Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
417 points by david927 2 days ago
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
417 points by david927 2 days ago
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
You can favourite comments. But yes, there was a Show HN.
There are not many sites I whitelist for javascript, or even bookmark these day. Really glad I tried your game, it's fun and nicely executed. Well done to you both.
Good fun. I discovered a big though. I could not yet reproduce it, but I managed to somehow have letters glitch out of the Tetris shapes they are in. When I move the tiles or rotate them, the letters are back where they should be. So it's not game breaking, but seems to happen in some case. At first I suspected, that it was because my phone was locked in between, but I tried that and when locking it manually, that bug did not happen. So no idea, sorry!
Ahh dang I’ve had a few people report this but I haven’t been able to reproduce it. I think it does have something to do with locking your screen and coming back but I haven’t figured it out yet
Really great! One of the things that Wordle did that I thought was very clever was having a copy and paste social media preview of how you did. It might be worth adding that for vitality... you could even add an image preview with Open Graph meta tags if you were clever.
Thanks, yeah I’d like to improve this. There is a “share” option when you complete a level but I don’t think it works as well as Wordle’s in terms of storytelling.
Generating a custom sharing image is interesting!
This is something I've gone and forth on for https://threeemojis.com/ as well. I think it's pretty hard to generate a story of a complicated puzzle, in part because the person you are sending it to doesn't have an idea of the terrain you were playing on and so kind of doesn't care. I do see some people doing custom share images with their puzzles, but it doesn't seem to have caught on so much.
It was super fun! Would love a little more space to move pieces around but otherwise fantastic job!
Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
This is a lovely game!
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
___________________
I saw your Show HN post a few weeks ago! Really appreciate the smoothness of your UI and the simplicity of your onboarding, I see how much you have dialed in. I've been working on a daily puzzle game too (it's getting there...), maybe you'd enjoy it https://slab17.com/
Slab 17 is a really interesting and unique puzzle! I love the act of slab creation. It’s very satisfying and the aesthetics are great.
I found the instruction about double tapping a little confusing at first but figured it out as I played.
Nice work!
Very cool!
I solved the first puzzle: -Congratulations! -You solved Paprika with 18 slabs
But this was unclear: -You've solved 0 puzzles! -Reveal Rule -Next Puzzle -View Archive -You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!
I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?
Thanks for the note! This part needs work and I really appreciate the call out. I'll try to explain here to share, and maybe clarify my own thinking.
Getting any of the guesses right counts as a win, and you get different guessing slabs for each guess (this latter part isn't made at all clear upfront).
If you have a rule in your head like "no red", but the true rule is "no red or orange", it's possible that on the guessing slabs those two rules evaluate to the same things (e.g. there weren't any oranges present in the guessing slabs). You could then try the rest of the guessing slabs, which might have an example where you get it wrong, giving more gameplay.
I wanted to give a victory on any subset of 5 slabs guessed successfully since trying to get all the guesses is very hard (especially the first guess on many puzzles), and you can get new information from guesses which fail, which offers some progression. Hence getting "you won" and the ability to reveal the rule (I've also thought about keeping the reveal unavailable until you do all guesses) and the invitation to keep playing.
If you have a minute I'd love to hear from you if that makes sense and if you have thoughts about what might make more sense. I've also tried to consider ways of restructuring the gameplay, e.g. automatically progressing to the next set of guessing slabs, such that the flow here is less confusing.
Thanks for playing, and for sharing!
Thanks! I spent a long time trying to make the core controls feel intuitive and natural to use
I really enjoyed this! wondering about a possible "scratch" section or larger area - found myself spending a lot of time moving pieces around to get enough space
Yeah I’ve gone back and forth on this.
On large screens adding more space would be a big quality of life improvement.
But it doesn’t really work on smaller screens.
So far I’ve tried to keep the experience as similar as possible across devices but maybe that’s silly
This is really fun — have you played with making the tile position opinionated (not agnostic)?
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
Could you expand on what you mean about opinionated vs agnostic? It sounds interesting but I’m not sure I follow.
I like that clue idea! I want to change how the reveals work. I’ll play with that!
I love Patchwork! One of my wife and I's favorite, easy, go-to games.
This is really good. I like the idea of the game and your execution of it is superb.
Great question… marketing is not my strong suit.
I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!
I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.
This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
Wow that is a clean and responsive interface! It feels great on mobile.
Thanks! Yeah I love Vue and Nuxt. They worked great for this project
Great game! The effort you put into animations and interactivity really pays off, especially when first learning how the game works.
This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.
Thanks! I would like to explore different difficulty puzzles in the future!
Im working on https://shoehorn.dev, nextgen internal developer portal.
- self-hosted - backstage compatible (zero change if you have catalog-info or templates files) - cli - event-driven - 15-minute setup - zero config principles - lightning fast search
I'm working on a local multiplayer party game platform, a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. We just won silver at the Big Indie Pitch competition!
- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.
- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)
- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs necessary to play
- The games are all action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia games!
- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking coded and infrastructure.
Would love any feedback you might have!
I wish you luck!!!
I tried this in 2014 with happyfuntimes
https://docs.happyfuntimes.net/
My conclusion was, past a certain number of people no one wants to game
Around the same time was AirConsole and still available
Thank you! Very interesting, maybe 2014 was too early for this kind of gaming, as now the concept really seems to resonate with people and we have been enjoying quite many months of doubling user amounts. But of course time will only tell...
I know AirConsole also struggled quite a lot in the beginning and now in the end they ended up in car entertainment as KPIT bought the whole company. So they don't focus on web/living-room gaming any more
How does this compare to AirConsole? (https://www.airconsole.com)
The underlying technology is largely the same, but our focus is specifically on the action party game niche, whereas AirConsole tries to cover a bit of every gaming genre and position itself as more of a replacement for traditional game consoles.
They were also very recently acquired by an Indian car software manufacturer (KPIT) and no longer focus on web or living-room gaming.
This is awsome! Exactly what I was looking for. I will try it with my friends tomorrow evening. I have multiple failed attempts of building something similar.
Continuing with my retro productivity software blog, Stone Tools: https://stonetools.ghost.io
I was getting a little bored of retrocomputing discourse being so centered on gaming, so I'm exploring the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. I put real effort into learning and using the programs, giving my light-hearted but heartfelt assessment of its form and function for both its time and today.
Using the software inevitably gets me thinking about other things, and I explore those threads as well. For example, "Superbase on the C64" also discusses the legacy and promise of "the paperless office." A couple of other posts got some nice traction here on HN, notably "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" and "VisiCalc on the Apple 2".
I'm hoping to build a strong monthly readership, so I'm putting in the work. It's been up for two months and five posts now, with a new one coming at the end of this week.
That's interesting. I agree that outside of gaming you really don't see much being done with the old systems.
My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!
On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.
Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.
I think this software archaeology / history-keeping is really important. Keep up the good work. These paragraphs resonate with me:
> There is utility in those old tools and interesting ideas to be mined. Recently I stumbled across something that by all accounts should have set the world on fire, but whose ideas needed more time to germinate before blossoming much later. Discoveries like this are not just nostalgic “what ifs” to opine wistfully upon, they can be dormant seeds of the future.
> Computing moves at such an unrelenting pace, those seeds may lie dormant for any number of reasons: bad marketing, released on a dying platform, too expensive, or even too large a mental leap for the public to “get” at the time. I see this blog as a way to explore the history of the work tools we use every day. I don’t do this out of misty-eyed sentimentality, but rather pragmatic curiosity. The past isn’t sacred, but it is still useful.
What's your research process? Do you use lots of Internet Archive material? Do you reference any personal artifacts i.e. old hardware or documentation laying around? Any interviewing?
Thanks for the kind feedback, and I'm happy you felt resonance with those words. I use tons of Internet Archive material, but also stuff from various retro enthusiast sites which focus on specific hardware platforms. Lots of books, I look through YouTube for interviews, and include my own personal history with the machines and genres (I don't want the blog to read like a passionless how-to manual). If I had the physical space for a hardware collection I'd do that, but alas. No interviewing of my own, just research into existing interviews up to present day. The main point is really to let the software speak for itself and see if it and I can be friends.
Thanks! I don't actually know anything about how Ghost blogging platform interacts with RSS feeds, but I get a small amount of traffic from personal aggregation services. I guess I kind of thought RSS is enabled, but I don't use it so I honestly don't know. I'll look into it and see if there's some setting or toggle switch somewhere I need to flip.
Currently working on a take on Pokémon GO + Pokémon Snap but for birding. The goal is to explore your neighborhood, find birds, take good photos of them all. Next month, I'll be doing an event to find a rare bird, excited to see how it goes!
It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com
Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI
Do you have any plans to provide this data to ornithological research groups? I know there's an annual event where people across the nation are encouraged to count the birds in their back yards and report it, so it seems like this kind of amateur birdspotting is valued in the scientific community.
Certainly gamified a bit as I learned from:
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo
1.9m view | 2mo ago | 2hr long (buckle in, documentary by a couple young goofball brothers)
Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!
A tool for creating custom Tailwind-style color palettes for web and UI design that pass WCAG contrast requirements:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
The interface is optimized to let you quickly explore and tweak multiple tints/shades at once so you can customize all colors exactly how you want e.g. try dragging vertically through the saturation curve in one motion to edit all the tints/shades at once, or shift whole curves horizontally by dragging between the dots on a curve.
It uses the HSLuv color space, where (unlike say HSL) the WCAG contrast stays the same when you change the hue and saturation sliders. This makes it much easier to explore accessible colors choices as you know only changes to the lightness slider will impact the contrast. You can also switch from the WCAG2 contrast checker to using APCA, which is meant to correct for inaccuracies in WCAG2, such as it being too forgiving for dark mode color combos.
Note the mobile version is more of a preview and the desktop version has more features.
I probably need to add something like a tutorial as there's a lot going on, but I've added more hints and tooltips recently. Open to feedback on what's initially confusing and what changes might help!
That's awesome, thanks!
I'd also keen to hear from people who are interested in accessibility but don't know much about it too. I've tried to explain the WCAG contrast rules in the simplest way I can (interactively, via the live mockup example on the right and contrast indicator icons that appear on the left) but there's quite a lot to cover.
I’m working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe
- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser
- Live PDF preview + instant download
- VAT EU support
- 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.
PS: e-invoice support coming soon
Ha! I built a similar service for quote generation a couple of month ago: https://quotemachine.cc
No signups, free for all, browser-only, live pdfs, etc
Built it for a friend and decided to share with all, it's just a react app (no backend) running on GCP and costs almost nothing to run.
Didn't think about opensourcing it and I will, why not.
Nice work. I liked the instant pdf viewer. Kudos for your efforts.
Only thing I would suggest is, to support different tax formats (or provide an ability to fill custom tax format name that applies to the whole invoice). Right now, it is largely VAT. In some countries, it may not be relevant.
(Having said that, as a work around, currently anyone can use Notes field to fill custom tax details and hide all VAT related fields.)
I think by this point everyone that is learning a language knows that immersion is very important, however a problem I've had myself is that the content that interests me is beyond my reach, and the content that is within reach doesn't interest me.
This is my attempt at doing something to remediate that. You select the content you want, and I create a personalized study plan to learn the most important words to achieve a target % of understanding. Then I generate a short story each week for your particular level containing the new words in the context of your content.
The idea is to bring the content you want to learn to your level so you can watch what you want to watch.
That's a great idea, and I live the UI! I wish I have some time now to learn Japanese now...
After taking a break from frontend development from a large corporate client. I wanted to get into iOS development to see how mature SwiftUI has become and finally get a chance to build my first iOS app. The result of that: PeekCard - https://peekcard.app
A simple iOS app for scanning (almost any) barcode and storing in the app, or adding it to your home via a widget. No tracking, no subscriptions, just a simple free app that is pretty simple to use and does the one thing I want it to do.
Building my own software has been super refreshing compared to working within a large organization. I really enjoy the path of just developing and it is fun to get into something different than React/TypeScript and Java. It was also really interesting to go through the process of publishing the app in the Apple App Store. Heard so many bad stories, but it was OK. Definitely not great, but not as bad as I was expecting.
Two learnings from this so far:
1. I do not think that I would want to do any Swift development in a large organization. Super fun to build indie style, but I can't imagine having to support 5+ years of old iOS versions. 2. I ditched most social media a long time ago and if you do not have any personal promotion channel, you are super limited into reaching any potential users for your software. I still do not know how to deal with this; I do not have any ambition to go back into building a social following. I just like building the "thing", but just building it is definitely not enough to get any traction.
For the current project I am building another iOS app, a bit more complex, also something I want to use myself. I was considering building with React Native, but ditched that plan because when I am building for myself, there would (I think) be a lot of overhead in testing Android.
For now I really like what I am doing, but financially I think I should consider going back to Java/Scala or React dev for a corporate client :-|.
We have been building https://finbodhi.com/ a local-first browser app (PWA) for personal finance, based on double-entry accounting.
FinBodhi uses double entry so complicated set of transactions and accounts can be modeled (which happen often enough in users financial journey). We wrote about double-entry here: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry
We do use online services like firebase for auth, and some service to fetch commodity prices etc. But all your financial data is on your system (we use sqlite over opfs, in browser). For synching across devices, that data is encrypted with your key before it leaves your device. You can backup the data locally (if you are using chrome) and/or to your dropbox. It's designed so that we (the people building it) can't access your data.
