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Ask HN: What are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In high school - BASIC class - we had to build a program to let a user input an address. I took the input for the ZIP code as a string, and the teacher 'corrected' me because ZIP codes were numbers, not letters. I said "if I starts with 0, that would be lost". "ZIP codes don't start with 0," she replied. "Umm... yeah they do." I pull out a copy of my New Zork Times from Infocom, located in MA, and their ZIP started w…

> Really didn't think anyone in the US could not know that in 2017 Well I guess you are just much much smarter than us. That goodness you cut us some slack. ;) I don't know if I have ever seen a zero prefixed zip code.

yeah... was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek (my tongue, my cheek).

I guess I just pay too much attention to addresses/formats, and have for years.

You can have as much slack as you want, FYI :)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#642
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. Let me know if your product is more or less ready (if it is OK with you). Love to see what you're doing. I believe there is so much scope and room for many of us here :-)

I have had the prototype up for about a year now. I am just trying get version 2 out the door in the next month or two. How do I get in touch with you?

johngummadi at gmail dot com

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#643
I'm sure this will be poopoo'd, but after performing countless phone screens I decided to make a software engineer screening service. I'm using Azure ML to adapt the screens in real-time as the candidates work through the assessments. It will decide if we should stick with a topic a bit longer and if we should dive a bit deeper into a certain subject. Right now it is just academic and code reading multiple choice questions. I'm currently working on the code editing portion.

There are other services that are similar, but I'm specifically targeting the screening market and offering more detailed reporting. Also as a bonus, candidates receive a "study guide" based on the questions they missed.

As for pricing, I'm forgoing the subscription for a "credit" based system where you trade 1 token for a screen (buy in bulk or on demand). No contracts, nothing to cancel, just purchase what you need.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#644
Two Projects

1st Problem: Went through a round of interviews a while back and was talking with friends about the feedback or lack thereof and thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could practice and get feedback from someone who actually does this and made . . .

Project: http://site-1146624-6257-8128.strikingly.com/

2nd Problem: Grew up playing Star Control 2 which was open-sourced as the urquan masters. However, the project seems to have lost some momentum and I feel like (on Windows at least) finding all of its exact dependencies is not easy.

Project: I've been porting a fork of UQM (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/) to Windows 10 and SDL 2 (still private) and playing with VCPKG at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#645

I am developing a new TCP/IP stack targeting embedded systems primarily. It is being written in a restricted subset of C++14 (e.g. no dynamic memory or exceptions, but virtual functions are great). There is a LOT of things complete already, it pretty much works. ARP, IP(v4), TCP (with NewReno congestion control), PMTUD, DHCP client. The design is single-threaded around an abstract event loop that a user would general…

How familiar should one be with networking? I know some C++ and know the low level C apis for maintaining sockets but never implemented them. I also never took a networking class.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#646
Most recently, I built www.halfchess.com (a personal project using React.js, Node.js and google cloud).

It is targeted at chess lovers who find it difficult to keep their chess skills sharp, as a game requires a continuous commitment of 20-30 mins. Halfchess is played on half of the board and a game completes in 1-3 mins.

Lately I am experimenting (while spending 15-20% of my time) on a new interface for wallet - that just works by taking pictures (an OCR library) and is useful for bill payments. It is targeted at digitally novice users to pay their bills by simply taking pictures.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#648

I am working for data engineering consultancy company and I noticed that we often need large datasets for various reasons, but it's hard to find those. So we started building open source tool which allows us to quickly generate large volumes of data. The idea is to create DSL for describing the data and allowed values and the generator should generate the data set based on that. https://github.com/smartcat-labs/range…

I could see this becoming a popular website (assuming there isn't something out there already). Including a bunch of standard (countries, cities, provinces, etc etc) datasets and whatnot, links to other sources.....like a one-stop directory for online datasets. Again, if there isn't already something (I don't think there is!?)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#649
post #167

currently making low-cost and low-powered tree cameras that will hang from Atlanta-area fruit trees and send us once-a-week tree photos. The idea is that we can hang them in trees all over the metro area and keep an eye on when they ripen. This is mostly powered by the Twilio programmable data service and the Ai-Thinker A20 ( https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIYmall-ESP8266-A20-Wifi-GPR... ) -- WiFi and 2G cell radio…

I was thinking of doing something similar actually! That looks pretty cool.

Do you know roughly how big the images that the camera takes are slash do you happen to have any example images?

I have a few more questions that I can't think of at the moment, but I'd be happy to give you a hand with any battery-related stuff (a specialty of mine) if you'd like! My email's in my profile, feel free to reach out even if you don't have any battery questions yet.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#650

Problem: The process of getting thoughts from your head into an organized, written draft form isn't as fast or accessible as it could be. Project: I'm building a conversational UI / bot ( https://writing.ai ) that helps people write faster. The basic idea is that it asks you a series of questions about a topic, asks follow-up questions for more detail as needed, and when it's done outputs a completed draft. You're st…

Sounds very promising, I can think of some professional applications in software development. Signed up.
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