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Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

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

#381

Post by rahimnathwani »

adamonduty wrote: post #311
thegeomaster wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, it works! I was surprised to actually see a service with such a wide coverage. I've made an account and verified it, and all seems to work smoothly. The only thing is that I can't find any info on how much the messages or calls cost. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. I'll also be sure to recommend you to people I know are having this specific difficulty of poor call quality with Skype or Viber. That's a grea…

Awesome! I agree that I need to improve the cost discoverability. The problem is the matrix of rates is huge. In some countries, costs are different per mobile provider, and landlines are usually half the cost or less than mobiles. For example, calling Serbian landline to the US would be roughly $0.20 per minute. Serbian mobile to the US would be roughly $0.55 per minute. That all changes when you call somewhere else…

Check out the UI for 'webcall' at didlogic.com. I use this service for the exact use case you're targeting, but it's a slight pain because:

1) I have to use Safari instead of an app, so it can't interact with my phone's address book. So I have to copy-paste the two phone numbers.

2) I almost always have to log in each time I use it, because the auth session has timed out.

3) I have to zoom in/out as it's not mobile optimised.

If you could offer the same quality and price as didlogic.com, but with a convenient app interface, that would be awesome.

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

#383

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jlhonora wrote: post #42

I'm connecting a Hedgehog to the Internet :) . I have a hedgehog that runs all night in a wheel. Counting the laps gives me the traveled distance, so every morning he'll tweet how much he ran. He runs up to 15 km./9 miles! Check him out at https://twitter.com/runhedgie This project is a combination of hardware and software. I'm using a Raspberry Pi, a custom-built wireless node based on Arduino, Python, Redis, and a…

A running hedgehog? Please, in the name of God, tell me you named him Sonic.

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

#384

Post by Aeolus98 »

I'm working on a frontend to manage arbitrary applications, and provide a centralised place to manage them all. It works across machines through ssh, and can provide pretty statistics and logging bits and pieces, but the core of it is to do something to multiple machines at once.

I can select and add arbitrary numbers of machines to a job, then run it, and also put that command on a schedule. Say i want all my packages to be upgraded at all times. I can have this every night at 00:01, to ssh to all the machines and run the appropriate command based on architecture.

This is useful for my internship, where i have to simultaneously deploy and manage many machines, and this app has proven to be immensely scaleable, with up to 1000 VM's being managed at once with no signs of slowdown.

Besides that, all i do now is worry about college

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

#385

Post by michaelmior »

Automated schema design for NoSQL databases[1], which admittedly is incredibly broad. Currently I'm working on a workload driven tool to select appropriate column families in Cassandra. The hope is that a similar approach will be viable in other NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB, Redis).

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2602624

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

#387

Post by jtrtoo »

augustflanagan wrote: post #351

A friend and I launched https://cronitor.io last week ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917587 ). It's a simple cron/scheduled jobs monitoring and alerting tool. We built it after trying to use a similar tool, but were unhappy with the types of alerts we could set. It's still in its infancy, but we have a couple of paying customers and are trying to get feedback from as many people as we can. If anyone has a fe…

I have a few places where a quick and dirty check based on the receipt of an email (or not) (think backup job emails) would be easier to integrate than http. Plus then adding the ability to notify based on the existence/non-existence of a keyword (e.g. "success" or "error").

I totally get the HTTP integration, but some places that just isn't all that convenient and part of what I pay for is convenience/one less thing on my to do list. :)

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

#388

Post by rahimnathwani »

archagon wrote: post #345
adamonduty wrote: post #163

I'm working on PhoneCard, a service to make cheap international phone calls without requiring a data connection. You enter the phone number in the webapp and it calls you. Next time you're using poor hotel wifi or you're frustrated with skype (e.g. multiple disconnects per hour), try PhoneCard for a high-quality call. PhoneCard can call most places in the world, and in some countries you can also purchase incoming nu…

How would you say this compares to a "virtual calling card" service like KeepCalling.com? (Dial a local KC number, enter your pin, and then dial your desired phone number in the US or wherever.)

Whilst we're talking about virtual calling cards, Rebtel is the best implementation of this I've seen. There are at least three ways to use the service:

1) The way you described: call a local number, then dial your desired phone number. It uses caller ID for authentication. Not perfect, as it can be spoofed, but likely not an issue.

2) You go online and enter the phone numbers of several people you call often. For each, the system allocates you a local phone number. So, e.g. when I call a specific local (Beijing) number, my mum's phone (in London) will ring. No PINs or double-dialing.

3) Like (2) BUT using their app and a data connection (even a slow one) you just dial the number (or choose from your address book) and their app does everything for you.

2 & 3 work because you already registered your mobile number with them. When you dial one of their local access numbers, they can combine those two pieces of information to look up where the call should go.

The call quality is great. It's a little more expensive than didlogic.com, but cheaper than Skype.

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

#389

Post by bnzelener »

Dnguyen wrote: post #118

I'm working on a todo list with a Seinfeld calendar. My take is that there are only three categories: Work, Home, Personal. There are two buckets of tasks, Short term and long term. You'd move long term tasks into the short term when you start working on them. At the beginning of the week, you'd move the tasks from the short term into the day of the week that you planning to work on them. The catch is, you can only w…

I dig!

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

#390

Post by Taek »

I'm working on a proof of storage cryptocurrency. It's quorum based as opposed to blockchain based, which allows it to scale such that each node only needs to track log(n) transaction while maintaining a secure network and being able to be certain about the validity of incoming transactions. Storage is cheaper, faster, and more secure than centralized alternatives. There is also functional (but expensive) support for secure decentralized computing.

It's nearly in an alpha stage. www.siacoin.com

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