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Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

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Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#71

Post by Dumblydorr »

I don't want you to take this personally, but your post seems very low effort. How can we devote time to helping you if you only put 10 seconds into making this post without reviewing it?

For one, writing skills are important. You will have a hard time selling your project to anyone on its merits if you write incomplete sentences with lackluster English.

Second, you haven't taken the time to list out what your strengths and domains are, therefore HN can't leverage its vast knowledge to point you in the right direction.

If you want to build a useful project, you'll need to be more detail oriented and persuasive than your post here. Take the time to do things right. Feedback is worth its weight in gold, and you've given us zero to offer feedback upon except for your scanty quick query.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#73

Post by clarry »

snazz wrote: post #23

Do something challenging but not too challenging. It should be hard enough that you can learn something without being so hard that you give up. Some classic computer science project ideas: - Build a path tracer. Physically-based rendering is a topic with lots of information on the Internet. It requires some math, but at least it's fun math :) - Write an operating system kernel. It doesn't have to work on real hardwar…

> a nanopass compiler

Got any good resources on this that aren't focused on the Nanopass Framework?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#75

Post by IgorPartola »

clarry wrote: post #49
krm01 wrote: post #17

1. Write down the apps on your phone or computer that you use the most. If you want to bootstrap a profitable business, I recommend listing the apps you use for work. 2. Write down the one feature for each app that you use the most within that app. 3. Write down what slightly annoys you about that one feature 4. Build the product around the one feature you feel you can cook up quickly and that will benefit your workf…

Cool! Let's try this. > 1. Write down the apps on your phone or computer that you use the most. If you want to bootstrap a profitable business, I recommend listing the apps you use for work. Emacs, vim, xterm, tmux. (I use them all for work. 99% of the time, what you see on my screen is either Emacs, or an xterm running tmux and some instances of vim.) On my phone, alarm clock. (I use it to get up for work) > 2. Writ…

I’ll try this for my phone:

1. Most used apps are the browser, Facebook (marketplace only), Snapchat, Messages, Amazon, and RobinHood.

2. Browsing the web, browsing local listings, messaging people, shopping, trading stocks and options.

3. I wish the browser had better tab management and persona management. I wish Facebook Marketplace had a lot fewer ads and better categories. Also I wish it wasn’t Facebook. I wish there was a way to disable Snapchat notifications about the other person typing. I wish Messages had a way to disable notifications if I am, say watching a video or have some specific apps on (like games). I wish Amazon had a proper filter for “items I can get soon”. I wish RobinHood allowed me to list options bids/asks for longer than a day.

4. Of these the Amazon and RobinHood ones are the only ones that are feasible. There are alternatives to Facebook Marketplace and they are all worse/less popular. I doubt Apple would let me change their apps or OS code.

I suppose there is something here with an unofficial RobinHood API. Scraping Amazon is a popular thing to do but I don’t want to develop a complete clone of their app with just a single additional filter.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#76

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

a different take: why not look for existing abandoned projects that need a new maintainer. every year we have thousands of new ideas that will never survive in the long run so why not help out on something that already has a user-base but doesn't see updates? maintaining an existing system, and making it better might not give you the same glory as inventing something new, but imvho it should.

e.g.:

slide #46 and #47: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/packaging-tutorial/packag...

https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#78

Post by inetsee »

codq wrote: post #11
leorio wrote: post #8

I would probably get downvoted for this.. It's very rare to find those "scratch your own itch problems", the solution to that itch is most likely a google search away. Pick a good product that you use and clone it. Keep an open mind because you can never copy the entire business since there is only so much you can see. Atleast you get some direction to start and you know that you are not trapped in building something…

I'm not a SWE, but this is how I sometimes make music if I'm starting without an idea. Take a song you love—or even a song you've just heard 15 seconds of—and try to recreate it, but extremely loosely, taking as many liberties as possible exploring directions the initial inspiration leads you towards. More often than not, it'll morph into something unrecognizable compared to the source inspiration, and quickly become…

I discovered a long time ago that I often get lyric ideas while listening to other songs, usually in the car. What I find interesting is that most of the time the ideas that pop into my head are completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song I'm listening to.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas

#79

Post by artembugara »

abhishektwr wrote: post #42
artembugara wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My story. I used to use news API services for my side projects. One day, I realized that I can build my own service that will be both, best quality (like real multilanguage support), and cheap. 8 months into it, it is my full-time job and we are releasing our first paid version (post-beta). We have 600 subscribers (beta-testers) and some people claiming they will become paid clients. It is a huge experience in both,…

On side, does newscaptureapi provide author information i.e. name of author bare minimum, email will be great. And also how you tackle copyright issues?

We provide the author(s) name when possible. No email. Regarding the copyright - no. It looks like a grey area as long as you do not return the full article’s text body
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