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

news.ycombinator.com

661–670 of 786 posts

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

#661
New version of Fitto[1]. The current version works well for people who, so to say, live in the gym, but not for others. So we are adding a ton of features to make it work well for the more casual gym-goer!

It's cool because of the many new hardware devices we are integrating.

[1] http://fitto.co

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

#662
I am quite late to this thread, but what the heck, I'll give it the ol' college try. :)

HashPix: Search for images tagged with the same hashtag across Twitter, TwitPic, Instagram and Flickr. Create public/private albums of these pics and share the albums with anyone and everyone. Anonymous albums allowed but are made public by default.

Good for:

- Events, e.g. #MySuperAwesomeHalloweenParty

- Contests, #TweetLikeAGhostAndWin

- Festivals #HalloweenHaunts

...anything where you can use a hashtag, really!

Link: http://hashpix.herokuapp.com

2. @updt_me: (RSS/Atom) Feed updates via Twitter DM. Follow @updt_me and send a tweet @updt_me with the keyword START followed by a URL, e.g. "@updt_me START https://news.ycombinator.com/rss". You'll receive feed updates via Twitter DM (hence, the need to follow) when they happen. I'm currently using it to subscribe to xkcd, smbc and a few others.

Good for:

- Avoiding RSS inbox pile-ups due to procrastination/lethargy

- Ensuring authors get the page-views their blogs/sites deserve

- Following 'thoughts' rather than 'people', i.e. no more "I just ate broccoli. I #WIN." when you just want to read, "The 7 habits of highly-successful techpreneurs that you must cultivate before bedtime."

Coming soon:

- Ability to subscribe to feeds via DM - for those subscriptions that you'd rather not announce to the world. wink wink nudge nudge

- (Almost)instant PuSH updates using Superfeedr. (Still trying to figure this one out, actually.)

Links:

http://update-me.herokuapp.com

http://twitter.com/updt_me

Why do these make me happy?

Because a year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to make a comment like this. I was (and still am) an utter newbie with no knowledge of any kind of programming. Deep-dived into Python/Django and the results are up there for you to peruse. Granted they aren't awesome like most others in this thread but hey, it's a start. :)

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

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused - what exactly are you doing? Are you making the projectors? Are you programming the game? What software are you using? Are you sensing what it's being projected on?

Some of the hardware was built (one of the projectors), some of it is purchased (a second projector due to time constraints, and all of the DACs). The games, graphic engine, DAC comms, etc. are all programmed in a mix of Python and C++. Most projection software available is commercial and expensive, so I've rolled my own stack. I'm working towards surface distortion mapping, which is increasingly important in the umb…

There is a company in Montreal called VYV (I am not associated with them but a friend works there) who are doing lots of projector/projection type work.. I don't know if they work with lasers but they are definitely working on solving the whole multi-projector and distortion mapping stuff that you're tackling..

They might be interested in talking to you, they're still fairly small and startup-ish but they're doing big things..

http://www.vyv.ca/

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

#664

I am working on a knowledge representation and reasoning system. It is cool because of the simplicity and expressiveness of the languaje it uses to represent knowledge. http://terms.readthedocs.org

That is very cool. Is this just-for-fun/-learning or do you have any real applications for it?

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

#665
post #628

I'm working on a proxy / community-run fork[1] of Healthcare.gov. After all the histrionics about the site's performance and bugs, and upon seeing that it was a Backbone.js app (which I develop full-time), and with unminified/commented source, I thought it might be worthwhile to pull as many files from the repo as I could so that bugs could be reported and fixed in the open. As the product sits today, it is close to…

Someone, give this this guy $90mm.

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

#666
post #450
post #98

Tool for academic researchers: beta.bohrresearch.com It is cool because it helps academic researchers to spend more time on their research.

Seen Write Latex? www.writelatex.com Seems like an ideal partnership opportunity.

Thanks, will check it out!

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

#668
post #83

A web-based IDE for automated testing [1] with real-time collaboration features. Pretty cool for a few reasons: First, it's actually making creating automated testing suites enjoyable. This is usually a pretty unenviable task. The IDE is something I actually like using though, and have found myself wanting to use it on just about every consulting gig or website I've touched since we started on it - even ones without…

god, please don't use autoplay videos! I open your link to read later, then I have to figure out where that damn noise is coming from.

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

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome. I was thinking about buying a personal plane to fly back and forth from Canada to California. I came across this, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis It's called the Synergy plane, and I think it will supposedly the most fuel efficient personal plane. Thoughts?

That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat. Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreaso…

you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death.

Do you think the increasing popularity of whole-aircraft parachute systems (which I note is an option on the SD-1) will improve the situation? It's my impression the Cirrus gets away with being hard to recover from a spin by making parachute deployment the standard recovery procedure.

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

#670
I'm working on Taniger https://www.taniger.com which is a real time Facebook chat encryption service. Quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0

Why it's cool: It's open source. It provides REAL real-time encryption without the hassle of "choosing a password", "copy pasting text" etc. Also same logic can be applied to any web chat service.

Code available at: https://github.com/sadreck/taniger

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