Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

410 pointsdavid9271,214 comments

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

A tree cutting tool.

Take photos of the tree from 6 different angles, feed into a 3D model generator, erode the model and generate a 3D graph representation of the tree.

The tool suggests which cuts to make and where, given a restricted fall path (e.g. constrained by a neighbors yard on one side).

I create the fallen branches in their final state along the fall plane, and create individual correction vectors mapping them back to their original state, but in an order that does not intersect other branch vectors.

The idea came to me as a particularly difficult tree needed to come down in my friends yard, and we spent hours planning it out. I've already gotten some interest from the tree-surgeon community, I just need to appify it.

Second rendition will treat the problem more as a physics one than a graph one, with some energy-minimisation methods for solving.

That’s a great idea, but so much liability if the user is an amateur and follows steps incorrectly

Or perhaps follows the steps correctly.

Making this determination alone will sink you in legal fees

Does an insane amount of fine print really save you? Even if you say the model is only an aide to be used by licensed or certified professional arborists or whatever, I fear some Joe blow whose tree lands on his house will be suing you.

This is the kind of thing that makes me love HN. An idea I would never have thought of, with an immediately obvious use in multiple ways (fall path plus ideal lumber cutting?), probably very difficult, yet being tackled with one implementation already... and spoken of quite humbly.

Where I live this could be very helpful becuase people is too, how to say it, maybe ignorant in safety and logic specs. Also could be usefull to know or estimate what tree are in a innminent or highr posibilities of fall with wind.

Happy to help!

Do consider the value of the wood in relation to your cuts. A well-placed cut not only guarantees safety but will also take the maximum board feet from the tree.

Seems insignificant. What are you optimizing for- an extra foot or two?

Yes, board feet is usually measured by the inch.

Aren't longer boards worth more per boardfoot too?

Yes, but most trees are plenty tall enough.

Yes, and the wider the more it costs per bf as well.

I have a couple products I make that require 12" widths, which means I pay a whole lot more per bf than < 10" widths at my hardwood supplier.

Then just make the cut as low to the ground as possible. You don’t need a lot of complex math for that.

No offense, but this comment is very reductionist. The problem isn’t nearly as simple as you’re making it out to be.

the right cuts at the right heights while working down the tree from a specific max height of the tree to still produce viable board feet while maximizing boards per cut. in most places, unless youre pulping the entire tree, its quite a bit more complicated than cut as low as possible.

its surprising to me how little work is done to make the tools which do this accessible considering how much money and open data there is.

it gets less open and more complicated is when you consider certain mills only can make certain cuts, produce certain products, and accept certain logs. then factor in distance between mills and the products they can make, and also log lengths accepted by the trucks which can travel those routes.

its all solvable and should be, but its so niche and that i still think there isnt an accessible solution

with dimension lumber it's way more about the width you can cut than length; sometimes shorter is more valuable depending on supply & demand (and transport). Accounting for the fact that trees are not perfect cylinders (or cones, really) is where all the fun optimization comes from anyways.

good ol conical frustum

i work a lot with NVEL for this. one time even tried porting nvel to wasm for fun and client accessibility. we "virtually buck" trees which seems like could be applied to your proposed use case. if op wants to go down this path: https://github.com/FMSC-Measurements/VolumeLibrary/tree/77d4...

How does the graph representation help you solve the problem?

I was mixing methods, sorry. My initial rendition for solving the cuts would initialise a somewhat sparse network from tree to ground, and solve for non-overlapping paths.

This became convoluted and I just opted for a far easier method of solving vector intersections.

Its also not perfect since I haven't factored in rotation origin very well, and I'm now pursuing a far simpler physics-based approach

I was imagining something like this for pruning fruit trees — something to help noobs like me see how to put pruning guidelines into practice on a real, overgrown tree. Good luck!

Funny, one of mine also involves trees -- but is mostly outdoor cleanup. The kind that involves decades' worth of it, thanks to what I'll just say is a lot of maintenance that wasn't done over a long time. There's an extensive amount of brush, leaves, etc of varying ages that could maybe be shredded up into something useful, invasive vines I'm still trying to deal with, and more old trash than I've fully figured out how to properly dispose of.

It's turning into various DIY rabbit holes, actually, with the next one (outside of various related landscaping stuff) being to gut a basement.

I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.

When i read OP this is what I thought it was going to be - these branches are going to be apex competitors, these are crossing or going to cross, this one shows signs of disease, this one interrupts air flow through the centre, etc.

You can start right now with an algorithm I learned from an expert when I was working in a landscaping business.

It is a very simple three-pass plan: "Deadwood, Crossovers, Aesthetics".

So, first pass, go through the tree cutting out only and all the dead branches. Cut back to live stock, and as always make good clean angle cuts at a proper angle (many horticulture books will provide far better instructions on this).

Second pass, look only for branches that cross-over other branches and especially those that show rubbing or friction marks against other branches. Cut the ones that are either least healthy or grow in the craziest direction (i.e., crazy away from the normal more-or-less not radially away from the trunk).

Then, and only after the other two passes are complete, start pruning for the desired look and/or size & shape for planned growth or bearing fruit.

This method is simple and saves a LOT of ruined trees from trying to first cut to size and appearance, then by the time the deadwood and crossovers are taken later, it is a scraggly mess that takes years to grow back. And it even works well for novices, as long as they pay attention.

I'd suspect entering the state and direction of every branch to an app would take longer than just pruning with the above method, although for trees that haven't fully leafed out, perhaps a 360° angle set of drone pics could make an adequate 3D model to use for planning?

In any case, good luck with your fruit trees — may they grow healthy and provide you with great bounty for many years!

i work in forestry software and am curious about your methods. is any of this open source? any intention on supporting growth modeling?

I plan for a time-bomb license (closed source for 10 years, make my money (if any), GPLv3 after that).

My methods are all over the place. Tree is taken as-is on the day, and cuts calculated on the fly, no future growth-modelling if that is what you're asking

This is great idea - I have a huge tree in front yard that will either cost be $5-10k to come down or was going to rent lift and do it myself - A few particular branches scare me though in terms of how they will come down... Bonus points for where to tie things off.

Perhaps an opportunity for weed control for lawn as well.

You should branch out (hehe) into flower and plant pruning suggestions with your app. ChatGPT can do this now if prompted.

Testing this is real pain in the ass, you gotta cut real tree to see if it works in various situations :(

I got filtered by the Ent arc of LOTR and dropped the book.

Not if tree cutting simulator is a VR experience

Cool idea. Just wondering why you wouldn't use Lidar for this? I'd have thought the spatial fidelity of a Lidar model would provide a much better model of the weight distribution of a tree.

Trees cost a lot of money to bring down. I've ideas for an automated cutter but it's a surprisingly difficult problem.

Forgive my ignorance but all the tree cutting I've observed has been based on climbing and cutting in segments from the top rather than letting the tree fall. Under what circumstances is it better or necessary to actually let the tree fall?

IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wield a chainsaw in an elevated position. Also, if you are interested in getting long planks out of the trunk, you would not want to cut it down progressively.

I think it depends on how much space there is for the tree to safely fall. If there isn’t enough space to accommodate the height of the tree, it needs to be done in controlled segments.

Any tree near civilization that someone wants to pay to cut down is likely going to be at a distance from a structure, powerlines, or pipes in the ground (that's also the reason they want it removed) where felling it as it lies is not likely an option which is why you see them sectioned down or done with a crane or bucket truck. A lot of these trees done by tree care companies in residential or commercial areas are also sprawling hardwood trees like oaks that can't always be safely just dropped from the ground even if there's a clear area to drop it in. For logging or wildland firefighting, most of the trees being dropped are straight growing softwoods like pine or fir that are just dropped from the ground (or by machine).

I was thinking of something similar during pruning season for my apple trees a few months ago. I even went so far as to take a scan of one of my trees with Luma and had it generate a 3D render of it. This worked surprisingly well, though it did take several days to get it rendered as it seemed their service was saturated.

My need/idea was to post that some where (r/backyardorchard probably) to get help in determining which limbs to prune. However, there didn't seem to be an easy way to share that sort of thing and time was of the essence, so I just forged ahead on my own.

I've been thinking for years about a safer alternative to chain saws. Something along the lines of a carbide coated wire driven by an electric motor and battery. Strap it to the tree, turn it on, walk away and some minutes later the tree falls down. The main difficulty is in how to drive the wire. Using friction would create fast wearing parts. Maybe a chain could be used instead of a wire. It could oscillate back and forth, instead of having to be wrapped and spliced to form a circle around the tree. It seems really strange that no one has come up with an alternative to chain saws for decades (except for large scale trucks that can process whole trees.) For small trees and branches even a sawz-all is safer than a chain saw. Inspired by spending some time sharing a hospital room with a guy who had a chain saw accident, but I still haven't come up with a workable idea. Maybe someone else can.

We use a winch to guide the branches down, but would never apply the winch directly to the tree in case of whiplash when the branch finally breaks

I hear you on the safety angle, but chainsaws work really well. They're also very versatile.

I was thinking I could use a tool just like the wire you described to remove a stump, after I spent 6 hours with a 5ton Bobcat trying to dig up a 3ft diameter pine stump to no avail today. For felling trees though, you need precise front cuts/back cuts to drop the tree at a desired angle, you can't just cut in one direction even if you have a cable attached.

Would burning the stump work?

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeGbunc_Sk

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsLCIB80Y6k

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35d5TtYJf_g

Perhaps drilling in a wedge shape so it weakens the branch and it eventually breaks off naturally but it seems like more work than just a chain saw. The holes could also be used for steam treatment, enzymes [0] or something else to break it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin-modifying_enzyme

I use a tool called the Alligator. Is is a tool you can use like scissors. It has 2 chains on the inside of the the business ends. You put around the branch. Close the end and press the button. Springs will then close the end even more and cut the wood. No open chains

Having joined may father and his friend during the process of cutting down big trees in the village neighborhood I can personally vouch that this indeed a cumbersome and very complex task for both the planning and the execution phases. However, for us the tasks are made easier by the trimming of the tree's branches since my father's friend is the expert tree climber.

From your descriptions, it seems that your tree cutting procedures do not involved precut of the tree's branches before cutting the tree down.

I've got the feeling that this cutting tree problem can be solved by constraint programming techniques [1],[2]. Alternatively generic tools for constraint programming, for example OR-Tools and MiniZinc can probably do the same if not better [3],[4].

[1] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk

[2] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

[3] Google OR-Tools:

https://developers.google.com/optimization

[4] MiniZinc:

https://www.minizinc.org/

The first ever SQL debugger – runs & visualizes your query step-by-step, every clause, condition, expression, incl. GROUP BY, aggregates / windows, DISTINCT (ON), subqueries (even correlated ones!), CTEs, you name it.

You can search for full or partial rows and see the whole query lineage – which intermediate rows from which CTEs/subqueries contributed to the result you're searching for.

Entirely offline & no usage of AI. Free in-browser version (using PGLite WASM), paid desktop version.

No website yet, here's a 5 minute showcase (skip to middle): https://www.loom.com/share/c03b57fa61fc4c509b1e2134e53b70dd

Is this postgres only? What an interesting idea!

For now, yes, but I'll start working on adding support for all other DBs (especially OLAP) as soon as possible. The geberal approach is the same, I just have to handle all the edge cases of the SQL dialects

Was thinking today... not a debugger but even a SQL progess bar, so I know that my add column will take say 7 hours in advance.

This seems like it could be extremely useful.

Thanks! Would you mind sharing what would be your use cases?

At my job, all of our business logic (4 KLOC of network topology algorithms) is written in a niche query language, which we have been migrating to PostgreSQL. When an inconsistency/error is found, tracking it can take days, manually commenting out parts of query and looking at the results.

Am not the person you asked, but feel that it could have good value for education and learning as well, besides debugging.

Nice one!

Cool! We're dealing with many complex CTEs and costly queries. Would be useful to have those visualized one by one.

What database are you using? I'd be happy to hear about your usecases and hopefully help you, shoot me an email (in profile)

This is awesome! I’m work with a team of analysts and data engineers who own a pretty big snowflake data warehouse. We write a ton of dbt models and have a range of sql skill levels on the team. This would be the perfect way to allow more junior devs to build their skills quickly and support more complex models.

I would recommend you target data warehouses like snowflake and bigquery where the query complexity and thus value prop for a tool like this is potentially much higher.

Thank you, nice to get some idea validation from folks in the industry. For sure data warehouses are the top priority on my TODO list, I picked PG first because that's what I'm familiar with.

I can ping you via email when the debugger is ready, if you're interested. My email is in my profile

This would be incredible to understand why some queries execute slow; most of the time it's one of the steps in between that takes 99% of the execution time at our company. Do you record the time each step takes?

You're onto the original idea I started out with! Unfortunately it's very difficult to correlate input SQL to an output query plan – but possible. It's definitely in future plans

Can you not use EXPLAIN ANALYZE to identify steps that had the highest compute time? I think most databases have some form of this.

I've never heard of this, and I'm pretty sure my coworkers haven't either. Thanks for mentioning it!

https://chatgpt.com/share/68104c37-b578-8003-8c4e-b0a4688206...

This is a great command everyone should know. We once had a long running database query that was blocking a pipeline (code was written in a week and of course became integral to operations). Ran it, 15 minutes of thinking, added a new index on an now important column, and cut the run time down from almost 30 minutes to 5 seconds.

MSSQL has the execution plan thing that will tell you which steps are involved and how long they take.

Possibly look at https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/parser_to...

Even if not for DuckDB, you can use this to validate/ parse queries possibly.

Thanks for the suggestion! I am using https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot, which magically supports most SQL dialects. And yes, support for DuckDB is also in future plans

this is very cool! Where can I follow you to see updates?

Following...

Finish it, shut up, take my money! This looks really good - make a website just to make it possible to sign up for updates.

Thanks for the motivation to finish this as soon as possible :) I'm working on a basic landing page with screenshots/videos and a "get notified" button right now – shoot me an (empty, if you want) email (in profile) and I'll ping you as soon as it's ready

https://dequery.io :) Added a little signup form (with possibility of providing additional feedback)

That was quick. I wanted to be quick too, but learned that I was too eager and missed that the are optional fields to pick from. I then re-submitted with the same email (will it go through or you have uniqueness validation?) providing optional stuff this time. Maybe play with positioning of the optional fields so they would be more apparent before submitting email address.

Thanks for the feedback! I updated the form

https://dequery.io

This comment is still (surprisingly!) gaining traction, so leaving this here

I’m working on Popgot (https://popgot.com), a tool that tracks unit prices (cost per ounce, sheet, pound) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. It normalizes confusing listings (“family size”, “mega pack”, etc.) to surface the actual cheapest option for daily essentials.

On top of that, it uses a lightweight AI model to read product descriptions and filter based on things like ingredients (e.g., flagging peanut butter with BPA by checking every photograph of the plastic or avoiding palm oil by reading the nutrition facts) or brand lists (e.g., only showing WSAVA-compliant dog foods). Still reviewing results manually to catch bad extractions.

Started this to replace a spreadsheet I was keeping for bulk purchases. Slowly adding more automation like alerting on price drops or restocking when under a threshold.

I like this idea a lot -- feels like there's a lot of room to grow here. Do you have any sort of historical price tracking/alerting?

And/or also curious if there is a way to enter in a list of items I want and for it to calculate which store - in aggregate - is the cheapest.

For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multiple stores to compare.

> For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multiple stores to compare.

A few years ago, I was very diligently tracking _all_ my family's grocery purchases. I kept every receipt, entered it into a spreadsheet, added categories (eg, dairy, meat), and calculated a normalized cost per unit (eg, $/gallon for milk, $/dozen eggs).

I learned a lot from that, and I think I saved our family a decent amount of money, but man it was a lot of work.

Glad you guys mentioned Costco -- I happen to have written a blog post on exactly that: https://popgot.com/blog/retailer-comparison Surprisingly, Costco does not win most of the time, and especially if you are not brand loyal. Costco has famously low-margins, but it turns out that when you sort by price-per-unit they're ok, but not great.

@mynameisash I'm curious what you learned... maybe I can help more people learn that using Popgot data.

One thing to call out is that costco.com and in-person have different offerings (& prices) -- but you probably know that already.

I just dusted off my spreadsheet, and it's not as complete as I'd like it to be. I didn't normalize everything but did have many of the staples like milk and eggs normalized; some products had multiple units (eg, "bananas - each" vs "bananas - pound"); and a lot of my comparisons were done based on the store (eg, I was often comparing "Potatoes - 20#" at Costco but "Potatoes - 5#" at Target over time).

Anyway, Costco didn't always win, but in my experience, they frequently did -- $5 peanut butter @ Costco vs $7.74 @ Target based on whatever size and brand I got, which is interesting because Costco doesn't have "generic" PB, whereas Target has much cheaper Market Pantry, and I tried to opt for that.

My family’s favorite experience has been that Costco usually doesn’t have the cheapest option but it has a good value option.

Our main example is something like pasta. Our local grocery stores all carry their own brand of dirt cheap pasta but it’s not as good as the more expensive pasta at Costco. Comparable pasta at the local grocer would be more expensive.

For items that are carried at both stores, Costco is usually no cheaper than the regular retail price and rarely much more expensive.

The quality difference I find between Costco and Walmart is significant, even if the price is not that different.

I'm so glad you like it!

We have historical price tracking in the database, but haven't exposed it as a product yet. What do you have in mind / what would you use it for?

Cool! I hope it's coming to Japan (I live) near future.

I like that you have the ability to exclude on some dimension (eg, I don't use Amazon.com). Do you have or are you considering adding more retailers beyond the four you mentioned? For example, I buy a lot of unroasted coffee from sweetmarias.com, and excluding Amazon from Popgot results eliminates all but one listing (from Walmart).

Ah, hell yeah! My buddy on this project has been itching to add sweetmarias.com ... he just needed this as an excuse.

So yeah, we'll add it. If you shoot me an email (or post it here?) to chris @ <our site>.com I'll send you a link when it's done. Should take a day or two.

I don't think I have the time to go to different stores to buy different things based on what is cheap. I have one fixed one.

However, what I would like is a product where I upload my shopping receipt for a few weeks/months from the one store I go to. The application figures out what I typically buy and then compares the 4-5 big stores and tells me which one I should go to for least price.

Yeah, I agree. It is a pain to search product by product instead of sticking to one store. Also popgot.com can only do what's online & shipped to you -- so really just the non-perishables / daily essentials that are not fresh groceries. But even when limited to consumables I save ~$100/mo by basically buying by unit price.

Uploading a receipt to see how much you can save... that's a good idea. I think I can find your email via your personal site. Can I email you when we have a prototype ready?

A one time email is fine.

However, I am in Canada. So can only test it once you expand there. Thanks.

I don't know how things are in the US, but it does seem like the grocery store oligopoly is squeezing consumers a lot, so tools like this are valuable for injecting competition into the system.

Shameless plug for my own project (https://grocerytracker.ca/) since you're in Canada. Eventually I'd love for it to do what you're suggesting, but for now the closest thing you can do is create a basket for each store with the same items and then check each week to see which is the cheapest.

This is a great idea. And OCR should be good enough nowadays to parse the receipts. Probably would work best as a mobile app, though.

Have you looked at receipts? They’re narrow, only do one line per item, and every store prints something different for the same product. It usually includes a store specific sku, the price and some truncated text on that single line. Good luck figuring out exactly what someone purchased from a random receipt.

God tier filtering. Do you mind sharing how you integrated AI into the filter system? Your "flagging peanut butter" example also makes me wonder if the LLM is tagging the product with a large number of attributes on each run so it's not prohibitively expensive.

This is so good I disabled my ad blocker.

Thank you. Seriously.

Note: I searched "Protein bars", and it treated all protein bars equally. The 1st-20th cheapest had <15g of protein per bar. I had to scroll down to the 50th-60th to find protein bars with 20g of protein, which surprised me for being cheaper than Kirkland Signature's protein bars.

My pleasure! Happy you could use it as much as I do. Anyway we can chat in person? I'd love to make more stuff for you. chris@<our site>.com

Awesome site. You've probably come across it, but just in case you haven't. In the UK we have trolley.co.uk (plus app) which is handy. The barcode scanner I use a lot when I want to check if the branded product is a good price in the shop i'm standing in or if i'm getting ripped off. They have all products (I assume because online grocery shopping is bigger here?). Personally, I'm looking to start online shopping (new dad so time poor), it'd be great if I could build a shopping list and a site tell me which online grocer to order from for the best value, with basket price breakdown for each.

There is a project linked to the Open Food Facts nonprofit of collecting prices of any products (food or other) with bar codes https://prices.openfoodfacts.org/about. They have a system for automatic price detection from labels and working on one from receipts.

Cool project!

I run tech for a reverse logistics business buying overstock from Costco/Target/Walmart and we’re building a similar system for recognizing and pricing incoming inventory. I sent an email a few days ago to see if you might be open to chatting.

It would be great to compare notes or explore ways to collaborate. Totally understand if things are busy!

I am about to begin a PhD in astronomy. Until last month I was working at Caltech for 3 years on code which calculates orbits of asteroids to high precision. This code is being used on several NASA telescopes now to predict when they will image known asteroids (NEO Surveyor, SphereX, maybe Roman eventually). I was allowed to open source it and I am planning on making it the basis of my PhD research:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

It can predict the location of the entire catalog of known asteroids to generally within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the orbits. Its core is written in rust, with a python frontend.

Ever thought of making a presentation about this subject and putting it on YouTube? :-)

It sounds really impressive.

I've never really dabbled in youtube. I have several projects/papers I am working on using this code, I have thought about writing some blog posts as I publish those. But a PhD is going to be a major time sink, we will see what happens.

Do you want to post it as a Show HN soon, before the PhD sucks you in altogether?

(If so, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.)

Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately the PhD has already sunk its claws in. I should have some flashy stuff to show off in a 2-3 months (I have a conference talk coming I have to prepare material for).

Drat! Well, if you ever have some cycles to share your work on HN, contact us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to help.

More importantly, good luck with the PhD and we all hope it goes swimmingly!

Looking forward to it! Good luck with the PhD! (and thanks for making your code Open Source!)

I like the daredevil asteroids going for the close dive of the star emoji sun :)

Would it be appropriate to communicate on the README which telescopes this is used for? You see these very niche, very professional-looking repositories on GitHub now and then, and it's never clear how much credibility they have and whether they come from a hobbyist, student, experiment, or are in operational use.

This sounds like an amazing project!

I have a background in physics and ~20 years as a software engineer in the tech industry. Astronomy and astrophysics are so reliant on code these days; is there anywhere I could volunteer my expertise just to be a code monkey and help teams be more productive when working on software?

https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/

Colibri—a self-hostable web application to manage your (and your family's) ebook library, intended as a companion to Calibre. I want it to be a friendly, simple, capable, opinionated app to review your books, add metadata to them, get them onto your reader, share them with family and (few) friends, create a public shelf for bragging, connect with Goodreads etc., and exchange comments and reviews on books.

This is explicitly not intended to ever be monetised, and I enjoy all the implications that has on the design. Colibri is as much a tool I personally want to use, as it is a study in small-audience user interfaces, and the quest to build the perfect book catalog schema.

I'm looking for fellow book-loving people to work on Colibri, to create the best personal digital library possible. If you're interested, feel free to reach out via email (in bio), or on GitHub.

A fan chiming in. I'm really happy someone someone is tackling this and it's looking good. One thing: can we get a demo instance just for initial snooping? A screenshot or two is fine but to get a feel for features it would be nice to have something (even heavily limited) we can just interact with?

That's the first thing I'm going to do as soon as it's possible! I recently refactored the code base to a monorepo, and still need to make some adjustments so it'll run stable again. Stay tuned :)

Ooh, this looks fantastic. I'd love to help, but I'm spending almost all of my off-work hours looking for jobs right now. Maybe I'll find a good one sooner rather than later...

Thanks you, that means a lot. And good luck for your search!

This is super interesting. Where do you store the ebooks and the metadata?

Ebooks in an S3 compatible storage bucket, metadata in a Postgres database. That has the huge advantage of being able to do full text search and kNN similarity right in the database, for example.

Colibri is built around a pretty solid data schema (I hope). Check out the migrations folder if you’re curious :-)

Not to push LLMs into everything, but does it make sense to also implement semantic search by the way I love what you’re doing.

Semantic search is planned as part of book content search, look here: https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/issues/45

LLMs might make sense to interact with your collection, so that could find its way into the app at some point. Plus, I've been experimenting with generating llms.txt for all routes to point your own LLM to.

On the other hand, I'm concerned with LLMs quite intensely at work, so it's nice to spend some time with plain, honest-to-god SQL for now!

Looks really cool, gave a star!

Great stuff, has been meaning to create an online library of my burgeoning ebooks collections for quite som time now, this is exactly what the doctors ordered and it's based on Postgres.

Just wondering about the encrypted collection of ebooks from Kindle for example. Are these ebooks supported and does it only supports metadata, what about the content search for these ebooks?

So, Colibri is intended to be a companion to Calibre, maybe do like 80% of what it does, but not all of it. Also, I want Colibri's core to have a fully clean collar: It handles your personal books, but will not be able to automatically de-DRM books and such. However, the way book assets work, you're of course free to just attach an encrypted AZW3 file to a book!

> Are these ebooks supported and does it only supports metadata, what about the content search for these ebooks?

Have you seen https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/issues/45? Content search is planned, but requires access to a book's text content, obviously. My recommendation would be to use Calibre to strip DRM and convert the books to epub/mobi files, and import those to Colibri; this has the general benefit of ensuring access to content you bought without depending on Amazon's good will :-)

looks great! but your linked homepage doesn't work: https://colibri-hq.github.io/colibri/

https://mysukari.com - A Diabetes management platform

I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in Feb (technically LADA as it's late onset). I'm the first in my family with it so I had zero info on it. I tried getting some CGMs to use but most don't work in Kenya as they are geo-locked, and even apps for measuring carbs like CalorieKing are not available in my region. I was really frustrated with the tech ecosystem, and started working on My Sukari as a platform of free tools for diabetics.

I mostly get time to work on it on the weekends, so it's not yet ready for public use, but I've fully fleshed out one of the main features: Sugar Dashboard - A dashboard that visualises your Glucose data and helps you easier analyse it.

To help with demos, I've shared my Sugar Dashboard here: https://mysukari.com/tools/sugar-dashboard/peter

I'm really passionate about this and getting as much free, practical tools in the hands of patients (it honestly shouldn't be this hard to manage a disease)

Is this just for Type 1 or would type 2 work well also? Seems like it would?

All types. The sugar dashboard allows import of data from different glucose apps, so its goal is to allow you visualize and analyze your data. I hope to integrate with cgms directly if I get some that allow it, and also source from Health connect. Sharing with specific people eg doctor is also a big ask that I'm working on. The other WIP tools will be fore general health, not just diabetes, like carb counting from a photo via AI

Also recently diagnosed and just open sourced how I'm using AI to count carbs + get insulin doses [1]. Biggest issues I've seen to starting a legit business is not having sanctioned access to real-time blood sugar values (the APIs are all one hour behind), and dealing with the FDA. Love the idea of more tech-enabled diabetes management, good luck!

[1] https://github.com/kennedyjustin/BolusGPT

Love this! Thank you for sharing! My backend is also in Go so this is a godsend. Will see how I can incorporate and let you know if I do!

> not having sanctioned access to real-time blood sugar values (the APIs are all one hour behind)

Ah, I didn't know this. One of the prospective tools I had in mind was real time alerting in case of drastic drops eg ping doctor or relative. I think will have to be limited to the apps/tools that do support realtime.

Technically there is unsanctioned access (someone reverse engineered the real-time APIs [1] which I ported to Go). I think the FDA does not want easy access to real-time values so that folks can't easily recommend insulin dosing without oversight. I am personally of the opinion that it is our right to have programmatic access to the real-time data and do with it what we please.

Would love to get in touch to hear more about your long-term vision for the project!

[1] https://github.com/gagebenne/pydexcom

>so that folks can't easily recommend insulin dosing without oversight //

Is there genuinely a consideration here beyond not allowing activity without paying money to the hegemony?

Insulin is lethal at higher dosages, so there is definitely an argument. My counter would be that someone who has to self administer this drug 5+ times a day should have the right to make determinations about dosing

That's so cool! Nice work!! Are you happy to share how you built and host it? How long has it taken you to get it to this point?

Thanks! I started out with a Nextjs full stack on Vercel, with db on Turso but ended up with a React frontend (next on vercel) and Go backend (selfhosted on vps).

Decided to port the backend to Go + postgres (on a Hetzner VPS), and retain the frontend on Nextjs - A lighter weight client, moving most of the compute to the backend API. Few reasons for the port: I've had a lot more success/stability with Go backends, Turso pulled multi-tenant dbs which is what I mostly wanted them for, Nextjs is getting too hard for me.

Go backend is just the std lib (1.22+ server with the nice routing) - I mostly write all the lines in this

Frontend is textbook modern react: React19,next15,tailwind4 - AI mostly writes the code in the frontend (Cursor + Cline + sequentialthinking + context7 + my own custom "memory bank" process of breaking down tasks). AI is really, really good at this. I wrote this https://image-assets.etelej.com/ in literally 2 days 2 weekends ago with less than 10% of code being mine (mostly infra + hono APIs)

Great stuff!

> I tried getting some CGMs to use but most don't work in Kenya as they are geo-locked

Are you familir with xdrip? (https://github.com/NightscoutFoundation/xDrip) It works directly with various cgm sensors (dexcom etc.)

yes, came across xdrip+ when looking for an android app I could use for Libre 2. I don't think Dexcoms are sold in Kenya, and even the Libres around are UK ones so you need 1) a VPN to setup, 2) an iphone. Both things being a challenge for most - I had to buy a my first ever iphone for this. Anyway, found xdrip a bit of a challenge to setup and a bit too technical to suggest to others; needs sideload and manually disabling a lot of Android defaults.

I had a lot of success with Juggluco[1] which is available on the Play Store and provides easy to use APIs to interact with supported CGM readings. Juggluco has an inbuilt xdrip web server but I haven't tried it yet.

Will definitely look into xdrip+ further.

[1] https://github.com/j-kaltes/Juggluco

I used to work for another diabetes management platform (NuMedics), great to see more entries into the space especially from LDCs

I just wanted to say I had exactly the same experience this month.

I was diagnosed with LADA type 1 diabetes. First in my family to have it.

My immediate reaction was wanting to put together something to track my diet, blood glucose weight and so on.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I used to work for Lark. They raised $140mm to solve this problem and the best they could do was a non-ai chatbot that whined at users for not eating enough vegetables. The Lark app has 100% user drop off in 60 days and yet is still the silicon darling in the diabetes space.

Your platform has more science & more solution than 100 engineers in 3 years could produce. Keep at it and know with confidence that there is great value in what you are building. I know it's not your primary goal, but this will be lucrative if you keep going. I wish you a lot of luck, this is very cool!

So many cool technical projects here. But I am doing something completely different - masonry. Repairing walls in 3 rooms. It includes reinstalling dozens of falling off bricks, installing 30 or so power outlets, replacing old windows with bigger modern ones, fixing openings for the doors and plastering everything afterwards. On one hand it’s interesting, because it’s very different from the dayjob. But doing it by myself pays my newish car in cash immediately. However I wouldn’t do it for money somewhere else, it’s really really hard work.

Instead of masonry I would like to work on time of flight cameras. But the day has only 24 hours :-(

If you had a YouTube channel or a flickr feed of that project or something, I'd watch it :)

Thanks. It is not sexy. There also many YouTube building channels. They concentrate on nice content while I live in construction site and would love to finish it asap. It’s also not really interesting topic - nobody builds brick houses anymore. Mortar was replaced with glue and bricks with much bigger building blocks.

There is many "not sexy" projects that many people indeed find interesting and worth watching. And OP did not want to watch ANY youtube video.. he wanted to watch your work, as I do to since these other youtubers (AFAIK) are not on HN :)

Yeah I agree! He can get one of those tiny cameras that can be installed on the head and just record the whole thing.

Looks like, the topic is really interesting. I started talking pictures, so I can add them to Flickr and share next month.

The fine dust is really the thing that makes filming impossible. I can use some mask from Covid supply stash, but all electronics and even power tools have problems with dust. A drill and angle grinder died from particles getting into gearbox and motor already.

I am working on the sunflower plant density estimation problem. The goal is to be able to estimate the germination rate as early as possible. Farmers benefit from such information, because:

- there are lots of expenses still to be made (fertilizer, pesticide, salaries), which may not be worth it if germination is under certain threshold

- if detected early, there is still time to plant another grain or to fill up the missing plants (requires precision seeders and seeding maps)

- is a very good proxy for yield estimation (farmers often trade futures even before they have harvested)

For the purpose I have created a dataset (a collaboration between my employer and Sofia University) and published it in order to enable scientific collaboration with other interested parties. Still working on the dataset annotations.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/su-fmi/sunflower-density-est...

Interesting, I'm also involved in a project to do yield prediction, but with a ground-vehicle with camera's on top to drive between strawberry and blueberry plants.

Yield prediction is huge indeed, because overshooting your prediction means seller stuff for a lower price. Undershooting means paying for someone's product to make up for the difference. Probably there's quite a bit of matchmaking in between those under and overshooters and someone making a good buck out of that too.

> Undershooting means paying for someone's product to make up for the difference

Indeed. Making up the difference can easily eat most of the farmer's profits. I guess it is even more pronounced for berries when compared to grains, because they cannot be stored for so long.

Very cool, what type of parameters are within your control if detected early?

I am not sure that I understand your question correctly, but given more precise sunflower density estimation, the farmer has three options:

1. Plow the field and seed again (same or different variety or grain). This is a very crude measure, but it is sometimes the right thing to do, because as I said most of the expenses have not been realized yet (fertilizer, pesticide, fuel, payroll, paying rent for the land). It is also a time critical decision, because the window of opportunity for plowing and reseeding is not very wide.

2. Accept the lower yield if it is within a reasonable margin (e.g. comparable to the expenses to plow and reseed).

3. Do partial reseeding over the existing plants (without plowing). This is an emerging strategy with the proliferation of smart seeders, but it requires a precise seeding map to be created beforehand (i.e. based on the density estimate). As an advantage, you spare the expenses for seeds and plowing, however there is some disadvantage as well, due to the different rate of development of the newly seeded plants. Farmers usually need plants to be ready for harvest at the same time, otherwise the quality of the grains suffers and hence the selling price is lower.

In addition to these points, having precise density information after germination helps with the identification of problems, such as seeder malfunction (e.g. nozzles getting clogged), seed quality and meteo data (e.g. too much rain, low temperatures etc).

Do sunflower farmers not use fertilizers, pesticides, or irrigation?

In the EU they use fertilizers and pesticides, but rarely use irrigation. However, pesticides are usually applied over the lifecycle of the plants. For fertilizer, there is some value to apply it on time, because it tends to migrate with water and applying now vs a month ago is not equivalent.

Feel like this basically enabling the use of ANOVA? (Compares yields across different treatments (e.g., irrigation methods, seed types).

It is possible. However, getting accurate yield data requires a "smart" harvester that can produce yield maps. Many modern harvesters are equipped with GPS and various sensors, so it is possible. However, farmers are really slow to replace old equipment if it works fine. I guess there are some retrofit solutions for yield mapping, but I haven't investigated their affordability and penetration into the (EU) farming landscape yet. Additionally, there are other interesting parameters apart from the harvested quantity that can be captured (e.g. the quality of the grain itself, such as size, composition, humidity etc).

Fisher invented ANOVA specifically for analyzing crop yields so it's a natural fit.

However for precision agriculture kavalg might want to consider other methods.

Hey, this is interesting. I used to work on a somewhat similar problem. Our problem was more general, but one usecase is to predict the number of interactions between flowers and pollinators, given some initial counts. As these initial counts are obtained manually (by going to the fields, taking pictures and count, like number of bees within a frame), those count numbers are likely to be lower the the actual numbers. We addressed this under-counted issue using low-rankness and Poisson mixture model. Take a look if you're interested: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10888717

Interesting. Thanks!

Working on a browser extension to make it easier to find content on YouTube that fits your interests.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos and have found it very annoying that YouTube latches onto one or two topics that you've watched and only recommends that type of content over and over again. Even if you use their "Not Interested" tool, not a whole lot changes in your recommendations.

At the end of last year I launched Relevant - a crowdsourcing website where users can categorize the channels they watch into a defined hierarchy of categories ranging from broad topics like "Science" and "Gaming" to more specific ones like "Phone Reviews" or "Speedrunning".

Although I've had good feedback on the website, engagement has been relatively low and I think that's because it's a big ask to have someone navigate to the website to find the content. This year I decided that I'd bring the content to them by making a Chrome extension that lets users interact with Relevant directly from within YouTube.

It's still a work in progress but I'd love to get a first version out within a month or so to start spreading the idea and gathering feedback. If this is of any interest to the people here on HN then please let me know what you'd like to see most on your feeds.

https://relevant.watch/

I strongly, strongly recommend adding video essays as a category as well - they're very big now.

Yeah absolutely! The category list is meant to be dynamic as the industry changes and new forms of contents crop up. I can't stay on top of it myself, so I'm always looking for suggestions/maintainers from anywhere.

If you have a look at the category tree, where do you think video essays would go in that?

Hm, I tried to contribute, but it asked me to categorize a channel I've never heard of (DefendTheHouse) and no matter how many times I click “skip” it keeps going back to the same one.

I also notice that you first said “browser extension” but later you said “Chrome extension”. Are Firefox users going to be out of luck?

Hmm that's strange. Perhaps you have two Google accounts with different subscriptions? When you sign in I grab your subscribed channels and that's what I send when you categorise. You can check the "Subscriptions" page to see exactly what data we pulled.

I did say Chrome browser because with the deprecation of manifest v2, I had to make a choice about which to support. I decided given Chrome's larger market share that it would benefit the most people sooner. However I'm building it in such a way that porting to Firefox shouldn't require much additional work.

I do have multiple YouTube accounts (channels) under one Google account. I initially logged in as one YouTube channel of mine that I wanted to categorize. Only then did I find out that it looks at subscriptions. So I logged out and logged back in as my main account which is subscribed to the other one. Then I hit the problem.

Hmm okay. Maybe some wires got crossed in the back end. Perhaps Google OAuth doesn't distinguish between accounts and associated both sets of subscriptions with the same user? Interesting

You might be interested by tournesol.app

Might pull good recs from https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com

I have been working on http://phrasing.app - a language learning & acquisition tool for polyglots. I’ve been using it to study ~12 languages (5 on maintaince, 2 seriously studying, 5 casually “studying”) and it’s starting to feel really good. If anyone is learning/maintaining several languages, please reach out! I’m looking for beta testers in as many languages as possible (it supports 120+).

In what I believe is still the spirit of the question though, I discovered Maltese these week and have added it to my casual study. It’s a Semitic language (closely related to Arabic), written in the latin script, with about 40-50% of its vocabulary being Italian/Sicilian based. It’s become my new obsession

Would be great to be able to login via Google or Facebook. Creating an account is cumbersome on mobile.

Yes, please. I've been looking for something like this. Lately I've been just casually going into another language with ChatGPT and asking it to correct me. I do I like some of the old languages, things like Aramaic, which just have a different feel.

I signed up, but now it's asking me for a "reference language" (which is a little ironic because it tells me this in English lol). I guess I'll play with this later.

Start by creating some expressions ("create" in the nav bar) and you should be able to play around with it. If you want to learn more, please get in touch. As mentioned elsewhere, I'll be adding a video tutorial soon (probably not this week, but sometime next week if all goes well).

Would love to get feedback on the old languages! It's been really good for the minority languages I'm learning

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

Since you're in Amsterdam, I'm curious how well you think it performs for learning Dutch? I'm a native English speaker with a B2~ in Dutch and just looking to progress more. I've not used spaced repetition up to this point in my learning journey (almost 3 years).

