ROUNDTABLES 13 upvotes 2018

Ask HN: Find a partner for an informal side project?

13 pts
Hacker News Signal
2018 · Shared by @ghgr
Ask HN: Find a partner for an informal side project? by @ghgr

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @ghgr on Hacker News:

I was wondering if there is a site to find a partner for informal side projects. With "informal" I mean to just develop something, not launch a startup. That means not caring about licenses, monetization, contracts, SEO, ads, MVP and so on. No binding documents (at least at first). Contributors are welcome, and they may come and go. Some examples of the type of projects I'd like to find:

- I think it'd be cool to download the full Reddit dataset and apply NLP techniques. Somebody out there who finds that interesting? Maybe with multiple TB of hard disk, or fast internet, or willing to setup a ipython notebook server, or experience with RNN, or just general interest and ideas?

- I've been wondering if you can efficiently find two nodes in Wikidata, and automatically extract insights (like "hmmm, this politician comes from the same city as this real estate tycoon and he entered office the same year that such controversial mall was built, soon after that forest fire burned the same area"). So, who would find that interesting?

- I'd like to take part in the Kaggle competition to detect Diabetic Retinopathy. Somebody who is a doctor dipping into data analysis?

- If I had a dump of the position of all planes each minute for the last month Somebody would find that interesting, and wants to propose an analysis? Like, detecting erratic flight patterns, or potentially forbidden areas?

- I find HFT (High Frequency Trading) interesting, so I listened for the raw transaction socket from multiple bitcoin exchanges, and I run some basic analysis. Somebody would like to extend it?

- Clickbait is both eerie and exciting. How such headlines play with our basic instincts is worth an analysis. Inspired by [1] I dumped thousands of clickbait ads, and I'm trying to find the patterns they follow.

If there's none I guess I'll build it myself, as another side project :-).

[1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum ↗

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled reflections, business mechanics, and tactical takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2018 where @ghgr convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:

Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

Key perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (5 total discussions):

P1 @p1esk Peer Contributor
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 13 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 5 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: