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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?

#361

Post by mide765 »

Never-Bored (http://mide765.com) - An iOS app you use when you have some time to kill. It's cool because you can choose between four topics depending on your mood and environment. You can read short-stories, watch interesting videos, learn facts and basic phrases for ten languages or play some games such as Pong.

On a personal level, I've started using Xcode for the first time on third of September. This is the final product of my first try on doing an iOS app.

Any feedback is appreciated.

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

#362

Post by dizzystar »

Unnamed project, probably beta released sometime this week.

Have you ever wondered which of the 10 courses offered by Coursera / EdX / etc to take, sign of up for 4, then dropped all but one and fell too far behind to finish?

Classes offered by MOOCs vary greatly in quality. This isn't a judgement call per se, just a question of "fit." Is this class up your alley, or maybe this class is too elementary for your level, or maybe it is too difficult.

The goal of my project is to offer students a place to express their thoughts, rank the courses (A, B, C, D, F), and rank difficulty. Other students can upvote comments and the top-ranked comment gets the top spot on the page, above the "official" review.

Another question often pondered is "what is the best path for the courses." Although this section is primitive, students are able to offer prerequisite sections.

Ideally, employers will have a place to look when people apply trumpeting up their certifications. Were these classes really worthwhile or was it all easy A.

Due to the anonymity of the site, students are offered the freedom to offer up honest reviews, why they dropped the courses, and what could be improved. Ultimately, MOOCs may have a place to see the real and raw opinions of the masses they are attempting to teach.

Nerd points? Stack is Linux, PostgreSQL, and Clojure.

The IP address is in my profile. Please don't create any accounts you'd want to keep since I am going to nuke the entire database soon. There are a few bugs on this site.

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

#363

Post by mercuryrising »

This thread needs more hardware.

I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the hood, slide onto the ground. I'm lying there for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened, wondering whether or not anything is broken. I wiggle my fingers, wiggle my toes, don't feel any pain. I stand up, the guy gets out of his car "Sorry man! I thought you were turning!" I say I think I'm fine... I go look at my bike - it's still upright, the front tire got wedged in a rust spot. I grab it out, hop on, and ride. I couldn't help but laugh the rest of the way to class.

That's the day I decided that bikers and automobiles need better communication. So I made a bike light that's easy to use, has front & back blinkers, brake lights, turns on when you ride (so you can't forget), a bright front light, USB rechargeable, 3400 mAh LiIon battery. I made a 3D printer to print the parts, I did the PCB design, physical design, and software. It's pretty damn cool. I ride pretty regularly and recharge it about once every three weeks. It's surprisingly water resistance - I am a little scared of selling this to people as I didn't know how it would handle water, but I've taken it through two large storms, one with huge puddles splashing all over the cases, and the light handled it all in stride.

Here's the images - http://imgur.com/a/EUzXm

I'm stalling on it a little bit right now - there's not a very good way of bootstrapping into manufacturing. I could 3D print the cases and assemble the boards, but each case takes about 20 hours to print (on my fiddly printer). There's ~100 components too, which is a pain for manual placing and reflowing. I have a couple other designs brewing that are simpler and lower cost, but without all the fancy features. Speaking of which... I have to go get some interrupts working.

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

#364

Post by frank_boyd »

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…

You get this kind of forums with http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ - it's a part of the "encrypted and distributed communication suite". Quickly growing community.

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

#365

Post by cwal37 »

mercuryrising wrote: post #270
cwal37 wrote: post #96

Nothing to do with coding, but I recently started writing energy things at www.btus.us It's just Wordpress for now, but I want to talk about energy generation and consumption related things using EIA and other data sources in ways people haven't seen before. Maps, charts, tables, I think there are a lot of fun things to look at in the energy industry, and most people don't have a strong grasp on it. I'm working on a…

If you haven't seen NPR's visualizing the grid, check it out - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...

I have, it's quite nice, although a bit old. High-detail shapefiles of the grid have become harder and harder to obtain over the years though (post 9/11 basically). So as an individual it kind of sucks to not be able to play with the grid and population/generation shifts.

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

#366

Post by dnautics »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #354
dnautics wrote: post #319

"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. Peop…

Great cause. Why is industry not interested in developing 9-deoxysibiromycin as a drug?

unpatentable. Check the date:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390171

Also the mechanism of action is baroque (although the compound class has fewer side effects), standard pharma is mostly interested in flashy new types of anticancer mechanisms.

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

#368

Post by city41 »

Metamorfus (http://metamorf.us) -- a site to help improve social skills

I have joined forces with my sister in law who has a Doctor of Psychology and specializes in anxieties. We both are shy people who have suffered with social anxiety, so we are working on new ways to help people overcome this. Combining her expertise with my dev skills. As you can see from the landing page, we don't have a designer :)

Why it's cool

* It's a really fresh way to conquer anxiety

* There's nothing else out there like it, existing anxiety/shyness communties and websites are rather archaic and/or simple

* It will help people of all types, from just wanting to get better at public speaking, to those who suffer from debilitating anxiety

* It will be helpful for both those who suffer and for psychologists to use as a tool

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

#369

Post by eudox »

AsmMAn wrote: post #222
eudox wrote: post #33

A statically-typed, JIT-compiled dialect of Lisp. I felt that there was a spot between performance and low-level control, and high-level metaprogramming that no language right now occupies (Except possibly Rust, which looks pretty promising). https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp

Great job! Very interesting it's even written in lisp! Do you have any book list you have read before wrote this compiler?

I learnt the basics of compilers from Game Scripting Mastery. I wasn't trying to write a compiler for game scripts, I'd just read it was a very practical (Light on theory) book, and my naive younger self thought this would be a good thing.

I'd also recommend Ghuloum's An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction, and the specially the accompanying tutorial: http://web.archive.org/web/20091005152403/http://www.cs.indi...

I never got far in Lisp in Small Pieces or the Essentials of Programming Languages, I mostly figured things out as I went along.

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

#370

Post by solnyshok »

I made private diaries for close friends (7 max). It is like post-it note on the kitchen fridge. Not indexed by google. Honesty of content there is amazing. Things that people would never trust to fb/twitter. Also, people that never write anything on facebook, do post there. It is simple stuff, like " I am doing that, I am feeling this, I am going to somewhere." If suddenly, all of fb contacts would post such small things, you'd go crazy. However, there are several people in my life, about whom I care deeply and want to know how they are doing even if they are 1000km away. This solves my need to keep in touch with chosen few souls. http://www.osom.me
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