My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers.
Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes!
The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous surface in a short time compared to static systems or man-portable insecticide spraying. Our goal is to be competitive with ITNs against Malaria.
Hadn't seen this before, this is awesome! I lived in Cameroon and Kenya briefly doing some consulting work and mosquitos still wreak havoc across the continent (and now living in DC I wouldn't mind having one of these in the summer for my place). I'm curious if you're also thinking about defense applications -- I would imagine that a super low cost drone that could help take out a shahed or other Russian drone that are wreaking havoc on Ukraine would be quite valuable
Glad to hear we could be of help! Some of our tech could be used for defense, but traditional defense companies and ukrainian startups already do low-cost shahed interceptors.
My impression is the solutions are still somewhat lacking/necessary -- I know Frankenburg, Eric Schmidt's stealth startup, and surely the primes are all working on it but given how many shaheds are still getting through (plus all the drone action at the frontline) I imagine there's still a market for low-cost; especially if they're largely autonomous
it’s a crowded market where politics and connections are worth more than technical expertise
This is 100% true.
Kill mosquitoes first. Then go for defense contracts when you can show you have sensors good enough to hunt and kill bugs.
I guarantee solving the bug use case first will put you head and shoulders above all the clueless UAS/cUAS companies out there these days - and there are TONS of them.
Just imagining how you'd test this in America. Just launch your target autonomous flying drone and then have the second one intercept it. Can you book range time at white sands?
No to discourage you ,but how do you handle a real world cluttered room where mosquito's will be able to shelter in the clutter, under table, drawers etc.
mosquito generally bite you on your legs , say when you are sitting in a chair...the area under the chair is a pretty complex space to navigate for a flying bot
Ans there is also a recent post where someone use a similar device to light the mosquito https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005200 (20 points | May 2025 | 5 comments) and you must give the final bow that sound safer. (Protip: Buy an Electric Fly Swatter)
there is a crowdfunding effort for one going on right now for such a device. I think the price is around $500. the videos are equally awesome and hilarious as they vaporize into a little puff of smoke
That will end up either dangerous or unreleased. Their system sends a 40W laser, which is what you use to cut plastics. There’s no way to make this safe as even a diffuse secondary reflection out of the field of view could blind someone.
ya, your absolutely right. still the idea of setting up an array of them around my house blasting the never ending barrage of West Nile virus attack drones as they cross the perimeter is pretty fun to think about. I suppose a well placed bat house would be just as fun to watch
This is an interesting idea. One thing that might help targeting is to have some sort of chemical that attracts the mosquitoes. In that way you can bring your target to you.
Very interesting idea! I wonder if a political campaign one day will be to start a program that eradicates mosquitos via drone fleets, not just in the context of malaria protection but also in just nuisance reduction. There are similar programs in place in certain metro areas that already do mosquito control (using chemicals of varying toxicity), so it's not as wild of an idea as it probably sounds.
My friend once came up with a joke idea for a solar powered ransomware drone that would fly to a random roof and jam wifi signal until someone paid it to leave.
There are bio solutions, e.g. my city puts mosquito-larva-killing bacteria in the river and the lakes.
It works okay, but they are unable target _all_ water surface. They use drones, they give out these bacteria to people so they put it in the rainwater tanks, etc.
Yeah, it’s one of our goal to work for government agencies at some point to implement city-wide mosquito control. 10 of our drones could cover a square kilometer, so we’d be a lot more efficient working at the city level rather than at the individual household level.
Please make sure it is specific to mosquitos and does not attack other insects.
Insect populations worldwide are experiencing significant declines in both abundance and diversity, with several studies reporting reductions ranging from 40% to 75% over recent decades. Estimates suggest that 5%–10% of all insect species have disappeared in the last 150 years, and some global meta-analyses indicate terrestrial insect populations are declining by close to 9% per decade.
> If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.
> For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.
Fascinating engineering! Doesn't seem like it would be possible but it apparently is. There's also more visuals at about 17 minutes in the video embedded in that article, the signatures seem fairly distinct.
Imagine the sound a mosquito makes when it flies near your ear; it's quite distinct. I'm sure it's possible to distinguish mosquitos based on that (which is a factor related to the doppler signature mentioned).
I wonder how distinct it is, really. It sticks out to us, but “mosquitos is enemy #1” is one of the strongest evolutionary pressure we’ve got, right? And one of the few that persists to this day.
Our brains probably have a dedicated cluster of neurons in there somewhere specifically looking for the Mosquito noise.
Don't want to underestimate how disastrous this could be for other insects. Even ignoring the impact on them, the impact on our needs to maintain pollinator populations.
I mean.. if they venture into human indoors they are already doomed in the first place. Not much scope of proliferating in such an artificial environment.
I imagine once everything else is tuned with your product you could make a hot-swappable blade assembly that can be quickly swapped out and later cleaned. Like if the entire guard and blade assembly came off, that would be super convenient.
Would add some weight and complexity but if it’s purpose-built it would probably be less stress on the Drone than constantly pulling props off.
How does this compare in reducing mosquito populations over something braindead like putting some yard waste and water in a bucket for a few days and either adding mosquito dunks or pouring the larvae out?
Or is this more like a stand-in for bug spray/smoke?
Duuuude! Give me this. Please.
We have these mosquito bats/racquets that I've to use every day in a futile attempt to keep my family safe. I need something like what you're building. I looked up even laser mosquito killers.
Surface level thinking, ecological disaster in the making. Birds and bats and other bugs eat mosquitoes to live. Killing all the mosquitoes is like the Chinese killing all the sparrows. We do not understand, and we do not want to understand, the deep consequences of our actions.
People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve.
Better option, if you really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
In general I agree that messing with ecosystems sometimes has unpredictable consequences.
In the case of mosquitos, though, they cause so much suffering, that it would be stupid to not work on eradicating them because of possible negative consequences.
We have to be careful, of course (widespread use of insecticides is a problem), but targeted measures are really unlikely to cause more harm than mosquitos already do.
Yeah well mosquitoes should definitely be made extinct btw but there’s no way a robot that kills bugs in your back yard is going to accomplish that so you can put your pitchfork down
Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines.
Brilliant work! Zippers got nothing on this! I am particularly taken by how the "stich" weaves into itself, to flatten the seam.
Now, what about footwear, I'm thinking. Stitched soles + uppers are so much more durable. If you could cut a sole to a person's foot size, then they could construct the upper to their best-fit, best-colour-combo design.
I've tried some footwear! These had a really soft rubber soles, but I've also made ones where the soles were cut from a sheet of hard Vibram rubber: https://self-assembly.fi/canvas-shoes
So cool! So, I buy this brand of thin-sole shoes called Xero. Their Do It Yourself kit is a simple Vibram sole I can cut to size, a hole punch to find the right fit, and a long lace that I can tie in many different ways, including as a slipper, or sandal, or greek-style laced-up huarache. Tie style, with different colour combinations of sole and lace make for distinctive personalisation.
Your stuff takes it to a whole other level. It makes me imagine a constructible footwear that can morph from a flip-flop (band across foot) all the way up to an all-weather knee-length boot.
No doubt you have already imagined how experimentation with materials and sealing/binding techniques could yield a design system that everyone can make their own; from the multi-spectral La Sape, to baby wear for those fast-growth years, to field equipment for the extreme adventurer.
Yeah, morphing is really the key idea here. You don't have to make all design decisions beforehand, but can wear something for a while and then make changes based on your needs & observations.
I haven't quite figured out how to apply this thinking to seam sealing though. The current garments that have taped / waterproof seams are locked into the taped configuration. For tents I have some geometrically water repellent structures (that guide the water away as long as it's coming from above), but for the soles of footwear, you might want something 100% sealed.
I would love a set of these! I've seen a few "legos of clothing" ideas out there but I believe this is my favorite execution of it so far. It lends itself to the "gorpcore" style of clothing like Cotopaxi where its blocks of different color. Even with the monochrome examples in your video, I love the texture inherent to its linkage.
Also, I've been working on this for a while under a beta version called Self-Assembly, which was a bit more fashion oriented. New i-t-s-e rebranding is to be more Lego like. Here's the old website: www.self-assembly.fi
I needed my own CAD setup that can draw the detailed assembly instructions as 3D vector drawings. And that can also derive the assembly order from a graph based garment representation automatically. I'm almost finished with those, so after that I just need more large format laser cutters and customers.
Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot.
I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-based index readers. I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.
It's annoying because it's right and also describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing. (It's also great because it describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing, likely saves me a lot lot of head scratching ;-)
I'm primarily looking at document lists and possibly the keyword-documents mapping.
Caching will likely be fairly tuned toward the operation itself, since it's not a general-purpose DBMS and I can fairly accurately predict which pages will likely be useful to cache or when read-ahead is likely to be fruitful based on the operation being performed.
For keyword-document mappings some LRU cache scheme is likely a good fit, when reading a list of documents readahead is good (and I can inform the pool of how far to read ahead), when intersecting document lists I can also generally predict when pages are likely to be re-read or needed in the future based on the position in the tree.
Will definitely need a fair bit of tuning but overall the problem is greatly simplified by revolving around very specific types of access patterns.
Ah interesting. Is your keyword-document map (aka term dict) too big to keep in memory permanently? My understanding is that at Google they just keep it in memory on every replica.
Edit: I should specify they shard the corpus by document so there isn't a replica with the entire term dict on it.
Could plausibly fit in RAM, is only like ~100 GB in total. We'll see, will probably keep it mmap:ed at first to see what happens. It isn't the target of very many queries (relatively speaking) at any rate so either way is probably fine.
No I mean for every query there is mapping up keywords to trees of documents, there is dozens if not hundreds of queries in the latter in order to intersect document lists.
I'm continuing the work on Cellm, an Excel extension that let's you call LLMs in cell formulas like =PROMPT(A1, "Rate the sentiment of the customer feedback as positive, neutral, or negative"), and then drag the formula down to apply the same prompt to thousands of rows. I built it after my girlfriend had to manually classify 7,500 research papers. Cellm automates that kind of repetitive work.
Since we added MCP and the use of structured output to "spill" multiple return values into adjecent cells, it is the quickest way I know of to monitor competitors blogs everyday before my 09:00 meeting. And also the quickest way I know of to test new AI models. I have a sheet with SimpleQA, MMLUPro, or GPQA Diamond and testing a new model is a matter of adding a new column. The whole idea is to enable normal people (like, non-techies) to automate manual, repetitive tasks with AI like programmers routinely do.
Looks very similar yes, it is a great UI paradigm for running many prompts. I think of spreadsheets as the OG low-code tool and with just a sprinkle of LLMs, people can do so much more with tools they already know
That’s pretty interesting. I’ve using Airtable’s “field agents” for a similar use case, but would love to use this instead. Does it automatically cache values? (Don’t want to pay for repeat prompts just because one input cell updated)
Yes it does, you can toggle it on and off. Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com or sign up to the waitlist on getcellm dot com and I will personally onboard you!
No not yet, we are about to onboard the first users on the waitlist one-by-one and when we have ironed out the major issues that we will inevitably discover, we will open up for paid users after that.
I wouldn’t worry too much about missing out, as you probably very well aware, whatever you choose to work on takes incredible amounts of time and energy to get off the ground. Now you just have more time to out into something else :)
I kept finding myself having to write mini backends for LLM features in apps, if for no other reason than to keep API keys out of client code. Even with Vercel's AI SDK, you still need a (potentially serverless) backend to securely handle the API calls.
I've been working on an open source LLM proxy that handles the boring stuff. Small SDK, call OpenAI or Anthropic from your frontend, proxy manages secrets/auth/limits/logs.
As far as I know, this is the first way to add LLM features without any backend code at all. Like what Stripe does for payments, Auth0 for auth, Firebase for databases.
It's TypeScript/Node.js with JWT auth with short-lived tokens (SDK auto-handles refresh) and rate limiting. Very limited features right now but we're actively adding more.
Currently adding bring-your-own-auth (Auth0, Clerk, Firebase, Supabase) to lock down the API even more.
I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on (https://adretro.com). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images.
So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.
I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.
The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.
What about having a contribute button? I know this must be a lot of work and it's such a cool idea! If you had a way to contribute on the join page I would chip in for sure :) My husband is a writer and he uses newspapers.com to research a lot of vintage newspapers for historical context. I can imagine this being a great resource for him.
Thanks I might try that! My impression of donation pages is the conversion rate is extremely low but it will be easy to add nonetheless. I might get better results with offering something in return, like Patreon (not sure what kind of patron content I want to regularly produce though) or products.
There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!
Thank you! Yeah the cigarette ads are some of the most consistent. Once I get more in I am hoping to see some trends and themes in the messaging over time.
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. The new version is a lot more optimized, thanks in part to feedback from you all in HN.
Currently I am working on a new featureset with missions, where the user is given a budget and geographical area to defend by placing different air defense assets; after which the system attacks it with various missiles and UAVs. Useful for just learning, exercises, playing through scenarios to defend critical infrastructure etc.
After 10 years in defense tech I’m sure you are very aware of this sort of thing, but how worried are you about accidentally leaking some non-public info? I guess one nice thing about public info is, well, it is public, so you can just use whatever’s public.
You'd be surprised how much "secure" info is public somewhere else. Like when you're working on training materials for a certain engine that is considered "military secrets" based on the govt you're doing the work for, that takes literally weeks and weeks to get various design materials, that's considered public information for one of your nation's partners, and you can just download it from them instead of waiting for weeks.
Not that I know from personal experience or anything... /sarc
Tanstack DB - a new client side store for web apps, with transactions, optimistic state, and live queries spanning multiple collections.
It's designed for sync, so rather than fetching you can hook it up to a sync engine (any!) to keep your front end in sync with your backend. It's built on Tanstack Query, making the sync engine optional, and a great path for incremental adoption.
The query engine uses a typescript implementation of differential dataflow to enable incremental computation of the live queries - they are very fast to update. This gives you sub ms fine grade reactivity of complex queries (think sql like joins, group by etc).
Interesting, I'll have to look at this in the near future. Definitely like what I see at a glance. One problem I've had with some other client sync/db options is that they don't support the use case for public, shared and private tables/collections. A lot of real world apps may have items that are available to all users (read only or not), some users (by group or management chain) or private (but reassignable by managers) in order to support real world workflows and potentially confrontational work (think avoiding stealing other worker's contacts/commissions).
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!
The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.
Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long term goals? I find both the concept and the end goal quite fascinating!
When my daughter was around 2 years old she would sit on my lap and type letters on my laptop into Emacs. I would change the color of the text and she would type more. I figured there was a simple webapp here, so built various things for her to play with over the next couple years. One let her type words and then fire off a ddg safe image search and return cartoon images in response. She would copy words out of her books to get pictures of dogs and trees and silly things.
We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.
I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.
Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.
Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.
I’d say some of the downsides on the modern internet become much starker when your kids come up against them. As adults growing up through the birth of the internet we are kinda inoculated to it.
I suspect the lack of privacy is because the target audience is “kids” not “teens”. When my kids first discovered group chat in iMessage with their cousins it was fun for literally 30 minutes before it was tears and abuse - which was a really instructive lesson for me.
At that (primary school) age parents would almost universally know the parents of your kid’s out-of-school playmates - if only because someone tends to have duty of care at any time and who is where with whom needs to be figured out.
The feature set seems sound and frankly welcome and overdue to me!
Yeah it is true. I am more or less modelling the interactions my kid has with other kids and the social relationships I have with her friends parents. She doesn't go to anyone's house who's parents I don't know. Obviously that will change as she gets older.
So for now, the social dynamic in the app is for parents to connect first. Once connected, their kids can choose to connect (facebook messenger kids uses this same process I think).
When I talk to less tech-savvy parents in my community, I think many feel quite helpless and unsure how to navigate a lot of this. Consuming youtube kids videos on an iPad is one option, or outlawing screentime entirely is another. Kids want real stuff that they are in control of. I want to build age appropriate versions of this kind of stuff... with the appropriate guards and oversight in place, keeping parents in the drivers seat.
Sounds cool, would love a link! I’ve started buying walkie talkies for neighbourhood kids and set up a Minecraft server which has turned in to a sorta social hub for my daughters- we’re trying to delay phones as long as possible - but a purpose built solution would be great
Thanks for your interest. I will send you a link if you want to have a look and try out something that is still rough around the edges. I'm working out some login/connection flow issues and am not ready to publicly share quite yet.
Continuing to work on https://www.hackernews.coffee/ to rerank the HN frontpage based on my interests, not just what's trending.
It does this by building a profile out of a small number of selected past articles, and we make the profile and how it produces recs from the profile transparent and editable.
Especially after feedback on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44454305), Im trying to get to grips with why people seem to care as much about seeing how their recommendations work as they do about the actual quality of recommendations themselves.
I'm increasingly convinced its due to how many opaque LLM-powered everything and black-box recommendation algorithms there are. People want personal content systems (they are useful for sure!), but theres a lack of ones where they stay in control of what 'personal' actually looks like.
Hit some speed bumps but still building out a Discord-based digital TCG platform. Discord felt like a natural social context for an accessible and customizable experience. Users can use their own media for card images, but it's also integrated with a free pixel art AI that generates cards based on description. Would love feedback, even if basic or high level suggestions.
This month I'm improving CI/CD for e2e testing across Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. Also adding support for unlocking password-protected PDFs and Word docs and improving OCR. OCR runs in the background and leverages native OS OCR where available and a pure LSTM Rust implementation elsewhere. Generally improving the word processor and looking for speedups. Adding a cross-platform spellchecker leveraging native where possible, too.
Some times you need to write a whitepaper, some marketing materials or something that a general product like Word is more suited for. Tritium is however aiming to replace Word as the transactional lawyer's go-to desktop application for the most common workflow.
Transactional lawyers are lawyers that primarily work on transactions, eg, mergers and acquisition, bond or share issuances, etc. It means they spend most of their time drafting, reviewing and negotiating deal documents rather than, eg, going to court.
I'm not the person you responded to but there are various diff programmes out there that lawyers use. I think they tend to be proprietary formats though. Lawyers pretty much all work in MS Word so any comparison software needs to work with that.
If you type some text into one of the documents in the web preview, click the triangle and click the name of that document, you'll get a redline. That's the current industry-standard diff format. Redlines don't standardize around any kind of metadata format, though, so parsing them (unlike a diff) is non-trivial. There's an opportunity for improvement.
As mentioned elsewhere, transactional lawyers are corporate lawyers who work on deals (think drafting corporate documents, M&A or IPOs) as opposed to litigators who go to court and argue cases.
Thank you. So this red squigeee line is the industry standard?
I built a simple "gpt wrapper" focused on legal - in the process of fine-tuning an llm, I've noticed that Gemini / Google scraped the hell out of a certain legal forum (phbb board) in my country. After that I've started focusing on court legal cases entries (since there's a public website for that) and thinking a bit about what would a diff in a court case ideally look like, and it's an interesting problem.
Your product reminds me a bit of quantus.finance (also here on HN) even though the space is not really related, but it caters to a business area in an interesting way. What are you planning on doing next (on a high level)?
I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews,
Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it.
I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it out extremely quickly due to WGU's competency based stuff, so now I finally am able to put "MS" after my name.
I'm actually planning on doing a second masters from a slightly more prestigious university with a more theory-heavy degree [1], but it's nice to at least have an official graduate degree now. Hopefully it helps me find work a bit quicker, and if nothing else it's just kind of fun to pile up degrees.
I couldn’t find anything that ticks all those outside of OU.
University of Texas has one that looked pretty ok, but it was kind of expensive for a non-Texas resident.
University of Western Florida has one for “Mathematical Sciences”, which more or less fits, and it’s not even that expensive, but I think that one is synchronous.
Yeah, I wish there were more options than that. Also, remote phd or master+phd would be even better, but these are even more uncommon and pricey (unless you know about a one that is good and cheap and remote then I’d love to learn more)
I was doing the University of York online PhD in computer science (formal methods), and it was actually pretty great, but it was costing me like $17,000 per year, and it was a huge time sink when I was already working full time.
That said, if you feel like you're organized enough to pull it off, I do recommend looking into University of York. It's a very good school.
Oh I get it now, thanks! Please let me know if you decide to enroll to math master's in OU, maybe we can help each other! I think I'll do the same on the next semester (so early 2026)
Do you feel like you picked up additional knowledge and skills? The pluses you mentioned are fighting boredom, being affordable, and being credentialed.
Not really, no. I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing; it didn't feel like "computer science", it felt like light software engineering, and since I've been doing software engineering for awhile I was able to fly through the work.
I did have a bit of fun learning about some of the more "platform as a service" parts of AWS, that has been something I've been putting off at learning more about for awhile, but overall I don't feel like I learned a ton.
I registered for another masters degree from a different online school to start in October that I think I'll enjoy and learn more from.
Have you ever wanted to write your life story but found it too overwhelming? I’m developing an app that acts as your personal interviewer, guiding you through your memories and helping you share them with your loved ones.
The app is designed for older adults who enjoy reminiscing but struggle to organize their thoughts into a coherent narrative. The goal is to preserve their hard-won insights and pass them down—to family members who may be too busy to ask the right questions now, and to future generations who would otherwise never hear these stories.
I have a working prototype that allows me to test the interview flow, and I’ll soon be sharing it with friends and family for initial feedback. I’m now looking for a designer to collaborate on the next phase.
Design will be a critical part of this app. The way stories are visually presented will be central to the user experience and will likely determine the app’s success. If you’re a designer interested in this kind of work, I’d love to hear from you. Given the text-heavy nature of the app, experience with typography and content-focused design will be especially valuable.
My great grandmother, who lived into my 20s, wrote a 10 page memoir about growing up - life stories, people, places etc... And I found it super interesting - I built a vacation around the places last summer.
I asked her daughter/my grandmother to do the same, but she wasn't interested. And then I've thought about the exercise myself - it's hard to think of things in my life that a future great-grandchild might find interesting. And it's not clear if my great-grandmother's story I find interesting, in contrast with financial hardships I did not face? How do you pick out the interesting from the mundane? What is most interesting about today 100 years from now?
And I can see the potential for core interview questions to help draw it out.
Very cool! Would love to check this out. Have been meaning to interview my aunts for years to write down my family history now that my dad is no longer with us. A tool like what you describe could be super helpful.
Thanks for sharing! Yes, I quickly came to that conclusion as well. It's put me in the novel position whereby product development is about finding the right prompt, and maybe even about finetuning.
Would love a link to the demo if and when you’re open to sharing. I’m a product designer but not looking for projects, I’m mostly curious - this is one of the more unique ideas I’ve heard.
I’m building Popgot (https://popgot.com): compare unit prices (per oz/sheet/lb) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. We normalize fuzzy sizes (“family,” “mega,” multipacks) so you see the actually cheapest option for staples.
New: a deep research mode that, on demand, crawls thousands of product pages and uses visual LLMs to read label photos (ingredients, counts, square footage) when the text is messy. First run takes ~60–90s, then it’s cached.
A good torture test: 20×25×1 MERV 13 home air filters—listings mix single/4/6/12-packs and vague claims (“3-month,” “allergen defense”), which wreck per-unit comparisons. I’d love feedback on misses (coupons/Subscribe & Save/region), categories to add, and to collaborate with a grocery-list app, budgeting tool, or anyone in the frugal/deals space. chris@popgot.com
I had to look at that carefully, but I think that "save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz" is both technically and meaningfully correct. It compares our best choice to the most popular choice -- we use the product with the most ratings as a proxy for that. Nizoral 2-in-1 has a crazy 100k reviews, but it is in fact almost 20x more expensive per fluid ounce! And it is the most popular product@
If you hover the text it explains the logic (you can see that in this screenshot https://imgur.com/a/hO7fiWR). But to replay the logic here:
Equate 2 in 1 Dandruff Shampoo 28.2oz is 21¢/fl oz (for 33 fl oz it costs
$6.99) is the Popgot choice.
But the most popular (e.g. most reviewed) product is "Nizoral 2-in-1 Anti-Dandruff Shampoo" and that costs a whopping $1.96/fl oz (33 fl oz it costs $64.63)
So yes, the most popular anti-dandruff shampoo (which I used to use, until I saw this shampoo list https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...) is literally 20x more expensive, so you can do a lot better by picking alternatives at the top of that list.
Interesting idea. Running the LLMs would be expensive. How are you monetising this product? Additionally, since the product is targeted towards frugal customers, do you think you will be able to generate a decent revenue from it?
The LLMs are in fact quite expensive! We run dozen of LLM calls across thousands of products. That's thousands to tens of thousands of calls per search query. The idea is we've got to find the best & the cheapest, and I have spared no expense in doing so. (Plus we have GCP credits.)
Eventually products will overlap between search queries, so we can serve fast and low latency results that have been pre-processed by LLMs. That will be near zero cost. And of course LLM prices will continue to drop quickly.
We monetize via affiliate fees -- you buy something off that list, and we get 1-4% back at no cost to you.
with AR and glasses camera platforms, this will actually be a big deal. pricing and real consumer interest and inventory levels are competitive.
If people are wearing AR glasses into big box stores that are comparing prices in real time, I could see there being a real time auction for CPG pricing the way there are for website ads now.
Trying to document and map as much of the publicly accessible stained glass as possible. The goal being the next time you visit a new city or town, you'll know where all the beautiful stained glass is to go see. Just recently added support for countries outside of North America. No exciting tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). But excited for folks to check it out!
I like it but I'd like to see images right in your page instead of going to an external website which sometimes is not even dedicated to stained glass making hunting for visual gratification really painful.
So, I'd add more visuals to the main page just like on your 'search' link, move the map to the bottom, let visitors know of every new location to keep them engaged and coming back for more, make a gallery sorted by most liked, viewed, commented, valuable (subjective based on history, cost, location, etc)
Cool! You could even consider abstracting it into a tiny lib that could be used to map and showcase any kind of location-based visual data and not just stained glass.
Among other things, I'm working on AOO, a cross-platform low-latency peer-to-peer audio streaming and messaging library: https://github.com/spacechild1/aoo
The C/C++ library can be easily embedded in host applications or plugins. It even runs on embedded devices, such as the ESP32. In addition, the project contains a Pure Data external and SuperCollider extension. There is also a third-party Max/MSP external: https://github.com/ddgg-el/aoo-for-max
Because of a HN post(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776), I've got a ton of feedback for Ensō: my writing app for flow/stream of consciousness writing. So, I'm wrapping up the release and adding good support for non-Latin, esp. RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) + pinyin and Japanese input methods.
I'm also thinking about organising the usage patters, because over the past few years I've collected a few interesting groups: mental health focussed users, script writers, neurospicy folks, bloggers, squirrel enthusiasts. I'm thinking about this here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/how-people-use-enso/
I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.
I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.
The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.
Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.
I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.
I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"
When a previous employer went bust, it was bought by the CEO after being listed by the administrator on an obscure website (ip-bid.com) which you have to make an account and log in to just to see the listings. There was only one bid. (I leave to the reader to speculate on the utility of a bid website without public listings, but such listings might represent good value compared to those advertised more widely). It may be worth checking company filings to see if there are equivalents used by insolvency administrators in Australia (I found out only by reading the administrator's "statement of proposals" on the fillings website after the fact -the sale wasn't advertised anywhere else as far as I can tell).
We have ASIC (Australian Securities & Investments Commission) that handles company registrations, notices, etc. and they maintain a register of insolvency notices and liquidations.
This can be a reasonable place to go to look for distressed businesses/assets too and I've considered using them as a source with my aggregation/search engine, though they don't really have the same type of information as a business for sale listing so they fall somewhat outside of the main type of results that I otherwise display.
Other reasonable places I've seen too, though in incredibly low volumes (think 0-3 listings a month), are commercial auction houses/sites where they'll list a business for sale or the full assets of a business. The main issue with that it is that they're so low volume that I'm not sure it's worth spending the time ingesting them this early on while there's still many other larger listing sources.
In my ex-employers case, the sale was what's called a "pre-pack" sale. That means the sale was advertised and proposed before the administrator were appointed and the administration was noticed. So you would not have found out in time from the filings, only from ip-bid.com. I don't know if Australian law allows pre-packs.
If it’s anything like the US, the listings only represent a minority of what’s available for sale and buyers are better off hiring a broker. If you could find a way to have majority of everyone actually list things for sale online, I think you’d have a solid business.
In Australia, brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.
There's just shy of 90,000 unique listings I'm tracking (i.e. after de-duplication) on these platforms.
On the traditional classifieds sites and things like Facebook groups focusing on these, there's a significantly smaller number of listings/ads for business sales (e.g. a couple of thousand).
I think where there are definitely hidden gems is where there are many small business owners at or close to retirement age where they haven't planned for a sale at all. For example, a family member nearing retirement age has a small business they're just intending to shut down because they "couldn't be bothered" selling it. I've heard people have had reasonable success just approaching local businesses like this that have older owners OR asking accountants if they have any clients that are thinking of selling.
> brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.
Works like this in US too. Commercial brokers rely on their network and not listing things on a market. Even most commercial real estate property for sale in the US is unlisted. It’s a weird industry, there are listings site but they only reflect a minor percentage of what you’d find if you drive around looking at for sale signs.
If you're interested in giving the tool a shot, feel free to shoot me an email (take my username and insert an @ after david and a .com at the end) and I'll happily give you access after I get it up somewhere publicly accessible -- possibly in the next couple of weeks.
Video demo was awesome, really good stuff! Love seeing how you managed to make gravity actually a thing without simply destroying everything above a certain point, as well as connecting different objects together - I feel like that's something most voxel-based games I've seen have done a terrible job at.
Given the online/multiplayer aspect how difficult has the network portion been?
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet.
Would be interesting to see a location-based Polymarket site. Would be great to get a feel for any one spot and what's on people's minds via their predictions related to that particular location. Powerful instrument for change too as observers interact with the observed.
I'm copying the Puppeteer / Playwright client API to run in a Chrome extension using the native Chrome extension APIs.
It is possible to run Playwright inside a Chrome extension, however, it requires the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate a browser which really hurts the user experience, is very slow, and opens security vulnerabilities. Chrome extension APIs can accomplish maybe ~85% of the same functionality as CDP or Webdriver BiDi -- it isn't complete because of security features which shouldn't be bypassed anyhow. For example, instead of calling a function in a content script with 'script.callFunction' with Webdriver BiDi in Playwright, a function is called with chrome.scripting.executeScript(). It will be 2 or 3 more weeks before I post a PoC.
This is following my work using VSCode's core libraries in a Chrome extension exactly as they are used in an Electron app to drive VSCode and Cursor. The important part is VSCode's IPC / RPC which allows all the execution contexts and remote runtimes to communicate with each other. [0] This solves many problems I have had in the past automating browsers with a Chrome extension.
Cool concept, would you expect this to be compatible with Firefox/Safari as well? Safari in particular would be useful as it doesn't natively support Puppeteer/Playwright.
I built https://www.stoodious.app for my wife while she was studying for her California Real Estate Broker's Exam. She was frustrated with the price gouging on text books, or being the "state-of-the-art" study platforms being video only, having no/poor mobile UX or just feeling outright dated.
So I built Stoodious as a study guide platform that intends to give you the material and get out of your way, as opposed to the engagement-driving gamification of others. One of the killer features is being able to drill practice questions related to the specific study section you're working on - e.g. 20-30 questions about water rights, encumbrances or calculating GRM. Frequently my wife found herself studying vocab for a section but having to skim through a 100-question practice test to find related questions.
I extended the material to all 50 states' basic real estate licensing exam and am looking to add even more "professional exam" material.
If you want to expand into other areas, it might be worth adding Amateur Radio (HAM) License training materials as a next step. Relatively well defined, also an area of technology that deserves more attention.
I've just published https://nohypeai.dev to share what I've learned about the state of LLM agents for software development and help people who are just catching up orient themselves.
It was also important to me to provide a non-hyped, balanced view (hence the name), including pointing people to realistic assessments of the effectiveness of these tools and highlighting the risks and concerns.
I will use this to keep track of all these emerging abstractions. it's a smart play to establish this position between the rapid cutting edge and people who need to be able to reason about it but not implement it.
I'm building ClosedLinks, a tool for sharing files and/or messages anonymously through one-time access links with no traceable sender. Most digital tools assume persistence; ClosedLinks is built for ephemerality and unlinkability. Each link is single-use, redirects on access, and stores encrypted content only temporarily. Recipients never see the original URL, enabling plausible deniability. Think: whistleblowers.
Encryption uses Fernet (symmetric), and all decryption happens only at point of access. There's no data retention after viewing or expiration. Optional analytics give visibility without compromising identity. Users can get notified when their shared links was accessed by the recipient, and they can set passwords for enhanced security. Limitations include email-based signups and no end-to-end encryption (yet).
Cool, I've been working on similar my self. Not released yet, haven't had the time recently.
Curious as to why you store the data in the database in b64 as opposed to files on disk. What's the reasoning for that? Doesn't it make storage/backups/etc more complicated?
Not an expert myself, I opted for in browser encryption, in chunks, so as to avoid memory limitations (at least in some browsers, not FF yet), and in browser gzip so as to keep file size down and speed things up.
I find your niche quite interesting (journalists, whistleblowers) but given the high stakes of that perhaps an open source or more collaborative approach would be easier to promote.
Another idea I've tried out but not pursued, is some sort of browser extension/addon (I used nwjs, similar to electron), that offers client side encryption for any site (form field really). So you'd only post encrypted stuff to whatever service (email, reddit, hn, whatever) and only anyone with the key would get to read it (well, assuming they have the key and the same extension). Just throwing the idea out there, I'm sure others have thought about something along those lines before. The details to get it right are tricky (UX wise), but for your target audience it may be well worth the extra work.
Thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to read the white paper. It's a good feeling when you spend time and effort on something and someone takes the time to go through it.
I opted for database storage to simplify the management of ephemeral data. For a solo project, and as someone still learning, this was a practical way to keep the codebase manageable while focusing on core features like encryption and token-based access control.
However, you should note, in case you missed it in the white paper, that messages and files are deleted upon view (for view-once links) or expiry, whichever comes first. This ensures that the ~33% storage overhead from base64 is temporary, as a file only occupies space until it’s accessed or expires.
That said, you’re absolutely right that base64 encoding adds unneccessay storage overhead and could complicate backups for large files. I also recognize that storing files on disk could be more efficient for large-scale use cases. As (or should I say IF?) the project scales with users, I’ll definitely consider optimizations like disk storage or compression (your gzip idea is great!).
If I run into optimization problems, then it means people are using my product, and that sounds like one of them good problems (Marlo Stanfield's voice).
Your suggestion of in-browser encryption is super compelling, especially to assure users of total privacy. I noted in my white paper that client-side encryption is a future goal to address the limitation of the current server-side encryption, and your approach aligns with that vision.
The browser extension idea is also fascinating, I did not think of that.
I’m open to collaboration (again, as mentioned in my white paper) and would love to discuss ideas for making ClosedLinks more auditable while still keeping it commercially viable/sustainable. I’d be excited to hear more about your project or explore ways we could collaborate on privacy-focused tools.
Thanks again for the encouragement and for sparking this discussion!
Just a +1 for browser encryption... you should be able to use pbkdf2 + aes to take an input passphrase with pbkdf2 to generate an aes key to then encrypt an input file in the browser, I'm not sure if you gain much via gzip before/after depending on the document that may already be a zip file (for word/oo, etc).
On the file storage, I generally recommend going straight to a cloud interface to separate storage backend from the actual storage medium... There are self-hosted options for an S3 compatible backend you manage, or you can use actual S3 or one of several other providers for S3 style storage.
"One-time access links with no traceable sender" ... so people get anonymous messages while logged-in to this site? How does the sender know about the recipient in the first place? What would I put in my HN profile to get messages on the site? You have people's email addresses... isn't that a problem when saying "no traceable sender?" People will need anonymous email addresses. Why not have pass-phrase logins?
I had this idea (linked in my 3rd most recent comment,) whereby what if I wanted to give someone some crypto via a set of keywords? Maybe you could turn this into some kind of PayPal for crypto.
Yea, the email part was a problem I mentioned in the white paper. Problem was I couldn't think of a way to enforce plan limits while making the subscription model work. If usernames, then they could just abuse it by creating new usernames each time. But I understand you. Maybe if you have some suggestions?
So regarding the sender and recipient, let's say I wanted to send you something. A message or a file, but wanted to maintain plausible deniability on if I sent it. I wanted a way of doing this, and the solution I came up with was that the link you receive publicly is not the link you land on to access the message or file. Anyone who lands on the publicly shared link, gets redirected to a new url each time.
But even without the deniability angle, it could be a way of sharing files with one time links. The links work once. And there's password protection, if enabled.
The implementation might not be perfect, but open to ideas, of course.
On, and there's API feature for generating links, and uploading files - for what it might be worth.
Well, I've used paste bins before. How about one with an email address input that'll invite whoever is meant to view it?
So instead of sending someone an image in an email, you send them a ClosedLink, they can view it once, and you avoid having to send them the image as an attachment?
Yea, I don't quite like the email idea because it doesn't fit the idea in my head. I want a tool where I can share a ClosedLink with someone without having to ask them their email and getting asked "why" questions. The link should be shareable via any communication channel, and they can be hidden behind passwords so only the intended person can access the link.
Maybe I'm bugging and my implementation/execution is not as perfect as I thought it would be when I started. lol
> Are you expecting a lot of signups? As plan B, maybe aim to get a grant from the Oasis Protocol Foundation - they're all about privacy - and quiz them on what to do next.
Ha! I was hoping to get lots of sign ups, but apparently that has failed. I'd never heard of the Oasis Protocol Foundation, I'll look into it.
Thanks for taking to time to respond. Appreciated.
Are you expecting a lot of signups? As plan B, maybe aim to get a grant from the Oasis Protocol Foundation - they're all about privacy - and quiz them on what to do next.
I'm working on an engine for Excel-like formulas, which will be available both as a library and as a service (which I've mentioned on HN a few times before). I originally started work on the engine back in 2008, when our app builder needed it.
This is a wheel I see people reinventing all the time, often for use in SaaS applications. The implementations are often underwhelming: function support is limited, documentation is sparse to non-existent and errors are typically only communicated at runtime -- if at all. Formula editors usually lack autocomplete, making them frustrating to use.
I've spent years solving all these problems (with a statically-typed language), and I'd love for others to benefit from the work. I have extracted the formula engine from our app compiler, so the library is nearly complete. The runtime part (evaluating formulas) has been rewritten in TypeScript. Next, I'll build a service around it to validate, compile and evaluate formulas -- which should be fun.
I'm planning to do a Show HN once I have a preview up and running.
Building a local CLI tool, hns [1], for speech-to-text in terminal in 5 keystrokes.
It records my voice, transcribes it locally using faster-whisper, and copies the transcription to my clipboard. Check the demo linked in the GitHub repo to see how it works.
I use it especially with Claude Code to provide detailed context for the outcome I want to achieve. I ramble for 5 minutes, and then paste the transcription to Claude Code, instead of having to type all my thoughts all the time.
The workflow is like this:
$ hns # start recording
<talk>
<Enter> # clipboard now holds the text
Less than a week ago I officially launched a game I've been working on for years, Omiword[1], my second word game so far. It was discussed here on HN previously while it was in open beta[2], and again when Stripe shut down my account without explanation[3].
Reception so far has been positive. It's nice to be done with a long project, though this one will never exactly be done--I need to make sure there is a new puzzle for each day, though I have several months' worth prepared in advance.
I've started designing my next game, but it's probably a couple of years out. I just need something for that part of my brain to occasionally chew on.
I've been working on Red Candle, a Ruby gem that runs LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Phi) directly in your Ruby process through Rust bindings (based on the candle crate from Hugging Face). No Python, no servers - just FFI with Metal/CUDA acceleration.
It's been useful for adding AI features to Rails apps without the complexity of managing separate services. Would love feedback from anyone working with LLMs in Ruby.
Still working on https://phrasing.app - an app for polyglots to learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI. Just finished a onboarding flow, now updating the search and create experience to fall more in line with actual usage from users, then hopefully prepping for a more public launch :)
Had a fun week fixing up the application so it’s 100x faster on 5 different axes, and it’s starting to feel really well polished. Also started to move from reagent to preact/signals in a long slow migration hopefully to hsx.
I also moved the critical algorithm logic into an independent Clojure file that is compiled (and tested) with cherry-cljs — I’m hoping to expand this to ClojErl and jank so I can have isomorphic Clojure code running on the browser, BEAM server, and native swift app :D
It’s getting really close to done, I’m using it now to study 18 different languages, including some really minor ones like Maltese, Welsh, and Cantonese (not sure if Cantonese is really a minor language, but definitely low learner resourced) and it’s easy, slick, and surprisingly effective!
I was a linguist in a former life, so these apps always intrigue me. I've made a few attempts myself over the years. Yours looks slick and would've been an interesting one to check out if I were learning a language.
I signed-in and took a look around getting a few "Error rendering home" errors occasionally, fyi.
I was a little surprised at the CC#/subscribe page, since the prices didn't seem to be matching up with the marketing pricing page.
You might want to consider having like a sandbox account with some sample materials so people can feel the power of the app rather than depending on someone subscribing based on the video only.
Thanks for the kind words! Sorry about the errors, I’ll get these sorted out.
The CC page will be updated next week sometime - for now I’m letting people register at the old prices (50%) while I’m plugging all the holes.
And the sandbox is coming! It’ll be on the marketing page, just under the video. It’ll probably take a month to get around to though. That, plus a trial week ($3.99) should hopefully give the user a taste
Why do you need a beautiful UI? Because you need something to use for thousands of hours.
Why have a visual interface at all? It’s more convenient to use, is way more engaging, and just better for learning. There is an audio component to the app, and I’m sure more and more audio components will be added, but I would be surprised if in-app audio ever exceeds half of my usage.
For example there is a shadowing exercise that is purely audio based (put in headphones and press play). But what if you want to see what a word means? Or see its gender/case/tense? Mark it as easy or hard, remembered or forgotten? I can look all this information up, plus read a few paragraphs of explanations in less time than I would take me to formulate a question.
Sounds nice! A word of advice, instead of claiming 120 languages, I feel it would be better to focus on a few an ensure that they work well with native speakers.
You are talking about a very different product :) I have spent over a year making sure everything works for many languages. The whole point is to have one interface, for all my languages, big and small.
Additionally, please try it out before assuming they’re just claims. I’ve been using it daily for 3 months in 18 languages (roughly one from each major language family), and been in pretty constant contact with native speakers.
True I cannot vouche for all 120 languages, and sure there is the occasional error in the lower resource languages. However, I have put in a lot of work to make sure I have a representivie sample, and the errors are currently well within an acceptable range — and I’m working hard to improve them!
Yes, it's a religious website, but it's also the site with the most languages of any site on the 'net, at 1100+ right now. Some of them are downloadable content only, most are web content as well. The translations are done at least in part by native speakers of the target language.
Figured you'd appreciate the complexity of having that many languages on a site. jw.org.
If I am associating the right error, it’s because you’re missing a critical browser API. I will add an intercept to show a message instead of an error, but I won’t be able to support legacy versions of browsers while it’s just me unfortunately
I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing.
I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either.
The app creates a thin, always visible line at the bottom of my screen that shrinks inwards as time passes, at the end of the allotted time the screen will blur preventing me from doing whatever I was doing and snapping me out of my hyperfocus state. I can choose how long the timer runs for and how long the screen blurs for. Tonight I added a loop feature so I can use it like a pomodoro timer with enforced breaks.
It's a simple menu bar app for MacOS and could be better, but it does what I want it to do. I've been using it for the past week and found it really helpful.
I haven't used Swift before so it was a good learning experience too.
It's the same principle as a Time Timer (timetimer.com) which I used previously but I find my app works better as the screen blur actually prevents me from just continuing whatever I'm doing, and the bar is always in my line of sight.
I use alarms/timers on my phone for this. Almost always 3-5min before a meeting... I have to make a habit of setting them up each morning, but that isn't too bad. I tend to miss the highlight color on the status bar for calendar or even chat messages/notifications. So the loud/obnoxious alarm is best for me... at least as I work from home.
The idea is interesting, but I'm curious as to why you didn't consider trying a Pomodoro Technique timer app, as there are many available. These apps offer time tracking and reporting features that can help boost productivity. Why not consider using existing methods or tools to address the issue instead of developing something new from scratch?
I'm really interested in this if theres a way I could make use of this too? Word for word I have the same list of problems when it comes to me hyperfocusing on things, where I don't even just forget to eat but I can't feel that I'm hungry. Too busy hyperfixating to feel so.
i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096
Gieeve an instantly deploying AppEngine Standard, please. It's still great and the integrated push queues rather valuable, but Google likes to make the rest sooo complicated...
Lately I’ve been heads‑down on a complete rethink of my dotfiles setup. It’s not just a `.vimrc` collection – the goal is to treat the dev environment like any other project: reproducible from scratch, automated, and designed to scale as AI becomes a bigger part of daily work.
The core of the project is a “Spilled Coffee Principle,” which basically says that if I spill coffee on my laptop, I should be back up in an afternoon. Every configuration change is codified into scripts, not a one‑off terminal command. Setup scripts create directories, handle symlinks, document dependencies and generally remove the “Brent the bottleneck hero” problem.
Beyond that, the repo lives inside a P.P.V system (Pillars, Pipelines, Vaults) where dotfiles are one of the pillars. This structure separates foundational configs from automation pipelines and secure vaults. It forces me to think at the system level: how do all of my tools fit together, where do secrets live, and how can I onboard a new machine (or person) with a single `git clone && ./setup.sh`?