There are many more features, like multi-currency, visualizations, a sheet to use your data to do complex calculations like taxes, planning for your future etc.
Feel free to try it out with the demo account (no sign-in required). Note: app doesn't work in Firefox private mode.
Cool stuff, happy to see that you focus on local storage. How do you handle uploaded financial statements? Are they sent to 3p?
Import is done locally. No 3rd party is involved. We have build custom importer. e.g you can import a csv and map it's columns to what we need internally. We also allow some logic in importer. E.g. to figure if a row is credit or debit. etc. It should be feasible to import most csv statements. PDFs and Excels should also work, except for some complicated cases where a transaction is spread across multiple rows.
There are a few custom importers also, for indian context.
I'm seeing a lot more Firebase spoof spam emails recently in general, keep that in mind as a service if you rely on it for outbound comms
Working on some fun/silly projects.
My favorite so far is: "The Anti-AI UI Test".
After ChatGPT Atlas came out I thought it would be fun to find UI patterns that AI browsers couldn't figure out like multiple download buttons, hidden unsubscribe buttons, etc. So I created 7 levels of web dark patterns for AI browsers. You can try it yourself if you want:
https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui
I found Atlas can get through most patterns, so I created an even more unhinged one (job application form) that shifts the interface and flashes content.
Don't take it too seriously as actually testing AI browsers, it just a fun side project. I documented the patterns here: https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui/about
FreeBSD 15.0. Rather depressingly, almost everything I said two months ago is still true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45419134
But I'm hoping to have it out by the first week of December.
I’ve been working on https://canine.sh which is a free, open source Heroku alternative for 2 years now.
It’s exactly the product I wish I had when I started my previous company. Running on PaaS is incredible for devex but the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases. We spent close to 400k / year for just 128GB combined fleet in our last startup on Heroku.
Canine tries to get the best of both worlds: developer friendly PaaS with no lockin or price gouging.
Just added build packs as a build option recently.
Also got a sponsorship from the portainer folks which lets me work on this close to full time
Hoping this saves someone the headache I had two years ago.
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. At this point it's getting pretty close to being shadertoy for voxels.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I recently ported the terrain generators to the GPU, and increased the visible volume to 1 billion voxels cubed. I did a short YouTube video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLfgjWsM1PI
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.
> Awesome, looking forward to use this
Stoked to have another user!
> What was the hardest part of this project?
Fuck.. that's a hard question. I'm almost always trying to push at least one of three boundaries; voxel engine techniques, engine performance, my mechanical programming skill. Trying to push those boundaries, often in tandem or tridem, is always hard. Different jobs are often hard for different reasons, but overall it's been a difficult project for most of it's existence. That said, doing hard projects is what I enjoy, and it's a great feeling when you sit down to, for example, optimize something, and end up making it 20x faster!
> What motivated you to attempt creating this?
It started out as a learning exercise; a safe space where I could just 'fuck around and find out'. When I started, I never expected to spend nearly as much time on it as I have.
I'm making Easel, a 2D game programming language designed to match how humans, not computers, think about game logic. It also has automatic multiplayer. I've been working on it for 3 years!
Easel feels like a declarative programming language even though it is imperative, because lots of useful game-oriented features are first class. Like behaviours - you just say `on Pointer { ... }` and you have a concurrently-executing coroutine that's lifetime is managed. But you don't think about any of that complexity, you just think of your entity as having a behaviour and go forth and make your game.
It also happens to have automatic multiplayer. Normally with multiplayer you have to worry about doing everything in a "multiplayer safe" way (i.e. be deterministic and only modify the things your side has authority over). My idea was to put all the multiplayer stuff in the programming language itself, underneath all your lines of code. This way, anything you write in that programming language can just be made multiplayer, automatically. So you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you. It was really difficult to make but it makes multiplayer so easy for you now.
Easel is my idea of how games should be made, or at least as close to the idea as I can achieve with 3 years of work, and I would love for more people to try it out.
> you can just pretend all your players are in one shared world, like a singleplayer game, and the engine does all the multiplayer for you
But how does this really work? The website also says it's just baked into the language but there are many different approaches to networking games that have their own pros and cons.
It uses rollback netcode. The inputs are relayed to the other players and executed on all clients, and they end up in the same state because all Easel programs are guaranteed deterministic. To hide latency, the clients simulate forward even before they have received all inputs, and once inputs have been received it rolls back to the point of divergence to correct the prediction error. This works because the prediction is correct most of the time.
To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.
It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.
I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.
That's great stuff! IIRC Factorio takes the same approach but relies on extensive testing to avoid running into desync issues with non-deterministic code. Would be very cool to be able to build games like that without needing to worry about desyncs!
It might be a good idea to highlight some of the limitations to this approach somewhere so users aren't caught off guard later in the development process. For example, it wouldn't be great to build a competitive FPS or MOBA with this because the game state is replicated to all players which is a cheaters dream. The latency characteristics would also not be ideal for games with a larger number of players. I also assume there are no escape hatches for doing any non-deterministic things like I/O so there would be limited to no persistence possible. It won't be an issue for most games but worth highlighting just in case IMO.
Oh, thank you!
I would love to hear more about what you were trying to do with your project before. Was it more similar to the declarative coding part, the automatic multiplayer part, or something else? Part of why I'm doing this is to explore the design space of how games should be made and I'm interested to hear what problems, issues, pet peeves, "bugbears" etc that other people think are worth solving.
It's been a while. But I believe what caused me the most headache while trying to build something like this was handling the interactions between different elements. Declaring which objects were affected by "attacks" or could be "player interactive" or "affected by player but not by NPC". Really this boiled down to proper inheritance. But I found myself so deep and tangled a fresh reset would have been better. Then determining if the object itself or an "objective manager" should perform the calculation each cycle.. etc
It was messy. I ended up having NPC, Item, Attack classes and for each a NPC Manager, Item Manager, and Attack Manager to calculate all their interactions and states.
That's why your project seems interesting because it seems to handle the heavy lifting of behaviors and "behind the scenes".
Porting Ruby to Fil-C
It's very interesting because the Ruby codebase uses a `typedef uintptr_t VALUE` type to mean any of the following:
- A pointer to the heap
- A Ruby tagged value (which may be a pointer to the heap)
- Any integer value that fits in `uintptr_t`
Fil-C doesn't allow you to carry around pointers using integers, in the sense that when you do that, the pointers lose their capabilities.
But in Ruby's case, it's not as simple as changing the typedef to a pointer type, since `VALUE` variables often end up being used for integer math (including bit math, shifts, etc).
So, it's going to take a nontrivial patch to Ruby to get it to work in Fil-C. I think I'm about 70% of the way through (I started Friday afternoon).
Working on a CLI tool called xpire which can add expiry dates to filesystem structures: https://github.com/benibr/xpire Idea is to use filesystem specific structures (eg. snapshots) if possible to prevent long treewalks for searching and store the dates in the filesystem itself not a seperate database. It's written in go and currently supports btrfs snapshots and zfs datasets.
Discovered in-door bouldering / rock climbing and now go 3x a week, am absolutely loving it! Because of that, I haven't really worked on any side projects in a while. Perhaps I don't need to? My job advances me plenty in my field, but it is a bit of a bitter-sweet feeling in a sense, like maybe I should try to squeeze more out of my free time somehow.
I’m replying from the cold east coast (from the edge of a wood chair in a lovely iykyk type of restaurant) to a human posting from el cap on hn; We have achieved peak technology. Oh yeah, I’m working on urban logistics, powered by AI.
I struggled with hand and wrist pain for years from spending too much time at a computer. I did physiotherapy for years and while it helped me manage pain, I was never able to truly build enough strength to get ahead of it until I started bouldering. I took it very slowly—I spent months on very easy problems—but because it was so much fun, I kept going back. Initially, I would only go on Saturday mornings, so I had the full weekend to recover before jumping back into the work week on Monday. After a two or three months of that, I was able to climb anytime I wished. I'm still not a particularly advanced climber, and I typically only go once per week, but I am still slowly progressing, and I absolutely love it.
Couple things to avoid finger injuries: go easy on one- and two-finger pockets, use an open crimp whenever possible (all finger joints are bent the normal direction, and your palm/thumb aren't really involved), and don't bother with the hangboard or campus board for the first ~year.
I wouldn't worry about it too much though - almost all of the people I know with finger injuries were trying to push into really being competitive climbers, not just doing it casually for fun/fitness.
Oh also to keep from tearing your skin don't climb tired. (That won't keep you from typing, it's just painful.)
I’ve been climbing for 20 years and it’s the thing that prevents RSI for me and makes it possible to use a computer too much :). Certainly possible to injure fingers but would be a very rare climbing injury that would threaten coding.
Climbing easy routes in a gym is pretty low impact. It’s only when you start to move into really hard crimps or slopers where you’ll hurt yourself. I was a climber bum for years and have climbed crazy stuff around the world and never hurt myself to where I couldn’t type. A lot of bloody tape, but still able to type.
Try top rope climbing! Bouldering is injury prone because every fall is a ground fall. With top rope climbing you should never hit the ground so way less injury prone.
I love the intense concentration for martial arts, but I had to stop because of this.
I never had a serious injury. Instead it would be minor injuries, that would make my ring finger 20% less responsive, that would totally mess up my typing cadence.
I tried capoeira, a non-contact martial art, for a while. This wasn’t as good for me as Taekwondo.
It's an explorable database of films, TV shows, books and board games based around their historical setting: where and when the thing is set. It's been incredibly complex and interesting getting the (messy) data, making sense of it and trying to design a UI to explore it.
https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-...
This reminded me instantly of Every Frame a Painting's video "Vancouver never plays itself"[0].
Started work on a project to put local history on a map. If I go somewhere I would ideally want to just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.
Maybe it's a story about named local fishermen from the early 1900s, with pictures, the history of a statue and videos of the process, or the state of a graffiti wall over time.
Currently in a phase of UI development and testing, and historical societies outreach for collaboration. It might stall and just fizzle into nothing, or it might be something cool.
Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.
Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.
https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.
It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.
Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
Yeah, that's cool. Currently tangential, but conceptually not something that would be completely out of scope in the end. I'm planning to use machine translations, text-to-speech, and multi modal generative models for accessibility already. There's also an idea for baking in GPS audio tours. Obviously depends on sourcing some quality content first
When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.
Open source was the wrong term (though that would be fine).
I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.
AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.
Built something similar almost a year ago during the holidays [1]. Open-source if you want to check it out [2]. I use the mobile app version from time to time when I'm going on walking adventures around the city.
[1] https://smartmap.ai [2] https://github.com/space0blaster/smartmap
Related to wheretodrink.beer, I just launched a rough version of: https://www.nomnominees.com/. A site focused on finding award-winning breweries/restaurants to check out.
I've been enjoying the breadth of projects made possible with AI, I've cataloged over 200 of them created in 2025 here: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025...
A few of my recent favorites: - swim lap counter in html/JS that uses the camera to watch you swim and count laps/timing - video recorder that records your window/desktop and uploads a file to S3 - video conferencing app that allows a 2 year to click on a family member face and initiates a video conference using webRTC, STUN, and browser audio/video capture with automatic bandwidth adjustments (works on all platforms with pure HTML/JS). - CUDA based ray tracer with HTML UI that can trace over 2m rays per second on my laptop for scientific study, allowing real-time display of optical parts. - chat front-end for image models like gemini-pro and openai that take other images and text as references and generate a big library of options to chose from in seconds, I've been using photoshop for decades but I tend to use this more now.
I have a node middleman that proxies request from an HTML/JS front end to a native cuda process using web sockets. To support multiple windows, the node process process provides communication between two browser windows. This lets me have render a model using 3JS in one window and a ray traced version in another window.
Woah that's a lot of projects. Would be cool if you could open-source some of them.
+1 to this, not all of them of course, but there's some very useful ones in there I could make use of.
Thanks for the encouragement. I do plan to make more of them open source, in the past it's been a bit of burden to document, test, and fix bugs before publishing but for some projects AI can do that for you now.
One project I did publish: https://github.com/jclarkcom/ble_proxy This turns your cell phone into a network proxy, but using BLE so the phone can be connected to a Wifi network (hotel, plane, etc). It's pretty slow, but in some cases you just need a little bit of data to work. I made it on a plane ride where my cellphone had data but my laptop didn't.
Currently working on two OSS projects:
Laketower: https://github.com/datalpia/laketower A lightweight data lakehouse exploration and management app (web+cli), using DuckDB as the default query engine. It can run locally or self hosted, and for now statically configured only. Hope to integrate Iceberg and Ducklake support by end of year.
Modelship: https://github.com/datalpia/modelship An ML model to app generator. For now, only ONNX models are supported as input, and only static website as target (onnx runtime web wasm/webgpu). I intend to also work more on it the following weeks/months, especially to support more model I/O types, and add support for more targets (REST API, CLI, etc).
These 2 projects were born from professional activity needs but are a nice playground to learn and try new things
The software engineer in me wanted a break, but the philosopher and systems thinker wanted to speak.