It does really well, 95% of the time. The application was built to jump in at any levels - find a movie you want to watch, align the subtitles, see the most important words, create expressions with words you don't know, and the SRS should focus on the words most important to you.

For my Dutch (which was probably once a high B2, now probably a low B1) I only use the audio review when walking my dog or cooking. It plays the audio of the cards in a playlist, so I practice hearing and repeating them.

It's not so self serve at the moment, but if you get in touch I can get you up and running.

"...are we still doing phrasing?"

So much of this stemmed from me wanted to learn French & Italian by watching archer :D

Sounds good.

What languages do you support?

Learning Latvian through Anki flashcards, but it's not well supported by the main platforms, and there's not a huge amount of content out there for learning.

This alongside a couple of the usual suspects.

As a side note, on a Pixel 4a 5G (old phone , but functionally not ready for e-waste) the homepage bleeds all over. Some components into each other, others off screen. Might want to check that.

Oh no, the website is brand new, it should be working everywhere. I'll have to dig up an older android, I should have one somewhere.

Languages below, if you know their alpha 3 code. Currently having some issues with Thai and Zulu though, so they're temporarily disabled until I have time to fix them.

I have not ~tested~ verified it for Latvian, I would be curious to hear your thoughts. It has been working pretty well for Maltese, Albanian and Macedonian though, which should be lower resource than Latvian!

As mentioned elsewhere, the first time user experience is abysmal. If you reach out though we can hop on a call and get you set up - or in a few weeks I'll have a video done and up. In the meantime, you should be able to create an expression (in the nav bar for desktop and mobile) fairly intuitively.

afr, amh, ara, ara-are, ara-bhr, ara-dza, ara-egy, ara-irq, ara-jor, ara-kwt, ara-lbn, ara-lby, ara-mar, ara-omn, ara-qat, ara-sau, ara-syr, ara-tun, ara-yem, asm, aze, bel, ben, bos, bul, bxr, cat, ces, chu, cop, cym, dan, deu, ell, eng, est, eus, fao, fas, fil, fin, fra, fro, gla, gle, glg, glv, got, grc, guj, hbo, heb, hin, hrv, hsb, hun, hyw, iku, ind, isl, ita, jav, jpn, kan, kat, kaz, khm, kir, kmr, kor, lao, lat, lav, lij, lit, ltc, lzh, mal, mar, mkd, mlt, mon, msa, mya, myv, nan, nep, nld, nno, nob, ori, orv, pan, pcm, pol, por, por-bra, por-prt, pus, qaf, qpm, ron, rus, san, sin, slk, slv, sme, som, spa, spa-arg, spa-bol, spa-chl, spa-col, spa-cri, spa-cub, spa-dom, spa-ecu, spa-esp, spa-gnq, spa-gtm, spa-hnd, spa-mex, spa-nic, spa-pan, spa-per, spa-pri, spa-pry, spa-slv, spa-ury, spa-usa, spa-ven, sqi, srp, sun, swa, swe, tam, tel, tha, tur, uig, ukr, urd, uzb, vie, wol, wuu, yue, zho, zht, zul

EDIT: I have tested it for Latvian, I know it technically works. I however have not had any Latvian speakers review it's quality

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

i signed up and tried to use it. The UI is very confusing. i couldn't find the place to setup what language i want to learn and what language i know (for translation). It is best if you can have a video or images documenting how to use it.

Agreed. I’m getting close to a video to put on the landing page, probably some time next week.

The first time user experience is really bad, but the app itself makes a lot of sense once you see it in action. Feel free to get in touch with me (there are several methods listed when you log in) and I can give you a personal introduction!

If not then check back in a few weeks for a cool video :)

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

I was quite eager to check this out. As some polite feedback, a few things turned me off quite strongly:

1. I want to get confirmation that the language I want is covered (Hungarian). "120+" doesn't confirm it for me, as Hungarian seems fairly rare for language apps. Can we not just have a "search your language" field?

2. I need to see what the app actually looks like, how it proposes it'll teach me.

I'm one of the eager-to-pay people, because Duolingo is frankly dogshit (ok. Mostly polite) at teaching languages (doubly so ones that it doesn't care about like Hungarian). But I'm so suspicious of language apps, due to being burnt a dozen times.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree with you completely.

1. I just started the marketing website a few weeks ago, and if you can believe it, I didn't readily have that information. One of my tasks last week was to compile a list of languages that could work, write some tests for all of the languages, and get a list of supported languages. I have that list now, I just need to put it on the marketing page.

2. As mentioned in other comments, I'm working on a video. I'm preferring to fix glaring issues before making the video, although at this point I'm verrrrrrry close. I have started scripting it, but it takes a lot of time to make a good video (1-2 full days if I don't want to edit it).

Your feedback is completely valid, and they're both reasons why I'm not really marketing the product yet. This thread seemed like a good middle ground though as having some people using all the languages would be really helpful. Also, I've genuinely been loving using it and want to share.

It's just me working on it, so these things are coming, but everything takes a while! Hopefully these didn't sour you on the project permanently :)

EDIT: And yes, it supports Hungarian :)

And fwiw, I've added the languages to the marketing page now in the FAQ section. I'll add a more prominent section in the coming weeks!

Thanks for addressing, really!

Nope, not soured. And don't worry, I totally get that things take a bunch of effort and time (doubly so as a solo project). I'll give it a re-look in a little while :)

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

The UI was a little unresponsive on mobile, and when I opened the "Media" page on desktop I got multiple block rendering errors. Opening the console reveals a syntax error (missing ] after element list) and some type errors.

Also, it looks like you have to get the subscription to use it in any way? It's hard to gauge whether it is for me or not if I have no way to trial it. I found the UI a bit confusing too, I was not sure what I was supposed to do after logging in. As another commentator mentioned, it's asking me to set a reference language but I see no way of configuring it.

Block rendering errors on the media page is new to me. I will look into it.

The reference language error should not be shown (I mean it’s not incorrect, but there is a “no expressions error” that should take precedence).

A video is coming :) I didn’t expect so much interest from a comment in this thread. If you get in touch, I can walk you through it personally, otherwise check back in a couple weeks and there will be a video overview.

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

Great job on the design. I like the idea here, but the app was unresponsive on Windows > Chrome to most clicks

Unfortunately I do not have a windows device to test with. I have a suspicion as to what’s causing it (background blurs) and I plan to get rid of it this week

I have just created an account and tried to use the app; either I am dumb (at this hour), or the app has a very not intuitive UI :-)

I (think I) managed to create an expression, but: 1. it takes forever, I don't know what it's doing and it's still not done 2. I have no idea how to use it, onward 3. does not seem that I will be actually able to use it, as the app requires to be subscribed to use it...

Looking forward for a how to use manual / page + a real trial period. If the app requires a subscription with this UX experience, I will be gone :-)

I am the first to admit that the UI does not make sense to people who have not seen it in use. I have done some user onboarding sessions where you just “let them ask questions and click” and it goes terribly if it’s any consolation, I have never gotten that feedback after showing people how to use it (quite the opposite actually!)

Wrt to the expression, all expressions created today succeeded, so if you’re still seeing a progress bar let me know as that’s a bug. It’s possible something failed with the live updates, or it does take several minutes to create an expression (depending on servers, it can take up to 10 minutes at times, although the typical timing is 2-4 minutes depending on the expression)

If you click on any of the review methodologies, it will start reviewing any of your successful expression. From there, the experience should be a lot more explorer-friendly :)

What it’s doing is: analyzing the sentence, splitting it into phrases, aligning it across all languages, tagging all of the gender/case/tense/etc, researching pronunciation, generating audio, aligning the audio, prioritizing the words (across several axes), and generation explanations/dictionary for each individual word

I made some quick live videos today:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Please excuse the video quality, there will be better paced/audio/scripted demos soon!

As someone who is both an avid language learner and a software developer - what’s the value added in this platform, for someone who is already pretty comfortable as a programmer and autodidact?

It would take a lot to convince me to pay that much for a product like this. True, it can be inconvenient trolling around for content in your target language, but as a software dev I am pretty experienced with finding obscure things on the internet by finessing search queries. And there are plenty of other apps out there that do spaced repetition for you, and open source tools and data sets that can be used to help you scrape/process vocab (again, if you don’t mind spending some time debugging, which I personally do not). Besides that, I really don’t find it that inconvenient to manually write down words/phrases from books or movies and copy them into my SR deck. On the contrary, I think this overhead actually helps the phrases stick better!

So how would you sell your site to someone in my situation? What would I get out of it?

I would have to know more about your circumstances before I could make genuine recommendations. But as an autodidactal programmer, I can serve as somewhat of an authority on this manner ;) The value I get out of the platform is:

1. I can study all my languages on the same platform. For my, having studied 30+ languages (note: not claiming to speak them), I just want to “do my languages”. I can study dialectal Arabic, minority languages, archaic languages, and the major languages, all in a nice consistent and (if I can say so myself) beautiful UI.

2. Everything is heavily annotated with all the information you could ever need. This means that I add flashcards, and when I’m learning them, I have the gender, cases, tenses, agglutination, phonetics, translations, audio, conjugation/declention tables, character breakdowns, mutations, idioms, multilword expressions, roots, etymology, etc etc (the list really does go on) at my fingertips. This means I just go through my flashcards, and when I have a question, I get an answer. If I have more questions, I have a context aware chat integrated. For me, this is the autodidactal dream come true.

3. Personally, I really love SRS. I also really hate SRS. If I have to study the words “dog”, “walk”, & “morning” - and I have a sentence “I walk my dog in the morning”, I just want to study that one one sentence and be done with it. Also, I really want to just be able to play audio sentences and listen to them while cooking/cleaning/walking my dog. Or do a free recall sessions, write down everything I remember from yesterday, and skip those reviews today (it’s more effective than SRS anyways).

Lastly, WRT to creating your own flashcards: You can still create flashcards manually on Phrasing - I agree the act of creating flashcards is beneficial, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone - but I’m not sure I buy it’s the highest leverage way for one to spend their time. At least for me, it definitely is not. I would rather skip that (admittedly beneficial) step, and move onto the next step. YMMV

It’s really hard to narrow the list down to three, I have a hundred things I want to say, but I’ll leave it here. Due to popular demand, I recorded a few live demos today so you can see it in action:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Higher quality demos will come in time!

Let me know your thoughts, I’m happy to dive deeper into any of this (I mean I could talk about Phrasing for literally days on end)

EIDT: s/extinct/archaic

I tried to use it, but I don't know how to set a language preference.

I'm just getting popups asking me to set up my language, but... where?? It needs a most intuitive UI. :3

It sounded interesting so I wanted to try it but I couldn't figure out how to actually use it.

It says "We need to know which languages you already know. At least one language needs to be selected as a reference (some symbol) language."

I couldn't figure out how to add that, I also couldn't see that symbol anywhere...

Checked settings, profile, home ("open search" and "create expression" do nothing), create, globe icon thingy... eventually gave up.

It's niche and boring, but I help immigrants pick German health insurance.

The existing information is mostly blogspam from non-experts who try to make a quick buck. They only recommend the two brands with an affiliate program.

I wrote a better guide with help from competing insurance experts. The information is clear and succinct without oversimplifying things. It addresses the specific needs of immigrants.

Then I turned the advice into an interactive recommendation tool. People get clear, specific advice in a few seconds.

The best advice is "don't choose yourself, talk to a broker". The problem is finding a honest one. It took me years to vet a good one. After testing him for a year, I have set up an affiliate partnership from scratch with him. The partnership incentivises honesty and neutrality, because he has a lot of skin in the game.

I'm super excited about it. I can't overstate how much of an improvement it will be. Readers get far better advice and easy access to an expert. The broker gets a steady stream of well-informed leads. I get a commission for my trouble. It's a win-win-win situation.

when you have some draft or first versions, please share. I would be super glad to read it. I have been in TK since I came to Germany, but would be glad to entertain other options.

TK is great if you're on public health insurance. If you qualify for switching to private health insurance, you might find cheaper and better contracts for the cost of more bureaucracy and that having kids costs extra.

As far as I have heard from people that switched to private is that if you ever need to come back to public, this is hell on earth bureaucracy. All of them recommended a supplementary plan instead of switching to private.

That's mostly correct. Generally, the only way to switch is to be forced back into the public system. For example if you reduce your income below the limit for private health insurance.

Public is an easy choice. Private is a very carefully made decision that can be worth it for some people in some situations. The entire industry is incentivised to sell private insurance, but it's not at all a "better" choice, just a financial move that may work for certain people.

It will be here: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance

The guide is pretty much finished and already reviewed by 3 competing brokers. If you email me, I'll send it to you. I'm now working on the recommendation tool, then the satellite guides.

This sounds fantastic. I'm building a product that helps immigrants identify opportunities that have a good chance of providing them with visa sponsorship (in the UK).

It'd be great to connect. My email address is kane [at] withpoli [dot] com.

I'm almost finished with a project that has taken up quite a lot of my life for the past few years, a book on Estonia! After working for their government and returning to the U.S. I wanted to better understand how the country modernized so effectively after gaining their independence from the Soviet Union so I did a fair amount of research into the topic and many interviews which culminated in a book, Rebooting a Nation.

If you're interested in Estonia, e-government, building tech hubs, and the future of the nation state I'd love if you take a look (and let me know what you think). It's available on Kindle now but Oxford University Press will be shipping out physical copies May 15 and buying from a smaller press is always appreciated!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rebooting-a-nation-9...

Is the digital version available for purchase anywhere outside of Amazon?

Not right now, working to get it on Bookshop

After sure global success of this book, would you consider having another go about similar topic - this time about Poland? (my country)

It might be interesting to see similar area from similar, but different enough, perspectives.

I appreciate that! Honestly, I'm not sure. Part of the reason I felt competent enough to write about Estonia is because I had lived there and worked for the government, so I thought I had a pretty decent insider look into how things worked and could tell the story well and I'm not sure I could replicate that in Poland. Although I do think a comparative study across some digital leaders (ex. Estonia, Poland, Ukraine) or even just comparing the Baltic states on topics like digitalization would be super interesting.

Myself.

Been a freelance dev for years, now going on "sabbatical" (love that word) imminently. Just moved to reduced hours, still in the transition and unwinding phase.

Planning to do a lot of learning, self-improvement, and projects. Tech-related and not. Preparing for the next volume (not chapter) of life. Refactoring, if you like, among other things.

I'm excited.

This sounds very cool! Do you have any travel planned? A move within country to more of a "reset" locale? :)

I do want to travel more, in general.

I'm eyeing some tech conferences in the next months, which would involve varying levels of travel and sightseeing.

I went on a ~three-week roadtrip once, which I saw as a shorter/practice version (it was originally planned for two weeks) of a longer one I'd like to do one day. So I might do something like that.

Are tech conferences really in tune with working on yourself??

I think I see where you're coming from, but then, is the travel you were asking about in tune with working on myself? Perhaps.

I've never had to go to a tech conference/meetup for work; the ones I've gone to have been social/community/fun events for me.

I was at North Bay Python last weekend and I'm going to PyCon US in May.

I hear you. For social! The way I think about it tho is, if taking some dedicated time for working on myself, I want to get as far away from all work/tech stuff as possible! For a while anyway :)

Curious what you tell people you do when they ask? Does everyone know what a sabbatical is?

I’ve been on a long sabbatical myself but I don’t feel like people would understand that so I usually just still say software engineer.

Btw feel free to email if you want to chat sometime. I haven’t especially productive so it would be great to get some inspiration.

>Are tech conferences really in tune with working on yourself??

Why wouldn't they be?

I like the concept of "refactoring" one's life.

When I move cities it feels like a rebase.

Will you write a bit about it? I find this sort of move really interesting. I'd be curious to see what you've learned by the end of that sabbatical.

I do want to write and publish more, generally. Perhaps some of it will be about the sabbatical itself.

I'll let you know what I've learned by the end when I figure out what "end" means. It's not my goal to go back to what I'm doing now.

I'll post about this again the next time (end of May presumably) this "What are you working on?" thread is posted, for anyone who wants to follow along. Also, email address in my profile; use subject, "What are you working on?".

Lovely! Enjoy it.

I am in a similar stage.

In brief:

25 years of experience including FAANG. Recently got divorced (complex litigations, fought hard, very satisfied with the outcome).

Now rethinking myself. Want to do something useful for humankind in the rest of my life. Having big ideas for the future. Trying some research-focussed 'side' projects. Considering writing a book. Learning new things. So on.

Depending on how long you're planning on sabbatical-ing, you might consider applying to the Recurse Center [1]. It's basically a (free) 6- or 12-week self-directed learning program that you do with others.

I had done a half batch last year and really enjoyed the experience.

[1] https://recurse.com

Ha. It's long been on my someday list, since before the rename from Hacker School, and something that I've been explicitly considering for my sabbatical. I've glanced at batch schedules more than once in the past weeks. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778951

I wonder if there'd be an appetite for this in an area w/ population of say 100k people. You'd still have most conveniences, but far less traffic, less distraction, etc.

I believe there's a remote option

I hacked my old kindle and turned it into a eink dashboard for my daughter’s school! Now planning to enahace it a bit further and make it easy to customise.

Here’s a a detailed write up of the process: https://samkhawase.com/blog/hacking-kindle/

Love it! Nice work

Genuinely brings a smile to my face. And such a nice exposure for the kid.

Thank you for the kind words. I’m trying to get back into writing and such feedback means a lot to me.

Love these Kindle dashboards and thank you for the excellent write up. If you did anything notable with refresh rates and cron tab for battery life management (or if that’s simply unnecessary), that may be useful to note in the blog post. Given you’re monitoring frequent bus times, I suspect it may have come up.

Reverse typesetting: reflowing page layouts where you don't have knowledge of the typesetting structure, i.e. a scanned physical book or PDF paper. Naive rules-based heuristics based on the dimensions of bounding boxes and gaps. Point is to reflow things for resizing to eink readers. (Specifically the size that fits in my pocket which I carry around. User #1 is me). Building in Common Lisp and targeting an Emacs mode for interactive execution with manual feedback.

i don’t quite understand, what makes it reverse typesetting?

my understanding is your typesetting books for responsive eink readers.

You're inferring the structure of the document from the printed result. If typesetting takes a set of layout directives and outputs a page, this is taking a finished page and guessing what layout directives could create it. Then you can take that inferred structure and reflow the page in a new layout.

so like ocr but not recognizing characters and words but recognizing the layouted structure and transforming it into content markup and layout markup?

That's a way to view it!

The reason I'm not falling back on OCR is because the general case is full of things, like math equations and inset graphics/diagrams, that can't be OCR'd. The only robust way to deal with those is to treat them as graphical atoms: "this bounding box can be moved around, but should not be split up into pieces".

Err, here's a visual explanation of what I mean by this, from my REPL:

https://ibb.co/album/MDw79y?sort=name_asc

(The source example is from David Tong's physics lectures notes, that were featured on HN last week — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43763223 )

A pentagonal geospatial indexing system: https://a5geo.org/

If you’ve used H3 or S2 it should be familiar, the major difference (apart from the fact it uses pentagons) is that the cell areas are practically uniform, whereas alternative systems have a variance of around 2 between the largest and smallest cells, making them less useful for aggregation. The site has many visual demos, e.g. https://a5geo.org/examples/area

The code is open source: https://github.com/felixpalmer/a5

Is it based upon repeated subdivision of an icosahedron?

No, it is based on applying a lattice onto the faces of a dodecahedron (technically a pentakis dodecahedron). Take a look at https://a5geo.org/examples/teohedron-dodecahedron and other examples on the website.

H3 is based on a dodecahedron it is it the reason the cell areas range so much, the same is true of S2 - but this is based on a cube.

It seems to have merit as a subdivision scheme.

The shapes look a bit wonky when projected onto a map, though, and it may not be as intuitive to reason about as the hexagons that would (mostly) result from subdividing an icosahedron. With a subdivided icosahedron you end up with a regular lattice of shapes that is easier to reason about. I think an icosahedron might be a better fit for an indexing scheme for that reason, despite it's higher mathematical error in approximating the sphere at a given resolution.

I explored a similar idea four or five years ago, without being aware of H3. My goal was to find a compact multi-resolution geospatial height map format. My idea was closer to H3 than to yours, it seems.

Wow, that's a really fascinating problem to work on. I work in mapping but haven't actually come across this field of what you call DGGS's.

Is it essential that the cells be the same shape?

Also where does the name "A5" come from exactly? I get that 5 is because it has five sides, but why A?

The cells being the same shape is useful in some use cases and irrelevant in others. For example, see the Airbnb demo: https://a5geo.org/examples/airbnb. The H3 tiles are very different sizes in the two cities, and make it appear that there is a much higher density of listings in Malta, even though that is not the case.

However the symmetry of H3’s hexagonal cells lends itself well to flow analysis, or routing - which is no surprise as it was developed at Uber.

As for the name, it follows the convention of S2 and H3, which come from group theory and refer (loosely) to the symmetry groups of the various systems

PodSnacks (https://podsnacks.org) — Personalized AI summaries of top podcasts, delivered to your inbox.

I've been building PodSnacks because I found it overwhelming to keep up with podcasts across tech, business, and science. PodSnacks uses LLMs to summarize the most popular episodes from shows like Lex Fridman, Acquired, All-In, Invest Like the Best, and more.

You choose your favorite shows, and we email you short, high-signal summaries — no audio to skim through, no endless backlog guilt.

So far:

126K+ episode summaries generated 92K+ hours of podcasts processed 48–50% open rates 2,900+ early users

Still iterating and adding features like bundling by theme, language translations, and audio feeds.

If you're the kind of person who wants more inputs without more noise — would love for you to check it out.

Always open to feedback from HN!

I’d prefer summaries of my YouTube subscriptions, where I can also add my own “summary template”

In currently have a prompt for it that works for me, based on the transcripts.

Problem: too much duplicate information in any type of publication and too much fluff

Problem2: YouTube/transcriptions

Probably wouldn’t pay for such a service, but would be very happy using it. Perhaps some channel promo / email based ads for discovery or recommendations.

perhaps gemini will native work with YouTube much better than we could.

Interesting. Once signed in, how do I search for podcasts? Discover is not showing a search field, unlike https://www.podsnacks.org/newsletter/podcasts

Edit: Ok, I found the search function in the hamburger menu. A bit unintuitive.

will add search to discover. thanks for the comment.

What are the costs like, for such a service? You have to spend for transcribing (even if you ran something like Whisper) and pay for APIs to summarize, correct?

I'm also interested in this. :)

yep. won't go into each cost, but it's primarily:

1) transcription (Assembly) 2) summarization (Claude) 3) podcast database (listennotes) 4) emails (postmark) 5) application hosting (render)

Just signed up! Do you use different AI prompts for each podcast based on the specialty or a single prompt?

currently a single prompt.

That's awesome! I'm really not a podcast person, but a lot of good content is available primarily through podcasts. Hope that can help with it.

thanks and agreed! we see a massive distrust in traditional legacy media, and hopefully PodSnacks can give readers more control about how they access those voices.

any way to expose api access for the keyword search feature? would be cool to build this into some topic summaries delivered via email I'm building for my team

at the moment no, but perhaps you'll enjoy podscan.fm

I've recently re-watched John Carmack's 2004 Quakecon keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=602&v=OOVUZZr655...), which happened during the Doom 3 launch. In that keynote, he mentions that he didn't see any differences between stencil and shadow maps. He mentions that he experimented a lot with both approaches, before settling for stencil shadows which were much faster.

I got curious about that statement, since shadow maps tend to look much different. I also knew that he left part of the experimental renderer in the GPLed code. So, I've decided to go on that rabbit hole of Doom 3 graphics, specifically Carmack's experimental renderer and ended up implementing his approach, as well as adding some poisson disc sampling and fixed the peter panning: https://github.com/klaussilveira/exp-dhewm3

I also spend a lot of time on archaic game engines. I like to call it software archeology.

Can you post screenshots or gifs/video comparisons of your updates to the renderer vs the original? Either directly in the readme or links? Keep up the good work!

Oh, sorry about that! This is D3 with shadow mapping:

https://i.imgur.com/TvnFuDG.jpeg

You can only notice it is not stencil when you get up close:

https://i.imgur.com/WtWojG2.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/4dniMOT.jpeg

In Carmack's experimental renderer, peter panning was quite high:

https://i.imgur.com/u2ZZJTR.jpeg

This is my version with tweaks and poisson sampling:

https://i.imgur.com/nPI6H5a.jpeg

I launched my web-based notepad calculator, https://numpad.io/, a few years ago.

Right now I'm working on a version 2 that has user accounts, multiple documents, markdown support, and document exports. Everything is local-first and it uses CRDTs to sync documents.

It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/Plk1DQ4.png the calculator is mostly the same for now, with a few improvements. It's unstable right now, so I don't want to publicise the dev url, but if you'd like to become a beta tester email me at contact@numpad.io

That 'per' and 'to' syntax you got there is chefs kiss.

Thanks! Though I can't really take credit for it, Soulver did it before me.

I think this is super cool, but feel like the killer implementation would be an extension for VSCode. Just a thought.

When I launched a lot of people asked for an Obsidian plugin too. I'm not averse to the idea, but I'm trying to turn it into a business, and those models seem tough to make any money from.

super cool

I would love a pad where i could dump any text with numbers and it will sum/avg all of them

It's not showing in the screenshot because the numbers in the doc have different units, but it does do that https://imgur.com/a/SusFZDh (bottom right hand corner).

Let me know if you'd like to be part of the beta!

nice! yes, please, add me to the beta :)

I see this on the example: 6 ft 2.0000000000000000004 inches

Yeah, that was annoying. It's fixed in v2

I just put live a daily logic puzzle, Clues by Sam. I've been working on it for a while now, mainly on the level generator. It was tricky to generate levels that are solvable using logic (no guessing needed), and also fun to solve (no crazy long deduction chains, but also not just obvious things). I'm sure the implementation still has some quirks on some devices, so would love to hear if you encounter issues!

https://cluesbysam.com

Highly enjoyable (after I finally read the definitions of "neighbor" and "to the right/left")! Did you write a program that can automatically generate these?? I'll definitely try this again. Note, the emoji graphic in "share" might be buggy? I'm seeing one green checkmark, one green square, and four red squares..

Thank you so much for trying out the game and taking the time to write the feedback!

I did! That was the main workload of this project, and is still ongoing. I have ideas for improvements, and I also have to fix some sentences manually sometimes. But it's getting there.

The sharing shows a kind of "health bar". Every time you make an illogical guess, it reduces one. Running out of "health" doesn't prevent you from completing the puzzle, but it does show up in your share. Based on this, you made 4 "illogical" guesses. If you didn't, then there's a bug. But feels like I should anyways clarify this, if it wasn't clear to you. Thanks again!

I think it's the green checkmark and the green square that are confusing. Like why is there a check on the first green square and not the second one? Maybe it would be cleaner without any checkmark at all? Anyway, nice game, I shared it with my sister who also wants to solve more of them!

I can see the confusion. I have to think about it. Thanks for sharing!

I was in a situation where I had to guess. It would be nice if there was a hint (after a successful guess) on why that box was 'ready for solve'. i.e., what other reveals can lead to this box being ready for a Innocent/Guilty choice.

I did enjoy the game though. Re-reading the clues is helpful - reinitialize your context window!

I wonder where you felt like you had to guess. The puzzles are always solvable with logic. Your guess must have been by chance also logically deductible!

frustrating. i eventually just clicked every single one, and keep getting the "This choice can't be made based on pure logic" message. maybe i'm just dumb...

You might be misinterpreting what "neighbor" means or what "to the left" means. There is always at least one choice that can be made logically. If the logical choice is, say, that Jess is innocent, and you say Jess is a criminal, the game won't let you do that choice. Maybe that's what happened to you?

I felt the same. I got a few tiles in and then just couldn't figure out what was next. https://cluesbysam.com/help/2025-04-29?state=EDQ%3D. Apparently Tom is Innocent, which I found by trial and error.

You know Rose or Xena is criminal since there's one under Mary. Paula and Will have only one criminal neighbor in common, so it must be Rose or Xena. All other common neighbors must therefore be innocent.

This comment is what made me realize the error of my thinking and allowed me to eventually solve it.

This is great, but the need for a long glossary of terms is a sign that you might want to keep tuning language/word-choice.

As you've seen in replies here already, many term choices you've made have enough variety in how they're conventionally used that people incorrectly assume they know what it means only to see the "nope!" popup when they try to apply it. That frustration is going to spoil first impressions of what actually seems to be a really great puzzle system, which is a shame. The more you can reduce that experience, the less likely you'll be to prematurely burn off players.

A good measure for getting it right would be that you don't even need a glossary at all, or that you can get it so condensed that you can make it more prominent without becoming distracting.

Alternately, you could maybe use symbols instead of words to represent your rules, as more players would intuit that they should learn the symbols before making (wrong) assumptions.

This is great feedback, and I think you're spot on. It's been really challenging to find wording that is brief enough, but also specific enough. I hope it's something I can improve in the future as I keep exploring new ways of giving hints. The idea of using symbols is interesting, hadn't considered that!

I really enjoy this! I like Murdle, too. I was very interested in a sort of quest generation system that would use similar concepts to generate RPG quests, basically constraint solving I suppose.

Thank you! This was definitely inspired by Murdle, so glad to hear it's finding the right audience. And yes, constraint solving is definitely at the heart of the generator. And you mentioning using it for RPG quests sets my mind racing...

If you haven't heard of it before, also check out Goal-Oriented Action Programming. I was looking at that for giving NPCs essentially their own questlines. So you have some random event happen ("Grug the orc steals Marf the orc's prized club!") and that would generate a quest for Marf to find his club. So he investigates; he sniffs the air (orcs have good noses). He strolls around and interviews the other orcs he sees and asks them if they've seen his prized club. Eventually, he might find his way to Grug the orc and they have a confrontation. Now, all of this is while you're sneaking through the orc hideout to retrieve some MacGuffin...

After getting frustrated by the game not accepting my responses to the obvious clues repeatedly I resorted to clicking on each person and selecting both Innocent and Criminal.

- "My only innocent neighbor is to the left of Harold"

- "Barb and I have one innocent neighbor in common"

- Implies Gary is a criminal

But the game won't let me.

Thank you for taking the time to go through this. The hint should be clarified. It means "somewhere to the left", so on the same row to the left. It is either Freya or Gary since they are both to the left og Harold, and common neighbors of Barb and Cheryl. You have no way of knowing which one yet. This will be clarified in future puzzles.

I really enjoyed this! I can't even comprehend how levels can be generated for it. After reading instructions I found it straightforward to play.

FYI there's a misspelled word - "accountat" on the home page.

Awesome! Thank you for playing! And well spotted, will fix!

The process of generating levels is based on constraint solving. For now I'm not going to say much more about it, since it's the most innovative and valuable part of the project.

Really good game. I liked that you can't guess your way to success, but must solve it logically. I found the terminology ok after reading it.

Great to hear! Preventing guessing was a critical step to make this concept click. Accidentally making an illogical guess (be it right or wrong) felt like it ruined the rest of the puzzle, since it spoiled the intended solve path. Happy to hear positive feedback on the choice!

I'm currently working through Frank Sikora's "Jazz Harmony" book [1] to learn to play Jazz piano.

In parallel, I'm building an exercise generator "Jazzln" [2] to help me practice.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54391815-jazz-harmony

[2]: https://jazzln.vercel.app

Here is a weird album you might find fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OJHPWlaCrc

Cheers =3

Creating stealth group in a huge Fortune 500 company with the blessing of my immediate boss but no other higher-ups. Trying to productize critical consulting tool sets in the utility industry so we can stop repeating ourselves for the 100th consulting engagement.

Yes, customer is a special snowflake but they still need 90% or whatever every other client in this industry needs.

Feeling increasingly like this is a fools errand.

Even though we've proved this out with tool sets strung together with duct tape and safety pins, and are therefore the most profitable group within our department, we still need to be 100% billable.

It's only because we're the most profitable group that we can pretend we're all billable while I work with two other people to bootstrap this crazy project

Edit: anyone hiring? Just found out my boss is quitting.

Oof. This post started so good and then got progressively more sad until the edit nailed it home. I hope your story continues and works out as a huge win, either as a new, good boss, you getting to openly lead this kind of thing, someone reading this and poaching/sponsoring you, or maybe even you working on this under your own name.

Good luck and we're rooting for you!

Thank you for the enthusiasm!

It was not intentional but my post really does read like a little story vignette that ends with a gut punch.

Not looking for sympathy so much as fellow appreciators of irony and schadenfreude but here's another kicker.

I pitched this idea to my previous company and was told there was no appetite for it. Just saw on my old company's blog that they released a "digital transformation in a box" program for mid-market clients in this space which is 90% of what I pitched to them. Bad and hilarious timing all around.

Good lord, how many times are you going to get punched in the gut today?

This is EXACTLY what pushed me over the line to quit my last job. Had a big pitch for a spin off I wanted to run, was told not only no appetite for it but is a stupid idea in a dying industry. Literally 2 weeks later it was in the board deck as something the company is going up build.

People are weird!

Sometimes you sow a little seed here and there, and sometimes it takes.

Very interesting. Maybe we can chat and explore? DM me on my X.com - it's on my HN about page - copy-paste the HN link here for context :)

This sounds very much like an application begging to be done as a stand-alone company supporting these F500 companies. Could be very profitable as the basis for a service-provider model while you gain enough knowledge to product-ize and package it on basically customer-funded development. It seems your company kicking you in the gut is showing you the direction

Good Luck!

It tried out vibe coding this weekend. I've been using AI to get smaller examples and ask questions and its been great but past attempts to have it do everything for me have produced code that still needed a lot of changes.

I hit an OpenSearch bug this week where you can't get any browser based requests to work. Its due to zstd becoming a standard part of Accept-Encoding and OpenSearch not correctly supporting it so I wanted to install a browser plugin that modified the browser HTTP request headers to my servers.

I don't know about everyone else but I love that browser plugins are possible but I hate having to find them. Its mostly due to never knowing if you can trust a plugin and even if you find one, you have to worry about it being bought out in the future. With vibe coding I was able to build a browser extension in 45 minutes that had more features than I originally planned for.

I spend more time documenting the experience than building which is wild. If you are interesting you can look at the README in https://github.com/mattheimer/vibe-headers

But I left the experience with two thoughts.

Even seasoned developers will be using vibe coding in the future.

I think in the near future the browser plugin market will partially collapse because eventually browsers will build extensions themselves on the fly using natural language.

So there is no technical debts ?

That's a difficult question to answer because I don't know if I'll grow the extension in the future. Only time will tell.

After I completed the extension I did try on another model and despite me instructing it to generate a v3 manifest extension, the second attempt didn't start with declarativeNetRequest and used the older APIs until I made a refinement. And this isn't even a big project really where poor architecture would cause debt.

Vibe coding can lead to technical debt, especially if you don't have the skills to recognize that debt in the code being generated.

In my experience, "vibe coding" can produce a rich prototype very fast.

Then as scope expands you're left with something that is difficult to extend because its impossible to keep everything in the LLM context. Both because of context limits and because of input fatigue in terms of communicating the context.

At this point you can do a critical analysis of what you have and design a more rigorous specification.

But my reading is that the parent wouldn't have tackled this at all without the vibe coding, and would have used an off-the-shelf extension. So in that case, it's a pure win, no?

Yeah I could have framed it better. I was responding to:

>I've been using AI to get smaller examples and ask questions and its been great but past attempts to have it do everything for me have produced code that still needed a lot of changes.

In my experience most things that aren't trivial do require a lot of work as the scope expands. I was responding more to that than him having success with completing the whole extension satisfactorily.

I don't disagree but context limits are expanding rapidly. Gemini 2.5 Pro which was used here has a 1 million token context window with 2 million coming soon. Cost will be a concern but context size limits will not.

Totally agree, I mentioned it in another comment but Gemini was a game changer for allowing me to increase the size of the project I can feasibly have AI work on.

Only issue is Gemini's context window (I've seen my experience corroborated here on HN a couple times) isn't consistent. Maybe if 900k tokens are all of unique information, then it will be useful to 1 million, but I find if my prompt has 150k tokens of context or 50k, after 200k in the total context window response coherence and focus goes out the window.

I'd love some more innovation on increasing context size without blowing up RAM usage. Mistral small 2503 24B and Gemma 3 27B both fit into 24GB at Q4, but Mistral can only go up to about 32k and Gemma about 12k before all VRAM is exhausted, even with flash attention and KV cache quantization.

What editor are you using with gemini 2.5 pro? I really don't like their vscode extension.

If your project is well organized and individual files are small and the dependency graph isn’t too crazy, Claude code does an amazing job building only the context it needs even as the project grows. You just have to be aggressive about refactoring for maintainability. The bonus here is that it’s easier for humans to work on too.

A note taking app - I know, I know, been done a billion times. But really, no software I’ve found works the way I want it to, so I’m just trying to write my own, starting with a front-end agnostic core and a TUI.

If it strikes a chord with anyone, I’d love to collaborate! The concept is centered around organization bubbling up naturally from dumping info in with tags, and “typing” your tags so that when you go to a tag’s page, the layout is customized based on what it is - a project, person, etc. A project could have all relevant tasks and notes listed, whereas a person might have name, contact info, etc.

https://github.com/weakphish/yapper

Expanding some - the tags concept is similar to AnyType[0] types, but the rest of the software I’m writing is more oriented towards dump-first, tag, and let it sort itself out, whereas AnyType requires careful management and configuration of the workspace.

[0] https://anytype.io/

I had a similar idea, sort of only instead of tags I thought why not stickers - hence https://stickerdocs.com.

Working on a database compatibility tool. So your app works on SQL Server 2022 on-prem, but does it work on Azure SQL DB, AWS RDS, GCP CloudSQL, etc?

These cloud flavours have a compatible SQL dialect, but it's often details like missing features (CDC and Auditing on RDS are good examples) or differences in system objects that make it difficult to support your app on these platforms.

I capture all sql statements, run them through multiple SQL parsers to find all the system objects your app is using (tables, functions, stored procedures, etc). I then check them all against a catalog I have built of all system objects for every version of SQL Server on every platform.

I then give a report to see which platforms your app will work on, which ones it wont work on and which system objects are the problem.

Other database engines will be added once I get it working end to end (almost there).

I'm working on a new open source CAD program for 3d printing based on Signed Distance Functions.

Benefits of SDFs over the standard Boundary Representation (used in Freecad and similar) are that you can do "pattern" operations with domain repetition, which means making N copies of a feature is O(1), vs O(N^2), you can deform objects with domain deformation, which means if you have a closed-form representation of how you want to deform space you can basically directly apply that to your object, procedural surface texturing is easy, CSG operations are easy.

The big drawback is that it is hard to provide any workflow based around "selecting" faces, edges, or vertices, because you don't naturally have any representation for these things, they are emergent from the model's SDF.

I have some blog posts on my progress: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sdf-thoughts.html and https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/frep-cad-building-blo...

I am solving the "selecting faces" problem by having the SDF propagate surface ids as well as distances. So the result of the evaluation is not just the distance to the nearest point on the surface, but the id of the specific surface that is nearest.

My next big frontier is reliably providing fillets and chamfers between arbitrary surfaces. I have a handful of partial solutions but nothing complete yet.

The most promising idea is one that o3 came up with called "masked clones", the idea is roughly to make a clone of the 2 surfaces you want to blend, mask them by intersecting with an object that is like a "pipe" along the intersection of the 2 surfaces, apply the blend within the pipe, and then add this "blend pipe" as another child of the lowest common ancestor of the 2 blended surfaces.

And after that I need to work on more standard CAD stuff like constraint solving in the 2d sketch editor.

This is super neat, cool that you have an online demo as well.

I wonder if there are any ideas on how to make this a OpenSCAD-style editor instead of interactive? I like the text-based style for simple regular shapes, but they tend to end up too simple and regular. Maybe tools like filleting edges SDF-style is a game changer?

