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Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

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31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#31
post #12

Automated NBA game recaps with more context than your typical boxscore. Note: I am not a web developer, so this project has been mainly to teach myself a new technology (Rails, primarily). It is very much a work in progress. Also, clearly, I am not a designer and am not really sweating that for now. http://recappd.com/games/2014/2/24

Where do you get your data for the games? I've been thinking about doing something similar for NHL...

Scraping. There are a ton of sources for NBA, be it nba.com/stats, ESPN, CNNSI, etc.

Many of these sites serve up their play-by-play on a JSON feed, which makes it even easier. However, I must warn you, the data is not as clean and robust as you may like. A large part of my work was implementing a cleaning algorithm to infer missing data.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#33
post #32

http://lottolane.com LottoLane is a lottery pool management tool. It will handle email invites/reminders, payment tracking, sharing pics of tickets, and more. It will take care of everything involved in a lottery pool except for buying tickets.

that's funny 'cause i would actually play the lotto (esp. those scratch off games) if buying a ticket was as easy as clicking a button, or sending an email. A daily email with the results of the lotto would be great too.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#34
post #32

http://lottolane.com LottoLane is a lottery pool management tool. It will handle email invites/reminders, payment tracking, sharing pics of tickets, and more. It will take care of everything involved in a lottery pool except for buying tickets.

that's funny 'cause i would actually play the lotto (esp. those scratch off games) if buying a ticket was as easy as clicking a button, or sending an email. A daily email with the results of the lotto would be great too.

Here's a site that sells lotto tickets online:

https://www.lottoland.com/en

Legality of doing something like this is questionable. Plus, there's the issue of trusting the site if the ticket hits the jackpot. I believe they have people that physically go to convenience stores to buy the tickets for you.

I do have some ideas of how to facilitate playing in pools without having to be geographically close to the pool manager. But, overall, the pool manager should be someone you know.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#36
This is the first time I am mentioning this publicly, but I have been working on Educator News. It's a clone of HN for the education profession.

It's been attempted before, and was well received. The people who made it previously were not programmers, so when it immediately outgrew the platform on which it was built, it disappeared. I think I can do it right. :)

I am planning a soft launch this weekend. After working out any immediate bugs, I will do a Show HN.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#37
eh... I keep telling myself I should have a side project ready the next time one of these threads shows up, but it never is.

http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/http://www.reddit.com/r/progr...

I'm playing around with creating feeds from metadata - specifically, building feeds with 'expanding' views which build trees from the outbound links on pages. The reason the url is appended there is the thing doesn't even have any caching - but just add a url to the form at the top or tack it on like so and it should build the feed out of whatever.

The [+] links should expand the feed. Unless they don't. Because it sometimes doesn't. When it does though it's nice.

Also trying to get dynamic rss to work but unless the dynos at pagodabox are really spinning this can be insanely slow:

http://precis.gopagoda.com/rss/http://www.reddit.com/r/progr...

But yeah... someday i'll get my crap together enough to make it into something worth something.

Also I have a hnlike forum i'm building in laravel - it mostly works but it isn't online. Maybe next time.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#38
I'm downloading all of Project Gutenberg and gonna run a markov chain text generator on it and see what works of genius it produces (inspired by the King James Programming post yesterday).

I think it'd be cool to have a site that lets people input sources and then it displays output from the generator. Need to do some more reading on markov models and see what improvements I can make to Barrucadu's code

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#39
post #36

This is the first time I am mentioning this publicly, but I have been working on Educator News. It's a clone of HN for the education profession. It's been attempted before, and was well received. The people who made it previously were not programmers, so when it immediately outgrew the platform on which it was built, it disappeared. I think I can do it right. :) I am planning a soft launch this weekend. After working…

Looking forward to this!

Re: Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

#40
post #36

This is the first time I am mentioning this publicly, but I have been working on Educator News. It's a clone of HN for the education profession. It's been attempted before, and was well received. The people who made it previously were not programmers, so when it immediately outgrew the platform on which it was built, it disappeared. I think I can do it right. :) I am planning a soft launch this weekend. After working…

Sounds nice. Are you using the original HN code?
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