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rkwzon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

Creating my own photo curation tool inspired by Adobe Lightroom - https://github.com/sheshbabu/riffle

rkwzon Self-hosting is being enshittified

> I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS.

Yes, fully agree with this and I've a similar setup. I even started with using wsl on the default windows install hoping to switch later to linux, but didn't have much need for this. Only gripe is tailscale seems to be flaky (rare) in windows.

Better to start with something small and cheap, see if it solves your needs and then upgrade if needs. Don't overcomplicate things based on what others do.

rkwzon Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems

I found this post very helpful to getting started with agentic systems, what other posts do others recommend?

rkwzon Launch HN: Lucidic (YC W25) – Debug, test, and evaluate AI agents in production

I see, that's a good way to think about it

rkwzon Launch HN: Lucidic (YC W25) – Debug, test, and evaluate AI agents in production

In the research workflow example, what if the first set of search queries don’t return good results. If the LLM tool loop decides to refine the queries, would this be “agency”?

rkwzon Launch HN: Lucidic (YC W25) – Debug, test, and evaluate AI agents in production

Do you have a writeup on the different interpretations of "AI Agent"?

rkwzon Ollama's new app

Thanks!

I use this package for markdown: https://github.com/gonzalezreal/swift-markdown-ui

rkwzon Ollama's new app

[Shameless Plug]

I built my own Ollama macOS app written in SwiftUI: https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital

Launches fast and weighs less than 2MB in size!

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

I'm working on Zen Notes - a minimal, distraction-free notes app that prioritizes ownership and longevity.

The core philosophy is: your notes should be yours forever, that also includes the software stack it's built on. Everything is stored locally in SQLite with standard Markdown, so no vendor lock-in or proprietary formats. The interface is very minimal without flashy colors or icons, so you can focus on your thoughts.

Key features: instant full-text search using BM25, flexible tag organization instead of rigid folders, rich Markdown support with formatting toolbar, and custom "Focus Modes" for different contexts. It's a PWA that works offline (read-only).

The tech stack prioritizes minimal dependencies - no NPM (self-hosted Preact instead of React), Golang for rich standard library, etc. The whole app can be run from a single binary, so no messy installation requirements. Docker is also available.

I tried to design this from scratch, learning about typography, colors, spacing etc. It turned out better than I expected!

I've switched to this as my main notes app and I'm happy with it.

Landing Page: https://www.sheshbabu.com/zen/

Demo: https://zendemo.fly.dev

rkwzon Don't animate height

CSS animations can sometimes cause weird performance issues or even crashes. 10 years back, animating box-shadow caused browsers to crash for our some of users by consuming a lot of memory: https://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/my-binary-search-debugging-s...

rkwzon Building Accurate Address Matching Systems

Robin's blog is a gold mine for anyone working on entity resolution, highly recommend reading other posts as well!

rkwzon Show HN: Distraction-Free Note Taking

Sorry, currently only supports standard markdown

rkwzon I deleted my second brain

> am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go.

Can you elaborate on this?

rkwzon Zoho halts $700M semiconductor plan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFB_Home_Appliances

TIL IFB is an Indian company

rkwzon How NASA Is Using Graph Technology and LLMs to Build a People Knowledge Graph

Any idea which LLM they're using?

rkwzon Show HN: ESP32 RC Cars

This is amazing! Is there a way to make the car recharge at dock like robo vacuums?

rkwzon Mistral Small 3

What local models are you currently using and what issues are you facing?

rkwzon Show HN: Organize Your Blood Tests into a Beautiful Health Dashboard

Thanks, sounds interesting!

rkwzon Show HN: Organize Your Blood Tests into a Beautiful Health Dashboard

This is nice!

How do you extract the data from pdf or images? How do you reduce inaccuracies in this process?

rkwzon React 19

Curious, has anyone tried to use React without bundler like webpack, esbuild etc?

rkwzon Bringing K/V context quantisation to Ollama

Thanks for the kind words :)

rkwzon Bringing K/V context quantisation to Ollama

If you’re using a Mac, I’ve built a lightweight native app - https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital

rkwzon SQLite: Outlandish Recursive Query Examples

Not SQLite, but recently used Postgres Recursive CTEs for graph retrieval - https://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/graph-retrieval-using-postgr...

rkwzon Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

This is a well written guide, thanks!

rkwzon My solar-powered and self-hosted website

The author clearly explains in the post:

> When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting.

> The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325 per kWh in Boston. This means the savings amount to $2.85 USD per year (8.76 kWh * $0.325/kWh = $2.85). Not exactly something to write home about.

rkwzon Python client for the $20 Colmi R02 smart ring

How safe are these cheap devices? Should one be concerned about battery exploding? Found some threads about this happening to Oura rings: https://www.reddit.com/r/ouraring/comments/s1fave/ring_batte...

rkwzon Python 3.13.0 Is Released

> Free-threaded execution allows for full utilization of the available processing power by running threads in parallel on available CPU cores. While not all software will benefit from this automatically, programs designed with threading in mind will run faster on multi-core hardware.

Would be nice to see performance improvements for libraries like FastAPI, NetworkX etc in future.

rkwzon NVLM: Open Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs

HuggingFace link: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVLM-D-72B

rkwzon Amazon Layoffs: Tech Firm to Cut 14,000 Manager Positions by 2025, Says Report

Is there more info on how this "bureaucracy tipline" works?

More often in big companies, the processes keeps getting bigger and more convoluted as time passes by.

Usually the change in process is approved by higher ups, but they might not have full visibility of the process as they're not the ones who are going through these processes (people below them are).

rkwzon Will plants grow on the moon?

> when roots can grow in air

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics

TIL