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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#671

Post by JoseVigil »

carleverett wrote: post #90

A high performance, affordable personal airplane: http://www.skycraftairplanes.com It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118 mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS, collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod. They sell for $55k. Here's the HN post I made a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062

In India Tata developed a car called Nano for only $2000 (the prize of a motobike) that failed to meed expectations. Since you seem to be on the same path there are some tips that you could consider from the consumer perspective which caused people not buying. Why failed?. Though it is cheap should have not looked cheap. The effort on engineering made Nano am affordable $2000 car but less efforts on design and finishing made it fail. My suggestion, put your eyes on design and make it look nice and modern before flying. Congratulations!.

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

#672

Post by burntsushi »

x0xMaximus wrote: post #622
burntsushi wrote: post #94

I'm working on a few projects. Firstly, I've developed a suite of Python libraries to deal with NFL data, including play-by-play statistics and slicing game footage into its play-by-play components. A demo of my work is here: http://demo.nflfan.burntsushi.net/?week=5 (excuse the slowness, my web server is crappy) Everything is on GitHub: https://github.com/BurntSushi/{nflgame,nfldb,nflvid,nflfan} Secondly, I'm also w…

Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project. I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts: http://mark2cure.org/

> Very cool to hear about the Entity-Relationship diagram project.

Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable at how rare they are. There are lots of GUI tools, or tools specific to a particular database system, but few that accept plain text as input. (There is erwiz, but it's unmaintained and a giant mess of Java code.)

> I'm working on something similar myself, an entity annotation and relationship builder app to annotate biomedical texts: http://mark2cure.org/

That is so awesome. I can't wait to see it in action! I've added my email to your list. :-)

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

#673

Post by gregdetre »

mindcrime wrote: post #133
gregdetre wrote: post #32

Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope! My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own, mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk

I'm no AI expert, but after reading both Hawkins' On Intelligence and Kurweil's How To Create A Mind , I'm pretty sold on the idea that our minds are basically pattern-matching machines. Lately I've been trying to spend a lot of time "thinking about thinking" and recognizing how I form thoughts, relate to memories, etc. I am not super familiar with Hofstadter's ideas, since I haven't (yet) finished even GEB, but the…

Cool! Drop me a line at greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk

Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies ch 4-6 are the best introduction to his modeling work. I can't recommend them highly enough.

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

#674

Post by turbojerry »

ihenriksen wrote: post #331

SparkleDB NoSQL database server is a horizontally distributed, real-time, performance-critical, highly available, and large-scale software solution capable of handling Big Data. Fast. Transactional. Both ACID and in-memory (we let you choose). Acts as a single logical database unit, even though it may consist of hundreds of physical computers located in the same physical location-or dispersed over a network of interc…

The query language for RDF is called SPARQL[1] pronounced "sparkle" which might cause some confusion in conversation.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

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

#677

Post by turbojerry »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #476

writing a sci-fi novel dealing with p vs np, quantum computing, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the future of civilization and culture, and hipsters. it's cool because it's also about my personal life and struggles with bipolar disorder.

It sounds excellent, like a cross between PKD and Charles Stross, please let us know when it's published.

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

#678

Post by carleverett »

noonespecial wrote: post #659
carleverett wrote: post #90

A high performance, affordable personal airplane: http://www.skycraftairplanes.com It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118 mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS, collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod. They sell for $55k. Here's the HN post I made a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062

Damn. I really wish you had this for sale already. I've seen too many awesome things like this "a few months from market" for half a dozen years until they quietly disappeared. You're in "shut up and take my money" territory here. I'm a GA pilot who rents at the moment. 55k? That's less than my freakin car.

I won't let you down! We are very much out of the concept phase and into production mode. Our factory is currently set up to be able to produce 50 aircraft in 2014. The waiting game right now is with Certification with the FAA, which will not be a problem for us since our plane meets all Light Sport standards - it will just take a few months because the FAA is slow.

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

#679

Post by collyw »

Unnatural_Log wrote: post #656
fbnt wrote: post #642

I'm working on a news reader that works in the opposite way of traditional news reading apps. It uses Twitter as a sort of enhanced RSS feed and ranks news based on how much they are shared in real-time, and lays them down in a newspaper-like format specifically designed for mobile devices. It allows you to find what's important for people rather then what matters to newsroom's editors, and put you in a whole differe…

Not available in the app store in Canada. It puzzles me why people do this, because it is just as easy to make the app available everywhere as it is to limit it to a particular country. Anyway, interesting idea. Pity about the gunshot wound in your foot. Hope it heals.

My guess would be avoiding legal headaches. It is easy to know what is allowed or not in your own country, but you have no idea in other parts of the world. That and less maintenance.

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

#680

Post by albertzeyer »

webjay wrote: post #521

I'm building Konfect ( http://www.konfect.com ) because it annoys me that at every social network I sign up I need to refind those I usually connect with. With Konfect I can manage my connections accross networks.

Very cool, this is on my own TODO list of things I would like to build for myself at one point.

I just posted it on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622332

Can you give some more details? Can I easily get the data and safe it on my disk? Can I add further metadata to each contact?

Is the software Open Source?

Will there be plugins/extensions such that when I'm on Facebook or in GMail or whereever, that it can easily show me more contact details? (A bit like rapportive for GMail.)

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