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

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

349 pointsdavid9271,087 comments

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

An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot.

At the moment, the flow goes like this:

1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened.

2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc).

3. At the end of the week (or month), the app automatically creates a newsletter for each group by pulling posts assigned to each group. Add some final touches yourself and send it off!

4. Every newsletter will come with a link to download all images.

I'm trying to design it to be as old people friendly as possible which meant making the experience as simple as it can get. This made me settle on email newsletters. Emails are ubiquitous, have been around and will be around for a while. It's easy to sign up and things are just pushed to you instead of having to go to another app.

Another thing I want is multilingual support as my family is Korean my in-laws are not.

I'm hoping to get an MVP working this week and get some testing done with my own parents and in-laws.

Are you self-hosting the email?

No, it will have to be a third-party provider. Currently using Amazon SES, but will be easy to replace with another email provider.

I've had good luck with Zoho for sending transactional emails, pretty cheap and I have not had delivery issues (YMMV).

this is quite interesting, could actually be an out of the box take towards fixing social media. good luck!

This is a really exciting idea. I really like how it bypasses the algorithmic advertising from Facebook and Co and have more content that you actually want to see.

If already open sourced, would love a link!

This!

Not yet sorry. I want to tidy up and test it out before making it public.

Your email deliverability will be key to survival and easily damaged. All it takes is a couple of spam reports from good or bad actors and you can get black listed. Your users may forget they ever subscribed. Think of some work around to prevent that. Some examples - for large mailings you are required to add a physical address to your emails and an unsubscribe link. Those are filtered by mail providers and automatically sent to spam a lot.

I haven't really thought about deliverability problems because at the moment, I'm not planning to provide it as a SaaS but only as an self-hostable app. I'm hoping it will be a kind of thing a tech-savvy person with their own domain will host for their own family and friends.

EDIT: but thank you for your advice! If it were a business, I agree that deliverability would be an important thing to think about.

Can a recipient be a member of multiple groups, for example, if I happen to be among coworkers and family (or whatever)? If so, hopefully I would get one newsletter containing all the posts tagged as any of my groups. But this means the potential number of different newsletters grows exponentially relative to the number of groups (although in practice, it would be extremely unlikely that a huge number of combinations actually exist) which might or might not matter, depending on whether each recipient already gets a bespoke copy (greeting them by name, click tracking, etc.) or if you're relying on listserv style distribution.

I've been going back and forth on this. For the initial version, I'm making it that a person can only be a member of one group just to keep it simple.

This sounds like Google+'s circles.

Once I add private blogs/post support to Pagecord, it will kinda do this automatically. Maybe. Sort of. https://pagecord.com.

Pagecord looks really cool. I was once inspired by Bear blog and thought about building something similar but ended up not going forward with it as I didn't think I could guarantee to keep the service up. Best of luck to your endeavor!

Thanks, appreciate it. Big fan of Bearblog myself, but I wanted to scratch my own itch and make something a little different for non-techies. Blog by email was the biggest thing I wanted.

This is a cool approach that really resonates with me. Workflows that extend email can be really powerful (at least for us dinosaurs).

Nice project, I'd totally set this up for myself as social media replacement. Please let me know once your MVP is ready. My main concern would be to overwhelm recipients if they'd ever get included in multiple people's newsletters.

I've been building on the opposite end of this. It's an open-source form submissions forwarder. I built it mostly because I wanted a service thats transparent, with usage based pricing that I could use economically for my low traffick sites.

Sometime this year I want to add docker-compose to make it easier to self host. Currently it's all manual. https://simplecontactform.org

This reminds of some commercial products (Famileo comes to mind). I don't know of any open source or self-hostable version of this type of product.

I recently quit my salary job after 16 years and am consulting in nuclear engineering now. I have a few passion projects that I'm working on (between the somewhat substantial consulting work that came out of the woodwork):

- Nuclear Reactor Starter Kit --- an open source set of procedures, processes, templates, and maybe even some IT advice that should help newcomers start companies with nuclear quality assurance programs easily and quickly while also making a new format in which nuclear companies can share lessons learned in efficiency.

- Reactor Database --- similar to the iaeas PRIS but focused on reactor development rather than power reactors. Will include nuclear startup company tracking with details gleaned from statements and maybe extrapolated where necessary from simple simulations. Will include things like fuel cost and licensing progress. This way people can more easily separate vaporware from real nuclear, and keep track of promises vs delivery.

Sounds very interesting! How did you get into this industry initially?

I wanted to do energy stuff and happened to be at a college that had a nuclear engineering dept. The peer advisor told me to take a class in the dept and I loved it.

Is there a repo for the starter kit yet that I can bookmark?

Not yet! Will probably show up in this org https://github.com/whatisnuclear

This is really really interesting. Do share any links, or do post about it here on hn.

Have fun!

Very nice! I ejected from the nuclear industry almost a decade ago and have played around in Healthcare/IoT/Oil&Gas/Finance software tech, but I'd love to figure out how to apply these skills to nuclear energy somehow.

Also - love whatisnuclear.com! About 10 years ago, I tried my hand at creating a generalized JS-based viz system (see examples in https://github.com/ahd985/ssv), but could never figure out a market/path forward for it.

Thanks. I love your viz examples! Those are beautiful.

Just curious: as a SWE, what are the prospects like in this field? What kind of background would be necessary to step in and what does the demand look like?

I've always been fascinated by nuclear and it seems like a field that's never going to be not needed, but I kind of suck at physics and chemistry.

Very cool stuff to see on your end, nonetheless!

There's a ton of money pouring into nuclear power right now, both fusion and fission. There are dozens of small VC-funded startups now in addition to the more "traditional" billionaire-funded nuclear startups. Each of them need SWEs to help with automating the physics/design simulations, document creation/management, plant design configuration/change management, QA compliance, construction management, experiment IT (instruments, controls, data collection, data reduction). Most companies have nuclear engineers like me who picked up some software skills along the way, but I've found it's always a huge benefit to bring in some nuclear-interested SWEs to help get things running with best practices. Some SWEs I've hired in the past felt a little isolated, but others have engaged well with the nuclear and mechanical engineers and had a great time. Be prepared for some weird fights with nuclear IT teams who are extra afraid of criminal penalties associated with export control laws.

Do you think there's a path for ..say.. a competent engineer from a small country to obtain such a starter kit and jumpstart a weapons program?

I'd guess all the information would already be available on the internet, but is there competitive advantage here?

Well hopefully the starter kit doesn't include a few kilograms of weapons grade plutonium.

damn there goes my nuclear program.

No I don't think it'd help that much with a weapons program. The starter kit would be mostly focused on QA, compliance, configuration management, cost modeling, etc. and would not include any non-public information about like how to optimize a core for high-quality plutonium or U-233 production or how to do the chemistry needed to separate plutonium from other actinides and fission products. And of course it would say nothing at all about weapon design. That said, vast quantities of normal core design knowledge are widely available.

Do you have any general advice for countries considering pursuing nuclear energy programs? Ex. Estonia is actively working on legislation to enable nuclear energy production (likely through a small modular reactor) and it'd be great to hear an experts advice on how to best pursue developing a domestic nuclear energy industry.

Also curious if there are any parts of the industry you think are particularly exciting and/or neglected (ex. there was just a startup that raised gobs of money to enrich HALEU since most of it used to come from Russia)

It's a huge topic. The UAE is probably the biggest most recent example of what has to be done to set up the legal and regulatory pathway and then move into good technical execution. I think they did it really well; bringing in experts to help, choosing a well-understood tried-and-true design rather than a cutting edge Gen IV never-before-tried technology, building 4 in a row rather than just one. Of course that all takes an absurd amount of capital.

I think the most neglected thing in the nuclear industry is the ABWR design. It's a good-enough boiling water reactor that Hitachi was able to construct with record-breaking speed.

The IAEA is the best place to start. They have workshops and publications on getting going, e.g. https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/developing-nuclear-power-infra...

I wonder if you could share some advice as to how to translate a marginal exposure to nuclear manufacturing and nde of nuclear grade components over the years(as a mechanical engineer) into a full-time position? What certs/specific experience/domain knowledge are the upcoming startups looking for in a hire? I'm a third-worlder btw. I love the field and champion its prospects to unwitting listeners :), but not much potential out where I am.

What are your thoughts on SMRs as a concept in general? I’ve seen startup hype in this space but also watched YouTube engineers say it’s basically a non feasible approach.

SMR is now a very general term, ranging a few megawatts to 450. We also have the term 'microreactors' now which are like 0.1-10 MWe or so. We have built dozens of microreactors and small reactors in these ranges in the past. Invariably, they were all too expensive to keep operating.

Major microreactor examples include PM-3A, which powered McMurdo station in antarctica for some years, SM-1A in Alaska, PM-2A in Greenland, PM-1 in Wyoming, truck-mounted ML-1 in Idaho, the ill-fated SL-1 microreactor in Idaho, the prototype SM-1 in DC, and the MH-1A floating power barge in Panama.

The smaller power reactors like the Peach Bottom HTGR ran fine, but were still too small to compete with their GW-scale neighbors. They all shut down. Larger advanced reactors like Ft. St. Vrain shut down due to operations and maintenance challenges.

Nuclear history is littered with failed advanced reactor projects. This doesn't mean they can't be done well, but it does mean that it's not easy. The guys out there right now hyping up that they're going to change the world but who have never handled radiation are in for a big reckoning. I hope they succeed, but they probably will not.

I do think small reactors are a good way to re-establish technical know-how. If you can make a few fringe small reactors and sell them in remote areas, then that's a great way to re-bootstrap people who do know how to build and run new types of reactors. For commodity power, e.g. powering data centers, this will help people be able to build larger more economical reactors.

Powering datacenters with microreactors is very likely an impossibly expensive proposition due to inherently poor chain reaction neutronics. Too many neutrons leak out.

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting in October. I'm working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant

I love this idea. I don’t have a Nest, but I really appreciate you making an effort to keep these devices at least partially in service

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Love to see efforts to /recycle/repurpose otherwise-useful hardware that has been abandoned by the manufacturer. I understand the commercial imperative to discontinue support for older hardware, but it still irks me no end.

I hate to rain on a cool personal project but you could just get a cheap z-wave dumb thermostat like a CT101 for $50 and hook it up to home assistant.

Solves the problem permanently, no risk of future deprecations.

The CT101 looks awful compared to the nest thermostat. I don't think you are raining on a cool personal project.

Put a hollow stretched canvas painting over it. Who cares what it looks like?

I just think that designing hardware to fit within another piece of dead hardware just to achieve what can be done off the shelf for $50 is not really my idea of a fun personal project.

Different folks different strokes. But I think saying "who cares what the decor inside the house looks like" is a little naive. Surely you can imagine that there is some population of people that care what the decor inside their house looks like AND do not want to hide the display on the thermostat? I think that group of people is probably a significant number of people... large enough that you are not raining on OP's parade.

I chose the CT101 based on low price, you could get a Honeywell T5 which is much more aesthetically pleasing and still supports Z-Wave, which accomplishes the goal of having a thermostat that won't lose smart home cloud support (by integrating it with Home Assistant using the standard Z-Wave protocol).

Plenty of cheap thermostats have good aesthetics. The $30 round Honeywell analog thermostat is a timeless design. Their $30 non-programmable digital thermostat (RTH5160) is aesthetically pleasing enough, I certainly wouldn't call it ugly. I didn't interpret the stated goal of this project to be particularly relevant to aesthetics.

Someone else replied about how ugly most cheap dumb Z-Wave thermostats are. Nests are beautiful by comparison. I've been searching for something I like as much aesthetically and come up short. That's one of the motivators

Upvoted. Anything that creates off ramps from the surveillance for advertising industry is great! Even tiny ones.

What microcontroller would you use?

ESP32-C6 on the faceplate board to have the WiFi and Zigbee. STM32 on the "ring" portion - that drives the display and the scrolling ring

What exactly does "will no longer be supported" mean?

Does it mean they'll stop working altogether?

Will they just not provide support for them but they'll keep working until the day they won't?

If it's the former, that's ridiculous and goes in the face of all the "good" they have been trying to do with the "leaf" program

"Dear Nest Learning Thermostat owner,

We want to make you aware of some upcoming changes that will impact our earliest generation thermostats, including those at Your House. Starting October 25, 2025, Google will no longer provide support for the Nest Learning Thermostat (1st gen) launched in 2011 and Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen) launched in 2012.

You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. See more details at our support website."

I've been collecting and digitizing vintage print advertisements and publishing them (https://adretro.com).

I have tens of thousands of ads in the collection and it would take me many lifetimes to complete, but I've been using AI to extract and catalog the meta data. I can get through about 100 ads/day this way.

One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-comp-digi-comp-1-table-top...

That’s really cool.

Indeed it is!

Thirded! Really impressive project. Very fun.

Thank you!

Is there a way to contribute? I have some old National Geographics I bought for 10 cents each a number of years ago. The old ads are one of my favorite things in every magazine.

Thanks for the offer! I need the physical magazines in hand to catalog, so if you want to part with them let me know. It can be a little pricey to ship a lot of paper but if you're up for it, my connect details are in my profile.

If you’re in the US, make sure you have people ship using discounted media mail rates!

Thanks, good idea

Ads are like graffiti. When they first appear, they are a nuisance, a menace. But in the fullness of time they become interesting relics.

Yep! I feel ads capture a certain authenticity of the time. Changing aspirations, preferences and values.

Except grafitti is cool from the start, so, totally different

This is absolutely fantastic! What a treasure trove you're building. I love that you're using AI to help with the metadata extraction while still requiring the physical magazines, that's such a thoughtful approach to preserving these cultural artifacts. That 1968 computer ad that "answers riddles" is pure gold. Can't wait to see more gems as your collection grows!

This is really cool! What are you using to digitize the ads?

Thank you! I've written a web application (I call the adverdex) to assist the process and automatically publish to the site. Magazines are inventoried, then camera images taken for each ad. Each image is cleaned up and cropped, then I use OpenAI to extract the brand, product, tagline and other details. Then I manually review and add more details for the published version. Only full page ads are currently being published but I intend to catalog every ad I encounter.

This is awesome-sauce! Any thoughts on an API?

Thank you! Yep I'm thinking about that. Any input as to the use case? The catalog is a full web application I've developed. I'm currently only publishing the best ads to the site for now to not clutter it up. But I could offer an API or access to the full metadata.

Really cool collection! It seems like these are just photographed on a desk? Would recommend a flatbed scanner if you don't have one already!

Thank you! Yep, just photographed. I considered scanning but because of the volume I need to save every second possible of effort per ad. I have about 50k ads already and that is at best only 1% of the source material out there! Only full page ads are being published to the site but I'm cataloging every single minor ad too. I want to rig up a static camera and better lighting and I think that will get a better overall image quality.

I like this approach. I’d get too caught up in the perfectionism trap of trying to capture perfect images and would never actually reach the point of publishing anything!

The website is very nicely done!

Thanks! Yeah, I've had to scale back my ambitions a lot to even make a dent in the backlog...

there is a very large collection of old catalogs on archive.org for people interested in looking at old print advertisements

This is a really cool project! I would love to see a timeline view where the ads from particular decade are shown together, followed by subsequent ones!

Thank you, will do!

Super cool project! The website looks great too. Some analytics would be amazing. Not sure why but I think it would be really interesting to see the data in aggregate from various perspectives, e.g. what were the most popular add types by year or by publication.

Thank you! Yeah I agree, I'm hoping I'll see some interesting trends I can write about.

What a neat idea! I'd second the person requesting a timeline view.

Cool thank you! I'll work on this.

> One of my favorite ads, a computer from 1968 that "answers riddles": https://adretro.com/ads/1968-digi-comp-digi-comp-1-table-top...

Went to take a peek and my phone content blocker apparently did what it’s supposed to do…

I think it's a problem with the cache, seems to be intermittent I'll take a look.

"answers riddles" - what kind?

Really cool project!

This brought to my mind to do something similar for digital advertisement, i.e. collecting various ads on the web and (automatically) label them through their metadata. I’m not quite sure yet we’re this could go. I imagine different categories: SaaS ads, video game ads, company ads, e-commerce ads, and so on, all categorized by company, date, site, etc. You could then see how ads changed for a specific tag/category over time or how ads for a single company, say SAP, changed.

Nice! And thank you. Yeah I am also cataloging all of the small ads, local or obscure. I want to see what trends I find in them. But they admittedly are not that interesting, unless you are looking for that product. The 1990s and after are not yet interesting to me either. I wonder if web ads will be interesting in 30 years...

A new YouTube app/player, for my kids.

It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.

Visually it looks the same. The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.

E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.

Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.

For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.

I'll put you on my list. And you can contribute ideas to our community Google Doc.

jim.jones1@gmail.com

Love this. As a new(ish) dad to a 16-month-old little girl, we're not in the YouTube vortex yet, but I know it's inevitable. When it comes time, I want to balance "she can watch and learn stuff" against my general sentiment against screen time / devices (which we've been pretty good at so far).

Anyway, a long way of saying awesome - would love to be on your list. I'll send you an email separately.

This is a fantastic idea. Do you end up playing whackamole with YouTube’s URL scheme?

With the current YouTube, it’s definitely whack a mole with topics

I can ban 100 Fortnite channels, but there’s another 1000 to fill the void.

Sadly, YouTube is driven by engagement, so dislikes have zero effect on the algorithm.

My algorithm is better suited for exploration and kids.

Very interested and will reach out, thanks!

This is awesome. having control over your feed makes all the difference. Never considered LLM for this. Makes sense. Would like to demusk my feed a little.

You may be striking the goldmine with this app. There's a lot of sentiment about the effects of tech on children and also parents spend money like no one else.

On a personal level I'm interested too. My son is too young, so we only watch youtube together, even then he's very susceptible to the attention-grabbing recommendations. "Theater mode" helps put the recommendations off-screen. "Don't recommend channel" helps a curate the feed a little bit.

But ideally I should be in control of the whole interface.

Nice idea. Do you have a timer .. like after a half hour of playing it recommends them to go outside and play (after checking with parents)?

A timer is a great idea.

I’ll add it to our community ideas Google doc.

As someone who has built a timer-based procrastination browser extension, I'd like to add that it would be a nice touch if you could stop playback between videos (or maybe between chapters on long videos) rather than cut people off right as the timer goes off. It's a bit jarring to be in the middle of something you're enjoying and for the screen to go blank.

Is a TV app possible, or only mobile/tablet?

It's a web app. I'm developing it as a PWA for easy installation on mobile devices. No app or app store required. Installation is like adding a bookmark.

https://www.bitcot.com/how-to-install-a-pwa-to-your-device/

Since it's a web app, I don't see why it couldn't be installed on any TV with a built-in web browser.

How are you getting access to the YouTube API in a way that's available to 3P developers?

https://easel.games

A game engine that lets you code multiplayer games without coding the multiplayer! My idea was to put multiplayer into the fabric of the programming language itself. This allows the engine to automatically turn your game into a multiplayer game, without you needing to learn anything about networking or synchronization. I imagine there are lots of people who have the talent and creativity to create a multiplayer game but don't have the interest or patience in learning how to code multiplayer, and so that's who this is for!

I've been working on this for 3 years and there were lots of tricky parts rolling back and deterministically executing a whole programming language, but it's working now! My next phase is to increase the breadth of features so better games can be made with it!

Very cool! I'll play more around with this later but right off the site UX is great. Being able to hit 'launch editor' and have it load a project right up without requiring an account or anything is just beautiful.

Yes you only have to sign up if you are publishing a game permanently, which I figure is reasonable since that means you will be taking up space on my server forever. But people can make whole games a never sign in if that’s what they want!

"Make games with Ease," and the cursor forming the "l," is really nifty.

Haha yes I was really pleased with it and you’re actually the first person to acknowledge it out loud so thank you!

Awesome!

I'm not sure who this is for. On one hand multiplayer games are complicated to make, even with a dedicated framework, but on the other the tutorial wastes time explaining to me how to undo with ctrl+z and there's even a large infobubble on how to copy and paste text.

This is good feedback! I thought it’d be a great first programming language for people and so I think I have aimed the tutorial far too basic, probably even for them. Maybe that’s where I am losing people. I am going to edit it and see if that improves the retention.

This is an impressive project and hopefully it will allow more programming beginners to get into multiplayer programming. Huge congrats. However, I am wondering: if your programming language is aimed at complete beginners, why make your language untyped and include undefined? Those are both fully loaded foot cannons. Sure, the language looks more inviting and probably gives the impression of faster development, but I'm not sure it's worth the amount of bugs that will be introduced eventually.

Yes, in the end I just made this decision pragmatically and it's not a grand statement about how I think programming languages should work. I felt that it would be possible to add gradual typing to Easel eventually, and so chose to prioritise other programming language features.

One of the original "agitators" which caused me to make Easel was because I was so surprised at how popular the modding tools for my previous game were with first-time coders. The modding tools used JSON, which might sound primitive, but if you look past the JSON it was actually defining a hierarchical declarative language for defining game behaviour. I have many theories for why first-time coders could just pick it up, but one of them is I think the hierarchical shape meant everything could be written inline, without indirection or jumping around. This format allowed all these gamers to just accidentally fall into coding and it was quite impressive how far they got without any help.

But those old modding tools were quite limited really, and that limited how much coding people could learn. So for years I just kept wondering what would happen if someone made that magic hierarchical declarative shape unlimited by merging it with a traditional imperative programming language. Would it allow gamers to accidentally fall into learning actual coding? It took me about 2 years to squash together these two seemingly-opposed paradigms and make the Easel programming language. Doing this required slimming down on the other language features in order to iterate quickly on this big problem, so that's how we ended up not having strong typing, amongst other things. But I don't regret what I chose to prioritise, and I hope to address this in the coming years!

Do you have links to the games people have made that you’re most proud of?

I see you’re wanting users to pay monthly to play games with for Easel+, do you think the current catalogue provides the right value?

To be honest, that's kind of why I'm here posting about it. I think https://gatew.easel.games is impressive, but I also know the engine is capable of so much more than what people have made with it so far, and I'm trying to find people who have dreams but haven't found the right tool yet so I can build that for them.

The pricing model and how to run Easel sustainably is a huge question. Easel is basically a free product, which is what I want because (a) I would just like people to use it and (b) multiplayer games need lots of players. I made the upfront decision to never run ads on Easel because I want parents and schools to be happy with it being used by their teenagers, and that has greatly changed the business dynamics. I have very delicately managed the cost-efficiency of Easel only expecting about 1% of people to ever subscribe to Easel+. For this reason, I've avoided expensive features so that one dedicated server can run at least 1 million projects and handle thousands of concurrent players at a manageable cost. It's been a real slimming exercise.

I know the catalogue is small, but despite that, there are some people who come back and play one game every single day on Easel. There are also people who come back and make games every day on Easel. And there are some who do both. We have people exceeding 100+ hours a month sometimes. It's these people who Easel+ is for. Easel+ is designed as a package deal with a bunch of different game-playing and game-making perks so that people can decide for themselves what parts of the package they find valuable. But I would honestly be happy to have thousands of people using it and not paying a cent. This is my life's work and I just want it to be used, even if I have to fund it all myself.

Well this is pretty cool!!

That's a cool idea, and seems technically satisfying to work on. Well done!

Small request: if you could please add a "copy this page" button near the top of each page in the docs (perhaps next to the title of the page), it would make it easier to feed the docs into an LLM for guidance on how to build a project on top of Easel. Neat project!

Art project. Counter Productive

A random button in a park with a countdown timer.

Instructions:

- Press the button to reset the 24-hour countdown timer.

- If the timer ever reaches zero, the project ends and the project will be removed.

- To keep the project alive — press the button

Its been running for 56 days with 820 button presses.

Write up: https://blog.abluestar.com/projects/2025-counterproductive/

Stats page https://blog.abluestar.com/other/counterproductive.html

You should make them input the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42

Those are cursed!

Are you ready to find out?! :D

This is cool!

Is it dead? According to the stats there’s a 25 hour gap :( great idea btw!

Maybe the project is a commentary on a post-truth world masquerading as a button.

Can you have it do something good for the park when it's been running for x days? Or would that make it mundane (productive) and de-art it.

How is that « counter productive »? That’s amazing!

A web os; it's full recreation of the Lisa Office System GUI in Javascript. The entire thing is output to a single canvas element, which has forced me to write a number of the UI components from scratch that I'd normally take for granted. It's got an IndexedDB filesystem, and it's got apps. I'm almost done working on the first real app for it - a word processor akin to LisaWrite. Once I roll that out, I intend to do a ShowHN post.

I never knew how much I needed this. Is it just a skin over JS apps, or have you done any work imitating the software architecture?

Thanks!

The answer is neither; it isn't remotely imitating the Lisa's architecture, nor is it a skin over some other previously written JS code. To be clear: this is absolutely NOT a CSS skin.

The only CSS involved is used for the positioning of the canvas element on the page, and for the styling of the temporary UI elements which mimic the Lisa's hardware test screen (and those that display as a fallback if JS is disabled). When the system "boots" all those temporary elements are replaced with a single canvas element on which the UI is displayed.

I should perhaps have been less modest in my original comment in that all of the UI components are coded from scratch. This includes a hierarchical system for displaying objects on the canvas (not dissimilar to the the DOM), the windowing system, a typesetting system, multiple systems for displaying and storing image data, and much more. I've written what I hesitate to call a graphics engine, but I guess that's sort of what it is... it even supports 1-bit blending modes.

This was originally going to be more along the lines of a CSS skin, but I became so deeply frustrated with visual inconsistencies across browser engines and platforms that I ultimately decided to move all the logic I could into JS. The result is what you see now.

Oh, gosh, I didn't mean a CSS skin, just, like, a frontend over custom/modern software with sensible design patterns meant to be sensible on modern hardware. I'm guessing alpha.lisagui.com is the URL; it's pretty slick!

Yes, that's pretty much correct! "Sensible" is debatable... And that's the URL!

(Guess I figured I'd emphasize that point before people start mistaking it for yet-another-CSS-skin™...)

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

I've been working on an e-ink laptop. I wanted a machine I could stare hours at and feel okay about it. I didn't seem to find a device like that out there.

I'm designing everything from the chassis to the software OS. E-ink has its own design constraints. I'm building 5 apps for it: a browser, reader, mail, writer and code editor. It's still a ways to go. Here's a picture of what I have so far:

https://www.heyraviteja.com/kitiki.png

Depending on what your goals are just adding a Bluetooth keyboard to an Android E Reader gets you 90% of the way there.

https://shop.boox.com/products/go103

I dabbled in hardware and I quickly found you need millions to do anything.

However, this definitely is a market waiting for a product. I’d lean towards looking if you can add a custom screen to the framework laptop.

That’ll be much cheaper to build and easier. I reckon you’d only need a custom Linux driver for the screen.

My main gripe with boox is their closed source bloated firmware and no ability to unlock the bootloader.

Thanks for sharing! Agree, building hardware hasn't been the easiest thing.

Interesting, I like the idea of a custom screen on the Framework. I'm sure that may come with its own challenges as well :)

hey maybe the kid that made the anyon_e would be inspiring for you!

Here's a couple related videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fks3PBodyiE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0sLQvuLwxQ

Huge inspiration! I loved the anyon_e videos. He DIY'ed the laptop and made it look really nice.

The site is unreachable for me

https://www.saintbeluga.org/

I was a YC founder in 2006 and still do software engineering and data science full-time, but on the side I also do Christian apologetics, helping fellow engineers/scientists/mathematicians seek answers to life's deepest questions.

Some cool articles for the HN crowd:

- My interview of Evan O'Dorney, a three-time Putnam Fellow and two-time IMO gold medalist, who converted to Catholic Christianity: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-i-conversion-of-a-p...

- In-depth scientific overview of Eucharistic miracles: https://www.saintbeluga.org/eucharistic-miracles-god-under-t...

- Conversion testimony by the Chief Scientist at NASA JPL: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-iii-bellows-of-aqui...

Love this, great work. Rock on!

Interesting.

I was just considering an app to facilitate the other side of the apologetics argument with an interactive resurrection of IronChariots.org as a native app.

All conspiracies's enemy is logistics. And yet for these eucharist miracles, the logistics are simple. They all have a clear and obvious point where foul play could be inserted, where the complicit number of people can be brought down to just 1. You may not like this explanation, but it's one people will rightly use to counter it. 'Why would people lie' is a pointless exercise. They would. Each person has a different story, intent, motivation.

Anyway I just read the first one, but I'm aware of these miracles some time ago. I don't think it has outward persuasive powers catholics think they do. It sounds trivial and specific. It's also so clearly some growth to me. You got the wafer, you got contamination, and you put it in a container with water. Of course, then they would find a separate heart tissue to send to the scientists.

(Also unrelated, but it's kinda funny. Catholics would be saying it's the literal body of Christ. And they they dropped it to the floor and went 'well, I can't eat that'.)

You're correct that we can't prove the chain of custody for the Eucharistic miracles - this is discussed at the bottom of the article.

In general, there's no airtight "proof" for any miracle, and the best way to determine whether Christianity is true is to live the faith and see what happens. I wrote an article about this:

https://www.saintbeluga.org/the-rosary-the-ultimate-life-hac...

This could be applied to any faith. Likely many people would find that faith was also true? So they are all true simultaneously? But they also contradict one another, and have people killing each other in their "team's" name?

AFAIK there hasn't been any evidence shown for any of the faiths yet.

> the best way to determine whether Christianity is true is to live the faith and see what happens.

So you're telling me you tried this with a bunch of other religions before you landed on Christianity? You became a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Wiccan and lived those faiths?

I'm convinced that Christianity is true, so I don't feel compelled to keep exploring other belief systems. My conviction comes from the intellectual evidence, the witness of other Christians, and the fruits of my own faith life as a Christian. As I mentioned in my previous comment, I believe that ultimately the fruits of a lived faith provides the strongest assurance.

So basically you are confirming your own belief system using, well, your own and choices of other people which believe in the same thing. That sounds a little bit biased, isn‘t it?

Wait a minute… This has even a name in logical fallacies: CONFIRMATION BIAS.

I did a similar thing, having been agnostic for many years. I thought I'd give Christianity a go, and keep going until I felt it likely wasn't true. ~5 years later, I'm still going.

Of course, if I was not living in a Western country with a historically Christian society, I may well have tried Islam etc instead. But I happen to be in a mostly Christian country, so I gave that a go, and so far it has stuck.

I don't think that's in any way inconsistent. I have never claimed to be doing a scientific study. I have a PhD, and did post-doc research. I know what science is, and what it isn't, and how far it can reach. IMO these big questions are beyond the reach of science.

In order to really test the waters of a particular faith, you have to put your weight on it. I don't think this would be possible if my research schedule told me I'd be converting to Buddhism in 2 years, and then on to Islam after that, etc. So this "scientific" approach is flawed from the start. Instead, it makes most sense to start off with what you think is the most promising.

> Catholics would be saying it's the literal body of Christ. And they they dropped it to the floor and went 'well, I can't eat that'

When Catholics say this, they mean Transubstantiation.

As in, it retains the accidents (physical/observable properties) of bread and wine, but its substance (what it is) does literally become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.

So it might look, feel, and taste like bread and wine, but it is in fact the body of Christ.

So, kind of both..

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" Epicurus

There are multiple potential answers to this basic riddle in various religions. Are you interested in understanding them?

For example, we can say that while God is omnipotent, he has chosen to create a world with humans who have the possibility of choosing to be good -- your word -- or not -- and grow through this choice. A world cannot exist where the "evil" is prevented, unless you also take away the the agency from humans and this potential for growth.

Much of which we think of as "evil" is actually consequence of things we do. One simple example in modern terms is that we tend to repeat the same unconscious patterns over and over again.

We often do it because we have a trauma maybe from childhood -- that we are not conscious of. If I get a physical trauma, muscles around the traums tend to form a tension to protect the site where we get hurt. These often become chronic even after the wound has healed. We have many such chronic tensions in our body.

Similarly, when we get a physical trauma that is too unbearable for us to process, we create tensions around it that protect us from experiencing it.

These patterns we repeat cause much of our suffering. By becoming more aware of our wounds, they can start healing, and we can start becoming free of such suffering.

Our "work" is to learn about ourselves, to overcome these traumas, and heal our wounds. In such a case the "evil" we see is actually a reflection which is necessary for us to become aware of these things in ourselves.

I'm replying to a comment about the Catholic/Christian God...

In his myths he has no problem actively interfering with man. The great flood story itself is a giant logical paradox.

God is perfect. God is all knowing.

Yet God creates a world so screwed up he has to reset it.

What free will does every human who's not Noah have ?

Revalations heavily implies that one day God will get sick of this. Too much free will or something.

Honestly everyone has a right to whatever myths get them through the day. The issue becomes when your myth infringe on the rights of others or are used to persecute. As in, your magic book has a few dietary restrictions, cool.

Your magic book calls certain people abominations, or suggest they should have less rights, not cool.

I am not too familiar with Catholicism.

But all major religions have multiple strands, and like others, Catholicism also has one or more mystic strands as well. Mystic strands of different religions are thinking man's version of the religion and actually closer to each other that you would guess from the surface level understanding of the religion.

Probably you can find people who believe what you are saying. People believe in strange things.

But if you want to have an intellectually honest discussion about this, you should first try to understand clearly the best possible arguments of the thing you are critisizing.

That is why I asked whether you are interested in understanding the religious point of view. What you are presenting is kind of a straw man version of Catholicism, and I imagine on site like this you will have hard time finding anybody willing to argue about that.

Note also that I have not anywhere said anything about what I believe. I have explained to you a kind of short version what is my understanding of the synthesis of Christian mystical traditions.

Noah's Ark is fundamentally impossible according to almost all science.

Yet you have people who are still looking for it.

https://www.foxnews.com/travel/researchers-find-compelling-e...

If pointing out the Bible has a bunch of basic logical issues is a straw man argument, it's a darn good one.

You can't prove religion. It's, by definition infalsable.

The intellectual dishonesty starts when someone comes and tries to post proof of Catholicism ,God or whatever.

What is this, r/atheism from 2014?

This feels like is a side stepping of Epicureus where the primary focus of refutation revolves around trying to explain away "evil" as that which is perpetrated by human beings upon one another.

Perhaps, if you replace "evil" with "suffering", you get a more expansive view of the Epicurean argument.

And if you feel the expansive version is too amorphously defined to refute effectively, you could just replace "evil" with just "plague" or "earthquakes". For eg.

"Is God willing to prevent plagues but not able..."

Yes, I can understand it feels to you like I am side stepping the argument.

The "evil" in the paradox above (I am not responding to Epicureus but to the quote, which is presented out of original context) refers implicitly to a very limited, modern definition of the term, as your examples show.

All the religions that I have some understanding of, have much more elaborate understanding of the question of good/evil. But each religion has a unique view point of this question, so we cannot generalize these terms. I just gave one example.

The paradox is a false dilemma. In my understanding, such dilemmas are often set up within religions as tools to help you to think things through for yourself, they are not refutations of the religion.

I am not trying to refute an argument or convince you of anything. That would be pointless.

I don't consider earthquakes to be "evil" by any sensible definition. But the question "if God exists, why did he create a world with earthquakes" is an interesting question. I don't have any idea how any religion would approach this question.

If you are really interested in what religions can offer you, you can take a look at the feeling that arose in you when reading my reply.

You said you felt that I was side stepping the argument. To me it seems that it was partly because you thought that I was trying to refute an argument. You also missed the part where I said "Much of which we think of as ..."

This being HN, you can think of religions as methods to hack your own thinking. You can use such feelings (and the fact that you miss some key points when you discuss the issue) as a signal for yourself that there is a subconscious emotional issue related to the question. You can learn about yourself and grow through studying these issues.

Firstly, I appreciate your kind and thoughtful answer.

More importantly, I thoroughly commend the intellectual honesty when you said this:

> But the question "if God exists, why did he create a world with earthquakes" is an interesting question. I don't have any idea how any religion would approach this question.

To be clear, I wasn't hoping for a handy solution to one of life's "big questions" in an HN comment.

I was just pointing out that your response to the Epicurean argument was a bit narrow in the assumed scope of the assumed interpretation of the Epicurean argument.

Cheers.

Thank you.

A "Postgres lock diagnostics" tool for migrations. We've been bitten a few times, by seemingly innocent migrations that ended up acquiring locks we did not expect (yes, RTFM).

So I thought: what if, when you opened the PR, you had a tool that actually executed your migrations, saw what locks they acquired (in runtime) and then reported it as a comment to your PR? This would provide you with yet another data point you could use to reason about whether your migration is safe to deploy or not. For example:

    ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN email TEXT:
      acquired AccessExclusiveLock on relation `users`

It does this by opening a transaction, executing the statement, and observing the `pg_locks` view from _a different_ connection before the initial transaction is rolled bac (or committed, depending in the flags you passed). The idea is to be able to use it as a CLI, as a library or with a ready-made GitHub Action (which will take care of commenting in your PR).

