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

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

38 pointsdavid92743 comments

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

Day job (contract): Massive overhaul of an antibody workbench for drug discovery.

Evenings: Building out a concept for a "YSQL" bringing CRDTs (Yjs) to SQLite and Postgres. CRDTs are great for real-time, but also awesome for offline async collaboration. Using the same CRDT for both front end data structures and backend database merging seems to me to be a good combination. The plan is to build out some simple primitives first, then layer a SQLite (WASM in browser) <-> Postgres sync system on top for local copying and modification of datasets.

Proof of concepts:

https://github.com/samwillis/yjs-sqlite-test

https://github.com/samwillis/yjs-pg-test

I recently released Card Buddy [1], a Mac app to help you organize ideas on small index cards on a canvas. You can pick from different canvas styles which can auto-arrange your cards to make it easier to reorder them for a narrative, or pick from a grid-based canvas which lets you stack cards. You can drag images in as well and create a mood board like Pinterest.

I'm planning on releasing an iPad version with drawing so you can sketch out storyboards with it.

[1] https://www.ussherpress.com/cardbuddy/

A project I posted a few years back on HN for an invisible full-lid sticker for MacBooks, so that you could both protect them _and_ keep your stickers once you get a new laptop. I finally found a cost effective manufacturing solution, so setup a shop for them!

LidLayer - https://lidlayer.com

• https://scrapscript.org

• fundraising for my pre-seed startup

• organizing a tech conference in Southern California: https://outland.sh

• writing at https://taylor.town

• preparing for the AIDS/lifecycle -- please donate :) https://giving.aidslifecycle.org/participant/taylor

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Check out my complete list at https://taylor.town/now

Keep it up. This is some really interesting tech you’re working on!

I'm working on Klugbot (http://www.klugbot.com) an AI personal assistant. The idea is to go way beyond what assistants like Siri, Alexa are capable of doing using a combination of LLMs, calling APIs, and deep integrations.

I'm approaching scheduling first - looking at your calendar and coordinating with others to find availability and setting up a meeting - all by just invoking the model.

Eventual goal is to do everything a real human assistant can do online + over phone calls.

Just starting off, and would love to talk to more people interested in this domain. Feel free to hit me up at hi@klugbot.com

Working on Conjure (https://conjure.so) - a habit, time, and goal tracking platform with a habit rules engine, data layer, dashboards, integrations, and API, real-time across web, desktop and mobile.

Just released a free plan, after a mere 2.5 years of solo and bootstrapped dev.

Feel the primitives are in place now (even down to a Habit version control system for the rules engine) and have daily users who are getting value, so focusing now implementing user feedback and trying to get it out there (as have done no real marketing), before I tackle the next big feature I'm excited about.

This is super cool! What motivated you to build it? What do you feel it offers over other habit tracking apps :)

Thank you so much! I spent some time researching subjective well-being, life satisfaction and behaviour change a few years ago when I was at an unhappy point in life, and started experimenting building systems that helped me be consistent and balanced in the things that are meaningful to me. I tried to figure out how to make it sustainable and low friction through automations, habit rules, emergency modes/completion types and so on. All this led to Conjure. For me, what differentiates it are Habit Completion Types, Habit Version Control, the Habit Rules Engine, being real-time across web, desktop and mobile, the Measurement system with custom fields and a bunch of other over-engineered things :)

I lead a team of physicists and software engineers that develop games whose core mechanics are natively quantum.

You can see our work: - https://quantumchess.net (has run on Google's quantum computer) - https://tiqtaqtoe.com - https://github.com/quantumlib/unitary (open source library to add quantum behaviour to software, aimed at coders, not physicists)

I've been working on https://onebag.travel/

Its more of a labor of love than anything else. This month I almost broke even so that's nice.

I've been plugging away at a multiplayer game server framework in Erlang, called Overworld: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld

It integrates with Godot, with the ability to generate a client library that (un)marshalls data by way of Protobuf and communicates over ENet (UDP) or WebSocket (TCP).

Most recently, I've been working on a 2D space game with the framework, envisioned as a top-down EVE Online or Elite: Dangerous style of game.