So I've been building something with no imported libraries or dependencies: a card game that gamifies Maslow's hierarchy of needs: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/nicomar/actualize-this
Each player drafts cards that represent ways you can spend your limited time on earth to gather resources (wisdom, gold, and virtue) to complete your own personal player board (your hierarchy of needs) with the goal of reaching self-actualization before other players. However, you can still win without becoming self-actualized, if you complete more hidden quests (which can only be discarded by the "therapy session" card).
I have to say, i love this. The name is fantastic and the whole concept. It's got a very Game of Life or Monopoly feel where you've just taken the fundamentals of something in society and turned it into a game instead of adding an additional story on top. I really like it.
My one comment would be, I think you need to change the branding a little bit. It's a bit too close to Magic the Gathering, and this feels like its own IP and can stand on its own legs. So I think you need to just adjust the cards enough so they don't instantly read as a Magic the Gathering card.
https://digital-storybooks.github.io/multilingual/#/testbook...
My friend had a cute baby boy and mentioned difficulty in finding children's storybooks in Spanish.
Challenge accepted:
I built an AI generated multilingual storybook, just to see if it would work.
Tap or click the little monster to have it read to you.
Local LLM generated the story, stable-diffusion generated the images, AI converted text to speech in two languages: English and Spanish ( could easily do many more languages ).
I "filled the app out" by adding a simple landing page placeholder, login page and "library" page.
Not very phone friendly, was made for her iPad.
Only the second book currently has a story, the others are placeholder templates.
It may sound absurd: But a website in which people can set their availability on a calendar. Kinda like Doodle. My requirements are: - no account necessary - timezone support - not have to pay for it Basically impossible to find something which fills those requirements. So I am coding myself a handy tool. For what? To coordinate people for the game Foxhole to take responsibility for certain areas so we always have a General Manager online
I absolutely hate Doodles mobile UI, this would be great.
I'm building CommitKit, a tool that turns your git history into résumé bullet points and STAR-based talking points for interviews.
After being downsized twice in two years from senior engineering roles, I realized how painful it is to reconstruct what you actually accomplished at a job once you’ve lost access to your repos.
Each time, I had to dig through memory and scraps of old PRs to remember what I’d built. The first time, I lost GitHub access immediately after the layoff notice. This time, at least we got 90 days of paid transition work. But even with just 5 months in the role, I’d already made hundreds of commits. For engineers who’ve been around for years, that’s an impossible amount of history to summarize manually.
So I’m building CommitKit, a command-line tool that scans your repo for your commits, groups them by feature or theme using embeddings, and generates professional CV bullet points or behavioral interview summaries. It runs locally using Ollama, so your commit messages and diffs never leave your machine. The goal is to help people quickly turn real engineering work into clear narratives of impact, especially when time or access is limited.
It’s still early: the clustering isn’t grouping commits quite as I’d hoped, possibly due to sparse commit messages or embedding quirks. But it’s been a great learning project: my first CLI tool, my first deployment on Render, and my first serious use of Ollama for local LLM inference.
Yeah I really want to add a JIRA integration as well, that would likely improve the output a lot.
I’m terrible at maintaining my resume/cv so I think this is awesome!
I was hitting Claude Code's rate limit pretty often while paying for their max subscription. Started thinking – I've got a decent GPU sitting at home doing nothing most of the day.
So I'm building a distributed AI inference platform where you can run models on your own hardware and access it from anywhere privately. Keep your data on infrastructure you control, but also leverage a credit system to tap into more powerful compute when you need it. Your idle GPU time can earn credits for accessing bigger models. The goal is making it dead simple to use your home hardware from wherever you're working.
It's for anyone who wants infrastructure optionality: developers who don't want vendor lock-in, businesses with compliance requirements, or just people who don't want their data sent to third parties.
Get notified when we launch: https://sporeintel.com
I don't want to get into blockchain-shenanigans but I did love the Folding@home model for democratized compute. Could spare cycles on GPUs at home be used for a P2P network of inferencing?
Yeah! not building a blockchain but we are building a system similar to folding at home (also a fan of that) where if you choose to have your node process others peoples requests you will get credits that you can then use to spend on other people nodes on the network. This is so you can still be able to use models that may be too big for your own hardware when you need them. Overall goal being to prevent people getting priced out of AI and providing and alternative way of accessing these larger models.
Yea that would be the best current solution out there and would work ok for one person with one computer but the average person isn't going to set that up and it isn't easy to use from any device just by logging into a website or app. And if you had multiple machines you'd have to manually load balance by switching between them. Spore will allow you to easily set up as many nodes running models as you want and manage what models they are serving from anywhere, this allows for simple servicing of an organization or your family for example.
A multiplayer falling sand game - kinda like Noita, but faster paced and online & couch co-op - which happens to run on both desktop and in the browser (including online multiplayer, powered by webrtc data channels).
I have a lot of devlogs at https://www.slowrush.dev/news though at this point I am quite behind showing off the latest graphical improvements there.
Here is some more up-to-date gameplay footage: https://bsky.app/profile/slow-rush.bsky.social/post/3m523ft2...
Building https://floxtop.com/, a Mac app that organizes your files and images.
It looks inside each file to see what it’s about, then moves it to the right folder with a single click. Everything happens on your Mac, so nothing leaves your computer. No clouds, no servers.
It already works with images, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) PDFs, ePubs, text, Markdown, and many other file types (30+) in English. Next I’m adding multi-language support.
If you have messy folders anywhere on your Mac, Floxtop can help.
Try it for free - requires macOS 14+ with Apple Silicon: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/download/1....
Looks very useful.
Just for clarity, it looks like image content itself isn't addressed, but rather just any text that might be in an image, correct?
Also: "Your sensitive data never leaves your Mac." Does anything leave the mac? Any metrics? I don't want this to have network capabilities at all.
Correct — right now Floxtop classifies images based on text only. It does not yet classify based on visual objects. If automatic object-based sorting (e.g. detecting pets, buildings, etc.) would be useful for you, I’d be interested to hear your use case.
Regarding privacy: everything runs locally on your Mac. No files or metadata are uploaded anywhere. The only network request is from Sparkle to check for updates. If you prefer, you can disable update checks and Floxtop will have zero network activity.
If you have questions or want to share feedback, you can reach me anytime at floxtop@proton.me.
Fantastic, thank you.
This is already useful. If you do wind up adding image classification, first, I'd like it distinguish photos, screenshots, and graphics. Then, I'd like broad categories, like people, places, animals, memes, etc. Base case is I want sort out my downloads since I generally download something and then not bother putting it where it belongs or deleting it.
It would also be handy if, in addition to moving the items, it could tag them via Finder tags/xattrs.
This is cool! I’ve added these to the backlog—I also think tagging with Finder tags/xattrs is a great feature. Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas!
If you want to stay updated when these features are ready, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter.
You know what would be a godsend would be marrying this app up with the Johnny Decimal filing system
It's cool to see this. I once saw an X thread on this and hacked a dirty tool for it: https://x.com/priyankc/status/1893112673434222985
A 68030 based computer - https://github.com/jeffsponaugle/roscoe
It has been a super fun experience so far - I'm using CPLDs instead of an FPGA which makes the logic a bit more era period. I have a working system now with the math coprocessor, SRAM, DRAM, and other device support.
I am just about ready to get the VGA card I designed produced so I can work on debugging the design.
While this is fundamentally a system that ss less powerful than my apple watch, it is just fun to work on. Going back to very first principles debugging, building tools, and of course getting to exercise an old logic analyzer!
Raptor - a new (Free software) way to build things like:
* Disk images
* Liveboot isos
* Container images (docker/podman)
Many build products are supported, with more on the way:
https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/builders/index.html#compat...
It uses a syntax that is inspired by Docker, but significantly enhanced.
Take a look at:
* The project: https://github.com/chrivers/raptor/
* The book: https://chrivers.github.io/raptor/
Built a local-first Kanban board with Tauri (Rust + Svelte) after getting frustrated with SaaS tools and basic offline options. Stores data in JSON files you control, full keyboard-first UX, parent/child tasks, release management, and it's blazingly fast with localStorage + background sync. No telemetry, purely local. Curious what others prioritize in personal task tools. Seems like there's a gap between "todo.txt" simplicity and Jira complexity.
Cool. Love Tauri. So the whole board dataset is stored in localStorage? If you get to a point where the size limitations or synchronous blocking operations are an issue might consider using IndexedDB. There is a nice higher level wrapper around it called Dexie that has full TS typing support and a nice async API. https://dexie.org/
I’m still using redmine. It allows me to create a project, break it down in to tasks, assign time estimates for the tasks, assign % complete, log time against tasks, which then allows for burn down charts so I can see if I am on track or behind. With time logged against projects I can generate timesheets and invoices. It also has Gantt chart which is handy for initial project planning meetings.
I’m building an AI-powered fashion search engine that helps people find clothes that actually match their style, fit and price across 1000s of brands and millions of products
Most shoppers spend hours to find the rights product. We’re fixing that with intent-based search that understands descriptions, images and personal preferences.
We’ve hit 25K+ searches in 4 months, growing 50% MoM, and built our own scraping system that makes product data collection 100× cheaper than existing tools.
Still early, but live. Would love feedback on search quality and result relevance.
PS! There are some products out of stock, this is expected, fixing it right now.
pretty damn cool. tested it with some still frames from movies and pinterest boards and it found most of the things.
Thanks! We’re adding millions of products and thousands of new brands over the next few weeks. We’re also exploring second-hand listings.
Gave it a try and worked wonderfully for me. Saved me around half a day of useless shopping haha
Biggest challenges in search relevance are: - collecting and maintaining a large, clean, diverse product catalog (up to hundreds of millions of products) - actually understanding what users mean (not just what they type) - giving them ways to refine vague searches.
Skip any of these and even the fanciest ranking algorithms feel useless. Helping users bridge that gap is where relevance actually clicks.
We differentiate by focusing on intent, not keywords. The giants return results based on matching terms. We return results based on understanding what the shopper actually wants to do, backed by curated, high-quality data.
Loved this! Finally found a maxi long-sleeve red wedding dress without drowning in crappy filters and bad listings.
Hmm, sounds interesting. What’s been the most surprising thing users are doing with it so far?
Working on a programming language for webapps!
Speed is not an optional feature on the web. The site above is written in Firefly, uses hydration, and scores 100% on PageSpeed Insights.
The language is largely complete, and we're now working on DX: Got a language server, a devserver, and some essential libraries.
This looks good! It feels a little bit similiar to ReScript. I like the idea to have nodeMain, browserMain and buildMain. The Roc language had something similiar with platforms and I love that idea!
In general I prefer a better language over an involved javascript framework that does not look like js anymore.
Thank you! Yeah, I think some of the newer frameworks really complicate dataflow. We're trying to keep dataflow clear, though it's a big design space given the distributed nature of webapps.
In any case, if you take it for a spin, I'd love some feedback.
Working on Strot - an AI agent that reverse-engineers website APIs for scraping.
Instead of DOM scraping, it intercepts AJAX calls and figures out which API endpoint gives you the data you need. Uses visual analysis + fuzzy matching to identify the right call.
The use case: scraping product reviews, paginated listing data (products), etc. Existing AI scrapers either didn't work or were very slow and costly. A product with 1000 reviews takes 10+ minutes with Playwright, costs $10 with LLM scrapers. With Strot? 10 seconds via direct API calls.
Being used in production by a couple of clients. Would love feedback!
Blog: https://blog.vertexcover.io/strot-is-a-api-scraper GitHub: https://github.com/vertexcover-io/strot
Very neat - I imagine you could even use this as a web scanner to identify security misconfigurations in API implementations (e.g. broken access control)
I recreated a little tool to simultaneously mount all the commits in a git repository as directories at the same time (but re-use the same inodes for the same content).
The code is at https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/git-snap-fs
The original was in Python and actually had a decent excuse for existing for a very specific problem at work a few years ago. The new version is in Rust and exists just for fun.
This was also a small experiment in coding with OpenAI's codex. I wrote the Python original by hand---like a caveman. Codex was mostly ok at the actual code, especially once I told it to make `cargo clippy` happy, but it needed lots of help with the design. It kept insisting on extra complications and state.
But perhaps I'm a bit unfair here, because I only figured out the nice and simple design after reflecting on the connection between Linux's fuse and git's design for a while when writing the original. So it's only fair that the computer would also need some help to see how to match them up nicely.
We had a bunch of quants who were writing Python and Matlab code.
Previously they just saved it in a (Windows) Shared Folder and it automatically showed up in the test cluster. No version control, no nothing.
The test cluster had actually grown to a few thousand machines or so. Running Shared Folders over that was crazy, and no version control was crazy, too.
In addition, they expected to be able to write output files next to the source files, and expected them to show up to be used by the other machines.
We were trying to help them migrate to something saner. We could convince them to not intermix source code and output files, but as part of that bargain otherwise they wanted everything to look as similar as possible to before, but still support some git-goodness we have promised.
To make matters worse, they had checked in some rather large files into their repository. Like Gigabytes, and lots of them.