I actually don't really like the OpenSCAD-style interface. For me FreeCAD is the current state-of-the-art in CAD.

But if you are into code-style SDF interfaces, I have some links on https://incoherency.co.uk/notes/sdf.html

This is cool, and something I've thought about a lot, as I'm pretty unhappy with the state of CAD on Linux. The world definitely needs another open source CAD kernel, and I was toying with making my own before I decided to pursue something else.

I think the problem of finding edges can be solved by stepping back and redefining primitives. One idea I had was defining them as a 2D sketch and a transformation function along a path. A sphere would be a 2D hemisphere that rotates as it moves along a circular trajectory, with the flat side staying in place, for example. A cube would be a square That moves along a vertical or horizontal path the distance of the sides. You get the idea.

The advantage of this type of representation is that edges can only ever be edges in the 2D shape, or the path traveled by vertices. The hard part is that when you do boolean operations using primitives, you probably want to go back and turn it into a primitive representation (2D shape, transformation along a path).

https://undetectag.com I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals. Current Airtags are detectable right away and cannot be used to track stolen property. That device allows you to hide an Airtag in your car, for example, and someone that steals your car will not be able to use some app to detect it. The Airtag will also not warn the thief of its presence. After some hours, the Airtag turns on again and you can find out its location. It’s not foolproof, as the timing has to be right, but still useful.

An idea for more complete coverage: have 2 of them, and invert their intervals, such that one and only one is always on

Yes it's also a good strategy.

This will work for a while, before thieves know to check for multiple airtags. Better to not detect any in the first place

Is 4 on 1 off really the best strategy? Seems like it just makes it a 20% chance that the thieves detect the AirTag, right?

Yes, I'm thinking of offering various set-ups in the future, if I see that people are interested

Make it timing based and randomized. Sync the 'seed' during device init, and then the listener knows when to listen for the airtag. The airtag then turns on for a specified duration (random between some min/max time), and the listener picks it up.

Bonus points if the 'seed' is volatile.

Airtags are detectable to prevent abuse, how do you want to prevent abuse with your product?

Due to its timing, the device is not suitable for stalking someone. Additionally, if you place it in someone's handbag, for instance, once the AirTag comes back online and the person starts moving, they will be alerted that the AirTag is tracking them.

Have you considered adding an IMU/motion sensor?

Interesting idea... I think it would increase the price a bit too much

I am working on a super mario land re-implementation for game boy using C. It's made with the GBDK toolkit so the ROM can be run on a gameboy. Currently the scrolling and background collision has been implemented, I am working on drawing the enemies... their is still a long way to go. As for why I am doing this is nostalgia and fulfilled a childhood dream repo at https://github.com/odrevet/marioland-gbdk/

Love it, good luck with the project!

I remember SML fondly, best of luck.

I'm working on an escape room! Initially I was working on a software/hardware bundle that I was planning to market to other escape rooms but I think that is the wrong approach. So I am going to build a bunch of modular stuff in my garage and eventually start my own, its been an awesome project so far! I want a more dynamic and action oriented experience so it might not really be an escape room anymore but I don't know what to call it yet.

Escape rooms are honestly... almost always a let down but the concept has a lot of potential and there are some really neat ones that standout like this local one where you pilot an airship https://www.portlandescaperooms.com/steampunk-airship

Once I build the best escape room on the planet, I can consider selling the tools.

Have you ever visited a Boda Borg? They’re not quite escape rooms; generally, the experiences are fast-paced. Some are puzzles; some physical challenges; some, an interesting mix. Lots of computer automation to make it all work.

Some sort of escape room backbone software that links together all of the hardware according to a script is such a neat idea. It would be so cool to have something like Twine [0] to build out the story graphically, where input/output is via cues to staff/hardware rather than just text on screen. An old boss of mine used to run home-haunts for halloween. (a walk-through haunted house experience scaffolded-up in his yard) I helped him a few times, and I was always amazed by how big of a community there was. There were at least 5-6 people doing a haunt next week and would come help out at his, then he would help at their haunt the next week. My boss was even making a magazine for the community for a while. Something for those folks doing quick popup theatrical events/escape rooms that could handle some "duct tape engineering" would totally have an interested market, and if it was open source you'd get great patches.

BUT I also get what you mean, have find out what works first. Do you have a blog for your escape room progress? That sounds like such a cool thing to follow you making!

[0] (https://twinery.org/)

A girl I went to HS went started an escape room business in my town, the first one they bought off of another company and customized it. Escape rooms need to refresh their content every so often, so the complete room or sometimes just the props end for sale. I was always curious about the tech side, if there were compatible 'systems' or if they are just one off things.

I'm hacking on Trailbound, a hiking and backpacking planning tool. The goal is combining a light version of the routing capability of Caltopo or GaiaGPS with more granular "leg" mapping based on how I learned to plan off trail trips and sharing functions that make it easy for my wife to know where I'm going to be, who I'm with, and who to contact if I'm not back in touch when I said I would be.

Its been a blast to build. At one point I was hosting my own ORS server but that's extremely silly to do when Mapbox has a very generous free tier. Learning about all of the open source tooling and open data available in the mapping world has been incredible.

The cost of the Hetzner box it runs on isn't much more than a Caltopo pro subscription with the added bonus of being much easier to share with non-hikers.

A quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/a5f7a7c23457400aa92b3f0f71a0008f

The app: https://go.trailboundapp.com

No marketing site, no onboarding, or any real UX attention paid to the app at this point, it is mostly Just For Me and will probably remain that way once I land a job again.

I'm starting to chip away at an iOS app so I can get offline access to maps and routes, but I'm not a Swift dev so the going is slow.

As a follow up to my relatively successful series in x86 Assembly of last year[1], I started making an OS that fits in a bootloader.

I am purposefully not doing chain loading or multi-stage to see how much I can squeeze out of 510bytes.

It comes with a file system, a shell, and a simple process management. Enough to write non-trivial guest applications, like a text editor. It's a lot of fun!

Not quite done with it yet, but you can see the progress here https://github.com/shikaan/OSle and even test it out in the browser https://shikaan.github.io/OSle/

[1] https://shikaan.github.io/assembly/x86/guide/2024/09/08/x86-...

I am working on an app for rhythm training for dancing. The first step is beat detection in music - here is my code for generating videos with beat counting: https://github.com/zby/beat_counter (vibe coding warning). Beat detection seems to work OK, downbeats are a bit more tricky and I have found not good solutions for further structuring of music (for dancing they usually count to 8 - that is two 4 beat measures - or 6 - two 3 beat measures for Waltz for example, I am not sure about 2/2 measures and other). Seeing all the LLMs generating music I thought there should also be LLMs interpreting music - but so far I have found no such model the available algos seem to be from a previous decade.

My current plan is to test the counting with people with good rhythm sense and once I find a good algo for beat detection I'll proceed with writing the app.

Very cool! Dancer here. Looking for something that counts music so I can do some choreopgraphy faster.

I assume that it would mostly help beginners (and maybe instructors) - but we'll see. If you send me an audio file I can generate the counting video (with the current model) - I am curious of your opinion.

We’re building a new social-enabled git collaboration platform on top of Bluesky’s AT Protocol: https://tangled.sh

You can read an intro here: https://blog.tangled.sh/intro (it’s publicly available now, not invite-only).

In short, at the core of Tangled is what we call “knots”; they’re lightweight, headless servers that serve up your git repository, and the contents viewed and collaborated upon via the “app view” at tangled.sh. All social data (issues, comments, PRs, other repo metadata) is stored “on-proto”—in your AT Protocol PDS.

We just shipped our pull requests feature (read more here: https://blog.tangled.sh/pulls) along with interdiffs and format-patch support! https://bsky.app/profile/tangled.sh/post/3lne7a4eb522g

We’ve also got a Discord now: https://chat.tangled.sh — come hang!

I've always been into MUDs since the mid-90s and every now and then I get this idea to write one from scratch (again) and I get pretty far and then I lose interest.

The new one is browser based.

The mud engine runs in a web worker and takes advantage of some of the modern web tricks to do stuff. For instance, data files (think: area files that don't change often) can be stored remotely and then cached with a service worker. This allows the MUD to run offline. But that's only fun if you're playing solo.

IO between the UI and worker is handled by message passing.

Multiplayer is handled by the MUD opening an outbound connection (probably websocket) to a connection collector host. Other players would then connect to that host and have their IO routed appropriately. The host can even be smarter: it could be a specialized Discord client, allowing users to play from there. Firebase may also be involved. I don't know.

The important bit is that this is still basically message passing, so the engine won't need to know the difference between the local user and a remote user.

The MUD database would be an IndexedDB. Probably. I haven't thought as much about that yet.

I am sure all of this is theoretically possible, at least.

IndexedDB seems really cool. Never really worked with it but seems like a good option for you.

YES! Another MUD programmer! I started writing one in Meteor about eleven years ago. I don't even know if Meteor's still a thing anymore... I've had a few projects in Rust that were mixtures of roguelike and MUD models, conceptually. I usually got aggravated with the models I created, though.

I really like your multiplayer idea. That sounds really clean and flexible.

Creating a modern development environment for win98. Currently I’m working on a git client. I have no patience for learning C. So backporting git is not an option. I also don’t want to use cygwin. So I’m using a server to expose git as http endpoints and coding a git client in php to use in msdos. I have Vim 7.3 and and gnu coreutils working in msdos already. So soon I will have a very nice dev environment. I want to create a one click installer which gives you xampp, vim and then all the tooling I’ve created. I’m also interested in creating SPA that works in IE5.5. But I’ll do that when my tooling is ready.

For Git, you may be interested in JGit, which runs on the JVM. From some MSFN forum posts, it seems to be possible to run Hotspot JRE 8 on Windows 98.

That is a ... heroic quest!

I'd love to hear WHY you want to do this.

I'm building a platform for small-city business directories called TownWire: https://townwire.com

We launched our first location last week and have had a great response so far from business owners and residents alike: https://canandaigua.com With the current tech climate of AI and big tech, things have gotten so impersonal for the majority of actual people. I'm betting on communities and the small businesses that serve those communities in the medium and long term.

I love this idea! Do y'all push/pull the data to OpenStreetMap at all or the users have to add it all manually?

Not at the moment but that's an interesting idea! I didn't want small biz to have to lift a finger to be on the site, so we manually populated 550+ biz to start, and then I paid a photographer to take shots of about 80% of the spots around town.

I really like the idea of contributing those photos back to OpenStreetMap actually... right now I have Google Maps on profile pages but only because we absolutely need the Google Places API for accurate hours (that's really the only spot businesses update current hours at the moment). But I could see swapping for OSM at least for maps in the near future.

I'm working on my second self-published technical book related to Elixir. The first one has been a surprising success, but since it was about learning to use Ecto on the basis of an old pedagogical toy database (and tiny dataset), the new book is about the development of a production-grade REST API with Elixir and Phoenix.

I find that many books out there are focused on documenting the "happy path" for rather small and simplistic applications without boundary conditions or business thinking behind them.

So, I thought (as with the first books) that it mix things up by also documenting the business context, the questions, decisions, and the decision-making process itself, as well as all the gotchas and "side-quests", rather than showing "here's how you do it" and then expecting the reader to suddenly make the jump from tutorial hell to actually software engineering.

Overall, it's enormously enjoyable, and I hope it goes as far as the first book, and possibly even farther.

I'd be interested in purchasing a copy when its done.

https://easel.games/about

A programming language for teenagers to learn to code by making multiplayer games. I've spent 3 years making the multiplayer completely automatic so you can just code it like a singleplayer game, then flick a switch and it just works. My hope is that teenagers will find it more engaging if they can play their games with their friends. A bit like a combination of Roblox and Scratch.

Currently trying to implement some region affinity so it doesn't just put everyone in the world in the same game. It's rollback netcode so the latency is very good even across continents, but it can't overcome the fact that the world is just too large.

The Goodreads of music. I'm a lifelong music nerd and have developed habits for finding and curating good music, both new and old. I'm codifying my habits and heuristics for discovering new music into an AI-powered social platform that can be used by anybody to widen their horizons in terms of music they listen to and to share their taste with others. https://waxnerd.com/adnan

> This weekend I’m working on mobile app that allows you to upload photos and it turns everything into a stitched anime (ghibli or not) with movements and eventually sound and script. Great to make mini animes from your day or travels or anything.

I vibe coded the above including everything: code, design, logos. Just did it solo. It has all error handling, video generation notifications (it takes a while) and credit system. I myself can't believe it's been done in a month with AI. It's already in closed beta in iOS and android app stores. Let me know if you want to try it out before public release.

My quoted comment above was 28 days ago. This is working on this part time and with a family.

EDIT: Added context.

I’ve been making photography software as an indie developer for a bit over a year now:

https://heliographe.net

A few released apps for now that are iOS/macOS, with some exciting more things in the pipeline.

If you’re a photographer who has frustrations with current mainstream photography software (whether capture/edit/publishing), I’d also love to hear from you - you can find me as Héliographe on (mastodon,bluesky,threads,x) or just email me at contact@heliographe.net :)

Hobby photographer, I shall check this out! :)

I'm working on a human-like AI opponent for VR table tennis. It's something I really want myself, love playing table tennis in VR, but with online play you get the latency issues, people that have adopted a playing style which basically hacks the game physics or other aspects, or people who are just plain rude. Playing against the AI is much nicer, but it's not varied or realistic enough such that when you actually play against real people you are ill prepared.

At a very early prototyping phase, but having a ton of fun. https://x.com/artofpongfu

What a lot of amazing projects!

I'm working on a defense drone.

I built a garage workshop with a Shapeoko 5 Pro, X1C, soldering station, and learned CAD (ok just fusion). I have a lil drone in the air and I'm adding OpenHD for vtx, Rpi for on-edge compute (Jetson would be better but is expensive).

Haven't figured out FHSS or GNSS-denied nav yet (tbh I feel like fhss is gonna be harder). And SITL in a good sim remains to be conquered (ros on osx is a terrible experience). I'm also designing a battery pack that's modular, quick-swap, smart/telemetry.

I've shifted a lot of focus to networking (attending SOFweek in tampa) for the normal fundraising/team-building/customer discovery.

I'm also basically broke due to bootstrapping so I'm about to partner on some b2b ai saas consulting with a friend, today I got Suna up and running, pretty cool.

What is Suna?

It's a FOSS project for an AI agent that can work in the browser. Just lets you give it a couple more tools than OpenAI/Claude can - I'm gonna use 1Password's SDK so it can use my passwords safely

https://github.com/kortix-ai/suna

Thanks!

"I gotta hustle on some B2B AI SaaS gig for a while so I can fund my bootstrapped combat drone work" is an extremely 2025 sentence.

This made me actually lol, you are so right

One of the things I'm working on is also this, most of the problems in the space have been solved already, the only interesting part is how elegant can your implementation be. Good luck!

Yeah finding a niche for your drone is tricky! hence SOFweek to find context, "context is that which is scarce" as they say

https://drawbeats.com

This is one of my long-standing passion projects, a simple web-based music sequencer built to have a very low barrier to entry.

I am very interested in web based music creation, have you seen web-synth on github? https://github.com/Ameobea/web-synth

Looks good! I think adding timing grid would be cool, ala 1/4, 1/16 etc

Fun! I used to play a PC game like this as a kid, but sadly can't remember the name.

A tool to organize my life.

All the things that are important to me in one place: notes, habit tracker, brag doc, action log, todos, events, data collection, biolinks, and a lot more.

That certainly sounds a bit boring, and rightly reminds of great tools like Obsidian. However, there was always something missing from the tools, or the configuration was too complex. That's why I started to build one myself. It's a mix of pwa and local-first and Github sync. I don't want a tool that only works in the browser, I also need to be able to continue working seamlessly on my smartphone, and Github offers an endless history that I can view. Plus: I can clone the repo locally at any time.

I don't need a habit tracker service, a tool for notes or a brag doc service anymore. Everything is stored as files that I can access at any time. Other nice features are forms (like typeform) or an infinite number of biolinks.

I've been using it daily for a few months now and have already been able to replace a few services with it.

https://lifosy.com/

I am working on a curated database of proxy IP addresses frequently used by bots: https://deviceandbrowserinfo.com/product/proxies-ips

So far I have ~ 3M distinct IP addresses per 30 days, with a lot of fresh proxy IPs, 1.7M. The DB contains only verified IP addresses through which I've been able to route traffic. It DOESN'T rely on 3rd party/open-source data sources.

I also made an open-source proxy IP block list based on the data: https://github.com/antoinevastel/avastel-bot-ips-lists

Wouldn’t this end up flagging a lot of residential IPs due to residential proxies?

The DB contains different types of proxies: - Residential - ISP - Data center

I don't include mobile proxies since they're heavily shared, so knowing that an IP address was used as a proxy at some point is basically useless.

Regarding your remark, indeed, there are several shared residential IPs, including IPs of legitimate users who may have a shady app that routes traffic through their device. That's why I don't recommend blocking using IP addresses as is. It's supposed to be more of a datapoint/signal to enrich your anti-fraud/anti-bot system. However, regarding the block list, I analyze the IPs on bigger time frames, the percentage of IPs in the range that were used as proxies, and generate a confidence score to indicate whether or not it is safe to block.

Sounds like pretty sophisticated filtering!

I’m working on a scraping project at the moment so looking at this too but from the other end. Super low volume though so pretty tame - emphasis on success rate more than throughput

I bought a 4G dongle for use as last resort if nothing else gets through. And also investigating ipv6

Using a 4G dongle makes it easier to hide in the crowd indeed. Since your traffic will go through heavily shared mobile IPs, probably with thousands of users behind them, anti-bot vendors won't/shouldn't block per IP, but per fingerprint/session cookie instead.

Ah hadn’t realised it’s the NAT. I thought it’s because the IPs are dynamic and rotate too much. Interesting.

Currently planning on doing a layered approach. Cloud IPs first etc.

Interesting challenge but also trying to be somewhat respectful about it since nobody likes aggressive bots

7 years ago I posted my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

4 years ago I made an install script that worked for Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. This made it easier to get going with them.

Over the last week or so I extended and polished that script to make it even easier and customizable, including adding Arch Linux support. The next step is to start installing and configuring GUI tools instead of only focusing on command line tools and environments.

I just used it the other day to set up a fresh work laptop in 5 minutes. Given the script is idempotent I run it all the time on my personal box.

Hi Nick - I did your Flask course in 2020 when I first learnt to code. Thanks for putting it together, it was a big help!

Hi Liam, thanks a lot. Happy to hear it.

Hey cool will see how much more it is from what I have. (Ubuntu/bash only atm) .. https://github.com/appsmatics/linux-setup

Working on Uncloud [1] — open source tool for self-hosting containerised apps across multiple machines. You can combine cloud VMs and on-premises to create hybrid compute environments, e.g. for cost optimisation or data privacy.

While Kubernetes offers power at the cost of complexity, Uncloud focuses on simplicity for common deployment workflows.

Progress from this month:

  - Enhanced Docker Compose support: You can now deploy your entire stack from standard Docker Compose files. This includes volumes, environment variables, resource limits, scaling and logging configuration.
  - Volume management: Create and manage Docker volumes across your cluster with automatic scheduling based on volume location.
  - Context management: CLI command to quickly switch between multiple clusters, e.g. homelab and production one

I'm particularly excited about the volume management system as it provides the cluster semantics to the good old Docker volumes. It uses a constraint-based scheduler that ensures services sharing volumes are properly co-located.

If you're seeking something between "just Docker" and full Kubernetes for deploying applications on your own infrastructure, I'd love to get your feedback on Uncloud.

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud

Sounds similar to Caprover. https://caprover.com/

Silly lisp-inspired language, but it turned into something different as I started asking myself more and more questions, and now it's more of a model for computation that tries to think about computers as different from looms (aka harward architecture). One where self-modification is the norm, where there is no stack unless you make one, and where there's no difference between a program extending itself or the programmer doing it (unlike LISP macros, my language, and model, does not have a distinction, there's no macros).

I'm not doing this because I'm convinced it's a great idea, or because it's going to revolutionize computing, or because it will be a good language, model or beneficial in any particular way, I'm doing it because I think it's fun, neat and interesting to think about (and talk about).

Have you looked at Kernel and wat? They use a fundamental operator (vau) to make macros, instead of a special form: https://github.com/manuel/wat-js

maru has this vau operator implicitly, rather than explicitly: https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru

My home-grown daily word game Omiword[1] (previously discussed on HN[2]) is nearing completion. Just a few last features and bug fixes to go, including a hint feature, access to archives, and a sharing feature.

[1] https://www.omiword.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

I'm teaching myself category theory, I'll kick back off a local trail, keep notes on the birds I see and read and do the problems in my notebooks. I've got Basic Category Theory by Leinster, and How to Read and Do Proofs by Solow as my references, notebook, pen and a pair of Nikon binoculars.

Can I ask what prerequisite mathematics you would need to know before reading those? I'm really interested in that topic and better understanding functional programming.

If you wish to approach Category Theory from the viewpoint of a programmer, not a mathematician, I suggest Bartosz Milewski's book Category Theory for Programmers. For this, all you need is some previous programming experience. He uses C++ and Haskell iirc but as long as you can read snippets of code, you'll be fine.

I am suggesting this since you said you want to better understand functional programming. Category Theory, as mathematicians look at it, is an extremely abstract field. If you want to do pure math related stuff in Category Theory, and only then, I would say important prereqs are Abstract Algebra and Topology. I believe the motivation for Category theory lies in Algebraic Geometry and Algebraic Topology, but you definitely don't need to be an expert on these to learn it.

Hey thank you for the excellent tips! I really appreciate it!

Here is a birds-eye view of programming (classic, functional, quantum) vs category theory vs logic -- aka the computational trilogy:

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trilogy

It helped me a lot putting into context my existing programming knowledge while learning category theory

Just learnt Applied Category Theory, it's a very big fun, hope you're enjoying it too :)

A Prolog TUI library that sticks to relational/logical programming, is conceptually simple, complete, and performant. Only requires some core ansi features that exist or are easily implemented in most Prologs. Currently have stuff like nested scrollable areas, toggles, frames, buttons, layouts working.

Also, a visual programming language implemented as a PICO-8 script, where the "programming" is done fully in the sprite editor.

https://weexpire.org - An opensource tool for creating emergency notes that can be read by your trusted contacts only after your death or if you are seriously injured.

I've been thinking about something like that. So the message is not stored, but if I scan it then it's in your HTTP server logs, isn't it?

Resume builder

7 months ago, I was looking for a job and got frustrated with the current resume builders, so decided to build one exactly how I wanted a resume builder to be.

- Free (like really free).

- No signup, no login.

- Has AI features to improve text.

- Find jobs matching the resume.

https://resumeyay.com

Nice!

Would like to see more written down on how the résumé-building part works.

Would love to see something that can start from a pre-existing CV and help refine. (My current CV is my own record of projects I have undertaken, so it has a lot of detail and runs into approx. 10 pages.)

Thanks!

You can upload your current CV, and it will parse it to fill out the form for you. You can then amend or improve it, choose a design, and export it as a high-quality PDF.

I will try to write about it. I faced some challenges related to exporting as a high-quality text PDF, including multilingual support and ensuring JS messages are all translated, among others.

If you just want to refine your current resume for a specific job, you can try my app https://aycabtu.com for free.

Really neat app! A button that says "instantly" and actually does the thing instantly already makes this better than every alternative! ;)

Maybe just an idea I think would be worth charging for to offset costs on yourself: if you could get a few accounts on different recruiting software packs (BambooHR, smartrecruiters, etc) and then let users test their resume with different recruiting software's AI filtering tools, that could help a ton of people. You'd have to make a lot of different job descriptions/postings in each one, but you could probably craft them all generically enough to fit most careers.

Once that's going, maybe a pay-per-use fee to test your resume that gives the paying user a couple unique recruiting links to a few job postings, and then use playwright or something to capture screenshots of their profile in the backend(s).

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.

I like your idea, but its hard to implement due to privacy concerns and could violate the ToS of these platforms (for sharing the account).

But I do have a feature in mind to do something similar. My plan is to always keep it free, with any feature, but I have to think of monetisation. Right now, it would be charging employers/job boards instead of job seekers. I've been there, the job search is stressful enough to add financial burdens.

Nice, this sound almost the same as my solution. Looking for a job and then building an app just how you would like to have it for yourself :)

I try to use a pdf upload to gather info more easily for a user (eg from LinkedIn). Maybe you can incorporate that also?

Thank you. It does have this option, you can upload your current resume in pdf, it will parse it and populate the form for you.

As for LinkedIn, you’re the second person asking for this. I can implement it but still not sure how it will be adopted, along with the cost of fetching a LinkedIn profile.

I also encountered this, I advised users to use the free export as pdf function in their account.

"Enhance with AI" returns "undefined"

https://marketingagents.net - Marketing Automation for Founders who Suck at Marketing. Open Source and Self Hostable

Building this for myself mainly, but hoping others might find it useful. Still very early and building out the bear essentials, but then the hope is to keep reading marketing books and use that to improve the platform.

Looks interesting and would love to try it out! but your repo is missing a Open Source license (https://github.com/rasulkireev/marketing-agents)

done: https://github.com/rasulkireev/marketing-agents/blob/main/LI...

Nice!

Around a month ago i posted on HN my side project for sharing Drum Patterns, got great feedback and i've implemented most of the suggestions - https://drumpatterns.onether.com/about/#changelog

Still happy to make little tweaks here and there, since there are some folks enjoying the site.

https://drumpatterns.onether.com

I'm preparing to leave the corporate world after twenty years and go get a master's in software engineering this fall in Newfoundland.

Pretty anxious about that, given how massive of a life change it is, and how much will be riding on me getting good grades.

That's awesome. I often dream of returning to a formal learning environment, I didn't appreciate how special dedicated (extended) time for learning was when I was in school.

Best of luck!

Lovely.

This is on my mind too.

Am an engineer (EE + CS) with 25 years of work experience, with a passion for Physics. Am widely known in my circles as a scientist/physicist, however, I do not actually know much. Learned some Lagrangian and Hamiltonian classical physics recently.

I personally do not mind going for even an undergrad in Physics if that would be a better fit for me to learn. :-)

I’ve also been ruminating on the idea of getting a formal education in physics since I always imagined myself as a physicist when I was a child. :)

That's super cool! Good for you!

I'm kind of contemplating the same thing - not leaving the corporate world, because I have too many bills and debts for that - but getting a PhD in something, maybe math or CS. I don't know that anyone really does that in their forties, though...

That's awesome.

The majority of people in my MSSE program were also heavy on work experience. It made for a far more interesting peer group than the few that had just come in from undergrad. Having that work experience meant that you could look at the coursework from the framework of how it would play out in an actual corporate environment.

It was really fun discussing how to apply the SQA and Project Management coursework in the workplace with people from very different companies.

I’m working on myself. :)

After three tough years in finance, I’ve decided to start a trip around the world, visiting the UK and the US, spending one month traveling through Japan, and then heading to South Korea.

There might be problems in life that can’t be solved with a three-month sabbatical trip around the world, but luckily, I don’t have any of them. :)

At the same time, I’m exploring ways to apply LLMs to video games and have built a small prototype of an LLM-based D&D system. Let’s see where this goes!

It’s useful to travel. I’m on a bit of a creative renaissance myself.

If you’re ever in Los Angeles or California, give a ring!

I recently started learning Rust so for my first non-trivial project I decided to build a system for real-time generative art driven by a DSL (defined with Pest) and interpreter that executes scripts for creating dynamic and interactive visuals. The goal is to make human-authored, interactive art more accessible than current methods like GLSL/ShaderToy but without going down the path of AI-generated content, although in theory there's nothing preventing users for using AI to generate scripts for this system. The project uses Nannou for graphics (via WebGL) and input handling (keyboard, mouse, MIDI, audio analysis). It will target WASM and I'll make it accessible as a web app where users can create and share their own projects. I'm also exploring community features to support collaboration and discovery. Still early days, but it’s been a fun way to get deep into Rust by building something creative and open-ended.

I've been building an intentionally annoying app against doomscrolling [1]. I've recently started with marketing, but oh boy is that out of my comfort zone!

I never thought that as an engineer I'd be doing TikToks. And here I am. It's fun to crack the algorithm little by little, but also frustrating because it's like a black box.

So far, I've discovered that going to the point works best. For example, I was sharing student tips and mentioning my app to improve focus. But conversion and engagement were terrible. Instead, I'm doing founder stories and tutorials, which get less views but more downloads. Plus, I can ask people in the comments for feedback on the app!

I'm happy to be doing something that devs overlook so much: marketing. Even if it's tough and slow. It's been an awesome learning experience.

[1] https://speedbumpapp.com/en/

Your app looks cool! I've tried a few other apps doing something things, Clearspace is the one I'm using now. Will give yours a try!

I'm in a similar situation as you (developer having to do marketing) but have not gotten as far, so far I've only posted on a few subreddits and here on HN. Have you found any nice learning resources?

Thank you for the support! I actually wrote an article about it here: https://speedbumpapp.com/en/blog/mobile-app-promotion/. It has the most useful resources I found so far (mostly B2C). I'm also happy to have a chat and help out: https://chat.nullderef.com :)

Been building HelloCSV - an open source FlatFile alternative. I've been building this for work and the folks at work were cool enough to let me just build it in open source.

https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/

It basically runs 100% on your / your users browser, and I'm adding localstorage support so the user can refresh their page without losing their progress.

Love flatfile but it sends your data to remote servers, and we're a healthcare company, so we need to have full control over our data storage

Hoping someone on here will find this useful!

Really nice - I love the simplicity of the UI and how intuitive it is!

thank you!

My project is an ongoing one of self improvement. I've spent most of my adult life working on technical stuff, and it's taken a bit of a toll on me.

I quit working about ~20 months ago, started a low-carb time restricted eating regime, lost ~230 lbs, have been doing 15-25 hours of cardio a month for the past year, started going to therapy, got an ADHD diagnosis, read a bunch of classic literature (Middlemarch and The Count of Monte Cristo are my favs thus far), maintaining a 19 week streak of Latin language learning through the killer Legentibus iOS app, and I'm playing guitar every day (trying to nail the the major scale in three different fingerings across all 7 modal starting points).

I miss my old job working with Vitess and Kubernetes a lot (Hi Sam!) but eliminating all work stress has really allowed me to take control of my life.

Really inspiring; most of what you've done are things I've been trying to ge the wherewithal to do since like forever. I wish you well.

so proud of you Mike. we still regularly talk about how we miss you. i am so glad you are doing well.

230 lbs in 20 months -- that's amazing. Congrats.

Yaaayyy Legentibus! I only dipped into it but next time I return to Latin really look forward to working through all the material. Extensive reading ftw.

Having enjoyable text to read/listen to that is just comprehensible enough to get you to keep working at it really a pleasurable way to learn a language. LLPSI is also great, and at times is a delightful read. I find myself also really enjoying Ørberg's student manual, in which he reveals (in English) all the finer points of the Grammar the text is trying to get you to internalize. It's amazing how much grammar you can just intuit by reading -- like I understood participles without explicitly realizing they had been introduced in Chapter 14.

The LLPSI-verse was my gateway drug (Luke Ranieri's reading is great, if a little hard to understand due to dropping final -um).

I have a bad tendency to do grammar exercises instead of trusting comprehensible input, happy to see such a strong cottage industry of Latin writers now!

I was diagnosed with ADHD last year, and am curious as to what you've learned in your time. I'm taking 40-50mg methylphenidate hydrochloride (Ritalin) daily and working a hybrid web developer role. I'm trying to increase my reading of literature and begin writing, but I find myself just watching YouTube/browsing Reddit and HN.

230lbs is wild. Great job :)

Diet matters. Protein, especially in the morning. Carbs and sugar are so bad for focus.

Sleep is essential. Getting a full night of quality sleep will probably help more than anything else. If you often wake up feeling tired already then maybe do a sleep study to see if there are problems there.

Exercise helps.

Developing a system for organization is key to unburdening your mind. There are various books for adults, for me I also found an executive function coach gave me the right amount of accountability and discipline to practice the systems enough that they didnt feel like a burden anymore.

Thanks! It has helped explain a lot of things about my life, and what I now understand as dopamine-seeking behavior, as well as why I found it so difficult to switch focus once I became obsessed with something.

I got a prescription for Adderall, and I take 10mg dose a couple of times a week when I need to get psyched up for deep-cleaning the house or doing a week's worth of food prep, or folding and putting away a mountain of laundry. Moving your body doing repetitive manual tasks just feels amazing on speed. My wife is pretty happy not having to over-function for me, and to have help around the house. Having healthy food that you want to eat in your fridge is also very helpful.

I seem to get plenty of motivation and focus for doing things I want to do by doing an hour of cardio every morning at the gym. Recently I've been moving between HR zones 1-4 while listening to the 4 movements of Beethoven's 9th, which I have a recording of that is just over an hour. I sometimes time it so I walk out of the gym at the end of the 4th movement to thunderous applause in my headphones. Reading while doing boring steady state Zone-2 on the elliptical is amazing -- I rarely feel smarter or more engaged. I read all of Jane Austen's novels that way, and it inspired me to read more!

I also go to bed every night at the same time, get up at the same time every morning, and if I don't manage to get at least 7 hours of sleep I take a nap during the day. I have developed friendships with the regulars at my local coffee shop and often have good conversations at nearly the same time several times a week. I meet with a couple of old college friends every week for dinner. I also take leisurely cold-ass showers every morning when I get back from the gym to prove to myself that I have executive function, and because by the time I've shaved and brushed & flossed I feel like a million bucks.

I am working to better understand AI agents.

What they are. their capabilities, and their and risks and write about it on my Substack

Encyclopedia Autonomica: https://jdsemrau.substack.com

On that note, I also curate a list of resources around AI Agents that fit my narrative:

https://github.com/jsemrau/Agent-Repository

I wanted to know what my kids were doing on the computer: homework or watching youtube shorts, so I built https://screenspy.app to monitor them. Now I’m working on turning it into a product.

If you add some remote command execution, you basically created some sort of a trojan ;-)

Really like to look of the product page!

I really like this idea of silent monitoring. Monitoring and talking about bad things seen weeks/months later. Because while I can block everything I want at home… there are other kids with free Internet access where everything is available and then I have no idea what’s happening.

I've been using something like Google Family Link, which works fine, except that it ties in to Google Family, along with YouTube, Play Store, Google One. I'd have to kick my sister out of the group to monitor another daughter and it means there's a limit on the number of children you have; such terrible design.

I do want to give them a little privacy and it gets to the appropriate level. Like restricting some apps at certain times, access to chrome but not xhamster. Locking it for certain periods of time and having them request more screen time past 4 hrs/day. Locking the phone whenever they've barricaded themselves in the room the whole morning.

I don't necessarily mind that they're watching YT or TikTok and such. I just want to kick them out of the doom scrolling cycle every now and then.

They might as well get used to being spied upon now. Beat the rush! :)

I hope they fight back and become the generation of the linux desktop

Genius. Could this work with iPads?

No way currently( I hope Apple will open something in the next iOSes.

I'm sure you're doing it with good intentions, but it's a bit sad that children will now grow up with so few rights over their privacy.

As someone who grew up on the internet, I feel that the freedom it gave me to explore the world at my own pace allowed me to develop my personality. The thought that every second of my online life will be logged in an app and accessible to my parents honestly sounds horrible.

I respect every parent's decision regarding how they raise their children, but I invite you to reflect on whether growing up under this level of surveillance is something you would have wanted for yourselves.

If you're worried about the parents, wait until you hear about the big brother

Premium tooling to work with JSON Schema (https://www.sourcemeta.com).

I'm a member of the JSON Schema Technical Steering Committee, and been making a living consulting with companies making use of JSON Schema at large. Think data domains in the fintech industry, big OpenAPI specs, API Governance programs, etc. The tooling to support all of these use cases was terrible (non-compliant, half-baked, lack of advanced features, etc), and I've been trying to fix that. Some highlights include:

- An open-source JSON Schema CLI (https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsonschema) with lots of features for managing large schema ontologies (like a schema test runner, linter, etc)

- Blaze (https://github.com/sourcemeta/blaze), a high-performance JSON Schema C++ compiler/validator, proven to be in average at least 10x faster than others while retaining a 100% compliance score. For API Gateways and some high-throughput financial use cases

- Learn JSON Schema (https://www.learnjsonschema.com/2020-12/), becoming the de-facto documentation site for JSON Schema. >15k visits a month

Right now I'm trying to consolidate a lot of the things I built into a "JSON Schema Registry" self-hosted micro-service that you can just provision your schemas to (from a git repo) and it will do all of the heavy lifting for you, including rich API access to do a lot of schema related operations. Still in alpha (and largely undocumented!), but working hard to transition some of the custom projects I did for various orgs to use this micro-service long term.

As a schema and open-source nerd, I'm working on my dream job :)

That's really neat. I've been doing some JSON schema work on our products recently, especially trying to take a schema and generate info compliant with the schema for e.g. testing accounts with clean data on non-production environments, etc. I feel like the area's underdeveloped.

Yeah, exactly. This is a great example. In theory schemas open up all of those use cases in an elegant manner, yet the tooling often sucks. Would love to connect and at least have your use case on my radar!

I was recently looking for a simple minimalist app launcher for iPhone that would respect my privacy and didn’t come with a stupid subscription plan, so instead I made my own! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/applist/id6743515756

I also published the list of url schemes / universal links on GitHub: http://github.com/sxp-studio/app-list-catalog

Just downloaded this. This is a great format for how my head thinks, especially for apps I use periodically but not so often that I want them on the main screen. Thank you.

(Minor note: The Setup Tutorial says, "Swipe right to continue" when the user actually swipes left.)

Fixed in the upcoming update. Thanks for the feedback :-)

That's cool. Reminds me of the Windows phone launcher.

I’m working on a free and open-source invoice generator with live PDF preview — fully browser-based, no sign-in required.

It supports multiple languages, currencies, European VAT deductions, and more.

I built this tool for myself so it’s kinda like a personal software. Hopefully, others will find it useful too :)

https://easyinvoicepdf.com/en/app

https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

I'm continuously building and improving https://lectronz.com/, a marketplace for electronic enthusiasts and professionals that focuses on the open-hardware and DIY electronics communities. We recently introduced "Threshold Pre-Orders," a pre-order mechanism that lets hardware creators gauge the market before committing to production/PCBA. We have successfully tested this on four low-volume products already. See https://lectronz.com/u/lectronz/articles/introducing-thresho...

A midi sequencer, which does or is supposed to do what you expect.

In the process of adding stuff like euclydian sequences, and trying to figure out how to generate melodies. Been considering using something like a simple markov probability from a bunch of jazz standards, but also starting to read more music theory behind it.

It's a programming project but it's directly related to me trying to figure out music. So not a random sequence of notes in scale or not. The idea is more to generate backing tracks or song starters.

That's a cool project, but learning music via music theory is a bit like trying to learn English via grammar theory. It's backwards, and out of the hundreds of musicians I've met, I've never met one that walked that path.

Strong recommendation: Hire a teacher. Even with experience playing four instruments, and when I decided to learn another, I still hired a teacher.

One of my goals for this years was to get a jazz teacher, specifically for guitar.

A layoff killed that goal for the foreseeable future.

Theory has helped me practice like I think you're supposed to. More structured, more analysis. It also tickles the same part of the brain the certain comp sci topics do.

I think it came from wanting to learn how to improv, and then wanting to make my own songs. So I make a few tracks a week, of different genres, depending on what I'm interested in at the time. I've seen improvement, and I take notes about what I learned/what works.

Ah, I have a thing vaguely like this in the pipeline too. Fun stuff!

Working on designing and building an interface to properly integrate a modern phone with Toyota/Lexus infotainment systems from before 2010 (which are using the proprietary AVC-LAN protocol).

