Ask HN: What did you build in March? I've enjoyed reading these in the past, and I think some folks who have recently built or launched something have enjoyed the brief publicity and chance to get some early feedback. So, If you built or launched something in March, let us know, and maybe even show it off with a link. |
Used Backbone and Bootstrap.
A method for constructing a semantic graph from a large corpus of text.
I also released updates for my other two apps My Audiobook player: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-audiobook-player/id4593930... Specialises in playing audiobooks you download from 'those' sites
Daily positive affirmations: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/positive-affirmations-daily/i... Positive affirmations sounds silly (my girlfriends idea!) but they are all quotes about success and whatnot. It really does keep me motivated. I look forward to getting my quote!
Very early alpha release. Lots of UI issues and its in desperate need of a tutorial.
Actually that was a good month re: learning new, and cool stuff.
Feedback appreciated.
A new way to discover web comics.
But also recently http://iphoneception.com
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~jpmayer/hegemony/demos/backed-geo...
Working on a better RSS reader at the moment, hoping to launch it in April.
Alpha in 2 weeks!
Lets you get feedback on your iTunes landing page vs a competitor
Input your letters and we return the best words.
You should setup a rewrite rule for the autistictouch.com
It's a price comparison website for Australian video games. Still early days yet, but it's been a fun distraction and an opportunity to learn some new tech/tools in the process.
Also re-designed my personal landing page ( http://bjorkst.am )
The missing "Star" feature for GitHub repositories.
We'll be releasing frequent UX and content updates over the course of the next couple months as we develop new features and add more tutorials. Please feel free to make suggestions; all are welcome! :)
At work, we received release to show the world the Hybrid Safety System for robots: http://bit.ly/Hp818r
I also cut a demo for a stealth startup I'm working at. =)
Redesigned the layout for merchant signup at
Built with 2 friends at a hack weekend
A cool mashup of upcoming events and ones that you rsvp'ed for. Currently it's integrated with eventbrite and facebook.
You can check out an alpha, alpha build @ http://smooth-wind-2063.heroku.com/
Not very pretty, but I am happy that it helped me get off the ground. Now working on something more complex.
Feed back been great so far. Average user time of 6mins and 15% bounce rate.
Would love some more feedback, here or @kseggie, kavan@saymama.com.
It's ultra-minimalist hosting. A bare HTML document and a short url. Built it to scratch my own itch. Bought the domain and opened the repo on March 5th. Launched 2 days later.
April will be spent re-writing it from scratch to support more stats and other cool features.
Patient Zero: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.egondev.an...
Contributed some additional Homebrew recipes.
Gave a talk at CloudFoundry Open Tour. http://speakerdeck.com/u/jvoorhis/p/hacking-cloudfoundry
The look and feel is a total tribute to MediaTakeout.com. You can search for terms in the corpus of generated headlines. It was just an excuse for me to play with NLTK and CSS. Nothing too impressive :)
I was so sick and tired of tweeting companies fails, to let them know what was going on, and just have them ignore me. So, I figured by using social pressure, maybe I can get their attention. I mean, who really wants to be at the top of my "I have bad social customer service" list.
Also built an android app for a manufacturer of GPS tracking systems. The app allows owners to control their assets(cars, motos, boats, etc).
It still needs a lot of work to become usable, but I am already happy I got this far!
I built a toy: Text to 8-Bit
Create 8-bit game screenshots using your own text in Fami-liar games. About 12 hours of work, most of that is in graphics work (chop chop chop). Javascript with Canvas, not terribly fancy but very fun.
I also launched a little website for my favourite Ruby ETL at http://www.activewarehouse.info/.
Thanks to the first round of feedback we got on HN, and to those who have already checked it out!
Up until now Handbag has only used the Android Open Accessory Protocol/ADK but one of the requests I've had has been to make it work over WiFi as well.
Taking the opportunity to also re-architect the app a bit.
My project log for March is available at http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower/p/android-arduino-handbag... for more details.
(Did I mention you can also start a project log for your project at Labradoc? http://www.labradoc.com/ :) )
* New landing page design https://kippt.com
* Readability integration
* Extensions for Firefox and Opera
* Preview feature for public lists https://kippt.com/karrisaarinen/yc-application
http://checkafilm.com - search for a film by title and see an aggregate review summary about the movie and any content advisories it might have.
http://tmfdb.org - a bookmarklet for automatically muting profanity in Hulu videos for a more "family-friendly" experience.
Both are open-source - https://github.com/jacobwg/checkafilm and https://github.com/jacobwg/tmfdb.org/tree/master/script
http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/
It ranges form Dec 31st 2011 back to Oct 1996. Its nothing special (I don't actually love or do crosswords) but when you search for some terms (mostly as Answers) it provides fascinating Questions.
FACEBOOK : Alternative to Friendster or MySpace
NYTIMES : Popular news site, with ".com"
HACKER : Cyber-nuisance
BACON : Strips for breakfast
Now for the testing phase! (anyone interested in trying it out, drop me an email mqudsi@neosmart.net and I'll send you a copy for free)
Sorry, this is the first i've come across it, and it looks like it's affecting other vendors as well (Paragon?) but i havn't found a useful source or summary.
