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Ask HN: What are you working on?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#591

Post by johngummadi »

biztos wrote: post #368
johngummadi wrote: post #329

I'm working on a Uber like service for home-made food in my spare time (apart form having a day job). http://crave.yorker.me

I love this idea. I recently saw a documentary about the home-cooked lunch business in India -- basically women, often single mothers, cooking great food at home and then middlemen selling it on a subscription level to office workers. But how do you reconcile "home-made" (as opposed to restaurant-made) with whatever Health Department equivalent operates in your area? Are you just planning an end-run around regulation…

Thanks for the feedback.

1. Reconciling the "home-made" food with restaurant food is not really necessary. It just gives home chefs to compete with restaurants regardless of whether or not they use this service. It is like Airbnb where regular folks like us can list our homes, but they don't stop commercial properties listing either.

2. As for regulations, yes for now run around the regulations until it gets really noticed. If it does, that means we already gained some traction. Recently many states introduced "cottage food laws", where they allow limited amount of food selling considered non-commercial, but I believe the food items are limited as well. We have to see how this goes. This is indeed an area of concern.

3. This type of business if not quite illegal. Most of it falls under gray area with "collage food laws".

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#592

Post by pesfandiar »

wordpressdev wrote: post #467
wcchandler wrote: post #432

I'm building a 21st century farm. I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only 8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the fun stuff. Right?

Interesting. If it can be implemented in an apartment, I am game :)

Yes, I'd be interested as long as it's legal. Illegal urban farming is known to generate a lot more than $100K/yr.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#593

Post by fudged71 »

kieranr wrote: post #398

We're building an SMS chatbot for the Canadian cannabis market. It allows you to purchase marijuana directly from dispensaries and licensed producers in a few messages. We’re adding NLP and a basic recommendation engine to help increase retention and drive purchases. We built out the infrastructure in a hackathon and are grinding away at an MVP. Starting to demo for dispensaries soon. I think we’re really on to somet…

I think you're on to something. Not much time left before July 1 2018, I hope you can build a good team of partners/PR. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#594

Post by cjhdev »

I have been improving a Ruby gem that I think would be useful for building web connected sensor applications (IoT stuff) in a hurry.

The tool implements a serialisation spec called The Blink Protocol. The spec is similar to Google Protobufs with a few differences, mainly:

- It's more compact on the wire (important for LPWAN)

- It's minimalistic and has a proper specification document

The gem implements a schema parser, a dynamic message class generator, and an extensible codec generator.

The idea is you can use the tool for both ends of your application:

- Use the codec generator to generate C source for your device

- Use the dynamic message class in your web app to consume messages

On the Ruby side it should be as easy to use as JSON.

https://github.com/cjhdev/slow_blink

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#595

Post by johngummadi »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #431
johngummadi wrote: post #329

I'm working on a Uber like service for home-made food in my spare time (apart form having a day job). http://crave.yorker.me

Do you plan to expand to other services beyond home-made food? In the city I live there are large condos that are almost like small towns. The one I live in has 300 families and around 1200 people. Some time ago I thought of developing an online service that would allow such condos to build internal "yellow pages" listing services such as: home-made food, baby siting, car washing, hair stylist, nails, dog walking. Th…

Not at the moment. I am focused on food services at the moment. I believe there are enough services for listing local businesses / services like craigslist, etc., The value our platform will add is not only bringing the cooks and customers together, but also providing them with delivery service.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#596

Post by slm_HN »

lexi-mono wrote: post #367

Made this web app to help you figure out how your favorite language is doing in the job market / what to learn next. Every month I scan the previous months’ Hacker News 'Who Is Hiring' thread and build these stats. Hope others find this useful. Constructive feedback welcome. This is only the first version. Next I'm planning to add more data for previous months/years as well and show the evolution of individual langua…

I like it.

A couple of little things:

    You've got both "Objective-C" and "Objective C"

    It would be nice to separate out the APIs, like Cocoa and QT, or make a different graph for APIs/Frameworks

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#597

Post by johngummadi »

tmaly wrote: post #487
johngummadi wrote: post #329

I'm working on a Uber like service for home-made food in my spare time (apart form having a day job). http://crave.yorker.me

great idea, I have a few friends in NYC that order food from chefs. I am working on a different sort of food app as my side project.

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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#598

Post by pastelsky »

Problem: I'm making a tool that'd help web developers and javascript library authors cut down bloat in the websites and libraries they make. This is done by helping them visualize the real world performance impact of adding a new dependency on the end users.

WIP here: https://cost-of-modules.herokuapp.com

Motivation: Maybe if I were to tell you the gzipped + min size, download times and the parse times of that ridiculously heavy react/ jQuery plugin _before_ you add it to your site, you'd think twice?

Problem: It's tricky to arrive at a configuration for webpack/rollup that would successfully bundle all npm packages.

Parse times are device specific, so calculating those reliably can be tough.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#599

Post by scottbez1 »

raphar wrote: post #519
scottbez1 wrote: post #126

As a hardware side project I've been designing and building an open source split-flap display - the kind of electro-mechanical displays you used to see in train stations and airports that loudly flip through letters and numbers as they update. https://scottbez1.github.io/splitflap/ Have a few working prototypes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslkflVv-Hw ), but I'm currently redesigning the electronics/PCB to make…

Building one is out of my league, but I would buy one for my desk.

Heh, I don't have any near-term plans to sell fully assembled modules, though I may consider making kits or something once I've refined things further. In the meantime, you could maybe try https://www.flapit.com ? No idea how they are (just came across them on the internet), but they appear to sell small assembled split flap displays?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?

#600

Post by contingencies »

wcchandler wrote: post #432

I'm building a 21st century farm. I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only 8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the fun stuff. Right?

Possible issues: capital, interest, land acquisition, zoning, weather, water, climatic region, crop seed availability, need for supplementary transportation (seeds, equipment, fertilizer, etc.), unpredictable transport overheads, etc.

The fact that you are sharing hard figures before a method really shows that you haven't advanced your thinking very far. Plants don't need technology to grow, they grow anyway. I'm not a farmer either but I can tell you the expensive part of farming is not the growing, it's the capital acquisition, land acquisition, transportation overheads, preparation, crop selection, harvesting, getting to market, and venture risk mitigation.

The most expensive part is often harvesting. The traditional US solution is "industrial scale farming and industrial scale harvesting equipment". The problem is that monocultures really suck in terms of biological efficiency (you start to need pesticides, fertilizers, machines and fuel for their deployment, crop rotation, wind breaks, etc). Better is inter-cropping, where you have different plants together in the same field. A smarter, robotic harvesting system to effectively harvest these naturalesque "mixed" fields could really be a game changer. Then again you could just employ Mexican immigrants like everyone else...

Another option would be an automatic guerilla farming drone to avoid paying for land. You see this done manually a lot in China. Something that can identify an area, clear it, plant it, potentially monitor or water it, and harvest it semi-autonomously. You would probably need a very high value crop to make this work, security would be a problem, and only certain types of unused land would function (legally, proximity-wise, security and visibility wise).

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