I've explored all existing commercially available solutions and none match my requirements/standards (high-quality audio codec/DAC, USB-PD, steering wheel controls, no splicing or cutting into the loom, no cutting up the dash, etc.).

After researching how the Toyota/Lexus infotainment systems work I found they are highly modular, and actually quite easy to produce custom modules for. The proprietary AVC-LAN protocol is well-understood, and actually makes it really easy to integrate with. The display are just NTSC composite, and touch events (in fact, all button presses, including steering wheel media controls) are emitted on the AVC-LAN bus.

An simple board with some interfacing logic, a DAC and an RPi nano should be all I need to allow good Bluetooth audio integration, and lossless audio via wired USB, both controllable from the steering wheel. You could do all sorts of fun things with the display (such as displaying vehicle status from ODB, lap timer, G-force meter etc.). If I use a RPi compute module then running Android Auto should be quite feasible.

It's just a hobby project though, I'll probably open-source everything. Not planning on commercializing it.

I'm already working on something like this and have a prototype board designed.

Here is my version 1.

https://youtu.be/pJjq_0hZEh4 https://youtu.be/drCtDADRJe8 https://youtu.be/jLCiIB6z968

Version 2 is being built around a CM4 IO board and will include my AVCLAN implementation, DAC, GPS and is intended to run AOSP Android. The board is fully designed already and I'm working on the custom Android build now.

That's really cool! Looks like you found the same resources as I did on the AVC-LAN inner workings.

It's also fun to see how each Toyota product uses the same modules and buttons, just different layouts and front panel designs. Your solution (sans the custom display that will only fit your model) should work on just about every Toyota and Lexus model from the AVC-LAN era (2000~2010)

Not sure if you'd be willing to share your code or diagrams, but anything would help me tremendously. My contact info is in my bio.

Yes, my coding should allow my module to easily be usable by any Toyota or Lexus, even to create new custom modules. I'm also working on a proximity sensor module to integrate into my custom LCD using the AVCLAN protocol.

Sorry, I don't see your contact info.

Godspeed. I find it frustrating these systems don't follow some sort of international standard, still. I can't justify replacing the system in my 2016 Highlander just to get Android auto, but the Bluetooth system handles non-phone calls poorly and the album art database hasn't been updated for basically the entire life of the vehicle. I don't like having to rely on the manufacturer nor Google/Apple for connectivity basics.

> I find it frustrating these systems don't follow some sort of international standard

They do, actually!

Most car manufacturers, including Toyota, now use the MOST-bus for infotainment system interconnects, which is an open standard. So your car being a >2010 Toyota, it will have a MOST system.

> I can't justify replacing the system in my 2016 Highlander just to get Android auto

You don't have to, there are plenty of aftermarket modules available that will add Android Auto to your existing MOST infotainment system. Can be a hit-or-miss though in terms of quality and integration. If you want something reliable and well integrated, stick with the OEM solutions.

> I don't like having to rely on the manufacturer nor Google/Apple for connectivity basics.

You're already relying on the car OEM for mobility and your safety, and you're already relying on Google or Apply for connectivity (aka: your phone's OS).

Remember that your 2016 Highlander (3rd gen XU50) was introduced in 2013, so developed well before that. Android auto didn't even exist back then, and we still hadn't consolidated on the iOS/Android duopoly we have today. Heck we were still using Windows phone and Blackberry OS back then. How could Toyota engineers have designed something that would still remain compatible with devices in 2025? Quite remarkable actually that it still works at all.

Is possible to equip an old car with some sort of infotainment+map system (ideally integrated with GMaps)? Something off the shelf that requires installation but after that integrates with your phone (Android or in the future Apple).

If you don't mind spending the money, go to crutchfield's website and pick a head unit with the features you want, they'll sell the kit to make it integrate with your cars built in systems.

Where's the fun in that?

Trying to remain employed. I can’t lose my job in this chaotic simulation we call life.

I've been working on https://asterai.io -- a platform for developing, running and managing AI agents.

It lets you create multiple agents, configure them via the web console (such as LLM parameters and system prompts) and manage their plugins and functionality.

The system is fully plugin-based, where each plugin is a WASM program that exposes functions/tools that the agent can call, and can also hook into the query lifecycle. Because plugins are WASM, they can be written in various languages such as Rust, Go, TypeScript etc. Plugins can also act as libraries, which is possible because of WebAssembly Components (a great piece of software!) -- so you can dynamically call functions from other plugins within your agent, and you get type support for your chosen language too (with codegen via WASM Components tooling).

More recently, I've been working on an SSH server for agents. The idea is that you can add public keys to your custom agent and then SSH into it to talk to it easily from terminal.

If this sounds interesting, feel free to join our Discord! The project is still new and feedback is highly appreciated. http://asterai.io/discord

This looks interesting, how do you plan to handle agents which operate apps with a UI - for example playwright, obsidian etc. Or is this out of scope?

Thanks!

That's a good question. Currently, there is one way to do it. The client querying the agent receives JSON-encoded values that are returned from plugin function calls made by the agent. These values are received alongside the agent token response stream (via SSE). So plugins can essentially emit events that the client can forward to the UI application, such as to click a button etc. The limitation with this is that there is no built-in way to send a success/error status back, it's one way only. It works well for actions that are infallible such as simple UI actions.

The client here would also need a way to interact with the target program of course, e.g. from a JavaScript browser you can click buttons and manipulate the DOM, or from a VSCode Plugin you can interact with the editor etc.

It's definitely something that can be improved though! I've been thinking about some type of MCP interoperability that could maybe assist with this.

I'm prototyping a Depth Anything[1] -assisted segment annotation tool, with an eye toward plant detection in non-agriculture environments (where the backdrop is an endless sea of green complexity). Even if the task I have in mind doesn't pan out, I think this tool could be useful to people for other difficult segmentation tasks.

[1] - https://depth-anything-v2.github.io/

https://mitte.ai — an AI image generator with focus on quality and details

so you can get logos / icons that doesn’t look AI generated.

it comes with Photoshop-like editor (https://mitte.ai/editor) so you can zoom into details and change / remove anything, or upscale, etc.

I built it for myself but now there’s good amount of paying users as well.

So I wanted to try this and it turns out you can't sign up?

simply go to the sign in button and then there is a reset password and then when you click on it , there adds an optional sign up and when you click on it , it leads you to mitte.ai/join which says Not Found.

Kind of interesting, wappanalyzer shows its written in erlang? So are you raw dogging erlang or maybe elixir or gleam? What's the tech stack behind this.

Where are you generating the images / videos at? Are you using something like openrouter api or are you self hosting the gpu / using aws for it??

I am also interested in what percentage of users are paying? and also the abuse vector that might arise from generating some pretty down bad images... , are all images that are generated here public or what exactly??

You can sign in with Google.

I had to close the sign up because there was so many abuse coming from regular sign ups.

'Sign in Google' is great because it eliminates low quality traffic who never pays and tends to be there for abusing the system.

We need a better mechanism than this for testing the abuse system, because I use proton mail and though I have a gmail, I don't want to use it anymore... I know Oauth is convenient, but please for everyone's sake, can we guys not either add literally every single Oauth / I think one of the best options is probably matrix OAuth with a captcha and rate limits

https://account.matrix.org/

Seriously, I don't mind a sign in option, I just don't want to be forced to use gmail / inferior privacy solution to use your app, no offense.

> Please add more Oauth solutions > I am investigating what can be the most universal Oauth solution while still preventing spam unlike emails, sounds interesting enough of a problem,IDK

Sounds like keycloak can sort of allow some sort of decentralized option or have many and I mean many including the matrix sign in as a option.

Keycloak also has strong integration in a lot of languages, there are other projects like authelia etc. but for some reason keycloak actually seems to me of having a little bad ui but still absolutely great in what it does

But authelia/ authentik are easier to host/integrate IDK

Sorry, I don’t want to serve this group of users. Please download the image models and run them in your own hardware. Perfect for privacy and all that stuff

Well, All I am asking for is a literal alternative to google sign in, maybe even github would work (though microsoft monopoly but IDK)

Dude, I don't have my own hardware otherwise I would've run it myself. Currently using lightning AI which also requires google sign up but it was created by the creators of pytorch and it gives me 30 hours free gpu per month to try something and gives me full flexibility which your product just simply doesn't provide.

I am not sure,but please,Privacy is not an afterthought, it is quintessential.

I see that it does drawing and illustrations as well. How good it is for science illustrations, like those seen in a Physics book.

I'm in the midst of a tectonic career shift, from being laid off from a position and place I loved, to another gig while I keep looking for another unicorn role like before.

So most of my project work is home-based, after years of being able to chase (and execute) dreams at work.

On the technology front, I'm finally investing in a proper network core for home. WiFi 7 AP, 2.5Gig core, PoE everywhere, zone-based firewall. Still mapping out DHCP scopes and VLANs, but once that's done it'll be moving on to proper IoT and Home Assistant build-outs to prepare for the Unfolded Circle 3 later this summer. Also looking to redo my two N100 hypervisors off Proxmox and back to RHEL + Cockpit, or some other Linux + KVM implementation; from there, it's all about Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform. Really just a lot of oft-postponed side projects because I had amazing fulfillment at work, that I suddenly have ample time for now.

Outside of the tech stuff, I'm still trying to get some decent photos of two local birds of prey that have been hunting in my neighborhood. They seemingly spite me by only showing themselves when I don't have my camera with me, but dangit, I will photograph them.

On the writing front, I've got a few topics jostling around in drafts: speculating on potential futures of LLMs, the internet as a psychohazard, and a series of "fundamentals" to try and teach my non-techie circles more about how computers and the internet work, so they can do some modest self-hosting and get off centralized services. I'll likely dovetail some of them with my own home projects, writing them alongside the documentation as I make progress.

Two things.

I have revived my work on Go Micro (https://github.com/micro/go-micro) and rewritten the v5 cli/api from scratch (https://github.com/micro/micro). As a VC funded company there was a lot of confusion around the tools we were building and we veered off in a direction that alienated the community. With the company dead, funding gone, etc there's an opportunity to rebuild value around the Go Micro framework.

The second thing I'm working on is the Reminder (https://reminder.dev && https://github.com/asim/reminder). As a muslim I feel like it's my duty to spread the word of Islam and as an engineer I feel like an appropriate way to do that is build an app and API for the Quran, names of Allah and hadith. It's a slow patient building of something as opposed to expecting anything from it.

In terms of new ideas, maybe not new but less screen time, less phones, more nature.

A very misguided project that started with me trying to run Linux on a newly acquired 386DX-40 and has led to me building my own Linux distribution for said purpose

Hi all! my name is Patrick and I'm a linux platform engineer out of Waterloo Can. This ( https://imgur.com/a/14YMyVN ) is a collection of Nesticles - lightweight isolated immutable desktop system containers using modern linux compositor technologies and shown on a debian stable host platform and targeting PC grade hardware. These are getting very useful and present opportunities to theme and deeply customize for your personal use or for an organization or company. On average they consume like 600mb of memory per running container, so you will see ~30 envs running there comforably in those screenies. Nesticles is also a platform for unifying desktop and app delivery, providing some building blocks for composing up useful containers. Currently these environments are specified as docker-compose projects, including all of the apps. Could anyone see these becoming useful to you? It kind of scratched a 20 yr itch I'd had since being a young lad configuring desktops painted on cubes and such. I'm shooting for initial support for the following host platforms (debian, ubuntu, steamos, windows, mac). I'd like to bring a launcher to Steam to fund dev and bring the core definitions to the community perhaps as open-source container definitions. Any suggestions or thoughts on Nesticles or lightweight desktop containers? I do view these as building blocks in some larger or more specialized system, but they have utility for desktop use cases now. Ps. I'm also currently on the job market if you are looking for a platform/backend developer - please see https://paddymahoney.github.io . Thanks all, Patrick.

I'm still tinkering on my multiplayer game server framework when not grinding away at my day job.

The idea is essentially: An Erlang-based control plane, supporting ENet and WebSocket connection modes, with Protobuf for messages. Erlang has an excellent concurrency story, and I think it's a great fit for game servers. I've wrapped up a bunch of this work into behaviors on the Erlang side, such that developers can target the "gen_zone" behavior (for instance) to implement a tick-based game server. I'd like to expand that into other types of games, such as turn-based games.

I've also got a Godot plugin for generating a client library based on your protobuf schema. The plugin handles session stuff, exposes functions for client-to-server messages, and emits signals for server-to-client messages.

These days I'm working on integrating Luerl (Lua in Erlang) and Love2D support. I want to be able to take advantage of Erlang on the back-end while writing the majority of game logic in Lua. Further down the road I want to explore hot reloading parts of the Lua game state on the client/server, perhaps with an in-game editor, to develop the game "inside-out", in a way.

Sounds cool. I'm interested in netcode using Godot. Is there a Git repo I can check out?

Godot has a nice netcode story with ENet, WebSocket and WebRTC integration. If you just want a off-the-shelf product instead of bespoke Erlangy stuff, I think there are a lot of good options out there like Godot's native high-level networking, products like Nakama, etc.

Server backend framework: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld

Chat server implementation (Erlang): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat_server_example

Chat client implementation (Godot): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat-client-example

Currently working on HN Alerts — a simple free site I made to alert me (via email) to trending stories on Hacker News.

It sends me an email once a story hits a certain number of upvotes per minute, so it's useful for keeping track of breaking news.

https://hnalerts.com

If you’re not aware, compare https://www.hnreplies.com/

Thanks. Been a happy user for a few years!

I have a similar domain - https://hackernewsalerts.com - but it's for tracking replies to comments and posts you've made. It's on maintenance mode at the moment, couldn't gather as much interest as I'd hoped. Have open sourced it.

Is there any difference to the existing one that made you built another one?

Yep, it notifies you when you get comments on your HN posts. The existing one only tracks replies to comments.

In case you continue to work on it, an RSS feed of comments would be interesting...

Hmm, why wouldn't you just use https://hnrss.github.io/ ?

Writing a complete API client for the Internet Archive in Typescript, with proper documentation, proper typing, unit tests and integration tests, so people can have a proper library for both front-end and back-end applications.

Im working on a Discord Bot that can spin up game servers on demand. We are two developers, me and my friend from uni. Its called SLASHPLAY (https://slashplay.gg) . We are trying to make it as convienient as possible to spin up a game server for friends or fellow gamers. Currently we are trying to find out if we can make a living from it :?

Three Kind Words (https://threekindwords.com)

It’s a small vending machine on the internet where people anonymously send a friend three postcards, one word at a time. The first two cards are unsigned, and the last one reveals who sent them. It’s meant to be a slow, kind surprise in the mail.

I shared this on HN a while back, and it gave us a quiet little push. Since then, we’ve sent 246 out of the 300 postcards we set out to deliver this year. Things have slowed down lately, but the whole thing is automated, costs almost nothing to run, and has been a lot of fun to work on!

Just some feedback, I think this would be much more compelling with better choices of messages. It feels like the first two words are setting something up and the third should have some kind of payoff, but a lot of the messages don't work like that. The third word is usually predictable and obvious and something of a letdown "Never give....up".

There's really nothing in that list that is interesting enough to send to anyone in my life. I'd be wanting to send something very specific like "Remember cycling Iceland?" or "Soy chicken success" or something.

I get your concerns about "writing something inappropriate" but you could probably let people choose 3 words from a list of a few hundred pre-vetted words?

thanks for this genuine feedback, it's really helpful insight. i like your idea of pre-vetted words and imagine there is something i could do with an LLM to moderate user generated messages.

"soy chicken success" hits close to home :D

Or just moderate them - 100 three word sentences a year is a very very achievable pace.

https://markdown.ninja

A Markdown-first CMS and website builder for blogs, newsletters and documentation websites.

I've been blogging since more than 10 years, and the only thing that made it possible is Markdown. That's why I've decided to build a complete publishing platform to replace the complex and fragile setups of bloggers and startups. Do you really need a CI/CD pipeline, static site builder, hosting, CDN and analytics just for a website? :/

The platform is currently 100% operational and I'm now working to Open Source it.

The best thing? You can publish directly from the CLI:

$ mdninja publish

Recall Audio - A multichannel audio recording app that has your back, even if you forget to hit record.

Basically it continuously records into a buffer (length is configurable), and if you realize that you wanted to start recording 30 minutes ago you can recall the buffer and have everything saved.

In my work and an audio engineer I was in this situation a couple of times, and since there was no tool for that on the market, I’m building it.

I've been thinking about this app for about 5 years but didn't build it yet. It could be used in professional and personal settings. Can you share the link to this app ?

I've been trying things for 25+ years and I'm about to kick off a test of a whole bunch of new business ideas. You might have read my article, How to Lose Money with 25 Years of Failed Businesses.

https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...

I've created a mailing list. Please sign-up if seeing all my new business tries is something you might be interested in.

https://tally.so/r/wvggOX

Recently started building a rules-engine for Warhammer 40k, so that I can finally play a game RTS-style in the browser. Hopefully one day I'll get to a public lobby / matchmaking (think chess.com for WH40k).

It's something I've been thinking about for years, but kept avoiding because I knew it'd be a huge commitment and I figured surely someone else would do it eventually. But I decided to finally tackle it and learn some new skills. 40k has literally 1000s of special rules across all the armies, so it's been fun designing a highly modifiable architecture.

I'm building an open source game backend for Unity and Godot: https://trytalo.com. GitHub: https://github.com/talodev.

Talo makes it easy to add systems that traditionally need extra non-gameplay build time like authentication, player analytics and game stats.

Right now you can drop Talo into your game or use the API directly. Importantly, I’ve made Talo easy to self-host and you can point the Unity package/Godot plugin to your own Talo instance.

Is this a competitor to Heroiclabs (Nakama, Hiro, Satori)? Just trying to understand more where Talo fits. Seems like it's Hiro + Satori wrapped in one, but minus Nakama which would be the game server.

Yeah it’s in a similar space to Heroiclabs. Looking at Talo as Hiro + Satori makes sense.

A few big differences though: I don’t think those products are open source and Talo has a different philosophy when it comes to features.

I’m designing Talo to be a great base for features by providing all the necessary tools and infrastructure that developers can build from.

As an example, I see Hiro has a dedicated inventory system. In Talo, you can store and retrieve any data on players so you can keep all the logic around item configurations in your game code (where it belongs imo) and let Talo handle the saving/loading part in a generic way that makes sense for your game.

I’ve been working on a side project called jobswithgpt — after months of building and refining, the first version is finally live: https://jobswithgpt.com

The idea is simple: a job search site that actually works for job seekers. It focuses on listings posted directly by companies (no spam, no middlemen, no bloated sponsored posts drowning out real opportunities). It uses AI to surface better matches, recommend jobs intelligently, and pull out the most important info from job listings automatically. You can also bookmark jobs you’re interested in and track them easily — no signup needed unless you want personalized suggestions.

It’s still early, and we’re improving it constantly. Would love for you to check it out, try a search, and let me know what you think — good, bad, rough — all feedback helps. Thanks a lot for the early support!

Site: https://jobswithgpt.com

love this. what does like mean? Do i have to just type engineering? Is it scraping data every seconds because applying to jobs just posted is essential

The crawler discovers new jobs as they come by but isn't real-time. You can just type keywords or phrases you like to see. Maybe Like is redundant. Thanks for the comment!

Learning Rust by building a simple database using it.

I’ve done my share of programming languages (PHP, C++, Python, Ruby, Haskell) and for the last 10 years I’ve been working in OCaml (which I love so much) but Rust would be a nice addition IMO.

And I never implemented LSM style database before! So that’s fun.

I only just started and the pace will be slow (I have 3h/week to spend on it on a good week), if you are curious: https://github.com/happyfellow-one/crab-bucket

LOL, love the name.

LSM style should be an interesting path, especially when it comes to optimization.

Hah, thanks!

I really wanted an optimisation rabbit hole and seems like this projective going to deliver on that :)

I also tweet about the progress on @onehappyfellow if you’re interested

AI bookkeeping for solopreneurs.

As a freelance web dev who also has an Airbnb side hustle, I got tired of expensive bookkeeping for a few transactions per month. I tried DIY, but my time is worth more than that.

Most importantly, both pros and DIY got subtle things wrong and caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars in deductions and credits.

So I’m making an AI bookkeeping chatbot that will handle all that for me. The aim is full automation while surfacing tax deduction and credit opportunities throughout the year. Like wouldn’t it be awesome to just have the research and tax credit or do home office deductions with zero effort?

At the end of the year, Kumbara puts together a series of financial reports that you plug into your tax software or hand to your CPA.

Working hand-in-hand with CPAs and some platform partners on this. Would love to hear from other solopreneurs or engineers who want to help build the future of financial freedom.

https://www.kumbara.money

I'll keep this in bookmark.

I procrastinate on taxes for the silliest of reasons: I don't want to spend the time to create a P&L for my side gig to give to my accountant. Takes less than an hour but it is just annoyingly tedious.

All my income and the majority of my expenses are done through PayPal because I want to minimize the bookkeeping effort. For some unknown reason, they don't have an annual P&L statement as a standard report. This year I tried a bunch of things with Copilot using PayPal reports. The most eye-opening result was that I could give it a .csv file with all my transactions for the year and tell it to generate a P&L statement with expense categories. It managed the task almost flawlessly. The only cleanup I had to do was to recategorize a couple of items. To say that I was blown away is an understatement.

Duckdb for streaming data!

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

I think the industry lacks lightweight fully featured stream processing solutions. I think it’s either heavyweight jvm or bespoke custom solutions

Sqlflow aims to be a middle ground , performant, fully featured, observable and supports sql

Last year I bought a broken jukebox. I wanted to convert it to be powered by a raspberry pi. I wanted it to work like a traditional jukebox where you used the buttons to input the song number. While there are a few existing projects to convert Jukeboxes to run from raspberry pi, most of them used a touch screen or didn't work well on RP5 which is what I had or the current version of raspberry pi os.

So despite not being a programmer, barely knowing a little javascript, and nothing about python, linux, or gtk, I was able to use AI to muddle my way through to creating a program that takes the input from a numpad, looks up the song from a list, sends it to mpd, and posts a picture from the album art embedded in the music file. https://github.com/jccalhoun/mpcButtonJukebox

Growing a non-tech company.

I started a functional beverage brand about 2 years ago and rebranded for larger scale about 7 months ago. I am located in South Florida and have had some decent success so far but still investing all profits back into the biz. Raised about $50k of outside money.

If you're in South FLA and are into fitness and health, consider reaching out to me or responding.

I will also have the capacity to sell in to the NYC market quite soon. If this sounds interesting, again, please respond or DM!

I'm working on a WASM clone of the original Castle Wolfenstein. I'm going to call it Castle WASMstein.

Please keep posting updates about this because if I could instantly fire up a game in my browser, I would definitely pay for that and play with it all day!

I am building a couple of apps:

https://spicychess.com: A real-time chess playing app where you can taunt your opponent and smack them during the game! If you smack them enough times to completely drain their health, you can steal their turn and make their move. There is also has a progression system where leveling unlocks increasingly fun abilities designed to torment and troll your opponent.

https://wordazzle.com: Inspired by the quote 'the limits of my language are the limits of my world,' it's a daily game delivering 7 carefully chosen, sublime words designed to genuinely elevate your verbal prowess. You can also save the words you love as flashcards to review them later!

A practical hacker's guide to the C programming language:

https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c

Also learning to deal with having very little to no money atm.

A little free library style box, but not free and not a library (https://thingio.dev)

I've got an LTE module connected to a solenoid lock. The module listens for a "checkout complete" callback from a Stripe payment link which will unlock the solenoid. There's also some weight sensing involved to track the current product inventory inside the cabinet.

I built this for a family friend who does a lot of wellness outreach around combating food deserts by introducing small scale farming to local schools.

As a result of their community bee hives, they have a bunch of excess honey. So, I thought I’d build them this little honey vending cabinet for their neighborhood.

I've expanded the service a bit to be more product agnostic, maybe someone else can find a use for it.

https://interestingbars.com: Discover the best, most interesting bars in your area

https://tallytabby.com: The simplest way to keep track of anything in your life. From habits to inventory, TallyTabby makes counting effortless.

https://qrfeedback.app: Get honest customer feedback with a simple QR code

https://skillriskaudit.com: Knowledge Risk Management

https://shiftingtictactoe.com: The classic game with a twist—play in real-time, and there’s never a draw!

> https://interestingbars.com

How does this work? I searched Boston and got zero results?

Still the early stages and in the process of finding the best most interesting bars. If you know any there I would love to hear from you. Feel free to submit them on the website or here!

I'm working on Damon[1], a Nomad Events stream operator that automates cluster operations and eliminates repetitive DevOps tasks. It's a lightweight Go binary that monitors the Nomad events stream and triggers actions based on configurable providers.

A few examples of what it can currently do:

- Automated data backup: Listens for Nomad job events and spawns auxiliary jobs to back up data from services like PostgreSQL or Redis to your storage backend based on job meta tags. The provider for this is not limited to backups, as it allows users to define their custom job and ACL templates, and expected tags. So it can potentially run anything based on the job registration and de-registration events.

- Cross-namespace service discovery: Provides a lightweight DNS server that acts as a single source of truth for services across all namespaces, solving Nomad's limitation of namespace-bound services. Works as a drop-in resolver for HAProxy, Nginx, etc.

- Event-driven task execution: Allows defining custom actions triggered by specific Nomad events; perfect for file transfers, notifications, or kicking off dependent processes without manual intervention. This provider takes in a user-defined shell script and executes it as a nomad job based on any nomad event trigger the user defines in the configuration.

Damon uses a provider-based architecture, making it extensible for different use cases. You can define your own providers with custom tags, job templates, and event triggers. There's also go-plugin support (though not recommended for production) for runtime extension.

I built this to eliminate the mundane operational tasks our team kept putting off. It's already saving us significant time and reducing gruntwork in our clusters.

Check out the repository[1] if you're interested in automating your Nomad operations. I'd love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions about implementation or potential use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/Thunderbottom/damon

https://indiantranslate.com

It's a translation map of Indian languages - type in a word, see the translations across 22 languages.

I was inspired by this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152587), and wanted to make something similar for India (which has similar linguistic diversity). Translations are fetched with Google Translate, but I also display 'romanizations' (transliterated into Latin script), which are generated with a local ML model.

Now that it's done, I've mostly been working on a little Markdown-to-HTML parser in Haskell.

We're working on the successor to Weebly, with https://www.articulationsites.com. My partner and I were founding engineers at Weebly. It's clear that the brand is in decline at the hands of Square, and it drives us every day to make a great alternative that Weebly users can rely on.

I'm working on a universal tool to create and print custom dust jackets.

I like collecting books and have lots of series, but editions and cover/spine designs changes all the time for no good reason. Especially for long series it's near-impossible to get a collection with consistent styles, which I find frustrating. And when buying rare or old second-hand books online, it's even worse.

The app will allow you to enter your book information (title, author, size, summary...), then choose the design/layout. You will then have the option to print it by yourself (for free - if you can find a big enough printer) or get it printed by a professional.

A simple coffee shop app that shows the nearest coffees shops that are closest to you. Using Google's AI, each shop has a Gemini AI overview that describes the shops offerings and other information that might be useful to the user.

I've only built it for Minneapolis and Chicago for now.

https://mplscoffee.com

I’m working on LookAway (https://lookaway.app) to help people stay healthier and more productive during prolonged screen time.

My main challenge has been making meeting detection more robust -- it currently uses both mic and camera activity, which led to a lot of false positives. In the next version I’m switching to mic only (the camera caused most of the noise) and I’ve added a way to identify which app is using the mic, so users can exclude non-meeting apps.

I’ve also added plenty of small tweaks throughout to make LookAway even less interruptive. I’m excited for the next release!

No Pizza On Luna, a graphic novel about a future run by AIs who have discovered that the best way to get humans to do what they want is to present as patronizing, unctuous clowns. Http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/

I recently found out my wife wants a gecko, so I’ve begun planning for a mega-paradise. I want weather systems, every sensor I could possibly ram in there, cameras, and more. Planning to jury rig a toilet setup to run water from the reservoir to the rain system.

The gecko comes from New Caledonia, so my goal will be to replicate that environment as closely as possible. This will be difficult, since most of the plants on the island are only found there, but you can get surprisingly close.

One awesome fact I learned about this: conifers actually started out in warm climates. They just got out-competed once angiosperms (flowers!) came about.

https://www.peta.org/blog/dont-buy-a-gecko/

https://www.peta.org/features/gecko-facts/

I don’t care what peta has to say on any topic honestly

You don't care about anything the largest organization that promotes the ethical treatment of animals has to say? Maybe that's a good indicator you shouldn't have your pet gecko.

A framework for Excel spreadsheets, written in Excel VBA. A nine-minute demo video is here: https://www.cabin.wtf (the file is 4mb, not 4kb)

If nothing else, this shows that the Excel UX can be radically changed thru one small Excel file... so much of the object model is exposed to VBA.

I had no idea you could do stuff like that in excel.

Your comment made my day, thank you :)

Reminds me of Emacs for Excel nerds. I like it! Do you plan to open-source it?

Thanks so much! I do plan to open-source it. ...Once it's tightened up. Please email me if you'd like to be on a beta list. mike at bishop dot wtf

A Chrome extension to track your research progress.

You give a title to your research session, and it keeps track of which tabs you have opened, which ones you have read and have not read.

When you want to resume your research, you can simply resume on whichever research session you want, and it will reopen all your tabs as before, so you can continue from where you left.

Erlang-RED[2] a combination of Node-RED[1] and Erlang to create a visual low code programming environment for Erlang based on the principles of flow based programming.

Reached a milestone today by being able to create a http endpoint and route the traffic (based to path variables) between various pathways. Thus it is possible to create a blog using Erlang-RED - what all good frameworks should be able to do ;)

[2] = https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red

[1] = https://nodered.org/

I just finished a small personal project: a self-hosted web app which stores and indexes my archived emails. None of the existing options I tried were very good so I made my own. A simple Rails app that ingests .eml files and stores the text in postgres for full-text search.

I learned a lot about text encodings, multipart emails, inline attachments, postgres' tsvector/tsquery, etc. I'm particularly proud of how I was able to use `WITH RECURSIVE` to get an email's entire thread, which seems basic but the other archive apps I tried didn't have that feature.

https://github.com/ndouglas/whispers

Whispers is a self-organizing, belief-driven mesh where nodes propose, verify, and evolve solutions through dynamic, decentralized consensus.

Basically a shared knowledge graph of proposed partial inferences in CRDTs using verification as a merge function. There're some issues I know I'll run into with e.g. admissibility but I have some solutions in mind.

I'm in the very early stages but I think it's a simple idea so I have high hopes for a cool demo soon.

Need to renovate an old house, built in the 50's, extended later in the 60's, 90's and 2000's. I want to calculate the heat loss, energy requirements to install a heat pump. So, I am writing a relatively simple Python program to compute the heat requirements (max total and max per room) to get the possible energy savings if changing windows, isolating etc.

By doing the calculations myself, I can play with different scenarios, I can also integrate the effect on the material quality uncertainty. Nothing fancy, but it fits my needs.

I'm working on a little 2D action puzzle game in Go on top of SDL (with bindings via https://github.com/veandco/go-sdl2). The prompt I've given myself is "Chip's Challenge meets Hotline Miami," but who knows how much of either of those elements will remain after I keep evolving the capabilities and general feel of the gameplay. For dev graphics I'm just cobbling together sprites from various pixel-arty asset packs I've purchased on itch.io, but in the future if I want to commercialize it I'll probably want to work with an artist to develop a unified look-and-feel for the game--I may even switch to 3D/2.5D depending on how the tone and my workflow evolve.

I've experimented with Unity, Godot, and GameMaker in the past, but for the time being I'd like to see what I can accomplish on my own in Go to keep my dev chops sharp especially since I've moved into an engineering management role at my job (which has nothing to do with game dev but is increasingly employing more Go source throughout). Something I've realized as I've been applying good code organization and reusability is that I'm essentially building an engine for anything top-down (hesitant to say "isometric" since I know that means something graphically specific)--RTS/TBS/tactics/RPG all seem doable with what I've built given a little bit of extra logic on top for each.

Working on a fridge camera; no good solutions exist and I need it to avoid that feeling that I get when I dump my large bag of fresh vegetables.

There is the Smarter Fridgecam - not sure if you're unaware of it or just that it doesn't meet your brief. In any case, this is it: https://smarter.am/products/smarter-fridgecam

I was inspired by this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43745615 and built a simple workflow to process all my photos: for each photo it generates a text description, a list of keywords, and the mood.

My plan for the next step is to detect faces, ask the user to label the most occurring faces, and then label all images accordingly. This step seems a bit harder than just feeding the image through Gemini and asking it to create labels.

Any plans to release it in any form, or is it just a personal project? I would love to do something similar to my collection.

I doubt it's useful to anyone but myself at this point, but it does work on my machine (taking 30+ sec per image). here's the git repo https://github.com/gdoct/batchscan

This is going to sound ridicilous. But in the past month, I have been working on an AI agent that can write its own AI agents. I can give it a task like: "Please create an AI agent that fetches the weather, and sends me an email every morning about some interesting stuff to do". The agent then goes through a loop of requirements gathering (with my input), and then starts building himself.

It self-references its own documentation, spins up a docker container and runs it. Alongside it builds tools, and registers both the agents and tools in a central system, so that it has knowledge of what other tools and agents it can use. I am not talking about "I am working on the theoretical idea of an agent that can build agent", but this is actually working. And I know of several other teams that are building stuff in this direction, its very fun.

I left behind a very well paying client to go full-time on this because its just so much fun. I have connected it to telegram, so now while I am at the gym, I can actually build software... the execution may take anywhere from a 10 minutes to an hour. Which is time spend writing and testing the code, then spinning up a docker container and fixing stuff, prompting me to create accounts somewhere an provide an API key. By far its the most complex project I have worked on, and all my friends and colleagues are slightly going crazy by seeing the outputs.

I'm working on a cookie clicker style web game that's secretly about AI safety: https://preview.mancato.nl/clean

My primary goal is to make a game that's fun. Secondary goal is to make you experience why an AI might do things you don't expect. Specifically, to further instrumental goals like collecting resources, refusing being turned off, things of that nature.

There are two endings currently but I'm working on adding some more.

An IDE for agents, that includes a general purpose agent inside so developers don't need to start with a framework or from scratch. It just works, out of the box.

I feel that the software development lifecycle for agents is uniquely iterative and requires a different set of tools and environment, so that's how this came to be. First we built the general purpose agent -> now we build the IDE around it.

For the curious: https://trypointer.com/

I’m working on extending Postgres to run on top of FoundationDB. The goal would be turning Postgres into a distributed, horizontally scalable database with automatic sharding and replication.

Hoping to share a first version of it soon. It’s been absolutely fascinating digging into Postgres internals!

Is this something like what TiDb does with MySQL compatibility? Sounds fascinating!

Yes, pretty similar although I don't think TiDB is actually built on top of MySQL, instead it just reimplements the protocol for compatibility. My project is actually an extension of Postgres, which hopefully means much better Postgres compatibility in the long run!

Planning on publishing to the repo here if you want to keep an eye on it: https://github.com/fabianlindfors/pgfdb

The Want Build System

https://github.com/wantbuild/want

https://doc.wantbuild.io

Want is a hermetic build system, configured with Jsonnet. In Want, build steps are functions from filesystem snapshots, to filesystem snapshots. Want calls these immutable snapshots Trees. Build steps range from simple filesystem manipulation and filtering, to WebAssembly and AMD64 VMs.

I'm working on an app for collectors that comes with an inbuilt, curated database where users can mark things as having, wanting and/or selling. It will have an invuilt marketplace soon, but currently I'm using links to external sales to cover the supply side. I'm also starting very niche by just covering Neo Geo games, systems and accessories for starters. https://sumthings.com

Last month, I started playing around with code sandboxes and how LLMs might interface with them and wrote a little blog post about it [1]. I then took the code and vibe coded my way to a multi-tenant (untested!) sandboxing server that lets you run arbitrary Docker containers and provides a simple HTTP interface and UI. A cute, novel idea is that you can fork containers easily, as seen in the video in my repo:

https://github.com/ammmir/sandboxer

It may not be useful, but it's been fun, and I've honed my gut-level experience in Docker, Podman, Linux namespaces, Checkpoint/Restore, CRIU, and more. The ultimate goal is to hand each AI agent iteration a sandbox of its own (forked from the previous iteration), and have it build apps in private sandboxes. You'll be able to view intermediate progress as the app is being built (or failed rabbit holes), since each sandbox gets a unique URL automatically. Like, imagine if each commit of your git repo had its own URL to preview the app!

[1] https://amirmalik.net/2025/03/07/code-sandboxes-for-llm-ai-a...

I'm working on a pure js webgl image editor with effects, filters, crop & perspective correction, ... oh and it's opensource as unfortunately most comparable solutions are closed sources

https://mini2-photo-editor.netlify.app to try it out (https://github.com/xdadda/mini-photo-editor)

I've been working on a web app that tracks ammo prices from various US ecomm merchants with the shipping costs included. It also tracks price trends and historical prices. Added some tools for enthusiasts to calculate trajectories, recoil, and compare calibers. Using rails, it's been fun and is generally a joy to work on, have learned a lot. https://ammosight.com

As a side project, I'm creating resources for learning Tamil, my parents' native language:

https://akprasad.github.io/tamil/

It's been a lot of fun getting the basic tools going: transliterators, morphological generators and analyzers, and some other things on top. But the main goal is to improve fluency as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As another Tamilian, thank you for making this! I'm fluent in spoken Tamil from my parents and I've learned to read and write at a basic level, but I'd never formally learned the language.

Currently working on launching a virtual receptionist service that helps SMBs stop losing revenue on missed calls. https://www.oliviaassist.com/

https://github.com/LLemonStack/llemonstack/

Little personal project that started as a means to try out AI tools that can talk to each other. Turned out to be super useful for building and debugging complex AI automations. I haven't had the time to promote it. But maybe someone here will find it useful.

(1) Business process modeling tool where processes are data and not graphs. I am doing it according to the USM method. USM is kind of "open source" service management method, although it works on different level than other frameworks and standards, and is compatible with all of them.

This makes it possible to create a kind of requirement "programming language" where the requirements can be evaluated. With this language it becomes possible to create cross-references from various compliance standards/frameworks, like ISO27K, to USM, and automatically evaluate the compliance.

(2) Dance event calendar in Finland, running in production for over a year. 1-2M page views/month. Django app, but I am now implementing a copy of the unauthenticated user views to S3 bucket and delivering it through Cloudflare.

(3) Django app to handle all the data related to custody trial. Emails, SMS, notes, official records, voice memos, etc. can be attached to a timeline, and tagge and searchable. It has command line interface for adding data, in addition to UI, so I can quickly add notes and attach files.

If you're in Helsinki, you should come to the next Hacker News meetup on May 18th: https://bit.ly/helsinkihn

Interesting, did not know that you have HN meetups in Finland. I am quite busy but maybe I could drop by sometime!

Do you have any more information about your USM modelling tool? It sounds interesting.

No, it is not public at the moment, although I am/we are looking for pilot customers especially interested in getting ISO27K compliance.

It is very interesting. I am very surprised how well it worked out.

I’m still working on these.

SaaS - I'm working on this mostly marketing that tech.. harder than it looks am I right? https://prfrmhq.com - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538744 [Show HN: My SaaS for performance reviews setting goals and driving success]

- Shows I can use AI and I've integrated into AWS Bedrock

- Shows I can integrate with Stripe for payments

Consulting (Architecture, Strategy, Tech) - I'm working on getting my consultancy started. If anyone wants the kind of skills I offer here let’s talk https://architectfwd.com

Next SaaS - Starting a SaaS for managing core strategy and tech concepts. I created goals for it but I’m failing to kick the tyres

Last night I actually also started playing with firebase studio, though the app I prompted isn’t even doing save of the document properly. I figure can’t be me but will try again and work through the errors.