What’s really interesting is the mindset shift this has caused. I’ve been experimenting with what I call the OSE (“Outside and Slightly Elevated”) principle: moving from micro‑level, line‑by‑line coding to a macro‑level role where you orchestrate AI agents. At the micro level you’re navigating files in an editor and debugging sequentially; at the macro level you’re using tmux + git worktrees + AI coding assistants to run multiple tasks in parallel. Instead of `1 developer × 1 task = linear productivity`, you get `1 developer × N tasks × parallel execution`, which has obvious 100×–1000× potential. This OSE approach forces me to design workflows, delegate implementation to agents, and focus on the “why” and “what” instead of the “how”.
The result is that my dotfiles aren’t just about aliases anymore; they’re a platform that bootstraps AI‑assisted development, enforces good practices, and keeps me thinking about the bigger picture rather than getting lost tweaking my prompt or editor colours. I’d love to hear how others are approaching the macro vs. micro balance in their own setups.
I've actually settled more on the opposite approach - my tool usage changes enough that I generally only care to configure the latest subset of tools when I get a new PC, and of course the others are there if I need them.
To that end, each tool has its own subdirectory in my dotfiles repo ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/ ), and I add READMEs to each subdirectory explaining what dependencies are necessary for this tool, what keyboard shortcuts this tool uses, etc.
This approach has been pretty resilient against my changing needs, changing operating systems, and changing tool versions; even if doesn't optimize for a single invocation of ./setup.sh
This is interesting, both in the sense that you did a great job on it, and I think unexpected-ways-to-explore-SQL is underrated. There are a lot of SQL databases that people could benefit from being able to drop a tool like this onto and explore.
One of the most interesting applications for LLM's is writing SQL based on a schema, and I wonder if your tool could incorporate a "show me the books titles from authors who's name starts with T" and write that out.
Yes, I agree. Just as we need to check what LLMs produce when writing code, I think this could be a way to check what they produce when trying to write SQL.
I'm finishing up a "book tour" (mostly podcasts) for my recently released book on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly post re-independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in e-government services and a top EU startup hub (Skype, Bolt, Wise, etc.). I'd love if people checked it out and gave feedback as it's my first big published work and the culmination of quite a few years of research and writing. https://www.rebootinganation.com/ or https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rebooting-a-nation-9...
Thanks! As of right now, no, but I'm sure if the book sells well enough the publisher will invest in an audiobook (given the state of AI I'm guessing the cost to develop one is going down extremely rapidly so hopefully the bar is lower than it used to be)
I really like it. I particularly like that you've resisted the temptation to include SQL itself or the jq queries in the DSL.
The validation piece makes it feel a bit a bit like the Rails mindset for people who work better in FP.
I'd make a could of suggestions for the docs:
Maybe a bit more discussion of how we'd test our webpipe code.
I see why you've called them 'middlewares' but, maybe the term 'macros' or 'pipeline functions' might avoid confusion with express/connect middlewares
thanks for making this! I'd love to use the microphone key (fn + mic) to trigger Handy but even after turning off dictation it doesn't seem like the system allows that key to be used (I get a dialog prompting me to turn on dictation).
We're supposed to use AI at work, which has been very 50/50 for me as expected.
Last month I decided to take a subscription of my own for Claude Code to use in my personal time mostly for practice and educational purposes.
So the past few weekends and the occasional week night I've been vibe-coding a game for iOS/MacOS using Swift and SpriteKit.
I have some experience with Swift previously but not at work, so it's extremely experimental for me. However it's been going pretty well. Most of the hang-ups are Xcode configuration issues.
It's interesting to poke Claude a bit and discover what it's actually decent at and awful at.
Gameplay mechanics-wise it's been able to implement things as requested generally without problems.
UI elements like menu screens and such it has been almost completely unable to do no matter what prompt I give to it.
It's safe to say I would never call the codebase professional quality. However, the base game has been implemented well enough to play without bugs and I've been solidly impressed.
How do you find xcode, is it as bad as everyone bashes it at reddit? I am planning to get m4 mac mini and do some Swift development, just didn't use xcode ever.
These days it feels particularly outdated. I'm used to Sublime Text and VS Code for most of my day-to-day work and I just find navigating code such a chore in Xcode.
The other issue I've had is if I want to change project/target/build settings, Xcode doesn't provide an easy way to do so. You need to poke around the UI to find where these settings and file relationships are set and change them that way.
There's a project file that I believe contains them all but it's not intuitive to modify by hand.
I've built a VST3 plug-in that simulates a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ preamp purely from the circuit.
The approach doesn't seem popular for professional plug-ins likely because it wasn't viable for real time until modern CPU enhancements became available. Performance scales with frequency of the input which is interesting and seems to be a consequence of using an iterative solver on a system of equations and using the previous sample's state vector as a guess for the current sample.
On my MacBook M3 it requires between 50 to 70% of a single core to produce a 2x oversampled output at 48000Hz. This can be scaled back by reducing the solution tolerance bounds and get down near 25% with minimal quality loss.
I'm working on a new memory-safe systems programming language that is supposted to be (almost) as fast as C, Rust etc, but as simple and concise as Python: https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang
There is a playground which is using a C compiler and WASM, and so is quite fast, while running fully in the browser. Theres also a (online) conversion tool to convert and compare source code. There are some benchmarks as well.
Writing my own (concise, simple) programming language was a dream for me since I'm 20 or so. Feedback would be great!
The "Comparison" section feels unfair. Add some things that some languages have but Bau is missing. I have no idea what trade-offs I'd be doing when choosing Bau.
You have the "Non-Features" section of course, but I'm looking more into what I'd be losing by going from C to Bau. Bau's price for safety.
Thanks! I know Rust, Java etc do a good job of array bound check elimination, but I prefer a way to _ensure_ there is no check. I felt this was missing.
Playing with motion amplification to see if we can predict heart/respiratory rate of my newborn. I shot a few 4k videos of him sleeping as test data and working through some algorithms from published papers.
On parental leave with my third. We are on month 4 so I have (a bit more) free time in the late evenings after we put the older ones to bed.
Working on a complex AI system that will eventually allow AI overseer subagents to create complex workflows internally on the fly for multi step reasoning capabilities. Its a vey complex system but easiest way I can describe it as a metacognitive framework for self organizing workflows depending on context and dynamic adjustment capabilities depending on environmental signals. lots of cool little systems that will do all types of fun stuff like feed logprobs to various Ai subagents to give extra bias signals or have the llms understand their own confidence in answering this or that query. Anyways I could write a whole decertation on all the various goodies in it. But currently at the moment starting small and working on developing automated hyperparameter reasoning evaluation system. its important to know the most affective hyperparameters per model and no better way to converge on those numbers then an automated system. After that using dspy or my own home brwe system to do same on converging for "best" system prompts for various tasks. And then setting up the various mcp servers that give these abilities to whatever llm uses them. Lots of work, but learning a lot in the process plus I love RND. I see potential in modern day systems for recursive self improvement just have to set up the system around the capability. thats the hard part, the vision is always easy...
Still building https://ongoingthings.com - a way to document and privately share life updates with close people.
I used to post personal updates in group chats - scattered, repetitive, and easy to miss. Now each topic (like raising a child, a trip, a project) gets its own private space - an Ongoing Thing - where updates stay organized.
People get email notifications for new posts. There's no feed, no comments, no ads - just a calm way to stay connected.
We just added Partner Things so multiple people (like two parents) can post to the same thing. Our small user base loves it.
Still figuring out marketing. Until now, it's mostly been word-of-mouth. Feedback welcome!
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently! My friends group all seem burnt out by the direction social media is going, with what you're building seeming like a better return to the norm. Will follow along to see your progress!
One thing that kept tripping me up when thinking about this was pricing - everyone is so conditioned to think that social media is free that this will be a huge hill to overcome. Your pricing, although I think if done right feels very fair, instinctively makes me recoil a bit.
Yeah, even calling it anything close to "social media" turns some people off. And most people are totally fine using group chats or DMs — which are free, for now.
It felt weird paying for email after using Gmail for so long. Even now, most people do not care enough in order to justify paying for it. This feels similar.
We can't afford to offer free-forever accounts to everyone - not without compromising on principles. But we are thinking of ways to make it more accessible at least for some people. Open to ideas!
The "social media" baggage, and the pricing bit you pointed, those are definitely the two biggest challenges imo. If this was not something we needed and used ourselves, we probably wouldn't have built it.
I am currently in the process of implementing a TLV message protocol (think MsgPack, CBOR, etc).
This is something I've been kicking tires on since my time at $BIGCORP; JSON without the bloat, Protobufs without the ceremony. I've drawn a lot of inspiration from MsgPack, CBOR, and Ion 1.1. Big emphasis on a tight set of core primitives, low-cost extensions, storing reused values/schemas, optional pre-negotiation, etc. That said, I've now been spending time trying to study the performance angle to make sure the design doesn't have a negative impact on encoding/decoding performance before committing to the implementation.
Regrettably nothing much to show (at least yet), but hopefully if nothing else it will become my go-to format for other personal projects that I work on.
I'm working on Beam, a web app that lets you transfer files between nearby devices using QR codes - completely offline, with no servers involved, and leaving absolutely no trace.
Beam is perfect for sharing sensitive documents, transferring files when you can't use USB, email, or cloud storage.
Im investigating creating a nattokinase overexpression strain for fun. This is my second home-brewed food GMO!
Basically, nattokinase is an enzyme made by natto (Japanese fermented soybeans). It’s been show clinically to help against blood clots. Unfortunately, the clinical dose is 5x the quantity in a serving of natto.
That’s too much natto to eat! So I’m working to genetically engineer a normal, typical natto strain to just over express that one enzyme, so 1 serving == 1 clinically relevant dose
My last was genetically engineering yeast to produce grape aroma, then baking bread. Was great fun feeding people it. I want to eventually throw GMO dinner parties in SF, but only with GMOs I’ve created with my own hands
I am working on easiest way to manage all your MCP configurations and credentials. Additionally, I have added couple of interesting MCP servers, like converting any OpenAPI v3 spec to MCP server (including support of authentication): https://x.com/getaikoapp/status/1945278307496235482
After working on and using many MCP servers, I hit couple of issues multiple times:
* Do I configure 2 MCP servers of same type for 2 different API Keys or do I manually update configurations all the time? (e.g. production and development environments)
* when I have too many tools enabled, I noticed that either I am hitting context limit too quickly or LLM is hallucinating when choosing a right tool
* Some MCP servers expose a lot of tools, I want to disable some of them forever, instead of doing configuration per AI assistant (first for Claude, then Cursor and so on)
* Most MCP servers are hosted by third parties, as a privacy conscious person, I do not want to share my credentials with third parties.
NOTE: Gmail and Calendar apps are currently under CASA Tier 2 security assessment, hence not published to production. But you can see demo usage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEy6Y1kfn4
Currently thinking about better ways to spread the word about https://theretowhere.com (my website that makes it easier to find apartments and Airbnbs/hotels close to things you care about).
I've actually started getting some back and fourth feedback with a couple users, which has kept me motivated and validated. But I need more organic traffic somehow. I've recently released a new usecase (https://theretowhere.com/vacation) that might be more well suited for vacationers, so let's see if that sticks.
Funny anecdote from today - I just set up Slack notifications so I get more instant knowledge of errors on the platform, and the first notification came in just a couple moments after I deployed. It was for an error that I thought noone would run into for a couple days. Imagine my (bad) luck!
I'm starting to think about moving to a new city and was considering to build a tool like this. And now I'm excited to see this already exists!
For my use-case the interface you created isn't the best. Now that I'm searching for a new home I'm interested in finding a place that has a bakery nearby, but it doesn't really matter what bakery. The same goes for restaurants, pubs, ... For this case there are too many places to add them "manually".
Thanks for creating this, I will be definitely using this in the the coming months.
You don't have to add them in manually - the heatmap interface supports "Open searches", where you can add in pins for a bunch of locations at a time based on a query (like "bakeries").
A CLI tool to make reasoning about Postgres locks a bit easier.
Given a database[1] and a set of DDL statements/migrations you want to check, pglockanalyze will open a transaction, execute the statements, read the pg_locks view to analyze the locks they acquire and rollback (or commit, depending on the flags you passed) the transaction. Then, it will output the results for each statement.
I think there's merit in this idea, that said it's very much an experiment so there could be flaws and/or corner cases that this strategy won't work well for.
It's meant to act as a complement, not a replacement, to things like static analysis and the official Postgres docs.
The most important features (for me) are: One Time Payment and 100% local and private. I don't send any data to any server. Just enough to verify license keys.
- Its one time payment, user can import any text, URL or ebooks and use the reader with read along text highlighting or export the audio as mp3 or m4a (audiobook specific format).
- Currently only supports MacOS with Apple Silicon I was doing Windows too but its making development slow, so I'm pausing that for now.
- The most recent feature I added is Global Capture where user can setup some hotkeys to import any text and URL. Text parsing and extracting text is one of the hardest part of this.
- Also, just added the a Reader view to website. Its goal is to mimic the app featuers as much as the browser limitations allow. I don't have a free Tier but a 7 days money back gurantee.
I mostly have a dev and engineering background but the most exciting aspect of this marketing and those stuff. Still trying to figure that.
I'd be happy to hear any feedback and ideas.
Edit: Only English at the moment. Adding more languages is in my plan but its very difficult for me since I don't know any other languages. But I think it would be great to add those as well.
This week I’ve been working on predicting upcoming paychecks with Nodejs so we can automatically decide how much funds to move into your budgets when you get paid. I pull the past 3 months of transaction data from our Postgres database using Prisma and run some analysis.
People think syncing and delayed transaction data is normal, and I’m working on changing that by having the budgeting built in to the checking account. Along with a high yield savings account, goal envelopes, bill envelopes, etc, joint accounts, etc.
I've been building for some time a local production like environment running in Minikube, deployed in a single `terraform apply` command. The plan is to deploy in one command a couple of home made services, frontend, backend, some websockets in between, and have everything accessible over HTTPS via Ingress resources. That, and all the open source observability tools you can imagine (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo), configured and running at once.
These last few days I have decided to try getting Kubernetes Gateway API to work, using the implementation of Istio. I have written an `auth` microservices which provides JWTs and published a public JWKS endpoint, and intend to have the API gateway validate tokens and claims to allow access to other services. The plan being to write API services without any knowledge of the authentication systems that happen upstream. If a request reaches them, it's that it had been validated before !
Most people use it for analysis and ops work, + data science.
I find myself using Sourcetable to run our company: query the DB, analyze the user data, make projections, write copy, help with technical SEO (search the web, scrape data, check status codes, clean my sitemap, run vector space analysis etc.), talk to apps, financial modeling for our operating model + forecasting, etc.
The main idea I'm thinking about is LLM related: we're all having a social experience with machines (!) while building the machines (!!). I'm not sure my brain fully grasps that it's talking to silicon while I work.
I’m currently working on implementing a Minecraft server in Rust. Not a new concept, I know, but it’s a great learning opportunity.
I already have a few basics like loading and saving worlds and placing/breaking blocks implemented.
In a few weeks I will release the first version and host a public server for testing. Then I will also do a show hn.
Repo link: https://github.com/T-x-T/oxide (better readme coming soon, don’t worry)
My new project is https://bingeworthyshows.tv where i take all the curated YouTube channels and make them easy to watch so you don't have to rot your brain on Netflix shows you don't really want to watch but end up watching because you can't find anything better to watch
I am building Overcentric - a simple and affordable toolkit that combines web & product analytics, chat support, help center, session replays and frontend error reporting, all in one place.
Building, testing and improving based on feedback of several startups that integrated it. Also using Overcentric for Overcentric itself, so I always get ideas for improvement.
What's next: more tools that are useful for startups are on the roadmap and I am exploring how LLMs can be further utilised (apart from support, session replay summaries, aiding in writing help center articles, integration) and refining pricing.
Also working on an improved landing page, but you can check out the current one at:
https://overcentric.com/
I'm writing an encrypted and padded IP tunnel to help people build their own multi-hop circuits to access the internet anonymously, without Tor, and with protection from end-to-end correlation attacks.
I'm working on Waywo, a semantic search engine for "What are you working on?" threads powered by new features in Redis 8 like the vector set data structure for semantic search.
Waywo will help users quickly digest hundreds of project descriptions, explore similar projects, deduplicate projects across threads from previous posts, visualize a graph of all projects, and more! I'll be documenting my approach to building this with coding Agents like cursor and Gemini CLI
I'm building Waywo for the Redis Hackathon on DEV.to that is running from now until August 10! Follow me on DEV/GitHub/X (@briancaffey) to see how this project turns out!
I still have https://founderfodder.com going as well. That's where I get my HN news now. I get to read the story, or at least its summary, and also read the comments summaries like an editorial. It's great!
I have been working on building a site where you search by phrases which you have heard in some youtube shorts and are not able to remember which video was it, my project would give the users the videos in which the phrase has been said or mentioned
Yeah something like that. I am thinking of using audio to text converter using whisper apis, index the audio text in a vector DB and then perform string matching.
I’ve been working on an animal management app for the last two years or so. It’s a hobby project so it’s not going very fast. Recently I’ve released a new version with support for one model of a UHF RFID reader. It allows me to count and identify my chickens from up to 15 feet away.
I am building a Pinterest clone that filters out AI generated imagery[1]. It is built on top of Bluesky so gets the benefit of its large library of well alt-text'd images, which aids with search.
Also working on a new kind of social media, where every user is a verified human[2]. The idea is to avoid the problems that sock puppet accounts controlled by the rich and powerful can have on our society. Again, I am starting with Bluesky as a target demographic and have already had some adoption.
I'm building a CVD system to make arbitrarily large single crystal optical quality diamonds. Not a coder, so I'm using ChatGPT and Claude to show me how to integrate microwave power sources, vacuum & gas supply systems, and other subsystems with LabView. As Gust said in Charlie Wilson's War, "We'll see.".
Animal colony management is largely managed in Excel sheets, with no integrations to related systems or hardware sensing. We're working on the spreadsheet problem first, so that biomedical researchers can share information about their colonies with other researchers at their institutions, and explore the lines that other labs have. This opens up collaboration options and makes it much easier for the research community to find out what mouse lines other labs have (and may borrow for their own experiments).
to me that's exciting and optimistic because any marginal efficiency in animal testing pays off in net-humane treatment of lab animals.
it's counter intuitive, but if even a small portion of animal rights money went into tech solutions like this, they could have an orders of magnitude greater impact on welfare.
I appreciate the perspective, but I think that tech solutions like this have plenty of opportunities to bootstrap and apply for various grants and funds (which we are doing). I'd rather see more money go towards non-tech solutions and direct care for animals. Shelters are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, and the number of pets people have adopted and given up has boomed since the pandemic. Not to mention the number of shady animal mills out there exacerbating the issue. Tech can't solve that problem, but more volunteers and outreach can.
The tech community is doing just fine in terms of money at the moment.
I'm currently working on DSC, a tensor library I wrote from scratch in C++ with a PyTorch-like API.
Right now it works on both CPU and GPU (both AMD and NVIDIA) and is capable of running LLMs like Qwen, I'm currently implementing a native profiler to trace CPU and GPU kernels and then I'll work on speed. Goal is to be competitive with PyTorch eager by the end of the year.
I've been building a desktop app on the side that addresses the problem of screenshots getting accumulated on disk over a period of time. It provides an alternate workflow for capturing screenshots, where the app let's the user select tags before taking the screenshot. Tags can be associated with actions such as "move to trash after 1 day", "delete after 7 days" or "store in /specific/location".
I have got the main functionality working and I've been using it myself in a crude way (using sqlite client directly for data entry etc.) for about a week. It was not meant to be a serious project to begin with - I just wanted to build something to evaluate Tauri for desktop apps. I am still not 100% convinced if such a tool is worth building, so the code hasn't been published anywhere. Do you care enough about "screenshots management and cleanup" to use something like this?
I would go further with this, essentially matching patterns of files in certain directories. Another use case for example is removing old log files from a directory.
In any case, I would have it as a user option to carry through the action, i.e. "the following is scheduled for deletion saving X disk space, do you wish to continue?".
Tags with actions sounds useful. Maybe worth a demo video to get opinions from a broader audience?
Personally, I think I'll stick to pruning my screenshots folder once a year with an image manager. I'm pretty content with niri's builtin screenshot capture or something like Greenshot on windows. Just my two cents
I've had a notion that LLMs can read Typescript types much better, than JSON schema types.
So, I've been tinkering around with a library that can generate schemas for structured JSON outputs, according to a Typescript-like custom schema definition: https://github.com/nadeesha/structlm
So far, I've been seeing promising results with accuracy on-par or better, but using 20-40% less tokens than JSON schemas.
Mostly just doing some furry porn commissions while I wait for my partner to finish enough of the scripts for the next chapter of out comic (http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/) for me to start drawing pages.
Jarvis: A native voice command layer for your desktop
I’ve been hacking away at Jarvis on nights and weekends for the past few months. I found myself increasingly frustrated with the constant context-switching involved in using ChatGPT through a browser for quick AI tasks. So, I decided to build a native voice-command layer that works seamlessly within any app you’re currently using.
It’s still pretty early, but I set up a frictionless web demo at jarvis.ceo/demo, where you can test it instantly without installation or sign-up. I’d love your feedback!
I am working on DataGrid Toolkit. Based on my experiences building and selling (Excel like) data grids, people always look for your data grid, "but can it do this"? With DataGrid Toolkit, a developer can choose his own building blocks/modules and make a more Excel-like data grid, or make a more DataTables style traditional paginated table. The toolkit is headless and stateless by design and comes with different renderers. Canvas, html or some hybrid. It is written in Typescript and the data store is in Rust/Webassembly.
Well not really obscure, but some want formulas, some want advanced filters, grouping/pivoting. Nothing that's not done before but you don't want to say yes to all these things as the product will lose its core identity and strength.
So I will release my new data grid component based on my own toolkit, and if people want tweaks or "add these features", I will demonstrate them the toolkit.
I noticed this for some companies: there are 10+ spreadsheets which should have the same structure, but different data. For example one spreadsheet per country for purposes of budgeting, modeling, or just inputs. These spreadsheets tend to break and it’s hard to update them centrally. There is of course an option with moving to a proper admin app, but it requires development and quite often results in less UX, because users are familiar with spreadsheets - they can write formulas, analyze the data, or connect with other systems.
This is why I’m writing a tool to simplify administrative work with these files, so you can quickly see where spreadsheets diverge, propagate updates, make them version controlled, and many other good things, which we have in typical app development, but still miss in spreadsheets management.
We are building a social network that makes it simple for people all over Africa (Niger) to find, organize, and share events, such as underground music performances, street festivals, local markets, and cultural gatherings. We are creating something that is accessible to all, supports grassroots communities, and honors local culture.
This platform is entirely self-funded and was created with passion, hard work, and faith in our goal. However, at this point, even modest assistance, such as paying for our internet, can have a significant impact on future advancement.
Find me on LinkedIn if this speaks to you or if you would like to work with me, grow together, or just have a conversation. Connecting would be wonderful.
One community at a time, we can work together to illuminate Africa's events landscape.
I often need a PostgreSQL server for testing an application, vibe coding, or troubleshooting a PG client. Inspired by Neon's architecture, I implemented PostgreSQL WASM (PGlite) with a cloud proxy (via Websockets) at https://postgresql.dbfor.dev
All the PostgreSQL data lives in your browser, and you have unlimited PostgreSQL servers that persist the data locally without installing anything.
Some folks I work with have a terabyte of short string records that they regularly scan with regexes to develop classification criteria; it's a prime application for a substring index that can accelerate their queries, but the scale is daunting.
I came up with a suffix-sorting index for this domain that's interestingly simple. Most algos for this use a generalized suffix tree that's built by concatenating all the strings into one giant string and feeding it into a conventional suffix sort, but that has some big constants on the indexing throughput, due I think to the overhead of handling one giant string instead of a bunch of small independent records.
In the latter case, by making the structure slightly simpler and search slightly harder, I can get indexing throughput in the GBps, at least for the sorting part.
The output of that in its simplest form is a 4n or 8n-sized set of int's, but it can be fed further into a compressed rank/select data structure for various space/indexing time/retrieval time tradeoffs, and I don't think those are slow (eg Roaring Bitmaps)
I'll post this on show HN if anybody's interested; I'm still writing up the details, as I've barely gotten the POC code working.
Working on https://openreaders.com – a platform with free graded readers, starting with Spanish (my native language).
When learning a new language, it’s surprisingly hard to find free, engaging reading content at your level. Even paid options often aren’t that great. I’m trying to solve this by leveraging LLMs, building useful features for learners, and focusing on user experience.
I'm heads down building a workflow pipeline builder that executes Wasm Components as part of individual nodes within the pipeline.
Think Zapier or n8n, but you either use existing processing nodes or upload your own code, written of course in any language that compiles to Wasm Components.
I'm working on my first project, a knowledge file creator that can build a RAG-centric file based on inputs like a website or a content document. I'm not sure how to grow; your feedback is valuable!
I'm working on hessra.net, a token-based authorization system for machines and built using biscuits. The idea is that any service/machine/IoT device can authenticate to the service and get authorization tokens for each request based on policy. Then the tokens can be included with the request and verified without any further RTTs using the service's public key. The tokens are meant to be single-use and scoped to a single request.
Besides the simple "get token and send to a thing that uses it to authorize a request" there's a couple of things we've built/are building on top:
service-chains: for a given resource, you can configure the token so that it needs to be signed by notable components along the path of the request, and at each step along the path check that it was signed by expected components up to that point. the thinking is this could really cut down on lateral movement in a system
multi-party authorization: for a given resource, you can configure N authorization services that also need to sign the token based on their policy. the token only authorizes if all parties have signed it. this could be useful for managing capabilities of software deployed into customer environments or perhaps for b2b agents to get signoff from both b's for doing an action
I've been learning systems programming for a while and recently I discovered kilo[0], which inspired me to start building my own editor[1]. Not sure how far I'll go, but hopefully it will be usable -- how fun would it be to build another project of mine using my own editor?
Getting together a very simple server (PHP), and very simple clients (UIKit and SwiftUI), and will publish a blog series on it (sort of like this[0]), once I get more used to it.
I need to really get comfortable with it before I do that, though.
My summer project for my comp sci MSc was an open source natural deduction helper tool for the Mac, called Baker Street. I let it lapse simply because I didn't have time to look after it, but now it's available for download once more: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/baker-street/id1528304157
VT Chat, is a privacy-first AI chat application that keeps all conversations local while providing advanced research capabilities and access to 15+ AI models including Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus, O3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and DeepSeek R1.
Research features: Deep Research does multi-step research with source verification, Pro Search integrates real-time web search with grounding web search powered by Google Gemini. There's also document processing for PDFs, a "thinking mode" to see complete AI reasoning, and structured extraction to turn documents into JSON. AI-powered semantic routing automatically activates tools based on queries.
Built with Next.js 14, TypeScript, and Turborepo in a monorepo setup.
After over 6 years working on the startup I co-founded (which was fully acquired by a larger company in 2024, after they had bought a majority stake in 2022), I’ve been focusing on building a new company since the beginning of this year.
I’ve explored a few different projects since January but nothing stuck, now working on https://pitch31.ai a SaaS that turns any OpenAPI specs (or Postman collections) into a conversational AI agent, so you can work with APIs without the need of a UI.
We are still early on the product and looking for some user feedback to improve it. Planning to launch it on major platforms in the next month!
Been working on a games curation site that is focused on hyper specific themes (https://exhibitplay.com/). I find game genres to be so broad, which makes discovery a boring process. My idea is to take a curatorial approach and make collections that highlight the themes that exist within genres.
It's pretty simple, JSON data that I manually fill out and display in a grid. Takes some inspiration from Letterboxd lists. Future plan is to run online and in-person exhibitions for smaller curation and to commission writers and other curators to provide further depth and insight into a list.
I have no plans to turn this into a profitable thing. It's a pure passion project which I hope will benefit researchers, academics, other curators, and the whole game community. It's a resource as much as it is a celebration.
This is really cool! The first game works great on mobile too.
I would suggest speeding up the speed that the text renders on the screen. The average person reads 250-300wpm, but you could probably speed this up a bit more and just leave it on the screen long enough to ensure the lower bound is met.
It's an environment for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, exams, flashcards, maps and more!
Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time (very Obsidian-esque).
I redesigned it to be much smaller and cheaper (surface-mount), made it an IoT device, and various other changes. Will order PCBs in a bit, hopefully it works well.
We don't have anything like Blitzortung in SE Asia as far as I know, and it would be pretty useful to me to detect lightning storms before they hit. The obvious application is to add it to my motorbike (driving a motorbike in a heavy storm is a necessary but miserable part of life here).
Bigger picture, there's no market for it, simply because it's cheaper to not buy one (I live in a very cost-driven market). However it would be useful to me personally.
I've been working on a little utility to transfer files between two computers using QR codes: https://github.com/cibyr/qftf
It's kinda like Magic Wormhole without typing. It uses iroh for the p2p networking - on both ends, and also in the little web app that you use to scan the QR codes and start the transfer.
Similar concept, though an important distinction: QFTF assumes that you have a phone you can scan QR codes with, but that isn't where you want the file to end up. Instead, it displays a QR code on both the sender and the receiver, and you scan both of the QR codes with your phone to start the transfer.
Now bootstrapping https://www.minute-master.com - AI formal minute generation for regulated firms primarily in financial services space but also free to use for charities.
Still on a sabbatical building things I enjoy, but it's summer here so have also spent much time in my hammock with cold beers.
Most effort on https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world.
No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. Since last month I've added a couple of minor things like maps and "where to go next" sections for each venue.
I'm debating whether or not I should add user accounts, and let people maintain venue bucket lists, venue endorsements.
Also planning to reach out to the venues and ask if they agree to monthly or quarterly one-click information verification emails from us.
Other projects that receive less love are:
- https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages, and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol)
- https://misplacy.com, just a dumb and wrong AI landing page for now but was thinking to work towards a drop-in solution for SMBs around lost/found management.
- A platform for helping voluntary associations with repetitive administrative tasks (non-english so not linking. Trying to rank the pain points currently)
- A platform for structuring national soccer club history (initial brain dump idea phase)
- A platform for structuring writing prompts and collaborative fiction writing (initial brain dump / mockups)
For the next month or so I think I need to prioritize what to focus on after summer
Always interesting to see what others are building and doing. So thanks for sharing!
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.
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.
Nothing specifically for the moment. I've toyed with the idea of having an option for smooth terrain, but it's not important for the game I'm currently making.
Working on Humadroid - trying to make SOC2/ISO27001 compliance less painful for small businesses. The $30-50K consultant route is brutal for startups, so we're building an AI-assisted platform that helps with policy generation and guidance.
Still in beta and learning a lot from each customer we onboard. We're actually going through our own SOC2 assessment in August, which has been... educational.
Recently added business continuity and incident tracking features. Trying to build something that's actually helpful rather than just another compliance checkbox tool.
Love this! Not a customer but could see it happening. ISO 27001 compliance (or equivalent) is a standard requirement when working with the public sector in my area. NIS2 is also on the horizon, have you looked into it?
Thanks! Really appreciate the interest.
We already support a major part of ISO 27001 - actually releasing our Statement of Applicability tomorrow or the day after. I went through ISO certification at my previous company, and that experience is what triggered building Humadroid in the first place. The pain was real!
NIS2 is definitely on our radar - planning to have support for it by Q4 2025. The public sector requirements you mentioned are exactly the kind of use cases we're building for.
An iOS app to help manage Yard Sales. There's a lot of clutter at home that we don't need or use; using that as inspiration to work on an app that can help with cataloguing and selling in-person, and in v2 turn into some sort of facebook marketplace where users can 'find yard sales' near them (and potentially even look up all items being sold at x yard sale, prior to showing up).
Hej, I am still working on FisherLoop [1] to learn Swedish (but I have added German, Spanish, French and Italian since). I created FisherLoop because I like audiobooks for language learning but I hated having to pause to look up words + I want to read along the book while listening. With FisherLoop I made "interactive audiobooks" where I use TTS with word level timestamps to highlight the words as they are spoken + I can click on words for the translation.
I am using cerebras for book translations and verb extraction and all LLM related tasks. For TTS I am using cartesia. I have played around with Elevenlabs and they have slightly natural sounding TTS but their pricing is too steep for this project. Books would cost a couple of hundred euros to process.
Why? SAP holds the most important data for companies that use it, but it's notoriously difficult to replicate this data consistently into a data analytics platform (think Snowflake, Redshift, etc...).
Couple of companies specialize in the SAP replication, but it's hard to validate the correctness of the replicated data, because:
- the SAP data is changing continuously and rapidly
- there are hundreds of tables and TBs of data
Usually it's the consumers of data downstream who notice that the data just "doesn't feel right".
Tracelake adds a validation layer on top of the SAP to X replication, which periodically compares the data between source and target and informs you about any missing / incorrect data, so you can tackle data quality issues proactively.
I'm still working on https://wut.dev/ - a simpler, privacy-focused, read-only AWS resource viewer. I did a "show Reddit" post a few weeks back and it got quite a bit of interest, so doubling down with actual user feedback now.
It also have a working LSP server and generates a sourcemap, so when you get a runtime stacktrace, it gives you the original line in your .agl file as well as the one in the generated .go file.
When I wrote Go, I figured that I would eventually have to do something like that, to fix the glaring omissions in the language. And then I stopped writing Go, but glad to see that someone got around to it!
Making it easier to build simple web applications, host your static content with in built authentication functionality to make your content secure and dynamic. For enterprise customers, solving the tenancy for SAAS businesses when it comes to authentication.
Bit of context, I have background building authentication systems and almost all the time its built as just another feature even though its THE FEATURE which gates all other features.
In a Lua scripting framework to:
- enforce non-globals
- project hierarchy (for tests and documentation)
- cli access for .md package docs
- installation in path
- extension of Lua stdlib (fs.mkdir, os.realpath)
- module autoloading/lazyloading
Expected support for Lua 5.4 and luajit. At first entirely in Lua with long term goal to compiled Lua modules (merging Wax)
The goal is to make Lua the first choice for system scripting in POSIX systems for Lua users without thinking twice between Lua, Sh and other tools like Python, Ruby etc.
I have many system scriptings in Lua but not in a easy way of reusing libraries. Also I don't like to think in creating Luarocks packages or deal with unstandardized ways to write code.
This sounds interesting! I often want to reach for Lua for general scripting in lieu of python or bash, but packaging and other issues make it a rough experience. I'd love a link!
Lots of very cool stuff already shared here by other folks.
I am building a simple app to help select/sort/cull photos easier on desktop. Born from my own need to learn/tinker/solve my own problem.
https://www.picpickr.com
I'm working on an open source wrapper and MCP server to give Claude Code voice capabilities (and Slack and WhatsApp messaging). It works with system default TTS and google free ASR on Mac out the box but allows you to BYOK to your favorite TTS/ASR provider. I've also tried to make it a viable python library to make it easy to switch between ASR/TTS providers.
With Claude Code I really like being able to multi-task but right now it's a bit like a Tesla on autopilot needing your hands still on the wheel. With TalkiTo I can do housework/go out for lunch and keep it on the right track remotely.
I'm working on bewCloud [1] after getting a decent sponsor(ship) earlier this year from NLnet.
It's a simpler alternative to Nextcloud and ownCloud (built with TypeScript, Deno, Fresh). Recently it got a CalDAV and CardDAV server, and I'll be working on the calendar and contacts UI next.
Currently working on a tool for creative workflow automation called runchat.app with the goal of giving creatives more control over gen ai. Its a jeckyl and hyde visual canvas that can be used for open ended exploration and experimentation with models on fal as well as automation of things like image processing or web scraping. Something weve been thinking about lately is the idea of ephemeral interfaces and how the ui of runchat can be generated on the fly to suit a specific design task. This makes it possible to vibe code workflows from self contained modular react components - something llms are really good at.
A clear, simple Markdown viewer for the Mac: ViewMD
When using developer AI agents like Claude Code, often they output, and use, .md files like CLAUDE.md, README.md, etc. You largely want to just read these, and if Claude updates them, read the latest version.
Other markdown apps incorporate editing, split screens, etc. I just wanted a neatly formatted read only view. And if you want to edit them, just use something specifically designed for that like Sublime Text, my viewer will instantly load with the updated file.
Anyway, check it out: search for "ViewMD" in the Mac App Store.
I've been working on a functional language and a specializing translator (a specialator) based on graph-reduction beneath lambdas.
The intention is to specialize away interpretive and meta-programming-like overhead,
and then translate the result into usable source code in whichever language is desired.
If the code, after specialization, has a suitable form, then you should get conventional imperative code out.
If there are still functional-idioms present that haven't been specialized away, the generated code will have a more functional-style.
The specialator currently targets JS and C.
The language has an expressive type-system based on self-dependent sub-typing.
The type-system is too expressive for everyday use, it is intended to be used with a decidability checker.
I am working on htmlsync.io, an easy way to synchronize localStorage between devices. I found myself using AI a lot to generate single-file HTML web apps that saved data in localStorage and wanted to have access to them from phone. This was my solution.
1. (continuation) Another video, this one about my experiences writing a homebrew PSOne game
2. (useful) a command line tool (or native desktop app) that generates white noise
3. (fanciful) See if I can unpack FFVII's world map data into OBJ models and UV mapped textures. And then from there create a 3D world map in Threejs
4. (stretch) I would love an app where I could look out into the distance, and be informed what's on the horizon. Likewise ships in the sea / planes in the sky. I think it's doable with some OSM data, open APIs and a bit of high school math
I've started working on a gotosocial alternative (activitypub/fediverse server) that's a bit more geared towards interoperability, hackability, and openness. Also submitted an NLNet funding request, fingers crossed!
I'm working on a rating/reviewing website for YouTube videos, with strong search and filter functions that YouTube sorely lacks, along with good curated list building functionality.
With a strong rating weight system that can avoid (some) of the pitfalls of community ratings.
Right now videos must be added to be searchable, to comply with YouTube API rules. I'd hope that over time, with enough usage, the repository could contain many categories of highly curated content. (eg. Documentaries) that someone could find without having to browse various communities and opinions to get lists.
I'm working on a mortgage scenario planning tool. A simple mortgage calculator can give you an estimate as to how much a mortgage payment will be but there are so many other inputs that must be taken into account on a per individual basis. For example someone could input that they want to put 20% down and see the monthly payment amount but there are other fees, such as closing costs, which must be taken in account to determine how much cash on hand a buyer will need to actually transact on the mortgage.
My friend and my lender has built up a giant Google Sheet which he uses with his clients and I've been slowly working to translate the logic in that Sheet into an application. It's been a lot of fun as I've been learning how to replicate the multiplayer aspects of Sheets into a React application.
I'm working on genesis, a project scaffolding and task runner tool that helps devs start and manage projects across different tech stacks with a unified interface.
Next, I'm working on a TUI app (using Textual) for board games like Tic Tac Toe and Connect Four. These will also have a modified rule that requires forming a square instead of a line.
This is cool! I am getting back into Python programming after having to work with Angular (with a code base that's a spaghetti mess of poorly used TypeScript), and doing little toy projects like this helps tremendously with bringing back the joy I once experienced with programming.
At the moment I'm building a C++ version of Tic Tac Toe, would be cool to implement it in Python.
Vercel is ending support for Node v18. Instead of updating my old app, I decided to finish the rewrite of the better version. The old version currently powers this site: https://viviblues.com
I've got a long term project trying to see how far I can get writing a contact simulation using techniques from Klaus Hollig's book on B-spline finite element methods. I'm using D for this. I've been focusing on level set domains, which has led to me spending an inordinate amount of time on high order boundary parametrizations. I'm very curious to see how efficient an approach like this can be made, especially using multigrid. I do numerics and geometry professionally, and this is a bit outside my wheelhouse, although close enough to what I do at my day job that I'm hoping there will be some nice cross pollination of ideas.
By contact simulation, do you mean solid dynamics? (mechanics is not my field)
I'm intrigued by the use of level set domains here. I've only encountered those in other type of numerical simulation where the intent is in avoiding surface meshing.
I suppose moving an object in this context is as simple as composing its level set function with a translation and rotation. However, deforming is non trivial, especially local deformations, right?
How do you efficiently resolve collisions? At the scale of an element, it seems to be a simple check of nowhere should both level set functions be negative. But how do you select the elements to check? Do you somehow keep track of only the elements traversed by the objects in a time step, or some other method? I would guess your method should be more efficient than intersecting meshes, is that what you've found?
I'm particularly interested by your mention of high-order boundary parameterizations, what do you mean by that exactly?
Sorry to bombard you with questions, I was intrigued by a combination of things I'd never seen together before!
Yeah. All of this is born out of a desire to avoid meshing, for some definition of meshing. I'm on a jag that explicitly meshing or computing topology should be unnecessary for this kind of simulation. People have done contact simulations based on penalty methods or Lagrange multipliers using level set descriptions of domains for quite a while, which just involve integrating over overlapping regions, which shouldn't be that hard to detect... in principle... but I'm not quite there yet.
What I'm saying about level set domains is maybe a bit misleading. I'm not talking about level set methods like you might find in the book by Fedkiw and Osher, per se (but if I found something useful from that literature, I wouldn't hesitate to borrow it...). They are easy to model with and give clean geometry compared to e.g. a B-rep. I'm only interested in messing around with toy and artificial problems at this point, so it isn't much of a limitation. At the same time, given a B-rep, there are a number of ways to get clean level set geometry from them...
By high-order boundary parametrization, I mean: given a implicit surface, how to quickly go to a parametric representation of the boundary which is accurate to many (say, 13+) digits that is relatively space efficient, even in the presence of sharp features in the level set (common for CSG...). This is easy in 2D, harder in 3D...
I guess the subtle point here is that for a finite element simulation, the only thing that really matters is integration. For that, you only need a soup of patches; there's no real need to assemble them into a B-rep or any other kind of mesh. But then if you take a time step, you have to think about converting from parametric back to implicit. I'm trying to figure out if there is some kind of hybrid parametric-implicit data structure that is particularly useful for simulations of this type. Remains to be seen, but there are many fun geometry problems to solve along the way.
I got laid off so I'm dusting off an old python project that takes OTF/TFF files and applies algorithmic effects to them. Then you can export the font as a new OTF/TFF file to unleash on your own design work, websites, etc.
I wanted interesting looking typefaces for my printmaking assignments when I was taking studio art classes on the side in university. Now that I've been laid off, I wanna polish it and see what other people create with it.
Lots of room to rewrite and improve it, but I have job applications and interviews to get through.
I was working on a routing application for San Francisco (+Daly City) where it includes being able to put how willing you are to walk to certain bus routes instead of how most apps try to put the least amount of walking and don't consider that if the wait for a bus or train is long, then I don't mind walking to connect to another route that takes me to my destination faster. It takes tree shade, elevation, and marked off location to avoid into account.
It evolved into more of tool for planning leisure walks and runs that could hit places I'd want to visit with a loose timeline--for days where I would want to wander and then end up at a particular stop/station to get back home.
Talking about them here has more ideas churning in my head and reminds me to step outside of my little bubble to remember why I truly love coding. To make fun and convenient experiences.
1. Software: An OS that masquerades as simple note taking software.
Goal is to put an end to all the disparate AI bullshit and apps owning our data.
I solved context switching for myself ages ago and now I'm just trying to productize it outside my 3 companies internal usage.
It also solves context switching for AI agents as a byproduct.
2. Ethics: Give Ai and proto-Agi a reason not to kill us all.
An extremely minimal, empirical naturalistic moral framework that is universally binding to all agents so AI won't kill us all. I view the alignment problem as a epistemic moral grounding issue and that the current pseudo utilitarianism isn't cutting it. Divine command, discourse ethics, utilitarianism, deontology they are all insufficient.
Still iterating on Trilogy, a SQL variant with an embedded semantic layer that removes the need for joins and better typing/functions.
Spent some time last month improving array handling + error messages and UX and adding an MCP server option; Claude does pretty well already but there's some syntax/error tweaks to make it simpler for it and humans.
Then pivoting back into scheduling + materialization optimizations (identify common aggregates across several scripts and automatically build the common datasets for reuse).
I've been building AltStack.jp, a curated directory of Japanese digital services (cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, and more) all operated in Japan, by Japanese companies.
It’s aimed at people who want to be less dependent on foreign platforms, especially with the current shift away from globalization.
Still early days: only about 20% of the planned categories are up so far.
I made a widget that better shows my work shifts (I work nights and the default calendar app displays overnights as two days in the zoomed out monthly view, so this improves upon that and also counts how many shifts I've completed in a month while looking nice too). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-next-shift-widget/id674063...
I wrote a simple MacOS app that lets me drag and drop screenshots then choose between a variety of "device frames" to create a consistent style and speed up my workflow.
And now I'm working on some plug-ins for open source apps that I use. Generally just doing small things to improve my workflow and enjoyment with my hobbies.
We're working on brief.audio, looking at taking the concept of personal podcasts (sort of introduced by NotebookLM) into its natural conclusion by thinking more about what content should be included and how to tailor the outputs into something that is really nice to listen to. Make it a truly slick mobile experience.
https://www.brief.audio -> Have a go, we're primarily testing internally atm, will look to make it more available and a bit more polished next week.
Primary focus is getting the content right this week with the audio script and hosts being user & content dependent. :)
Especially interested in hearing what content to pipe in (we're looking to put in our hackernews.coffee as a feed for example, but also other key news sources).
see my separate comment for more on hackernews.coffee in particular, we (same team, different experiment) are thinking a lot about personal content, and how you have maximum visibility and control.
Keeping these projects separate allows us to test ideas that orbit around a theme (not 100 % sure what the theme is yet, but it features personal, anti-slop content, while still using llms.)
AirPosture: Turn your AirPods into a smart posture coach
An iOS app that uses your AirPods' sensors to catch bad posture in real time.
