Ask HN: What are you building?

59 points by mukgupta ↗ HN
Got anything you've been working on in the last few weeks/months? Go ahead give us a short demo of it! What does it do? What problem does it solve? When will it launch?

126 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread
I can answer this. We are working on a do-it-yourself SaaS tool that marketers can use to create mobile engagement campaigns like incentive-based mobile contests, games, surveys, etc. To create one, marketers currently have to rely on developers and designers which can cost them a lot of time and money. With our tool, marketers will be simply able to pick a ready-made campaign, customize with content, rules and difficulty levels, and simply publish it in a matter of minutes for a fraction of the cost. We are actually working on a demo video as I write this and hopefully you'll be able to see it over the weekend. So keep your eyes open.
http://www.hackerlunch.com

I am working on an iOS app that lets hackers meet up with each other and have lunch.

I moved to San Francisco from Bangladesh last year and found it tough to meet other hackers. Being rather introverted, tech meetups didn't really work for me. I felt that a one-on-one meetup would be ideal. So that's what I'm building.

I'm hoping to launch within a few weeks. If it sounds interesting to you, you can sign up for an email notification when I launch, just go to hackerlunch.com. I'll probably do a Show HN once I launch as well.

Sounds like a great idea, sort of like a non-romantic version of Tinder for hackers.
Are you launching this specific to SF, or other cities as well?
No, It'll be open to everyone. I originally intended to limit this to SF but have changed my mind since.

I initially tested out this idea by creating a simple form that asks users for their name, email and zipcode and manually pairing them up myself via email. I limited that to San Francisco zipcodes only, since I figured it not doing so would mean that I would have a bunch of users who may not have anyone nearby to get paired with.

A lot of people who weren't in SF actually emailed me and expressed their disappointment in not being able to try it out. So this time I'm opening it up to everyone.

If you are the only one in your city, you'll get a message telling you so and you'll be paired whenever a new user in your city signs up.

If anyone has any better ideas, I'm open to suggestions regarding this.

Since posting this I've had a few people advice me to limit the launch to one or a few cities.

It seems like a good suggestion, since the app wouldn't be too useful until there's a least a few users nearby. Focusing my attention on one city would definitely help with that.

I'm still considering the best strategy, so if you have any advice, comment here or email me at ashrafulsf@gmail.com

Sounds great man! Let me know if I can help out from USC. -fellow Bangladeshi
This is a really cool idea! Glad you're launching worldwide. Good luck with the launch.
Reminds me of letslunch.com
The basic idea is fairly similar. The key difference is that, instead of you requesting someone to have lunch, the app automatically pairs you with someone.

I believe this would make the experience much more natural and fun.

Also it solves the problem, where a large number of users are only interested in having lunch with a few people (VIPs on LetsLunch).

I'm hoping this will make HackerLunch more about meeting interesting people and less about "networking".

I haven't used LetsLunch in years but the last time I did it was random pairing. You couldn't actually decide who to meet although you could submit who you'd be interested in and what general areas of interest were. If they changed that aspect then it sounds like you're building the original LetsLunch concept.
Hey guys! I'm the founder of http://LetsLunch.com we still have the automatching feature which schedules your lunches two days in advance. infact it is the most popular feature on our site. We do have a mobile app coming up in few weeks that will have same day matches and other geolocation/mobile based stuff. Good to see other sites coming up in this field.
Oh sorry, I never used letslunch and always thought you needed to request lunches with people. Glad to know the automatching is a popular feature, since that is what my entire product is.

Any thoughts or advice on HackerLunch? I'm sure you have a lot of interesting insights into the space since you guys have been doing it so long.

I'm in a similar space as the founder of Glassbreakers. We're automating the process of connecting women who can mentor each other. We should all lunch -
Sure..we should all lunch.. how does october 1st sounds like for lunch at plants restaurant in financial district.
that works! I'm [redacted] shoot me an email and i'll send you a calender invite.
Awesome idea, but the background image (the cityscape) takes about 7 seconds to load for me. Try optimising it down to a smaller filesize?
A toy native code compiler for a made-up language where all functions are anonymous.

