Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

101–110 of 111 posts

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

#101
post #87
post #82

We just started sales for our product. Distributed about 30 flyers to restaurants and hair salons yesterday. Because it was the first time for us, it was quite a learning experience. Sales requires a much thicker skin and open ears. Also, because I am an American living in China, I had to learn some new technical words. Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages. Its a captive portal plus a loc…

> Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages Aka the thing nobody ever asked for and why I don't even bother with public Wi-Fi anymore. Your users are just looking for Wi-Fi and are already in your venue; your best interest is to not piss them off by wasting their time and instead offer a good, seamless Wi-Fi experience so they can move on and enjoy whatever they planned to do at your venue.

Our product is designed for people who ARE LOOKING for local info. For those who arent, the business can set it up so that it works seamlessly - the way you stated it.

But in some instances, such as restaurant ordering system - it may be more convenient to order from your smartphone directly. In that case its useful.

Another use case that we are already having is - event translation. The attendees WANT the live streaming - so they join the wifi, go to the local webserver and get the streaming. If the local server is not there, the sound quality is sometimes poor because the same signal is coming in parallel to all the users from a remote server.

In short, its designed for people who ARE LOOKING for local information.

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

#102
post #82

We just started sales for our product. Distributed about 30 flyers to restaurants and hair salons yesterday. Because it was the first time for us, it was quite a learning experience. Sales requires a much thicker skin and open ears. Also, because I am an American living in China, I had to learn some new technical words. Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages. Its a captive portal plus a loc…

Thanks to those who responded. Its nice to get feedback - being so neck deep in the technical stuff, sometimes I cant see the forest for the trees :-)

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name is quite strange. Does it mean anything?

We are creating a platform called 100. So, if the user sees a Wifi with 100-something, they know its our platform and can access it by entering 100.here in the url. So Johns bar would call it 100-JohnsBar, a salon would call it 100-TopSalon...

Okay, I suppose that makes more sense. But maybe the-100-network.com or network-100 or even hundrednetwork.com would be more clear. I think the current one looks like a spam domain that an ad network would have for some ad serving. Then again I am not the target audience so it might be irrelevant.

Anyway good luck.

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

#104
I'm working on Zenkit. It's a collaborative project and task management software which is meanwhile a great alternative to Trello, Wunderlist and other tools on the market. The flexibility it gives us in the office (yes we use it ourselves in every department) is awesome and we have so many ideas on how to improve it that we sometimes not know what to do first. The potential is high and I'm curious about where we are going with that.

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

#105

We are working on Doqume ( http://doqume.com ) It is an enterprise search engine which departs from traditional keyword-based search in order to provide an easier way to run complex, semantic queries on huge collections of text documents. Why it's cool: image a pharmaceutical research task, where you need to find all documents mentioning drugs that interact with a specific class of diseases. In a normal setting, you…

I think even google does this right? If I say - 'Drugs that interact negatively with so and so', I get the result

Well, you can obtain these results with Google, but not really in most scenarios. For example, if you search "cities in Palestine with more than 1000 inhabitants" you will get lists of cities in Palestine and things like that, but not that New York Times article talking about Hebron (and not even a complete list of cities that match your criteria). This happens with lots of queries, where in the best case scenario Google will just return you a list of items (and not actual content talking about those items) and in the worst case scenario you will just get random results because it failed to parse the query.

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

#106
post #98

We are working on Doqume ( http://doqume.com ) It is an enterprise search engine which departs from traditional keyword-based search in order to provide an easier way to run complex, semantic queries on huge collections of text documents. Why it's cool: image a pharmaceutical research task, where you need to find all documents mentioning drugs that interact with a specific class of diseases. In a normal setting, you…

What interests you in pharma culture ? Do you have family who rely on certain drugs to live ?

It's just one of the examples that came to my mind and that I thought was good. From what I know people working in pharma routinely have to search thousands of documents (e.g., research articles) looking for information.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are creating a platform called 100. So, if the user sees a Wifi with 100-something, they know its our platform and can access it by entering 100.here in the url. So Johns bar would call it 100-JohnsBar, a salon would call it 100-TopSalon...

Okay, I suppose that makes more sense. But maybe the-100-network.com or network-100 or even hundrednetwork.com would be more clear. I think the current one looks like a spam domain that an ad network would have for some ad serving. Then again I am not the target audience so it might be irrelevant. Anyway good luck.

Thanks for the response. We are located in China - so our target are Chinese as well as the Western audience. Any english word in the url will cause the Chinese audience to just zone out. Chinese are used to numbers such as 360.com 136.com and so on.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-time HFT and stat-arb trader here. Not really your target market here, but I have a few suggestions that you may or may not find useful. - Don't write the core platform in python. The lack of support for concurrency is going to bite you in the ass down the line when you're trying to trade at scale or deliver high performance. I'd stick to C++, Java, Rust or Golang. - Don't send market data in HTTP/JSON. It's way…

Python does just fine with concurrency. A lot of your other suggestions are not relevant for this kind of product either. -t. guy who built a HFT fund using python.

> Python does just fine with concurrency.

Can you explain to me what the GIL is and how it works...

> guy who built a HFT fund using python.

I mean, maybe you and I have definitions of HFT. But I'd say the base minimum to compete in HFT space is tick-to-trade latency from off-the-wire data packet to on-the-wire order packet of 50 microseconds or less.

That's simply not possible in any python stack. Period.

I believe you're maybe doing something that turns over positions on an intraday basis. But that's not HFT. HFT's typical characteristics are colocation+DMA, very low latencies, full-scale analysis of the entire order book, volumes of more than 1% of the ADV, and Sharpe ratios above 10.

(And no, nothing in crypto space is anything close to HFT, because the infrastructure simply doesn't exist.)

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I suppose that makes more sense. But maybe the-100-network.com or network-100 or even hundrednetwork.com would be more clear. I think the current one looks like a spam domain that an ad network would have for some ad serving. Then again I am not the target audience so it might be irrelevant. Anyway good luck.

Thanks for the response. We are located in China - so our target are Chinese as well as the Western audience. Any english word in the url will cause the Chinese audience to just zone out. Chinese are used to numbers such as 360.com 136.com and so on.

Oh right, that makes sense.

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

#110
post #99

I’m working on a new training to help people have better social interactions, aka charisma. Whether they use it to get ahead at work, enhance their relationship with a partner, relate to their kids, gain new friendships, sell something important, or just be able to be in their own company, that’s something that enhances everything they do. I think it’s cool because it’s my small way of connecting a world that has bee…

Are you a genius at social interaction. ? How have you gauged your own advices value ?Perhaps consider publishing a book

I wouldn’t say genius.

The value of the advice has been tested over the last 15 years with many happy students returning over and over again.

We’ve got people in the UN doing good work.

We’ve had people find love.

Entrepreneurs get funding and lead their own companies.

We’ve got a book in the works. It seems better though to teach things live with this kind of experiential skill.

Post reply on HN