Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday
We talk a lot about ideas and there is "Show HN" for when you reach a somewhat working state, but what about in between? There seem to be many people struggling with motivation to continue on their side projects, so how about having a weekly post where you can post a progress screenshot?
The concept is based on Reddit's "screenshot saturday" meant for indie game devs. For example the most recent one is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/22tpar/screenshot_saturday_166_better_than_pax/
So if you like the idea, please post a screenshot and a few words of explanation on what you have been working on for the past week.
174 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadHopefully I can get it launched next week and see if I can get some orders. I used these chopsticks as an extra gift to current customers and they seemed to like it and were wanting to order more, so that's why I decided to work on a separate page for those.
I was thinking of using them as a moving background, but that didn't seem to work out on iOS as it won't autoplay videos. Was fun though.
The wedding blog/forum niche is tough to break into, but could be a great marketing avenue for you, as they /love/ merchandise that can be customized to guests, particularly products that are new and still unique/uncommon.
Screenshot Saturday will take some getting used to.
Awesome idea and they look great. My only caveat would be the logo might put off corporate customers (who may be your biggest customers.)
Isomer, an isometric graphics library for HTML5 canvas.
Screenshot: https://cloudup.com/ca2TeFocl6F
I'm _almost_ ready to release. I've been working on the docs here (http://jdan.github.io/isomer/), but the code is still private.
1. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b31569e20134891583...
I've been working on Rokumo, an automated gift-shopping service:
http://i.imgur.com/ZzGpeVd.png
Finally got a working sort for an implementation of a closure table for a forum project. Horribly inefficient though.
Riveting, I know.
Also, this is a great idea.
Unfortunately, while it works, it requires extra effort to sort the results properly.
Another problem is agreeing on who would post these weekly threads. If something semi-official wasn't decided on people may race to be the first to post every Saturday because of the guaranteed karma, which would lead to threads starting at pessimal times. While the optimal time would be 9 AM EST[2] for maximum exposure, people might be posting the second it turns midnight (or even earlier), which would lead to empty threads and ultimately the death of the tradition. Perhaps a novelty account could be created just for the sake of posting these threads with no affiliation to anyone in it's bio, in the same way there's the user "whoshiring"[3].
To follow the rules of this thread: This week I've been working on my Snapchat Marketing SaaS app. I recently lost a lot of my backend work, so rather than immediately rewrite the code I lost I'm focusing on the frontend part to keep my morale high. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/d3La9td.png
Edit: Oh yeah, I also forked "HN Special" and added the ability to save posts for later: https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special/pull/58#issuec...
[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=screenshotsaturday
[1] It even follows the "S" formation!
[2] http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring
did my first test in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwAOXroBL-k
and here is the result https://www.dropbox.com/s/ggk0b0fmcvfp77x/photo.JPG
looking forward for daylight. should produce much better results.
http://imgur.com/GFbIQKf.png
The app is called Fora. At first glance, an open source version of Medium. But it's really much more. I am struggling with how to describe it (which is extremely important), perhaps HN could help here.
Idea: Most information (such as music, movies, blogs or products) is typically stored in database tables having various structures. Fora lets people define these tables, describe how it needs to be formatted on screen, and build communities around them. So for example, Medium.com will be a structure having Cover (image), Post Title(string), Content (html) and Comments (string).
Code: https://github.com/jeswin/fora
Am I on the right track by saying this is medium for all different mediums?
As a musician and sometimes songwriter, I think it'd be really cool to be able to share songs in a user-friendly and visually appealing way, like medium does for stories. I imagine a lot of other artistic disciplines would be the same.
- If you don't find the type (or medium) you need, you could create a new type yourself. And if you made a new one for Songs (say with Title, Lyrics, Date and Band name), it becomes available to everyone on the site.
- You could customize a type further with Javascript, which the app executes inside a sandbox. That let's you do, for instance, downloading and attaching a band's picture when someone adds a new song.
package.json is on my todo list. I've been sitting on it for way too long. :)
On the downside, that is what all publishing platforms will claim to be. I might also prefer something a little less technical (omitting platform), yet not missing that aspect completely.