All programming languages are horrible in certain crippling ways. It's my hope that this one will be slightly less bad in some areas (undoubtedly with the expense of some glaring deficits). It's pretty cool to have first-class functions, type extension methods, PHP-like vectors/maps, and still end up with a sub-4KB exe.

You forgot a link to the Hello world example :)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ovaludi.no...

I've been working (and still am) on an Android puzzle game using libgdx. The puzzle requires to fill a board with Xs and Os while obeying the no-three rule (no three Xs or Os in a row) and the same number rule (same number of Xs and Os on each line and column).

The puzzle turned out to be quite challenging and addictive, similar to sudoku. The most difficult part of development was that I would start the game to see check a new feature and I wouldn't get back to development until I finished filling the board.

The most interesting part of development was writing the algorithm that generates the board in order to ensure a unique solution and account for the various levels of difficulty.

I've already published a version of the game and I'm currently working on adding some features to it.

http://cutcss.com

Creating responsive CSS with flexible layouts is still ridiculously hard, mostly done by hand and I want to fix that with a GUI.

I think you have a small layout bug on your website: When you mouseover the animated stick man at the bottom of the page some text pops up, but it's in the top-left corner of the page and half off the page (tested in IE11, Chrome and Firefox).
I told you CSS is hard haha. Thanks for the heads up, it's now fixed.
I am working on a free Windows application for Nest products (Learning Thermostat and Protect Smoke & CO alarm).

Primarily a notifier (heating on, Smoke or CO emergency etc), it also gives you thermostat temperature and home/away control.

You can see the status of your Nest devices at-a-glance by means of a series of icons (one for each device) down in the taskbar notification area (aka system tray).

Currently seeking beta testers!

More details at http://richardeverett.com/Nest

All feedback (good and bad) as well as feature suggestions welcomed.

Credits - A built from scratch cryptocurrency that seeks to solve a few pain points with current cryptocurrencies.

* Aiming for instantaneous(ish) transaction confirmations.

* Much easier and safer to develop against the protocol than Satoshi clients.

* New consensus algorithm that doesn't require paying $2 million per day in electricity and hardware to secure the network.

http://getcredits.io https://github.com/CryptoCredits/credits

I'm working on a Chrome extension for Gmail. The main feature is Tab completion of templates. If you do a lot of Gmail it might save you a lot of time:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quicktext-for-chro...

This looks v. cool (not tried it yet).

What would be awesome would be if the templates could have a bunch of {placeholders} within. So I type the initial prompt and press tab and it autofills the text, then I can tab through the placeholders filling them in.

http://dineserve.com

We're building a marketplace where chefs buy local ingredients directly from purveyors.

Our complementary back-of-the-house app for iOS has 500+ MAU and we're adding ordering functionality to it this month!

We'll also open our API once we have enough restaurants and purveyors onboard that will allow developers to mine our growing dataset.

Looking for help and also would love to hear how developers want to use our data! Shoot me an email if you're interested in chatting at kirill@[projectname].com.

More like what am I "writing"!

I am writing a free ebook on Ionic Framework / Angular / Firebase. Check it out http://www.innovie.com/

I will post on Amazon soon but subscribe to get early preview.

We're scratching our own itch and we're building Pushline

http://www.getpushline.com/

It's an Android to Mac/PC notification mirroring and device control app.

Still in some sort of public beta, accepting feedbacks, enjoying the engineering challenge behind it, figuring out what matters most to us in order to build it next.

Linux too, please? An REST API would be sweet.
http://rushapp.co

Rush is Spritz powered speed reading app for iOS. I've always been fascinated with speed reading. Decided to build this a couple of months back.

Dev work is finished. Getting ready for launch.

