Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#481

Post by imposterr » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #370

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

A zillion years ago I had a housemate who was a brilliant programmer and could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business, and one of his weird little side ventures was a Mac app to cut up Illustrator files and lay them out in HTML using tables, because that was the state of the art. As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator,…

Was it possibly integrated into Adobe ImageReady [0]? It had a feature like what you're describing where after you finished designing your website, you could define cutouts and export as images+HTML.

This is actually how I first got into programming when I was younger. I made my first site in ImageReady, but it couldn't do all the other cool stuff other sites did like comment sections and logging in, so I went on a quest to learn how to do all that and the rest is history :)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ImageReady

Edit: actually, I found an example from 13 years ago https://youtu.be/qCq0JiwMcJs

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#482

Post by occase » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:01 AM UTC

I have written a chat app for selling and buying cars. It has been more than two years work now, mostly on weekends but it is not finished yet. Cloud costs to keep it online are very low, only 5EUR/month since I do not use any paid service. I am still very motivated and have the expectation of launching it in the city where I live soon. Link: https://www.occase.de

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#483

Post by newdude116 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

koellewe wrote: post #4

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder. It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Te…

"I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes"

This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#484

Post by oarsinsync » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

scottmf wrote: post #479

type0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other alternative to the pointy nose theory you'd think it would have been much more successful with Obama

?

Obama’s nose is a bit flatter than GWB’s, so would poke out a bit less.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#485

Post by scyzoryk_xyz » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

Scarves - anyone want to buy one? I have a full suitcase

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#486

Post by wiradikusuma » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:19 AM UTC

I made an Android app to keep track of my domain name collections -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.every

From the name (Every.ID), you can say that it aims to be the one app to keep track of everything you collect: domain names, postage stamps, games, etc.

My end goal is to make it pluggable with API e.g. connect with your Steam account to auto-sync your game collection.

Unfortunately, since I'm doing it as a playground for learning new techs (I learned Flutter and Dgraph), the progress for the app itself is slow.

Fortunately, since I'm also a user (I use it often), it keeps being enhanced.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#487

Post by nevster » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:22 AM UTC

issa wrote: post #395

nevster wrote: post #303

I probably have about 20 domains registered that I've never done anything with. Eg wherewasthistaken.com - the idea being you have a photo, eg from your parents, and you don't know where the photo was taken. So you post it on the website and people can comment if they recognise where it was taken.

I think this is a great idea. Did you ever do anything with it?

Absolutely nothing! Other than a bit of paper brainstorming. Too many other things to work on.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#488

Post by overkalix » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…

I had a similar idea last year, but clearly I'm not talented nor experienced enough to do it. Congratulations dude, this rocks.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#489

Post by joe_91 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:29 AM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #246

www.gaffologist.com Maybe it'll make money yet. I dunno. Search for homes for sale in Ireland by proximity to fibre broadband, schools, cycle routes, train stations, and proposed infra (new metro route, cycleways, etc.) and by site area. Ended up buying myself a dirt cheap thatched cottage an hour from Dublin by train on a few acres with it and figured I'd see if others would benefit from it.

Great idea! I'd thought of doing something similar for years. I can't believe the likes of Daft haven't added something like this in yet. It's so useful and you've a load of filters! How much time did you spend on it and how/where did you get the data from do you mind me asking?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#490

Post by jve » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #136

I have built and continue to build extremely sophisticated LED lights. But there's no market for fancy anymore. I maybe made back my expenses, though I have a bunch of lights at home to show for it I guess.

Got anything to show us?