Ask HN : What side project are you working on?

46 points by sideproject ↗ HN
Time flies! It's that time of the month again for HN'ers to share what they are working on. We've had some awesome projects shared in the previous threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696274

117 comments

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I do a few.

Tech related:

http://www.freecodecamp.com/ Because I never felt that comfortable with web development. The interface is super easy to use and I can't wait to start helping non-profits.

Non tech related: Write. I write and I write and I write. I have so much to say and I want to say it in the best way possible.

Also draw. I don't draw as much as I should because I am so bad at it. But sometimes things with terrible art can still take off so it keeps me going. example: https://twitter.com/KeLuKeLuGames/status/553404094958694400/...

I love your idea for Free Code Camp. I love it so much that I did the same thing a few years ago.

Unfortunately, after approaching and talking to dozens of nonprofits, we gave up. The Boards of NPOs tend to be highly egotistical, highly possessive morons. I can't tell you how many times we weren't allowed to fix an awful website because it had been a Board member's pet project done by one of their friends or relatives. Or, in many cases, the Managing Director just wouldn't give up control.

I hope you have better luck. I've now worked with two industries I'll never work with again -- restaurants and nonprofits.

Wait, did you do freecodecamp.com or a similar idea on your own? The camp sets me up with the nonprofits.

http://www.freecodecamp.com/nonprofits/directory

Similar idea on my own. My understand was that you started Free Code Camp.

When we actually did projects, they would accept the work, semi-cooperate, and then bury the finished product because the Board wouldn't approve it.

Even if we didn't have someone hovering over the project, trying to micromanage it, we always ended up with a committee-based feedback system. No matter what we did, someone would hate some part of it and demand it be changed.

I'm writing a quick frontend to search the AM leak database. And sticking some ads on it. /s
I was wondering how long it would take for one of those to crop up. Make sure you put a few ads for AM on the site for the irony.
Charge to reveal more than last initial?
I've been building a program that plays Yahoo! Fantasy sports. http://fantasybots.com. It updates your roster every morning in case you forget or have too many teams to keep track of. Also great when you only care about the draft party and don't want the grind of actually coaching. Currently looking for beta testers!
Coincidentally, I have been roped into an office fantasy sports pool that starts next week, which I have no time to manage. I would love to be your beta tester!

Can it manage the draft and trades as well?

Yahoo's draft tools and auto-drafting is really great so I haven't messed with that. I'm working on trade stuff but it's not ready for beta testing yet.
I'm game for beta testing it.
Awesome! If you have any trouble with the signup on the site feel free to contact me through the link in the footer.
i just started http://www.projecttalk.io

it's messageboards for github projects.

mainly because a lot of projects use live chat (gitter, slack), which i think isn't always the best solution (time zones, discoverability of past discussions, ...).

I've been working on an app for reading email newsletters - http://mlist.io/. When you sign up you choose a username that you use as an email address (username@mlist.io) when subscribing to newsletters.

Part of the project is creating is also list of high quality newsletters across a wide range of topics. Feel free to provide any newsletter suggestions!

hey i have been working on something similar with bit more ideas around it.. working on it alone sucks..i would love to have a chat with you .. pm meif you would be interested ..?
I love Mlist! Keep up the great work.
I'm a webservice purist, do I absolutely have to download the app to sign up? Lol because I really don't like doing any long reading from my phone...
Immersive sci-fi teambuilding experience - like Disneyland's star tours but for hours.
A high performance database-as-a-service platform that provides NoSQL and SQL access. http://www.amisalabs.com/
JackDB already does this?
JackDB from what I see does not store your data. They provide a browser based tool to connect to your SQL databases. Amisalabs platform on the other hand is a DBaaS where you can store any kind of data and run any kind of queries.
I'm building a social network for scuba divers, mixed with some stackoverflow concepts (upvoting posted dive spots).
Socialite - For keeping track of contacts: https://socialite.ooo/

The idea is that for each contact you can connect them to events and connect those events to locations. This way you can pivot off any piece of information about an acquaintance (where you met, when you met, etc.) to recall the details you know about them.

