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Ask HN: What are you working on right now?
78 points by andrewtbham on Oct 20, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 195 comments
What are you working on right now?

I'll start... I am working for as a contractor for a company that sends messages (phone calls, text messages, and emails) for schools and businesses. Currently I'm working on an android app that is a front end for they system.

in my spare time i work on a side project... search engine with integrated social bookmarking http://www.searchstream.co




I'm selling the majority of my stuff and prepping my condo for sale. I expect my employer to go out of business soon and I have to leave the USA once that happens (my work permit is non-transferable and the green card application didn't work out).


Wow, that sounds like a bummer. I'm really sorry to hear that. May the future hold better luck for you.


Well, it would totally suck if we were carrying any unsecured debt. Luckily we live below our means so we have (some) money banked.

So I'm considering taking the family for a 6 month world tour (while I'm still young enough to handle it)... if we're frugal we might be able to stretch it out to a full year.

Guess I better put "get homeschool materials" on my todo list eh?


Do it. My parents took me (and my siblings) out of school at age 14 for four months in Asia (three months in China, rest of the time in Thailand, Malaysia, HK) and it was a great experience. Already had an appreciation of it but grew up with a massive appreciation of travelling to new places and seeing different parts of our planet. Will always be thankful for my parents having done that for us.

Have been back to China twice since, Thailand a few more times, etc.


My parents are totally opposite, I have only visited two states of my country (excluding the state where I live i.e. the awesomest gujarat). So now I totally lack any enthusiasm for traveling.

But I hadn't realized it till you pointed your enthusiasm out. Umm... don't know whether to thank you or hate you from my guts.


You are awesome.

Truly and emphatically awesome. What a great way to make the most of a bad situation. I think it'll be great for your kids – they'll learn so much in the process.

I really wish you the best of luck.


The same thing, basically, happened to a guy I know from the UK. He had lived here for years and was working on an application for permanent residency, but now he's no longer in the USA because of issues with his employer and visa.


Curious to know (and for entirely selfish reasons) what classification of work permit is non-transferable?


I had a H1b but just about maxed it out so now I hold a TN1 (I'm Canadian).

The upside of the TN is that I can (in theory) get an unlimited number of them and there is no cap on how many can be issued in a year.

The downside is that if I step off of US soil I immediately lose it and have to apply for a new one at the border when I attempt to re-enter. Should the INS agent dislike me for any reason (or for no reason), s/he can deny my application and deny me entry to the US. I would have no recourse if that happened... which makes crossing the border kind of stressfull (so I don't do it anymore).


I'm on a TN too. It's transferrable as far as I know because I've just done it (well I guess they just issue you a new one). I know the nightmare at the border fairly intimately. I always get secondary inspections. The second last time I got this whole giant grilling, with the officer threatening to not let me in. The last time the office said "I don't know why you're in here (secondary inspection), is there something you want from us?"


Currently working on a Super Nintendo Emulator in Java for my senior project in college.

The intent is to make it easy to embed the emulator as an applet and link it to a ROM, save states, etc. so visitors to your site can play an SNES game at a point of your choosing (IE a blog post talking about the atmosphere of Zeal in Chrono Trigger with accompanying demo).

We're also hoping to allow Javascript to receive information about what is happening inside of the game, and possibly to interact with the emulator or respond to certain events (IE someone makes a monitor for a specific game that triggers events on, say, the player beating a level).


FYI, there's a project called JSNES where someone ported a NES emulator to JS / canvas, complete with audio!

http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/


That's a really cool idea. I hope to see a post on here when it's playable!


The control system for the automated Heat Exchange Recirculating Mash System[1] my brother, my dad, and I are building. We're trying to introduce some repeatability into our home beer brewing experiments.

The biggest surprise so far has been just how time-consuming and expensive it is to source and buy food grade materials & equipment that can withstand up to 80 °C. Even with heat-resistent plastics instead of stainless steel, we're still spending over $1000 on this part of the set-up alone.

Code is very early stage, but what I have so far is here: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/mash-lauter-control (mostly I've been working on the electrical components up to this point).

[1] An example of the type of system (and a strong influence on our designs) can be found here: http://powersbrewery.home.comcast.net/~powersbrewery/


Today was my last day at Microsoft. I'm taking time off to work on an XBOX indie game, and also the 3D engine I've been tinkering with on and off for 9 years.


"What are you working on" was the standard conversation starter at the Startup School mixers. It's amazing how there are so many makers; makes me feel like the world's being improved every second.


I'm glad I'm not the only one who noted that! That's one of the things that struck me: in "regular" settings, the usual question is "what do you do?"; at Startup School, it was always "what are you working on?".

Subtle but telling difference.


Creating public profile pages for Notifo.com services and projects. We are lucky to have an active developer community and unfortunately our current system of having to manually link up ( http://notifo.com/services ) cool projects and services we find is getting to be cumbersome. Service accounts will be able to provide screenshots/video and detailed description/setup info for their service. Developers that build projects (as we like to call them.. usually many notifo related things on github, cpan, etc) can setup a public project profile as well.