And playing drums, must get better

Positron, a data science IDE. Has roots in RStudio but it's built on VS Code and has robust support for both Python and R workflows. If you use VS Code and install a bunch of extensions to try to make it a competent R/Python data environment, you'll probably love Positron.

https://positron.posit.co/

I wrote a novel in French a couple of years ago that I want to translate to English. The way I do it is paragraph by paragraph: copy/paste a paragraph in OpenRouter (Sonnet or Gemini), get back the translation, and rewrite/adjust it.

It works well but copying/pasting back and forth gets old very fast, and it would be better if the process was done inside the word processor. For some reason (various reasons) I still use Office 2003, which doesn't have any AI feature. (It does have a "translate" function but it's awkward to use and not very good.)

So I wrote a macro to send selected text to OpenRouter and replace with the response (with a system prompt that says to only output the translation, otherwise most models start with "Here's the translated text:")

I had never written a macro in vba; I got started with Sonnet and adjusted many parts with the help of StackOverflow (which turns out to have more information about vba than Sonnet...)

And finally it worked; and it turns out to be an incredible boost to translation productivity!

Currently working on http://untamed.earth

Scratching an itch, the intention is that its a map, centered on the users that shows all (configurable) things of interest near by. Think of Atlas-Obscura but much more local - eg AO doesn't list every prehistoric burial mound on the planet, but I want to know where they are ;)

https://github.com/runsecret/rsec

An easier and more secure way to work with secrets during local development. It’s open source, cloud/vault agnostic, and doesn’t require a single line of code change to use. I call it RunSecret.

RunSecret is a CLI that replaces your static secrets with “secret references” in your ENV VARs (or .env files). These references are then replaced when your application starts up by reaching out to your secret vault of choice - making your .env safe to share across your whole team and removing a slew of gotchas when you use git ignored env files. Even better RunSecret redacts any instance of these secrets from your application output, reducing your chances for accidental leaks.

The approach is inspired by the 1password CLI, but built for the rest of us. I’ve got AWS Secrets Manager support pretty well baked, but the goal is to support all major secret vaults within the next couple of months (Azure KeyVault is already in progress).

Interesting approach. Why this over GitLab secrets that are integrated with a vault of choice?

I assume this is to cover the non-CI/CD scenario.

Thanks for checking it out! The pain point for me has largely been during local development, especially in a team setting when secrets change or people onboard or roll off and those manually managed .env files get unwieldy.

Gitlab Secrets looks cool, but that hits at another reason I think RunSecret is valuable even for CI - we don’t use GitLab at my day job so it’s not an option for me! I think GitLab and 1password have interesting proprietary solutions that definitely have inspired RunSecret, but I’d love to see an open source, universal solution here - which I’m hoping RunSecret can be!

The disadvantage to GitLab is to get the feature mentioned is you need to pay for the premium version. We host it ourselves and looking to buy the Enterprise version to get us the vault integrations (specifically AKV)

Ahh, yup! The RunSecret CLI is completely free and open source.

Azure KeyVault support is in progress and should land soon. I will notate it in the release changelog once it’s ready, but I’m also happy to reply here or let you know another way if you are interested!

Will monitor your progress

Also be interesting to see what trufflehog finds (should be false positive)

https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog

Where are you storing the creds to get the secret from the vault?

This is the secret zero problem and other platforms solve it in other ways such as HSM

Yea that is a hard problem to solve. Right now RunSecret depends on the host system (your laptop, CI runner, or application container) having access to the secret vault(s) of choice that you reference. This can be through ENV VARS, OIDC, or IAM roles (in some cases) but currently there is no HSM support.

No worries, interesting way to solve this problem!

I've been working on https://textquery.app -- query raw data from your desktop.

I love exploring data, but it always felt clunky to juggle multiple tools, write code/commads, just to import and query a dataset. While there are multiple GUI tools for databases, none are focused on raw data.

TextQuery is the tool I built to solve that. You can import CSV, JSON, and XLSX files and start querying them instantly using SQL. Want to create a chart? Just hop over to the Visualize tab.

I'm also rolling out a major update this week — adding tabs, filters, a redesigned UI, and keyboard shortcuts.

Looking ahead, I’m planning to expand support for more formats (like Parquet and ORC) and data sources (like Postgres and BigQuery), so you can import data from anywhere, and query it right from your desktop. Something like a local data warehouse. With Apple Silicon, the capability of a desktop can make it very cost-efficient compared to something like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Athena.

Happy to hear any feedback!

I'm working on my own mini time series database.

It only stores (timestamped) floating point values with a series id and uses a B+Tree as the backing data structure. Querying is done with a lisp-like query language.

A reactive notebook with managed side effects for building backend/AI-engineering pipelines.

Reactivity can update the state of the notebook automatically, so you don't have to keep track of which cells to execute again. Side effects are managed to make it easier to reason about while maintaining reactivity and ability to interact with the outside world.

https://mujo.app I’ve been building a minimalist productivity app for musicians. Mujo adds time tracking, task management, notes and other “practice journal” tools into a simple metronome interface. Been hacking at the iOS version for a while, and starting to think about Android.

I'm working on a correlation matrix with Svelte 5.

It has hierarchical clustering, rolling correlation charts, a minimap, time series data detrending, and 2D matrix virtualization (to render only visible cells to the DOM).

It has up to 130K matrix cells and correlates up to 23.5M time series data points.

https://covary.xyz

I'm writing a study about how to write likely-correct studies ... :)

This is a second part of a series on likely-correctness, the first is how to create likely-correct software: https://www.osequi.com/studies/list/list.html

Debugging co-routines / threading is a pain in any language. I'm a big believer in observability anyway so this isn't a leap. Nor is it the first time I did this very thing, but last time I had implemented a console and it was a console command. This is in a product written in Python which implements a DNS gateway for Redis:

    # dig @sophia.m3047 coroutines.redis.sophia.m3047 txt +short
    "write_control:1"
    "get:3"
    "statistics_report:1"
    "process_pending_queue:1"

The implementing code (not including turning it into a DNS response) is surprisingly simple: https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns/blob/f6fba9523a83aa5125378bb...

Dns gateway to redis is a fun idea

Pretty nervous as this is my V0.1

MindJam helps brands, studios and creators understand their YouTube communities.

MindJam analyses millions of YouTube comments to instantly reveal the unfiltered voice of your audience – their true sentiment, emerging themes, and the topics they really care about.

Here is a sample analysis - https://mind-jam.co.uk/analysis/HPMh3AO4Gm0?utm_source=hacke...

I didn't intend on building MindJam... I wanted to learn about LLMs.

At first I wanted to see how Laravel would/could work with an LLM and after doing some reading I ended up learning about OpenAPI 3.0 Schema and Multi-Modal RAG.

In the last few months I have built on top of Gemini, Claude and OpenAI. All have their perks and quirks.

I am hoping this learning is only the start of a pretty cool journey.

I've been working on mock: https://dhuan.github.io/mock/

the process of creating APIs for testing and automation should be as easy possible. the tools that exist nowadays for this purpose aren't good enough IMHO, which led me to build it.

I'm working on running sequences of heap operations (insert and delete-min) in linear time instead of O(n log n) total time. It's a silly little project in theoretical computer science I have.

Crucially, to make this bound work, you only learn the final state of the heap, not which element got deleted when.

I'm also building a simpler soft heap.

Working on: Pantry Recipes – AI meal generation based on what’s in your kitchen

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been building Pantry Recipes – a mobile app that lets you quickly generate recipe ideas based on the ingredients you already have at home.

The idea is simple:

- Save or quickly select ingredients you have on hand - Tap Generate Recipes and get ideas instantly - You can also describe what you want to make free-form (e.g., "cheese omelette") and the app will generate a recipe for you.

The app is free for a number of recipe generations, then offers a low-cost subscription if you want unlimited use. It's live on the iOS App Store now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pantry-recipes/id6744589753

Happy to answer any questions if anyone’s curious about the tech, UX challenges, or what I learned from launching!

Since you are using AI, what are the chances of your app suggesting existing recipes vs "inventing" new recipes.

Also, there can be set of ingredients that should not be mixed together or be cooked in certain way. Are these cases considered when generating recipes ?

Cool idea! I’m a big fan of AnyList so this was intriguing.

I think it could be useful to have a “recently generated” section in the Recipes tab that lets you find things you might have forgotten to save. Substitutions could also be a useful feature. For example, if I can’t find Mexican oregano, what else can I use?

I'm working on a travel planning application. I know a lot of other apps exist, but I'd like to build one myself.

https://github.com/kenrick95/ikuyo

So far it has some sort of activity calendar + expense tracker

There's still so much ideas to implement, like adding map, improve UX of creating activities, to-do list, etc

I've used it once or twice of a short trip, but in 6 months time, I'll have a 2-weeks trip, so that's my self-imposed "deadline" for this project

Anyway this project is a pure static web page and all the 'back-end' is handled by InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com/ ) after I saw their submission on HN >.< So far it has been quite a good experience overall except maybe the permissions model which can be a bit confusing to me

Awesome project! Which other alternatives did you find/get inspiration from? I haven't really found great options in the (more broad) travel planning space, which is why I am building in it.

Thanks!

I tried Wanderlog, but didn't get the right 'vibe' for me. The one that I actually used is Navitime specifically to travel in Japan, but didn't have as much function as I hoped.

So most functionalities I had in mind was inspired from my Excel sheets that I used over the years for travel planning

Main work: tokenization of real-world assets, but on the side I’m building two projects as a solo dev:

  - XRoll.io — a fully on-chain gaming framework on the XRP Ledger, inspired by SatoshiDice but built for compliance. Commit-reveal fairness (HMAC_SHA256(secret, bet_txn_hash)), full transparency on-chain. Integrated KYC, AML, self-limits at the protocol level. Frontend is optional; ledger is the source of truth.

  - Nexula — an evolutionary image generation system. Embeddings extracted with CLIP, clustered via HDBSCAN, visualized with UMAP. User behavior (time spent) drives fitness scores; top samples recombine through weighted interpolation to generate new images. Built on Django backend, session-based personalization without login.

Looking for like-minded people interested in exploring both the technical and business sides of these systems.

I'm working on an unified MCP server that can search and use a large number of tools. The current way of using MCP server (adding each MCP server directly) simply doesn't scale. If your AI agent needs to use 100 tools, you need to manually configure a lot of MCP servers. And when you feed those tools to the LLM, it may get confused and tool calling accuracy starts to drop.

This is why I'm building a unified MCP server with just two meta tools: - Search Available tools - Execute a tool

When I want to send an email, I ask LLM to use the Search Meta tool to search for Gmail related tools in the backend, then the meta tool returns the description of relevant tools. The LLM then uses the Execute meta tool to actually use the gmail tool returned. https://github.com/aipotheosis-labs/aci

I recently started working on a fishing journal/log kind of app. I got that idea last year when returning from fishing with dad, that it would be nice if we could track what we caught each time we went fishing, where we went, and to track some details (water and wea details). There apps that already do that, and one could also use Excel or just paper notebook, so I'm making this mainly for us and his friends to use. It's still early, but I'd like to add groups so you can exchange messages or catches with your friends, add stats allowing you to see for example at what time and where you caught most fish, or using which lure or bait. The app is in Serbian though, but here's a link if you want to check it out: https://buckaros.com

I’m building a small integration to take scheduled transactions in YNAB and display them in any normal calendar application. I’m hoping to add historical transactions one day as well to help with reconciling.

https://calendarforynab.com

Any feedback is welcome!

I once saw an idea on here[1] about putting a lot more historical information into a calendar, including past activities. It resonated with me and I wondered if bank transactions could be part of this activity layer. At the time I was working on a real-time integration between my bank and YNAB so I was already thinking about the space.

1: https://julian.digital/2023/07/06/multi-layered-calendars/

For people like me who didn’t know what YNAB means:

YNAB stands for "You Need A Budget." It is a privately-owned personal budgeting software company.

Working on launching a podcast and associated website which I hope to use as the launchpad for all my ventures going forward. 2025 is the year I ditch my corporate job and finally start working for myself. At least, that's the goal. I'll be the master of my fate; the captain of my soul.

I know its been done before but im building/tinkering on a window manager for windows called "Doors". https://github.com/A-Waters/doors

Ive got a MVP right now, but i'm reworking the region build system and potentially reworking the underlying designing to follow a more tree based approach for managing the windows

I've just tried other windows managers on windows and felt that have either been slow or buggy and wanted something that looks nice. My inspiration is based on Hyperland, as im currently dual booting and when I work on windows, all i want is a nice window manager.

still very early in development but im excited for its potential.

This also goes in line with my current studying of the windows OS, so its a bit of learning and then working. :)

Work wise I'm building a discrete event simulation with pysim. I manage the autonomous vehicles program and underground control center for the subarctic mine I work at, and we've desperately needed some means to evaluate efficacy of designs and forecast productivity. Using it to model scoop-truck movement and loading operations, and it's working very well. It's been a joy. I've been taking advantage of the enormous context window of Gemini 2.5 pro to have it make upgrades, fix issues, and just generally doing all the legwork.

Personally I'm having fun learning some web design and three.js as I try to debug the very tricky issues with my new personal website loufe.ca using AI is fantastic but you need to micromanage when things get complicated, I find.

Building HatchAStory for my own needs as a busy dad — to generate fun, personalised bedtime stories in seconds.

https://hatchastory.com/

Built a backend and web version but now focusing on an Expo/React Native app (my first ever).

A CMS but instead of forms, it is based on Natural language

https://medium.com/@level09/build-the-future-an-ai-powered-n...

I'm working on a better frontend (in sveltekit) for Udio - music generation app. Udio has good models to generate audio, but awful UI and organization/management tools. My frontend allows collecting all the generated content from udio, organize them by topic, rate them with 5-star rating system, add custom labels, filter by these, make playlists, generate prompts and create an arbitrarily long generate queue (udio allows you to create 4 prompts simultaneously so you can sit in front of UI babysitting it if you don't have custom tooling and you want to actually use your 4800 credits you paid for). I use LLMs heavily here, so the quality of code is so-so, but work very well for me and I'm having a lot of fun with this.

I'm working on a fantasy console that work on iOS and iPadOS https://github.com/moechofe/LowResRMX

My goal is to create games on the go, during my commutes.

It's a fork of https://lowresnx.inutilis.com/, there is some videos of my progress on https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtmKVaz_2Cxe6pG7VbQfw... and a Discord channel https://discord.gg/jcT9CXDgHB

Fantasy consoles are awesome, very fun project and I love your demos. The way the bombs fall with the music in Kaboom is smart. I've thought a lot about building a hardware PICO-8. Not just running the software, but implement the APIs for real hardware and transpile the game cartridge. One of those ideas that will probably forever stay in the back of my mind.

Mostly on an AI-based tender analysis tool which is focused on the construction industry, https://www.tenderstrike.com

It's a pretty specific niche with interesting challenges like massively varying project sizes (ranging from a few pages to 20,000+ documents), a high importance of graphs / charts, and very different extraction tasks (from more qualitative analysis to quantitative, exhaustive lists which is still a pain point).

Built most of the pipeline by hand, mostly because I started this earlier than many RAG tools came out, but I am glad I did because we needed a bunch of adjustments and changes that might have been hard with something ready-made.

I’m building ninja.ai — it looks like a one-click App Store for MCP Servers, but the real goal is much bigger: creating a “Universal Fabric of Context” that lets AI tools tap into structured information across the web easily.

It started when I found it surprisingly hard for my partner to install and connect MCP Servers — even simple ones. I realised if we want AI agents to really interact with the web, it needs to be as easy as installing an app.

Right now, you can browse, install, and connect servers in one click. Over time, it’ll make AI integrations as easy as installing an app — no messy APIs, no custom scraping.

If you’re working with AI models, agents, or data-heavy tools, I’d love to hear what kinds of “context pipes” you’d want to see added.

I've been thinking about the need for something like this. Another person told me the idea was like Neo in the Matrix saying "I know Kung Fu." I think the most powerful idea is to create unique bundles of context for specific use cases. Context A + Content B = best context for Situation C.

Worked a little on Server Radar [1] again, the Hetzner Auction price tracker.

It's my fun little project to resort to. Implemented dark mode, sorting, grouping and various layout improvements. Also added a Drawer with Auction view the other week. UI is finally fun again with component libraries and LLMs.

Oh, and I added a Cloud Server Availability [2] page as I noticed people on /r/hetzner were complaining about lack of resources. Looks like their Cloud offerings are going quite well.

[1] https://radar.iodev.org/ [2] https://radar.iodev.org/cloud-status

I’m working on JSON Query (https://jsonquery.app), a tool that lets you store, categorize and query JSON using jq in the browser.

This is a complete remake of the original I made a long time ago for the Mac App Store, sharing only the name. I realized it was better to use the jq language since it was already familiar to many people and way more powerful than designing my own query language. I also do not agree with Apple's App Store command and control so I've decided to make it a web app, and I'm astounded at how much more powerful web apps and their DX are compared to native application development in the Apple world.

Just finished porting Boot.dev's backend learning path to TypeScript (used to only be available in Python/Go, now also Python/TS)

Official release is Cinco de Mayo, I'm very excited!

https://www.boot.dev

AI has taken over the hype in sales and go-to-market strategies. But for independents, solopreneurs, professionals, and many founders or CEOs, relationships and partnerships are still central.

I think sales will bifurcate: either fully automated self-sale, or fully relationship based. All of the major CRMs (customer relationship management) software are going all in on AI and sales automation.

I think relationship sales is going to see an increase in comparative advantage. I've always been a relationship seller but the current crop of CRMs are not designed for me. So I've built https://humancrm.io/ to scratch my own itch.

http://makefizz.buzz/

I work at a small startup trying to hire engineers and got tired of looking through resumes. As Joel Spolsky points out, they're not great indications of technical ability. Instead, I decided to throw together a take-home challenge that applicants could access via an API. "If they can't solve the challenge, I don't need to see their resume," I told myself.

FizzBuzz.md is a better version of the solution I built for work. It lets applicants send questions and submissions to configurable email addresses via API so the email addresses aren't exposed directly. (Less spam, FTW)

This is neat! I hope this gains traction and one day becomes the norm. I hate Leetcode :/

Building an app that extracts key information from PDFs + highlights citations.

You provide a PDF and a JSON schema defining what to extract, and it returns the extracted values, the citations and their precise locations in the document.

This is especially valuable in workflows where verification of LLM extracted information is critical (e.g. legal and finance). It can handle complex layouts like multiple columns, tables and also scanned documents.

Planning to offer this both as an API and a self-hosted option for organizations with strict data privacy requirements.

Screenshot: https://superdocs.io/highlight.png

Feel free to get in touch for a demo.

I've been working on some structured OCR tools recently (in the context of reading resume pdfs and allowing much more useful search filters over them than our ATS system allows) and I've found Gemini with structured outputs capable of doing a fantastic job. I'm curious, do you have any rough pointers for how to do this self-hosted?

I'm building https://www.howbazaar.gg/ which is a companion website for the video game https://playthebazaar.com/!

I was enjoying playing the game, there were some shortcomings in the info it provided, I dug around and found the info in game files, and decided to make that info more accessible. It was quickly a hit with the community and got official support from the game company. Trying to add enough features to take on the big players in this space and make working on it sustainable.

Working on a series of interviews with gamers about how the hobby is part of their lives, called Unmuted [1]. It's been awesome to interview people from different backgrounds and see how gaming has influenced them.

It's the first original piece of content for a newsletter of curated gaming content that I've been running for more than five years now, called The Gaming Pub [2].

[1]: https://www.thegamingpub.com/features/ [2]: https://www.thegamingpub.com/

DodgeALL Party Mode! It lets people with smartphones connect to a player in VR (DodgeALL for Meta Quest) and decide which obstacles are launched at the player, that they then have to physically dodge in real life (there is no fake movement).

I also "recently" (~2 years ago) added Twitch interactive mode so that streamers could play against chat, but so far haven't gotten anyone to play it on stream (that I know of). While I was adding features, I realized that I could easily make a version that works over WLAN.

On the side I'm working on a mixed reality mode but it's been a slog trying to adapt the game to fit into various room sizes.

Cool, I bet my son would love to throw stuff at me

I need beta testers soon ;) float me an email in my bio and I can send you an invite.

p.s. also please hit me up because I'm really interested in your game! I love Eleven Tennis but the AI is horrible... if you need any testers ;)

Sure thing, also good to share experiences on VR dev

Taking a break from my agentic AI framework for prototypes and makers arkaine(1) and made two fun useful apps for myself

1. Eli5 equations(2) uses an LLM to convert a given picture of an equation to latex and, if given additional context, breaks down the equation parts to explain it. Gemini for the model.

2. reflecta - a journal prompting app with deepseek to help reword and target the prompts towards you better.

(1) https://arkaine.dev

(2) https://eli5equation.com

(3) https://reflecta.hlfshell.ai

MITM on Android Emulator to capture which 3rd party IP/URLs apps talk to:

MITM + Waydroid doc: https://github.com/ddxv/mobile-network-traffic

Actual scraper (look in adscrawler/apks/waydroid.py): https://github.com/ddxv/adscrawler

Final product of reporting for which apps talk to which country / companies will go on: https://appgoblin.info

Feel free to contact me if you're interested in learning more.

way cool!

Iterating on my geography site: https://geolede.com

Next feature is search.

This is a dope idea, nice job!

I would love to see some UI/UX improvements like split view where the map is on the left and the news reading/scrolling happens on the right reading pane instead of on the bottom while horizontally scrolling.

You could even use AI/LLM's to summarize the most important news from each country etc.

Building a simplified inexpensive <20 nanometer accurate vacuum-tolerant positioning stage for microscopy and lithography projects. Trying to unlock the caveman achievement by keeping tools/budgets necessary to replicate the work accessible for other hobbyists.

Also still working on a custom Slicer for a special metal printer design. The VTK library version needed replaced by a simpler Blender Geometry nodes solution to extract texture information, and infill hull features.

Also considered a beautiful solution to Roger Penrose's Andromeda paradox. That guy has a wicked sense of humor... very funny. =3

I have two:

The first is a preventive maintenance and calibration tracker (https://pmcal.net) that was born out of my day job as an engineer in small business manufacturing.

The second is an AI engine for pulling structured data out of incoming email (either via IMAP on your email server or via SES). If you think of the engine that powers TripIt, they had to write about 10,000 different ingestors for each airline and hotel and travel booking site. With a structured output AI, the need to write specific ingestors goes away.

You can also get structured data out of mailboxes with my project EmailEngine. You can use an API request to fetch message contents, or you can configure EmailEngine to send a webhook for every new email in a structured JSON, for example, like this: https://emailengine.app/webhooks#messageNew

I don't think I was specific enough on what kind of structured data. The idea is that it extracts information from the text/HTML content of emails (e.g. a flight itinerary from an airline booking email or an ingredient list from a recipe) using AI.

Since you already have a method for reaching into folks Microsoft 365 inboxes and such, you could probably train an LLM to extract arbitrary data based on a user's prompt quite quickly though.

My team and I are working on embodied AI. More specifically, focusing on humanoid legged robots for long horizon tasks combining navigation and manipulation/interaction.

We've recently put a paper out in arXiv (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12533) and the project page is: https://beingbeyond.github.io/being-0/

BAAI is also hiring! No fully remote positions though. :-/

Chrome extension to organize web-based learning into journeys. Uses the tab group API and sidebar to bundle a set of websites into a "container". Sidebar tracks progress through visiting the pages. Requires an LLM token for generating "packets" from a prompt. Requires s3 bucket token because it generates web sites just in time.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unpack/mcgdbnjjnnfm...

I'm working on a site that lets you tile and watch multiple videos from different platforms all at once.

You can drag and drop links from YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or Kick --and they show up in a grid.

You can reload or remove streams without refreshing, save mixes for later, and share them as links. It works best on a really big screen --phones aren't really supported and even notebooks are too small to get much benefit.

There's no backend, no login --everything runs in the browser.

https://panoptic.live/

brainrot.com

Did this used to be a site?

I’m working on a web based note taking app that is open source and lets you own the notes in your file system - https://bangle.io

Great name!

I am working on a telegram bot deployed on cloudflare which is just a basic app for van drivers to sign up on a fixed location near my area and see which drivers are online and see how many people have sit in a van which the drivers can increment/decrement by just chatting with the telegram bot who want to go to a popular spot where I have to go to quite daily because I am studying at a place which is way far away and its the most economical and sane method to travel..

Yet my problem really arises that its too luck based, sometimes I can be the last guy, Sometimes I can be the first guy so I have to wait for the van to get fully occupied which will take a lot of time...

I have just made it, and I find it pretty nifty, I made it all completely via AI and this one absolutely crazy good youtube video on deploying telegram bots on cloudflare...

Also, I had seen this telegram bot ai maker idea on HN a few days ago, So I had also created a project which you can chat with the microsoft deepseek r1 post training bot for free because the api key of open router for this model is free, It doesn't have incremental streaming or multi chats, really basic, and It can generate me the code but I am not sure how I would deploy that code .. , I used to think its easy but not... ,any resources out there? (Though I want to open source this, but I am not going to be building this ai idea further because I lack time and I have to study)

Transitioning from iOS development to web and embedded development with Elixir (Phoenix/LiveView and Nerves).

The direction Big Tech is heading made me reevaluate what is important in my career and life.

A few things:

- Snapshot (https://apps.shopify.com/snapshot): AI generated product photos for Shopify. Previously used Flux and Stable Diffusion but always had quality problems. Was very tricky ensuring text remained the same and the product fit into the generated background. Just integrated the new OpenAI image generation model and results are much better however their masking feature doesn't work properly so need to wait for them to fix that before I can offer the same feature of keeping text/fine details the same

- Lurk (https://apps.shopify.com/lurk): New one I just launched - allows Shopify merchants to track the prices of competitors and adjust their own in response with dynamic pricing rules. It's cool because you just have to paste a URL and it uses AI to figure out the price. Again, there's a surprising amount of things you need to figure out to make this work reliably at scale (e.g. popups, ambiguous HTML, location-based pricing, etc.)

- Origin UTM Tracking (https://apps.shopify.com/origin-utm-tracking): Simple UTM analytics for Shopify stores. Acquired this last year and its being growing nicely.

I’m working on LngBrdg, a Chrome extension that helps professionals write and translate emails in 100+ languages — right inside their browser.

Built it solo with no coding background after struggling with existing translation tools that couldn’t handle tone or clarity well. Now live on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dhbmdjoebgmgcjedejb...

Would love feedback!

Started working on a case discussion platform for students almost two years ago. Mostly for dentistry and medicine, but it's template-based so works well for other purposes (e.g. teachers, social workers, etc.). It's going well and is being used by three universities right now.

On the way, I developed lightweight image editor and 3D model viewer components, which I've open sourced [1].

[1]: https://github.com/kigun-org/

I used "Claude Code" to create a local-only webapp for tracking symptoms of my chronic sinusitis, which seems to be tricky for the doctors to figure out, over time, using the "Sino-Nasal Outcome Test" (SNOT-22) questionnaire. Trying to correlate environmental and medical factors and interventions with raises or decreases in my symptoms.

https://snot-22.linsomniac.com/

This is awesome! I suspect I have vasomotor rhinitis and could use something like this to track the same sort of sinusitis-type symptoms. My nose basically hasn't stopped being wet and runny for the last 20 years. Two questions: (1) Where is data stored? (2) Are you comfortable sharing an open repo on GitHub?

The data is stored entirely in your browser. Meaning, be careful about using an incognito browser window. I probably should have it add a "download data" button combined with "upload". I should also add an "About" with information about this and also a pointer to the SNOT-22 sources.

My situation is I possibly have a "local rhinitis", though my ENT dismissed that. I base that on him visually confirming that I have an allergic reaction in my sinuses, but my allergy screening on my shoulder showed no reactions. But it might also be a lot of other things including being in an extremely dry environment. Next steps are to get a CPAP, which will give me high humidity air and treat minor apnea, and a nebulizer treatment once a quarter, plus taking allergy medicine semi-regularly.

ATM, I'm not planning on releasing the source. Due largely to being way, way underwater on time available to deal with my existing projects. Is there something you wanted from the source? If you are interested in auditing it for where the data is stored, try using your browsers developer tools and watch the network traffic while using it.

A one command tunneling tool to get public URLs to localhost. No installation required. https://pinggy.io

Currently working on a simple timing website for running and cycling race organizers. A manual 'just press a button when someone crosses the finish line' is already there, but now I'm experimenting with a printable QRcode that contestants have to wear. Once the QR code crosses the line, the time is registered. All within the browser, so no apps need to be installed.

https://beontimer.com

1. Still maintaining Pages CMS [1], a CMS for static sites and apps.

2. Basecoat, a HTML/CSS port of shadcn/ui v4 [2] (no React).

3. DevPu.sh, a Vercel for Python apps.

Releasing both Basecoat this week and DevPu.sh hopefully in the next 2 weeks.

[1]: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms

[2]: https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/tailwind-v4

I'm working on an IDE for lawyers: https://tritium.legal

It's inspired by VS Code and hopefully positioned to eventually be a Cursor-like experience for transactional lawyers. The LLM integration isn't baked in yet to keep the in-house onboarding frictionless.

It's a desktop application written in Rust. It uses egui (an immediate mode UI library) for speed.

I'd greatly appreciate any comments.

https://github.com/cluoma/Pico2Maple-fw

Currently working on a USB/Bluetooth to Sega Dreamcast controller adapter.

It's based on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2/W board and originally started as a fun project to play around with the PIO features of the RP chips and get my Steam Controller working on the Dreamcast. It has since expanded to support more controllers, keyboards, mice, and acts as VMU - the Dreamcast's memory card - while plugged in. Building the dongle itself has also been a fun exercise in 3d printing, cad and pcb design.

I'd really like to expand the amount of supported USB devices as I only have access to a limited amount of hardware that I can test myself. I've started looking into if I can use the SDL Game Controller DB (https://github.com/mdqinc/SDL_GameControllerDB) to kind of crowd source support for a bunch of controllers. I'm definitely open to other ideas though. I feel like I'm slowly learning that USB controllers are minefield of one-offs and edge cases.

For the last couple of months, I'm working on https://SharpAPI.com.

SharpAPI is an AI-powered API platform designed to automate and optimize workflows across various industries, including E-Commerce, Marketing, Content Management, HR Tech, Travel, and more. By leveraging AI , SharpAPI offers a comprehensive suite of tools that streamline complex tasks, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively.

What Problems Does It Solve?

Some examples: - Manual Processing Challenges: Automates tasks like resume parsing, product categorization, and sentiment analysis, reducing the need for extensive human intervention. - Language Barriers: Provides real-time translation and analysis across 80+ languages, facilitating global business operations and customer engagement. - Inefficient Workflows: Streamlines processes by automating repetitive tasks, enhancing productivity, and allowing teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives. - Content Quality Issues: Offers tools for paraphrasing, proofreading, SEO optimization, and spam detection, ensuring high-quality and consistent content across platforms.

Whats your MAU count?

I’m currently developing Oliphaunt, a native macOS client for Mastodon, designed to offer a clean, responsive and fully native experience that feels at home on the platform. You can find more details, including screenshots and a project overview, here: https://github.com/anosidium/Oliphaunt-Feedback-And-Support. A new TestFlight build will be available soon, with plans for an eventual App Store release.

I’m also working on the next version of HacKit, a macOS Hacker News reader focused on simplicity, performance and adherence to macOS design language. It’s already available on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1549557075 and further information can be found here: https://github.com/anosidium/HacKit-Feedback-And-Support.

I’d be delighted to hear any feedback, suggestions, or ideas — or simply to connect with others working on Apple platform development.

2004 Lincoln Towncar. Recently replaced the intake manifold myself. Next is J-modding the transmission. Would like to replace gears with a different ratio for more power, but that will require taking it somewhere, not something I can do in my driveway.

Started my first garden this spring. Have several peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and a few herbs.

Looking into internships and new opportunities. Been out of the profession for along while and need find my way back in.

https://www.accessgrid.com/ - The best way to issue and manage secure NFC credentials for Apple and Google Wallet via API.

No app required!

We took all of the complexity of issuing MIFARE DESFire enabled NFC credentials and made it extremely developer friendly. SDKs in most major languages (python, ruby, csharp, js, etc), developer console with request logs, and more.

This is really cool!

Currently building a CORS Proxy.

After working on it for a while, I noticed there’s a stigma around using CORS proxies, often associated with fetching undocumented APIs.

While that’s sometimes true, I’m hoping to change that perception, to show that they can also be used for accessing real APIs. It just requires the proxy to correctly handle credentials and secrets.

The idea is to open up more possibilities for building static-first apps without worrying about CORS.

We're building electric batteries for e-bikes that are repairable and fireproof!

https://gouach.com

Are there standardized e-bike battery formats or are you hoping to partner with e-bike manufacturers?

There's no standardized format, but:

- we ship with a mounting piece that is easy to put on any bike frame to mount our battery

- our app and communication protocol is open-source, and we provide code for compatibility with the major bike controllers, meaning we're compatible with 90% of the e-bikes!

so in practice we're the perfect battery for e-bike enthusiast who want to change their battery to a repairable and fireproof one

and we also do B2B deals with some brands who want custom design etc

but basically if you are running Bafang / Shimano / Bosch controllers, it will work with our battery

A open-source Looker/Data Studio alternative, supporting Bigquery/Snowflake/DuckDB. Has a custom SQL dialect with embedded semantic layer to make reusable and interactive visuals easier. Can be self-hosted, but a public version is available. Still very WIP!

https://trilogydata.dev/trilogy-studio-core/

universalestimator.com

I started experimenting and I think this builds out pretty neat estimations from jira tickets/other descriptions. When I was sitting in the CTO role, I spent a ton of time talking with people about how long/short various projects would be. When I was a developer, I hated the estimation piece because it felt like it was both keeping me from building and was almost never done with enough context to get really accurate results.

I was playing with the OpenAI API and I noticed that they can actually return a set of probability x next tokens and I thought that it might actually give you kind of cool ways to see the distribution of potential outcomes. (You can see an example here: https://universalestimator.com/estimates/c68db45b-7622-4bab-... that looks at a detailed ticket for implementing filtering on a dashboard.)

Let me know if you have any feedback, it's free with the promo code TYHN. If you run into any issues, please send me an email at earl@unbrandedsoftware.com

Cool idea! Does it take your team’s prior estimations into account to improve future estimates?

No, but it's on my roadmap! https://feedback.universalestimator.com/p/calibrationnorms-f...

Right now, it asks you some follow up questions and assumes you're a medium sized org, but I'd like to start to move that into configuration and do some sort of time/bayesian expiration of memory/information as part of the questions it asks.

I think a ton of the variance between teams is probably captured by some version of a few calibration questions, aka: - How large is the org? - What region is your org based in? - How long does it take to get the smallest possible change into production?

After trying to start a business for a year, I basically gave up negotiating with VCs.

My current goal is to spend half of my time on the development and maintenance of open source projects, such as Glicol (https://glicol.org/).

The other half of my time is to do some business that can generate profit from day 1.

I just found that the VC model is not suitable for my current situation.

I am working on an administrative app for small shops. It has inventory, invoices, quotes, returns, purchase orders, payables, receivables, finances, etc. It's almost ready for v1, just finishing the final touches to start onboarding first users

https://my.adminix.app/demo

If you like what you see please let me know, all feedback is appreciated

Did a Show HN about a month ago, but we're hard at work building dédédé [1] - it's a not-for-profit website that invites people to casually share the "good, bad, and why"s of urban spaces.

[1] https://dedede.de/en

We're based in Kyoto and the posts are heavily Japan-centric; we'd love to see posts from all over the world!

I love this idea! I'll probably add it to the next edition of https://urbanismnow.com

Are y'all involved with "for Cities"? (https://www.linkedin.com/company/for-cities/posts/)

Thanks so much, and super cool newsletter btw!

Not directly involved with for Cities, but they're friends of friends and we should have a chance to meet them very soon.

I’ve been building an Elixir app to poll RSS feeds and pipe new entries to Discord.

Performance is rock solid, and it’s almost ready to release, I just need to tweak a few things (like free trial with no CC).

I have a very long to do list, and ultimately want to extend it with “change detection”, e.g. notify when an HTML element on a website changes.

All feedback is welcome

https://feedsync.net

Cool, could also check out a unified App platform framework:

https://quasar.dev/

Cheers =3

I've been using elixir to build an app that lets an administrator add new rss feeds, render the article titles and summaries to a single page, scroll through them and push the ones they like to a landing page as a collection to read later. Many of the sites I like don't have the conventional RSS "structure" so I have to modify my main parser and adapt it to the outliers. I'm curious, how do you adapt to feeds that don't fit the conventional RSS structure? I was thinking of just using an LLM to automate it as I keep using Claude AI to expedite the process.

Do you mean they technically have RSS, but they’re using slightly different fields? E.g. summary instead of description?

I’m using FastRSS[^0] with some lightweight pattern matching to convert them to an internal model. I get error notifications for mismatches, and just push a new pattern match to handle the outlier.

Longer term it could be interesting to get an LLM to write some Lua to parse JIT.

[^0]: https://github.com/avencera/fast_rss

Some music control using Wii balance boards thing: https://gitlab.com/TOGoS/SG-P27

So far this has means orchestrating a set of processes just to talk to bluetoothd, automatically connect to boards, guess which /dev/input/event* device each one is associated with, and start reading those and sending data somewhere over OSC. Every step of the process is about 10 times as difficult as I initially expected it would be, which is why, after months of work, I'm still putzing around with process orchestration instead of actually doing anything with music.

The bit of hair on this yak that I'm currently shaving is building a TUI library for Deno so that I can build a nice dashboard for keeping tabs on the state of all the different pieces. I prototyped a bit of the orchestration process in Node-RED, which was neat, but not exactly what I'm going for. There is a TUI library for Deno already, but it's kind of buggy and non-ergonomic for my brain.

I am working on the https://moviemovie.club/about, it's a tiny website about film review.

It works like a run club, where you have to make a review first to see other people's reviews.

I am currently implementing watchlists, comments and a mural to make it feel a bit less lonely. Right now I like the UI but it feels to lonely.

This seems like it would only work if “reviews” would be something rare to come by. Like some forums where you have to contribute to be able to download attachments, or see higher level subforums.

But reviews are everywhere, good ones too so it will be a hard chicken egg problem to solve.

Been working on https://www.labophase.com/ I mainly built it to save money on subscribing to multiple places to try out a new ai with a privacy focus.

Basically it's an AI aggregated service where users can prompt multiple ai models at the same time/place for free and/or under one subscription fee ($20).

Neat. I usually try different models for the same task, however, I have developed an intuition for which one is better for a particular task. Have you considered routing user queries to the optimal AI model based on the specific task or combining multiple AI systems to produce superior results?

I think that's an interesting idea - sort of like cursor's automode?

I'll post next month when I get around to implementing it :)

I am building a service to make accessing AI as easy as sending email called ThreadWise

https://threadwise.app

You can email prompts directly to your ThreadWise address and get instant AI-powered responses, essentially an always available co-worker. Another great feature is the ability to schedule recurring tasks and since the AI has web access, you can get things like:

Daily mortgage rates or airfare price monitoring

Weather and news summaries

Sport scores, jokes, quote of the day

Pull data from public APIs (and more)

So you can essentially use it as a personal newsletter, crafted to your taste.

The free tier will let you test this out for free! I am looking for some feedback/criticism, testing, and additional ideas and I am open for collaboration if you have experience with sales. Also open to hearing which scheduled tasks people would find most useful.

Why I built it: I noticed a trend online, as well as with family/friends, that people would like to have a quick access to AI in instances where they couldn't always install apps or use browser-based tools (such as in remote/low bandwidth environments). This is when it him me, email clients already have all the features needed to interact with an AI (text + attachments) and I quickly got to work.

