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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?

#691
post #688

Proper ( https://properapp.com ) - Easy to understand contracts for freelancers. Cool because it makes the process of creating, sending, and signing freelance contracts much less difficult. Ultimate goal is to get it to a point where a freelancer can pick from a series of pre-loaded templates related to their type of work (e.g. a brochure website, developing an application, wedding photography, etc.) and send their c…

Just had a quick look at your site. I assume it is US only? (I like the idea, I had a similar idea for flat rental contracts here in Barcelona). How much lawyer time did you need to spend on setting it up? One suggestion for the website, it clearly states the benefits for the developer, but I assume the customer half of the deal would end up seeing it as well. Point out the benefits to that party, make it seem more o…

US only for now. I'm a solo dev/designer so really just as time allows me to add in il8n.

Not much lawyer time. I had the fortunate position of having my dad as a lawyer/a good friend who was a lawyer to pass the idea on to. The core idea (save for storing signatures) doesn't have any legal implications, so building it was pretty straightforward on that front.

Re: the site, thank you for this. I currently have an item on my to do list labeled "guide for curious clients." On my radar for sure, but I'm more concerned with getting the basic pieces in place before I invite that storm :)

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

#692

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/

Hi Jerry. SPARQL is the SparkleDB query language.

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

#693

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?

I'm working on an real application [1] but it is undocumented, you can look here [2] for the Terms part.

1.- https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server 2.- https://github.com/enriquepablo/terms.server/tree/master/ter...

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

#694
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually went to the local university - they said that you can't use university resources for personal gain (I was trying to print a case on their 3D printer). I'm sure there would be some people in the engineering department willing to give me some pointers, there's also a local prototyping company (I've emailed them a few times). Nothing too serious though - I guess I don't really have much of a plan yet, and did…

Where are you based?

Minnesota, USA.

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

#695
post #577

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, s…

Cool! How do you plan to deal with theft? Most bike lights are trivial to steal. I tend to avoid the fancy ones since in my experience lights disappear immediately as soon as the bike's parked (unless I remove them and put them in a bag every time I park, but that's a pain). Curious how you're addressing that.

That's something I only put a little bit of thought into, as I'm not very worried about my bike getting stolen.

It would be non-functional if someone stole it without stealing the magnet and reed switch as well, but they wouldn't know that.

There's a bit of a trade off, as you're going to want to remove the light to charge it up, in that if you want it to remove easy, it will be easy to steal, and if you want it to be hard to steal, it will be a pain to charge. I don't have any solutions for that yet.

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

#696

Recommendation engine as a service ( http://savant-api.com/ ) -- absolutely nothing public yet, except a fancy d3 powered widget that has nothing to do with the service. It's cool because I'm hoping to make collaborative filtered recommendations easy to obtain for small outfits.

Will your recommendation algorithm be public or secret? Will it be customizable by your users?

You mention a bulk import. Will you provide a bulk export, or will I have to keep my own backup database to avoid lock-in?

I see in your API example a bucket, a source, and a target. Would you consider a "value" field, for graphs with weighted edges? (The question is moot if I can't modify the recommendation algorithm to employ it.)

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

#697

http://moviegalaxies.com We're working on visualizing the social network within movies. :)

Awesome! The social network analysis course taught by Lada Adamic on Coursera used your site as a case study.

Yes, thanks for the remark! Some people of that course sent us really nice feedback. The list of universities and courses using MG grows, which is really cool.

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

#698
http://apbox.co

it is cool because it allows businesses to become more profitable by allowing companies to negotiate discounts on supplier and service provider invoices.

basically sellers can get paid early (adding liquidity to their business) and buyers can profit on discounts, adding thousands to their cashflow (which they will never get from a bank).

you can think of it as twitter meets dropbox meets ebay for the supply chain.

checkout our blog too: http://blog.apbox.co

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

#699
post #649

Toy project: an HTTP(S) brute forcing tool using Python as a templating language. Why is it cool: high performance using async IO, powerful templating for Python programmers, very easy to take HTTP requests and turn them into a fuzzing template that mutates request in a combinatoric fashion. Similar to features built into Burp proxy for those that are familiar with it. Real project: A system that will help organizati…

I'd really like to take a look at your fuzzing project. Is it opensource? I'm coding something quite simular at the moment and would like to leech from / contribute to / test your project. If you're interested - tkmop / lenta.ru

It will be. It has languished for a very long time, but I have resolved to get it out the door soon. I will put it up on a github repo (https://github.com/bitexploder) so watch there.

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

#700

Toy project: an HTTP(S) brute forcing tool using Python as a templating language. Why is it cool: high performance using async IO, powerful templating for Python programmers, very easy to take HTTP requests and turn them into a fuzzing template that mutates request in a combinatoric fashion. Similar to features built into Burp proxy for those that are familiar with it. Real project: A system that will help organizati…

In regards to the first one: Sounds like a cool idea. Might I also suggest an overall fuzzing engine? Sulley and Peach Fuzzer both have fairly ugly APIs and config formats, in my opinion. A pretty DSL that lets you describe a template, also with the ability to add custom Python functions and integrate them on the fly, would be great.

It, more or less, has a separate "Fuzzing Template" system which it uses to generate the brute force test cases. It was never meant to rise to the complexity of Sulley's fuzzing system. I wanted an in between complexity for the dumbest fuzzing and something completely flexible like Sulley and Peach. To solve that 80% problem of, "OK, I just grabbed an HTTP request, let's turn it into a quick and dirty fuzzing template." and from that, "And make sure it runs really fast on a single machine". In the time boxed assessment world you rarely have time to do all that you would like so this seemed to be a reasonable solution.

I will put it up at http://github.com/bitexploder soon (a week? Maybe two?).

The beauty of the "fuzzing engine" I built is that there is nothing to it really. You put in "scriptlets", which are really just small bits of Python that generate lists or sequences, and it combines all of them. My goal was to just write up a lot of the common HTTP fuzzing scenarios (integer sequences, alphabetical sequences, demonstrate common encoding and other scenarios giving you a simple list of things you can copy/paste/modify into a template. And then it runs, logging it all into a SQLite database.

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