I think this is probably a critical thing for you to solve. When I read down through posts like these, rarely do I give anyone more than a few sentences. I respond most strongly when I have a general idea of the product, without analogy, by the end of the first short sentence.
Please avoid jargon, things that can be interpreted multiple ways, and analogies in that first sentence. They're all unnecessary and domain specific.
There is a lot of room for Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" when describing product.
By example, this is what I would want to see for Hacker News:
"Hacker News is a group driven news site, oriented mostly but not exclusively towards technology and new business, which leans heavily on a community which shares viewpoints, opportunities, and critique, in the hopes of driving one another forwards towards mostly internet business success. There is a lot of discussion of startups, of market and business strategy, business models, advertising and site technique, and a very high ratio of personal requests for discussion on specific topics."
http://bit.ly/1gpcB95
The add-on makes it dead easy to put SSL onto your Heroku app-instance.
If you're still interested after seeing how it works, my email is in the YouTube description. The add-on is still in restricted access while it moves through the Heroku approval process.
The website (in the process of learning front end development) is viewable at www.retailius.com. As of right now, it is a static prototype consisting of Keynote-linked wireframes.
http://i.imgur.com/QMr3m8B.png
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/1600/hahz.png
That's a WIP port of Conception in Go. It's an experimental code editor/live development environment tool.
What you see is an experiment at creating a Sublime Text/Atom-like fixed UI, with the list of Go packages in a tree view on the left, code in the middle, and various live widgets on the right. For instance, you can see a live git diff, the type of variable under your cursor, and various other debug things related to the parsed AST.
Unfinished Code: https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/commits/master
https://twitter.com/tectonic/status/448565716761837568/photo...
This week as been all about getting a second version stamped and out (nowhere near a finished version or even 1.0, but a 0.2 version)
I've been working on https://ghostream.com a framework for constructing stream processing systems. Getting a first draft of the website (http://imgur.com/ujsmjJz) and the documentation (although there is still much to do)
And after that, lots of bug fixes and environment clean ups (code coverage pipeline / static analysis etc.) Managed to knock down quite a few little bugs that way.
Mostly I found the follow problems with existing frameworks :
- Tied to an execution environment - Storm with ZooKeeper and Streams with their own custom one. This makes it very difficult to use either for small projects - and limits integration choices when scaling.
- Resource hogs - The IBM Streams environment is a huge resource hog, I never really got that far with Storm but the number of dependencies it required just to get something up and running provided a similar sense of dread.
- Easy to debug/optimization - Streams has the best tools for this at the moment but they are all heavily tied to the execution environment. I'm hoping with ghostream that structures can be built at the protocol level to provide a way to build tools on top - not tied to any particular environment.
Finding a job can be difficult and managing the application / search process has always been a pain point for me.
I'm working on a personal app to help me find a job and manage the application process for it.
I've scraped and indexed all of the Hacker News "Who is hiring" threads since January 2013 and am putting support in for Github Jobs and Careers 2.0 to get a pretty decent list of companies I may want to work for.
The next piece is to add a tracking system to help me manage phone screens, followups, note taking, etc.
I've been learning about machine learning and slowly training it to filter out jobs at places that I wouldn't like.
Also if you're hiring, I'd love to chat: sfdev14@gmail.com.
Looks like a really good idea.
This is mine. 2 weeks ago I set out to learn how to write android apps, and do gaze tracking. Story here: http://blog.chewxy.com/2014/04/08/eyetracking-jetpack-joyrid...
The result is http://eyemap.io. It's a simple-to-use, affordable gaze tracking analytics system with your tablet. I'm still testing if people actually want the service. It's hard to make sense of it, because people sign up to the mailing list but nobody would pay for it.
