Ask HN: Show us your work in progress

20 points by jbrooksuk ↗ HN
Are you working on something that's half baked? Or have you been meaning to release your project for ages but worried it's incomplete?

Show us!

42 comments

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http://www.hn-sentiment.com I wrote this for a hackathon over Christmas. Does sentiment analysis on an entered topic against hacker news posts and comments.
I'm getting an error for an unterminated string literal - it looks like all the google analytics code isn't there.
Hey thanks, sorry somehow the js tracking code got messed up, should be working now.
Heads up that it doesn't seem to work in IE11. Typed in "Chrome" and hit the button. Page refreshed, but nothing about the page changed except the text box was cleared.
Yeah, um, you want to clarify what you are asking people to post? Because I have two webcomics I could use feedback on and I seriously doubt anyone would think that fits here, on HN. But your question is broad enough to toss it out there as a reply. However, I mean, this is HN, so I assume you don't mean that.

Edit: Then, feedback welcome (publicly or via email or whatever):

http://www.novemberwest.com/

http://lilnovember.blogspot.com/

When I am posting updates more regularly, I plan to post them to mefi projects but I am not ready for that yet.

Thanks.

I feel like anything goes. Getting feedback on something from all kinds of minds is a good thing.
I'm developing the arduino package index. Basically an online repo where people can share their code/schematics with others. It is in the same spirit as the python package index. Have already integrated it into the Arduino IDE, and currently building the webapp. Should be done by next week. Currently talking with the arduino core team to see if this is something they would integrate into the ecosystem.

https://github.com/ASIMUV/Arduino

https://github.com/ASIMUV/arduino-package-index

The ball is in God's court. I made His temple.

God says... place guilty Hasta thank_you_very_much beam_me_up It's_nice_being_God I_give_up eh

A game - I haven't worked on it in exactly ten months now :'(. My willpower is drained.

Here's the pathfind & boid/flocking - I am going to rewrite it, it's incredibly buggy and ugly as of now :( https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1367825/coop_pathfinding... - sorry for the dirty screen, I couldn't record the screen because of performance.

Here's the menus - saw a presentation by Martin Johansson on "Make it jucy" (or something along those lines) it somehow stuck with me. I'm experimenting with jucyness here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1367825/wip.mov

What's the difference between the green and read blocks/boids? — The menu QuickTime movie didn't load for me.
Different types of enemies. Sorry, not sure why they didn't work. It's the same type. I'll look into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Here's the presentation. It's a pretty fantastic watch that shows what just a few small design decisions can do for a product's impressions on an audience.

Ah... brings back memories. Martin (amongst others) is sorta of an inspiration.

Thanks for bringing it up.

(comment deleted)
http://frinlet.com/alpha_1.0

An HTML5 video game. Going into this I would have never thought making a game could be so much work. Still very much a prototype and only really works well in Chrome.

Here's a screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/1x3X1X1I0s0Y

I liked the demo :-) I wanted to know what was beyond the horizon so I kept walking for a little while, and some birds apparently were afraid of me and flew away when I was close. I wonder what the gameplay idea is?
I'm glad you like it. I plan on it being mostly a game of discovery, exploration, and collection. I plan on there being several hundred species of plants, animals, and insects each with their own special use within the game. I want the world to feel very alive and dynamic, obviously I'm not there yet but thats the goal. :)
Working on a iPhone app, it's in the store but is still a beta release. Working out a couple of bugs, adding walk through, and a couple of features.

Http://protactapp.com

Export Org mode files to OPML: https://github.com/edavis/org-opml

I think OPML[1] is way more powerful and interesting than most people realize. It could be the lingua franca of transmitting structured information if more tools supported it.

My problem was I couldn't find an outliner I was happy with. Then I remembered using Org mode a few years back and decided to dust it off again. Turns out it has a very powerful export engine and I was able to whip something together pretty easily.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML

I've started building a website with warming smiles:

   http://a.warming-smile.org/
Feedback welcome :-)
An introductory tutorial about web development. The plan is to assume the reader has no prior knowledge, start at the basics, and hopefully walk all the way up through building a dynamic web application. It's only just started, http://trevorhunsaker.com
It's not really "in progress" for the moment since I've essentially solved the problem for myself, but I examined several different techniques to enable real-time transliteration in OSX (in the vein of http://www.translit.ru — "chego" turns into "чего" as you type) and implemented most of them to varying degrees of completeness. I'm now happily using technique #1 (input method binary) in my everyday life and it's so, so much better than the default or phonetic Russian keyboards. Eventually, when I have some free time, I want to generate pre-compiled binaries, do some refactoring, create a pretty home page, fix the documentation, and add some extra features. But if you'd like to use it now, you can pull the code and compile to your heart's content. You can even change the transliteration input/output map to anything you want — the format is simple JSON!

https://github.com/archagon/cyrillic-transliterator

up, a bash function to make walking up the directory tree easier.