As before, we wanted to support running multiple processes at the same time, but this time on different versions. As a joke I suggested to 'just mount' the git repository directly (that we constantly pull to every computer in the cluster), but my boss thought it was a grand idea, thus the tool.
An additional nicety: under the hood 'git stash' consists of two phases, the first phase make something like a commit from what you have lying around in your repo, the second phase cleans up what you have lying around. If you use libgit2 (or a similar library) you can use just the first phase to get something like a commit, and send that to the server to execute, while changing nothing on the quant's machine, and not forcing them to explicitly make a commit nor polluting their git history.
One saner alternative would have been to just make a checkout for each run. But naively that would have taken more storage space than we had, thanks to those big files. Alternatively, we could have done some sharing for running the same version. But that would have involved some reference counting etc and cleaning up.
So my suggestion was to 'just let the kernel caches handle it'.
In the end, the prototype was useful to get the quants to get along with what we did. And luckily for our sanity, we could soon convince the quants to store those large files somewhere else, and not in the repository along with the code. That restored our sanity, and we could move to a more conventional scheme.
The working life of the tool was blessedly short, but it played an important role in getting the quants to move along in their journey to using version control. Though even though on paper it might have looked like an abortive and wasted effort, in terms of business value it was very successful.
I love the quants. They are very technical and very smart and effectively write software all day every day, but they don't see themselves as software engineers, and they aren't.
I recreated it just for fun, because I like the connection between git and how filesystems work. You can really tell that Linus Torvalds, the original author and designer of git is an operating systems guy.
I'm making an HID translation dongle.
In programming mode, its a flash drive you can put LUA scripts on.
In run mode, you can select a lua script to run. Lua scripts can take HID input and produce HID output.
All open source, hardware and software: https://github.com/cedarhacks/ReMapper
It can do things like keyboard -> joystick mapping, key logging, macros, mouse wiggling etc etc
I built this: https://github.com/dvcoolarun/web2pdf — a CLI tool for converting web pages to PDFs, recently open-sourced after adding several new features. (Might be useful!)
Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...
A tool that detects potential signs of overwork in incident responders, which could lead to burnout. To compute a per-responder risk score, it integrates with Rootly, PagerDuty, GitHub, and Slack.
We offer both a hosted version (https://oncallburnout.com/) and a self-hosted one (https://github.com/Rootly-AI-Labs/On-Call-Burnout-Detector).
Still very focused on making light healthier. 3 new products:
Bedtime Bulb v2[0]: A massive improvement over our original Bedtime Bulb, a light bulb meant for use in the evening to reduce blue light. The headline feature is the re-introduction of infrared, which was removed from lighting to make it more efficient, but emerging research suggest it's beneficial for health. After a long wait, this is shipping in 2 weeks!
Atmos Bedside Lamp[1]: A fully automated circadian lamp that automatically shifts in color and brightness throughout the day, helping you prepare for sleep and wake up more naturally. Working on some machine learning features that mimic the functionality of the Nest Learning Thermostat, but for lighting. The first units are shipping by Christmas.
Circadian Mode for Philips Hue[2]: A web app that gives your Philips Hue lights circadian powers, so that they gradually shift from bright light during the day to dim, low-blue light at night. It's way more powerful and easier to use than first- and third-party options from Hue, Apple, and Home Assistant. Just launched this week; looking for beta testers to give feedback!
[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...
[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
[2] https://restfullighting.com/pages/circadian-mode-for-philips...
Running OpenStreetMap off the grid (self-hosted to say the least) on a Raspberry Pi 500 (and to some extent a Pi Zero 2W) for Internet In a Box:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielkrol_openstreetmap-acti...
All of the street and satellite tiles are thanks to maps.black. The search uses Nominatim's sqlite3 mode. I was told that it's experimental only because it hasn't been tried in production yet, so I'm sort of testing it in the process. So far I'm only doing administrative boundaries and natural features, but so far so good! I'm going to slowly add a few more types of POIs, I just don't want the database file to get too big.
Note that Internet in a Box has an OSM offering already, but the data is five years old and the tech makes it harder to update. As of today, there are much easier options on the table, and we get cool stuff like 3d buildings. Also, the search was much more limited.
* https://internet-in-a-box.org/
* https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/customize/SQLite/
I'm reviving a project I last touched in 2006, in the hopes that it might be of use today in making social networking human again.
Back in the day, after the company I worked for bought the Electric Minds community and migrated it to its own CommunityWare system, and then the company that bought our company decided to shut the platform down, I reimplemented the community platform in Java and helped rescue the community. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/09/08/electric-minds/
EMinds eventually sputtered out because of the rise of platforms like Facebook. Well, now we see what came of that. So I think there's room for a platform like the one I used to have. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/11/03/what-we-once-had-and-co...
The new system is being written in Go. I'm porting the code over without using AI, though I have used Claude to translate the old crusty HTML pages into modern HTML with Tailwind CSS. Once it gets to the functionality I had back in 2006, I'll put it up...and then see about going beyond that, including how to make it distributed and provide more interoperability.
Over the years, I've read countless books. I started documenting one idea that shaped my thinking from each of these books. This idea may or may not be the core theme of the book.
Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.
Working on UPSS (Universal Prompt Security Standard) - an open-source framework for managing LLM prompts securely at scale.
The problem: Most organizations hardcode prompts directly into application code, creating security vulnerabilities (90% prompt injection success rate in typical deployments), operational inefficiency (3-5 day deployment cycles for simple prompt changes), and compliance gaps (insufficient audit trails for SOC 2, ISO 27001).
Our approach: - Externalize prompts from code with secure configuration management - Implement modular middleware architecture with composable security primitives (BasicSanitizer, LightweightAuditor, SimpleRBAC, InputValidator) - Provide complete audit trails and version control with approval workflows - Support both startups and enterprises with practical, not theoretical, security
Version 1.1.0 is now available with Python implementation and examples for Node.js, Java, Go, Rust.
We're actively looking for community contributions - security primitives, framework integrations, language implementations, and adoption stories.
https://github.com/upss-standard/universal-prompt-security-s...
I'm working on 3 projects right now:
---
Backdoor: https://github.com/tanin47/backdoor
A self-hosted database querying and editing tool for you and your team. Modern and elegant UI. Supports Postgres and ClickHouse. It can be embedded into any JVM app or runs as a standalone.
---
Embeddable Java Web Framework: https://github.com/tanin47/embeddable-java-web-framework
A lightweight production-ready Java web framework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).
It is packaged into a single fat jar with no external dependencies. The starting size is 350KB. This is great for embedding into your larger JVM app or runs a lightweight website.
---
PlayFast: https://github.com/tanin47/playfast
An opinionated production-ready PlayFramework that comes with batteries (e.g Svelte, Tailwind, Github Actions, browser testing).
I'm working on Flavia, an ultra-low latency voice AI data analyst that can join your meetings. You can throw in data(csv's, postgres db's, bigquery, posthog analytics for now) and you just talk and ask questions. Using cerebras(2000 tokens per second) and very low latency sandboxes on the fly, you can get back charts/tables/analysis in under 1 second. (excluding time of the actual SQL query if you are doing bigquery).
She can also join your google meet or teams meetings, share her screen and then everyone in the meeting can ask questions and see live results. Currently being used by product managers and executives for mainly analytics and data science use cases.
We plan to open-source it soon if there is demand. Very fast voice+actions is the future imo
Great feedback thanks! We have added a synthetic e-commerce dataset as an example when you sign up so you can test it without your data first. Will also add a demo video ASAP.
are you guys built on recall or did you guys build out the meeting joining functionality yourself?
They introduced pay as you go recently. The limits on that is similar to the plans, 1 million tokens per minute, so if you stack a few keys and do a simple load balancing with redis, can cover a decent amount of traffic with no upfront cost. Eventually we would have to go enterprise though yes!
ok.. when I tried to use pay-as-you-go it was unusable for me because there were a ton of 429s and 503s. one test it was just constant for a few seconds when I tried it, 429 or 503.
I am using it for a voice application though so retrying causes a delay for the user that they don't expect. especially if it stays unavailable for a few seconds.
I'm working on https://www.evcourse.com/ (I work in the EV industry)
This is pretty cool. can imagine it being useful for people thinking to switch to am EV.
the popup for miles/km stays too much on top. it should go away after selecting it once.
I'm building RecallBricks - persistent memory infrastructure for AI coding tools.
The problem: Every time you switch between Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, your AI forgets everything. You spend half your time rebuilding context instead of coding.
RecallBricks automatically captures context from your coding sessions and makes it available across all AI tools via semantic search. Works with Cursor, Claude Code, Continue.dev, GitHub Copilot, or any LLM.
Built the entire stack with Claude Code (meta, I know). Gas utility worker who taught myself to code, now shipping production infrastructure. Currently in private beta, launching publicly in a few weeks.
Tech stack: Render API, Supabase (Postgres + pgvector), Python/TypeScript SDKs, VS Code extension, MCP connector.
Would love feedback - especially from folks juggling multiple AI coding assistants.
I have been working on implementing iCalendar/RFC5545 in Emacs Lisp. I recently submitted a large patch and hope it will be merged in the next couple of months:
https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2025-11/msg0...
This will add an iCalendar library to GNU Emacs, allowing packages in core and third-party packages to work with the format. More on the decisions I made and what I learned here:
When someone dies, you don't get even one extra second to access the documents and information they meant to share it with you.
Trying to fix this problem with Eternal Vault.
Link: https://eternalvault.app
Another thing thats in early alpha right now is CapKit, AI professional captions for short form videos
Eternal Vault is interesting. I would for sure use something like this. However, only if there is a strong story how the vault will survive 20+ years, even if your company is defunct. I do see the pieces scattered around the website (backup to Dropbox, etc), but this story needs to be front and center.
Hi Luke, thanks for the feedback. Will be working on improving the marketing site to share the story in better way, any other feedbacks are also appreciated. Lastly, would love for you to give the platform a try at https://dash.eternalvault.app/register
Hey HN! I'm building https://openfret.com/ - the all-in-one platform for guitarists that I wish existed when I started playing.
OpenFret combines everything a guitarist needs in one place: smart gear inventory management, AI-powered practice sessions, real-time collaboration tools, and a vibrant community. Think of it as "GitHub for guitarists" meets comprehensive practice tool.
Core features:
1) Smart Guitar Inventory: Track your collection with auto-filled specs from thousands of guitar models. Monitor woods, pickups, scale length, string changes, and discover patterns in your gear
2) AI Practice Sessions: Generate personalized guitar tabs and lessons based on your practice history, with VexFlow sheet music and integrated metronome
3) Session Mode: Fork and merge music tracks like code. Layer recordings, see version history, and collaborate with musicians worldwide
4) Practice Analytics: Persistent timers, song tracking (Last.fm integration), scale visualization, fretboard maps, and chord progressions
5) Built-in Tools: Guitar tuner with frequency control, Strudel integration for backing tracks, and musical helpers to break out of E minor habits
Looking for:
Feedback from guitarists/musicians on which features resonate most
Link: https://openfret.com/ | Discord: https://discord.gg/G3Pur3PzZm
Thank you!
I think AI guided practice sessions could lead to something incredible but like everything "AI" it actually takes a lot of hard work to make it really useful.
A few months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?” Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”
Turns out not that hard.
In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/
Building the world’s first “Travel Confidence Engine.”
I’ve been obsessed with how people actually make travel decisions — not how platforms think they do. From a consumer’s standpoint, travel isn’t just “search → compare → book.” It’s emotional, contextual, and full of FOMO.
You open 20 tabs across Booking, Google Maps, Reddit, and Instagram trying to answer simple questions like: Is this the right area? Is this hotel actually good? Am I missing a better deal somewhere else?
Most existing tools either oversimplify (like ChatGPT giving three confident but unverifiable answers) or hide information behind algorithms and commissions (like OTAs). Both remove choice — and ironically, make people less confident.
I’m building SearchSpot, a “Cursor for travel.” It automatically does what power travelers already do manually — cross-check reviews, verify real photos, compare prices across platforms — and then shows its reasoning transparently so you understand why something was recommended or excluded.
The goal isn’t to replace your decisions, but to help you close your tabs with confidence. From FOMO to flow. From chaos to clarity.
If you’ve ever spent hours researching a trip just to end up more confused, I’d love your thoughts: https://searchspot.ai/home
Why does it need a login though? big friction to just see the result of search
yeah, but there's no way to reach out for feedback or follow ups if not logged in. At this stage, we want loads of feedbacks and help genuine users plan their trips well, hence the login wall.
Well, as a "genuine" user, you'll never get so far as to get feedback since I'm (and likely others too) not going to bother with a tool that I can't even test its authenticity, correctness or usefulness of over known good individual routes for information. So if you want feedback; lower the friction. If it's useful, people will make accounts. E.g. too save searches and whatnot.
Built an in-browser AI managed spreadsheet. https://banker.so/
Too many things I wanted to analyse went to nothing because I was too lazy to fetch information and the put it inside a spreadsheet cell by cell. So I developed this to help me extract docs into spreadsheets while also having access to the web.
