Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
302 points by david927 3 days ago
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
302 points by david927 3 days ago
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Really cool project. A quick note, I had to dig in your FAQ to find your definition for LOQ:
> "What does 'LOQ' mean in your results? > > Limit of Quantification (LOQ) is the lowest concentration we can reliably measure. Results below LOQ are marked "<LOQ" - this doesn't mean zero, just below our measurement threshold."
IMO this definition should be on every results page, since most of the pages have more LOQs than anything else.
I love this idea. I imagine it could be extended to other types of testing - for example, I've always wished there was a way to more readily verify whether the contents of vitamins were as specified on the label.
I LOVE this idea. Tangentially, a more pimitive case: in trying to recycle or reuse jars or carboard containers food comes in, I wish there was a simple service for ranking brands. For example, some jam jars have labels that can be immediatey removed - others tear and stick to the jar. Similarly, some brands use excessive plastics and packaging, others less so.
I love this!
I keep telling my euro-friends that food and health regulation could potentially be enforced by the free market more effectively than by corruptible government, and this is a perfect example of this.
I'd want to see all products I can buy in there, with all possible chemical, ingredients and nutrients, and clear indications of good/bad, a little bit like in Yuka. You should partner with them maybe even!
1. This doesn't seem to enforce anything
2. The "more free" market in the US seems to have produced worse food, based on what I am reading here
I guess the words "could" and "potentially" are doing quite a bit of heavy lifting here.
Either way, I agree it's a cool project! The transparency is needed, on both sides of the pond.
I agree "enforce" is a poor choice of words. It does not need to be "enforced" using state violence if any consumer can access facts with such transparency. What's missing today is this level of transparency with which the market will just naturally benefit to producer of sane and safe goods in a much more natural way.
Also, speaking of the "more free market in the US", my answer is that you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism.
> you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism
What distinguishes this from 'you don't hate socialism, you just hate every so-called socialist government'? I know this seems like lazy smartarsery, but I'm genuinely curious whether you think we have real-world examples of countries doing capitalism right -- and, if not, why that's not a bad sign in the same way that a dearth of examples of socialist success stories is a bad sign.
This is great. I thought about a different model even before plasticlist: make a subscription and test various products, but people will have a number of upvotes based on their sub streak. They vote for food to test, and then you show results to everyone subbed. Kind of like what examined does, but they do deep dives into medical topics for subs. I think this model will work better than the one you currently have. Awesome project anyways!
It is extremely weird to me that countries don't do that on taxpayers money and show the results publicly, this is what they should do.
I definitely considered a voting mechanism, but there are a few million active, buyable CPG UPCs in the U.S. at any given time. When conducting some basic market research for this project, I found that most people are only willing to pay to find results about the specific products they care about.
Wow, great idea, simple website and hopefully a positive impact, not often you see all three in one project :) Good job!
I'm guessing it's limited to US products and US labs? Would love something similar in Europe and/or EU, but it isn't clear if you're limited to US/North America right now, would be nice if it was a bit clearer up front :)
This is great. We definitely need something like this.
Where are the safe levels limits to interpret test results? This would be a small addition that would make any of the results interpretable. I had to open the PlasticList website to get the baseline safe thresholds for each chemical and to do some rough approximations.
Blueprint is doing exactly this. I got my cat’s food tested there.
What would be a good strategy to prevent companies from cottoning on to this and gaming the system? They could for example change packaging on production runs for a product that’s undergoing laboratory.love funding campaign.
It's an interesting thought. Companies do change packaging somewhat regularly. However, the underlying skew usually remains the same. Changing the packaging and/or the SKU is very expensive. It's probably cheaper and more beneficial to your company to do your own Plastic Chemical testing and get ahead of the problem.
It is ABSOLUTELY a joke. Downloaded Oasis app last night. My ‘Whole Foods’ water, ya turns out I’m drinking levels above what I should of arsenic, amongst other nasty shit
This is so incredibly important, well done. The problem of our food being steeped in plastic hits the news here and there, but it should be front and center in my opinion. Testosterone has been plummeting for decades and it scares the heck out of me. The hormone whose job is "form goals, shrug off failure, and try again!" is being destroyed and corporations are given a free pass to pump us full of phthalates and bisphenol. It's infuriating.
Plastics could be part of it, but three years ago Cleveland Clinic said it could also be weight, sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep, diet, and alcohol
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/declining-testosterone-le...
And anecdotally, I've still been forming goals and shrugging off failure five years into suppressing most of my endogenous testosterone with exogenous estrogen
Have you had your levels checked?
Well that's great for you, but I was making a generalized statement about the role of testosterone, scientific data showing huge decline, and more and more studies linking it to plastics. We can't just alter a key hormone within the span of a few decades and shrug it off. My levels are great for a 40 year old
And yes there are certainly other factors, but that's not what the original comment was talking about?
Love this! But I’m struggling to understand the results
I'm working on a system that helps surgeons make precise bone cuts during knee replacement surgery. Believe it or not, manual cuts are still the standard in that type of procedure. Robotic systems exist but they are very costly, big, and actually add time to the surgery (bad news when you are under anesthesia and your leg is in a tourniquet).
It uses 4k stereoscopic capture and bunch of ML models to match bone position with sub-millimeter precision. The surgeon screws a metal base piece into the bone, and we detect where that is in space. Then, a Stewart Platform adjusts another part that is placed onto the base. The robotic adjustment allows the base to be placed in a ballpark area, with the robotically-adjusted piece oriented in the exact spot where the surgeon needs to cut.
The net result is a robotic system that is many times cheaper than the least expensive incumbent, decreases surgery time significantly, reduces error, and basically "just works" as opposed to requiring a ton of training. We are debuting at a tradeshow in October.
Thanks, buddy! I'm having fun. There are a few sides to it. There are the actual physical surgical tools that you have to design, test, and manufacture. Then there's the robot that adjusts those tools. That stuff is a lot of CAD and 3D printing. The camera is a big deal and it's a ton of work to get that right. Then of course you have all the software, which is a slew of computer vision models that operate on a local computer in a careful dance of resource orchestration. The software has a lot: UI, grpc services, ml models on containers, inverse kinematics for calculating robot position, hardware interfaces, etc. Then there's a bunch of regulatory, validation, compliance, etc.
To answer your question about expertise, it really depends on what you are interested in. We have some dedicated mechanical engineers with medical device experience. The software is handled by a few computer vision and full stack folks. So there's different skillsets.
I'm a bit of a journeyman and as a result, I am decent across all of it. I always did software and went where the wind blew. It's been 20-something years since I graduated so I've seen a lot. About 10 years ago I got a job I was totally unqualified for, which was R&D for a company that made lab equipment for testing gas and oil. I was solo and had to learn all the mechatronics stuff - CAD, microcontrollers, electronics, etc. Check out this video: https://youtu.be/MA6hnyXx4p4. That specific experience allows me to be the glue in our engineering org.
To work here, you don't need medical experience. We have plenty of that. One of the cool things about engineering, especially software engineering, is that you can float around between verticals. I've learned all about media, finance, petroleum, insurance, waste disposal, etc. The skills translate. If you are purely software, I recommend picking up an Arduino and some motors and building something like a simple pan/tilt mechanism with an accompanying mobile app. Just do it. It might inspire you. I think curiosity and enthusiasm are the most valuable traits one can have.
Building something that combines software and hardware is so rewarding. Reach out to me if you have questions - steve at redefinesurgery.com
VR training hasn't really stuck in ortho training. It's legit and people do it, but it's a distant second to doing it live. I haven't seen that much of it, but from what I have seen, the fidelity is quite low. It would be cool to see what a good game studio could produce.
Doctors, like most people, don't like stuff on their head. Plus in ortho there is a lot of feel to it. It's often referred to as "carpentry". The docs I know, especially those with experience, would prefer a video and a cadaver lab. Even that's a lot to ask because they are so swamped. In every surgery there is a rep from the implant company, and those reps are really the ones doing the training.
So there is certainly potential but it's just not to the point where people are excited about it.
Used to work for a major implant company, we had a cadaver lab at company headquarters and flew in doctors for training. The rep in the OR is mostly just for support. They carry in a bunch of hardware in case the doctor needs to pivot midway through, they may need different sized screws or something. They can show doctors how the device is meant to connect together without bone/tissue but they often have little to no medical training, they are sales representatives.
"Google maps but for old maps": https://pastmaps.com
This is a solo startup that I've been working on for 2 years now. It's a labor of love and I'm very lucky and thankful that it's big enough to surprisingly pay all of our bills. Still constantly feeling FOMO over all of my startup buddies working with AI and LLMs while I plug away at old maps and GIS .
It gets ~80K MAUs and just slowly and consistently is growing organically through word of mouth through history focused communities. I'm currently playing with expanding the coverage internationally as I still only support the US which is a wickedly fun project.
Hey, cool to see!
I'm running a similar but smaller project (5k MAU), my oldest map is central London in 1561
https://onamap.me/maps/London1561/
I got into it because I was interested in the technical challenge of registering GPS to maps which are very warped compared to reality, like very old maps or illustrated tourist maps.
My home page is here for more: https://onamap.me/
I also came across this similar project a while ago:
https://www.verbeeld.be/2024/11/17/using-gps-in-the-year-156...
Good luck continuing to build out the project!
Hey Brendan! I also would love to add Canadian maps, it's been a huge request from my users and something I've been wanting to focus on all year. A big challenge I have in bringing the service to new regions is just data access, both to raw hi-res map imagery as well as to satellite, LiDAR, etc so this is on my todo list to begin digging into what the Canadian government offers. Brave new world for me
Will absolutely reach out to connect!
Nice project! The National Library of Scotland has a nifty tool focused mainly on the UK and Ireland that does something similar (with a paid print service attached): https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/marker/
I love this tool - seeing what was originally on areas. Granted its mostly fields
Really cool! I built the website for an antique maps dealer (Dat Narrenschip) when I was 15 or so and fell in love with antique maps. It's still up and running but now on Shopify.
Over the years I experimented a bit with leaflet.js and thought of overlaying maps too so you can navigate maps through time, but quickly realized it was super difficult. Kudos for setting this up!
If you want to expand to other regions, or chat, or get access to high-res scans, let me know. I think plenty of old maps sellers would love to sell their maps this way.
That's pretty cool, I'll definitely check it out. I've also been looking around for old maps like this.
I also started a small free-time project, where users can download maps as wallpapers for free and put them on their walls :]
GIS is underrated. This is awesome!
Have you looked into speaking with the various SHPOs in each US State/Territory?
I've worked with several of them a fair bit and they have a ton of old maps hidden internally. Especially for small, specific areas of the state, like historical districts.