How it works:
Real-time tilt tracking – Your AirPods already have the tech Customizable alerts – Adjust sensitivity so it nudges you only when needed Prevent strain before it starts – Stop neck pain and headaches at the source
I'm working on Simple Observability[0], a platform for monitoring servers (metrics and logs). Think of it as a super simple alternative to the Prometheus + Grafana + Loki stack, designed for teams who just want to know “is my server healthy?” without setting up and maintaining a full observability pipeline.
It uses a lightweight, open-source agent[1] that collects data and pushes it to the backend, so it works behind firewalls and doesn’t require any open ports or scraping setup. The goal is to get useful monitoring and alerting with minimal effort: one command install and a UI-based configuration.
For the landing page, I think it'd be useful to see an actual screenshot of the UI. Also, what I'm looking for in a solution like this is to receive this information passively — I don't want to need to proactively watch a dashboard. I would want to receive email alerts when, for example, I'm running out of disk space. It says on your landing page that you provide this feature, but it also says it's configurable. Everything on Grafana is configurable, but tbh it's a PITA to configure. It'd be nice if SO just worked OOTB wrt alerts.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll make sure to add screenshots.
For the alerts it is configurable pretty quickly (you just select what you want to monitor, a threshold value, and a notification channel). But I’ll look into having some sensible defaults built in so it works out of the box
Nothing really at the moment, job and family takes most my time and energy.
Last thing I made was this semi-vibe-coded a local-storage-only site for helping myself plan stuff, I made so it works offline as a progressive web app too if you install it, but it's not suitable for phone at the moment, I don't know if I can be bothered to make it suitable for phone either..
Two features are missing, I might find some energy to make them at some point: 1. right now only the entire "ordeal" can be moved, so situations with multiple fix points are annoying, I'd like to be able to "anchor" multiple tasks and have the tasks between stretch and shrink as needed.
2. I want to add a red horizontal line that's moving and shows the current time.
Finished a solo exercise using Blazor and various server infrastructure to create a website to search and browser over 200,000 pages of American history - currently Civil War and American Indian.
I'm working on Zen Notes - a minimal, distraction-free notes app that prioritizes ownership and longevity.
The core philosophy is: your notes should be yours forever, that also includes the software stack it's built on. Everything is stored locally in SQLite with standard Markdown, so no vendor lock-in or proprietary formats. The interface is very minimal without flashy colors or icons, so you can focus on your thoughts.
Key features: instant full-text search using BM25, flexible tag organization instead of rigid folders, rich Markdown support with formatting toolbar, and custom "Focus Modes" for different contexts. It's a PWA that works offline (read-only).
The tech stack prioritizes minimal dependencies - no NPM (self-hosted Preact instead of React), Golang for rich standard library, etc. The whole app can be run from a single binary, so no messy installation requirements. Docker is also available.
I tried to design this from scratch, learning about typography, colors, spacing etc. It turned out better than I expected!
I've switched to this as my main notes app and I'm happy with it.
I'm working on a GitHub + Slack bot to let organizations customize and get notifications on Slack from GitHub.
I've tried using the official GitHub Slack integration (https://github.com/integrations/slack) but found it limiting and unmaintained by GitHub.
For example, at the companies I've worked at, we want to get notifications sent to a specific channel when there are deploys to the "production" environment on GitHub. The official integration doesn't let you filter events by environment, so it's all or nothing. Your Slack channel for production releases will be filled with staging and qa notifications.
I designed it so users can filter on essentially any field of any event - deployment environment, branch patterns, file paths, PR labels, commit authors, etc.
It's at chivesbot.com as a hosted service, however, the signups are disabled right now as I'm working on some core features, but here are a couple of screenshots of the filter creation: https://imgur.com/a/pSiolWu
I'm looking for early beta users and feedback, so if this problem resonates with you, my email can be found in my profile.
I'm working on pact[0], a tool to enable developers and hopefully less technical users to interact with Playwright and perform actions and tests on web-based user interfaces and applications using either a YAML file or a simple DSL (in a .pact file).
Initially this started off as a feature for a PR on venom[1], an integration testing tool, but as I thought about it more - it made sense to maybe make a standalone tool that can evolve a bit different from venom. It's still very early but it works to perform some basic actions using typical CSS selectors that playwright supports.
Might be worth considering a different name before you get too big. There's already pact.io, which will be the first result any time anyone searches for pact testing.
Working on a script to let people launch claude code, gemini cli, and aider agents on the same task and compare results. Handles all the git worktree stuff for you so they can run in parallel. Kind of like OpenRouter but for CLI agents.
What feels really cool is using the framework to build framework, I've got 150 ai generated commits stacked on top of each other, you can see every prompt and accepted solution in the dev logs I produce: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
Early Access for a new terminal emulator [0] bringing dead text to life. It's my professional dream to evolve our conception of terminals without bringing in the bloat of, say, electron (read: staying native).
>Do you have any new ideas you're thinking about?
I like the thought of dropping you into the terminal right on the browser. It wouldn't be the real thing, but having a toy to play with is superior to dry docs.
I recently built a site for guessing house prices. I thought I'd be done with it in a week. Over a month later I still have a ton of things to work on.
One thing I will be doing this week will be to get different AIs to play the game to get an idea of how good they are.
The easiest to start with will be open AI - using the new agent I should be able to record a screencast of it with explanations for each one.
I appreciate your sentiment, and agree to a point. There’s a time and a place for both disposable email addresses as well as blocking apis.
Assume you offer a free trial with LLM capabilities. There’s a very real cost associated with multiple signup abuse. You can card capture or KYC, but now there’s more friction and greater loss of privacy.
I'm working on an update to my flashcards app, Fresh Cards. The current version has a lot of limitations, so I've been working on a rewrite that improves all aspects of the app, for nearly a year now.
Most recently, I've been incorporating a lot of improved UX design. The app has always used a playlist metaphor, i.e. your database of flashcards is your library and you can sort them in different ways and then hit Play to start reviewing. Within the review session itself, you go through the cards in the playlist in small batches so that it's less overwhelming, among other reasons. After every batch, the app returns to an overview screen so you can see what you've just reviewed so far in the session.
The challenge has been designing this overview screen so it's clear where you are in the playlist without making it overwhelming. I finally came up with a good design this week, which I was quite happy with: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/114921335089371494
I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement this new UI has made on how the product feels. The old UI only showed you the history of cards you've reviewed in the session and highlighted the most recent batch of cards. This new one shows you the full playlist, but redacts the contents of the playlist ahead, so you immediately get a sense of how much left there is to do, but without being shown what is in the contents of the cards. Interestingly, this has the effect of making you want to see what is in those cards, i.e. to keep reviewing!
My design process is heavy on prototyping directly in code. I usually start off with sketches in pen and paper and then a quick mockup of the UI directly using Swift code since my apps are for iOS and Mac only.
I don't have any testers on this new version at the moment, but I'm considering having some beta testing once I get closer to release. No videos either, but I'm planning on writing some blog posts going over some of the UI flows and new features in the app to help with promotion. Once I polish the lesson UI a little bit, I'll probably post a video on YouTube of it too.
For a long time I've been wanting a private, E2EE social media app for sharing pics/videos of my son with friends and family, but haven't found anything fitting that description. Like most people, we've just been using group texts; the closest alternative I found was shared photo albums, but we wanted the ability to make "posts" with a few pictures and some text. So I've been building it and using it for a couple months with some friends, it's a strange feeling to have the ergonomics of social media with none of the toxic nonsense.
Most people I know are using group texts for this, but I find that unsatisfying because my wife and I want to share stuff with ~20 people, but we don't want to be blasting all of them with texts all the time, or put those 20 people in a group text with each other. We wanted something pub/sub, but with the privacy of E2EE chat apps, and so easy to use our parents will use it.
It's a React app running on Cloudflare Workers, and there's an iOS app in the works using Capacitor; the E2EE is built on OPAQUE. There's a landing page/signup at freefollow.org if you'd like to learn more. I'm working on some demo videos.
I am working on a time tracking app for tasks. I built it because I want to gain a better understanding of how I spend my working days. It's meant to be very simple. Everything is stored locally and requires no login. I don't currently plan to sync it with any backend. This isn't something that can be used to track employees — it's just for personal use.
it's somehow on a block list in ublock. Hence white screen here too, I have to disable adblock to see your site. Maybe the domain used to be for something else before.
Thanks for the feedback - means a lot. I had enabled high level usage tracking on Vercel. I was tracking page views to see if I got any users. I have switched to using Plausible [0], a privacy focused analytics tool, and added an opt out option on first load.
I merged support for JavaScript object "shapes" in my Nova JavaScript engine last week; now I just have to clean up some of the ugly parts of the API (and maybe do some performance adjacent changes), and then it's time to use the shapes for property lookup caching!
This is one of the most important performance features in a JS engine, as without shapes property lookups would be terribly slow. I'm looking forward to getting this working.
I started playing around with the idea of a new programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Despite syntactic improvements and type-checking, it's goal is to streamline promises, async/await and callbacks into one signal based system I call live variables. Additionally, those could be compiled via different, interchangeable compiler plugins to framework specific code, like React's useState or Vuejs' Refs, to make it more future prove.
It's still in a concept stage and maybe the whole project is futile, but if it piqued your interest, check out https://github.com/nkoehring/Solace
At my day job we have an MCP server and had to spend quite a lot of time setting up extra monitoring and validation for it so I'm building a tool to do those things. Pretty much a regular server uptime checker, but also with some extra's that an MCP client gets access to tool and resource calls.
Our MCP server at work relays most of it's calls over to our API so we wanted to be sure something was testing and validating the whole flow.
I'm sure you're familiar, but just in case: https://totaltypescript.com does a phenomenal job in this space -- esp. its VSCode extension, which acts as an interactive linter.
I've been working on an encrypted environment variables management tool, called kiln[1], for teams. I know, tools like age and SOPS exist, but this partly came through because of the lack of a good UX around the encryption part especially for a team-based workflow. I aim to continue building kiln as a developer-first experience, making it seamless to integrate into a large team's workflows.
The idea came to me when we were trying to find ways to manage Terraform secrets , CI vars were a no-go because people sometimes wish to deploy locally for testing stuff, and tools like Vault have honestly been a pain to manage, well, for us at least. So I have been building this tool where the variables are encrypted with `age`, have RBACs around it, and an entire development workflow (run ad-hoc commands, export, templating, etc) that can easily be integrated into any CI/CD alongside local development. We're using this and storing the encrypted secrets in Git now, so everything is version-controlled and can be found in a single place.
Do give it a try. I am open to any questions or suggestions! Interested to know what people think of this. Thanks!
Just finished generating alien bugs and then rigging/animating by hand. Loads of fun and very satisfying to visualize the ideas in my mind.
https://youtu.be/sMYmnQlF_Ww
I'm getting into frontend web development with Rust by making a tracker [1] (not the advertising kind, rather a type of music-making app that was popular with chiptune artists in the '90s).
This is my first time doing anything with frontend more complex than an image carousel, and I have occasionally felt that I'm in over my head with things like multithreading and audio playback, but it's immensely satisfying seeing the app come together.
I am extremely impressed by the Leptos framework [2], and I'm thrilled that I haven't had to write a single line of JS, even when doing DOM interactions or communicating with web workers.
Once I polish up the tracker frontend, I'd like to add a backend and potentially try to release it as a paid app.
Earlier today I implemented "bbcodes" for bold, italic, underline, em (grey background color) and strikethrough. They way it works for bold is like this: b[text here]. If you want to apply multiple you can go bui[text here] for example, which would be bold, underline and italic text.
I've been working on GrokVocab (https://www.grokvocab.com), an app to improve vocabulary without flashcards or memorization.
Everyone knows reading is the best way to build vocabulary, but many avoid it and turn to flashcards or spaced repetition because long texts can feel overwhelming, and they often have to refer to a dictionary.
This app gives users short, engaging passages focused on comprehension. While reading, users guess word meanings from context and find out whether they got it right by answering a few questions below. I believe this will be helpful for people who haven’t had much success with popular vocabulary learning methods.
I shared it on HN earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543063), but it didn’t get much attention. If you're interested in novel learning methods or vocabulary, I’d love your feedback.
P.S. Login is required since the app uses LLMs to generate interesting passages. You can register with any non-existent email if privacy is a concern.
Byte-Vision is a privacy-first document intelligence platform that transforms static documents into an interactive, searchable knowledge base. Built on Elasticsearch with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) capabilities, it offers document parsing, OCR processing, and conversational AI interfaces.
I'm still working on Kavita, an open source, self hosted book/comic media server with a strong focus on metadata. Been in deep developing a custom annotation/highlight system for epubs.
civilwhiz.com – A website dedicated to sharing knowledge about Autodesk Civil 3D. It’s all about old-fashioned knowledge sharing through blog posts, with absolutely no coding (on my part). I host it via WordPress and use some plugins to make it work.
Unlike most Civil 3D portals out there, this site provides deeper explanations of Civil 3D’s inner workings and very few (currently zero) video tutorials. That’s because I believe video tutorials are already widely available elsewhere.
I originally set up this website to teach myself Civil 3D. Along the way, I decided to "open-source" my learning process so others could benefit as well.
I'm releasing an actually instant search-to-type TUI and CLI Finnish to English dictionary called Taskusanakirja (pocket dictionary). It's been steadily optimized to the hilt to be the perfect brookside or website-side dictionary for any learner of the Finnish language. Available on Windows, Mac and Linux as a single standalone executable, with an optional paid database download for Taskusanakirja Pro.
This is the first time I've ever actually released something with a monetization option, so I'll be interested to see where it goes. It's a small enough niche that I think I have several features that genuinely don't exist anyplace else, like the ability to lemmatize even heavily inflected words (a very common stumbling block for learners of Finnish).
A web app would obviously be much easier to monetize, but then I would lose the buttery smooth feel of the search at it currently exists.
I’m working on LearnMathsToday, a mobile app that helps students learn math in a fun and engaging way. It’s self-paced, with AI-generated questions that adapt to each student’s level. One unique feature is AI-powered marking, which gives instant feedback on written answers. I’ve also added gamification—points, levels, and a storyline—to keep students motivated. Right now, the app is based on the Singapore syllabus, since I’m based in Singapore.
I'm finishing the work of adding apply, list, delete mechanism to my Kubernetes package manager.
The tool is written in Go and exposes a JavaScript interface (like k6) to generate manifests using both template-based and object oriented approaches. It is similar to cdk8s, but is more flexible, doesn't require a dev environment, and allows sharing packages. The apply mechanism will be like kapp, but using kubectl's apply sets.
It already has the features to generate manifests to be used in GitOps. With this addition and the next one, which will be waiting for generated resources, it will become a fully featured package manager.
I run a job board for Germany called Arbeitnow. It runs well without any frequent changes. Recently I've added a couple of new sources for jobs and filtering the kind of jobs that get through (relevant to my audience).
Not planning to do a lot during the promised Berlin summer though
If it's not gauche to post the same thing two months running, I've been working on https://filmhose.uk, a listings site for London's independent and arts cinemas. Now at the awkward stage where I should probably stop messing about with the site and start "growth hacking" or something.
I got tired of Spotify recommending me, or creating playlists with the same songs over and over again, so I built something to make varied, targeted playlists from my library.
I've been using it for months now, and the playlists generated are my top listened to playlists - I'm literally listening to them every day. Personally I'm super happy with it, and a few friends have also been using it quite successfully.
If you could try again. I fixed a few small things, and I haven't seen the error since. Unfortunately it seems to manifest sporadically on mobile. I have a feeling there's something in the callback URL I get when authenticating through the mobile app... but still can't pinpoint it 100%
You could also clear your cookies - in case you managed to log-in the previous time and they got set.
Been working on a real time public transit app for the Bay Area and New York but recently decided to use the same data to create a visualization of all the transit vehicles moving in real time!
Initially wanted to make this before my app but it was quite a bit to process all the GTFS data. But now that the data is already processed for the app, the visualization was quite easy to make!
Currently trying to add geocoding so users can search for destinations for routing. Been interesting as I want to avoid Google Maps and other private data sources so open street maps it is.
Mainly used by my friends right after we have a group lunch or dinner.
You just upload a pic of the receipt after a meal and it parses out the items. We assign who got what and it calculates who owes what.
I just use free API keys and limit my hosting costs right now. I could keep it free for several months but if my users run into usage limits, I'd request financial help to keep the service up. I really dont want an app like this to be expensive.
Please DM me at my email: archit72<at>gmail if you run into rate limits or want more usage! I'd be happy to help you.
I'm building AI for documentation. It will answers users queries related to your product through videos, documentations and blogs. Reducing the load on customer support.
I'm working on a development tool for specification-driven development. It uses LLMs to verify that your specification files and implementation do not drift. More specifically, I am trying to lower the number of false positives I'm currently seeing. I find that the LLM will hallucinate issues when there are no discrepancies, or become forgetful in the case of long documents (like RFC texts). The first step in improving this is to expand my evaluation suite so I can reliably measure improvements.
I think semcheck has a different use-case. AI is inherently imprecise, if you need formal mathematical verification, AI isn't suitable for that. What semcheck does give you is a very simple way to start verifying specifications, and it's best used in combination with AI-assisted development workflows where you're already spending a lot of time writing specifications (i.e. prompts).
Assertables is a Rust crate for smarter assert testing, debugging, and runtime checking. Good news is it just reached 500K downloads so I'm seeking more people to try it in more kinds of use cases.
In lieu of chatbots as the primary means of working with AI.
This is an approach that is human centered and intended to accommodate a wide array of possible use cases where human interaction/engagement is essential for getting work done.
I recently launched one of my small side projects. It's quick online multiple choice code tests aimed at recruiters to evaluate applicants: https://hashtagcode.io
The goal was to make a simple way for recruiters to create coding tests to screen people applying for jobs, and to make the process quick and easy for applicants. The default is a 15 minute multiple choice test across a few different domains.
I will eventually monetise it (when I have more free time) but for now it's free (1000 invites) so I can get feedback and improve it
I'm working on DailySelfTrack ( https://dailyselftrack.com/ ) , an app to track what matters to you in a way that you find relevant. So it is a mix of habit tracker, health log and journal. Like a spreadhsheet app, but with much better UX. And like a habit/health app, but with much greater customization.
I want this to be a tool highly useful for people who have complex health issues, are working towards ambitious goals, or just want to regularly reflect on their day.
I'm building it since I couldn't find a satisfying solution anywhere. It's local first and does not force you into a subscription, or tries to exploit you with any other dark patterns.
Almost ready to launch an all-in-one platform for solving problems I face all the time at work, with clients and my own sites.
Frustrated with running 10+ different checks on domains/websites I've built or working on with 10+ different services, I've built - with help from Claude Code - a Django app that tries to wrap all those key checks into one place. On top of that, I've built in scheduled monitoring and alerting.
It's been a great experience learning about the intricacies and nuances in different website set-ups, the complexities in avoiding false negatives, fun with CloudFlare workers, agentic coding and much more.
The site is still running off a RPi (Coolify) in my home-server behind a CF Tunnel at the moment, so won't link directly here - but ping me if you want to give it a test-run.
After 25 years in web and app development I’m venturing into game development. I’ve already created a small game for a game jam [1] and it served as as a proof of concept to me that I can make something fun so now I want to tackle a bigger game project, complete with original art, music and story. AI coding agents will play a big role here as in my prototype they significantly sped up the process for me. I’ll try to document this one too and the plan is to release the source code for it as well.
Finally caved and built a custom AI newsletter curation platform for a friend who's been pestering me to automate his GPT news digests. Still no idea if there's real demand, but the learning experience with Cursor and Claude Code has been worth it. After growing my own newsletter to 800 subscribers, I'm convinced aggregation beats adding another newsletter to the pile.
Hey, as the friend who nudged you into this, this really helps me in my work with (former) elite athletes now entrepreneurs/investors and with high-octane executives. These folks receive too many calls, emails, messages, and yes, of course, newsletters and reports. I understood, the last thing they need is another newsletter or report. Instead, they need sharp, AI-driven tools to sift through the noise and surface actionable insights—signals, risks, and next steps, etc. ProCurator AI's platform is shaping up to do exactly that (btw, very easy to set up for users), and it’s cool to see how you leveraged Claude Code and Cursor to make it happen. This whole thing makes it possible for me to deliver these guys customized briefings tailored to their needs and schedule based on the information they receive in their inbox e. g. via newsletters and reports. Curious to hear what others here think about tackling info overload with tools like this.
Thanks very much for your interest. I fixed a bug that prevented signup. (There is an extra signup tab on the login page https://my.procuratorai.com/login) Works again now.
Just confirm your email address and you are good to go. Any feedback super welcome (marco / irg@procuratorai.com). Irg will also gladly give you an onboarding session, if needed. Just get in touch.
Building low cost tools to give email owner's their attention back.
1. Inbox Toll - solves the "real human, still spam" problem by making the sender pay a fee before the email actually lands in your inbox. Set your toll as low as $0.01.
2. Auto Label - automatically label (+ optionally archive) all non-human messages into logical categories like newsletters, receipts, promotions, etc.
I am working on a chess analytics tool, specifically a free and open source replacement of Chessbase in this age of LLMs that can run on all platforms. The idea is to lower the barrier of entry to use a chess improvement tool since Chessbase can be intimidating for a causal Chess.com beginner looking to go into serious chess prep. At present, it can do basic queries like H2H score of Magnus Carlsen vs Hikaru Nakamura, the top 10 juniors in the US, Magnus Carlsen's games with the London system opening and involving a queen sacrifice etc. Though getting it to work for advanced multi-step tactical patterns and finding games with certain imbalances in the query using natural language is getting challenging. DuckDB has helped a lot, along with modern LLMs for query generation with schema and some preprocessing of game PGNs and piece hashes. It can also import a user's Chess.com and Lichess games given the usernames and do similar queries as on Master level games.
I also used the tool to generate an Adult Chess improvers FIDE rank list for all federations around the world. Here are the July 2025 rankings though it still needs major improvements in filtering - https://chess-ranking.pages.dev
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Another idea that I have been working on for sometime is connecting my Gmail which is a source of truth for all financial, travel, personal related stuff to a LLM that can do isolated code execution to generate beautiful infographics, charts, etc. on my travels, spending patterns. The idea is to do local processing on my emails while generating the actual queries blindly using a powerful remote LLM by only providing a schema and an emails 'fingerprint' kind of file that gives the LLM a sense of what country, region, interests we might be talking about without actually transmitting personal data. The level of privacy of the 'fingerprint' vs the quality of queries generated is something I have been very confused with.
It is a platform for prompt challenges, in leetcode style. But you act as a director for the AI writing the code. You ask what you need and the AI implements your request.
The idea is to create some awareness about the fact that you do need to know how to code to be able to steer the AI in the right direction.
I am working on world model for computer systems. I am designing experiment and benchmark for LLM Agents to see if they possess understanding of "Linux". World model for computer systems will be crucial next step for computer use agents to reliably plan their actions over long horizon.
I'm working on JustRef[1]: AI Referee for Sports. I shipped the product a few days ago and seeing more than 2K users have already signed up and using the web app. Seeing people enjoy the application you created gives me a lot of enjoyment. Currently, I'm giving away 1 credit for every sign-up. No need to pay to try out.
That sounds awesome actually, as a woman football player I for sure would have some proper fun with it. You should try to pitch it to the organizations imo!
https://www.threeemojis.com/ , a daily word game for learning foreign languages. It's been a lot of fun to work on, and it's almost something that I am very proud of. For now it's only playable in German, and someday I hope that it will include many more languages. Today's puzzle shows the challenges of making something like this because there are a lot of old ancient words in there (that I am working on filtering out).
Hoping to see the English version soon! By the way, I'm also working on a daily games website with a subscription model (it's not live yet!), and I'm considering a price range exactly like yours. Are you having success with your subscription model? This thread [1], specifically this comment [2], was a letdown, but I haven't given up.
Ask me in a few months about subscriptions, I'm only a few weeks into having this thing be something even remotely playable. It's more or less the nytimes model and they seem to make it work. Right now, my girlfriend is very helpfully finding very obvious bugs in it most nights that I am fixing, and then after that I hope to get English in there.
I have also read that thread previously and disagree with ads being the only way to go. I think if the game is good enough and, for three emojis in particular, people learn more about their target language, that they will happily pay for it. I know I would at least, and I personally don't think I'm so weird. Friends have surprised me by signing up as soon as I sent it to them, specifically on the language learning value proposition, so I think there's something there. But, if it was just a puzzle game for fun only, then I might agree that the model doesn't work. We will just have to see!
Currently working on https://exitfox.com/. After recently switching jobs, I became frustrated with the handover process to the new joiner. This experience inspired me to start building a tool that uses Gemini/Claude to ask relevant questions about the project being handed over, streamlines the exit process in a structured format, Now I am adding more features for HR managers and employees around Clearance, FnF etc
Interestingly I found Claude Code to be the only LLM good at designing frontend, asking it to make it look better actually helps
ATProto is helluva complex and inconvenient to work with without supporting libraries, even in a relatively sugary language, like Kotlin. So, I decided to write a (programmatic) code generator that takes Lexicon on input and gives all the HTTP code and data classes you may ever need.
If you wonder why Bluesky native apps are crap, that's because they are in TypeScript, not in Kotlin and Swift, which are programming languages of Android and Apple platforms.
Maybe, someone will take my code and use it to make an app that feels good...
I'm building https://adeptli.org with the goal of making personalized learning available to anyone with an internet connection. It's pay-as-you-go, and everyone starts with free credits to check it out and not incur costs if they don't find it useful. I'm still very early in development and very open to feedback!
I'm building Journoo, an Ai-native journaling/diary app as an intelligent companion and memory repository for mental well-being, accountability, seeing patterns, critical thinking, processing thoughts/feelings, making better decisions, thinking of others, creativity, help staying focused on long-term aim/goals, and documenting and remembering your life - all according to your core values (via text, voice, and image).
Basically a productivity tool for making sense of reality and living your best life.
I love making something truly valuable and it's also a crash course on AI product/app development. Absolutely having the time of my life and am so grateful to be on this path!
Flutter with iOS and Android this summer. Desktop and Apple Watch soon.
A desktop environment for Linux, visually inspired by OSX Snow Leopard with a touch of contemporary. Coming with compositor, apps like dock, finder, status bar, and a UI framework like AppKit. Scratching my own itch and would love to see if it can gain traction. Still in the early innings though.
what framework/techstack are you using? i'd love to see something built on top of GNUstep which is close to what OSX is originally based on. (don't know how much of that is still found in Snow Leopard)
I'm working on a reading app. It integrates llms with your content. I know that the current llm providers already help you upload and ask qs about the docuemnt.
But I'm focused on building a good reading experience overall - which helps you learn and understand the content more easily. Imagine Macos preview integrated with llms. Currently, the web app uses the llm apis but eventually will add support for local llms as well.
I'm aware of other apps that have done something similar, but want to see this through for myself.
I'm building a information hub that utilize AI agents to compile all the relevant information from China (gov, econ, commerce, anything and everything). I call it "information domination". Heard many times that language barrier stops people having a better understanding of China. Now the LLM translation is good enough, and AI agents can do way more in information gathering stage. It's time to put things in practice.
For now, it only has a daily newsletter fully compiled by AI agents without any human intervention. I plan to add public listed companies (semiconductor, energy provider, etc) onto the platform. Already found lots of good data points that can be used by analysts, researchers or observers.
I'm working on a decade old problem - searching files in macOS. Started building to solve my own issues after realising none of the tools supports what I need. Very excited about the upcoming feature that I'm releasing this week as it lets you search inside specific folders - something that is not offered by other tools
Working on an open source RAG-as-a-service platform that bakes in the best practices and continues to evolve them so that customers get the best retrieval without having to go deep or stay up to date.
Our flagship feature is Agentic RAG, which is quite difficult to build from scratch.
I've been working on my YouTube channel here, creating content for n8n workflows. My latest video is about creating an automated youtube newsletter for your videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQcsCbM9Fgs
I’m still slowly working on a location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info) - the idea is people install an app and agree in a very upfront way to have their location tracked over time.
The union monetises this by selling privacy preserving aggregates (think ‘where is everyone in London right now’, or ‘where did people commute from?’), and acts on behalf of union members to stop data brokers selling their location data.
this is a really fascinating idea. I'm reading it as, instead of seeing my individual identity in a location dataset, it will see -DataUnionMember- with no unique identifier? When two members are in the same place at the same time, you don't know which one went in which direction?
The question of who can de-identify or unmask the data is there, but I could see the capability being required for gov, military, and police, and then as a premium service to customers.
I think at least initially the ‘product’ is datasets which don’t show individuals. You could of course build out a future direction which is differentially private.
More or less my initial approach to this is you take a grid, and you show movements/density on that grid. If necessary you coarsen the grid to avoid reidentification of individuals, and ultimately to get a good picture of the population given the biased sample which is the union membership, you need a statistical model on top which also helps from a privacy perspective.
State actors demanding individual location history is definitely an issue. I have a few possible approaches in mind to defend against that.
1. Offline AI file manager
2. Health tracker, sport, food, mental health (CBT) with AI - only for myself, for now(probably forever :)).
3. Community app where you can find people working on the same hobby/idea. I was trying to find someone to work on my small roach size swarm bots, but didn't know how to find same-minded people.
I'm working on ThreatCluster - automatically clusters related cybersecurity news from over 100 sources, so you see complete threat stories, timeline and analysis instead of scattered fragments.
We work with a single restaurant each month to create a 10-20+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Here’s the 2024 update (I haven’t run the year to date cumulative numbers yet):
I am a radio listener (not only shortwave, but also ham, utilities, etc.) and I am working to create a social network for radio listeners, that help to identify unknown radio stations and also to send QSLs.
I am keeping very simple to learn principles of web development, as I am very struggling in frontend.
I took July off. ()!_!()
Having implemented [2] in [1], a long time goal, the accomplishment of which has made me very happy, I felt the need to step back and take a break, sort out what I want to do with it next. A little bit about the journey can be gleaned from [3].
I'm working on a webapp for home inspectors. Early phases, no demo yet, just occasional updates and screenshots: https://wonger.dev/nuggets#n166
It's been tough to find work, so I figured I'd revisit an old SaaS idea. I worked for a home inspector in the past and saw a need for better (cheaper/faster/easier) report software.
Even if the business side flops, I'd still be satisfied with the experience. I've learned a lot about new tools like WASM and web components. I also like the UX challenge of designing for inspectors filling out reports on their phones.
https://github.com/osintbuddy/osintbuddy - Node graphs, data mining, and plugins. This year I've rewritten the project to learn Rust and we're nearly at feature parity compared to the old Python version (github.com/jerlendds/osintbuddy). I'm currently working out how the Python plugin system will work and I've jotted down some thoughts related to that here: https://studium.dev/osib/architecture#existing-plugin-system...
I’m working on https://voicecast.app/. It’s podcast voicemail and now recently, videomail. Trying to capture the YouTuber and Twitch streamer market but worried about diluting the product’s selling point. Seeing some cool growth lately.
It's a tool to help teachers detect student assignments that have been written by AI. Unlike other solutions out there, it's an entire web-based text editor that analyses not just the final assignment, but all the keystrokes used during the writing process.
My theory is that analysing the final text only is a futile struggle - billions are being pumped into making LLM text look more human, so trying to make an assessment off final text alone is guess work at best.
I'm curious what folks think! Especially teachers, devs, and anyone navigating this space...
I can't help but immediately think about a counteracting piece of software, which asks an LLM for variations of a paragraph, or a phrase, or a few synonyms, and types it the way a human would, with pauses, typos, navigation, rearranging pieces via copy-paste, etc.
Not that your software is going to be useless. But as long as there is an incentive to cheat, new and better tools that facilitate cheating will crop up. Something else should change.
Yeah it's a good call out. I think it's a (more) winnable battle though.
For both a keystroke based AI detector, and software designed to mimic human keystroke patterns, performance will be determined by the size of the dataset they have of genuine human keystroke patterns. The detector has an inherent leg-up in this, because it's constantly collecting more data through the use of the tool, whereas the mimic software doesn't have any built in loop to collect those inputs.
I got burned by software like this, when I pasted in a essay I transcribed while driving through Whisper, and software like this thought I had pasted AI content lol
Interesting idea! Could someone use the software to train an LLM prompt that will get around it? By learning what passes and what doesn’t and then having the LLM train on that
Yeah this is something I'm a little worried about - right now it's not extremely difficult to just take an AI generated essay and then just tweak the essay until it passes.
My first pass approximation is to make the assessment of whether the essay is AI generated or not accessible only to teachers. I may need to also rate-limit the checks, so people can't brute force it to gather data on what passess.
I'm building a cursor for document editing.
I'm tired of copy pasting text between ChatGPT and Google Docs/notion. There's too much formatting work after and the edits are a pain. The plugins those platforms offer aren't as good.
Not sure how many people struggle with this. Would love to know if there are alternatives already too.
Working on www.lattix.app, a macOS app to launch apps and files across multiple monitors, in the layout you want them to be in. I built this for myself as a companion since I context switch a lot ( work, personal projects and hobbies ), now it's public.
We are working on Gossip: the future of media insights (think Meltwater, Brandwatch, etc).
It’s been a journey but getting close to launching our first version to pilot customers in August. We use an enormous amounts of AI tokens every month to extract data not possible with any traditional player in this media monitoring space. Benchmarking competitors, tracking impactful discussions, and receiving actionable brand insights.
If you are currently using one of the big media monitoring companies, I’d love to chat!
pgqueuer turns vanilla PostgreSQL into horizontally-scalable job queue with zero extra infrastructure. If you’re running Postgres and want to ditch extra queue clusters, give it a spin and let me know how it holds up.
Working on AutoDBA [1]. The goal is to help developers and DBAs find and fix common performance issues, misconfigurations, unused indices, and silent slowdowns directly in your IDE.
We're trying to figure out how to narrow down our target audience and get to early revenue. Also, how we can grow the extension adoption.
Making progress on a Warhammer 40k rules engine and client (think in-browser RTS style). It's actually getting to be playable with a reduced rules set, and designed to be highly extensible / plug-in-able.
I'll still need to implement some kind of "AI" opponent or hack together P2P networking to demo it though; playing against yourself is fine for testing, but not really how the game is meant to be played.
It's hand coded so far, but I'm hoping AI can be a big lift for churning out the multiple thousands of named special rules, as most of these are very simple (+1 here, reroll there, etc).
Any WH40k players out there? Love to hear your thoughts!
I spent some weekends and after-work evenings tidying up some ambient and electronic recordings both new and old, and today I finally decided to publish it on bandcamp: https://semicolony.bandcamp.com/
It’s all downloadable for free since I make a living off databases so I don’t need to make money off this. I did this to give some closure to ideas I started working on 30 years ago.
A motion capture App that uses a probabilistic approach to fully automate the labeling and mapping process. I have this algorithm for quite a while in my head and want to use it to get up to speed with Godot and Rust. Intended to work with marker-based systems and eventually on unsynchronized multi camera setups
I work on portsentry (https://portsentry.xyz) - A portscan detection and response tool. It was first released in 1997 and abandoned in 2003. I’ve been a user for a long time but needed several features so I adopted the project in 2022.
I'm trying to integrate Meshtastic devices with the Signal K marine software ecosystem.
The idea is to facilitate communications between ship and the shore party, as well as to have alerts, some commands ("boat, turn deck light on") without reliance on telecommunications infrastructure.
Down the line communication and telemetry sharing between different vessels is also potentially interesting.
I'm building Zenta, a small set of offline tools to help you focus and stay present.
And Flow – a terminal app that helps you track deep work without distractions. It runs locally, keeps things simple, and protects your attention instead of just counting time.
I have a couple smaller projects pending that may become a part of something bigger, but the most amusing one so far a priorities app. At its core its basically a todo list. The difference is that I let it go through local llm to reconcile against declared ( and occasionally derived ) priorities and check for alignment to the todo list with the idea being that the most aligned items should be the ones to act on.
Overall, it is ending up being the most amusing thing I was working on.
edit: Very much for personal use. I currently have no intention of sharing it anywhere.
A Pomodoro timer to improve my skills but primarily as an excuse to get better at various AI coding tools when they pop up.
A website down-time detector because I think I can make money off it and learn a few things so I can later launch a grown-up SaaS.
A replacement for MS Notepad but with Markdown support. (I know Notepad sort of added this but it isn't great.) It's the tool I want to have when I say, "I like the way I can edit things in Notion and Obsidian but 95% of the functionality of those apps feel like bloat for my use case".
Cubic chunks, full lighting engine, opting to be non-deterministic, everything is unsigned integer math except for rotation and rendering, multiplayer is mostly implemented, built to be able to handle heavy simulation.. the foundation work is almost done. Right now it's just a hobby to try to build the best thing I can build. I work on it because it's fun.
In my day job, working with biotech and life science research companies to automate FDA compliance. That is automatically generate sections of their submissions based on their results/protocols and FDA rules[1]. Here is a short demo: https://www.loom.com/share/3a5a7f4c1cbe4abe825339c18c7397bf?...
[1]: We work at clioapp.ai w a paragraph more detail under products
Soon approaching a 1.0 release for sanctum once I get my brain out of vacation mode and into hacking mode again. A lot has happened this year and I am excited.
I will be talking about how sanctum and its cathedrals work at sec-t 2025 [2] so in full swing working on the demos and presentation.
The process names in the sanctum project made me smile :) I wonder why you chose "guardian" and not "bishop" (or even "episcopus"), which is literally "overseer".
I'm dipping my toes into decompilation -- specifically, decompiling Super Smash Bros. Melee. Once you get into the groove, it's kinda addicting! Now that I've done a few functions by hand, I'm wondering how to best leverage AI to speed up the process.
Me and another artist are having our fourth live performance of “We Wade Awake” [0] We’ve iterating on it each time, and the latest had a fully dynamic and procedural world generation using Unreal PCG. All input comes from two midi controllers, and we’ve built out a 25 minute experience of a fever dream trip through a surreal Bayou. Some videos and sound in the link.
I'm working on the TXR Lisp compiler, improving a certain optimization that identifies and eliminates certain kinds of wasteful VM register moves. It works and has many good "hits" in the code base, but doesn't handle certain cases.
Appio lets you add mobile widgets and native push notifications to your web app within minutes, without building or maintaining mobile apps, hiring developers, or dealing with app stores.
You can try it at: https://demo.appio.so/
If you’re building a web-based product without a mobile app, or just want to try Appio, I’d love to chat! You can reach me directly via https://my.appio.so/ or drop a comment here.
It's not a bid deal but... I've become interested in low level programming some time ago. During past 5 months I've been working (not with the diligence I wanted) on a GameBoy emulator written in C++. It started with me trying to emulate the gbz80 chipset, then the "why not?" question did hit my mind.
Actually I have finished the CPU fetch-decode-execute cycle, so I'm implementing the CPU instructions and looking forward to implement a basic version of the MBC and get cycle accurate.
A workflow engine, but not an "airflow like" (even if I hope it will become an airflow killer) but more similar to old job scheduling systems from mainframe era(OPC/TWS/CA7 ecc).
In my opinion, those mainframe-era dinosaurs are conceptually far more superior to what we have today on servers and cloud systems.
I've been making songbooks for my favourite songs. I am currently working on a songbook for some friends. I've found https://www.chordpro.org/ an amazing CLI tool, under active development. I am using the ukulele, but the program also easily can do guitar or piano. The program reads a bunch of text files and produces a really nice PDF. I've also used pandoc + LaTeX for the front matter.
I'm just done writing the report for my nlp exam, I tried to fine tune some gemma models and wow, I have to say that there's still a lot to do in terms of documentation, examples, whatever. It still feels a very fresh field, sometimes not knowing where to bash my head
It's an electronic product database, where you can search through products and see all of the detailed specifications about each product. Has an API as well.
Currently integrating electronic news / reviews that will be linked to products.
I'm currently working on the NimbyDar - a tracker for cancelled renewable developments in the UK, attempting to find patterns within which locations tend to hate clean energy and renewable projects.
I quit my job to work to create a story game powered by AI. We have a few agents that are in charge of memories, perception, and unlocking game achievements. If that sounds cool you can give it a try here:
https://k58.duya.io
I'm building an app for language learning with Youtube. I realized that yt probably has the largest collection of spoken language that ever existed, so I wanted to make it accessible, especially on mobile.
I'm focusing on Chinese (Mandarin) right now, because that's what I've been learning, and the language learning community on reddit likes it too. But other languages are also available.
I have been experimenting with rendering fonts in Rust lately. I was pleasantly surprised by how simple reading the ttf file format is. The hard part, of course, is actually doing everything with the bezier curves and contours and filling the insides etc. But if I were to just be working with straight lines, I already have everything I need. Indeed, I used MATLAB's `patch` to quickly check my progress and see the major bugs in my rendering implementations, and got there within a couple hours.
A tool to solve optimization problems using quantum computers. Just released the first open-source version https://github.com/pasqal-io/maximum-independent-set/ . Now expanding it to more complex types of optimization problems.
Also, thinking about resurrecting http://opalang.org/. We'll see if I have the energy to work on that.
I'm working on DBOS Transact [0], our open source library that adds durability and reliability to your codebase. We're about to launch support for Golang [1] and Java, and that's going to bring some really interesting customer problems. I can't wait!
We focus on people with relationship issues, and so far it's been deeply fulfilling. So many people have written in about how this has helped them heal.
Launched with React Native about 8 weeks ago, and continuing to grow fast. This is a niche space with lots of potential over the next few years I think.
Just submitted an update to help people compare their unique relationship needs to others which is so cool.
I'm working on my game "Night of the Trickster". It's a Christmas themed stealth/horror game
After tinkering with game technology for years now, I'm pleased I've finally managed to use all that knowledge to create something (soon to be) releasable
Flux is a high-performance message transport library for Rust that implements patterns inspired by LMAX Disruptor and Aeron. It provides lock-free inter-process communication (IPC), UDP transport, and reliable UDP with optimized memory management for applications with low latency requirements.
I am trying to figure out how to do marketing for my journaling app for language learning.
Basically, you journal in a foreign language and see grammar and other mistakes directly in the app: https://langdiary.com
Experimenting with exhaustive tagged-union support based on Clojure's defmulti.
I think it might be better to go the other way, and have a pattern-matchey form generate the defmethods instead, but I need to gain tacit knowledge about it first.
Working on Lunova — a QuickBooks Online app that you can create custom alerts via SMS/email such as when big deposits land, invoices go overdue, or vendor prices spike. Just cleared Intuit’s tech/security + marketing review (Took over 3 months... after building the MVP) and we’re now live on the QBO App Store. Feedback and feature requests welcome: https://uselunova.com
https://podskim.com is for turning podcasts into knowledge graphs and making them visually skimmable.
Keep adding features but need to shift to some user research and see how people are using it
I'm studying, on my spare time, whether LLM can enhance democracy (mostly with a direct use of technology by helping citizens). I'm currently doing a systematic literature review on this topic
Happy to discuss on that topic or to discover new initiatives / sources
I spent good amount of my summer holiday rebuilding Masterlist (https://masterlist.fi)
This is probably third (or fourth) incarnation of the app and I like writing a web apps with Hotwire more and more. Especially leaning more on <turbo-stream> features removes frontend complexity compared previous versions. Highly recommended, both Hotwire and rewriting your apps!
My business partner and I are building an AI-powered lead gen platform that allows you to request leads directly from Slack for a variety of roles. Most mature sales orgs have really in-depth CRMs that can serve this purpose (Apollo etc) but smaller teams generally don’t. We’re here to fill that gap.
I've been building promptslice.com as a way to create, test, and optimize prompts + tools + context. I needed it when building agents for other use cases so I built it. Unlike Langsmith and some of the other prompt editors, this has a first class editor for your prompt with "Cursor style" chat where you can ask it to make tweaks, overhaul sections, optimize ambiguity, etc.
My co-founder and I, are building an AI travel assistant that creates personalised itineraries for users and allows them to book everything with one click, making it easy to manage all the bookings in one platform. It also helps with contingencies making travel planning and travelling, as a whole, stress-free.
Working on 3dpack.ing, an AI-powered 3D container loading tool.
It calculates optimal ways to load boxes into trucks or containers, considering stacking rules, fragility, and real-world constraints. You can drag boxes like 3D Tetris or upload photos to auto-estimate item dimensions. Recently added: batch-wise guided loading for warehouse use cases.
We're at ~$400 MRR and just opened up a 14-day free trial. Feedback, trials, and intros to logistics folks welcome.
Firstly a DevManual - for “any” software team/IT dept - how to think about the philosophy, history and practise of basically everything - release management, backup and recovery or IAM and security and marketing-by-engineering or CSS
It’s kind of “this much I know” and a working docker based OSS “software team in a box”
And the second one is really expanding on the philosophy - how software is changing companies and how democracy works with software
I'm trying the make an "OS" that simulates all of the OS processes on Python and React called Maamut95. I'm kinda clueless about how an OS works, so that's why I've gotten help from AI a lot. This is some kind of learning project.
A configurable and extensible orchestrator for Claude Code (and other agents). Turns out it can be effectively used not only for coding, but also for reviews, testing, and other tasks. https://github.com/Gusarich/orchestrator
I just open-sourced: https://github.com/cloudexplain/xaiflow, a mlflow plugin to get interactive xai (particularly shap values) as mlflow artifacts.
Furthermore looking into causal AI, especially dowhy.
While medical records systems in much of the developed world are still shared via fax, we think there's an opportunity to leapfrog existing systems and have a cloud-based source of truth.
I'm working on an app[0] that makes hosting temporary PDF forms simple, without needing an account or payment. You simply add input fields over any static PDF and publish it to get a link which you can send to other people who may need to fill the form.