I’m currently building a service that allows someone to text a link or content they want summarized either via SMS or Discord and the service will return a summary based on certain parameters specified. I realized that there are numerous summarization tools based on Chrome extensions, but I do most my reading from my phone and thought that linking a URL and having a service figure out how to parse and summarize (using GPT) would be a lot easier flow. Lmk if anyone wants to try it

I'm building an ai-generated motivator that takes user inputs regarding goals and things that are holding the user back, and pulls from 100's of strategies from sports psychology, performance psychology literature, and motivational stories to create a personalized motivational speech (and eventually, video) that is crafted to help the user incorporate helpful mindsets into their day.

I’m writing a weekly newsletter called Meaningful Jobs while I’m working on my too-early-to-share-publicly SaaS. The newsletter is focused on engineering jobs at companies working on climate change, healthcare, and education.

https://www.workdna.com/newsletters/meaningful-jobs

Rolepad (https://rolepad.com) - a free web app to help folks applying for jobs track their progress. It's flexible and comes with Sankey visualization of the job search process. You can also forward emails with recruiters/hiring managers so all communication and notes are in one place.

I'm building a robot from scratch. It's pretty cool to see how processing at the edge (one might even call it AI) lets even lower-power microcontrollers like the Jetson Nano perform tasks that even 10 years ago would have been impossible or needed serious compute/power to perform.

I work in ecommerce as my day job for a larger company. I currently built a package of web components that can be mixed and matched to build a wide variety of templates / ecommerce without worrying about accessibility, performance, or responsiveness. It also addresses some of the pain points I've seen, like being able to swap an image for a video.

The components were built about a year ago, I'm now working on a WYSIWYG that lets you start from a template. Because it's web components, I'm able to export the Props each component. The WYSIWYG reads the export and creates a CMS based on the template you selected.

Not sure if I will leave it at that and just give you some HTML you can copy into your own site, or go one step further and start branching into a whole self-hosted content solution.

Been working on the past 2 years nearly 100% of my time outside of work a self-hosted media server for books and comics, Kavita.

The goal is to take the simplicity of Plex and bring that to comics, manga, and books (epub and pdf). There is so much potential with an app like this, esp with text to speech getting good.

I'm also working on Comic tagging tool: MangaManager, which is aimed at bulk editing/writing ComicInfo.xml into archives, which is how metadata is loaded into the major applications for Comics/Manga.

https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita https://github.com/MangaManagerORG/Manga-Manager

I've been working on django-simple-deploy, a platform-agnostic tool for automating initial Django deployments. It has preliminary support for three platforms: Platform.sh, Fly.io, and Heroku.

I sprinted on it at PyCon, and it was good to have a bunch of new eyes on the project and the codebase. I'm hoping to get it close to 1.0 this summer. Most of the work to get there involves making sure it supports all platforms on Windows, and deployments are stable and reliable across all three platforms.

https://django-simple-deploy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

http://census.report

The data is lagged (currently only supports 2020-2021 YoY rate of change, currently expecting the 2022 data in Sept of this year. For questions/feature requests contact me at https://twitter.com/censusreport/

Here is a sample map. https://imgur.com/RG7E2yx

Some of the data groups include

MARITAL STATUS

SCHOOL ENROLLMENT

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

VETERAN STATUS

RESIDENCE 1 YEAR AGO

U.S. CITIZENSHIP STATUS

LANGUAGE SPOKEN AT HOME

ANCESTRY

COMPUTERS AND INTERNET USE

EMPLOYMENT STATUS

COMMUTING TO WORK

OCCUPATION

INDUSTRY

INCOME AND BENEFITS (IN 2021 INFLATION-ADJUSTED DOLLARS)

HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE

PERCENTAGE OF FAMILIES AND PEOPLE WHOSE INCOME IN THE PAST

12 MONTHS IS BELOW THE POVERTY LEVEL

HOUSING OCCUPANCY

UNITS IN STRUCTURE

YEAR STRUCTURE BUILT

ROOMS

BEDROOMS

HOUSING TENURE

YEAR HOUSEHOLDER MOVED INTO UNIT

VEHICLES AVAILABLE

HOUSE HEATING FUEL

OCCUPANTS PER ROOM

VALUE

MORTGAGE STATUS

GROSS RENT

GROSS RENT AS A PERCENTAGE OF HOUSEHOLD INCOME (GRAPI)

Working on a fun drinking game for south asians! https://outdesi.com/ We're in beta right now, trying to figure out how to get people to try it out

What's south Asians? India and Pakistan?

yes! I think Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are also South Asian countries

I'd also include Nepal and perhaps even Bhutan here.