I've always wanted a map with a horizontal slider for the year, so I can watch the map change as you slide further back in time.
I know that's different than what you're building, but what you're doing is super cool. Nice work!
cool! you might be interested in https://maps.arcanum.com/en/ with a lot of European maps
That is awesome. Of course you can bolt LLMs on to any product, I'm thinking AI reviews of (historical) local businesses to give it that google maps feel.
Around 90% of the maps currently on the site are from the US government (USGS). The last 10% are from public institutions and libraries and this is the newest segment that I'm actively working on growing. My hope is to flip this ratio with time.
I also have a few partnerships in the work with some private collections but those have proven trickier to actually get to a "yes". It also involves a lot of bespoke work to process and ingest each individual source so I'm not focusing as hard on this type of sourcing anymore.
I’m working on an ISBN database that fetches information from several other services, such as Hardcover.app, Google Books, and ISBNDB, merges that information, and return something more complete than using them alone. It also saves that information in the database for future lookups.
Mostly because I’m working on a personal library management service called Shelvica to solve my own problems[1], and none of those services provided all the information on a book. One might provide the series, the other might provide genres, and yet another might provide a cover with good dimensions, but none provided everything, so I decided to work on something of my own (called Librario).
While Shelvica is the focus, Librario could become its own thing in time, so I don’t mind the sidetracking.
I also plan on having a “ISBN Search” kind of website that feeds from that database as a way to let users search for information about books, which then feeds the service’s database, making it stronger for Shelvica.
I open source everything I make, but I’m still wondering if these will be open sourced or not. I’ll probably go with the EUPL 1.2 license if I do decide on open sourcing them.
[1]: My wife and I have a personal library with around 1800 books, but most applications for management are either focused on ebooks or choke with this many books. Libib is the exception, but I wanted a little more.
Interesting! Have you looked into data from Anna (https://annas-archive.li/blog/all-isbns-winners.html)?
Didn’t have the time yet, but it’s on my todo list. I have extractors for Google Books, Hardcover.app, and ISBNDB already working, and Amazon, Goodreads, and Anna’s Archive in the todo list.
I do plan on including a link to the book on Anna’s Archive in the “ISBN Search” website. At least to the search page with the filters already filled.
Hey I'd like to learn more about what you're doing. I'm working on a tangentially related service but focusing on audiobooks. One big stumbling block I ran into early on was trying to find something close to a unified ISBN datasource.
If you're up for it, shoot me an email at charles@geuis.com.
Sure, I’d love to keep you in the loop. Send a message to the email on my profile and I’ll let you know once I have something ready for testing :)
I'd love to get updates on this and talk with you. My email is ben@bookdna.com
We are in the process of building Notion but for books (specifically aimed at your to-be-read list and book log): https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/launch-our-tbr-app-to-...
Very interested to hear how it goes.
I need the search service so bad.
I attempted something like this because I wanted a good books search service which provided me at-a-glance information I needed from Storygraph & Goodreads. The main things I look for when I search a book is genres/Storygraph's "moods", number of pages, whether it's part of a series, rating across services & how much does it cost.
Could never make it work properly.
The algorithm to decide what to merge is the hardest part, in my opinion, and very basic right now. Eventually, I wanna try doing something with machine learning. Definitely a fun thing to work on, though.
Having a full time job and a baby to take care of make progress slow, but I should have the website ready soon. Shoot me an email and I can let you know when that happens.. email is on my profile.
I finally collected the courage to release my operating system into the wild:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400006
I'm super curious if anybody will pick it up and do something useful with it. This was a couple of years of my life and I absolutely loved working on it but having a child put a hard stop to such entertainment for many years. Now, a good 30 years later I finally found the time to resurrect it.
I'm not sure yet if I am going to do more work on it or leave it as it is, it's good enough to give someone new to OS development a running start and a foundation to build on.
In 2023 a friend and I started a monthly dinner club with the goal of eating around the world without getting on a plane. We gather once a month at a restaurant on Long Island for a meal focused on a theme or region of the world. The meals are around 10+ courses and include a drink. We work with the restaurant to craft a menu that is as close to authentic to the region as possible.
Our first dinner was with 13 friends and has since grown into a group of just about 1,000 members. Last year we generated around $140k for local restaurants on off nights (dinners are on Tues and Wed when business is slow).
Now we are working on evolving into more of a lifestyle brand for people who love food. I'm currently working on our clothing line and new site, which we quietly launched a few days ago (there's still a few odds and ends to finish): https://www.deadchefssociety.com. Would love any feedback!
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.
That is so neat. I built something a little bit like this for a simulator of a 3D portal mill. Trying it on real wood got expensive fast so for debugging runs and trials of designs I would run a simulation where the toolbit would hack out the shape out of a three dimensional array of voxels. This was then displayed using a very simple engine built with PyGame. I got a lot of use out of that and it saved days (and a small forest).
Great to see something along those lines but with much better visuals.
This thing I built was in 2006 or so iirc, here is a screenshot:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/snapshot4.png
Apologies for the low resolution, I don't think I have a better one.
Wow the voxel engine work is beautiful! Impressive work man
Yeah, just render to texture, with one instance of cpu readback (for generating voxel data). There are a couple features I'd like to implement that require 4.3, but I'm pretty committed to the bit at this point. Maybe one day I'll have some optional features.
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics/circuits: https://circuitscript.net/
Recently, I have released a simple IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/
The next steps are to create more schematics with Circuitscript as examples to test the limitations of the language and to generate PCB designs with KiCAD. The Circuitscript tool (currently only the desktop cli tool) is able to generate KiCAD netlists and this can be imported into PCBnew.
The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.
The main language goals are to be easy to write and reason, generated graphical schematics should be displayed according to how the designer wishes so (because this is also part of the design process) and to encourage code reuse.
Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
As a big openscad fan I love the idea of designing circuits with code.
I do wonder though about designing circuits vs designing schematics. I see you have ‘wire down 100’ making it a more visual language than defining the nets. Be interesting to separate the schematic layout from the nets, so rule base schematic layout can then be applied.
You can actually skip all the wire commands and still generate a valid netlist, however the schematic might be a bit hard to decipher if there are many components!
I did explore automated layout algorithms for components in the schematics, however the readability and flow of the schematics might not be ideal, depending on what the algorithm prioritizes.
In the end, I realized that the actual layout and arrangement of the schematic itself was critical in the overall understanding. That was when I decided to add the "wire" command and give more control back to the schematic designer.
In the future, I do plan to add some automated way to generate these "wire" commands for automated layout. If the designer ever chooses to edit this automated schematic layout, he would be able to edit the wire commands for finer control.
In the end, I do believe that the visual part of the schematic plays an important role in understanding it. I, too, have spent hours puzzling/being misled by poorly drawn/disorganized schematics. Especially during troubleshooting or creating an updated revision, having a good understanding of the schematic saves time.
One of the aims of Circuitscript is to make the visual part easier, so at least more time can be spent thinking and organizing the schematic itself.
I think it may be a good idea to either enable auto-save or remind the user that there are unsaved changes before navigating away from the page.
Hey I am a embedded sw / hw engineer. looks pretty neat. would love to talk to you about it
I launched Quiet UI this week:
It prioritizes accessibility, longevity, performance, and simplicity.
With the autoloader, one script tag loads components dynamically without downloading the entire library. (npm also available.)
Theming uses color-mix() and OKLAB to create uniform color palettes from a single CSS property. Adaptive palettes are used for dark mode.
All form controls are form-associated via ElementInternals and work with native validation APIs (required, pattern, etc.).
Dialogs, popovers, tooltips, etc. use Popover API for top-layer access without having to portal or hoist.
Some of the more fun components include: Joystick, Stamp, Mesh Gradient, Flip Card, Random Content, Intersection Observer, Typewriter, Lorem Ipsum, Slide Activator
The library is free for personal, educational, non-profit use. Commercial use requires a license.
FYI the browse components button clips text from the next section on ios
From the text ‘What's in the box?’ Only the W is visible
I especially liked the browser frame page. It’s so beautifully crafted. I would move the inception example onto the homepage and up on the examples as it is a good example of love put into the whole project and its execution. https://quietui.org/docs/components/browser-frame#embedding-...
Working on orbital dynamics code for my PhD in astronomy, written in rust, it can accurately calculate the positions of all asteroids/comets to within a few meters. Today I am adding a new numerical integration method which should enable me to predict orbits from observations.
https://github.com/dahlend/kete
I'm working on modeling the motion of observed dust particles coming off of comet 67P, here is are some example 3d plots:
Example of rocks ejected from one position and their possible motions: https://dahlend.github.io/67p_beta_dust.html
Trying to determine possible orbits from a set of observations (the straight lines): https://dahlend.github.io/67p_dust_orbit.html
Shout out to pyvista for making these great 3d plots possible, a little less ergonomic than matplotlib, but it can export directly to html.
Hi, this looks amazing! Can't wait to check it out properly tonight. What are you using for numerical integration?
I did this last month: https://www.nhatcher.com/three-body-periodic/ https://github.com/nhatcher/three-body-periodic
There are a couple of half baked integrators there :)
Its an implementation of a pretty standard integrator used by astronomers informally called "RADAU", but it is not exactly the same RADAU you would find elsewhere. Basically it is about as good as you can typically get for multi-step integrators, tuned for speed not precision though.
Note that how the code is laid out you cant really simulate non-solar system masses. Its really aimed at massless objects in the solar system, your 3-body simulations are actually quite difficult to do given the design.
I suggest the appendix of the arxiv paper if you want to see some of the math required for solar system objects beyond simple Newtonian gravity (like Relativity corrections). I wrote that section specifically because I found it a pain in the ass to source those equations in literature.
I'm working on Typegres, a new data layer for the modern stack (TypeScript + PostgreSQL).
My take is that for years, ORMs have hidden the power of PostgreSQL behind generic, database-agnostic abstractions. This made sense in 2010, but now it's a bottleneck.
Typegres rejects this. It's a "translator, not an abstraction," designed to express the full power of PostgreSQL (all statements, built-in functions, etc.) in a type-safe TypeScript API.
The latest killer feature my take of "object-relational mapping done right": class-based models with methods that are actually composable SQL expressions. This lets you extend your tables with expressive logic and fully-composable relations.
It's easier to show than tell. Take a look: https://typegres.com/play
Interesting! have u taken a look at safeql? https://safeql.dev/
I'm personally not a fan of query builders for SQL. it's already a defined language, why are we trying to move away from queries? On top of that SafeQL is only a dev dependency, there's no abstraction. it gets ran through any query client you want
Thanks for the great points and link to SafeQL! I'm a big fan of its approach to bringing type safety to raw SQL strings. For static queries, it's a fantastic solution.