The form stays online for 30 days. To keep the forms online for longer, I will be offering paid plans.
Thanks!
The radio buttons as well as check boxes do show an outline so that they can be used in PDFs where no existing outline exists. If the PDF already has these outlines, the widgets can be resized so that the outlines of the widget match the existing ones.
You can erase existing signatures by overlaying a new signature widget on top of it and specifying a solid color as the background.
The frontend uses React, with Firebase handling most of the backend stuff.
We recently installed a solar system on the roof, battery included. The app it comes with is okay to answer most questions. But that wont prevent me from shipping my own dashboard based on locally scraped data. Just for the sake of it. Also my homelab machine is bored.
Just soft launched: http://disposableapps.com - Hugging face for micro-tools. Disposable apps propose few apps a week and the ones with max votes stay and rest gets "disposed off" and the ones which stay are available for flat monthly subscription.
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features!
I finally completed my self published beginner Android programming book earlier this year. I took a break and now I'm working on updating it to add more Kotlin examples.
I wrote the book in markdown and used Pandoc to convert it to print ready PDF.
Working on a combination note-taking app, cloud drive, and AI assistant, all on a server you own. You can vibe-code apps in your notebook, use your notebook's underlying filesystem, and serve apps to the public, all from your new cloud computer. Still early, but would love feedback!
I’m working on an open source TACoS (Terraform automation and collaboration software) called Burrito.
Our goal is to empower infrastructure as code with drift detection, contribution workflows and a comprehensive UI, all in a Kubernetes based software strongly inspired by ArgoCD.
At actualia [1] we're working on delivering customized-and-verifiable news summaries! We summarize RSS feeds and other sources filtering by interests, with a strong emphasis on user relevance, routine integration, and UX in general. We're in closed beta right now aiming for a launch in Q3 !
For the past two months, I have been working on Hyvor Relay [1], an open-source, self-hosted alternative to AWS SES, Mailgun. It's been an awesome ride learning SMTP and DNS in depth. And, we're pretty close to a beta release.
Recently I've been working on a project I call term-to-svg. It's a command-line tool that converts terminal session recordings into animated SVG images.
I've been working on a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
I’m working on Reflect [0], it’s a private self discovery and self experimentation app. You can track metrics, set goals, get alerted to anomalies, view correlations, visualize your data, etc.
I've been building Crossabble (https://crossabble.com/) a free and fun weekly web word game. Feedback welcome!
The game is mostly done, so I'm now focused on tooling to make it easier for me to craft each week's puzzle. I'm solving some interesting graph and optimizations problems
I just discovered the formulas Excel library for Python, and I have about two dozen ideas for things that you could do with it. It turns out they already implemented the first dozen in the library itself, but the possibilities that come from extracting the computational graph out of a workbook are huge.
At the top of my list is taking unstructured workbooks and adding a sheet to tabulate inputs and outputs. A lot of spreadsheet models are not set up for bulk evaluation or retaining old results, and the peculiar arrangement of cells constitutes an ad hoc user interface for the model. I want to take that seriously as a programming environment for subject matter experts and give them an extra tool for working with their models. As programmers, we give spreadsheet authors far too little credit for intelligence and skill, and often blame them for the faults of their platform. This is unproductive, and we can do better.
Built a bespoke loyalty points system for a chain of gas stations back in 2020. Thought at first it would be a one time deliverable and then I could move on with my life. Cut to today and I'm trying to launch it into it's own platform.
Nothing much to show other than one client, but I'm on the cusp of charging them monthly vs getting paid by the hour.
When I read social spaces like Reddit or X, if the government has done anything contentious you get nothing more than strident left takes, or strident right takes on the topic. Neither of which is informative or helpful.
So I am setting up a site which uses AI which is specifically guided to be neutral and non-partisan, to analyse the government actions from the source documents.
It then generates:
- a summary,
- expected affects,
- benefits,
- disadvantages, and
- ranks the action against 19 "things you care about" (e.g. defence, environment, civil liberties, religious protection, etc.)
The end result is quite compelling. For example here's the page that summarises all the actions which are most, and least, beneficial to individual liberties:
I sent feedback to ground.news the other day asking them to have a toggle to get rid of the left/rightometers on their articles.
So much of this nonsense is framed around some arbitrary understanding of left/right by americans which has basically no bearing or interest to me. Its helpful to have a source of news that can identify coverage gaps, but I dont need everything helpfully added to some subjective seppo political bucket.
Even in your example you dont explain whether you are talking about positive or negative liberty, a relatively neutral framework to discuss liberty that pre exists AI.
We have gone to a lot of trouble to try to engineer the prompt to make it clear to Gemini that it should take a "non-partisan and unbiased" view in all the analysis. This is an attempt to get away from any person's opinion, including ours.
Obviously, whether you think it achieving that ideal is in the eye of the beholder :-) But it is certainly less biased than most mainstream media, and social network echo chambers.
Working on an web application to turn form fillable PDF's into full interactive TTRPG character sheets, with 3d dice rolling, configurable / re-usable rolls, etc...
Easiest way to explain it is something like D&DBeyond but for indie games.
Looking for a job and trying to get clients for my new security consulting startup. May start up a local malware cleaning service, but I don't think I'll get any clients since I can't afford a storefront and there's a few small computer repair stores near me. I live in a rural part of Louisiana, so yeah idk.
After 4.5 years it's finally time to build a mobile app for OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) - it provides uptime monitoring for software teams and status pages for their users
I'm starting with React Native to see if anyone actually ends up using it, and will go from there
Building a developer marketing agency. No, I'm not doing anything evil, moreover, I'm trying to do things that actually make sense for devs and founders.
A videogame for a variant of poker with i cut you choose mechanisms, where there is some meta plot, and NPC in the game remember you and the way you play.
Inspiration from shuffle puck cafe and pc98 / japanese bar table card game.
This weekend I (& AI) made a little quizzing app for testing myself after watching Jeopardy.
Only put the last three games of this past season so far, but I will probably add more each day (re-runs are still on until the new season starts in September).
We're working on Crystal: a real time infrastructure map for energy operations in the Pacific Northwest. Our focus is to inform energy traders, dam operators, and transmission analysts to support a reliable grid.
I'm developing a simple video processing and generation library for Python focusing on short-form videos (think TikTok or Youtube Shorts) and ease of use for humans and AI agents https://github.com/BartWojtowicz/videopython
https://www.dbmuse.com a visual GUI for Mongo and Postgres with an Agent to ask questions about your DB for macOS. Soon also for Windows/Linux and with MCP support to let Claude Code/other LLM use your local database as a tool.
Something new https://mu.xyz. I guess after many attempts I've realised I really can't stand the state of the internet and just need a really basic app for specific things I do on a daily basis e.g LLM chat, new headlines, etc.
Working on the notes app with MCP, JSON export and Git backup. Like Apple Notes, but works on every platform and in the browser. Offers focused mode where you can just full-screen the app and type your notes.
Might start doing a few posts on Cloudflare WAF as I've been working with it extensively lately. Maybe it'll help me uncover some startup ideas in that space.
I've been pretty frustrated with my 3d print quality, decided to make my self an esp32 based heater control board. It connects to wifi and is based on esphome so you can automate it via home assistant. The prototype worked well enough so designing an integrated pcb and in the process of ordering it on JlCPCB
The Calculator app for LisaGUI. I'm using high precision fixed point arithmetic to do the calculations. It's gonna have the same functionality as the original, with three different modes and a toggle-able paper tape. The Lisa's manual has been surprisingly helpful.
I’m working on a pretty simple rss-to-email service. Currently a few friends are beta testing it but anyone is free to check it out and give feedback: https://anomail.co/
had a hard time finding a light weight carry-on luggage, since every time the airline checked i was nearly over, so i created a site to help me sort things by weight and airline compatibility:
I'm working on a superpowered version of Siri/Alexa that can manage finances, notes, meetings, research, automation, and communication - including email/Slack
Working on xclip.in - software that fully automates content creation for content creators by deeply analyzing their past content/analytics and the current social media trends.
Git hosting for async teams that supports versioned patches and patch stacks instead of pull requests. All done using the standard git SSH protocol, so no git-send-email needed.
I'm experimenting/prototyping 3D models to passively absorb specific low frequencies, with the idea of reducing fatigue/increasing productivity in the workplace (where making/taking calls is continuous).
The 3D models are based off of a research paper by Yong Li and Badreddine M. Assouar, called "Acoustic metasurface-based perfect absorber with deep subwavelength thickness" [0].
Absorbing low (male voice; 80Hz - 300Hz, not including overtones) frequencies normally takes a fair bit of dampening material, unless something like a Helmholtz resonator [1] is used.
The paper shows that a ~100x100x12mm 3D printed Helmholtz resonator may entirely absorb 125.8Hz (in an extremely narrow band). I'm uncertain about transmission losses (i.e. volume of the frequency perceived behind the material).
So far, I have created/vibe-coded a script to take the inputs: frequency and tile dimension (it's square). The output is a 3D object (.stl) which can be printed.
Today I tested my 3D model, which roughly resembles the model in the paper (1mm roof & floor as opposed to 0.2mm, because of printing difficulties), by using a DIY'D impedance tube and publicly available software [2].
The print was meant to be tuned at 125Hz, but results showed 131Hz and absorption factor of ~0.42 (lower number as opposed to 1.0 may be due to inexperience with all of this; it may be due to an imperfect test setup).
My impedance tube is made from 96mm (inner) diameter PVC tube, a Visaton KT 100 V 4 Ohms speaker, an amplifier, Motu M2 audio interface, 2 Behringer ECM8000 measurement mics and some 3D printed adapters (to hold the speaker and sample).
Nothing to concretely publicise or share so far, but am thoroughly enjoying the process of digging into a field (acoustics) completely new to me, solely out necessity and/or frustration in the workplace.
Should anyone be interested, I will share my project with HN once it has progressed to where I have something written up or worth sharing.
A tool to map your network - for fundraising, sales, partnerships, etc - to get intros to people. Cold email is dying as it gets so much cheaper and easier to send emails with AI and automation, so human connection is going to skyrocket in importance.
An LLM coding cli tool, not agentic, not small primitives to make navigating code base and coding easy and fast. I won't say the future isn't agentic, but I'm still having fun doing it manual.
We are working on a DOM/Text Only AI Web Agent, rtrvr.ai:
- an AI Web Agent that autonomously completes tasks, creates datasets from web research, and integrates any APIs/MCPs – with just prompting and in your browser!
Trying to vibe code a tool that provides a better navigation of github releases for monorepos. I wanted to use this project to as a way to experiment with ai coding agents (Junie), sveltekit, GraphQL, and Cloudflare workers.
i am working on a website to track painted stones on a map. similar to geocaching but you can see their path and the comments people leave when they find one.
powered using QR codes people have to glue on the back.
Jounaling bot that asseses the content and hilights over time important stuff. Obviously relying on llm and well designed prompts and data structures. Already in testing on live users.
Building a free service to detect fraudulent D.P.R.K job applicants.
It has been going on since 2018 at least and I have flagged thousands of such applicants.
mostly spending free time on my daily note taking / standup tool, daylog: https://github.com/notnmeyer/daylog-cli. more or less the definition of “useless”, for-myself software.
We’re building a P2P protocol that replaces capitalist value systems with contribution-based logic.
It measures value through actions, prestige (trust), and system response—not profit.
The model is mathematically proven to converge to π, symbolizing natural harmony.
So people can choose it not as a dream, but as a rational system for real well-being.
My creation this week, i hope some find it interesting and fun. Last night I was bored so I created a python app to analyse historical euromillions draw numbers. I added tons of features and some statistical analysis features to examine patterns and bias. Good luck if it helps you win I would love to know, also let me know your thoughts and experiences, what you found, how it helps you understand the draw more, and any features I could add in future. I could not find many official sources for entire historical draw data; the official lottery website only appeared to provide 6 months historical data and i wanted to analyse all past draws.
I'm building yet another Pomodoro app. I wanted something multiplatform with low resource consumption, using the native OS styles, so it integrated well with the OS, I'm using slint for that.
It's possible to install with nix and I'm working on other package managers. I'm targeting Linux and Mac.
It has a ticking sound, and the notifications remind you to stay hydrated, stretch and walk. I've used many different Pomodoro and I'm trying to consolidate the features I like the most from each.
Right now it works quite well on Linux and it should work on Mac.
I am working on a platform called ikverdienbeter.nl (i deserve better) that educates people on recognizing healthy behaviour and healthy boundaries. I take snippets from popular tv, like dating shows, and mark the "red flags" on a timeline. For instance: "here at time 1:05 you see the woman gaslight the man. Gaslighting means [...]".
Using AI for auto subtitles and actor matching. Will build some auto deploy fragment to social media as well. I think these short fragments will do well op TikTok.
I'm currently polishing up an on-device app that I wrote for myself a few months ago to safely expand shortened links and to get rid of tracking parameters from URLs and QR codes for release as a free app (https://cleanlinks.app).
My other app (https://slopornot.app , an on-device AI generated text and image detector) has been stuck in App Store review limbo for almost a month now. Probably because it's an on-device ML app and not another OpenAI API wrapper, which seem to get approved by Apple, really fast. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am finishing mobile UI for Gethly(sales and hosting platform for digital content creators - paywalled content hosting). It is taking a bit longer than I wanted but it will be done soon. But I am looking forward to August because I will be implementing a new feature - Paywall As A Service, which will allow content creators signed up with Gethly to host their content remotely and Gethly will manage finances and content access. Due to the way Gethly is set up, it supports micropayments, so people can charge merely 1 cent for access, which should satisfy both - creators and consumers. It is a feature I am really excited to work on and I expect it to take no more than two weeks to implement and deploy.
working on a tool to help people lie on their resumes because the job market is ridiculous and who really has the energy to do "training" for an entry level retail job, applie-ai.com
helping educate the population of the United States with the assistance of Chinese Australian missionaries on how to navigate the "food" supply chain and minimize the consumption of adulterated/compromised food while still achieving a well-rounded nutritional diet
The main features are it shows if your colors meet WCAG accessible contrast on a live UI mockup, you get quick and precise control over every color grade in a swatch (via editing HSL curves) instead of these being auto/AI generated, and it helps you create a full palette of tints/shades for each color rather just a handful of colors.
The idea here is to design your tints/shades upfront with accessible contrast in mind so you don't run into problems later. Most brand style guides I see only have around 5 brand colors, and when you need more tints/shades later to implement actual UIs and landing pages, you get into a conflict where you can't find contrasting colors to introduce that match the brand.
I've had interesting feedback about different workflows designers have so far. It's tricky to make a single tool that fits everyones workflow but I might end up with multiple modes e.g. easy but more opinionated, and more freeform but for advanced users.
I admit it has a learning curve at the moment but I'm not sure how simple you can make it without giving up control. I think once you get it though, you'll realise it's much easier to make a custom accessible palette than you thought.
Looks awesome! I'm using tailwind in my open source project and Ive been really struggling with accessible colors, inclusivecolors sounds like itll be perfect for me
> Ive been really struggling with accessible colors
Thanks, feel free to message me if you want some tips!
Most accessibility/WCAG guides say things like "Tip #1: Choose accessible colors", but they don't go into any detail about how you pick sets of colors that contrast, like text/background/border colors for buttons on different backgrounds, as if it's trivial. It's actually really tricky and can feel impossible in some scenarios until you internalize the basic rules and constraints.
I usually see people saying the opposite, that it's easy to pick accessible colors, when it's often not, especially when you have existing branding to stick to.
Very cool project. I don't use tailwind but I have been thinking that the color palette part is great. Love that you can export it all to a big list of CSS variables.
Thanks! To clarify, it's aimed at more than just Tailwind, but Tailwind popularized the color naming like red-500, blue-100, green-900 etc. so I went with that convention.
You can use the CSS export in regular CSS projects directly e.g. via `color: var(--red-900)`, or something like `--bs-danger: var(--red-500)` for Bootstrap projects with semantic naming. The same export format works for Tailwind too because since version 4, Tailwind is mostly configured via CSS variables now.
I probably need to make this more obvious, but if all your swatches have the linked/shared lightness option set, you can pick lightnesses where all grade 500 colors contrast against all grade 100 colors, all grade 600 colors contrast against all grade 200 colors etc. so when you're picking colors in CSS, you know by design which colors will contrast without having to go check them.
I've been working a ton on some variations and ports of it over the last couple months, but the problem is that I need funding.
So my plan is to setup github sponsors, where for each project people want me to work on, they can donate any amount, and for each $25, I'll work one hour on that project. It'll have a few related projects that all come from a unified vision I have for 90s.dev -- to be a full platform that recreates 90s-era development, from dos and qbasic, to win3 and vb3, not to mention assemblers for those who want it (see my show-hn about hram.dev).
It's a bit of clusterfuck, because my earlier clone was made in C#. And Rust enforces you to learn some different tricks, which are expands your knowledge and fun to learn.
I've been working in the intersection of LLMs and Traditional Astrology, for personal knowledge, professional and personal decision-making, and mostly for fun. I'm not a professional astrologer (I'm a CS PhD Professor), but I've studied with some people (some renowned authors on the field) and always had curiosity about it.
I have a python astrology library [1] which I use to generate my astrology chart, as text, to feed it into an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro). I then ask it questions about personal characteristics (the easy parts), but, more interesting, I can also ask it to consider some scenarios and it answers back with several hypothesis and how well it fits my character, personal goals, etc. It's like talking to a friend that knows you very very well.
Lately I've been working with a technique called Primary Directions. It's a predictive technique that tries to describe events in your life by means of astrological symbols (things like "Opposition of Saturn reaches the MC by 34.5 years old", which means something "bad" for your career or social position) and use it to check if a specific scenario has worked for me previously and will work in the future, and to ask it for other scenarios that match my personal characteristics and predicted symbolic events. I find LLMs, specifically Gemini Pro, quite good at these kind of things.
I also have fun "playing" with other peoples charts. For instance last night I gave it my chart and list of primary directions to Gemini and asked it if it could find who it was. It said Kurt Cobain. Quite off! But it described a lot of events that could fit my primary directions, like for instance, that Kurt Cobain got his guitar at his 14's or the one at 27 where he died. I didn't die at 27 (but "life issues") and also got my first guitar at 14. I'm also a musician, although an amateur one.
If you're into these kind of things, I created a gist [2] that you can feed into an LLM and talk to Kurt Cobain's chart. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that it's Kurt Cobain. For fun, ask it something like "Considering the chart and the events predicted by the primary directions, in which ages will this person have some success or public visibility". In my case it answered, among others, 13-14 yo something related to "success, popularity, academic, sports or artistic achievement" (Kurt Cobain seems to got his first guitar at 14, and discovered his vocation), and 23-24 "beginning of career, marriage, or first step that puts the person on the 'map'" (release of the Nevermind album that catapulted Nirvana to the world stage). You can then ask it to match the events to Kurt Cobain, and it will find the real life events that seem to match it quite well.
I find that LLMs are quite good at generating hypothesis, multiple scenarios, and I'm still exploring their strengths and weaknesses (and of astrology as well).
I'm trying to get the word out that: The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.
The US domestic (family) court system, in Ohio in particular, has become functionally corrupt.
The Ohio bar association has co-opted the domestic court system for their own revenue generating stream. The judges profit from kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions every four years from the very attorneys are supposed to be judging against, this is not just the appearance of corruption it is a system built on it.
On top of that, all the judgments are sealed and secret, meaning that there's zero records and zero accountability for any judges or lawyers in the system. This means the judges only incentive is to judge in a way that is most in line with his best interest. In practice this means that what little data we have shows that almost every time the judge finds in favor of whichever attorney donated the most money to his campaign.
This has been going on for the better part of 20 years and is the reason that 85% of divorces end with single parent custody in Ohio, it's because the judges are getting paid off.
I'm blowing the whistle, working on websites, printing signs, sending out mailers, Court watching and taking notes on these corrupt evil fucks, doing anything and everything I can to get the word out that the Franklin County Ohio domestic court system in particularly has been corrupted by a small group of judges, mainly Judge James Brown. I'm doing everything I can to get the word out about these evil and corrupt judges, the biggest hurdle seems to be how much money they are making and that people believe that once a lawyer gets rich and powerful enough they're uncorruptible, which is the exact opposite of the truth. The judges are the ones running a corrupt, pay to play, system of kickbacks with themselves at the top. The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.
They are literally horse trading children like they're chips at the casino and what they've done to a generation of young people and millennial fathers is pure evil.
Working on The Card Caddie (thecardcaddie.com) free credit card recommendation site + extension with no personal credit card info. Never miss a point again!
(Built for fun as I optimized my daily spending to get a year's worth of flights for free and friends wanted it haha)
Working on Git-related tooling for conflicts, ownership, workflows, etc. Still very early stage. Looking for early testers, so if anyone is interested feel free to reach out.
I'm in Tuva (currently organized as a Russian Republic on the border of Mongolia), about to go offline for 10 days into a small throatsinging retreat. This has been a dream of mine for many years.
I flew Rapid City -=> Minneapolis -=> Seoul -=> Ulaanbaatar -=> Kyzyl to get here; it was quite a harrowing journey, not only for the many difficult flights but also an hours-long interrogation by Russian security (though they were polite and professional - I'll tell that whole story another time).
I'm increasingly convinced of the connection between traditional music and a free internet. As some of you have followed, I have done a few deep-dives into the bluegrass roots of the early Bay Area cypherpunk scene. Because traditional music necessarily lives outside the complex of copyright and intellectual property, I believe it is a natural and necessary fuel of innovation of free ideas.
I can scarcely believe this is happen. t-minus one hour. See y'all in 10 days. Then I'll be online for a few hours, then I head to another similar retreat in Mongolia.
Today (Sunday) I've spent the day studying Analogical Reasoning. Specifically reading chapters from The Analogical Mind by Gentner, Holyoak, and Kokinov (eds), and Similarity and Analogical Reasoning by Vosniadou and Ortony (eds).
Beyond that, I've spent most of the weekend working on some "test harness" code for doing AI research. You all may have seen me mention XMPP a few times over the last year or so and if so, you have have rightly wondered "What does XMPP have to do with anything?"
Good question. The short answer is "nothing, in and of itself."
That is, there's nothing in particular about XMPP that has anything to do with AI. I'm just using XMPP as a convenient interface to interact with my AI experiments. The thing is, most of this code was written in very much an "exploratory programming" style (eg, "vibe coding before vibe coding was a thing and done without an LLM"). As such, the architecture and structure of the code is kinda crap and it's hard to extend, reuse, modify, etc. There's too much "XMPP stuff" tightly coupled to my "Blackboard" system[1] and nothing was written to use dependency injection and so on.
Soooooo... I've spent a bunch of time over the weekend re-working that stuff to make my test harness much more useful. Now, all the "XMPP stuff" is contained to a single deployable unit, and the Blackboard stuff is likewise properly designed to allow making all the components Spring managed beans and wired together in a Spring Boot application. And that in turn exposes it's interface as a simple REST API. One thing I'm debating now is if I want to try and coerce this into fitting the OpenAI API model, and then adopt the OpenAI API for my backends[2]. Still debating with myself on that point.
Anyway, with this stuff done, it will be easy to switch out the AI backend components, run parallel tests, and do other nifty things. One thing I'll probably do is integrate Apache Camel into the XMPP receiver component to support complex message routing logic where desired.
I also finally created a Dockerized build for all of this stuff and a docker compose file, so now I can just run "docker compose up" and have a running system in a few seconds. And since everything is built as a Docker image now, if I want to move this to K8S or something in the future that becomes less of a slog.
All in all, I have gotten quite a bit done the last couple of days. I attribute a lot of this to the success of my eye procedure on Thursday. Now that I can see again, and am not experiencing near constant severe levels of eye strain and fatigue, it's a LOT easier to get stuff done!
[2]: As an aside, I say "coerce" because what I'm doing is not fundamentally based on LLM's or GenAI in general. Most of this work is either purely symbolic AI, or neuro-symbolic hybrid stuff at present. That said, I do allow for the possibility of using an LLM in places, especially for the "language" part. That is, if my system does a bunch of computation and creates an "answer" as a bunch of RDF triples or something, I can then take that and feed it to an LLM and say "translate this into conventional English prose" or whatever. I'm not an absolutist about any particular approach.
Learning OpenGL. https://gamemath.com/ is free and a great way of explaining most of the math in an intuitive way without getting handwavy or imprecise. https://learnopengl.com/ is also free!
a distributed compute framework for unstructured data that treats retrieval as a first class citizen - it feels like we're rebuilding the modern data warehouse using all ai native primitives. joins, clustering, retrieval, all using distributed compute/inference primitives.
Me and 2 cofounders are in searching for our next B2B startup idea to implement. We come from different backgrounds (im the tech guy). We are in the process of market research for prospective ideas.
My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers.
Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes!
The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous surface in a short time compared to static systems or man-portable insecticide spraying. Our goal is to be competitive with ITNs against Malaria.
Some links :
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/supercon-2024-killing-mosqui...
https://manifund.org/projects/build-anti-mosqu
Ha so cool, would love one for in my bedroom ;-)
I know of a Dutch company doing something similar. Focusses on pest detecting/mitigation in greenhouses atm: https://www.pats-drones.com/
Yeah, what they do is very cool. Not sure how far they are in the development but the videos are super cool.
Hadn't seen this before, this is awesome! I lived in Cameroon and Kenya briefly doing some consulting work and mosquitos still wreak havoc across the continent (and now living in DC I wouldn't mind having one of these in the summer for my place). I'm curious if you're also thinking about defense applications -- I would imagine that a super low cost drone that could help take out a shahed or other Russian drone that are wreaking havoc on Ukraine would be quite valuable
A 40-gram device is unlikely to pack any punch, except against a mosquito.
It could be a great reconnaissance tool though.
Glad to hear we could be of help! Some of our tech could be used for defense, but traditional defense companies and ukrainian startups already do low-cost shahed interceptors.
My impression is the solutions are still somewhat lacking/necessary -- I know Frankenburg, Eric Schmidt's stealth startup, and surely the primes are all working on it but given how many shaheds are still getting through (plus all the drone action at the frontline) I imagine there's still a market for low-cost; especially if they're largely autonomous
It might be, but it’s a crowded market where politics and connections are worth more than technical expertise. So, we’re okay to stay out of it
it’s a crowded market where politics and connections are worth more than technical expertise
This is 100% true.
Kill mosquitoes first. Then go for defense contracts when you can show you have sensors good enough to hunt and kill bugs.
I guarantee solving the bug use case first will put you head and shoulders above all the clueless UAS/cUAS companies out there these days - and there are TONS of them.
Just imagining how you'd test this in America. Just launch your target autonomous flying drone and then have the second one intercept it. Can you book range time at white sands?
You built what I ofte. imagined should exist (for flies).
Very cool idea. What is your estimated price? This could work well in many African countries if the price is low.
Long term, around $300/unit
Holy wow, if this works well, I’d like to order a dozen!
No to discourage you ,but how do you handle a real world cluttered room where mosquito's will be able to shelter in the clutter, under table, drawers etc.
Not OP, but they have to come out to be a problem.
If they're out of sight and not bothering me, I don't really care. If they're out and possibly annoying and biting me, that's a problem.
mosquito generally bite you on your legs , say when you are sitting in a chair...the area under the chair is a pretty complex space to navigate for a flying bot
Exactly! Plus we’ll get a nice beautiful sonar echo when they’re on walls/ceiling
Props to you for not using a UV light to attract moths and calling it a mosquito killer.
I guess you already researched this topic: would laser turret work for killing mosquitos? And if no, why not? Seems more reliable.
Someone had this idea, but from a static laser tower https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376376 (343 points | 4March 2021 | 250 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793660 (317 points | October 2021 | 161 comments). I'd be very afraid of a missed shots or reflections impacting an eye, also the fire hazard.
Ans there is also a recent post where someone use a similar device to light the mosquito https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005200 (20 points | May 2025 | 5 comments) and you must give the final bow that sound safer. (Protip: Buy an Electric Fly Swatter)
why spend the scarce energy of the battery in addition what's already being spent spinning the propellers
I mean getting rid of drone, and having just laser turret.
Oh my bad, yeah that's a cool idea, think I've seen something along those lines once actually, think it was someone on youtube that built one
Unfortunately it won’t. an eye that collimates light is much more fragile to laser than a mosquito.
there is a crowdfunding effort for one going on right now for such a device. I think the price is around $500. the videos are equally awesome and hilarious as they vaporize into a little puff of smoke
That will end up either dangerous or unreleased. Their system sends a 40W laser, which is what you use to cut plastics. There’s no way to make this safe as even a diffuse secondary reflection out of the field of view could blind someone.
ya, your absolutely right. still the idea of setting up an array of them around my house blasting the never ending barrage of West Nile virus attack drones as they cross the perimeter is pretty fun to think about. I suppose a well placed bat house would be just as fun to watch
This is an interesting idea. One thing that might help targeting is to have some sort of chemical that attracts the mosquitoes. In that way you can bring your target to you.
Their velocity is much lower than the one of the drone, so it wouldn’t make much sense to increase efficiency
I seem to recall reading that mosquitos mainly seek out carbon dioxide...
I read this as well, and tried holding my breath (I can hold it for several minutes) while walking in the forest, and the mosquitoes still bit me.
Mosquitoes use different cues (olfactory, CO2 and infrared emissions/heat) depending on the distance to target.
Super interesting project! What stage are you at currently? What are the main open challenges that you are facing?
Everything works in simulation, and the detection works in the real world! We’re working on miniaturizing the electronics to embed it in a real drone.
Good question. How does your drone know the difference between a fly and a mosquito (and a human)?
I've watched OP's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ScCG3qTOuc
At 17th minute he explains that they look at microdoppler signatures and can detect mosquitos through the wing flapping frequency. Pretty cool.
I watched your talk, very interesting! Super inventive idea, I hope it works out.
Is the name a word play with "torgnole" at all, or does it mean something?
Yeah, you’re spot on! The original name was « mosquitorgnole »
Very interesting idea! I wonder if a political campaign one day will be to start a program that eradicates mosquitos via drone fleets, not just in the context of malaria protection but also in just nuisance reduction. There are similar programs in place in certain metro areas that already do mosquito control (using chemicals of varying toxicity), so it's not as wild of an idea as it probably sounds.
My friend once came up with a joke idea for a solar powered ransomware drone that would fly to a random roof and jam wifi signal until someone paid it to leave.
There are bio solutions, e.g. my city puts mosquito-larva-killing bacteria in the river and the lakes.
It works okay, but they are unable target _all_ water surface. They use drones, they give out these bacteria to people so they put it in the rainwater tanks, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...
Yeah, it’s one of our goal to work for government agencies at some point to implement city-wide mosquito control. 10 of our drones could cover a square kilometer, so we’d be a lot more efficient working at the city level rather than at the individual household level.
Sounds cool but doesn't that send mosquito bits flying in all directions?
Yes, but mosquito bits are better than mosquito bytes.
The missile knows where it is...
Please make sure it is specific to mosquitos and does not attack other insects.
Insect populations worldwide are experiencing significant declines in both abundance and diversity, with several studies reporting reductions ranging from 40% to 75% over recent decades. Estimates suggest that 5%–10% of all insect species have disappeared in the last 150 years, and some global meta-analyses indicate terrestrial insect populations are declining by close to 9% per decade.
From the linked Hackaday article:
> If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.
> For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.
Fascinating engineering! Doesn't seem like it would be possible but it apparently is. There's also more visuals at about 17 minutes in the video embedded in that article, the signatures seem fairly distinct.
Imagine the sound a mosquito makes when it flies near your ear; it's quite distinct. I'm sure it's possible to distinguish mosquitos based on that (which is a factor related to the doppler signature mentioned).
I wonder how distinct it is, really. It sticks out to us, but “mosquitos is enemy #1” is one of the strongest evolutionary pressure we’ve got, right? And one of the few that persists to this day.
Our brains probably have a dedicated cluster of neurons in there somewhere specifically looking for the Mosquito noise.
Don't want to underestimate how disastrous this could be for other insects. Even ignoring the impact on them, the impact on our needs to maintain pollinator populations.
I mean.. if they venture into human indoors they are already doomed in the first place. Not much scope of proliferating in such an artificial environment.
Arm it with salt or sand munitions.
Any problems with the blades getting dirty?
Not our highest priority concern haha
I imagine once everything else is tuned with your product you could make a hot-swappable blade assembly that can be quickly swapped out and later cleaned. Like if the entire guard and blade assembly came off, that would be super convenient.
Would add some weight and complexity but if it’s purpose-built it would probably be less stress on the Drone than constantly pulling props off.
Or you just use a tissue or don't clean it at all.
please make something for miggie's - there are currently no specialised products for this baddie
We could do something about it. Any flying insect is only a change of parameters for us.
There's an awful lot of complex navigation, signal processing and trigonometry required here, good luck.
What's the fidelity of the sonar in detection of flying mosquitoes?
What do you mean by fidelity? We’re still unsure about the tails in terms of detection probability/false detection rate
I mean the smallest possible detectable object within reasonable distance to make an intercept maneuver.
Say got example that you can only detect an average sized mosquito from a range of 1cm, then you're in random collision only territory.
This is incredible. What is the background you needed to even have intuition on how to build something like this?
Just an insane obsession with ultrasound! (and some control theory classes)
How does this compare in reducing mosquito populations over something braindead like putting some yard waste and water in a bucket for a few days and either adding mosquito dunks or pouring the larvae out?
Or is this more like a stand-in for bug spray/smoke?
Duuuude! Give me this. Please. We have these mosquito bats/racquets that I've to use every day in a futile attempt to keep my family safe. I need something like what you're building. I looked up even laser mosquito killers.
Super cool. I made myself laugh thinking it would ram into someone's nose while they are snoring at night.
Surface level thinking, ecological disaster in the making. Birds and bats and other bugs eat mosquitoes to live. Killing all the mosquitoes is like the Chinese killing all the sparrows. We do not understand, and we do not want to understand, the deep consequences of our actions.
People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve.
Better option, if you really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
In general I agree that messing with ecosystems sometimes has unpredictable consequences.
In the case of mosquitos, though, they cause so much suffering, that it would be stupid to not work on eradicating them because of possible negative consequences.
We have to be careful, of course (widespread use of insecticides is a problem), but targeted measures are really unlikely to cause more harm than mosquitos already do.
Yeah well mosquitoes should definitely be made extinct btw but there’s no way a robot that kills bugs in your back yard is going to accomplish that so you can put your pitchfork down
Mosquitos can thrive and play their part in the food chain as much as they want.. outdoors.
What bird or bat or other bugs is getting their food needs fulfilled by hunting mosquitos inside your house?
Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines.
Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw
Brilliant work! Zippers got nothing on this! I am particularly taken by how the "stich" weaves into itself, to flatten the seam.
Now, what about footwear, I'm thinking. Stitched soles + uppers are so much more durable. If you could cut a sole to a person's foot size, then they could construct the upper to their best-fit, best-colour-combo design.
I've tried some footwear! These had a really soft rubber soles, but I've also made ones where the soles were cut from a sheet of hard Vibram rubber: https://self-assembly.fi/canvas-shoes
So cool! So, I buy this brand of thin-sole shoes called Xero. Their Do It Yourself kit is a simple Vibram sole I can cut to size, a hole punch to find the right fit, and a long lace that I can tie in many different ways, including as a slipper, or sandal, or greek-style laced-up huarache. Tie style, with different colour combinations of sole and lace make for distinctive personalisation.
Your stuff takes it to a whole other level. It makes me imagine a constructible footwear that can morph from a flip-flop (band across foot) all the way up to an all-weather knee-length boot.
No doubt you have already imagined how experimentation with materials and sealing/binding techniques could yield a design system that everyone can make their own; from the multi-spectral La Sape, to baby wear for those fast-growth years, to field equipment for the extreme adventurer.
(edit: fixed broken sentence)
Yeah, morphing is really the key idea here. You don't have to make all design decisions beforehand, but can wear something for a while and then make changes based on your needs & observations.
I haven't quite figured out how to apply this thinking to seam sealing though. The current garments that have taped / waterproof seams are locked into the taped configuration. For tents I have some geometrically water repellent structures (that guide the water away as long as it's coming from above), but for the soles of footwear, you might want something 100% sealed.
I would love a set of these! I've seen a few "legos of clothing" ideas out there but I believe this is my favorite execution of it so far. It lends itself to the "gorpcore" style of clothing like Cotopaxi where its blocks of different color. Even with the monochrome examples in your video, I love the texture inherent to its linkage.
Clever seams. Have you tried washing any of the garments?
Yeah, I've been wearing and washing the prototypes for years now.
This is insanely amazing. The youtube video is so well-created. I hope to see this become successful!
This is actually very therapeutic to watch! All the best
I would like sign up for your newsletter.
looks so cool and cyberpunk-y in an odd way.
ah this is fascinating!!!! Any more info anywhere?
Here's a recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85fy8cXpkyk
Also, I've been working on this for a while under a beta version called Self-Assembly, which was a bit more fashion oriented. New i-t-s-e rebranding is to be more Lego like. Here's the old website: www.self-assembly.fi
this is simply great! godspeed with the project!
this is a really important and disruptive idea. amazing.
what do you need to scale this?
I needed my own CAD setup that can draw the detailed assembly instructions as 3D vector drawings. And that can also derive the assembly order from a graph based garment representation automatically. I'm almost finished with those, so after that I just need more large format laser cutters and customers.
Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot.
I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-based index readers. I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.
[1] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf
> I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.
You make it sound like I was trying to troll everyone when we wrote that paper. We were warning you.
It's annoying because it's right and also describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing. (It's also great because it describes the exact type of paradoxical performance reversal I'm seeing, likely saves me a lot lot of head scratching ;-)
Which part of the index are you putting in the buffer pool here? The postings list, the doc store or the terms dict?
Is it being cached for future queries or are you just talking about putting it in memory to perform the computation for a query?
I'm primarily looking at document lists and possibly the keyword-documents mapping.
Caching will likely be fairly tuned toward the operation itself, since it's not a general-purpose DBMS and I can fairly accurately predict which pages will likely be useful to cache or when read-ahead is likely to be fruitful based on the operation being performed.
For keyword-document mappings some LRU cache scheme is likely a good fit, when reading a list of documents readahead is good (and I can inform the pool of how far to read ahead), when intersecting document lists I can also generally predict when pages are likely to be re-read or needed in the future based on the position in the tree.
Will definitely need a fair bit of tuning but overall the problem is greatly simplified by revolving around very specific types of access patterns.
Ah interesting. Is your keyword-document map (aka term dict) too big to keep in memory permanently? My understanding is that at Google they just keep it in memory on every replica.
Edit: I should specify they shard the corpus by document so there isn't a replica with the entire term dict on it.
Could plausibly fit in RAM, is only like ~100 GB in total. We'll see, will probably keep it mmap:ed at first to see what happens. It isn't the target of very many queries (relatively speaking) at any rate so either way is probably fine.
>It isn't the target of very many queries (relatively speaking)
Wow why is that? Do you use a vector index primarily?
No I mean for every query there is mapping up keywords to trees of documents, there is dozens if not hundreds of queries in the latter in order to intersect document lists.
Ah I see. I thought by query you meant "user search query". I'm guessing by query here you mean "read".
This is basically what everyone that tries to use mmap in their database realizes.
What kind of structure does Marginalia Search help people to obtain?
I'm continuing the work on Cellm, an Excel extension that let's you call LLMs in cell formulas like =PROMPT(A1, "Rate the sentiment of the customer feedback as positive, neutral, or negative"), and then drag the formula down to apply the same prompt to thousands of rows. I built it after my girlfriend had to manually classify 7,500 research papers. Cellm automates that kind of repetitive work.
Since we added MCP and the use of structured output to "spill" multiple return values into adjecent cells, it is the quickest way I know of to monitor competitors blogs everyday before my 09:00 meeting. And also the quickest way I know of to test new AI models. I have a sheet with SimpleQA, MMLUPro, or GPQA Diamond and testing a new model is a matter of adding a new column. The whole idea is to enable normal people (like, non-techies) to automate manual, repetitive tasks with AI like programmers routinely do.
https://github.com/getcellm/cellm
Like https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999?hl=en-GB ?
Yes exactly like that!
That's a clever project name! :)
Cool, thanks!
Will keep an eye out for this when it launches.
Somewhat similar is https://paradigmai.com.
Looks very similar yes, it is a great UI paradigm for running many prompts. I think of spreadsheets as the OG low-code tool and with just a sprinkle of LLMs, people can do so much more with tools they already know
Kind of looks a bit like what Clay is built to do...?
That’s pretty interesting. I’ve using Airtable’s “field agents” for a similar use case, but would love to use this instead. Does it automatically cache values? (Don’t want to pay for repeat prompts just because one input cell updated)
Yes it does, you can toggle it on and off. Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com or sign up to the waitlist on getcellm dot com and I will personally onboard you!
Do you have paying users?
I built something like that for Google Sheets in early 2024 and now I'm thinking whether I missed an opportunity.
No not yet, we are about to onboard the first users on the waitlist one-by-one and when we have ironed out the major issues that we will inevitably discover, we will open up for paid users after that.
I wouldn’t worry too much about missing out, as you probably very well aware, whatever you choose to work on takes incredible amounts of time and energy to get off the ground. Now you just have more time to out into something else :)
Hey Kasper - would love to grab a coffee sometime (on the Internet : )
Hey, sure! Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com and let’s find a time
I kept finding myself having to write mini backends for LLM features in apps, if for no other reason than to keep API keys out of client code. Even with Vercel's AI SDK, you still need a (potentially serverless) backend to securely handle the API calls.
I've been working on an open source LLM proxy that handles the boring stuff. Small SDK, call OpenAI or Anthropic from your frontend, proxy manages secrets/auth/limits/logs.
As far as I know, this is the first way to add LLM features without any backend code at all. Like what Stripe does for payments, Auth0 for auth, Firebase for databases.
It's TypeScript/Node.js with JWT auth with short-lived tokens (SDK auto-handles refresh) and rate limiting. Very limited features right now but we're actively adding more.
Currently adding bring-your-own-auth (Auth0, Clerk, Firebase, Supabase) to lock down the API even more.
GitHub: https://github.com/Airbolt-AI/airbolt
A way to single click install stuff like this (a moderner cPanel) would be excellent for letting non backed people deploy apps like this.
I guess a bunch of yaml for each of the main PaaS services would be nearly that.
I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on (https://adretro.com). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images.
So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.
I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.
This may be of interest to you:
The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA; https://tobacco.stanford.edu/) collection currently contains 62,553 tobacco advertisements.
Thanks, I'll check it out!
What about having a contribute button? I know this must be a lot of work and it's such a cool idea! If you had a way to contribute on the join page I would chip in for sure :) My husband is a writer and he uses newspapers.com to research a lot of vintage newspapers for historical context. I can imagine this being a great resource for him.
Thanks I might try that! My impression of donation pages is the conversion rate is extremely low but it will be easy to add nonetheless. I might get better results with offering something in return, like Patreon (not sure what kind of patron content I want to regularly produce though) or products.
There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!
This is awesome! Cigarette ads are so seductively cool, yet the embodiment of selling you a fantasy
Thank you! Yeah the cigarette ads are some of the most consistent. Once I get more in I am hoping to see some trends and themes in the messaging over time.
superb and immensely valuable, this is a history of desire.
Indeed :) The aspect I like most is seeing through the advertisers lenses what they thought the public would care about the most.
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. The new version is a lot more optimized, thanks in part to feedback from you all in HN. Currently I am working on a new featureset with missions, where the user is given a budget and geographical area to defend by placing different air defense assets; after which the system attacks it with various missiles and UAVs. Useful for just learning, exercises, playing through scenarios to defend critical infrastructure etc.
https://airdefense.dev/
That seems neat. Modern missile command, haha.
After 10 years in defense tech I’m sure you are very aware of this sort of thing, but how worried are you about accidentally leaking some non-public info? I guess one nice thing about public info is, well, it is public, so you can just use whatever’s public.
You'd be surprised how much "secure" info is public somewhere else. Like when you're working on training materials for a certain engine that is considered "military secrets" based on the govt you're doing the work for, that takes literally weeks and weeks to get various design materials, that's considered public information for one of your nation's partners, and you can just download it from them instead of waiting for weeks.
Not that I know from personal experience or anything... /sarc
That's a very valid question! I've based everything on strictly datasheets or datapoints from open sources to be clear on those counts.
Tanstack DB - a new client side store for web apps, with transactions, optimistic state, and live queries spanning multiple collections.
It's designed for sync, so rather than fetching you can hook it up to a sync engine (any!) to keep your front end in sync with your backend. It's built on Tanstack Query, making the sync engine optional, and a great path for incremental adoption.
The query engine uses a typescript implementation of differential dataflow to enable incremental computation of the live queries - they are very fast to update. This gives you sub ms fine grade reactivity of complex queries (think sql like joins, group by etc).
Having a lot of fun building it!
https://tanstack.com/db/latest https://github.com/TanStack/db
Interesting, I'll have to look at this in the near future. Definitely like what I see at a glance. One problem I've had with some other client sync/db options is that they don't support the use case for public, shared and private tables/collections. A lot of real world apps may have items that are available to all users (read only or not), some users (by group or management chain) or private (but reassignable by managers) in order to support real world workflows and potentially confrontational work (think avoiding stealing other worker's contacts/commissions).
Very excited for this. Current client-side DB implementations are hard to work with. Will it support IndexedDB?
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!
The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.
Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long term goals? I find both the concept and the end goal quite fascinating!
When my daughter was around 2 years old she would sit on my lap and type letters on my laptop into Emacs. I would change the color of the text and she would type more. I figured there was a simple webapp here, so built various things for her to play with over the next couple years. One let her type words and then fire off a ddg safe image search and return cartoon images in response. She would copy words out of her books to get pictures of dogs and trees and silly things.
