Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2023) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2023)

36 pointsdavid92741 comments

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

I'm working on ExecAPI - https://execapi.com - a code execution as a service platform, starting with WebAssembly nanoservices, deployed a bit like CGI scripts, but running on the edge, so comparable latency to Cloudflare Workers and Lambda@Edge. Currently thinking about ideas around HTTP-triggered workers, long-running services, web hook handlers, etc. and how we can bring cloud costs down to the bare minimum.

It's more of a fun project right now, but hoping to unearth some marketable use cases and ideas as I go along. I'll do a proper launch in a month or two.

Built a PWA (+ TestFlight) to search, browse, and generate Stable Diffusion images: https://app.pica.so/

Fun to build, mostly just thinking through the UI, catching up with all the new AI models coming out these days. Would be a ton of work to really polish and monetize an iOS / Android app like this, not interested in taking it much further.

This will probably be different than other comments but working to finish up a metal/welding project. Converting a trailer to be usable for a 22' sailboat - almost done just having to do some spray painting and add bolts. It's been probably about 8 months of working in my free time to get here, pretty excited to be done.

Nice work. Could you weld before or did you learn it for this? I built a trailer a couple of years back and really enjoyed it. I’m thinking about building some sort of cage / box so I can get more loose landscaping material on there.

Thanks and that’s awesome! basically learned to stick weld for this project and it was one of the reasons to take it on. Have found welding cage/mesh-like pieces to be difficult since theyre so thin but not the best usage of stick rod in the first place

• organizing outland 2023: a tiny tech conference in southern california

• i rewrote a giant piece of software from scratch and will demo it for the owners of the product tomorrow (wish me luck)

• creating an mvp for my new startup that will tackle the AI alignment problem (looking for pre-seed investment!)

• polishing a compiler for a programming language i made

• writing essays on productized services, selfish recycling, elm, and wolfram alpha

• searching for a healthcare plan

• training for the aids/lifecycle (7-day bike ride from SF to LA)

[1] https://taylor.town/now

[2] https://outland.sh

[3] hello@taylor.town

Goodluck!

Thanks! I just finished the demo, and I think it went well.

We'll see how they respond...

Rolepad - https://rolepad.com, helping job seekers manage their search process. Emails and spreadsheets can quickly get overwhelming and there aren't really many tools out there for folks that want to manage their own pipelines. Companies have applicant tracking systems, this is similar but for the other side.

At the moment working on functionality to easily ingest email communications with recruiters/companies so that it can truly be a system of record (without needing to give access to your inbox or any of that).

Couple of thoughts.

You need to find a way to sync with platforms you have applied on for example LinkedIn Easy Apply

Will edit when other thoughts come in.

One for the Indiehackers/Startup, or even company internal tools people.

Firestarter https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter, is perhaps a more humble project than most here, but happy if anyone is interested to follow it.

It is an attempt to build what is (in my opinion!) a great stack for quickly iterating on a web app idea. Probably about a month off from first release, which will be a simple TODO app you can sign up for, with full instructions on getting it set up and deployed that would be about an hour's work. From that point you have a semi-professional setup with devops and CI taken care of so you can move faster on your idea or startup. No need to touch a server (there isn't one to touch!)

Uses Firebase/NextJs/Vercel/React/Tailwind/Github Actions/Jest/Testing Library

I chose firebase because it is a very good choice for getting up to speed fast. The downside it is a lock-in, and not open source. However the code is written in such a way that swapping out to Parse, for example would be fairly easy to do.

UI components as a service. I struggle to find inspiration for simple ui components when i design and build websites.

It would be great to not start from scratch everytime and still have base ui that could be customizable.

Codepen partially solve this, but searching them takes time and often they are not customizable.

There are multiple sites but they just redirect to selected codepen.

Don't know if it's viable. I am banking on the rise of indie devs building products without designers.

Im building a p2p rental marketplace https://www.rentr.me/ . Focused on NYC and allows NY'ers to safely rent items from each other.

Currently looking for a cofounder so feel free to reach out :) https://ellispinsky.com/

I used to be in this space. How are you going to handle fraud/theft? E.g. someone uses a stolen driver’s license/whatever to sign up with a verified account, uses a stolen card, shows up to borrow $highValue item, and then never returns it.

Fair concern. Im using stripe to process payments and would be able to hold a user accountable if an item wasnt returned or was heavily damaged, but some mechanism should be put in place to verify people are who they say they are without adding too much friction to checkout / registration flow.

What if that all checks out but someone else goes to actually pick up the item?

IME it’s reasonable to verify that an identity is legit, but not that the person providing that identity is the person tied to that identity. And it all goes out the window when they send their boyfriend/assistant/coworker to actually pick up the item.

I always forget when to plant things in my garden so I made a little tool for myself. You set your zip, then pick your plants, and it will tell you your upcoming planting dates.

https://rootedreminders.com

InventAI: https://inventai.xyz

This will help creators build with AI using a cool UI with tons of features. Initially for images, then I'll expand to documents and code. I'm aiming to launch in the next few weeks.

It's still very modest and in it's starting phases (not ready for Show HN), but I'm working on small website/guide on how to get started using Rust for Data Engineering. I've been using Rust in my new job with quite some success over the past months and decided to share what I learned. As someone who's used to Python for almost a decade now, it is a very nice complement and quite surprisingly fits the bill for things like Data Engineering.

https://datawithrust.com

I've been working on OnlineOrNot for two years (as of last week), and started building an open source CLI in TypeScript for it:

https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot

I'm finding building a CLI fun because it's still a "frontend", but you have to think harder about how the UX should work - since you can't just make it pretty.

(it's also a cheap way to grow the roadmap for my public API since I need to build all these endpoints to make what I want to do possible)

Working on adding “environments” to my business’ API (https://keygen.sh). I’ve gone over 6 years without offering a “sandbox” environment to customers, so I’m excited to finally be working on this one. It’s been quite complex implementatiom-wise, and has touched a lot of surface area, since I want it to support multiple named environments (e.g. staging, dev, one-off isolated test envs for CI/CD). But it’ll be worth it.

Building a site that helps people determine where to live using publicly available data sets. https://searchaway.co/

It's a fun side project but something I think needs to exist. I found it difficult to see how places were changing over time (ie are schools getting better or worse, is income increasing or decreasing, etc..) Would love to hear your feedback or meet individuals interested in working together. hello@searchaway.co

I'm building a productivity app based only on camera images. For me it's always easier to capture what I need than to put it into words

think:

- fixes around the house / todos

- image as a reminder

- wishlist (some photo lists can be public and shareable)

- recommendations (when someone is showing you a book or sth, just capture and save it)

I'm still at an early experimentation stage, but have I'm documenting progress at https://twitter.com/visuelapp

I started something similar, so far just an inventory of my stuff but I wanted to add a chores and maintenance schedule. I like the UI you have for setting up an item when you take a picture.

thanks, similar story here. I'm in the middle in apartment renovation and initialy I made it to save images for todo to the backlog.

It's also very handy when my girlfriend shows me sth she likes, I can easly store it for gift ideas

Currently putting the final touches on https://www.sheetmonitor.com/

Its a simple tool that plots how data changes in a google sheet over time. So the categories of value per row, number of rows added & removed and some more complex things like averages.

I use it personally to monitor user and finance related sheets that others are editing so I can see how things are changing over time.

A remote controlled car , using LEGO + Android. I'm also try to insert a simple AI to this, to make the car remember every driver and adapt its sensitivity.

A stupid project just for sake of learning. Within are immature group of friends we always had a million nicknames. The website will give the nickname of the day! As stupid as is sounds, I want to kind of buld everything from ground up and i am facing a lot of challenges. Handling login, exposing APIs with an API Gateway, Database etc. I wish I could find more interesting project to learn with, but i have no ideas :(

What stack are you using and are you familiar with Ruby on Rails?

No, i'm using node.js, fastify, postgreSQL. The interface is going to be very easy. Probably easy html+css (bootstrap) and simple JS, but maybe i'll try to learn a bit of some FE framework (I essentially know nothing about FE).

