Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

I am working on Blubyn - an AI powered travel agent helping users book flights and hotels quickly by personalizing results. Here is the link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onelink.to&#x2F;blubyn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onelink.to&#x2F;blubyn</a> (app only - available on both iOS and Android)<p>Being an avid traveler, it has always bothered me that travel experience has remained almost the same over the years. We scout 50 websites to figure out where to go and what to do, where results&#x2F;posts are something written with a view of catering to everyone(and hence very little for my interests), then to book I have to look at 100 different variables (and repeat the process almost everytime), and not helped by 8-10 websites which all look and function the same way - showing the most results, and not being upfront about anything. It still takes me half an hour to book a flight or hotel - when I do the same set of checks and actions everytime.<p>Once the booking is done, now again begins the anxiety of scouting trip advisor and lonely planet and forums to get more knowledge about a place. Altogether its a very inefficient experience, to say the least. Comparing that to buying a product on Amazon, one click booking, personalization, one stop shop, a seamless experience, and its fares really bad.<p>We want to bring that Amazon experience to travel. We have just started, long way to go. Hoping to crack it.

I’m working on a skin for developer laptops so that you can apply those sweet conference and startup stickers. No more risking your resale value, or even physically risking damage to your expensive MacBook.<p>I want the skins to be identical to the original laptop material so that they are practically invisible. So for the MacBooks, a silver aluminium sticker (or space grey etc.)<p>I’ve done a proof of concept and it worked brilliantly (in the process of writing this up) and its allowed me to display my old ‘laptop’ as a keepsake, whilst being able to sell the laptop on in almost perfect condition.<p>I’m thinking of going down the crowdfunding route, as a way of proving there is a market, as well as helping to fund someone of the equipment needed.<p>Edit: Added they’d be a near identical match to the original laptop, rather than just a plain ‘sticker’

I’m using an old paper tape punch machine to print out (5% of) the human genome. The punches are from the early 80s, and it’s really neat to be able to physically see each bit of data. The plan is to fill up a room with the punched tape, sort of mirroring a strand of dna and giving you a sense of just how large the genome actually is.<p>Unfortunately I’m having a hell of a time finding space to print in. May just end up finding some commercial warehouse space on Craigslist

I’m working on Tiny Thor:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bGrNjyV5PhE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bGrNjyV5PhE</a><p>It’s cool because it’s the game I always wanted to make since I was a teenager. What’s even cooler is that two heroes of my youth are doing it together with me: Henk Nieborg (Pixel Artist) and Chris Hülsbeck (Music).

I’m tinkering with combining liquid cooling with waste heat electricity generation as a way to cut down on datacenter energy use. I think it’s cool because datacenters consume 1-2% of all electricity generated worldwide, and roughly half of that goes to air conditioning. If it’s viable, it might make a measurable dent in CO2 emissions.

I&#x27;m working on a tiling window manager for Windows:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workspacer.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workspacer.org&#x2F;</a><p>In another life I worked in a mostly linux environment, and developed on linux, where I used xmonad as a window manager. Switching to windows for a new job several years ago made that super painful. I use workspacer every day at work, and sometimes at home, and it mostly works! It crashes sometimes, and super DOES NOT LIKE IT if you reattach monitors (think laptop), but a restart of the application usually solves it.<p>The cool part: the configuration file is actually just C#, so you can configure it with a similar level of power that you would configure xmonad (or dwm) with (like implementing custom layouts, etc). I have not solidified the configuration API yet though, and have some plans to switch some major things up, so the road is a bit rocky for the time being.

I’m working on a satirical newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techloaf.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techloaf.io</a><p>I’d like to think it’s cool because a) it articulates and ridicules a lot of nutty things that most of us in tech recognize, but refuse to talk about and b) it’s fun and makes people laugh each week.<p>Life’s too serious, so it’s fun to make something that lightens the load.

I’m making a permissively licensed json&#x2F;whatever encoding you’d like English dictionary by parsing Wiktionary. There’s a beta demo type thing at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mostaccioli.club" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mostaccioli.club</a> if you’re interested.

I&#x27;m working on getting better at cooking. My partner loves to cook with me, but I kind of suck at it. It&#x27;s cool because we can spend some quality time together making a meal.

