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Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

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171–180 of 786 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#171

Everyone is working on new 3D printing hardware but the software is still years behind. PrintToPeer ( http://www.printtopeer.com ) is connecting 3D printers to the internet for remote control and analytics. We have a web dashboard with a real-time connection to your 3D printer(s) for queueing and monitoring, and we've built a printer driver that works on the majority of current desktop 3D printers. A hardware-agnosti…

How does this compare to Octoprint[0]? What makes PrintToPeer different?

[0] - http://octoprint.org/

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll never make animal testing obsolete, nor would it be a good idea to do so as the benefits from using animals in research are so immense, and most such experiments are not transferable to humans (e.g. genetically modifying humans is not viable.) But it sounds like an interesting idea nonetheless - what experiments are you considering running?

A little friendly advice: don't ever tell someone what they can and can't achieve. It's impolite and the future is malleable. Feel free to sign up for when the first of many self experiments is launched: http://flowandzone.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=bc7fdf29...

I understand that you must have invested a lot of your time and energy into this idea, so it may be difficult to accept criticism of its base concept. However by posting about it on a public discussion board you are implicitly inviting others to discuss and critique it, so I don't really see how that can be considered impolite.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#174
A Selenium Grid (http://testingbot.com)

I love working on this because I get to learn a variety of things. Right now I'm switching from Amazon EC2 to my own setup with KVM/Qemu VMs.

It's been quite the experience prototyping with kvm/qemu, overall I'm really happy with it. From tuning libvirt, to loading RAM images straight into the VM in order to avoid boot-storms, learning about the various VM disk formats, virtio drivers, ... there's plenty to learn!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#175
An iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com) for ebooks. I have a day job so this is an after-hours side project.

It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its users like it too!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#176
http://babygra.ms

Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a successful iOS app myself.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#177
post #129

GeoGraph - http://geographapp.com/ Like imgur for location. No sign up & 1 click to share your current location. If you sign up, you can save your location privately (only you can see it). Use cases are wide open. Save your parking spot. Share location to meetup with a friend. Save a special spot in a forest. Etc. If you use check-in services, GeoGraph may interest you. If you never share your location online, you sh…

dig the simplicity and saving seems useful. any plans to let a user tag the location and maybe get their history via json.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#178
post #73

Soundslice ( http://www.soundslice.com/ ) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music. Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so... It's cool because: * The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta... ). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement. * It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new…

This is amazing. Awesome work. How much trouble have you ran into licensing / obtaining tabs for popular copyrighted songs? I think a legitimate tab database itself would be incredibly valuable and could power awesome services like this. I look forward to hearing more about this project, I think this is absolutely great.

Ethically speaking, I don't care if a database has "legit" tabs or not. (I downloaded 1000's of tabs in a zip a lot of years ago, that was definitely helpful as far as learning songs goes.) It's one thing if a it is a song that a band has actually recorded themselves, but an "illegitimate" tab is often the labor of the listeners. You could say that it is plagiarism, but I'd argue that it isn't as long as it doesn't pretend to be something that it is not ("my new cool song!"). It seems comparable to transcribing a video presentation (the video presentation might be copy righted).

Artists don't owe it to give out tabs of their songs, but listeners don't owe it to artists to not lay out what it was that they heard.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#179
post #73

Soundslice ( http://www.soundslice.com/ ) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music. Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so... It's cool because: * The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta... ). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement. * It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new…

This is amazing. Awesome work. How much trouble have you ran into licensing / obtaining tabs for popular copyrighted songs? I think a legitimate tab database itself would be incredibly valuable and could power awesome services like this. I look forward to hearing more about this project, I think this is absolutely great.

We sell tabs as part of our Pitch Perfect program (http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/), and for that we deal directly with the artist to clear copyrights.

The YouTube (free) part of the site is meant to be a loss leader / tech demo for Pitch Perfect and our technology licensing. We haven't run into any licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, as I don't believe in putting ads on the site, and I'd like to keep a free version and a pay-for version.

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