Recetly launched https://centi.in , alternative analytics with "ask questions to your data" approach .
Ask HN: What are you working on?
341–350 of 751 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea but extending it to the whole world based on geolocation. Use an app and earphones to find voice/text descriptions of places and landmarks, monuments, sculptures, buildings, etc. Everything can be geo-toured. Of course in a museum is perfect but based on geolocation it doesn't have to be linear, you can go anywhere in the museum and get voice/text about that particular place/masterpiece and when they…
Really cool idea, I think people would love that! The biggest hurdle would be getting enough interesting content. You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations. If you were able to get enough content I think that would be an incredible app/service.
> You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations.
Exactly. Wonderful service with world wide use and translatable to all languages. You definitely would need "curators" for every place and at the beginning let people add their own transcripts in order to build a huge database.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#343As a hardware side project I've been designing and building an open source split-flap display - the kind of electro-mechanical displays you used to see in train stations and airports that loudly flip through letters and numbers as they update. https://scottbez1.github.io/splitflap/ Have a few working prototypes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bslkflVv-Hw ), but I'm currently redesigning the electronics/PCB to make…
For some reason I forget what I wanted this for, but I literally was thinking about trying to find where you could order these things just a couple weeks ago. This is super cool. Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#344Project: Building a custom email service allowing users to send emails from their own domains, looking into eventually reinventing the modern modern email UI. I wanted to originally create my own private email server, but realize I had the option to allow others to use this. I also got really frustrated with the current way email UI worked so I'm working on revamping the UI to something more modern. https://quantumma…
Sounds great. Are you using Roundcube with a custom skin (or similar), or is it written from the ground up? Would be cool if you had some screenshots of your UI in any case.
Which mail server software are you using? Are you doing anything to increase deliverability? Do users get their own IP address, for example?
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#345Code Corps is intended to be a place to find and volunteer for open source projects you think are worth whatever free time you have. For maintainers, we'd like to make scaling your community trivial: acquire and retain volunteers, onboard newcomers, recommend the right tasks to the right people, and fund your operations. https://www.codecorps.org As an aside, I'm kind of curious how others feel they fare on building…
I don't like that I cannot browse projects without signing up. I like looking into things before acquiring more spam mail.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting idea. I used to watch Berkeley webcast videos at 1.5x to shave off ~30 minutes from a 90 minute lecture. Any faster wouldn't be intelligible.
It is the case that you can teach yourself to understand faster and faster speech. The blind often have human interface devices which speak at absurdly high vocal acceleration.
This also depends heavily on information density. I can listen to some types of content at 2x without issue; other content I can't accelerate more than 10-20%.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#347I've been getting derailed into a game project based on Minecraft 1.11:
http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-madness/
https://github.com/airwindows/SnowballMadness
Maybe it's lame but I like using that system to experiment with what happens in gameplay, especially in an anarchistic mode where it's the system itself that copes with entropy. Been playing with this particular toyset for a few years now. The main feature is making available to players, VERY destructive features on a persistent server. You can fire infinite TNT artillery just off the hotbar, 'multipliers', pickaxes that remove terrain outright, very nasty semi-tame mobs: the idea is to take lots of 'hacked client griefer' behaviors and build them into the game in still grander forms.
Then the trick is, how do you resist entropy and allow for any sort of constructive use? I came up with a system where the server (on unloading chunks) checks for a diamond block at the very center of a region. If it doesn't find one, it marks the region for deletion on restart, which regenerates the area. The idea is that there will be random destruction, but some of it will revert to normal: and you can't necessarily tell the difference between normal, and protected/built on, in just surface gameplay.
A lot of the coding addresses challenges the plugin makes possible in the first place: for instance, placing a giant sphere of fire is one thing, but then if you multiply that times 16 times 16 per shot and begin spamming the multiplied fire spheres, it's pretty obvious the server will grind to a halt. So it turned into a more sparse placement, with a special 'fire spread' handler to make spread die off a lot quicker so the server crunch would only be a minute or so.
Next, since there's the capacity to empty water with an empty bucket, it seems like a good idea to make an 'ocean filler' that fills back up areas that were emptied. Seems like there is always a new concept to play with :)
Previous experiments showed me how easy it is to just get swamped in toys and effects, so at some point it really became a 'generalize effects to create a logical discoverable system' project…
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#348Problem: coordinating weekly carpools with N > 2 drivers
Solutions: https://beta.snapridesapp.com, React/iOS/Firebase app to basically coordinate user provision, group membership, schedule, calendar synch & email/push/sms notifications. Had two weeks between gigs to port to Firebase; so far so good, waiting on Apple to approve and push the update.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#349Prepping notes before I dive in to redraft and finalize Ghost Engine, my new space opera for July 2018 (UK publisher will be Orbit; US publisher TBA).
Also working on a Wild Cards short story for George R. R. Martin, and awaiting the copy edits on Dark State, the second Empire Games book (publication scheduled for January 2018, by Tor).
And in the queue behind that, is the scheduled final rewrite of Empire Games book 3, Invisible Sun (due for publication in January 2019, from Tor).
This should keep me busy through to the end of the year!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#350Problem: The process of getting thoughts from your head into an organized, written draft form isn't as fast or accessible as it could be. Project: I'm building a conversational UI / bot ( https://writing.ai ) that helps people write faster. The basic idea is that it asks you a series of questions about a topic, asks follow-up questions for more detail as needed, and when it's done outputs a completed draft. You're st…
I also find this fascinating. I just signed up..ryan@recraigslist.com I also have another use case I'd like to bounce off you if you could shoot me an email. Thanks!