Ask HN: What are you working on?
I know this question has been asked before in one way or another, but in the mean time projects have been started and finished. People have changed jobs or even fields, etc...
What are you working on? And where? Start-up? Academia? Your favorite MegaCorp?
234 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadAlso working with hnuser://jasonlbaptiste on Ramamia (beta), which lets you keep in touch with your family. http://ramamia.com -- as well as status updates for sports games at http://tickrtalk.com (we were launched, but the data source pulled the plug on our API access...)
...and Classleaf, http://classleaf.com - bringing education a bit more into the 21st century by helping teachers create class websites, with homework, test and due dates, events, file attachments, email lists, pages, and more, and class tracking for students. (You can tell I say that pitch too much.) Mostly managing sales staff (they're working on commission, $1000 per sale) to make sales to high schools primarily.
Lastly, working to study/improve SAT/ACT/SATIIs/my abysmal GPA so I can actually get into a decent college come this fall... sigh. Anyway, overview's mostly at http://markbao.com.
Enjoy having no time for your personal projects and instead having to do mindless "introduction to cutting-and-pasting java 1.1".
Please realize that there are many different paths through life. We are lucky to be in the top 1% to take advantage of these educational opportunities. But we're also just as lucky to have the freedom to choose how we want to live our life in a way that brings us the most joy.
I agree with some of the other posts that you will not likely learn things in college that you don't already know or couldn't easily learn, about _computers_, but my recommendation is to ignore the computer curriculum in college (unless the program is outstanding) and pick a completely unrelated topic that you enjoy. Your college degree will be a piece of paper that no one cares about, so make college about you, not about getting a degree to impress someone else. This also has the advantage of keeping programming fun, a lot of programming classes and homework take topics that are very interesting and make them tedious and unenjoyable.
If I was to go back to college and start over right now, I would double major in physics and linguistics, and minor in greek/roman history and in philosophy. You can still take programming classes, but ignore the earlier classes, figure out the materials, teach yourself anything you need to know, and test out of those classes so you can just take the classes you are interested. There is also a lot of interesting math classes you can take.
(EDIT: typo)
Can't wait to see the fruits of your labors with Avecora Mark...best of luck!
Interesting intro :)
You, OP?
Our main difference is providing ReadyStacks for easy bootstrap of servers: watch the screencast for more info here - http://webbynode.com/railsvimeo.
http://www.webbynode.com/screencasts/webbynode-sixreasons.mo...
?
The most interesting topic today for me along those lines had to be the auction site story
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700738
In my spare time I'm making tools for web developers at http://www.binaryage.com.
Also look at http://hashpage.com (mashup builder on top bespin, github and google app engine) code: "michael" -> click to generate homepage -> woid -> "edit"
Anyone uses XRefresh, FirePython, FireQuery, FireRainbow, Visor? Gimme feedback! :-)
Other than that, doing iPhone and (soon) Android consulting to pay the bills.
Also how does one get into iPhone consulting. Do you still get paid if your client's app gets rejected?
As for consulting, I started out with a bit of luck, a company I was subletting office space from wanted an app made. Past that, referrals are priceless. And yes, this hasn't come up yet, but they absolutely pay if the app gets rejected - you get paid for the work you do, not for the success (or failure) of the app. Most clients are curious (and fearful) of the approval process, and it's very valuable if you can guide them through the submission process and likely pitfalls - but approval is not ultimately your responsibility.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Gu...
You can also physically install the app yourself from your development machine if you get their device (again, there might be a limit on the number of devices, since you have to register each one).
As rdouble mentioned, there's also the enterprise program.
And, of course, there are jailbroken devices with third party app "stores". I don't have much experience with these, but jailbroken iPhones are supposed to make up a significant percentage of users - might not be as useful for business use, though.
Nights and weekends are split between developing my side-startup (a service to help makes diabetes management simpler), the occasional WoW session, and spending time with my wife and year-old daughter (not necessarily in that order).