Now working on a vibe-coded version of it where instead of showing a spreadsheet, it will be able to generate data-focused tiles and apps
I’m working on “Stripe Integration as a Library.” It seems that whenever someone uses Stripe, for example for subscriptions, they go through the same few steps: creating a database table, setting up webhooks, and implementing the events they care about. The challenge of course is that everyone uses a different stack.
I’m building this using our framework for stack-agnostic JS/TS libraries. On the database side, we currently support Drizzle and Kysely, with Prisma support coming soon.
https://fragno.dev/docs/our-fragments/stripe/quickstart
Inspired by the Stripe integration built for better-auth.
I've been working on a sillier project lately. Green teeth!
Lumina has made a probiotic strain that is able to, theoretically, prevent cavities. I don't care that much about, but I do think it is a neat strain that can likely colonize your mouth. I'm genetically engineering it to express sfGFP, which would theoretically make my teeth fluorescent green under black light. Would be fun at raves! Also, if I make out with anyone, you could theoretically see changes in microbiome composition just from green-ness. I do wonder how much microbiomes are shared while kissing: this would be an example of a way to directly measure that, instead of just measuring on proxy like much microbiome research
Working on generation reliability for TuxSEO. The product is good, but needs to be more reliable. Once that is done, I will move onto the link exchange program. https://tuxseo.com/
An algorithm to optimise vacation days using public holidays and weekends. Especially relevant at this time of year.
I created it a year ago and received quite some comments on the Show HN post[1]. Last weekend I updated it to work for end of year planning and adding fixed days off, which seems to solve most of the feedback. It was done with Cursor in agent mode.
We are working on desplega.ai, and we are toying with this long term vision https://www.pleasedontdeploy.com/p/the-trap-we-automated-cod...
I would love feedback on the post, how do you see the tech stack for software control evolving into this new category.
As a means to learn about both WebAssembly and Rust, I started writing a WebAssembly binary decoder (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files) from scratch.
Recently it hit v2.0 spec conformance. 3.0 is next on the roadmap. (I'm executing it against the upstream spec test suite.)
My aim is probably not for it to become a highly-performant decoder for use in production environments, but rather one that can be used for educational purposes and/or debugging issues with existing modules. That's why I decided not to offer a streaming API, and why I'll be focusing on things like good errors, good code docs etc.
P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.
I built this while working on a data center design and management tool. Interactive react components for rack and network design. https://react-networks-lib.rackout.net/fibre
I've opened this demo, on a flagship phone from 5 years ago. And this phone almost spewed its guts out trying to render it.
Why is react still considered a viable tech?
I'm building a small rural ISP and web hosting service, as a way to learn about low-level networking stuff. I've got an ASN + IP space, and am working out the details with a colo, local fiber provider, and some upstreams. Right now I'm configuring the hardware itself (server, router, switch, etc) and learning all the bits and bobs (Proxmox, BGP, OPNsense, IXPs, etc)
Best of luck with this. If you get the web hosting part going and need to stick a load balancer in front of web servers/front end proxies, may I suggest that you give my project[1] a go? Speaks BGP directly to your routers to advertise healthy services and scales from small VMs (for services that are only a few gigabits/s) to physical servers if you need to serve tens of gigabits/s traffic.
Shameless plug, sorry (not sorry!) but I would have killed for it when I worked in web hosting :-)
All I can say is good luck. We spun up a co-op isp to take advantage of fiber grants for rural areas about a decade ago.
Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.
If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.
And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.
Oof, thanks for sharing and the well wishes.
I'm funding this myself, and my current approach (hopefully!) avoids most of the red tape. I'm leasing fiber from a local ISP for the colo <-> my home connection, and once I have myself as a successful "customer" of my own ISP, I'll start doing the last mile build out, which is where I expect the red tape to begin.
But I haven't decided if I'll do fiber or wireless, and if I go wireless, I might be able to avoid pole agreements entirely by just working directly with my neighbors. The problem is that our area is pretty heavily wooded, so I'm not sure if I can place antennas high enough to cover a reasonable swatch of the area.
Our best approach was to run fiber in the ground in the public right-of-way on county or local streets and avoided the state highways. It was much easier to get easements with property owners and local towns than the state (as far as I know, our request is still sitting unread with the state). That meant we had to build twice, essentially. Once for the north of the major highway that bisects the area, and once for the south. But that cut out all of the nonsense with existing agreements from the state. So that helped.
Most property owners we had to cut across were willing to forego payment of any kind for free fiber hardware, and access at reduced rates for 10 years. So that was nice.
We didn't evaluate wireless, just because of the terrain, but I do know a local chap who is providing that for folks using grain bins for line-of-site access points. That's seemed to work well for his use case.
> If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.
Loads of politicians have come back from worse! Don't let that hold you back.
Pretty much finished my photo gallery app for Windows -- https://github.com/Bloomca/Piktosaur. It is a pretty standard gallery viewer, the main feature is that you can point it at any folder and it will recursively search nested folders for extra images, e.g. an external hard drive.
Really happy with it as I wanted exactly that for myself.
---
The next idea I am going to work on is the audio player. I already wrote a Rust library to read TOC + raw track data from audio CDs (https://github.com/Bloomca/rust-cd-da-reader) and a CLI tool to do so + convert to FLAC and embed metadata from MusicBrainz (https://github.com/Bloomca/audio-cd-ripper).
I've been researching this topic and while my background is related to digital signal processing, I think I will use a library, there seem to be too many edge cases to work with WASAPI and such directly.
I am working on Rad [0], a programming language built specifically for CLI scripts, so you don't need to write Bash, and it offers CLI-tailored features which make it a better choice than Python.
Lately I've mainly been working on stability and bug fixes. I've released some big features the past few months so I'm doing a big push on polish, before I again tackle some larger features that I'd like to implement.
If CLI scripts is something you're interested in at all, give it a go! We have docs and a guide [1] for getting started, feedback very welcome :)
[0] https://github.com/amterp/rad [1] https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/
I'm building a Jellyfin client focused on music using Rust + GTK:
https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
I've been enjoying rebuilding my music collection from both old hard drives and ripping old CDs. Jellyfin is great but I wanted a native application focused on music, not video. Thus Gelly. It's been really fun to work on.
Plug-That-In [https://plugthat.in] (Mac App; Paid)
An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.
---
There are times when I am deeply involved in a focus-work session, a meeting, OR watching some sort of engaging video content, and don't pay timely attention to the standard low battery notifications from my MacBook.
After the laptop shuts down suddenly, what follows is the most annoying walk to find the charger or the charging outlet. It's frustrating at times, sometimes embarrassing because you have to say, "Sorry, my battery died down" as you join back the session after 2-3 minutes.
Over the last 3-4 weekends, I have been building Plug-That-In, which has floating notifications. Essentially, a notification that follows my cursor movement, so I get a stronger nudge irrespective of what I am doing.
There are a few other critical features, such as Reminder Mode and Do-Not-Disturb Settings.
- Reminder Mode: On critical/lower battery levels, it will keep beeping like a car's seat belt alert for some time (configurable) when the battery is really low.
- Do-Not-Disturb settings: Configure what sort of alert/sound it will generate when I have system audio playing or video playing, or the camera is active.
It has addressed a personal need and has already proven useful a few times over the last weeks.
I am spending my free time doing a few projects to relax and "fix" a few things that should improve my productivity:
- An AI RSS feed summarizer (https://feeds.carmo.io)
- A PyObjC replacement for the bloated StreamDeck app (https://mastodon.social/@rcarmo/115498602604176483)
- A new keyboard, mostly to get back into SMD soldering (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115521815709828495)
- A bunch of small MCP servers for other projects (https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac/115315732816298110)
- A case for a little server (https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/11/09/1930) that will eventually run at family's out in the countryside and manage a few ESP32 boards scattered around
I am working on my own Lisp-like language (cliche, I know). Goal is a hybrid. Syntax is a bit more Clojure inspired, but want to emulate the interactivity of SBCL once I am done.
And the other goal is minimal dependencies. The only bootstrapping stage is a very very small core in Common Lisp + FSet but could also be replaced with other languages, and then using that subset to bootstrap the rest.
There is absolutely zero claim to be highly performant, it is more of an educational experience.
All of it is done via literate programming in org-mode. So far it's working pretty well, but will have to see how that approach works if the project grows.
OOI how does the org-mode dev work? Are you tangling and then compiling in a hot-reload loop?
So far it works pretty good. Minor edits I just quickly edit and tangle, otherwise I open the source block in a buffer (C-c '), and from there I can just use the usual C-c C-c shortcut to send it to the REPL.
But as the first stage bootstrap in CL is mostly done at this point, I have to hot-reload anyway.
At some point it might be nice to have my own REPL running in Emacs, but that is a worry for way later when I actually get something usable. For now this is purely for personal entertainment.
DIY grid-tied residential solar+inverter+battery. Trying to design the solar arrays' tilt mechanism now for lifting/lowering 5 panels at a time in winter (60-degree winter angle, 35-degree spring/summer/fall; ~24" difference). Thinking either two linear actuators, or a single hydraulic jack connected to multiple support beams. The weight isn't much, but I want a way to lift entire top edge at once to prevent twisting. Linear actuators are slightly more money and easier to build, but require power and weather-proofing. Jack is cheaper, but more complex to distribute force. Wondering if there's other options. (winch would require more robust/taller rear posts, seems more complex, might shade rear array)
Nice, I started with 5 panels (450W each) and a simple design of interchangeable long and short rear legs to adjust the angle of each panel. Base of leg sits in a bracket on a steel frame, and pivots on an M8 bolt. Top of the leg attaches to some angled 'meccano' steel I affixed to the rear of the panels. It worked great, but I slightly over optimized by sharing legs, which made the twice a year switchover a bit tricky, since I could only manage to lift a single panel at a time.
Last year the 550W panels here dropped to 90eur, and so I just added some more panels to remove the need for the switchover. I saw last week 600W panels going for 80eur but no space left, but tempting. Good luck! It's a nice feeling to have energy independence.
Tilting them vertical or nearly so is very useful if there could be any hail, that might be a good idea to support.
What about compressed air? It might not be too hard to find a small brushless low power air pump that could drive pistons directly.
You could mount the pump controller onto the back of the panels and use an accelerometer to measure angle, and run the pump until it's where you want it.
You'd probably need to do some testing and make sure it couldn't get jammed, then build up pressure, then suddenly unstick and move unsafely.
"Projects With Everyday Dave" has done quite a few tests, and may be worth a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Fz5T5c0OQ
Best of luck =3
Thanks! And I've seen Dave's tests. Since I don't need a fixed angle, do need to maximize production (due to a limited sun horizon), and only have 10 panels, the best option is adjusting angle during winter. The N-S orientation is a really poor performer. (Notice that his test is 30-degree tilt vs N-S; 60-degree tilt will provide 20-25% more power than 30-degree at my latitude, without even considering bifacials w/snow. The only thing that would produce more is an active tracker, but I've got other things to do, and a December deadline...)
I’ve been working on ScratchTJ, a DIY digital turntable built with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Nano. It’s based on the open-source SC1000 code, but with some hardware changes and tweaks to make it easier to build and customize.
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 with an AudioInjector sound card, a small LCD screen, a rotary encoder, and even an old hard-drive platter as the “deck.” The goal is to make a simple, open, and affordable way to experiment with scratching and mixing — no fancy gear required.
It’s still in progress, but it works pretty well and has been a fun way to explore DIY DJ tech and embedded audio.
After 10 years in defense tech, watching missile attacks in Ukraine and the Middle East made it clear how little most people really get about air defense. So I'm building this simulator which drops you into the operator’s seat. You can test out different scenarios and build an air defense network against various types of threats (stats from real world). Also have Ukraine, Israel-Iran scenarios. https://airdefense.dev/
I also wrote a longer technical post on the maths behind it: https://medium.com/p/292c755a6ceb.
Every time I talk acquaintances, friends and family members about finances I'm always shocked at how little people know about basic things like tax brackets, 401Ks, IRAs, ETFs, compounding interest, debt management and etc. So I decided to write a financial literacy/education book with a bit of humor and easily comprehensible language to distill some of these topics. I'm about 1 month into it and try to write a chapter a week.
https://rankingsgame.com/ - A strategy game simulating management of a university
I’m working on https://regularly.co/ - A website made for inquisitive minds to get their daily puzzle fix. Still very much a WIP (mainly working on tuning the difficulty of puzzles to make it enjoyable for most). That being said I really do enjoy the unique combination of puzzles when I do them each day. I’m looking for feedback so if you do take a look please do let me know your thoughts!
I don't understand why I can't place two kings in "adjacent diagonal" position when they're in two different regions. Something like:
..k..
.k...
Rules state they must be in different regions, row and column. No mention of diagonal or adjacency.
About 2 years back I began working on a very simple markdown compiler, it was “immediate” in that it would consume markdown and immediately spit html. That project turned into a whole static site generator called Kevlar — https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar
Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16, so many memory leaks and generally issues that I wanted to rectify and begin using third project for my own blog (currently old version is used — https://aadvikpandey.com)
The Kevlar v3 (https://github.com/aadv1k/kevlar/tree/kevlar-v3) here is all that it includes; more spec compliant markdown AST-based parsing; A better .ini config parser (right now it’s literally strtok on ‘=‘ and generally very hacky) as well as name spacing; more powerful templating tags like IF, FOR with lisp-like configuration
Of course staying true to the spirit of “from scratch” :)
Honestly I did scope creeped a little since I mainly wanted to fix a memory leaks issue in the markdown compiler lol; anyway I will share it once it gets completed on hacker news :)
> Entirely built from scratch in C without any dependencies. Now I wrote this code when I was 16
Very few young folk are learning C; I think it is commendable that you are.