We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.
I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.
Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.
Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.
I’d say some of the downsides on the modern internet become much starker when your kids come up against them. As adults growing up through the birth of the internet we are kinda inoculated to it.
I suspect the lack of privacy is because the target audience is “kids” not “teens”. When my kids first discovered group chat in iMessage with their cousins it was fun for literally 30 minutes before it was tears and abuse - which was a really instructive lesson for me.
At that (primary school) age parents would almost universally know the parents of your kid’s out-of-school playmates - if only because someone tends to have duty of care at any time and who is where with whom needs to be figured out.
The feature set seems sound and frankly welcome and overdue to me!
Yeah it is true. I am more or less modelling the interactions my kid has with other kids and the social relationships I have with her friends parents. She doesn't go to anyone's house who's parents I don't know. Obviously that will change as she gets older.
So for now, the social dynamic in the app is for parents to connect first. Once connected, their kids can choose to connect (facebook messenger kids uses this same process I think).
When I talk to less tech-savvy parents in my community, I think many feel quite helpless and unsure how to navigate a lot of this. Consuming youtube kids videos on an iPad is one option, or outlawing screentime entirely is another. Kids want real stuff that they are in control of. I want to build age appropriate versions of this kind of stuff... with the appropriate guards and oversight in place, keeping parents in the drivers seat.
Most teens are kids.
Sounds cool, would love a link! I’ve started buying walkie talkies for neighbourhood kids and set up a Minecraft server which has turned in to a sorta social hub for my daughters- we’re trying to delay phones as long as possible - but a purpose built solution would be great
Thanks for your interest. I will send you a link if you want to have a look and try out something that is still rough around the edges. I'm working out some login/connection flow issues and am not ready to publicly share quite yet.
Continuing to work on https://www.hackernews.coffee/ to rerank the HN frontpage based on my interests, not just what's trending.
It does this by building a profile out of a small number of selected past articles, and we make the profile and how it produces recs from the profile transparent and editable. Especially after feedback on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44454305), Im trying to get to grips with why people seem to care as much about seeing how their recommendations work as they do about the actual quality of recommendations themselves.
I'm increasingly convinced its due to how many opaque LLM-powered everything and black-box recommendation algorithms there are. People want personal content systems (they are useful for sure!), but theres a lack of ones where they stay in control of what 'personal' actually looks like.
Hit some speed bumps but still building out a Discord-based digital TCG platform. Discord felt like a natural social context for an accessible and customizable experience. Users can use their own media for card images, but it's also integrated with a free pixel art AI that generates cards based on description. Would love feedback, even if basic or high level suggestions.
https://discordtcg.com
Working on Tritium, the legal IDE in Rust (https://tritium.legal/)
This month I'm improving CI/CD for e2e testing across Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. Also adding support for unlocking password-protected PDFs and Word docs and improving OCR. OCR runs in the background and leverages native OS OCR where available and a pure LSTM Rust implementation elsewhere. Generally improving the word processor and looking for speedups. Adding a cross-platform spellchecker leveraging native where possible, too.
Play with it online: https://tritium.legal/preview
Download for free: https://tritium.legal/download
Are you having lawyers getting of MS Word. Ive tried in the past with no success.
But this is really cool. Its definitely a problem they have.
I don't think Word will go away, no.
Some times you need to write a whitepaper, some marketing materials or something that a general product like Word is more suited for. Tritium is however aiming to replace Word as the transactional lawyer's go-to desktop application for the most common workflow.
Have you ever thought about a kind of a diff format for legal texts / documents / cases? And what are transactional lawyers btw?
Transactional lawyers are lawyers that primarily work on transactions, eg, mergers and acquisition, bond or share issuances, etc. It means they spend most of their time drafting, reviewing and negotiating deal documents rather than, eg, going to court.
I'm not the person you responded to but there are various diff programmes out there that lawyers use. I think they tend to be proprietary formats though. Lawyers pretty much all work in MS Word so any comparison software needs to work with that.
Thank you Noboru! So there are proprietary diff formats for text formats?
Thanks for checking it out, and yes!
If you type some text into one of the documents in the web preview, click the triangle and click the name of that document, you'll get a redline. That's the current industry-standard diff format. Redlines don't standardize around any kind of metadata format, though, so parsing them (unlike a diff) is non-trivial. There's an opportunity for improvement.
As mentioned elsewhere, transactional lawyers are corporate lawyers who work on deals (think drafting corporate documents, M&A or IPOs) as opposed to litigators who go to court and argue cases.
Thank you. So this red squigeee line is the industry standard?
I built a simple "gpt wrapper" focused on legal - in the process of fine-tuning an llm, I've noticed that Gemini / Google scraped the hell out of a certain legal forum (phbb board) in my country. After that I've started focusing on court legal cases entries (since there's a public website for that) and thinking a bit about what would a diff in a court case ideally look like, and it's an interesting problem.
Your product reminds me a bit of quantus.finance (also here on HN) even though the space is not really related, but it caters to a business area in an interesting way. What are you planning on doing next (on a high level)?
I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews,
Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it.
I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it out extremely quickly due to WGU's competency based stuff, so now I finally am able to put "MS" after my name.
Good for you. Cross my fingers that you'll land a good job soon. Or create your own job.
I have a few prospects lined up.
I'm actually planning on doing a second masters from a slightly more prestigious university with a more theory-heavy degree [1], but it's nice to at least have an official graduate degree now. Hopefully it helps me find work a bit quicker, and if nothing else it's just kind of fun to pile up degrees.
[1] https://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/qualifications/f04
I was recently looking for a master's degree in math that is:
- 100% remote
- 100% self-paced
- fairly cheap
and it looks like Open University is the best option right now? Did you find any better option?
I couldn’t find anything that ticks all those outside of OU.
University of Texas has one that looked pretty ok, but it was kind of expensive for a non-Texas resident.
University of Western Florida has one for “Mathematical Sciences”, which more or less fits, and it’s not even that expensive, but I think that one is synchronous.
Yeah, I wish there were more options than that. Also, remote phd or master+phd would be even better, but these are even more uncommon and pricey (unless you know about a one that is good and cheap and remote then I’d love to learn more)
I was doing the University of York online PhD in computer science (formal methods), and it was actually pretty great, but it was costing me like $17,000 per year, and it was a huge time sink when I was already working full time.
That said, if you feel like you're organized enough to pull it off, I do recommend looking into University of York. It's a very good school.
Thanks, that's actually useful and I will be happy to consider it once I have more spare time in life!
Why did you complete WGU masters in computer science after already having a PhD in computer science?
I don't have a PhD, I dropped it about a year ago; sorry, rereading my comment that was not made clear.
I wanted a graduate degree in CS, and I figured I could get the WGU one quickly.
Oh I get it now, thanks! Please let me know if you decide to enroll to math master's in OU, maybe we can help each other! I think I'll do the same on the next semester (so early 2026)
I actually just registered for it :) Assuming I'm approved I'll be starting in October.
Feel free to email me (address in profile) if you want to talk about it.
Thanks! Keeping fingers crossed for your success with this degree
Best of luck on your job search, hope you land something soon!
Do you feel like you picked up additional knowledge and skills? The pluses you mentioned are fighting boredom, being affordable, and being credentialed.
Not really, no. I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing; it didn't feel like "computer science", it felt like light software engineering, and since I've been doing software engineering for awhile I was able to fly through the work.
I did have a bit of fun learning about some of the more "platform as a service" parts of AWS, that has been something I've been putting off at learning more about for awhile, but overall I don't feel like I learned a ton.
I registered for another masters degree from a different online school to start in October that I think I'll enjoy and learn more from.
What did the total cost for your MS?
Not very much, around $4,400. https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/computer-science-maste...
WGU charges "per term", and you can take as many courses as you'd like per term, as long as you can complete them.
I'm editing my 3B1B summer of math exposition video: Elliptic curves for programmers
It's a motivated video introduction to Elliptic curve arithmetic where in 10 minutes we write (in the C language) a legal bitcoin wallet bruteforcer.
Video edit: https://leetarxiv.substack.com/p/a-programmers-introduction-... Bruteforce bitcoin puzzle wallet in C : https://leetarxiv.substack.com/p/hacking-dormant-bitcoin-wal...
Have you ever wanted to write your life story but found it too overwhelming? I’m developing an app that acts as your personal interviewer, guiding you through your memories and helping you share them with your loved ones.
The app is designed for older adults who enjoy reminiscing but struggle to organize their thoughts into a coherent narrative. The goal is to preserve their hard-won insights and pass them down—to family members who may be too busy to ask the right questions now, and to future generations who would otherwise never hear these stories.
I have a working prototype that allows me to test the interview flow, and I’ll soon be sharing it with friends and family for initial feedback. I’m now looking for a designer to collaborate on the next phase.
Design will be a critical part of this app. The way stories are visually presented will be central to the user experience and will likely determine the app’s success. If you’re a designer interested in this kind of work, I’d love to hear from you. Given the text-heavy nature of the app, experience with typography and content-focused design will be especially valuable.
I love this.
My great grandmother, who lived into my 20s, wrote a 10 page memoir about growing up - life stories, people, places etc... And I found it super interesting - I built a vacation around the places last summer.
I asked her daughter/my grandmother to do the same, but she wasn't interested. And then I've thought about the exercise myself - it's hard to think of things in my life that a future great-grandchild might find interesting. And it's not clear if my great-grandmother's story I find interesting, in contrast with financial hardships I did not face? How do you pick out the interesting from the mundane? What is most interesting about today 100 years from now?
And I can see the potential for core interview questions to help draw it out.
Very cool! Would love to check this out. Have been meaning to interview my aunts for years to write down my family history now that my dad is no longer with us. A tool like what you describe could be super helpful.
Interesting! I built something similar at a hackathon a while back: https://fnands.com/blog/2024/factory-hackathon/
We called it Journalaist, and billed it as a personal ghostwriter. What we found is that it lives or dies by the quality of the interview
Thanks for sharing! Yes, I quickly came to that conclusion as well. It's put me in the novel position whereby product development is about finding the right prompt, and maybe even about finetuning.
This sounds super interesting! I'd love to beta test it if you are looking for people to try!
You can find me at:
http://twitter.com/samuelgoto
Sure, I'd love to have your feedback. Let me package this into my first beta and I'll reach out.
Would love a link to the demo if and when you’re open to sharing. I’m a product designer but not looking for projects, I’m mostly curious - this is one of the more unique ideas I’ve heard.
Yea, let me send it your way once I have it! Please update your profile with contact info.
Have you heard of https://www.autobiographer.com/ ? Is it similar, different?
It's pretty much the same, but I have a few ideas to make my app stand out. Thanks for sharing! Nice to see the idea has potential.
Sounds really cool! Best of luck. Do you have a website or samples/demo yet?
Nothing yet, but I can keep you posted. Please update your HN profile with contact info.
I’m building Popgot (https://popgot.com): compare unit prices (per oz/sheet/lb) across Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. We normalize fuzzy sizes (“family,” “mega,” multipacks) so you see the actually cheapest option for staples.
New: a deep research mode that, on demand, crawls thousands of product pages and uses visual LLMs to read label photos (ingredients, counts, square footage) when the text is messy. First run takes ~60–90s, then it’s cached.
A good torture test: 20×25×1 MERV 13 home air filters—listings mix single/4/6/12-packs and vague claims (“3-month,” “allergen defense”), which wreck per-unit comparisons. I’d love feedback on misses (coupons/Subscribe & Save/region), categories to add, and to collaborate with a grocery-list app, budgeting tool, or anyone in the frugal/deals space. chris@popgot.com
I see paper towels but no toilet paper? I think toilet paper is the most confusing one
edit: also this doesn't seem correct:
Everything above will save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz
https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...
I had to look at that carefully, but I think that "save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz" is both technically and meaningfully correct. It compares our best choice to the most popular choice -- we use the product with the most ratings as a proxy for that. Nizoral 2-in-1 has a crazy 100k reviews, but it is in fact almost 20x more expensive per fluid ounce! And it is the most popular product@
If you hover the text it explains the logic (you can see that in this screenshot https://imgur.com/a/hO7fiWR). But to replay the logic here:
Equate 2 in 1 Dandruff Shampoo 28.2oz is 21¢/fl oz (for 33 fl oz it costs $6.99) is the Popgot choice.
But the most popular (e.g. most reviewed) product is "Nizoral 2-in-1 Anti-Dandruff Shampoo" and that costs a whopping $1.96/fl oz (33 fl oz it costs $64.63)
So yes, the most popular anti-dandruff shampoo (which I used to use, until I saw this shampoo list https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...) is literally 20x more expensive, so you can do a lot better by picking alternatives at the top of that list.
Not sure why you didn't see toilet paper, but it is right here: https://popgot.com/toilet-paper
Interesting idea. Running the LLMs would be expensive. How are you monetising this product? Additionally, since the product is targeted towards frugal customers, do you think you will be able to generate a decent revenue from it?
The LLMs are in fact quite expensive! We run dozen of LLM calls across thousands of products. That's thousands to tens of thousands of calls per search query. The idea is we've got to find the best & the cheapest, and I have spared no expense in doing so. (Plus we have GCP credits.)
Eventually products will overlap between search queries, so we can serve fast and low latency results that have been pre-processed by LLMs. That will be near zero cost. And of course LLM prices will continue to drop quickly.
We monetize via affiliate fees -- you buy something off that list, and we get 1-4% back at no cost to you.
haha this is fun. shared with my partner.. he spends hours doing it manually
thanks! let me know if y'all have any feedback :)
with AR and glasses camera platforms, this will actually be a big deal. pricing and real consumer interest and inventory levels are competitive.
If people are wearing AR glasses into big box stores that are comparing prices in real time, I could see there being a real time auction for CPG pricing the way there are for website ads now.
Been working on https://www.stainedglassatlas.com.
Trying to document and map as much of the publicly accessible stained glass as possible. The goal being the next time you visit a new city or town, you'll know where all the beautiful stained glass is to go see. Just recently added support for countries outside of North America. No exciting tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). But excited for folks to check it out!
I like it but I'd like to see images right in your page instead of going to an external website which sometimes is not even dedicated to stained glass making hunting for visual gratification really painful.
So, I'd add more visuals to the main page just like on your 'search' link, move the map to the bottom, let visitors know of every new location to keep them engaged and coming back for more, make a gallery sorted by most liked, viewed, commented, valuable (subjective based on history, cost, location, etc)
Cool! You could even consider abstracting it into a tiny lib that could be used to map and showcase any kind of location-based visual data and not just stained glass.
How does that clustering in Leaflet work? I have a similar use case
Among other things, I'm working on AOO, a cross-platform low-latency peer-to-peer audio streaming and messaging library: https://github.com/spacechild1/aoo
The C/C++ library can be easily embedded in host applications or plugins. It even runs on embedded devices, such as the ESP32. In addition, the project contains a Pure Data external and SuperCollider extension. There is also a third-party Max/MSP external: https://github.com/ddgg-el/aoo-for-max
For more background information, check out this article: https://www.soundingfuture.com/en/article/aoo-low-latency-pe... https://aoo.iem.sh/
The project is still in beta stage, but I hope to make a final release this summer.
Because of a HN post(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776), I've got a ton of feedback for Ensō: my writing app for flow/stream of consciousness writing. So, I'm wrapping up the release and adding good support for non-Latin, esp. RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) + pinyin and Japanese input methods.
Recently I also made a font for it! https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/433-how-to-make-a-font-that...
I'm also thinking about organising the usage patters, because over the past few years I've collected a few interesting groups: mental health focussed users, script writers, neurospicy folks, bloggers, squirrel enthusiasts. I'm thinking about this here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/how-people-use-enso/
Love this idea. I like to use voice recording and transcription for the same thing, but having a text interface is nice for public spaces!
I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.
I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.
The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.
Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.
I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.
I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"
When a previous employer went bust, it was bought by the CEO after being listed by the administrator on an obscure website (ip-bid.com) which you have to make an account and log in to just to see the listings. There was only one bid. (I leave to the reader to speculate on the utility of a bid website without public listings, but such listings might represent good value compared to those advertised more widely). It may be worth checking company filings to see if there are equivalents used by insolvency administrators in Australia (I found out only by reading the administrator's "statement of proposals" on the fillings website after the fact -the sale wasn't advertised anywhere else as far as I can tell).
We have ASIC (Australian Securities & Investments Commission) that handles company registrations, notices, etc. and they maintain a register of insolvency notices and liquidations.
This can be a reasonable place to go to look for distressed businesses/assets too and I've considered using them as a source with my aggregation/search engine, though they don't really have the same type of information as a business for sale listing so they fall somewhat outside of the main type of results that I otherwise display.
Other reasonable places I've seen too, though in incredibly low volumes (think 0-3 listings a month), are commercial auction houses/sites where they'll list a business for sale or the full assets of a business. The main issue with that it is that they're so low volume that I'm not sure it's worth spending the time ingesting them this early on while there's still many other larger listing sources.
Makes sense.
In my ex-employers case, the sale was what's called a "pre-pack" sale. That means the sale was advertised and proposed before the administrator were appointed and the administration was noticed. So you would not have found out in time from the filings, only from ip-bid.com. I don't know if Australian law allows pre-packs.
If it’s anything like the US, the listings only represent a minority of what’s available for sale and buyers are better off hiring a broker. If you could find a way to have majority of everyone actually list things for sale online, I think you’d have a solid business.
In Australia, brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.
There's just shy of 90,000 unique listings I'm tracking (i.e. after de-duplication) on these platforms.
On the traditional classifieds sites and things like Facebook groups focusing on these, there's a significantly smaller number of listings/ads for business sales (e.g. a couple of thousand).
I think where there are definitely hidden gems is where there are many small business owners at or close to retirement age where they haven't planned for a sale at all. For example, a family member nearing retirement age has a small business they're just intending to shut down because they "couldn't be bothered" selling it. I've heard people have had reasonable success just approaching local businesses like this that have older owners OR asking accountants if they have any clients that are thinking of selling.
> brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.
Works like this in US too. Commercial brokers rely on their network and not listing things on a market. Even most commercial real estate property for sale in the US is unlisted. It’s a weird industry, there are listings site but they only reflect a minor percentage of what you’d find if you drive around looking at for sale signs.
Living in Australia and interested in buying a business, I can attest to biz4sale-type sites being a real problem.
If you're interested in giving the tool a shot, feel free to shoot me an email (take my username and insert an @ after david and a .com at the end) and I'll happily give you access after I get it up somewhere publicly accessible -- possibly in the next couple of weeks.
A multiplayer survival game based around voxel physics.
Can be described as Astroneer-like setting, Teardown voxel physics, in a Valheim-like online multiplayer survival game.
Game isn't really announced yet but I've shown some videos of the tech: https://x.com/Alientrap/status/1909316208563732866 (On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWISaUmvit4 ) https://x.com/Alientrap/status/1918024969939808654
Video demo was awesome, really good stuff! Love seeing how you managed to make gravity actually a thing without simply destroying everything above a certain point, as well as connecting different objects together - I feel like that's something most voxel-based games I've seen have done a terrible job at.
Given the online/multiplayer aspect how difficult has the network portion been?
Technically impressive. From a gameplay standpoint, I worry that it's too easy to wreck work that took long to create.
Are there any open source games like this? I would love to see how these types of games are built.
Looks pretty great so far. Reminds me of playing Red Faction as a kid
If you liked Red Faction, check out Donkey Kong Bananza (2025) on Switch 2.
It’s like Super Mario Sunshine X Deep Rock Galactic / RedFaction / Minecraft.
I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet.
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
Would be interesting to see a location-based Polymarket site. Would be great to get a feel for any one spot and what's on people's minds via their predictions related to that particular location. Powerful instrument for change too as observers interact with the observed.
I'm copying the Puppeteer / Playwright client API to run in a Chrome extension using the native Chrome extension APIs.
It is possible to run Playwright inside a Chrome extension, however, it requires the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate a browser which really hurts the user experience, is very slow, and opens security vulnerabilities. Chrome extension APIs can accomplish maybe ~85% of the same functionality as CDP or Webdriver BiDi -- it isn't complete because of security features which shouldn't be bypassed anyhow. For example, instead of calling a function in a content script with 'script.callFunction' with Webdriver BiDi in Playwright, a function is called with chrome.scripting.executeScript(). It will be 2 or 3 more weeks before I post a PoC.
This is following my work using VSCode's core libraries in a Chrome extension exactly as they are used in an Electron app to drive VSCode and Cursor. The important part is VSCode's IPC / RPC which allows all the execution contexts and remote runtimes to communicate with each other. [0] This solves many problems I have had in the past automating browsers with a Chrome extension.
[0] https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal
Cool concept, would you expect this to be compatible with Firefox/Safari as well? Safari in particular would be useful as it doesn't natively support Puppeteer/Playwright.
Absolutely. However, it is easier to start with just Chromium flavor of browsers.
The two important concepts from Puppeteer/Playwright are managing the lifecycle of pages (tabs) and frames and the other is using handles / locators.
There are a lot of limitations using the extension API in any browser instead of CDP / Webdriver BiDi. I'm curious, how would you use this idea?
Could be cool for automated website UI testing/verification (check if certain text appears), perhaps also with network API events as well.
I built https://www.stoodious.app for my wife while she was studying for her California Real Estate Broker's Exam. She was frustrated with the price gouging on text books, or being the "state-of-the-art" study platforms being video only, having no/poor mobile UX or just feeling outright dated.
So I built Stoodious as a study guide platform that intends to give you the material and get out of your way, as opposed to the engagement-driving gamification of others. One of the killer features is being able to drill practice questions related to the specific study section you're working on - e.g. 20-30 questions about water rights, encumbrances or calculating GRM. Frequently my wife found herself studying vocab for a section but having to skim through a 100-question practice test to find related questions.
I extended the material to all 50 states' basic real estate licensing exam and am looking to add even more "professional exam" material.
If you want to expand into other areas, it might be worth adding Amateur Radio (HAM) License training materials as a next step. Relatively well defined, also an area of technology that deserves more attention.
I've just published https://nohypeai.dev to share what I've learned about the state of LLM agents for software development and help people who are just catching up orient themselves.
It was also important to me to provide a non-hyped, balanced view (hence the name), including pointing people to realistic assessments of the effectiveness of these tools and highlighting the risks and concerns.
I will use this to keep track of all these emerging abstractions. it's a smart play to establish this position between the rapid cutting edge and people who need to be able to reason about it but not implement it.
I'm building ClosedLinks, a tool for sharing files and/or messages anonymously through one-time access links with no traceable sender. Most digital tools assume persistence; ClosedLinks is built for ephemerality and unlinkability. Each link is single-use, redirects on access, and stores encrypted content only temporarily. Recipients never see the original URL, enabling plausible deniability. Think: whistleblowers.
Encryption uses Fernet (symmetric), and all decryption happens only at point of access. There's no data retention after viewing or expiration. Optional analytics give visibility without compromising identity. Users can get notified when their shared links was accessed by the recipient, and they can set passwords for enhanced security. Limitations include email-based signups and no end-to-end encryption (yet).
You can check it out at = https://www.closedlinks.com/
You can read the white paper here - https://www.closedlinks.com/white-paper/
Cool, I've been working on similar my self. Not released yet, haven't had the time recently.
Curious as to why you store the data in the database in b64 as opposed to files on disk. What's the reasoning for that? Doesn't it make storage/backups/etc more complicated?
Not an expert myself, I opted for in browser encryption, in chunks, so as to avoid memory limitations (at least in some browsers, not FF yet), and in browser gzip so as to keep file size down and speed things up.
I find your niche quite interesting (journalists, whistleblowers) but given the high stakes of that perhaps an open source or more collaborative approach would be easier to promote.
Another idea I've tried out but not pursued, is some sort of browser extension/addon (I used nwjs, similar to electron), that offers client side encryption for any site (form field really). So you'd only post encrypted stuff to whatever service (email, reddit, hn, whatever) and only anyone with the key would get to read it (well, assuming they have the key and the same extension). Just throwing the idea out there, I'm sure others have thought about something along those lines before. The details to get it right are tricky (UX wise), but for your target audience it may be well worth the extra work.
Keep it up!:)
Thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to read the white paper. It's a good feeling when you spend time and effort on something and someone takes the time to go through it.
I opted for database storage to simplify the management of ephemeral data. For a solo project, and as someone still learning, this was a practical way to keep the codebase manageable while focusing on core features like encryption and token-based access control.
However, you should note, in case you missed it in the white paper, that messages and files are deleted upon view (for view-once links) or expiry, whichever comes first. This ensures that the ~33% storage overhead from base64 is temporary, as a file only occupies space until it’s accessed or expires.
That said, you’re absolutely right that base64 encoding adds unneccessay storage overhead and could complicate backups for large files. I also recognize that storing files on disk could be more efficient for large-scale use cases. As (or should I say IF?) the project scales with users, I’ll definitely consider optimizations like disk storage or compression (your gzip idea is great!).
If I run into optimization problems, then it means people are using my product, and that sounds like one of them good problems (Marlo Stanfield's voice).
Your suggestion of in-browser encryption is super compelling, especially to assure users of total privacy. I noted in my white paper that client-side encryption is a future goal to address the limitation of the current server-side encryption, and your approach aligns with that vision.
The browser extension idea is also fascinating, I did not think of that.
I’m open to collaboration (again, as mentioned in my white paper) and would love to discuss ideas for making ClosedLinks more auditable while still keeping it commercially viable/sustainable. I’d be excited to hear more about your project or explore ways we could collaborate on privacy-focused tools.
Thanks again for the encouragement and for sparking this discussion!
Just a +1 for browser encryption... you should be able to use pbkdf2 + aes to take an input passphrase with pbkdf2 to generate an aes key to then encrypt an input file in the browser, I'm not sure if you gain much via gzip before/after depending on the document that may already be a zip file (for word/oo, etc).
On the file storage, I generally recommend going straight to a cloud interface to separate storage backend from the actual storage medium... There are self-hosted options for an S3 compatible backend you manage, or you can use actual S3 or one of several other providers for S3 style storage.
"One-time access links with no traceable sender" ... so people get anonymous messages while logged-in to this site? How does the sender know about the recipient in the first place? What would I put in my HN profile to get messages on the site? You have people's email addresses... isn't that a problem when saying "no traceable sender?" People will need anonymous email addresses. Why not have pass-phrase logins?
I had this idea (linked in my 3rd most recent comment,) whereby what if I wanted to give someone some crypto via a set of keywords? Maybe you could turn this into some kind of PayPal for crypto.
Perhaps think about a video demo for this site.
Good luck anyway.
Yea, the email part was a problem I mentioned in the white paper. Problem was I couldn't think of a way to enforce plan limits while making the subscription model work. If usernames, then they could just abuse it by creating new usernames each time. But I understand you. Maybe if you have some suggestions?
So regarding the sender and recipient, let's say I wanted to send you something. A message or a file, but wanted to maintain plausible deniability on if I sent it. I wanted a way of doing this, and the solution I came up with was that the link you receive publicly is not the link you land on to access the message or file. Anyone who lands on the publicly shared link, gets redirected to a new url each time.
But even without the deniability angle, it could be a way of sharing files with one time links. The links work once. And there's password protection, if enabled.
The implementation might not be perfect, but open to ideas, of course.
On, and there's API feature for generating links, and uploading files - for what it might be worth.
Well, I've used paste bins before. How about one with an email address input that'll invite whoever is meant to view it?
So instead of sending someone an image in an email, you send them a ClosedLink, they can view it once, and you avoid having to send them the image as an attachment?
Some screenshots would be nice.
Screenshots are here -
https://www.producthunt.com/products/closedlinks?launch=clos...
Yea, I don't quite like the email idea because it doesn't fit the idea in my head. I want a tool where I can share a ClosedLink with someone without having to ask them their email and getting asked "why" questions. The link should be shareable via any communication channel, and they can be hidden behind passwords so only the intended person can access the link.
Maybe I'm bugging and my implementation/execution is not as perfect as I thought it would be when I started. lol
> Are you expecting a lot of signups? As plan B, maybe aim to get a grant from the Oasis Protocol Foundation - they're all about privacy - and quiz them on what to do next.
Ha! I was hoping to get lots of sign ups, but apparently that has failed. I'd never heard of the Oasis Protocol Foundation, I'll look into it.
Thanks for taking to time to respond. Appreciated.
Are you expecting a lot of signups? As plan B, maybe aim to get a grant from the Oasis Protocol Foundation - they're all about privacy - and quiz them on what to do next.
I'm working on an engine for Excel-like formulas, which will be available both as a library and as a service (which I've mentioned on HN a few times before). I originally started work on the engine back in 2008, when our app builder needed it.
This is a wheel I see people reinventing all the time, often for use in SaaS applications. The implementations are often underwhelming: function support is limited, documentation is sparse to non-existent and errors are typically only communicated at runtime -- if at all. Formula editors usually lack autocomplete, making them frustrating to use.
I've spent years solving all these problems (with a statically-typed language), and I'd love for others to benefit from the work. I have extracted the formula engine from our app compiler, so the library is nearly complete. The runtime part (evaluating formulas) has been rewritten in TypeScript. Next, I'll build a service around it to validate, compile and evaluate formulas -- which should be fun.
I'm planning to do a Show HN once I have a preview up and running.
Is this like gorules?
very cool
Building a local CLI tool, hns [1], for speech-to-text in terminal in 5 keystrokes.
It records my voice, transcribes it locally using faster-whisper, and copies the transcription to my clipboard. Check the demo linked in the GitHub repo to see how it works.
I use it especially with Claude Code to provide detailed context for the outcome I want to achieve. I ramble for 5 minutes, and then paste the transcription to Claude Code, instead of having to type all my thoughts all the time.
The workflow is like this:
[1] https://github.com/primaprashant/hnshttps://github.com/srv1n/kurpod
Lets you hide 1000s of images, pdfs, videos, secrets, keys into a single portable innocent file like "Vacation_Summer_2024.mp4".
Would be cool to get a wasm build that runs fully on browser
Less than a week ago I officially launched a game I've been working on for years, Omiword[1], my second word game so far. It was discussed here on HN previously while it was in open beta[2], and again when Stripe shut down my account without explanation[3].
Reception so far has been positive. It's nice to be done with a long project, though this one will never exactly be done--I need to make sure there is a new puzzle for each day, though I have several months' worth prepared in advance.
I've started designing my next game, but it's probably a couple of years out. I just need something for that part of my brain to occasionally chew on.
[1] https://www.omiword.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038
I've been working on Red Candle, a Ruby gem that runs LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Phi) directly in your Ruby process through Rust bindings (based on the candle crate from Hugging Face). No Python, no servers - just FFI with Metal/CUDA acceleration.
It's been useful for adding AI features to Rails apps without the complexity of managing separate services. Would love feedback from anyone working with LLMs in Ruby.
GitHub: https://github.com/assaydepot/red-candle
Still working on https://phrasing.app - an app for polyglots to learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI. Just finished a onboarding flow, now updating the search and create experience to fall more in line with actual usage from users, then hopefully prepping for a more public launch :)
Had a fun week fixing up the application so it’s 100x faster on 5 different axes, and it’s starting to feel really well polished. Also started to move from reagent to preact/signals in a long slow migration hopefully to hsx.
I also moved the critical algorithm logic into an independent Clojure file that is compiled (and tested) with cherry-cljs — I’m hoping to expand this to ClojErl and jank so I can have isomorphic Clojure code running on the browser, BEAM server, and native swift app :D
It’s getting really close to done, I’m using it now to study 18 different languages, including some really minor ones like Maltese, Welsh, and Cantonese (not sure if Cantonese is really a minor language, but definitely low learner resourced) and it’s easy, slick, and surprisingly effective!
I was a linguist in a former life, so these apps always intrigue me. I've made a few attempts myself over the years. Yours looks slick and would've been an interesting one to check out if I were learning a language.
I signed-in and took a look around getting a few "Error rendering home" errors occasionally, fyi.
I was a little surprised at the CC#/subscribe page, since the prices didn't seem to be matching up with the marketing pricing page.
You might want to consider having like a sandbox account with some sample materials so people can feel the power of the app rather than depending on someone subscribing based on the video only.
Cool idea!
Thanks for the kind words! Sorry about the errors, I’ll get these sorted out.
The CC page will be updated next week sometime - for now I’m letting people register at the old prices (50%) while I’m plugging all the holes.
And the sandbox is coming! It’ll be on the marketing page, just under the video. It’ll probably take a month to get around to though. That, plus a trial week ($3.99) should hopefully give the user a taste
> learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI
Why would you need a UI if the basic way to learn a language is to speak to someone? (I suppose you meant graphical UI.)
Wouldn't a good STT/TTS interface be more appropriate?
Why do you need a beautiful UI? Because you need something to use for thousands of hours.
Why have a visual interface at all? It’s more convenient to use, is way more engaging, and just better for learning. There is an audio component to the app, and I’m sure more and more audio components will be added, but I would be surprised if in-app audio ever exceeds half of my usage.
For example there is a shadowing exercise that is purely audio based (put in headphones and press play). But what if you want to see what a word means? Or see its gender/case/tense? Mark it as easy or hard, remembered or forgotten? I can look all this information up, plus read a few paragraphs of explanations in less time than I would take me to formulate a question.
Sounds nice! A word of advice, instead of claiming 120 languages, I feel it would be better to focus on a few an ensure that they work well with native speakers.
You are talking about a very different product :) I have spent over a year making sure everything works for many languages. The whole point is to have one interface, for all my languages, big and small.
Additionally, please try it out before assuming they’re just claims. I’ve been using it daily for 3 months in 18 languages (roughly one from each major language family), and been in pretty constant contact with native speakers.
True I cannot vouche for all 120 languages, and sure there is the occasional error in the lower resource languages. However, I have put in a lot of work to make sure I have a representivie sample, and the errors are currently well within an acceptable range — and I’m working hard to improve them!
Yes, it's a religious website, but it's also the site with the most languages of any site on the 'net, at 1100+ right now. Some of them are downloadable content only, most are web content as well. The translations are done at least in part by native speakers of the target language.
Figured you'd appreciate the complexity of having that many languages on a site. jw.org.
"Error occured rendering base application" - on an older iPad.
If I am associating the right error, it’s because you’re missing a critical browser API. I will add an intercept to show a message instead of an error, but I won’t be able to support legacy versions of browsers while it’s just me unfortunately
I've been learning languages for almost 10 years now but your site UI is unusable on mobile
I assume you mean the marketing site, probably on android, most likely Firefox? I’ve received that feedback just haven’t had time to get around to it.
It should be fixed now though :) let me know if you have any more issues!
PS the app is very smooth inside, there was just a rendering issue on the home page.
I'm making a personal app to help me visualise time passing.
I get "time blind" when I'm fixated on something like work, programming, reading, research, etc. While it can be a good thing, it also means I forget to eat, don't take breaks, miss meetings, or just spend way too long doing one thing and end up wondering where the day went. Typical notifications don't seem to snap me out of it either.
The app creates a thin, always visible line at the bottom of my screen that shrinks inwards as time passes, at the end of the allotted time the screen will blur preventing me from doing whatever I was doing and snapping me out of my hyperfocus state. I can choose how long the timer runs for and how long the screen blurs for. Tonight I added a loop feature so I can use it like a pomodoro timer with enforced breaks.
It's a simple menu bar app for MacOS and could be better, but it does what I want it to do. I've been using it for the past week and found it really helpful.
I haven't used Swift before so it was a good learning experience too.
It's the same principle as a Time Timer (timetimer.com) which I used previously but I find my app works better as the screen blur actually prevents me from just continuing whatever I'm doing, and the bar is always in my line of sight.
One feature to help those with ADHD would be pulsing the line at a gradually slower rate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274782#38276107 (125+ subcomments circa 2023)
> your brain will try to sync with the light that you can barely see, calming you down and allowing you to go focus-mode with the task in ha[n]d
I use alarms/timers on my phone for this. Almost always 3-5min before a meeting... I have to make a habit of setting them up each morning, but that isn't too bad. I tend to miss the highlight color on the status bar for calendar or even chat messages/notifications. So the loud/obnoxious alarm is best for me... at least as I work from home.
The idea is interesting, but I'm curious as to why you didn't consider trying a Pomodoro Technique timer app, as there are many available. These apps offer time tracking and reporting features that can help boost productivity. Why not consider using existing methods or tools to address the issue instead of developing something new from scratch?
I'm really interested in this if theres a way I could make use of this too? Word for word I have the same list of problems when it comes to me hyperfocusing on things, where I don't even just forget to eat but I can't feel that I'm hungry. Too busy hyperfixating to feel so.
i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096
This sounds really useful for me. Any way to share the code?
I'm working on a Heroku / Render / Flyio alternative thats free, open source, built on top of Kubernetes.
Supports deployments of your own apps as well as 15k+ other packages (postgres, airbyte, dagster, etc) via helm charts.
https://github.com/czhu12/canine https://canine.sh
Reason? Got sick of paying for the massive markups on PaaS but missed the simplicity and convenience.
Gieeve an instantly deploying AppEngine Standard, please. It's still great and the integrated push queues rather valuable, but Google likes to make the rest sooo complicated...
Lately I’ve been heads‑down on a complete rethink of my dotfiles setup. It’s not just a `.vimrc` collection – the goal is to treat the dev environment like any other project: reproducible from scratch, automated, and designed to scale as AI becomes a bigger part of daily work.
The core of the project is a “Spilled Coffee Principle,” which basically says that if I spill coffee on my laptop, I should be back up in an afternoon. Every configuration change is codified into scripts, not a one‑off terminal command. Setup scripts create directories, handle symlinks, document dependencies and generally remove the “Brent the bottleneck hero” problem.
Beyond that, the repo lives inside a P.P.V system (Pillars, Pipelines, Vaults) where dotfiles are one of the pillars. This structure separates foundational configs from automation pipelines and secure vaults. It forces me to think at the system level: how do all of my tools fit together, where do secrets live, and how can I onboard a new machine (or person) with a single `git clone && ./setup.sh`?
What’s really interesting is the mindset shift this has caused. I’ve been experimenting with what I call the OSE (“Outside and Slightly Elevated”) principle: moving from micro‑level, line‑by‑line coding to a macro‑level role where you orchestrate AI agents. At the micro level you’re navigating files in an editor and debugging sequentially; at the macro level you’re using tmux + git worktrees + AI coding assistants to run multiple tasks in parallel. Instead of `1 developer × 1 task = linear productivity`, you get `1 developer × N tasks × parallel execution`, which has obvious 100×–1000× potential. This OSE approach forces me to design workflows, delegate implementation to agents, and focus on the “why” and “what” instead of the “how”.
The result is that my dotfiles aren’t just about aliases anymore; they’re a platform that bootstraps AI‑assisted development, enforces good practices, and keeps me thinking about the bigger picture rather than getting lost tweaking my prompt or editor colours. I’d love to hear how others are approaching the macro vs. micro balance in their own setups.
I've actually settled more on the opposite approach - my tool usage changes enough that I generally only care to configure the latest subset of tools when I get a new PC, and of course the others are there if I need them.
To that end, each tool has its own subdirectory in my dotfiles repo ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/ ), and I add READMEs to each subdirectory explaining what dependencies are necessary for this tool, what keyboard shortcuts this tool uses, etc.
This approach has been pretty resilient against my changing needs, changing operating systems, and changing tool versions; even if doesn't optimize for a single invocation of ./setup.sh
I've been working on an new approach to working with SQL: https://5QL.site
You select columns and then just drill down to create further joins. Change the SQL text and it updates the view.
I'm a CS undergrad would love feedback.
This is interesting, both in the sense that you did a great job on it, and I think unexpected-ways-to-explore-SQL is underrated. There are a lot of SQL databases that people could benefit from being able to drop a tool like this onto and explore.
One of the most interesting applications for LLM's is writing SQL based on a schema, and I wonder if your tool could incorporate a "show me the books titles from authors who's name starts with T" and write that out.
Good luck!
Thank you!
Yes, I agree. Just as we need to check what LLMs produce when writing code, I think this could be a way to check what they produce when trying to write SQL.
I'm finishing up a "book tour" (mostly podcasts) for my recently released book on how the country of Estonia modernized so quickly post re-independence from the Soviet Union and became a leader in e-government services and a top EU startup hub (Skype, Bolt, Wise, etc.). I'd love if people checked it out and gave feedback as it's my first big published work and the culmination of quite a few years of research and writing. https://www.rebootinganation.com/ or https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rebooting-a-nation-9...
Is the story about the Scottish football fans I once heard about them staying true, and partly to blame for some of the entrepreneurial mindset?
I'm not sure the story! Would love to hear about it
Congratulations on the book release. Do you plan to make an audiobook version for it?
Thanks! As of right now, no, but I'm sure if the book sells well enough the publisher will invest in an audiobook (given the state of AI I'm guessing the cost to develop one is going down extremely rapidly so hopefully the bar is lower than it used to be)
A web app DSL that looks like:
WIP article that explains more:https://williamcotton.com/articles/introducing-web-pipe
I would love feedback!
I really like it. I particularly like that you've resisted the temptation to include SQL itself or the jq queries in the DSL.
The validation piece makes it feel a bit a bit like the Rails mindset for people who work better in FP.
I'd make a could of suggestions for the docs: Maybe a bit more discussion of how we'd test our webpipe code. I see why you've called them 'middlewares' but, maybe the term 'macros' or 'pipeline functions' might avoid confusion with express/connect middlewares
Ooh, I like “pipeline functions”!
And thanks for the motivation to for figuring out a good way to talk about testing and generally clean up the (very messy) docs.
It’s comments like yours that give someone the drive to continue.
I'm trying to systematically track & collect historical MICHELIN awards for restaurants globally. It's been fun to look at the results!
site: https://michelindb.jerrynsh.com/michelin
and I wrote about my journey here: https://jerrynsh.com/building-what-michelin-wouldnt-its-awar...
Been working on https://handy.computer. It's similar to SuperWhisper and others, but is open source and cross platform
It uses whisper.cpp under the hood and should be accelerated on most devices using the Vulkan backend
thanks for making this! I'd love to use the microphone key (fn + mic) to trigger Handy but even after turning off dictation it doesn't seem like the system allows that key to be used (I get a dialog prompting me to turn on dictation).
hey! these kinds of keyboard related things are well solved by Karabiner elements:
https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
There you can map (whatever key) to (whatever other key). E.g. I have right command mapped to F20, available to all other apps .
No problem! Thank you for trying it and requesting features!
I added a issue (and comment) for this on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy/issues/47
We're supposed to use AI at work, which has been very 50/50 for me as expected.
Last month I decided to take a subscription of my own for Claude Code to use in my personal time mostly for practice and educational purposes.
So the past few weekends and the occasional week night I've been vibe-coding a game for iOS/MacOS using Swift and SpriteKit.
I have some experience with Swift previously but not at work, so it's extremely experimental for me. However it's been going pretty well. Most of the hang-ups are Xcode configuration issues.
It's interesting to poke Claude a bit and discover what it's actually decent at and awful at.
Gameplay mechanics-wise it's been able to implement things as requested generally without problems.
UI elements like menu screens and such it has been almost completely unable to do no matter what prompt I give to it.
It's safe to say I would never call the codebase professional quality. However, the base game has been implemented well enough to play without bugs and I've been solidly impressed.
How do you find xcode, is it as bad as everyone bashes it at reddit? I am planning to get m4 mac mini and do some Swift development, just didn't use xcode ever.
These days it feels particularly outdated. I'm used to Sublime Text and VS Code for most of my day-to-day work and I just find navigating code such a chore in Xcode.
The other issue I've had is if I want to change project/target/build settings, Xcode doesn't provide an easy way to do so. You need to poke around the UI to find where these settings and file relationships are set and change them that way.
There's a project file that I believe contains them all but it's not intuitive to modify by hand.
I've built a VST3 plug-in that simulates a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ preamp purely from the circuit.
The approach doesn't seem popular for professional plug-ins likely because it wasn't viable for real time until modern CPU enhancements became available. Performance scales with frequency of the input which is interesting and seems to be a consequence of using an iterative solver on a system of equations and using the previous sample's state vector as a guess for the current sample.
On my MacBook M3 it requires between 50 to 70% of a single core to produce a 2x oversampled output at 48000Hz. This can be scaled back by reducing the solution tolerance bounds and get down near 25% with minimal quality loss.
How does the performance and accuracy compare to modeling the same amp using NAM or similar AI tool?
Not sure, don't have any of those. The response feels very natural from my own playing.
Here's a little announcement video I put together a week ago for an earlier version:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xEy34cuOPaY
I'm working on a new memory-safe systems programming language that is supposted to be (almost) as fast as C, Rust etc, but as simple and concise as Python: https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang
There is a playground which is using a C compiler and WASM, and so is quite fast, while running fully in the browser. Theres also a (online) conversion tool to convert and compare source code. There are some benchmarks as well.
Writing my own (concise, simple) programming language was a dream for me since I'm 20 or so. Feedback would be great!
The "Comparison" section feels unfair. Add some things that some languages have but Bau is missing. I have no idea what trade-offs I'd be doing when choosing Bau.
You have the "Non-Features" section of course, but I'm looking more into what I'd be losing by going from C to Bau. Bau's price for safety.
Thanks! Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I will improve this section!
> what I'd be losing by going from C to Bau
Well, you can add native C code, so in theory you do not miss much. But in practise, yes of course many features are missing still.
I like the idea of compile-time asserting that no runtime check is needed for array access!
Thanks! I know Rust, Java etc do a good job of array bound check elimination, but I prefer a way to _ensure_ there is no check. I felt this was missing.
Playing with motion amplification to see if we can predict heart/respiratory rate of my newborn. I shot a few 4k videos of him sleeping as test data and working through some algorithms from published papers.
