I built VMSave a number of years ago to fulfill a request from some family members. My definition of "success" for it is that it helps people, that it's relatively maintenance free and that it sustains itself via donations. Especially since recently moving it to hosting with a more reliable internet connection it's been wildly successful according to those metrics.
Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
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Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#772I'm a musician. Long term. 43 years old, been playing forever. Don't care if I get any success at it. Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage. If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things. I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a r…
I'm 31 and just started learning music a year ago. Ever since I started this is probably the only thing I actually enjoy doing everyday. Is it possible to get to a level of proficiency at this point in life where you get to play good enough you can start getting paid for it?
You can get paid, but it on its own most likely won't cover the costs that go into creating it. But it's often worth that cost anyways
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#773I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convi…
This is, naturally, awesome. If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different…
The funny part is that several providers do actually have GTFS included in GMaps. Someone with decent lobbying power managed to score a contract to provide "Google Maps integration", so I don't think the providers even have the right to share the GTFS files, even if they have them.
And since the contract is absurdly overpriced and (unofficial info) charges for each conversion instead of simply handing over the conversion software, their GMaps data is often out of date. So currently, for at least one city, the GTFS file my system generates from scraped data is actually more accurate than the one they have and provide to Google.
One of my goals though is quite similar to what you're saying - to have the most accurate data and provide it openly enough that it takes away Google's (and anyone else's) power to come in and offer something like "we'll develop a conversion system for free if you push Chromebooks or GClassroom in your schools". Our municipalities love making deals that are "free", but actually end up costing far more in other ways and it really needs to stop.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#774I’m 53,000 words into a Harry Potter fanfic that fixed some issues I had with the seventh book. Basically, I object to how little the main characters ‘play to win.’ Example: Team Voldemort taboos his name, so that if you say it, his goons show up to arrest you. So everyone tries to stop saying his name. But here’s another idea. One person says his name while another hides nearby. After saying the name, the first pers…
Whenever anyone mentions Harry Potter I always think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8shqjr6O8
Stewart Lee is not everyones cup of tea however.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#775I’m the project leader for Homebrew and have been maintaining it for 12 years. I have no planned dramatic changes for it or expectations I’ll radically improve it in any way. I just try to keep all parts of the project ticking along and I still enjoy doing so, despite feeling no real obligation to continue.
Is there a donation link or something for homebrew? I can't believe such a popular tool is not making you guys money.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#776I designed a really small webserver (actually about 9 of them but only one on github) because I wasn't happy with the configuration file syntax of the other opensource servers. After repeated rewrites trying to fit both fcgi and a reverse proxy I somehow managed to fit most of the things I wanted in ~107k (the lightest mainstream alternative is like 350k). I really like small programs that do their job well so for me it's a pretty good win already.
https://github.com/tiotags1/hin9/
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#777I've been working on a racing game for about 18 months. It's insanely fun just designing the levels. I plan on releasing what I have for free and then if it's popular working on a full version.
Unity HDRP is really nice!
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#778I built https://inferoo.com for myself to summarise my calendar(s), weather and select news sources so I don't have to manually scour a bunch of sources in the morning. As much as I love others taking the benefit of the service, I mostly care that the service is up for me as it's painful when my briefing doesn't arrive (downtime/bugs).
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#779A programmer's text editor for a language called DataFlex, written in DataFlex (well some parts are in C++ for performance reasons) https://projects.vdf-guidance.com/projects/hammer It's only 21 years in the making :) Oh and I should mention that it is my main programmers editor for a variety of languages (not just DataFlex)
This is only the second time in fifteen years of professional development I've seen someone say they work with DataFlex. What makes the language attractive to you compared to all the other languages that are around and see significantly higher adoption?
Thanks for the question :)
You are correct that there's not that many of us around.
DataFlex is attractive for writing business software on windows (desktop and/or web).
The framework is crazy effective in regards to how fast and efficient you can build an application. I have not seen anything that comes close and I do look around and try other things every now and then.
A text editor isn't exactly the main target. I guess it is important to point out that the first release of that editor was in 2001. Not that it took 21 years to get something working :D.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
#780I built this chess website so that my Dad didn't need to install an app... just click a link for the latest move:
Sessionless, all state in URL.. no registration ... not sexy, just simple. (and buggy)