You code doesn't seem very strongly structured (to be expected, TBH) but much better than any learner would see.
What resources did you use to start learning C? I ask because it looks to me that those resources covered "how to program in C" but not so much design and structure.
Here's two links (my own blog) to get you started on one or two common C patterns designed to minimise bugs:
Hey, thanks for your comment :) I had a look at your blog, it's looks really useful and high quality! I will go through it with vim open on the side and a nice coffee
Yeah and I'd agree with your point. One BIG critique I have for my own 2-year-past code was that I did not know how to do dynamic heap allocation very well, hence you may have seen everything is stack allocated lol
Particularly egrigeous example:
typedef struct ListingItem {
char lTitle[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
char lDate[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
char lContent[CONFIG_MAX_FILE_SIZE];
char lPath[CONFIG_MAX_PATH_SIZE];
int lOrder;
} ListingItem;
So with the V3 release, I am re-writing the markdown compiler for instance, and being a bit more mindful of the structure
Example: https://github.com/Aadv1k/kevlar/blob/markdown-compiler-rewr...
I think once I am done I will create a separate "Show HN" post to get valuable feedback (like this one!) from smarter folks than me. Once again, thanks for the fantastic blog :) will be sure to go through it
Cheers!
Working on a budgeting app which uses interactive sankey diagrams.
It has some dynamic features like sending excess cash or taking missing cash from somewhere else, making it quite useful.
Also, you can connect with our partner or flatmates for shared budgets.
I am actively using it myself together with my girlfriend, and adding new stuff as our demands for budgeting become more elaborate!
Dog enrichment calendar - I have a lot of different types of treats, toys and activities that I'd like to do with my dog but I fell into routines and just gave him two or three toys and treats on repeat. So I'm building an app where I'd be able to configure an inventory of all the treats and toys I own and the app would remind me to use a new toy or treat every day, to minimize repetition. You'll also be reminded ahead of time for toys and treats that require preparation
Career Skills AI Coach. Sharpen how you think and speak by debating AI
We are clearly on the verge of the largest white-collar skills dislocation ever. Our goal at Socratify is to make skill building and reskilling for interviewing, onboarding, promotions, and career change as effective as possible with an AI coach and sparring partner.
I'm working on a K8S hosting solution that just gives the user a simple Kubernetes cluster. I (or we) handle the compute, (networked) storage and ingress hosting for you, and the cluster provision time should be within minutes.
You just need to pay for a fixed monthly upfront cost rather than PAYG, giving small developers a good save of their money.
In other words, this is similar to self hosting with K0S/K3S/OpenShift, except you don't have to own servers to begin with, in other words, it is a little similar to serverless K8S.
Well, all you those you can actually do with a VPS today, heck why do I have to do it if EKS/GKE/LKE/OKE/DOKS exists? That's because it takes a lot of time to properly setup VPC/EBS/S3/EC2, you need to pay an insane amount of premium and overheads to those while an ordinary user just don't want to hassle too much.
I want to undercut the big clouds by saving people's money and time. I have had enough of seeing a ludicrous EKS billing. I just want K8S to be the control panel of everything.
Deploy, run and scale later, simple as that
This resonates with my experience as a small startup dev. I wouldn't mind bringing my own servers for running my apps but for k8s I need at least 3 control nodes in each cluster and I need multiple clusters to cover different parts of the world. All those control planes are idling most of the time but cost money and effort to keep them alive. I'm sure those could be shared among dozens of users. Is this something you are going to support? Or I'll also have to rent the worker nodes from you?
You rent the compute, storage and network from the worker clusters at a fixed monthly price as one budget package, just like how you buy VPSes back in the days (think EC2 Lightsail or Linode, except now you just have a K8S context). You can choose multiple geolocations, but I'm still looking for a successful lab simulation first.
Right now I'm hosting my own test cluster under my bed so I can't show it.
You don't have to manage CNI, CSI, Linux kernel, etcd. You just need Kubernetes app development knowledge and that's basically it.
Now I'm still thinking about how to get live migration and failover working, so it is going to take a painful while...Kata Container doesn't support it out of the box but Cloud Hypervisor does
No link yet as I'm still just a solo dev, the (hobbish?) project is crawling very slowly, but I have the general architecture in mind. I need to get the frontend first.
I tried to submit it as a startup project last year but the feedback isn't great, I want to have something polished first before making it public
I am working on SecurityBot https://securitybot.dev a service that combines uptime, performance, SEO, and security monitoring. Among other things it inckudes PageSpeed Insights analysis, a broken link auditor (401, 404, 500, etc), and historical ping/uptime results.
I recently shipped an MCP server thst can delivered broken link results to Cursor so they can rapidly be resolved.
ABISan. Think of it like UBSan, but for assembly.
It's a custom assembler built on top of the LLVM assembler (llvm-mc) that emits instrumentation code to catch ABI violations at runtime. Stuff like clobbering nonvolatile registers, misaligning the stack pointer, misusing the redzone, assuming volatile registers don't change across a function call, etc.
Hoping to finish up basic x86_64 support within the next few days. I can now reliably assemble and run unoptimized gcc output without hitting false positives, but I still have to iron out some false positives triggered by OpenSSL's handwritten assembly routines.
TODO items for the near future include porting the runtime support library into a kernel module so I can instrument Linux, and beginning ports other architectures (ideally something semi-obscure like POWER or RISC-V). I also need to figure out how to support dynamic linking, because the tool currently needs static linking to access its thread-local variables.
https://github.com/kenballus/llvm-project/tree/abisan/llvm/t...
Building https://typequicker.com
I’ve always wanted a typing application that’s both more than typing random words and is data-focused so I built this.
The more you type, the more the analytics system learns about your typing patterns and generates natural text to target those weakpoints (SmartPractice mode).
There’s a lot of variety as well; you can practice typing code in any programming language, or type text of various topics, use custom text, etc).
I've built a self-hosted reddit-like community platform in Go: https://baklab.app
Users can create their own sub-communities, and within them, set up different categories and boards. Posts can be voted on, and board types can include regular posts, Q&A, or live chat. It's like a hybrid of Reddit and Discord but leans more towards a traditional web community. It also supports server-side rendering, making it SEO-friendly. This project is an extension of my previous Hacker News clone, dizkaz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885998).
Check out my project at https://www.MobiusClock.com: A 3D WebGL Clock on a Möbius Strip that shows 24hr time on a 12hr face. The hour indicator follows the edge of the strip, thus must make 2 turns to return to its starting point, giving you a 24 hour clock. The minute and second indicators move along the middle of the strip and thus return to their starting points in only one turn. Has the ability to rotate!
Just added a new feature: a 'Fast Mode' button to temporarily speed up the hands, which helps visualize how the slow-moving parts work, how the hour indicator moves along the edge. Would love feedback on the implementation.
If you happen to have an old or spare iPad or tablet, you can open my mobius clock page in a browser and set it on a shelf (plugged in of course). Kind of like a weird wall clock...
Working on a charity + website (not live yet) that allows you to centrally manage your charity donations.
I'm in Germany so I'm working on a Germany-specific solution for now.
- you choose from a list of charities (right now I'm working with the list from the https://dzi.de plus a few such as Wikimedia Deutschland)
- you setup a recurring donation to our bank account
- we redistribute the money according to your split
- no spam in your email and snail mail
- one pdf at the end of the year for your tax returns
I'm not planning on taking any cut of the donations obviously, so this will be a fully self-funded project at first, but I'll reach-out to foundations once I'm up and running.
The URL will be https://super.giving/ (not setup yet, should be fairly soon).
I'm also planning on releasing the source code as open-source.
I'd be happy to hear your feedback, either here or via email :)
I recently have gotten into the "drag and drop" forms of programming like Node-RED and n8n.
Obviously, anyone here who has read my posts knows I know how to write code, but having a bunch of built in connectors that are agnostic to each other with the Oauth and the like being somewhat plug and play allows me to iterate on some ideas a lot quicker.
I installed an n8n instance on my server, and have become kind of addicted to making different Discord bots, and I'm having more fun with this than I thought I would. 95% of the stuff on there is basically drag and drop, and when I need more elaborate logic then I can easily drop into JavaScript. I am looking into writing new nodes for different services, and I keep having new ideas for different stuff I want to build.
I'm building a node based image editing / graphic design tool called Sevro
The hope is that I can bring more procedural workflows to graphic design so you can make generative branding systems and parametric identities
(or just make sick posters)
you can try it in the browser, no login no tracking https://sevro-app.netlify.app/
I'm working on Pocketdata - a personal, private AI data plane.
The idea is to take boring components: PostgreSQL, Bifrost (LLM gateway), Open WebUI, LanceDB, Agentgateway (MCP and OpenAPI gateway) and deploy them in Fly.io. One Fly.io "org" per user. The closest equivalent is blaxel.ai, but it caters for AI SaaS startups, not individual customers.
The combination of the fact that Fly secrets are visible only from within the apps, distroless containers, and transparent data encryption for PostgreSQL assures that the service (Pocketdata) provider cannot access their data, only the infrastructure provider (Fly.io) theoretically can, but practically speaking, this gives an extremely high degree of privacy assurance.
The latest update on the project: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/tasklet-is-the-o1-mo...
Hey! Your project looks very similar, from a conceptual point of view, to what I'm doing with https://github.com/superegodev/superego. Would you like to have a chat about it? Email in my profile, if you're interested.
Porting my 2014 WebGL game (https://phoboslab.org/xibalba/) to the N64: https://x.com/phoboslab/status/1982883072292069641
How are you doing this? Do you have a blog going over the work or a Github page? Just curious, it's an interesting project.
The WebGL game was build with my 2D game engine "Impact", which I previously ported to C[1]. The game has a 3d view, but logic still mostly works in 2 dimensions on a flat ground. The N64 version "just" needed a different rendering and sound backend.
Working on a binary that will instrument every Java service running on Linux host machine with OpenTelemetry Java Agent.
Kinda like this (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-injector) but with support of having multiple service name for different services. This includes tomcat, normal systemd services and also services running inside docker containers.
EDIT: I am popping my cherry with this comment on HN. Been a lurker since past 2-3 years.
I'm working on Solitairle – a Yukon solitaire game where every board is guaranteed solvable: https://solitairle.com
Why? Most solitaire apps frustrate players with impossible games or endless randomness. Solitairle is designed for people (like me) who want a satisfying win through skill, not luck. Every day brings a new, solvable challenge, complete with helpful tools (back button, dead-end warnings) to keep it fun and frustration-free.
I’m especially interested in feedback from people who:
Enjoy casual puzzle games but get discouraged by unwinnable setups,
Value clean, minimalist interfaces without ads,
Have ideas for daily challenges or fun player stats.
Would love your thoughts: What frustrates you most about digital solitaire? What would make you want to play daily?
I run a SVN server for my personal projects, home lab and home automation stuff.
I noticed that the SVN CLI workflow is a bit dated and I think there's room to create a graphite like experience for svn, especially focusing on stacking.
I am set out to: - create a modern CLI to interact with SVN
- create a subsystem to run alongside the svn repo (similar to gitaly)
- create a good looking web UI to browser the repo, review code reviews, etc
I've been building a Decentralized Database built on top of syncing CRDTs, and recently got it to a point I can demo. It's definitely in a "proof-of-concept" stage though, known security holes and all.
I've been focused on building out the featureset and keeping everything unstable instead of trying to finalize each piece as I build it. It's the opposite of how I normally build things but I think it's been working pretty well for this.
I've written about it a few times, most recently "Using CRDTs + Sync as a Database" - https://jackson.dev/post/crdts_as_database/
I‘m working on Astroloot, think of a Diablo/PoE like ARPG but in space.
I‘ve just finished the final pinnacle boss of the endgame in the version released last weekend.
Today I'm hacking on automate-terminal, a command line program and Python library that abstracts the various terminal emulator automations (iTerm2, WezTerm, Kitty, tmux) into a single API. Mostly made for use by other tools. https://github.com/irskep/automate-terminal
I am currently working on a breastfeeding tracker for Garmin devices. It is already released a time ago, but I want to include a companion app for this app.
I used it with my first child, and it helped me greatly. After releasing the support has been amazing and I recently passed 1000 downloads :)
I am hoping to extend the functionality with more insights and helpful tips (double-checked with professionals) to help young parents with the beauty of breastfeeding their newborn children.
I’m building A2Fusion [1], a dual RP2350 expansion board for the Apple II to provide, storage, hdmi video and other functions in one card. The PoC is currently a big mess of wires. Waiting on JLCPCB for first prototype boards.
[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/5251478676/permalink/101664026...
Assuming that you're in the US, what's been your experience with JLCPCB recently re:the tariff situation?