It's in early-stage and very much a PoC yet, but I think there's merit in the idea.

https://github.com/agis/pglockanalyze

P.S. Also, an excuse to learn Rust - so any feedback from Rust ppl more than welcome

This sounds super useful. I imagine a pipeline where each migration has to explicitly mentioned which locks it will acquire (and the build failing if there's a mismatch).

A thing I always go back to, regardless of what language I'm working in, is the checks performed by strong migrations

https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations?tab=readme-ov-fi...

It's pretty popular, and has even been ported to other languages

https://github.com/Artur-Sulej/excellent_migrations

Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.

In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.

I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)

Neat! Have a repo?

Thanks! I have been thinking about opening it up, but not sure, as I've never done any open source stuff and don't know how useful others would find it - there's some clunky bits!

I also have the whole Aider/Claude prompt history in the repo too, as I started this on a platform & framework I'd never used, and used the AI to scaffold much of the app at the beginning. Thought that might be useful to go back and see what worked the best when AI programming.

This isn't entirely on-topic but I've been trying to understand why AI video editing isn't more common, and thought you might know. I've had an idea for a while to make tennis match highlight videos that show every single point of the match. Tennis has a lot of downtime between points (and even more between games and sets). I just want to tell an LLM: here's a two-hour long video of a tennis match. Strip out all the gaps between points. I'm guessing this would a very expensive frame by frame analysis of the video right now and that's why it's not done. Is that right or are there other reasons?

I would do it based on the sound of the ball hitting in the audio track during service. Way cheaper ;)

Yeah, it's probably too expensive and complicated to send all the frames to an LLM. I only send about 30 images at 576x324 which is around 15000 tokens a video, and comes to about $0.045 per video. First I save one frame every second and then loop through them comparing each to find the differences, and send just screenshots which have changed significantly, up to a max of 30. Claude only allows 100 images per API call, so it would be a bit fiddly and costly to handle 7000 frames.

Though, now that I'm thinking about it, you could probably do this locally and just look at the part of the image that has the current score, do some local OCR on it to check if the score has changed each frame, if it has, store the timestamp and then use ffmpeg to extract the correct parts. Probably wouldn't need an LLM at all.

As for editing, one thing I do in my videos is audio keywords so my app can do specific things. For example, I can say "AI, mark what I just said as important." Then when it transcribes the audio and the LLM processes it, it will mark that part as a Distinct Moment with a start and end timestamp, a title and description that will show in my app as a clickable link to that part of the video. I'm thinking of adding more commands for more complex editing too.

The second version of https://www.physician.fyi/ , a database of doctors and other medical practitioners with their disciplinary actions for patients to check. In this version, I’m expanding it to include all 6.5 million practitioners in the US, and integrating more data like how much doctors have been paid by drug/device companies. I’m planning on adding patient reviews/complaints too.

It’s the biggest and dirtiest dataset I’ve ever worked with, so it’s been interesting to figure out practical solutions to run things fast and generalize cleaning tasks. Of course it’ll be impossible to get every case (I can only match about half of the state licenses to national records at the moment), so I’ll have to figure out a user-edit/consensus system for the rest.

I noticed your physician-view is just raw JSON. I had time on my hands and this sounded cool so I whipped up a quick desktop dashboard [1] based on the JSON I saw. Feel free to use / adapt / reach out about it. Either way a great resource!

1 - https://ibb.co/v6WZ7MFr

Thanks a lot :) That’s really helpful. I’m working on adding a map view for now, but will save this for when I get there.

Love these threads..

Decided to do an extended sabbatical after being part of one of the many tech layoffs the last years, and I'm thus working on things I like, instead of things that pay..

Collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world, at https://wheretodrink.beer Still a WIP, and it's not trying to be the most extensive list, but I want it to be a substantial list. Once I reach a certain maturity in the data I'll probably look to spawn minor projects off from the data set.. have a couple ideas already that I'll just keep to my self for now :D

I also had a set of left over domains relating to beer that I'm offering up for use with BlueSky handles, and beer related link pages at https://drnk.beer - a bit on the back burner.

I'm collecting a collection of PEG grammars here https://mingodad.github.io/cpp-peglib and Yacc/Lex grammars here https://mingodad.github.io/parsertl-playground/playground both are wasm based playgrounds to test/develop/debug grammars.

The idea is to improve the tooling to work with grammars, for example generating railroad diagrams, source, stats, state machines, traces, ...

On both of then select one grammar from "Examples" then click "Parse" to see a parse tree or ast for the content in "Input source", then edit the grammar/input to test new ideas.

There is also https://mingodad.github.io/plgh/json2ebnf.html to generate EBNF for railroad diagram generation form tree-sitter grammars.

Any feedback, contribution is welcome !

This is awesome! I've recently begun diving deeper into working with grammars, using them as part of a new project, and these tools look super useful.

https://sublevelgames.github.io/blogs/2025-05-24-armor-games...

I analyzed 7 years of Armorgames.com data (999 games) to understand web gaming market trends.

Key findings that might interest fellow developers:

User standards are rising: Average ratings dropped from 7.02 (2018) to 6.45 (2025), but the percentage of high-quality games (8.5+ rating) actually increased from 12.3% to 14.7%. This suggests quality polarization rather than overall decline.

Genre trends: Rising: Idle games, Strategy, RPGs (deeper gameplay mechanics) Declining: Traditional arcade/action games Stable: Puzzle and Adventure (web gaming staples)

Innovation wins: The highest-rated "hidden gems" all had one thing in common - innovative mechanics rather than genre variations. Games like "Detective Bass: Fish Out of Water" (9.3 rating) and "SYNTAXIA" (9.1 rating) show originality still pays off.

Market maturation: The correlation between rating and popularity is surprisingly weak (0.126), suggesting quality ≠ virality. However, play count strongly correlates with favorites (0.712).

I'm not sure the take away for the first point that user standards are rising is correct. Could that also be the number of people making games is increasing? I say this because more highly rated games and a trending down of the average (more slop) could explain that as well. I think the idea that standards are rising would hold constant the number of games.

It could also be that game standards are dropping, no?

Maybe on other platforms? Armorgames curates pretty heavily, but you're right that AI-generated games could be flooding less selective platforms. Would be interesting to run this same analysis on Steam or itch.io where the barriers are lower.

Fair point, but here's the thing - Armorgames is actually way pickier now about which games they accept. They're letting fewer games through their gates. So if the average rating is still dropping even with higher curation standards, that pretty much confirms users have gotten more critical over time.

A program that will play chess (written in Go). My 18yo daughter can now beat me at chess (not that I'm any good). I figured if I can't beat her, I'll see if I can write a program to beat her instead. My idea for v1 is that I'd write the algorithm myself, without looking up anything about how to write a chess program (I'm sure such literature abounds). I've just about finished v1; still a few bugs to iron out. To be honest, I didn't find it all that fun, mainly because of all the special cases (all the castling rules and the like).

I can't help but point out the irony of a chess program written in Go, as someone that enjoys playing Go [1] myself. Sorry to hear it wasn't that fun, hope you still got something out of it!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

Yes, definitely still got/getting something out of it, thanks. And I'll probably get more out of it when I read up on "how to write a real chess program" for v2, and learn about all the things I didn't think about.

Same, always wanted to do this, especially without looking stuff up, which feels like cheating. I haven't yet figured out the recursive tree search thing.

I'm a big chess buff, and will say that the hard part is not making an engine (which is hard!), but making an engine that plays poorly, well. What I mean is: engines are very smart and better than the best human. When you make a "dumb" engine, you are telling a chess god to intentionally make mistakes. The mistakes they make, however, are not the same mistakes a beginner chess player would make. Today, beginners are discouraged from learning by playing against bots because of this; It simply doesn't serve you in human games.

Lichess has a "humanlike" bot[1] but I haven't played with it yet. I think this problem will haunt you, if you get past the whole "create a chess engine" problem :) I have tried and failed to do this in the past.

[1] https://lichess.org/@/maia1

I always assumed that chess engines are dumbed down by occasionally inserting random moves but now it occurred to me that a way to get more realistic mistakes might be feed them a distorted version of the game state.

Check out chessiverse (I’m not affiliated just found from YouTubers). They purport to be a collection of bots that play like humans with human-like mistakes matched to ELO levels. I like it so far - the main value for me (vs lichess/chess.com) is knowing that who’s on the other end isn’t constantly cheating.

I just shipped a camera app for iPhone dedicated to Bayer RAW capture (that's the true, unprocessed sensor output of your device - not Apple's ProRAW which is already demosaic'd and has noise reduction, etc).

https://bayercam.app

I had fun with the interface - it's themeable, and inspired by classic cameras: lets you quickly switch between full auto/half auto/full manual modes with dedicated dials.

Going to add more features in the coming months, but the #1 focus is keeping it super simple and blazing fast.

Given that virtually all processing pipelines these days stack multiple shots to create a photo, as far as I'm aware this is the only way of getting a "traditional" single-exposure photo on iPhone, where the shutter speed is actually meaningful.

There are other camera apps that support Bayer RAW capture, but those support a bunch of other formats, and you probably don't want Bayer RAW for most of your shots anyways, so for my own workflow it's better to have a dedicated app that I can launch really quickly rather than tap around in menus.

On my free time I've been making a small "game" where you control a spacecraft using a 6502 computer. You can control things like thrusters, antennas and read data from star sensors, gyros, etc. using memory mapped I/O directly and you can't control anything directly.

The whole thing works pretty well, it's built using Godot & a custom Rust extension with the 6502 emulator & assembler. It can even be exported to the web so you can write your code using a CodeMirror editor and send it to the game in the browser.

Now, as expected, the hard part is making it fun. Just giving players an empty code editor and a manual for the sensors/actuators doesn't seem great, and there's also no goal for now. I'd like to take inspiration from Shenzhen I/O to build a sense of progression by tackling more and more difficult control challenges maybe?

It also supports running multiple computers at once so I think there's some fun potential for a "multiplayer" mode where you try to achieve some objective (scanning X, mining Y) against other players by sending spacecrafts with your code on them and all the crafts would run on one server. Anyway I'm curious if people would be interested in such a game!

Very curious, email me?

This sounds super cool! pls share when you're ready!

Reimplementing from scratch every major idea in modern deep learning, to help people transition into deep learning research.

https://github.com/tanishqkumar/beyond-nanogpt

Wow!

Username... does not check out!

Which resources are you using?

I just carefully read the papers inventing the techniques I want to implement, and verify correctness of my implementation by checking outputs from my code match the papers and pass sanity checks (ie. diffusion produces nice images, RL improves rewards, etc).

Nice work!

Maybe I missed it but would be great if there was links to the original paper. Will be going through this repo for sure.

Planning a hobby alpaca farm (3-4 alpacas), very early stage.

Everything from farm related stuff (water, food, shelter, etc.) to self-sufficiency (solar, etc.) to real time monitoring (which cameras, affecting power supply).

Who knows if it'll ever happen, but just planning everything in detail is a lot of fun. Especially with weird regulatory constraints where I'm living, there's a lot to watch out for.

Example: Solar panels at >3m height need building permits. Snow in winter means panels should be set up at a specific angle. So my initial plan of putting the panels on my 2.5m high carport doesn't work. Either lower carport, lower angle, different place or getting a building permit.

This must be the dream for a lot of tech people living behind a screen. I can see myself wanting to do this (although maybe work on the farm not own it)

I think a lot of people in office jobs day dream about this sort of thing. My father-in-law is a third generation farmer producing ultra fine wool. I am a source of free labour at shearing time and I will tell you that when I treat myself to a sleep in on Monday morning and roll out of bed for standup at 9:30 I sit there with the biggest shit-eating grin on my face meanwhile my father in law is already 4 hours in to his 12+ hour day.

Also if I was to go into farming I'd have to do something with crops/fruits/vegetables. I am a bit of a softie but the realities of livestock husbandry when met with the economics of farming can be quite confronting.

I already live in a farm with a permanent remote job!

/brag over

Do you forsee the tariff situation improving demand for domestically produced wool? I have land and am speculating that the economics of livestock may actually improve.

LOL

The "best" plan is probably to observe someone who already has alpacas and go there frequently at all times of the year, in all kinds of weather conditions to see if you still want to deal with it. Also, ask yourself if you ever want a vacation again.

I've lived next to horses for 19+ years now and I don't remember what kind of a plan there was. Suffice to say that it would have gone out the window by day 2.

> Snow in winter means panels should be set up at a specific angle

Not sure what this means, but I can assure you that Mother Nature will subvert whatever plan you have, probably by sending enough wind to pack the snow so hard to the panel, that it will stick there even if vertical.

I was reading a lot of technical books and kept highlighting things I wanted to remember — but I rarely went back to review them. The notes just sat there, on my Kindle or in the reading app.

So I started building something simple: a tool that lets me turn highlights into flashcards with as little friction as possible.

Just select text on your iPhone, share it with the app, and it creates a flashcard using AI — a Q&A pair and a short summary. You can browse cards in the app, or show them on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, or watchface of your Apple Watch.

This is my first iOS app, and building it has been a great learning experience. I’m using Supabase for the backend which have been mostly great.

Check it out: https://komihag.com

This is a great idea!

I really like this. I'm going to grab some of my kiddos 7th grade biology notes (handwritten), and see what it does. I did notice that's it's a little hard to manage your deck: removing and shuffling are not obvious?

Let me know how it goes! I'm not always very happy with how the cards turn out, will see what I can do with some LLM prompt tuning.

Yeah, it's very barebones at the moment, if you swipe the name of a deck left on the list of decks, you should be able to delete it, and I haven't added the ability to delete individual cards yet. Shuffling is not possible, adding it to the backlog.

Given that it's summer-break and school is not the top of their thoughts, they're actually pretty thrilled. Here's what my youngest did: she took her hand-copied notes (from the book), took a photo with her camera, highlighted her notes, and had it created cards. She did this (rapidly) for a whole page of notes, and then had a card-deck to drill from.

I'm really glad to hear that! Two things I've thought about that would probably make the process even smoother:

- Create cards directly from camera input in the app.

- Create multiple cards from a source text, so that she can just supply a text body and the llm figures out what is important, and then the user can just discard cards they do not find useful.

You could... ? Or, it can just be what it is: addressable from "share". That has the nice property that if she gets a copy of notes from friends, or the internet, it's not "built in": it uses the functionality already in iOS?

> select text on your iPhone, share it with the app

Nice. Minimizing UX friction is always difficult and this is clever.

Good job! You have completely my thoughts. Does it work on macOS?

RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo. I've been building over the past 3 years & it's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.

I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on.

I recently completed a leaderboard function that cross compares photos from different tests using Claude, which was really impressive and scared me for my day job..

This is cool. It could be generalized into arbitrary ranking (not just photos).

Questions: how do you plan to deal with people that will randomly rank other's pictures to get credits quickly (or even build a script to do so)?

Hi! Sorry for the late response, went to bed and forgot about this post. Thanks :)

We check to make certain people aren't ranking formulaically, and if they are we invalidate their votes and ban them automatically. We also check how close people's rankings are to the consensus retroactively and do some fancy anti cheating patterns there as well.

Very interesting! Have you also thought about using an invitation system (like the one on lobste.rs - https://lobste.rs/about#invitations)?

Would you mind to tell a bit more about the exact logic and algorithms you use for those checks? I'm working on project in a totally different space (offers) but it shares the same idea where users vote on other users submissions and get credits for doing so (to incentivize participation and keep it fair). I haven't really worked out how to prevent abuse, so I'd be curious to learn from others. If you can share things (even just resources) I'd be super happy. Feel free to shoot me a mail to ca-rankpicstuff@willscher.com in case you don't want to make things public.

Hey Ben, this looks like a neat project/app! I'm always curious with apps like this about how financially viable it is. Seems to be a fair solution to be able to generate credits yourself by ranking and then buying more credits to get ranked, do you have any numbers or insights you are willing to share? (or have shared somewhere else before?)

Hi, thanks!

That's a great question. It is not making anybody rich, but I cover my costs and make a few hundred extra a month. I think on the order of $500+ MRR.

Besides buying credits there is also a pro membership where people choose which demographics rank them (age, location, gender), can have more tests, larger test sizes and always be at the front of the queue for ranking.

Mathbreakers 2 (https://mathbreakers.com)

A 3D game to help students in grades 5-8 learn Arithmentic, Fractions, Geometry, and Algebra.

50% or more of middle school students experience math anxiety, and it's no wonder that so many people grow up believing, "I'm not a math person." Math can be incredibly fun and beautiful if approached and experienced the right way. Mathbreakers is a vibrant, interactive world where all game mechanics are built on intrinsic mathematical properties, so simply by playing the game, a foundation of understanding of those concepts is built.

We're doing early prototype testing now with a planned launch in September 2025. The game engine is PlayCanvas (engine-only) and the platform is WebGL (Mac/PC/ChromeOS).

I just had a flashback to Math Blaster - interested in checking this out.

Neat - I’m working on fractions and decimals with my son right now, and certainly interested in ways to engage him in it!

I signed up for the waitlist, but FYI the heading “mathbreakers” on your homepage is skewed off the right side of the screen on my iPhone.

My collection of art, philosophy and poetry apps. They have previously just been on iOS but I just finished the Kotlin port of the art one, so will be releasing that soon.

The poetry one is react native. Art and philosophy ones are swift/kotlin. I wanted to see if you could use LLMs to effectively create a cross-platform app. The idea behind react native was that you write it once in an approachable language, then the framework compiles to native app code. In 2025, the approachable language you code in is English, and the LLM now generates native app code.

It was generally a success and I feel less of a need of the development overhead of react native these days.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/for-arts-sake/id6744744230

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/daily-philosophy/id6472272901

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-corner/id1602552624

A small tool I'm building for myself because I often forget what I actually did during the week, especially when it's time to summarize it, do my weekly review, or prepare for 1:1s or evaluations.

The idea is simple:

1. On the days I work, I get an email one hour before the end of the day (as I usually use emails as todo lists).

2. I reply to that email with what I did just like I would in a personal journal.

3. My reply gets saved and shows up on a calendar. It's nothing fancy, just the content of the email on the day it was written.

4. When I need to prepare for a performance review or a manager check-in, I can generate a clean report based on my past entries with summaries written by AI

That’s it. No login every day, no new tool to open. Just a little trace of my work, saved quietly, and summarized when needed.

That sounds useful. My company tends to work out of Slack, so having it interface that way would be cool.

I've been trying to put the finishing touches on my daily word game Omiword (https://www.omiword.com/), but I've been waylaid by Stripe because they decided that a simple daily word game is a "restricted business," and they shut down my account.[1]

Now I need to figure out an alternate payment handler, or just give up on my modest monetization plan where players can pay a small one-time fee to unlock all of the archived puzzles. It was never going to make a fortune, but it would have been nice to offset some of the hosting expenses.

Don't use Stripe. They shit on you just because they can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

This sounds like a decent use case for Patreon?

OMIWORD.com ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬛ ⬛⬜⬛⬛⬛⬜⬛ ⬛⬜⬛⬛⬛⬜⬛ ⬛⬜⬛⬛⬛⬜⬛ ⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Solved #146 (Easy) Time spent: 01:17 29 moves • 0 hints

Have you considered crypto payments?

I got tired of using Markdown and Org mode for writing web pages last year. They're so limited, and so full of odd gotchas and limitations. Instead, I started writing raw HTML, but with a post-processing step to add titles, headers, footers, and CSS, and to do macro-like things, e.g. insert pull quotes and YouTube viewers. But raw HTML is not great, either. I'm now working on an editor that lets me use Emacs-style commands and key bindings (e.g. character, paragraph, sentence, and word motion, deletion, and transposition; Emacs-style undo/redo; incremental search; and case conversions) to edit HTML in a WYSIWYG view. The new editor does it all in a Webkit-based HTML view built with Tauri. Editing this way is so much more pleasant and more powerful. I plan to publish it under an MIT license once it's good enough.

modeling the heat transfer modes in Enceladus' icy shell that rests above its liquid water ocean. previous modeling has assumed that all heat transfer is conductive, but using dynamical simulations i've shown that under certain conditions convection can occur at in the shell. specifically, these conditions are having a thick enough ice shell, the right amount of porous fluffy ice deposited from the plumes at Enceladus' south pole which jet water into space through fissures in the crust, and the right thermal conductivity of this porous layer.

now i'm starting on adjusting the model to include the liquid water ocean underneath the shell and observe the effect of changing viscosity gradients in the equilibration of the ocean and ice shell, as well as adding in compositional impurities (chloride brines) and tidal heating effects.

Are you planning to publish your results when you're done?

I'm writing a science fiction book that takes place mostly around Jupiter, and would love to hear more about this; if you found anything particularly interesting or unexpected or striking (especially visually), and whether it might transfer at all to e.g., Ganymede/Europa/Callisto.

A mobile app called Trip o'clock (https://tripoclock.com)

An AI-trip planner with a nice twist. It shows you everything you need to know about a place even before getting there: Images, a great summary, cost of living broken down weather conditions etc. It also comes with the usual features you'll expect in a trip planning app (ai itinerary suggestions, travel expenses tracker, group chat for group trips, google places integration for looking up places to eat, things to do, healthcare places and transportation centers, and a private travel checklist). You should check it out today!

I've been able to have the privilege of working at a company that is cool with me open sourcing everything we build along the way -- its a nice perk and it also makes me motivated to work on stuff outside of work :)

The two things I've open sourced that I've been moonlighting after hours for:

https://canine.sh/ - An open source Heroku alternative, 10x cheaper. Got sick of paying those prices

https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/ a free open source flatfile alternative

i saw that the hellocsv link was "visited" for me, looked again and remember checking it out when evaluating other csv parsers :)

i see you use papaparse. you can try something else, if you want :p

https://github.com/leeoniya/uDSV

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. My most recent addition has been public moderation logs to keep the admin accountable.

- 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

Continuing to work on my MMORPG made with Elixir and Godot. The game has been live for 2 months but there's still lots to do. A lot of the architecture revolves around the AI simulation run in Elixir. I started working on this game after quitting my job on a whim (18 months ago!). I've started to get some daily players which is exciting.

https://swarmmo.games The game is playable in browser! And theres no sign-up required to try it out.

Impressive, keep going!

I was building an intentionally annoying app against doomscrolling [1]. Being technical, I tried to focus on product, marketing and more instead of the implementation. But I still didn't ship quick enough. It's so hard. Only after a few months did I start with marketing, and it hit me like a wall.

So I'm giving a try to a project which started with marketing. No implementation, just a TikTok to see if people like it. And holy crap, we got 75k views!

The new idea [2] is easier to explain (1 pushup = 1 minute of scrolling) and already has a community. Plus, not working alone helps me focus on what I'm good at: programming. I don't regret learning about other areas but doing marketing for a living is not my thing.

I'm not getting rid of SpeedBump, though. It's a fun side project and it does help people :)

[1] https://speedbumpapp.com

[2] https://pushscroll.com

I'm just finishing up a book called Rebooting a Nation on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly after independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in tech and e-government. It should start shipping on Amazon in the U.S. later this week! Happy to chat with folks who have questions about the publishing industry from an authors perspective (I ended up signing with Hurst in the UK which distributes through Oxford University Press).

https://shorturl.at/LKMxS (Amazon link)

Very cool. Fun username too. I know Estonia has been an amazing leader in this space. Any thoughts on how their gov digitization compares/contrasts with Ukraines DIIA efforts?

Thanks! I think one of the main differences is timing -- Estonia started 20+yrs before Ukraine so in a way they're quite far ahead in terms of systems/process maturity. However, because Ukraine started later they were able to skip over desktop and build just for mobile which is where the vast majority of folks interact with e-services these days, so in a way Diia (at least from a user interface perspective) if probably further ahead than Estonia which had to invest in both desktop and mobile platforms and was a bit slower to move on the latter. Overall, I find Diia and the pace of innovation from the team building it incredibly impressive.

An "JIT interpreter" for Emacs Lisp [1] with Graal Truffle [2] in Java. And it is really amazing how the frameworks these days simplify building a JIT runtime for a language. Currently I'm working on a pdump[3]-like feature for it.

[1] https://codeberg.org/gudzpoz/Juicemacs/src/branch/main/elisp

[2] https://www.graalvm.org/latest/graalvm-as-a-platform/languag...

[3] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu...

That's great. I will like to be part of your team

OpenCLI - https://github.com/bcdxn/opencli

A document specification for defining command line interfaces.

It's really just a fun side project to get more familiar with Go. The goal is to be able to generate boilerplate code in a few languages/frameworks and to generate documentation in a couple formats.

This looks really cool! OpenAPI for CLIs is a great idea.

I like this, would you like some help?

Yeah I'd love to get some help. You can DM me on the Twitter/X that's in my profile.

I would also like to help if you need a hand with docs :)

Yeah I'd love to get some help. You can DM me on the Twitter/X that's in my profile.

I'm working on https://nuenki.app. It's a browser extension that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so you learn through immersion as you go about your day.

I've been doing a lot of experiments evaluating LLM translation performance, and I used what I learnt (that LLMs make mistakes, but different LLMs make different mistakes, and they're better at critiquing translations than producing them) to make a hybrid translator (https://nuenki.app/translator) that beats everything else.

And I was invited to do a talk about that to a company, which was really cool! I'm 19, doing this in my gap year before uni.

This is incredibly impressive work, especially at 19! The insight about LLMs being better at critiquing than producing translations is brilliant, and using that to build a hybrid system that outperforms individual models is exactly the kind of innovative thinking the field needs. Congrats on the company talk, well deserved recognition for solid research and execution!

Nice work and blog! You might consider crossposting some blog entries to LessWrong for more visibility of your research. People are very interested in new ideas on benchmarking.

That's a good idea, thanks for the suggestion. I'm thinking of writing one big blog article about everything I've found, loosely based on the talk, and I'll crosspost it there.

Hi Alex, lovely work. I have just started working on a similar idea, to have level-aware language support in a podcast player (extending Anytime Player) to help the listener recognise words, phrases and meaning in native content.

I'm a non-techy person learning from scratch so it's slow going but as a language learner who selfishly wants more tools to support immersion learning if you want to support audio I think something podcast based would be super interesting.

I’m working on https://postcardlove.com — a super simple site that lets you send real postcards using a photo from your phone. No login, just upload, write, and send.

It started because I wanted to send my sister an old photo for her birthday, and instead of using CVS or Shutterfly like a normal person, I ended up building it using Bubble and Lob.

Now I’m exploring the B2B angle — a friend asked if I could do postcard mailings for her medical practice. Curious if anyone here has experience with postcards for outreach or marketing?

Very cool.

I launched https://PostalAgent.com recently that solves a similar problem.

It also can be used for Marketing because you can circle areas on a Google Map to send mailings to, and then filter by Household income, home value, etc

Ping me if you want to chat

i wanted to build this! but now i don't need to. very great execution here, and your per-unit postcard prices are awesome. is there a minimum?

No, no minimum - send a single postcard if you want!

Hey!

Let's chat! Postcardlove.com was a small side project that I created while working on the larger project. I think I can use PostalAgent for that project.

patelamit@gmail.com

Best, Amit

yay, postcard apps! this is my space, too. there's something really fun about making an API call and then postcards shoot out the other side.

i like your site and the visual design, very simple and straightforward. at $3.99 it does seem rather expensive compared to other options out there (i have an idea on how much it costs you). also, having some actual pictures of what the cards look like on the website will surely help with conversion.

the first postcard app I built is 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. we've sent over 250 cards so far.

my latest postcard app is Slow-Mo Rainbow (https://slowmorainbow.com). this one lets you send a rainbow in the mail, one postcard at a time. i just launched it last week and am still getting the rough edges worked out, but in the spirit of the thread, i'm sharing it here.

I love threekidnwords.com, I remember reading a blog post that you wrote. I also love your website.

For the pricing, I just picked what I thought I would pay. I have been using it to send postcards to myself and my wife!

I'll check out slowmorainbow.com!

I am working on a music recommendation algorithm for your self hosted music. Think of it like your personal pandora.

Backend is already working: Boldaric https://github.com/line72/boldaric

And a simple iOS native front end (which I haven’t submitted to the App Store yet). Tor Jolan https://github.com/line72/torjolan

It has been interesting tweaking the algorithms and models for various similarity searches.

I really like that it focuses on music characteristics and not metadata, so popularity of a song/artist isn’t even taken into account. This has really helped me explore my rather large music collection especially when I get stuck in a rut of listening to the same things.

Wow! I was thinking about doing something similar (extracting audio features to find really similar songs) some weeks ago. I love the idea, it'd be great to have something like this to discover music too, but it'll be difficult to discover new music because it won't be present in the collection.

I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp and often a label will have their whole catalog on sale, so I’ll just buy that. But I haven’t been good exploring the new 50+ albums I just bought, so this is helping.

I also finally took my wife’s collection, properly tagged it, and added it to my collection. That has been fun to explore.

That sounds nice. Sometimes I listen to a really great fragment of a song (the final minutes of Descending from Tool) and I think: "It'd be great to hear songs that have this kind of fragment".

I don't know if that's possible or not, but it'd be much better for me than the recommendations from popular streaming services.

I think for exploring new music last.fm or listenbrainz are still good options.

Listenbrainz has some cool tools like troi to come up with weekly lists.

They work on popularity and neighbors, so if you listen to a lot of underground music that isn’t on major platforms, they fail

I’m tinkering on pgflow – an open-source, DAG-based workflow engine that uses Postgres to orchestrate workers on top of PGMQ queues. It seamlessly integrates with Supabase (no new infra needed!) and executes code on Edge Functions using custom, serverless task queue worker. All the current and past state of all executions is stored in Postgres and can be queries with simple SELECTs and flows can be started from within the db (think: pg_cron, triggers).

I have strong focus on db consistency and Type safety between steps.

### Built so far – core SQL orchestration (state machine, retries, observability, queue management) – strictly typed TypeScript DSL + compiler that turns flow definitions into migrations – a minimal Edge Function worker that polls, executes and reports back

### Current focus I’m heads-down on a dedicated client library. It leverages Supabase Realtime to stream events and progress of each flow run back to the browser, while having strict compile-time safety for flows defined with the TypeScript DSL.

### Next on the roadmap - Fanouts for processing arrays of data in parallel, with per-item retry logic. - SQL-based conditionals/branching that leverages JSONB containment operator and step outputs

Docs: https://www.pgflow.dev/concepts/how-pgflow-works/ Repo: https://github.com/pgflow-dev/pgflow

https://tritium.legal

Tritium is an IDE for corporate lawyers. Draft Word docs, review PDFs, redline all in a single application. It's written in Rust using a modified version of egui. Immediate mode has some interesting tradeoffs that I'd love to discuss on here. Also the web/desktop dichotomy presents a lot of interesting opportunities and challenges where data governance is concerned. I'd love your thoughts or to share mine!

I'm not a customer, but having seen the workflows lawyers go through with documents this product would be extremely useful. I suspect your challenge will be that most laywers are likely risk averse, and would hesitate to put any important changes through something that is not well vetted. I wonder if there's a way to combat that by keeping your product compatible with their usual format, therefor making it a less risky product to try?

Great question - it aims for 100% compatibility with MS Word documents. It falls over on the rendering side, but guarantees not to drop data or miss any text. If you see it on your screen, someone using Word will see it too.

Getting it onto the desktop is the big challenge for the moment!

Now my lawyer will be using vscode too, sweet!

Hopefully it will save you some billable hours :)

Nice idea! Some possible really good reading here for you: https://substack.com/@jordanbryan - YC 2021 building out “git for lawyers”

Concur with most of that.

What experience do you have in law?

I was a special counsel at a funds practice. I began practicing corporate law in 2011. Check it out here: https://tritium.legal/about

Looks great! Well done.

I'd recommend a better landing page for mobile when you have time :). The gif is very tiny on a smartphone and takes time to get to the point.

Thanks for the advice!

I am currently working on thethoughtcatcher.com

It started as a side project to explore the latest AI trends. Now it’s something we use daily — and others are starting to as well.

Thoughtcatcher is a lightweight, AI-powered notes + reminders app that acts like a memory companion.

It helps you: - Capture raw thoughts and auto-tag them using AI - Set smart reminders triggered by context and meaning - This was a game changer for me personally - Search and chat with your notes like a conversation — not just by keywords, but by intent

Example? You’re walking out of a meeting and think: “We should revisit that pricing model after the new release.” You jot it into ThoughtCatcher — no structure, no stress. A week later, right before the next sprint planning, it reminds you. Just when you would’ve forgotten — it remembers.

What started as a learning project has grown into something useful — not just for individuals, but for teams too.

We’re now exploring B2B use cases like: • Project knowledge management • Shared team notes with smart search and chat • Meeting follow-up insights and reminders • AI-powered team memory for client or product work

Want to try it out? Android users: Download the app iOS users: Use the PWA — just “Add to Home Screen”

Still early. Still learning. But ThoughtCatcher already feels like something I wish I had years ago.

Would love your feedback or thoughts. And if you’re building something similar— let’s connect

Ingesting idea! I've been looking for an alternative to using Android's Tasks app for jotting down thoughts. I prefer it over the Notes app because I can curate categories as different lists.

Random callout: the copy in your app store preview images would benefit from some proof reading. Example: "WE dont just store thoughts, but makes sense of them" should likely be "ThoughtCatcher doesn't just store thoughts, it makes sense of them". My 2 cents is to also rework "Capture your mind" as it's a little awkward. Maybe "Organize your thoughts", "Supercharge your thoughts", or something along those lines.

Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback — really appreciate you taking the time to point that out!

You're absolutely right — the copy needs some polish, and that line in particular slipped through. I'm already working on updates to clean up the messaging and make it more clear and engaging (and less awkward — "Capture your mind" was definitely a placeholder).

Thanks again — feedback like this is super valuable as I shape ThoughtCatcher into something truly useful!

Nice to see an entirely new category of program, based on the core data type "thought", which is what I would call pre-organized information. A spontaneous thought could become a task or a whole project plan, a project or product, once refined, or a memo, even a book. The value proposition is to capture early where other tools force more orgnization before or at capture. So one problem you solve is losing a nucleus of a thought before having time to enter it in a program that requires more metadata. A second way you provide value is that despite being pre-organized, your "thoughts" are already somewhat actionable - this is what using an LLM gives you.

Personal information management is flooded with useless "TO DO" apps that offer little value over plaim text files (which is what I use for tasks), but it appears you have put something together that caters to the informal side of knowledge management in the same sense that Google catered to informal (unstructured) Web pages, overcoming the world of relational databases and forced categorization of library card catalogs.

My recommendation would be to offer APIs and plain text import/export capabilities to grow your app into an ecosystem that can accommodate playing with enterprise tools or homegrown solutions.

I wish you a huge success with this app!

Thank you so much for this deeply thoughtful comment,you’ve articulated the core intent behind ThoughtCatcher better than I could myself!. The idea of capturing a "nucleus of a thought" before it dissolves exactly that!. I absolutely agree with your suggestion on APIs and plain text import/export. That’s on my roadmap, I want users to feel like they own their thoughts and can plug them into any workflow, from personal journaling to enterprise systems. Thanks again for taking the time — it means a lot!

if anyone want to go through the current use cases possible , please see our initial documentation at #https://docs.thethoughtcatcher.com/introduction

> not just by keywords, but by intent

A relatively "simple" approach (augmented associative memory) gives very good results, check for example the good old "Remembrance Agent", and it may complement a LLM(?)

I didn’t know about the Remembrance Agent, just looked it up, and it sounds super relevant! I’ll definitely dig deeper into it. Thanks a lot for pointing it out and for your comment!

I'm still working on a complete overhaul of German health insurance advice for immigrants. It's a really boring topic BUT a fascinating problem.

The system is complex. Choosing the best option is difficult. Understanding the timelines, the required documents, and how to prove coverage for a visa application or school enrolment is super complex. I'm trying to streamline the whole thing.

I released phase one yesterday. It's a simple overhaul of the text advice plus a new health insurance calculator. I also paired up with a health insurance broker to give more personalised advice, since everyone needs a different recommendation.

It's here: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance

I'm now working on phase two: covering the exact process of getting insured for a visa application. I really want to walk people through the exact order of things, with detailed steps and timelines. The calculator will get a hell of a lot more complicated.

Phase three is compressing all of that. Once I have a good idea of how things work and where friction can be reduced, I'll simplify and automate as much of it as possible. It should turn a messy, complex and confusing process into a fairly straightforward thing.

I feel like no one is really doing this yet, and I'm surprised at how achievable it is.

I am restarting my free and open source SRS kanji learning app https://shodoku.app which is based on free and open source dictionary data and Anki’s FSRS algorithm.

