it completely at least three times. If anyone is interested, the scraper I wrote for it is here: https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug. I have no idea when it will be worth showing to anyone.

stats: nobody, technology: Laravel 4, history: been working on it for about a year.

- Rewriting a school project from last semester (a project manager in C#) into something decent.

stats: none, technology: C#, sqlite, history: haven't touched it in a while, because it turns out pasting stuff into a text file in Notepad++ is way easier.

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#66

Post by struct »

Blahah wrote: post #48

I've been developing the stack for The ContentMine ( http://contentmine.org ). In the next month or so, we will start scraping the entire scientific literature as it is published each day, and processing it through our 'fact extraction' pipeline. Done so far: - I've defined a JSON format for declarative web scrapers (ScraperJSON: https://github.com/ContentMine/scraperJSON ) - made a Node library for web scraping with…

I've long thought about doing this with arXiv to determine if you could extract results and synthesize answers to questions. Is anything like that part of the goals for The ContentMine?

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#67

Post by krapp »

aepearson wrote: post #64

I love threads like this - so inspiring. At the same time, reminds me how much of a lazy ass I am. I have like 10 side projects that I have about 0.005% complete right now. Any advice for a guy like me? (besides, "stop being a lazy ass", I already know that...haha)

>Any advice for a guy like me?

I kind of have the same problem, but I find I get a lot further if I just pick one thing and run with it for a while.

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#68

Post by nutmeg »

http://stationgenius.com/

Find local radio stations and talk radio programs using your phone.

A friend who travels for work quite a bit likes to listen to local radio stations for weather and other information. So we built this to easily find stations wherever you are.

- Using Flask, Postgres+PostGIS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

- Still at a very early stage. Appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#69

Post by davegaeddert »

I've been working on a site called Sibbell (http://sibbell.com/).

At the core, the idea was to provide a way to get notified when GitHub projects you use (star or watch) publish new releases. Keeping you in the know when features get added or that bug that's about to kill your Monday gets fixed. Seems like something GitHub would do, but the only way you can get notified about releases through GitHub is to 'watch' a repo and then you get notified for every issue, comment, pull request, etc.. Got some pretty good reception on HN and have some major improvements and additions coming in the next week or so.

Technology: Django, Celery, GitHub API

Re: Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

#70

Post by minhajuddin »

Working on http://www.websrvr.in/ . An app which lets you host websites using dropbox. Just create a new folder in your dropbox to create a website.

Technologies used: Rails, Go, Node.js, Beanstalk, Postgresql, Redis, Nginx

I have created more than 10 content management systems in the past and every time I create one, I have to write code for a web host. I hope this is the final webhost, it compresses and minifies your html/js/css and also has plans to handle other preprocessors (markdown, less, coffescript etc,.)

I have been chipping away at the code for the last 4 months and it has been very rewarding.

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