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Ask HN: Any Special Projects Over the Holidays?

39 points by brentr ↗ HN
I just finished all of my work for this semester. Now I am free to do whatever I want until about the middle of January. My plan is to learn more about Objective-C. Since a lot of us are college students, I was wondering: What projects are you working on over the break?

92 comments

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speek
Flock simulator in either ObjC, some form of lisp/scheme, or Erlang. Haven't decided yet but Erlang really makes me happy.

I'll probably start up another company January 2. I have a dream about educating the world's future smart people.

brentr
Explain your "educating the world's future smart people." I have thought about writing a free online textbook for some branch of undergrad mathematics.
speek
I'm planning on starting a "chain" of either charter or cost-free/cost-very-little schools. These schools would be high schools, but they'd be for geeks/nerds/people who actually want to learn.

Needless to say, I'm still in the very early stages of this idea.

About your textbook, what branch would you _like_ to write about?

brentr
I have always been fascinated by the application of both ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations. The mathematical ideas behind the methods involved in reaching solutions are some of the most beautiful ideas in mathematics. I also find the mathematics of game theory and finance quite beautiful. Any one of these topics are more than enough to fill several textbooks.
elviejo
Yes please explain.

I have some projects on how to make college education cheaper.

speek
My interest has just been piqued.

I'd love to hear more about your projects.

dangrover
I've got updated versions for all of my products (http://www.wonderwarp.com) in the works.

I've got an incremental update to ShoveBox in testing now, but I'm spending most of my resources finalizing the iPhone version of the app and getting it to sync properly with the desktop app. That will probably be 1.8 or 2.0.

I'm not sure if I should charge for the iPhone app or not though. I'm worried Windows people will accidentally download it and get pissed. Hmm. But none of my direct competitors (except for maybe Evernote) have this feature, so I'll be psyched to have it out.

jpcx01
Cool! I love shovebox. iPhone sync would be rad
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DarkShikari
I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of H.264 in the open source x264 encoder.

I'm going to take it and make it committable.

Yes, I'm risking my sanity.

axod
Finish XMPP/Jabber support in Mibbit.

It's a ridiculously overcomplicated horrible format designed by committee :( Seems like a good job to pick though...

stanley
I find your site very useful. If you'd like some SEO advice shoot me an IM sometime (AIM: StanleyShilov).
axod
Your comment scores 98% on my spam detector.
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stanley
Haha, I can see why you would say that. What I was trying to convey was that from an SEO standpoint, your site fails miserably. You need to change your title tags to be more keyword specific, and move your wiki to a subdirectory instead of a subdomain (same goes for the blog).
axod
Fails miserably??

#1 on google for 'mibbit' (obviously)

#2 on google for 'web irc', 'online irc client', 'web irc client', 'web based irc', 'irc web', 'irc web client', 'web based irc client', etc etc

#9 on google for 'irc client', (Only mirc and xchat beat it).

This is all without doing any SEO. Sure there are ways to improve it, but it's more important to improve it for users, than for search engines.

Glad you like it though :)

stanley
SEO is not just about ranking for a handful of keywords, it's about ranking for the million other searches that aren't as popular.

Well, either way you're obviously against taking any advice so I won't waste any of my time trying to help you. Good luck with your service.

axod
Sure, and I appreciate the advice, but it's not rocket science.

I already have http://www.mibbit.com/networks/ (Work in progress) which is a complete browsable list of networks and channels, with topic info etc etc. As well as being hugely useful for users, it's obviously useful for ranking on searches. For example, if someone searches for "freenode", mibbit has some good results there.

A solid example: Search google for "freenode javascript". Mibbit is result number 3. I'm happy with that...

I repeat. SEO is not rocket science, it's simple best practices for end users.

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tome
I'm going to be improving metapaw-dip: http://www.metapaw.co.uk/projects/metapaw-dip/

At the moment I'm working on automatically generating maps from a small base dataset, and shortly I'll start working on a Django based wrapper to host this for many people's use.

SwellJoe
I'm not a college student, but I have been taking advantage of a little bit of a slowdown during the holidays (sales always drop off a bit for a couple of weeks).

I'm working on a chiptune version of Abbey Road, in order to teach myself a few new trackers that I've never used before (the last trackers I used heavily were OctaMED and ProTracker on the Amiga). I'm mainly tinkering with Renoise, which is an awesome multi-platform modern tracker with VST/LADSPA support. But I'm also playing with a cool sounding SID emulating tracker called Goattracker, and NitroTracker for the Nintendo DS. I probably won't finish all of Abbey Road in two weeks or spare time, since it's quite elaborate, and I'm only about half of the way through one song two days in, but I'm sure I can make three or four nice tracks. And I'll probably get faster as I get more comfortable with the tools.

arnorhs
I can whole heartedly recommend renoise... very solidly built and it has great sound quality... can also work inside other hosts.. cubase etc..
rksprst
Working on finishing up two web applications and an iPhone app that compliments one of the web apps.