What I have is a basic flash card app with double sided cards (for writing (i.e. drawing) the kanji, and reading). What sets it apart is that each card contains all the relevant dictionary data, and users are encourage to bookmark a couple of words to help them remember the writing or the reading of the kanji.

What I am working on now is the database backup/sync system. I store all the user’s progress in indexeddb store in their local browser. To sync I am writing a simple patch system, so they can pick a remote somewhere (e.g. a gist on github) and push their latest patches, when syncing progress I would check the hash of the patch and apply the relevant patches.

After that I am planning on turning it into a progressive web app so users can download the app onto their devises.

https://shodoku.app/

https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku

Love the aesthetic! Also your handwriting input is super smooth, amazing!

I've been building something similar for Chinese, just for myself: https://hazel.daijin.dev/ It's got PWA, let me know if you want my presets for working with PWA with Vite.

Will definitely be taking a few pages out of your (app) when I get a chance!

I'm building https://signwith.co/ - a pay per doc alternative to DocuSign

We used to run a content and product studio, and every time we had to get NDAs or service agreements signed, it felt ridiculous to pay $30/month for 2-3 documents.

So we built SignWith — no subscriptions, just simple pay-per-document pricing. ESIGN act and UETA Complaint.

Every month you get 3 free signatures - and then you can pay per document. So best ROI.

Works great for freelancers, early-stage founders, agency folks, or anyone who doesn’t need to send docs every day but still wants something secure and professional.

Launched recently. Early traction's been interesting. Would love feedback if you’re in this space or use e-sign tools regularly.

Looks useful. Add a developer tier and an npm module for user to embed in their apps.

That’s a great suggestion - thank you!

We're releasing a lightweight API in a week and even bundling an npm module to make embedding signatures seamless inside other apps. Especially for internal tools and client dashboards.

I've been working on a programing language to read and write Excel spreadsheets. Or more accurately I've been writing a custom programming language and porting my library to it, so I can transpile it out to other languages.

Currently it is being transpiled to C++ and C#

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CPlusPlus

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CSharp

I’m building software to augment human cognition.

In particular:

To help solve forecasting & planning problems too hard to hold in your head, I’m converting natural-language formulations of constrained optimization problems into (back)solvable mathematical programs, whose candidate solutions are “scenarios” in a multi-dimensional “scenario landscape” that can be pivoted, filtered, or otherwise interrogated by an LLM equipped with analytical tools:

- 5 minute demo: https://youtu.be/-QdqiLp_9nY

- Details: https://spindle.ai

Eager to connect with anyone interested in similarly neurosymbolic “tools for thought”: carson@carsonkahn.com | +1 (303) 808-5874

https://dailytokki.com

It's an email-only Korean (and English) language learning service started by me and my partner! We've both been interested in language and, since I've been learning Korean and she's been improving English, I've been looking for a modality that works for me -- apps don't click for me for some reason.

It started by me sending myself an email everyday with new Korean vocab/grammar, but we thought it would be nice if it responded with corrections and learned from my common mistakes to make better questions. So, we've built it out to work for us, and turns out other people also like it and are growing everyday!

Most of what I'm working on ends up being social clubs.

Tech Pizza Mondays has been going well, as the Toronto HN meetup. If you're reading this on HN, you're welcome to join us -> URL Mondays.Pizza details on fedi.

We just finished Toronto's Pizza Day, our fifth year in a row and most successful so far. toronto.pizzadao.xyz will eventually get updated to next year's event invite.

I threw a fun experimental comedy party, and I plan to throw another in August. Having a volunteer cast was great, the clown burlesque was shockingly great. I hope to find some team members who want to join forces and put on the greatest talent show this town has ever seen!

Working on founding a school in Toronto has been very difficult, feels like I'm making zero real progress over time. If anyone cares deeply about education, I'd be happy to talk. I'm extremely enthusiastic about the Sudbury Valley School model.

And this last week I started a fitness club, where most weekdays we do strength training with giant wooden swords. Looking for people who want to join up and get strong and have fun!

I'm working on a programming language called Mech: https://github.com/mech-lang

It's for building robots, scientific computations, user interfaces, reactive systems, and so forth. Currently working on docs for this new version that I'm about to release. I'll post a Show HN when I do. Here's the spec so far it's a very WIP, maybe 20% done: https://docs.mech-lang.org/v0.2/II.reference/specification.h...

The cool part about the spec is it's a valid Mech program which is formatted into html by the formatter! https://gitlab.com/mech-lang/docs/-/raw/main/II.reference/sp...

https://periplus.app

A website for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, quizzes and flashcards.

Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time. Currently using the graph for topic suggestions, though I've also been playing around with steering document generation with it as well.

This is amazing. I tried to build something like this about a year ago and didn't get very far. How much time did this take and how big are your AI bills?

Feature suggestion: fact checking the contents of a flash card with perplexity

The first prototype was done in a weekend for an Anthropic contest a while ago, but by now I've been working on it on & off for the better part of a year!

API costs are roughly == subscription costs for power users (slightly more) since it uses Sonnet in most places, but I have credits to burn right now :)

> fact checking the contents of a flash card with perplexity

Will see what I can do! Main issue is that search grounding can be a bit expensive...

I’m intrigued and made a note to check this out, but I just wanted to say that I love this design! It’s gorgeous. Is this a template or did you hire a designer or design it yourself?

Thanks! It's done by me (and Claude). I've never done any design in the past so I'm glad you like it!

This is an amazing project. I like it.

Working on my Mill build tool, aiming to bring a modern developer experience to the JVM ecosystem:

- https://mill-build.org

Build tools are generally an un-sexy field, and JVM build tools perhaps doubly so. But Mill demonstrates that with some thought put into the design and architecture, we can speed up JVM development workflows by 3-6x over traditional JVM tools like Maven or Gradle, and make it subjectively much easier to navigate in IDEs and extend with custom logic.

If you're passionate about developer experience and work on the JVM, I encourage you to give Mill a try!

Is mill ready to be used in production ?

There are some companies out there using it in production. I know Netflix and Disney have some teams using it, and the Chisel project (and associated SciFive company) recently moved completely onto Mill from SBT. They all seem pretty happy

YugabyteDB a distributed postgres database.

Think of it as a true drop in replacement for postgres that runs on multiple nodes. It internally does replication, sharding and leader election. Just add more nodes and you get to increase both read and write scale.

I personally am working on a few things like online major upgrades, async replication for DR, enhanced backup/restore/pitr/clone capabilities, and more recently supporting DocumentDB extension which provides a true Mongodb API.

Being a startup I also get to talk with large customers, help with marketing content, and participate in database conferences.

A hybrid between forum and (headless) CMS, with customer support tools built in, so people can build websites that are kinda like posthog.com without having to patch everything together from scratch (and instead focus on their actual product AND not lose their community content in slack/discord/whatever).

Checkout how posthog did it [1], it's an interesting approach. Having something that can support both devs and content folks (non technical) is great. It is easy to get bogged down in building the website and reinventing bunch of wheeels, instead of focusing on the product & content, esp in smaller teams.

[1] How PostHog built a community forum, roadmap and changelog on Strapi https://strapi.io/user-stories/posthog

how do i learn more?

Info in my profile. If you don't mind I'll shoot you an email, would love your thoughts on some things.

btw - hats down for your work @ PostHog! We are all big fans and deeply inspired by it

Fostrom (https://fostrom.io)

A developer-focused IoT Cloud Platform. The idea stems from pain points experienced while automating an indoor farm a few years ago where I had to spend way too much time building the data collection and analysis infrastructure instead of focusing on the actual automation.

Devices connect via secure MQTT, HTTP, or WebSockets and send structured, typed data. Each device gets its own sequential mailbox for messages. You can trigger webhooks or broadcast messages to other devices based on incoming data, powered by programmable actions.

Just deployed to production. Currently working on Device SDKs (coming very soon) and time-series analytics. Check out the platform, we're in technical preview now. Happy to answer questions and appreciate any feedback.

What is your plan for time-series analytics?

We're currently working on a data explorer which will allow you to choose, filter, and sort datapoints in a table view. We're gonna add time-based aggregations, charts, anomaly detection, and correlation analytics soon after.

Any feedback or suggestions on what you would like to see?

I’m working on Karl [https://www.veloursdevices.com], a MIDI controller. It’s quite unique because it features 32 encoders over a display, which allows you to have a fully customizable interface—like a touchscreen, but with actual knobs you can touch.

I have a software engineering background, and I’ve been working on this for nearly 3 years now! I used to play with the Electra One controller before, but having the encoders over the display is really something I’ve always wanted.

I presented Karl last month at Superbooth (a fair in Berlin) and got really good feedback. After 6 months of beta and 2 years of touring with it myself, the first batch will be dispatched in August, and this is quite exciting!

Wow! Never seen "encoders over a display" before. This could be revolutionary in so many different scenarios beyond MIDI controllers. First scenario that comes to mind are car user interfaces. Mixing screens with physical controllers is such an innovative idea. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks a lot!

Yes, the first idea that came to mind (after music/light controllers) was indeed car user interfaces.

Maybe some cool interfaces for home automation too, and I can also imagine controllers for factories or workshops—pretty much anywhere with lots of parameters to control.

But really, if you have other scenarios in mind, please share, I’m very interested, as you can imagine ;)

The Ford Mustang Mach-E has a physical wheel on its touch screen.

We’re trying to make AI-first apps accessible to everyone.

Here’s a simple app my toddler made to generate toy trains[0].

“Real users” are using it to build personal software tools like finance dashboards, content generators, and educational apps.

Right now the functionality is great for many simple tools, but it’s notably lacking a first-class data layer (coming soon!).

All of the AI-generated code runs in secure MicroVMs, and the front-ends are just static assets, meaning the apps scale to zero when not in use.

We’re currently in the process of making the builder less of a “workflow” and more purely agentic, which should improve the overall success rate.

[0]https://toy-train-generator.magicloops.app/

> Here’s a simple app my toddler made to generate toy trains[0].

Can you explain what you mean by this? How did a 3-year-old (or younger) meaningfully contribute to the design of this app? Do they know how to read?

Good question! He can't type and the local voice assistants can't really understand him...

He simply asked it to make toy trains, all I did was clean up the text to "create toy trains"

From that prompt, it goes through steps to build out a UI and any back-end functionality (Loops) needed.

To use it, he tells me what type of train to generate ("underwater"[0]) and I type in the prompt. He has a lot of fun with it!

[0]https://app.magicloops.dev/storage/v1/object/public/images/d...

A web app which we plan to be always free for personal use. It's called MyMirror 360 [1].

The goal is for you to get complete and honest feedback from the team you work with. The killer feature is we make it quick and easy. And your reflectors can never initiate the instance of giving of feedback, the system invites them; this avoids the "but I am angry now" situation.

You can add the team members you work with in any setting and specify how often you work together. Depending on that, they will get the chance to reflect on you between every four weeks and every eight weeks. A reflection takes literally seconds.

Sign up is invite-only atm but invites are handed out pretty quickly since we want the feedback! Just sign up for the wait list on the site [1]. It will be free because we have a business version [2] that will support it; and the personal app will hopefully generate interest in the company one.

You can send feedback to "admin" at the domain of the company one [2].

[1] Personal: https://www.mymirror360.com/ [2] Company: https://www.mirror360.org/

Looks like a great way to collect honest, accurate feedback - love the anonymous aspect!

Any company that doesn't want to use this is sus.

I'm working on a universal tool to generate and print custom dust jackets for books, with the goal of making prettier bookshelves.

https://www.jacket-lab.com/

cool idea, looking forward to seeing that on Show HN :)

Thanks! I'm waiting until it's a bit more mature before sharing it there.

Hit me up when you do, ben@shepherd.com. Happy to tweet it, and share on my reader newsletter.

It would be super cool to see different patterns etc for different genres.

Thanks, will do! I hope I can also provide different templates and some default art in the future, but I'm not entirely sure about what yet.

(nice website BTW ;) )

Myself.

Been a freelance dev for years, now going on "sabbatical" (love that word) very shortly.

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.

---

I posted about this on last month's thread, and mentioned in a descendant comment that I was going to PyCon US in May. Someone well-meaning asked if tech conferences are in tune with working on myself. I just got back from PyCon. Yes! It was an incredible experience. Not for learning technical things from talks – the talks are mostly online already – but for the social and community aspects.

Out of interest, how are you approaching this? Are you trying to "refactor" in specific areas, or is it somewhat more ad-lib? Do you have something in mind for the next "volume"?

I'm working on a chrome extension for use in a headless browser in marginalia search to capture information about network traffic, ads, and popovers when visiting a website, to better identify nuisance websites.

A bit of a janky setup, but I've mostly gotten it to do what I want it to do after some head scratching.

Holy shit, so you are uh building a search engine from scratch. Do you crawl yourself? What is your infrastructure? What is your goal for search.marginalia ?

> Holy shit, so you are uh building a search engine from scratch.

Yup

> Do you crawl yourself?

Yup

> What is your infrastructure?

All custom built in Java, sitting on a rack server in a basement in Sweden.

> What is your goal for search.marginalia ?

I'm basically building what I feel is lacking in internet search and discovery, which is tools for finding stuff based on something other than a popularity metric, as those tend to feed into themselves to make the web seem so small.

I love the 'coffee stain'indicator! How do you rank results?

Can you give some rough indications of how many pages you index in total? How many page you crawl each day? Size of the machine(s) in RAM and HDD?

Sorry, many questions, just genuinely intrigued!

> How do you rank results?

There's a ton of factors.

https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...

> Can you give some rough indications of how many pages you index in total?

I index like 300 million documents right now, though I crawl something like 1.4 billion (and could index them all). The search engine is pretty judicious about filtering out low quality results, mostly because this improves the search results.

> How many page you crawl each day?

I don't know if I have a good answer for that. In general the crawling isn't really much of a bottleneck. I try to refresh the index completely every ~8 weeks, and also have some capabilities for discovering recent changes via RSS feeds.

> Size of the machine(s) in RAM and HDD?

It's an EPYC 7543 x2 SMP machine with 512 GB RAM and something like 90 TB disk space, all NVMe storage.

I'm working on tooling to turn kids from consumers into creators. I'm focusing on game development initially, but have plans for video production and hands on crafts.

For older kids I've been making it easier to write games in Godot using TypeScript:

https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...

I'm building tooling using this technology which allows kids to create their own games, this is itself presented as a game kids can play through. Basically, imagine if Roblox actually delivered on its promises to kids.

Most of what we're building will be open sourced, so that older kids / young adults will be able export their projects and share their creations stand-alone.

Of course, telling kids they can create their own game is only relevant is kids want to do that. We're not locked into one way of thinking. We've also modified Overcooked 2, a traditionally co-op game and introduced a visual scripting platform which allows kids to code their way through levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ackD3G_D2Hc

Overcooked 2 won't be the only game for which we do this. Introducing coding to existing games is a fun way to teach kids to code, without yet burdening kids with too much creative freedom. Kids already want to play these games, so this approach allows us to bring educational tooling to kids rather than vice versa.

I used to be Head of Engineering at Ender, where we ran custom Minecraft servers for kids: https://joinender.com/ and prior to that I was Head of Engineering at Prequel / Beta Camp, where we ran courses that helped teenagers learn about entrepreneurship: https://www.beta.camp/. During peak COVID I also ran a social emotion development book subscription service with my wife, a primary school teacher.

I have interest in this space, but as you wrote the software will be only useful if kids want to create games and there aren't many kids (I think) who want to create their own game. Kids mostly want to play for fun.

My kids play Roblox for pure entertainment, but I think the experience can be improved. Making a platform like Roblox that's fun to play and has ability to extend (the learning and game creation) it easily would be great. Atmosphere was great but it vanished.

I vibe coded a chrome extension that highlights new links on HN frontpage since your last visit, so that you dont have to waste time looking for which links are new.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-new-links-highli...

I've been using a js bookmarklet every single day for over a decade. It sorts the entries by most voted and dims the ones already shown last visit. I won't post it here as it may mess up with formatting, so here is a link to pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/dzT7PckU

you should turn it into an extension as well

https://www.moviemixup.com

A wordle-like game based on a road trip game my friends and I used to play. It serves you up a mashup of two different movie plots, and you have to guess the combined movie title. There's always some sort of shared word or wordplay between the two movie titles.

An example from the tutorial: the day after tomorrow never dies.

Nice idea! Not sure I'm missing something obvious, but it really needs an archive, or "play random" button.

There is one! When you complete today's puzzle, it asks you if you want to play an older one.

I get background anxiety while waiting for long-running terminal commands. Nowadays that nagging feeling extends to LLM calls too. Seems like as AI spreads, the pain will only get worse

So I’m working on a universal progress bar HUD

- inspired by World of Warcraft raid mods

- fun sound effects for job start, end, error, and milestones

- can quick jump back to relevant app/tab

- starting with terminal commands and Claude code, cursor agent next

https://youtu.be/6pk7KGOh60A?si=75FRq4kjhDHNSdE9

this is awesome. is this on github? i would love to use it.

Very cool idea! Never thought of making use of the notch for anything.

https://desktop.with.audio/

A one time payment (no subscription), local text to speech solution for MacOS or Windows. I've been a heavy user of Speechify but it was a bit expensive to justify. So I eventually built With Audio and after a few iterations now I'm working on the desktop app. Our laptops are very powerful and they are more capable of running some of these Text To Speech models with near to real time performance.

Care to explain more? how is it going? how many paying customers? how did u get the first 100 users or how are u going to achieve it?

Of course. Its very early days of doing this. I released the early access last month and then spent some time compiling it for Windows as well (before that it was only Mac arm). I'm promoting it again. At the moment I have 5 customers that are not friends and families by posting on Reddit audiobooks subreddit. My plan is to just keep promoting on social media, or communities like study groups or students for a while. I believe I should be able to get first 100 customers without paying for ads. It might be too naive but I think it not being a subscription can be a very good selling point and also it being local.

I'm a dev, I'm very much new to sales and marketing world. I think its fair to say I have no idea about next steps after dev work is finished (enough to attempt to sale). Mostly trying to figure that out.

Free Resume Builder

When I was looking for a job last summer, I got frustrated with the current resume builders on the market and decided to build one exactly how I wanted to use it.

- No signup, no login, and no payment.

- Suggest a professional summary (with highlighting) to match a job description [0].

- Preview as you go.

- ATS friendly templates.

- Find relevant jobs for my resume.

[0] Recruiters skim through resumes, and highlighting the keywords they look for has always helped me to get their attention, so I decided to implement this feature using AI.

https://resumeyay.com

I’ve been researching cloud GPU providers and collecting per hour prices at https://computeprices.com.

My thesis is that the next few decades will be driven by the prices of compute and kWh. This is my way of getting a better understanding of the ecosystem.

After a decade of professionally working with container orchestrators like Kubernetes and ECS I quit my job to build Uncloud — an open source lightweight version of those [1]. I want the tool to bring me joy when I use it, in a similar way Docker did when I first tried it in 2013.

Imagine Docker Compose and Tailscale had a baby. Uncloud is the baby that allows you to deploy and manage containers across a network of Docker hosts. I feel like we forgot how to build simple tools that do the job and not a thousand other unnecessary things.

I've started migrating some of my self-hosted web apps from my k8s cluster and I really enjoy it. Using the tool early on helps me better understand where the biggest pain points are and what I need to prioritise.

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

I am writing a newsletter, https://www.clientserver.dev. It started with the writing prompt “what if someone tried to make Money Stuff for software engineering?” My time is constrained since I have a kid, and I’m still iterating on the format a bit. But I recently crossed 250 subscribers and have made the Hacker News front page twice in the 6 months I have been running the newsletter, so I feel like I’m on the right track.

In the past few months, I've learned that (a) writing a bulleted outline is a cheat code for producing decent work quickly, (b) every newsletter is a reminder that people could unsubscribe, so skip publishing issues that you're not proud of, (c) people really like stories, and (d) it's okay to have a mix of formats.

How often do you share your posts in HN? How do you decide which posts to share?

If one gets any traction (like 10 upvotes or more), I wait a month or so. I know the site values pacing out content from the same source. If something was on the front page in the past week, I don’t post it. This eliminates probably 80-90% of my posts; “news + reaction as a staff software engineer” is my primary format. Beyond that, it’s mostly feel.

And what is your strategy regarding commenting? I don't spam (like commenting "good post") but my logical arguments get downvoted sometimes, don't understand the culture of HN properly.

I have a light touch. I think it comes from the foundation of having confidence in what I write. My three goals are to be entertaining, to be educational, and to stand by everything that I write. I don't have any emotional stake in being right or wrong; I'll make a correction if I'm wrong or have a typo, but I rarely have to do that. I don't really care if people disagree with me, because again, I stand by everything that I write. If I notice a trend in negative feedback I'll respond to it once and then check the thread again 2 or 3 days later to see how it shook out.

"Don't argue about the definitions of words online" is my "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." If people know what you mean but ignore it in favor of picking a fight, they're arguing for sport and I don't want to get involved with it.

A cross between a text MUD and an early 2k browser based RPG. Hoping to incorporate many advanced MMO and LitRPG based features plus complex economic, npc, guild, quest, and crafting mechanics. It’s more of a passion project/hobby with no expectation of adoption. It has been very fun to build.

Cool! I really love this sort of project. I've abandoned many similar things :) What do you like most about it? What things do you find fun to implement?

I’ve been experimenting with data formats like Parquet and Iceberg, and recently came across Lance. I wanted to try building something around it.

So I put together a simple Digital Asset Manager (DAM) where:

* Images are uploaded and vectorized using CLIP

* Vectors are stored in Lance format directly on Cloudflare R2

* Search is done via Lance, comparing natural language queries to image vectors

* The whole thing runs on Fly.io across three small FastAPI apps (upload, search, frontend)

No Postgres or Mongo. No AI, Just object storage and files.

You can try it here:

* https://metabare.com/

Or see the code here:

* https://github.com/gordonmurray/metabare.com

Would love feedback or ideas on where to take it next — I’m planning to add image tracking and store that usage data in Parquet or Iceberg on R2 as well.

A card game in Ruby on Rails, with an emphasis on deep reaction trees, and where the resolution order of action trees depends on whether actions resolve before or after their triggers.

Its real purpose is twofold: I enjoy data modeling, and doing just enough Rails work to regain fluency after a gap.

https://github.com/alexnyeoverride/causality-rails/

An app for parents to motivate their kids by awarding them points for good deeds. There are existing apps out there, but I tried them and didn't like them, so I'm building my own. This is a side project for me and I only get to spend a few hours a week on it. Currently in beta testing and I hope to launch around July.

https://whirl.digital

Some 20 years ago my kid's first grade teacher did something that motivated the kids to read a lot. Each kid had a small notebook where they would list books they read and the date. The parent had to sign off on each item on the list. When they completed 10, they would be eligible to pick a toy from a basket of dollar store junky toys she had in class. I think it was not just the toy (because they could get enough toys at home) but also the competition and recognition.

My teacher also did this same thing, I wonder if it was something that teachers widely practiced?

I am working on a critical thinking class based around the use of LLMs.

This involves exploring the ethics of using magic to accomplish tasks. The problem then boils down to a matter of epistemology— a testing problem. But testing is something you only do in the absence of trust. So critical thinking begins with the rejection of trust.

It’s been interesting to read about “Anomalistic Psychology” which is the study of magical thinking. Malinowsky commented that not a single canoe was built by Melanesian islanders without the use of magic, yet none of them would say that they could be built without craftsmanship.

Magic is the belief in the infallibility of hope, to paraphrase Malinowski. Which may explain why too many smart people are uncritical about LLMs.

I'm working on Finzz; I like investing but was struggling with doom-scrolling across various platforms to find things that were relevant to me. So I created Finzz which on-demand creates a multi host audio podcasts focused specifically on my stock portfolio and investment goals. I tell it the reasons behind why I hold these stocks and it tries to keep me honest to these goals and suggest rough actions from time to time.

https://finzz.xyz

Here's a sample if you are wondering what its like: https://finzz.xyz/shared/rnl-oO955IPZN6Ux78E-l8DC

As far as what I'm focusing on this weekend:

1. Right now, working on standing up an MCP server in Java. Not using the Spring Boot support at the moment, but rather setting up embedded Tomcat and doing it the more "low level" way just for didactic purposes. I'm sure I'll use Spring Boot once I get deeper into all of this.

2. Plowing through the "AI Agents in Action" book. I'm just wrapping up the section on AutoGen and about to move into crew.ai stuff.

3. Reading a book on Software Product Line Engineering.

4. I have an older project that's Grails based that I let linger without any attention for a really long time. I'm working on updating it to run on the latest Grails and Java versions and also writing some automated smoke tests.

This inspired me to buy the Agents in Action book! Gonna start working through it as well.

Before starting this book I'd worked with LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Ollama, the OpenAI API, etc. to varying degrees. What's been good about this book (so far) is that it has covered a number of technologies I had not previously explored: AutoGen, Crew.ai, SemanticKernel, etc.

The downside though, is that it doesn't go super deep into any of those things. So for me, it's been good to at least get a taste of what each is useful for and to serve as a starting point for further explorations. But just be aware that you won't become, say, a Crew.ai expert or whatever, from working through this. Still, I think it's valuable and I'm going to keep grinding through it. In Chapter 5 now, I think.

Trying to replace everything I use daily, outside money/banking, with my own fully customizable software. I had enough depending on others.

neat. anything you can share? code, blogs, etc?

probably too far for me, but very interesting to follow someone on this journey

That sounds like a very cool (and very difficult) project, do you rewrite everything from scratch or build on top of FOSS solutions for some things?

I'm looking for a replacement simple accounting software. I'm still using Quicken 96, which will stop working at the end of next year. I'm tired of subscription software that sucks. Give me simple and reliable, without the enshittification.

I've looked at a number of open source projects, but they are more complicated than what I'm looking for. Just let me manually enter my data or import a CSV into a ledger. All my data should stay local.

Suggestions?

What does it mean for the CSV to be imported into a ledger? Do you simply want a CSV viewer?

I'm building an app to do this, will let you know when it's in beta. :) Meanwhile, some of the similar apps that store data locally I've come across are: - https://copilot.money/ (nice UI; partly local—think it might use CloudKit for syncing) - https://ufincs.com/ - https://actualbudget.org/

I feel like http://monarchmoney.com is still the best UI I've come across, but I can't believe how common it is for all these providers to store your transactions in their cloud... seems like a fundamental security flaw to me, no matter how much they claim to lock down access to customer support agents/etc.

I am working on an administrative app for small businesses and it has some accounting functionality, take a look at it and let me know how I can improve it to suit your needs

https://my.adminix.app/demo

I’m building Electrobun (https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun)

It’s an alternative to Electron/Tauri that uses Bun.

It has a bsdiff based update mechanism that lets you ship updates as small as 4KB, a custom zstd self extractor that makes your app bundle as small as 12MB, and more.

I’m currently working on adding Windows and Linux support.

sounds awesome!

Excited for this!

I'm working on a programming game called "Pragma Twice". As in, playing the game involves programming. I just put up a steam page for it (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3528840/Pragma_Twice/) and have a demo submitted to Valve for review (which should hopefully be approved any day now, since I'm trying to participate in June's NextFest)

This game was originally inspired by the game "Untrusted" (https://github.com/AlexNisnevich/untrusted)

This gives me exapunks / Zachtronics vibes

A web app for my wife and my friends so they can order hot drinks when they are coming to my home.

Still quite early in the development but if you want to make my phone ring you can place an order on this page : https://micro-cafe.nuxt.dev/alix

You won't see your placed order nor get served however.

Building (https://estan.ai), an AI that reverse-engineers real estate listings by pulling not just from public records, but also social media, neighborhood forums, historical sales, and user reviews. It flags red flags—like crime trends, sketchy development patterns, neighborhood trends, and so on—then presents them in plain, opinionated language.

Goal: replace the vague boilerplate of listings with something closer to a paranoid friend who's done way too much research. Curious if this kind of subjective, context-heavy analysis adds real value—or just noise.

Think this is a great idea, I would have paid for this when we were buying our house. Especially for one feature: let me give you a list of properties (perhaps forwarded from my agent, or e.g. a Zillow search) and get back the "enriched" listings with your added insights. It'd be great if I could then weight different factors (local schools, walkability, etc.) to stack rank them.

With a once-in-a-century shakeup in commission structure for Realtors, you're building this at a very interesting time.

Happy to chat more if you'd like to bounce ideas around.

edit: Also, I think you could easily monetize this by charging agents (or their brokers) for it.

> With a once-in-a-century shakeup in commission structure for Realtors, you're building this at a very interesting time.

Could you please elaborate on this?

I’ve thought about something similar, after having been burned twice by rosy outlook from real estate agents (USA). The issue is there’s no incentives for a tool like this. A pre-sale inspection is really just to protect “the deal” from being unwound, and to check boxes where there is regulation or if one or the other party could be sued post-sale. Neither the selling or buying agent would want a tool that will prevent a deal, and a homeowner may not see the value given they are already paying a ton of cash to their agents. You would need to monetize via some side channel, or convince the buyer to pay you - the non-competitive MLS status quo of US realty would never permit you to partake in a transaction. Or, sell to those who have been burned (Id be a client if I ever can stomach buying a new home again).

Some ideas for your tool: - noise - neighbors with farm animals (increasingly popular in suburban areas, and local regs haven’t caught up wrt noise), or neighbors who have been reported or fined for animal neglect or noise violations (for example, pets that live outside where homes are close enough for this to be a meaningful noise problem). Problem neighbors in general, which is subjective but probably easy to find outliers. - traffic patterns, utilization by Waze drivers, speeders, prevalence of stop signs per intersection, if the street is used by emergency personnel or is close to a fire or police station - frequency of nearby construction via permit applications - inspector reviews - US inspectors have little oversight and typically protect themselves from damages contractually, it would be good to know which ones regularly flag things like roof leaks or don’t have exclusive relationships with real estate agents (which queers their incentives wrt buyers - “use my guy, he’ll give you a deal” gets contracts signed quickly) - prevalence of rentals or Airbnb in the area, renters aren’t bad of course but a buyer may want to know there’s a higher density of residents than appears, and all the knock on effects this could cause like traffic, trash, noise, new faces, non-owner residents engaging in risky behavior etc.

I’d considered a device that could be nailed to a nearby telephone pole, like a raspberry pi with a sensitive mic and some presence sensing, with a few days of battery life. A technology version of “hang out in this neighborhood for a bit and give me the low-down that the sellers may want to hide”.

https://dateit.com

A social event planning app to capture the fun my friends and I had with facebook events, but without the facebook. We have native apps for iOS, Android and the web. dateit has a generous free features compared to competing apps (SMS invites, photo upload, customization).

My cofounder and I have fully bootstrapped this and now it mostly self sustains which is an exciting achievement!

It's been a fun project to hack on for the last couple years and spawned several interesting side quests. For example, the backend is in Swift (as I started as an iOS dev) so that has been an exciting space to work in.

My workplace is a bird conservation non-profit with java code from 2006 and the website is many jsp files.

I've added a react SSR system. It has node subprocess code for rendering HTML from java via stdin/stdout. There's a Node/Vite proxy server that adds the fancy HMR you expect from SPA apps.

It supports multiple roots on a page, every SSR component has data-props and data-componentname, and the entry script just queries those attributes and hydrates everything.

The node renderer script is packaged as an EXE which is deployed in WEB-INF on the server.

It's fun to add the amazing React tooling to an old codebase. It also shows how you really, really, really do not need NextJS.

Coinbase has just unveiled x402, a protocol that resurrects the HTTP 402 status code and enables instant stable-coin payments—no bank account, card, or subscription required. APIs, applications, and AI agents can now autonomously settle or receive micro-payments to buy data, services, or computing power.

To tap into this revolution, I created Mogami: a Java / Spring Boot library that lets you make any URL pay-to-access with a single annotation. → Code & docs: https://github.com/mogami-tech/x402-spring-boot-starter

I've published a lot of interactive programming courses on Boot.dev over the last few years, but the issue that's been plaguing the platform is how quickly it moves through material.

Like we give people challenges for each new concept, but we don't give them 4 or 5 challenges for each new concept. It's hard to get right because

1. It's a lot of work to make challenges/review material 2. Every student wants a different amount of practice/review

So anyways I think we've got a really good solution in the works, been cooking on it this week and we're hoping to be ready to go live in August

You've built a great product IMO. I'm a happy customer.

Working on a mathematical model to quantify what is theoretically possible for humans to bridge all fragmented theories across psychology, mental health, productivity, economics, and more (similar to what Shannon did for Information theory).

It stems from my struggle to keep up with the feeling of overwhelm with so many things to learn. Currently working on organizing all of my thoughts into a coherent theory.

You can check my blog to learn more about my journey and the theory = https://www.moderncynicism.com/about

What exactly is the mathematical model? What are the mathematics involved? I couldn't find it on your blog.

Yet to reach that math stage, work in progress. I am studying game theory and economics to get inspirations.

In the blog and X I am sharing ideas as I encounter them. For example last week had new thoughts on representing emotions and wrote 2 articles.

Thanks! I'm just digging into this, but there's a lot about this that I like. Your writing is very clear and to-the-point.

Thanks for checking out. Sent you request in Linkedin, would like to discuss more.

A deep research system to discover if your dumb saas idea is already out there.

I got sick of starting a project only to later discover significant competitors or features of the marketplace I missed, despite looking. I can now do in minutes what used to take me days.

https://already.dev

Already out there: https://websets.exa.ai/

How ironic

I know. My son joked about using already.dev to find out if I never should have built it the first place!

That's only how it seems. General purpose deep research just doesn't work as well.

Thanks for taking the time! I love these guys. They are definitely way more useful in that they are general-purpose. What we're doing is much more specific, and the results are very different. Try both and compare!

I have no doubt we'll soon get taken over by general-purpose systems. But for now, all we do is deep research to find competitors, and the results are for sure much better with us for that narrow use case.

We’re building conversational product discovery tools for e-commerce stores, moving beyond the limitations of traditional search bars. Our system lets shoppers explore and find products naturally—using their own words. We’re about to launch with our second customer, and early results show a faster, more intuitive, and more convenient shopping experience. For our retail customer we've had users just copy and paste their complete shopping list and be done within one conversation turn. https://www.isartech.io/

I have been making a photo management app for myself (https://viroop.com/) since i hate paying the monthly Adobe tax for Lightroom. I like Lightroom but for my needs, paying $10 per month is too much.

I have built the basic photo management functionality. I have also added conversational search using the CLIP model, which is working really well.

I hope to add a photo editor to the app because that's the part i love about Lightroom. It's a photo management app with a built in photo editor (which is really good).

Why not use Adobe Bridge? It's free.

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

Believe it or not, so am I!

https://stainedglassmap.com

Focusing on Ireland for now, my home country. And admittedly I haven’t had a chance to work on this/ update it since September.

A 3D terrain renderer called 'FreeFlight', using real world elevation data and aerial imagery. I am hoping to turn it into a flight simulator eventually.

https://www.jakobmaier.at/posts/free-flight/

My first iOS app, a book reading tracker. I used to set a timer every time I was reading a book, but I decided to create an app for myself to track the time, log sessions, organize my books into bookshelves, see progress, etc.

- https://bookreadinghabit.com/ - https://apps.apple.com/app/book-reading-habit/id6742913266

Very cool, checking that out :)

Because I love building APIs and backend services, I built a simple IP geolocation service with the best developer experience. It has free (rate-limited) access and affordable paid tiers. Check it out: https://ip-sonar.com

This is cool - how does IP geolocation work? How do you know that xyz IP is at this particular spot?

Edit: I see you are using MaxMind database - do you add some sort of additional analytics or overlay on top of that?

At this moment, I'm still very early with the service, I don't do any serious data crunching on my end (but I plan to).

Now that Claude 4 is out, I’m making some updates to the project I’ve built primarily just with Claude Code: https://github.com/mwalkerr/BookmarkCanvas

It’s just a basic IntelliJ plugin which provides an infinite canvas to add code bookmarks to. I work on a large code base and often have to take on tasks involving lots of unfamiliar areas of code and components which influence each other only through long chains of indirection. Having a visual space to lay things out, draw connections, and quickly jump back into the code has been really helpful

The canvas and UI is built using Java AWT since that’s what IntelliJ plugins are built on, but it occurred to me that I could just throw in a web view and use any of the existing JS libraries for working on an infinite canvas. React Flow has seemed like the best option with tldraw being what I’d fallback to.

But then.. if the canvas is built with web technology then there’s no reason to keep it just within an IntelliJ plugin vs just a standalone web app with the ability to contain generic content that might open files in IntelliJ or any other editor. I’m pretty sure the “knowledge database on a canvas” thing has been done a number of times already so I want to also see if there are existing open source projects that it’d be easy enough to just add a special node type to

HomeFree

https://homefree.host

A turnkey self-hosted home router + app server that you can (eventually) just plug into your modem and go through a simple setup and have self hosting. It's in heavy development, so it requires some experience with NixOS to get running, but the goal is to have it usable by non-technical people.

