Ask HN: What projects are you working on?

219 points by mfalcon ↗ HN
I've recently finished working on some clients projects and now I've got some time to work on my own projects. I'd like to know in which projects the hn people is working on for some inspiration.

513 comments

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In my free time, I contribute to the project uCoin [1], protocol + softwares building P2P crypto-currencies based on individuals and Universal Dividend. It's based on WoT as opposed to bitcoin-like cryptocurrency based on PoW. [1] http://ucoin.io
You probably want to get your landing page proof-read since it contains a number of spelling and grammatical errors.
I'm trying to collect and gather all free programming learning resources from the Internet and index them. URL : http://reSRC.io

[edit] Feedback is welcome!

It's not a product, but I am trying to get better at meditation. Being able to calm yourself is an invaluable skill for a hacker.
I've been thinking of trying to work on this myself. Both as a way to manage stress in my life and as a way to put myself in a better creative mindset. Any good resources/tips?
I'm a meditation novice so take this with a grain of salt, but the only "For Dummies"-book I've ever enjoyed was "Meditation For Dummies".

It's not a heavy read like some meditation tomes can be but it's not very dumbed down either (IMHO), and it recognizes that some people are interested in the spiritual parts, some the philosophical, while some are only interested in the practical. The book has them all to a good extent, but helps you navigate to the parts that are of use to you.

I'm sure YMMV and different books suit different people, but this one worked well for me. I recommend it, but regardless of what resource you use: There is calm to be found, and it can feel great. Good luck!

Edit: Grammar.

Make sure that when you sit(preferably lotus position) that you are comfortable. You can't meditate if you are uncomfortable. Focus on your breath as it goes in your lungs and your belly rises. Thoughts will appear, gently shift your attention back to the breath. Start with short(10 minute) sessions twice a day then move up if you wanna get better at it. And finally, meditation is a tool for self-exploration. Don't treat it like a chore. : )
Conquest of Mind by Eknath Easwaran
I've got a monitoring service I'm spinning up that came from my main project needing another monitoring service (one external, one internal) ... that's coming along well and almost done, \o/
I'm working on a piece of hardware to measure the progress of fermentation (as one of my hobbies is brewing). I'm going to do this through the use primarily of an FPGA to measure the speed of sound through the liquid.

http://hackaday.io/project/1231-Zymeter

You are busy. For which type of fermentations does this work? For making vodka, beer, pilsner, etc.
I've been working on http://rwt.to for a while now, which is a public transit planner for South Africa. It's meant to be a replacement for Google Transit, with fare calculations. I'm accountant/consultant by day, and programmer by night. An example route for those not in South Africa: https://rwt.to/*H5ZVyZFo6. Almost production-ready, most work lies in gathering data as our transit agencies don't supply GTFS data like most 1st world countries :)

EDIT: brief on what it is.

Cresta to Sandton returns a 502.
Working on Ghostnote which is a contextual notes & todo app. It allow you to add notes to Folders, Files, Applications, Documents open in applications and even URLs.

Don't think there is anything like it out there.

It will look kind of like this:

http://grab.by/xJIG

Huh? That link shows a 404, and ghostnote.com seems to be a drum enthusiasts community.
Sorry I was an idiot should be fixed now.
This sounds interesting, but the URL isn't working (404). Nor is ghostnote.com/uploads (same 404), and ghostnote.com redirects to "ghostnote.net the drum builder's community".
Sorry I was an idiot should be fixed now.
I'm working on an enterprise honeypot framework with an emphasis on internal honeypots that alerts a network administrator as soon as an attacker messes with it. An example would be a fake PHP myadmin page that alerts a security engineer as soon as it receives a POST request

It's closed source but I've finished the architecture for the software and a couple of the services (MySQL, Web, FTP). They are really cool in my opinion. I'm writing this in Java (yuck but great at the same time), so packaging each service as a Jar file makes deployment super super easy.

It's actually been really successful thus far (and really easy to write, only a few hundred lines). I think enterprises need to use more "trickery" in their security systems and I don't think a framework exists for this previously. It is really powerful to know that

if (honeypotTouched){ //critical alert }

A lot of honeypot software is old and does not send you alerts when something bad happens to it. Most are external facing. I guess a better name for this is "canary". I got the idea my second time sitting through mubix's "Attacker Ghost Stories" talk.

That does sound pretty interesting, though I'm not sure if the enterprise folk would pay for it.

I know on my personal hosts I tend to grep the access logs for requests to /wp-admin, /phpmyadmin, and blacklist IPs that make request to them. I should probably just switch to using fail2ban to do the processing, but I like the notices posted to my internal xmpp server.

Hey I appreciate the response. I'm honestly not sure if they will buy it. If it's cheap enough and portable enough I feel it could be extremely effective in drawing attention from attackers.