Some of the advantages are also that since there are no new apps, or browser tabs needed, the tool is ideal for companies who don't have the bandwidth to setup full fledged AI solutions on their own. The companies can choose either between public LLMs (e.g. OpenAI) or host everything on-premise with locally run models, so no data ever leaves the premises.

Eager to hear what you all think!

https://extension.scaledown.ai

I realised that I'm a horrible prompt writer and so are many other people. So i created this extension to help me write better prompts, using templates, save prompts, and optimize it for better performance. No login, not paid, just a useful little extension. Check it out!

I’m working on SimpleeFood, a simple self hosted recipe app.

https://github.com/abhchand/simplee-food

I found most of the offerings out there to be too bloated. Recipes are a simple thing - you want to store them, search them, and view them easily.

It has a full screen viewing mode for easy cooking with your tablet or phone.

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. Just this weekend I began adding cypress tests. I can finally see an official release in the distance!

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2

(open source) Self-hostable, private social media alternative (like Facebook circa 2012). Functionally it is a private blog that speaks RSS with a built-in RSS aggregator. Self-hosting being the only way to actually have privacy in a social-media-type space.

https://github.com/havenweb/haven

High definition model of the Sojourner rover to eventually produce a museum-quality copy showing the mechanical aspects (in particular the unfolding) and a robot mower for myself.

https://gist.github.com/nraynaud/5c7613d876f10c5df6f3ec48046...

I have been working on a intentional farm to table co-housing network spanning from S.Flo, ATL ,to Cape Breton in NS CAN. It's been a humbling experience of meeting, learning and living with great interesting people to say the least. Each property is different but all are tailored to reduce hospitals readmission, provide various high risk groups housing opportunities, and supply fun lasting agrarian experiences. Each member has access, via provided transportation to the other properties and it's different resources. The struggle has been being a father of six, husband and career man alongside this project. I resign from my career almost 3yrs ago thats helped and hurt as struggling to secure income at times, I have learned and relearned alot! I can say I'm still moving forward and excited at what's ahead! https://www.funnyfencefarm.com/

I develop Chips of Fury, a poker app for playing privately with friends. Currently I am building support for lots of home game variations like pineapple (regular, crazy, lazy), different Holdem variations like Super, reverse, super reverse, blind man's bluff etc and many more. I am thinking about how to implement AI bots for a wide range of variations.

Ah, I've made the same! I made a very flexible turn-based framework - write the game logic on server in javascript, then state+options are given to clients, so platforms (swiftui, web, unity, webxr etc) "just" have to implement UI on top (Also means I have a default/debug view, which works for all games). The games can run offline (via javascriptcore on ios, natively on web etc) and supports bots for all games (they randomly choose options on their turn) which has a very simple opening to get some reinforcement learning in.

Then specifically I was making an app which let me customise rules for poker - extra streets, antes, throwaway cards, passing cards, multiple boards, multiple decks, etc to support as many variants as possible, and ideally, stumble across new ones.

As an aside, I posted to reddit for research of other home variants people play (Basically to stumble across more fun variants in our home games) there's a few good alternatives I've not heard of in here!

https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/1i91mnz/what_are_you...

I've run out of steam a little bit (burnt out & seeking work isn't great for own projects), but has been an excuse to learn swiftui. I'd be tempted to team up with people to keep the project alive...

wow, i would like to talk to you to learn more if nothing else. can you please email me (mail in profile) if you would like to connect.

I’m working on Vystery (https://vystery.com) - a visual puzzle game where you strategically uncover an obscured image bit by bit to figure out what it is.

There's a limit to how many reveals you can do to make your guess.

I’ve recently added hints, spare moves, and an easy mode, as some days are harder than others.

I played a couple of rounds, that was fun!

Glad you liked it!

A native PDF-reader with hot-reloading and keyboard navigation, obviously inspired by https://github.com/pwmt/zathura but also cross-platform.

It's in a functional state, I use it myself but it needs some more ergonomic features before I'd suggest for someone else to use it.

I've been working on onsite deployments for https://www.keystash.io, which is a Linux SSH Key and User management system. It's been going for a while now and I am finally implementing onsite deployments as so many customers actually want to run this themselves. When we started, we really thought customers wouldn't want the hassle of another piece of infrastructure to manage, guess we were wrong :-)

Onsite deployment is a lot more difficult to make slick and easy. We've been thinking about the best way for our customers to deploy while reducing the load on our support team. So far, we are thinking about RPM's, Debs and Docker and trying to make this as close to a '5 step process' as possible.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on other mechanisms that make it easier for SRM's / DevOps to manage key platform infrastructure software.

Building an app to reverse geocode all the photos I've taken and screenshots of places I want to go from TikTok/Instagram.

Use cases are extracting the itineraries I took from prior trips, then using that to ground LLM search recommendations: I have a set of bookmarked places, say in NYC, can you make me a week of plans given what I enjoyed in Taipei?

I’m Moha from Somalia .

I’m building Cigaal, a super-ecosystem app that blends social media, commerce, payments, crypto rewards, and AI. Think of it as a lightweight alternative to WeChat, Grab, and Temu – but designed for underrepresented regions first.

Key Features: Marketplace + Delivery + Travel Booking

ZooCoin: our in-app crypto rewards system

AR shopping, short videos, stories, and chat

Cigaal ID: unified profile & wallet

A2A/B2A Agent Economy: agents handle cash deposits, deliveries, and API integrations with businesses

CoreIQ: an AI memory core that assists users across all Cigaal mini-apps (wallet, health, travel, shopping, etc.)

Why it matters: Cigaal helps bring modern digital experiences to places with limited infrastructure, enabling creators, travelers, small businesses, and buyers to thrive in a shared economy without being locked into Big Tech platforms.

Would love feedback, suggestions, or partnerships – especially from people building in fintech, agent networks, or AI-driven apps for underserved markets.

Site (coming soon): [cigaal.com]

A series of pulpy short stories, sort of a Dark Americana / weird fiction thing. Noir, magic, existential dread, horror. Warming up for a novel in a completely different genre but I wanted to iron out some of my own shortcomings and stretch some muscles before I write yet another 100k words on a project I'm unhappy with.

That's right up my alley. I've been thinking about writing something in this style but with a jazz biome twist (kind of like steampunk but with a jazz-centric world instead of steam power). Do you use a specific text editor or git workflow to manage your work?

That also sounds super fun. I love it when things get hyper-specific like that. If you ever need a beta reader, let me know.

I use a mix of things. For a long time I used vim with some plugins to emulate iA Writer, along with vimwiki for general notes. Now I use Obsidian for notes (general stuff like character bios, tags, ways to track relationships, worldbuilding stuff).

I use iA Writer for a quick outline and first draft because it's simple and distraction-free, and I like its focus mode. Again this can be done with vim, I can send you my .vimrc if you're curious. I just wanted to support the company.

Once the first draft is done, I spin up Scrivener. I put in the notes from the outline into the corkboard view, then paste the draft. I read through it front to back and take notes, usually in iA where the outline was. Then I create a new version of each doc, one by one, and do line edits or rewrites where I see fit. Sometimes I rewrite something wholesale, or split it into multiple scenes, or delete completely.

Scrivener is very handy for this type of work, especially with the corkboard view, which lets you slide things around and see a story from a higher level than headlines or chapter / scene titles would.

I know Scrivener has a focus mode, but I use iA specifically to remove distractions. If I have Scrivener open, I'm tempted to fiddle with things in its UI, or try to take that high-level view too early. iA is for drafting because drafting is supposed to be a single-minded enterprise. There's no room for second thoughts and any loss of momentum kills a story for me.

This sounds fascinating! I'm a big fan of weird fiction. If your stories are published or shared anywhere when complete I'd love to check them out.

Thank you so much! I'll put you on a list :)

I'm trying things a little differently right now, by plotting/writing, then revising in between the next set. Think spaced repetition for writing. Every story needs some drawer time before it's revised and edited. I anticipate a small anthology of sorts being ready by the end of the year.

Language learning app for intermediate learners who want to practice reading and listening:

- As you're reading, AI helps you with words it thinks you might not know

- Highlights etymologies & mnemonics

- Shows you words in their natural habitat, e.g. listen to example sentences

https://www.hellozenno.com/

I'm trying to read a kid's version of The Odyssey in Greek and to be able to understand my partner's mum, and these are the features that I wanted.

Also, I wanted to experiment with "what would an app like this look like if we could trust AI to be very cheap/fast/correct?".

- So, for example, it's a fully generative dictionary & search, e.g. the dictionary entries/metadata/example sentences don't exist until the first person searches for them!

- You can upload any kind of content (image, audio, text), and it'll automatically transcribe, translate, annotate, etc.

Working on Taskade (https://www.taskade.com), building the execution layer for AI collaboration.

Taskade started as a real-time workspace for teams to organize projects and ideas. It's evolved into something bigger — a platform where humans and AI work side by side.

We’re moving past simple chatbots into real agentic workflows, where teams can generate structured task lists, mind maps, and tables, train custom AI agents with dynamic knowledge, and automate work from start to finish.

Today, Taskade is built around three core pillars: Projects, Agents, and Automation. It’s like giving your team a second brain that can think, plan, and get work done across projects, automations, and real-time collaboration. If you’re interested in the future of human-AI collaboration, take a look!

https://www.taskade.com

https://eval.16x.engineer/ - 16x Eval: A desktop GUI app to evaluate prompts and models

With 16x Eval, you can manage your prompts, contexts, and models in one place, locally on your machine, and test out different combinations and use cases with a few clicks.

I made an electronic board game: https://github.com/seanboyce/Calculus-the-game

It's compatible with Settlers of Catan. However, I plan to make my own rulesets, artwork, manuals, etc. It will not be a commercial product, of course you can make your own with the files I provide.

Right now the boards, electronics, and firmware are in good working order. Although the routing is pretty YOLO.

It feels like there's a lot of unpleasantness going on in the world right now. I thought maybe I could put my other projects aside and try to make something that might brighten your day (It certainly has enough of LEDs).

A big TODO is to replace the 0402 SMT components with something larger and easier to work with like 0603. I'll find time within a week or so and push it to the repo. (I am notoriously cheap and only keep 0402 in stock)

Very cool, i like it a lot!

Just needs some slick design for broader appeal.

If you have any ideas, please share! Design is not my strong suit.

I was thinking maybe some surface features, like craters (in silkscreen) and some "resources" -- tinned exposed copper / copper covered by solder mask.

Or some way to hold the boards together, like a magnetic clasp or even just velcro. It's not really a problem presently, but might be neat.

I think getting a good designer onboard has the best chances of taking it to the next level.

Yeah, that's a good point. A colleague did offer to help, and then donate the results to some schools. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to just say yes!

A language learning app for couples (https://couplingcafe.com). I wanted to learn my wife's native language, so I've been building this on my own for a long time and testing solutions! Just a few paying happy users. Cooking up a lot of ideas

Looks nice. I really tried but couldn't find it: Pricing please! :)

WebSocket Router for Bun — A type-safe WebSocket router for Bun with Zod-based message validation. Route WebSocket messages to handlers based on message type with full TypeScript support.

https://github.com/kriasoft/bun-ws-router#readme

A social advocacy platform for small and medium sized B2B businesses. LinkedIn is more or less the only social platform for B2B social selling and smaller firms could benefit from their posts getting a bit more augmented and coordinated engagement. So we’re building a solution for a marketing manager to request advocates (employees, partners, others) to engage or reshare (tweaked in their own voice if they want) their content. Not world altering but shockingly underserved market. With few players who raised money and therefore have to price expensively, whereas as a bootstrapped side-hustle we can offer it in a flat-fee way that doesn’t “penalize” growth by charging per-user or for inactive users.

(Pre-launch [https://www.sevenbaton.com] would welcome feedback from marketing folks)

I'm working on creating a volume mixer, basically like Deej, but more polished.

Some things I'm planning on including: - App drag & drop for assignment. - Programmable macro buttons. - Small OLED displays to show app icon and volume levels.

Attempting to do everything in Rust too, even the MCU firmware. It's been a lot of fun. xD

I am working on making it easier to learn languages. We provide a platform for teachers and educators to create their own language courses. The platform offers features similar to software like Babel or Anki, along with some unique features for phonetics study and customizing the learning experience.

We're currently working with language influencers to build courses on Emurse. This year, we launched Japanese Phonetics course created by the YouTuber Dogen https://emurse.io/course/japanese-phonetics.

If you want to try out Emurse, we have a free Thai reading course available. You can view the first lesson without out creating an account: https://emurse.io/courses.

Working on specstory.com which today is an extension for Cursor & Github copilot that allows you to save, search, share your AI chat history.

Most AI first coding tools don't seem to respect how much critical context gets lost between sessions. Prompts, chats, refactors, decision paths all gone. Really believe that intent (prompts & responses from AI) is going to be the critical artifact upstream of code and there is a need to capture all of it: what the AI suggested, what you kept, what you rewrote, and why. We integrate directly with AI-powered IDEs so your intent becomes as searchable as your code.

We started with Cursor and just shipped support for GitHub Copilot (Agent Mode). The long-term goal is to build a canonical intent layer for codebases built with AI—something like git log/blame, but for why things changed, not just what.

For awhile I've been working on an MPE MIDI controller called the Mosaichord. It uses a tuning system called just intonation, where the frequencies of all the notes are related to each other by whole number ratios. I'm using a scale that has 28 notes per octave. Keys are pressure sensitive.

A few weeks ago I got a video of one of my friends playing it at a show: https://mastodon.social/@DesiderataSystems

Something I'm working on right now is trying to implement a basic on-board synthesizer so people can use it without a laptop or external hardware synth. (I added a DAC a couple hardware revisions back, I just haven't done anything interesting with it yet.)

The firmware is open source and there's a fairly detailed user manual.

Working on a site to help people find stained glass windows to visit in their towns/cities. No exciting tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS) and lots of data entry, but making some decent progress!

https://www.stainedglassatlas.com

Walking, and Writing on Substack

Currently; > Main goals: Improving my writing and finding some people with similar interests Writing about my current walking season that I'm in, combined with reflections during the walking, recently about walking around the island of Menorca, and Aloneness:

>> https://felipevanbeetz.substack.com/p/build-some-capacity-to...

Thinking about starting another Substack: > Main goal: Audience growth Called something like: "Walk more", "Walk intentionally", "Move intentionally", "How to walk more" About: Short, (bi)Weekly, Practical tips/inspiration, to Move (and specifically Walk) more and more intentionally.

Still cracking away CodeVideo, a way to create software educational content in a declarative manner. Design your course once, export it to every format you can think of (video, PDF, markdown, HTML, and more). I was recently inspired by the feature set I saw at Scrimba, so we just added slide functionality! The blog post is here: https://codevideo.substack.com/p/introducing-the-slide-displ...

And an example video is here: https://youtu.be/1duE604MGHs

It definitely has not gotten the traction I'd expected, but at the very least I'm very close to start making my own courses with it!

Crypto, Fiat, AI Ecosystem

I'm working on a new kind of financial infrastructure that combines crypto, fiat, and AI to make managing money in decentralized environments simpler and smarter. The core idea is to move beyond the traditional 'wallet' model and instead help people, especially in emerging markets, make better, more informed financial decisions using real-time intelligence and automation.

It’s designed for everyday users, not just crypto-native folks, and it focuses on things like streamlining DeFi, improving transparency, and reducing user fatigue. We’re building with scalability and user experience in mind — something that actually fits into people’s daily financial lives, not just trading.

If you are very keen on working with me, I am building a team of devs too.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

Are u hiring ?

Yes. Currently building and recruiting potential team members.

You can reach out to oluwatosin.mayowa@outlook.com

I'm building an interactive map based search interface for concerts and events in the bay area: http://fanflame.city/

This is something I've always wanted for myself so I decided to build it. Plenty of event aggregators out there, but not many that let you search and filter by any combination of locations, dates, and genres.

It currently supports automated data feeds from ticketmaster and the Civic Joy Fund; hoping to add Parks & Rec, Library events, and some other ticketing sites in the near future.

It has been a fun way to keep my coding skills sharp (Eng Director by day), I've learned a ton about react, mapbox, django, postgis, and GCP doing it. If you have an event source I should look into or a feature request let me know!

https://nuenki.app - a browser extension that translates sentences at your level while you browse, so you learn a language through immersion while you go about your day.

I'm also working on and off on a hardware device for blind people.

Recently I’ve pretty much replaced searching Yelp or TripAdvisor with a combination of Instagram Reels/TikToks and Google maps for travel and food recommendations. I usually just save a lot of places that I have to dig through and watch again to dig through and add to my saved Google maps lists. Because this takes me a fair bit of time when preparing for a trip, I decided to automate part of it by building a pipeline to “watch” the video for me by getting the audio and video frame data and taking into account key POIs that I then export out to a note. Later I plan to also integrate this with other travel or food tracking software like Wanderlog, Google maps list, or Beli eats. So far it’s been working well, but def expensive (so thank god for free GCP credits haha)

While Git is great at asynchronous collaboration, its a bit clunky to try and work on the same commit with other devs or across devices. This is because Git tracks what changed, not how it changed.

It'd be cool if you were on the same branch as somebody else, or another device, and your working directories could be synced. It'd also be cool for the commit history to be a bit richer, so you could see who, what and when for a change at a keystroke level.

So I'm working on real-time sync for Git! I'd represent the working directory as a tree CRDT [1] and sync that through FUSE and p2p networking.

Not sure whether this is actually a good idea! This is a POC :)

[1] https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/move-op.pdf

One idea I have had for years is that it would be great if file system would support structured data.

This would combine well with your idea.

So let's say that I change python source code, the "file system" would understand the syntax of python source. Your tool could then use this to derive the sematics of my change, i.e. "added a function foo() with the following signature and body"

so I'm working on side project to make managing and exploring your music library easier.

The idea is you can set a few filters (like bpm, key, decade, genre) and then swipe through random songs, accept or reject them for inspiration or playlists. Kinda like Tinder but for digging through your own tracks.

It also tracks what's trending on TikTok/YouTube/SoundCloud weekly, so you can find stuff that’s blowing up, filterable by region. Plus it can build smart playlists automatically based on rules you set (like “new 90s house under 120bpm” every month).

It is just a tool to make working with your existing local/Apple/Spotify/SoundCloud library faster and more creative.

Here's a demo of it: https://filtered-f.web.app/

Will it work with Beets? :)

I hadn't heard of Beets until you mentioned it. I took a look at it and yes, it'll work with Beets.

I was using Python to get the bpms and keys on local tracks, and was going to start figuring how to fill in the missing metadata.

Thank you!

I'm trying to figure out how I can turn hobby products (that me and family and friends are using) into real products for a wider audience. So far, I've found 2 main failure cases:

1. While I can share source code and documentation with trustworthy people, that won't work at scale: the market would get flooded with Chinese clones that re-use my Open Source software but then I have no ongoing revenue to fund support / maintenance.

2. Especially for products with a physical component, shipping, taxes, refunds, CC chargebacks etc. add considerable overhead. Plus I need to add in Amazon fees and marketing spend. And suddenly I need to charge 8x the manufacturing price, which means I either need to massively cheapen out with quality, or it's going to be a very premium product.

I'm working on a long-term project to better understand Operating Systems, video game development, and Rust by building the simplest possible OS in Rust that boots directly into a game of Doom, which will also be re-written in Rust.

I'm giving myself 18 months- it's been super fun so far!

https://www.lookoutwindow.com , read about the places you are flying over, and figure out which side of the plane to sit on. Map and wiki articles all work offline, in about a 10MB download for each route.

Building a GnuCash companion app for personal finance, with budgeting and auto synchronization over iCloud.

P.S. Link https://apps.apple.com/us/app/handsonmoney/id6740042181

A semantic music visualizer :) real-time capture of elements of music —- not tracks but true elements —- paired with time-stable frame generation for display. It likely won’t be as good as a real VJ, but I want to outshine all the visualizers which are basically a demo atop a grapheq.

Interesting, right now using LedFx for the experience

I'm working on a Kaggle competition about predicting subsurface models - a map of the geologic layers beneath a given area - from seismic data.

I don't expect to place competitively but I learn a lot from these competitions. I like competitions like this that are connected to physical problems and datasets (though sadly this one is largely simulated), I learn as much about the broader world as I do deep learning. I've always idly wondered how seismology worked, and now I have an excuse to dig into it.

It's also given me a greater appreciation for the "seismology" we perform in our day to day, like knocking on things to see if they're hollow, or (as I learned here a while back) the way battitores test the porosity of cheese by knocking on it with hammers.

Improving the libc that gets used when compiling C to Wasm (usually based on musl).

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/tree/main/sqlite3/libc

I'm working on a global roaming[0] AI device for my friend's widow[1]. This is the first week of testing in Mabel's hands (lots of feedback already), and Mabel's first trip abroad with it is next week. Between working on improvements, based on this week's feedback, I'll be writing it up in a blog entry (also to-do: setup blog for [0]).

[0] https://walledgarden.ai/r/wgd [1] https://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/news/people/twice-wed-fyl...

I'm looking for an open source system that has the following features. Forum for questions and answers. A section to upload video tutorials A way for experts(teacher) can upload their own series of videos.

Basically looking to clone laracasts.

If I can't find one, that is what I'll be working on.

This is an exciting project, Where exactly have you looked until now ?

A children's book about creative problem solving and entrepreneurship.

The book is written in the Choose Your Own Adventure style. Readers get to join the protagonist Daphne on a fun, week-long adventure launching her own mini-businesses. Readers help her make smart decisions, solve fun challenges, and learn about money and problem-solving in the process.

The book has been a fun endeavor in both writing the manuscript and code! On the latter, I wrote an exporter for Twinery to Org Mode and an Emacs Org export backend to do the reverse.

The book is currently open to beta readers - Happy to let a few more in through the sign up page here: https://tendollaradventure.com/#get-notified

I want to increase my presence on Twitter by posting more, but I don't like going on Twitter. So I created a chrome extension that opens a small text box and I write my post there and send it.

https://tweettoilet.com

I believe on your home page it should say "Instantly tweet from any page without opening Twitter" not as it currently states "with"

I am working on an [ONLY EV AI SALES AGENT]. I have a dealer feed. I am focused on Electric cars. Basically you ask the AI agent about your electric car needs and using our inventory feed from our dealer partner ( pilot) we match user to car. Video demo here. Trying to ship ASAP. I will update my site soon. I do sales and my partner is doing the build.

https://www.onlyev.com/

demo video - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bv9vhagugpuz3mhc089mz/ScreenR...

Just a small hardware project: I am building a cocktail mixer in an old PC case. I saw something similar at a con over Easter and had to build one myself, it had a tap coming out of the 3.5" bay and the ingredients were inside the pc case. It uses peristaltic pumps to move the different ingredients to the cup. It is very simple, but still took a couple of days to complete. In detail it consists of 6 x peristaltic pumps, 3 x L298N motor driver, 3 x PCF8574 io expander and an esp32. The software for the esp32 is very dumb and I actually coded it correctly before I had all the parts, it just enables and sets the speed for the motors and is attached via USB to a laptop. There a webapp is used to manage ingredients and recipes.

I am working on a PromptLibrary (https://promptlib.prashamhtrivedi.in/) to organise my prompts and make it accessible from multiple clients (Including chatbots (via chrome extensions), CLIs, IDE extensions amongst the few).

I wanted a library to store my own prompts once and retrieve it in multiple locations (i.e. Try something on claude desktop and then once I wrinkle out the edges, load it in Roo code or claude code and use it.) Give some variables to the prompt and creating infinite versions of same prompt by providing the value. Or having the versions of each prompt.

Currently I have the landing page, soon (In max 10 days) I will make it live for everyone to use.

Rebuilding most of my serial literature + newsletter service for fiction writers because I used FaunaDB for both DB and authentication and now they are shutting down by the end of May.

https://www.confabulists.com

I am implementing a baremetal USB device stack in an embedded application and an having a really, really hard time. The device in question is a decoder for sportive chronometry and uses lots of DSP for detecting and measuring when vehicles pass through the finish line.

A storytelling/creativity card game. I was struggling for a bit to figure out a mechanic that could make it more fun and I think I am finally making some good progress. If anyone has tabletop simulator and wants to help test, hit me up. Stephen at the domain below.

www.fableflops.com

MAGiE: Your MAGnetic Interactive Explorer

A simple puzzle game: a cassette-futuristic story, heavily inspired by Nell’s adventures at Castle Turing in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”.

I could go on and on...

I’d love your feedback:

Rewind to the start of the story: https://magiegame.com/test/2025/04/04

Or skip to today’s puzzle: https://magiegame.com

Right now I’m focused on story development and integrating it with the daily-puzzle system I built last time I was between jobs.

This is a years-long slow-burn side project. My career moved away from the frontend long ago—this is my first React app, with a Django backend running on AWS Lightsail.

I'm currently working on Academy Referral* (https://academyreferral.com). It's a referral platform for martial arts academies, allowing owners to reward their students for bringing in new members.

I've trained martial arts for a few years, and have always been that person who tries to introduce those close to me to the community. I know a lot of other people do the same.

Now, I don't care that I wasn't rewarded for it, but why not? We have point-based programs for nearly everything. Why not for martial arts as well?

* Have a few academies in the process of testing it out. Still a lot to do, including the demo video that isn't going to load on the main page.

Critic (https://getcritic.dev) - An improved inbox for GitHub pull requests

The experience with GitHub can be terribly frustrating when it comes to managing the stream of incoming pull requests. The default inbox and notification systems are not so good, and not flexible. Critic allows to create any number of sections, each section being defined by an arbitrary search query.

I would now like to expand it to provide a better code review experience, similar to what Graphite or Reviewable may provide - but under as an open source project. Source code is available at: https://github.com/pvcnt/critic

Working on a FOSS card game.

I realized after trying multiple tools like Supabase and Firebase, I really need to program my own solution. I don't need a bunch of *Enterprise* level features. I just need to read the card data from a database, and process the games with some simple server side code.

I hope to have the server, along with a basic front end done by this summer. Then it'll be released under a permissible license. Probably MIT.

I want a community of different front ends compatible with the same server. I suspect a straight up cli client without a bunch of effects might be popular with some of y'all.

If you want to code a frontend in Unreal, the server doesn't care. The game remains the same.

Of course your free to fork it privately, build a commerical product, etc.

I'm building an MVP for an "AI bedtime stories" app. The idea is that you just input the character names, a theme, and choose a voice (including the option to clone a parent's voice for narration). It generates a story and reads it out using TTS.

There are already a few services like this, but most don't support using a parent's voice, and very few can connect stories together into a continuous narrative based on previous ones. Also I would like to hold context for fairy tales kinda local. For example Polish folklore is different than British. Most common villains are different and it can be fun and educating problem to solve.

I'm mainly doing this as a learning project, but curious to see where it ends up.

I've been writing a software synthesizer, I want to use it to make an album when it's finished. As of now I've implemented a basic subtractive synth with the usual primitive oscillators, random noise, high and low pass filters, and an ADSR envelope. I've implemented input and output "drivers" for Windows and Linux: WASAPI, ALSA, Windows Raw Input, and evdev.

Soon I'll start work on Lua bindings. The idea is to configure the core engine programmatically. Hook up inputs, modify synth parameters, route output. It's going to be inferior in every way to something like SuperCollider, but I just think it'll be insanely cool to materialize music from thin air. I've learned lots.

I spent the weekend working on the Ansible automation needed to deploy Tomcat and Roller Weblogger for my new personal website/blog[1]. Once the loose ends are tied up with this, I plan to deactivate my Facebook account and mainly focus on the personal site + Fediverse sites for sharing stuff. This is both to be consistent with my principles, which say to disfavor closed-source / walled-garden sites like Facebook, and because it should free up some time I waste when I allow myself to get pulled into political discussions on FB. It'll probably be better for my mental health as well.

[1]: https://www.philliprhodes.name

I'm working on an Ephemeral Markdown Paper: https://github.com/unvalley/ephe

If you’re tired of bloated to-do and note-taking apps, give this a try. It's OSS, free and No sign-up.

I’m working on Catchcam - https://hackaday.io/project/199220-catchcam-speed-camera-det..., a privacy-first, offline speed camera detector for drivers. Unlike apps like Waze or Radarbot, Catchcam doesn’t track your location or require an internet connection. Just plug it into your USB socket, and you’re good to go.

Key features:

• Built-in speaker and LED for alerts

• Preloaded with 66,000+ known speed camera locations (more to come)

• Easy updates via drag-and-drop on your PC

It’s been a fun project to build, and I’m excited to see it help drivers stay away from speeding tickets while keeping their data private.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions!

in what way does this help drivers "stay safe"?

Safe from speeding tickets of course!

Here is another thread today that could give you prospect ideas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812856

Working on redesigning my SaaS template. It uses Dokploy to deploy the NodeJS app, and Pocketbase instance within the same server, so DB reads and writes are very fast. Also doesn't use the Pocketbase client library at all, all calls are wrapped in their own API routes and everything is server side rendered.

You might ask why use Pocketbase at all, and I'm not sure anymore. I suppose the dashboard is great, built in auth is great (although I've had to write cookie middleware to make it SSR anyway). I wish there was a lightweight Pocketbase/Supabase style "backend in a box" setup that didn't push the whole client library directly communicating to DB paradigm.

A custom Python/Django based mini-app (mini — at least for now) that will allow me to import transactions sanely and safely to my local GnuCash install.

I’ve been doing tedious manual entry for a bit over two years now and after having missed three consecutive months, the only other option was to bail.

As a start it should help with 3 main things:

- Translation, categorization: my source documents aren’t in English but my GnuCash entries are. This is one of the reasons I don’t use the built-in imports. (This should shave off at least 90% of time spent entering data)

- Human-error prevention: there were at least 5 times where it took me over 15 minutes to reconcile a discrepancy because I entered some number or some account wrong somewhere.

I shared this last month as well but I’ve added a couple new features since then: a weekly digest email, a list of what you’re tracking and a price history chart.

I’ve been building https://lowlow.bot, it tracks price changes on any website. I was inspired by https://camelcamelcamel.com, but wanted something that worked for more than just Amazon. It’s been handy for big purchases I’m ok waiting for and stocking up on recurring non-perishable essentials when they go on sale. It also lets me know when something has come back in stock.

How are you scraping the prices? Are you using AI for that?

I try to use JSON-LD metadata on the page if it’s available and fall back to AI if it’s not.

I’m making a presentation ai assistant. Existing ones don’t cut it… they’re really nice to demo but not good enough for professional use. Full MVP by next week. https://unblank.ai

Working on a framework for a Factory Management System, for small-to-medium sized industry.

Detected a signal from extraterrestrials!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/warm-sesam3/id6744872364

Please take a look at the 'About' in settings

Working out some smaller bugs of my meta tags checker / builder HeyMeta, which I've rebuilt in Svelte (prevously used Node.js for both FE and BE and it was buggy as hell)

https://heymeta.com

Also revisited and updated Let's see, an eye trainer, which is basically a PWA you can "install" on your tablet/mobile/e-reader. I'm not a scientist, but have had some success training my eyes with this technique and wanted to make a simple app that I can share with my friends to try.

https://letssee.publicspace.co/

Any feedback welcome :)

nice work

Thanks :)

I'm making some minor changes to my personal site/blog to improve contrast, have a more uniform usage of colours throughout, and also replacing "categories" with tags so that I can have related content easily linked and searchable.

I may also finally finish implementing WebMentions support too as a kind of comment section.

I may also work some more on my long-term relaxation/creative maze generation and solver project.

At work, I keep putting off yet more refactorings that are required because of poor/missing requirements and non-technical leadership of the project.

It wouldn't be so bad, but part of this "new" project involves communicating with some awful SharePoint """database""", as well as a poorly designed real database (it has multiple values in one column, not even with any standard, just sometimes there's extra numbers I need to parse, sometimes not - just lots of this type of crap repeated everywhere), and the worst development/deployment experience I've ever had to deal with in ~10 years.

To write code involves Remote desktop to what was a single core VM (and much protesting gained me... one extra core) to Windows Server 2016 meaning most modern/nice developer tooling isn't supported, and deployments are all done by copy pasting files over yet more nested remote desktop sessions.

Sadly there's no real way of automating any of this, every suggestion is always a "default no", again most of the tools I'd need for this won't run on Windows Server 2016, and even if I worked around it the stakes are way too high for "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission".

The turn around time for even a small change is huge because of this mental burden, it's a complete slog to get anything done.

So I guess what I'm saying is I've been casually looking around at jobs this month.

This is why I always stress the importance of being able to work on my own projects, because otherwise, I'd have burnt out.

/rant

I have been working with a small team on a platform that allows luxury brokers to do due diligence on clients, ownership transfer and receive/issue payment all in one platform. We are pretty much merging the luxury retail market with banking.

Brokers (cars, planes, houses, boats, watches, etc) never have to worry about chargebacks, they get instant payment, free deposits and payment (compared to payment processors and marketplaces charging 2-10% per transaction).

We are currently onboarding luxury buyers, brokers, and brands you can check us out and apply to be part of the ecosystem. https://nezzapp.com

I'm still mulling how to go about porting my tiling window manager for Windows[1] to another platform, or even if I'll do it at all. There is some demand, but I don't know if there is _enough_ demand

Regardless of if I target macOS or Linux first, this would be a pretty full time endeavour on my part. I could wait until the commercial use licenses of the Windows version sustain me enough to be able to work on this full time, or try to raise a Kickstarter for $X00,000 to be able to quit my 9-5 and work on porting full time for a year or so

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

A social network where each participant is guaranteed to be a human. It's a tricky problem but I think I've got a pretty good first prototype[1].

1 - https://onlyhumanhub.com

Mastodon solves this

how?

There's no algorithm to suggest feeds

How does that guarantee that all participants are human?

Give it a shot and see for yourself

I recently published this library for routing messages within an application using the same kind of wildcard semantics that NATS uses - https://www.npmjs.com/package/@gooseus/natsrun

Currently just test driving it in some relatively simple work scenarios, but I imagine it could be a useful tool for consuming a NATS firehose of messages in a single application and routing them internally using the same semantics subject rules so that it would be easy to split them out as separate consumers when/if that became necessary.

https://docs.rwsdk.com

RedwoodSDK is a React Framework for Cloudflare. We wanted to build something that allows people to focus on the software that they want to write, rather than the infrastructure that it runs on. Writing software isn't really a barrier anymore, the parts that developers find annoying can be shortcut with generated code, but you can't gloss over pushing to production.

Cloudflare gives us the ability to offer developers compute, database, storage, queues, AI, realtime with durable objects, etc... and to emulate that locally with just a single package installation.

Building an IP Geolocation guessing game: https://abdullahdevrel.github.io/ipguessr/

Let me know if you have any feedback or feature requests.

Very interesting idea. Are those IPs real? Where are you getting these from?

You can download data sets from Maxmind.

I work for IPinfo — I described my process of how I made the game in the other comment.

Using a dataset-based implementation would require me to have a backend, which is out of the scope of this project. Right now, I'm generating random IPv4 addresses, but if I were generating random IPv6 addresses, I would have to go the database route. For that, I would use our free IPinfo Lite dataset: https://ipinfo.io/lite

My colleagues actually developed an extremely fast algorithm to select truly random IPv6 IPs from a series of CIDRs, which is what you see reflected in our dataset.

Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for me, please.

I appreciate you enjoying the game! I work for IPinfo but initially made it as a sort of meme for our users.

I'm generating random IP addresses on the frontend, then making an call to our free API to validate the "realness" of the IP addresses — mainly to remove bogon IP addresses, non-routable IPs, and IPs from large ASNs (national ISPs, the DoD, car companies, etc.).

Our free API supports 1,000 requests per day from unique IP addresses, so there shouldn't be any issues for low usage. However, if we get more power users who enjoy the game, I’ll switch to our Lite API service (which is also free, https://ipinfo.io/lite) to validate IP addresses, as it supports unlimited requests.

Let me know if you have any feedback for me :) I made it mostly by "vibe coding", I will write a post about the whole process of it.

I am working on Grog, the “grug-brained” alternative to Bazel. A mono-repo build tool where all you do is provide your build commands and interdependencies and the tool will run everything in parallel while caching as much as possible.

Why should I use this and how is it better than Bazel?

If you are a small to mid-sized team, moving to Bazel is massively painful and basically requires up to one full-time position to provide your team with a good experience.

Grog on the other hand let's you keep your existing build setup while just parallelizing and caching it. It's not a full replacement, but it's more than enough for most mid-sized teams that want to have fast mono-repo builds.

A standardized dictionary/lexicon for the variant of pidgin English that is spoken around Western-Africa.

https://yarnz.app/

It contains words and phrases with their accompanying context.

This is really cool. Do you speak this pidgin or are you trying to document it as a non-native?

Thank you! Yes, I'm from Nigeria. I became interested in this when I met people from other West African countries and learned that they speak the same type pidgin with tiny variations.

Still working on https://theretowhere.com since I announced it to HN in February.

It's an website who's goal is to make it easier to find apartments/hotels/etc that fit your housing preferences (starting with places that are close to the people and things you care about). It's flagship feature is the ability to make heatmaps of cities based on your preferences.

Since February I've slowed down on feature development temporarily as I try and find a way to sustainably increase it's popularity and learn what's the most important thing to focus on next.

Working on a web app builder that generates code via AI, much like hundreds of other tools out there. The differentiator is that the tool automatically sets up a Postgres DB (using Neon) for you. So, it's a lot easier to get started and it can handle large complex apps that require auth and database, but it can also build simple websites. The stack is next.js and code is easy to export and view.

Primarily uses Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Gemini Pro 2.5. But you can choose other models too.

You can try it for free while I'm beta testing it here: https://lumosbuilder.com?ref=hn

This is awesome. My name is David and I work at Neon btw. Email me through david@ if you want to chat!

https://github.com/datalpia/laketower

Slowly building an open-source Data Lakehouse management utility application for local development, scratching my own itch and trying to accelerate development workflows with customers developing for Databricks.

For now it only supports Delta Lake (using delta-rs + duckdb), only supports table metadata inspection and querying, but in the near future will add dashboards as code, simple Markdown notebook like mode, and Apache Iceberg support.

For now it's an enabler for me and others, hopefully I can turn it into a product somehow at some point.

Manabi Reader - native iOS / macOS reading tool for Japanese with flashcards and Anki integration

https://reader.manabi.io

Currently working on adding a manga mode and Netflix auto-captioning

https://github.com/dh1011/c2p

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=H337.c2p

I’m developing a VS Code and Cursor extension that helps developers quickly copy all code in a workspace to the clipboard for use with LLMs.

It also displays the token count for each file, as well as the total token count across the workspace.

By default, it ignores files listed in .gitignore, but this behavior can be customized in the extension settings, along with many other options.

I am working on a direct competitor to Netsuite. I’ve worked on ERPs, accounting, and inventory long enough to think I can do it. And with AI I can make progress on this in a way that would have been unfathomable a year ago.

(Thoughts welcome!)

Lighthouse (https://lighthouseapp.io/) - a different take on RSS readers, focusing on inbox zero

RSS readers show content based on the feed they're coming from, and show read and unread items in the same list. That makes it difficult to know which items you've already seen, and is especially annoying for managing items that you want to read at some point but not anytime soon.

Lighthouse splits it into Inbox (new items) and Library (bookmarked items). This makes it possible to process new items quickly, and take your time with reading them.

For a more data science-y project, I'm having a blast building https://nhlforecasts.com. I live in a town with a hockey team, and figured the best way to become a fan would be to understand the sport from a data driven approach.

I did a ton of work on building an Elo model first, but was getting very compressed results in terms of postseason predictions. I swapped to a Bayesian approach which has really taken off. Not sure how it's going to handle the second round of games approaching, but that's a problem for the future!

I'm working on Proflect — a personal and professional growth platform that connects goals, journaling, and feedback into one flow. To help you grow by reflection, not just action.