As for why I'm doing that, it's to address a common FAQ - "how do I subscribe to this service?" We want to give services a page to describe that and more. Kinda like your typical Add-on/Extension Gallery found at the likes of Mozilla, Chrome, et cetera.


I'm trying to get my side project launched for the November Startup Sprint thing. I'm building an app to help make life easier for people with Diabetes (my wife is a Type I): http://diabeti.ca


Freshman CS.

"job": homework, trying to improve my grades. personal: implementation of MIDAS [1].

[1] http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html


Looks like MIDAS has the party touch. :D


I'm learning C++ so I can get a job. I've been programming since 1976, doing C since 1987 and embedded C since 2001 but there are more job ads for COBOL than C programmers.


Working on my next Android game, hopefully it will come out this week - maybe Thursday ;)

Then going back to do some updates to my other games.

In my personal experiences in the Android market, the more polish I put on my games, the more they sell. Hoping to keep the ball rolling.


Awesome, could share your experiences regarding selling Android apps (Hours put in to sales made)?


I like the personal experience tip... i should have added that to the question.. what are you working on and share an insight from it.


Working on startup http://www.estate3d.com, a place where anyone can have their physical building/premises created in 3D for the Google Earth 3D buildings layer and/or embedded on their site.


Current fun project is an RPG played over the phone. You can try it by calling (415) 689-9751 (while my minutes last). It uses Twilio and static XML hosted on GitHub. Adding to the story is as easy as forking and making a pull request.

http://github.com/abraham/audio-rpg/


Still:

http://getmetricmail.com - An easy way to receive Google Analytics reports.


Very cool. I may have missed this but is there a way to share the links? It doesn't seem like I can add multiple recipient email addresses and the links only seem to work for my google account as far as I can tell. I guess I'd have to change the recipient to an inbox that forwards to multiple people?


You can just share the link. Also, the "multiple recipient" feature is nearly there.


How have I not heard about this?!

Quick aside, how are you for scaling? If I were to roll this out across our agency and pass it on to my circle, you'd probably see a fairly sizeable jump in usage...


We currently have about 3000 users and process way more than 20000 reports every month. So this shouldn't be a problem, although it depends on the size of your network ;)

Let me know how you like it and if you have any suggestions.


Ahh... I read your site as 30k reports total. You might want to fix that, as if it worries me, it'll probably worry others.

A running total would be cool.

Will send feedback next week.


Also, I'd try testing price points of $1.97 and $2.47 when you launch the pro version.


Djangy.com - Instant deployment and scaling for django apps. Currently in private beta.


sounds a lot like janky, which is slang for slipshod


Working on a new platform to crank out several new product prototypes.

Otto ( http://github.com/mathgladiator/otto ) = CouchDB replication to node.js

WIN ( http://github.com/mathgladiator/win ) = overly simple node.js web framework

Longbeard ( http://longbeardstudios.com/ ) = simple UI framework for engineers/scientists/longbeards like myself.


Document sorter, in perl, written with fuzzy searches, data extraction, and Baysean filtering, along with various other tricks that I haven't seen used in other document categorization systems. Should help with my paper load.

Also, and XML based (actively using namespaces/xpath/xslt, so json wouldn't cut it) network documentation and configfile creation system, as everything else I've seen out there sucks or is limited/nonextensible.


Improvements to my app http://TheWikiGame.com, making more "game types" like "Speed Race", "Least Clicks", "5 Clicks to Jesus", etc. After that, iPhone/Android apps for the game.


This is so great! My siblings and I invented "5 Clicks to Jesus" (as I'm sure many have) during some drunken family gatherings over the past two years. I had been vowing to sit down and code it when I got some free time, but you just saved me the trouble. Hats off!

PS Have you ever thought about analyzing the wikipedia graph to make the game more interactive? (I study combinatorics.) I thought it would be fun to have the game give you feedback ("Warmer! Colder!") as you muddle through.


Awesome, thanks! I love hearing about people who invented the game - people tell me all the time, "hey, I invented that!" :-) I certainly did not invent the game, but I'm determined to make something awesome out of it.


that game is cool... i think you might could clean up the front page a little... to make it more obvious... but the idea for the game is great! did you make it yourself? do you make lots of games? do you do this full time?


Thanks. Yeah, the front page is pretty messy/busy - any simple ideas to make it cleaner?

It's just me working on the game, part time right now, and it's the first game I've made.


here are some ideas: 1) integrate the "Play the game now" box with the "How to play The Wiki Game" box.

So be one box that has: " click as few links as possible to get from "Banana" to "Britney Spears", as fast as you can!"

where Banana and Britney Spears are replaced with your actual words.

2) have a very clear "start" button. It's not clear without spending a few moments to understand to click the first term to start the game.

good luck. it's a cool game... another thing might be to show an example or some strategy tips. that might not should be on the first page though...