I’m trying to build a distributed system like Spark, but in Go. I think it will be a fun project to try and brush my knowledge of Go. If this interests you Reach out at linkedin.com/in/amanjaiswalofficial

I'm working on Mayu Live [1,2] which is a server side web framework inspired by React, written in Ruby, but it uses Haml instead of JSX. Recently I've done some experiments with a different approach in RDOM [3] using custom elements.

1. https://mayu.live/

2. https://github.com/mayu-live/framework

3. https://github.com/aalin/rdom

For the past 2+ years I've been working on this project on and off (mostly off as of late, but I'd love to get back into it again)

MusicLink - a third party music app that does song matchup across streaming services. You can message a friend a link to a song and the app will automatically translate the link to their preferred streaming service. No more getting links to songs on services you don't have and manually looking up music.

That's the core functionality but I'm also building in generative playlists & music discovery tools.

I have been yearning for something like this for so long as I use multiple streaming services. As an example, I wanted to add the song to the other streaming services as soon as I added it to my library in any of them. H

Recently, I started a project that draws simple illustrations using GPT. It began as a lighthearted curiosity, but eventually grew into something bigger, something that makes me smile when “a cat” or “a tesla car” turns into a recognizable sketch with a hint of creativity. It is private yet, but I will be releasing soon. I cherry picked a few illustrations and published them here: https://drawmeasheep.net/

8086 emulator in Rust: https://github.com/jafarlihi/core86

Want to eventually run MS/DOS on it.

I'm building a Business Rule compiler. My grand unifying theory is that business rules occupy a hazy border between configuration and code, and this haze is the source of both software bugs and frustrated stakeholders. The idea is to make an app that treats those Business Rules like configuration, automatically generate the proper code, and package it up for your programmers to deploy.

My second project (when I get bored of the above) is a VR Clojure REPL.

Working on my site - https://SignalProcessingJobs.com - a job board and website for signal processing engineers.

Been figuring out what content people want, what to write, how to promote it as tastefully as possible, and figuring out how to make my first sale (job posts). Never been a sales person, so its a fun learning experience.

A universal timeline that scales from milliseconds to all of time, so I can record events in my life, human history, and the cosmos.

It works, but I want to add a bunch of features, most importantly the ability to share events with other people.

https://www.timepasses.net/

Yet another language learning app. The aim is to be the opposite of Duolingo, that is teaching the last 10% of a language. It's basically a glorified Anki Deck builder, which picks out vocabulary which user does not yet from texts/websites/song lyrics and then teaches then through spacial repetition.

Learning synths and music production workflows.

I’m a Front end engineer / manager by day and things have been slow. Rather than try to move on I’m just embracing spending some hobby time during the day. I should probably figure out what I want my next role to look like, but I like all these noises I’m making so far.

Building with AI for E-commerce. The 5-10 yr future of search, shopping, etc. is going to look very different, so I'm building that direction.

In the short term, chatbots and api's to allow developers to expand keywords, data, product metadata, rank higher in LLMs. Lots of room for optimization here.

Finally made up my mind to learn Swift and SwiftUI...currently working on a Hacker News app: https://github.com/Livinglist/ZCombinator

Java interop for Dart / Flutter through JNI.

https://github.com/dart-lang/jnigen

It's rough around the edges, but I hope it will make to beta by end of the year.

I'm working on a tool to automate 80% of my job as a software developer. It's too early to share but the basic idea is specification in, working code out.

Working away on kons-9, my 3D Common Lisp system.

https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

Updating my android apps, creating/updating my business websites, working on some 3D printed items, and working on a Flir Lepton project.

building an experimental load balancing tool in rust

github.com/anddddrew/juggler

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