Current features

    - Firewall
    - Headscale VPN, apps private by default
    - Automated DDNS
    - Dozens of apps with automated subdomain allocation and TLS cert management
    - Ad Blocking
    - Customizable public landing page
    - Single module configuration for all features
    - Automatic backup for all apps

In Work/TODO:

    - Better landing page and contribution process
    - Admin Dashboard, Config page
    - SSO across apps
    - Ability sync to a cloud instance in case you no longer want to host at home
    - Ability to mesh with friends/family/associates for social networking, distributed backup, distributed CDN, etc
    - Getting others to install it and build a community

Aspirational:

    - A standard protocol or tool for updating DNS entries at registrars
    - A standard protocol or tool for updating modems with suitable settings for self-hosting
    - a free DDNS service to provide to users of HomeFree

This is very interesting. Do you think people will trust it enough in terms of security/hardening to let homefree be their main router/firewall/vpn ?

This weekend working on an open-source algorithm to automatically lay out schematics. Easy problem to do poorly and very difficult to do well! My current approach is “match to existing corpus of well-laid-out schematics, then adapt until the netlist fits” hopefully it works out!

I've been building a coding agent SaaS (https://cheepcode.com) for the past several months. I waited too long to release it and ended up launching after Jules/Codex/CCSDK instead of before, but I'm glad I got it out there.

It works by connecting directly to Linear and dispatching assigned tasks to agents that submit PRs in GitHub when finished. My agents work in a fully-integrated Linux development environment, including internet access. This means that they can browse the web, install dependencies, and creatively work around environment issues to make sure they run and test the code they ship.

It's really gratifying to see people asking all over the internet, "Where can I just create tickets and get pull requests?" because that's exactly the workflow I built CheepCode to support. As an engineer for almost 15 years, I knew what I personally wanted, and it really makes me happy to see that what I built will work for so many others too.

As a bootstrapped solo founder, it's challenging to juggle product/growth/development/strategy all at once, but also incredibly rewarding. I wouldn't necessarily say no to funding ;) but in the meantime, it's quite a thrill!

Hobby: I'm trying to write a simulator for Brandon Sanderson's cosmere magic system using a vector database to represent the in-universe spiritual realm and all it's connections, and small AI models to represent intents.

I’m building https://TaleTwister.com – an AI tool that generates and narrates bedtime stories based on a kid’s interests, a specific moral lesson, age, and optional specifications. The product was born out of necessity (a stint of bad behavior that comes with age).

It uses GPT-4 for story generation, ElevenLabs for narration, and a simple Next.js + Supabase stack for the app layer. I’m experimenting with story memory (so kids can revisit recurring characters) using vector embeddings, and building a “choose-your-own-adventure” mode with dynamic audio rendering.

Biggest challenge so far: aligning narration, ambient sounds, and story pacing without sounding janky or robotic. Solved it by tokenizing and chunking the story for synchronized audio stitching via ffmpeg.

Another challenge was the inconsistent image illustrations via Dall-E 3. I’ve adopted a dynamic prompting method that includes as many details about the scene, character details, and other visual elements which should remain consistent on each of the storybook pages.

If your kid ever demands “one more story” after a long day, I built this for you. It’s had a meaningful impact on my son’s behavior.

That's really cool! I made something similar but much simpler using R Shiny.

Edit: Looking at the featured story, I notice that the character illustration is not consistent currently. I got relatively consistent character illustration from scene to scene by asking the LLM to write a prompt for image generation based on the story text and use the same character description in each sentence. That got me pretty consistent character drawings. Also, to keep the same drawing style, my prompt was like:

Drawing style e.g., Digital painting {drawing prompt}

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll be incorporating that. The scene is described with the dynamic image prompting however there’s nothing on style in the prompt.

I’ll update the prompt and see how it works. Thanks again!

I've been working on a Virtual DOM in C. Basically like dear imgui but it uses a retained-mode toolkit like GTK instead of rendering manually.

https://github.com/petabyt/rim

I've been working on an offheap allocator for Go.

In contrast to the popular arena based allocators (which target quickly allocating/freeing short lived per-request allocations), I am targeting an allocator for build very large in-memory dbs or caches with almost no garbage collection cost.

There's a little no-gc string interner package in there as well.

https://github.com/fmstephe/memorymanager

It's somewhat on pause right now as I have just started a new job. (but it has been a very fun project, nerdy joy).

Related to the memorymanager, as in intending to support it are

https://github.com/fmstephe/fuzzhelper A library for setting up fuzz tests for complex data structures.

https://github.com/fmstephe/gossert A library for adding runtime assertions to Go code. It's developed so that when the assertions are switched off the compiler should be able to completely eliminate the assertions. But this requires build tags to switch the assertions on.

I've been working on a browser use agent embedded within a Chrome extension: https://github.com/parsaghaffari/browserbee

You can use it to check and summarize news and social media, fill out forms, send messages, book holidays, do your online shopping, conduct research, and pretty much anything else that can be done within a browser.

Nice - would you be interested in making this into a saas service? We are starting to open up our "automation API" and could maybe work together on bringing your extension to something that does not use playwright and a remote browser.

The raison d'être for BrowserBee is to control the user's browser in a private fashion so they can automate tasks that require them to be logged in. I'm unsure how it would work in a remote browser setup - tools like Browser Use and BrowserBase seem to cover that use case already.

The key differentiator is privacy and local control. When users need to automate tasks on sites where they're already authenticated (banking, personal accounts, work systems), they need their actual browser with their existing sessions and cookies, not a remote instance.

I’m working on https://rejobs.org - a job board dedicated to careers in the renewable energy industry.

It aggregates job ads from various sources and lets employers post directly. The goal is to help more people find meaningful work in wind, solar, BESS, etc.

Built with PHP, PostGIS, and a swarm of GPT-assisted cron jobs. I’d love your feedback.

I'm working on a modular OSS stack for creation of interactive tutoring systems. Think anki + wikipedia + mathacademy + duolingo, but with very generic interfaces that allow for all sorts of interactive content (eg, one working prototype is an ear training / site reading course with midi keyboard hookup).

I want to sand away the roughest edges of the SRS user experience, and to enable individuals and organizations to easily spin up courseware that's aligned with best pedagogical practices and fits naturally into the hands of educators.

And, in the current wave, also think bolt.new or lovable.dev, with 'agentic' workflows for both content (scouring source material for ) and for user-authored bespoke interactive, via LLM authored artifacts.

Optimistic for some ShowHNs or more general shilling this week.

- https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder - https://patched.network

A wifi router that blocks all websites except for those needed for kids to study when you need it, and there is no way to escape, not even with vpn or tor or whatever, also with dashboard to show where they spent time on for how long.

My middle school aged kids was able to escape with free proxy, vpn, tor etc in the past which forced me to figure out a way to lock it down totally when it's absolutely needed.

Still escape via 4G/LTE. But this is a great idea and I love it!

That's true but carriers and android/ios do have parent control apps, not ideal but still possible.

More tools / toys / sandboxes to play with.

Growing a coding agent as a "game": https://github.com/dhamidi/smolcode. Started with https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent and then asked the agent to modify itself. It's so much fun and hard to stop!

Since coding is cheap now, I'm building a web framework for myself, using reasonable defaults: built around the transaction log, single binary deploys, sqlite3 for everything, runtime introspection tools to make ops easier.

I want the framework to "compile itself out of the project", so that projects don't have devtime dependencies and can be easily edited by Cursor et al. It should still stick around in the form of a high-level CLI that an AI agent can leverage to fulfill common tasks (e.g. add a new UI component, query, command, etc).

smolcode's awesome! You've inspired me to create an agent for my Pi bramble :)

Finntegrate: AI-powered multilingual assistant for immigrants to Finland

https://finntegrate.org

My co-founders and I are building an AI assistant that helps immigrants navigate Finnish bureaucracy. As immigrants, we've experienced firsthand how fragmented and inaccessible essential information can be, scattered across Migri, Kela, the tax office, and municipal websites, often only in Finnish and Swedish.

We're using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to create a multilingual chat interface that connects people to official resources rather than replacing them. The system reduces "failure demand" - support requests that arise because people can't achieve their goals through existing resources.

The technical approach is a multi-agent system in which specialized AI agents handle different domains (immigration law, employment, housing, healthcare, etc.). We've named the agents after Finnish mythological figures (such as Tapio, Ilmarinen, and Sampo) to create a cultural connection while providing practical assistance.

Interestingly, this addresses a systematic problem - government agencies spend significant resources on repetitive support that could be automated. At the same time, immigrants get frustrated trying to piece together information from multiple sources.

We're exploring B2B opportunities (companies relocating employees, municipalities, healthcare systems recruiting internationally) and EU funding for integration technology.

Happy to share more details or get feedback from anyone who's worked on similar multilingual AI systems or government-facing tools.

GitHub: https://github.com/finntegrate/tapio

- I am working on a production grade node express, hono, fastify, python, fastapi, flask, django generator that configures all the tools necessary for a production environment and gives you a readymade starter with granular commits that you can directly start building features on.

- For node, that means it installs eslint + prettier / biome,

- setups all the plugins,

- sets up typescript with watch mode using tsx and alias support,

- installs vitest with all configuration,

- installs dotenvx and configures it to use separate development, staging, test and production configuration,

- installs commitlint, commitizen to ensure all your commit messages adhere to specific conventions,

- installs lefthook / husky to run tasks before commit, on push etc.

- Adds github actions for linting, running tests.

- Creates a docker development, testing, staging and production setup with different dockerfiles for each.

- Development version installs self signed localhost SSL certificates for use by nginx/traefik/caddy.

- Test environment runs all tests inside the container and shuts it down,

- Staging environment mimicks real production as closely as possible with minimal resource consumption.

- Production environment uses actual SSL certificates issued by the likes of zeroSSL or letsencrypt with a highly optimized dockerfile for minimal footage.

- Direct deployment to AWS / Azure / GCP

- Python version does a tonne of stuff too. Will share if anyone is curious

- What is special about this? As dependencies change, the boilerplate also updates itself, runs the tests and passing configuration is cached

Sounds very cool! Is there a repo?

thank you, it is not a repo,it ll be running online as a generator because it runs everything inside docker to verify if things work. AS dependencies change,it upgrades dependencies automatically and serves the last working version. I haven't made the website live yet. If this takes off, I intend to setup quick start generators for a whole lot of frameworks

Super interested in this. Please reply when you have something to share! Would love to test.

https://recallify.app/

A way to store bookmarks all in one place similar to Pocket, but built around semantic feature as the primary feature. Been beta testing an iOS app, but need to pivot on the name since there’s another Recallify on the App Store, and haven’t gotten around to it due to not much user growth.

WhatSignal, WhatsApp <-> Signal relay, written in Go

https://github.com/bikemazzell/whatsignal

I'm working on a WhatsApp to Signal relay. I.e.: whenever someone sends a WA message to you, it appears in your Signal. You can reply and it will go back to the original sender.

Why? I'm privacy conscious and don't fancy using a Meta product. But some of my friends/associates/family still insist on WhatsApp only. Running this WhatBridge service on my micro server behind a VPN allows me to communicate without having WhatsApp on my mobile.

Behind the scenes, it connects WAHA (https://github.com/devlikeapro/waha ) and Signal CLI (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli). Still early stages, but getting closer to a workable state.

Very cool project. I've wanted something like this for ages but never had the patience to glue it all together. Do you plan to support group chats too? That was a huge headache in my case. Excited to see how this evolves, even if setup's a bit fiddly.

I just finished shipping a weekend project that I really needed:

yt2brave[0], a MacOS app that automatically opens YouTube links in Brave Browser for a better browsing experience on YouTube (no ads). It's compatible for Safari, Google Chrome and Edge. It is magic.

[0] https://www.yt2brave.com

Continuing my return to GameDev. I'm making my own copies of subsets of games or recreating games that already exist. Currently making FlappyBoo (FlappyBird with the ghost from Super Mario). Nearly at parity with the original game and will add a few "upgrades".

End goal is to have many reference examples when I start to make the game I want to make.

Working on expanding https://iplocate.io - an IP geolocation and threat data service I've worked on since 2017.

I've found it really satisfying to solve the data challenges that come along the way, from "where on earth could this data come from" to collecting, storing, parsing, validating and serving constantly. It's also - by nature - something that's never going to be "done". There's always something to improve. I love it!

We now offer more types of data (ASN/whois, proxy/threat detection, so on) than most other providers, more accurate and more frequently updated, at a tenth of the cost, which is something I'm really happy about.

For anyone interested, you can make 1,000 requests day free, or reach out if you have an open source/public interest project for an unlimited key or access to the data.

I'd also love to hear any suggestions for additional data types to add.

Yesterday I released version 0.7.17 of Serverino, my HTTP server written in D

Serverino is a small, fast, and dependency-free HTTP server implemented in D. A minimal app with serverino can handle on my laptop ~150k reqs/s and it uses just a few mb of ram.

https://github.com/trikko/serverino

Vibe coding a few apps I always felt humanity deserves (a bit exaggerated but kind of not :) )

- https://padsnap.app/ : PadSnap is a simple web app that adds customizable padding to your images so they fit Instagram’s/custom dimensions — no cropping, no quality loss. All on browser, no server uploads. Also no ads or login.

- https://shiryakhat.net/ : redid my podcasts website last week: Shir Ya Khat podcast, which translates to "Head or Tails" in Farsi, began its non-profit journey in 2016 with a mission to make blockchain and cryptocurrency technical knowledge accessible to Farsi speakers worldwide.

- life timetime visualizer, still WIP, feedback welcome: https://shayanb.github.io/timeline/

Finished my 4th short story. This one is about Life Expectancy. I wrote it after reading something on HN.

https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Base%20Rate.p...

Will now move at the usual snail pace to write the next one.

I am building a device that helps me - and hopefully others - learn how to play a brass instrument. When picking up the tenor horn I started by making flashcards. On one side there was the note, and on the other side the fingering was shown. But this was a cumbersome way to learn, and I wanted faster iteration to get this into muscle memory. So - to procrastinate - I made a device with speakers, microphone and a small lcd screen. It is currently showing the notes and fingering automatically. But I am implementing a fast fourier transform to pick up what note I am playing to show whether it's the correct one or not. FFT for a brass instrument is not straight forward as there are many frequencies being played, but I think by tuning it - it would be a very fast and gamified way to learn an instrument compared to playing scores.

The fastest PostgreSQL Node driver written in TypeScript: https://github.com/stanNthe5/pgline

Dude those benchmarks are nice great job

I caught myself on being so overwhelmed on possibilities current state of tools and technologies can one easily utilise, so ended up working on exactly nothing at all.

AI SEO/GEO (or whatever it will be called eventually) monitoring for companies.

We monitor how companies/brands rank in LLMs/AI Search, we don't use the API but the user interfaces (since these are totally different). We run thousands of prompts to analyse responses and combine that with website traffic to get an understanding of what is being said and how well you rank.

I didn't anticipate Google moving to AI mode so fast, to be totally honest, which makes it really interesting because we likely see rank tracking and keyword tracking disappear in the near future.

website: https://promptwatch.com

As a fun side project, I run https://homestra.com a kind of Zillow for Europe but for second/vacation homes

> As a fun side project, I run https://homestra.com a kind of Zillow for Europe but for second/vacation homes

This is cool but it really needs a map. If I'm looking for a house i know the rough area, I don't want to see the whole country listing

I'm working on building a repairable and fireproof e-bike battery! Check it out at https://gouach.com

Cool - is it easy to tell which batteries have a problem when you need to replace some?

yes! the app will show you :)

I’m working on a Content Security Policy parser. There are a handful of them around the web, but I couldn’t find one that implemented the entirety of the CSP spec and I wanted something I could use to verify structure and validity of CSP directives.

https://github.com/damien/content-security-policy/tree/main/...

Once I’m happy with my take on a reference implementation I’m hoping to create some tooling with it to do some interesting analysis of CSP abstract syntax trees to identify things like policy anti patterns, reporting on capabilities a policy grants to a domain/resource, and a better mechanism for allowing tools like OPA, SemGrep, etc. to define and enforce rules on a policy.

I implemented CSP and created internal tools to handle and process the reports. Would love to contribute and build a OSS tools to process reports.

Neat! What were your experiences with the tech and how did you interface with it? Feel free to respond here or email me via my contact deets in my profile—I’d love to hear about your use-cases.

I developed "LessEncrypt" for my dev environment, an ultra lightweight, hassle free alternative to LetsEncrypt for use with self-signed CAs like in a dev or homelab environment. At work we have self signed keys for our dev/stg environment, and manage it with Ansible and some scripts, but spend a surprising amount of time dealing with it. This is an experiment to get us out of that business.

https://github.com/linsomniac/lessencrypt

Short description:

- Client generates RSA keypair and connects to server from <1024 TCP port, sends pubkey. - Server uses reverse DNS to come up with cert name (rules can specify alternate CN and SANs, override TTL, etc). - Server generates a signed cert and connects back to client on <1024 TCP port and sends cert.

Sounds interesting and useful. How difficult has this been to create? Have you encountered obstacles you didn’t expect that chewed up a lot of time?

Not too hard. I came up with the idea in the shower one morning after a week of doing a lot of cert maintenance. I spent around 20 minutes writing a design document and did a couple back-and-forths with Claude Code and testing, then some refinementand improvements. Had some discussions with friends and associates looking for security issues I had missed.

Maybe 2 hours into it so far, Claude Code did all the coding so far.

Any reason why you didn't use `step-ca` for this?

Counter-drone defense tech https://orcrist.us

That's a really cool idea.

I'm curious, why electric motors vs a solid rocket motor? Volatility? Control over thrust? Making it safe to throw without worrying about backblast?

All of the above. Thrust vectoring, throttleable, hand launchable. Yes, yes, and yes, and a few more covert reasons

Really rad idea, are you doing any active pilots? I'm currently in Tallinn, Estonia and there is quite a lot of crossover with the Ukrainian military (both to support them and to help prove out product viability). Happy to chat if I can be helpful. Email is jb2956@georgetown.edu

Impressive!

Been working on a single-pass WebAssembly JIT compiler (atm only guaranteed to work on M1 air), been super interesting learning and thinking through strategies to balance fast compilation & fast generated code. It's the fastest single-pass JIT output-wise that I'm aware of, but the compilation speed could use some work.

Also: the README is pretty outdated, the real interesting stuff happens in https://github.com/csjh/mitey-jit/blob/main/backend/arm64/ba...

https://github.com/csjh/mitey-jit

That's an interesting project!

We have an opening in Wasmer to work on the compiler side of things, I think you could be a great fit: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/15822

Appreciated, but not sure I'm ready for that yet - still need to finish uni :p

Inspired by MathAcademy, I'm developing:

1) a note-taking workflow in Obsidian (you take bite-sized notes about a topic, then connect "prerequisite" notes in Obsidian's canvas editor)

2) a tool that uploads each note and graph data to a database

3) a webapp that presents those notes algorithmically using spaced repetition. This enables you to allow others to "traverse" your note graph in a guided and self-paced manner.

You can add "challenge presets" to each note so that your mastery of each piece of knowledge can be tested with simple flashcards, multiple choice, free response, or some visual/actionable task to force active recall. An algorithm uses your success rate and spaced repetition data to introduce & drill more advanced notes into your long term memory.

Here's some more reading I was inspired by:

https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy

https://www.justinmath.com/individualized-spaced-repetition-...

Even if there are a lot of imperfections and flaws about this project (like the sheer difficulty of curating a good knowledge graph to begin with), I'm hoping to make my note-taking in Obsidian more structured and thorough, replace my Anki routine, and make any of my notes into an automated + algorithmic course. If someone has another similar project (combining note-taking with hierarchal, topological knowledge graphs with spaced repetition and testing all in one platform) I would love to hear more about your approaches. Quick shoutout to one person I've seen who is doing something similar: https://x.com/JeffreyBiles/status/1926639544666816774

You think current AI could create such a knowledge graph? And use it?

I did write about that! tl;dr I think it'd be really cool as an augmentation, the only thing steering me away from solely AI-generated graphs are hallucinations. But I think it definitely has a place in some capacity for anyone who wants to discover "what they don't know that they don't know", to find the prerequisite skills they don't realize they're missing.

https://euvinkeel.github.io/tart/Traversing-Knowledge-Graphs

I'm building something similar in my free time! Please let me know how you go :)

https://veeto.ai

A tool that scans California legislation and flags bills that might affect your startup. You drop in a link to your website or a short description, and it returns plain-English summaries and impact analysis of relevant bills.

A few months into creating iOS apps after working on large distributed web apps for decades. Just released the first called _My Conversation Curator_ (voice to text dictation + AI summary) with Halo West[1]. The next app may be an interactive assistant to help craft OKRs and KPIs.

Separately, working on building an app to assist with cipher analysis of things like Kryptos and Bitcoin/crypto puzzles. Loosely modeled after CyberChef, but a native app that is capable of far more detailed frequency analysis and brute forcing with the GPU.

Also, experimenting with LLM workflows for both work and the rest of life. Prompt engineering seems like an incredibly valuable skillset for the next decade.

[1] https://halo-west.com/

Timely posting! I've been inspired by some recent... large gaps in data at work (silent analytics processing failures) to build a service called QueryCanary. It's a surprisingly powerful but simple tool that lets you define scheduled SQL checks to run against your database, and then checks those results for anomalies, variances, and other issues.

Really hoping to get some early feedback on this tool, I've been using it for two production sites for about a week now and I've already discovered (at work) that we've had the 2nd largest user signup day, and that we deployed a change that inaccurately tracked a specific metric. Check it out at https://querycanary.com

Testing the limits of vibe coding. Created a programming language 100% via prompting a o4-mini-high, but did carefully review the code. https://github.com/ryanmcdermott/spress

Sounds interesting. How much manual labour you had to do? Or was the code completely vibe coded and not edited?

It took about 10 hours. Arguably would have taken me 100 to do it manually but likely would have fewer bugs, there’s a few I’m aware of, but I bet there are many.

I started with a basic syntax for expressions and specified a lot up front such as it being a bytecode interpreter and using a recursive descent parser.

I found building it up feature by feature to be much more effective than one shotting an entire feature rich language. Still there was a lot of back and forth.

Really cool!

Only 1 commit :/ Would love to see the prompts and how you iterated on this

Great point. I regret not being more systematic about this. I have tried on most popular models since gpt 3.5 launched, but it’s all been very ad hoc with the same general approach of building up a language feature by feature.

I stared on building my first macOS (SwiftUI) window-based sticky notes app. It’s a combination of the default Sticky Notes app and the Notes app, making it possible to stick notes to a specific window or file. Attaching a note to a window shows the note when this specific application window is started/active, e.g. an IDE window with your repository selected. I’m also planning on extending this by adding browser tab notes as well as email (document) notes.

I always felt like collecting all my todos / notes in a single notes app is not enough. Sometimes you want to remember something just for the next time you open this app/window. Attaching the note directly onto the window makes sure you won’t forget on it.

We're building a service to generate consistent AI personas, and create any media you need with them, photos, videos, tryons, product photos, etc.

- Works by selecting traits, which then trains a model(flux) OR uploading your own photos.

- Hopefully useful for shopify/ecomm store owners, digital agencies, or just about anyone to drastically speed up the time and reduce the cost to test creatives, create media content, or just do what you want with a model of yourself.

- Web with Nextjs, DB with Supabase, marketing with nothing.

- Happy to share more details into how we built this, and hear feedback and thoughts.

https://www.theinfluencer.ai/

I've been working more on my homelab.

In short: installed immich(instead of Synology Photos), Beszel, Paperless-ngx(configuration pending), moved a bunch of tools out of my HTPC VM in to separate VM, did a proper backup of my proxmox cluster and set up cloud-init template with new ubuntu.

Due: gitops style deployment and terraformation of infrastructure(provision proxmox VMs via terraform) and auto redeployment of docker containers across 5 machines. Probably would need github runner in my network. Also Authelia is still missing in my lab, I need to get to that soon

I'm working on a customizable app for self-tracking, a combination of habit trackers, health logging and journaling. You should be able to track what you want in a way relevant for you. Think of a combination of free form CSV programs x habit tracker or health app.

App will be local-first and without locking important features behind a subscription.

Very recently I finished my bachelor thesis which was about this app (focus usability and market fit).

Also made this site a few days ago, get notified when it launches: https://dailyselftrack.com

More about me here: https://bryanhogan.com

I’ve been looking for something like this for awhile, going to check it out, good on you for building it!!

Thank you for the comment! Hearing that people actually want what I'm building motivates me a lot. And feedback is also always great.

Low-level deep learning library from scratch in C, without external dependencies, while not knowing C well yet https://github.com/jmaczan/curiosity

That's brave! I've thought about doing the same thing in Rust, and I saw someone else's (Andrei Karpathy?)'s implementation in... C, too, I think, but not sure about that. I think it's a great project, and you're bound to come out the other end with a ton of valuable knowledge.

Thx Nate, Rust will probably save you a ton of headache with things like index arithmetic on memory, just today I wrangled with my wrong accessing to weights and biases, but I guess to squeeze performance once would need to use some unsafe {}?

A toolkit for SaaS startups, especially solo founders and small teams, that combines web & product analytics, session replays, error reporting, chat support and knowledge base in one place.

Instead of integrating, maintaining and paying for multiple tools, everything is available in one simple to use dashboard.

For those familiar with PostHog, you can think of it a simple version of that.

I've been developing it and testing with few startups and plan to start promoting it more soon once the MVP is bit more polished. Also more tools are on the roadmap.

https://overcentric.com/

Image optimizer site using WASM builds of Jpegli and Oxipng: https://image.samatech.tw

I made it because the desktop software I use (ImageOptim) doesn't support Jpegli, which I find to be much better than mozjpeg for most types of jpegs used on the web.

There's still a lot of missing pieces, like adding color quantization and other PNG options, improving the UI, parallel webworker support, etc. The code is open source and can be used as a library: https://github.com/sampullman/image-opt

Trying to build a small tool that will allow me to edit files in my local text editor from within SSH sessions, with as few dependencies on the remote as possible, so I don't have to depend on whatever `vi` happens to be where I'm working.

I started the project around a year ago, then got a little stuck and forgot about it for a while, until now.

For anyone curious about the technical details, it's a Rust program that wraps `ssh`, copies a small statically compiled binary to the remote, and uses SSHFS/SFTP (haven't decided yet, maybe configurable?) to allow your local editor to access the remote files as easily as local ones

I'm working on a isometric rpg/turn based strategy game with a sci-fi theme, currently in the writing and design phase with very little code done. It's gonna be a multi-year project. Nothing to show, sadly :(

Unifi Video was replaced by Unifi Protect some time in 2020. I wasn't sure how to self-host Protect, so I never migrated to it. I've recently reached a situation where some phones can no longer install the Unifi Video app. These phones are now relegated to using the rough-on-mobile UI. The Unifi Video web UI has also never worked well in Firefox for me.

In the past few months, I've finally started working on a basic replacement NVR that works for me: https://github.com/AlbinoDrought/creamy-nvr

Like many video projects, it's a glorified ffmpeg wrapper :)

You might be interested in running Frigate NVR ( https://frigate.video/)

Replaced my Synology surveillance station since 2023, and has been running great. I also have a Google Coral for the image processing, but this is optional.

I’m working on https://voicecast.app/ but struggling to get users. It’s a way for podcasts to get voice messages for their shows. Any advice appreciated!

This sounds like a cool idea. What have you tried so far?

Reached out to some of my favs, got my favorite podcaster to sign! But past that cold email has been not super effective

Looks like a cool idea but not immediately apparent how it works. E.g. there dont' seem to be voice messages visible when I go to the example?

Have you thought about using the landing page itself as a demo? I.e. to allow users to post voice messages on your main page. Would at least be intriguing.

Cool idea! Yeah, an example means the input page but I should make it more of the admin view!

Aren't podcasters already relying on tools like Whatsapp/Telegram for this?

No. I haven’t spoken to any that use telegram, one that used WhatsApp but found it a nightmare. A lot of people still use landlines/phone numbers

Building a Duolingo-like app to "learn from the greats, daily." (https://www.scrivium.com)

Until recently, it was cost-prohibitive to gamify topics with indefinite answers and progressions. As a result, "left-brained" topics have been gamified for years, but "right-brained" topics have resisted gamification. LLMs and generative AI unlock game economics for unstructured text.

Casual gaming is only category outpacing passive, social media. The most direct way to elevate humanity's media appetite is to turn human greatness into casual games.

We’re looking to improve signal and reduce noise for energy traders. Currently, power is a niche market that relies heavily on day-ahead forecasts to set prices for energy contracts. When they’re actually exercised, it can be problematic for the buyer and/or seller if energy demand is significantly lower or higher than anticipated.

We currently are focused on hydroelectric power in the PNW region - converting river flow to tradable metrics.

Check us out -> https://askcrystal.info/dashboard

Working on MedAngle - the world's first Super App for premed/medical/dental school. tens of billions of seconds spent in our family of Super Apps, 100m+ questions solved, ~100k users (invite only, doctors+med studnts). We personalize to the curriculum of any school we launch at.

https://medangle.com

We're looking on scaling further internationally. I myself am a US-Pakistani, the first medical doctor + full stack engineer and technologist in Pakistan's history (~250m people). Would love to chat with anyone interested!

An open-source pluggable version of Omnivore (read-it-later app).

The idea came since Omnivore decided to shut down. It is open source and self-hostable but the whole system has so many bells and whistles that nobody would want to self-host it. Even more, even if I am able to export all my data, I will be unable to use their beautiful client to view my data or build anything of my own because I am not good at that.

The idea is to have a read-it-later app that has modular components each of which can be self-hosted independently which talk in protocols. So a different data crawler module that can take many forms - browser extension, Telegram bot, or something else, that takes an URL and posts the page content to a server.

The server will have modular parsers that are extensible to support different websites and pages, contributed by community (similar to Telegram's parser or Calibre's). It then converts it into a common format to be stored.

The storage should also be pluggable so that I can easily store my data wherever I want - whether locally as MD files, on S3, or on an SQL Database. This also should be extensible to allow different storage types like so many other tools do.

Then a web server that serves common endpoints to read, add tags and annotations, and other operations. It just needs the user's storage endpoint and authorization to allow them to access their data. I feel this is going to be the most challenging.

Let users create their own clients that render this for users. Just like Telegram and Matrix.

This idea resurfaced recently because I wanted to try getrecall.ai but it looks too expensive and I am worried about privacy. Having a setup like this would allow me to plugin a local LLM to this system as well.

Started working on a geo-location game about birdwatching. Imagine Pokémon GO but for taking photos and audio recordings of birds around the world.

Planning to have a first testing session some time next month. Really excited but still lots to go!

That's awesome! I recently picked up bird photography as a hobby and have contributed a few pictures to wiki commons.

Do you have a website I can follow?

Oh really?! Could you share your wiki profile with the photos?

I have another little game for bird watchers who want to improve their recognition skills and we often showcase photographers and recordists who contribute to the public domain. It's called Birdle and we have a few countries (next month will be releasing Mexico and India). Here is the website with the country selector: https://birdle.world (or directly https://birdle.us for the US one).

If you join our community newsletter, we will be giving access to the new game to our Birdle players. You can join it for updates at: https://newsletter.birdle.co.za/

Sure, my wiki username is the same as HN: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:List...

Thanks! I signed up to the newsletter

Thank you, will check it out!

Working on: https://www.zigpoll.com a contextual micro-survey tool solo.

I'm now supporting over 30K clients and over 40 million survey responses. Naturally lots of things come up when scaling a project solo heres a few:

- Optimizing existing reporting dashboards

- Improving onboarding experience

- Tapping new growth channels (Organic SEO, Paid ads, Integration marketplaces)

- Resolving customer support tickets and minimizing ticket flow in general

Lots of things come up which always keeps the work interesting. It's probably time to scale past one person though so that's next on the docket!

I'm just trying to get my ideal PKM collection system working the way I've always wished it would. It involves trying to coax an LLM into writing code for me when I'm not a developer myself, so that's been an adventure.

All I really want to do is be able to clip/save articles (and maybe generate transcripts from videos) from my phone or computer, read them in KOReader on a Boox tablet, and then export them and my eBook notes into Logseq, but every time I think I have it figured out, some project pulls a rug out from under me and I end up back at the drawing board.

Fully open source cinematography drone. Spoilers: I only started a few weeks ago and I've got a long way to go still. Currently prototyping the gimbal for more context and wasting a ton of PLA in the process.

Neat! What makes a "cinematography" drone different than a generic drone?

I just finished my useless Brainfuck compiler ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44087363 ) and was thinking of a more novel application that hasn't been done already, like going the other direction and turning RISC-V assembly back to Brainfuck code. Currently trying to get MD5 work...

Also another fun idea I want to try is to let the Claude design a new programming language, i.e. where the AI makes all the decisions and goal-settings and I just help it instead when it's stuck.

I'm building Codus — a privacy-focused, offline-first toolkit for developers with AI enhancements where they make sense. It includes tools like offline chat, a Markdown editor, UUID generator and a JWT decoder. LLMs are pulled and run locally via Ollama, keeping everything private and fast. I'm currently adding a database client, regex tester, text diff tool, and more. https://github.com/JamieLivingstone/codus

I’m hacking on a tiny open-source/self hostable “prompt vault” so you can stash prompts and personas once and use them with whatever AI model you’re playing with today (or tomorrow). Right now it’s just a single-binary server with a SQLite file next to it—add / edit / tag in a simple UI, then copy or share. Next on the list: a lightweight browser extension that pops your saved snippets anywhere there’s a text box. Maybe it could grow to a more serious prompt testing/comparison pipeline, prompt templating etc

Do you have a placeholder repo I can star?

A free DocuSign/e-sign alternative https://useinkless.com/

Andrew Wilkinson tweeted the other day "I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped." https://x.com/awilkinson/status/1892638803505868824

So I thought "how hard could this be?" and decided to build a free alternative that's UETA and ESIGN act compliant!

Oh man please make this open source! I'd love to host it in a container.

Curious why you want open source/why you want to host it yourself?

Looks great. How can I contribute as a dev?

Don't need much help right now! Honestly still trying to find PMF, talking to users, and figuring out what to build next!

Still [1] working on my travel planning web application: https://ikuyo.kenrick95.org/ (repo https://github.com/kenrick95/ikuyo )

This is an example view-only trip: https://ikuyo.kenrick95.org/trip/2617cd98-a229-45d4-9617-526...

So far it has:

- Timetable view, with drag-and-drop support. I think it will be useful for planning the activities as I need to be able to quickly swap activities - List view. I think it will be useful for actual travel itself as the day go, I'll need to focus day-by-day - Maps. To make it easier to plan nearby activities, but I think I still need to rely on Google Maps or other kind of maps since I still need the navigation/direction in-between activities - Sharing & comments. Since I plan to use it to collaborate the travel with my friend, this is a must-have feature for me. - Expenses. This is still quite basic but maybe I should also track who owes whom...

I think now I'm happy with the feature set and will start planning my travel using this to polish the UX :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818652

https://negativestarinnovators.com We been working on Thieves which monitors websites using AI agents. Users set natural language conditions for websites and get a email, Telegram, Discord, Webhook once their conditions has been met. We also have a REST API replicating the full functionality of Thieves.

Currently working on making it even more reliable, navigate pages and understand website images not just the text of the webpage. Also getting ready for a Product Hunt launch.

I’m in the midst of reviving https://beatscratch.io (https://github.com/falrm/BeatScratch-Flutter). I’ve let it sit unmaintained (because it’s been “good enough” at its job) for a couple of years, through the addition of null safety to Dart and numerous Flutter changes (though I have to say, its API stability over this time is pretty impressive!). I’ve also GPLed the code in that time and the new version will also be under that license.

Once I’ve got at least the iOS and web release pipelines working again, I plan to replace its Reddit integration/sharing features with an implementation based on https://jonline.io (https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline), the AGPL, Rust/gRPC-based social network I’ve built in the intervening time.

I’m also planning on adding more detailed (left to right audio) panning and other output controls, oriented towards using BeatScratch live with other musicians. My hope for this is to use it to complement my own musical practice I’ve been working on, outside of all this 1s-and-0s programming time.

the link for https://github.com/falrm/BeatScratch-Flutter return a 404 for me. (maybe it's private?)

Sorry, yes, it’s actually at https://github.com/JonLatane/BeatFlutter.

I initially open sourced it under my “Fully Automated Luxury Robot Music” organization, but I mostly use that for music projects I no longer plan to actively maintain (a category into which BeatScratch no longer falls).