If not I guess I'll just open source it and turn it into a con talk =).

I'm working on a service which provides (obfuscated) aliases of your users e-mail addresses on your own domain. It only requires some API calls to generate the aliases and eliminates e-mail servers or servers to process the e-mails. Started working on it after a request of a fellow HN'er.

Check it out on: http://mailobfusc.com

I'm not sure I understand the tradeoff here.

It sounds like people are gaining a little bit of extra privacy (by preventing spammers harvesting your email) while sacrificing a ton of privacy (by allowing a a third party MitM to intercept all of their emails to and from that domain).

I actually like the idea a whole lot, but I'd prefer if this could be done in some provably confidential way (where your service has no ability to see the content of messages, only To and From).

Of course you're putting some kind of trust in a third party. But the idea here is that you do that with all your good intentions and have a better alternative than just plain listing the address. It is up to us to prove our reliability, got some ideas on how to do that, but love to discuss that with you!

Apart from that it could also provide a service to your customers with the webhooks you utilize.

It's not hard to believe in good intentions, but a bit harder to believe that your service is and will always be secure. One breach and suddenly millions of emails from thousands of domains from old backups are all over the internet. There is a way of making a service like this with minimal risk if you have a full breach, but it's hard to verify that as an outsider.
I've been writing the documentation for my neural net powered 3D Reconstruction WebAPI that creates lip sync'ing 3D avatars from a single photo: www.3d-avatar-store.com
Interesting--have you written up much about how you do it?
It's exposed as an API, so others can drive the process. If you're asking how the neural nets are trained, that's discussed in the power point hosted on our blog.
This is my startup http://skyul.com and right now I'm implementing a proxy server in php. So mostly working for fun, I think this is what's most important.
I've been working on http://trailers.flix.ie, I'm looking to finish the main site off soon, but trying to figure out the best way to get background video/media to work on tablet and mobile or what's the next best solution.
Have just launched an app to enable people of all skill levels to create music - http://beatwave.co
Cool! Reminds me a bit of the Tenorion.
You should probably know: You just lost a sale/install because you only target one platform, a mobile one even.
Yeah reality is we only have enough dev resources to pick one. iOS is a good platform to start on because if things go well there then there's a chance it will do well elsewhere and on the flip side if doesn't go well then it's probably not worth investing in an android, windows mobile ver etc.

What platform would have been your pref ?

It's unfortunate, definitely. I would have liked a desktop/web "client", if you will. But android/windows, definitely.

Look forward to trying this on a platform I have.

An actor library which lets you run easily addressable processes on multiple machines in Python. And a Colosseum type RPG for the fun of it.
Working on a Digital Audio Workstation in HTML5 / Web Audio API, front and back end: http://hya.io
This is one of the projects I most admire in the space. It's the ideal I set my programming learning around when I started teaching myself this stuff. Upvoted
Thanks wturner! If you ever want to develop a plugin for hya, feel free to contact me for any info or support you need.
I don't have the time or the know how for that to be honest. I do think you're ahead of the curve in terms of the opportunities that are possible. If I were you I would seriously try and pitch your know-how to Yamaha or some of the other music instrument companies about building things in this realm. I heard a talk by Chris Lowis that Yamaha was exploring the web audio api for MIDI devices etc.
I'll probably try that. I'm trying to expand the project, currently.
We are working on a MTurk like system for audio/video transcription. We have developed a four step process to ensure that the accuracy as high as possible irrespective of the difficultly level of the file.

Check it out at https://scribie.com

If your cost of transcription is above 10-15 cents/minute email me at 1000app at gmail and I can give you some feedback on how to get there.

If you are already below, then Kudos.

Cost of transcription is not really the problem. The problem is quality.
I agree, I learned you have to have both human + machine to do this efficiently and with quality.
I'm working on a site for enthusiasts of construction toys - initially Meccano / Erector but not system tied, they're just what I know best :-) Model galleries, plans, collection management and sales facilities for dealers.
I'm building a Bittorrent Sync alternative aimed at ease of use to solve http://www.xkcd.com/949/:

https://github.com/rakoo/rakoshare

Just out of curiosity, why not just share it through Google Drive? 15 gb is more than enough even for bluray.
I want a Free-as-in-free-speech alternative. I also don't want users to depend on yet another third-party (do you remember Megaupload ?), and I certainly don't want someone to know who shares what with you.
I working on open source personal finance app (Web, Android and probably iOS). It will be small and simple enough to deploy to Heroku's free dyno without any hosting fee.

I know out there have a lot already, but I want a modern and open source version of it (Web + Mobile app).

I am working on my hobby project http://techpost.com which is basically manually built tech post index.

Other than that, I am developing few small websites, and still selling and brokering domain names.