Hacking on mrdoob's Three.js / WebGL:

http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/three/three-obj-3.png

http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/three/examples/obj_convert_test...

http://github.com/alteredq/three.js


Currently working on synchronising information across a wide area network when the updates are streaming in to all machines from various sources. Application is soft real-time and semi-safety-critical.

Also working on an alternative to the (extended/unscented/whatever) Kalman Filter the better to detect and track fast moving objects in cluttered environments.

Also working on

+ a web site for my local math association

+ write-up of a 1800 dimensional optimisation problem

+ write-up of a variant data structure

+ write-up of P vs NP

+ write-up of a real-world example of a fold catastrophe

+ finishing the analysis of the routines people sent me ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404347 )

I've also got a dozen other projects mothballed, ready to be re-started when the time is right.

But this week I'm mostly organising the MathsJam weekend. We've got 60 paid-up delegates and now 20 submitted talks. We can accommodate 120 people (and possibly stretch to 150) and need 30 to 40 talks. Money comes in, contracts to sign, people to cajole, all in the name of a weekend of fun.

Hope it works ...


I work for a telecom company as a web developer during the day. (PHP/MySQL/Joomla/XHTML/CSS/JS/jQuery).

Finishing up some work for a side job now. If any of you guys need some reasonably inexpensive web dev work, let me know, side work is my way of drumming up $ to launch a side project and provides my traveling/leisure budget as well :).


can u give an idea what reasonably inexpensive means?


Send an email to ryandavies@gmail.com and I'd be happy to talk with you.


Any reason this was downvoted? Typically in the 40-60/per hour range depending upon the work, if your objection was to me not posting this.


It was probably downvoted because people like numbers and formulas upfront versus having to email you.


may be he's not looking for freelancers but just wandering what's your rate.


Trying to get a bunch of features released for http://verbapp.com/. Just launched http://hellohype.com/ and need to start getting the word out about it. Also need to release an iPhone app I made. Rebuilding my blog (using HTML5 and a whole bunch of fun new things). Getting the plans together with a co-founder for a secret new startup. Designing a whole new brand/site design for a current startup (and sorting out some founder issues with it). Oh and my day job (UI/UX designer). I think that's about it (apart from a bunch of tiny projects, like a font I'm halfway through creating).


Hey, I looked at http://verbapp.com and couldn't help but notice the text is generally a little small. I initially was struggling to read it. I opened up inspector and started fiddling. Would you ever consider doing it a bit more like this - http://i.imgur.com/ic5F8.png - or is it intentionally neat?


I've been redesigning the homepage (one of the many new things that need to be deployed). As monitor resolutions get higher I think font sizes will go up (there's certainly a trend that way). I'll have a bit more of a think about what's acceptable. Thanks for bringing that up.


http://www.glancely.com/ Instant Etsy Search

Also: http://www.bigcrumbs.com/ Cash Back Shopping

Oh, and I work at a bank. I don't sleep much.


I can't express how much I despise Etsy. Good luck.


Why?


There is a vast amount of discontent in the Etsy community, and this has been the case as long as I've been involved (2006). The complaints of their customers apply to nearly every area of the company and are well-founded.


Interesting. Etsy was the idea I had years before they actually did it, and always regretted not following it up.

Hmm...


A large number of Etsy imitators have sprung up (ArtFire, CraftIsArt, Cargoh, Bonanza, SilkFair, Zibbet, Folksy, etc.) but none of them seem to be particularly great to me.

Etsy is pissing off their best customers every month, and thousands have already left in disgust. They have a large lead in terms of size and funding, but they don't seem particularly capable of getting anything done. The market is definitely ready for a polished craft market with decent management and good marketing.


I am working on a CMS that is "data first, design next". There is a large number of people saying people hate filling up forms. They hate wizards. But existing apps compounded the problem instead of solving it. Applications like Squarespace and Weebly are design first. This is where my app differs. I make it mandatory to have a required minimum data like images and company profile ready before they dive in to create a simple website.

I will be releasing this app in a few weeks. Thank you for asking. Bookmark http://getsetweb.in

I am located in Mumbai, India.


http://Spojit.com We're trying to make it easier to create and share your online business card/identity when you meet people at events. We want to make it more seamless than the two-handed exchanges of business cards that happen at events - and you gotta do it and repeat with so many people ! Spojit is about to go into alpha very soon. Do sign up for an invite if you wish to help us test out the alpha version.


http://profquotes.feedladder.com - funny prof quote app

Similar to an idea I showed earlier on HN (http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com), I'm basically trying to generalize this as a "Reddit for tweets" to create a collaboratively made twitter feeds. Idea being others could make a group-administered feed on a particular subject.


I'm working on a series of tutorials that teach web designers how to take their skills to the iPhone and iPad and start building native iOS apps. Each tutorial will go through the full process of designing one screen of a fictional app in Photoshop and then taking that mockup and building the interface using UIKit. Both the PSD and Xcode projects will be included and each tutorial will cost less than most computer books.


K&Rv2! Since I had issues with University (got admitted into one, but had visa constraints and missed the resumption date), I'm at home for a year (yet, again).

