Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

126 points by dholowiski ↗ HN
Release early, release often. Don't worry, be crappy. Fail fast. Iterate.

Show us your half baked, not really ready for prime time projects, HN. Is it ugly but interesting? I'll start with mine: http://smsul8r.com - a SMS message scheduler. Ugly, buggy, but it works. Come on... let's see your worst work!

312 comments

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http://smsmyride.com

http://smscard.com.au

i also have this half-baked search engine that has no content: whatwhere.com.au :) but you can't really do anything with that!!

(incidentally when you're ready to add "rest of the world" you can use my 8centsms.com API ;)

Haha, my project couldn't be a better fit for your description: http://valuegrapher.com/
Looks great! I do all my timesheeting via an IRC bot - will plug this thing in and then blog about it when I get the chance :)
hey - can you say more about the IRC bot? I'm working on ohMore.com and the idea is somewhat similar, but with web/mobile interface instead of irc.
Trying to incorporate wakoopa anytime?
Hadn't thought about that... I'll look into it.
Gold.
(comment deleted)
This was something that always impressed me with HN. Instead of using a robust, proven forum system, you created a new project that grew with the community, and opened the whole thing up for us to see and even hack ourselves.
code.reddit.com
Ha ha. Comment of the year.
Okay, I know this is a reply to a pg post. And that complaining about downvoting is poor HN etiquette. I realize that therefore, this post is double sacrilege.

I am choosing to note right here that I'm quite tired of the uptight comment nazis on this site.

I THINK IT'S THE COMMENT OF THE YEAR

SO GO FUCK YOURSELVES

The thing is, if we stop downvoting comments like the one you posted (even though it was a completely harmless comment), people would start to think such comments are acceptable and we'd soon have useless comments on HN that would add absolutely no value to the discussion.
Why do you consider http://news.ycombinator.com as half baked?
this was an hilarious joke by PG, lost on the humourless HN community.
Don't you mean lost on the three people that upvoted pmarin's comment?
Because it's still missing features that might seem essential if you decided what was essential a priori instead of empirically.
When you started Hacker News you wanted a site which you could moderate and where users could only upvote (even though users of a certain karma level can downvote), according to Huffman's interview on mixergy. What features did you think were essential a priori that you left out?
Half baked and medium rare. Delicious.
http://69.197.166.101:2261/ Helping freelancers find new work.

Going live tomorrow :)

Edit: if you want to know soon as it's live, add your email here: http://tekbob.wufoo.com/forms/notify-me-when-tekbobs-live/

wow this is amazing
cool idea. double "within within" 24 hours for each listing.
great catch thanks:)
This is really not bad at all. Interesting idea with the extensions. I'm interested to see where you go with this.
Nice.

Have you thought about some integrated click-to-call?

(And add border:0; to your images.)

Hey thanks for the feedback! What browser/OS are you on?
Firefox 3.6.11 MacOS

The issue I'm seeing is on the logo, btw.

(Checkout browserlab.adobe.com for testing btw.)

I'm torn on the price display there, given the format unless you attract a very high quality buyer invariably the price is going to be a factor. But then if you don't have it makes it harder for the buyer.
Can you clarify what you mean? I'm not sure I follow. Thanks a lot for the feedback!
I think he's suggesting that the most obvious way for potential buyers to quantify freelancers is through price, meaning that no matter what (in most cases), the job will go to the lowest bidder, leaving quality freelancers with no other way to 'prove' they are worth more.

I'm not sure I agree with robryan 100%, as there are other ways for buyers to compare the freelancers (years experience, etc.). For a middle-ground, you could have the freelancers give a per hour range to be negotiated dependent on the scope/intensity of the project. Also, you could expand on the freelancers' credentials by including websites, previous projects, or client testimonials.

Good luck with your launch!

yeah, we have plenty of places for freelancers online which are essencially a race to the bottom on rate, a lot of buyers are looking to compare on rate, most sellers that sell at a premium would at least like buyers to give them the time of day to hear what that premium will get them.
I've thought about this idea and 3 things should help:

1. we'll have a min. hourly rate of $40/hr.

2. by making it phone-based, we will be filtering out most non-US programmers

3. we intend to charge $2-5/lead once we get traction. This will probably make it unaffordable for folks that only compete on price.

I really don't want to attract elance/rentacoder-type audience which only cares about cost. My experience as a freelancer AND client has shown that you get what you pay for. I'd like higher end clients to match with higher quality coders.