I've been working on a GitHub App to help developers identify potential software supply chain security risks (pipeline misconfigurations, dangerous dependencies, SCM misconfigurations, etc.). Only has a handful of features at the moment as I'm doing some user interviews to learn more.

https://docs.sourceshield.io

Been diving in the world of ChatGPT and other AI tech lately.

In February, I was working on two projects and just released them both recently:

https://trackmybot.com - public ChatGPT responses with public archive.

https://artsy.sh - dynamic drawing tool featuring DALLE-2 and Stable Diffusion 2.1 engine models.

Building a "community-as-a-service" idea. Our team has years of experience starting, moderating and growing online communities on slack/discord, so want to make this available for everyone. https://communityexperts.carrd.co/

I currently building an "mobile data entry" system (where our salespeople can place orders while with the customers and our technicians can fill out service reports) for the company i work at... nothing fancy, but because the company goes pretty well along with my inherent crazyness they let it build me based around Plan 9 (or more exactly: 9front).

Highlightra: https://highlightra.com

Onboarding and messaging tool for small SaaS businesses. Should be ready in a week.

This will slowly evolve into a time-to-value helping tool, which means clients will be able to help their users minimise time-to-value of their product, thus reducing churn and improving free to paying conversions.

I built a URL shortener to teach myself serverless. I'm working on adding link metrics and custom domains. I'd like to eventually use it for tracking link clicks in email newsletters, etc.

https://ugh.lol/

AGI in cobol running on a seedless watermelon. Looking for venture funding. Softbank is in.

a low latency, ping normalized, multiplayer competitive game. powered by physx and wickedengine.

An open source notion like note taking app with a static blog generator.

Helping teams reorganize / scale by embracing Conway's law and graph data.

https://miniware.team

Two things, one which supports the other:

First is Concise Encoding, a secure, binary and text ad-hoc data format with full type support: https://concise-encoding.org/

Example of the text format:

    c1
    {
        "string"        = "Strings support escape sequences: \n \t \[1f415]"
        "boolean"       = true
        "binary int"    = -0b10001011
        "octal int"     = 0o644
        "decimal int"   = -10000000
        "hex int"       = 0xfffe0001
        "very long int" = 100000000000000000000000000000000000009
        "decimal float" = -14.125
        "hex float"     = 0x5.1ec4p+20
        "very long flt" = 4.957234990634579394723460546348e+100000
        "not-a-number"  = nan
        "infinity"      = inf

        "list"          = [1 2.5 "a string"]
        "map"           = {"one"=1 2="two" "today"=2020-09-10}
        "bytes"         = |u8x 01 ff de ad be ef|
        "int16 array"   = |i16 7374 17466 -9957|

        "uuid"          = f1ce4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000
        "date"          = 2019-07-01
        "time"          = 18:04:00.948/Europe/Prague
        "timestamp"     = 2010-07-15/13:28:15.415942344
        "null"          = null
        "media"         = |application/x-sh 23 21 2f 62 69 6e 2f 73 68 0a 0a
                             65 63 68 6f 20 68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f 72 6c 64 0a|
    }

Almost all existing data formats are horribly insecure and ripe for exploitation (many of them are already). And they can't be fixed because the formats aren't versioned.

-----------------

But describing the data format was painful because most existing metalanguages are only for describing textual grammars, and the few that support binary aren't really suited for documenting for human consumption.

So I'm putting the finishing touches on Dogma ( https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/dogma_v1.md ), a modernized BNF-style metalanguage with better expressiveness and binary grammar support.

For example:

A UDP packet consists of a source port, a destination port, a length, a checksum, and a body. The length field refers to the size of the entire packet, not just the body.

    udp_packet   = src_port
                 & dst_port
                 & uint(16, var(length,8~) )
                 & checksum
                 & body(length - 8) # subtract header from length to get body length
                 ;
    src_port     = uint(16,~);
    dst_port     = uint(16,~);
    checksum     = uint(16,~);
    body(length) = uint(8,~){length};

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