During my travels, I managed to do quite a bit of work on The Silver Searcher: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher . It's a clone of ack[1], but written in C instead of Perl. I've done a decent amount of profiling[2] to find slow parts and improve the speed. For literal searches it uses a version of Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr[3]. For regex searches it uses the new JIT compiler in PCRE[4].
Depending on the search, it can be 3-5x faster than ack. And thanks to some contributors this past month, it's now in homebrew and Gentoo portage.
Well, back to the grind tomorrow.
2: Using gprof, valgrind, and Instruments.app. See http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/01/23/making-programs-faster-prof...
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string_sear...
Good luck with the project!
How I built it: http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/03/16/on_building_pushover/
Chrome (latest, Win7): http://tinypic.com/r/2vdpfd1/5 Firefox (latest, Win7): http://tinypic.com/r/1zbs09/5
I like the design, but I feel as though BCC lost some of its "uniqueness." The design looks like a lot of other designs these days. Then again, your customers probably don't know or care, and it's just us who read about BCC.
How I built it: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/03/21/launching-exportmyposts...
Love this, because the pain point costs way more than the cost of your service.
Some day im going to come back to it and walk through the commit history and see if I ever made any progress in my rails skillset.
It's one of those everlasting work-in-progress projects, right now I'm not sure what functionality I want to provide. Right now im thinking about collecting data and drawing some conclusions. But that will probably be another app.
It also made me realize that something like Sinatra + backbone would be a better fit. So I guess thats something atleast.
I've also had a number of conversations recently on the state of academic publishing and how it can be improved, so I put together a reddit-based interface to the arxiv pre-print server, where hopefully people can now discuss up and coming papers and let the cream naturally rise to the top: http://arxaliv.org/
I'm also a developer on http://lmfdb.org/ but that's a rather technical site for research mathematicians.
It's still rough around the edges and buggy, but I should have an update ready tonight or tomorrow to smooth things out.
The one thing I tried to avoid was asking for too many permission. The site only asks for basic permissions + your email address.
You can read about my success (or lack thereof!) here - http://atomyard.com/blog/How-not-to-market-an-iPhone-app/
I built it to surface the likes, favorites, +1's, ... that tend to be hidden on most services. Basically about.me + Pinterest for your 'liked' content.
[edit]: If it is not clear enter your user name in the textbox
[edit]: source: https://github.com/nabilt/Like-List
Followed that up by making a ticket sales web app using the SeatGeek affiliate API and my Python app skeleton [3]. I also demoed [2] and [3] to the Memphis Python user group [4].
I apologize for the javascript failure on Tickets of Memphis, it seems the SeatGeek API has stopped accepting my jQuery JSONP requests so I have a ticket in.
[1] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite
[2] https://github.com/dpritchett/wwebsite-python
[3] http://ticketsofmemphis.com
[4] http://www.slideshare.net/dpritchett/quick-and-dirty-heroku-...
Offers compatibility with AMS-LaTeX (theorems, lemmas, proofs, etc), and drop-in integration with a Markdown/MathJaX blogging environment. Pandoc can't cope with these environments, so it seemed useful to build something that did.
The usage model is effectively:
1) Write your mathematic documents (lecture notes, blog posts, exercise solutions) in LaTeX using the full AMS-LaTeX suite.
2) Convert to PDF, Markdown, or another format.
3) Use Markdown/MathJaX for blog, use PDF for distribution, etc.
Full source available at https://github.com/ajtulloch/LaTeX2Markdown.
- the ability to mount VM filesystems on the host via the API, which was a huge amount of work for a fairly small gain, mainly wrangling FUSE (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/libguestfs-mount-local...)
- a way to make it easier to use libguestfs from Linux distros other than our primary ones (ie. other than Fedora, Debian): http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/appliance/
So two deceptive features that are small, but involved a huge amount of work and wrangling behind the scenes, particularly the first one. Made much harder by the primary requirement to write most things in C.
This is our MVP into intelligent time tracking, seems to work well for people that spend all day in the browser. We'd love some feedback!
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paydirt-time-...
2. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clfnlkjacgohceabde...
This is useful for businesses who don't want their screenshots to go up on the web. They can keep all their screenshots on their intranet while still using the great Jing client for taking & sharing the images.
It needs polishing but it's a good 1st step into making something that is ready for production use.
If anyone has a fresh startup/website that needs content to get it off the ground, I can be of assistance.
I am the creator of the Rails/Mechanical Turk integration gem Turkee ( http://www.github.com/aantix/turkee ), and am an expert with Mechanical Turk and content creation. Drop me a line if you'd like to see a demo, jim.jones1@gmail.com . I do contract work on the side and live in San Francisco.
It's vastly faster than SQL for this purpose.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/introducing_hobo.html
https://github.com/stucchio/Hobo
I say it's not a database because it isn't even a Key-Value store. It's just a key-store - you query it for the keys, and retrieve the values from somewhere else (e.g. postgres).