I’m working on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apilope.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apilope.com</a> - I think it’s cool for monitoring rest apis with test cases, which was kind of a scratch my own itch thingie.

What am I working on? I just replaced a resistor in my car’s aircon to fix it. Feeling mighty pleased with myself.<p>Not the answer you were expecting but javascript wasn’t going to fix this bad boy ;-)

A toy 24-bit virtual machine and assembler. It has 16MB of addressable memory split into 256 64KB banks. 8 specialized and 8 general purpose 16 bit registers. An address stack and a register state stack and memory mapped I&#x2F;O.<p>Most of the opcodes have been written, apart from interrupts. It has built in function calls, near and far jumps, a bunch of different branching operations and basic looping based on flag States. Comparisons, unsigned and signed addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. Most opcodes support direct, indirect and relative addressing.<p>I tried to keep the assembly language fairly simple and straightforward. So far I have a two pass assembler that supports labels, named variables, subroutines, 8 and 16 bit numbers in decimal or hexadecimal format, 24 bit addresses in hexidecimal, character literals and zero terminated strings.<p>At this point the next steps are to finish doing interrupts and work on input and ouput. Right now, it will read an assembled binary and spit out a new binary with any modified memory addresses and a register dump so there&#x27;s still a bit of work yet to making something interactive.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of using bearlibterminal(though I wouldn&#x27;t mind keeping it dependency free...i&#x27;m just not sure if I can) and making it pseudo text&#x2F;graphical terminal based I was thinking of maybe having different modes that could be switched so data stored in vram memory would be treated and displayed differently depending. I&#x27;d also like to keep the display and input fairly separate so it would be possible to write a different display frontend if people wanted. My hope is to eventually have keyboard, mouse and maybe other inputs, graphics and basic audio all as separate modules.<p>I&#x27;d like to eventually release it all open source with full documentation. I dunno I was inspired after trying to learn assembly and finding it was either fairly complex and more for compilers in the case of modern processors or you had to deal with weird hardware limitations and strangeness with old processors. So I tried my hand at making something similar to an older processor without having to deal with the frustrations of old hardware. My goal was to make it as fun to program in as possible while still giving the feeling of working directly with memory and registers.<p>Personally, i&#x27;ve learned tons from working on this and I figure if I was looking something like this, there&#x27;s probably others that could benefit.

I&#x27;m working on a personal organization app - basically integrating a to do list, habit tracker, and notes app into one. I think it&#x27;s cool because it&#x27;s useful to me and a &quot;scratch your own itch&quot; app.<p>If you&#x27;re curious it&#x27;s at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nominal.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nominal.net</a>

I&#x27;m working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datagekko.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datagekko.com</a>. It&#x27;s a passion project of mine that came from a scratch your own itch situation. Working on it for the past 6 years or so a couple hours every day on average (spent a ton of time). As it matured I decided to push it from a hobby project to a product. Super close to launching it, but constantly keep delaying it as I always have something to improve.<p>Learned a ton on it and literally helped me shape my career in the past 5 years.<p>A short description would be a large scale metrics&#x2F;telemetry system. But I&#x27;m aiming to make it available for small-scale use as well so that small guys (like me) can leverage those benefits.

I&#x27;m working on a tourism portal about Ravello, a jewel town of the Amalfi Coast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ravello.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ravello.com</a><p>Right now I&#x27;m re-writing it using Elixir &amp; Phoenix. It&#x27;s currently running on Wordpress after first being a static site served from Amazon&#x27;s Cloudfront &amp; S3.<p>This way I&#x27;m also transitioning away from PHP &amp; Laravel, my previous stack, to Elixir &amp; Phoenix and learning its ropes along the way. I&#x27;m super excited about this new stack.<p>It&#x27;s cool because I get to work and learn more about places I like using awesome tools.

I&#x27;m working on a service that texts you when one of your preloaded accounts sees a change in balance - for example, public transit or toll roads. I&#x27;ve got three services supported so far: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;balancebeamapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;balancebeamapp.com&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s cool because I login to these accounts very infrequently and months later I have no idea what balance I&#x27;m carrying, whether I&#x27;ll be able to board the bus in a city I&#x27;m visiting, etc. Also, the websites are usually not great to use especially on mobile.