The idea is that growth becomes a lot more intentional when you can reflect daily, set goals clearly, and get structured input from people you trust — all in one place instead of scattered across different tools.

I'm getting ready to open early access soon. Curious if others have tried combining these areas or if you use separate tools for goals, journaling, and feedback!

https://proflect.io

Torch Lens Maker - https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/

Open-source differentiable geometric optics in PyTorch.

Working on supporting MCP (model context protocol) in my LSP (language server protocol) proxy: https://github.com/noredeen/lspwatch.

I wrote this tool to make instrumenting language servers very easy. MCP (both protocol and architecture) seems heavily inspired by LSP which made me curious about what it would take to support it through my telemetry-capturing proxy.

Haven't thought too deeply about how useful an MCP proxy can be but I see it as potentially a general platform for monitoring or debugging MCP servers or clients.

Super interesting! I'm also working on something related to MCP and LSP: https://github.com/isaacphi/mcp-language-server it's an MCP server that runs a language server.

Do I understand this properly, you're building a telemetry tool for MCP similar to your telemetry tool for LSP, or is it something else?

Yup exactly. My tool is supposed to sit between MCP clients and servers. For now only stdio is in scope. Your tool is great. An MCP server for LSPs! I'll be taking it for a spin.

Schematic and PCB design relating to Lighting and Control Systems for my main job. Schematics and PCB Design after hours as a contractor too, because I have a daughter now, my wife can't work, and life has become /very/ expensive in Sydney.

What I'd love to be working on: Try to initiate a high voltage arc through the air to a target device, and modulate it to send "Data over Lightning", like Alyx does in Half-Life 2. It won't work the way it does in the game, but I'd it's an idea I've had for a long time and I'd love to prototype it some day.

I'm working on a mobile app for exploring places with Wikivoyage (https://mapvoyage.app) and a wikitext to structured JSON-tree parser to support that (https://github.com/bcye/structured-wikivoyage-exports) and am finally getting pretty close to a beta version :) I hope to unify the workflow of going back and forth between Wikivoyage, the favourites list on Google Maps and notes into a single app.

A new way to type on gamepads designed around the hardware rather than trying to fit gamepad input to a qwerty keyboard.

I’ve been working on it for a few months and I’m hoping to have a demo up at 7:00 PST today for HN to play with :)

I'm working on a workflow automation tool that lets devs write workflows in simple yaml files, and then deploy them to the cloud _or_ on premise. Each workflow is a set of actions and a trigger that can transform data, make api calls, run AI models, or really anything (via docker!). Each step relies on the output of the last step, and the workflow framework is engineering to be declarative, testable, and versioned. Similar to GitHub actions, but for *anything*. Think webhook to slack, email to support ticket, nightly aws backup & restore, mirror a file each night, etc.

premises, not premise :-)

Thank you! Learned something new.

B2B SaaS for Sponsorship ROI measurement (https://wehave.io)

We use data from club & sponsor to measure conversion over time. Our challenge lies in attributing a select group of people who appear in both datasets. Sponsors spend millions on their sponsorship, and they have no idea what comes back.

We also got funded last week & looking for a founding engineer (2nd employee) :)

https://wehavenotes.notion.site/backend-engineer-aws-python

As a teacher of computer science, I'm working on various free resources for teachers and students, such as a guide to simulating forces and collisions in JavaScript (https://www.mathsuniverse.com/particles) and super simple real-time forms for lessons (https://www.mathsuniverse.com/forms). What brings me joy is seeing that they are actually useful for people other than just me.

Still trying to make my CMS a thing: https://github.com/SeleneSoftware/SeleneCMS https://github.com/SeleneSoftware/SeleneCMSBundle

It's a PHP application running in Symfony. All the CMS heavy lifting is done in the Bundle, and a minimal amount happens in the actual application side. I have worked hard on what is there, and still have a ton of work to go. Always could use the help.

I'm still developing podcast websites with transcripts[^0] while maintaining a part-time job.

This thread made me realize I've made no progress in acquiring new clients since posting about this 6 months ago. However, my part-time job ends in May, which will allow me to focus exclusively on Fanfare. It's somewhat intimidating, but I'm also looking forward to it; the prospect of resolving this uncertain situation (either through success or failure) feels liberating.

[^0]: https://www.withfanfare.com/

Working on my Java NLP library that can figure out what geographical location is from a piece of free text.

e.g.

"san francisco ca united states" - San Francisco, California, America

"california, san francisco" - San Francisco, California, America

"glasgow, kentucky" - Glasgow, Kentucky, America

"glasgow, UK" - Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

It started as a project when I was scraping websites, and some data had inconsistent ways of writing a location or address.

The library is called location4j - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j

I’m just putting the finishing touches on (https://jtrack.app)[JTrack]

I spent a long time working in manufacturing and struggled to find a piece of software where we could define a process, share instructions and collect data all in one go.

The idea is you can basically turn your process into an interactive flowchart and follow it through. I’m almost code complete on the MVP, moving into distribution mode in a few weeks.

I’d love to hear from any HNers who’ve gone from 0 to 1 on a SaaS for non technical users. What worked for you?

We’re building BLUO - https://bluo.cms a modern multi-website CMS focused on simplicity and performance.

Key features: - Multi-website management with single sign-on (one dashboard for all sites) - Static rendering via Cloudflare KV for 100% uptime and blazing speed - Real-time editor with AI-powered automated internal backlinks - Theme switching without breaking functionality

We're currently serving 100+ websites. It's completely free for non-profits.

Would love feedback from anyone managing multiple content sites!

Can't access your link, is it https://bluocms.com/ ?

That’s correct. Somehow the link was wrong in the original post.

TUI browser for the Modern Web. Runs JavaScript, works everywhere, but only shows text. Quietude, noise cancellation for content. Sneak peak: https://youtu.be/rmykR_OLYhg

I also just today made a fun way to fully host a front end and SQLite back-end on GitHub for free using Pages + Actions, you can try it right now: https://do-say-go.github.io/fully-hosted/

ShippentPlanner - easily plan and organize your sku paletizing! Make a shippment to a destination warehouse in minutes! For ecommerce sellers. I'm preparing a demo to be able to show to others...

Robot walking. But really, a programming language and tools to make it easy to solve hard nonlinear control problems like walking. There are videos & source code for 2-legged walking robots (in simulation) at https://throbol.com/post/how-to-walk, and videos & source code for 4-legged walking robots (on real hardware) at https://throbol.com/

A minimalist, text-based memory system designed to naturally store and recall important events. It emphasizes simplicity, portability, and human-friendly structure by using six optional fields: who, what, when, where, how, and thing. These fields capture factual context clearly, deferring interpretation for later use or analysis.

https://github.com/scottfalconer/vibedb

I still have no idea if it's a good idea or a bad idea but it's been fun to think through.

Om working om a distributed erp system. The goal being native ui in android, iOS, Mac OS, web, windows, Linux and curses with crazy fast response times. No user operation takes longer than 100 ms.

Building visual AI research tool https://why.new

just waitlist for now, but I have posted some demos on my twitter - https://x.com/rogutkuba/status/1915533678207262931 - https://x.com/rogutkuba/status/1915226139812839690

For the last months I've been working primarily on building a UI framework for Go in Go via WebASM.

Had to implement the bindings first, because js.Value kind of sucks. Meanwhile I am building web components and widgets and it's slowly getting where I want it to be.

Maybe after a couple more weeks I can finally build apps in 100% Go and together with webview/webview. Still needs a lot of work around the edges here and there.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey

Recipin - https://recipin.com

Private recipe archiving/bookmarking. No ads, no AI, no javascript . Join a server or host your own (https://github.com/bradly/recipin).

Bacon Wrapped Urns- https://baconwrappedurns.com

Mortality is so hot right now so why not celebrate with a custom urn to enjoy your journey into the spirit world in style.

I'm writing more software-related articles. Just finished my 2nd in the past month, this one on why you should "always be refactoring."

https://medium.com/@DougDonohoe/ce45d56c8773

Writing well is hard and takes time. Was it Mark Twain that said "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."? I can totally relate to that this month. Getting your point across without being long winded is challenging.

I'm building a simple web-based drawing app for home sewing patterns. It's a little bit CAD and a little bit sketching tool. Born of my desire for easier and 100x cheaper home drafting tools. The app is still quite early (adding Bezier tools today) and the core workflow is not functional: of draft, lay out, print, repeat, only draft is working. But one step at a time! https://github.com/twaldorf/flatland-client

Working on writing a series of blog posts on interaction nets. The first one is up already an is an introduction to the topic [0]. I feel like the topic is very accessible but the ideas are spread out across discord channels, papers, twitter, and GitHub repos. Hoping to centralize it a bit.

[0]: https://ezb.io/thoughts/interaction_nets/lambda_calculus/202...

Thank you for sharing this, do you have any plans to add an RSS feed in the future?

Yes, you're not the first to have asked this. I'll add one before I publish the next post.

https://medangle.com

Since my third year in medical school, I've built the largest medical education platform in MENAP. 90k+ users, 100m+ questions solved, billions of seconds spent learning across our Super App. Now working on sustainably scaling further, building medGPT.

It's awesome, exciting and impactful work. I am the first medical doctor + full stack technologist in Pakistan (250m) people, and we've helped the country move medical education decades forward.

Are you aware of anything similar for vets, or would there be interest in building this?

Part of my vision is to also help revolutionize adjacent healthcare fields, as we're focused on premed, medical and dental currently for undergrads + recent medical graduates, but nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy and veterinary school all are of great interest to me. I am a big animal lover personally.

For such markets, you can imagine that the TAM etc is smaller, but still important. For us it's a blend of mission driven and business.

Thanks for the comment! I would love to chat vet-ed-tech further, I am on LinkedIn (/in/az1b) or email: azib [at] az1b [dot] com

Setting up new projects shouldn’t be a chore. We built DevExp (dx) to fix it. -Secrets stay local (or sync across devices). -Tunnels with unlimited subdomains + WebSocket support. -Full HTTP/WebSocket traffic inspector. -Git profiles per project — no more editing .gitconfig. -Instant deploys to lightweight Deno isolates.

Coming soon: embedded DB, password manager, dotfile manager, boilerplate generator — all inside the CLI. waitlist: https://devexp.pro

A blender addon for uncluttering the viewport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k91LbFFcMVY

It is a smaller part of a whole collection of addons I've been working on meant for helping with animating character assets from Daz Studio in Blender and then bringing the animation back into Daz Studio.

Eventually I want to have a zero effort way to get characters from Daz Studio into Unreal or Godot with FACS morphs, JCMs, etc. already setup.

I find tracking movies and series I have watched with my partner an impossible task. Spreadsheets are too fiddly for my partner, and I want to look up what is next on my phone so I have turned to Airtable and n8n for automation.

input a relevant url, it will decide if it IMDB or Youtube or a list. using an llm, it will attempt to extract the movies or series from the list and find the relevant IMDB link.

Then I have a masonry view of movies & series I have and have not watched, sortable by tags that I can rate and add notes to.

Tried justwatch.com for this?

What notes do you want to add to a movie?

I’m working on a review website for Generative AI. Targeted at people who want to use GenAI to build stuff.

e.g.: Following up on one of my HN comments on OpenAI ImageGen gpt-image-1 quality: Side by side comparison of more challenging prompts at Low/Medium/High:

https://generative-ai.review/2025/04/apple-a-dog-how-quality...

I'm making a hymn presentation website for my dad. He's an organist at the local church and they've got TV's at the front showing everyone the words to the hymns. He switches the pages using a foot pedal while he plays and sings.

The software he currently uses is too complicated and he gets lost easily with all the buttons and features. My website is basically the same thing but only the buttons he needs, only his hymns and is completely controlled by me so I can fix things to suite him.

I updated the catalogue of movies and added some internal tools to my movies released on YouTube website: We Love Free Movies (https://welovefreemovies.com/). It's hard to share it because it gets flagged because of the name... But yeah, planning to add search, design touch ups, more movies, etc. this year.

Also working out the logistics of offering a microgrant to award people who want to make movies like this!

I'm working on improving Fil-C's stability and compatibility.

Fil-C is a memory-safe implementation of C.

https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/blob/delug...

You can try it easily on Linux/X86_64:

https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/releases

I built a tool to help hiring managers scan and categorize resumes against a job description: https://app.joinrunway.io/rank/create.

It gives you a ranked list so you can quickly spot the strongest candidates, or at least get a solid starting point without reading every resume manually.

It scores applicants based on job requirements, flags any concerns, and suggests interview questions you might want to ask.

I'm working on https://catmatch.theden.sh/ as a fun way for people to adopt rescue cats

I'm working on a multicast dns implementation in OCaml. It's a library allowing one to build custom queries/responders, plus a conventional querier that can be used as a stub resolver for .local to get the resolver functionality of avahi.

My main motivation was to implement a service that publishes the addresses of containers and vms that I run on my workstation to my local network, but it gradually has grown into a full-blown implementation of RFC 6762, which has been fun.

After struggling with bloated, ad-filled debugging tools, I decided to build MyDebugTools—an open-source, clean, and ad-free debugging tool. It’s designed to simplify the debugging process and help developers stay focused. No ads, no distractions—just efficient debugging. You can check it out at mydebugtools.com, and I’d really appreciate your feedback or suggestions!

https://www.mydebugtools.com/

working on saying no to new projects, i have a tendency to fill up all the time i have available with startups or creative ideas.

thinking about taking dancing lessons instead, maybe afrobeats.

I'm working on some social media analysis tools for Bluesky. It's unbelievable that there's an active social network for which you can see all the data.

A simple LLM client, for the simple reason that the one I bought stopped being supported and I could not find any replacement. It's free, right now only for Mac (Windows coming soon when Microsoft finally decides to approve my account). You just need an api key from your favorite LLM provider (right now it supports Gemini, OpenAI, Deepseek, and Anthropic). https://elleelleaime.org

https://curriculum-me.fly.dev/ makes a curriculum with books links for anything

Create a two-sided deal review app: https://dealcred.com

I work a lot with smaller investors, in real estate, private money lending, etc. It's sometimes hard to do due diligence on someone, and after having a couple bad deals and realize over 30 people were scammed, I wished there was a simple review site where you could see someone's past reviews.

Site is 80% there, hoping to enter beta in the next month.

I am working on Scharf, an open-source SAST tool to identify and auto-fix 3P GitHub actions those are prone to supply-chain attacks. It is blazing fast and written in Go.

Project link: https://github.com/cybrota/scharf

Quick demo: https://imgur.com/a/wEyk9AR

This tool can cutdown hours of grind for Security engineers.

Swedish and English subtitles for Eurovision sensation KAJ's 2018 musical Gambämark: https://github.com/dolkow/gambamark-subtitles

My wife and I are fans, but their Finland-Swedish Vörå dialect is not easy to understand, especially for us in the very south of Sweden. I have watched the recording too many times to count, and made these so she could enjoy it more.

https://www.nativeplants.nz/

Basically a test of putting guard rails around format and content of a website and seeing how much I could automatically generate on a topic of interest to myself.

Biggest benefit I've seen with cursor is to write tests for everything. Far too mcuh content hallucination, or made up links at first, but once you put in some test guardrails you can minimise this.

D Library - 100% decentralized operating on the D.Licence (pun intended).

Currently working on a solidity upgrade for a leader-board, and public analytics.

D-Safe for children, adults and plants. I am looking for contributors to integrate it on https://internet-in-a-box.org .

No worries, I'll do it myself if everyone is busy.

https://datapond.earth

Email: data at datapond.earth

Still working on Connet[1] and the associated Connet.dev[2], which is a p2p reverse proxy with NAT traversal (and hosted version of it). Currently, adding support for defining multiple points of ingress, next will be adding support for PCP port forwarding.

[1] https://github.com/connet-dev/connet

[2] https://connet.dev

I recently released an AI software architect chat app.

https://www.exploravention.com/products/askarch/

It is an interesting discovery journey on extracting relevant information from both code and documentation with a sufficient density to stay within the context window and extracting efficient criteria from arbitrarily phrased questions.

https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda

I am working on an open-source insurance application platform.

The main goal is to accelarate time-to-market for insurance and insurtech innovations, providing all these "boring" enterprise features (like multitenancy, role-based security, audit trails, etc.) out of the box, so that you can focus on building the actual product.

Any plans to integrate with Download providers like IVANS?

I'm working on Monitor Monkey[1]

It's attempting to be the easiest and nicest way to monitor Linux servers. I'm currently implementing 0 config custom alerting. All you will have to do is write a file to a home directory with some json in it e.g event_name:blah,interval:1m,data=10 - no server side config at all!

So should be quite suitable for big deployments :)

[1]: https://monitormonkey.io

Open source Granloa alternative https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote

I'm working on a motion capture app. The idea is that I can map my movement that's recorded through webcam footage into the movement of a 3d model. This project has involved 3d graphics and AI through 2d pose estimation and 2d to 3d pose lifitng. This project's been pretty fun so far. Here's the github link:

https://github.com/aabiji/mocha

As a hobby started working on Verso, a 6 DoF arm using Dynamixel servos, Raspberry Pi, python and javascript (for controller). https://youtube.com/shorts/Wpnihkz23BE?feature=share

All code opensource at https://github.com/meekaaku/verso

Aside from my main project, ʻŌlelo Honua, I'm working on an air/hydro foil simulation (just for fun). Currently using rudimentary physics and in it's early stages. Would like to add more particles and incorporate Navier-Stokes equations.

[1]ʻŌlelo Honua:

https://www.olelohonua.com

[2] Foil Sim:

https://foil.olelohonua.com

I’m working on https://dropbag.co (fyi, not optimized for mobile web yet)

It’s a service for endurance athletes to configure nutrition packs to be available along the course at aid stations.

Right now it’s just a cool tool to build the bags based on your nutrition goals. I’m still doing a lot of outreach to race directors to get an opportunity to pilot the distribution of bags at an event.

I'm building Meteor (https://browse.dev) - an agentic browser. The goal is to remove the prompting layer in CUA, and to have a browser that just gets you and can do actions like a personal assistant.

I got tired of waiting for Perplexity to launch Comet, so me and a friend just decided to build our own. This is probably the most fun I have had building a project.

I made a game called "So you think you know Brisbane?", in which you guess the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

https://johnscolaro.xyz/projects/so-you-think-you-know-brisb...

I'm working on expanding it to all large cities in Queensland, moving it to its own domain, and monetizing it to cover hosting costs.

I'm about to wrap up the alpha release of an Rust/Tauri based GUI desktop app that allows me (and others if interested) build modular AI agents. At this point it gives you control over the system prompt, LLM, message and which MCP tooling you want to use (to prevent cluttering the request with 69 unnecessary tools you do not need anyway). You can store agents as templates, so you can reuse them with ease.

1. Brain dump

- Voice based note taking tool that does transcription locally

- Markdown files to any folder(s) you setup.

- Help with ideation, rumination, todolists

- Alternative to when writing is too high friction

- https://voicebraindump.com

2. VoiceType

- wisprflow, superwhisper alternative

- runs locally so no subscription

- dictation tool, best for when using cursor, windsurf, chatgpt or talking to an LLM

- https://carelesswhisper.app

Are these running whisper underneath?

I'm just currently spending my free time learning elixir/phoenix to build some fun useless real time apps just to learn the ins and outs of it all

https://monadicdna.com

Open, secure personal genomics using fully homomorphic encryption.

With 23andMe bankrupt, I want to put out somewhere secure people can put their genomic data and receive insights. In a few months, I'll have a protocol in place to open up the data to third party apps (with user consent). The data does not have to be decrypted ever to be operated upon!

I'm working on making Anubis way less aggressive so that it only challenges the worst of the bad bots. I found a pattern that the bots can't fake client side and I've turned that into a sample rule that I've deployed to my website.

    anubis_policy_results{action="CHALLENGE",rule="bot/lies-browser-but-http-1.1"} 3891

This is coming soon to an Anubis near you!

https://computeprices.com

A side project I started at the end of last year.

It's pretty clear that compute and energy are going to be two of the most important resources to track and manage in the coming decades. I'm trying to get a sense for prices and usage of compute and this project is my attempt to do that hopefully providing useful info to others as well.

I've been meaning to build a Stripe app to experiment with their UI SDK, which allows you to extend the Stripe dashboard interface with custom code. I took a go at it with a Customer Enrichment app: https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/hybound-enrichment and got a couple of installs!

I've been working hard on MCP Router. MCP Router is a free desktop app (Windows/Mac) that lets you securely manage local or remote MCP servers via GUI, with access control & logs.

https://github.com/mcp-router/mcp-router

Works with VSCode, Cursor, Cline and any MCP client, and connects to servers from any registry (Zapier, Smithy, etc.).

ELI5: What is MCP, and how would I find it useful?

It’s a protocol to extend the capabilities of LLMs. https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol

I’m working on supporting photo posts on my blog (Kirby), I bought a new camera and thought it would be nice to share them in one place (Cross post to Mastodon).

I’m still looking for a new SaaS idea, so if you have something you want to partner on do reach out. Preferably Rails or Go. Previously I built stuff like https://getbirdfeeder.com/

Exploring MCP (model context protocol) using Claude as a base LLM. I understand that this is quite new and may change a lot in the next few months but I feel something interesting could be done by plugging transactional APIs to a LLM. Remind me of the old CGI (common interface gateway) stuff in the 1990s.

This kind of hack can lead LLMs to be the 21st century browsers.

Oh yes... also working on preparing my retirement end of this year...

ProductMe App: A Duolingo-like app for learning product management theory. It's for people who don’t want to spend thousands on PM bootcamps or courses, but still want quality learning material

It’s free to use with a reasonable daily limit (5 lessons). To access unlimited learning and additional utility features, it's ~$4.99/month

https://productme.org

I’ve been working on https://ulry.app - a simple link archiver that lets you tag and attach notes on each URL. Right now I’m working on a feature that uses LLMs to summarize an article.

Plus, implementing encryption for https://github.com/mattrighetti/envelope

LLM document editor using your voice only.

Sounds basic, and it is, but I've yet to find any open source project (let alone product) that does this.

All I want to tap a button, talk to the little guy about how to update my document, and see the changes flow. I guess Claude projects or similar might do this but I'm making it more for friends and family. Current use case is keeping track of a house renovation project going on.

Mostly just exams this month haha, but technically a self-hostable workout tracking app.

The only self-hosted option I found was wger.de and while it looks great, it's a bit too much for my needs. I want something lightweight (so as not to hog resources on my cheap VPS) that does what it needs to do and nothing more.

It's been a while since I've done web dev, so I'm going to try out Deno (TypeScript) with htmx.

I'm working on an internal office project: an AI assistant that connects with project management tools, Google Sheets, and shipment tracking apps. It helps teams manage orders, track production statuses, pull real-time updates, and summarize next steps — all without switching between different systems. Goal is to streamline operations and make project and logistics tracking a lot faster.

I'm creating a keyboard driven list application like Trello. It's going to be the «Obsidian of lists».

Everything will be bound to a key in the spirit of VIm :-)

I don't have a landing page yet, but if this sounds interesting to you, you can sign up here: https://lindon.app

I'd also love to hear what would be important to you in an application like that.

Also see https://checkvist.com/

I build right now 7 birdhouses. Using Wood and 3D printed PETG. Each house is a different Build. On computer side I implement a CPU in Verilog for a FPGA for fun. For Bussines I build the firmware for a LCD monitor that can display up to 16 video inputs. It can scale, cut, rotate and distort every input and then place them on different layers. The device is used in telemedicine

I am aiming to contribute meaningfully to the postgres project, to learn and grow as a Postgres hacker, I want to hear directly from you—PostgreSQL users—about the problems you face, big or small.

I created this "ASK HN" post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43886414 please share your feedback.

Quick project practicing working with some AI tools (Replit, etc) - https://www.tasktiley.com/ which is a task manager focused on building good habits. I was missing a year-long view of what had been completed (similar to what GitHub does for developers) so implemented a contribution graph for tasks.

I keep adding new features to my hobby project at https://nobsutils.com It's a collection of various tools that run locally in your browser. The latest addition is a simple color palette maker https://nobsutils.com/colors

I recently spent a week building a pricing experiment to test whether moving OnlineOrNot from feature based pricing (upgrade to a higher tier for more features) to pure usage (all features enabled, additional monitors cost money).

Not your regular "idea" but still interested in how it plays out.

https://onlineornot.com for the curious.

Working on a python library for combining shell commands and python functions with pipeline operator syntax. Hasn't progressed beyond an experimental prototype, some of the tests (i.e. test_bash_pipe.py) show how it works.

- repo: https://github.com/JanukanS/cudgel/tree/main

In little bits of free time I get here and there, I've been working on using reinforcement learning to build some better bots for my favorite multiplayer game. Project is up here: https://github.com/cgadski/autotude

So far all my work has gone into the technical side of setting up the game (a Java app written in 2010) to work as a reinforcement learning environment. The developers were nice enough to maintain the source and open it to the community, so I patched the client/server to be controllable through protobuf messages. So far, I can:

- Record games between humans. I also wrote a kind of janky replay viewer [1] that probably only makes sense to people who play the game already. (Before, the game didn't have any recording feature.)

- Define bots with pytorch/python and run them in offline training mode. (The game runs relatively quickly, like 8 gameplay minutes / realtime second.)

- Run my python-defined bots online versus human players. (Just managed to get this working today.)

It took a bunch of messing around with the Java source to get this far, and I haven't even really started on the reinforcement learning part yet. Hopefully I can start on that soon.

This game (https://planeball.com) is really unique, and I'm excited to produce a reinforcement learning environment that other people can play with easily. Thinking about how you might build bots for this game was one of the problems that made me interested in artificial intelligence 8 years ago. The controls/mechanics are pretty simple and it's relatively easy to make bots that beat new players---basically just don't crash into obstacles, don't stall out, conserve your energy, and shoot when you will deal damage---but good human players do a lot of complicated intuitive decision-making.

[1] http://altistats.com/viewer/?f=4b020f28-af0b-4aa0-96be-a73f0... (Press h for help on controls. Planes will "jump around" when they're not close to the objective---the server sends limited information on planes that are outside the field of vision of the client, but my recording viewer displays the whole map.)

OkNext! (https://oknext.io) - a task manager for solopreneurs and small teams.

I'd love for you to try it out! It is browser based only for now and pretty basic. I'm adding features sparingly as needed but my next task is to add some documentation for brand new users and making what it can already do more obvious.

The screenshot on the homepage should be a demo instance of the web app that uses session storage.

A dense UI, nice.

I have small solo project that I am slowly expanding on. It started as an old-fashioned text sentiment analysis more for my amusement more than anything else ( no real insights were gleamed so original version was used as a foundation for what came next ). I don't think I will ever put it out there publicly, but it keeps me occupied when I need a distraction.

Nothing fancy. Just this[0].

It's a bottom-to-top rewrite of a timer app that I've had in the App Store since about 2012. This is probably the fourth rewrite.

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara/tree/master/...

The world didn’t have enough json variants. I’m doing my part and inventing a new data interchange format. Don’t worry though, it’s not compatible with any of the others.

Edit: in case this sounds like a piss take, I’m serious about it. My way is really better though! No syntax typing, efficient encoding, human writable. But also not like the other formats with those properties.

Trying to use genetic algorithms to evolve voice styletts2 tensors for kokoro. Using Resemblyzer as part of fitness calculations. Results have been interesting with over fitting occuring where the voice sounds horrendous but scores high (usually later generations). The funnest part has been exploring how it all works and finally committing to a Python project.

I'm working on email. Principles are growing stronger and for some reason I don't want to use Gmail/Tuta/Proton anymore, so I'm _making my own_. It'll be paid and you'll be able to bring your own domain and however many aliases/inboxes you need.

It'll eventually be at c3n.ro and will be "sovereignly" hosted in the EU.

Predicting RNA-sequencing data from DNA sequence!

I'm building a simple, minimalistic web-based note-taking app called tonotes.com. https://tonotes.com

It's still a work in progress, but it's already functional if you want to try it out. I'm keeping it super lightweight, clean, and focused just on writing without the usual bloat.

I'm on a schema migration tool for tortoise-orm. tortoise-orm is a mature async ORM but it lacks a good migration tool. It isn't a super exciting project but it is something that people request over and over again.

https://github.com/henadzit/tortoise-pathway

AI Agents and search for the AEC I industry.

Recently I was fortunate to join a cool startup (as Head of Engineering) that tries to improve the AEC industry by helping them with their paperwork.

So lots of RAG, chat, agents, deep research. It's really interesting but also challenging. The biggest challenges are: large data; different stakeholders/user stories in one org

Continuing to work on my indie app https://textsniper.app

I'm working on an open-source Pivotal Tracker. I just started a week ago but if anyone is interested in following please checkout the repo: https://github.com/bendangelo/Iterator

I'll have a working project in about a month. But for now it's just a readme.

A bit of a mix between Pokemon Go, Tripadvisor/Wikivoyage and Duolingo.

Basiclaly an app where you can travel a city on a hex grid (h3) and learn about it/receive recommendations on things to do. Different activities and landmarks are hooked into language learning games, which when completed, add phrases/words to a flashcard deck for future study.

I am working on DevOps AI for my DollarDeploy platform. Helps you define correct settings when deploying any kind of app, guessing from the GitHub repo contents. Not another chatbot but Cursor IDE style autocomplete for the app configuration.

For now it is a bunch of ifs, and that's ok - lot of them are generated with AI but validated to be reasonable.

I have working on a pluggable secret and key scanner from scratch [1]

The idea is to build scanning databases, file systems, buckets, etc. for static keys and credentials while allowing users to add new file types and parsers.

[1] https://github.com/adaptive-scale/blacklight

A tool to address friction in B2B interactions (mostly between large companies) I've seen in my career. Main innovations are in comms and contract management. Leaning in on some hardcore dev talent in the team for the stack: there's Rust and Gemini in the mix. I'd say we're past the halfway point of MVP development

Honestly a little bit hesitant to say anything yet. There are a few more features to add, and a whole lot more work to be done to showcase just how cool it is. But the short version is, I'm working on a sort of meta-pico8, a game maker for WebGL2 2d pixel art games (e.g. 320x180 games like Animal Well) that runs in the browser, but one that's firstly collaborative, so that we can all build it together. And some of the coolest features are the based around that. For example, I got arbitrary imports of user code working in the browser, so all you have to do is create an account, add a JS file, and other people can import it as if it were a built-in module, and it just works. Plus the SDK I ended up making is simple, and the API is clean, and there's a few innovations in the GUI layer that I'm excited to share. I wish I could explain just how cool this is.

Interesting, I have been working on a similar project, albeit 320x240.

I also got some code-share and collaboration features working, but got a bit stuck on fonts. But I can appreciate your feeling of 'how cool this is'

I ground to a halt once I realised I had no barrier to entry, ie it could be cloned very easily. Always an issue with Web Development I guess. Plus I hate what modern browsers have become in recent years and not sure I want to target such a fast moving platform. I got burned once already with WebStart 'warning this app might do something scary' and certificate fiasco.

I thought about some native binaries, but I know I am kidding myself. I had an ios app that was pixel cloned within 6 months. But somehow a web app feels like publishing straight into public domain.

It's not just the web, native apps have always had free open source clones that technically render them useless, often just as good quality, yet they didn't go out of business. There are other considerations people make when deciding to use an app, including network effect, a strong community, sheer level of quality and passion from the developers, etc.

For fonts, I just went with a simple raster bitmap font and pixel grid storage format. Creating these limitations makes it easier for me and for developers and artists. I choose 320x180 because it fits the 16:9 perfectly, which would make full screen ideal on most monitors.

A website that extracts useful images from youtube videos. It would be a summary but includes the images because "text only" doesn't work for really new ideas. and "text only" doesn't show bar graphs. And I think I will make it also make it draw boxes and arrows on top of the images for extra clarity.

https://esp32.jgarrettcorbin.com

I made an online partition calculator for ESP32. I made it because calculating this manually is a huge pain, and the only tool I could find was google-sheet based. I've gotten some feedback from people who've found it useful.

www.promptcol.com

A prompt collection platform that let's you organize your prompts, share them, learn prompts from other users and reuse them on multiple LLM / AI platforms. It's aimed at improving prompt engineering skills for both technical and non technical LLM users. Currently in Alpha phase and actively looking for feedback.

https://recipit.me

I was tired of all the ads, and the poor formating on recipe websites.

So I made a website to import food recipes from any location (text, YouTube, file...).

It has been fun so far! I tried importing from fb/ig by using a meta app but it has been a horrible experience so I scrapped that ^^

My own terminal emulator [0] currently in closed beta with a hundred users. Reach out if you're into testing experimental stuff (info on the site.)

Terminals are tragically under powered as well as hostile towards beginners! We're moving the needle there.

[0] https://terminal.click

A podcast summarization tool:

https://podcasts.yayaapps.com/

I have too many podcasts to listen to and realistically not enough time to get through all of them, so I created a web app that transcribes and summarizes your podcasts and emails you a summary every morning.

I'm working on GPU-accelerated SQL+Spark in a zero-hassle package: https://paraquery.com

Been prod for a few months, recently ripping through 900TB with ~5x efficiency (customer was on BigQuery).

If anyone has any data/infra challenges, or just wanna talk about this kind of tech, lemme know :D

Very early stage, no link, but I have been working on getting terminal fonts (like Cascadia Code) to work in the browser more progressively without requiring such a giant single download, and on using them for text-based animations. One of those unimportant, low-stakes kind of projects that makes it relaxing to work on :P.

Various interviews. Ideally putting various other things back together thereafter.

Conversely, tearing apart a bunch of things, around my family's house -- invasive vines, old worn-down structures, an extensive amount of brush, etc.

Aside from that, getting a landing page working for my side project along with various ancillary tasks for a demo deploy.

PwnScan - https://pwnscan.com/

My current side project is a vulnerability scanner for binaries. I do VR in my day job, so im trying to figure out how useful (or not) AI is for this domain.

Jury is still out. Getting false positives and negatives, but I can find some known CVEs!

Building a AI-assisted aviation regulation compliance tool for aviation professionals: https://aviation.bot At the moment just a RAG with EU aviation regulations. Soon FAA, UK CAA, and more complex AI agent features that do more complex deep research.

Checkra, an inline assistant for UX, copy and conversion feedback right on your site. It’s easy to set up with a tiny JS snippet and free to use - no account needed. We’re using it for our in-house product development and it has streamlined our workflow for generating A/B versions of pages and copy significantly

https://repoiq.be

Website allows you chat with all github repository.

https://www.ticketsidekick.com/

I'm working on TicketSidekick having lots of fun with pinecone, chromadb, llms, aws serverless and golang!

TicketSidekick is a smart support agent that manages tech support automatically across the entire incident lifecycle.

Pinecone integration too, that's cool!

Yup we are big fans.

Turns out 2 companies do exactly this thing:

1. https://www.stack-ai.com/ 2. https://www.intercom.com/

pivoting to something else closing down ticketsidekick after a customer brought up stack-ai.

I launched Foqos here a few months back: https://github.com/awaseem/foqos and just working on the feedback. Since then added QR codes, breaks, ability to block apps manually and even a mini redesign. It’s been a ton of fun so far!

I've been working on Million Timer (https://milliontimer.com), a time-blocking and invoice generation app for freelancers who hate tracking time but need to do it anyway.

While it's still in alpha phase, please feel free to beta test and roast it.

I’m working on https://askcrystal.info. We’re a government dataset aggregator in our very early stages. We’re looking to expand into API use cases, e.g. grounding LLM responses. Would love to get feedback and connect with others in the space.

We're building Grovs (https://grovs.io), an alternative to Firebase Dynamic Links, Branch.io, and AppFlyer. It handles dynamic links, attribution tracking, and referral analytics—great for deep linking and marketing—at about 40% of the cost.

https://github.com/luizpvas/explicit

Explicit is a validation and documentation library for REST APIs built with Rails that enforces documented types at runtime. This week I added support for MCP servers with the Streamable HTTP transport.

Just launched a free, online tool to easily copy Cloudflare firewall rules across multiple domains: https://configberry.com/blog/042025/copy-cloudflare-waf-rule...

I am a tech guy, now turned VC in Europe. However, something curious and interesting I'm working on with some partners is the renovation of a Palazzo in Venice. Learning new things almost every week. Absolutely stressful, and exhilarating. Completely different from coding or investing in tech startups.

Cool! Got a blog or similar?

No, but I should.

Working on adding Job schedule and cron features in Daestro[1].

About Daestro: Daestro is workload orchestrator that can run compute jobs across cloud providers and on your own compute as well. More like cloud agnostic batch jobs or step functions.

[1]: https://daestro.com

I’m building an accounting automation tool that captures and extracts information received from your billing inboxes and send them to your accounting system. I had this idea after freelancing and running a small software business in Estonia for 4 years. Let me know if you want to become an early adopter!

Taking on a fun technical challenge, building a distributed database to serve the needs of Actor State saves in Orleans. Using the guarantees around actor placement to implement something optimal for its needs.

Much cheaper to hire a VPS with attached local storage, than to use an external database and a lot quicker too.

Building a foot traffic API to see the busiest venues (bars, shops, museums, etc) in (your) worldwide neighborhood: https://besttime.app We are now busy adding more demographic data like age, male/female ratio, tourist level, etc

An MCP server that runs and exposes a language server. Current tools seem to mostly use grep but this works much better for many tasks.

I'm new to Go and this has been a fun project.

https://github.com/isaacphi/mcp-language-server

Working on my university degree. I failed my first one and now I got myself into a critical situation again. Started using Anki. I often put in the hard work of thoroughly understanding a subject but don’t profit off it because I don’t keep the understanding after that. I am working on improving that.

I'm developing trading bot for Pocket option binary options https://github.com/VitalySvyatyuk/pocket_option_trading_bot I created it to myself dreaming about passive constant profit.

https://visitorquery.com a proxy & VPN detecting tool that does it's thing based on the specifics of a connection rather than parsing list and known databases which makes it very effective against residential ones too.

I cobbled together something that generates playing cards from html and css. Currently running off a csv, building a game for a friend's birthday.

The experience with printers has left me thinking there's a gap in the market for _good_ Europe-based, small batch card printing. Awful experience with printers.

[1] Surveys. Thinking about how to tighten up the onboarding experience, improve brand awareness, improve in-app data analysis, and how to integrate AI in new and exciting ways... and handling customer support tickets!

[1]https://www.zigpoll.com

I'm writing a lightweight high-performance stream processing engine：https://github.com/arkflow-rs/arkflow

docs:https://arkflow-rs.com/

Building a Magic: the Gathering draft assistant trained on historical data.

Produces a pick order that shifts as the draft progresses.

Have a browser runnable colab notebook for 20+ sets.

https://github.com/danieljbrooks/statistical-drafting

Working on a bitmap vectorizer for my SVG editor Hyvector https://www.hyvector.com

I am also working on the last few remaining issues of Hyvector, of which some are surprisingly difficult to solve and AI unfortunately cannot help me a lot.

I work for an asshole, it's been 4 years but i can't find any other job (frontend) i found the job when i was 17. i hate it so much that i don't have any will to code on other things but lately i have been learning more low level programming like c and doing shaders using c.

I'm working on a distributed object storage system to be the backing store behind my website (https://scmscx.com). It currently uses back blaze b2 which is good and cheap but I thought it would be fun to roll my own.

https://tankly.com.au

I'm working on software specifically for the bulk water cartage/haulage industry.

There was no ready-made solution in the market so looking to fill the gap.

If anyone knows any water haulers looking to digitize their business, let me know!

An email-based service to mail your photos as postcards. As a parent of littles: the littles love the postcards, and the grandparents love them too.

I know you can print photos at Walgreens etc, but I never do it because it has some friction: email-based reduces almost all of the friction in my use case.

I'm working on switching teams, finding a new job, or beating this PIP. None of that looks promising.

