ROUNDTABLES ★ 40 upvotes 2016

Ask HN: Realtime app ideas for side project?

The Founder's Submission

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

What are some ideas for apps that could be built to become more conversant with near-realtime technologies à la Storm, Kafka, Spark Streaming and the like?

Let's define realtime not as financial index realtime but as responding very quickly to a potentially large number of input events which will be coming in over a network.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @mbm 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

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (25 total discussions):

GA @garysieling Peer Contributor

If you're just looking for ideas, I would look at what people have done for conference talks, sometimes they have good project ideas - https://www.findlectures.com/?q=%20realtime&p=2&class1=Technology

ZE @zengr Peer Contributor

I got this idea of using my twitter follower graph and extracting out entities like movies, restaurants, books and people they talk about.

I have noticed that I end up eating at places, go to coffee shops, read book and watch movies/shows people I follow talk about. If there was a simpler way to browse that, it might be useful.

TE @tedmiston Peer Contributor

A social network for people drinking the same beverage right now.

You could have rooms for particular regional coffees or more simple like hot chocolate or commercialized like one for Budweiser.

There could be content you unlock by proving you're drinking a certain drink.

BO @boltzmannbrain Peer Contributor

Real-time anomaly detection (http://numenta.org) for airplane flight routes, wearable sensor data (heart rate), energy smart meter readings, seismometers for early earthquake warnings, ...

EM @employee8000 Peer Contributor

It's best to learn what real-time actually means in the context of technology. None of the above technologies are real-time. Near-real time might be more accurate but it depends on your tolerance.

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 40 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 25 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: