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

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

#281

Post by fudged71 »

mercuryrising wrote: post #171
fudged71 wrote: post #165

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/

We've used Octoprint in the past and it just didn't meet our needs. We believe in designing for the novice and giving configuration options for the professionals; Octoprint just isn't user-friendly enough.

Out of the box, we support Makerbots (as well as ReRaps). Multiple printers are managed from the same interface. You don't need to wrestle with firewall settings to be secure. We offer multiple slicers in the cloud rather than one slicer on the client. And we are starting with a Raspberry Pi client rather than relying on other projects to provide that capability.

And again, by having the service hosted by us, we're able to provide an API to 3rd parties to tie their apps into. Marketplaces, design apps, games, sharing economy services, etc.

Do you use Octoprint? Which printers do you have connected to the service?

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

#282

Post by suresk »

I've been slowly working on a few things, and hopefully can finish them during the winter:

1) Shared Places

The idea is that you can have public or private lists of locations that can be shared with other people, and would be integrated with mapping software on your phone so it is easy to navigate to them.

Some private lists that may be useful:

a) A family one that keeps track of extended relatives, friends houses, soccer fields, etc

b) A small business that works at, delivers to, or services fixed locations.

Some public ones might be:

a) Places in this area that are related to US Civil War history.

b) Gas stations in this area that have a drive-thru (this sounds silly, but was actually where I got the idea - my sister has small children and it is a pain to get them out of the car and into a store to just pick up a few convenience items, so knowing where she can go that has a drive-thru is really handy)

2) Insomnia Tracker

An app/website to log things related to sleep (beverages consumed, medication taken, notable social situations, what time you try to go to sleep, what time you wake up, etc). Hopefully having it available on a phone will make it easier to keep track of things more fully than if you had to remember to write it down in a paper log, since you usually have your phone with you.

Then this data can be used to find trends such as how, say your coffee consumption affects your sleep, or maybe how stressful arguments at work are keeping you up at night.

I don't have anything up for either of them yet, and I'm not sure either could actually make enough to be more than a hobby, but they are both useful to me and kind of fun to build.

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

#283

Post by martindale »

mindcrime wrote: post #261
martindale wrote: post #229

Coursefork ( http://coursefork.org ) -- github for education. We're trying to open-source the entire education system, starting with creating an easy way for materials and processes to become "forkable". - Fork, for example, an MIT OCW course. - Make modifications. - Submit a pull request back to MIT with your changes, or, just teach from your own fork.

This is amazingly cool. I was excited about this from the first time Elliot mentioned it to me, and I'm thrilled to see how far you guys have come. Way to represent the Triangle!

Thanks, Phil! Let's make sure to catch up between now and demo day. :)

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

#284

Post by Goopplesoft »

pla3rhat3r wrote: post #277
Goopplesoft wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very very doubtful. The base plan is $24 and covers 5000 users (a fairly large amount). If it saves 1 hour of developer time a month to maintain the code/infrastructure/bugs/issues/scaling you're already looking at a 50% price savings. Through building this I can guarantee that it will save way more than 1 hour a month. Source: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/13/silicon-valley-salaries-de...

But you could create a very simple response and add numbers pretty easily. And at .075 cents per message I gotta think, in the long run, Twilio is a cheaper alternative. I should add that I work for Twilio so I'm a bit biased. However, I love your idea. Just trying to do the math. :)

Twilio is the SMS/Voice provider so the bias doesn't really apply :) Thats why I kept the SMS/Voice rate the same as twilio. Not trying to make money of SMS/Voice just trying to implement a service over it so its easy to use. Have you tried out ezGAuth? Love to know what you think. I'll probably try to seek out someone from twilio soon for some sort of relationship since it helps their sales too.

There are also the added benefits of doing your 2FA independently. Furhter, should the long run come, we give you full read/delete perms on all the data so you can implement it yourself.

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

#285

Post by c0lin »

Notelab (http://notelab.org) - a way to take synced notes alongside web videos.

It's cool because:

* It's really simple (paste a YouTube URL then take notes and they all sync up).

* At the moment there's no good way to capture, organise, export and share notes relating to online videos. You have to open a text editor next to your browser window, or (gasp) write on paper.

* It solves a pain point I have when teaching, as I often recommend videos as "recommended viewing" to my students, and I like to share my notes on the videos with them, and also see what they are writing.

* It's my first coding project, so I'm learning a lot :-)

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

#286

Post by alecsmart1 »

tynan wrote: post #275

Sett ( http://sett.com ) It's a new blogging platform that helps people build audiences. Our oldest users (1 year) have seen roughly 100% increase in daily traffic, twice as many comments, etc. My personal blog has doubled daily visitors and growth rate for subscribers went from 1% to 10%.

On a very off topic, how much do you have to pay for a four letter domain like yours and whats the process like. Did you use something like sedo/godaddy? I've always wondered how difficult is it to acquire one.

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

#287

Post by kylelutz »

Boost.Compute (https://github.com/kylelutz/compute) - A C++ GPU Computing Library for OpenCL

It's cool because it offers C++ developers an easy path to running code on GPUs and multi-core CPUs via an STL-like API. It's similar to NVIDIA's Thrust library but supports all OpenCL compatible devices (including AMD GPUs and Intel CPUs/accelerators).

Documentation is here: http://kylelutz.github.io/compute/

P.S. It's still under active development and we're looking for more contributors with an interest in parallel computing and C++. Send me an e-mail if you're interested!

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

#288

Post by keven25 »

A bookmarking tool that tracks progress of webpages/videos

I've been using this app to bookmark all my webpages: http://alittleapp.com/

It is especially helpful for unfinished long articles and long videos, which I have to come back for. What makes ALittle unique is, it actually saves the play progress of the video (in the case of articles, it saves the scroll position), so that next time you can come back to the exact same spot. No more writing down the time manually. No more time spent trying to remember the spot you left off at.

ALittle makes this possible with a Chrome extension. It adds a cute little button next to your browser's address bar. With just one click, you can save the progress of any webpages. Furthermore, the progress can be synced across computers, as long as you have Chrome browsers.

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

#289

Post by wfn »

rolleiflex wrote: post #234

I'm building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It's fully encrypted. Take a look at http://www.getaether.net It's cool because: * It's anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin. * It's encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suit…

The thing that you're working on falls within the area of 'truly relevant and important [to our times, etc.] software', IMO. Very nice and interesting indeed.

I didn't notice any mention of an adversary model, do you have one? (cf. e.g. http://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/27/how-does-tors-thre...)

How transport-agnostic is the system aiming to be? Could it be used in combination with Tor/I2P/etc. (as an underlying transport/anonymization mechanism)? (cf. http://syndie.de/)

Overall, this is very interesting indeed.

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

#290

Post by jph »

ronilan wrote: post #110

PlaceUnit ( http://www.placeunit.com/ ) -- an iOS app to build a mini-responsive website. Download here: http://www.appstore.com/placeunit Just the video: https://vimeo.com/68029789 Demo: http://fantastic-vancouver.placeunit.com/ It's cool because: * It is very very simple to use. Any person with an iPhone/iPad can build something in minutes. * It's a PhoneGap app (HTML5/JavaScript) which integrates Open Source compo…

Superb demo video and product. Your MVP is solid, business proposition is strong, and UI is terrific. You've got a home run on your hands.
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