My take is that while "Just use SQL" is healthy pushback against heavy ORMs, a good query builder solves two fundamental problems that raw SQL can't in the application context:
1. Dynamic composition: A query builder is the macro system that SQL is missing. The moment you need to build a query programatically (e.g., conditional filters or joins) you're left with messy/unsafe string concatenation
2. Handling Relations (and other common patterns): Using raw SQL, a complex query with JOINs returns a flat list of rows that now becomes the application's job to properly denormalize. It greatly reduces cognitive load to think in terms of relations, not just join conditions.
Again, showing is stronger than telling. To illustrate, I'd urge you to go through the first couple of examples in the playground and think about how you'd express them (e.g., the composability of the "example1" query) in something like SafeQL: https://typegres.com/play/
Neat idea. Would you say that biggest difference from something like Kysely is the focus on extracting common calculated SELECT targets into methods that can easily be accessed when querying? Or perhaps it's more thorough with providing TS versions of all the SQL syntax available? The list of reference fields/methods in your docs is certainly massive.
Thanks! That's a great question.
First off, I'm a huge fan of Kysely and it's a massive source of inspiration for Typegres.
You've nailed the two big differences:
* Architected for Business Logic: The primary innovation is the class-based model. This is all about co-locating your business logic (like calculated fields and relations) directly with your data model. The cool part is that these methods aren't just for SELECT; they're composable SQL expressions you can use anywhere: in a WHERE, an ORDER BY, etc. The goal is to create a single, type-safe source of truth for your logic that compiles directly to SQL.
* PostgreSQL-Native: The other fundamental difference is the focus on going deep on a single database rather than being database-agnostic. That massive list of functions you saw is a core feature, designed to provide exhaustive, type-safe, and autocomplete-friendly coverage for the entire PostgreSQL feature set. The philosophy is to stop forcing developers to reinvent database logic in their application code.
Philosophically, it's a shift from composing type-safe SQL strings (like Kysely, which is brilliant for its WYSIWYG approach) to composing SQL expressions as if they were first-class TypeScript objects.
I've been making and selling my electronic social battery pin badges for a while now (https://hortus.dev/products/social-battery) and I'm expanding the range with seasonal versions like a Christmas mood badge, and a halloween themed ghost badge that's coming soon. I'm lucky enough that these projects have gone down well and are making enough money to fund some more complicated (and expensive) projects that I wouldn't have otherwise had the guts to try. Currently I'm working on an RGB digital sand timer with customizable timing sequences so that you can use it for things like the pomodoro technique - I have a working prototype and at the moment I'm experimenting with interfaces for setting the sequences. I wanted to use a combination of buttons and an accelerometer for this but it's not as intuitive as I'd like so I may end up making a small smartphone app to configure it.
Building an iOS app for metronome sequencing to get faster at playing guitar and reaching "shred" speeds at different subdivisions/time signatures in a single sequence. Planning on adding accuracy indicators and scoring so rushing or dragging can be easily identified when finishing a saved routine. I.e., some post-routine metrics.
I've been playing guitar for a little under 6 years and ran into the common problem among many intermediate guitarists fall into, which is stagnating into a plateau at a certain BPM.
The most effective solution I've found is to take the top speed hit playing a chunk of a lick and simply increase it 20-50 BPM past that limit, attempting one's best to stay in tempo. Regardless of how sloppy it sounds. Then roughly halve that increased addition of BPM, it will become relatively easier to play. For example, if you are stuck at 120 BPM, upping it to 150 BPM with sloppy attempts, then dropping it back down to 130-140 BPM.
I've gone cleanly from alternate picked 140 BPM triplets to 220 BPM triplets in two months after being stuck at 140 BPM for over a year with this method. Sometimes even hitting 280 BPM triplets when I have the focus and time for it.
Even then, I want a more consistent, and variable way of customizing a practice session using a metronome from a hobbyist perspective without using a DAW. With a simpler interface for doing so. As well as encourage with said method above for other guitarists in the pursuit of speed.
When I was 14 I would have wanted to "shred at 220bpm" but today I wouldn't get my wallet out for that. What I really would pay for is help getting into the pocket.
Anyone who can read a guitar tab can play the notes of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder. But simply playing the notes against a metronome sounds mechanical -- the song only comes to life when you get the timings right (both the note attack and decay have to be timed for a "swing.") A good swing will practically force your audience to start dancing to your music -- it's magical! But it's very difficult to learn because regular metronome practice won't achieve it.
If you're measuring "rush and drag" against a straight metronome, could you also measure against a swung time, perhaps against timings extracted from in-the-pocket songs we know and love?
> When I was 14 I would have wanted to "shred at 220bpm" but today I wouldn't get my wallet out for that.
That's fair, essentially why I put "shred" in quotes originally is that shredding guitar isn't necessarily playing fast. You laid out a nice example with Superstition for that.
I don't see why that couldn't be implemented in some way (accenting specific notes and different sustain times).
What would be difficult is quantifying note attack exactly for XYZ's riff sections. I.e., what constitutes a relative baseline pick attack and the target pick attack. If we are using a float and define the "normal" attack as 0.5, then how do we know, for example, the first or fifth note in the iconic Superstition riff is 0.85? Is it empirical?
Either way, that is a lovely insight I will consider. Matching another guitarist's intonation down to a tee can be extremely difficult, but very rewarding.
> What would be difficult is quantifying note attack exactly for XYZ's riff sections.
At 60 BPM, mathematical quarter notes are 1000ms apart. But in a pocket groove, you may notice that every other quarter note is "late", or "swung":
|o---o---o---o---| (mathematical)
|o----o--o----o--| (swung)
Another factor that affects rhythm is note duration relative to the tempo -- you'll want to measure that too.
> Matching another guitarist's intonation down to a tee
I suspect if you study a few groovy songs you'll find there's just a slightly different note grid that's common to these songs (there could be more than one grid!) Teaching this grid (rather than teaching one specific song) will help the student learn to shift notes away from the the mathematical metronome placement. This skill will equip many of them to mimic the feel of their favorite artist by ear.
I see what you mean now. I interpreted note attack as pick attack, which is traditionally defined as how hard a given note is played with a pick.
Yeah, swing usually has uneven subdivisions. Funk is almost always syncopated, and depending on the style, can be a mix of syncopation and swing.
This goes back to how you noted simply using a metronome will give that mechanical, or even a soulless characteristic, to playing a piece which inherently has a soulful quality about it. And with respect to intonation, there's a lot more that goes into that than just timing it right (how hard fingers are pressed on the fretboard, the pressure between fingers holding the pick, the angle of the pick, where the pick strikes relative to pickups, the pick attack, accenting notes, etc.)
I do love this idea of being able to apply some "in the pocket"/"swing" deviation to a metronome sequence. I agree with you that it adds that magical musical quality that people would instinctively dance to.
Accuracy indicators for rushing and dragging are very useful, but equally interesting would be an indicator that checks for a consistent peaks, so every note is played with equal volume. A dream would be if your app can detect differences in sound (fingernails occasionally scratching the string, fretbuzz).
Is there any way to get notified when your app is done, or do you have a name for it already so we can search for it in a couple weeks?
Love those ideas, would be awesome for really nailing down consistent tones. Latter one would be fairly ambitious for me but I'll keep it in mind for future improvements.
Just published the waitlist[1], the app will be called ShredBlocks.
Great instructional video. First place I learned E natural minor with his scale fragments section.
Yes, not a new technique by any stretch of the means. AFAIK John Petrucci takes a less aggressive approach with raising BPM. Funnily, Shawn Lane goes into a very similar methodology >30 years ago[1].
Release engineering for FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE. Major releases are always a lot of work, but this is probably the biggest release in 20 years due to the new base system distribution system landing. (We're switching from "here's a tarball containing everything" to "here's 500 packages", with resulting changes in the build process, download/update mirrors, installer, etc.)
Target is 2025-12-02 00:00 UTC.
Given that this is a major release, there are fairly wide error bars on that; it could be as much as 3 weeks earlier if the first release candidate turns out to be perfect, and of course it could be later if things go badly (but I very much hope to get it out by the end of 2025).
Definitely a massive job. Some FreeBSD developers have stepped up to volunteer tremendous amounts of help (and also the FreeBSD Foundation has paid staff helping out with parts of this) but my best guess is that I'll be spending around 300 unpaid hours making this release happen; I've been doing pretty much full time hours on this in September and I'm really hoping that once pkgbase moves from "need to implement the stuff which isn't implemented yet" to "need to iron out some bugs" I'll have time for other things... like my paid job, Tarsnap.
On the side, custom coloring books for kids using nano banana, started with a project for my son, and its a little janky for some photos but have had some interest already: https://bespokebooks.io. I think it needs to be a phone app to really work for most people though, so that's next on my to do list besides some prompt tweaking.
Notebook to do it yourself here: https://github.com/dbish/bespoke-books-ai-example
I think there are a lot of really fun projects possible now in the child book creation space, particularly as you build tools that they can use themselves (like adding voice interfaces to building a book or story).
This is outside my 996 job of AI Agent/Assistant infra + ops :)
Currently using Lulu because they have a developer api and allow printing a single book programmatically, many places I found either didn’t have an api or required a min order of books that isn’t needed for a one off custom design. https://developers.lulu.com/home
My hope for this project is to get enough demand that I have an excuse to figure out a printing option myself and buy some new equipment :)
This is truely awesome and reminds me of the project that was making a litle one story book with the child as the main character. It was at least a couple of years ago I think.
Working on a webapp for critically think with others about a problem.
The idea is that you build a diagram that contains all the details about the problem and people's thoughts on it, and it's organized in such a way that it's easy to just keep refining, down to the smallest detail. So you build this concrete, shared understanding, and move it forward and forward, until hopefully y'all can make some best decision to improve the situation.
There's a lot to do. Currently working on UX to allow hiding intermediate nodes and still have indirect edges drawn. Want to add an LLM integration to generate/update diagrams via natural language, which I think will help a lot with usage barriers to using the app.
Happy to get any feedback :) https://ameliorate.app/ https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate
I wanted something similar for a worldview. I want an app where I can dump all the things that actively go into shaping my worldview and then when someone wants to know why I think the way I do, I will share them the link of my worldview board. We are not famous people to have our memoir written but this is another way to peek into minds of strangers.
That's a cool idea. Seems like there would be a ton of things contained in an individual's worldview, that it'd be hard to build all of it up. Perhaps when you encounter something that makes you think of some core philosophy, you note it and the philosophy, and eventually there would be a loose picture that forms amongst all the relations.