We are working on Doqume (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doqume.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doqume.com</a>)<p>It is an enterprise search engine which departs from traditional keyword-based search in order to provide an easier way to run complex, semantic queries on huge collections of text documents.<p>Why it&#x27;s cool: image a pharmaceutical research task, where you need to find all documents mentioning drugs that interact with a specific class of diseases. In a normal setting, you would need to first research which drugs satisfy your condition and then either build a boolean OR query or probably query them one by one. Doqume saves you this hassle, because it allows to express conditions like &quot;drugs that interact with infectious disease&quot; with a simple user interface. As a result, you can get both the items that match your conditions (i.e., in the example, all the drugs that we know interact with the class of diseases that you specified) and the documents that match the query (e.g., recent research articles mentioning those items). The approach is not specific to pharma and you can easily build queries that span across several domains (e.g., &quot;cities with more than 1M inhabitants&quot;, &quot;USA companies with more than X employees&quot;, &quot;singers who are born in Chicago&quot;, etc...).<p>If you want to give it a try you can see a demo with this query building capability at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doqume.com&#x2F;search.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doqume.com&#x2F;search.html</a>

Solo, an open source security key. Think of the open source counterpart of a Yubikey or Google Titan. Just a few hours ago we&#x27;ve been featured by Kickstarter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solokeys.com&#x2F;kickstarter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solokeys.com&#x2F;kickstarter</a><p>What makes Solo special is that it&#x27;s the first security key:<p>1) open source + FIDO2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SoloKeysSec&#x2F;solo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SoloKeysSec&#x2F;solo</a><p>2) NFC + USB-C<p>3) in many colors, i.e. &quot;customizable&quot; also by non-tech people

I’m working on a new training to help people have better social interactions, aka charisma.<p>Whether they use it to get ahead at work, enhance their relationship with a partner, relate to their kids, gain new friendships, sell something important, or just be able to be in their own company, that’s something that enhances everything they do.<p>I think it’s cool because it’s my small way of connecting a world that has been slowly drifting apart and is in need of coming together to solve huge divides and problems that are to come.

I am working on a podcast called Would You Like to Restart[1], it&#x27;s essentially a single player DnD (Player and GM).<p>It&#x27;s cool because unlike all my other failed projects it&#x27;s for fun rather than an attempt at profit. Even if nobody listens we&#x27;re doing it because it&#x27;s a laugh - and people seem to be listening to it, so bonus!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wouldyouliketorestart.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wouldyouliketorestart.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m creating an interactive presentation on Git for my company who has been using SVN since the dawn of time. Many might consider this a boring project but it also happens to be a wide sought out skill. Very few really dive in to becoming power users of Git which is why I think it&#x27;s a cool project for me. Teaching any topic to someone else almost always resolves in a considerable skill enhancement for the teacher.

I am working on an &quot;All-in-one Client Management&quot; Software that allows our company to track everything about our clients in one place which includes: Onboarding, Registration, Subscriptions&#x2F;Billing, Emails&#x2F;Communications, Helpdesk, Projects etc. This will solve an internal problem we have at our SAAS company. Not sure about the &quot;cool&quot; factor but it surely will make our lives easier.

I&#x27;m working on an experimental tool to simplify React Redux app development. Inspired by the simplicity of Turbolinks, and powered by Rails. You can develop React and Redux SPAs without any APIs.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jho406&#x2F;Breezy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jho406&#x2F;Breezy&#x2F;</a>

A KISS replacement for react + redux. It comes in two flavors:<p>- callbag-html + callbag-store<p>or<p>- callbag-element + declaredom + callbag-store if you&#x27;re planning on using web components<p>Benefits:<p>- It uses morphdom for fast diffing, which is as fast as virtual-dom<p>- It&#x27;s lack of parochiality -it just uses plain HTMLElements. It makes using 3rd party libs seamless because you don&#x27;t have to wrap them. It also means that you can batch things into animation frames to avoid unnecessary layout thrashing<p>- Callbag is used because it&#x27;s a stupidly simple streaming library, easy to understand. Things like cold&#x2F;hot observables, or what gets updated in a tick, can make streaming libs pretty complicated. Callbag fights that with it&#x27;s extreme simplicity.<p>In general the entire toolset is easy to understand in terms of how it works, and that&#x27;s important

We just started sales for our product. Distributed about 30 flyers to restaurants and hair salons yesterday. Because it was the first time for us, it was quite a learning experience. Sales requires a much thicker skin and open ears. Also, because I am an American living in China, I had to learn some new technical words.<p>Our product lets your wifi guests land directly on your web pages. Its a captive portal plus a local web server. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.100-xyz.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.100-xyz.com</a><p>Looking for ideas on how to get customers&#x2F;users. Suggestions, comments appreciated.