On parental leave with my third. We are on month 4 so I have (a bit more) free time in the late evenings after we put the older ones to bed.
Working on a complex AI system that will eventually allow AI overseer subagents to create complex workflows internally on the fly for multi step reasoning capabilities. Its a vey complex system but easiest way I can describe it as a metacognitive framework for self organizing workflows depending on context and dynamic adjustment capabilities depending on environmental signals. lots of cool little systems that will do all types of fun stuff like feed logprobs to various Ai subagents to give extra bias signals or have the llms understand their own confidence in answering this or that query. Anyways I could write a whole decertation on all the various goodies in it. But currently at the moment starting small and working on developing automated hyperparameter reasoning evaluation system. its important to know the most affective hyperparameters per model and no better way to converge on those numbers then an automated system. After that using dspy or my own home brwe system to do same on converging for "best" system prompts for various tasks. And then setting up the various mcp servers that give these abilities to whatever llm uses them. Lots of work, but learning a lot in the process plus I love RND. I see potential in modern day systems for recursive self improvement just have to set up the system around the capability. thats the hard part, the vision is always easy...
Still building https://ongoingthings.com - a way to document and privately share life updates with close people.
I used to post personal updates in group chats - scattered, repetitive, and easy to miss. Now each topic (like raising a child, a trip, a project) gets its own private space - an Ongoing Thing - where updates stay organized.
People get email notifications for new posts. There's no feed, no comments, no ads - just a calm way to stay connected.
We just added Partner Things so multiple people (like two parents) can post to the same thing. Our small user base loves it.
Still figuring out marketing. Until now, it's mostly been word-of-mouth. Feedback welcome!
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently! My friends group all seem burnt out by the direction social media is going, with what you're building seeming like a better return to the norm. Will follow along to see your progress!
One thing that kept tripping me up when thinking about this was pricing - everyone is so conditioned to think that social media is free that this will be a huge hill to overcome. Your pricing, although I think if done right feels very fair, instinctively makes me recoil a bit.
Yeah, even calling it anything close to "social media" turns some people off. And most people are totally fine using group chats or DMs — which are free, for now.
It felt weird paying for email after using Gmail for so long. Even now, most people do not care enough in order to justify paying for it. This feels similar.
We can't afford to offer free-forever accounts to everyone - not without compromising on principles. But we are thinking of ways to make it more accessible at least for some people. Open to ideas!
The "social media" baggage, and the pricing bit you pointed, those are definitely the two biggest challenges imo. If this was not something we needed and used ourselves, we probably wouldn't have built it.
I am currently in the process of implementing a TLV message protocol (think MsgPack, CBOR, etc).
This is something I've been kicking tires on since my time at $BIGCORP; JSON without the bloat, Protobufs without the ceremony. I've drawn a lot of inspiration from MsgPack, CBOR, and Ion 1.1. Big emphasis on a tight set of core primitives, low-cost extensions, storing reused values/schemas, optional pre-negotiation, etc. That said, I've now been spending time trying to study the performance angle to make sure the design doesn't have a negative impact on encoding/decoding performance before committing to the implementation.
Regrettably nothing much to show (at least yet), but hopefully if nothing else it will become my go-to format for other personal projects that I work on.
I'm working on Beam, a web app that lets you transfer files between nearby devices using QR codes - completely offline, with no servers involved, and leaving absolutely no trace.
Beam is perfect for sharing sensitive documents, transferring files when you can't use USB, email, or cloud storage.
Try it here: https://get-beam.vercel.app
Bluetooth, or animated QR?
Im investigating creating a nattokinase overexpression strain for fun. This is my second home-brewed food GMO!
Basically, nattokinase is an enzyme made by natto (Japanese fermented soybeans). It’s been show clinically to help against blood clots. Unfortunately, the clinical dose is 5x the quantity in a serving of natto.
That’s too much natto to eat! So I’m working to genetically engineer a normal, typical natto strain to just over express that one enzyme, so 1 serving == 1 clinically relevant dose
My last was genetically engineering yeast to produce grape aroma, then baking bread. Was great fun feeding people it. I want to eventually throw GMO dinner parties in SF, but only with GMOs I’ve created with my own hands
Coolest project I've seen in this thread so far.
I am working on easiest way to manage all your MCP configurations and credentials. Additionally, I have added couple of interesting MCP servers, like converting any OpenAPI v3 spec to MCP server (including support of authentication): https://x.com/getaikoapp/status/1945278307496235482
After working on and using many MCP servers, I hit couple of issues multiple times:
* Do I configure 2 MCP servers of same type for 2 different API Keys or do I manually update configurations all the time? (e.g. production and development environments)
* when I have too many tools enabled, I noticed that either I am hitting context limit too quickly or LLM is hallucinating when choosing a right tool
* Some MCP servers expose a lot of tools, I want to disable some of them forever, instead of doing configuration per AI assistant (first for Claude, then Cursor and so on)
* Most MCP servers are hosted by third parties, as a privacy conscious person, I do not want to share my credentials with third parties.
And I am building Aiko - AI tools marketplace: https://getaiko.app
NOTE: Gmail and Calendar apps are currently under CASA Tier 2 security assessment, hence not published to production. But you can see demo usage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEy6Y1kfn4
Currently thinking about better ways to spread the word about https://theretowhere.com (my website that makes it easier to find apartments and Airbnbs/hotels close to things you care about).
I've actually started getting some back and fourth feedback with a couple users, which has kept me motivated and validated. But I need more organic traffic somehow. I've recently released a new usecase (https://theretowhere.com/vacation) that might be more well suited for vacationers, so let's see if that sticks.
Funny anecdote from today - I just set up Slack notifications so I get more instant knowledge of errors on the platform, and the first notification came in just a couple moments after I deployed. It was for an error that I thought noone would run into for a couple days. Imagine my (bad) luck!
I'm starting to think about moving to a new city and was considering to build a tool like this. And now I'm excited to see this already exists!
For my use-case the interface you created isn't the best. Now that I'm searching for a new home I'm interested in finding a place that has a bakery nearby, but it doesn't really matter what bakery. The same goes for restaurants, pubs, ... For this case there are too many places to add them "manually".
Thanks for creating this, I will be definitely using this in the the coming months.
You don't have to add them in manually - the heatmap interface supports "Open searches", where you can add in pins for a bunch of locations at a time based on a query (like "bakeries").
Looks cool! One use case for travel is ppl like often like to be near public transport, especially places like Tokyo, NYC, etc.
Might be nice to have an easy way to enter all subway stations in a city and create the heatmap based on that.
I’ve been building https://getpensive.com a bookmarking app I started after Pocket shut down.
I wanted three things Pocket didn’t offer:
1. A search-first experience
2. Integration with tools I already use (like Telegram)
3. A way to actually review saved content, with help from LLMs and spaced repetition
Still in beta, but usable. Would love to hear thoughts or your experience on building a product like this.
A CLI tool to make reasoning about Postgres locks a bit easier.
Given a database[1] and a set of DDL statements/migrations you want to check, pglockanalyze will open a transaction, execute the statements, read the pg_locks view to analyze the locks they acquire and rollback (or commit, depending on the flags you passed) the transaction. Then, it will output the results for each statement.
I think there's merit in this idea, that said it's very much an experiment so there could be flaws and/or corner cases that this strategy won't work well for.
It's meant to act as a complement, not a replacement, to things like static analysis and the official Postgres docs.
https://github.com/agis/pglockanalyze
[1] typically an ephemeral database spawned by your CI pipeline
"WithAudio", a text to speech solution for Desktop.
https://desktop.with.audio
The most important features (for me) are: One Time Payment and 100% local and private. I don't send any data to any server. Just enough to verify license keys.
- Its one time payment, user can import any text, URL or ebooks and use the reader with read along text highlighting or export the audio as mp3 or m4a (audiobook specific format).
- Currently only supports MacOS with Apple Silicon I was doing Windows too but its making development slow, so I'm pausing that for now. - The most recent feature I added is Global Capture where user can setup some hotkeys to import any text and URL. Text parsing and extracting text is one of the hardest part of this. - Also, just added the a Reader view to website. Its goal is to mimic the app featuers as much as the browser limitations allow. I don't have a free Tier but a 7 days money back gurantee.
I mostly have a dev and engineering background but the most exciting aspect of this marketing and those stuff. Still trying to figure that.
I'd be happy to hear any feedback and ideas.
Edit: Only English at the moment. Adding more languages is in my plan but its very difficult for me since I don't know any other languages. But I think it would be great to add those as well.
Nice!
I'm curious, what on-device text-to-speech engine did you use?
Thanks I'm using https://huggingface.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS
I’m currently 4 years in to doing everything possible to build the best budgeting app https://envelopebudgeting.com
This week I’ve been working on predicting upcoming paychecks with Nodejs so we can automatically decide how much funds to move into your budgets when you get paid. I pull the past 3 months of transaction data from our Postgres database using Prisma and run some analysis.
People think syncing and delayed transaction data is normal, and I’m working on changing that by having the budgeting built in to the checking account. Along with a high yield savings account, goal envelopes, bill envelopes, etc, joint accounts, etc.
I've been building for some time a local production like environment running in Minikube, deployed in a single `terraform apply` command. The plan is to deploy in one command a couple of home made services, frontend, backend, some websockets in between, and have everything accessible over HTTPS via Ingress resources. That, and all the open source observability tools you can imagine (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo), configured and running at once.
See https://github.com/chazapp/o11y.
These last few days I have decided to try getting Kubernetes Gateway API to work, using the implementation of Istio. I have written an `auth` microservices which provides JWTs and published a public JWKS endpoint, and intend to have the API gateway validate tokens and claims to allow access to other services. The plan being to write API services without any knowledge of the authentication systems that happen upstream. If a request reaches them, it's that it had been validated before !
I'm working on an AI spreadsheet platform called Sourcetable (https://sourcetable.com).
Most people use it for analysis and ops work, + data science.
I find myself using Sourcetable to run our company: query the DB, analyze the user data, make projections, write copy, help with technical SEO (search the web, scrape data, check status codes, clean my sitemap, run vector space analysis etc.), talk to apps, financial modeling for our operating model + forecasting, etc.
The main idea I'm thinking about is LLM related: we're all having a social experience with machines (!) while building the machines (!!). I'm not sure my brain fully grasps that it's talking to silicon while I work.
This looks great man. I will save and check for later.
I published 2 (two!) new chapbooks of poetry, both priced at $0.00:
> Sonnets of dark-held love - A sequence of poems after the 'Sonetos del amor oscuro' by Federico García Lorca - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/sonnets-of-dark-held...
> End Time - A collection of noir-themed poems for the last days of the world - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/end-time/
Effort well spent.
I’m currently working on implementing a Minecraft server in Rust. Not a new concept, I know, but it’s a great learning opportunity. I already have a few basics like loading and saving worlds and placing/breaking blocks implemented. In a few weeks I will release the first version and host a public server for testing. Then I will also do a show hn. Repo link: https://github.com/T-x-T/oxide (better readme coming soon, don’t worry)
I got tired of repeating myself to LLMs over and over so I built context-llemur
https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur
It’s a CLI/MCP context management tool that allows you to easily move your project context around to your favourite LLM clients/IDEs
My new project is https://bingeworthyshows.tv where i take all the curated YouTube channels and make them easy to watch so you don't have to rot your brain on Netflix shows you don't really want to watch but end up watching because you can't find anything better to watch
I am building Overcentric - a simple and affordable toolkit that combines web & product analytics, chat support, help center, session replays and frontend error reporting, all in one place.
Building, testing and improving based on feedback of several startups that integrated it. Also using Overcentric for Overcentric itself, so I always get ideas for improvement.
What's next: more tools that are useful for startups are on the roadmap and I am exploring how LLMs can be further utilised (apart from support, session replay summaries, aiding in writing help center articles, integration) and refining pricing.
Also working on an improved landing page, but you can check out the current one at: https://overcentric.com/
An offline-only translator app for Android, using Mozilla's translation models (on device) and Tesseract.
App is alpha quality but working: https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator
Trying to figure out F-Droid publishing..
I'm writing an encrypted and padded IP tunnel to help people build their own multi-hop circuits to access the internet anonymously, without Tor, and with protection from end-to-end correlation attacks.
https://github.com/markasoftware/i405-tunnel
I'm working on Waywo, a semantic search engine for "What are you working on?" threads powered by new features in Redis 8 like the vector set data structure for semantic search.
Waywo will help users quickly digest hundreds of project descriptions, explore similar projects, deduplicate projects across threads from previous posts, visualize a graph of all projects, and more! I'll be documenting my approach to building this with coding Agents like cursor and Gemini CLI
I'm building Waywo for the Redis Hackathon on DEV.to that is running from now until August 10! Follow me on DEV/GitHub/X (@briancaffey) to see how this project turns out!
I still have https://founderfodder.com going as well. That's where I get my HN news now. I get to read the story, or at least its summary, and also read the comments summaries like an editorial. It's great!
I have been working on building a site where you search by phrases which you have heard in some youtube shorts and are not able to remember which video was it, my project would give the users the videos in which the phrase has been said or mentioned
I could really use that for YouTube Poops
Like youglish but for more videos?
Yeah something like that. I am thinking of using audio to text converter using whisper apis, index the audio text in a vector DB and then perform string matching.
I’ve been working on an animal management app for the last two years or so. It’s a hobby project so it’s not going very fast. Recently I’ve released a new version with support for one model of a UHF RFID reader. It allows me to count and identify my chickens from up to 15 feet away.
https://youtu.be/_iGn_pZ3IkY?si=x4ijZdAP-suhuJ7Y
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/manger-animal-manager/id674269...
Two things:
I am building a Pinterest clone that filters out AI generated imagery[1]. It is built on top of Bluesky so gets the benefit of its large library of well alt-text'd images, which aids with search.
Also working on a new kind of social media, where every user is a verified human[2]. The idea is to avoid the problems that sock puppet accounts controlled by the rich and powerful can have on our society. Again, I am starting with Bluesky as a target demographic and have already had some adoption.
1 - https://scrapboard.org
2 - https://onlyhumanhub.com
But what about the furries :(
What about them?
I was making a "verified human" joke.
Furries are human too heh
I'm building a CVD system to make arbitrarily large single crystal optical quality diamonds. Not a coder, so I'm using ChatGPT and Claude to show me how to integrate microwave power sources, vacuum & gas supply systems, and other subsystems with LabView. As Gust said in Charlie Wilson's War, "We'll see.".
Software for biomedical research labs.
Animal colony management is largely managed in Excel sheets, with no integrations to related systems or hardware sensing. We're working on the spreadsheet problem first, so that biomedical researchers can share information about their colonies with other researchers at their institutions, and explore the lines that other labs have. This opens up collaboration options and makes it much easier for the research community to find out what mouse lines other labs have (and may borrow for their own experiments).
https://www.mousehouse.bio/
Currently in closed beta at Harvard
to me that's exciting and optimistic because any marginal efficiency in animal testing pays off in net-humane treatment of lab animals.
it's counter intuitive, but if even a small portion of animal rights money went into tech solutions like this, they could have an orders of magnitude greater impact on welfare.
I appreciate the perspective, but I think that tech solutions like this have plenty of opportunities to bootstrap and apply for various grants and funds (which we are doing). I'd rather see more money go towards non-tech solutions and direct care for animals. Shelters are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, and the number of pets people have adopted and given up has boomed since the pandemic. Not to mention the number of shady animal mills out there exacerbating the issue. Tech can't solve that problem, but more volunteers and outreach can.
The tech community is doing just fine in terms of money at the moment.
I'm currently working on DSC, a tensor library I wrote from scratch in C++ with a PyTorch-like API.
Right now it works on both CPU and GPU (both AMD and NVIDIA) and is capable of running LLMs like Qwen, I'm currently implementing a native profiler to trace CPU and GPU kernels and then I'll work on speed. Goal is to be competitive with PyTorch eager by the end of the year.
Source code: https://github.com/nirw4nna/dsc
My original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310678
I've been building a desktop app on the side that addresses the problem of screenshots getting accumulated on disk over a period of time. It provides an alternate workflow for capturing screenshots, where the app let's the user select tags before taking the screenshot. Tags can be associated with actions such as "move to trash after 1 day", "delete after 7 days" or "store in /specific/location".
I have got the main functionality working and I've been using it myself in a crude way (using sqlite client directly for data entry etc.) for about a week. It was not meant to be a serious project to begin with - I just wanted to build something to evaluate Tauri for desktop apps. I am still not 100% convinced if such a tool is worth building, so the code hasn't been published anywhere. Do you care enough about "screenshots management and cleanup" to use something like this?
I would go further with this, essentially matching patterns of files in certain directories. Another use case for example is removing old log files from a directory.
In any case, I would have it as a user option to carry through the action, i.e. "the following is scheduled for deletion saving X disk space, do you wish to continue?".
Yeah, a generic tool could be useful. Thanks for replying. It gave me some ideas!
Tags with actions sounds useful. Maybe worth a demo video to get opinions from a broader audience?
Personally, I think I'll stick to pruning my screenshots folder once a year with an image manager. I'm pretty content with niri's builtin screenshot capture or something like Greenshot on windows. Just my two cents
I've had a notion that LLMs can read Typescript types much better, than JSON schema types.
So, I've been tinkering around with a library that can generate schemas for structured JSON outputs, according to a Typescript-like custom schema definition: https://github.com/nadeesha/structlm
So far, I've been seeing promising results with accuracy on-par or better, but using 20-40% less tokens than JSON schemas.
Mostly just doing some furry porn commissions while I wait for my partner to finish enough of the scripts for the next chapter of out comic (http://egypt.urnash.com/npol/) for me to start drawing pages.
If you have more money than you know what to do with and want to support queer artists then https://comradery.co/egypturnash and https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash are great ways to funnel some of your money into my wallet :)
Jarvis: A native voice command layer for your desktop
I’ve been hacking away at Jarvis on nights and weekends for the past few months. I found myself increasingly frustrated with the constant context-switching involved in using ChatGPT through a browser for quick AI tasks. So, I decided to build a native voice-command layer that works seamlessly within any app you’re currently using.
It’s still pretty early, but I set up a frictionless web demo at jarvis.ceo/demo, where you can test it instantly without installation or sign-up. I’d love your feedback!
I am working on DataGrid Toolkit. Based on my experiences building and selling (Excel like) data grids, people always look for your data grid, "but can it do this"? With DataGrid Toolkit, a developer can choose his own building blocks/modules and make a more Excel-like data grid, or make a more DataTables style traditional paginated table. The toolkit is headless and stateless by design and comes with different renderers. Canvas, html or some hybrid. It is written in Typescript and the data store is in Rust/Webassembly.
Have you checked out MUI’s DataGrid component? It works great, but some important-to-some functionality is locked behind the paid versions.
What are some of the more obscure requirements people have on data grids?
Well not really obscure, but some want formulas, some want advanced filters, grouping/pivoting. Nothing that's not done before but you don't want to say yes to all these things as the product will lose its core identity and strength.
So I will release my new data grid component based on my own toolkit, and if people want tweaks or "add these features", I will demonstrate them the toolkit.
I noticed this for some companies: there are 10+ spreadsheets which should have the same structure, but different data. For example one spreadsheet per country for purposes of budgeting, modeling, or just inputs. These spreadsheets tend to break and it’s hard to update them centrally. There is of course an option with moving to a proper admin app, but it requires development and quite often results in less UX, because users are familiar with spreadsheets - they can write formulas, analyze the data, or connect with other systems.
This is why I’m writing a tool to simplify administrative work with these files, so you can quickly see where spreadsheets diverge, propagate updates, make them version controlled, and many other good things, which we have in typical app development, but still miss in spreadsheets management.
We are building a social network that makes it simple for people all over Africa (Niger) to find, organize, and share events, such as underground music performances, street festivals, local markets, and cultural gatherings. We are creating something that is accessible to all, supports grassroots communities, and honors local culture.
This platform is entirely self-funded and was created with passion, hard work, and faith in our goal. However, at this point, even modest assistance, such as paying for our internet, can have a significant impact on future advancement.
Find me on LinkedIn if this speaks to you or if you would like to work with me, grow together, or just have a conversation. Connecting would be wonderful.
One community at a time, we can work together to illuminate Africa's events landscape.
Some links :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/smiletondi/ https://kuukoo.com/
I often need a PostgreSQL server for testing an application, vibe coding, or troubleshooting a PG client. Inspired by Neon's architecture, I implemented PostgreSQL WASM (PGlite) with a cloud proxy (via Websockets) at https://postgresql.dbfor.dev
All the PostgreSQL data lives in your browser, and you have unlimited PostgreSQL servers that persist the data locally without installing anything.
This is very cool.
Some folks I work with have a terabyte of short string records that they regularly scan with regexes to develop classification criteria; it's a prime application for a substring index that can accelerate their queries, but the scale is daunting.
I came up with a suffix-sorting index for this domain that's interestingly simple. Most algos for this use a generalized suffix tree that's built by concatenating all the strings into one giant string and feeding it into a conventional suffix sort, but that has some big constants on the indexing throughput, due I think to the overhead of handling one giant string instead of a bunch of small independent records.
In the latter case, by making the structure slightly simpler and search slightly harder, I can get indexing throughput in the GBps, at least for the sorting part.
The output of that in its simplest form is a 4n or 8n-sized set of int's, but it can be fed further into a compressed rank/select data structure for various space/indexing time/retrieval time tradeoffs, and I don't think those are slow (eg Roaring Bitmaps)
I'll post this on show HN if anybody's interested; I'm still writing up the details, as I've barely gotten the POC code working.
Working on https://openreaders.com – a platform with free graded readers, starting with Spanish (my native language).
When learning a new language, it’s surprisingly hard to find free, engaging reading content at your level. Even paid options often aren’t that great. I’m trying to solve this by leveraging LLMs, building useful features for learners, and focusing on user experience.
Just launched the beta yesterday on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1matsp6/fr...
I'm heads down building a workflow pipeline builder that executes Wasm Components as part of individual nodes within the pipeline.
Think Zapier or n8n, but you either use existing processing nodes or upload your own code, written of course in any language that compiles to Wasm Components.
It's week 2 but it works and it's live at https://pipestack.dev
Anyway to reach you?
Tell me it's early days without telling me it's early days...
hi (at) pipestack.dev should work
I'm working on my first project, a knowledge file creator that can build a RAG-centric file based on inputs like a website or a content document. I'm not sure how to grow; your feedback is valuable!
link:- https://magenta-salmon-660543.hostingersite.com/
I'm working on hessra.net, a token-based authorization system for machines and built using biscuits. The idea is that any service/machine/IoT device can authenticate to the service and get authorization tokens for each request based on policy. Then the tokens can be included with the request and verified without any further RTTs using the service's public key. The tokens are meant to be single-use and scoped to a single request.
Besides the simple "get token and send to a thing that uses it to authorize a request" there's a couple of things we've built/are building on top:
service-chains: for a given resource, you can configure the token so that it needs to be signed by notable components along the path of the request, and at each step along the path check that it was signed by expected components up to that point. the thinking is this could really cut down on lateral movement in a system
multi-party authorization: for a given resource, you can configure N authorization services that also need to sign the token based on their policy. the token only authorizes if all parties have signed it. this could be useful for managing capabilities of software deployed into customer environments or perhaps for b2b agents to get signoff from both b's for doing an action
I've been learning systems programming for a while and recently I discovered kilo[0], which inspired me to start building my own editor[1]. Not sure how far I'll go, but hopefully it will be usable -- how fun would it be to build another project of mine using my own editor?
[O] https://github.com/antirez/kilo
[1] https://github.com/bloomca/love
I am working on a world model for computer systems (world).
Do LLM Agents really understand Linux?.
"Understanding" meaning.. can they predict the outcome of their actions before executing them? Computer system is irreversible.
World model for computer systems is crucial next step for computer use agents to reliably plan their actions over long horizon.
Links to draft: https://open.substack.com/pub/disastermanagementtechnologies...
I've been learning PassKeys and WebAuthn.
Getting together a very simple server (PHP), and very simple clients (UIKit and SwiftUI), and will publish a blog series on it (sort of like this[0]), once I get more used to it.
I need to really get comfortable with it before I do that, though.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/universal-links/
https://jar.tools/ - peek and patch Java jar files in your browser.
Recently added a new feature – Java property file editor (took me too much time than I planned, but it works now)
My summer project for my comp sci MSc was an open source natural deduction helper tool for the Mac, called Baker Street. I let it lapse simply because I didn't have time to look after it, but now it's available for download once more: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/baker-street/id1528304157
I've been working with Claude to bring some new features, like printing a proof - unsuccessfully! https://github.com/OolonColoophid/bakerStreet/issues/9
I have launched VT, a product that I have been working on for more than 1 year. And I'm continuously improving it.
https://vtchat.io.vn
VT Chat, is a privacy-first AI chat application that keeps all conversations local while providing advanced research capabilities and access to 15+ AI models including Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus, O3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and DeepSeek R1.
Research features: Deep Research does multi-step research with source verification, Pro Search integrates real-time web search with grounding web search powered by Google Gemini. There's also document processing for PDFs, a "thinking mode" to see complete AI reasoning, and structured extraction to turn documents into JSON. AI-powered semantic routing automatically activates tools based on queries.
Built with Next.js 14, TypeScript, and Turborepo in a monorepo setup.
After over 6 years working on the startup I co-founded (which was fully acquired by a larger company in 2024, after they had bought a majority stake in 2022), I’ve been focusing on building a new company since the beginning of this year.
I’ve explored a few different projects since January but nothing stuck, now working on https://pitch31.ai a SaaS that turns any OpenAPI specs (or Postman collections) into a conversational AI agent, so you can work with APIs without the need of a UI.
We are still early on the product and looking for some user feedback to improve it. Planning to launch it on major platforms in the next month!
Been working on a games curation site that is focused on hyper specific themes (https://exhibitplay.com/). I find game genres to be so broad, which makes discovery a boring process. My idea is to take a curatorial approach and make collections that highlight the themes that exist within genres.
It's pretty simple, JSON data that I manually fill out and display in a grid. Takes some inspiration from Letterboxd lists. Future plan is to run online and in-person exhibitions for smaller curation and to commission writers and other curators to provide further depth and insight into a list.
I have no plans to turn this into a profitable thing. It's a pure passion project which I hope will benefit researchers, academics, other curators, and the whole game community. It's a resource as much as it is a celebration.
I just finished create my first gaussian splat of a macro: https://superspl.at/view?id=cf6ac78e
We’re building ChartDB - an open-source tool to visualize and edit your database schema.
Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, MSSQL, ClickHouse. Includes AI export to generate DDL in any SQL dialect.
17.5k+ GitHub stars, Feedback welcome!
https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb https://www.chartdb.io
On my 2D game engine https://carimbo.site
First game in progress https://reprobate.site
Any feedback is welcome!
This is really cool! The first game works great on mobile too.
I would suggest speeding up the speed that the text renders on the screen. The average person reads 250-300wpm, but you could probably speed this up a bit more and just leave it on the screen long enough to ensure the lower bound is met.
Still working on https://periplus.app!
It's an environment for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, exams, flashcards, maps and more!
Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time (very Obsidian-esque).
A while back I saw an RF lightning detector on HN (https://techlib.com/electronics/lightningnew.htm)
I redesigned it to be much smaller and cheaper (surface-mount), made it an IoT device, and various other changes. Will order PCBs in a bit, hopefully it works well.
We don't have anything like Blitzortung in SE Asia as far as I know, and it would be pretty useful to me to detect lightning storms before they hit. The obvious application is to add it to my motorbike (driving a motorbike in a heavy storm is a necessary but miserable part of life here).
Bigger picture, there's no market for it, simply because it's cheaper to not buy one (I live in a very cost-driven market). However it would be useful to me personally.
I've been working on a little utility to transfer files between two computers using QR codes: https://github.com/cibyr/qftf
It's kinda like Magic Wormhole without typing. It uses iroh for the p2p networking - on both ends, and also in the little web app that you use to scan the QR codes and start the transfer.
Have you seen https://file.pizza/ FilePizza? Similar concept using WebRTC
Similar concept, though an important distinction: QFTF assumes that you have a phone you can scan QR codes with, but that isn't where you want the file to end up. Instead, it displays a QR code on both the sender and the receiver, and you scan both of the QR codes with your phone to start the transfer.
Just sold my data management software business https://www.fundipedia.com.
Now bootstrapping https://www.minute-master.com - AI formal minute generation for regulated firms primarily in financial services space but also free to use for charities.
Still on a sabbatical building things I enjoy, but it's summer here so have also spent much time in my hammock with cold beers.
Most effort on https://wheretodrink.beer, collecting and cataloging craft beer venues from around the world. No ambition of being exhaustive, but aiming for a curated and substantial list. Since last month I've added a couple of minor things like maps and "where to go next" sections for each venue.
I'm debating whether or not I should add user accounts, and let people maintain venue bucket lists, venue endorsements. Also planning to reach out to the venues and ask if they agree to monthly or quarterly one-click information verification emails from us.
Other projects that receive less love are:
- https://drnk.beer, a small side project offering beer-related linkpages, and @handles for Bluesky (AT Protocol)
- https://misplacy.com, just a dumb and wrong AI landing page for now but was thinking to work towards a drop-in solution for SMBs around lost/found management.
- A platform for helping voluntary associations with repetitive administrative tasks (non-english so not linking. Trying to rank the pain points currently)
- A platform for structuring national soccer club history (initial brain dump idea phase)
- A platform for structuring writing prompts and collaborative fiction writing (initial brain dump / mockups)
For the next month or so I think I need to prioritize what to focus on after summer
Always interesting to see what others are building and doing. So thanks for sharing!
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.
https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
Hey, I had a quick look at your engine's github page, what are you looking to do with surface meshing exactly?
Nothing specifically for the moment. I've toyed with the idea of having an option for smooth terrain, but it's not important for the game I'm currently making.
Working on Humadroid - trying to make SOC2/ISO27001 compliance less painful for small businesses. The $30-50K consultant route is brutal for startups, so we're building an AI-assisted platform that helps with policy generation and guidance.
Still in beta and learning a lot from each customer we onboard. We're actually going through our own SOC2 assessment in August, which has been... educational. Recently added business continuity and incident tracking features. Trying to build something that's actually helpful rather than just another compliance checkbox tool.
If anyone's interested: humadroid.io or feel free to join our beta waitlist at https://humadroid.io/join-the-humadroid-beta-waitlist/
If anyone's been through the compliance journey, would love to hear what worked (or didn't work) for you!
Love this! Not a customer but could see it happening. ISO 27001 compliance (or equivalent) is a standard requirement when working with the public sector in my area. NIS2 is also on the horizon, have you looked into it?
Thanks! Really appreciate the interest. We already support a major part of ISO 27001 - actually releasing our Statement of Applicability tomorrow or the day after. I went through ISO certification at my previous company, and that experience is what triggered building Humadroid in the first place. The pain was real! NIS2 is definitely on our radar - planning to have support for it by Q4 2025. The public sector requirements you mentioned are exactly the kind of use cases we're building for.
An iOS app to help manage Yard Sales. There's a lot of clutter at home that we don't need or use; using that as inspiration to work on an app that can help with cataloguing and selling in-person, and in v2 turn into some sort of facebook marketplace where users can 'find yard sales' near them (and potentially even look up all items being sold at x yard sale, prior to showing up).
Hej, I am still working on FisherLoop [1] to learn Swedish (but I have added German, Spanish, French and Italian since). I created FisherLoop because I like audiobooks for language learning but I hated having to pause to look up words + I want to read along the book while listening. With FisherLoop I made "interactive audiobooks" where I use TTS with word level timestamps to highlight the words as they are spoken + I can click on words for the translation.
I am using cerebras for book translations and verb extraction and all LLM related tasks. For TTS I am using cartesia. I have played around with Elevenlabs and they have slightly natural sounding TTS but their pricing is too steep for this project. Books would cost a couple of hundred euros to process.
[1] https://www.fisherloop.com/en/
I am building Tracelake - a data quality solution for SAP replications.
https://tracelake.com/
Why? SAP holds the most important data for companies that use it, but it's notoriously difficult to replicate this data consistently into a data analytics platform (think Snowflake, Redshift, etc...).
Couple of companies specialize in the SAP replication, but it's hard to validate the correctness of the replicated data, because:
- the SAP data is changing continuously and rapidly
- there are hundreds of tables and TBs of data
Usually it's the consumers of data downstream who notice that the data just "doesn't feel right".
Tracelake adds a validation layer on top of the SAP to X replication, which periodically compares the data between source and target and informs you about any missing / incorrect data, so you can tackle data quality issues proactively.
I'm still working on https://wut.dev/ - a simpler, privacy-focused, read-only AWS resource viewer. I did a "show Reddit" post a few weeks back and it got quite a bit of interest, so doubling down with actual user feedback now.
I'm working on this programming language that compiles to Go.
The goal is to have it behave like typescript for Go, where any Go program would compile out of the box, but then you can use the new syntax.
Featuring: built-in Set/Enum/Tuple/lambda/"error propagation operators"
It also have a working LSP server and generates a sourcemap, so when you get a runtime stacktrace, it gives you the original line in your .agl file as well as the one in the generated .go file.
I recently finish porting all my "advent of code 2024" in AGL -> https://github.com/alaingilbert/agl/tree/master/examples/adv...
https://github.com/alaingilbert/agl
Nice!
When I wrote Go, I figured that I would eventually have to do something like that, to fix the glaring omissions in the language. And then I stopped writing Go, but glad to see that someone got around to it!
I like the bang operator for propagating errors. Shame to lose multiple returns though
That's why there is a "Tuple" expression that you can use instead, which allows you to easily return multiple values, and destructure them as well.
Well, it seems to support tuples, which are more powerful.
Making it easier to build simple web applications, host your static content with in built authentication functionality to make your content secure and dynamic. For enterprise customers, solving the tenancy for SAAS businesses when it comes to authentication.
https://weblegit.com
Bit of context, I have background building authentication systems and almost all the time its built as just another feature even though its THE FEATURE which gates all other features.
In a Lua scripting framework to: - enforce non-globals - project hierarchy (for tests and documentation) - cli access for .md package docs - installation in path - extension of Lua stdlib (fs.mkdir, os.realpath) - module autoloading/lazyloading
Expected support for Lua 5.4 and luajit. At first entirely in Lua with long term goal to compiled Lua modules (merging Wax)
The goal is to make Lua the first choice for system scripting in POSIX systems for Lua users without thinking twice between Lua, Sh and other tools like Python, Ruby etc.
I have many system scriptings in Lua but not in a easy way of reusing libraries. Also I don't like to think in creating Luarocks packages or deal with unstandardized ways to write code.
This sounds interesting! I often want to reach for Lua for general scripting in lieu of python or bash, but packaging and other issues make it a rough experience. I'd love a link!
Lots of very cool stuff already shared here by other folks. I am building a simple app to help select/sort/cull photos easier on desktop. Born from my own need to learn/tinker/solve my own problem. https://www.picpickr.com
I'm working on an open source wrapper and MCP server to give Claude Code voice capabilities (and Slack and WhatsApp messaging). It works with system default TTS and google free ASR on Mac out the box but allows you to BYOK to your favorite TTS/ASR provider. I've also tried to make it a viable python library to make it easy to switch between ASR/TTS providers.
With Claude Code I really like being able to multi-task but right now it's a bit like a Tesla on autopilot needing your hands still on the wheel. With TalkiTo I can do housework/go out for lunch and keep it on the right track remotely.
https://github.com/robdmac/talkito
I'm working on bewCloud [1] after getting a decent sponsor(ship) earlier this year from NLnet.
It's a simpler alternative to Nextcloud and ownCloud (built with TypeScript, Deno, Fresh). Recently it got a CalDAV and CardDAV server, and I'll be working on the calendar and contacts UI next.
[1] https://bewcloud.com
Currently working on a tool for creative workflow automation called runchat.app with the goal of giving creatives more control over gen ai. Its a jeckyl and hyde visual canvas that can be used for open ended exploration and experimentation with models on fal as well as automation of things like image processing or web scraping. Something weve been thinking about lately is the idea of ephemeral interfaces and how the ui of runchat can be generated on the fly to suit a specific design task. This makes it possible to vibe code workflows from self contained modular react components - something llms are really good at.
A clear, simple Markdown viewer for the Mac: ViewMD
When using developer AI agents like Claude Code, often they output, and use, .md files like CLAUDE.md, README.md, etc. You largely want to just read these, and if Claude updates them, read the latest version.
Other markdown apps incorporate editing, split screens, etc. I just wanted a neatly formatted read only view. And if you want to edit them, just use something specifically designed for that like Sublime Text, my viewer will instantly load with the updated file.
Anyway, check it out: search for "ViewMD" in the Mac App Store.
I've been working on a functional language and a specializing translator (a specialator) based on graph-reduction beneath lambdas.
The intention is to specialize away interpretive and meta-programming-like overhead, and then translate the result into usable source code in whichever language is desired. If the code, after specialization, has a suitable form, then you should get conventional imperative code out. If there are still functional-idioms present that haven't been specialized away, the generated code will have a more functional-style. The specialator currently targets JS and C.
The language has an expressive type-system based on self-dependent sub-typing. The type-system is too expressive for everyday use, it is intended to be used with a decidability checker.
This is an experimental work-in-progress.
I am working on htmlsync.io, an easy way to synchronize localStorage between devices. I found myself using AI a lot to generate single-file HTML web apps that saved data in localStorage and wanted to have access to them from phone. This was my solution.
Still working on my game, Astral Divide.
I finished writing most of the story and am now working on implementing the main enemy's AI.
I'm having quite some fun with studying and making a schooling algorithm that fits my needs.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597060/Astral_Divide/
Nice job! Out of curiosity, how have you been using gen AI in your work?
I'm not using any kind of AI.
I considered leveraging LLMs to help write some parts the scenario, but in the end I prefer doing it myself.
When I said "enemy's AI", I didn't mean machine learning, just how it behaves.
I just finished a YouTube video on why PlayStation had multiple names (https://youtu.be/m4rpN_oQF2s)
After that, I'm not sure. I have four big ideas:
1. (continuation) Another video, this one about my experiences writing a homebrew PSOne game
2. (useful) a command line tool (or native desktop app) that generates white noise
3. (fanciful) See if I can unpack FFVII's world map data into OBJ models and UV mapped textures. And then from there create a 3D world map in Threejs
4. (stretch) I would love an app where I could look out into the distance, and be informed what's on the horizon. Likewise ships in the sea / planes in the sky. I think it's doable with some OSM data, open APIs and a bit of high school math
I think that video was in my recommendations, funny seeing you here
I've started working on a gotosocial alternative (activitypub/fediverse server) that's a bit more geared towards interoperability, hackability, and openness. Also submitted an NLNet funding request, fingers crossed!
https://github.com/myfedi/gargoyle
I'm working on a rating/reviewing website for YouTube videos, with strong search and filter functions that YouTube sorely lacks, along with good curated list building functionality.
https://www.ytdb.io/
With a strong rating weight system that can avoid (some) of the pitfalls of community ratings.
Right now videos must be added to be searchable, to comply with YouTube API rules. I'd hope that over time, with enough usage, the repository could contain many categories of highly curated content. (eg. Documentaries) that someone could find without having to browse various communities and opinions to get lists.
Maybe you hit some type of Heroku limit, currently an HTTP 404 "no such app" error.
Interesting, I think it must've unluckily been during a daily restart as that coincides with the timing of your reply lol... I hope.
edit: scratch that. wrong url. forgot i dont have www mapped: https://ytdb.io
I'm working on a mortgage scenario planning tool. A simple mortgage calculator can give you an estimate as to how much a mortgage payment will be but there are so many other inputs that must be taken into account on a per individual basis. For example someone could input that they want to put 20% down and see the monthly payment amount but there are other fees, such as closing costs, which must be taken in account to determine how much cash on hand a buyer will need to actually transact on the mortgage.
My friend and my lender has built up a giant Google Sheet which he uses with his clients and I've been slowly working to translate the logic in that Sheet into an application. It's been a lot of fun as I've been learning how to replicate the multiplayer aspects of Sheets into a React application.
I'm working on genesis, a project scaffolding and task runner tool that helps devs start and manage projects across different tech stacks with a unified interface.
Github: https://github.com/felipevolpatto/genesis Page: felipevolpatto.github.io/genesis/
This month I release an updated version of my "Practice Python Projects" book: https://learnbyexample.github.io/practice_python_projects/
Next, I'm working on a TUI app (using Textual) for board games like Tic Tac Toe and Connect Four. These will also have a modified rule that requires forming a square instead of a line.
This is cool! I am getting back into Python programming after having to work with Angular (with a code base that's a spaghetti mess of poorly used TypeScript), and doing little toy projects like this helps tremendously with bringing back the joy I once experienced with programming.
At the moment I'm building a C++ version of Tic Tac Toe, would be cool to implement it in Python.
Veneer: a thin facade over Google Forms/Sheets (https://github.com/Leftium/veneer)
Some samples:
- https://veneer.leftium.com/v/s.1o5t26He2DzTweYeleXOGiDjlU4Jk...
- https://veneer.leftium.com/v/s.1pk4C9jFI02CnZaxo9obsD4oAmLla...
Vercel is ending support for Node v18. Instead of updating my old app, I decided to finish the rewrite of the better version. The old version currently powers this site: https://viviblues.com
Compare to the new version:
- https://viviblues.com/pretty/sheet?u=https://docs.google.com...
- https://viviblues.com/pretty/sheet?u=https://docs.google.com...
I've got a long term project trying to see how far I can get writing a contact simulation using techniques from Klaus Hollig's book on B-spline finite element methods. I'm using D for this. I've been focusing on level set domains, which has led to me spending an inordinate amount of time on high order boundary parametrizations. I'm very curious to see how efficient an approach like this can be made, especially using multigrid. I do numerics and geometry professionally, and this is a bit outside my wheelhouse, although close enough to what I do at my day job that I'm hoping there will be some nice cross pollination of ideas.
By contact simulation, do you mean solid dynamics? (mechanics is not my field)
I'm intrigued by the use of level set domains here. I've only encountered those in other type of numerical simulation where the intent is in avoiding surface meshing.
I suppose moving an object in this context is as simple as composing its level set function with a translation and rotation. However, deforming is non trivial, especially local deformations, right?
How do you efficiently resolve collisions? At the scale of an element, it seems to be a simple check of nowhere should both level set functions be negative. But how do you select the elements to check? Do you somehow keep track of only the elements traversed by the objects in a time step, or some other method? I would guess your method should be more efficient than intersecting meshes, is that what you've found?
I'm particularly interested by your mention of high-order boundary parameterizations, what do you mean by that exactly?
Sorry to bombard you with questions, I was intrigued by a combination of things I'd never seen together before!
Yeah. All of this is born out of a desire to avoid meshing, for some definition of meshing. I'm on a jag that explicitly meshing or computing topology should be unnecessary for this kind of simulation. People have done contact simulations based on penalty methods or Lagrange multipliers using level set descriptions of domains for quite a while, which just involve integrating over overlapping regions, which shouldn't be that hard to detect... in principle... but I'm not quite there yet.
What I'm saying about level set domains is maybe a bit misleading. I'm not talking about level set methods like you might find in the book by Fedkiw and Osher, per se (but if I found something useful from that literature, I wouldn't hesitate to borrow it...). They are easy to model with and give clean geometry compared to e.g. a B-rep. I'm only interested in messing around with toy and artificial problems at this point, so it isn't much of a limitation. At the same time, given a B-rep, there are a number of ways to get clean level set geometry from them...
By high-order boundary parametrization, I mean: given a implicit surface, how to quickly go to a parametric representation of the boundary which is accurate to many (say, 13+) digits that is relatively space efficient, even in the presence of sharp features in the level set (common for CSG...). This is easy in 2D, harder in 3D...
I guess the subtle point here is that for a finite element simulation, the only thing that really matters is integration. For that, you only need a soup of patches; there's no real need to assemble them into a B-rep or any other kind of mesh. But then if you take a time step, you have to think about converting from parametric back to implicit. I'm trying to figure out if there is some kind of hybrid parametric-implicit data structure that is particularly useful for simulations of this type. Remains to be seen, but there are many fun geometry problems to solve along the way.
I got laid off so I'm dusting off an old python project that takes OTF/TFF files and applies algorithmic effects to them. Then you can export the font as a new OTF/TFF file to unleash on your own design work, websites, etc.
I wanted interesting looking typefaces for my printmaking assignments when I was taking studio art classes on the side in university. Now that I've been laid off, I wanna polish it and see what other people create with it.
Lots of room to rewrite and improve it, but I have job applications and interviews to get through.
I was working on a routing application for San Francisco (+Daly City) where it includes being able to put how willing you are to walk to certain bus routes instead of how most apps try to put the least amount of walking and don't consider that if the wait for a bus or train is long, then I don't mind walking to connect to another route that takes me to my destination faster. It takes tree shade, elevation, and marked off location to avoid into account.
It evolved into more of tool for planning leisure walks and runs that could hit places I'd want to visit with a loose timeline--for days where I would want to wander and then end up at a particular stop/station to get back home.
Talking about them here has more ideas churning in my head and reminds me to step outside of my little bubble to remember why I truly love coding. To make fun and convenient experiences.
Two things:
1. Software: An OS that masquerades as simple note taking software.
Goal is to put an end to all the disparate AI bullshit and apps owning our data.
I solved context switching for myself ages ago and now I'm just trying to productize it outside my 3 companies internal usage.
It also solves context switching for AI agents as a byproduct.
2. Ethics: Give Ai and proto-Agi a reason not to kill us all.
An extremely minimal, empirical naturalistic moral framework that is universally binding to all agents so AI won't kill us all. I view the alignment problem as a epistemic moral grounding issue and that the current pseudo utilitarianism isn't cutting it. Divine command, discourse ethics, utilitarianism, deontology they are all insufficient.