I'm getting ready to have a couple prototypes made soon and trying to decide between getting boards made at OSHPark and hand-stuffing/reflowing myself or having JLCPCB do all of it.
I've just released my beta of FURS.
FURS does for Forth, what headers do for C, namely provide all the embedded configuration information inside a Cortex-M MCU, for the up to 100 inbuilt peripherals.
Without this data, neither C nor Forth (or any other language) have any clue about how to use the peripherals.
FURS does this by intercepting the Forth user source as it's uploaded to the on-chip compiler and transforming it into language the MCU inherently understands.
The Forth user source code is not altered in any way.
I've used the Fossil DCVS for the entire FURS project so that all the flowcharts, pictures, code, user doc, trouble-ticket, wiki ... everything is contained in the ONE FILE, under 5MB.
This one file gives you a web server so all you need is a browser to easily view all the above from the main menu.
Howto: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc/f...
A custom provider for kubernetes cluster autoscaler for homelabs that lets you turn on and off the nodes without reprovisioning them.
https://github.com/homecluster-dev/homelab-autoscaler
https://autoscaler.homecluster.dev
Works with any mechanism to turn on and off nodes(IPMI, WoL...) I have some nodes that I turn on and off via a curl to homeassistant to the power plug.
I’m working on a quantum simulator written in C++ from scratch. I’m not using any external library, so I had to implement everything from the lazy eval structure to the eigen solvers and so on. It’s still very a WIP, but here’s the repo: https://github.com/braketware/hilbert-qusim
Any feedback is welcome!
XLabel, a Computer Vision annotation tool capable of working with several formats, besides storing labels as metadata within the images themselves. Also features a redesigned GUI.
Building Valori, a Python-native vector database. It’s basically Lego blocks for embeddings: storage, indexing, quantization — all modular, all hackable. The goal? Let anyone plug in their own models and search pipelines without touching C++.
I’m working a Garmin watch app to query all the rich data on the watch (health, physical, environmental, location sensors) from the watch + general AI assistant. Privacy focused using your own keys and Gemini. API calls direct from watch - no backend. https://untether.watch
I'm working on an alternative for Quora/StackOverflow. It's everything i like about those two platforms but without the lock-in/giving them all intellectual property rights.
Main idea:
- Portable identity - Your data/posts/reputation is yours - Client choice: Use any nostr client to reply from/to - Open ranking/Anti-Spam: Web-Of-Trust/Global pagerank - Zaps/Payments weigh more than likes (likes are cheap)
I'm working on fighting IBM's patent trolls. IBM slapped the words 'AI Interpretability' on Gauss' 200 year old continued fractions and was awarded a patent.
Now they can charge rent if they encounter a continued fraction library in the wild.
It's bizarre
Have they actually tried to sue anyone for infringement? Kind of a moot point unless they do.
They haven't and that's the crux of it all: they can sue if they want or when they want.
Here it is: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20230401438
On Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230401438A1/en
The authors simply implement a continued fraction library in Pytorch and call the backward() function on the resulting computation graph.
That is, they chain linear neural network layers and use the reciprocal (not RELU ) as the primary non-linearity.
The authors reinvent the wheel countless times:
1. They rename continued fractions and call them ‘ladders’. 2. They label basic division ‘The 1/z nonlinearity’. 3. Ultimately, they take the well-defined concept of Generalized Continued Fractions and call them CoFrNets and got a patent.
IBM's lawyers can strip out all the buzzword garbage if they feel litigious and sue anyone whose written a continued fraction library. Because, that's what the patent (without all the buzzwords) protects.
Thanks for that. That is patently absurd.
You sent me down a rabbit hole. In trying to track it down for myself I read a couple of others that I thought might be it, and was stunned by how obtuse these patents are.
What sort of leverage does this stuff provide? You mentioned "charge rent". What does that look like?
Honestly, I don't even know where to begin. It's insane IBM owns the patent to continued fractions.
If you wrote a continued fraction class in Pytorch and called backwards (or even differentiated the power series) then you're infringing on their copyright.
I'm building https://localhero.ai. Automated i18n translations that run in your CI pipeline.
I have worked as dev in many different constellations of the years, and seen many teams choose between bad options like delay feature launches for manual translations, ship incomplete translations and promise "we'll translate it later," or lately use ChatGPT/LLMs that lose consistency/context and require coordination.
Localhero starts from the premise that translations are part of CI. New strings get translated automatically in GitHub Actions, with glossaries and style guides so it sounds like your product and not generic AI output.
Goal is to help product teams ship localized features without all the coordination/delay.
I created a free collection of 4,300+ real website designs (screenshots, fonts, colors, live links)
https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb
I was tired of inspiration sites like Dribbble full of polished mockups that aren't practical. Or awwward like sites that don't represent the mundanity of most websites.
So, I spent a while building a tool that captures website design snippets. It's now a collection of 4,363 designs from 544 different domains.
For every design, it extracts:
The exact fonts used on the page (so far 561 unique font families I've found)
The precise color palette
A direct link to the live site
You can check out the full free collection here: https://fontofweb.com/u/fontofweb
Very cool, I will for sure be checking it out from time to time.
I'm resurrecting peer-to-peer Matrix (https://arewep2pyet.com) thanks to the Dutch government, who started funding it in October.
The main question is which P2P overlay network to use, if any: the prior incarnation used Pinecone (a variant of Yggdrasil), whereas this time we're pondering keeping it simpler and more scalable and using Matrix itself as the backbone to connect together smallish local P2P meshes - so by default you try to route via Matrix, but failing that you look on your LAN or BLE to see if you can talk directly to whoever you're addressing. Time will tell if this works :)
We are open to suggestions :) And the very first generation of P2P Matrix was indeed built on libp2p (and Protocol Labs led Element's Series B). However, the thought experiment here is whether we can get away without a full global P2P overlay at all in the interests of keeping it simple & stupid. We might well end up back at libp2p tho!
Edit: another option on our todo list to look into more is Iroh (https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh)
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
wow, lots going on.
I'm actually curious how you get the data from reddit! Are you running your own scrapers or buying the data?
also small typo `State of art AI agents` -> State of the art AI agents
Since I got a baby and we’re still adjusting to their schedule, I’m still working on the same project, Librario[1]. Librario is a simple book metadata aggregation API written in Go. It fetches information about books from multiple sources, merges everything intelligently, and then saves it all to a PostgreSQL database for future lookups.
You can think of it as a data source, or a knowledgeable companion that can provide comprehensive book information for online booksellers, libraries, book-related startups, bookworms, and more.
I got a pre-alpha build running for those that want to test it out[2], but the code is still not out there, as there are a few things I want to refactor. Wrote comprehensive documentation for it this weekend, now I need to refactor the merger package with some new rules, and write something to decrease the number of genres returned.
Been tough to find time to work on it because of the baby, but AI has been helping a lot to speed things up, and the work has been quite fun. Not sure if there will be interest in the idea, but it solves a problem I have, so I had to work on it anyway.
Hope to have the code on GitHub by the end of this week. AGPL licensed.
[1]: https://github.com/pagina394/librario
[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/5612eaa80fc7eee8b6180a31...
https://RadioPuppy.com - Listen to 1000s of online live radio streams.
This is a pet project for myself. I love listening to online radio while at work, helps me focus. But I didn't really click with any of the current selection of web apps out there so decided to build one myself.
It uses the great API available at radio-browser.info for all the radio information.
Been using it as a way to learn how to market a website as well. Learning a lot.
I welcome any constructive feedback.
Very cool, will be using this.
Would suggest that you filter out any radio stations where the URL isn't working if possible.
For example I filtered down to "United Kingdom" and then "bass" - 3 of the 6 worked and would rather see ones that are active.
Also if possible to apply the country filter within the search bar, took me a second to realise I had to open the filter for country, select that, then go back to my search.
When clearing my search of "Bass" in the example above, it reset the search to default (didn't have my country filter) even though the filter was still applied when opening the filter section.
Super easy interface to use though, really well done.
Hey thanks so much for checking it out.
It is annoying when some of the stations don't work. I've done an initial try at filtering them out without much luck but will try again.
Good idea about the country filter.
Thanks for the feedback really appreciate it!
All the best - the best project to work on! I recently tested a walking pad with a standing desk at my friends place - I was surprisingly productive being able to walk while using the computer. Will be investing in a standing desk and walking pad for my home office.
A few things:
https://terminalwire.com streams a TUI/CLI from web apps without having to build an API and
I recently finished 45 videos at https://beautifulruby.com/phlex, so now I’m talking more about them and
Updating https://sitepress.cc to work with Rails 8.1 and thinking about another set of videos for it at https://beautifulruby.com/sitepress.
I have always wanted to learn Rust, but was too distracted to get started.
So, I started working with Claude on building a postgres database replication application. I'm learning Postgres internals as well as how brittle database replication and subscription can really be. Although this is for Seren, you can replicate between any PG databases. https://github.com/serenorg/postgres-seren-replicator
Big learning: Claude Sonnet with Rust is massively productive. I'm impressed, but code bloat is a thing.
LINOG.ph is a live earthquake tracker for the Philippines.
The Philippines deals with thousands of earthquakes a year. Whenever the government volcanology and seismology department detects earthquakes, they post it on their official website.
When a major earthquake happens, a huge number of people try to visit the site, causing downtime for up to an hour.
LINOG.ph caches earthquake data from the official government website and the U.S. Geological Survey site, and makes them highly available to the public.
I built this after seeing friends and family donating and providing support for affected families after a major earthquake in Cebu. This was my way of helping out.
Two super typhoons have hit the Philippines in the past two weeks, so I'm also considering adding in typhoon tracking.
Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?
I've been studying wine and was a bit frustrated with the wine note taking apps around, so I've been building one. It allows to:
- Scan wine labels (it analyzes the label automatically)
- Add structured or unstructured tasting notes
- Create lists (shared or not) to keep wines organized
- View information about the regions/grapes
It's called Cork Club: https://corkclub.app/
Frustrated by the complexity and high overhead of most monitoring tools, I wrote Simon.
It’s a single binary, dependency-free monitor in Rust that does it all: metrics, Docker, alerts, and file browsing. While maintaining a minimal footprint for embedded systems and other constrained hardware.
There are many language-learning apps, but almost none that focus on improving conversational Hindi for kids.
Made this web app for my nephew, based in Singapore, after watching him struggle to find anyone to practice Hindi with outside of family calls (since most of his friends are Chinese). The idea is to have a 24x7 partner to speak with Hindi and make it fun. This can complement the formal Hindi classes that most kids of Indian diaspora parents take.
My nephew started using this and is enjoying it!
Link: https://www.hindispeakingtutor.in/
Looking to hear feedback from the community!
A low(er)-level agent runtime: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/
AgentOS is a lisp-machine inspired runtime where agents can safely propose, simulate, and apply changes to their own code, policies, and workflows, all under governance, with full audit trails. Every external action produces a signed receipt. Every state change is replayable from an event log.
I just launched a 10-Bit Video Thumbnail Provider for Windows.
Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.
When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.
I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.
I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.
I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.
Reverse image search to match dirty XTC tablets to lab reports https://pillscanner.app/
https://kauwenofspauwen.be/en Belgian food hygiene rating from official gov reports
I've been wanting to learn more embedded type projects, and I've been snacking too often so I've been building a box that will only open on the weekends.
I got all the components, tested it on a breadboard, learned to solder and now I'm working on the 3d Print to enclose everything.
I actually just did a test run to see if my current 3d design would fit my PICO board, and it fit, but not that secure yet.
Im a developer but never worked this close to metal, so I've been so happy with how it's been going so far, making me real proud of myself.
Been working on documenting as much publicly-accessible stained glass as possible with https://stainedglassatlas.com/. No fancy tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). Come document any local stained glass in your area!
For the past 2 months I have been doing a heavy deep dive into image generation and image generation editing capabilities. This then had me discover that you can generate storyboards for short stories, and automate the creation of these as videos with video generation models. This is a topic that interests me heavily, and as such I am now building my own workflows around that. I am documenting the entire journey here:
https://edwin.genego.io/blog/lpa-studio
https://edwin.genego.io/blog/ai-branding
It's not something I am looking to commercialize, but I actually did drop out of film school (with semesters in creative storytelling) to pursue software 15 years ago. And I feel like this will open up a whole new way of visual storytelling as well as personal and product branding. I have gotten quite some emails about it, from interesting people in different industries, as some more strongly worded (not so nice) emails from someone in the VFX industry since I started. Its by far one of the most interesting tangents I have ever went on.
For my work I've developed a web-based Monte Carlo simulator with a visual, node-based editor for building supply chain models. Last week, I started making it available for everyone.
You can have a look at https://simcarlo.com. The tool allows you to see the full spectrum of potential outcomes instead of just a single guess.
Postbase
Open source, drop-in replacement and self-hosted alternative for Firebase
Using Node.js, Express.js, BetterAuth and PostgreSQL (JSONB)
A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use. There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.
When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
Live wallpaper for Android that shows your local weather radar (US only for now):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.radarlove....
Just launched last month.
I'm working on Fillvisa.com - a free, browser-based tool that lets you fill complex U.S. immigration forms (like DS-160, AR-11, I-90, etc.) entirely in your browser.