Working on a project that uses Chrome Puppeteer - a Node.js API that uses Chrome DevTools Protocol to control a (possibly headless) Chrome. Its very cool because now the phenomenal power of DevTools is accessible programmatically and can be run on CI systems and stuff!

I’m working on fabricating interactive art pieces&#x2F;clocks. I’ve been making these ask gifts for a few years. A big part of the gift is my time and effort. I think that is invaluable.<p>People always ask if I sell them. So I’ve come up with a wordclock design I really like and am working on some basement manufacturing.<p>For my day job I’m in charge of making physical products. So this is a hobby extension of that skill set.<p>Right now I’m hoping to ramp up production enough to sell a few of these for the holiday season. Hopefully this weekend lead time will change from 3-5 weeks to 1 week. Moderator Dan suggested I post a Show HN about this. I plan to once I get through this production hurdle.<p>Www.finewordclocks.com

I&#x27;m working on Zenkit. It&#x27;s a collaborative project and task management software which is meanwhile a great alternative to Trello, Wunderlist and other tools on the market. The flexibility it gives us in the office (yes we use it ourselves in every department) is awesome and we have so many ideas on how to improve it that we sometimes not know what to do first. The potential is high and I&#x27;m curious about where we are going with that.

Working on my multiprocessing library, ZProc<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pycampers&#x2F;zproc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pycampers&#x2F;zproc</a><p>It&#x27;s cool because it tries to bring some creativity into the rather standstill multitasking world :)

A simple reporting tool for tracking and reporting project&#x2F;task activity.<p>It&#x27;s cool because work requires me to submit an activity report each week and I wasn&#x27;t about their terribly inefficient form, so I built a web-service to track my activities.<p>It&#x27;s nothing special per-se, but it&#x27;s significantly less complicated than other free options I&#x27;ve found for this sort of reporting and I like things that don&#x27;t require me to learn how to use them.

I’m working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;checklyhq.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;checklyhq.com</a>, an API monitoring and site transaction monitoring SaaS. The coolest thing about it is discovering the many subtleties in the product offerings in the pretty huge and abundant monitoring market and how customers value them.<p>The technical stuff is cool too, and actually much trickier than many would expect, but I find customer development and support much more rewarding as I’m signing up the first customers.

Not work related, but I am working on my body. Trying to run faster marathon at the same time building muscles to look good. It&#x27;s hard after 40, but I was a 123 lb weakling at 24, now a 145 lb with good muscle tone.

I am working on Execution.com - We are showing businesses what meetings cost in terms of time&#x2F;money at their organization, as well as a lot of analytics to help them improve meeting culture. And, we are trying to see what the best companies are doing so that we can give companies the tools to improve the effectiveness of meetings.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;execution.com&#x2F;free-meeting-stats&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;execution.com&#x2F;free-meeting-stats&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m working on a self-hosted, automated testing service for universities. I&#x27;m designing it to be distributed and fault-tolerant, which I&#x27;ve never done before! Structuring the application around producers, consumers &amp; queues has decoupled it immensely, and (so far) has made the codebase extremely easy to grok. I&#x27;ve just go to figure out docker-compose, so I can throw up a new instance in a few seconds ;)<p>Does anyone have any recommendations for a newbie to the distributed architecture space?

In my freetime I have been working on learning React, and more generally modern javascript. After dragging my feet for so long because of bias, I took the plunge a few weeks ago and I love it! It&#x27;s very cool, in my opinion, because the web ecosystem really has grown a lot as an app platform, and honestly I like it. The &quot;old&quot; web and an app web can exist side by side, I see now.<p>At work, still just connecting API to API, test to test, pipe to pipe. I feel like a plumber, but I guess that&#x27;s &quot;backend&quot;.