A easy way for users to detect whether or not they are being scammed/spammed/phished. Link: https://isthisspam.org

Built the first product, which is email based where users email/forward suspicious messages to check@isthisspam.org and get a response back. Next up is a chrome extension, for now will have to use cloud providers but hoping to make it fully locally

A "native" LLM chat application that looks very similar to ChatGPT but all chats are saved locally and you can use multiple providers. The reason I've built this is because I've used many "api wrappers" but none of them felt as good as for example ChatGPT's or Anthropic's interface. So the goal was to build the best "api wrapper" possible with no subscription. https://anylm.app

Looks neat. Have you thought of GTM? Is it B2C or are you thinking enterprise.

Thank you, what does GTM mean?

https://tkte.ch/chancy/

https://github.com/tktech/chancy

Chancy is a postgres-backed task queue for Python that scratches a lot of the Celery itches. It's not meant for folks that need to run a million tasks a second, but for the majority of projects (many millions per day) it offers:

- Robust job support, including timeouts, memory limits, retries, global uniqueness, global rate limiting, scheduling (cron and "in 10 seconds"), priorities, etc...

- DAG based workflow plugin

- It's asyncio-first with support for threading, multiprocessing, asyncio, and sub-interpreter tasks so each job can use the optimal concurrency model. Workflows can mix tasks across multiple queues and concurrency models.

- Can be embedded inside your existing ASGI servers - great for things like development docker containers or containers deployed on say, unraid.

- Worker's handle scheduling (no need for `celery beat`) and have an optional built-in dashboard.

- 1 infrastructure dependency (postgres) and 1 required package (psycopg3) - with everything else isolated in optional plugins. - Dynamically re-assign queues to new workers based on tags, add, pause (with auto-resume), modify or destroy queues at any time.

- Highly observable - unlike Celery, you can just query your database when needed to see the entire system state

- Portable - Linux/Windows/OSX

- Permanently free and open-source without any "premium" or paid features.

- Django integration - ORM/models, admin, and django auth integration for the dashboard.

Chancy is a young tool, but is used in production environments with tens of thousands of users and billions of jobs run with great feedback from early users:

> ...thank you for this amazing library...

> hey, first thanks for such a great library! Chancy has worked incredibly well, and its modular design has made it a pleasure to use. Super lightweight but feature-full; it's a hard balance to strike.

I've been working on a calibration website / app.

Along the lines of predictionbook, metaculus - something that helps you be "well calibrated", but more playful/fun than metaculus.

It doesn't have a lot of upside - predictionbook actually went offline due to lack of interest. But it was a good excuse to try out some vibe coding, and learn react native (I've mostly been a backend programmer).

In an attempt to make it more engaging and fun, I decided to have it focus on sports picks. Also partly because calibration graphs need to have a lot of predictions to yield any reliable information about your calibration.

I got it up in time for March Madness and about 25 of my friends joined and it was a good time. I nagged and reminded them a lot about about 15-20 of them predicted all 63 games, by picking the winner of each match and what their percentage confidence was. I had a leaderboard and live-blogged and gave silly awards.

I later added support for multiple "tournaments" and currently have tournaments going for NBA Playoffs and NHL Playoffs, but interest is waning. Of my friends, only 2-3 others are still regularly predicting.

Maybe it'll be more fun for the NFL season but I might also let it go a bit dormant.

Biggest challenge is that there isn't really a bulletproof way to rank people if people only predict some games in a tournament. I've tried all sorts of things, minimum # of games, bayesian kernel smoothing, but it's ultimately arbitrary when choosing how to penalize someone for not participating.

If I were to continue I'd be looking at things like automatically integrating with sports apis and odds/bookmaking apis, allowing users to create their own tournaments, etc. But ultimately, the UX of the site isn't much more than making a prediction, and then checking back later when the game is over to see your score. Not much more reason to hang around on the site than that.

An agent based simulator with LLMs. When I did my PhD in 2016 I used Agent Based Simulations to predict how to influence humans with chat agents on a large scale. The main criticisms with such simulations is always the realism of the agent (and network).

Now, with LLMs, this got much simpler. As LLMs are really good at mimicking humans.

The first application will be to simulate a LinkedIn post against your own (virtual) followers. I grab your actual LinkedIn followers, "turn" each one into an LLM and see how they react.

Oh wow, that's far out!

Sereze Breathing App — an AI-powered, offline breathwork coach for iOS and Apple Watch.

Sereze guides personalized breathing techniques like Box Breathing, Yoga Nidra/NSDR, and Silent Meditation, tailored using your Apple Health data (HRV, HR, sleep). It works completely offline with no logins or server sync — just phone and your Apple Watch.

It tracks heart rhythm and variability in real time during sessions, then uses LLM/GenAI to offer personalized insights into your nervous system health, sleep recovery, and stress resilience. You can even ask it questions post-session and receive contextual responses.

Recent features include TTS-guided breath cues, REM/Deep/Core sleep stage breakdowns, and a silent mode for mindful journaling or meditative tracking.

Would love feedback or collaborations! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sereze/id6736566597

I previously worked in Finance, where collecting forecasts and internal data from colleagues - often using Excel - was a recurring pain point. Existing systems sometimes covered part of the process, but their inflexible data structures made it difficult to adjust them for new use cases. Therefore I’m building a flexible internal data collection platform: it supports multidimensional data, custom workflows, a rules engine, automatic consolidation, and a range of configurable widgets.

I'm working on a block-based visual programming environment for kids — a sort of Scratch alternative — but instead of inventing a new language, it's a subset of Elixir. I'm using Google’s Blockly to generate real Elixir code from the blocks.

Right now, I'm building a Space Invaders clone in Elixir with LiveView, and integrating Blockly so the game's core logic can be edited visually. Hoping it becomes a fun way to learn both functional programming and web dev.

CopDB (https://app.copdb.org/)

A community powered, wikipedia-like, database for tracking police and their activities.

I built a workflow to auto-generate highlight clips from long videos.

I've been experimenting with a custom workflow to turn long-form videos into short, engaging highlight clips. I know a bunch of startups are in this space, but I wanted to build something lightweight and flexible just for fun — and ended up integrating it into one of my products.

Here’s the general flow:

Transcribe the video Use tools like Whisper, AssemblyAI, or Deepgram to get an accurate transcript.

Extract interesting clips Feed the transcript into an LLM (I recommend Gemini because of its long context and quality) and prompt it to segment the video based on criteria like "viral", "engaging", "funny", etc. Make sure it returns timestamps.

Generate the clips Use ffmpeg to slice the original video using those timestamps.

(Optional) Auto-crop for vertical If the user selects a mobile/short-form format, use something like Sieve to auto-crop and center the subject for vertical (9:16) output.

(Bonus) Enhance captions Run the extracted clip transcripts back through the LLM to pick out keywords or phrases to emphasize in the captions.

Add captions with styling Use Remotion or similar to render the clips with styled, animated captions. The component handles logic for timing and highlighting.

Render and download Batch render your clips and you’re done.

I used this exact pipeline to build a feature in one of my tools: https://www.shortsgenerator.com/highlights-generator

Appreciate any feedback!

A small web Podcast player that simly does its core job properly. Meaning working autoplay, state syncing and good flaging of finished episodes. There are so many players who don't get that right, especially when listening to 'drama' Podcast, which have a kind of different usage pattern then tradition Podcasts. Once that is working I'm also keen on exploring automatic blocking of advetisment segments, but that is certainly a harder Problem.

I've been experimenting with whether I can use LLMs to produce interactive maths explainers for kids. There are a few examples here: https://rupertlinacre.com/

Unless I'm missing something, it's amazing how few free, _high quality_ materials are online.

Ultimately I'm interested in two things: genuinely fun games that make you do some maths, and quality visualisations that help make concepts easier to learn

https://diffwithgpt.com is a tool that summarizes GitHub diffs using a locally hosted Qwen/Qwen-8B model. It currently indexes a small set of Go/devops repositories and enriches commits with AST derived context to improve semantic accuracy.(only past 3y of commits for now) The goal is to evaluate whether lightweight, local LLMs can provide meaningful changelog summaries. Any feedback welcome.

Updating https://webhooks.fyi/ as a resource on designing, building, and consuming webhooks.

microfn.dev - https://microfn.dev

It started out as a cloud runner for small (mostly pure) composable javascript functions that we run for you in the cloud. So whenever you have some small code snippet that you want to run, you can hit up microfn.dev, paste your code and then plug it into wherever you want (pipe into the terminal, use from MCP, add a cron to it, add to Siri shortcuts, use for home automation, ping it with webhooks, etc)

Now we added agents support, so you can have autonomous AI agents take your functions and decide when to use them. Even better, you can hook microfn into a MCP and have anything that supports MCP use those functions as well!

Suppose you need a new thing that your agent should do, you could ask the agent (whether that's claude or cursor) to compose a new function, add it to microfn, then use it itself going forward!

microfn.dev wants to be a toolbox for composable small tools. Imagine a toolbox at home with a bunch of hammers and screw drivers that you collect, share, and use for different purposes.

Some actual examples:

- Pull data off services (twitter, etc)

- Store data from sensors somewhere

- Give agents tools to talk to your specific systems without needing to write an entire MCP

- Wrap complex logic (eg slack auth + sending a message to slack) into a function and add it to a Siri shortcut, so you can quickly send messages to a specific channel with a ping or curl

Still very early alpha (beta-ish), but very excited about this

Agent builder vs “Cursor for APIs” — which dev tool would you actually use?

Hey everyone, I’m building my next project and would really value your input. I’m exploring two directions — both designed for mid-to-senior technical builders: AI Agent Builder: Create complex, production-ready agents from plain text in minutes. Fully code-ownable, transparent (not a black box), and easily connectable to modern tools — even the latest YC startups with APIs. Cursor for APIs: A dev-first tool to connect to any API instantly. Just type “build a RAG system for…” and it suggests the best tools, then generates the right code and surfaces the latest docs — including niche APIs. Think of it as a fast, intelligent API library with copy-paste-ready code. Which of these would actually improve your workflow?

On https://github.com/anttiharju/vmatch as a hobby. It's starting to get to a workable state, I'm using it to manage Go and golangci-lint for the project itself. It even works with the Go vs code plugin.

I think many version managers make things unnecessarily difficult, especially if one hops from one repo to another. vmatch automatically uses and installs the right versions.

The toolchain management added in Go 1.21 sounds related to this. Hopefully you’re already aware of it, but if not, see https://go.dev/blog/toolchain.

It's a helpful link, thank you. I think I need to play with toolchain more. Last time I checked I think there was some corner case that was not covered but I could be wrong.

With `brew install go`

and

module github.com/anttiharju/vmatch

go 1.21.0

toolchain go1.21.1

I still get a binary that claims to be built with the latest version of Go instead of 1.21.1 or .0

vmatch has version 0.1.6+dirty built with go1.24.3 from 83c9aa83 on 2025-05-25T18:43:30Z

I think this is a problem for me. Go 1.22 did a breaking change with the for loops for example https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview.

I see that I can change it with a command like `go env -w GOTOOLCHAIN=go1.21.1+auto` but then again I'm doing something I don't want, managing the version.

Perhaps I'm missing some config.

Only in the conceptual stage right now. So far my thoughts are.

An app framework targeting modern C++ (>C++20) based on Boost.Fiber and stdexec( sender/receivers when C++26 releases)

I got inspired by a recent Java talk[1] from a Netflix employee about how they are building. I have the pretty strong opinion that async/await are implementation details and shouldn’t be exposed in APIs. They effectively have the compiler/runtime generate a state machine for you and you wouldn’t put a state machine in an api. Using C++ though we do have low level access to the CPU and there is no reason we cannot just use stackfull coroutines. This allows you to write literally synchronous code but it will defer blocking operations to an even loop and allow concurrency.

For GUI at least in the beginning Im thinking that I just spawn a native window and it’s up to you how you draw to that. I’m targeting something basic on linux myself which means it will probably just be direct calls to the wayland compositor to create a window. Getting a context etc will be up to the user since my idea would be in windows we use C# and on macos we use swift for UI. Documenting and building tooling around getting those languages integrated feels like it would provide more benefits than actually trying to reinvent the wheel in C++.

Likewise HTTP client will just wrap libcurl, for server side Im actually thinking of just calling into golang. HTTP servers aren’t the hard part, it’s all the infrastructure around it that is the hard part and well golang handles that better…

1. https://youtu.be/XpunFFS-n8I?si=olBE3W0AMicUZM5c

I'm working on Logchef: https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef

It's an open-source (AGPLv3), purpose-built log analytics UI specifically for ClickHouse. I've been using ClickHouse for logs and love its power, but found the existing UIs either too heavy, too focused on ingestion (which we already have covered with tools like Vector/Promtail/Fluentbit/Logstash etc), or not ClickHouse-native enough.

Logchef aims to be a lightweight, powerful log explorer that sits on top of your existing ClickHouse setup.

Key things:

- Schema-agnostic: Works with your existing ClickHouse log tables. No need to change how you store things.

- Dual Query Modes: Simple search syntax (e.g., level=error service=api) for quick looks, and full SQL for complex analysis when you need to dig deep.

- Lightweight & Focused: Single binary, easy to deploy. It doesn't do ingestion, letting you use best-of-breed tools for that.

- Team-centric: Built with multi-tenancy for teams and access controls for different log sources from the get-go.

I've got a demo running at https://demo.logchef.app if you'd like to try it out. It's still evolving, so feedback (especially from other ClickHouse users) would be super valuable!

Wrote an announcement post with a bit more detail: https://mrkaran.dev/posts/announcing-logchef/

Github URL should be: https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef (found in announcement post)

Edit: ok, I see you have edited your comment

Thanks! :) fixed the typo.

I have been trying to setup ultra low cost rdp clients program for schools using RPi Zero 2w.

This is mostly a hobby/community help project. Majority of schools in my area are either not required with computers or they have lots of older ones with no funding to maintain our modernize them.

I'm trying to setup everything within VPN (either wireguard or tailscale). I'll most probably go with tailscale so I can use the subnet router.

The zero would would run the older RPiOS (32 bit) and would autostart a rdp session using xrdp client. It's pretty usable for mostly static work that students need in schools.

Each RPi unit would cost around ₹2500 ($29) which includes all the adaptors, power supply, sdcard etc.

On the server side I'm running two Ubuntu server OS VMs (inside proxmox) configured with XFCE4 and KDE.

The work is still in progress, I'm yet to iron out major bugs.

https://casepro.club

A platform for consulting aspirants to practice business case interviews.

Finding case prep partners is a major pain point for B-school students/consulting aspirants. Fortunately, frontier AI models are now good enough to function as surprisingly competent case interviewers.

Im working on a setup converter for the F1 Game. I hate searching for setups and things, and I already have dry setups for every circuit, so I'm making a GUI app in PyQT (not gonna lie - maybe not the best choice but im comfortable in python, and its not critical to be fast so i guess for now its fine), where you input the setup values, and it converts them to a (pretty good - for me) wet setup for the track, by changing some values here and there.

I'm going to add track guides to it, in the hope that, eventually, I don't have to google for track guides or anything, I can just have them all in one place for me.

I also want to make my own overlay by analyzing UDP data that the F1 games export, because I play on xbox, and my shitty laptop probably doesnt have space for simhub - but mainly because its cool. If i can figure out how, I might also integrate some AI thing to comment on improvements you can make to your driving based on the values too!

I'm a student still so the code organization at the moment is literal trash but im working on it - when it's at a point where even I don't cringe looking at it I'll post it here!

I'm working on an AI web game generator for businesses. I spent a year developing our custom game engine to build a few games that didn't work, but I made the game engine to have reusable modules we can reuse for creating new games quickly . Now I've pivoted to allow anyone (business especially) to create new games on the fly.

here the games result so far: https://playcraft.fun

Got me a iCE40 based FPGA which I'm playing around with Verilog and an opensource toolchain (icestorm, yosys and nextpnr) and using this as a reference https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

I recently strongly solved the Royal Game of Ur (https://royalur.net/solved), and am now back to the less academic pursuit of working on our implementation of the game.

Funnily enough, players are much more excited about the achievements I am planning to add than they ever were about us solving this 4000-year-old board game. I guess you've got to pick your audience.

My favorite sideprojects are daily games. One I am currently enjoying building is VideoPuzzle: https://videopuzzle.org/ where you have to unscramble a video split into 4x4 tiles.

We are up to almost 200 puzzles, with around 700 players per day. I've become much better at finding videos that work well as puzzles and am working on adding small quality of life updates.

That's awesome! This one https://videopuzzle.org/puzzle/184 just about cost me my sanity though.

I'm building MLSync.io [1], an ETL platform that helps real estate companies easily access and use MLS (Multiple Listing Service) property data without the technical headaches. I've originally developed this for internal use in an IDX startup, but the complexity of RESO synchronization led me to spin it off into its own dedicated tool.

[1] https://MLSync.io

Looks good. I created propertywebbuilder.com as an open source real estate website builder some years ago. Had wanted to do something similar to mlsync next but never got round to it.

Robot technician/builder and I'm working on finding another job, because I just got laid off. Shame. I liked this job (mostly), because I could combine craftsmanship (I'm an electrician) with nerdy electrical and hardware/software/mechanical debugging and occasionally development. And I learned so much. Onwards to new things I guess, but I loathe the job application process.

I hacked together a way for my Kindle PW running KOReader to connect to my self-hosted Calibre catalogue (OPDS) via Tailscale (PW5 is tricky) with a simple Go program.

My brother and his wife would like to have the same setup, but it’s definitely not user-friendly, so I’m trying to figure out a one-click way to set everything up so you can have your own private ebook catalogue on the go on the device of your choosing.

AirPosture: Turn your AirPods into a posture coach on macOS

A macOS app that uses your AirPods' sensors to catch bad posture in real time.

How it works:

Real-time tilt tracking – Your AirPods already have the tech Customizable alerts – Adjust sensitivity so it nudges you only when needed Prevent strain before it starts – Stop neck pain and headaches at the source

Demo:

https://youtu.be/UEOla3WBy1g

Cool idea! I used to have a sleek clip on posture monitor that is now e-waste due to the company folding. Great idea to use AirPods

Thank you! let me know if you wanna join the beta (forever free).

lseconomist@gmail.com

I am working on a simple tool to help founders:

StackAdvisor (A tech-stack advisor for MVPs and beyond)

- Understand the idea, team, budget, skillset, preferences (cloud services, language, frameworks), time to market, etc

- Generate smart questions and iterate based on answers

- Suggest rationale optimal architecture to begin with and implementation detail

- Include In Scope / Out Scope tasks, Week-1 to Week-12 plan

- Suggest low-code/no-code/AI-assisted tools for implementation

For the past several years, I've been tinkering on and off with something that might be called a "game engine", except there's not enough of it. More of a "conceptual framework", or maybe "organizing principle". Basically, I cut the idea of the Entity-Component-System down to the bare minimum and provide some structure and queries.

Here's a presentation, includes examples: https://hg.sr.ht/~oofoe/candheat/raw/dox/intro.pdf?rev=tip

It's fairly free form, so you can do almost anything you want, but still structured and "legible" for computers and the person debugging it. I wrote it in a Lisp that compiles to JavaScript, but there's no reason you couldn't implement it in any language that supports associative arrays -- idea is that the language has most of what we want, just need to organize it a little. I think the idea is useful enough, that it's potentially useful for more than "just" games.

Repo with several more-or-less worked examples: https://hg.sr.ht/~oofoe/candheat

Recently used it for a Lisp Game Jam entry, which someone described as "Helltaker meets the Magic School Bus": https://oofoe.itch.io/class6

About 800 SLOC, compiles down to just under a hundred lines of JavaScript. This includes the utilities, the "engine" (keyboard handling, overlays, text and art composition, animation, sound effects, etc.) and the game logic itself (which includes a level editor).

Converting my home server from Docker + Docker Compose to Podman + systemd. (The server runs self-hosting for my movies, TV, ebooks, comics and photos, networked to my other devices via Tailscale).

The DevEx isn't quite as easy, but I'm very happy with the final result. I don't have to run the overhead of a Docker Engine anymore, the network policy is far simpler to write and audit, and I can use the same logging tools for both containerized and non-containerized services.

The main hurdle has been file permissions for the mounted volumes for my data; Podman is rootless by default, which means you _should_ build your containers to run as non-root UIDs/GIDs and map them onto host UIDs and GIDs, then grant permissions for those host users and groups to access your data volumes. In practice, the easiest path is usually to run Podman in rootful mode, which is not a best security practice but avoids the difficult-to-troubleshoot file permission errors if you don't do the UID/GID mapping correctly.

However, unless you are really trying to optimize for overhead/performance, you should probably use k3s.

Anecdata for selfhosters: I got a one-liter PC recently, with an i7 6th gen, and it consumes about 5W of power at idle. Just running k3s, with no workloads and controlled for other variables, bumps the consumption to 7W. Benchmark it yourself before committing to it.

Thought it was goofy that I was still reading newsletters through my inbox. I really don't want to open my email unless I'm working. Anyways, some friends and I made Scrollz to fix that and also add some cool features to the newsletter reading experience. AI summaries, newsletter discovery, audio narrations, etc.

https://www.scrollz.co/

I'm also not a fan of email newsletters, and the reading interface of scrollz looks nice, but I'm not understanding how scrollz actually fit into the reading workflow. How do the newsletters in my inbox get opened for reading in scrollz?

Yeah so we didn't want to build out anything that invades your inbox, for privacy concerns, I know I would not feel comfortable with that.

So we've curated a ton of the top newsletters and made the process of adding them to the platform super easy. You just subscribe to them within Scrollz. If you sign up and have any that you're missing we can get them added in no time!

https://lookaway.app

I'm working on the next major update for LookAway. I'm improving the wellness reminders to be smarter - instead of nagging you on a timer, blink and posture alerts now only trigger when you actually need them.

Also adding productivity stats so you can see how taking proper breaks during prolonged screen time affects your work output.

I’m working on Orbiter, simple static web hosting that allows anyone to upload a directory of files, use a CLI tool, or use a GitHub action to host their sites and apps in seconds.

My co-worker and I started this as a side project because we were building so many sample apps, proofs of concept, and engineering as marketing apps and we were feeling more and more locked into Vercel every day. So we wanted to go back to client and server separation and when we did that, we realized most hosting providers have moved toward server-side rendering as the default.

Client-side rendering isn’t for everyone, but plenty of people still make simple websites or even complex CSR web apps and don’t want to deal with fully integrated solutions like Vercel (and Netlify now to a lesser extent). Plus they want the flexibility of choosing different tools for their frontend and backend.

This remains a fully bootstrapped side project for us, but it’s gotten the most traction of any side project either of us has worked on.

https://orbiter.host

A tool for creating custom/branded palettes that have accessible WCAG contrast by design:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

No AI or autogeneration stuff, more like an advanced editor that lets you tweak large sets of colors to your liking and test they pass contrast checks in advance before you start using them in your UI/designs.

Love this bookmarked and will be using this for future web!! Good founder

Will give it a try next time I need to pick a color palette. Thanks

I'm working on a open-source schema migration tool for tortoise-orm. tortoise-orm is a mature Python 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

I'm working on a resume review service. Really simple, submit your resume and I'll record a video analysis of it. I created it because every so often I get asked to review someone's resume and they've found it very helpful, and it's my way to address the poor resumes I've received when hiring.

https://resume.fail

Assembling my CPS5 underwater drone: https://www.cpsdrone.com/

Impressive! Love how you have hacked yourself into such a great idea.

DragoChat - https://www.facebook.com/ai.drago.chat <~~^(o_o)^

TINY attempt to fight the growing divide between "AI haves" and "AI have-not" with

- PREPAID access (+ bring-your-own-API-keys alternatives for more technical users) to premium models (ChatGPR plus and above)

- multi-channel access (SMS/MMS, Whatsapp + many many more) to give ANYONE, ANYWHERE, regardless of how non-technical they are access to absolute TOP/SOTA model advisors with easy access in their language + fact checkers + more (think african farmers looking for intelligence to grow best crops, former delinquents lookeing for rehavilitation, absolutely anyone deservers ACCESS TO INTELLIGENCE)

- zero lock-in - paid (freemium, but no adds) product, but 100% open data formats, sharing, import/export etc.

STAGE: prototype for personal use as a whatsapp bot+ webui, somewhat usable for us but still wip, next stage is building accounts and payments for EU access, next for US/international

[btw this is "first contact" for a WIP stealth thinggy - fb page had to exist for meta apis authorization reasons and related + I just made this new HN user now, without the baggage, so for any inquiries pls contact us on this user instead \(o_o)/]

I'm working on Valuate! An AI powered hotel acquisition underwriting platform. I'm currently iterating based off of feedback I've been collecting from brokers and hotel investors.

I'm also available for other work/projects. I'm a full stack developer with a decade of experience working in government tech and real estate. Feel free to reach out!

I'd be interested in this for different REI -- multi-family, storage, single family, co-living, sober living, etc.

Hey, really appreciate your interest! Funny enough, I’ve actually been thinking about expanding the platform to cover other types of real estate.

The biggest difference with hotels is that they operate more like businesses—you’re dealing with things like daily rates, fluctuating occupancy, and a lot more operational complexity. That makes the valuation process very performance-driven and dynamic.

With something like multi-family or storage, it’s more about stable leases, consistent rental income, and lower day-to-day volatility. The underwriting approach shifts accordingly—less focus on real-time performance, more on long-term cash flow and cap rates.

I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on or what you’d want to see in a tool like this. Sounds like we’re thinking in a similar direction.

Working on https://sauna-assistant.com - app to make sauna rituals in home sauna - from ambient music and time tracking to lighting automation

It is a personal itch for my home Sauna. Lots of stuff to manage, but trying to work on consistency as a priority as I dropped the ball in many previous attempts.

I'm making a fun app that allows people to share what they're doing right now, and you can see what others are doing right now. It reminds me of what it was like when the internet was first born - seeing what others are living makes me not feel so alone anymore.

If you'd like to play, visit: https://cike.app

I am working on an agent that can tutor you in introductory physics. Beyond being a chatbot, it can summon and mutate several kinds of diagrams and graphs to teach concepts like kinematics, energy, momentum and hopefully much more down the line.

Here’s a very early version for circuits: https://www.circuit-tutor.xyz

We all have those tasks in our applications that are not common enough to warrant a project (and another deploy) to make an admin panel, but also are painful to do, because they are tricky or time-consuming. So I'm working on an internal tools building platform to quickly wrangle some admin interface do automate them.

This is currently just a prototype I'm developing, but I'm honestly eager to receive some feedback, as I'm not completely sure about the direction.

https://github.com/luizgfranca/synthreon

A webapp to improve how we discuss, model, and understand problems https://ameliorate.app/ (repo: https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate).

The core idea is to ground discussion in a causal diagram that ties together problems & solutions, then each node/edge can have structured details (importance score, arguments, unknowns, relevant facts, etc.) to help clarify & refine the information. It also has some features for working with this information, e.g. comparing perspectives, using a table to evaluate tradeoffs between solutions.

Right now, you basically need to be a power user to get benefit from it, but I've got a lot of ideas for making it smoother, and I'm slowly working through them.

I’m working on these in the wee hours

* prfrmHQ SaaS The modern way to manage performance reviews, set clear objectives, and ensure alignment across teams or individually — all in one place

https://prfrmhq.com

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538744 [Show HN: My SaaS for performance reviews setting goals and driving success] https://youtu.be/ygvKdgiKRj4?si=Q9ael-oCLEGKMIgN - Shows I can use AI and I've integrated into AWS Bedrock

- Shows I can integrate with Stripe for payments

* Consulting (Architecture, Strategy, Technology leadership and advisory) - 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 technology concepts.

I'm migrating my blog (https://alprado.com/) to a custom solution built with Laravel. I know the HN community appreciates simplicity, but in my opinion, hosting static HTML is almost as easy as hosting PHP. However, PHP gives you the flexibility to build an interactive and optimized CMS.

Working on a new tool to automate busy work and save time for founders, engineers, support reps, and marketers.

Most ai apps are focused on reading and synthesizing data, but none are great at “write” actions across apps.

We’re focused on making the simplest and easiest way to use ai to control your apps and get things done

https://stride.systems

My side project is Daily Optimist - a super-simple app that asks you a single question every day to train positive thinking and boost your mood. Mainly for personal use.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily-optimist-think-positive/...

I recently launched Early Access for my AI-powered service for automated bug reporting, PR review, fearure implementation, a difficult test/documentation/refactor suggestion PRs.

It was in the works for about a year, and I'm now trying to find ways to make it more marketable and useful.

The three main things I'm working on are:

1. GitLab support (GitHub only at the moment) 2. A demo on the landing page that doesn't require any sign-up. 3. Better "vibe coding" experience through the Chat interface for those who want it.

I built it with TypeScript on the front- and back-end, React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL. And I over-engineeres it, as one does, with a Redis cache and websockets to push the latest data to web clients so the latest info is always shown without needing to refresh. I'm using the OpenAI API right now, but I want to switch to local models when I can invest in the hardware for it.

Edit: https://mysticode.ai - Would absolutely love feedback.

I built a web app for looping specific sections of YouTube videos as a way to practice songs.

https://proloops.jprokay.com/

Slowtube was a huge inspiration for me (I’ve spent many hours with it), but I wanted a way to save my loops and continue my practice.

Saving is solely to the browser’s database right now.

Feedback is much appreciated!

A real-time video processor in hardware:

- static (mp4) or live (hdmi) input, hdmi output

- a collection of effects (various distortions, color glitches, demoscene-like) applied over incoming video stream, maximum of 4 effects stackable on top of one another

- midi controllers support (controlling actions/params of effects via CC)

- modulation of effects params via LFO and audio events (bpm, kick, tonal detection)

- loading of .glsl shaders (eq. shadertoy.com)

- dynamic input resolution, output either 360p (rpi 4/5) or upscaled to 720p / 1080p (networks like SRGAN over Hailo / RPI or RK3588 with a Radxa 5B SBC).

Given a 2nd screen (timeline editor) would love to evolve this to something like a hardware editor, somewhat in the line of DAWs in the audio world. Most things are working with biggest challenge now being building a control surface (buttons, rotaries + associated oleds, etc) and attempting laying it all on a PCB, a process I don't know much about. If there's interest welcome comments and could elaborate more.

I merged the last major big thing for the android version of Tricktrapper over the weekend, it's kind of 2FA for normal phone calls, verification that you're talking to who you think you're talking to in this age of deepfake voice. There's no LLM in this, because I think that way only lies model vs model competition and nobody can win. Better to try and cut the whole vector if it's possible.

Been chasing pilot customer but it's few companies that only have android, so I'm picking up a mac mini after work to start working on the ios version, see what's possible with the various restrictions.

https://www.tricktrapper.com/ if anyone is curious, it's sparse of the details though. I'm working on a doc with all the technical info. The plan is to release it for free to private people, charge companies.

I'm working on a site (https://panoptic.live/) that lets you collect, watch, and share videos from different platforms.

You can drag and drop links from YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or Kick.

You can add or remove streams, save mixes for later, and share them as links.

You can watch multiple videos at once in a wall-of-video grid and navigate quickly from one stream to another. It works best on a really big screen --phones aren't really supported.

So far, people seem to like it. I've made a lot of updates based on people's feedback since I announced it a few weeks ago.

A small, cute CLI app that gives overviews about files and other entities. I've called it `what`. It's inspired by being able to right-click on stuff in a GUI file manager to get an overview about what it is.

https://github.com/richsmith/what/

About what what is?

This is great! Does this have like a plugin system for different types of things?

Thank you!

Currently it is just a bit of pattern matching and polymorphism that pulls in various libraries according to entity type. If it picks up any interest I'll put some thought into how could be a bit more elegant / modular.

I'm working on https://greatriftsafari.com — a travel planning platform that uses AI + local expertise to help people design and book personalized safaris in Kenya.

Most safari booking sites are either outdated, opaque on pricing, or offer one-size-fits-all tours. We let travelers customize everything — dates, interests (e.g. big cats, birding, photography), travel style, and budget — and generate a full itinerary with lodge picks, activity suggestions, and accurate cost estimates (including seasonal pricing and transportation).

We also partnered with local operators so users can actually book what they see — not just get ideas. The goal is to make safaris more accessible and planning less overwhelming.

Still early, but if you're curious or planning a trip to Africa, I'd love feedback: https://greatriftsafari.com

Inspired by Steve Brunton(on YT) and his colleague, a platform that makes working on/with dynamical systems much easier in terms of sensing, modeling and controlling the dynamics. Eventually iterating quickly using SOTA techniques(compressed sensing, super-resolution(spatial-temporal tradeoff), RandNLA, ML) without the need to understand them deeply

Sensing effectively by optimal (re)positining of the sensors (both number of sensor and physical placement) Think spatial sensor/data fusion, perhaps using more cheap sensors rather than few expensive

Building a model of the dynamics (based on both reasonable assumption about the system based on grounded physics, and dynamical interpretation of the sensor's data (PySINDy, DMD)

And eventually controlling the dynamics

Love to get your feedback, ideas, if you know about such products/business etc, how could it help any business, real life application, if it interests you, anything :)

Just released a “Loudness Contour” audio plugin. Let’s you apply various equal-loudness contours like Fletcher-Munson, ISO-226, LUFS style K-weighting, etc.

Fits into my “loudness series” suite of tools.

Have 3 more in development and then it’ll be on to the next series.

https://apu.software/contour/

Context and “memory” (not really a fan of this term and how industry uses it) are actually complex to manage for power users including humans and agents.

While it may sound counterintuitive, the agents of today aren’t truly autonomous in that you need to really guide them and plan their actions well.

I believe this is true today, and will be even more true when agents are guiding agents.

We need new infrastructure for dynamic context management.

The answer is not as simple as “hook up your agent to an MCP that pull docs from the web” … also MCP needs its own revolution. I tend to use no MCP and prefer raw agent performance.

I’m evolving the simple concepts I built in my VS Code extension to address this. Nothing public now, but I and a few others use this everyday to feed parts of large codebases into Gemini (to build plans for Claude code, other coding agents): https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower

I work on an iOS habit tracker called Spark: https://letspark.it I’ve been working on it since sometime mid-January and I post daily on Bsky on the process: https://bsky.app/profile/stojanowski.dev The app is kind of simple for now, just basic habit tracking with reminders and streak counter, However, I wait for approval from Apple of a bigger update introducing irregular habits and improving reminders’ reliability. All that with a nice-looking UI. I try to stick to the native Apple UI language, but modify it so it has its own, unique vibe.

I treat the project as a learning opportunity. I’ve always wanted to work on some mobile apps, so Spark is my first step towards that.

A reactive notebook with algebraic 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.

I’m building https://ninja.ai/mcp/servers — an app store for AI assistants.

Most AI agents today are like smartphones without any apps. Ninja.ai makes it easy for anyone to install and use AI tools (MCP initially) that automate useful tasks, without needing to write code.

Think:

  - One-click install for AI-powered tools (MCPs, Model Context Protocol servers)
  - Automatically share relevant context so tools know what you’re working on
  - “Recipes” that bundle multiple tools into workflows (e.g., check inbox → pull receipts → send summary to accountant)

We’re focused on everyday users and small teams who want to get things done with AI — not configure it.

Still early. Just launched our prototype. Bootstrapped so far, now fundraising.

If you’re excited about agents, app ecosystems, or making AI useful to normal people, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Working on a few 'vertical' AI apps that hopefully can bring those real productivity gains everyone is hoping for to some narrow areas:

TenderStrike (https://www.tenderstrike.com) - AI for tenders in the construction industry. Fascinating how large and complex a tender can be, and how many there are. LLMs can be super helpful here, but there are many challenging parts to it.

Optivise (https://www.optivise.io) - product data optimization and translation using AI. We're focusing on a niche here, helping customers to onboard onto Mirakl-powered marketplaces, but hoping to expand to other marketplaces soon. I have spent the last years before that deep down the trenches of product data management and the traditional approach isn't fun :)

I’m exploring a few ideas at the intersection of tech and creative writing, starting with a modal Markdown-based focused editor: https://saturn9.studio/flow/ Still in early stages, I have more ideas than time to implement them :)

Making it easy to create good charts. Put your CSV data, write a prompt, and get a professional chart in any style - e.g. matching your company's website, slide deck style or blog post.

https://charts.quesma.com/

Now it is early alpha, but you can already give it a try.

https://pwnscan.com

A binary static analysis tool that identifies vulnerabilities.

Right now, still just focused on buffer overflows. It can find some known CVEs and I’ve made several reliability improvements over the past month or so.

I think I’m going to expand to additional vulnerability types soon.

Very cool! Where can I read up on how something like this works?

You’re the second person who has asked me this, I think I need to start a blog or something.

So I dont want to give too much away about how it works because I think I might try to offer a paid version where the results are private.