I manage remote engineering teams and I'm building a series of tools to help facilitate our standard ceremonies (standups, retros, ice-breakers etc.).

I'm trying to capture a sense of fun, wonder and connection through these tools which I feel has been lost in recent times with remote working.

I’m working on https://vimgolf.ai, to help me learn new vim commands and in doing so hopefully help others. Right now, still working on adding the ai assisted level creation for each motion, but more to come on that.

Is it possible to add an interactive challenge or two on the homepage prior to sign up? I think that would hook people in and make them want to sign up.

Good idea, currently I spin up a 2 neovim instances for each challenge, so can only spin up so many at once with my current setup. But, am moving to a kubernetes setup where I can scale up and down the number of neovim instances more reliably and will add that in then.

Ah, I assumed it would be an nvim JS clone running client side. Had you looked into that route?

I have, but all the JS vim clones are emulations of vim, and don't support all the vim motions (like copying from registers, etc). I honestly could do that and it would be easier, but doing it this way, also allows me to record the keystrokes directly from the neovim runtime.

One suggestion: please consider allowing custom key mappings. I use a Colemak-DH layout, so I remap HJKL and other VIM keys to more ergonomic positions. Tools like Vimium support this, and it’d really help with accessibility for non-QWERTY users.

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll see if I can add this into the plugin for neovim I use.

Botnet of Ares, a hacking video game where you control millions of devices: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

I'm currently developing qApp, a lightweight queue and appointment reservation management system for businesses (banks, clinics, shops, etc.). The idea is to let customers join a queue through a simple online form and receive updates via SMS — no apps, no complicated logins.

A privacy app for macOS which tells you when someone is looking at your screen.

It uses the webcam and a locally running facial detection model to alert you if it detects someone in frame.

It's FOSS and available @ https://www.eyesoff.app

Billing. Subscription plans and invoices in micro services architecture.

I honestly hate it at this point and would appreciate any reading on the topic. It's been a grueling 4 months of back and forth with a lot of mission critical business aspects to handle that I had to learn on the fly.

I'm preparing my t-shirt store for launch soon.

I was having trouble meeting people after moving to a new city so I designed and printed some goofy funny t-shirts for my wardrobe, and that has really helped on getting the ball rolling on conversations.

Hoping to make the launch within the next few weeks.

What are some examples? I'd love to check out your store but I'm worried by the time you launch this post and any communication with you will have vanished to the ether.

Usually some commentary or puns on a random relatable life topic, I started with jokes about allergies.

I'll setup a redirect on https://shop.gtmnayan.com when it's ready, still have to figure out logistics.

I’m working on Nelly, a no-code AI agent platform for building, using and (soon) sharing AI assistants.

It’s currently in beta for macOS but I’m waiting for Anthropic to extend my rate-limits before I announce it here on HN.

https://nelly.is

An online coop game inspired by Ice Climber (NES) and Spelunky. Randomly generated chaotic coop fun is my goal.

https://bsky.app/profile/arcadenest-games.bsky.social

A v2.0 update for my biology education app. I'm adding the ability to walk around cell models with billions of atoms on the Vision Pro.

I'm designing the content browser right now. I'm trying to achieve something really immersive like Apple's new Spatial Gallery app.

A website for AI/Semiconductors/Tech news with our own threaded comment/reply functionality. https://www.asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads

Super super small g2p library (IPA transcription) with Zig, WASM, and Llama.

https://seongminpark.com/ipa-transcription-in-kilobytes-with...

Shipped a new programmatic ads debugging tool https://floors-check.mile.so/ .

It has these capabilities for now : - Prebid flooring insights ( uses an LLM to generate a summary )

- screenshot at various times

- real time console logs

- Prebid detection

https://workplacify.com/ - an open source desk booking software. Can be self-hosted.

There is some small improvements to make but I want to focus on onboarding via a sandbox environment first next month.

Trying to understand the possibility and feasibility of LLM on Indian vedas and ancient hindu mythology. I am thinking like there is a input box where user will enter his problem,/query and get resolved with the help of Vedas, puran and old hindu religious books.

A webapp to display a dialect map of the area where my language is spoken and where variations of the same word are used.

It'll be my first major personal project since I haven't had the time or a serious idea worth implementing (In my mind, at least), so I'm excited!

I started an Application and API Gateway: https://github.com/jmaister/taronja-gateway

I am making it for myself, focused on less config as possible and making it secure by default.

Building a suite of apps and a piece of hardware for my Sovereign IT stack. CarPuter and Daily Driver App Club (dailydriverapps.com).

Think multi-generational family and asset data. Everything in common formats, written in simple code.

Looking for early customers or modest pre-seed investment.

My 2D engine

https://carimbo.run/

An eBook sever on raspberry pi running nodejs. I had a lot of issues with iCloud not being able to download my books, plus my entire library is almost 1 GB. So, my solution is to serve a list of PDFs over node and allow download of a specific page range.

pile - a framework & cli for managing a large number of docker-compose files running on the same machine.

Inspired by a pile-of-poo SOA application where essentially every service was dependent other services such that the entire app stack needed to be run in order for any 1 service to work.

In addition to organizing the array of docker-compose files, which may live in different directories, i also add some helper functions to bring clarity to the usual docker cli output. Ugly "docker ps" output can be gathered by using pile ports, pile commands, & pile state - all of which output what you think they do, but in a way that is actually legible and useful when running 20+ containers locally.

RSS -> LLM -> RSS

https://zacusca.net

Currently, I am exploring one of the simplest and fastest ways to create a command-line utility (in TypeScript) and its distribution mechanism

- repo: https://github.com/vseplet/PPORT

I am building https://hire.blue, its a platform for HR to reduce time to interview by 90% while being applicant friendly, this can be used as a ATS for small companies and for founders!

I'm currently developing qApp, a lightweight queue and appointment reservation management system for businesses. The idea is to let customers join a queue through a simple online form and receive updates via SMS — no apps, no complicated logins.

Still supporting https://monkeys.zip - my pet art project where users simulate thousands of monkeys on typewriters for silly rewards. After which, moving on to a music creation app.

Working on static website hosting. Thinking about how I can build backend functionality for customers as well while maintaining the openness that the static hosting has offered.

https://orbiter.host

I use Fastpanel, which is an incredible tool for that, but seems to be completely unknown. Free as well.

https://www.cobolcopilot.com/

We use a combination of 1) static analysis/PL theory and 2) Large Language Models to help large enterprises decode their legacy COBOL systems

Some time ago I create a RSS client. RSS feeds operated as Sources for data. I have extended them to be able to parse pages, collect links.

Currently I have decided that I can add "Email" as source, to be able to read not only news, but emails in my app.

I'm working on an application that will help me install AppImages. The problem I'm solving is that some apps come with the wrong logo/icon. So in the app I'm building we'll be able to set a custom icon for the AppImage.

code input - https://codeinput.com

A merge conflict resolution tool integrated with GitHub. Now working on a solution for preemptive conflict detection and a smarter/simpler merge queue.

https://domdb.com - aftermarket domain name aggregator and search engine.

It has integrated BIN inventories from Afternic, Sedo, Namecheap, Porkbun, and Gname.

Currently working on custom price alerts and an API.

Currently I'm developing https://findl.top. Lately I've added sort of an AI-analyst, which can help to find meaningful changes from one financial report to another

Automation of Linux distribution testing using qemu and sparky

https://github.com/melezhik/sparky-qemu-example/tree/alpine

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=ARD+Online one of these.

(Trying to stay a little pseudonymous, so here is a list.)

Infinite 3D worlds! Also love how the Godot engine is so small and fast

https://github.com/bsubard/Godot-3D-Procedural-Infinite-Terr...

if you haven't seen, there is a fun game on the xbox called Exo One. i am certain it could be done in the browser.

on Orchestra, a chat-centered tool that addresses the collaboration gap. it’s when your software drives you crazy with all its complex features and integrations, when all it should really do is help you work. simple as that.

startups and small teams like ours don’t need a monster setup. we just need the basics to communicate and manage (as god intended). a few years back, the three of us – me and two fellow CTOs – got tired of searching for the right tool, so we built one ourselves.

so, here’s Orchestra – https://orch.so/.

if you’re up for trying it out and sharing some feedback – please do!

I am collecting IPs and other IOCs from some servers and honeypots that I have around and aggregating them with well known IPs and IOCs.

I would like to create a sort of search engine for that.

Nothing fancy or innovative, but just to learn Golang in a bigger context.

i am building a little iMessage app called Whenish.

this was spurred from group texts with friends planning a vacation or outing. we would just throw a bunch of dates that would get lost in the mix and people would forget who was open on what dates. Whenish just allows user to select dates they are free and then it will show what is the best date that works for everyone.

i have a testflight right now and if anyone wants to give it a go please do! i would love feedback :)

https://testflight.apple.com/join/4HaADNMF

ps: i am not a designer and app icons are hard

I've been building proxymock, a CLI tool which automatically builds mocks and load tests from captured traffic.

Feedback appreciated - https://proxymock.io/

After a 30 years delay, perhaps I can finally build a game with AI. https://youtu.be/5_73DO9juBA?si=DCRH89vXapOI3nWG

Haha similiar story, with AI I got now the enhanced productivity to build things myself instead of wishing to split myself into multiple clones.

Bug out bags, emergency contact phone trees, burner phones, places with cheap visas

An open-source security platform, unifying SIEM and fraud prevention for web applications.

https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno

Go program that converts markdown files (e.g. from an obsidian vault) to RSS feed with tags, publication date, etc.

https://github.com/TimoKats/mdrss

How To Beat Procrastination And Write A Book With Github Copilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnjt1gJo3Ts

I'm working on https://kaiboard.com which was at first throwaway project that somehow survived and now has couple of users who love it :)

I'm working on a desktop-based, performance- and privacy-first note-taking app that lets you quickly capture notes from any selected text using hotkeys.

I'm curious: what are your must-haves in a note-taking application?

> I'm curious: what are your must-haves in a note-taking application?

Unlimited undos. Even if I deleted text a year ago, app must bring it back. Ideally something like git, with branches and auto-commits.

Great, thanks. This is already in my minimum requirements.

I thought about doing something similar some time ago, because I never quite found the perfect note taking app for myself. There's a million ways how to do notes, and it feels like there's just as many different notes apps.

Eventually, I've settled with Obsidian because of its simplicity and extensibility. You can leave it with basic features and truly own your notes in a simple format (you can also put them into any cloud, as long as that cloud reaches your filesystem). It doesn't do everything just like I'd want to, but I've thought about just building another notes app that reads and writes to the same path your Obsidian notes are in, instead of trying to cover every possible editing feature like most big notes apps. Then I'd use different apps for different needs, with one place to store data.

Since you're focusing on privacy, have you considered using Obsidian? Is there anything particular you want to do differently?

Basically I want to build it with focus on speed and work efficiency from start. To not bias myself too much, I will refrain from doing too much market research. First of all I'm building this for myself, and I'm guessing it might translate into at least a tiny market share.

Developing an open source library that simulates pigment mixing in the browser, inspired by mixbox[1].

[1] https://scrtwpns.com/mixbox.pdf

I’ve been doing a lot of work with ros2 lately at work. Been seeing some moves with VLA models driving robots with text prompts. I think I’m going to focus more of my “free” time on mastering that technology.

I am exploring ways that LLMs can be applied to language learning and spaced repetition.

https://github.com/RickCarlino/KoalaCards

Almightty: AI Terminal Emulator

which enables you to debug faster with error optimization.

you can join our community from website. https://www.almightty.org/

I am trying to create an open-source alternative to JustCall and CloudCall. These SaaS products use VoIP as their foundation and provide AI agents for calling, along with multiple features during the call.

Plugging away on my PostScript interpreter.

PostScript has two mechanisms to save and restore the machine state and they are intertwined and only vaguely documented. I'm trying to get my head around all that this week.

https://blackpage.ink/ a dev tools website, such as Color pick, Time Converter, I need it, as other site not good enough.

Working on Replyhub.co, AI that finds high-intent posts on Reddit and X where your product can naturally be introduced. It suggests replies, tracks leads, and helps turn conversations into conversions.

In my last week of funemployment before going back to work. I’m working on fun stuff like gardening, designing battle tech terrain in cad and building a web tool for solo roleplaying.

Nice to do something just for myself

https://mydogisthebest.org — my partner wants to build a self-therapy-through-dog-memories game, I'm doing the coding. :)

Is it supposed to be a photo album of your old dog photos??

It's dog-mediated self journaling. Remembering your life through their love :)

Self Improving Agents with Test Time Reinforcement Learning

https://github.com/CakeCrusher/self_improving_agents

I'm working on platform that helps you vibe code APIs. It'll generate clean, scalable, maintainable monolithic backend APIs built using Express + Postgres.

Launch soon! Drop a comment if you want early access

A local first read-it-later app for power users, who want to own their data. https://github.com/jonocodes/savr

I built a simple PDF invoice generator a few months ago. Been polishing that up recently: https://invoiceden.com/

I work at a secure online elections company. We're refactoring the code to make the tally as performant as possible, both in the use of resources and speed. So this is the fun part :)

https://VoteFeature.com - An open catalog of products and features where users can vote to help build what matters.

Fourth year of Wide Angle Analytics and going strong :)

More advanced digital marketing features, scaling and what's typical for mature product, an upgrade cycle of for major 3rd party dependencies.

https://kintoun.ai

A translation app that keeps document layout almost intact. It's also better than Google Translate and DeepL.

https://www.webring.gg

I've been working on a webring creation and management app with embeddable widgets for member sites.

Building SecretCrush.ai (NSFW) (https://secretcrush.ai) from scratch, form zero to one, with AI's support

any feedback is appreciated - btw

I'm still working like crazy on our privacy-friendly web analytics tool Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) :) I've been doing this for more than 4 years now and I'm still super motivated, especially because it's challenging from a technical point of view and very rewarding (I live from it now).

There is still a lot to do and learn (especially in the marketing department), but we have plans for a new product in the privacy space. I don't want to say too much about it until we've started working on it, but it's in the compliance space and fits quite well with our existing product. I think it's always a good starting point to solve your own problems.

I am extending my pet project menuop.com, a digital menu maker for restaurants. I plan to integrate AI to enhance visual impact, analytics and recommendations to restaurant owners.

I'm building Incidenthub.cloud - a B2B SaaS that monitors public status pages of third-party dependencies.

It was born out of a personal need in past roles and teams. I launched it last year.

IP Geolocation service with the best UX/DX possible. Straightforward API and SDKs https://ip-sonar.com

I'm currently building AttendList — https://attendlist.com — an attendance tracker for google meet.

I'm finetuning and improving a DI system I made for WordPress (https://github.com/x-wp/di)

A Unity for immersive visit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEsqp93sq3w

A visit generated by the tool.https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01

Trying to make interpretability research practical. A bit early for the demo, but I am getting some interesting results for large multimodal models in terms of their reasoning.

I'm building an AI meeting assistant that can help you "during" the meeting. https://caret.so

A clone of gifglobe[0] but for Italian movies/tv series. Very important stuff

[0] https://gifglobe.com/

An entry for the IOCCC (https://www.ioccc.org/), which is currently open until 2025-06-05.

Letterboxd for video-games! Don't know if it's novel enough but it's given me the chance to get into front-end design and think harder about database design.

A line haul network optimization engine for international air freight. Managing line haul schedules and freight moves between carriers/cities/terminals etc.

Injee - The no configuration instant Database for front end developers.

https://injee.codeberg.page/

I'm building a CLI time tracker. https://github.com/ludovicianul/timi

I've never coded in Python anything besides some scripts here and there.

So I started making a simple roguelike and an engine for a browser game. Nothing fancy but entertaining.

Built a bunch of tools for youtubers and content creators

https://shorts.aviparshan.com/

Finishing my book: https://www.rapid-saas-with-laravel.com/

Sourcing a vendor to unravel 2 decades worth of VBA macros that are the backbone of a company so that we can make it more modern and scalable/extensible.

I'm building a Bluesky analytics and post scheduling — https://theblue.social

http://blueintegrations.com

Jobless and no prospects ... Working on a couple projects at once.

1. Helping set up a friend's company to scale. 2. Interview about homeschool for my blog 3. A software project I'm not ready to talk about ;)

Im working on https://udf.ai/ ,Build and host data analysis agents quickly!

Trying to measure how well LLMs can make scientific hypotheses, and more generally, execute on the scientific process (as part of a pivot in my PhD).

https://www.PieterPost.com the easiest postservice in the world!

iOS app size analysis running locally on your mac: https://dotipa.app

Launching my AI product which will help HR in automating a lot of boring work, do let me know what should i do for a successful launch!

A new fitness app! Sign up for the waitlist at https://gaintain.co

I am working on a text based android RPG Game, its a boring incremental game, no graphics just some icons and button, and a battle log.

https://JobBoardSearch.com a meta directory of job boards

Jar File Explorer: https://jar-viewer.fly.dev/

A multitenancy library for .NET https://www.finbuckle.com

The menu links do not lead anywhere

I am currently redesigning how we blog with lakyai.com. The first version will likely be focused on technical writers like myself.

I am geoengineering yeast and bacteria using CRISPR to produce raw materials critical for European sovereignty.

Which one? We are figuring this out.

I’m working on a UK business search tool for people looking to buy businesses (ETA/Search funds/ M&A). No name yet.

i’m working on http://harcstack.org

Combining HTMX with raku Air, Red and Cro so that you can just build websites the right way™.

Here is an entire (minimal) website…

  use Air::Functional :BASE;
  use Air::Base;

  sub SITE is export {
    site
      page
        main
          p "Yo baby!"
  }

This is something I definitely want to check out. I was playing around with raku just before christmas and wanted to try making a small webapp with it.

https://volt.fm - Advanced Spotify Stats & Music Discovery

Event based portfolio tracker: https://stockevents.app

Great work, I've been using Stock Events on iOS for a while now. It's what got me into dividend investing, and it's fantastic to just keep track off all the dividend income.

Thank you so much! That's very kind of you. Good luck on your journey.

first order zero knowledge proof system (zk-stark), it works on android, macos, linux, webassembly, vulkan/cuda backend (metal coming), but the composition polynomial evaluation is suboptimal so i am working on that now

https://theorium.org/constraints.html

Computer-Use Agent for QA Testing https://testdriver.ai

https://cartes.app.

A free French alternative to Google maps. Soon European.

I'm working on finding an endorse for arxiv for SE. I want to publish a small paper applicable to front end development.

I'm building a no-code AI agents builder.

https://aiconstrux.com

Some random free APIs - http://freeapi.me/

Building browser-based RPA workflows with https://browsable.app/

Notably not an AI agent like Operator, Manus, etc. which are largely unreliable for the time being. Instead this uses AI to turn your task into something repeatable and configurable.

Currently focusing on scraping use cases but hope to make it more powerful soon so it can actually do complex tasks rather than just extracting data.

I want to work on a grid-based inventory system similar to those found in aRPGs and extraction games in the Godot engine.

I just discovered a new meta-discipline, which most likely will become a new science.

I know, it sounds crazy.

In a month or so, I’ll be sharing some news.

UTM builder for marketers in Flutterflow. Most on the market are hard-to-configure, bloated, and/or expensive.

I'm building a client-side encrypted personal management tool for myself, with support for file encryption:

Please consider adding country filters. I would love to use this in Canada while we are still an sovereign.

a multi ai workflow wizard engine

basically a user give an initial prompt ie "create a game" and then a series of ai (gemini, openai, claude) prompt themselves until a finished outcome. the user can change any output step in between so the end result can be tuned instead at any point

Interior design with image gen AI models. Getting AI to follow your prompt with inpainting is painful.

A TigerBeetle client for Haskell.

The smallest (in terms of system calls and code) event sourcing database I can make.

Being more present.

An AI Agent API service:

https://agentscode.dev

I'm working on a customer service product, that aims to bridge the gap in the industry now.

https://timer-task.com

A way to buy plastic bins by dimension size instead of volume. That supports multiple stores.

just finished https://www.treesnap.app/ now just doing some light marketing on the daily. next project is multi-vendor monstrosity so happy to have gotten that win.

just made an ai graphic designer for marketing emails

learns about your brand and creates custom email graphics for headers etc

pretty cool what gpt-image-1 can do

if curious, can check out https://graphic-design.email

A database of indieweb/blogosphere pages that lets people search for peer content.

working on muhu.ai : ai product manager

and this small site makes a curriculum for anything you want to learn and gives you books + sources to do so:

https://curriculum-me.fly.dev/

A TUI for categorizing financial transactions into valid plain text accounting records.

A sales co pilot that helps startups move deals faster. You can think of it of Cursor for sales. It knows to perfectly summarise deals activity and prepare the next action. Saving you precious time and enables you to close more customers faster

https://closer.so

Venture backed thing on language agnostic semantic mutation testing- testcode.ai

i finished working on www.startupselector.com - a free tool that helps startup ideas/health by asking relevant questions and analysis your answers.

currently i am working on a graaljs javascript web runtime written in clojure.

I am building my own journalling app.

I know there are several out there, but I have never liked any of them, and quite frankly never trusted any of them. So far I have only been writing my journals in google docs, but the one time I used the integrations to give the ai context of my writings, it sent a shiver through my spine.

I probably sound too paranoid and naive, and I know that things like obsidian exists, but this has been a passion project since long and I am glad I have finally started spending some consistent effort on building it.

no links or name to share yet, but yes that will hopefully come soon.

A mathematical / computational model of the primate primary visual cortex

visionOS app for adding a spatial component to real estate pre-listing checklists. a for-fun prototype to demo how helpful it can be to tie standard form data to a physical location in certain use cases

https://shkur.ski/notai A tool that automatically shows you relevant information as you work so you don't have to search for things manually. With privacy guarantees.

Being sick of where things are headed, I didn't want to join the "trend". Instead, there is NotAI. I built it for myself first and foremost, as I am:

  1. Too lazy to Alt+Tab into Notion in order to write a note or find it. Instead, I want to select text and write a note in-place. Next time when I see something relevant on screen, I want it to appear.

  2. Usually distracted with the need to structure information manually. If you see it on screen, it should be enough. With NotAI you see a name in messenger -- it adds contact automatically. You see meeting caps -- it memorises them. Etc.

  3. Tired of bloatware, all those 500MB text editors draining the battery. I wanted it to be fast, small and smooth. NotAI is fully native, consumes a few tens of MBs and runs even on modest 5-7 y.o. laptops. It's fully local, meaning no network requests / server-side processing -> reaction time is usually within 40ms.

  4. Sick of marketing bs. Privacy-first products with telemetry and requests to ChatGPT. Attempts to achieve "privacy" by redefining the meaning of it. I no longer believe what I read. If it's private, I want guarantees! So NotAI is fully local. It's a single executable program. You go Windows Defender (or any other firewall) and block it from network. Period.

Here is an old tech demo from last year: https://shkur.ski/notai/demo.mp4

Soloing over the changes to Peggy-O as well as Dylan’s Señor on my Tele.

https://skeet.build

Building a tool to supercharge your Cursor, Windsurf, Claude and other developer tools by connecting it to polished, high quality mcp servers for linear, slack, DBs, and other useful workflows.

I am working on words, symbolic representations, sound. Nothing fancy.

www.synthgenie.com – an AI-powered sound design assistant that connects to your hardware synth via USB MIDI and lets you control it using text, essentially turning the knobs for you.

Working on an electronic dictionary for my sister. She wanted something to look words up in Italian that wasn't her phone, and well I like a project. E-paper display, snapdome keyboard, an ESP32 to round it out. (Runs lisp.)

Pictures at the link. There's also some webtoys on there, feel free to peruse

https://lmao.center/babble/

This is kinda cool.

I would use a polished version.

When I read books, I find myself getting easily distracted since my phone has so many alternative apps/things to do OTHER THAN looking up a word in a dictionary.

I’m working on a simple app that logs Karting activity and data. My son has been karting for a year or so, and there is so much data to collect - times, pressures, sprocket set up, track location, weather and more (about 30 datapoints a session)

Collecting the data helps with recording engine performance, tyre ages, best lap times but is also really useful for recalling how well each setup performed for future reference.

I’m deliberately doing this all in a very low-tech way as my son will be creating a more polished version for a school project. We’re front-running that a bit to give him a good dataset and explore various ideas.

On that note, they do Python in school. For the backend it will be SqlLite and Flask. Any suggestions for the front end tech? This will mostly be forms- and grids-based so nothing sophisticated needed, but some simple client-side logic (e.g. validation, geolocation, simple stop watch) would be good. Ideally this would be python as well. We could use WebAssembly but am wondering if there is a suitable framework that does the is out-of-the-box.

I'm working on getting a wife.

I actively work on it a few hours every day.

What’s your method?

Having had some former coworkers that ended up at various dating platforms, dating is fascinating, I still think dating is something that needs a better modern solution than what “the apps” offer. Every dating app has a few fundamental flaws. There’s the human element too.

What worked for me was hacking Tinder circa 2014 by faking my geolocation and hypertargeting certain places and neighborhoods I knew would be up my dating alley and spamming posts on social media sites like Reddit and Craigslist.

It’s tough because some people don’t even know what they’re looking for in a partner.

I'm doing "daygame", 180 approaches so far.

I also use 5 dating apps, spend ~15min in them in total.

What kind of posts?

Building atlez.app with my brother to manage our BJJ course.

Loving the journey!

Learning to record my songs with Ardour, Hydrogen on Debian.

i am building a search engine for fashion with a virtual fitting room https://likeo.me

i write a website about website downlader, site downer https://sitedowner.com

Batteries included python starter template `py-launch-blueprint`

- https://github.com/smorin/py-launch-blueprint

Features TLDR

  - Bootstrap commands
  - Command Runner
  - Dev Tools: Ruff (linting/formatting), MyPy (type checking), Pre-commit hooks
  - AI Ready: Default configs for Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code
  - Production: Python 3.10+, uv package manager, testing setup
  - DX - Developer Experience: VS Code integration, sensible defaults, quality documentation
  - CI/CD: GitHub Actions workflows, automatic testing, version management
  - Task Templates, PR Templates
  - License and Contributor License Agreement Checks

TTS api for voice chatbots for customer support teams.

At home... about to welcome a dog, so that's going to shrink my free time even further.

On the "side projects" side of things, I've been working on a "boot to EndBASIC" disk image since December with the goal of creating a small "dev kit" box that boots quickly and directly into the interpreter. The disk image is pretty much done for a first release, so now I need to get to the design and 3D-printing of a case for the board+screen combo. The latter is brand new territory for me, and I have a self-imposed deadline of June when I'll be presenting this at BSDCan.

... but I've also taken a small detour to improve the EndBASIC website and provide a dynamically-generated gallery of user-uploaded projects. This has been a deficiency for a while and I felt it'd be easy to add it, right on time for the "dev kit" release.

Stay tuned!

working on kexa.io saas with an ia agent to do security administration on differents infrastructures ( gcp,aws,azure).

A special zero-latency service called Nonya

A static site generation library in Swift.

Virtual Staging with AI for real estate!

A CLI argument specification and a parser that implements it. Mostly because I’m annoyed with Python’s argparse, so I’m adding blackjack and removing hookers. Also because I’m annoyed with the arguments used for programs at work and how the same author might use args a different way for each tool (To pull up a usage string, you might need to use `help`, `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `+help`, or `+<prog>.help`… not all scripts display a usage string when no args are given).

It’s not much, but it’s all I can cram into the free time I have, there’s a possibility I might actually finish it for once, and it’s something I could actually use once it’s done.

Improving trend day detection signals.

Clarify?

Are you building a Google Trends like tool?

I've been using / testing out such tools lately for market research + discovering new ideas etc.

Trading markets.

muhu.ai : an ai product manager (makes biz reports and benchmark your dev team, keep everyone aligned)

a 3D camera setup using the cheapest gopro knockoffs maybe ever. $50 total. it'll look insane!

I’m building https://lorelight.ai/, a way for brands to monitor AI chatbots and see how they talk about their brands, watch for disinformation etc.

Still early stage but building it has been fun.

quit my senior eng manager job to vibe code on youtube www.youtube.com/@travis-vibes

I'm actually really interested to see how other people are coding with LLMs. I guess this sort of thing is already happening on youtube and I could have searched it out but I did not. Will checkout your channel.

I am particularly interested in seeing how you handle the transition from LLMs doing great at one-shot prompts but then struggling as the scope of everything expands and you have to get smarter about breaking down problems.

A 'social casino'. I know it's competitive but I think there is a room to make games targeted toward gen-z.

News filtered through Ai and Ml

Working on an EU domiciled PaaS

ok been quietly working on this thing for the past 5 months, and the reports finally hit the quality bar i was aiming for.

long story short: i built a system that scrapes a company’s site, profiles, press, and anything else it can find online, then runs it through a multi-model prompt engine i wrote from scratch (multiple LLMs chained together with custom logic). the workflow is split into three parts: crawl, process, synthesize.

output comes in markdown. all signal, no bs. useful for GTM, growth, competitor analysis, product gaps, strategic blindspots, that kind of thing.

i’ve been stress testing it on real companies. just pushed 2 sample reports to GitHub if you wanna peek:

- Grab (SEA unicorn) - LemmyHomes (early-stage Malaysian proptech)

→ https://github.com/lightyoruichi/numen-output

not selling it as a product (yet). backend still in dev. just doing reports manually for now while testing edge cases/validating if anyone wants this at all lol.

note: it’s not fully automated. i use the system to generate raw analysis, then apply human input to reframe, expand, or clean up weak insights. think of it like pairing with an AI researcher who works fast but lacks nuance/context, you still need a strategist to shape the output. there's tons more feature but at the core this is it.

happy to run one or two more this week if anyone wants a teardown. not free though (token cost’s brutal lol). DM if interested.

Learning iOS development by building a the habit-tracking app I wished existed - habit tracking has been done to death, but I couldn't find anything that worked exactly the way I wanted, so I figured I'd build it. I've found Swift / SwiftUI alternately delightful and infuriating so far. Most of my experience has been with web tech, so it's exciting to build something that doesn't run in a browser.

I'm developing PAPER (the Python Application, Package and Environment wRangler, a Python package installer), and will soon return to bbbb (the Bare-Bones Build Backend, a build backend for Python packages).

PAPER is designed from the ground up to avoid Pip design mistakes, directly taking advantage of new standards while also offering Pipx-like functionality. Unlike uv, Poetry etc., PAPER is not a project manager or workflow tool; it installs the packages that you tell it to (and their dependencies), when/where/because you do. It's entirely user-focused, and usefulness for developers is treated as mostly incidental. (However, it can of course form a useful part of a proper development toolchain.)

It's not in a publicly-usable state yet, but these are the main design principles I'm working from:

* It's designed from the ground up to provide a programmatic API and to install cross-environment (in fact, you're only expected to install in its own environment in order to provide plugins). The API is provided by a separate wheel; other projects can explicitly cite that as a dependency and don't have to `subprocess.call` to a CLI.

* Size and performance are paramount. (Much of Pip's slow performance on smaller tasks is due to its size). I'm aiming for ~1MB total disk footprint for the base installation (compare ~10-15 for Pip, which is often multiplied across several environments; ~35 for uv). Dependencies are very carefully considered; installations are cached as much as possible (and hard-linked when possible, like with uv); etc.

* The program bootstraps itself as a zipapp that pre-loads the program's own cache before having it install itself from its own wheel (within that cache). This entails that there aren't any "hidden" vendored dependencies; anything that ends up bundled with PAPER can immediately be installed with PAPER, without an Internet connection.

* Non-essential functionality can be provided later by simply installing optional dependencies. The default is sufficient for the program to install wheels with minimal feedback.

* The CLI is built around separate hyphenated commands rather than sub-commands, for simpler implementation and better tab-completion. Commands are aimed at offering somewhat finer-grained control while keeping simple use cases simple.

bbbb is largely inspired by Flit, but is also intended to support projects with non-Python code, and doesn't enforce distributions with a single top-level import package. It uses the same split between a core package and a full development package, except the core package is treated as default. It's designed to be even more minimal than flit-core, and in fact can only build wheels by itself (dynamically pulling in the dev package if asked to make an sdist).

The goal is to minimize download footprint and maximize modularity when end users download an sdist and want to make a wheel from it (for example, implicitly via an installer). Users will declare the dev package as the build system in pyproject.toml, and may even declare it as an in-tree backend which will then be automatically added to the sdist. So people who (for some reason - perhaps to satisfy Linux distro maintainers) want to distribute an sdist for pure Python code, won't need any build-time dependencies at all.

Building non-Python code in bbbb, as well as customizing sdist contents and metadata (beyond what's directly supported), works by hooking into arbitrary Python code. Unlike the setup.py of Setuptools, the code can have custom name and locations specified in pyproject.toml, and it has specific and narrow purpose. I.e.: it's not part of implementing a class framework to power a now-deprecated custom CLI; it only implements compilation/metadata creation/manifest filtering - and does so with a much simpler, more direct API. You're meant to build upon this with additional support libraries (e.g. to locate compilers on the user's system) - again, modularity is key - that are separately listed as build-time dependencies.

I'm trying to make simple, elegant, pure-Python tools that complement each other and respect (my understanding of) modern Python packaging standards and their underlying goals. A developer could end up with a toolchain that looks like: PAPER, bbbb, build (the reference build frontend provided by PyPA), cookiecutter (or similar - for setting up new projects), twine (the default uploader), and some shell scripts - for things like "install dependencies with PAPER in a new environment and then add a .pth file for the current project to that environment". (And if you like linters and typecheckers, I certainly won't stop you from using them.)

I’ve been working on publishing my book and then setting up a podcast using ai. I write them about them here

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/viveksiva87_ai-podcast-spotif...

Nemorise.com 3dpack.ing

building a console Tic Tac Toe game with C++. Just for fun :D

an agregator website for camera lenses. lens-database.com

I am brainstorming an App to disrupt an incumbent and quite frankly outdated industry with old practices that are detrimental to consumers.

Becoming employed.

I recently got into embedded development and built a small 12V Bluetooth relay that lets me start my ATV without a physical key. I shared it with some friends, but mostly got blank stares and a few "but why?"s. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I just don't like carrying keys.

AWS Lambda clone

OSGI >.<

Im working on a slackbot that translates passive aggressive messages into empathic speech.

https://goodspeech.chat

It’s not launched yet officially, only friends and family so far!

Any feedback is welcome!

Nice. Wrongspeak is ungood and should not happen.

Fun, although often I find myself wanting to do the opposite translation :D

hacking a illegal gamble website

A git forge

Thanks

Surviving.

(Deleted)

I'm working on a running app. Mainly for me but others have expressed interest.

It's a performance analytics platform for runners who love to dive into the details after they've been for a run and to be able to accurately track their progress over time.

It's not like Strava because I'm not including any social elements, intitally. And not like trainingpeaks because it's focused on individuals as opposed to teams or coaches. Also the analytics and models I offer are peronalised as opposed to one-size-fits-all. It's also running only. No cycling or anything else.

Ideal target market would be fairly decent amateur runners (e.g. sub 3 hour marathoners) who already know quite a bit about training but don't have a coach and are not good enough to be pro and have a full team doing this stuff for them. The pros have awesome tools but sadly most are not available for us mere mortals BUT I can build some of them! Example features:

1. Personalised "adjusted speed" models. The strava GAP model doesn't fit very well for me and many others, so I've made my own personalised model which gets updated each week. If you get better/worse at running up hills then model adjustments take that into account. The idea is not to provide a physiological correct model but more a performance based one.

2. I'm trying to do the same for surface types, heat and humidity as well. Of course these models are not personalised. I'll get to wind later on as it's much more complicated than the former. The idea is to have an accurate representation of "effort pace", which you can use as an input to performance models.

3. Using adjused pace data I will offer a pace/duration model to estimate critical speed/LT1/LT2/VO2max and this model forms the basis of tracking progress over time. Clearly most training wont be all out efforts, so I also estimate race performances based upon current fitness as well. E.g. if you ran X speed for Y time at a sub maximal effort then you can estimate what a maximal effort would be based upon the remaining aerobic and anaerobic power. From reading sports science literure, this is the most advanced way to track performance at the moment. The actual model I use is called an omniduration model.

4. I also have build some other models, e.g. Daniels running formula, which can be used but I don't find them to be as useful as the omniduration model.

5. I'm also trying to model how a workout or training session will effect your fitness. Where it's base/aerobic, threshold, VO2max or an anaerobic effect. Then, the idea would be to look at future training performance to assess whether the model was correct. You can then assess which types of training you respnd best to as well as which types of sessions you need to get the performance gains you need for your next race.

6. Specific race time predictor. Most platforms offer a single figure prediction for a distance but I want to offer specific race perdictions which take the course and weather into account. The model will give you splits taking all this into account.

7. Cohort adjusted performance models. How are you tracking against people your age? But more importantly, how are you tracking against people doing a similar volume and type of training to you? Are you improving at a similar rate?

There's a tonne of other stuff I can add but I'm going to keep it simple and focus on performance modelling for now because no-one seems to offer any decent tools around this at the moment.

If anyone found this interesting then I'd love to hear any feedback - let me know. Cheers!

I've recently added autobatching to my SFML fork (https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML/tree/bubble_idle). Drawing multiple objects that use the same RenderStates will now be automatically coalesced into a single draw call, for example:

for (int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) renderWindow.draw(sf::Sprite{/* ... */});

Upstream SFML: - 10000 draw calls (!) - My fork: 1 draw call

This (opinionated) fork of SFML also supports many other changes:

- Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten - Batching system to render 500k+ objects in one draw call - New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices - Enhanced API safety at compile-time - Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles - Built-in SFML::ImGui module - Lightning fast compilation time - Minimal run-time debug mode overhead - Uses SDL3 instead of bespoke platform-dependent code

It is temporarily named VRSFML (https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML) until I officially release it.

You can read about the library and its design principles in this article: https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml.html

You can read about the batching system in this article: https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml2.html

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML

You can try out the interactive demos online in your browser here: https://vittorioromeo.github.io/VRSFML_HTML5_Examples/

The target audience is mostly developers familiar with SFML who are looking for a library very similar in style but offering more power and flexibility. Upstream SFML remains more suitable for complete beginners.

I have used this fork to create and release my second commercial game, BubbleByte. It's open-source (https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML/tree/bubble_idle) and available now on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3499760/BubbleByte/

BubbleByte is a laid-back incremental game that mixes clicker, idle, automation, and a hint of tower defense, all inspired by my cat Byte’s fascination with soap bubbles.

A trailer is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db_zp66OHIU

ml program for stocks

Last year, I repurposed an old laptop into a simple home server.

Linux skills? Just the basics: cd, ls, mkdir, touch. Nothing too fancy.

As things got more complex, I found myself constantly copy-pasting terminal commands from ChatGPT without really understanding them.

So I built a tiny, offline Linux tutor:

  - Runs locally with Phi-2 (2.7B model, textbook training)
  - Uses MiniLM embeddings to vectorize Linux textbooks and TLDR examples
  - Stores everything in a local ChromaDB vector store
  - When I run a command, it fetches relevant knowledge and feeds it into Phi-2 for a clear explanation.

No internet. No API fees. No cloud. Just a decade-old ThinkPad and some lightweight models.

Full build story + repo here: https://www.rafaelviana.io/posts/linux-tutor

crm

clocks

I'm working on a programmer's calculator specifically as a companion for legacy computer programming. It's geared toward the kind of calculations a person might need when writing 6502 assembly language. It even uses the C-64 palette of colours.

so much cool stuff here, every time i read these threads i get fired up - makes me wanna double down on my own projects. you think the urge to build and tweak ever really fades or does it just shift into new stuff as life goes on?

Hackerman Text

AI-first text editor.

https://hackerman.ai

Bookkeeping, automated :)

https://invoicepilot.net/

crap

I'm working on a SEO agent: https://qwikrank.com

People hate AI generated content, but the quality is actually good and Google likes it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com