Certainly would be helpful for trying to understand someone else. Not sure if this is totally appropriate, but it does seem like something that a chatbot would be good at combing through to find examples to suggest why one thinks a certain way about a new topic. You could even ask it about your own worldview!
I’ve been suffering from migraines for the past year and the health system hasn’t been too helpful in diagnosing why. I’ve got some meds, but they’re expensive and not without side effects. So I’m building an app to try and figure out how to avoid the triggers in the first place.
Sort of like a digital bullet journal. You setup some rows of events you want to track, then just tap for when/if that events happens. It’s already helped me spot certain triggers for my migraines, which I can now minimize. My wife has been finding it helpful to diagnose sleep problems. I think it might be super helpful to others with trying to understand lifestyle choices and how it impacts their wellbeing.
About to roll out the beta. Hoping to have a full release by the end of the year.
It’s my first iOS app in 8 years! Learning SwiftUI after UIKit has been quite the shift.
> some rows of events you want to track
Neat.
I also created a grid for habit tracking (for chronic pain mgmt). Day of month across the top, all the things I'm supposed to do along the side. Something to share and discuss with my care providers.
Mine's just a spreadsheet that I tweak and print every month. (Then added to my discbound clipboard organizer, that I bring everywhere.)
I haven't had the gumption to digitize my effort. I really like the physical check lists. Though I've wondered how a hybrid solution might work. eg vital signs added automatically to digital version via Health.app. eg scan printed copy and magically fill in the digital version.
I look forward to seeing your app.
That’s precisely how I started too! But opening the spreadsheet on my phone to try and log something got to be tedious. Especially while actively having a migraine. I figured an app could ease the difficulty a lot.
I appreciate your interest!
Oof, 4 years living with that, I’m so sorry! It’s been so frustrating not knowing when/if I’ll have one, regaining some amount of control eases the pain a bit.
I'm working on Small Transfers (https://smalltransfers.com/), a payment platform that makes it very convenient for SaaS / API makers to provide a pay-as-you-go model to their customers.
You can charge as little as 0.000001 USD per request. The platform uses our own system for tracking usage, which is settled through Stripe. No crypto, tokens, or wallets.
If combined with subscriptions, the pricing can work similarly to mobile plans, where monthly plans become cheaper above a certain usage threshold.
Looking for more developers to try it and share feedback.
Resources: integration guide (https://smalltransfers.com/merchant/docs/integration-guide), a quick walkthrough (https://youtu.be/WQW5fiUFNRk), a Next.js template (source code: https://github.com/smalltransfers/nextjs-starter, live demo: https://nextjs-starter.smalltransfers.com/), an AI template (source code: https://github.com/smalltransfers/ai-starter, live demo: https://ai-starter.smalltransfers.com/).
Do you know https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr? They did something similar.
Flattr was a micro-donation subscription service where users set a monthly budget that was allocated to creators.
Small Transfers is for usage-based billing of online services and APIs. There is no monthly budget, wallet, or pre-funding. Customers are charged only for actual usage.
Customers do create an account and provide a payment method, but they don't pre-fund or hold a balance, and they don't initiate a payment. Small Transfers is an API that allows merchants to charge very small amounts programmatically. At the end of each month (or earlier, if a threshold is reached), we charge the customer what they owe. This makes the tiny charges viable and avoids death-by-$0.30.
It's not a PayPal remake, since there are no wallets, no P2P transactions, and no stored funds. In addition, Small Transfers allows very small charges (as mentioned above), and provides customer OAuth and spending caps.
If a customer's balance is under $1 at the end of the month, we delay charging them for up to 60 days and send email reminders. If it's still under $1 after 60 days, we charge at least $0.50 and credit the difference (after fees) to their account for future use.
Non tech, but I started a sports beverage company with my brother and a neighbor. We are based in South Florida.
My brother and I grew up playing sports and remember the simplicity of home-made drinks we'd take to games that blew the likes of Gatorade out of the park. We aim to replicate the simplicity of home-made drinks with simple ingredients.
Our whole value-add is based around the fact that most sports drinks or hydration drinks contain a lot of junk. We are opposed to the bullshit catch-all that is "natural flavors" and believe in product transparency and honesty. Our products straddle the line between fresh-pressed juice and sports drinks. Our prices are definitely on the higher end, but with scale, we can lower them.
We currently are in growth mode - and currently are one of the best selling products in the top boutique gym chain in the Miami area, as well as going strong in all SoFLA Equinox locations (except for the WPB location which isn't open yet).
We do sell online but shipping is a PITA as overnight shipping costs for cold products are astronomical. When we find a cheaper solution so I can ship around the country, I'll let everyone here know :)
Based in South Florida (Miami-Dade, FtL, West Palm)? DM me and let's meet up!
Great point! I will add it to our site.
In terms of our sugar content, is 16g sugar and 17g sugar, respectively. (2 of our flavors are 17g, one is 16g).
In terms of "no sugar added", it's true, we don't add sugar. But we have natural sugars involved - our drinks are made with real fruit which obviously contains sugars. But we don't add stevia, fructose, or anything like that.
Part of hydrating effectively is adding sugar to your bloodstream as well as salts, etc.. in the right balance in addition to water / liquid.
Pretty cool, I’m sure you’re well aware but I feel like the powder packs are the future here. Makes E-commerce more feasible too. Have you looked into this? Guessing the fresh part rules it out?
Writing as someone that’s switched to liquid iv and have tried LMNT and a few others.
>Have you looked into this?
Yes. I get asked this frequently. I don't want to follow the same trend bandwagon that it seems everyone is on. Stick packs taste fake and often are loaded with non-essential junk (the FDA also doesn't regulate a lot of supplements).
A lot of stick packs are also leaning heavily into "natural flavors". A lot of our customers are people who go out of their way to avoid "natural flavors". If I put something in my body, I want to know what that something is, and I don't trust some catch-all term abused by corporations who put harmful chemicals in their products.
>Guessing the fresh part rules it out?
Correct. Gatorade is my competitor, not LMNT. If you're a fan of stick packs, you can replace LiquidIV/LMNT with half a teaspoon of pure sea or pink salt and a few drops of fresh squeezed lime and/or lemon juice in your water bottle. The end result will effectively be the same but you'll have more control over the flavor and saltiness. And it's cheaper.
Thanks for the response. Certainly respect your direction but I happen to think the trend will mature versus fade away. I know you're going after this certain niche, which I understand, but I don't think most people care as much about knowing exactly what is going into their bodies. I mean, sales and the average American diet proves as much. For me, the convenience of keeping a packet in my bag/desk/car/etc for weeks or months far outweighs the control over flavor and cost. Also usually prefer a tropical punch flavor over lemon/lime and that's more difficult to recreate on the fly (probably "natural flavors" lol). I don't have a workout regimen I just sometimes do work that is labor intensive and it helps me recover. It's usually an unplanned activity and the powder stuff is stable and available when I need it and really that's all I care about. I haven't even looked into the ingredients to see what it is that is actually helping me, but Liquid IV definitely is helping me recover and feel more hydrated than Gatorade ever has. Helps with cramps too, which I just assume is K but again, I haven't even looked. Just wanted to share my "customer journey" as anecdata, obviously no right/wrong path here and it's your company to push in whichever direction you want. Best of luck with it, I will give it a try if I ever see it in my area!
I’m building a daily word puzzle game with a twist!
In Tiled Words you rearrange tiles to solve clues and rebuild a broken crossword.
You can play a demo at https://tiledwords.com - it’s free and web based so it works on whatever device you’ve got.
I’ll be officially launching on October 19th at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. You can sign up to be notified on launch. Starting then there will be a new puzzle every day!
So far I’ve gotten really positive feedback and have around 100 people signed up to get notified. It’s been a lot of fun to build!
Cool idea. One suggestion is to allow a selection box to be dragged around a block of letters. Once selected, all of the tiles in the area could be dragged at once.
That would reduce the frustration of having to move a large chunk of words around piece by piece. It would be better than the existing affordance, which moves the whole grid.
Thanks! I experimented with this but struggled making it feel natural on mobile.
I ended up implementing an alternate solution that I’m hoping solves for the same paint point.
My current dev build “merges” tiles when you connect them to complete a word. This allows you to move them as
I’m going to release a demo with that feature soon. My core playtesters seem to like it but I want to get more feedback on it from a larger group!
playlin.io is super cool! Nice job! I’ll submit my game there when it launches :)
I shared this with my colleagues at work. Got this feedback:
> This is amazing. I could lose days to this.
love the UI! one feedback I have is it would be nice to be able to use arrow keys on the desktop website to move the tiles
I'm creating Comper, an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the company etc), languages used, security issues. There's time-travel, think Gource for all software in your company, and maybe the most fun: a GeoGuessr for code. Select the repos for your team (or if you feel confident, of the entire org), you get a snippet and have to guess where it is. The plan is for LLMs + tree-sitter to analyze all the code and show relations to other systems, databases etc.
My initial announcement got the top spot in "What are you working on? (February 2025)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157056 but now I'm a lot further, there's a website https://comper.io and the company is getting incorporated within two weeks.
Last week I showed it off in the Feeling of Computing Meetup (fka Future of Coding) - the recording is here and the reactions were extremely positive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-rg-FPZJtk
I'm opening the private beta soon, where I mix using the product with consultancy, to get better customer feedback. Not sure if that will work, but I don't have all the features yet for bottom-up adoption.
The video is not loading on FF fyi.
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No video with supported format and MIME type found.
FF.
I'm on the cusp of launching an interior design software I have built with my partner (she's the interior designer, I'm the coder).
My read of the industry in terms of software is that it's split into 3 groups:
1. Interior visualisation (basically 3D renders) which largely target the what-if amateur market
2. Big, clunky and old software tools for professional interior designers working on huge projects, which works well but has that universal sort of mild dislike to strong disdain depending on the person
3. New players who want to replace the old clunky software
Seeing this, we decided not to try to overthrow the old all-powerful project management solution, but rather to replace a single process in the interior design workflow. And of course to do it very well.
I'm currently building Visirya, an app that helps people record their night dreams and transforms them into short videos and written journals. The bigger goal is to use this dream data to create dream cartographies, essentially maps of recurring themes, emotions, and symbols—to uncover patterns and insights across dreams over time.
So far, we've built the video generation and dream journaling features. The app is live on TestFlight, and we're preparing a major update soon that includes a new better UI, and dream questionnaire to help with pattern recognition and dream mapping.