But at a high level it combines an LLM, program analysis, and heuristics.

I'm (slowly and haphazardly) working on https://pianobooth.com. Give it a midi file and it should visualise the playing on a piano (though I make no promises and at least currently it doesn't parse all files correctly, but it's mostly there).

I think I've finally gotten it to a point where it's usable and it seems to work on my phone as well. Hopefully baking in the lighting for the 3d models will give a small performance boost and I don't think it will be noticeable at all with the color changes and small movements.

I've also been going through the fastai course so hopefully I'll be able to put that to use on this project by generating midi files from audio! I might be underestimating the difficulties there but it should be fun.

A few years ago I started experimenting with embedding V8, one thing led to another and I was suddenly down this rabbit hole building a rudimentary IDE to create standalone applications with JavaScript. It was a lot of fun building all the different parts and I learned a lot porting it to macOS.

Is anyone still interested in cross platform development for desktop apps (Windows & macOS)? Yes, it's similar to Electron, but mine uses native UI components and there are no prerequisites to get started.

I don't want to violate any rules about self promotion, so if anyone is interested in checking it out, let me know and I can give you the link.

I turned a game my friends and I play during March Madness into a web app:

https://bracketmayhem.app

While the tourney isn't going year-round, it has a demo mode where you can play through prior years (with friends! Or with yourself on another browser/device). The chat feature is admittedly half-baked and is mostly there to get my wife to quit asking about it. Will try to get that fully done for next year.

I'm also working on another side project in Gleam just to check it out. That seems to be taking shape and once I get something decent I'll post it.

All of these are self-hosted via Coolify on a VPS, which has almost been a project to itself (I've had it with cloud providers). I've learned a lot and it was cool to see some other self-hosting solutions in the thread here.

I'm working on a programming language aiming to replace Bash. It specifically targets CLI scripts where Python or Rust are overkill, but it contains a bunch of constructs that make it particularly well suited for CLI scripts, including arg parsing, table formatting, HTTP querying, Bash command invocation, etc.

Keen to hear people's thoughts and feedback! GitHub here: https://github.com/amterp/rad

The docs site also contains a guide for getting started, including some of the unique features: https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/

I spent hours on prompt engineering recently and I hate it. This is for a startup and requirements change daily so the prompt has to be revamped all the time.

I decided to develop a system that take requirements and some sample inputs as an input, then automatically evalute the outputs and fine tune the prompt.

I’m working on https://jobLetterAI.com (still in progress). The idea is to help people generate cover letters based on their resume and the job post.

One thing I’ve found super helpful is showing users what’s missing — like skills or tools mentioned in the job ad but not in their CV. That little “gap check” makes the letters more focused and relevant.

Still building and testing, so if anyone here has thoughts on what actually helps in real job applications, I’d love to hear.

As someone on the market, would be really into trying this out!

Appreciate that! Still early, but if you’re open to testing a beta version soon, I’d love to send you early access. Just DM or drop your email at jobLetterAI.com — feedback means a lot right now.

Signed up for early access!

Contributing to Pure data for the upcoming 0.56 release: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data

AOO - a C/C++ library for low-latency peer-to-peer audio streaming and messaging:

https://git.iem.at/aoo/aoo

https://www.soundingfuture.com/en/article/aoo-low-latency-pe...

"game over" - a musical 2D game engine: https://vimeo.com/389378372

I'm learning what "vibe-coding" really is, and using GitHub CoPilot to build a variant of BASIC with a permanent equals (aka declarative programming) in node/typescript (of which I know nothing, I'm an old Turbo Pascal programmer)

Long ago, I came across Metamine here on HN, and thought it was magic... but there's a LOT of stuff in that code I don't understand.... maybe I'll do a Turbo Pascal version later? I do have code to do cooperative tasking under MS-DOS from the 1980s I wrote. ;-)

https://github.com/mikewarot/PermEq

An AI tool for data analytics so that companies can get data insights by chatting, all data in one platform. I have worked at multiple start-ups, and each company struggles with getting data insights quickly and easily. Would love to hear your feedback. https://www.dataglide.ai

Would like to suggest a possible need to the dev wizards on HN, and also request pointers to something good that may already be out there:

I would like a phone app that would disable anything that a user doesn't actually need (not something like the existing google android feature that identifies apps that haven't been used in x months). It may ask a user what they actually need (for example, calling, SMS, a browser, etc.). The app would identify all the software/apps on the phone that are not required for the above needs and identify / disable them (say for example Location services). When you get a new phone one could start off with an absolute minimum.

It would need ongoing updates, as the app universe and surveillance technologies continuously evolve.

2 hours in and this thread is already stacked, but I'll bite since I am stuck on this problem and need help. I am working on a language learning solution that involves llms. The way I am branding it is "Anki meets Ai" because it combines a flashcard-esque method of generating complete exercises such as multiple choice, cloze, etc. with the tried-and-true SRS methodology.

I think it works great! The problem is, I think it works great. The issue is that it is doubly-lossy in that llms aren't perfect and translating from one language to another isn't perfect either. So the struggle here is in trusting the llm (because it's the only tool good enough for the job other than humans) while trying to look for solid ground so that users feel like they are moving forward and not astray.

Hey, I happen to have run into a similar issue with my project!

I've documented a lot of my research into LLM translation at https://nuenki.app/blog, and I made an open source hybrid translator that beats any individual LLM at https://nuenki.app/translator

It uses the fact that

- LLMs are better at critiquing translations than producing them (even when thinking, which doesn't actually help!)

- When they make mistakes, the mistakes tend to be different to each other.

So it translates with the top 4-5 models based on my research, then has another model critique, compare, and combine.

It's more expensive than any one model, but it isn't super expensive. The main issue is that it's quite slow. Anyway, hopefully it's useful, and hopefully the data is useful too. Feel free to email/reply if you have any questions/ideas for tests etc.

Hey thanks for the reply! Is this "hybrid" method what you wrote in the last line - llm comparison?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking?

It is in the LLM comparison blog posts, at least the newer ones, though it tends to be on the first line.

Sorry, when you said hybrid I was expecting something that was partly an llm and partly something else. How did you arrive at your coherence/idiomaticity/accuracy numbers (if you'll forgive me not delving too deep into the website)?

Hybrid as in a combination of different LLMs. I recommend trying the demo on the site, it should give you an idea of what it's doing. The code is also pretty short.

So those numbers are from an older version of the benchmark.

Coherence is done by:

- Translating English, to the target language, to English

- repeating three times

- Having 3 LLMs score how close the original English is to the new English

I like it because it's robust against LLM bias, but it obviously isn't exact, and I found that after a certain point it's actually negatively correlated with quality, because it incentivises literal, word by word translations.

Accuracy and Idiomaticity are based on asking the judge LLMs to rate by how accurate / idiomatic the translations are. I mostly focused on idiomaticity, as it was the differentiator at the upper end.

The new benchmark has gone through a few iterations, and I'm still not super happy with it. Now it's just based on LLM scoring (this time 0-100), but with better stats, prompting, etc. I've still done some small scale tests on coherence, and I did some more today that I haven't published yet, and again they have DeepL and Lingvanex doing well because they tend towards quite rigid translations over idiomatic ones. Claude 4 is also interestingly doing quite well on those metrics.

I need to sleep, but I can discuss it more tomorrow, if you'd like.

I'm writing an easy to use APM platform in a single executable (plus the database).

I tried self-hosting Sentry recently and found out there are a lot of moving parts, which makes sense for their scale and use case.

I was wondering if I could build something small and not multi-tenant. So I started experimenting with writing a server (in Go) that collects OpenTelemetry data and inserts into Clickhouse, an API for retrieving data/statistics (P95 in a time range, etc...), and a frontend (React.js) that displays them. All of this in a single executable file (yes, including the frontend, but not including Clickhouse).

This is all very new to me so I'm learning Go, Clickhouse and OpenTelemetry at the same time.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/nabatshy

Have you tried coroot?

I haven't, but it looks interesting, might try it. Thanks!

About to port libffi to Fil-C.

Unlike most programs, which just work in Fil-C with zero or no changes, libffi needs to basically be rewritten. Instead of using assembly for reflectively crafting calls it needs to use the Fil-C zcall api. And instead of JITing closures it needs to use the Fil-C zclosure_new api.

Should be fun

Having fun vibe coding my first personal website with astro and three.js - I'd say it's working pretty well so far. I need to tone down the amount of animation and glows this, it's a little too much.

https://www.Loufe.ca

I've made a couple of silly browser games, http://matchmoji.arjam.net and http://matchmoji.arjam.net/minesweeper

Wut.Dev - a "better" AWS console (https://app.wut.dev)

I got tired of using the AWS console (the UI is inconsistent across services, resource-heavy, and loaded with things I don't need)

I've built a handful of features, mostly to scratch my own itch, including:

• Multi-region mode (select 2+ regions and see all your resources on the same page)

• Automated diagrams (tree-style resource relationships)

• Easy export to CSV

• Reference matrix of AWS service/region availability

The best way to explain it is with a demo, so I built a demo version: https://app.wut.dev/?service=acm&type=certificates&demo=true

Inquisitive - self-hosted knowledge-base with a touch of LLM/RAG.

Link: https://github.com/kanishka-linux/inquisitive

I've been working on this on and off since last couple of months to consolidate all of my digital knowledge-base like notes/links/pdf etc with the help of LLM/RAG. It is fully self-hosted with very minimal setup instructions - which should be easily installable by anyone on their local machine.

UI is very bare minimal. It still has some rough edges when it comes to the UI part, but usable. I've been regularly using it since sometime, and it works well (atleast for my use case) when it comes to searching and organizing personal knowledge-base.

Feel free to try it!

Looks neat. How does it compare to the already available solutions out there/any thing different about it?

Thanks. I've written about it in detailed in the README. But most important thing that differentiate it from other self-hosted variants is the ability to see references along with chat and ability to exclude/include specific sources from your local sources for targeted discussion. Moreover it has integrated note taking feature in markdown, so that all of your digital knowledge-base is at one place.

I had built a social network for my friends which is working great so now I am building it for the world.

A place to dump all my thoughts in text to people I already know.

No photos, no clout-chasing, ego boosts, infinite scrolling, findable profiles etc.

I created a waitlist page (code only) using Gemini 2.5 and hosted it in cloudflare pages using D1 for database.

Waitlist page is here: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

Here's the full feature list for the initial version I am building where you can leave comments anonymously:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wkxk01C8ePEQ2jkwwt6p5Z7V...

Any feedback is appreciated.

FYI I get access denied for your google docs link

I have made it public. Thanks!

Working on:

https://vimgolf.ai

It's a site where I hope to make learning vim more fun by competing with a AI bot (powered by reasoning models) when solving challenges. Looking to hopefully complete the project very soon.

notd - A lightweight outliner built with PHP, JavaScript, and SQLite: https://github.com/andjar/notd

I'm building a simple outliner focused on core functionality: hierarchical notes, backlinks, file attachments, and todo management. The goal is portability and longevity - it runs in phpdesktop as simple php, js and sqlite without compilation or complex frameworks.

I have been a happy user of LogSeq, but the current major rewrite, intended to enable real-time multi-user collaboration, introduce a lot of complexity and I am now more worried about the longevity of that project.

Built with assistance from Cursor, Gemini, and Jules, so vibe coding. Still early stage but functional for basic outlining needs.

I am working on a platform to improve product management and communication between the product team and engineers at https://Full.CX - got a few paying customers. Would love and welcome any feedback or suggestions.

I got tired of using SplitWise, personal finance app, and Tab to manage budgets/expenses. So I vibecoded a small web app (https://web.savida.ai) to do it all in one place (and pay much less for it too with no limits). Since I made it, it fills all my needs. But would be nice to get feature requests from other people if they want to use it too.

First time trying vibe coding as a staff SWE at F, so it’s been a lot of fun to try things out. 100K+ lines of code without a single line myself. Working on a new process to one shot the mobile app from scratch (even deployment). Learned a lot that I apply to my day job. Hoping to make an agent builder next!

What process did you use? I still find it hard to believe an LLM could write 100k lines of code without completely failing - it fails on much more basic stuff in my experience.

I had a bunch of copy pasted prompts. Start off in Claude to reason out the feature and basic code, then paste that to Cursor agent, then let it build. Then copy paste 3 step workflow to check the code. Then ask it to fix errors and bugs when I UI test or curl test the code. Lots of logging info lines

Just started out building a micro-agency into software engineering and consulting. I left my 9-5 jobs in engineering and big-consulting to pursue my dream of building something myself. I love to code and build software and have always dreamed of bringing in change to the landscape around software engineering services.

https://shunyaek.se is my agency, "shunyaek"'s home-page. shunyaek refers to "shunya", meaning zero, and "ek", meaning one, in Hindi, my native language. It refers to the binary building blocks of the software & digital world. The landing-page is still under construction. Always open to feedback and crticism.

I'm working on a MCP Server to get Starlight API documentation quickly connected to any model. I have the initial stuff setup, doing some experiments now to figure out how to optimize performance (reduce number of roundtrips, don't overload the context).

For example, if during the conversation someone asks, "tell me how this API call works". It should be able to. 1. find the right API document (requires search) and then 2. 'retrieve' that API document. But if that API document also requires other content (eg Authentication is separate) that will require ANOTHER roundtrip. So I'm currently trying to figure out what the best flow would be for this.

I’m working on LearnMathsToday, a mobile app that helps students learn math in a fun and engaging way. It’s self-paced, with AI-generated questions that adapt to each student’s level. One unique feature is AI-powered marking, which gives instant feedback on written answers. I’ve also added gamification—points, levels, and a storyline—to keep students motivated. Right now, the app is based on the Singapore syllabus, since I’m based in Singapore.

Feel free to download here: https://learnmathstoday.com/2025/03/02/learnmathstoday-app-i...

Quit my job few months back and working on an unstructured data to Knowledge Graph building tool - https://graphora.io. The goal is to make Knowledge Graph building and maintenance easier.

This looks really cool. There's something about your menu at the top, though, perhaps it could use debouncing? I feel like I click it just as it's automatically opening, which causes it to close.

Thank you for reporting. I fixed it :)

It's ridiculous that we live in 2025 and most people in North America have apartment buzzer systems that don't work with "long distance" calls or forward to multiple phone numbers.

[freshbuzzer.com](freshbuzzer.com) does that and much more!

I am working on kel, a typed configuration and templating language both written and embeddable in rust: https://github.com/sagering/kel.

Feedback, suggestions or contributions are very welcome! :)

Last December, I started building a desktop app so that I could keep all my running, eating and assorted physical misadventures in one place. I decided to build it with Electron so started profiling right away but wasn’t write home about it happy with any profilers so now I’m building a profiling tool and the fitness thingamajigger in tandem. And of course, it’s a personal project so scope creep is an issue. Now I have structured logs, full replay and so much data that this wacky little profiler makes me feel bad about all the decisions I made on the wacky fitness app six months ago.

Which just goes to prove, if you’re slightly demoralized it’s a side project. :)

I originally built https://prontopic.com/ to help my girlfriend take better photos of her clothes for Vinted.

Turns out people really like it, especially for food photography :)

I'm curious as I have not idea how you do this, but do you prompt a GenAI model with an image to generate an output image? What happens if the image is not 1:1 accurate?

I guess they’ll text me or stop using the service. With food is much better.

Even in the demo image in the hero section you can notice that the "AI generated" costume is not the same as the "real image" one.

Yes, it derails a bit when it has to reproduce creative patterns

I am building a webserver using Luau[1] and Lune[2], which will be used to host my own website. I haven't been this excited in a long time, when it comes to trying out a new programming language. Luau seems to make Lua _perfect_ (except for the classic 1 based indexing). And with Lune it also includes a very simple way to serve requests, which has always been a headache to do with regular Lua in a cross-platform way.

I am hoping this will be the way in which I write most of my future scripts and projects.

[1]: https://luau.org/

[2]: https://lune-org.github.io/docs

Interesting, didn't know about lune. Will check it out and good luck with your project

A visual exploration tool for mapping large-scale public opinion data (derived from conversations hosted with the Pol.is public engagement tool), but using more advanced dimensional reduction algorithms like PaCMAP/LocalMAP:

https://patcon.github.io/polislike-opinion-map-painting/

Am also working on a python library to generalize the pipeline of Pol.is, so that more projects can use its features without recreating from scratch:

https://github.com/polis-community/red-dwarf/

Recently, I upgraded some parts on my PC and started tinkering around with building a tool to show hardware metrics

https://github.com/MahmoudDolah/linux_hwinfo64 https://pypi.org/project/linux-hwinfo64/#description

I started out by copying features of HWINFO64 (which does not run on Linux). I'll probably keep hacking on this for a bit. It's been interesting to dig deeper into how hardware and software interface

Working on restoring my late father-in-law's Lambretta scooter that he bought new in 1958 and rode all over Europe with my MIL before storing it away in a garage in the mid-60s. Frame and bodywork are solid and it's mechanically sound, but is very tired looking. Have disassembled it and am now stripping the faded and chipped paintwork off of everything ahead of a full respray.

Reinforcement learning system. Currently trying to understand how to implement contextual thompson sampling and its details after doing non contextual thompson sampling. My YouTube history is a lot of logistic regression related videos at the moment.

Replyhub (https://replyhub.co), a tool that helps businesses not just monitor Reddit and X, but actually engage with the right conversations that can turn into customers.

The idea is simple: instead of blasting you with every keyword mention like F5bot, Replyhub filters for posts where people show real buying intent. These are posts where they ask for recommendations, compare products, or look for solutions.

It also suggests context-aware replies and helps collect leads from people who show real interest.

If you want to reach niche communities where people are actively discussing products, it might be useful.

Would love to hear feedback or questions from folks here.

Currently developing templates and resources for a consulting business to enhance B2B and B2G contracting process - specifically selling against AI in the same space. The English language used for business is nuanced and must have factual basis, especially in Procurement and Contracting in the US, and clients therefore cannot afford to trust AI content. As such my platform and service connecting SBEs with skilled, knowledgeable Humans will provide a solid ROI.

A totally bootstrapped, professional services undertaking with no investors needed. The value is in the knowledge acquired over a decade plus in sales support roles and learning about an underserved, viable market.

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.

We are working on open source platform for AI robotics, https://positronic.ro

Fully open hardware and software, including ML, so that you can start building useful robots immediately

https://github.com/mikecarper/meshfirmware

CLI Meshtastic flasher that works well. No internet mesh networking sounds awesome; just the bandwidth is extremely limited

Neat! Question - how have you used Meshtastic so far? It sounds cool, but the use cases people always bring up seem a bit forced.

Kids text only cell phone. LILYGO T-Deck Plus. I can track and communicate with them and not have to worry about giving them full internet.

Any sort of disaster they also are useful to get messages around. A couple days into a power outage and no cell towers work anymore, this happened 1 week before thanksgiving in the Seattle area 2024.

Oh, neat! I didn't realize there were such ready-out-of-the-box items for Meshtastic.

Thanks!

We’ve been working on a lightweight tool to help small teams and individuals manage and publish content across multiple social platforms — currently focusing on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Most tools we’ve tried are either too bloated, too expensive, or limit you to one or two accounts per platform. We’re aiming for something simpler: connect multiple accounts (free up to 3 per platform), schedule posts, organize media, and view basic performance stats — no AI or calendar features yet.

Still early, but the core workflow is live and usable. Would love to hear how others here handle multi-platform content publishing, especially if you’re doing it without a full-time team.

I am using Buffer and so far it is working well for me (arts/programming). Maybe offer a comparison in your site or somewhere else when your product is ready. Good luck.

Thanks for your kind words and feedback! We're glad to hear Buffer is working well for you — it's a solid tool.

With Cerlo, we’re aiming to differentiate by supporting more social accounts per platform (especially personal ones, not just business profiles), which we know is a limitation in many current tools. Our goal is to serve creators and indie teams who need flexibility and scale without jumping through hoops.

Would love to share a comparison once we're ready — stay tuned!

Building a tool chest of software for my own needs. IT for Sovereigns.

Mostly not open source, contrary to how I have historically operated. I think I'll drop them open source as time goes on and money matters less. Kinda feels like I might make more money just open sourcing it all because of good karma tho.

It's all in Python because that's what I could get on the $200 Windows laptop I built it with, I kept it in S Mode as a challenge because I want it to run as constrained as my customer personas might experience.

Present stage is finding those personas and slicing the wares up into offers/products.

TypeScript Coach (https://ts.coach)

While I love the official TypeScript handbook, it's not easy to play around with the code examples or approach it as a beginner. I started working on a complete TypeScript tutorial that also showcases some advanced use cases. All the code examples run in the browser, and there are some neat visualizations that clearly show what the type system has picked up.

I've been trying to fix some of the performance issues, finish writing all the content, and adding documentation before making the GitHub repository public - right now the page can hang when loading a long tutorial.

Most recently, a tool for identifying NTP daemons and testing their capabilities: https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/ntpscan

I am also working on a web frontend for rrdtool (for graphing collectd statistics): https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/collectrack

And a wayland bar that is configured via a Ruby DSL: https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/rubybar

Drowning in technical debt from my 12 year old auction startup. While building another startup for the hotel industry. Wish I had more time for personal/side projects. I have a million ideas that just die on lack of time to execute.

Are those startups side projects, or would you want to run personal projects on top of those two startups in parallel? Are they making money?

The auction project makes about 1 million per year gross, but net is closer to zero. The hotel project hasn’t launched yet.

Currently working on some research proposals for studying methods to detect consciousness as relational capacity in AI systems by mapping internal representations, analyzing conversation topology, and testing how consciousness-related concepts degrade and recover across different model architectures.

In principle, using my current free time (& not only tbf) to figure out a way to fund a few positions on full-time study / audit of emergence, specifically emergence of consciousness in this case.

Setting a basis in semantics & wanting to optimize as sense gets un-sparsed.

Hmu if interested to figure out some of these together (agiornot@gmail.com)

I'm still working on Routing24 https://routing24.com - free route optimization and planning app without stops or vehicles limit.

It's been 6 month since our first appearance on Show HN [1], and I'm working with first free users on bugs, improved workflows and UX, geocoding, solver features, future mobile app etc. etc.

We officially crossed the limits of 1500 stops per optimization with some waste collection guys, all still running fully client-side in the browser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41995427

I'm working on restoring my website/blog.

I stopped writing right after college when I moved to full-time work, but I want to change that now.

Just as I started, I realized the website was hosted on Forestry CMS, which has been discontinued, so I will have to figure out how to maintain the URL structure, etc. (this is important since there are a few popular/top-10 pages for certain queries/searches [1]).

[1]: https://hackpravj.com/blog/solving-semantris-opencv-word2vec... (for "Google Semantris")

Trying to get out of burnout. I joined a company after being laid off, but the previous company has left me so burnt out that I feel... Slower. I finally fixed my neovim config, and I've set up `aerospace` on my work Mac so I can try to use a tiling window manager on this device. I've also set up my workspace tools after forever, and I'm starting to feel a little productive. Company hustle culture does not help.

I want to build a learning platform powered by deliberate practice and AI. To teach how to program from a practical perspective.

I am also trying to kick off a podcast for folks in tech at Bangalore. I hope to start it in June.

I’m working on Proflect — a platform that combines goal-setting, journaling, and feedback to support intentional personal and professional growth. You can link daily reflections and feedback directly to the goals you’re working on, and track your progress over time.

The idea is to bring more structure and insight to self-improvement without making it feel like a chore.

I’d really appreciate any thoughts on the concept or the site itself: https://proflect.io — does it make sense? Anything unclear or missing?

I built https://startthelanding.com mostly for myself as I have needed it a lot over the past few years and always ended up building quick one offs. I'm now working on marketing it through a few different channels while at the same time starting work on my main project that I needed the landing pages for which is a fashion for tech/finance people site. I'm going to be doing a big social campaign for that one soon involving myself so I'm pretty excited but also quite scared since I'm not really the post myself on socials type.

I'm working on a free meetup platform: https://github.com/strathausen/laundryroom.social

because I got frustrated with meetup.com

Text to 3d simulation on a map. It does historical or fictitious events pretty well if it's interesting: https://mused.com/map/

I was working on world models / generative environments but without the training data available as an independent researcher, ended up focusing on building with existing geospatial data.

The same architecture of the '24 Genie paper's dynamics model is instead trained on historical data for risk analysis and creating a heatmap in the 2d map. I'll try to adapt this for a more generalizable urban mobility model as well.

Working on building a platform that allows the hosting for the front end of the website, and use the dynamic backend similar to Firebase. Only difference may be the drop in authentication functionality without any hassle going all way up to support enterprise level IDP.

The authentication space becomes too complex above a certain company size, the concepts like admin user, service user, are not always supported as first class concepts. In a nut shell, just trying to solve the problems that I have personally come across the last decade and more in the industry in authentication space

Papers with code for quantitative finance. Still just thinking about it. Replicating research is a great way to learn a field.

>90% of the work to replicate academic research in quant finance is data collection and cleaning. Academics have WRDS, Bloomberg, and research assistants. Others need to find cheap vendors of acceptable quality. Write scripts to fetch and clean. Actual algorithms and analysis (the fun part) are a tiny fraction of the total effort.

Project objective is "good enough" data collection & cleaning for daily frequency equities, futures, and FX. In that order. Annual data budget target < USD 500. Cheaper is better.

The plan: You are a PM and Engineer - and so is the AI. You both write tickets and you both complete them to iterate on your code.

https://codeplusequalsai.com

You can build webapps very quickly, especially AI-enabled ones, and deploy them on a subdomain. Other users can sign up and use your webapp, and any tokens they use will be billed to them and you will get a large cut (80%) of the margin earned on the tokens billed - as I bill 2x OpenAI API token costs to create this margin.

So ideally you can validate your idea by rapidly building a prototype and evening earning revenue to boot.

A PTY in JavaScript. XTERM.js is not pure JavaScript as it builds binaries to do this.

It'd be great if it had browser support and seamless ink[0] integration!

[0] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Adding a Portuguese translation for https://www.utilitarianism.net/ and a French one is on the way too!

https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net

Built this website with Hugo and it's been one of my favorite (and best) projects of my life. Has PDF generation of articles and a static low-bandwidth instant search of the whole website. Very happy with the build system too (using just)

Two things! - Videogame, you live inside a mechanical ladybird called a Clomper, which you control by making pipes to power machines with steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2349380/Clomper/

- Building plastic self organising maps (Lang 2002) using Python CUDA build to parallelise the more expensive bits. Also fancy building the directed graph half in Unity 3D.

- Also doing some data engineering pre-training and AIIA at work but no deets, sadly.

Well, I did a rewrite of this app (RiVal.T, an iOS timer)[0], and I'm working on a new release that includes a Watch app (acting as a remote control). Getting the Watch and phone talking reliably is a challenge, but I seem to be stumbling towards success (eventually).

I have a couple of other apps that I have plans for, as well. If I get sick of playing traffic cop, with the phone app, I may take a break, and work on them.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/ios-apps/rival-t/

FOSS-side-project-wise, working on next release of the TXR Language.

It is just now a matter of, cut it now, or include yet one more thing?

I started writing the RELNOTES two weekends ago, yet more stuff started going in.

In the semantic versioning scheme selected for this project, 300 means that it is literally the 300th public release.

There are over 140 new commits and 299 was all the way back in February.

It's going to be very exciting (for the small number of people that know about this project, now nearing its 16th anniversary).

https://nongnu.org/txr

I recently quit my job and build Cookboox (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cookboox/id6743146885), an iOS app that lets you scan cooking recipes (from photos, screenshots, or physical cookbooks) and turns them into an interactive, step-by-step guide. The idea is to make your existing recipes easier to use in the kitchen. Instead of just a static image or page, you get a hands-free friendly, guided experience. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

https://github.com/weakphish/yapper

A block-based TUI note/task application using the Charm tools. I know there’s a billion note apps out there, but none fit my mental model, so just hacking my own.

Goal is to have a system of dumping info in and letting organization naturally rise from tagging.

Each tag has its own page that aggregates all blocks tagged with it, and can have a custom page layout depending on the defined “type” of the tag I.e. a person, project, etc.

Tasks are also first class citizens and can be aggregated with dependencies on other tasks.

A CLI ai-powered job matcher and application tracker for finding tech/startups roles. Open source: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs

Also having fun one-shoting or few-shoting, little games and interactives:

* https://openjam.ai/stupid_coral_852/yj34um3hkq

* https://openjam.ai/lonely_ant_702/v3nyt4if54

https://liverestful.com - We're releasing a smart bedside lamp that reduces circadian input at night and wakes you up to light in the morning. This took about 3 years of active development; and we're building out an ecosystem of connected circadian lights for the home (think desk lamp, reading lights, etc.).

This builds on the back of our popular Bedtime Bulb light bulb - much-improved v2 coming soon: https://get.bedtimebulb.com

Expanding the functionality of Wabbit S2[0], e.g. Sesame AI[1], and improving existing features based on feedback over the last few weeks of Mabel's testing.

[0] https://blog.walledgarden.ai/2025-05-20/wabbit-s2-welcome-to...

[1] https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_...

Built an AI interview assistant that processes speech → context → personalized responses in under 2 seconds. Small overlay window that's invisible to interviewers during video calls.

The interesting challenge was balancing response quality vs speed while handling real-time audio processing from browser tabs.

Use case is interview help, but could work for other real-time conversation assistance.

Feedback welcome for interviewbee.ai

I recently released suggestion-mode functionality for prosemirror

https://github.com/davefowler/prosemirror-suggestion-mode

and now I'm building it into my reading and note taking app for a better interaction of AI giving assisted edits, most similar to the Patchwork project from ink and switch https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/07/

I've been working on a kinda-sequel to my first technical book, Northwind Elixir Traders. This one (Phoenix Product Codex) is about developing and deploying a production-grade REST API with Elixir and Phoenix.

I finally got my yaml task runner to a workable state.

Getting the parts that I absolutely HAD to implement while not descending into feature-creep hell (driven by my own curiosity) was challenging.

Then again so were the self-debates about the syntax and documentation.

Maybe one day I’ll learn Go or something, but until then - Boku is my yaml-based task runner written in Python.

https://git.sr.ht/~hxii/boku/tree/main/item/README.md

*Sashi: AI-Powered Workflows from Your Own Codebase* https://www.usesashi.com/

Sashi is an open-source workflow automation system that lets you turn real backend functions into reusable, shareable workflows—created with AI, validated by code, and executed from a secure dashboard.

*What makes Sashi different?*

- *Real Code, Not Just Integrations:* Register your actual backend functions (Node/TypeScript) with a lightweight library. Sashi uses Zod for type-safe validation and auto-generates UIs based on your return types.

- *AI-Generated Workflows:* Describe what you want in plain English—Sashi’s AI chat interface builds and validates multi-step workflows, connecting your registered functions in powerful sequences.

- *No Admin Panels to Build:* Sashi provides a secure, auto-generated dashboard for your team to run, manage, and visualize workflows. No more custom admin UIs or glue code.

- *Secure by Design:* All execution happens server-side, with scoped API tokens and session management. You control your stack and infra—no vendor lock-in.

- *For All Teams:* Support, product, DevOps, and engineering can automate internal tasks, trigger backend logic, and collaborate—without waiting on developer cycles.

*How it works:*

1. *Register Functions:* Use the Sashi library to expose backend functions with type-safe schemas.

2. *Create Workflows:* Use the chat or flow builder to compose workflows—AI helps connect steps and validate data flow.

3. *Execute & Visualize:* Run workflows from a central dashboard, see results in real time, and auto-generate UIs (tables, cards, graphs, etc.) based on your data.

*Example Use Cases:*

- Support: “Refund a user” or “Reset password” via dashboard, no SQL or custom tools.

- Product: “Send weekly usage report to Slack” or “Find users who abandoned signup.”

- DevOps: “Spin up preview envs” or “Rotate API keys” as repeatable, auditable workflows.

*Try it or learn more:* https://www.usesashi.com/

A few things:

Reflect - an app to track anything and analyze your data, including a feature to run self-guided experiments [0]

Later - an app to schedule non-urgent tasks and ideas, with an SRS-like scheduler to punt items [1]

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/later-set-intentions/id6742691...

Working on something to penetrate the hiring and recruitment market(141 billion pounds just in UK). There's lot issues I see and data on current skills gap is not very good. Given use of AI tools junior roles are seem to vanishing soon enough. So looking to work on something meaningful. Also want to create health tracking specified just for kettlebells with a community element built in.

I shipped a tool that uses logprobs to generate pretty detailed estimates about how long tasks are going to take (i.e., give a new product manager/business person/sales person this tool and then they'll have reasonable estimates for how long various tasks will take.) If anyone wants to try it at universalestimator.com, it's free with code "TYHN".

I'm also making a picture book generator for my kids. I want to be from some pictures, a description of a story, and will then pop out a ready-to-print picture book for them.

Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly.

https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions

I’m working on https://lurkhub.com a web app that lets me store my bookmarks, articles to read later and rss feeds in a private GitHub repo.

Training to run a half-marathon. I recently ran an hour for the first time in my life (~5 miles). I enjoy the challenge of long-distance running, and the mental clarity, and doing it all barefoot.

Link: https://infinitepod.app/

I'm building Infinite Pod, a web app that generates language learning podcasts tuned to your individual learning goals and level.

It's based on the principle of language acquisition through comprehensible input, as described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug

It's still a bit rough, but feels magical in my own testing so I wanted to make it available to others.

This looks very interesting! A bit of feedback for you: the number one question I have as I look at this is, podcasts about what?

Thanks Adrian, that's helpful feedback! I've updated the page -- would you say that it now better answers the question?

Yes, totally. And it makes the concept even cooler.

Thanks!

https://avrhut.com/web-clipper-to-apple-notes.html

Working on solving my own pain point, around saving web pages to apple notes. While there are workarounds like singlefile and apple shortcuts, it ends up being a multi-step process, and limited search functionality within apple notes.

Also, experimenting with using texting to manage family calendars: https://textconcierge.ai/

Insurance policy administration system using Rails 8. HexaPDF based document generation. JSONLogic based rating with vanilla js WebComponent based embedded sales SDK. Think Stripe for Insurance sales.

I’m building a free, open-source invoice generator with live PDF preview — all browser-based, no sign-in needed.

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

Originally made it for myself, so it’s a bit of a personal tool — but I hope others find it useful too :)

https://easyinvoicepdf.com/en/app https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

I'll like to use it but it is limited on currency options.

I work on the local-first that scales.

https://www.evolu.dev/blog/scaling-local-first-software

CodeVideo - https://github.com/codevideo

Basically, event sourcing for the IDE - build entire software lessons and course videos without actually recording anything.

You can get up and running pretty quickly at our studio https://studio.codevideo.io

Or locally with the CLI tool: https://github.com/codevideo/codevideo-cli

I still haven't found what an actual working product in AI Agents could be and write about my journey into capabilities, frameworks, and restrictions here: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/

Initially I thought there is a use-case in finance, but the barriers of entry are incredibly small and the value add is not that large.

Currently, there seems to be a lot of traction in code generation (Cursor, Lovable, et al), but I have not seen that work on a useable code base/workflow.

From our observations on why - you need to have an extremely tight validation loop on everything you do for AI agents to be useful. They also need a ton of highly specific instructions and context. This requires a deep understanding of the platforms and tooling or a highly standard way of working (coding).

This is why tools like cursor work so great, they’re able to work in a super tight feedback loop with the compiler, linter and tests. They operate in a super well-known, documented environment.

If we can replicate the same thing on business systems… that’s when the magic happens - just very hard to do without deep knowledge of those platforms and agentic AI because everyone does stuff differently in each org. The overlap of people with skills in both AI and specific business ops areas is absolutely tiny.

An example of where we’re using this is in a fully AI native CRM (part of SynthGrid - see https://mindfront.ai). We don’t even have any way to interface with it outside of AI, but we’d also never want to do so again anyway because the efficiency gains are so huge for us.

The Pareto frontier will continue to inexorably advance forward, dragging even the complex or non-standardized domains in with it. For those tightly integrated business systems, we’ll probably see huge gain in utility, if not function, from the improved underlying models combined with the excellent tools. Be sure to try out Claude 4 Opus hooked into some systems if you haven’t already!

The tighter the scope/validation loop, the closer the "agent" gets to a more narrow business case of machine learning. These more traditional cases are in comparison significantly cheaper to implement and maintain. If you consider as an example traditional scorecards+policy rules in credit underwriting vs an agent that "reasons" over the loan application context.

Yeah for sure - that's exactly why we use that approach - it's unsurprising, simple and definitely works.

One difference is that you don't necessarily need structured data in, just output validation from the LLM. This is a big difference from ML because you're not having to worry too much about doing complex data engineering - or at least it solves the annoying ingestion problem in many cases.