Also planning a natural language datetime parsing service with a friend who was an old boss at another startup.
eproject - file/buffer grouping for emacs, http://github.com/jrockway/eproject
cperl-mode for MooseX::Declare - http://github.com/jrockway/cperl-mode/tree/mx-declare
On my agenda:
Emacs/LLVM; compile Emacs to LLVM bitcode, link with extensions written in arbitrary LLVM langauges. Right now, even my simplest attempts immediately segfault, so it is on hold for a while. http://github.com/jrockway/emacs
(Once this works, I want to make ECL run on LLVM. Then we can write Emacs extensions in a real programming language. I hear Python compiles to LLVM now also, so that's another option. Eventually Perl will too.)
HTTP::Engine refactoring; removing unnecessary metaclasses and adding support for requests inside preemptable coroutines: http://github.com/jrockway/http-engine (A threaded web server without the disadvantages of threads.)
Persistent application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/eventful (Generic foundation for web applications, TCP servers, IRC bots, ...)
Persistent command-line application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/app-persistent (Make your slow-starting Perl application start up instantly.)
Path::Class replacement based on Forest::Tree::Pure: http://github.com/jrockway/data-filesystem (I also have a binding to make a Data::Filesystem tree into a FUSE filesystem.)
Once this yak shaving is out of the way, I have a few applications to write:
Filesytem::Kindle - plug in your Kindle and see the books as unencrypted HTML (this one is going to be released anonymously, you didn't hear this from me, I was never here...)
PleasureChicken - email / im / irc message consolidator, indexer, data extractor. The idea is to let the computer read your messages for you, so you don't have to. When you buy something from Amazon, it will stick the UPS delivery date in your calendar, and remind you that you just spent $300 on your Amex. When your boss IMs you at 3am with the word "broken", play a sound. etc., etc. This might be a hosted service one day, as well. http://github.com/jrockway/pleasurechicken
Angerwhale 2 - A weblog for programmers that doesn't suck. http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale-ng (See also: http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale for the old version.)
Unfortunately, my time is being taken up by menial $work_tasks, which distracts me enough to not get much done. But that should all be ending soon.
Popular by Nada Surf is down, have you heard of grooveshark.com? http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Popular/21866669
On the other hand my retarded anime episode crawler at crawlanime.com gets several thousands hits for a half ass'ed effort with curl. my roleplay site at Eliteskills.com/rp is crawling with people making god damn twilight roleplays at a depressing rate. I'm rewarded more often for making stupid shit than for making well designed sophisticated apps for improving actual skills.
That's where my frustrated statement comes from.
Well, your intro video is very good, a good script. And, you jargon disclaimer is hilarious. Most good intros need a good disclaimer to remind new users that the ideas behind the jargon are simple and the real goal. The ideas are the forest, the jargon are the trees.
I think it might benefit from a simpler interface, and/or making it more obvious where I should look first. I wasn't paying much attention when I first checked it out and I thought I was supposed to hit the piano keys to answer the questions. Then I read that I could hit Replay, but I didn't see the Replay button, so I just hit Play. This changed the interval, which I thought was the intended behavior and didn't like that. Then later I saw there's a Repeat button, and then I saw the song answer choices.
If I were you, I'd do something like:
-Make the Song Answer Choice buttons bigger and/or brighter.
-Bring the Play and Repeat buttons closer to the answer choices and the piano.
-Change the instruction to click "Replay" to be consistent with the word "Repeat" (or change "Repeat" to "Replay").
-Hide the statistics, songs and other buttons from the main interface; instead, have them accessible with Show/Hide buttons or tabs.
I know there's a tutorial video, but I think you could still alter the interface to make it easier for people who don't want to watch videos (for example: me. I'm on a relatively slow connection right now and YouTube videos take ages to buffer.).
You might also like to grab random people, put them in front of it, and watch what they do, see what confuses them, etc.
I think it could be really successful! Maybe post it to Hacker News separately as a "review my app" kind of post.