I would also try partnering with specialized cloud hosting solutions like * https://www.heroku.com/ * http://www.acquia.com/ * https://www.getpantheon.com/
Unless you are seeing keen interest from people willing to pay for this directly in its current form, where I would research and learn how website or app optimization platforms market themselves.
Curious how you approached that!
What I did to measure accuracy was to draw targets on the screen, and focus my eyes on them. The error the absolute distance from the estimated pixel to the actual target pixel.
To answer your question - on a Nexus 10, there is a expected error of about 0 to 160 pixels radius in office lighting conditions.
As for small movements, I use the full resolution video of 1344xwhatever, which gives a lot more leeway in terms of movements. The movements are then smoothed over time using a moving average over 8 frames, and another smoothing algo uses a pyramid kernel.
TL;DR: lots of algorithm. Quite a number are dodgy.
Nothing really special here. Being a perfectionist I haven't been able to find any expense-tracker apps that I like. Most have either to much stuff going on, or are too focused on being pretty. Or are too 'budget' inspired. I don't have any spend-too-much problems, I just want to keep track of my expenses out of pure interest in recording stuff. So there is no budget-functionality, only pure minimal expense-income tracking. Just the way I want it.
Since I am travelling I've also made it so that I can easy input the expenses in the currency but at the same time always have a converted "main currency" visible. I haven't been able to find another app that did that in a smooth way.
I will have some basic charts also in the future, dropbox sync etc.
If you want I can notify you on email/twitter/etc when it's done.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/y5b4Yy7.png
Github: https://github.com/kijin/qade (MIT License)
QADE (Quick and Dirty Editor) allows anyone who can access it over the web to view and/or edit any file that the web server process has access to, as well as execute any arbitrary shell command and view the result right on the web page (via the "Console" tab). It's written in good ol' spaghetti PHP with a generous topping of AJAX. Because why not? The idea is insane to begin with, anyway.
The screenshot shows QADE editing itself over the web. The webshell lets me commit my changes and push it to Github, right in the comfort of a web browser. The editor component is ACE, which provides syntax highlighting for every language I care about as well as a regexp-enabled find & replace function.
The "New" button currently doesn't work, so you have to use the webshell and `touch` files that you want to create.
All in all, it's a security nightmare, and it's supposed to be. It might have some legitimate uses if you put it behind TLS, a good firewall, a chroot and HTTP authentication, but you really shouldn't take any chances with it unless you know what you're doing. If anybody uploads QADE to a shared server that you control, kick them out ASAP ;)
Ideally this would let you write code and switch quickly between your site and the editor, like an IDE's run button, but all within the same browser tab - I did a quick (and very crude) jsfiddle to show this: http://jsfiddle.net/RyT3w/1/.
Like you say there are security issues but that isn't a big deal with local web dev or within a company that has firewalls to the outside world.
[1]: https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9
Chinese Text Analyser: http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/
A tool for analysing and segmenting Chinese text to help identify content appropriate for your vocab level and help prioritise which words in a given piece of text you should learn.
It also opens large text files instantly.
It's an open-source pocketable e-paper device with an (Arduino compatible) ATmega, USB transceiver, Real Time Clock, FRAM, and coin cell Li-Ion rechargeable via USB. It also has five buttons along the top. Whole thing should be around 4mm thick. Repo here: http://github.com/Hylian/arducard
Some potential applications: QR codes, barcodes for rewards cards, Google Auth OTP, text terminal for a Raspberry Pi, etc.
Unfortunately, it seems I missed a certain small detail... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/538662/missedtrace.png
You can buy a cute dev-kit that works as a MSP430 Launchpad Boosterpack and has extension headers for Arduino, etc. off Digikey.
Finishing touches on a new music search engine
In my spare time, I'm working on http://fivestar.io, which gives you the best Amazon item for a query and breaks it down by price range. So you can find the 'best' product based on relevance, popularity, reviews, and cost, without having to compare reviews and popularity yourself.
The results still need some work; sometimes Amazon's API returns illogical price brackets, so a fallback is necessary, but I'm pretty happy with it at the moment.