Another observation is that most businesses don't have any ML engineering capabilities in-house - they're pretty much willing to pay a premium, because unlike the bespoke ML solutions, you can just do it with an off-the-shelf system (provided it's designed with the right validation loops).

The agent is in some ways an abstraction that just enables use and adoption - even if it would be orders of magnitude worse than normal ML solutions - it's competing against no solution, not ML-based ones.

Last thing is just around what level of autonomy people expect from these things. You can go pretty far, but like flipping N coins, the more you flip the greater the chance that something goes awry. Agents still need a lot of guidance and it's up to the system builders to bring that to them, either by connecting humans or very tightly integrated, well-designed tools.

I'm trying out vibe coding a bit on my olive oil index site — building a full website with 11ty, tailwind and LLMs. The LLMs also serve as a data pipeline to watch and update content as new information is published online: https://www.extravirginvault.com/

I've always enjoyed the farm-to-table concept, but I find it really hard to identify trustworthy companies. Wine has been done to death, but I feel extra virgin olive oil is currently underserved.

I did something similar for Californian oils :) https://www.californiaoliveoil.info/

I like the personal touch your site provides with the producers' images. How did you source your data?

I'm building https://rispose.com which is a tool to embed chatgpt on any site. It's super cheap and it's growing nicely.

Rispose is the first tool I build which isn't tightly coupled on another provider.

I can easily swap OpenAI for another provider or even host my AI. This IMO is something really interesting and something before was relay hard to achieve (most tools are built on top of bigger platforms).

I am implementing native support for deploying Python apps in DollarDeploy.

DollarDeploy is like Coolify and dokploy but with better UI, no docker containers and fast deploys for full stack apps, NextJS, react

We've been working on a vibe-coding platform called Hypership.

https://hypership.dev

What's different with Hypership is that your apps get user auth, page view analytics, event tracking, logging, and an admin dashboard all set up and ready to go out of the box.

It's also a much nicer platform for devs because we host VS Code in the cloud for you as you're vibe coding. That means you can manually edit the code as you go.

It's basically what web development should be in 2025.

Interesting! How does it compare with Supabase?

Not only do we give you auth out of the box (like Supabase) but we give you app hosting, analytics, event tracking, logs and we have plans to expand our services to cover forms, a help widget, and even Cookie consent!

Also we let you build an app using AI, which is a pretty huge difference between us and Supabase.

I’m a mom. I built https://www.DreamList.com a few years ago because all of the wishlist companies were indexing your baby registry stuff by your name on Google. It has been growing steadily for years and it’s going well, so I never needed to raise money for it, but I noticed that a number of the Angel Investors in my network were former Traders. So I started looking into the market as well. A lot of even paid data sources were deliberately delayed - putting retail investors behind on any trade. I started digging for more reliable real time data, started generating my own candles from trades and doing my own indicators and doing my own trading and now that’s growing too. (not an outside thing, just for personal use). You wouldn’t believe the number of obstacles that get in the way if you want to do anything with finance or trading. Not touching crypto with a 10 ft pole - this is bread and butter stocks and you will still hit 100 gotchas. The more obstacles that show up, the thinner the air and the more money end up on the other side of overcoming each obstacle.

been building a free, simple save-later and notes app: https://eyeball.wtf/

you can do all the usual stuff (save any link with one click, tag your stuff, add notes to each link). i'm not sure what to do next with it, open to suggestions.

i also made a IMDB of the creator economy, a free database of indies making cool things: https://indieworld.io/

Building a small framework for securely connecting desktop apps/clis directly to your existing browser using Native Messaging i.e no headless browsers or cloud sandboxes/proxies involved.

Inspired by secure password managers like Bitwarden, goal is to reduce detectability, avoid CAPTCHAs, and mitigate common fingerprinting pitfalls.

The idea is simple: leverage the trust your browser already has.

https://github.com/srv1n/rzn-browser-native

An intent-based Linkedin B2B lead finding tool that evaluates tens of thousands of comments in small thematic niches to find prospects that have a certain problem, and are actively looking for a solution. I just finished building the backend side of the tool, and released it to a group of early customers to find out how well it performs. It's a really fun engineering problem to cut through tons of spam, bullshit, and hustle porn, and find the few gold nuggets in the comment sections.

I am now working on forming a new data strategy framework. I think that one of the biggest issues we are seeing out there is the rush to GenAI and create automation. However, in reality, people tend to ignore the data that is supposed to be used.

So I started my blog Cooking Data, and slowly, using Vibe Coding, I am building tools to translate the philosophical conversation into actionable tools. I am always happy to learn and discover how the team handles the data strategy and answers the business goals with it

I’m working on something inspired by Cursor and Obsidian — but for research, reading and note-taking.

I’ve not been satisfied with how AI is bolted on after the fact — reading in one place, notes in another, and AI as a separate assistant. So I’m combining them.

It works over EPUBs, PDFs, and HTML — you bring your own sources (BYOS), and it turns them into a AI scaffolded, structured, hierarchical reading experience.

Already using it for both reading and deep research style deep dives, and its already way better than my otherwise broken workflow!

Writing a silly little iOS app with ChatGPT. I’ve done a little iOS dev, but not enough to be proficient. As an experiment I wanted to see how far I could get just asking the AI to write a thing and make changes.

It’s been a very instructive process and it’s shown me where the strengths and weaknesses are.

As an aside on that. I don’t think AI is going to replace Developers. I do think it’s going to be a rough couple of years while businesses try everything they can to make that happen. And that’ll probably be disastrous for everything.

I'm working on a new secondary dominant exercise for my Jazz pratice app: https://jazzln.vercel.app/

I built an RSS to Bluesky poster an hour ago.

In the long run, writing a gui for https://github.com/iesahin/xvc and Git.

I'm building a cross-over between Linear and Obsidian. Think Linear for personal use but with full VIM-support in the editor. Every action in the application can be bound to a key.

I still don't have a landing page, but if you are curious you can test it out here: https://lindon.app

If you do test it out you can see all keyboard shortcuts with 'Shift+?' and you'll have to enable VIM-support in the settings (Cmd + K to open).

Trying to leverage LLMs for creating custom lessons(from prompts)that use stuff like dev-typing simulation(instead of just copy/paste), narration, theoretical concepts and quizzes. Basic idea is to use 'AI'(yeah I know...) to increase our coding knowledge and curiosity about other languages and overall fingers memory, instead of just copy/pasting from LLMs.

https://thecoderssage.com/

Build user-facing prototypes with your real data.

Every startup/company I work for I've had to jury rig ways to get new product ideas in front of users. Google sheets, Grafana boards, Chartio (RIP), etc all to go "SQL query" -> "user-accessible website". For some reason Retool doesn't have a "make externally available to these people".

So I'm playing around with how to build a generic interface between db and user access panel.

A HTML validator for websites and web applications. It’s just not scalable having to do this manually, and having valid HTML is still important. Wrong HTML can cause bugs, and can harm accessibility. This is becoming more important now in Europe with new accessibility laws coming into force next month.

https://jezenthomas.com/2025/05/dont-skip-html-validation/

https://bookhead.net the missing piece of an independent bookstore's tech stack

Social voting site Where people will discuss and vote about social issues, which could be general, regional, environmental, politics, science, IT, etc.

Here every users votes are weighted, means it's not necessary that every user votes count equal to one, may be it will be less than one or in negative also.

Algorithms is very complex and I'm figuring it out.

Currently at ideation stage and soon start the development.

I'm working on this idea to make sure my platform present a clear view about the topics from general public's.

Have you given any thought on how you'll combat bots and AI manipulating results or even public opinion (a la that one subreddit)?

Yes, when we launch v1.0.0, all users need to verify themselves. And for verification we only accept National ID of that country.

And all the non-verified users cannot vote. SO they cannot manipulate the results.

And we also allow to anonymous post of Polls, means anyone can create Poll, still we need some parameter to make sure its not scam, but user ID.

And public opinion is calculated based on lots of parameters.

WORK IN PROGRESS!

A web UI that enables collecting of the dollar amount of the local major utility providers monthly bills (Before engineering I worked in marketing research). I am concerned about the data collecting part, not because the local consumers don't seem okay too provide it (there's outrage) but because I'm not working and don't feel confident in publishing anything live. State government only publishes the annual yearly rates. There's no transparency on the rest.

An employee advocacy platform that helps companies amplify their brand reach and thought leadership through their employees’ social networks. It integrates with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing marketing teams to easily share curated content that employees can like, comment on, or reshare without needing to leave their workspace or log into LinkedIn.

https://www.socialweaver.com

I recently completed https://askannie.it.com, at first it was just a tool that I used myself after constantly copy/pasting YouTube transcripts into ChatGPT. A couple of friends liked it, so ended up building an app around it.

For a next project I'm exploring building something that let's you quickly embed charts. Similar to what Google Charts was, but I still haven't found a good alternative.

Building a budget home server. Ebay style. There is a lot of gear out there that isn't suitable for gaming anymore but still very sound as home server.

Software wise doing proxmox + nixos LXC

Can you share any particular pieces of hardware that appear to be excellent value?

A workout app that uses human readable/writable text file as input. I’m on the 4th iteration.

It started as a bunch of spiral bound notebooks. I made an iOS prototype but realised it’s so niche that it would never get approved. Made a PWA that I’m currently using for about a year. Now I’m building a second version which I finally plan to share.

The reason I’m making it is that I realized that any other style (mainly, tabular input, dropdown boxes, input fields) just doesn’t fit my routine.

Why use a separate app at all? I just use notepad (or its iOS equivalent).

Multiple reasons:

- first I wanted to always compare my current workout to the previous one (to know what weight to use, how did I do my warmups etc). This I originally did by flipping pages (on paper) or scrolling up.

To solve this I have the history scrolling on top of the current workouts input field.

- I still want to see my progression.

The app does allow tapping on individual lines which shows the details for the lift performed and expands to history of all workouts of the same exercise.

- I want to see which muscle groups I might be neglecting.

The app calculates all the usual statistics like muscle group workload for the last 7 day period and recommends exercises based on what is needed.

To sum it up, it has all the convenience of a notepad (backing up is a copy paste, anything not parseable is a comment) but most of the features of a full workout app with statistics, periodization and so on.

Eventually I want to add some sharing or coaching features.

The Cursor for SQL - getgalaxy.io

We think theres a huge gap in tooling for devs associated with writing SQL. We've reimagined the SQL editor to make it modern, fast, beautiful, and have a AI copilot that actually works. Importantly, we've also added sharing and collaboration in a Postman / GDrive nature so you never have to share queries with your team via slack or notion again.

Check us out and ping me on LI. getgalaxy.io linkedin.com/in/garrettawolfe

https://blendful.com — A template generator (currently for Tailwind). I've been frustrated by marketing templates and their unitary visual style which becomes implemented all over the web. I think people want high quality templates and assets that they can theme themselves, without diving into the nitty gritty of padding, line-height, et al. Super early, launched on Reddit and have a few users.

For the past almost 3 years - full-stack vertically integrated business AI systems. We got a nearly perfectly timed start on this.

We’re solving the problem of “How can agentic AI interface with legacy and existing business systems.” - if you’ve got a boring job and are tired of filling out forms in business software or swapping between 10 different systems, convince management to let us come and have AI do it for you.

https://mindfront.ai

I have several projects in the works:

- mach9poker.com: incorporated startup developing a poker tournament training app for novices and unprofitable players. Looking for UX/product designer co-founder.

- policyimpact.org: A journalism site for highly vetted articles responding to actions of the current U.S. administration and other import political vectors.

- sharpee: a new interactive fiction platform built in Typescript

- bsky.poker: root domain for poker community to have nice handles on BlueSky

Happy if anyone wants to pitch into any of these projects.

For fun over the weekend I started an ambitious project of creating a "pocket size" space trading game, inspired by a classic BBS door game called Trade Wars that I really loved as a kid. I'm keeping a development log to keep myself motivated and wrote the first post about it here https://jarv.org/posts/stardewar-v01/.

There was a Trade Wars inspired game 25 yrs ago called "Black Nova Traders" that was a whole lot of fun. The original author is embarking on a v2 after a quarter century since the first release. You might find it interesting to see if yours and his vision align and work together[1]. All good if not, I'll keep an eye on your project as I love Trade Wars inspired games.

[1] https://github.com/harwoodr/bnt2

very cool, I'll keep an eye on that project and try to connect with the author too

A local dictation app for Mac to use when coding. I spend a lot of time talking to Cursor, Chatgpt and needed to get rust and swift library names correctly.

Spent a lot of time on low level hardware libs to roll out my own version of VAD, grammar correction and stitching segments.

Faster than the hosted dictations tools thought it runs locally and a lot more control in terms of custom vocabulary.

https://carelesswhisper.app

My current side project is a game development market analysis and research platform with built in marketing channels (youtubers, streamers complete with contact data, etc).

For example, you can research the best genres for indies by copies sold, numbers of released games/saturation, etc. You can also find youtubers that have streamed similar games/genres and get their contact info.

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 aren't good enough, they require you to use their programming language of choice or complex procedures for a task that should be simple. I built mock to try to solve that and still continue to maintain it.

Dora: https://dorafiles.com

It's a file explorer where it embeds your local file structure so you can use natural language to search your file system.

Started off as a local inference/vector-db only project last year and now also using cloud inference/vector-dbs for faster processing.

You can also use "agent-mode" to organize your files/folders, create items, move, copy and save content to disk directly from chat.

A REST framework for FastAPI and SQLAlchemy, creatively called "fastapi-alchemy". A bit on the ambitious side, but I had the opportunity to open-source work I did for an employer. It is running in production, but it needs extensive documentation and testing still before I'll package it and offer it to PYPI.

https://github.com/rjprins/fastapi-alchemy

EyesOff a privacy focused macOS app (other platform support coming soon) - https://www.eyesoff.app

Built using python the app alerts you to when someone is looking at your screen, using locally running deep learning models + your webcam.

I developed the app when I felt uncomfortable with working in public spaces, I wanted EyesOff to give an extra barrier of security to shoulder surfing scenarios

Working on a 3D-Editor that transforms photos of a place into an FPS game. - Editor : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEsqp93sq3w - FPS Example : https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01

This has been my WE project for a long time. But it's only working really now.

https://codeinput.com

Building Tools for working with Git and managing your code base. Initially started with an online merge conflict tool integrated with GitHub. Now working on a Code Owners CLI https://github.com/CodeInputCorp/cli to improve on the current Code Owners functionalities on GitHub.

I have been working on Broadcast (https://sendbroadcast.net).

It’s an email marketing tool, self-hosted, for use with existing ESPs like Postmark, Mailgun, Amazon SES, etc.

Been working on this since September 2024, and have been consistently hacking away at it weekly: https://sendbroadcast.net/changelog.

http://github.com/egonSchiele/typestache - Mustache with static typing

I'm working on MyPhotosGallery, an application that allows people to create photo galleries from their Google Photos. I've made it easy to onboard users and also priced it in Ghana Cedis so that it's cheaper for anyone. Currently there are templates for birthday, graduation, wedding and general photoshoot. https://myphotosgallery.com/

I have started to lean into my love for education and security and created Phended for non-technical users. I just did a rebranding, added an LLM chatbot, and a learning management system which I am going to be working on courses for the next little bit and would am looking for contributors to course content.

Would love some feedback overall and suggestions: https://phended.com

I work a project that let doctors and laboratory send notifications reports in FHIR format to the Health Offices located across Germany, based on their address.

Recently we have released everything as open source, even the code for setting a local development Kubernetes cluster using OpenTofu

https://github.com/gematik/DEMIS-Development-Cluster

An iOS app that removes reels from Instagram, shorts from YouTube, and any other distracting features from social media. Also has a time budget feature to prevent you from doom scrolling.

Download link: https://apps.apple.com/it/app/timecap-limit-screen-time/id67...

I did not know you could essentially change functionality in other apps. How does that work tectonically? Do you need a specific entitlement?

A newsletter "Startup Marketing', where I break down early-stage marketing strategies of successful startups. So far, I’ve published case studies for 8 successful SaaS products.

https://newsletter.saastrek.co/

Been building Namekit [1] — a simple tool that uses AI + a small proprietary model to generate domain name ideas and surface only the ones that are immediately available. I got tired of bloated name generators with useless suggestions, so I built something fast, clean, and actually useful — mostly for myself, but now for others too.

[1] https://namekit.app

https://shuffle.dev

For the last few weeks, we have been working on catching up on features for vibe coders (prompt -> project), but now we are back to our strengths (visual editor and new beautiful UI libraries for Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, and more).

We realized there are just too many apps for vibe coders, and it would be better to work on something unique that we are really good at!

I have been working on https://carzenie.com to improve online car buying experience. Buying a car is complicated because it has more dimension to consider than other items (i.e. body, engine, fuel, etc.) LLM is a great fit to help translating car buyer's requirements into car's spec and returns the results.

Free worldwide reverse and forward geoloc. Based on DuckDB + Parquet files. I just got access to a big server for free by some kind folks to process the planet.osm data.

The idea is that instead of running Nominatim which is costly you can just query Parquet files over the network.

Instead of a cluster of PostgreSQL servers all I need is a bunch of static hosting holding the dataset that's around 1Tb.

Send me an email if this interest you, it's in my profile.

I am currently working on AnythingSticker - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/anything-sticker/id6745157608

An app that can turn anything into adorable stickers. In my region, people uses WhatsApp a lot, and there's this ability to create custom stickers. So we uses a lot of stickers on a conversation.

I'm building a personal CRM tool that I use to store my network. I have a bad habit of not checking up on people. Even close friends. That's why I'm building this. The goal is to have a software where I can input people and then set reminders to catch up with them. It's kind of like a relationship management tool.

Existing alternatives: Clay, Dex.

Working to make a really sweet app to manage your to-be-read book pile, and bring it to life: https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/launch-our-tbr-app-to-...

Excited about it, as I've been wanting something like this for a while :)

After installing access points we were looking for a quick and simple way in a standard (mobile) browser to continuously check connectivity.

https://latencychecker.com does just that, because opening a ping prompt on a mobile device isn’t a thing without installing apps.

And it gave us a good excuse to stretch the legs and dabble in a little frontend development.

I'm still working on and off on my https://dawnofthe.dad/crossword, albeit most of the guts (solver backing the crossword builder) have been stable and lately most of the work has been on the front-end. On that note, I've been meaning to rewrite the UX component to be HTML element based, rather than canvas.

I've been working on a drawing/animation library/language based on patterns and abstractions.

On one hand the idea seems so simple and intuitive (Define patterns (like 3 red blocks to the right), combine patterns ( 5 up * 3 red right), use patterns inside patterns (each block is a square), but implentation wise I keep running into so many intracies and I want it to be perfect so it's been kind of tough and slow.

I'm still building AttendList, a Google Meet attendance tracking extension (https://attendlist.com).

It's starting to pick up! Which is cool — a few new users are trickling in each week. I think it's about time I invest more time in marketing now though (which is probably what I should be doing now instead of posting on HN!)

I’m building a system for free universal ai access for the important things in life - education, health, government etc

Stuff that should be open source, open data

Made state of the art datasets, health models, research systems & agents so far @ www.ii.inc but the plan is ai first open source full stack systems for every regulated sector

Have a distributed ledger announcing soon to tie it all together and create a flywheel so more folk can get access to ai

Amazing mr Emad. Open datasets are hugely important nowadays. I was thinking in the future I could make myself a database of small programming problems and solutions, 5 to 10 lines each, but a lot of of them, so as new LLMs become better and better at coding.

We should try our best when it comes to coding, open datasets should be better than proprietary ones.

I'm still working on Marketing Agents (marketingagents.net) in my free time. Trying to make an open source, self hostable app that will allow founders scale their marketing efforts.

Thinking about future monetization efforts and found myself liking Posthog approach for that.

Host for large companies looking to automate marketing, yet leaving it free (self hostable) for smaller companies that can't pay.

Email newsletter tracking the latest VC rounds, built in Rust: https://gtmintel.com

Really like your web design!

Thanks! I'm leaning into the concept of intelligence gathering / aviation aesthetic.

On the home page right now it links to the Slash funding announcement 4 days ago, but the description looks way off

Thanks for the feedback. I should probably make it more clear - there is no description field.

The block of text is the 'Likely to outsource' column. I use Perplexity Deep research to try to infer what services the company might need based on it's probable current challenges.

In this case it was: "Cloud infrastructure support to manage rapid scaling, pivoting, and new product integrations as part of business model transformation[3]., Specialized consulting (e.g., industry-specific financial regulations, fintech compliance, and go-to-market strategy) to facilitate entry into new verticals and optimize operational resilience[2]."

https://forms.md, open-source Typeform alternative with a one-time pricing.

I am reverse-engineering a PKCS#11 module for Gemalto smart cards and re-implementing it in Zig (https://github.com/ubavic/srb-id-pkcs11). The original module is published only for Windows, and my implementation targets *nix platforms. This is my first project in Zig, and I am very happy with the language.

A programming environment where boxes and arrows and hyperlinks are pervasively available to source code.

https://akkartik.name/post/2025-03-08-devlog

https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/114547652849162554

https://ewatchbill.com - a fair schedule generator that uses simulated annealing to minimize a ‘unfairness’ heuristic. I wrote it for my friends in the Navy who have to write duty bills every month.

https://bearingsonly.net - a submarine combat game in the browser.

Nowadays, I am working on learning robotics from a software engineer's lens on weekends. I got a yahboom one hand robot with Nvidia jetson nano orin gpu. So far i have setup the robot and next i am going to run basic apps on it. I am also going to document video and blog the journey. If someone else is also playing with robots would love to learn

I have a ton of spare time and wish I could write some kind of side project, but I simply have no good ideas. I already have everything I need.

I (was) working on a highly parallelized game using go and ebiten, but upon realizing I wasn't going to achieve the CPU utilization I wanted, I wrote an article about it instead. https://thomashansen.xyz/blog/ebiten-and-go.html

I’m working on https://spoken.me language practice for intermediate and advanced learners of English and Spanish. Hoping to launch a new flashcard experience in the next few days and a new role playing mode in the coming weeks. We’re small fry at the moment but it beats working at FAANG (except for the money)

I'm working on a cycling app that analyzes your Strava data and matches your activities to the OSM street grid. You get cool statistics which paths in your city you've already taken. The goal is to make your commute more fun :)

https://cyclonauts.net

I’m still working on my physical music management application.

It integrates with MusicBrainz and Last.fm, so that I can easily add records, scrobble them, and search/track stats.

I want to figure out how to track availability for records I want to buy, which would involve interacting with marketplaces.

Using Elixir, SQLite and Phoenix LiveView, which is what I know best and lets me focus on UX and UI.

Working on trre - extension of regex for text editing. I'm redesigning the underlying engine to operate on deterministic automata (transducers) for most expressions. Theoretically, it should outperform AWK in complex text-processing tasks.

https://github.com/c0stya/trre

I am creating a heavily LLM-oriented distribution of Emacs (with a lot of the heavy lifting done by Karthink's gptel). This is primarily me rebooting my .emacs.d for the LLM age, but I've come to think that Emacs is a far, far more interesting place than VSCode as the basis for an AI coding environment: a text-first, eval-enabled, constantly self-improving IDE.

I decided to try the AI train and develop something without actually writing any line of code.

The result was very satisfying, https://rss.sabino.me - a rss new aggregator, with a summary to save some time on news that I do not want to read, but am mildly interested.

I will not say the same about the code quality tough

A platform for project prioritisation. Or at least I thought I was. It turns out that early users really want to use it as a sales tool to demonstrate ROI to their prospects, so I've been pivoting towards that. Check out https://www.reschematic.com if you're interested.

Retirement and leaving behind a code base that’s not crappy. And someone mentored who can take over when I’m gone.

And get my MG Midget back on the road.

3 personal projects i uave been working on:

Queue management AI agent where clients interact using Whatsapp/sms for appointment and reservation;

School management system that integrates AI for reporting and teacher/student/staff task s assistance;

A cloud based remote execution platform to run python(and other languages) scripts in a isolated virtual machine.

> What are you working on?

Nothing useful, like always. A non-computer project for the next week or so.

> Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

A few, but I'll never do them. It would be cool to offer free hosting services to projects (in lieu of places like Github and Fandom, and in the spirit of Miraheze) but in the current legal environment, feels like I'd be risking my life.

Using LLM as a judge architecture to optimize multi-agent system prompts and configurations. For now it's achieved through LLM based consensus system that evaluates another LLM output, and based on its performance for a specific task, it's tune the architecture and the prompt e.g. refine the prompt, change the base model to a smaller or cheaper model, etc

I'm building a browser dev tool for tailwind projects that provides you with an instant link from your browser to the code files with minimal per project setup. It also lets you save the changes directly to the code files.

https://quick-edits-extension.vercel.app/

I'm working on an app for easily conducting and organizing evals for LLM-powered applications. The core idea is making it easy for domain experts to review examples of interactions and tests with synthetic data, as well as tracking an application's evaluated performance over time as changes get made.

I’m working on TalkCue.app: an simple, clean and intuitive tool to generate 1on1 questions for more useful and engaging 1on1s [1].

This is a lightweight alternative to my earlier startup attempt Strateamic [2].

[1]: https://talkcue.app

[2]: https://strateamic.com

A set of free online internet infrastructure inspection tools. Think DNS, IP, ASN, WHOIS, email config, etc. It will replace my current main project nslookup.io when it'll launch.

Beta is open at https://beta.nslookup.io (registration wall for now, but I'll remove it at launch).

I'm currently beating around the bush on building a GitHub clone minus react, copilot, etc.

There's no reason I should have my browser tabs crash when I view a pull request involving more than 100 files. The page should already have been generated on the server before I requested it. The information is available. All that remains are excuses and wasted CPU cycles.

Are you just building a web front end on the GitHub API or are you building an end-to-end social programming service?

I started with front end for GH API, but the rate limits and web hook limitations (must own repo) make it a non-starter for total replacement of the typical use cases. 5,000 requests/hr is a lot, but there are repositories with so many issues that you couldn't keep up with things like edits to comments.

there's also no reason you should be viewing a pull request with more than 100 files :p

A cute medicine tracking app featuring an adorable mascot that gets increasingly annoying if you miss a dose (art & animations are original by me) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pill-buddy-meds-tracker/id6742...

Oh hey, I saw this on product hunt or some copycat, and thought it stood out. It mades me wonder, is it based in a particular experience with yourself or a loved one?

I got tired of trying to pick a date spot with my girlfriend, so I made this website to randomly pick an restaurant/date activity for me based on OpenStreetMap data.

I've also used the data corrections submitted by users to contribute over 3,000 edits back into OSM!

https://surprisedatespot.com/

As an avid mapper (and liking to go on dinner-dates with my wife) I absolutely love this. Very slick and quick search, congratulations! Do you also parse the `opening_hours` tag to filter for currently open restaurants?

Currently I don't check the opening_hours, because I've found it's missing for many (most?) restaurants, so I felt it wouldn't be a very useful filter

Client-side Whatsapp chat analyzer, extremely easy to use, privacy friendly. I already made a Python implementation and am currently porting it to JavaScript, and will be available at: https://jotalea.com.ar/misc/wanalyzer

I've been working on a pickleball/badminton (or really any doubles type sport) event manager which integrates an Elo-style statistical rating system (OpenSkill) into the client-side UI. By simply logging the win/loss of every match that happens, it can real-time update and estimate skill ratings in only a few iterations of matches. Its use cases are to manage open play events even with a wide spread of levels, balance the teams of a match, and enforce fair turn-taking.

I implemented a simple first-come-first-serve event RSVP system, and from the event RSVPS it will pull the players into an event management UI from which the organizer can place players into the available courts and arrange matches balanced by level automatically.

The app does ratings calculations fully locally in the browser so it not only works offline but every new match is based on the last rounds' updated player ratings immediately. There is an option to submit matches to be persisted in my hosted service (pkuru.com) so player ratings are retained. The goal isn't to rank players like existing popular systems (DUPR, UTR, etc) but to do matchmaking within an organized session, or before a session.

The web UI and session management app, which is tentatively named FairPlay, is open source on my github. The version I host at Pkuru.com is free to use as well, and currently used by the #1 club (by average skill) in central Tokyo, as well as the highest level club in Thailand.

I don't plan to commercialize it as it is merely a side project but I can't promise the service will always be free to use due to potential operating costs at scale. However, the front-end UI including the session manager is and will be open source.

There's no fundamental reason the system cannot be easily adapted to other sports such as volleyball, soccer/football, or even a 100-person race since the rating system was designed specifically for team based competitions. It can do everything from ranking players in game like PUBG (100 teams of 1-4 players), to 5v4 futsal (asymmetric teams), to classic 1v1 duels as well.

If any clubs or even businesses are interested in using it to manage open play or rec play sessions where people can just drop in and out and be put into a balanced match of the appropriate skill level, please feel free to contact me. The hosted version on pkuru.com is free to use, but I can also assist in my free time on a volunteer basis if you wish to adapt the front-end open source code.

- work all day at cool job for smart people

- applying ML/AI to some security research with some defence or product possibilities

- impementing a test for a quant'ish trading idea that just won't leave me alone

- preludio en mi menor by augustin barrios mangore

- piaffe to canter transitions on a horse

- still figuring out what I actually want to do, but mostly who I want to make something for

An app to screen properties based on your own esoteric criteria. Things like, "I want to have a balcony facing south, looking at a park." Then you can send a list of suitable properties to a real estate agent to scout, or set a notification in case any of them come into the market

A compound word splitter in JS that splits up words of different (esp. Germanic) languages down to simplexes reliably based on a dictionary, including Segmenter API and SQLite FTS connector. Works very reliably by internally using statistics for known compound words, too, and a stemmer.

Sounds neat, got a repo?

May take some weeks.

A POTS line simulator. Basically a telco central office that fits on your desk. Up to 16 lines, touch tones only, only 1 call at a time. No digital intermediate between the caller and answerer, just a pure analog line.

I'm going to plug a couple phones into it, but the main goal is to get all my old computers to talk to each other using their modems.

New Knife Day: (https://new.knife.day/blog/knife-steel-comparisons/all) My goal is to build the most complete wiki and social network for knife collectors, makers and consumers researching a new purchase

I'm working on 3D printing a lens mount and battery holder for Canon EF lenses to a night vision tube I've got (https://github.com/anfractuosity/darkplace).

As well as been playing with creating plastic keys using a flatbed scanner with the printer.

Currently trying to bring my NetBSD build workflow staggering back to life -- again. This time I'm using hg, which seems to have some official support, rather than git. The goal is to resume work on my filesystem code -- specifically ext3 journal support, which has recently attracted interest from the FreeBSD community.

An text-based online RPG (inspired by muds of yesteryear) inhabited by LLM-driven NPCs which takes place in the zombie-infested wild west (side project for about 2 years now, should be live soon ) https://www.blightwood.online

A modern take on ESL (English as a Second Language) vocabulary building flashcards. It might also be fun for native speakers who like language games. It is in beta and feedback is very welcome - iterating to improve it... https://www.dictionarygames.io

Working on AntView.

AntView is an ActiveX wrapper for the Microsoft WebView2 component. AntView enables programming languages that cannot use the WebView2 component directly to have a modern browser component in their applications.

You can find it here: https://antview.dev

https://finalefeline.com

I'm developing a small community focused on rating TV show endings. I've grown tired of investing time in series that get canceled and end on cliffhangers. Unless the show is really good, and even then, I prefer starting knowingly.

Curious how "Lost" scores on the scale of endings. It's not a cliffhanger and it didn't get cancelled but...

Outside of work, I've been making small projects for fun in my spare time. Most of which need to be refined. The latest one being https://tools.coresoftworks.net/

Far less spectacular or impressive than other projects I've seen here bu I wrote a quite small blogging engine

I‘m working on some scripts to make my Mac life a little easier:

1) Setup Apache https://github.com/marchildmann/IDS-Scripts

2) Setup MLX and MLX-LM Finished by tomorrow

3) Working on a micro PHP framework to instantly deploy an API, connect a database and have a basic middleware

Pagecord (https://pagecord.com) - an open source blogging platform written in Rails. Post by email, reply by email, subscribe by email.

Who needs Substack?

https://github.com/lylo/pagecord

https://polyreader.app

My brother is always sending me articles to read, and I don't like reading at a computer, so I made a tool to send articles to my Kindle. It makes me happy and I use it every day, along with a small but apparently happy customer base.

Working on https://jobswithgpt.com to solve my own frustration with job search. Indexes only jobs posted directly by companies (on their own sites or ATS). Offers simple features like saving jobs, reviewing resume against job listing using openai.

I just published MCP Ghost, an MCP client you can call from Python. It's the one orchestration layer that deals away with the boxes-and-arrows of graph-based workflows of today.

https://github.com/kimjune01/mcp-ghost

it's on pip!

For those in Canada, I've been working on SnapEntry - which automates entry into apartment buildings with one time use codes.

I got tired of missing deliveries, so now software answers the buzzer.

Using a mix of telephony, transcriptions, and websockets. Webserver is in C++.

https://snapentry.ca

Realtime voice API. I want you to be able to submit a few form fields to an API endpoint and have AI call your customer by phone and collect that information.

After that's out (hopefully end of the week), gonna focus on ambient voice AI that would do turn taking (e.g. participate in conversations when it makes sense).

Continuing my 2+ year project of building a texting-based productivity app. Started as a way to get a grip on Flutter and local-first sync for mobile, ended up being my by far longest running commitment. Still really enjoying it.

https://tetrify.com/

A music for ppl who like to listen whole albums and keep track of what they discover (and maybe share it with friends). Something like Goodreads, but for music.

Original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

I' working on a voxel building environment, but using irregular (Voronoi) voxels instead of the usual cubic grid ones. Still very much a work in progress:

https://jazzprogramming.github.io/vorfract/

Elide, a new polyglot runtime. https://elide.dev

1. Consumer demand/trend identification: a tag based survey system that allows companies to identify trends in the market at early stage.

2. Productivity tools for independent sales reps that simulate a Sales supervisor/manager. Fights procrastination and lack of focus on daily activities.

I have been working on a site to create and share your dev stacks over a weekend. Did not have much to do.

https://www.sharemydevstack.dev/

Still working on some updates to it like a search

Add your stack without going to the actual create your stack page etc.

I've just released an update for my spatial audio /3D music software https://www.audiocube.app/blog/update-v25520

Now I'm updating the user manual to show all the new features!

I am making an incremental game prototype in rust and wasm, so I made this library for me to handle extremely big numbers: https://github.com/sh4ka/big-number

Adding a support for direct CDP connection with our custom browsers cluster that powers our web scraping API (https://scrapingfish.com/) so that our customers can integrate it into their existing workflows.

A computer algebra system hosted online at http://axcas.net

https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot . Basically open source Custom GPTs. Heavily focused on plugins. Has browser use, computer use, agents can delegate subtasks, Chroma KB, etc. Fully customizable front end.

Currently working on https://ireact.to/ - A public inbox for content creators.

Its a super simple way for your community to submit and vote on the content that they'd like you to check out/react to next.

Nudges Mandarin-Chinese learners to read comprehensible input for 3 mins/day without an app :)

Simply emails you the story with chinese characters, pinyin, etc based on your level and story topics of interest

Link: https://dailychinesestories.com

A beautiful implementation of the most exotic sorting algorithm I'm going to teach this semester:

https://bead-sort.arithmetic.guru/

Oh, and also a PhD on p-adic machine learning, but no one will remember that.

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

Keep working on a test automation library that should allow writing browser/mobile tests easier with LLMs help, so I could focus more on testing, and less on automating.

A sales copilot for startup founders. You can think of it like Cursor but for sales (in the sense it integrates into existing systems and giving an ai native workflow on top of it). https://closer.so

I’m building a keyboard-driven tool for designing in the browser. It’s like a mashup of Webflow, Storybook, and Vim.

It’s still in development, but you can see a codebase for an earlier prototype here:

https://github.com/matry/editor

Trying to do better marketing for my self-hosted analytics apps (https://uxwizz.com/ and https://wplytic.com/)

A web os based on Vue components as apps, with a bunch preinstalled (including basic app repositories and terminal), search and sync (which I just started working on) — https://jun.is (a bit more buggy on mobile yet)

Currently taking a break from my C book to iterate my Lisp dialect in Go.

https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c

https://github.com/codr7/eli-go

Finally want to make a start this week on a database manager that doesn't suck.

DBeaver was my go-to but the UI became too buggy for me. Alternatives all cost a buttload of money for basic features and I couldn't be bothered spending money just so I can make a backup of my DB

1. New version of Enso: https://write.sonnet.io

2. Getting back to writing regularly after a health break (https://untested.sonnet.io)

A geometry processing library in the Odin language - https://github.com/nahumfarchi/odin-geometry.

Not much yet, it includes a basic half-edge implementation and a couple of small examples.

