Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#61

Post by psmithsfhn »

Been working on a service to let you listen to the web -- similar in function to the audio part of the Pocket app.

Mostly using AWS Lambda and SNS.

Some occasional weirdness in stringing functions together -- might do more with Step Functions.

But weird part is some calls just seem to hang and never return -- unless they get a clean/new function of their own.

Using Pythom 3.8 with Boto3 library.

But generally amazed with what Lambda seems like it might be able to do if I can get it humming.

http://readonthegoapp.com/

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#63

Post by XCSme »

enonevets wrote: post #12
XCSme wrote: post #4

My main project is a self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net I am still struggling to accomplish my goal of becoming sustainable by focusing on the self-hosted part instead of the SaaS part, but I'm not giving up. I do think that self-hosting is the future! :)

Honest curiosity here. With so many competitors in the space both free and paid, and with many doing self-hosted, privacy conscious angle, and many open source as well, what are you doing to separate your tracking from those. At a glance, I wasn't able to discern the major difference and I'd imagine a lot of users looking for analytic solutions might fall into the same thoughts.

Thanks for the feedback!

I think most of the unique points are mentioned on the landing page in the "What's different about userTrack?" section.

The main gist is that userTrack is primary self-hosted, so the product's goal is aligned with the customer's goal. A platform like Matomo for example, earns money by providing a cloud solution, which means that anyone who chooses to self-host instead of using their service will reduce their revenue. This also leads to them making it harder to install and maintain the self-hosted version and they also provide some features only for the cloud plan (session recordings, heatmaps). Most of the other open-source analytics platforms that you might be referring to are pretty simple and usually only provide basic visitor stats.

tl;dr: ease of installation, automatic updates, human support, highly performant/well optimized, unique interface and features, very affordable compared to alternatives with similar features, bootstrapped.

Apart from this I am also trying to promote self-hosting as much as possible, thus I am continuously looking for and promoting different ways to reduce 3rd party dependencies and making it easier to do so.

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#64

Post by EvanKRob »

sideproject wrote: post #24

Building a tool to make use of un-used domain names. https://www.newsy.co I had about ~30 domain names which were not doing anything. I got tired of them. But I didn't want to spend time working on them. So I built Newsy, which converts your domain name into a fully functional & automated content site. It finds niche contents and display them like Reddit. Over the months, I've built membership, newsletters, comments,…

This is really cool. Do you have any examples of live sites?

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#66

Post by Irongirl1 »

app17 wrote: post #9
zb1plus wrote: post #2

I have two side projects. The first is a PDF reader that persists reading state between devices and has a queryable notes overlay. For this project I am using SwiftUI and targeting iPhones and desktop MacOS. The second centers around exploring how to conduct interactive virtual lessons in VR using Mozilla hubs.

Is your PDF reader open sourced? It's a feature I'd like to implement at some point in my own personal project ( https://github.com/appaquet/exomind )

hth:

https://onesimpleapi.com/docs/web-page-to-pdf

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#68

Post by lbutler »

Simulating water distribution networks in JavaScript.

I maintain a JS conversion of the EPA's simulation engine EPANET. https://epanetjs.com/ https://github.com/modelcreate/epanet-js

I've built a few open source apps and few other little projects to help automate my workflow.

There are only a handful of providers of modelling software, most are commercial and one recently sold to Autodesk for $1B.

Not sure I'll convince the industry to change but I'm enjoying tinkering around and making my own small difference.

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#69

Post by carmen_sandiego »

psmithsfhn wrote: post #61

Been working on a service to let you listen to the web -- similar in function to the audio part of the Pocket app. Mostly using AWS Lambda and SNS. Some occasional weirdness in stringing functions together -- might do more with Step Functions. But weird part is some calls just seem to hang and never return -- unless they get a clean/new function of their own. Using Pythom 3.8 with Boto3 library. But generally amazed…

Step functions are interesting in theory but they become quite messy in my experience. Are you using Chalice for your Lambda functions? Or something else? What kind of problems are you having with SNS? With Chalice it should be pretty easy to just trigger on SNS messages that come after each step, though I’m not sure which steps you would need for your app. Is it TTS with Poly running async or something?

Re: Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

#70

Post by carmen_sandiego »

vocabboost wrote: post #37

I am developing a browser extension to make a fill-in-the-blank language test out of any webpage. I personally used this to improve my German vocabulary. This way one can learn new words from materials they naturally enjoy (vs boring text books). The extension is available for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vocabboost/obgbcam... ? Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vocabboost/…

Maybe you already know, but ‘cloze’ is another keyword for this that you might want to pepper around to get more people finding you.
Post reply on HN