2. by making it phone-based, we will be filtering out most non-US programmers

I think you underestimate the capacities of non-US programmers. The international shops (ie. the coders from India and Singapore who can charge a fraction of what a US programmer would need to) usually have access to great VOIP and 24/7 availability.

cool idea but the design looks really spammy.
Looks like a great system to white label for recruiters and networking types.
Some feedback for your site: You might want to put up a message promising not to do unethical things with my phone number. It would give me a little peace of mind.
Tasterator.com

Neat toy I think, but pretty buggy and really no business potential

www.appcanvas.com. I posted it here a few days back and was blasted for poor and unintuitive usability. Have been working my ass off on the UX since then. For what's it worth it definitely fits the description here.
I think this is an incredible concept! I tried to use it but couldn't actually enter in any text (FF 3.6.11) but keep at it! This is a really great idea and already well on the way to being a great execution.
Yeah the usability sucks. Right now the problem is that one can use it after 15 minutes of training and become expert in may be few hours of training, after which you can create super complex sites like twitter/HN.

I am doing a UX rewamp and trying to minimize the learning curve. The next version with some major UI modifications and support for all browsers should be out in 2 weeks. Do follow me on twitter or drop a line and I will make sure you know.

Will follow for sure. Hey - Harsh Jain - were you on Google SOC 2005? Or is that just a really common Indian name :)
haha far out, I was in that too :) I did this: http://rubyforge.org/projects/koto/ and then never looked at it since :(

As far as I know, there was ONE GUY in Germany that managed to install it and get it running. He blogged about it under the title "That's Real RAD!" in German - but my lack of autotools skill and inabiilty to properly use qtruby as a "lib" meant that the install process was pretty diabolical.

What did you work on? Did you ever do anything with it after SOC?

I worked for Project Looking Glass, added natural language voice control. It was really cool demo and stuff but didn't go anywhere as the parent project was always in a demo like state itself.

I did continue to work for Google and played a part in some of the SoC activities for next year.

Can't reply to the child thread. Yes I am the same guy :-)
ChatPatio.com - I just embedded a bunch of chatrooms into different topics people would want to discuss. It's been sitting on the side untouched for a few months now. I just created it as a quick mockup and may launch a real app sometime.

http://chatpatio.com

I wanted to be able to see products on Amazon side-by-side with their pros and cons: http://silvos.com.

I need to add more products, product specs, and fix the way the pros/cons work, but I'm already using it to start thinking about which digital camera to get.

This looks useful. It would be a good idea to have the pros and cons lists next to each other so that one doesn't need to scroll down long lists.
Interesting idea - in a similar space to my startup http://www.happybuy.com/

It may be good if the site was able to, based upon the metadata and extraction from the product description, show the relative differences in the specs of the products.

For instance, if I compare a Macbook 13" and a Macbook Pro 15" it would be great if it listed all of the differences - such as screen size: 2", price: $300, speed: 0.4Ghz, weight: 700gms, popularity: 200 difference in sales rank etc.

It would allow objective comparisons to go along with the subjective comparisons of the reviews you currently show.

That's a great point -- currently, I'm in the process of scraping specs from other sites, and I really like your idea of putting a layer of understanding over that to simplify the display for the user.

Kind of like Google Squared, but easier to generate the table.

http://www.crushtease.com

Anonymous matching site with a twist.

This is cool - and kids will love it. I don't get the "50%" thing though - why complicate this any further?! I mean I know I'm FARRRR far far from being the target market here - but it just seems to make no sense to me and doesn't add anything to the usefulness of the program.
We were thinking about omitting the actual percentages and just telling them that any four of those possibilities will happen. So far we haven't gotten any traction, but we haven't spent much time marketing it because we have been working on another more exciting project that will probably be ready for launch by next week.
http://vps.kevinmehall.net:8123/hn

An Operational Transformation (like Google Wave / EtherPad) implementation in node.js and coffeescript. Source at http://github.com/kevinmehall/OTpad . It's much cleaner and lighter-weight than the EtherPad open source project. Chrome recommended for now, FF sort-of supported.

That's really very incredible. I started implementing it in clojure, but I node is really well suited for this. Thank you for sharing the code!
what are you using as backend? mysql? postgres? couchdb? redis?
http://playrelay.io

I wish I had some time to finish it (client work first)! It also might be a miniscule market.

I don't think it would be a miniscule market, someone was asking me about multiplayer on iphone the other day and I don't even make iphone games.
Sorry I was unclear. Multiplayer on iOS is a huge market. But with Apple providing peer-to-peer built-in a hosted solution such as PlayRelay might not find many fans. Game Center might be "good enough". That is why I am trying to add things like accountability (opponent is losing and quits the game with no punishment) and tournaments.
http://inboxSEO.com - daily or weekly SEO emails - see where does your site rank, lots of little UI bugs but it works and we have some paying customers despite the poor UX...
o_O word!! This is what you call half-baked?