Also some updates to my current iPhone apps (http://www.awaytalk.com).

pxlpshr
Going to take a nice week long break away from my home in Austin. For the past 4 months I've been cooped up in my place trying to get everything put together with this mobile app company. It's been many late nights and 7 day work weeks... time to recharge.

Spiked egg-nog... here I come!

brandnewlow
Making a local politician tracker for Chicago.

Basically a Chicago clone of this:

http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/

brandnewlow
Also, we're hoping to open source it and release as a Django project for others to hack on. Should be cool.

Type in your address.

We figure out the coordinates.

We place those coordinates in all their relevant political "zones" (neighborhood, district, ward etc.) and give you maps of what they look like, just like the Times.

We show you everyone representing you in those zones with links to the homepage, wikipedia page, twitter results, flickr results, youtube results etc

We show you a newsfeed of their appearances in mainstream press.

Should be cool.

quickpost
Very cool idea. Do you have a URL for it yet? I'd like to bookmark it to check back in the future... :)
brandnewlow
Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/bflora I'll announce on there.

Looks like we're going to build it at the eventual live URL so I'd rather not give that out just yet. My buddy's doing all the heavy lifting on this one. I'm just tracking down shape files and representative listings and so forth.

alabut
Very cool, I had a similar idea for a "scorecard for politicians" type of app - input either your location or a politician's name, see some info on what laws they've voted on and if possible, boil it down to a scorecard of where they stand on issues (pro guns, pro choice, etc).
randomwalker
I'm a grad student. I'm working on a way to turn papers written in latex into a form that's readable online, because having to print everything is so 1990s. I start from the output of latex2html and go from there. For instance, if you hover over a citation, I pop up a bubble showing you links to author homepages, the abstract of the cited paper, download links, etc., even though the latex bibliography didn't specify any of those.

Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/ If someone knows an easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks.

kingnothing
Why not just convert it to a PDF?

http://www.msi.umn.edu/software/tex/help/pdf.html

acj
Being able to hover the mouse over a citation and get a hyperlink to the referenced paper, abstract, and homepage would be a huge time saver when doing research. PDF can only give the title of the paper and (if you're lucky) where to find it.
ruddzw
For my last winter break, I'll be working on completely re-doing a web-based game I made. I'm thinking I might also work my way through a simple book on NLP (http://www.nltk.org/book).
qqq
Gonna read more Feynman and Popper.
GavinB
Writing my novel!

Okay, so I guess I'm not a real hacker.

silencio
Oh please :)

I wrote a novel during nanowrimo and ignored it since then, I may use my free time to edit and maybe publish copies for friends/family.

but mostly, I'm going to knit, work on some iPhone and Mac app ideas, and generally just have fun.

leftnode
Working more and more on my PHP framework, it's starting to get some traction as I will release 0.2 before new years. Check it out, http://artisansystem.com
Darmani
I'm working on a way to play the card game Mao online, except that, as Mao is a game that lets you make your own rules, in order to be capable of playing a substantial subset, it'll have to be capable of playing any card game.

(Yes, I've thought about turning this into a startup.)

And that reminds me, I really should be working on that right now, if I'm going to have time to do my college apps...

bjclark
Working on some super awesome blog software. Just like, uh, everyone else in the world.
ashleyw
Me too — I try to rewrite my own blogging platform/CMS every year or so, wrapping up all the design elements and programming quirks I've learnt over the past year, into a cool little package — fast, simple, and fun to use. :)
akeefer
Writing a Java bytecode emitter for my company's language (currently called GScript, hopefully open-sourced under a different name some time in the not-too-distant future). It's currently executed off the parsed AST.
bkrausz
Research into web crawlers for a startup idea, some consulting work, and bartending classes.

Also writing up an article about the soda machine card reader I built, as well as some other blog posts.

jasonlbaptiste
We'll be releasing a new project to hacker news on Tuesday. It's perfectly timed for the holidays.
wastedbrains
My goal over the holidays is to become much better with my editor (emacs). I am also trying to contribute a bit to open source and release some Merb and DataMapper code onto github.
tialys
I've been playing through the games I haven't had time to, and also learning how to write apps for my Mac and by extension for the iPhone. I've had a bunch of ideas for things I thought would be great for the iPhone, so I made a class next semester with a friend of mine and we're going to start a business. (And before someone says it, we checked and we own the code ^_^)