Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

211–220 of 786 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I signed up to check it out and created a campaign. I can't tell if it's doing anything, though. Should I expect an email of some sort? Or do I need to check back to look at your page later?

Sorry it's so confusing. If you created a campaign then it is already working. There's nothing else for you to do inside the product. Now all you have to do is interact with the people that are starting to engage with you. It's not an instant thing. Our system detects when relevant conversations are going on using fancy algorithms based around machine learning, sentiment analysis and POS tagging.

But what does it "do". What is causing these people to start engaging with me? (I signed up and am completely bewildered)

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

#212

Laser projection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs (Pong on a 20 story building, billboards, etc.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5_v2By3Ec (Multiple laser projectors) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-A9LvPbmg (Canny edge detector) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans (Asteroids on a 4 story building) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OCvjq3ps (Reddit's Snoo on a 20 story building) I've just added…

I can imagine a future, where homeless people are playing pong on the wall of some gas station.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds incredibly cool, but as someone who lost their sister to cancer I wish this would've existed earlier.

I'm so sorry to hear it. This is why we're working in cancer. We all work as fast as we can, but I've already seen too many cases with poor prognoses. The hope is that in growing this technology, we can catch cancers earlier when they are more treatable.

Thanks, she was five so a lot of stuff was going on in her body which meant they couldn't really catch it in time.

Is there anywhere I can follow the project?

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

#214
post #73

Soundslice ( http://www.soundslice.com/ ) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music. Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so... It's cool because: * The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta... ). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement. * It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new…

Awesome! Love the simplicity of this. My kid was glued to this for about an hour before I had to pry him away. :)

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat. Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreaso…

Thanks for the response! Yeah, after doing more research, I realized that the Synergy plane would guzzle way more gas than your plane. However, I think it's a dual seater vs. the Sky Craft plane. I would need a dual seater to haul me and my wife across the country.

It looks like they're actually talking about making it a 5 or 6 seater. There is a strong direct relationship between maximum weight of a plane and the cost/fuel consumption of the engine required to power that plane. A plane as affordable as ours is only feasible right now as a single seater, but hopefully one day with enough volume we can get a 2-seater out in the same price range.

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

#217
I want to build a marketplace for electronic cigarette vendors/individuals. I've been a vendor for almost 3 years and have a unique product which is even more effective than others in helping people quit smoking (even though we are not allowed to market it this way). I think that looming regulation will destroy a lot of small businesses, so I am trying to find a way to respond to that.

Getting someone to take payments is really hard though. Balanced just changed their terms, so I am really demoralized but still keeping at it. My options seem to be to become a payment processor myself (expensive and I have no clue what to do) or wait until a similar service comes along and make sure to get in quick so I can get grandfathered in before they change the terms.

If anyone has some insight on payments and wants to help me learn the industry or if you smoke and want to quit, let me know.

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

#218
post #195
post #176

http://babygra.ms Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a successful iOS app myself.

I like your idea very much, but don't forget the Droid legion. I would definitely pay for it.

Yeah if I can get to the point where this thing makes good cash on iOS I'll build/contract a Android version, don't worry :)

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

#219

I'm working on a gmail replacement to deploy on my own server. It's called kite. It uses a lot of cool techs like vagrant, puppet, angularjs and of course, postfix for mail handling. For the moment, it doesn't do much besides displaying a list of emails in a maildir but in a week or two I should have thread handling written. The source is at: http://github.com/khamidou/kite (sorry for the lack of readme, I should get…

Cool. A demo or screenshots would be really nice.

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

#220
I've been working on PLUNK. It's a Technology Consultant Firm which specializes in helping the entertainment industry.

I've been going to a lot of conferences where the reoccurring theme is the tremendous divide in technology and the entertainment world. Either they don't know, don't care, or are too overwhelmed to know where to begin.

PLUNK will help them build applications that will deliver meaningful experiences with their audience. Whether it's simply helping to improve upon their social network to building a fully customizable application. Their audience is already engaging them, it's time to talk back.

http://www.plunkus.com

Post reply on HN