Would love to hear thoughts, feedback, or connect with others working on similar intersections of tech and the mind! If you're interested in trying it out, you can find the TestFlight link on our website: https://visirya.com
Super cool! I'm building in the same space but for Muslims - Dreamstate: Interpret your dreams Islamically https://dreamstateai.replit.app/
I tried your app - it's quite abrupt to go straight to Access Microphone permissions. The voice recording took a long time to analyse, it timed out for me. It's a great idea but didn't work for me unfortunately.
The idea is nice, but I wonder if a generated video can have any resemblance of the actual dream. At least for me, dreams are very tied to emotion, and the visuals are kinda blurry, so i don’t know if that sort of thing can provide any satisfaction. But I know certain aesthetics can feel “dreamlike”.
I'm building a manually curated catalog of games made by the HN community. Currently the collection has data up to the end of 2022. The plan, of course, is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection.
You can browse the catalog at these addresses:
https://github.com/little-book-of/maths/blob/main/books/en-U...
I've been working on a book called "The Little Chronicles of Mathematics, Data, and the Mind of Machines", this is a 100 sections journey from counting stones to thinking silicon. This book is more like a storybook for curious builders. I wrote it for people who love see how things connect, how math become language, how data become memory, and how machines learned to reason. If you enjoy clear ideas, and big arcs of history, this book is for you.
I skimmed this and it looks like a remarkable work, and clearly you've put a lot of time and love into it. What inspired you? What are your next steps? Also, how do you deal with the disappointment of too few github stars? What is your success criteria?
I'm launching a new product for my clock-making business: https://DigitalHorology.com
None of my clocks tell the time.
They're all fully automatic GPS-enabled timepieces. For a couple of years I've been developing, hand-making, and selling these clocks that track the moon phase, the sun's position, etc.
My new idea is the tide clock "NautiKron." It's getting a lot of interest from US coastal buyers.
Putting the marker inside the tide curve would give it a cleaner look.
I considered it, and figured it was more legible to have the hour marker directly under the numbers. People looking at the NautiKron from across the room or who have low vision might like it better this way.
Good idea to revisit -- I'm always tweaking the designs and responding to owner feedback.
Thanks for the comment!
Love these! Where did you get the idea? Would love to know more.
Thanks! I posted the story here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/DigitalHorology?#about
I started a newsletter that tries to recreate the original magic of stumble upon. To feature cool random stuff from across the internet.
I believe the old internet is still alive and well. It's just buried under a mountain of shit.
Nearbywiki is a really neat find. Thank you for doing this.
I love these threads, and always learn or pick up something new.
From my side, I've been working on a multi-lingual first words book for a baby. None of the published books have our mix of languages (which is fair enough, I don't think there is much of a market for it!) and so I decided to create our own. It's just images and then the word translated into three different languages alongside it (like a typical first words book). I used Google's AI for the images, and it has done a surprisingly good job of creating baby friendly images, with enough detail to spark interest.
The other tangential benefit is that I found it awkward to speak in my mother tongue, but having this book helps break that by having me speak in that language and then leads to it feeling much more natural in other contexts with babies.
This is not very technical project (though if I had the time it could easily become a fun project where people select their unique mix of languages and the book gets produced).
If anybody is in a similar boat and wants to produce their own version for their mix of languages then please let me know and message here - I will happily share the Canva file with you (you'll just need to write in the words yourself). (This idea of sharing is inspired very directly by Derek Sivers 'Sharing' idea [0])
I'm trying to make an RF lightning detector small enough to trivially add to my motorbike.
I live in Viet Nam, and driving through bad storms this time of year is pretty miserable, and they happen fast and are local enough that weather prediction is not terribly useful.
There are a lot of problems with EMI. Lots of ungrounded brushed motors everywhere that make the RF bits hard. If I succeed, I'll publish the PCB designs.
I've also got some educational products in production right now, about Vietnamese history. I'd share a link, but my website probably can't handle the traffic right now.
Building an app where 1 pushup = 1 minute of scrolling allowed [1]. We've fiiinally started to grow and reached a whooping $30k in the last month!!
I was literally thinking about quitting in August. My motivation is now at an all-time high - some users have done >8k pushups :)
As always, the key has been the marketing (10M views on Instagram). But we have to improve the product to make people love it even more. So the roadmap is more full than ever.
Just an old hobbyist these days. I'm finishing up the written manual portion of a "breadboard helper" for playing with (learning) electronics. The current "helper" I am finishing up gives you instructions (and an explanation) for wiring up over a dozen transistor logic circuits with the aid of a small PCB + breadboard [1].
Inspired by Forrest Mims III, Don Lancaster and the "75 in 1" style electronic project kits my mom got for me for Christmas when I was a kid.
I hope to sell them and then probably never recoup my investment.
(I'll leave it as an exercise for someone clever to figure out what circuit is being depicted in the photo.)
Very cool! Where's the loopstick antenna, CdS cell, and meter, though? :)
I'm not great at electronics, but it looks like it alternates turning on the two LEDs.
Very much a hobby, but I'm working on a Pinterest alternative built on ATProto called Scrapboard[1]
The Bluesky ecosystem is a really great platform to build social media on and with Pinterest being overtaken by AI content I figured I'd give it a shot. There is definitely not as much content there, but it is of much higher quality and the culture of providing alt text on images really makes search work rather well.
I’ve been working on ZenPocket, a minimalist mindfulness iOS app. https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/zenpocket/id6748869085
It has three main parts: – A simple Zazen (sitting meditation) timer – Zen readings – And the main feature: a chat with an AI Zen teacher, where you can ask anything from Buddhist teachings to handling personal problems.
I built this because I’ve always been drawn to the minimalistic style of Zen. ZenPocket doesn't have notification because I am tired of notification-driven apps myself and wanted something simple and clean. Meditation, I believe, can help solve a lot of stressful problems, and adding readings + an AI teacher helps keep my mind stable.
1. A port of linq-to-sql for Typescript (https://github.com/webpods-org/tinqer) allowing queries like:
const activeAdults = from<User>("users")
.where((u) => u.age >= 18)
.where((u) => u.active === true);
It'll go into webpods (https://github.com/webpods-org/webpods), which is like firebase but with hash chains underneath.
I started a company to grow unlimited eggs from stem cells, based on the work from my recent PhD. This will solve nearly all female infertility and help prevent genetic disease.
Are you making a joke, or is there some use for that? (I would think of all species on earth, chickens are the easiest to get eggs for once you exclude the insects, but lack of domain knowledge means I could easily be missing something)
Not OP but I think there are a lot of people (maybe mostly vegans) who would be interested. I have no thought on whether it would be financially viable.
I'd be interested just because I'd rather use non-animal alternatives if available.
I hope lab-made milk becomes a viable thing even though I'm not vegan or vegetarian. Lab-made eggs would be good too.
I'm working on a new unconventional form of computing called "temporal computing" - as both a PhD and as a fledgling business. The idea is to use delays in time (It's called interval modulation) as the data. I have a video explainer on YouTube https://youtu.be/rXbzJxThgig?si=FYMleAgZ0GMNEqk9. It's a long road building your own computational model and I'm currently looking at Turing completeness, and models of multiplication.
Well, that's certainly an interesting way to save energy in a logic circuit. The problem I see is that you're going to be able to have to save the value in an analog form at some point to do anything other that single bit math.
Perhaps looking at using each transition in a circuit as a bit, instead of level, could be useful as a power saving strategy that could be compatible with existing VLSI fabrication?
I've been working non-stop on my game development tutorial website:
https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/
Currently it mainly focuses on libGDX which is my most favorite framework. I prefer code-centric approach because that's how game development should be in my opinion.
Most of the tutorials are just pure coding with algorithms explanations. My goal is to build one of the most resourceful website for libGDX because it's quite underserved at the moment.
In the future I may expand to other code-centric frameworks and more general game development topics, let's see how it go.
First time hearing about libGDX. Do you have any resources on why it's your favorite framework? It might be useful for your website as well. To sort of "sell" the framework to game developers who have not used it before.
libGDX is not in the same spotlight as Godot or Unity but still popular within Java devs circle.
I'm not aware of any resources explaining the "why libGDX" but here are some differences, speaking from my own experiences:
- Code oriented development, no authoring tool, no drag and drop, just you and the API, which might attracts traditional devs who prefer a pure coding approach.
- Very thin abstraction over the platform graphics layer, it just adds a few more drawing APIs over the underlying graphics API (OpenGL and WebGL). You’re free to build your own abstractions on top of the core APIs.
- Java, while might be verbose, is very stable, easy to learn and has huge ecosystem. Or you can just use Kotlin.
- Once you learn the ins and outs of the framework, it actually has a greater sense of freedom compared to Unity, Godot, Unreal, etc because those engines always force you to do things in their own opinionated ways.
Great, I will check it out, I am a Java dev and always wanted to learn about game programming!
I'm pursuing my vision of "music-i18n": Open source music software that works for microtonal music and worldwide musical cultures.
It's not a from-scratch effort, quite the contrary: I'm trying to tie in existing music standards (MIDI, MusicXML, SMuFL, MEI, etc.) and ensure that FOSS systems (MuseScore, Verovio, smaller components) implement enough of those standards to support music-i18n.
Sometimes, this also includes extending the standards themselves when they are not fully capable of representing some non-mainstream musical aspect. For example, MusicXML lacks the ability of representing multiple accidentals per note (whereas MEI does), which is a must for microtonality.
I started down this path around 2018, as a music player who got interested in arranging Arabic songs in a "Real Book" style. It opened a giant rabbit hole that I'm still far from having fully explored.
Now and then, I collaborate with other devs who are interested in adjacent topics. I would love to hear from some of you here!
As an entry point, I recommend checking out the "progress report" I wrote last October: https://blog.karimratib.me/2024/10/01/music-grimoire-progres... - I'm currently drafting this year's update. My main demo is at https://blog.karimratib.me/demos/musicxml/
Building https://fallinorg.com/, a Mac app that organizes your files.
It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder for you.
Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.
It already works with PDFs, text, Markdown, and many other file types. Next I’m adding ePub, and later Microsoft Office and iWork support.
If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Fallinorg can help.
I pride myself on being pretty well organized with my digital life, especially files and folders. I’ve been using Hazel (God Knows, since it's beta). Recently, I realized it has become a muscle memory for me to name/rename files, and drop them where they belong while I'm working on or as it happens. This works for me now because I have a weekly routine of digital chores that picks up any slack and missing things that I missed during my days. Compound this with the fact that I have reduced a lot of clutter, minimized things that I’m involved in. That worked. I did away with Hazel since the beginning of 2025 and I didn’t missed it.
However, I’ve been sheepishly and shamefully looking at either an AI-assisted solution to even do away with the last mile cleanups and organization that I do.