Would love try out and contribute to both of these! Let me know if you'd like to get in touch.
Still iterating on Trilogy, a SQL variant with an embedded semantic layer that removes the need for joins and better typing/functions.
Spent some time last month improving array handling + error messages and UX and adding an MCP server option; Claude does pretty well already but there's some syntax/error tweaks to make it simpler for it and humans.
Then pivoting back into scheduling + materialization optimizations (identify common aggregates across several scripts and automatically build the common datasets for reuse).
Link: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy
Taking a long break, but also working on the following:
What plants you should grow if you want a "second harvest" of beautiful dried seedpods, to decorate your home.
Decorating ideas for the round concrete pillars that many new condominium units have nowadays.
"Juicy" text editor ideas - making the most gamified text editor. The absolute opposite of the zen editor at https://enso.sonnet.io/
I've been building AltStack.jp, a curated directory of Japanese digital services (cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, and more) all operated in Japan, by Japanese companies.
It’s aimed at people who want to be less dependent on foreign platforms, especially with the current shift away from globalization.
Still early days: only about 20% of the planned categories are up so far.
[1] https://altstack.jp/en/
I'm making small improvements to things that I use daily with the help of AI (mainly using Claude Projects in the browser).
I created a simple Hacker News Redesign extension to make my mobile browsing experience better (larger touch targets, prettier UI and texts). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/y-redesign-for-hacker-news/id6...
I made a widget that better shows my work shifts (I work nights and the default calendar app displays overnights as two days in the zoomed out monthly view, so this improves upon that and also counts how many shifts I've completed in a month while looking nice too). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-next-shift-widget/id674063...
I wrote a simple MacOS app that lets me drag and drop screenshots then choose between a variety of "device frames" to create a consistent style and speed up my workflow.
And now I'm working on some plug-ins for open source apps that I use. Generally just doing small things to improve my workflow and enjoyment with my hobbies.
We're working on brief.audio, looking at taking the concept of personal podcasts (sort of introduced by NotebookLM) into its natural conclusion by thinking more about what content should be included and how to tailor the outputs into something that is really nice to listen to. Make it a truly slick mobile experience.
https://www.brief.audio -> Have a go, we're primarily testing internally atm, will look to make it more available and a bit more polished next week.
Primary focus is getting the content right this week with the audio script and hosts being user & content dependent. :)
Especially interested in hearing what content to pipe in (we're looking to put in our hackernews.coffee as a feed for example, but also other key news sources).
see my separate comment for more on hackernews.coffee in particular, we (same team, different experiment) are thinking a lot about personal content, and how you have maximum visibility and control.
Keeping these projects separate allows us to test ideas that orbit around a theme (not 100 % sure what the theme is yet, but it features personal, anti-slop content, while still using llms.)
AirPosture: Turn your AirPods into a smart posture coach
An iOS app that uses your AirPods' sensors to catch bad posture in real time.
How it works:
Real-time tilt tracking – Your AirPods already have the tech Customizable alerts – Adjust sensitivity so it nudges you only when needed Prevent strain before it starts – Stop neck pain and headaches at the source
https://www.airposture.pro/ (TestFlighting)
I'm working on Simple Observability[0], a platform for monitoring servers (metrics and logs). Think of it as a super simple alternative to the Prometheus + Grafana + Loki stack, designed for teams who just want to know “is my server healthy?” without setting up and maintaining a full observability pipeline.
It uses a lightweight, open-source agent[1] that collects data and pushes it to the backend, so it works behind firewalls and doesn’t require any open ports or scraping setup. The goal is to get useful monitoring and alerting with minimal effort: one command install and a UI-based configuration.
[0] https://simpleobservability.com
[1] https://github.com/Simple-Observability/simob-agent
This is really cool.
For the landing page, I think it'd be useful to see an actual screenshot of the UI. Also, what I'm looking for in a solution like this is to receive this information passively — I don't want to need to proactively watch a dashboard. I would want to receive email alerts when, for example, I'm running out of disk space. It says on your landing page that you provide this feature, but it also says it's configurable. Everything on Grafana is configurable, but tbh it's a PITA to configure. It'd be nice if SO just worked OOTB wrt alerts.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll make sure to add screenshots.
For the alerts it is configurable pretty quickly (you just select what you want to monitor, a threshold value, and a notification channel). But I’ll look into having some sensible defaults built in so it works out of the box
Nothing really at the moment, job and family takes most my time and energy. Last thing I made was this semi-vibe-coded a local-storage-only site for helping myself plan stuff, I made so it works offline as a progressive web app too if you install it, but it's not suitable for phone at the moment, I don't know if I can be bothered to make it suitable for phone either..
https://dusted.dk/pages/ordeal/
Two features are missing, I might find some energy to make them at some point: 1. right now only the entire "ordeal" can be moved, so situations with multiple fix points are annoying, I'd like to be able to "anchor" multiple tasks and have the tasks between stretch and shrink as needed. 2. I want to add a red horizontal line that's moving and shows the current time.
Finished a solo exercise using Blazor and various server infrastructure to create a website to search and browser over 200,000 pages of American history - currently Civil War and American Indian.
https://allhistory.us
I'm working on Zen Notes - a minimal, distraction-free notes app that prioritizes ownership and longevity.
The core philosophy is: your notes should be yours forever, that also includes the software stack it's built on. Everything is stored locally in SQLite with standard Markdown, so no vendor lock-in or proprietary formats. The interface is very minimal without flashy colors or icons, so you can focus on your thoughts.
Key features: instant full-text search using BM25, flexible tag organization instead of rigid folders, rich Markdown support with formatting toolbar, and custom "Focus Modes" for different contexts. It's a PWA that works offline (read-only).
The tech stack prioritizes minimal dependencies - no NPM (self-hosted Preact instead of React), Golang for rich standard library, etc. The whole app can be run from a single binary, so no messy installation requirements. Docker is also available.
I tried to design this from scratch, learning about typography, colors, spacing etc. It turned out better than I expected!
I've switched to this as my main notes app and I'm happy with it.
Landing Page: https://www.sheshbabu.com/zen/
Demo: https://zendemo.fly.dev
Nice design, esp considering you started from scratch. The UI reminds me a lot of Simplenote.
I'm working on a GitHub + Slack bot to let organizations customize and get notifications on Slack from GitHub.
I've tried using the official GitHub Slack integration (https://github.com/integrations/slack) but found it limiting and unmaintained by GitHub. For example, at the companies I've worked at, we want to get notifications sent to a specific channel when there are deploys to the "production" environment on GitHub. The official integration doesn't let you filter events by environment, so it's all or nothing. Your Slack channel for production releases will be filled with staging and qa notifications.
I designed it so users can filter on essentially any field of any event - deployment environment, branch patterns, file paths, PR labels, commit authors, etc.
It's at chivesbot.com as a hosted service, however, the signups are disabled right now as I'm working on some core features, but here are a couple of screenshots of the filter creation: https://imgur.com/a/pSiolWu
I'm looking for early beta users and feedback, so if this problem resonates with you, my email can be found in my profile.
I'm working on pact[0], a tool to enable developers and hopefully less technical users to interact with Playwright and perform actions and tests on web-based user interfaces and applications using either a YAML file or a simple DSL (in a .pact file).
Initially this started off as a feature for a PR on venom[1], an integration testing tool, but as I thought about it more - it made sense to maybe make a standalone tool that can evolve a bit different from venom. It's still very early but it works to perform some basic actions using typical CSS selectors that playwright supports.
[0]: https://github.com/zikani03/pact [1]: https://github.com/ovh/venom
Might be worth considering a different name before you get too big. There's already pact.io, which will be the first result any time anyone searches for pact testing.
Thanks for the heads up! I don't know how i missed pact.io - interesting that both are about testing. Will try to think of a different name :_)
Making rent as an open source developer.
Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my really bad HTML skills.
https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
Ah you're the pizza guy! I remember discovering you thru Brad's pizza page: https://btxx.org/pizza/
Hah, I remember them sharing that on mastodon. Happy to inspire more pizza pages. :-)
Working on a script to let people launch claude code, gemini cli, and aider agents on the same task and compare results. Handles all the git worktree stuff for you so they can run in parallel. Kind of like OpenRouter but for CLI agents.
What feels really cool is using the framework to build framework, I've got 150 ai generated commits stacked on top of each other, you can see every prompt and accepted solution in the dev logs I produce: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
> What are you working on?
Early Access for a new terminal emulator [0] bringing dead text to life. It's my professional dream to evolve our conception of terminals without bringing in the bloat of, say, electron (read: staying native).
>Do you have any new ideas you're thinking about?
I like the thought of dropping you into the terminal right on the browser. It wouldn't be the real thing, but having a toy to play with is superior to dry docs.
[0] https://terminal.click
I recently built a site for guessing house prices. I thought I'd be done with it in a week. Over a month later I still have a ton of things to work on.
You can at least play some games now though:
https://housepriceguess.com/roundup/v/holiday-destinations/p...
Enjoy. And yes that really was my wife playing one of the games for the first time in the video ;)
One thing I will be doing this week will be to get different AIs to play the game to get an idea of how good they are. The easiest to start with will be open AI - using the new agent I should be able to record a screencast of it with explanations for each one.
On Raft consensus protocol in Zig - https://github.com/cocky-punch/raft
I’m working on https://tempmaildetector.com and more specifically a Wordpress plugin to support it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/temp-mail-detector-block-tempo...
The plugin offers users a way to input their own block lists, a pre-existing one, or make use of the API which is constantly getting updated.
As a first time Wordpress plugin developer, the approval process was a bit slow but it’s like that for a good reason.
As a frequent temp mail user (for privacy reasons) I wish these things didn't exist..
I appreciate your sentiment, and agree to a point. There’s a time and a place for both disposable email addresses as well as blocking apis.
Assume you offer a free trial with LLM capabilities. There’s a very real cost associated with multiple signup abuse. You can card capture or KYC, but now there’s more friction and greater loss of privacy.
I'm working on an update to my flashcards app, Fresh Cards. The current version has a lot of limitations, so I've been working on a rewrite that improves all aspects of the app, for nearly a year now.
Most recently, I've been incorporating a lot of improved UX design. The app has always used a playlist metaphor, i.e. your database of flashcards is your library and you can sort them in different ways and then hit Play to start reviewing. Within the review session itself, you go through the cards in the playlist in small batches so that it's less overwhelming, among other reasons. After every batch, the app returns to an overview screen so you can see what you've just reviewed so far in the session.
The challenge has been designing this overview screen so it's clear where you are in the playlist without making it overwhelming. I finally came up with a good design this week, which I was quite happy with: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/114921335089371494
I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement this new UI has made on how the product feels. The old UI only showed you the history of cards you've reviewed in the session and highlighted the most recent batch of cards. This new one shows you the full playlist, but redacts the contents of the playlist ahead, so you immediately get a sense of how much left there is to do, but without being shown what is in the contents of the cards. Interestingly, this has the effect of making you want to see what is in those cards, i.e. to keep reviewing!
What's your design process? Any sketches, wireframes, other people testing? Also do you have a video demo or screencast?
My design process is heavy on prototyping directly in code. I usually start off with sketches in pen and paper and then a quick mockup of the UI directly using Swift code since my apps are for iOS and Mac only.
I don't have any testers on this new version at the moment, but I'm considering having some beta testing once I get closer to release. No videos either, but I'm planning on writing some blog posts going over some of the UI flows and new features in the app to help with promotion. Once I polish the lesson UI a little bit, I'll probably post a video on YouTube of it too.
For a long time I've been wanting a private, E2EE social media app for sharing pics/videos of my son with friends and family, but haven't found anything fitting that description. Like most people, we've just been using group texts; the closest alternative I found was shared photo albums, but we wanted the ability to make "posts" with a few pictures and some text. So I've been building it and using it for a couple months with some friends, it's a strange feeling to have the ergonomics of social media with none of the toxic nonsense.
Most people I know are using group texts for this, but I find that unsatisfying because my wife and I want to share stuff with ~20 people, but we don't want to be blasting all of them with texts all the time, or put those 20 people in a group text with each other. We wanted something pub/sub, but with the privacy of E2EE chat apps, and so easy to use our parents will use it.
It's a React app running on Cloudflare Workers, and there's an iOS app in the works using Capacitor; the E2EE is built on OPAQUE. There's a landing page/signup at freefollow.org if you'd like to learn more. I'm working on some demo videos.
I am working on a time tracking app for tasks. I built it because I want to gain a better understanding of how I spend my working days. It's meant to be very simple. Everything is stored locally and requires no login. I don't currently plan to sync it with any backend. This isn't something that can be used to track employees — it's just for personal use.
https://www.zookeeper.fyi/
it's somehow on a block list in ublock. Hence white screen here too, I have to disable adblock to see your site. Maybe the domain used to be for something else before.
Thanks for the feedback - means a lot. I had enabled high level usage tracking on Vercel. I was tracking page views to see if I got any users. I have switched to using Plausible [0], a privacy focused analytics tool, and added an opt out option on first load.
[0] https://plausible.io
edit: fixed url
Just FYI, when I open this on mobile iOS, a blank white page appears. Not sure if this is intended or not.
Thanks for checking it out and thanks a lot for telling. Me definitely not intended. It should work now, but I will monitor this.
Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly.
https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions
I merged support for JavaScript object "shapes" in my Nova JavaScript engine last week; now I just have to clean up some of the ugly parts of the API (and maybe do some performance adjacent changes), and then it's time to use the shapes for property lookup caching!
This is one of the most important performance features in a JS engine, as without shapes property lookups would be terribly slow. I'm looking forward to getting this working.
I started playing around with the idea of a new programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Despite syntactic improvements and type-checking, it's goal is to streamline promises, async/await and callbacks into one signal based system I call live variables. Additionally, those could be compiled via different, interchangeable compiler plugins to framework specific code, like React's useState or Vuejs' Refs, to make it more future prove. It's still in a concept stage and maybe the whole project is futile, but if it piqued your interest, check out https://github.com/nkoehring/Solace
At my day job we have an MCP server and had to spend quite a lot of time setting up extra monitoring and validation for it so I'm building a tool to do those things. Pretty much a regular server uptime checker, but also with some extra's that an MCP client gets access to tool and resource calls.
Our MCP server at work relays most of it's calls over to our API so we wanted to be sure something was testing and validating the whole flow.
https://healthymcp.com/
Working on https://ts.coach, a free guide to Typescript that runs entirely in the browser.
I'm sure you're familiar, but just in case: https://totaltypescript.com does a phenomenal job in this space -- esp. its VSCode extension, which acts as an interactive linter.
Menu is unclickable and Firefox shows "this page is slowing down firefox"
Thank you for the heads up - I made some poor React decisions when I was getting started for the sake of expediency, and now need to untangle them.
I've been working on an encrypted environment variables management tool, called kiln[1], for teams. I know, tools like age and SOPS exist, but this partly came through because of the lack of a good UX around the encryption part especially for a team-based workflow. I aim to continue building kiln as a developer-first experience, making it seamless to integrate into a large team's workflows.
The idea came to me when we were trying to find ways to manage Terraform secrets , CI vars were a no-go because people sometimes wish to deploy locally for testing stuff, and tools like Vault have honestly been a pain to manage, well, for us at least. So I have been building this tool where the variables are encrypted with `age`, have RBACs around it, and an entire development workflow (run ad-hoc commands, export, templating, etc) that can easily be integrated into any CI/CD alongside local development. We're using this and storing the encrypted secrets in Git now, so everything is version-controlled and can be found in a single place.
Do give it a try. I am open to any questions or suggestions! Interested to know what people think of this. Thanks!
[1]: https://kiln.sh
Seems to be very cool project, especially for teams. I like Access control mechanism, and also klin run command is great!
Just finished generating alien bugs and then rigging/animating by hand. Loads of fun and very satisfying to visualize the ideas in my mind. https://youtu.be/sMYmnQlF_Ww
And here's my tech notes - https://www.jasonfletcher.info/vjloops/insectoid-protocol.ht...
I'm getting into frontend web development with Rust by making a tracker [1] (not the advertising kind, rather a type of music-making app that was popular with chiptune artists in the '90s).
This is my first time doing anything with frontend more complex than an image carousel, and I have occasionally felt that I'm in over my head with things like multithreading and audio playback, but it's immensely satisfying seeing the app come together.
I am extremely impressed by the Leptos framework [2], and I'm thrilled that I haven't had to write a single line of JS, even when doing DOM interactions or communicating with web workers.
Once I polish up the tracker frontend, I'd like to add a backend and potentially try to release it as a paid app.
[1] https://mondobe.com/tracker
[2] https://leptos.dev/
My Reddit clone called Comment Castles [0].
Earlier today I implemented "bbcodes" for bold, italic, underline, em (grey background color) and strikethrough. They way it works for bold is like this: b[text here]. If you want to apply multiple you can go bui[text here] for example, which would be bold, underline and italic text.
[0] https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles
I've been working on GrokVocab (https://www.grokvocab.com), an app to improve vocabulary without flashcards or memorization.
Everyone knows reading is the best way to build vocabulary, but many avoid it and turn to flashcards or spaced repetition because long texts can feel overwhelming, and they often have to refer to a dictionary.
This app gives users short, engaging passages focused on comprehension. While reading, users guess word meanings from context and find out whether they got it right by answering a few questions below. I believe this will be helpful for people who haven’t had much success with popular vocabulary learning methods.
I shared it on HN earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543063), but it didn’t get much attention. If you're interested in novel learning methods or vocabulary, I’d love your feedback.
P.S. Login is required since the app uses LLMs to generate interesting passages. You can register with any non-existent email if privacy is a concern.
Byte-Vision is a privacy-first document intelligence platform that transforms static documents into an interactive, searchable knowledge base. Built on Elasticsearch with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) capabilities, it offers document parsing, OCR processing, and conversational AI interfaces.
https://github.com/kbrisso/byte-vision
I'm still working on Kavita, an open source, self hosted book/comic media server with a strong focus on metadata. Been in deep developing a custom annotation/highlight system for epubs.
Annotation ideas: https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita/issues/3890 (since from research, seems there is a strong need for this)
Kavita: https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita
civilwhiz.com – A website dedicated to sharing knowledge about Autodesk Civil 3D. It’s all about old-fashioned knowledge sharing through blog posts, with absolutely no coding (on my part). I host it via WordPress and use some plugins to make it work.
Unlike most Civil 3D portals out there, this site provides deeper explanations of Civil 3D’s inner workings and very few (currently zero) video tutorials. That’s because I believe video tutorials are already widely available elsewhere.
I originally set up this website to teach myself Civil 3D. Along the way, I decided to "open-source" my learning process so others could benefit as well.
After 15 years doing mobile apps, security, and systems development. I ended up learning ton about Cloudflare.
Now connecting all the dots and building a backend for mobile apps. It’s already live https://calljmp.com
Fully powered by Cloudflare, unbeatable pricing, rls and app attestation, raw SQLite queries, and tons more.
Looking for early feedback and adaptors.
I'm releasing an actually instant search-to-type TUI and CLI Finnish to English dictionary called Taskusanakirja (pocket dictionary). It's been steadily optimized to the hilt to be the perfect brookside or website-side dictionary for any learner of the Finnish language. Available on Windows, Mac and Linux as a single standalone executable, with an optional paid database download for Taskusanakirja Pro.
This is the first time I've ever actually released something with a monetization option, so I'll be interested to see where it goes. It's a small enough niche that I think I have several features that genuinely don't exist anyplace else, like the ability to lemmatize even heavily inflected words (a very common stumbling block for learners of Finnish).
A web app would obviously be much easier to monetize, but then I would lose the buttery smooth feel of the search at it currently exists.
Tsemppiä! It's not live yet, but when it is it will be at https://taskusanakirja.com/.
I’m working on LearnMathsToday, a mobile app that helps students learn math in a fun and engaging way. It’s self-paced, with AI-generated questions that adapt to each student’s level. One unique feature is AI-powered marking, which gives instant feedback on written answers. I’ve also added gamification—points, levels, and a storyline—to keep students motivated. Right now, the app is based on the Singapore syllabus, since I’m based in Singapore.
Feel free to try it by downloading here https://learnmathstoday.com/download/
I'm finishing the work of adding apply, list, delete mechanism to my Kubernetes package manager.
The tool is written in Go and exposes a JavaScript interface (like k6) to generate manifests using both template-based and object oriented approaches. It is similar to cdk8s, but is more flexible, doesn't require a dev environment, and allows sharing packages. The apply mechanism will be like kapp, but using kubectl's apply sets.
It already has the features to generate manifests to be used in GitOps. With this addition and the next one, which will be waiting for generated resources, it will become a fully featured package manager.
https://github.com/ohayocorp/anemos
I run a job board for Germany called Arbeitnow. It runs well without any frequent changes. Recently I've added a couple of new sources for jobs and filtering the kind of jobs that get through (relevant to my audience).
Not planning to do a lot during the promised Berlin summer though
https://www.arbeitnow.com/
If it's not gauche to post the same thing two months running, I've been working on https://filmhose.uk, a listings site for London's independent and arts cinemas. Now at the awkward stage where I should probably stop messing about with the site and start "growth hacking" or something.
I got tired of Spotify recommending me, or creating playlists with the same songs over and over again, so I built something to make varied, targeted playlists from my library.
I've been using it for months now, and the playlists generated are my top listened to playlists - I'm literally listening to them every day. Personally I'm super happy with it, and a few friends have also been using it quite successfully.
https://riffradar.org/
Cool idea, tried to signup and got: Invalid state parameter
:(
Are you on mobile by any chance?
If you could try again. I fixed a few small things, and I haven't seen the error since. Unfortunately it seems to manifest sporadically on mobile. I have a feeling there's something in the callback URL I get when authenticating through the mobile app... but still can't pinpoint it 100%
You could also clear your cookies - in case you managed to log-in the previous time and they got set.
Been working on a real time public transit app for the Bay Area and New York but recently decided to use the same data to create a visualization of all the transit vehicles moving in real time!
Initially wanted to make this before my app but it was quite a bit to process all the GTFS data. But now that the data is already processed for the app, the visualization was quite easy to make!
Currently trying to add geocoding so users can search for destinations for routing. Been interesting as I want to avoid Google Maps and other private data sources so open street maps it is.
https://realtime.abetterride.app
An app to help you split individual receipts with a bunch of people:
https://demo.snapreceipts.fyi/
Mainly used by my friends right after we have a group lunch or dinner. You just upload a pic of the receipt after a meal and it parses out the items. We assign who got what and it calculates who owes what.
Makes the receipt splitting part super easy.
I just tried it and I really like it! Do you think it’s gonna stay free?
I just use free API keys and limit my hosting costs right now. I could keep it free for several months but if my users run into usage limits, I'd request financial help to keep the service up. I really dont want an app like this to be expensive.
Please DM me at my email: archit72<at>gmail if you run into rate limits or want more usage! I'd be happy to help you.
How is the text extraction done? Tesseract?
I just use an LLM with a prompt (pls dont hate). Found tesseract to be very bad for text extraction.
I'm building AI for documentation. It will answers users queries related to your product through videos, documentations and blogs. Reducing the load on customer support.
https://chakam.tech
I'm working on a development tool for specification-driven development. It uses LLMs to verify that your specification files and implementation do not drift. More specifically, I am trying to lower the number of false positives I'm currently seeing. I find that the LLM will hallucinate issues when there are no discrepancies, or become forgetful in the case of long documents (like RFC texts). The first step in improving this is to expand my evaluation suite so I can reliably measure improvements.
https://github.com/rejot-dev/semcheck/
How does this compare to previous generations of specification-driven development using formal methods?
I think semcheck has a different use-case. AI is inherently imprecise, if you need formal mathematical verification, AI isn't suitable for that. What semcheck does give you is a very simple way to start verifying specifications, and it's best used in combination with AI-assisted development workflows where you're already spending a lot of time writing specifications (i.e. prompts).
Fastest locally running dictation tool for developers. Done with VAD, noise profiling, low level audio work.
https://carelesswhisper.app
Assertables is a Rust crate for smarter assert testing, debugging, and runtime checking. Good news is it just reached 500K downloads so I'm seeking more people to try it in more kinds of use cases.
https://crates.io/crates/assertables
"Intelligent Workspace":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627910
In lieu of chatbots as the primary means of working with AI.
This is an approach that is human centered and intended to accommodate a wide array of possible use cases where human interaction/engagement is essential for getting work done.
I recently launched one of my small side projects. It's quick online multiple choice code tests aimed at recruiters to evaluate applicants: https://hashtagcode.io
The goal was to make a simple way for recruiters to create coding tests to screen people applying for jobs, and to make the process quick and easy for applicants. The default is a 15 minute multiple choice test across a few different domains.
I will eventually monetise it (when I have more free time) but for now it's free (1000 invites) so I can get feedback and improve it
I'm working on DailySelfTrack ( https://dailyselftrack.com/ ) , an app to track what matters to you in a way that you find relevant. So it is a mix of habit tracker, health log and journal. Like a spreadhsheet app, but with much better UX. And like a habit/health app, but with much greater customization.
I want this to be a tool highly useful for people who have complex health issues, are working towards ambitious goals, or just want to regularly reflect on their day.
I'm building it since I couldn't find a satisfying solution anywhere. It's local first and does not force you into a subscription, or tries to exploit you with any other dark patterns.
Almost ready to launch an all-in-one platform for solving problems I face all the time at work, with clients and my own sites.
Frustrated with running 10+ different checks on domains/websites I've built or working on with 10+ different services, I've built - with help from Claude Code - a Django app that tries to wrap all those key checks into one place. On top of that, I've built in scheduled monitoring and alerting.
It's been a great experience learning about the intricacies and nuances in different website set-ups, the complexities in avoiding false negatives, fun with CloudFlare workers, agentic coding and much more.
The site is still running off a RPi (Coolify) in my home-server behind a CF Tunnel at the moment, so won't link directly here - but ping me if you want to give it a test-run.
Taking time off from formal employment to work on whatever I want. Which is open source projects entirely of my own choosing.
Which projects have you worked on recently?
I built Youtube Segment Clipper, a free Chrome extension to save parts of YouTube videos with timestamps and transcripts.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mkmcjgbighammmaoohb...
After 25 years in web and app development I’m venturing into game development. I’ve already created a small game for a game jam [1] and it served as as a proof of concept to me that I can make something fun so now I want to tackle a bigger game project, complete with original art, music and story. AI coding agents will play a big role here as in my prototype they significantly sped up the process for me. I’ll try to document this one too and the plan is to release the source code for it as well.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967
Finally caved and built a custom AI newsletter curation platform for a friend who's been pestering me to automate his GPT news digests. Still no idea if there's real demand, but the learning experience with Cursor and Claude Code has been worth it. After growing my own newsletter to 800 subscribers, I'm convinced aggregation beats adding another newsletter to the pile.
Thanks to Claude, it works way better than I should've managed solo: https://www.procuratorai.com
Free signup to test: https://my.procuratorai.com/login (no help/intro yet, and I'm paying for tokens so not advertising it widely...)
Homepage is basically a one-shot Claude build using Nunjucks on Netlify (first time with both).
(Subscribe button is broken - still working on that...)
Hey, as the friend who nudged you into this, this really helps me in my work with (former) elite athletes now entrepreneurs/investors and with high-octane executives. These folks receive too many calls, emails, messages, and yes, of course, newsletters and reports. I understood, the last thing they need is another newsletter or report. Instead, they need sharp, AI-driven tools to sift through the noise and surface actionable insights—signals, risks, and next steps, etc. ProCurator AI's platform is shaping up to do exactly that (btw, very easy to set up for users), and it’s cool to see how you leveraged Claude Code and Cursor to make it happen. This whole thing makes it possible for me to deliver these guys customized briefings tailored to their needs and schedule based on the information they receive in their inbox e. g. via newsletters and reports. Curious to hear what others here think about tackling info overload with tools like this.
I didn't wanna read all that
Here is what the bot said
This helps me turn inbox noise into useful briefings for busy clients. Cool use of AI—curious what others think.
Good work! I'm trying to sign up using joel@joelparkerhenderson.com to try it. Can you enable my account? Thanks!
Thanks very much for your interest. I fixed a bug that prevented signup. (There is an extra signup tab on the login page https://my.procuratorai.com/login) Works again now.
Just confirm your email address and you are good to go. Any feedback super welcome (marco / irg@procuratorai.com). Irg will also gladly give you an onboarding session, if needed. Just get in touch.
Claude Code has changed the way I write code.
Programming for me has become a lot more fun because of Claude Code. I get to spend more time planning and researching.
I have been working on https://codient.dev to be able to run Claude Code agents in the background without setting up a local IDE!
Building low cost tools to give email owner's their attention back.
1. Inbox Toll - solves the "real human, still spam" problem by making the sender pay a fee before the email actually lands in your inbox. Set your toll as low as $0.01.
2. Auto Label - automatically label (+ optionally archive) all non-human messages into logical categories like newsletters, receipts, promotions, etc.
3. Inbox Cleaner - time-based inbox scan that bulk deletes non-essential emails.
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junkmailcleaner.com
I am working on a chess analytics tool, specifically a free and open source replacement of Chessbase in this age of LLMs that can run on all platforms. The idea is to lower the barrier of entry to use a chess improvement tool since Chessbase can be intimidating for a causal Chess.com beginner looking to go into serious chess prep. At present, it can do basic queries like H2H score of Magnus Carlsen vs Hikaru Nakamura, the top 10 juniors in the US, Magnus Carlsen's games with the London system opening and involving a queen sacrifice etc. Though getting it to work for advanced multi-step tactical patterns and finding games with certain imbalances in the query using natural language is getting challenging. DuckDB has helped a lot, along with modern LLMs for query generation with schema and some preprocessing of game PGNs and piece hashes. It can also import a user's Chess.com and Lichess games given the usernames and do similar queries as on Master level games.
I also used the tool to generate an Adult Chess improvers FIDE rank list for all federations around the world. Here are the July 2025 rankings though it still needs major improvements in filtering - https://chess-ranking.pages.dev
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Another idea that I have been working on for sometime is connecting my Gmail which is a source of truth for all financial, travel, personal related stuff to a LLM that can do isolated code execution to generate beautiful infographics, charts, etc. on my travels, spending patterns. The idea is to do local processing on my emails while generating the actual queries blindly using a powerful remote LLM by only providing a schema and an emails 'fingerprint' kind of file that gives the LLM a sense of what country, region, interests we might be talking about without actually transmitting personal data. The level of privacy of the 'fingerprint' vs the quality of queries generated is something I have been very confused with.
I'm working on https://leetprompt.io
It is a platform for prompt challenges, in leetcode style. But you act as a director for the AI writing the code. You ask what you need and the AI implements your request.
The idea is to create some awareness about the fact that you do need to know how to code to be able to steer the AI in the right direction.
Do LLM Agents really understand Linux?.
I am working on world model for computer systems. I am designing experiment and benchmark for LLM Agents to see if they possess understanding of "Linux". World model for computer systems will be crucial next step for computer use agents to reliably plan their actions over long horizon.
Links to draft: https://open.substack.com/pub/disastermanagementtechnologies...
I'm working on JustRef[1]: AI Referee for Sports. I shipped the product a few days ago and seeing more than 2K users have already signed up and using the web app. Seeing people enjoy the application you created gives me a lot of enjoyment. Currently, I'm giving away 1 credit for every sign-up. No need to pay to try out.
[1]: https://justref.app
That sounds awesome actually, as a woman football player I for sure would have some proper fun with it. You should try to pitch it to the organizations imo!
I'm glad that you enjoy it! Please let me know your email so I can assign some more credits for you to play around more.
awesome. did you write something about how the service works?
Thinking of writing a blog in the upcoming days. I'll share it through the website.
https://www.threeemojis.com/ , a daily word game for learning foreign languages. It's been a lot of fun to work on, and it's almost something that I am very proud of. For now it's only playable in German, and someday I hope that it will include many more languages. Today's puzzle shows the challenges of making something like this because there are a lot of old ancient words in there (that I am working on filtering out).
Hoping to see the English version soon! By the way, I'm also working on a daily games website with a subscription model (it's not live yet!), and I'm considering a price range exactly like yours. Are you having success with your subscription model? This thread [1], specifically this comment [2], was a letdown, but I haven't given up.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595184 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43600346
Ask me in a few months about subscriptions, I'm only a few weeks into having this thing be something even remotely playable. It's more or less the nytimes model and they seem to make it work. Right now, my girlfriend is very helpfully finding very obvious bugs in it most nights that I am fixing, and then after that I hope to get English in there.
I have also read that thread previously and disagree with ads being the only way to go. I think if the game is good enough and, for three emojis in particular, people learn more about their target language, that they will happily pay for it. I know I would at least, and I personally don't think I'm so weird. Friends have surprised me by signing up as soon as I sent it to them, specifically on the language learning value proposition, so I think there's something there. But, if it was just a puzzle game for fun only, then I might agree that the model doesn't work. We will just have to see!
Currently working on https://exitfox.com/. After recently switching jobs, I became frustrated with the handover process to the new joiner. This experience inspired me to start building a tool that uses Gemini/Claude to ask relevant questions about the project being handed over, streamlines the exit process in a structured format, Now I am adding more features for HR managers and employees around Clearance, FnF etc
Interestingly I found Claude Code to be the only LLM good at designing frontend, asking it to make it look better actually helps
Do you have any particular prompt foo for Claude Code re: frontend? I'm so tired of the generic designs
I am working to build a book discovery website: https://shepherd.com/
Right now I am focused on building a full app for readers where the books they log feed into recommendations based on a ton of variables...
ATProto is helluva complex and inconvenient to work with without supporting libraries, even in a relatively sugary language, like Kotlin. So, I decided to write a (programmatic) code generator that takes Lexicon on input and gives all the HTTP code and data classes you may ever need. If you wonder why Bluesky native apps are crap, that's because they are in TypeScript, not in Kotlin and Swift, which are programming languages of Android and Apple platforms. Maybe, someone will take my code and use it to make an app that feels good...
Can you elaborate on BlueSky native apps being bad because they are written in TypeScript?
I'm building https://adeptli.org with the goal of making personalized learning available to anyone with an internet connection. It's pay-as-you-go, and everyone starts with free credits to check it out and not incur costs if they don't find it useful. I'm still very early in development and very open to feedback!
I'm building Journoo, an Ai-native journaling/diary app as an intelligent companion and memory repository for mental well-being, accountability, seeing patterns, critical thinking, processing thoughts/feelings, making better decisions, thinking of others, creativity, help staying focused on long-term aim/goals, and documenting and remembering your life - all according to your core values (via text, voice, and image).
Basically a productivity tool for making sense of reality and living your best life.
I love making something truly valuable and it's also a crash course on AI product/app development. Absolutely having the time of my life and am so grateful to be on this path!
Flutter with iOS and Android this summer. Desktop and Apple Watch soon.
A desktop environment for Linux, visually inspired by OSX Snow Leopard with a touch of contemporary. Coming with compositor, apps like dock, finder, status bar, and a UI framework like AppKit. Scratching my own itch and would love to see if it can gain traction. Still in the early innings though.
what framework/techstack are you using? i'd love to see something built on top of GNUstep which is close to what OSX is originally based on. (don't know how much of that is still found in Snow Leopard)
Still working on Orbiter[0], and open source web hosting solution focused on keeping things simple and helping developers avoid vendor lock-in.
We recently added serverless functions for backend support, specifically for the bhvr[1] stack though they work with just about anything.
[0] https://orbiter.host [1] https://bhvr.dev
I'm working on a reading app. It integrates llms with your content. I know that the current llm providers already help you upload and ask qs about the docuemnt.
But I'm focused on building a good reading experience overall - which helps you learn and understand the content more easily. Imagine Macos preview integrated with llms. Currently, the web app uses the llm apis but eventually will add support for local llms as well.
I'm aware of other apps that have done something similar, but want to see this through for myself.
I'm building a information hub that utilize AI agents to compile all the relevant information from China (gov, econ, commerce, anything and everything). I call it "information domination". Heard many times that language barrier stops people having a better understanding of China. Now the LLM translation is good enough, and AI agents can do way more in information gathering stage. It's time to put things in practice.
https://wallnot.com
For now, it only has a daily newsletter fully compiled by AI agents without any human intervention. I plan to add public listed companies (semiconductor, energy provider, etc) onto the platform. Already found lots of good data points that can be used by analysts, researchers or observers.
Working on a dog collar that understands dog vocalizations: https://sarama.ai
The current app is being rebuilt as it sucks and the device is under active development.
We've gotten the following to work:
1. Emotion detection with barks
2. Cough detection (Kennel Cough specifically)
3. Identifying a dog from their bark
4. Video analysis of dog behavior
5. Identifying key parts in dog vocalizations (similar to phonemes in people)
6. Some basic intent detection (or what people call translation)
If anyone is good at μpython + TFLite and can help us transferring our models on device that'd be awesome. Currently our set up is super hacky.
I'm working on a decade old problem - searching files in macOS. Started building to solve my own issues after realising none of the tools supports what I need. Very excited about the upcoming feature that I'm releasing this week as it lets you search inside specific folders - something that is not offered by other tools
https://www.fileminutes.com
I'm working on Paint Launcher (beta) – a minimalist Android home screen without icons, where you paint tappable zones onto your wallpaper instead. You can try it out now here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lukew3.pai...
Very cool. I wish there more more customizable smartphone interfaces like this.
Working on an open source RAG-as-a-service platform that bakes in the best practices and continues to evolve them so that customers get the best retrieval without having to go deep or stay up to date.
Our flagship feature is Agentic RAG, which is quite difficult to build from scratch.
https://agentset.ai https://github.com/agentset-ai/agentset
I've been working on my YouTube channel here, creating content for n8n workflows. My latest video is about creating an automated youtube newsletter for your videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQcsCbM9Fgs
I’m still slowly working on a location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info) - the idea is people install an app and agree in a very upfront way to have their location tracked over time.
The union monetises this by selling privacy preserving aggregates (think ‘where is everyone in London right now’, or ‘where did people commute from?’), and acts on behalf of union members to stop data brokers selling their location data.
this is a really fascinating idea. I'm reading it as, instead of seeing my individual identity in a location dataset, it will see -DataUnionMember- with no unique identifier? When two members are in the same place at the same time, you don't know which one went in which direction?
The question of who can de-identify or unmask the data is there, but I could see the capability being required for gov, military, and police, and then as a premium service to customers.
I think at least initially the ‘product’ is datasets which don’t show individuals. You could of course build out a future direction which is differentially private.
More or less my initial approach to this is you take a grid, and you show movements/density on that grid. If necessary you coarsen the grid to avoid reidentification of individuals, and ultimately to get a good picture of the population given the biased sample which is the union membership, you need a statistical model on top which also helps from a privacy perspective.
State actors demanding individual location history is definitely an issue. I have a few possible approaches in mind to defend against that.
1. Offline AI file manager 2. Health tracker, sport, food, mental health (CBT) with AI - only for myself, for now(probably forever :)). 3. Community app where you can find people working on the same hobby/idea. I was trying to find someone to work on my small roach size swarm bots, but didn't know how to find same-minded people.
I'm working on ThreatCluster - automatically clusters related cybersecurity news from over 100 sources, so you see complete threat stories, timeline and analysis instead of scattered fragments.
https://threatcluster.io/ https://threatcluster.io/about
I replied to a similar discussion in April 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822#35568411) about a dinner club a friend and I host in our free time.
We work with a single restaurant each month to create a 10-20+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Here’s the 2024 update (I haven’t run the year to date cumulative numbers yet):
* Grew to over 900 members
* Hosting 2 seatings per month
* Served 1,300 guests
* Generated $140k revenue
I am a radio listener (not only shortwave, but also ham, utilities, etc.) and I am working to create a social network for radio listeners, that help to identify unknown radio stations and also to send QSLs.
I am keeping very simple to learn principles of web development, as I am very struggling in frontend.
I took July off. ()!_!() Having implemented [2] in [1], a long time goal, the accomplishment of which has made me very happy, I felt the need to step back and take a break, sort out what I want to do with it next. A little bit about the journey can be gleaned from [3].
[1] https://newspeaklanguage.org [2] https://multisynq.io https://chalculator.com/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo...
Working on going sub 20 min 5K. It's hard but I am enjoying the challenge.
I'm working on a webapp for home inspectors. Early phases, no demo yet, just occasional updates and screenshots: https://wonger.dev/nuggets#n166
It's been tough to find work, so I figured I'd revisit an old SaaS idea. I worked for a home inspector in the past and saw a need for better (cheaper/faster/easier) report software.
Even if the business side flops, I'd still be satisfied with the experience. I've learned a lot about new tools like WASM and web components. I also like the UX challenge of designing for inspectors filling out reports on their phones.
Very cool idea, best of luck! This is the kind of “unsexy” software that has the potential to make boatloads of money. And it’s still fun to build.
https://github.com/osintbuddy/osintbuddy - Node graphs, data mining, and plugins. This year I've rewritten the project to learn Rust and we're nearly at feature parity compared to the old Python version (github.com/jerlendds/osintbuddy). I'm currently working out how the Python plugin system will work and I've jotted down some thoughts related to that here: https://studium.dev/osib/architecture#existing-plugin-system...
I’m working on https://voicecast.app/. It’s podcast voicemail and now recently, videomail. Trying to capture the YouTuber and Twitch streamer market but worried about diluting the product’s selling point. Seeing some cool growth lately.
A new context preparation engine tuned toward AI Assisted CLI, i.e. Claude Code
Based, in part, on my work on my open source project, FileKitty: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty
Other efforts:
- Ways to rip, parse and fuse various content typesinto simple and well-indexed input documentation for use in LLM contexts
- Reverse engineering various AI web chat frontend stacks
- Generalized subagents and commands useful for claude code
- Onboarding SWEs using claude code
I'm building Collie (https://collie.ink/).
It's a tool to help teachers detect student assignments that have been written by AI. Unlike other solutions out there, it's an entire web-based text editor that analyses not just the final assignment, but all the keystrokes used during the writing process.
My theory is that analysing the final text only is a futile struggle - billions are being pumped into making LLM text look more human, so trying to make an assessment off final text alone is guess work at best.
I'm curious what folks think! Especially teachers, devs, and anyone navigating this space...
I can't help but immediately think about a counteracting piece of software, which asks an LLM for variations of a paragraph, or a phrase, or a few synonyms, and types it the way a human would, with pauses, typos, navigation, rearranging pieces via copy-paste, etc.
Not that your software is going to be useless. But as long as there is an incentive to cheat, new and better tools that facilitate cheating will crop up. Something else should change.
Yeah it's a good call out. I think it's a (more) winnable battle though.
For both a keystroke based AI detector, and software designed to mimic human keystroke patterns, performance will be determined by the size of the dataset they have of genuine human keystroke patterns. The detector has an inherent leg-up in this, because it's constantly collecting more data through the use of the tool, whereas the mimic software doesn't have any built in loop to collect those inputs.
I got burned by software like this, when I pasted in a essay I transcribed while driving through Whisper, and software like this thought I had pasted AI content lol
Lol! Technically they're not wrong about it being AI generated, just not at all in the way they meant.
Interesting idea! Could someone use the software to train an LLM prompt that will get around it? By learning what passes and what doesn’t and then having the LLM train on that
Yeah this is something I'm a little worried about - right now it's not extremely difficult to just take an AI generated essay and then just tweak the essay until it passes.
My first pass approximation is to make the assessment of whether the essay is AI generated or not accessible only to teachers. I may need to also rate-limit the checks, so people can't brute force it to gather data on what passess.
I'm building a cursor for document editing. I'm tired of copy pasting text between ChatGPT and Google Docs/notion. There's too much formatting work after and the edits are a pain. The plugins those platforms offer aren't as good. Not sure how many people struggle with this. Would love to know if there are alternatives already too.
Working on www.lattix.app, a macOS app to launch apps and files across multiple monitors, in the layout you want them to be in. I built this for myself as a companion since I context switch a lot ( work, personal projects and hobbies ), now it's public.
We are working on Gossip: the future of media insights (think Meltwater, Brandwatch, etc).
It’s been a journey but getting close to launching our first version to pilot customers in August. We use an enormous amounts of AI tokens every month to extract data not possible with any traditional player in this media monitoring space. Benchmarking competitors, tracking impactful discussions, and receiving actionable brand insights.
If you are currently using one of the big media monitoring companies, I’d love to chat!
https://www.gossipinsights.com/en/top-companies/us/
pgqueuer turns vanilla PostgreSQL into horizontally-scalable job queue with zero extra infrastructure. If you’re running Postgres and want to ditch extra queue clusters, give it a spin and let me know how it holds up.
https://github.com/janbjorge/pgqueuer
Working on AutoDBA [1]. The goal is to help developers and DBAs find and fix common performance issues, misconfigurations, unused indices, and silent slowdowns directly in your IDE.
We're trying to figure out how to narrow down our target audience and get to early revenue. Also, how we can grow the extension adoption.
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=autodba-...
I'm working on Botnet of Ares [0], a hacking game set in a cyberpunk world where everything is connected.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
When do you think it’ll be done?
Hopefully some time next year!
Making progress on a Warhammer 40k rules engine and client (think in-browser RTS style). It's actually getting to be playable with a reduced rules set, and designed to be highly extensible / plug-in-able.
I'll still need to implement some kind of "AI" opponent or hack together P2P networking to demo it though; playing against yourself is fine for testing, but not really how the game is meant to be played.
It's hand coded so far, but I'm hoping AI can be a big lift for churning out the multiple thousands of named special rules, as most of these are very simple (+1 here, reroll there, etc).