So, I'm going to spend this time (against my mother's better judgement, until she finds me some work or something when she's tired of me being in the house) learning C properly, learning assembly, and so on.

But, so far, just K&R :)


Work: sports-related startup. Perso: trying to swim (not just float around) in open water every day all year round, essentially hacking my mind (meditation) & body (gasp reflex) to withstand the cold temperatures. Currently 12 deg C. [Edited to add: http://www.coldwaterswimming.com]


Mostly doing client work but put up a personal site to summarise my side-projects and also built this one afternoon the other week:

http://languagesplit.com/

Had never built a bookmarklet before and not sure if it's too embarrassingly basic to try and promote, or worth doing more with. Would appreciate any suggestions/feedback.


While it looks nice, I'm not so sure about learning a language by using Google Translate.

The results produced are not always examples of good writing.


Oh, it wouldn't really be a primary method of learning a language, more like a supplement. e.g., take a course or online program at night, then at work you run this on some news articles for practice just to extend yourself on certain words.

I know very little Spanish but just by reading Cormac McCarthy books (which have some dialogue in Spanish only) I have picked up a few extra words and certainly enough to have a rough idea of what is being said in those books.

Thanks very much for taking the time to look at it though.


This is good. Can you make it configurable, so one may choose the language of translation?


Yeah, that wouldn't be too hard so I'll do that at some point.

Trying to think of how best to promote it. Maybe email a few language sites and see if it appeals to any? It's not the sort of thing that SEO will work that well for. ("learn spanish" etc would be incredibly competitive.)


As far as bookmarklets go people generally care what they do, not how they're made.


A WPF application desktop search engine/launcher. A little like Quicksilver/Ubiquity but with a new kind of interface and scope.


Currently, I am working on homework: representing a sudoku puzzle instance in a knowledge representation description language. Next I will study for a midterm in another class until I can't manage to stay awake any more or 6 AM arrives, whichever comes first.

At 6 AM, I will shower and go to work as a software developer where I'm transitioning to building a Windows application in .NET after working in web development (PHP, JS) in all of my previous professional experience.

After I get off work, I will meet with a professor before going to class and taking the midterm.

The worst part is trying to cheer up and encourage a friend in a similar situation, because I don't feel like I am helping. :(

In my spare time, I am solving the Google AI Challenge (http://www.ai-contest.com/) and working with someone on a side project which helps groups collaborate. If the side project goes well, then we will be co-founders in a new venture.


Building / re-building in-house pages for a company, for which I'm making a lot of entertaining utility code with APIs as simple as I can manage, which I'm finding is woefully scarce in the .NET world. Studying AI for my capstone essay. Learning on the side. Trying to figure out where the f&#@^ money goes.


http://github.com/jdodds/voussoir a node.js app for generating Arch linux livecds.

It'll sit behind a pylons app in the near future, most likely.

Making a website-as-service for making linux livecds is something I've wanted to do for a while, and the few projects out there that do it do it poorly, imo.

I had the start of something like this using Ubuntu a while ago, but frankly there's not much more room on the Ubuntu isos, and it's kinda a pain to make sure you're generating them correctly.

Arch is such a simple distro that it's easy to automate. The node.js app is pretty much just a wrapper over mkarchiso, but if that didn't exist it wouldn't be too hard to write.

Other than that, preparing for an interview at a sweet-looking company in Cleveland tomorrow, and finishing up some stuff at my current place of employment.


I've wanted to do this for so long, good luck, on the app and the interview


Thank you! The interview went well, just waiting on them to check my references and do a background check.

Patches welcome ;) The frontend to it may get open-sourced when I'm done with it, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to proceed with it yet.


Just moved to Boulder, Colorado a few months ago to start working for an agency. Doing lot's of frontend work as well as some PHP using Cake.

In my spare time, working on an implementation of the classic mac game bolo using HTML5.

http://hbolo.brianwigginton.com


http://safariextendr.com Working on polishing a safari extension community site and attempting to draw traffic in between studying for my software engineering uni exams. It's tough (on both fronts!) but I'm getting there.


1. Working on two content management systems, currently trying to reduce the code to the minimum possible, whilst still making it friendly towards new(ish) developers.

2. Storyboarding a short stop-motion film for a client

3. Writing a book (will be somewhere around 80k when all's done)

4. Studying for a taekwondo grading

I like to keep busy...


I quit my job for PlayStation three weeks ago and now I'm working for the company I've founded http://codeamplifier.com

I'm going to be creating tools that make game developers happier. First up is a tool to help with localization woes.


Aside from the boring things like taking a full course load, preparing for the ACM ICPC in November, being the ACM President, being the IT Chair of Phi Psi, and having a social life, I am co-teaching Northwestern's "Network Security and Penetration" course this quarter. The project which I'm leading a couple groups on will be a generalized web attack framework written in Python that will focus on identification of vulnerabilities, easy presentation and analysis, and exploitation.