Your text above is good enough marketing for me, and your website’s content sealed it. Didn’t even look further. I’m your customer now. And, personally, have always loved supporting other founders/builders building interesting tools and utilities.
Edit: I just realized this is not compatible with Intel Macs which I wanted to use on too. I didn’t read everything on the website, did I?
Suggestion: Please send me an email after successful purchase, so I have a record.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment and support, Brajeshwar — it really means a lot.
You’re right, Fallinorg currently only supports Apple Silicon Macs. The main reason is that the M-series chips have neural engines and very high memory bandwidth, which makes the AI models run fast and efficiently. On Intel Macs the performance just isn’t the same, but I do want to explore ways to bring a great experience there too. If you’d prefer a refund in the meantime, just let me know and I’ll send it right away — no worries at all.
Also, thank you for pointing out the email confirmation — I’ll definitely add that.
I noticed you mentioned using Hazel for years and building up muscle memory with rules. Right now, Fallinorg is built around content-based AI classification rather than rules. But rules can give a lot of precision and flexibility. Could you share what kind of rules or workflows you relied on most with Hazel? That would help me understand how people like you used it, and how Fallinorg might evolve to cover those use cases better.
Again, really appreciate your support and feedback.
No Refunds. I’ll use it with a Silicon Mac.
Some of the key uses that I remember with Hazel were;
- Of course, cleaning the Trash, Downloads, and the “tmp” folder to either delete or mark as old for me to attend to during my digital chore sessions.
- Syncing a backup copy of all Work-Related Google Workspace, which is pre-converted to Open File Formats (I use InSync for this.)[1]
- Screenshots older than a set day to be archived into the Pictures Backup folder. They are yearly for now. So, I have almost all screenshots I ever took, since 2022, in their yearly folder (YYYY). Each year is less than 1GB, so I’m fine with the storage.
This might be what I've been looking for. On the first of every month I have Hazel put everything in ~/Downloads/yyyy-mm (previous month), with the intent to move each file to the correct project/area folder in my actual file structure. But I'm about 1.5 years behind on that...
Have you looked at competitors? If so, what are they? I haven't found anything that does this as elegantly as Fallinorg.
Thanks for sharing, jonpurdy — I know how fast that backlog can build up!
Most tools I’ve seen (like Sparkle) sort by file name, but that only works if names are clear. Fallinorg looks inside the file itself, so it understands what the content is about before sorting. I haven’t found another Mac app doing that.
Curious — if Fallinorg could automatically handle your ~/Downloads/yyyy-mm folders each month, would that take care of the backlog for you?
Thanks Jon, Custom categories are available starting with version 3.0 beta. To add one, open Fallinorg Settings → Add New Category. Then enter a name, description with keywords or sample sentences, and make sure the destination folder is set correctly.
Could you please check in the About section which version of the app you’re running?
This is perfect for cleaning out my Downloads folder and adhering to the Johnny Decimal system (as a first pass, anyway). Neat!
Glad it looks useful! Downloads, Desktop folders get messy fast, so it’s perfect for a first clean-up.
How do you usually decide where each file goes in your Johnny Decimal system? I’d love to hear your workflow. Thank you :)
I’m building https://www.kidcarekit.com, a Rails SaaS for family-run daycare centers that still juggle spreadsheets and phone calls. It wraps waitlist management, enrollments, and Stripe billing into a single dashboard with Tailwind + Hotwire on the front, Devise for auth, and Azure Blob for logos. Solid Queue handles scheduled jobs like weekly tuition and late fee automation so owners get predictable cash flow without hand-cranking invoices, while MailerSend keeps parents in the loop.
Right now I’m polishing the onboarding flow so new centers can import families, configure their billing cadence, and connect Stripe in under ten minutes. Next up is richer analytics (occupancy tracking and revenue health) and rolling out a guided setup for late fee policies. If you’re running childcare ops or know someone who is, I’d love feedback on the workflow pain points you still feel daily.
I launched two apps for visionOS 26 this month:
Metaballs: Spatial, which is a really fun interactive sculpting app. Brand new app. Fast-follow update this week adds USDZ and STL export! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metaballs/id6748781900
Vibescape: an immersive meditation app. This one is currently featured at the top of the App Store, yay! Launched as a day one app on Vision Pro, new update has what I think is the best immersive environment I've made yet that comes alive with music: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vibescape/id6476827678
I'm also working on the next episode of Ice Moon — a YouTube series I'm doing on how to build immersive environments for Apple Vision Pro: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHA_sJmXyiktWkqLnHEUj1k5h...
I'm working on Macscope (https://macscope.app), a better Cmd+Tab for macOS. I built it because macOS window management feels slow compared to the keyboard-driven speed of a terminal or code editor.
It augments your existing muscle memory: a quick tap of a shortcut switches apps like normal, but holding it opens a powerful interface with features like:
Unified Search: Instantly find any window, app, or browser tab.
Scopes: Save and restore entire window layouts for different projects (perfect for after you unplug a monitor).
Placement Modes: Snap windows to screen halves as you switch to them.
The goal is to make the OS feel as fast as my other tools. I'm always looking for feedback on how to make window management less frustrating!
I have made a Bürgeramt appointment finder. It was down for a few weeks after the city of Berlin changed its anti-bot measures. I just released an updated version that works again: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/appointment-finder
My citizenship wait times page (https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/citizenship-wait-times) has also gotten enough feedback to be useful since its release last month. I'd like to make it more useful with better visualisations.
Now I'm working on another iteration of my health insurance calculator (https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/health-insurance-calculator). It's kind of a big deal both because it's a huge financial decision for recent immigrants, and because it funds a big chunk of all the free stuff I'm putting out. This is especially important with ChatGPT and AI summaries halving my traffic. This iteration will recommend health insurance combinations that work for a visa application and for a long-term stay in Germany. It will provide far better explanations.
At the same time, I'm testing a new insurance broker with far shorter response times, so people can directly ask an expert to help them choose. They're reachable via Whatsapp, and that made a huge difference in how people get advice. It worked so well that I want to do the same for other topics. I'm already talking with an immigration lawyer who's interested.
Working on a personal recruiter / talent agent for my smartest dev/product/design friends (and theirs) https://www.hedgy.works
Key problems we're solving:
- Everyone wants to be doing meaningful, fun work that feels like their "life's work". Few feel like they are.
- In recruiting, the AI spam problem is real and only getting worse, essentially killing the cold application pipeline. You need a referral.
- Optimizing your career feels like annoying politicking for a lot of the most talented folks who just want to focus on building cool stuff. But, as an employee, if you don't test the market (e.g. take a recruiter conversation) from time to time, your comp can really stagnate.
I left my job to work on my side project (MCP-B: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403) full time. I set out with the goal of making the ability to vibecode a webMCP server for your website and inject it via userscript.
While building that, I basically wrote a modern version of Tampermonkey with its own marketplace built in. So you can vibe code any userscript and publish it to the marketplace all within the extension.
The automation stuff is still the core value-prop, but this is a fun bonus feature while I work on solidifying the automation features.
I'm writing a HN post for it. Excited to show everyone in a couple weeks here.
Full-time indie dev breathing life into next-gen terminals [0]. This is my lifelong career ambition.
If you can't afford early access, please email me and I'll grant you a free copy: I need all the feedback I can get!
As someone who's curious (I see lots of room for improvement in terminals!), I can't tell what this does from the website, other than the ability to load and view 3d models.
Ah right, that’s just the “wow factor” hook. If you scroll down a smidge you’ll see a 3-minute video trailer.
The Media page also has a 15-minute demo comparing Terminal Click against suckless.
Of course I just need to do a better job telling you what we’re all about without the need to watch videos.
I'm working on Blobcache. https://github.com/blobcache/blobcache
Blobcache is content addressed storage, available over the network. Blobcache allow nodes to securely produce and consume storage. Configuration in similar to SSH, drop a public key in the configuration, and you're done. Blobcache is a universal backend for E2E encrypted applications.
Docs - https://github.com/blobcache/blobcache/blob/master/doc/0.0_B...
I'm also working on Got Version Control https://github.com/gotvc/got
Got uses Blobcache for storing file data.
Got is like Git, if you fixed all the problems with storing large files and directories in Git. There's no "large files provider" to configure separately. All the data for a commit goes to the same place. Got also encrypts all the data you put in it, E2E. If you've run into problems putting your whole home directory in Git, you might have more luck with Got.
Both projects are GPL licensed, FOSS. Contributions welcome.
I'm finally organising 20 years of voice notes. Some were quite outdated - I probably no longer need the mozzarella cheese I reminded myself to buy in early 2008.
To organize them, I'm writing a Python Qt application with Claude Code. It started off as vibe coding, but I'm now developing it using processes very similar to those I would use when managing software teams. I've picked up a lot of good tips about that here on HN. I've got Whisper, and fallback online services, transcribing the audio and summarizing it and adding tags. After much UI experimentation, I've landed on something that looks not unlike an email client, with tags in the left pane, a center pane which lists transcriptions and notes about each audio file, and a right pane with more detailed information about the selected audio file.
Next step is to serve it all as a model context protocol server - I need to pick an agent.
I've been building https://resolver.one - a DNS server that returns GeoIP data as TXT records. Query an IP directly as the hostname (e.g. dig TXT 8.8.8.8.rslvr.one) and get back country, ASN, etc.
Always been fascinated by repurposing established protocols for unintended uses - DNS is everywhere, passes through firewalls, and has built-in caching. Seemed like a fun way to deliver location data without HTTP APIs.
Super niche, definitely a bit odd, but that's the appeal.
Neat idea, even if it doesn't end up going anywhere.
Out of curiosity, are you able to share what your source of data is? Isn't GeoIP data typically licensed?
I work for IPinfo, focusing on data adoption and supporting the wider use of our free services.
The dataset the user is accessing (IPinfo Lite) is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and does not come with an End User License Agreement (EULA).
Most free IP geolocation databases in the market do include restrictive EULAs. These usually require each individual user to register, obtain their own copy of the database, and limit usage to themselves only. In many cases, sharing the data or keys outside of the original intended scope is considered a violation of license agreement. Because of these restrictions, some providers also offer paid redistribution licenses, which can be expensive and typically targeted at enterprises.
Our approach is different. By licensing IPinfo Lite under CC-BY-SA 4.0 WITHOUT an EULA, we allow anyone to share or redistribute the data freely, as long as proper attribution is given. The goal is twofold:
- Make it easier for projects to use the data without legal barriers.
- Ensure that any questions or issues about the data are directed to us rather than to project maintainers.
