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

12 points by type12 ↗ HN
I'm working on a self-service product for SaaS that predicts which users will churn, are ready to buy or upgrade. This is something I desired to have at my previous company, and I just thought this would be the right time to build it.

You?

22 comments

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ojuara
I'm working with my family managing our supermarket. It is not cool at all.

I got a Bachelors degree in CS at UFPE. I have been studying for a while to get back to software developer career.

is_true
If you have some kind of purchases database you could practice data science on it.
nicksalt
You could so some pretty cool stuff. Have you been hyper optimizing it?

Product shelve to sale ratios?

80/20 type optimizations on revenue by skus?

Traffic flow maps?

I'd love to hear some result or stories if you do end up doing some of this.

kaennar
Doing some basic image processing and tracking customers flow through the store would be fascinating.

You could categorize what people are shopping for, how long, and what buying one item tends to mean for the rest of their shopping cart.

I'd read that paper!

ejanus
Which paper ?
kaennar
I was implying that it would make an interesting academic paper.
ejanus
I am into consumer goods distribution, wondering how I could apply any of the above ?
nicksalt
Can you get into a little more detail regarding your primary business? I'd love to brainstorm? Whatsapp or Skype maybe?
ejanus
If you can send me a mail , I would exchange cellphone number so that we can chat via whatsapp. My email address is in my profile.
nicksalt
Just looked at your HN profile and cant find a way to contact you.
ejanus
Send to this email :: satajanus [at] google popular email .com
dronescanfly
Electrical Vehicel Routing

Highly theoretical stuff that let me transition well from university

ejanus
Is it possible to allow me to be part of your adventure?
kwillets
I've been looking at Apache Arrow (https://arrow.apache.org/) and trying to figure out how to integrate it into the browser. It's an in-memory data format, and the idea is to share the same data chunks amongst various clients, but shared memory in javascript got nuked by Spectre, unfortunately. I'd like for the same data to be accessible from, eg, multiple tabs or session-wide without copying, so it's like a shared cache that mmap's or shmat's its objects into each consumer on a read-only basis.

If we get this to work we make data a lot easier to play with in the browser; the user can load the data once and then play with the presentation or slice and dice it in multiple ways without overhead.

ajeet_dhaliwal
Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) - it’s cool because for teams of say 10 or more doing automated testing they can focus on writing tests and maintaining automation infrastructure and allow this to handle reporting. It also gets better and better every day. Just today, launched a feature where csv files attached as part of a test case (like for captured performace metrics data) are automatically visualised as scatter charts with x and y axis fields being selectable.
SirLJ
AI driven stock trading robots, it's cool, because you compete in the market with the smarts people on Earth every day and making good money in the process...
RikNieu
I'm working on a brainstorming/idea generation site as a side-project. No idea if people would want this.

Which lead me to down the path of wondering if there are any idea pitching sites. In the meanwhile, I just created a subreddit(/r/ideaspitch) which could serve that function for the time being, just so that I can relax and focus on my original idea again...

So yes, brainstorming/idea generating tool.

elderK
I'm working on a bunch of lexer and parser related tools for personal use.

The reason they're cool is that it automates a lot of the tedious, error-prone stuff that I've been doing by hand as I experiment with grammars and the like.

Sure, there are a ton of tools out there to generate lexers and parse tables and such. But using them doesn't help me understand how they were built.

And using them doesn't produce the same sense of accomplishment or, at least for me, /depth/ of understanding.

I try to document the tools as best I can so that fellow students who are interested in such things can learn or make use of them. :)

NVRM
Since many months, I am building back my very own base tools. Alternatives to: grep, cat, apt, tail, head, cut, awk, sed, inotify, macro recorder, gif recorder, etc... Yes, reinventing the wheel, my very own set of. It appear to be an incredibly good experience. Both of my tools performs over the originals, this wasn't my first goal! Using them in other projects is amazingly faster than i can imagine. Facing real cases, I modify them to perform better and better. I can't advise it much than anything else. This is exactly what an old mechanics do. His tools perfoms over anything you can gift him.. ;)
atsushin
I'm working on a piece to go into my portfolio. It's a guidebook for companies navigating crisis communication during and after security incidents occur, such as breaches. I'm only an undergrad so I don't have much experience, so a lot of it is compilation and synthesizing professional advice (properly attributed of course), but with my own recommendations and criticisms of specific cases.

note: if anyone has particular advice to give me with this project, what you might want to see featured, i'm all ears.

elliottinvent
Thanks for the opportunity for some self promotion! I'm working on a new data serialisation language that focuses on character efficiency. It's around 30% more character efficient than JSON at a basic level but 60%+ more efficient for complex objects.

Minimal Object Description Language

http://www.modl.uk

It's cool because MODL makes it possible to store objects in places that have extremely limited capacity like DNS TXT records, QR codes and RFC tags.