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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?

#311

Post by meemoo »

scottlilly wrote: post #301
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…

I was thinking about doing something similar. One of the things I wanted to incorporate was an reputation ability (beyond just blocking). It would be similar to a referral engine in Netflix or Amazon. So, I'm user A. I mark user B as a high-value poster. User B marks user C as a high-value poster. When I run across a post by user C, I see they have a good reputation. If many people I ranked as high-value, also ranked…

Are there any link voting sites on the public web that have tried this?

I'd love it if YouTube comments worked like this. Why don't they?

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

#312

Post by sakai »

A friend and I are developing a new fast, space-efficient (read: probabilistic) key-value store. We're using it for some computational biology applications.

It's cool because: * It scales to really large data sets: We store ~10 billion keys in memory on a single, not-too-ridiculous machine, and the design supports sharding trivially * It's fast: we have a lot of optimization still, but can do ~1M lookups/sec (O(1) lookups) * It's a data structure! (Which as non-formal-CS people we find fun)

Would be very interested to hear other applications that people would find the above attributes useful for!

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

#313

Post by jph »

chasb wrote: post #264
trey_swann wrote: post #48

https://www.truevault.com/ TrueVault is a HIPAA compliant data backend for apps, devices, and sites. Developers use TrueVault so they can develop healthcare apps without building out their own HIPAA compliant infrastructure. You access data in TrueVault via our API and native clients. Think of TrueVault as Stripe for confidential patient data. You use Stripe to store credit card data so that you are PCI compliant. Ou…

What's a use case for this?

My client's use case: we have multiple hospitals that need to share confidential information, for example a patient intake survey that is essentially a typical web form. We need somewhere to store that data.

Building the AWS site to do this took upwards of 1000 person-hours to figuring out HIPAA-compliance issues. This will continue to be an ongoing cost for us, because HIPAA is an ongoing law and it changes sometimes. It takes substantial auditing time and money.

TrueVault would save us all that.

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

#314

Post by tihag »

k4st wrote: post #197

I'm working on https://github.com/Granary/granary . It is a Linux kernel dynamic binary translation framework. It's cool because it lets you rewrite the Linux kernel (at different granularities) while it's running. This is useful for analysis, debugging, etc. Right now I'm putting together benchmarks for an upcoming paper deadline.

made an account after years of lurking, to say how awesome this is.

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

#315

Post by toomuchtodo »

sunspeck wrote: post #30

A biodiverse, edible forest garden in the center of an public high school. We are breaking ground with a team of students in about an hour. This is (very) cool because it will expose adolescents to a variety of concepts, perspectives, and phenomena that are severely lacking from most urbanized places.

Have you thought about putting kits together to do this? And funding with Kickstarter?

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

#316

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

wfn wrote: post #308
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a library, so it doesn't handle plugins. However, the library is thread-safe, and the server [1] I wrote on top of the library supports plugins and is also thread safe. For anything dependent on a specific thread, there's generally a queue to push things into. [1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/PartyCraft

That sounds like a very nice and thought-through architecture/design. What's your current status / how far away are you from a more or less complete beta (e.g. in regards to the minecraft client) (if you don't mind me asking)?

Well, the design has been through a few revisions. I'm not afraid to make breaking changes before version 1.0.0 (for example, I completely rewrote the level handling system to improve level editing performance by an order of magnitude).

The current status of the server is:

* Full support for Minecraft 1.6.4 networking (1.7.x networking is a WIP)

* Full support for editing Minecraft levels

* Implementations of all Minecraft data types (i.e. slots, metadata dictionaries, NBT, etc)

* Slightly buggy emulation of Minecraft physics

* Simple procedural terrain generation

Here's an incomplete list of things that aren't done:

* Lots of block interactions (like water emulation, or falling sand) were done, but were lost during the refactoring I mentioned above

* Redstone and all related logic

* Mob AI (work in progress, not very far along)

* More detailed world generation (missing ores, caves, biomes, villages)

Aside from the server, there's also a mature classic networking library, and a fairly complete client library (no rendering).

The project is more than a year old now and is built on top of code that's about three years old. It's a pretty big undertaking, and it's going to take a while to finish. It'll be done faster if I get more third party help, though!

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

#317

Post by MAGZine »

nav wrote: post #251

Seat 14A (www.seat14a.com) a). Most men hate shopping. b). Sizes are never consistent and a number cannot define a unique bodily shape. Our solution: We simply send an email with a few complete looks every few weeks, if you like a look - order it and we make it made to measure for you. We ship globally for free. Each look is about $150-$175 (so won't break your bank account). Each look is based off of heavy research…

Are the pieces in the outfit generally specific to that outfit?

This is an interesting idea, but the value proposition to buyers is much higher if you're selling a few pieces that can go together, but are also very versatile in that you can use them in any number of combinations.

I don't want to spend money on 'one-offs'. Can you speak to the quality of the pieces?

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

#318

Post by druska »

hcm wrote: post #113

I'm working on CodeCube ( http://codecube.io ) - a pastebin that allows you to run the code snippets and see the output live in your browser. It's built on Docker. I posted an article about how I built it here: http://hmarr.com/2013/oct/16/codecube-runnable-gists/ The source is up on GitHub at https://github.com/hmarr/codecube

I love this, very cool stuff. You should add a code format button to the editor.

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

#319

Post by dnautics »

"open-source", IP-free anticancer drug candidate (http://indysci.org)

We're launching in January (or possibly December)

It's cool, because we want to disrupt the way that pharma operates. Biotech could learn a lot from the way that the software industry has been revolutionized by the open-source philosophy. The world could stand to also see tangible benefits if we succeed in (re)proving it's actually possible. People have done this in the past (salk and sabin come to mind); sometimes the global consciousness just needs a reminder.

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

#320

Post by gio »

Blimp http://getblimp.com

Project management software for creative teams with no managers.

It's cool because:

* We help you automate a workflow for your tasks (Plan -> Do -> Review ->Done)

* Beautiful and easy to use

* You can see the status of all projects on a single page (no more status meetings)

* You can see who is doing what in any moment

* Conversations are task centric, no need to read long messages to figure out what to do

* Google Drive, Dropbox Integration

* Proudly bootstrapped and made by three guys from Puerto Rico.

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