Data source is IPinfo Lite MMDB file, which seems to be offered freely without restrictions. I'd love to offer comprehensive GeoIP attributes but I'm afraid to even ask how much the DB download of that costs... I'm working on supporting new data sets now like security CVEs, shodan integration, etc.
LLMRing
is a unified interface across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Ollama - same code works with all providers.
Use aliases instead of hardcoding model IDs. Your code references "summarizer", and a version-controlled lockfile maps it to the actual model. Switch providers by changing the lockfile, not your code.
Also handles streaming, tool calling, and structured output consistently across providers. Plus a human-curated registry (https://llmring.github.io/registry/) that I (try to) keep updated with current model capabilities and pricing - helpful when choosing models.
An MCP server and client are included, as well as the ability to help you define your aliases/models with an interactive chat.
It's a thin wrapper on top of the downstream providers, so you are talking directly to them. And it also comes with a postgres-backed open source server to store logs, costs, etc.
MIT licensed. I am using it in several projects, but it's probably not ready to be presented in polite society yet.
Continuing to do a lot of historical review of early AI stuff. Just finished the Semantic Information Processing[1] book edited by Marvin Minsky, and now I'm reading Volume 1 of the Parallel Distributed Processing[2 book by Rumelhart and McClelland. After that, I have Principles of Semantic Networks[3] by John F. Sowa queued up.
Along with all of that, still working on a lot of stuff using Jason[4] / AgentSpeak[5]. I created a fork[6] of Jason that is meant to be easier to integrate with Spring Boot, and to take more of a "run headless on a server" approach, which meant taking out references to a Swing based in-process logging/management tool. In place of that, I'm implementing a JMX based management interface, and recently I've started to work on replacing the old Swing app with a JavaFX app that can connect using JMX Remoting.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Information-Processing-Marvi...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Distributed-Processing-Vol-F...
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Semantic-Networks-Explorat...
[4]: https://github.com/jason-lang/jason
I love this! If you want to do a short book club or do a review after each book, I'm very down!
It's funny you say that. I already do run a weekly "book club" group, but it's at work at my $dayjob employer. And, for various reasons, we've drifted away from the book focus and turned into a more presentation/discussion oriented group. But I still love to read physical books, and wouldn't be opposed to trying to come up with something to structure some discussion around some of these "outside of work" readings that I do.
If you want, drop me and email (prhodes@fogbeam.com) and maybe we can set something up.
I built a free & open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe
- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser
- Live PDF preview + instant download
- VAT support (EU-friendly)
- Shareable invoice links
- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency
- Multiple templates (incl. Stripe-style)
- Mobile-friendly
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features!
How are you planning to generate revenue? My concern will fully free services is that they often don't exist after 3-4 years. Then I have to find another invoice generator. Sticking to WaveApps for now, but this is looking great actually and I'd consider using it.
It’s completely open-source, so it’s easy to fork and self-host if you want to avoid lock-in. I originally built it for myself and don’t have plans to monetize it. Even if I do in the future, the current version will always stay free and without sign-up. Any monetization would come as a separate pro version with extra features, not by removing what’s already available =)
I'm still working on DocSpring (which I launched on HN in 2017 as "FormAPI"). It's a tool where you can drag-and-drop fields onto a PDF to create a template, then post data to our API to generate PDFs. We also support e-signatures and hostable forms.
It's still going well, and I've been making a ton of progress lately by using AI agents. I'm very excited to launch my new homepage and pricing soon, plus some other really cool side projects that I've built.
I'm quite proud of this renaming tool as well: https://docspring.github.io/renamify/
I just finished some new features today and launched v0.5.0. The VS Code extension and MCP server are both really handy. I've been using them for quite a few different renames lately. This is one I did today: https://docspring.github.io/renamify/case-studies/deploy-req...
I've been working on a map that shows which neighborhoods in a city are nice/not nice with a short description.
Whenever I visit a new city, just looking at Google Maps is pretty meaningless - it's just a bunch of gray land and streets. I end up looking up Reddit posts for where to go, searching for crime maps, trying to find annotated maps, etc. to get a better idea of where to visit in a city (or even live, like when I had moved to Austin). AI generated scoring and descriptions, while imperfect, have already helped me when visiting SF recently. Early stage, so please help with submitting corrections, if you'd like!
I have a similar problem where I want map-type data, but it's subjective reviews that couldn't go in OSM directly.
Are you using OSM's nodes and relations and such as foreign keys for your own overlay, or just lat/long?
I'm working on a partition-oriented declarative data build system. The inspiration comes from working with systems like Airflow and AWS step functions, where data orchestration is described explicitly, and the dependency relationships between input and produced data partitions is complex. Put simply, writing orchestration code for this case sucks - the goal of the project is to enable whole data platforms to be made up of jobs that declare their input and output partition deps, so that they can be automatically fulfilled, enabling kubernetes-like continuous reconciliation of desired partitions.
This means, instead of the answer to "how do we produce this output data" being "trigger and pray everything upstream is still working", we can answer with "the system was asked to produce this output data partition and its dependencies were automatically built for it". My hope is that this allows the interface with the system to instead be continuously telling it what partitions we want to exist, and letting it figure out the rest, instead of the byzantine DAGs that get built in airflow/etc.
This comes out of a big feeling that even more recent orchestrators like Prefect, Dagster, etc are still solving the wrong problem, and not internalizing the right complexity.
Very much agree that to this is the direction data orchestration platforms should go towards - the basic DAG creation can be straightforward, depending on how you do the authoring - (parsing SQL is always the wrong answer, but is tempting) - but backfills, code updates, etc are when it starts to get spicy.
I think this is where it gets interesting. With partition dependency propagation, backfills are just “hey this range of partitions should exist”. Or, your “wants” partitions are probably still active, and you can just taint the existing partitions. This invalidates the existing partitions, so the wants trigger builds again, and existing consumers don’t see the tainted partitions as live. I think things actually get a lot simpler when you stop trying to reason about those data relationships manually!
Work continues for me on Rad[0]. It's a programming language designed specifically for CLI scripts. I was sick of writing Bash scripts and thought we could do much, much better, so that's the goal with this project. Been working on it for a bit over a year now, and I'm using it every day! Still have many big features in mind, such as commands, I suspect I'm still only at the beginning at this journey!
I'm working on an audiobook service (currently for myself) that will fill in major missing features for platforms like Audible.
- Ignore AI voiced books
- Show me unread books in series that I have in my library
- Experimenting with better search. I have experience with building semantic search systems and have been highly disappointed with Audible's extremely sub-par search capabilities. I want results that are actually based on books, authors, and narrators that I have already purchased, read, or listened to.
- Get automatic notifications when new books from authors and narrators that I subscribe to become available.
There's at least a few more gripes I want to address, but these are the high priority ones that come to mind right now.
>- Ignore AI voiced books
My biggest issue these days, is that after spending 1000 hours messing around in eleven labs, almost all female american audiobook narrators sound AI generated to me. I feel like as a demographic they must have sold a lot of voice recordings to the platform for analysis. I have DNR'ed a few audiobooks recently due to this.
Continuing to build https://crucialexams.com/, a platform that helps people prepare for IT certifications like CompTIA, AWS, and Microsoft/Azure. It offers realistic practice tests and study tools. I also have partnered with educators and universities who now offer it to their students and get dashboards to review student progress and identify where they are struggling.
I am working on FastFileLink (https://fastfilelink.com/), yet another file-sharing CLI/app that uses WebRTC for P2P transfer but exposes HTTPS links, making it compatible with browsers and tools like curl/wget.
It's ~90% production-ready. We use it internally to move files between containers and hosts (especially when volumes aren't mounted), and for WFH employees to exchange large files without a relay server. For huge files, there's resumable upload to our infra-backed server — fast global downloads included.
The CLI will also support receiving files via WebRTC, but that feature hasn't been released yet. It is open source (https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl), but the README hasn't been updated yet and the code is not synced with the latest version (working on these).
Another production-used tool I'm working on is MailTrigger (https://www.mailtrigger.net/) — a programmable SMTP server that turns any email into a message on LINE, Slack, Teams, Telegram, SMS, or basically anything. If your app can send email, it can trigger multi-channel notifications with zero extra code.
Think of it as “SMTP to Anything,” or an email-native IFTTT/Zapier.
It supports JS and WASM for preprocessing, routing, and automation — you can write custom logic, auto-reply with LLM-generated messages, or forward alerts intelligently. We use it for price drop alerts, server health monitoring, and integrations with Jenkins/Sentry to push incidents to our DevOps Telegram channel.
Also experimenting with LLM-assisted rule creation: you can define notification logic in natural language instead of writing code — for example, auto-reply with an LLM-generated joke or handle customer support queries dynamically.
Docs are more complete than the website (which is still evolving), and the pricing page is currently a placeholder. Already running in production for us and a few early adopters.
Working on real-time log visualization platform with wallboard/tv support, initially inspired by Logstalgia:
Launched the initial version a couple of weeks ago and making good progress, trying to share as much of the process as I can on X.
Backend API can be used by any client, but I also built an open source agent in Go that makes setup really easy.
Currently working on a proper log viewer, alerts and visualization improvements.
It's been a while since I've used CloudWatch myself. How would you expect this? IE would you lean more towards having a lambda/firehose that forwards events to to the API (which is [public](https://tailstream.io/docs/api) by the way!) or would you expect some kind of agent / connector to run that automatically pulls the logs from CloudWatch?
I am working on PicPickr.
It is a desktop app built with Electron and React. I built to help newlywed couples to quickly sort thousands of wedding photos with a Tinder style swipe UI. It is offline first, fully private, and offers one click export of your selected pictures.
I started building it earlier this year after going through my own wedding photo experience and realizing how overwhelming it can be. I saw my wife dragging and dropping photos from one folder to other and thought there has to be a better way for non-photographer folks.
Right now, I have a working prototype, a landing page live, and I am testing distribution and feedback from early users.
Going solo on
I'm putting a bunch of security tools / data feeds together as a service. The goal is to help teams and individuals run scans/analysis/security project management for "freemium" (certain number of scans/projects for free each month, haven't locked in on how it'll pan out fully $$ wise).
I want to help lower the technical hurdles to running and maintaining security tools for teams and individuals. There are a ton of great open source tools out there, most people either don't know or don't have the time to do a technical deep dive into each. So I'm adding utilities and tools by the day to the platform.
Likewise, there's a built in expert platform for you to get help on your security problems built into the system. (Currently an expert team consisting of [me]). Longer term, I'm working on some AI plugins to help alert on CVEs custom to you, generate automated scans, and some other fun stuff.
https://meldsecurity.com/ycombinator (if you're interested in free credits)
Working on a dutch voting compass that uses real world motion votings as a way to determine which party fits you best. The Netherlands got an open API for this since last year, so it felt appropriate to start using it.