It allows walking up by passing in a --level commandline option:

  $ cd home/helpermethod/projects/bash-specs
  $ up --levels=2
  $ pwd
  /home/helpermethod
or by passing in a basename:

  $ cd home/helpermethod/projects/bash-specs
  $ up helpermethod
  $ pwd
  /home/helpermethod
It's written in pure Bash (no external dependencies) and features autocompletion for options and basenames.

It's more or less finished implementation-wise but lacks documentation and installation instructions.

https://github.com/helpermethod/up

FairTutor went through a nice little closed Beta, got a bunch of good feedback, had a good group of remote tutors interviewed and ready to go...

... and then I had a kid.

It's still that ready. I just need to kick myself back in to gear and find a couple spare weeks to re-interview a new crop of teachers, fix what needs fixing, and flip it live.

Any day now...

http://www.fairtutor.com/

How old is your kid? The hardest part I have with building a second career as a programmer is making time around my (fairly new) family's needs. My motivation to make meaningful projects is higher than it has ever been though, because I want to help make a better world for my son.

As he grows up, which is happening as fast as everyone says it does, I will have plenty of time again. I enjoy every day with my family now, but I also look forward to having enough time to polish some of the projects I have started.

I get an hour or two in the morning before I have to go to work, and maybe an hour at night if I'm not exhausted by then.

My side-project tries to improve NBA game recaps/box-scores by adding more context from analysing the play-by-play.

http://recappd.com/

Click on a score to see an enhanced box-score. Click on a players name to see their game logs. Almost none of the links in the banner work, so it's clearly unfinished.

It started out (and remains) a way for me to learn Rails, as my career has been spent developing non-web software. I am desperately trying to put in enough hours (I average about 5 a week) to get it to an MVP state (e.g. all the links actually work). Keep in mind this is my first web project and I have no design background whatsoever (it shows).

Fuck that's awesome! It needs a lot of work, but I love the ideas behind it. Keep chugging away!
http://reporeader.com is my first project built using Ember.js and Rails. The idea behind RepoReader is that it gathers events from your favourite open source projects (hosted at GitHub) and shows it in a "grouped" way so it should be easier to follow high traffic projects like Rails, Ember, etc.

At some point I just lost interest in that idea and now the project is living it's own life...

We are going live with our Toothbrush Subscription company in a few weeks and I would love your candid feedback before our launch: http://maverickbrothers.com/ Please comment on pricing, product, website design or anything else that you like or dislike. Thanks in advance! Marcos Founder
This is funny. I was pretty skeptical when I read your post, but when I looked at your site I realize how seldom I replace my toothbrush if my wife doesn't buy me a new one. Then I remember how much better a new toothbrush feels. So I think this might work!

I wouldn't use the service, but a little feedback:

- I couldn't tell the difference between what you get for $1/month, and what the $19 is for. Is the $19 for your first toothbrush with a stand?

- The images of "classic" toothbrushes kind of turn me off. They look like objects I would not want going near my mouth. I understand the appeal of a classic razor, but I have never thought of toothbrushes as having any historical appeal at all.

Good luck!

That's kind of cool. I'm in Australia so can't sign up. Concerns I'd have before signing up:

1 How good are the toothbrush heads compared to the better ones you get in the shop? I'd be concerned about downgrading.

2 I don't know which frequency option is best. What frequency do dentists recommend? Could you guide people here?

3 Does this work out cheaper than buying them in the store? Is there a saving here, or is it just about convenience?

Well i have been working on the following project for some months whenever i manage to find spare time. Between working 8 hours a day and playing professional basketball, time is hard to find.

www.fitorganizer.com It is a personal trainers appointment scheduler. It is still in early alpha stages, and i am working on making a better calendar at the moment ( which is open source on github ), adding hours and figuring what needs to go where is harder from what i thought it might have been.

The version on line is a bit old, as i havent updated it for a few months. My local one is much better and fixes several bugs, with a newer database design.

Feel free to break stuff.

I've been learning rails and recently began a personal project to build an app to automate the reinvestment of cex.io profits (i.e. bitcoins into bitcoin mining contracts - Gigahashes/sec). It's very minimalistic at the moment, but it works! http://lazycexio.herokuapp.com/
I've been working on Educator News, a clone of HN for the education community.

http://www.educatornews.net

It's been tried before and was well-received initially, but the people behind the project were not developers. They tried to build it on a framework that wasn't really designed for building web apps, and the project disappeared pretty quickly.

I need to optimize some of the queries before the project gets too large, but the most basic functionality is there. It's pretty satisfying to have a project that I'm confident will fit a pretty significant need.

Working on a CRM for small business owners. Currently aligned towards the pet service industry and in the future other small business verticals

Production - www.petworkslabs.com QA - www.petworkslabsqa.com (admin login - sp1@pwl.com/password)

Feel free to forward it to your dog walkers!