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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?

#61

Post by interpares »

lbearl wrote: post #57
interpares wrote: post #39

What: Emphatic ( http://emphatic.co ) -- social media as-a-service Why it's cool: gives marketing resources to small businesses who lack the time or expertise

Just an FYI, but under the blurbs about the founders, a little bit of proof reading would go a long way to ensuring legitimacy: "...other large corporates in..." I understand typos, but when it is for someone who wants to run a service which would have very high visibility for a companies image, they really aren't acceptable.

Ah! "Corporates" is a term that's often used within European professional service firms and is a holdover from my Dutch corporate banking days. Thanks for the advice, I'll change!

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

#62

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

westward wrote: post #55
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #21

What: A chording keyboard. Why: Englebart's demo made people overlook the chording keyboard, and now we are still mostly stuck with QWERTY, a layout that takes too long to learn and doesn't take much advantage what humans are good at. I'm joking about Englebart, but I do like the line of thinking that computers can be powerful instead of faux friendly.

Have you looked at Plover? It's target audience is stenographers, but it can be used by anyone who wants to type at 250 wpm. http://plover.stenoknight.com/

Steno is a great at taking advantage of something humans do well, it might be on the far end of that spectrum. I'd like to see a keyboard that with 100 hours or less of practice would let you type at 100 WPM.

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

#63

Post by graycat »

balor123 wrote: post #45
graycat wrote: post #3

What: A new Internet search engine. Why cool: To be the best for the roughly 2/3rds (safe for work or not) of Internet content, searches people want to do, and content they want to find at best poorly served now.

Porn I'm assuming? I would think that spam dominates internet content.

Porn? No, not necessarily at all, or as I said, "safe for work or not".

Spam? No, not at all. Instead, as I said, searches people want to do and results they want to find, and those are nearly never spam.

Nothing tricky; take my description just the way I gave it.

The content types are primarily still images, recorded music, video clips, i.e., content types where search by keywords/phrases work from poor down to not at all due to far too little text in the content for matching users' keywords/phrases, and a major fraction of blogs and long tail Web sites, that is, where the content is mostly text.

A point is that search by keywords/phrases works well for only about 1/3rd of the content, searches people want to do, and results they want to find. My work is for the other 2/3rds. This description is difficult to understand?

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

#64

Post by lbearl »

interpares wrote: post #61
lbearl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an FYI, but under the blurbs about the founders, a little bit of proof reading would go a long way to ensuring legitimacy: "...other large corporates in..." I understand typos, but when it is for someone who wants to run a service which would have very high visibility for a companies image, they really aren't acceptable.

Ah! "Corporates" is a term that's often used within European professional service firms and is a holdover from my Dutch corporate banking days. Thanks for the advice, I'll change!

Ah, I did not know that. I just assumed with a .co domain, and mostly targeting American social media companies the main focus would be on US English.

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

#65

Post by interpares »

lbearl wrote: post #64
interpares wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah! "Corporates" is a term that's often used within European professional service firms and is a holdover from my Dutch corporate banking days. Thanks for the advice, I'll change!

Ah, I did not know that. I just assumed with a .co domain, and mostly targeting American social media companies the main focus would be on US English.

Most of are customers are American. Just the old habits dying hard :-)

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

#66

Post by PeterWhittaker »

Danny Boy on the viola, and my own arrangement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for solo instrument (I'm using primarily the first violin line, reading it as written in alto clef, not treble, so down a 7th, dipping into the other violins or the viola occasionally to replicate the "feel" of the piece).

Because the viola is cool. Just like fezzes are cool.

Because life cannot be all-tech-all-the-time.

During my day job, key marketing messages, conceptual architecture, and high-level system architecture for an open-source service-to-business platform for governments based on two primary notions, true "tell us once" to ease the burden on business and automated on-boarding of new programs to ease the burden on domain-expert but IT-ignorant (as they should be) program managers.

Why? Coz it's like fezzes. And because after years in business, anything I can do to make dealing with the government easier and cheaper is good for me, good for the government, and good for the economy.

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

#67

Post by ducuboy »

What: News discovery platform (Svven.com - news rearranged).

Why: It works by clustering the users based on their reading history, ranking one's fellow readers, and providing what else they read in order of relevance. Besides the news discovery part, I find it very cool to automatically connect the people with similar interests. Great things may come out of this.

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

#69

Post by conorgil145 »

ibanez270dx wrote: post #5

What: A personal finances app Why: Because Mint and Credit Karma have horrible interfaces that don't allow me to manage my money and view spending trends in a way that I feel is satisfactory. Prototype for now and using plaid.com API for access to financial institutions.

I am also really interested in this. Do you have a working prototype that others can play with? Is it SaaS based or something a dev can run on a local box?

What is your main goal with the project? Just improvements to the interface?

I have been thinking about downloading all of my financial information and throwing it into a project based upon Elasticsearch and Kibana (http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/). I have been using these tools to process log data at work and I get more and more interested in Elasticsearch the more I read about and play with it. They are both open source, but I have not yet dove into either project in detail (certainly not enough to build something on top of it).

What technology are you using/plan to use for the project? If you are interested in getting input I would love to chat more about it. Feel free to reach out (personal email in my profile).

EDIT: My main motivation for creating a mint-like project is to improve the search and data analysis capabilities so that I can visually explore my spending habits more easily.

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

#70

Post by gingersnap »

jeffmorrisjr wrote: post #40
spencerfry wrote: post #7

What: https://www.uncover.com Why is it cool: In the fifteen months we've been in operation, we've never lost a customer. It just gives everyone a smile on their face and that's the type of businesses that I like to work on.

@spencerfry Out of curiosity: why does your tagline say "makes it easy to put a smile on your employees faces" yet the landing page image features an employee who is not smiling? I know this seems petty but that employee does not actually look very happy. Small things like this make a difference.

That put a smile on my face
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