I'm hoping it will also operate using the event-based Twisted framework instead of the standard multithreading network applications. https://bitbucket.org/agocke/attack.py


I work for Atlassian and I'm hacking away on Bamboo 2.7, a CI server. Previously we only offered a way to execute a single build but through our own dogfooding we thought a more powerful way of doing it would be to allow a developer to have a single build that runs many distributed parellel builds.

The cool part: functional test runs for some of our products have gone from about an hour to about 20 minutes because of this rewrite - so we are hoping to shorten build times for our customers too :)

http://blogs.atlassian.com/devtools/2010/10/bamboo-27-beta-p...


I'm working on coza robot: http://cozarobot.co.za

It's like Dotster for co.za domains. The current way to register co.za domains is a real pain in the butt. Oh, and it has a DNS manager built-in.


+1. I always just register a .com. Even though they're harder to find, it's less hassle. Having an easier co.za registration service is a win.


I'm helping us build a common open cloud computing foundation so everyone can focus on building applications that solve business problems.

Sure, this sounds like "marketing speak" but it isn't about that. People write apps that solve problems and they want wide distribution of those apps.

The best way for that to happen is by having a common foundation layer for all of them to run on. Is the project I'm working on the answer, I sure hope so. If not I hope you help start a better project to do it.

Re-inventing the wheel is a waste of all of our time. Having to re-architect or re-code an app to deploy it in different places is reinventing the wheel.


Sounds fascinating to me. But that might be because I've already started that better project to do it. :P


I'm trying to plan a wedding (a lot harder than any project I've started to date!) and working on some new features for http://onesentencereview.com


Teaching people the essentials of business and entrepreneurship at http://personalmba.com - an urgent need for many people, expensive alternatives, and a huge market. My first book hits shelves on 12/30: http://book.personalmba.com. Learning a lot about marketing and PR during the launch - it's a whole new world. Next step: live seminars.

That, and my wife and I are expecting our first child around the time the book comes out. Never a dull moment...


Most of my current spare time goes into making a Common Lisp bot for the current Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars. See http://ai-contest.com


Job: C++ and Java developer working on development tools in the data warehouse and BI space.

Extra curricular: An AJAX site on a LAMPP stack for aiding in teaching Computer Science. Students can create exercises and answer other students exercises. Academic purposes only.

Also working on a start-up in the Rural/farming sector to help with the sharing, transparency and analysis of information.

And planning out my next venture.. something to do with a service providing templates, distribution and collection of vouchers/coupons for small and medium businesses


Good post; very interesting to read these! I'm a mutual fund analyst by day, returned to programming a couple of months ago after a long time away to bang out an idea in Pylons. I've missed it! In hopes of getting out of my daily grind to put more time into it, I'm selling custom acrylic displays and cases, focusing on custom iPad display trees, because it's working! Will exit securities analysis next year- so unfulfilling and statistically pointless. Index your money.


Improving some algorithms and calculations that predict future energy scenarios. The prediction engine is programmed in Ruby, so performance is low (we chose ruby because of inhouse knowledge and it makes it easy to discuss with domain experts). Now, fine-tuning/micro-optimising the computation to optimize speed, so that it's fast enough for a web-request (< 200ms).

http://www.energytransitionmodel.com


I am creating a business intelligence tool for franchises. Have some seed funding from a local YC / TechStars inspired program.

Also doing some work for a company that makes international e-commerce easier for US merchants (handles billing, shipping, and duties).

And wrapping up two mobile app projects for clients.

Also I am working on getting married. That part is pretty awesome :)

Edit: technically "right now" I am working on posting comments on HN. This is not what I should be doing.


I'm building a contact import script for a hip hop artist's newsletter. Essentially its what powers the "invite your friends" button on the newsletter.

I am dealing with yahoo's contacts api at the moment. It seems that althought yahoo! provides a php sdk, a direct fetch of email addresses from a user's address book still requires a restful get request.

The yahoo php sdk makes the oauth stuff really easy though.


For my day job, I work on technical improvements for our infrastructure at Blue Box Group, and I help out in the support queue when there's especially weird problems to debug. Most things I write are shell/Perl scripts and Ruby code.

On the side, I'm always reading books on computer science and programming. One of the projects I'm working on is a toy compiler written in Ruby.


Primarily awareness building and PR for my recently launched startup - http://www.happybuy.com/

One good lesson thats recently been reinforced as part of this is that launching is really only the start of the journey. Gaining traction and building a business once the product is available takes as much if not more work.


the http://www.fortiguard.com/ network protection we have here in work has flagged your site as porn wont let me in. just FYI.


Thank you for letting me know. I have requested that fortiguard correctly reclassify my site.


the site looks good very well laid out. i did a search for ipod and mac book pro and didn't get relevant results.


Thanks for the feedback. I'll need to look into improving the search relevancy. Sometimes if you filter to a specific store or department you'll get more relevant results - but I understand this isn't completely obvious at the moment.


Looks good. Best of luck with the venture!


Two side projects, one that delays RSS feeds in your inbox until 5 PM - see http://rssafter5.appspot.com, and one that only sends your email every 4 hours, which isn't online yet, as well as prepping for the ACM ICPC, where I'm improving rapidly but still really far behind most other people.