I am writing a Wavelet Transform and de-noising library over OpenCV. Its fun but tough.
We launched a jobs board for the Finance industry earlier this week:

  https://www.financejobs.co :)
If you're in the finance space, email me (in my profile) for a great deal you can't refuse!
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A how-to guide for technical founders that suddenly have to hire and manage a development team.
Software-wise, just got a few scrappy demos I've thrown together. One creates an RSS feed for YouTube channels so you can subscribe to them as video podcasts. Problem is, it relies on hot-linking Google's servers and I'm sure it breaks all sorts of conditions in their Terms of Service. Still, want to finish it so I can at least use it myself.

Outside of that, I'm working on a screencast series for the Meteor JavaScript framework:

http://meteortips.com/screencasts

Launches in a few days. Then I'll start working on the next update to my (free) book about Meteor:

http://meteortips.com/book

:)

Built and launched http://www.encorebeat.com in the past couple weeks. We found that finding new, good electronic dance music is very time-consuming/difficult, so we built a Product Hunt for EDM.

It got a great reception on PH itself!

http://yathletics.com - a men's activewear company that's going to make only one product per category.

I think apparel brands offer too many choices so I'm creating a brand that keeps it simple but at the same time invests in making very high quality products. For ex: the first product we launched is our athletic shirt - SilverAir. It's made using silver which kills the odor-causing bacteria in your sweat, so you can wear the shirt for the entire day and feel fresh, or reuse the shirt more often (i do).

The fabric is completely new and something we made from scratch. Without letting cost be a factor, we sourced some of the best yarns you can buy and achieved a feel that is super comfortable while being lightweight and breathable. To manufacture, we use seamless knitting machines so the body of the shirt does not have any stitches on it. (trust me, the silver is what sells but the most loved feature by our customers is the material and how you feel as if you're not wearing anything - in a good way)

This is awesome but why do you only target men?
1) I started building this out for myself and for some of my male friends who shared the same sentiment.

2) Men and women shop differently and I feel as if women want more choices so the model does not necessarily work for them. That said, I've received a lot of interest from women for the first product we launched so plans may change in the future.

Keep in mind that women buy a lot of clothes for men. So even if you're just making menswear, don't forget to target women in your marketing and research.
I've been working on a video course for conversion optimization in software companies, and it's been taking much longer than I expected. There's no convenient way to show-and-tell, other than an email mini-course I made for it, and I don't want to link to that for fear of shilling.

What does it do? Ideally, get J. Random Product Person at a software company up to the point where they can confidently A/B test the marketing site and increase sales of the company.

What problem does it solve? "We know we should be A/B testing but we don't know how to get started." and "So we did A/B tests, and had a few results, and we think the business is better off than it was before, but we're not sure, and we're not confident that 'throw stuff at the wall' is the best way to go about this. Do you have any suggestions?", which are the two most common pieces of feedback from software companies about A/B testing I've had in the last, oh, five years or so.

When will it launch? Last August ^H^H December ^H^H May ^H^H July ^H^H I'm really hoping to ship it before Halloween.

An integrated party lighting / video projection software that listens to music real-time and allows synchronization to different metrical levels.

Website: http://wavesum.net

Here I tutorial for some of the video control stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02TU6ysHIW4 The DMX lighting part is in progress.

All feedback is welcome.

This looks really cool, thanks for sharing.

My immediate feedback would be adding a short, to the point, explanation of what it does on the homepage. Also the video looks cool but takes too long to begin showing the product in action, I think. If I arrived at the site I'd be unsure why I want to hear the AIs explain themselves before I understood what they did.

Good luck with it!

I am developing a a bucket list application, http://calm-gorge-2271.herokuapp.com Is a web application which creates a bucketlist for you and provides you a list of ideas which user can add to their list. It allows user to add a target date and date of achievement for their ideas. Still under development phase and looking to complete within a month,also figuring out other featu res like giving ratings when user completes their bucketlist idea!
I am working on a platform that helps you to write unit tests for your application code. Unit testing is currently yet another code base that you have to maintain and change each time you change your main code base. There is surely value in it, but I believe that we dont extract extra value out of them than mere assertions.

http://www.dhi.io