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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?

#651

Post by franga2000 »

I'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 convinced, so I've sunk countless hours into the project.

I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.

// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#653

Post by AussieWog93 »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #638

I’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.

Possibly dumb question, but have you considered looking for a successor to take over the project?

Homebrew has basically reached the point where it's "critical infrastructure" for macOS devs, and it would really be a damn shame to see it slowly fade away just because the creator has moved onto other things.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#654

Post by sunsetMurk »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #638

I’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.

So casual :-)

I use Homebrew every day. Thank you for the the incredible work in keeping things ticking along. And congrats on still enjoying it!

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#655

Post by spolsky_co »

I built a product monitoring tool couple months ago, because I had problems with knowing what users do in my app without looking into the database.

Usually I was sending some logs to Slack, but I didn't get any stats from that and couldn't read easily the history of events/logs, so I created the Logspot which monitors user activity and automates workflows (WIP).

Couple of users has registered - not much, but I'm still hoping it's going to take off some day.

https://logspot.io

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#656

Post by mabub24 »

franga2000 wrote: post #651

I'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 deeply commendable work and a real public service. Access to public transportation is an issue for a lot of people, and outside of the usual issues of cost, often comes down to people finding the PT systems difficult and hard to use. When people make their own apps and make them freely available with the PT data, those apps are usually lightyears ahead of the official apps to the degree that it is embarrassing.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#657

Post by sleepingadmin »

I have a honeypot network that collects a good amount of attackers, but I also have multiple other sources of attacker infos that let me build a threatfeed that is unlike any other. ISP scale SOC, ISP DDOS, etc. My threatfeed is insane, every firepower I add it to ends up blocking virtually all threats. Better yet, everything is fully automated.

Why doesnt this succeed? I can't share it with anyone outside our non-profit membership.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#658

Post by jheriko »

a compiler generator working from descriptions of the language producing a clang quality compiler (with richer errors actually...) with LLVM backend.

it actually already works, with a few short cuts for generating itself... and ive used bits of it to do the 'make a scheme in x hours' thing in x/10 hours... the next step is unpicking those shortcuts so it can be completely generalised - there is no theoretical boundary there, just work i need to do which is boring.

kinda like flex/bison/yacc/bnfc/antlr but not of jaw-droppingly abysmal quality.

too much time is wasted on compiler development, and academia seriously dropped the ball there... the last decent effort i've found is the META work, which is basically ancient now.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#659

Post by shishironline »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #638

I’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.

You have done a great job, and helped innumerable developers along the way. Thanks

Re: Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

#660

Post by bbkane »

mfru wrote: post #571

I am scratching my own itch and learning Clojure on the way with building a FLOSS alternative to a very famous project management tool. I found that this tool is quite a sweet spot for bringing small teams of technical and non-technical people together and get stuff done, but I yearned for an open-source version of it to hack around. It is all still in a very early prototyping stage, but I plan to release an alpha un…

JIRA?
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