I'm updating my CV so i can get a job for those days i am not in uni, also working on a small app made around someone elses work parsing Civilization 5 replay files into HTML5/JS in-browser replays. http://github.com/flexd/civ5replays -- Too little time, so many ideas!


I'm working on growing the customer base for my company, http://dnsimple.com/ while at the same time servicing multiple development contracts that I have open and also maintaining the dotMP registry, registrar and chi.mp services. Sometimes I also get out of the house. :-)


Job: SugarCRM customization for a client. Own: building a website for file administration and sharing, to learn Rails 3


Day job here is making Dynamics CRM awesome...have you tried Dynamics?


Nope, sorry.


My employment isn't worth mentioning.

A minesweeper implementation for Emacs: https://bitbucket.org/zck/minesweeper.el . If anyone tries it, please let me know what you think.

Also, I'm working on learning unicycling, juggling, becoming ambidextrous, and finding a project to hack on next.


Building a "DailyCandy/Thrillist"* for luxury travel (email newsletter focused on luxury resorts, aviation, etc).

http://murphyonluxury.com (it's free to sign up). website is very alpha right now.

Bootstrapping but thinking of raising money.

* not affiliated with either company -- just inspired by their success


I went back to grad school this fall, so I'm working on programming assignments, getting ready for midterms coming up, and making progress on an Eclipse plugin for my lab. It's a great mix of work in C++, Lisp, Java, Soar, and soon Prolog, but it's keeping me busy enough that I've put off side projects for now.


Rewriting my old site, http://www.timeline-x.com/VST formerly http://www.virtualstocktrading.com

Make it Object Oriented. Follow a MVC pattern. Give it a new look and feel. Not necessarily in that order.


I'm working on the new http://www.mcsquare.me UI and features.


Trying to see what I can do to get the iPad app my wife and I made to sustainable profitability (http://www.bentomaster.com). We did hit the front page New and Noteworthy section for iPad apps in Japan a couple days ago but I'm not retiring yet ;^).


GazeHawk GazeHawk GazeHawk

Sometimes I sleep, but not often.


I'm playing around with nodejs, building http://billable.co.za


I'm working on a logicless & valueless templating system in ruby that also has work going on for java and eventually python. In the process of using it to see how the idea shakes out and getting examples that people can learn from in the process.

Also working on a version of Smalltalk that runs on the jvm.


http://qwerly.com, a people search for the social web. Currently works like a whois for Twitter: put in a Twitter username, get back a page with links to that person's other social web profiles.

(Tried to submit it as a Rate My Startup last week, but got nixed.)


At work: Trying to make our Google Search Appliance play nicely.

On the side: Email campaign analytics done right. There are already companies in this sector, but I feel I can do better.

For fun: I run http://www.re-cycledair.com (PHP & Wordpress Articles).


Building a "DailyCandy/Thrillist"* for luxury travel (email newsletter focused on luxury resorts, aviation, etc).

http://murphyonluxury.com (it's free to sign up). website is very alpha right now.

* not affiliated with either company -- just inspired by their success


For work, I'm building websites with Drupal. My latest project is http://dateunknown.com . As a side project, I've started to build a Drupal wrapper for Phono, a jQuery front end for sip calling, sms and xmpp chat in a browser.


I'm fixing the sorry state of Esperanto online dictionaries. My system allows the user to use any of the major writing systems, tolerates spelling errors and even does some stemming and morphology analysis. It's been interesting because this has never been done before (AFAIK).


For the lack of a better word: I'm building better forum software. It's something that teams and organizations will find useful for general communication, idea exchange, even light project management.

We're testing the app at the moment in–house, hoping to get to private beta before December.


I'm building a results based website builder at http://www.netmate.co and iterating photography shopping cart software http://www.photographyorders.com


I am working on taxonomy development, and building a rule base in a NLP framework in order to automatically identify taxonomy traits in raw text. Also working on defining/optimizing a matching engine sitting on top of the taxonomy extraction layer.


I'm working on changing the way people approach personal development, from the usual current approach of digesting a huge chunk of information via book/tapes/DVDs/etc to helping people make little tiny changes that add up over time to big changes.


Trying to build the best resource out there for learning organic chemistry. And tutoring online through Skype. Having a blast. http://masterorganicchemistry.wordpress.com


I'm working iPhone and Android sports apps: http://reflect7.com I also blog about entrepreneurship and my experiences http://techneur.com


I'm starting work on a few university projects, the main one being a multiplayer zombie game, turn based, online. see how it works out ;)

also a side project I want to have out before November, in rails. But I'm keeping it mostly-hush for now =)


Trying to get a project launched that has been 80% completed for too long: http://chatroulettespy.com

Does anybody still use Chatroulette? It should work on all Adobe Stratus based apps.


http://www.openpoll.us

An electronic direct democracy that will allow Americans to vote on state and federals bills and elections. I'm shooting to have my MVP done beginning of next year.