For now there's video tutorials there that guide through the basics of using the ear trainer and further instructions on the help page. There's a few things that are counter intuitive but are far more efficient that way. For example when you click the wrong answer the correct associated song starts playing. Clicking star wars and having it play here comes the bride might seem confusing but it's necessary for improving the song associating with the correct interval. Also automatically playing a new interval when you're correct is confusing at first but the more clicks saved the more efficient training can be.
I can't guarantee anything if they don't watch the tutorial or read the help page for now. Making it beginner foolproof would be great but not if older users have to make 5 - 10 clicks when starting up to get it back to the most efficient settings. I tried a version with elements hidden but in the end it's better just make another version and call the current one the 'advanced version'. The song buttons are packed because they're dynamic in length. The songs can be named anything in the song editor. Also if you select all chords or scales in the first dropdown it already overflows the expected area. There can be a lot of answer choices.
Thanks again for the detailed comment, It'll try and reciprocate my time if I notice somewhere I can or if you tell me something you want feedback on.
Now: Ramamia.com co-founder with Mark Bao. Part time side project, but may make it full time. Also, CTO of MIT Enterprise Forum in florida (nonprofit).
more: jasonlbaptiste.com
I'm in nyc and I would love to hear any feedback! Thanks.
How about taking it one step further, and giving viral video content creators an affiliate cut in the shirt profits. With Store front widgets, that could be placed anywhere. Transitioning into a platform.
We do sketch comedy, and I could see us using a service like that.
How tough is the online t-shirt market? It seems like every time something goes even remotely viral, everyone and their dog tries to sell t-shirts. Do you even see random websites and opportunists as real competition (do they actually sell much?), or does your competition consist mainly of the other large t-shirt sites?
Minor amateur opinion: the artwork seems too large on the shirts / too overstated.
the 2 ideas i'm at will to share:
1 - .org - wikipedia-style database of case-law commonly used by pro-bono lawyers -- create something that would assist legal clinics manage their information locally but also something that stores that data and shares it with other clinics doing similar work. caselaw is supposed to be free and without copyright but somehow its come to be locked up by the lexis/westlaw duopoly. I understand they add value, but we believe there is room for a simple database of opinions & briefs, even w/o the shepherdizing.
2 - .com - brainstorming site for early stage startup development, using principles from Covey & Napoleon Hill. i.e. weekly meetings with small groups of founders discussing multiple ideas, voting immediately upon disagreements, etc.
I'd love to discuss the last idea as its the one I'm actually working on coding right now but the folks I'm working with want to remain hush-hush for now.
I'd be fascinated to hear folks' ideas for startups with a broad focus on the role technology can play in community development, government & regulation & even stuff like troll regulation / comment scoring. If anyone wants to IM or chat, hit me up at hitesh@gmail.com.
But then I remembered some interview with the founder of betterworldbooks.com: "This idea would be best embodied in a company." In this case, maybe it's not. Lowering the barrier for a non specialist lawyer to work on the kind of cases that attract pro-bono attention is good work.
Also, at one point the fake news site 23/6 thought my fake news site was real (and actually advocated that Sikhs put flag pins on turbans). This is perhaps the most hilarious thing that happened on the site: http://fannity.com/?p=553&cpage=1 . The users "backdoorman" & "gacracker" were in on the joke and pretending to be Hannity fans.
With free software, say someone has a good feature they want implemented, they have a means to affect that change in theory in a way a user can not do with closed source software. If they can't win the project over, they can fork the idea and start their own variation. the theory is that these kinds of mini-democracies lead to the most efficient software, could this work for businesses as well?
As before.
Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.
Articles, comments it's all the same.
Fatherhood, Arc and YC are three things, though:-) Don't know if it's your intention to share anything about the first one, but I'd be curious if you did, and very understanding if you didn't.
I've been working on this fulltime for over a year now and it seems like I can't make a dent in it. Don't get me wrong, I have a very solid foundation so far that includes an indexer and a very flexible server/client framework that should work for any organization. However, even with this I still have a boat load of work to do.
There are definitely days where I think I've gotten way over my head, but I figure I've invested too much to walk away now.
Django is fun, and surprisingly productive even while learning, though with little free time it's going slower than I'd like.