Live data from Hacker News

Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#51
post #48

I would like some help on a small(?) pyparsing project for a prostate cancer research project I'm doing. First try and some test cases here. https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser What's in it for you? 1) Tell your Movember buddies you're actually working on prostate cancer research 2) Maybe a trip to SD (big maybe, but hey) 3) a chance to make some connections. For example, I'm getting some help on the postgres side…

Could you explain what work do you need done?

Most immediately, I need to turn this file

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/tests/Abb...

into this file

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/tests/Des...

longer story:

I'm a doctor in the military, and we use IT systems derived from the VA's original VIsTA project. If you've ever heard of Mumps, this is it. The manuals date back to the early 80s. I am trying to build out some infrastructure so we can sensibly work with external research institutions in the San Diego area. I have figured out how to get some decent text out, which then needs to be parsed for specific things, which may vary depending on the project.

Think of this as a startup within the largest of large organizations. The downside is there's a huge bureaucracy. The upside is we're operating far enough up, that everybody understands the bureaucracy problems and some key people are willing to help facilitate some things along the way.

So my minimum viable product is a research paper published using 55 cases. Trivial, right? Maybe if you're at Stanford. Here, not so much. getting enough code written that I can automate the parsing and inject this (and some other similar files) into postgresql, and then pull data back out and do data analysis with it. I have struggled to find help. Joe has been very generous with helping me wrap my head around postgresql. I have been through a lot of python tutorials, but I have never sat down with someone who knows python and seen how they solve a problem. Go to a desert island and teach yourself python with nothing but the internet. Can it be done? Yes, but it is very hard.

So I'm hoping to build a relationship with someone who could help with practical matters, like finishing this first step of a small parser. Paul McGuire, the author of pyparsing, has been very helpful over Stack Exchange, but crafting a well-formed question on Stack Exchange is very difficult when, again, one learned to code on a desert island.

Here's my effort so far

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/ProstateP...

Which I'm sure anyone here will look at and say: dude, you could have finished this by the time you wrote this comment! Except it's really hard to wrap your head around something you've never done, never seen anyone else actually do, and can only spend 10-15% of your time on.

But I need to automate some of this work if we are going to undertake larger projects in the future, which is the goal.

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#52

An open source, secure, drop in login/authentication system for developers hosting their sites as github pages (static only, no dynamic server side code will be executed).

What do people login to do if there's nothing dynamic? To edit the pages?

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#53

I'd pay $20/year if you build a reliable HN e-mail comment gateway. I'd pay double if you convinced PG to let your app sync people's comment history. Use e.g. Gmail OAuth IMAP authentication, sync to a label, optionally sync bidirectionally (i.e. comment replies from Gmail), but that's only marginally more useful than getting e-mail archives of comments here. Hell, if you write it in Python then I'll even donate the…

Have you seen HN Notify? http://hnnotify.com/

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#54

a software that help us to download all our pictures,data,comments,etc. from facebook, so we can have it for us, and then be able to delete our accounts from that evil web...

They already let you do that.

1. Download data: http://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/ 2. Delete account: http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#55
post #2

Curve matching in javascript. Take a list of data points (x,y) and creates an equation that offers the best fit. Side question: you will be making the code open source right?

Octave is open source, you can port "polyfit" to JS if you like.

thank you, looking into this now

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#56

I'd pay $20/year if you build a reliable HN e-mail comment gateway. I'd pay double if you convinced PG to let your app sync people's comment history. Use e.g. Gmail OAuth IMAP authentication, sync to a label, optionally sync bidirectionally (i.e. comment replies from Gmail), but that's only marginally more useful than getting e-mail archives of comments here. Hell, if you write it in Python then I'll even donate the…

Be careful about putting dollar figures on things like this and estimating demand. What if this guy spends a few hundred hours on this and then no-one buys it? Sure, it's his risk to take, and you carefully qualified your last statement, but overestimating demand is a deadly thing. So let me as - why do you think people will be willing to pay for this service, and what kind of numbers are you talking about? 100? 1000…

My goal is to make $0 from this - maybe beer money, but thats all. No hosted SaaS - just an open source Github repo. Still, interesting idea.

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#58
post #20
post #16

Say you do build something for someone, for free, who owns the work at the end?

He says it will be MIT licensed. Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769947 Edit: witch means he owns the original code but you can do (almost) anything with it.

Well, I'd even release it under something more free than MIT if that's possible - I don't really need any rights, as long as the user can use it for commercial work and doesn't need to credit me - as long as they don't claim they made my part...

Re: Offer HN: Tell me what you need, and I'll program it (for free)

#60

I'd pay $20/year if you build a reliable HN e-mail comment gateway. I'd pay double if you convinced PG to let your app sync people's comment history. Use e.g. Gmail OAuth IMAP authentication, sync to a label, optionally sync bidirectionally (i.e. comment replies from Gmail), but that's only marginally more useful than getting e-mail archives of comments here. Hell, if you write it in Python then I'll even donate the…

Have you seen HN Notify? http://hnnotify.com/

Creepily, it claims someone is already signed up for my username.
Post reply on HN