I'm working on an HTML5 video player. The special features that will differentiate it from others are a sharing widget in the video and a gallery that show up when the video ends pushing the user to watch more videos.

Any other ideas?


Adding Python support to my programming test platform http://codeboff.in.

Last week I added random hints that show up during a test session to let people improve their code (and score).


Work: A firefox addon which shows you latest horse racing odds on any website (http://oddsanywhere.com)

Personal: Tweaking ads on my blogs, trying to become the next patio11 ;0)


Working on http://bettermeans.com Open, democratic, project management for social enterprises. Been coding for over 18 months now, launching November 1st


Working on my startup project http://inspection2.com. This is my first project with Django and JQuery, so I'm mostly spending time learning things.


Literally right now? I'm coaching a friend of mine (high school sophomore) in assisting another friend (college freshman) in his CS homework. I'm a college junior, never written Java before this :)


I am working on learning Ruby/Rails to build a couple of projects I'm imagining.

I'm coming from C, Objective-C and iOS work. It's a little tough, since the framework is doing so much for me. It takes detective work and vigilance to keep track of what's happening.

Getting through it, though!

Day job is consumed with UI prototyping and other product-centric adventures at Aurora Feint.


I'm working on the new high score tool for http://playtomic.com/ since I moved the leaderboards over to mongodb/mongohq.com the other day.


Job: Improvements to the ORM in our framework.

Own: Crossword generator for latin words.


Lately I've been spending as much time as I can working on http://milechaser.com - lots of really interesting problems to solve.


My main thing: http://jellly.com/

Also, a real-time multi-player browser game built on node.js and socket.io, but this is just for fun.


Database migration. meh. But also some startup i freelance for, a webgame I've started Saturday and my own startup. I tend to switch between them all week long.


I'm working on a tool for journalists and researchers to help them archive all the information they read. Private beta coming up soon if anyone is interested.


Sounds like something I could use. Very interested


Illustration on an electric guitar and a few submissions for national / local art competitions. Also designing an org structure for a local Roller Derby team.


Integrating Buzz into PinkelStar, a free platform for mobile app developers. Its driving us nuts. Can't get the final redirect to hit our servers, aaargh


Working on a security risk assessment application: http://bit.ly/9jKMR9

Login and subscribe still need a lot of work....


Privacy Policy, not Private :)

Nice design though


Thanks, spelling is not a strong point! :)


I am working on http://tradesalerts.com - email notifications of stocks to buy in Asian markets.


I'm working for a robotic toy startup and on the side designing an efficient & flexible radiant floor heating distribution & control system.


Let me know when you have the rfhd&cs done. I'm designing a house that will use radiant floor heating and I'd be interested to see your system. My email is in my profile.


I'm working on a social caption application which creates the captions dynamically. There's no image manipulation, everything happens on the fly.


A ruby framework for hosting your own url sharing / archiving site.

http://github.com/mmb/murlsh


Full-time: Consultant to senior finance leadership @ Hitachi Global Storage in the Bay Area.

Side: Web Development Consultant

Past: Serial Entrepreneur

Next: Looking to join a new startup!


iPhone app design for a startup. They don't have a full time designer, so outsourcing it all to me has been working good for them.


Day job with oil and gas company. Stupidly trying to build a double entry accounting app in spare time. Learning way too much.


try doing it on a dos machine using Lotus-123 macros..:)


Remote admin web app for an multi-server "Enterprise" system. Unfortunately the client-side uses ExtJS, which makes me sad.


Working on a logo (you can see it at the dragthelake.org coming soon page).

The site will be my take on curating interesting content.


Tonight: Upgrading MySQL server on AWS.


http://gokode.com a tagging platform for conversations.


Day Job: custom erp type system for manufacturing/aviation

Startup: personal finance/buget webapp... with a twist.


Learning Scala, losing weight and wasting time. Oh, and avoiding emails and actual work.


Currently working on cooperative game for programmers and a sophisticated web crawler.


Wikipedia for ordinary people.


Sort of like http://simple.wikipedia.org/ ?


Somewhat. We've been working on it for about a month, should have something to show by next week if all goes well.


Working on ShelfLuv - adding some features that were requested from the HN crowd


contact.ly which will use twillio, dropbox, and other services to build a more modern contact, calendar, file storage system (and for marketing to ride on the hype of other companies).


what makes it more modern?


Importing a csv list of contacts defines the contact mangers intial setup. You can then setup additional fields and group fields together into "sections" from an administrative interface. Each field can be further defined by purpose (email, text, phone number) so can group email's together by contact and soon you could do other things based upon type of field, you can also have sub-contacts and then the sub-contacts are further defined by contact types so you can group together emails of all contacts by a certain type.

It took me longer then expected to make (about a month) but now I have a totally customizable contact manger that is more like a database in itself, it is searchable and very flexible (no predefined fields).

On the contact list display where you see few fields from each contact you can define what fields are displayed on that list and each user can change that to there own preference. This way the data is out front and may save users an extra click to go see some piece of contact data they use the most.