KloudTrader - A commission-free (flat-rate) algorithmic trading platform. Think of it as the Netlify or Heroku for computational finance. We provide a datafeed and a commission-free brokerage, not to mention server hosting. Basically everything you need to get started. Push to deploy.

I’m working on a simple and free way to generate a press kit for your company.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;presskite.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;presskite.com</a><p>The tech is cool and most of the early customers we have are realizing how important it is to be able to describe and pitch their company in a succinct and captivating manner.

I am working on ORows. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orows.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orows.com</a><p>It enables teams to collaborate on structured data. Think of it as a fusion of spreadsheet, git and a content management system.<p>Right now it’s in very early stages but I want to get to a stage where I can quit my job and work on it full time.

I&#x27;m working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appreviewbot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appreviewbot.com</a>, a tool I made for myself to post iOS app store reviews to Slack. I&#x27;m still trying to figure out what makes it cool though, having a hard time getting feedback from users!

I am working on Jupyter Notebook diff tool: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewnb.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewnb.com</a><p>It&#x27;s stimulating to write diff algorithms when textual diff is coupled with images, markdown, html, and code syntax rendering. Also, it&#x27;s super useful for a lot of people in Data Science community.

Im half way in a algorithm that redraws pixel art image that have been corrupted by scaling or compression. 1 step it analise the image to define the &quot;pixel size&quot;. Then it generates a pallet with all the colors needed to redraw that image. The it redraws it.

I&#x27;m working on an online debate mediation platform to settle Twitter flamewars more thoroughly and amicably.

I bought the toy robot Cozmo from Anki and now I am trying to make him see using openCV.

I am working on Primer. Basically a bot that makes it much easier to learn &quot;difficult things&quot; on your own. Here is a screenshot : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;E5Kw54P" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;E5Kw54P</a><p>The screenshot has changed a lot by now though.<p>I have been working on this, alone, for last almost two year. I have iterated more than 15 times. One time, I was trying to do non-linear twine[0] based interface. Was pretty complicated. Right now, this is the version I am most satisfied and excited for. Also, it took some while to create a CMS from scratch for this one.<p>Here is why it is cool.<p>0. Primer teaches you in a conversational way. I understand video based MOOCs are new norms, but conversational way makes user better focused towards learning. It also makes it easier to revise, recall and resume from where you last left.<p>1. Primer will provide you notes in form of Tufte-Latex Books[1]. The way it works is that there is already a template for each course and when the user completes the course, his&#x2F;her response accounts generates tex Code along with the previous templates and results in personalized books. The books authors name is the username.<p>2. Primer enforces spaced repetition. Not only it teaches you something, it also reminds you to revise after certain intervals. Although Anki export is a desirable feature, I did not have the energy to look into it now, but it is definitely in the roadmap. Primer takes responsibility of your learning.<p>3. Primer tracks time spent on your courses. Good tool for homeschoolers.<p>4. Primer courses are versioned. Primer courses improve based on feedback. If you get stuck at a course, it is improved so that, next time it feels easier to understand. And often times, we will screw up, so it is there for that too. But importantly, courses should have pretty iteration times. This is a major advantage of text based courses.<p>5. Primer based courses take a fraction of time to complete than Video-based courses.<p>6. Last, my favorite. It makes difficult things easier to learn. Although, achieving this feature to a practical extent will take another year or so, but still feels good to have the potential. Suppose, you want to learn how to build a spaceship. There is a ton of things you need to learn before you can even begin to learn about spaceships and rockets. Primer ensures that you have understood the prerequisites before you start doing something. All these courses are present on Primer itself.<p>I am not good with deadlines. But I can assure that I am pretty close to completion.<p>These are the initial courses to be offered by Mid 2019.<p>Tentative Tracks: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Fantastic ML Papers and how to implement them, Teach yourself Computer Science, Fantastic CS Papers and how to understand them, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.<p>To follow updates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyletter.com&#x2F;primerlabs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyletter.com&#x2F;primerlabs&#x2F;</a><p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twinery.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twinery.org&#x2F;</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tufte-LaTeX&#x2F;tufte-latex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tufte-LaTeX&#x2F;tufte-latex</a>