Working on a JavaScript Metroidvania using Phaser.
A few months ago I launched an email newsletter that features one fantastic piece of journalism each day: http://readthisthing.com/

I just launched it for fun, and have had fun working on it. The list has grown to more than 5000 subscribers, which is pretty cool.

Not totally sure what I plan to do with it, but I really enjoy working on it and have found lots of people who like it, so that's good enough for now. :)

I'd love to subscribe but I'm using a screen reader so can't get past your captcha!
Meal Planning Recommendations - suggests what you should eat this week.

The second stage will be to pre-order the food from a Supermarket API, so all the food will already be in your house.

If I can figure out how to make an app that actually cooks my food, I'm done :)

Hypervault (https://hypervault.github.io/) - a complete file encrytion web app contained in a single HTML file (so it runs totally client-side). It outputs a "locked vault" - the encrypted file data embedded in a copy of itself.
I'm working on a receipt-saving service for small businesses/freelancers: https://receiptron.com/

The goal is to make it the easiest way to save receipts. No app to install, no complicated expense report forms to fill out, just take a picture of the receipt with your phone camera, email it to our specially-trained robots, and it gets saved and sorted for you for later.

This is neat. Are you using OCR to extract data from receipts?
Nope, just a specially-formed subject line at this stage. OCR is a neat idea, but I'm trying to do the "launch quickly, figure out the market, build features based on actual customer interest" thing. OCR would be fun to do, but very error-prone, very hard, and not necessarily proven to add as much value as a whole bunch of other ideas that are on the backburner as well.
This is absolutely brilliant! I might sign up just for my own personal use. That said, when I was a contractor, I would've paid double that for a service like this--if this works as well as it claims, the amount of time saved during tax season would more than justify $100 a year.

Edit: Never mind, I thought this worked using OCR. It's still a cool service, but I wrote this comment under that assumption, so unfortunately I'm a little less excited about it.

It's still early days. Do me a favour? Let me know: if it worked via OCR, what important information would you want it to pull out? And if I do get that in there, would you want me to let you know?
Yeah, that's totally fair, I just got overly excited.

Even just the total would be awesome. I don't mind entering metadata manually, and looking through a picture of the receipt for each line item if I need to do that, but I've love it to automatically capture the total so I can see those at a glance without manually inputting them. Maybe the date, too, but that's less important if I can just take the photo as soon as I get the receipt. (Getting the vendor would be doubly awesome, but I know that would be nearly impossible, so I wouldn't ever expect that.)

I wrote a web app to do this for myself when I was contracting, but I had to manually enter the vendor, total amount, and date for each receipt, which got really tedious. (The process wasn't fast enough that I would do it on the move, so I saved up receipts and did them in batches, which took a lot of time.) I'd love to just be able to take a picture and enter some metadata (probably just vendor and category) and have at least the total be pulled from the receipt, and the date either pulled or defaulted to today's date.

Yes, please let me know if you ever implement OCR! And feel free to contact me directly in general. My email is sasha1rus@gmail.com. In the meantime, I'm going to give this a try as-is. Thank you!

Ha, i've done something similar. It's dirt simple , you put total price and categories / tags in the subject of the email ( because you are much more accurate than any OCR, and doing 1 receipt at a time it's not even noticeable work ), and attach a picture/pdf or the expense.

then i have a ruby script which connect to the imap account, creates reports based on sender and tags, including attachments in the breakdown. Simple and effective.

I worked on javelinbrowser.com, but it's now lay to waste due to the focus I have to put into my startup.

Anyone wanna take it over? Send me a mail.

Looks great! Very elegant design. Probably the thing I liked most was the reading mode, that was a really good idea.
http://hasgluten.com (database of gluten-free ingredients in 5 languages) and its successor, not released yet.
I like the idea but my biggest problem isn't ingredients, it's eating out. Having this available on my phone when looking for a place to eat would be a real time saver.
You can save it on your home screen and... voilà :) We spent quite some time making it usable on mobile too.

If you really really want an app, you can get the code http://github.com/hasgluten/hasgluten and plug it in Cordova/PhoneGap.