Adminix is an administrative app for small businesses featuring invoices, purchases, accounts payables, receivables and inventory.

You can take a look at https://my.adminix.app/demo

Tokenized and ownable dice games. Perpetual and verifiable.

Its blockchain dev using the flow blockchain's verifiable random function, basically gambling where the games are NFTs and the fees go to NFT owners.

- AI wrapper to summarize long text files (sort of like the LLM-plays-pokemon agentic summary of conversation history)

- single page site for keeping track of what you're reading/watching (building for my parents who use pen and paper for this)

ParseLM: https://github.com/parselm/parselm

It's a Typescript library that allows you to wrangle structured outputs from LLMs and pipe them to programmatically useful control flow or structured data.

Working on a PDF driver for my PostScript interpreter. The drawing model is very similar between the two so it should be fairly straightforward. The only exception is the graphics save stack which persists between pages in PostScript but doesn't in PDF.

I'm making a website for learning languages through comprehensible input: https://input.emanuelrylke.com/

The idea is to aggregate videos by language and then sort them by difficulty.

AI Augment - Enabling SMEs to keep quality jobs local, without giving up data.

Novelty: Massively Agentic multi-modal AI Model with task-based agent synthesis and no measurable hallucinations. New consensus algorithm able to integrate empathic reasoning and emergent motives.

Currently just finished building a job board website for restaurants. Had AI help build it. Initially it was an app but thought it was best to try a website version now. Next up is marketing and getting users. Every step seems complicated.

Started a small Kotlin project - an llm-based assertion library, to verify the response from another LLM, check images or, actually, anything https://github.com/Litemn/llm-assert

I'm making a web app for watching various world news TV channels on the go.

https://worldnews24.tv/

I’m working on a research cybersecurity tool that attempts to combine the natural language understanding and information synthesis strengths of LLM-driven agents with symbolic logic and knowledge bases expressed as Datalog programs for determinism and declarative semantics.

The approach is to perform system scanning using a combination of LLMs and traditional algorithms to dynamically populate a Datalog knowledge base. The facts of the program are constrained to a predefined “model schema” of sorts and a predefined set of rules that encode specialized domain knowledge of how new facts can be derived from known facts.

We generate proof trees / attack graphs from the knowledge base and queries posed to it. The attack graph uses big-step semantics to plan and guide the execution flow, and the system dispatches to agents with tool use to fill in the details and implement the small-step semantics, so to speak. This may include API calls to a Metasploit Framework server or RAG over vulnerability and exploit databases.

We use Pydantic AI to constrain the LLM output to predefined schemas at each step, with a dash of fuzzy string matching and processing to enforce canonicalization of, e.g., software names and other entities.

Tl;dr: neurosymbolic AI research tool for cybersecurity analysis and pentesting.

Very promising concept! Any link/video/website you can share to learn more about this idea?

A minimal website (https://lgtms.app/) to get a random ASCII art for the acronym LGTM cause I love using them in the comment field while approving PRs. Supports CLI as well.

https://vocabuo.com

App with dynamic/flexible spaced repetition flashcards for language learning.

Recently I've added dialog & definition cards, so I can learn German from short dialogs with images and audio.

An S3/Blob Storage bucket monitoring system that checks for files when you expect them to be there. This allows you to check when files are available for processing and if they are not, you’ll receive a notification via email or Slack.

I've been working on a tiny library to handle the OpenGraph protocol in Kotlin. It's been fun https://github.com/jlengrand/opengraphkt

Finally got around to cleaning up and publishing my userscript for recreating the old Slack UI (before August 2023)

https://github.com/blakegearin/old-school-slack

Yesterday's shenanigans: https://clubmate.place/ - find (and/or register) where you find your ClubMate! Just click on the map to add a store.

My stenography app is stable enough that I can actually use it to learn stenography with it.

I have been building a Bluesky+X cross-posting tool with Bluesky analytics — https://theblue.social for the last few months. 2nd time I've gone full indie in 30 years.

A recipe site that makes my favorite cooking youtuber videos easier to follow https://justshare.io/recipe/1Dd7GNm68hI

Great idea!

A simple web app to manage appointment for my barber, here's the repo: https://github.com/Bogghi/cut-connect

I added dark mode to OnlineOrNot's web app (https://onlineornot.com) recently, as part of a new focus on making the user experience as world-class as I can.

I‘m writing a visual travel guide for the edge of the humanly thinkable:

https://www.unthinkable.net

(I made a small newsletter sign-up form, feel free to join the wait list for betas and a free e-Book!)

I wanted to let you know there is a typo on the website. it says "Atumn 2025", I believe it should be Autumn 2025.

Anyway, looks like a very interesting topic and I signed up for the newsletter :)

Just writing blog posts on all my startup failures: https://developerwithacat.com

https://zerem.fi - Offshore Real Estate - Crypto Friendly

* We are just starting with Projects in Porto Belo - Brazil. We are adding more countries soon, but it is worth to explore the catalog.

I'm building an AI based habit tracker. https://health.poonai.xyz/ You might like talking to the agent, It's pretty funny actually.

I'm working on a desktop app called runik that lets you generate and manage e-reader dictionaries for fictional books and series.

https://github.com/Runik-3/core

Ostensibly, making French cleats to put on the walls around my house to hang all my computers (and other stuff) on.

In practice, writing journal entries about why I can't seem to get myself to make all these French cleats that I supposedly need.

Also some software stuff.

here's the answers by category: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/what-are-you-working-on

That's what I'm working on.

I was getting tired of summarizing long articles & threads on HN/Reddit with ChatGPT so I made a simple little Chrome/Firefox extension to do it for me:

https://literead.ai

I’m currently setting up Hyprland—it’s my first experience with a tiling window manager.

Working on Pandora's Inbox (https://pandorasinbox.com). Aiming to be the biggest email search engine. Would love to get feedback from the HN crowd.

I'm redoubling work on IronCalc (https://www.ironcalc.com), a spreadsheet engine. Actually considering going full time on what it begun as a side project.

I'm a tech guy turned rare coin & currency dealer -- this is my world:

https://rarity7.com

The retail site is 100% custom code built in Crystal (server) and Svelte (client). The only part that isn't running my own code is our checkout flow -- I let Shopify handle everything after "Add to Cart".

Our system backend is a separate Crystal app which handles inventory management, pricing research, and price prediction. I've developed an ML model to do price prediction and it kinda works?

What I'm actually working on: This is my full-time gig and probably 60% of my time is spent running the business (going to coin shows, buying coins, photographing new purchases, etc.) and 40% is spent writing code to make the 60% run more efficiently :). It seems I have an infinite list of things to do -- improvements to our retail site; Improvements in how to efficiently go from coin to retail listing (turns out you can send just photos of coins to Claude and with the right prompt it will actually give you a reasonably good description that doesn't sound toooooo AI slop-y); Next "big" project is adapting our ML model for paper currency. The taxonomy is similar but not the same and there's a whole world of notes out there that need to be priced.

Always happy to talk about this stuff so always feel free to email with any numismatic (or tech-numismatic) questions. noah@rarity7.com.

Why not integrate with Shopify and do a theme/use its webhooks for this?

I've played with Shopify for many years and it just can't do some of the low-level stuff I want it to do without badly mangling how product taxonomy works. Coins are a different kind of beast than typical retail and if I'm going to be writing code anyway, I'd rather write my own code (vs. writing code "on the shopify platform").

The really sensitive stuff - financial stuff - they handle through checkout (and I don't need anything special there), so I've really just written my own catalog & front-end.

recently launched book recommendations feature for my books side project that I put a LOT of work into. I might be biased but I think it works well as long as you give it your favorite books.

https://thegreatestbooks.org/recommendations?demo=tgb2025

warning: account required, and the full featured version where you can specify book length, include/exclude genres/subjects, etc requires a membership. if you would like to test it though just e-mail me at contact@thegreatestbooks.org and I'll mark your account as paid.

Working on https://are-we-up.xyz/ - A very basic website pinging service for non-technical people.

Considering expanding the service for REST endpoints.

Currently working on InstaClock. Time tracking app for individuals. Do check it out: https://instaclock.app

I redesigned the home page today itself. Any feedback is appreciated!

Im working in a new form of payment transaction, where you can add products, service or money as a new way of payments. This will require a previous "perfil trustment" to garantize the process of transaction's.

Training a GPT-2 model from scratch on my desktop to learn more about how LLMs work under the hood. Next step is modifying it to be multimodal, and then trying out diffusion models.

Pretty fun project!

A native MacOS app called CutWord that turns command words spoken during video recording into automatic timeline edits.

You can grab a TestFlight link at https://cutword.com

Been building proxymock (proxymock.io) a free CLI tool to make local apps feel connected to prod, or any other environment. Good for fast integration testing, mocking, driving load, etc. Critical feedback appreciated.

Been working on a agentic system of Jungian opposites, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, just for fun and to learn rust and LLM combinations, system prompts etc, it’s been fun and I think that’s all for now.

I'm working on a language learning tool. An early version, that I'm quickly improving is live here: https://langsesh.com

Started as a handy tool for personal use, now paid application. From launch to first paying customer in just 1 month: https://jar.tools

https://preppear.com Magically remove ads from any recipe website, save to your collection and automatically generate meal plans

Check out Voibe: https://github.com/corlinp/voibe

Open source Mac-native menu bar app for speech to text using GPT-4o-transcribe (current STT SOTA)

Whenever speech to text apps come up, I get curious how people use them in their workflow. I've tried to integrate it into my daily work a few times, but have found myself dropping it not too long after. If I'm already at a keyboard, I just don't seem to find any case where I don't prefer that as an input. What are other people using these for?

I’m working on another midlife million dollar idea.

https://www.ammid.com

You might have read my previous article about How To Lose Money with 25 Years of Failed Businesses.

Browser extension to let you categorize and rank your search results in a collaborative way https://catsearch.net/

I’m still working on Danger World!

https://danger.world

Flutter + Flame + Spine + YarnSpinner. After a year of development, we’re coming up on some very fun milestones!!!

A new programming language inspired by golang. I'm trying to share and promote it.

https://github.com/nature-lang/nature

I'm building a cli / tui program for dealing with jira. I enjoy project management, and even jira, but just hate how long it takes to do anything. Luckily the API is pretty easy to work with!

I am working on version 2.0 of HACK (an iOS, macOS and Android app for hacker news). Currrntly only working on iOS and macOS version.

It's not exactly version 2.0, it's built entirely from scratch and instead of only hacker news, it can also be used for similar forum sites like Lobste.rs, Tildes, Lemmy etc. In fact, it's built in a way such that more website support can be easily added on the fly.

I had restarted this 3 times in the last 2 years. But the current code is finally coming together to be released to the public.

Currently, I already have the reader part working. So one can read posts, comments, expand collapse comments, read articles etc. I don't have the writer part working yet (voting, favoriting, commenting). I am debating whether I should just release the reader part first and then continue working on the writer part and release it as part of update. Thoughts?

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1464477788

AI agents and testing “vibe coding”

It doesn’t feel there yet, but starting to seem some workflows could be close. And non-technical folks at business are starting to pay attention and want projects moving in those areas.

I'm working on an ear training app that listens to what you play on guitar. https://gapsguitar.com/

I’m working on a personal project to design a spoken language inspired by Tolkien’s Elvish. Still early and learning as I go.

App for learning chinese, aimed at intermediate learners. SRS, reader, import content. Lots of fun problems like word segmentation, relevant distractors, integrating with LLMs, local-first sync.

roleplayr.ai : a browser extension that lets you talk to any image on the web.

An LLM answers in-character; Try it free: https://roleplayr.ai

Would love feedback.

I'm building an amateur radio SSB transceiver for the 20 meter band.

I've been working on a platform for car collectors to manage their car collections. https://capsured.com

I’ve built https://orateai.app

A free macOS that does TTS to any highlighted text in any app with AI voices. A Speechify alternative.

I'm working on Austen[0] which generates story relationship graphs with Mermaid

[0] https://github.com/herol3oy/austen

Been playing with my birdnet detection data. Made a realtime synth based on species detections and working on wireless framed art piece that displays the latest detection on an eink display.

> framed art piece

love this idea! my retired mother spends a lot of time at her living room window with the Merlin Bird ID app and optimizing her bird feeders. it'd be fun to build something like this for her.

You need to post more detail on this!

Here ya go! https://birdymusic.com/

BirdNET-PI posts detection notifications via Apprise interface to a little Rails app running on a tiny vps. Sound generation is done through the wonderful Tone.js library which wraps the WebAudioContext API.

I'd like to continue building more generative sound structures like adsr graphs from sparklines of detections and things like that. Trying to keep it generative, but without AI blackboxing things.

I made a free copy/paste helper meant to help get multiple source code files into LLMs. Just something simple to give more granular control over context and work with other ides eg xcode

pastybara.com

Website for news can post/reply. https://asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads

Putting the final touches on the iOS version of my HN client done. Android client was refactored to Kotlin multiplatform and just has a few components that need to be reworked for iOS.

A daily briefing that bundles content from every source you care about into a simple newsletter format.

https://usedigest.com

This is really cool!

Support for bigger group sizes (5 - 8 users) for https://catchup.rocks

Prepare to release https://github.com/Yiling-J/tablepilot v0.4.0, new workflow feature

I'm writing a doorknock organising application for an Australian climate action community group, using lots of PostGIS and as much vanilla js as I can! Super fun so far.

Atomic non blocking writes for storage https://github.com/guycipher/wildcat

I'm currently working on an online gallery platform for professional photographers: https://picstack.com

Looking for a job (targeting fullstack engineering, ai engineering) and trying to get myself unstuck and back to coding everyday. Neither going great, but that's life?

keep trying. good luck!

Thanks!

A proof-of-work based imageboard; as you navigate through different threads and mouseover certain images and such it mines on them. Threads are sorted and bumped based on PoW.

A marketing asset generator that allows users to input campaign details (eg. feature launch PRDs) to then automatically create launch assets (eg. blog, social post, etc)

A stealth enterprise-grade headless browser for hard automations. https://metalsecurity.io

I am working on https://www.merklemap.com/ a certificate transparency search engine.

I'm working on https://blueprintapp.design an app to simplify the creation of user flows.

I'm building an open-source and mobile-first Roblox alternative called Blip. (https://blip.game)

Vilcos — https://vilcos.com/

Futuristic CMS concept with Embedded agent to replace traditional forms.

We develop the best place for typescript job seeker https://typescript.jobs/

Recently pivoted. Working on Cursor for PR reviews.

You can sign up for the beta here: https://diffender.com

A site for helping smaller musicians on youtube to get their first listeners: https://nwtb.eu

AI app generator that also generates the backend, a database schema, and auth. Mostly a test bed for different workflows and to see how good the SoTA models are.

SIMD enhanced YAML parser. My original parser didn't have enough MB/s (around 2-70 MB/s), so I'm trying out SIMD. I hope it goes well.

Gemini 2.5 TTS client integration for the Unity game engine so indie games can generate dialogue directly in the editor (and perhaps live games, eventually)

A new computing system based on parallel addressing.

Two demo are already written: explanation how to compute parallel and algorithm of parallel space emulation.

https://livedocs.com

An AI data scientist for serious data work. Think of it like an AI native Jupyter notebook.

Tailor your resume and cover letter in minutes: https://resumebuildai.com

I had an idea at one point that I'd record every cover letter I wrote, so that eventually I could fine tune a model to write in my style.

I didn't end up sending many, but I've noticed that it's really difficult to get AI to write in a decent style. I've tried giving it a list of AI-isms to avoid, and it just doesn't work.

I has the most success with deepseek V3, giving a list of AI-isms, then ending with "You have been randomly assigned the following writing style/personality: [codeblock]" then a stereotype. Eg "Write in the style of a to-the-point, concise HN commenter" works alright, while "Write naturally and without AI-isms" is hopeless.

(Don't worry, I'm not using it for HN botting or whatever, it just tends to write in a nice style when you give it that)

A local-first multi device app for digitally shuffling, dealing and recording game history and points for a specific points based card game (Truco)

Graph algorithms running on existing quantum computers.

Big 5 Archive (https://big5archive.live/): a Chrome extension that auto‑opens news articles in Archive

I've been reading the Wall Street Journal every morning this year but I'm too cheap to pay for the hefty $39/mo. subscription. My routine was: open article → hit paywall → copy URL → paste into Archive. After a few dozen times that got old.

So I built Big 5 Archive: a tiny Chrome extension that automatically redirects any link from WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, L.A. Times, or USA Today to its archived, paywall‑free copy.

I had fun making this and I hope it is helpful to the news-readers out there. Feedback welcome, happy reading!

working on an app that lets you take multitrack “voice memos” by plugging your phone into an interface. then the audio is automatically synced to the cloud, akin to a primitive dropbox for audio. there’s a simple mixer to adjust levels for local playback. for now i use it to get hi fi recordings of band practice and shows.

https://carnyx.ai

I'm experimenting with conversational AI, for example live video calls with Santa. Super fun.

If you want to try, send me an email.

litevna.app - a DICOMweb compatible medical imaging archive, built on cloudflare workers, to optimize fast image delivery globally. Images are all encoded as HTJ2K for progressive image loading, and the popular OHIF zero-footprint DICOM viewer is built in.

Building mainly to power the next generation of pacsbin.com, but may offer as a standalone service as well.

A free tool to summarize and "chat with your emails"

https://aichat.email

How to find your ideal place to live in the US: https://exoroad.com

odor tech CPG startup. just dropped $1800 to fund first round prototyping. super excited as this is my first startup. loving it already

What’s odor tech CPG?

It’s a discreet accessory that selectively masks environmental odors, not a mask, more like a smell barrier. Currently filing provisional. Made for healthcare, sanitization, crime scene cleanup. anyone who smells bad stuff. biotech adjacent

iOS app size analysis tool that runs locally on your mac https://dotipa.app

Webring.GG - www.webring.gg

It's a democratic webring creator/management app where members can vote on new websites to join their ring.

we at https://www.dolphinwhispers.com are building an Android app to let you add your own AI models to it and compete with DolphinGemma. The app can currently be used without AI models and chat ethically with dolphins by using your own intelligence.

yeet - a dynamic runtime / system performance toolkit for Linux.

you can checkout our sandbox at https://yeet.cx/play

CLI that abstracts rolling out multiple terminal-driven coding agents in parallel with the same prompt using git worktrees

A Europe based PaaS. It’s now dog fooding (the management dashboard is deployed to the platform). Slow and steady progress

https://preview--tool-millions-accessed.lovable.app/launchpa...

For the tinkerers of the world: drop your tool, we handle auth, payments, usage. You get paid per run.

For the consumers: don’t like selling your data just to convert a file? You’ve found your home. No tracking. No ads. No dopamine hacks (only regular dosage).

An app to estimate the risk of your job being automated and how to hedge against it professionally and financially

Exploring N8N

I have the impression clients like it when their code is “visual” so I’m trying to learn more of it to attract new clients

i lead our ai products team at io.net, come get some free credits (1m tokens per model per day). contact us if you like the service, our api is openai compatible and we have deepseek, qwen3, and llama 4 maverick along with lots of other neat models. hope to have more cool stuff out by the end of the quarter, thanks.

On and off building https://pricetracker.wtf

A python script to flip and walk quote-skeet meme threads on bsky with the object of visualizing them non-linearly.

I'm building small web and mobile games. Always exploring new game ideas, happy to chat with others in game dev

Feel like I've been saying this way too long. Connect Payment Systems to various unsupported web builders.

Fantasy Apps

OpenSource Dex agregator for Solana - easy to anyone to integrate on their apps, setting their own fees and ui

I'm working on yet another spending analysis app. How will this one be different?

- Stores transactions locally in a SQLite database, so in theory you could build your own Front End if mine didn't do everything you wanted. Think someone who wants to do a fancy "year end summary" visualisation. And if you want to do a complex filter, can just write an SQL query to the database itself.

- Has a great UI.

- Allows you to write your own import connector and mix 'n' mash between locally-saved CSV/OFX files and APIs, rather than going down the standard route of only supporting Plaid. Current solutions leave users high and dry if the Plaid connector doesn't work well / they want to import old data (Plaid only gives the last 2 years I think).

MapAI - https://www.mapai.net

Converting a 600GB database into a 1GB database through refactoring/normalization/compression.

Wow, nice optimization.

I'm working on a data-visualization blog. Hoping it will lead to some cool projects / apps.

klartraum.ai: "Klartraum will be a real-time neural rendering and inference engine build on top of Vulkan." Currently, it is mostly a pipe dream, but Gaussian splatting is nearly implemented and I plan to release version 0.0.1 in the next days.

Post-train an open source LLM on real time news for detect the current emotion of stock markets

this weekend I created on a graph-based wikipedia explorer to make sharing the rabbitholes you go down in wikipedia with other people easier

https://rabbithole.fsobral.dev/

Built an llm based url shortener

https://yurl.ai

Create alternative self-made feed of videos using VEO3 based on my intercation in social media.

Working on a pytest plugin with a tui to run tests interactively and manage plugins and options

A new site of daily puzzles, mostly word puzzles but also one numbers puzzle. Releasing soon!

building blog using go with postgres and minio and self hosting on secondhand. raspberry pi on kubernetes.

building a prometheus exporter to monitoring like temperature, cpu, ram and building simple html monitoring tool to expose those metrics.

a Tool Management Platform - https://toolingmetrics.com - helping digitalize and automate tasks in the metal machining shop.

A cyberpunk-themed hacking game inspired by FTL and Netrunner made in Unity.

A bitemporal data model in SQLite

... for a little SaaS app, because my friend-and-sponsor hasn't given me a deadline, nor sent irate letters asking for results.

Think of it like the poor man's XTDB + Datomic, if you like. Readings and conversations have taken me to deep questions explored in works by Snodgrass [0], Jensen[1], and Jepsen [2]. Shout out to the XTDB folk for their feedback and suggestions. This is why I hang in the Clojure community... it's full of people doing rad stuff who are also unwaveringly kind, helpful, and generous with their time.

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

The pre-alpha version of "Project Writing for Nerds" [3]

A cohort-based workshop to help fellow gentlenerds "spool brain to disk" with as little friction as possible.

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

[0] Developing Time-oriented Database Applications in SQl https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/tdbbook.pdf

[1] Temporal Database Management https://people.cs.aau.dk/~csj/Thesis/

[2] Jepsen's helpful little notes on Consistency https://jepsen.io/consistency

[3] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#writing-for-nerds

(edit: fix formatting)

Open source hybrid piano. Been a very part-time hobby for several years.

I'm starting a Low Power FM radio station for my local area.

A tiny numbers mobile game, playable on Android, iOS, and the web.

moving off of Ghost to an astro blog b/c I don't write often enough to justify a $110/year fee and I also found out there's no way to moderate spam comments.

I’m running a headless Ghost blog using Astro.

To do the same, move your blog to the free plan on digitalpress.blog (a Ghost hosting provider). Then use the Ghost JavaScript SDK to pull content and build a static site with Astro. You can write posts in the Ghost editor and publish them seamlessly with Astro.

Oh you know, just the most advanced mmometarpg in history.

an online marketplace for talents, sapces, and funds.

it's a tarpit idea that a lot of users and investors like to shit on so i decided to just build something that i like myself.

Getting a LLM writing a python module I'm considering

I'm still working on https://gridwhale.com

It's basically a full-stack web platform written entirely from scratch. One of these days I'll write about it and get yelled at for reinventing the wheel.

But I'm using it internally and for my biotech clients and I'm still excited about it.

iOS app size analysis tool that runs locally on your Mac https://dotipa.app/

Tradofire - Swipe Like Tinder on trading opportunities https://tradofire.com

I got everything done technically but marketing is challenging

Kubernetes upgrades and AI agents. www.kubegrade.com

Rust based software defined radio application

Can you elaborate further on this? What is this application about? I am interested in SDRs.

AI powered Public Health Management: phm.ai

I bought a cheap doorbell camera. It uses an app called Aiwit which I frankly don't trust. So I'm going to spend a few hours seeing if I can get a raw feed which I can host on my own server and block this thing from any external access. Or I'll just return it.

HN is probably not the target audience for this, but hey, here we are: https://www.youtarot.app/pages/about

A web app for people to get tarot readings, and create their own tarot cards using AI. I'm enjoying working on this because I'm using as an opportunity to learn parts of the stack that I didn't usually do at my day job - frontend, design and marketing (my career has focused more on the backend).

open source llm compiler for prompts called selvedge.

rather than manually write prompts for llms (which is like hand coding byte code for cpus), declare a structure and instructions and let the system do prompt writing for you.

it also exposes an optimizer which can do sophisticated prompt learning for tasks.

github.com/viksit/selvedge

Making rent this month so I can unslack.. help appreciated. :-)

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

But seriously, I'm looking for "no-strings" sponsors, if any companies (or individuals) would like to help support me so that I can focus on open source full time. Feel free to email me: https://brynet.ca/

My mental health

Yet another Japanese learning app[0], but something that is very useful to me, so I hope it will be useful for others as well. I struggle to deal with comprehensible input that interests me at this time. The best way to immerse yourself is with content that interests you but sometimes that content is a bit advanced. I'm building this to bridge the gap, you can upload or select content that interests you (or we can recommend you content that would be comprehensible input), and we'll generate short stories, set in the universe of the content you want to learn that will introduce new words you need to understand the original content every week. The words and sentences of these stories will then be reviewed using spaced repetition (using the Ebisu SRS algo as underlying model with some modifications).

[0] https://katarineko.com/

Since I had so much trouble managing my entire digital information universe [1], I decided to scratch my itch and solve it for myself and maybe others as well. Here are my ideas about my product:

- Manages the entire range of personal (and maybe business) information/content: Documents, Media, Messages (email, instant, etc.), Contacts, Bookmarks, Calendar, etc.

- Is tag based, so that where to put and find content is easy to answer. Think of a set of flat folders, on one or more devices, within which the files are stored with tags attached. Since people often find navigating/browsing files more natural than searching, virtual folders will be dynamically generated to guide navigation. Also, entire folders can be treated as atomic, and tagged/managed as one object (useful for repositories & projects). And, heuristics (and maybe AI) will be used to automatically tag files when they are imported into the tool, greatly reducing the tedium of adding tags.

- Is file based, so that all information is physically stored as individual files. This allows information to be more easily managed on a physical level: moved around, backed up, exported/imported, searched, navigated, etc. So in addition to docs, each email/instant message, contact, scheduled task/event, bookmark, etc. would ultimately be stored as a file, unlocking all the things you can do with files.

- Has a local web-based UI launched from a local agent, so actual file content does not usually need to move across the network and stays local, and the tool is also easily multi-platform, with consistent UI irrespective of platform.

- Provides a cloud web UI as well, that communicates with content devices through the local agent, so that content stored across multiple devices can be managed in one central location, even without direct access to those devices, team/org features can be provided. However, file content still stays local, except when shared.

- Provides tools for exporting data as file from the data islands of various apps and service, and backing up as files to cloud storage services.

My vision is a situation where I am in charge of my own data irrespective of whatever device, app, or service I use, can ensure that it is always available and will not be lost, and that I can easily navigate and search through it all to find whatever I want, no matter how scattered and massive it is.

[1] Here are some of my issues with personal information management affordances of current tech, which is driving me to work on a solution:

- Our data is too bound to device and vendor islands. Can't easily move my information across Apple/Google/Whatsapp, etc accounts. Can't easily merge and de-duplicate either. I almost always somehow lose data whenever I have to move to a new phone, etc.

- Hard to own your data on many services: Discord, Slack, etc. Can't easily export, search.

- Hard to have a 360 overview and handle on all your data assets and query them in a consistent manner.

- Files as a unit of information storage and management is very ergonomic; we shouldn't allow that concept to be buried by vendors for their own gain.

Vibe coding a vibe coder.

Voice - Voice llm model.

Voice - voice ai model

I work my contextual macOS Shortcuts launcher a bit back: BarCuts (https://actions.work/barcuts).

Now I struggle with a marketing strategy, quite a bit. But hey, I was told it's part of the job ;)

A Pinterest alternative. Sick of seeing AI generated slop on Pinterest and want to build something better.

I am also integrating it with ATProto.

Current MVP supports search only: https://imaginarium.picheta.me/

Pfft. Obviously the funniest, most educational science podcast on the planet https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com/

A video game!

Fundraising.

What are you fundraising for?

A giant factory that builds robots using other robots.

legal tech apps via AI

Do you guys think it's too late to start building yet another AI Agent for writing software?

awq

I've been on parental leave, and it turns out newborns sleep a lot - so lots of stuff! :)

The most exciting thing is I'm working on a way to pre-bake one's WiFi information and an SSH key into the piCore Tiny Core Linux image.

piCore is sort of the holy grail for a lot of people who just want to stick a tiny personal-user server onto a Raspberry Pi and then not have to worry about the SD card burning out on them, because the entire system runs in RAM after first boot anyway - the only thing standing in its way, methinks, is that it requires you to physically plug in a keyboard and a monitor to get it up and running on the first boot.

I think that's dumb. A Raspberry Pi should be a thing you can plug into a wall socket in your home and then work entirely via SSH with. I do a lot of work with Linux images and virtualization like this at my day job anyway, with more scrutiny and regulatory compliance in place - if you can imagine what "embedded devops" might look like, that's a good way to describe it. So I'm a surprisingly good fit by now for this kind of thing.

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Currently I'm neck deep in some Fish shell scripting to automate writing posts for https://andrew-quinn.me/ , similar to what I already have for https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/ . With the latter, I just type in `til` at a terminal, and I

1. Get asked for a title;

2. Get a fzf multi-select list of all previous tags used on the blog (this ensures I actually continue to use the same handful of tags, which makes the blog much more fun to dive down); and

3. Get a vim window open to actually crank out the blog itself.

aqdm doesn't have tags, but it is built on a very similar Hugo base. Honestly the hardest thing about writing this script is simply wrestling with the fish shell programming language. I should really sit down and learn it properly one day...

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We changed our modem recently, which broke the cronslave Raspberry Pi I had powering https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/. That led me to spend the weekend finally moving its codebase off of Raspbian and onto a fully RAM-based Tiny Core Linux.

Running the OS entirely out of RAM for a Raspberry Pi increases its longevity by at least an order of magnitude, because you only ever read from the SD card on boot and on backups. If you configure the server such that everything is ephemeral anyway, you'll basically never see that little green "Writing" LED blink. That's how I got interested in the aforementioned prebaked piCore project!

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I collected my smattering of Finnish language learning software projects all in one place at http://finbug.xyz/ . I recently added the ability to mark and unmark words to my Finnish pocket dictionary https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk - that makes it super easy to save words during a reading session and then import them into Anki later.

Of more general interest to people might be https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki , which takes a YouTube URL, runs it through Whisper for an automatic transcription, then slices it up sentence-per-Whisperified-sentence and creates Anki cards out of each transcription for spaced repetition listening practice.

I made this for Finnish originally, but it fills a niche I was surprised to see had no really good locally-runnable FOSS options. There are some startups hawking a similar slice-and-dice service which I'm sure is much higher quality. But I figure the most likely people to get a lot out of a program like this are high school students, who generally don't have credit cards they can buy SaaS with - they need something they can dump their hours into, to get to work, instead of their dollar bills to get something that already works.

I'm casually ideating on a new orthography for Japanese that does not require Kanji.

Because it's hard to remember how to handwrite complex kanji (many people have character amnesia in real life due to smartphone usage), I casually wondered if it was possible create a Japanese orthography that was: (1) easily scannable (which rules out hiragana); (2) disambiguated words without Kanji; (3) still relatively compact? (which hiragana is not).

I figured a good substrate to start from was romaji + a new emoji system.

You know how people think LLMs can't invent things? o3 just invented this system whose goal is to maximally disambiguates homophonic Japanese words (performing the same semantic compression role that Kanji does today). This is the first iteration. After each romaji noun, it tags it with a geometric shape. These are the 30 tags o3 came up with (based on homophones requiring disambiguation):

  | Diacritic     | ◐  living              | ▢  built / object      | ⬢  nature               | ◊  abstract                  | ⟐  action / event           |
  | ------------- | ---------------------- | ---------------------- | ----------------------- | ---------------------------- | --------------------------- |
  | •  top dot    | ◐• adult / main person | ▢• building / place    | ⬢• plant / flora        | ◊• idea / thought            | ⟐• movement / travel        |
  | –  bottom bar | ◐– child / minor       | ▢– tool / instrument   | ⬢– water / liquid       | ◊– emotion / feeling         | ⟐– communication / speech   |
  | +  right plus | ◐+ group / collective  | ▢+ vehicle / transport | ⬢+ weather / sky        | ◊+ social tie / relationship | ⟐+ creation / production    |
  | ×  left cross | ×◐ animal (non-human)  | ×▢ food / consumable   | ×⬢ mineral / material   | ×◊ value / moral             | ×⟐ perception / sense       |
  | | center bar  | ◐| deity / honorific   | ▢| document / media    | ⬢| terrain / landscape  | ◊| state / condition         | ⟐| change / transformation  |
  | ‿  bottom arc | ◐‿ anatomy / body part | ▢‿ container / vessel  | ⬢‿ energy / fire        | ◊‿ knowledge / data          | ⟐‿ rest / passive state     |

I gave it this wikipedia JA text:

  現代における日本語の一般的な表記法は漢字仮名交じり文であり、漢字と平仮名（昔の法令などでは片仮名）を交えて表記する。漢字は実質的な意味を表す語に使われ、平仮名は主に活用語尾[注 1]や助詞に使われる。朝鮮語などでは漢字が主として字音語にしか使われないのに対し、日本語では和語にも使われ、外来語を除いてほとんどの語に使うことができる。煙草（タバコ）や合羽（カッパ）、珈琲（コーヒー）など大航海時代以降にヨーロッパから入った語彙には、外来語であるにもかかわらず漢字が使われるものがある。

And told o3 to rewrite it in the new system it just created:

  gendai◊| ni okeru  nihongo◊‿ no  ippan-teki na hyōkihō◊‿ wa kanji▢|  kana▢| majiri  bun▢| de ari, kanji▢| to  hiragana▢|  (mukashi no  hōrei▢| nado de wa  katakana▢|) o majete  hyōki◊‿ suru. kanji▢| wa  jisshitsu-teki na imi◊• o arawasu  go◊‿ ni tsukaware, hiragana▢| wa  omo ni  katsuyō-gobi◊‿ ya  joshi◊‿ ni tsukawareru. chōsengo◊‿ nado de wa  kanji▢| ga  shutoshite  ji-on go◊‿ ni shika tsukawarenai no ni taishi,  nihongo◊‿ de wa  wago◊‿ ni mo tsukaware, gairaigo◊‿ o nozoite  hotondo no  go◊‿ ni tsukau  koto◊‿ ga dekiru. tabako⬢• (tabako) ya  kappa▢– (kappa),  kōhī×▢ (kōhī) nado dai-kōkai-jidai◊| ikō ni  Yōroppa⬢| kara haitta  goi◊‿ ni wa, gairaigo◊‿ de aru ni mo kakawarazu  kanji▢| ga tsukawareru  mono◊‿ ga aru.

It's pretty readable, and takes care of the homophone ambiguities (remaining ambiguities can be resolved through context). It also naturally resolves onyomi and kunyomi. Add italics and punctuation, and katakana is replaced.

(of course, it's incorrect in parts... because LLM)

But the idea has legs. It will probably not replace Kanji due to cultural inertia, but this could a kind of shorthand especially for handwriting.

I'm pretty impressed! o3 just invented something new. It combined romaji and a tag system that it hallucinated to design a new Japanese orthography. As far as I can tell (I could be wrong), something of this nature has not been done before.

I'm building a stock portfolio tracker, because I've found myself managing many portfolios with spreadsheets and Python scripts, which became a massive time sink. At the same time I couldn't find a tracker that was 100% what I wanted, while at the same time I wanted to learn web dev, web services & cloud deployment.

I've decided to release an MVP so I can gauge interest, and after ~8 months of deployment and 2 releases there has been some great feedback. It's definitely a much much bigger and more complex project than I originally anticipated though!

At the moment I paused new sign ups as it's not scaling up nicely, so I'm now refactoring the services to use async / message queue for the heavy Python tasks using Celery / RabbitMQ.

It was quite difficult to get the product in front of people that might interested and even though I found enough users to test and give feedback, it's been tough to find them. So my strategy now is to try and release blog posts on my architecture, approaches, pros/cons, etc, and build in public regularly. This takes away time from the actual development but hopefully I'll have a big enough community that I can tap into for testers when the new release is out.

I'm not posting a link to the project or even mention the name as I got a shadow-ban in Reddit when I posted a summary to my MVP post-mortem (no link) and now I'm terrified!

I'd appreciate any suggestions / different approaches you might have in terms of reaching more users!

maybe you could add link in your HN profile so interested people could atleast take a look?

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