Top man! Thanks, I went trough the votings to see if the party I was thinking of matched actual voting behaviour in the 2e Kamer. It kinda did, but I was suprised another party matched a bit more.
Since that second party also comes forward in other voting compasses I might be more inclined now to vote them instead.
Encoding / decoding hidden messages in LLM output.
https://github.com/sutt/innocuous
The traditional use-case is steganography ("hidden writing"). But I see more potential applications than just for spy stuff.
I'm using this project as a case study for writing CS-oriented codebases and keeping track of every prompt and generated code line in a markdown file: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/blob/master/docs/dev-summa...
My favorite pattern I've found is to write encode implementations manually, and then AI pretty easily is able to follow that logic and translate it into a decode function.
I'm working on Pruno (https://pruno.dev/), it's similar to Dependabot/Renovate bot but it removes dependencies instead.
My team suffers from dependency creep. As soon as your system grows, the number of dependencies skyrockets. In Python/Javascript projects it's especially hard to determine which dependencies are not used anymore.
Pruno saves time for your team by automating this work. It's still WIP, but I'd like to get feedback. How are you dealing with your dependencies?
I'm building a tool shed completely from scratch. Actually doing woodwork (ok ok it was also an excuse to get a nice nail gun) and seeing something tangible at the end of your efforts is surprisingly nice if your day job is entirely virtual.
Building SupaBird.io - reverse-engineering viral X content so you don't have to guess what works.
Here's the catch: most creators study top accounts but can't replicate their success. They miss the patterns.
Analyzed 1M+ tweets from top performers and built AI that doesn't just copy - it adapts their winning frameworks to your voice and niche.
One user went from inconsistent posting to systematic growth. The content quality jumped. The engagement followed.
Not promising follower counts. Promising you'll finally understand what actually converts on this platform.
I have a friend who is having twins. I'm using some new woodworking techniques to make a pair of baby rattles for her. The real challenge is trying to make two shapes with organic curves and precise cuts that are as close to identical or mirror-image as possible, while also hiding the joints.
It's very low-tech. No screens, no CNC, the most technically advanced tool is the digital RPM readout on the lathe. It's nice to disconnect from my screens once in a while.
I recently released JazzEar, an iOS app for ear training. Specifically focuses on improving recognition of chord progressions you would hear in jazz standards.
Now I'm working on a smaller app for jazz musicians to manage their tune list and act as a tool to help practice and review tunes. I wanted this app to tell me what tunes on my list I haven't played in a while (and might forget), or try different keys or exercises on the tune and track what I found difficult.
I've been contributing to a project called Folk computer[1]. It's focused on creating a physical medium for computing (think printing out a program, which is then tracked by the computer. There's some really cool spatial interaction that happens). Folk v2 is currently in development, so I've been digging into the guts of the datalog-like engine. It's been a lot of fun to pick up C and see it applied to a project I can directly interact with!
I'm still working on Danger World (https://danger.world), my casual 2D narrative adventure with turn-based RPG elements. Built in Flame, on top of Flutter for iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS.
We're getting close! It's just a matter of polishing and polishing and polishing, but I'm really excited about how close we are to launch.
Building Evidentia – platform for scientific knowledge that never gets published
Science's most valuable output never gets published. Negative results, failed replications, protocol details etc. all vanish into the file drawer. This means that the public body of knowledge is slow and also often wrong.
The cost: 70% of researchers can't reproduce published findings. Only 6 of 53 landmark cancer studies replicated. Industry wastes $28B annually re-validating work that doesn't hold up.
We're building a platform to capture what gets lost. Scientists share the details papers omit: failed antibodies, critical protocol tweaks, replication attempts. AI + a graph DB structures it into queryable data. Contributors get DOIs so it counts as real academic credit.
Been testing with beta users for 2 weeks. Opening up waitlist now: https://evidentia.bio/
Key challenge: will scientists share without traditional publication incentives? Early signal says yes (especially younger researchers), but needs to scale.
Feedback welcome, especially on keeping it alive (avoiding the "data graveyard" problem) and monetization.
Trying to re-legalize "neighborhood commercial" by right in the city I live in. Things like corner stores or small barber shops or coffee shops or converted restaurants. ACUs or Accessory Commercial Units, home conversions... different ways of doing it.
Great. I assume you live in the US ? Your urban planning law are atrocious. In countries like thailand for instance it's very common to have a shop in the house. Things go nicely and it's more lively. Good luck, that a good project at the root of so many issues
If you have a shop in a house in Thailand and a crazy person decides he likes the shop and stays in front of it all day yelling, in Thailand, the people in the house call the police, who make the crazy person leave. In the US, every person, crazy or not, has Freedoms and Rights, and the police won't do anything to help the people in the house because it would be wrong according the the US way of thinking to curtail the Rights and Freedoms of the crazy person (who is yelling all day near the shop, which is very near the house).
Consequently, owners of houses in the US try to make it as boring as possible and as useless as possible for any crazy person, homeless person or group of teenagers to hang around near the house. One way they do this is to make sure the house is surrounded only by other houses, trees, parking spaces and roads (and there is not anything as useful or interesting as a shop in easy walking distance).
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is directionally accurate.
No, it's mostly just car-brain where people think that cities should be designed around cars cars and cars, and then if there's room left over, maybe some shops and homes.
So they worry about a neighborhood shop taking up the precious, precious parking spots or causing 'traffic!' even if in reality it reduces it because people have something close by their home they could even walk or bike to.
Do people often yell at stores in commercial settings?
There's some writing up at https://bendyimby.com/ but it's not really 'documenting my experiences'. What would you like to see/know? Feel free to write me an email, I'm more than happy to chat about it!
I'll start with that link which - at a glance - looks great and covers the process of working through local government.
I admit this is mostly and idle curiosity for me but it's a good cause and hope others see your work.
I'm working on a Nintendo 64 emulator made in Rust (WASM compatible).
https://gitlab.com/rusto64/core
No visual or sound yet; still working on making tools to debug the execution.
Live demo of the debugger : https://n64.watier.ca/
I’ve been working on a custom RTOS for Cortex-M for the past 10 years: https://github.com/raphui/rnk
It started as a way to learn RTOS internals, and over time it has grown into something with lots of nice features. I’m even using it in a dirtbike anti-theft tracker I am building.
Also, this month I did a weekend challenge to build an embedded software parameter DSL and compiler. Its goal is to let firmware developers define configuration values, thresholds, constants, and other application-level parameters in a structured, human-readable format, and compile them into binary data that the firmware can directly use.
Happy to get any feedback :)
Enhancing the restorative function of sleep, without altering sleep time.
Our patent-pending neurostimulation builds on over a decade of research in slow-wave enhancement, and more than 50+ published peer-reviewed papers.
Today we're building our last 3D printed unit. In October we start our first tooling run.
I'm working on top down shooter for the browser (co-op to come) https://www.demoncleaners.com/
This uses phaser, standard web tech, wasm (built from Go engine running on server).
Trying to build browser games that feel more like Steam games.
Impressive! Feels really responsive. I feel the controls are a little unusual though: WASD corresponds to actual map orientation rather than to where the character is facing. I find it confusing when playing together with a mouse, where I would expect I can hold W to move forward while using the mouse to control the character's orientation and direction.
The initial implementation actually used that approach - but I got some complaints from people saying it felt weird and I changed it. That was a long time ago during prototyping though - might change it back and see how it feels now (or just add an option). Thanks for the feedback.
I’m building a text editor inspired by ed, but instead of editing files on disk, it edits live network flows. In this model, files don’t exist as static objects—they exist in motion.
Creating a file generates a self-sustaining pattern of packets circulating through the network, and editing it changes the flow itself. Multiple users can edit the same file simultaneously, because the file isn’t tied to any machine—it’s in the network.
The interface is familiar if you’ve used ed, with commands like append, delete, and substitute, but behind the scenes it’s all live traffic. You can even discover existing flows and jump into them in real time.
It’s a Linux proof-of-concept using raw sockets, and the goal is to explore what files could be if we thought of them as living, circulating processes rather than static storage.
I'm trying to incentivize people to build IRL communities instead of AI-related apps because the demand for human interaction FAR outweighs the supply. My platform (https://onthe.town), is basically Shopify for social experience clubs. Anyone can start a club and create events based around bringing random people together IRL based on shared interests. You get your own website and infra that handles signups, payments, and matching.
It's largely based on platform-izing the extremely popular Timeleft app that simply matches 6 random people for dinner. With onthe.town, anyone can create a Timeleft-like app around any concept they're interested in. Some clubs people have created include a golf club (get matched with 3 other people to play golf with), a vinyl record sharing club, a lunch club for biotech networking, and a club to meet other parents for dinner.
There was a startup in my region who got popular with the simple idea of having a website/service that manages simple events, like talks, presentations etc.
I think it started with mostly students using it because there used to be a lot of university-related events like these, and eventually they’ve become the standard platform for that, at least in the State. It was all pretty simple, it managed payment etc. and you’d get a QR code by email or in the app that could be scanned in the entrance.
Love the idea. From the FAQ section on the website:
> Organizers can keep a portion of sign-up or event fees
Isn't this a given? Don't event organisers expect to keep the entire sign-up fee for themselves when they host an event? The website banner reads:
> Build an IRL community. Get paid for it.
I was under the impression that onthe.town will pay the organisers from their own pocket for organising the event, but that does not seem to be true.
Really appreciate the feedback. The idea right now is that you set up a club and attendees pay a small amount for each event, and then we take a small (~10%) fee for selecting the venues, doing the matching, and handling payments for you.
But I do love your idea and it's something I'm pursuing. We are matching people to meet at venues (restaurants, golf courses, etc) and it makes sense for venues to pay to be selected. That money would go to organizers and the events could be free. It's just a harder B2B problem to convince companies to sponsor communities.
Ultimately, clubs will have the flexibility to be run in multiple ways - from free, to business-sponsored or attendee-funded, to even onthetown-sponsored as you suggest.
Most of our jobs consist of working with tools. Yet it’s very hard to get insights into which tools are required most, are growing in your area, etc. So I decided to keep track of tools and technologies mentioned in the data space by keeping track of job openings for the last two years. Now I’ve opened up that data set. Here’s an analysis for jobs per data warehouse: https://selectfrom.work/insights/data_warehouses
Currently a one-man side project:
https://laboratory.love
Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.
This seemed like a solvable problem.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.
Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.
The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.
Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.
So far a couple dozen products have received some funding, six products have been fully funded (five product results published, the sixth is at the lab as I write this!)
You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love