I am working on building a billing system for the twillio api, keeping track of all of the sms messages sent, phone calls made, etc. Once I am done with that then I can add to the contact manager functionality, let's say you have a non-profit and you have 500 contacts that are going to be doing your charity "fun run" you can send them out a reminder via a phone call and sms to remember to show up, etc. Once you have your contact in the system, you can make "lists" and so your contacts here would be on the "fun run 2010" list for example. Then next year you can send them an email inviting them to do the 2011 fun run...

I feel this is more modern at least in what I am doing as this can be as big as or small as a person needs. If a company has 100 fields (like the cw tv network does they easily have 100 fields which is who I designed this for) then it will work for that and if a company only has a few fields they can grow out to the number of fields they need but without having that overhead right away.


A complete translation of all the 'Spot does X' children's books.

Yes. I am a student.


I'm working on a site that will be useful to all of you, hopefully.


I'm writing a web application in coffeescript.


Writing firmware for an RFID reader/writer


this is interesting. I had a similar idea. How much is your pricing point for this send message site.


google anlaytics for business phone calls. http://contexium.com


Is this built on the twilio platform? Or did you roll your own?


Tons of stuff around Hackety Hack. It's got a new blog, http://blog.hackety-hack.com/ . I also started a blog for the Shoes project, http://blog.shoesrb.com/ . I've been working on wrapping up the 1.0 release for Hackety, and tons of other bits that are currently a secret, but will be reported soon. :)

The last 90% is the hardest 90% in any project.


working on my first web app to keep track of travel expenses.


Hacker News Repository


This is not your kind of start-up (I have found HN to mostly work on SaaS applications), its more manufacturing based.

Right now working with another guy to make cheap mobile chargers to export to the USA. So, any cheap charger you may purchase 4-6 months from now may be from my design. But that's just helping a friend, I do not have any monetary gain from it. Apart from that, whenever I will get time I a company is ready to hire me as employee # 1 in there education department (its a software dev + CS education startup).

But on my own home front I am finally starting to work towards my own idea which has been appreciated by some industry people and entrepreneurs I have met. Its a localized hobby kits shop. I provide them with hobby kits which are cheap and have manuals which are in the customer's native language (right now just english, hindi and gujarati as my target right now is gujarat). I know its not that fancy, but hey you people gave me the bug to at least try something before giving up on it (i.e. if its not obviously stupid). Anyways, working on MVP kits for electronics, computer programming, robotics and (if I can manage it) maths.

I have a few slides prepared if anyone wants to see.

EDIT: And btw, I am in second year of engineering


Today I'm teaching for a few hours on DOM events (yesterday I taught for 4 hours on JS: The Language) for http://jsmasterclass.com

Finishing the launch & prep for my "build your own product, market and sell it" course - http://unicornfree.com/30x500 (about 65% sold out already, I'd like to see 100% by Monday)

Working with an illustrator to create custom illustrations for my launch concepts, & a duo of marketeers/illustrators to create fun promo materials to help grow my profitable SaaS

Working with my biz partner (husband) and freelancers to create a system, priorities, and workflow so we can all work together on bug fixes & new features to grow that profitable SaaS - http://letsfreckle.com

(Delegating well is INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY hard.)

Wrapping up the last bits to get http://charmde.sk dogfood-ready

Sourcing the exact mid-century furnishings & art I want for our apartment - cuz I'm superficial like that

Hacking on a fairly revolutionary (if I do say so myself) decision-making & pm tool, with my husband & a friend

Suffice it to say: TOO. DAMN. MUCH. But that last project is just pure fun, and it's really making everything else less burnout-y.


A craigslist reputations service http://craigrep.com. Although, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to make it secure and user-friendly after realizing that a referral URL was not enough to verify that a request from craigslist came from where it said it came from due to referer spoofing proxies. A browser plugin seems to be the only way to do this, and that won't reach critical mass.


Why can't it be done without a browser plugin?


Just because the only way I think it will take off is if the ratings are displayed on the actual craigslist posts.


I would totally use that as a plugin. Why do you think that couldn't/wouldn't take off?


Well, I was counting on the viral aspect where you saw a rating and said, I want one of those. My gut says that most people who do that will not want to install a browser plugin. Even if I made one for all possible browsers.

It's also hard for it to spread through the plugin directories because the people who download it would be too geographically fragmented.


I'm working on a remote control for Google TV based on computer vision and gesture recognition.

This is my masters dissertation and I'm currently researching algorithms and techniques that enable real-time detection and tracking of hands or objects.

A prototype will be made for the Logitech revue if I succeed :)


Hello, my real name is Fred Grott and I am an android developer with previous exp in enterprise java and lamp and mobile java.

I am building some android applications and some sever side applications to demo android integration via restlets and GoogleAppEngine.

Basically using this as a resume to obtain some development contracts so that I can fully launch my startup.

Failed Startups thus far: -Xspot-same as Google Latitude but I did not execute fast enough to get prototype out to obtain venture funding

Hopefully, I will have better luck this time.


FrostWire for Android




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