It mimics the official USCIS forms but autosaves locally, validates inputs, and lets you download a ready-to-submit PDF - no signup, no uploads, no tracking.
It’s meant for travelers and immigrants who just need to fill a form once, and as a side effect, it’s become a great acquisition funnel for my paid B2B product, VisaSimplify, which helps immigration lawyers automate client intake and PDF mapping.
I built a tool to generate a PDF for each row of a Google sheet. For example, you can generate 100 personalized PDFs (like certificates) for 100 students listed in a Google Sheet.
Once you sign up and connect your Google sheet, it generates a template (using AI) based on your data, which you can edit in a Notion-like editor. You can then generate PDFs for your entire sheet or a for a range of rows.
Some use cases I'm seeing:
* Certificates for students or course completions
* Monthly invoices for all your clients (https://sheetstopdf.com/use-cases/business/invoices)
* Personalized reports with individual client data
* Event tickets or conference badges
* Contracts, offer letters, or any personalized documents
* Really anything where you have rows of data that need to become individual PDFs
Would love to hear what you think or if you have use cases I haven't thought of yet!
A modern day mail merge.
I was a YC founder in 2006 and now work as a data scientist full-time, but on the side I also do Christian apologetics, helping fellow engineers/scientists/mathematicians seek answers to life's deepest questions.
Some cool articles for the HN crowd:
- [published several days ago] Medical miracles in Lourdes, France recognized by the Catholic Church 2018-2025: https://www.saintbeluga.org/our-lady-of-lourdes-immaculate-c...
- My interview of Evan O'Dorney, a three-time Putnam Fellow and two-time IMO gold medalist, who converted to Catholic Christianity: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-i-conversion-of-a-p...
- In-depth scientific overview of Eucharistic miracles: https://www.saintbeluga.org/eucharistic-miracles-god-under-t...
- Conversion testimony by Harvard astronomy professor Karin Oberg: https://www.saintbeluga.org/veritas-part-ii-conversions-at-h...
An AI (not LLM, but image-based one) based tool which transforms photos into visa compliant photos.
You take a selfie, pick document type (China Visa online, Green Card lottery, etc) and the tool knows what size it should be, head height, shoulders position and other requirements. AI is used to detect head position, emotions, objects and other details to provide better recommendations
Check it out and let me know what you think: https://ishotaphoto.com
We’re building Ward, a security browser extension that uses Gemini Nano, an on-device LLM, to scan for phishing, scams, and other threats from the DOM.
Think of an antivirus for everyday web users, like young children, older adults, and less savvy individuals.
We recently participated in the Google Chrome Built-in AI Challenge 2025 and have submitted to the Chrome Web Store.
We’re looking to meet people who may know someone Ward is good for and would want to provide feedback. Alternatively, we’d love to chat with any IT Managers/Directors of Security/Google Apps Admins who would be interested in piloting us as an anti-phishing enterprise solution.
You can DM or hit me at fitzgeraldcedric(AT)gmail.com :)
Ooh, good idea. It started as a question: "How do we make this thing the most private?" and the obvious answer was using offline local device LLMs (e.g. Prompt API/Gemini Nano).
Will poke around and see if there's interest here, thank you!
I've been working on an open-source containerized agent framework called Capsule Agents. Its built around 3 key ideas I've dealt with inside the agent ecosystem
1. Agents become far more capable when they have access to a CLI and can create or reuse scripts, instead of relying solely on MCP.
2. Multi-agent setups are often overvalued as “expert personas” but they’re incredibly effective for managing context, A2A is the future.
3. Agents are useful for more than just writing code. They should be easy for non-engineers to create and capable of providing value in many domains beyond software development.
If that sounds interesting take a look! https://github.com/brycewcole/capsule-agents
I’ve created a small command-line tool that generates a hash-based, human-readable list of git repositories and data folders. Its purpose is to capture the exact state of all projects and files in a single plain-text file.
I built it because I work across multiple machines and often worry about which projects are on which computer or whether I’ve left any files in unique locations. Now I can diff the summaries between devices to see what’s out of sync, which repositories have uncommitted changes, and which folders have been modified.
I avoid using cloud sync services, and most of my files are already in git anyway. I find that having clear visibility is enough, I just need to know what to commit, push, pull, or sync manually.
I would be glad if it proves useful to someone besides me.
I've been working on two game development projects for the past couple of years.
One project is for building rhythm games in multiple game engines and multiple platforms. Currently, it works in Unity, Unreal, Godot, SDL (or any C++ game engine), and MonoGame (or any C# game engine), and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I'm working on adding Love2d (or any Lua game engine) and Bevy (or any Rust game engine). I have a few local prototypes of it working in Unity and Godot, but nothing public yet. Still trying to figure out what kind of game I want to make with it.
https://github.com/neogeek/rhythm-game-utilities
The other is a general purpose game engine in C++ with SDL. It's far enough along that I'm building games in it, but it's more of an exploration into how games are made than a replacement for Unity or Godot. I suppose it could be eventually, but I'm trying to be realistic with what it can do. One thing I'm pretty happy with regarding this engine is that one of the demo repos will automatically build to WebGL and publish to itch.io when changes are pushed.
A webcam & microphone JS tester library that you can put in front of your WebRTC or MediaRecorder web app to diagnose any possible issues (the presence of getUserMedia, secure context, required devices, policies blocking device access, supported resolutions, etc.). It also primes your users’ OS/browser permissions before they get to the real app.
https://github.com/addpipe/webcam-tester
Live demo @ https://addpipe.com/webcam-tester/
Andurel - a rails-like framework in Go
https://github.com/mbvlabs/andurel
Probably only building for myself here but super fun to explore how that would look like.
This is good - I previously used Buffalo https://gobuffalo.io/ at my startup, but eventually decided to move off it. Go doesn't seem like the kind of language that could support a framework like rails (it's safety takes away from the flexibility).
Would love to see how this turns out though! Great work
I’m building DB Pro, a modern database workbench that makes working with Postgres, SQLite, and MySQL fast and intuitive.
I’m documenting the journey in monthly devlogs.
Here’s the first devlog: https://youtu.be/cSY-C8oiUU8
You can check it out here. We're very close to launching a v1: https://dbpro.app
Working on cross-flock discovery in sanctum [1] so I can cut a 1.0 release hopefully before Christmas.
I am always looking for more people to test and play with it or even review the code. We've got a nice little user community going.
Usually this comments drowns in the crowd of the massive amount of awesome stuff people are building, but if you find sanctum useful, hit me up. Good things are happening.
Stay happy
I am working on https://embedhub.com
I am building better dev tools for firmware and PCB developers.
For example, we have GitHub Action workflows that allow you to push builds to the connected EmbedHub project. Your EmbedHub project has fine grained release management - so for example only the git tagged releases will be shared with the customer, but the testing/QA team will get access to builds from regular commits on branches as well.
I am also building a physical device (called HAL) similar to the now discontinued EtcherPro[1] - which will connect to your EmbedHub account and have access to your releases. This will let you offload tasks like long term testing, mass flashing and provisioning of devices, and more.
I'm working on Argon Chess, a deterministic chess variant with some degree of cheat resistance (hard to describe to chess engines like Fairy Stockfish) and tons of variety. A week ago, I added a way to play friends online a week ago (a Discord Activity) and a simple Play a Dumb AI feature on its website. You can also print the cards for free for offline play. https://argonchess.com/
I finally relaunched my product Onset, a release note management platform.
It took me a year to rebuild it from ground up but finally finished it.
I wanted to give anyone the magic power to make himself an FPS game of their place (appart, museum,ect...). Still not perfect but it's light and my 3D editor is simple enough for anyone. - No coding. - And no need for Unity or Unreal.
==> Here is a photo of the Editor : https://ibb.co/FC9Hzj2
==> website with an example of a FPS visit https://free-visit.net
Please be honest, tell me why I don't have traction.
This is a cool idea! So I think, unfortunately, you are competing with automated tools like https://poly.cam/ My cousin-in-law produces music videos, and he'll take a polycam of sports cars (or even people!) and add them to his videos, it's powerful and instantaneous. No 2-3 day wait time.
It's great that you're working on this. If you want to continue on this, I'd consider: - Cleaning up the design of the website-- it looks kind of crappy. Get an AI agent to clean it up for you, it's better to look like "generic professional website" rather than "crappy amateur". - Use the more common words for creating 3d models. A "Visit" sounds like an experience, but what you're really making is a "scene", or a "spatial capture", or a "floor plan". - Maybe try to figure out a niche. Is your niche that people can edit this the 3d object afterwards? Or is the niche integration with video games? You gotta find something that doesn't directly compete with polycam.
I'm working on Curatora.io — a smart content ideas discovery tool that helps creators and marketers discover share-worthy content ideas from thousands of trusted sources.
Curatora filters the noise using AI and surfaces the most relevant, high-quality articles in real time — so you can stay consistent with your message without burning out.
I'm working on ReFocused (https://refocused.app), an all-in-one productivity app.
It's a personal project that grew out of my own frustration. I was annoyed of paying for (and switching between) 8+ different apps for my Pomodoro timer, a secure journal, and habit tracking. I wanted to consolidate everything into one clean, fast interface.
I've spent the last few months building it out it's a full-stack app with a Next.js 15 frontend and a FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend. I'm really proud of the tech and the "minimalist UI, maximalist features" feel.
The app is live and free to use. I'd love any feedback on the app itself, but I'm also genuinely looking for advice: What's the best way to find your first 100 users for a new productivity app?
I figure having real users is a good resume boost and its an app anyone can use so I thought getting users would be easy but I've been struggling with it
I am learning Godot engine, going through the list of 20 games in order to build up my experience https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/
I am almost done with flappy bird (2nd challenge)
Why? I love the old arcade and game boy games, and I want to recreate them to my liking. I also love mechanical systems and space rovers, and I want ro build worlds to explore and simulate these things
Thanks for the link to that 20 games challenge. Godot is fun and something I want to get back to eventually!
Professionally, my team just made our big new launch of a feedback collection tool - https://www.sunbeam.cx/asklet. It tries to go just a little beyond the "give us a star rating" and collect some more detailed feedback without being too in-your-face or annoying.
In my spare time I've been working on a small service for making sure I remember friends and families birthdays. I think it's really important but with friends all having kids it's becoming more and more to keep track of in the calendar. I'm putting together a small web app which takes in the birthday and sends me a reminder a set amount of time away, with some suggestions for birthday gifts.
The suggestions right now are just ones that I've entered as I've come across ideas throughout the year for people. But I want to try and plug in known interests and see if I can do a better recommendation for myself. I'm hoping to keep it quite small as I don't want to take the spirit out of remembering people's birthdays, but I do want to be more consistent.
I’ve been working on MemoryPlugin (https://www.memoryplugin.com), a tool that adds long term memory across AI tools
Lately I’ve worked on a chat history based memory feature that can recall information from every conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and Claude. It’s been particularly useful and also technically fun to implement. Speed has been very important as I do just in time summarisation and a multi stage RAG pipeline, and most LLMs have unacceptable performance. I ended up going with GPT-OSS on Groq due to its ultra low latency often completing full generations before Gemini or ChatGPT APIs return even the first token.
The ability to recall details from conversations going back years makes tasks where I want personalised plans or feedback like 10x more useful, at times I get the AI to ingest tens of thousands of tokens of context to help me better.
It is a recipe app but better, and way more technically capable than anything out there. The goal is to make the best recipe app ever made. With bulletproof easy to follow recipes and smart features to make cooking simple. Everyone deserves good food at home, but good food is complicated and time consuming. An experienced cook can make good food quickly, cheaply and make it look easy. The idea is that Kastanj will have the knowledge you don’t so you can cook like a pro without having to spend years learning everything.
Backstory: I have a note where I write down practical problems I experience in life. I noticed over time that the amount of notes related to food and cooking was growing faster than anything else. I then began searching for a solution. I tried over 50 recipe apps, always the premium version if possible. There are some good apps out there but even the best ones only solved something like 50% of my issues. After enough frustration and search I just decided to start working on my own app. That was 4 years ago... It turns out that solving some of these problems where technically complicated to do, so now I understand why no other app could solve my problems. None the less, after 4 years of work, starting over from scratch 5 times, I have now landed on a solution that technically solves all my problems.
Going forward: Now I am working on filling the app with data and make it easy to use for normal humans. I am on purpose limiting myself to only perfecting the core functionality of what a recipe should be. I intend to launch sometime in 2026. The UI will be small and limited at first, but it is perfect for my needs. Therefore I hope it will also be perfect for someone else. Over time I will enable more advanced functionality and build it out based on user feedback. I know the backend can support 100% of my needs, but I don’t want to make it bloated. Therefore the UI is on purpose focused on only the most important things and then we will build it out with time, together with the recipe creators and end users.
I'm working on a man in the middle proxy for BGP, which can fix and inspect routing sessions on the fly. Like a firewall for the BGP control plane.
Some time ago I was building a mitm proxy myself, then I found out about: https://www.mitmproxy.org/ Maybe you already had it in your radar
I recently launched a daily word puzzle!
https://tiledwords.com
It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.
It’s free, web based, and responsive.
I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.
I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.
I’d love to know what you think!