/me signs up and begins using it immediately

cool. would love feedback. we haven't really 'launched' it yet as we've just too busy on other projects, and for instance when you do google analytics integration you can end up with WAY too many keywords and some weird behavior on the dashboard page...
Well - feedback so far is: I signed up and setup a profile/keywords etc. in under 2 minutes. I'll email you when I start getting information in my inbox :)
Looks great. Who did the design for you?
A designer who works for me part time here in Buenos Aires...email me if you want me to introduce you (scared to introduce you as she's busy for me right now :)
This is fantastic. I've also signed up and am glad you shared this. Something I've always wanted but figured it was out of reach.

This post is great, too. We should make this a regular feature because, how many frequent HN users end up launching a neat product like this and it languishes among blah-blah news links? Tragic.

I've never even posted a launch on HN, but I love seeing them -- it seems like they should be highlighted on the new page or something.

good implementation, but why 3 websites for the pro with 1000 keywords?

Don't even limit to websites at all, just use keywords. It's regex parsing anyways, it's not hard to check any number of domains.

The failing point of almost all rank tracking systems is limiting keywords and domains the way they do

good point. those numbers keep changing and the pro seems too low; we're probably going to make it higher.
This.

Also: grouping keywords in different, Venn-like ways should be easy and intuitive.

Mine is http://www.soulplaying.com

It's a web app that integrate RPG elements with a TODO list.

I'd like to check it out, but it doesn't seem to be up.
Oh sorry. For some reason, it only like www.soulplaying.com not soulplaying.com.

Try the link again. It'll work.

http://oddalerts.com

Made it for my gf and I, but never got around to polishing it. It still tentatively works. Basically it sends reminders at odd times because I felt when you set a reminder, you automatically remember it anyway, and wind up staring at the clock. So this comes at different times.

Bit fuzzy around the edges and I haven't worked on it in months :(

Cool idea actually. I'd use something like this for daily notes to self.
http://movief.ly

Wanted a place to keep track of what movies I was watching, when and who I was watching them with, and then be able to recall them later.

For instance: Recent movies watched http://movief.ly/users/adamfortuna/viewings

Movies first seen in 2009 http://movief.ly/users/adamfortuna/lists/first-seen-in-2009

Never went beyond the 'scratch my own itch' stage, but gomiso seems to like the idea of checking in to TV/movies.

i like this idea. my husband and i are always watching tons of movies and can never keep track.
Thanks! I really want to get it to the point where it can look into your friends lists to generate lists as well.

For instance -- What're my girlfriends favorite movies that I've never seen? Or What are my friends favorite movies of all time (that I have seen or haven't seen)? In the end it's all about keeping track of what you've seen, and helping decide what you should see next though, so it might have Netflix integration so I don't have to reinvent the recommendation wheel either. What movies you'll like is only half the equation though -- the other half is what people you know are actually watching!

Nicely done. I made something vaguely similar as a weekend project. Mine is a lot more minimal and focused more on just tracking things to watch. Perhaps I'll post it if i can find enough time to get it online.
regvex.py -- http://gist.github.com/641688

Regvex is a proof of concept timing attack against regex engines. To make a long story short, the timing characteristics of regex engines make it perfectly suited to timing attacks, allowing you to (locally or remotely) create data that matches a given regex, and potentially even reconstruct the actual regex you're matching against.

The current version works locally against Python's sre, but I plan to take it further when I have time.

Fascinating, could you explain how this works?
I'm planning on writing up a blog post exploring the attack and possibilities, but from a high level:

When you pass data into a regex engine for matching, it works character-by-character. When it reaches a character that doesn't match, the matching is terminated. That means that if you have the regex /^foo$/, "f" will take slightly longer to parse than "b", since it'll move on to the next character for "f", but not "b".

Due to this, you can produce matching data for a regex in a fairly small number of samples. Interestingly, it takes fewer samples to reliably get characters further down the string -- however, this may be a result of my horrid statistics code. Not sure yet.

As far as I'm aware, no one has ever done this before.

As someone who has made regular expression acceleration products, we were aware of this possibility but we didn't ever implement a proof of concept. The range of applications is pretty staggering just in network and host security. I'm interested to see what you come up with.
You will not be able to reconstruct the regex by a timing attack unless you make some assumptions on the input like maximum length and even then reconstructing the regex will be tough. If you don't make a maximum length assumption then the best you can do is create a string that will pass it because you will never be able to tell the difference between /a+/ and /a{1,10^99999999999999}/. Practically this might not make a difference but theoretically it does.
Actually, while that was my first thought as well, it depends on the underlying implementation. I'm not positive here, but I think that the characteristics of the regex engine could allow you to recognize the difference between /a+/ and /a{1,1000}/. That said, I haven't done anything to this end yet -- we'll see if my idea remotely pans out. It'll certainly require knowing what regex engine you're attacking, unlike just generating data.
You're probably right. I think the idea is really cool and I'm surprised some CS grad student hasn't jumped on this stuff yet. There is a lot of theory lurking in the background for this kind of stuff and it would definitely make a nice master's thesis.