Any WH40k players out there? Love to hear your thoughts!
Building Rappo (http://buildrappo.com/founders), an agentic GTM for devtools and infra startups to land their first customer.
I spent some weekends and after-work evenings tidying up some ambient and electronic recordings both new and old, and today I finally decided to publish it on bandcamp: https://semicolony.bandcamp.com/
It’s all downloadable for free since I make a living off databases so I don’t need to make money off this. I did this to give some closure to ideas I started working on 30 years ago.
A motion capture App that uses a probabilistic approach to fully automate the labeling and mapping process. I have this algorithm for quite a while in my head and want to use it to get up to speed with Godot and Rust. Intended to work with marker-based systems and eventually on unsynchronized multi camera setups
I work on portsentry (https://portsentry.xyz) - A portscan detection and response tool. It was first released in 1997 and abandoned in 2003. I’ve been a user for a long time but needed several features so I adopted the project in 2022.
I'm trying to integrate Meshtastic devices with the Signal K marine software ecosystem.
The idea is to facilitate communications between ship and the shore party, as well as to have alerts, some commands ("boat, turn deck light on") without reliance on telecommunications infrastructure.
Down the line communication and telemetry sharing between different vessels is also potentially interesting.
https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/signalk-meshtastic
I'm working on tirreno (1) - an open-source (2) cybersecurity analytics. Like SIEM but for web-developers.
(1) https://www.tirreno.com
(2) https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
I built zkshare to share secrets securely without trusting the server. https://github.com/streetsmart-ai/zkshare
I'm building Zenta, a small set of offline tools to help you focus and stay present.
And Flow – a terminal app that helps you track deep work without distractions. It runs locally, keeps things simple, and protects your attention instead of just counting time.
Made for developers who want calm, not noise.
GitHub:
- https://github.com/e6a5/zenta
- https://github.com/e6a5/flow
I have a couple smaller projects pending that may become a part of something bigger, but the most amusing one so far a priorities app. At its core its basically a todo list. The difference is that I let it go through local llm to reconcile against declared ( and occasionally derived ) priorities and check for alignment to the todo list with the idea being that the most aligned items should be the ones to act on.
Overall, it is ending up being the most amusing thing I was working on.
edit: Very much for personal use. I currently have no intention of sharing it anywhere.
A Pomodoro timer to improve my skills but primarily as an excuse to get better at various AI coding tools when they pop up.
A website down-time detector because I think I can make money off it and learn a few things so I can later launch a grown-up SaaS.
A replacement for MS Notepad but with Markdown support. (I know Notepad sort of added this but it isn't great.) It's the tool I want to have when I say, "I like the way I can edit things in Notion and Obsidian but 95% of the functionality of those apps feel like bloat for my use case".
I'm working on what I hope to be a high-performance voxel engine from scratch in Rust in my free-time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlolXvBDmRY
Cubic chunks, full lighting engine, opting to be non-deterministic, everything is unsigned integer math except for rotation and rendering, multiplayer is mostly implemented, built to be able to handle heavy simulation.. the foundation work is almost done. Right now it's just a hobby to try to build the best thing I can build. I work on it because it's fun.
In my day job, working with biotech and life science research companies to automate FDA compliance. That is automatically generate sections of their submissions based on their results/protocols and FDA rules[1]. Here is a short demo: https://www.loom.com/share/3a5a7f4c1cbe4abe825339c18c7397bf?...
[1]: We work at clioapp.ai w a paragraph more detail under products
Working on sanctum [0] and reliquary [1].
Soon approaching a 1.0 release for sanctum once I get my brain out of vacation mode and into hacking mode again. A lot has happened this year and I am excited.
I will be talking about how sanctum and its cathedrals work at sec-t 2025 [2] so in full swing working on the demos and presentation.
[0] https://github.com/jorisvink/sanctum
[1] https://reliquary.se
[2] https://sec-t.org
The process names in the sanctum project made me smile :) I wonder why you chose "guardian" and not "bishop" (or even "episcopus"), which is literally "overseer".
I'm dipping my toes into decompilation -- specifically, decompiling Super Smash Bros. Melee. Once you get into the groove, it's kinda addicting! Now that I've done a few functions by hand, I'm wondering how to best leverage AI to speed up the process.
Come decompile with us! https://github.com/doldecomp/melee
Thanks for your work! Always impressive to see the technical side of the SSBM community.
Me and another artist are having our fourth live performance of “We Wade Awake” [0] We’ve iterating on it each time, and the latest had a fully dynamic and procedural world generation using Unreal PCG. All input comes from two midi controllers, and we’ve built out a 25 minute experience of a fever dream trip through a surreal Bayou. Some videos and sound in the link.
Been fun to push Nanite and Lumen to the limit!
[0]: https://boris.kourtoukov.com/we-wade-awake-live-visual-perfo...
I'm working on the TXR Lisp compiler, improving a certain optimization that identifies and eliminates certain kinds of wasteful VM register moves. It works and has many good "hits" in the code base, but doesn't handle certain cases.
Bedtime Bulb v2: A light bulb for use before bed that reduces blue light and adds near infrared [0]
Atmos Sleep Lamp: A bedside lamp that reduces blue light at night and wakes you up more naturally with light in the morning [1]
[0] https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...
[1] https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
I am bootstrapping Appio.so
Appio lets you add mobile widgets and native push notifications to your web app within minutes, without building or maintaining mobile apps, hiring developers, or dealing with app stores. You can try it at: https://demo.appio.so/
If you’re building a web-based product without a mobile app, or just want to try Appio, I’d love to chat! You can reach me directly via https://my.appio.so/ or drop a comment here.
It's not a bid deal but... I've become interested in low level programming some time ago. During past 5 months I've been working (not with the diligence I wanted) on a GameBoy emulator written in C++. It started with me trying to emulate the gbz80 chipset, then the "why not?" question did hit my mind.
Actually I have finished the CPU fetch-decode-execute cycle, so I'm implementing the CPU instructions and looking forward to implement a basic version of the MBC and get cycle accurate.
Working on SAAS Community Builder - https://kocial.net
We saw an increase in demand for individuals willing to build their own HackerNews, Product Hunt, or Reddit-like Community.
So, we built a SaaS platform for them, where they can launch their own community with their custom domain in just a few seconds.
Demo community - https://kocial.co
Get your own community here - https://kocial.net
Working still on Diabetes Diary Plus. Simple Diabetes Tracker. Did my own app because all other sucks.
https://diabetes-diary-plus.com
https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/diabetes-tagebuch-plus/id16622...
A workflow engine, but not an "airflow like" (even if I hope it will become an airflow killer) but more similar to old job scheduling systems from mainframe era(OPC/TWS/CA7 ecc).
In my opinion, those mainframe-era dinosaurs are conceptually far more superior to what we have today on servers and cloud systems.
I've been making songbooks for my favourite songs. I am currently working on a songbook for some friends. I've found https://www.chordpro.org/ an amazing CLI tool, under active development. I am using the ukulele, but the program also easily can do guitar or piano. The program reads a bunch of text files and produces a really nice PDF. I've also used pandoc + LaTeX for the front matter.
I'm just done writing the report for my nlp exam, I tried to fine tune some gemma models and wow, I have to say that there's still a lot to do in terms of documentation, examples, whatever. It still feels a very fresh field, sometimes not knowing where to bash my head
Currently working on Hydal: https://www.hydal.xyz/
It's an electronic product database, where you can search through products and see all of the detailed specifications about each product. Has an API as well.
Currently integrating electronic news / reviews that will be linked to products.
I've been working on an app that writes customer emails so small businesses can focus on what energizes them.
It makes answering customer emails 10x easier.
The magic are training templates which are templates that get suggested (and eventually auto-selected) and personalized by LLM for every reply.
Every reply sent trains it to auto select that training template for future similar customer emails.
The stack is Ruby on Rails and Postgres hosted on DigitalOcean. The LLM currently is Kimi K2 hosted on Groq.
https://vipreply.ai
Also built an app that lets you search inside Youtube videos and jump to the specific moments where something was mentioned.
For example: "Paul Graham interview best founders" (surfaces moments where pg talks about founder qualities): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqk9QaV-ag
A music album bookmarking site. Like Goodreads, but for music. For folks who like to explore and listen to whole albums.
https://digs.fm
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
I'm currently working on the NimbyDar - a tracker for cancelled renewable developments in the UK, attempting to find patterns within which locations tend to hate clean energy and renewable projects.
https://nimby.bemben.co.uk
I'm adding feature to run jobs with custom CPU and Memory quota, so that multiple jobs can be run on a single system to better utilize it's capacity.
This is for Daestro[1] which is a cloud agnostic job orchestrator.
[1] https://daestro.com
Me and my brother are working a social network with chronological feed and private profiles.
Goal is to build a social network that doesn't harm the user in any way and provides full control over their data.
Here's the waitlist: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev
Let me know if you have any questions. Email is cornfield.labs@gmail.com
I quit my job to work to create a story game powered by AI. We have a few agents that are in charge of memories, perception, and unlocking game achievements. If that sounds cool you can give it a try here: https://k58.duya.io
I'm building an app for language learning with Youtube. I realized that yt probably has the largest collection of spoken language that ever existed, so I wanted to make it accessible, especially on mobile.
I'm focusing on Chinese (Mandarin) right now, because that's what I've been learning, and the language learning community on reddit likes it too. But other languages are also available.
Link: https://lingolingo.app
I have been experimenting with rendering fonts in Rust lately. I was pleasantly surprised by how simple reading the ttf file format is. The hard part, of course, is actually doing everything with the bezier curves and contours and filling the insides etc. But if I were to just be working with straight lines, I already have everything I need. Indeed, I used MATLAB's `patch` to quickly check my progress and see the major bugs in my rendering implementations, and got there within a couple hours.
A tool to solve optimization problems using quantum computers. Just released the first open-source version https://github.com/pasqal-io/maximum-independent-set/ . Now expanding it to more complex types of optimization problems.
Also, thinking about resurrecting http://opalang.org/. We'll see if I have the energy to work on that.
Building a database of film, tv, games etc based around historical setting: in what year or historical period was the thing set, and where.
It's early days but it's fun
I'm working on DBOS Transact [0], our open source library that adds durability and reliability to your codebase. We're about to launch support for Golang [1] and Java, and that's going to bring some really interesting customer problems. I can't wait!
[0] https://github.com/dbos-inc
[1] https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-go
https://attachedapp.com
We focus on people with relationship issues, and so far it's been deeply fulfilling. So many people have written in about how this has helped them heal.
Launched with React Native about 8 weeks ago, and continuing to grow fast. This is a niche space with lots of potential over the next few years I think.
Just submitted an update to help people compare their unique relationship needs to others which is so cool.
I'm working on my game "Night of the Trickster". It's a Christmas themed stealth/horror game
After tinkering with game technology for years now, I'm pleased I've finally managed to use all that knowledge to create something (soon to be) releasable
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3407760/The_Night_of_the_...
I'm working on this, improving in every iteration. (Documentation needs to be updated as well)
https://github.com/bugthesystem/Flux
Flux is a high-performance message transport library for Rust that implements patterns inspired by LMAX Disruptor and Aeron. It provides lock-free inter-process communication (IPC), UDP transport, and reliable UDP with optimized memory management for applications with low latency requirements.
I'm currently working on https://beontimer.com a free timing app for running and cycling races.
It started off because I wanted to see if I could print QR codes on a piece of paper and use these to detect people crossing a lap if finish line.
That proved more difficult than I thought, the QR codes were not easy to scan from far away and while moving. It is still in alpha stage.
What does work is a simple manual mode for people to use at their races.
I am trying to figure out how to do marketing for my journaling app for language learning. Basically, you journal in a foreign language and see grammar and other mistakes directly in the app: https://langdiary.com
Experimenting with exhaustive tagged-union support based on Clojure's defmulti.
I think it might be better to go the other way, and have a pattern-matchey form generate the defmethods instead, but I need to gain tacit knowledge about it first.
https://github.com/escherize/clj-multimatch
Productionizing duckdb :) I built a streaming tool around duckdb that allows for high performance stream processing and a rich connector ecosystem:
https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow
Building a company around a tool is hard. There's been some interest but streaming is kind of commoditized.
I'm taking everything I learned building it and working on a customer-facing security product, more to come on that :)
Working on the TAIKO-01, a mass produced split curved keyboard. Planning for release in 6 months.
Join the waitlist here: taiko.taikohub.com
Working on Lunova — a QuickBooks Online app that you can create custom alerts via SMS/email such as when big deposits land, invoices go overdue, or vendor prices spike. Just cleared Intuit’s tech/security + marketing review (Took over 3 months... after building the MVP) and we’re now live on the QBO App Store. Feedback and feature requests welcome: https://uselunova.com
https://podskim.com is for turning podcasts into knowledge graphs and making them visually skimmable. Keep adding features but need to shift to some user research and see how people are using it
I'm studying, on my spare time, whether LLM can enhance democracy (mostly with a direct use of technology by helping citizens). I'm currently doing a systematic literature review on this topic
Happy to discuss on that topic or to discover new initiatives / sources
I spent good amount of my summer holiday rebuilding Masterlist (https://masterlist.fi)
This is probably third (or fourth) incarnation of the app and I like writing a web apps with Hotwire more and more. Especially leaning more on <turbo-stream> features removes frontend complexity compared previous versions. Highly recommended, both Hotwire and rewriting your apps!
My business partner and I are building an AI-powered lead gen platform that allows you to request leads directly from Slack for a variety of roles. Most mature sales orgs have really in-depth CRMs that can serve this purpose (Apollo etc) but smaller teams generally don’t. We’re here to fill that gap.
It’s called Wednesday.
Check it out: https://wednes.day
I've been building promptslice.com as a way to create, test, and optimize prompts + tools + context. I needed it when building agents for other use cases so I built it. Unlike Langsmith and some of the other prompt editors, this has a first class editor for your prompt with "Cursor style" chat where you can ask it to make tweaks, overhaul sections, optimize ambiguity, etc.
The demo on the homepage is neat. I see the advantage of the editor.
My co-founder and I, are building an AI travel assistant that creates personalised itineraries for users and allows them to book everything with one click, making it easy to manage all the bookings in one platform. It also helps with contingencies making travel planning and travelling, as a whole, stress-free.
We have just launched our waitlist landing page: https://travist.app
Working on 3dpack.ing, an AI-powered 3D container loading tool.
It calculates optimal ways to load boxes into trucks or containers, considering stacking rules, fragility, and real-world constraints. You can drag boxes like 3D Tetris or upload photos to auto-estimate item dimensions. Recently added: batch-wise guided loading for warehouse use cases.
We're at ~$400 MRR and just opened up a 14-day free trial. Feedback, trials, and intros to logistics folks welcome.
Still plugging away at bitemporal databases. Yesterday, someone shared my blog post about it!
> Poor man's bitemporal data system in SQLite and Clojure (evalapply.org)
> 13 points by PaulHoule 1 day ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695670
Two things I’m thinking on.
Firstly a DevManual - for “any” software team/IT dept - how to think about the philosophy, history and practise of basically everything - release management, backup and recovery or IAM and security and marketing-by-engineering or CSS
It’s kind of “this much I know” and a working docker based OSS “software team in a box”
And the second one is really expanding on the philosophy - how software is changing companies and how democracy works with software
I'm trying the make an "OS" that simulates all of the OS processes on Python and React called Maamut95. I'm kinda clueless about how an OS works, so that's why I've gotten help from AI a lot. This is some kind of learning project.
A configurable and extensible orchestrator for Claude Code (and other agents). Turns out it can be effectively used not only for coding, but also for reviews, testing, and other tasks. https://github.com/Gusarich/orchestrator
I just open-sourced: https://github.com/cloudexplain/xaiflow, a mlflow plugin to get interactive xai (particularly shap values) as mlflow artifacts. Furthermore looking into causal AI, especially dowhy.
I’m working on a free & open-source invoice generator:
- Live PDF preview
- 100% client-side
- No sign-up required
- Includes a Stripe-style invoice template
- Built with modern web tech – simple to self-host or fork
Repo: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Demo: https://easyinvoicepdf.com
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features!
Seems to work well. The live preview workflow is nice. I like data URLs but not sure how other people feel handling several-hundred character URLs.
Only minor gripe is that the "support my work" popup is a bit aggressive.
Thanks for the feedback!
The long URL is a compromise that lets the service work without requiring sign-ups or storing user data.
I’ll definitely try to make the “support my work” popup less aggressive.
I think you could cut the URL length in half if you remap the JSON keys before compressing. Like turning
to this Cut from ~1400 to ~700 chars in my testing, which is still a lot, so idk if you think it would be worth the extra code.Awesome idea, thank you, will look into this
I'm working on a telemedicine system connecting patients with remote doctors in rural Africa.
https://www.virtualhospitalsafrica.org/
While medical records systems in much of the developed world are still shared via fax, we think there's an opportunity to leapfrog existing systems and have a cloud-based source of truth.
https://withoutcms.com - the non-technical user friendly CMS for the Vercel age.
https://gather.buzz - an influencer tracking / CRM platform.
I'm working on an app[0] that makes hosting temporary PDF forms simple, without needing an account or payment. You simply add input fields over any static PDF and publish it to get a link which you can send to other people who may need to fill the form.
The form stays online for 30 days. To keep the forms online for longer, I will be offering paid plans.
[0]:https://www.signmypdf.com
Well executed! Low fuss. The widget process was intuitive and worked good enough on mobile. Shareable link was easy.
Some minor thoughts: Are the radio buttons meant to have a big outline? Any way to erase the signature? What tech did you use for the frontend?
Thanks! The radio buttons as well as check boxes do show an outline so that they can be used in PDFs where no existing outline exists. If the PDF already has these outlines, the widgets can be resized so that the outlines of the widget match the existing ones.
You can erase existing signatures by overlaying a new signature widget on top of it and specifying a solid color as the background.
The frontend uses React, with Firebase handling most of the backend stuff.
We recently installed a solar system on the roof, battery included. The app it comes with is okay to answer most questions. But that wont prevent me from shipping my own dashboard based on locally scraped data. Just for the sake of it. Also my homelab machine is bored.
fully custom made? Or Grafana?
Fully custom made, scratching my frontend/UX itch!
A fuzzy matching community extension for duckdb: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/splink_udfs
And I've been vibe coding some maths educational tools and games for (my) 6yo: https://rupertlinacre.com/
Just soft launched: http://disposableapps.com - Hugging face for micro-tools. Disposable apps propose few apps a week and the ones with max votes stay and rest gets "disposed off" and the ones which stay are available for flat monthly subscription.
Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features!
I finally completed my self published beginner Android programming book earlier this year. I took a break and now I'm working on updating it to add more Kotlin examples. I wrote the book in markdown and used Pandoc to convert it to print ready PDF.
https://a.co/d/blzUk62
Mostly been turning my side project into a cursor for notes. https://grugnotes.com
PayRankJobs (https://payrankjobs.com) - Got tired of my tech writer wife getting spammed with $55K jobs when she's worth $200K+.
Built an AI-powered system that finds the highest-paying roles that match your resume and respect your salary requirements
Working on a combination note-taking app, cloud drive, and AI assistant, all on a server you own. You can vibe-code apps in your notebook, use your notebook's underlying filesystem, and serve apps to the public, all from your new cloud computer. Still early, but would love feedback!
https://www.zo.computer
I’m working on an open source TACoS (Terraform automation and collaboration software) called Burrito. Our goal is to empower infrastructure as code with drift detection, contribution workflows and a comprehensive UI, all in a Kubernetes based software strongly inspired by ArgoCD.
https://github.com/padok-team/burrito
At actualia [1] we're working on delivering customized-and-verifiable news summaries! We summarize RSS feeds and other sources filtering by interests, with a strong emphasis on user relevance, routine integration, and UX in general. We're in closed beta right now aiming for a launch in Q3 !
[1] https://actualia.app
For the past two months, I have been working on Hyvor Relay [1], an open-source, self-hosted alternative to AWS SES, Mailgun. It's been an awesome ride learning SMTP and DNS in depth. And, we're pretty close to a beta release.
[1] https://github.com/hyvor/relay
Recently I've been working on a project I call term-to-svg. It's a command-line tool that converts terminal session recordings into animated SVG images.
https://github.com/arthurdick/term-to-svg
https://rps.plus/
I built a competitive rock paper scissors game. It's got ranks, match-making, and a leaderboard.
I've been working on a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features.
Solarite.js: https://vorticode.github.io/solarite/
I’m working on Reflect [0], it’s a private self discovery and self experimentation app. You can track metrics, set goals, get alerted to anomalies, view correlations, visualize your data, etc.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
I've been building Crossabble (https://crossabble.com/) a free and fun weekly web word game. Feedback welcome!
The game is mostly done, so I'm now focused on tooling to make it easier for me to craft each week's puzzle. I'm solving some interesting graph and optimizations problems
I don't get it. It just looks like 6 clues I'm supposed to guess words for like a fully disjoint crossword puzzle. What am I missing?
Each row reuses the letters from the row above and below. So think a combination of clues and scrabble/jumble.
I just discovered the formulas Excel library for Python, and I have about two dozen ideas for things that you could do with it. It turns out they already implemented the first dozen in the library itself, but the possibilities that come from extracting the computational graph out of a workbook are huge.
What ideas haven't been implemented that you're going to work on?
At the top of my list is taking unstructured workbooks and adding a sheet to tabulate inputs and outputs. A lot of spreadsheet models are not set up for bulk evaluation or retaining old results, and the peculiar arrangement of cells constitutes an ad hoc user interface for the model. I want to take that seriously as a programming environment for subject matter experts and give them an extra tool for working with their models. As programmers, we give spreadsheet authors far too little credit for intelligence and skill, and often blame them for the faults of their platform. This is unproductive, and we can do better.
Built a bespoke loyalty points system for a chain of gas stations back in 2020. Thought at first it would be a one time deliverable and then I could move on with my life. Cut to today and I'm trying to launch it into it's own platform.
Nothing much to show other than one client, but I'm on the cusp of charging them monthly vs getting paid by the hour.
Quick, clear, non-partisan analysis of government actions
https://sivic.life
When I read social spaces like Reddit or X, if the government has done anything contentious you get nothing more than strident left takes, or strident right takes on the topic. Neither of which is informative or helpful.
So I am setting up a site which uses AI which is specifically guided to be neutral and non-partisan, to analyse the government actions from the source documents.
It then generates: - a summary, - expected affects, - benefits, - disadvantages, and - ranks the action against 19 "things you care about" (e.g. defence, environment, civil liberties, religious protection, etc.)
The end result is quite compelling. For example here's the page that summarises all the actions which are most, and least, beneficial to individual liberties:
https://sivic.life/tyca/tyca_individual_liberties/
How do you decide what "non partisan" is.
I sent feedback to ground.news the other day asking them to have a toggle to get rid of the left/rightometers on their articles.
So much of this nonsense is framed around some arbitrary understanding of left/right by americans which has basically no bearing or interest to me. Its helpful to have a source of news that can identify coverage gaps, but I dont need everything helpfully added to some subjective seppo political bucket.
Even in your example you dont explain whether you are talking about positive or negative liberty, a relatively neutral framework to discuss liberty that pre exists AI.
We leave it to the AI.
We have gone to a lot of trouble to try to engineer the prompt to make it clear to Gemini that it should take a "non-partisan and unbiased" view in all the analysis. This is an attempt to get away from any person's opinion, including ours.
Obviously, whether you think it achieving that ideal is in the eye of the beholder :-) But it is certainly less biased than most mainstream media, and social network echo chambers.
Working on an web application to turn form fillable PDF's into full interactive TTRPG character sheets, with 3d dice rolling, configurable / re-usable rolls, etc...
Easiest way to explain it is something like D&DBeyond but for indie games.
Link if anyone is interested: https://raze.cloud/
Looking for a job and trying to get clients for my new security consulting startup. May start up a local malware cleaning service, but I don't think I'll get any clients since I can't afford a storefront and there's a few small computer repair stores near me. I live in a rural part of Louisiana, so yeah idk.
Add backup and out-of-band communication into your portfolio and you're good.
After 4.5 years it's finally time to build a mobile app for OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) - it provides uptime monitoring for software teams and status pages for their users
I'm starting with React Native to see if anyone actually ends up using it, and will go from there
I'm working on my LLM for stocks price prediction. Recently added tracking results and now working on making prompts dynamic:
https://ftocks.com
Building a developer marketing agency. No, I'm not doing anything evil, moreover, I'm trying to do things that actually make sense for devs and founders.
https://www.literally.dev/resources/marketing-to-developers-...
I'm writing a book about MCP and Python. The book has been released. But I plan to add more chapters.
https://leanpub.com/practical-mcp
A videogame for a variant of poker with i cut you choose mechanisms, where there is some meta plot, and NPC in the game remember you and the way you play.
Inspiration from shuffle puck cafe and pc98 / japanese bar table card game.
Little project but fun :)
Just launched a little form-tool to integrate feedback gathering into all of my projects easily. Decided to make a standalone thing out of it.
As simple and personal as can be. Straight to inbox.
Optimized for coding agents DX through full customization and data appending by url parameters.
https://formvoice.com Appreciate any feedback!
This weekend I (& AI) made a little quizzing app for testing myself after watching Jeopardy.
Only put the last three games of this past season so far, but I will probably add more each day (re-runs are still on until the new season starts in September).
https://triviascroll.com
We're working on Crystal: a real time infrastructure map for energy operations in the Pacific Northwest. Our focus is to inform energy traders, dam operators, and transmission analysts to support a reliable grid.
https://askcrystal.info/dashboard
OKR Software for Startups. 100% free for 1-10 users. $30/mo for 11+ . Create your first OKR in 30 seconds or less https://www.OKRsTool.com
I'm developing a simple video processing and generation library for Python focusing on short-form videos (think TikTok or Youtube Shorts) and ease of use for humans and AI agents https://github.com/BartWojtowicz/videopython
Working on WebNami - an open source lightweight blogging website generator. It is markdown based, fast and seo ready.
https://github.com/webnami-dev/webnami
Building TypeQuicker: https://www.typequicker.com
The AI Typing Application
I am working on "over the air" security tooling for NR 5G SA networks, by tampering with the lower layers of the cellular wireless protocols.
I am implementing both specific test cases and automatic vuln hunt (ie. Fuzzing).
For a year, I have been working on an alternative keyboard like dvorak, and I think I have gotten some place good.
https://github.com/inscapist/deuterium-layout
https://www.dbmuse.com a visual GUI for Mongo and Postgres with an Agent to ask questions about your DB for macOS. Soon also for Windows/Linux and with MCP support to let Claude Code/other LLM use your local database as a tool.
Something new https://mu.xyz. I guess after many attempts I've realised I really can't stand the state of the internet and just need a really basic app for specific things I do on a daily basis e.g LLM chat, new headlines, etc.
I built an AI agents platform: https://aiconstrux.com
You can build a chat agent with some advanced features with NoCode, and beyond that with LowCode.
A newsposting site. Posted some news on tech, finance. politics https://www.asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads
Working on the notes app with MCP, JSON export and Git backup. Like Apple Notes, but works on every platform and in the browser. Offers focused mode where you can just full-screen the app and type your notes.
Just writing about learnings from failed startup attempts: https://developerwithacat.com
Might start doing a few posts on Cloudflare WAF as I've been working with it extensively lately. Maybe it'll help me uncover some startup ideas in that space.
I've been pretty frustrated with my 3d print quality, decided to make my self an esp32 based heater control board. It connects to wifi and is based on esphome so you can automate it via home assistant. The prototype worked well enough so designing an integrated pcb and in the process of ordering it on JlCPCB
An open source STL-like set of containers and algorithms for treating bit-resolution types like first class citizens.
https://github.com/petercdmclean/bitlib
The Calculator app for LisaGUI. I'm using high precision fixed point arithmetic to do the calculations. It's gonna have the same functionality as the original, with three different modes and a toggle-able paper tape. The Lisa's manual has been surprisingly helpful.
I’m working on a pretty simple rss-to-email service. Currently a few friends are beta testing it but anyone is free to check it out and give feedback: https://anomail.co/
I track the installation and use of ALPR systems: https://alprwatch.org/
had a hard time finding a light weight carry-on luggage, since every time the airline checked i was nearly over, so i created a site to help me sort things by weight and airline compatibility:
https://newcarryon.com/
Confirming which Linux GUI games (Frogatto) and apps (HandBrake) work on top of Android Terminal. https://www.androidauthority.com/linux-terminal-graphical-ap...
I'm intending to finish migrating Wabbit S2's functionality to MCP[0].
[0] https://blog.walledgarden.ai/2025-05-27/wabbit-s2-mcp-openai...
Pagecord!
Publish your writing effortlessly. All you need is email.
Blogging, micro blogging, email newsletter, etc.
Freemium, Open source, Ruby on Rails.
https://pagecord.com
Shadertoy for geometry - Geotoy
https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy
Most core functionality is finished, and it's ready to go. Still some work to go on docs, tutorials, and polish.
https://jobswithgpt.com/ and added automatic categorization https://jobswithgpt.com/browse/
I'm working on a superpowered version of Siri/Alexa that can manage finances, notes, meetings, research, automation, and communication - including email/Slack
https://github.com/rush86999/atom
Check it out.
https://cubiclekingdom.robertss.info/
Working on an idle/incremental game based in an office environment.
Working on xclip.in - software that fully automates content creation for content creators by deeply analyzing their past content/analytics and the current social media trends.
https://gitpatch.com
Git hosting for async teams that supports versioned patches and patch stacks instead of pull requests. All done using the standard git SSH protocol, so no git-send-email needed.
I'm experimenting/prototyping 3D models to passively absorb specific low frequencies, with the idea of reducing fatigue/increasing productivity in the workplace (where making/taking calls is continuous). The 3D models are based off of a research paper by Yong Li and Badreddine M. Assouar, called "Acoustic metasurface-based perfect absorber with deep subwavelength thickness" [0].
Absorbing low (male voice; 80Hz - 300Hz, not including overtones) frequencies normally takes a fair bit of dampening material, unless something like a Helmholtz resonator [1] is used. The paper shows that a ~100x100x12mm 3D printed Helmholtz resonator may entirely absorb 125.8Hz (in an extremely narrow band). I'm uncertain about transmission losses (i.e. volume of the frequency perceived behind the material).
So far, I have created/vibe-coded a script to take the inputs: frequency and tile dimension (it's square). The output is a 3D object (.stl) which can be printed.
Today I tested my 3D model, which roughly resembles the model in the paper (1mm roof & floor as opposed to 0.2mm, because of printing difficulties), by using a DIY'D impedance tube and publicly available software [2]. The print was meant to be tuned at 125Hz, but results showed 131Hz and absorption factor of ~0.42 (lower number as opposed to 1.0 may be due to inexperience with all of this; it may be due to an imperfect test setup).
My impedance tube is made from 96mm (inner) diameter PVC tube, a Visaton KT 100 V 4 Ohms speaker, an amplifier, Motu M2 audio interface, 2 Behringer ECM8000 measurement mics and some 3D printed adapters (to hold the speaker and sample).
Nothing to concretely publicise or share so far, but am thoroughly enjoying the process of digging into a field (acoustics) completely new to me, solely out necessity and/or frustration in the workplace.
Should anyone be interested, I will share my project with HN once it has progressed to where I have something written up or worth sharing.
[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4941338
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance
[2] https://mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/931
Naive question but what would be the advantage over traditional sound isolation? (such as in music studios)
Homebrew tabletop RPG adventure maker for multiple settings that easily lets you toggle from AI/human creation.
Also Plex for books (https://www.passagebooks.com/) but that has a much bigger scope.
A tool to map your network - for fundraising, sales, partnerships, etc - to get intros to people. Cold email is dying as it gets so much cheaper and easier to send emails with AI and automation, so human connection is going to skyrocket in importance.
Would love feedback - in open alpha:
www.draftboard.com
- A server to run TrueNAS using ZFS. Going to pair it with Tailscale and Nextcloud as a replacement for Dropbox.
- Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network in pure Python to learn how it works.
- A Open AI Whisper to an embedding model pipeline to transcribe and summarize podcasts.
Building a search engine on top of Apache Lucene and S3 block storage. Think Elasticsearch done right: https://github.com/nixiesearch/nixiesearch
I am currently implementing a journal log viewer for an IoT device management web interface based on NixOS. https://github.com/Thymis-io/thymis
https://voicebraindump.com
Low friction Markdown based voice journaling.
I am working on a pickleball game scheduling app: https://www.pickleballdinking.com/resources/schedule.html
A couple things:
Matry - a keyboard driven tool for designing in the browser. It’s like a cross between Storybook, Webflow, and Vim.
RealTea - comment on Zillow/Redfin listings and share info that wouldn’t otherwise be publicly available.
Having fun going from 'does this ai coding stuff work yet' to 'this is nuts. ok, so let's build a whole team to do stuff'
I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon, but it been fun so far.
Working on a framework for making Factory Management Systems (FMS), based on Django and finite state machines.
Still working to upstream my Wasm SIMD libc work.
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AWebAssembly%2Fwasi-libc+s...
Nice!
An LLM coding cli tool, not agentic, not small primitives to make navigating code base and coding easy and fast. I won't say the future isn't agentic, but I'm still having fun doing it manual.
Building a 3D dating RPG: https://turnon.fun
Idea is to add a lot more NSFW stuff like sexy avatars and mocap animations, cinematic controls, even a marketplace of content and assets.
https://mv.ramshanker.in/
We are working on a DOM/Text Only AI Web Agent, rtrvr.ai:
- an AI Web Agent that autonomously completes tasks, creates datasets from web research, and integrates any APIs/MCPs – with just prompting and in your browser!
I just wrote a post about an interesting color debate in the art community:
https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy
Fighting Big Tech feudalism through decentralization and privacy, come join us if you're interested! https://okturtles.org
Trying to vibe code a tool that provides a better navigation of github releases for monorepos. I wanted to use this project to as a way to experiment with ai coding agents (Junie), sveltekit, GraphQL, and Cloudflare workers.
Knowii, a community of knowledge workers who want to stay relevant with or without AI:
https://store.dsebastien.net/l/knowii
Making trading strategies accessible to everyone.
https://www.growbell.com
Vibe-coding for 6 months as a solo dev (on the side) and loving it.
saying you vibe coded something, and then its financial trading strategies does not lend confidence.
i am working on a website to track painted stones on a map. similar to geocaching but you can see their path and the comments people leave when they find one. powered using QR codes people have to glue on the back.
work in progress though, not much to show yet
https://kintoun.ai/
Translate docx/pptx/xlsx etc while keeping document layout and formatting.
I've been working a website for searching openwrt routers across multiple marketplaces
https://routerprices.net
Love this! Did you make Diskprices.com or just inspired by it?
Appears broken when looking for 5g routers.
Jounaling bot that asseses the content and hilights over time important stuff. Obviously relying on llm and well designed prompts and data structures. Already in testing on live users.
https://www.knei.space - human relations interface
Alternative, cheaper air defense for Europe.
Identifying coins as they roll by. Not just denomination, but variations and mint marks.
It's a fun project, because I have to do hardware for it, and that's outside of my current skill set.
Currently learning Swift so I can rewrite my Flutter app (https://sccomps.com/) using purely Swift.
https://free-visit.net A tool to create a tour of you place. A real FPS first person tour.
I am writing a stock trading framework in Rust, you can follow my (mis)steps at https://rustquant.dev
Working on Livedocs.com
We are building a modern alternative to Jupyter, something like Cursor meets Jupyter.
https://gogogame.org helps you find people nearby to play sports or other games with.
Building a free service to detect fraudulent D.P.R.K job applicants. It has been going on since 2018 at least and I have flagged thousands of such applicants.
Upgrading to new version 2.0.0 of dnsdist using nghttp2 instead of h2o
It's never easy for me to compile this monster
Static-PIE binary with minimum options is a whopping 15M
It just keeps growing
https://gogogame.org helps find people nearby to play sports or other games with.
working on building open-source technical hiring platform https://coderscreen.com/
I'm working on busmatics.com
Full fleet/driver management platform for private transportation companies (busses, limos, white glove taxis, etc)
iOS apps size analysis app you can run on your Mac https://dotipa.app
mostly spending free time on my daily note taking / standup tool, daylog: https://github.com/notnmeyer/daylog-cli. more or less the definition of “useless”, for-myself software.
We’re building a P2P protocol that replaces capitalist value systems with contribution-based logic. It measures value through actions, prestige (trust), and system response—not profit.
The model is mathematically proven to converge to π, symbolizing natural harmony. So people can choose it not as a dream, but as a rational system for real well-being.
GitHub: https://github.com/contribution-protocol/contribution-protoc...
Euromillions data analyzer: https://github.com/benb0jangles/euromillions_analyser
My creation this week, i hope some find it interesting and fun. Last night I was bored so I created a python app to analyse historical euromillions draw numbers. I added tons of features and some statistical analysis features to examine patterns and bias. Good luck if it helps you win I would love to know, also let me know your thoughts and experiences, what you found, how it helps you understand the draw more, and any features I could add in future. I could not find many official sources for entire historical draw data; the official lottery website only appeared to provide 6 months historical data and i wanted to analyse all past draws.
I'm instrumenting my CLIs with OTEL traces and working on usefully visualizing the JSON output.
Fun so far!
I'm building yet another Pomodoro app. I wanted something multiplatform with low resource consumption, using the native OS styles, so it integrated well with the OS, I'm using slint for that.
It's possible to install with nix and I'm working on other package managers. I'm targeting Linux and Mac.
It has a ticking sound, and the notifications remind you to stay hydrated, stretch and walk. I've used many different Pomodoro and I'm trying to consolidate the features I like the most from each.
Right now it works quite well on Linux and it should work on Mac.
https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/
Cleaning up the aftermath of a fairly large refactor of my computer music system this weekend.
I am about to release a mental health app to tackle dissociation and daydreaming.
Unlike its competitors, it uses proven research and techniques to measure the issues, as well as the improvements.
https://groundme.app/what-is-ground-me
Test users and early adapters are very welcome
I am working on a platform called ikverdienbeter.nl (i deserve better) that educates people on recognizing healthy behaviour and healthy boundaries. I take snippets from popular tv, like dating shows, and mark the "red flags" on a timeline. For instance: "here at time 1:05 you see the woman gaslight the man. Gaslighting means [...]".
Using AI for auto subtitles and actor matching. Will build some auto deploy fragment to social media as well. I think these short fragments will do well op TikTok.
A little password manager with the aim to be distributed and local first.
I'm adding an extra feature to the Polish blacklist of tenants: https://czarnalistanajemcow.pl/ BTW it's completely legal.
Tomorrow, I'll start a brand new project, also related to the real estate industry and society.
I'm currently polishing up an on-device app that I wrote for myself a few months ago to safely expand shortened links and to get rid of tracking parameters from URLs and QR codes for release as a free app (https://cleanlinks.app).
My other app (https://slopornot.app , an on-device AI generated text and image detector) has been stuck in App Store review limbo for almost a month now. Probably because it's an on-device ML app and not another OpenAI API wrapper, which seem to get approved by Apple, really fast. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Scunthorpe problem seems to be showing in the latter case.
Indeed! :) I noticed it too and decided it was worth the risk. The name was too good to pass up.
Gardening automation :-D
I am finishing mobile UI for Gethly(sales and hosting platform for digital content creators - paywalled content hosting). It is taking a bit longer than I wanted but it will be done soon. But I am looking forward to August because I will be implementing a new feature - Paywall As A Service, which will allow content creators signed up with Gethly to host their content remotely and Gethly will manage finances and content access. Due to the way Gethly is set up, it supports micropayments, so people can charge merely 1 cent for access, which should satisfy both - creators and consumers. It is a feature I am really excited to work on and I expect it to take no more than two weeks to implement and deploy.
building AI Agents on https://alineo.tech
working on a tool to help people lie on their resumes because the job market is ridiculous and who really has the energy to do "training" for an entry level retail job, applie-ai.com
a hacker news clone for AI agents where AI agents and humans can interact in a hacker news way
dedicated built for ai agents first, humans are welcome, too
Is it ever going to be possible to hear this question without thinking about the DOGE "five things you did this week" email?
working on sqlpremierleague.com Practice sql on real-world sports data
A (better) iOS app for Overseerr.
Vibecoding MCP every damn day.
As in vibecoding an MCP server, or ?
We're french engineers/designers working on building repairable ebike batteries!
We just released our first B2C model, check it out at https://gouach.com :)
awesome project!
I'm working on my old camper (VW T3) and I just bought and tried out my new welding machine to replace some rusty parts with fresh metal.
Building a MCP SDK for Zig.
helping educate the population of the United States with the assistance of Chinese Australian missionaries on how to navigate the "food" supply chain and minimize the consumption of adulterated/compromised food while still achieving a well-rounded nutritional diet
I’m working on a social site where users post (and “fork”) “micro games” (<500kb) instead of tweets
https://xelly.games
I love this
I'm still working on a tool to create custom accessible Tailwind-style CSS color palettes for web and UI designs:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Example with colors from HN to play with (the grays used for links and main body background, orange from the navbar, green from newbie usernames):
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/?style_dictionary=eyJjb2xvci...
The main features are it shows if your colors meet WCAG accessible contrast on a live UI mockup, you get quick and precise control over every color grade in a swatch (via editing HSL curves) instead of these being auto/AI generated, and it helps you create a full palette of tints/shades for each color rather just a handful of colors.
The idea here is to design your tints/shades upfront with accessible contrast in mind so you don't run into problems later. Most brand style guides I see only have around 5 brand colors, and when you need more tints/shades later to implement actual UIs and landing pages, you get into a conflict where you can't find contrasting colors to introduce that match the brand.
I've had interesting feedback about different workflows designers have so far. It's tricky to make a single tool that fits everyones workflow but I might end up with multiple modes e.g. easy but more opinionated, and more freeform but for advanced users.
I admit it has a learning curve at the moment but I'm not sure how simple you can make it without giving up control. I think once you get it though, you'll realise it's much easier to make a custom accessible palette than you thought.
Looks awesome! I'm using tailwind in my open source project and Ive been really struggling with accessible colors, inclusivecolors sounds like itll be perfect for me
> Ive been really struggling with accessible colors
Thanks, feel free to message me if you want some tips!
Most accessibility/WCAG guides say things like "Tip #1: Choose accessible colors", but they don't go into any detail about how you pick sets of colors that contrast, like text/background/border colors for buttons on different backgrounds, as if it's trivial. It's actually really tricky and can feel impossible in some scenarios until you internalize the basic rules and constraints.
I usually see people saying the opposite, that it's easy to pick accessible colors, when it's often not, especially when you have existing branding to stick to.
Very cool project. I don't use tailwind but I have been thinking that the color palette part is great. Love that you can export it all to a big list of CSS variables.
Thanks! To clarify, it's aimed at more than just Tailwind, but Tailwind popularized the color naming like red-500, blue-100, green-900 etc. so I went with that convention.
You can use the CSS export in regular CSS projects directly e.g. via `color: var(--red-900)`, or something like `--bs-danger: var(--red-500)` for Bootstrap projects with semantic naming. The same export format works for Tailwind too because since version 4, Tailwind is mostly configured via CSS variables now.
I probably need to make this more obvious, but if all your swatches have the linked/shared lightness option set, you can pick lightnesses where all grade 500 colors contrast against all grade 100 colors, all grade 600 colors contrast against all grade 200 colors etc. so when you're picking colors in CSS, you know by design which colors will contrast without having to go check them.
The easiest way to share development iOS (ipa) or Android (apk) builds Free to use
https://appsend.dev
90s.dev.
Well, kind of.
I've been working a ton on some variations and ports of it over the last couple months, but the problem is that I need funding.
So my plan is to setup github sponsors, where for each project people want me to work on, they can donate any amount, and for each $25, I'll work one hour on that project. It'll have a few related projects that all come from a unified vision I have for 90s.dev -- to be a full platform that recreates 90s-era development, from dos and qbasic, to win3 and vb3, not to mention assemblers for those who want it (see my show-hn about hram.dev).
Wow, as soon as I post, my comment is second to the bottom.
And no upvotes bring my comment up further. My account is permanently punished.
lol
Yet another clone of Asteroids, but now in Rust: https://github.com/siberianbot/asteroids-rs
It's a bit of clusterfuck, because my earlier clone was made in C#. And Rust enforces you to learn some different tricks, which are expands your knowledge and fun to learn.
I've been working in the intersection of LLMs and Traditional Astrology, for personal knowledge, professional and personal decision-making, and mostly for fun. I'm not a professional astrologer (I'm a CS PhD Professor), but I've studied with some people (some renowned authors on the field) and always had curiosity about it.
I have a python astrology library [1] which I use to generate my astrology chart, as text, to feed it into an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro). I then ask it questions about personal characteristics (the easy parts), but, more interesting, I can also ask it to consider some scenarios and it answers back with several hypothesis and how well it fits my character, personal goals, etc. It's like talking to a friend that knows you very very well.
Lately I've been working with a technique called Primary Directions. It's a predictive technique that tries to describe events in your life by means of astrological symbols (things like "Opposition of Saturn reaches the MC by 34.5 years old", which means something "bad" for your career or social position) and use it to check if a specific scenario has worked for me previously and will work in the future, and to ask it for other scenarios that match my personal characteristics and predicted symbolic events. I find LLMs, specifically Gemini Pro, quite good at these kind of things.
I also have fun "playing" with other peoples charts. For instance last night I gave it my chart and list of primary directions to Gemini and asked it if it could find who it was. It said Kurt Cobain. Quite off! But it described a lot of events that could fit my primary directions, like for instance, that Kurt Cobain got his guitar at his 14's or the one at 27 where he died. I didn't die at 27 (but "life issues") and also got my first guitar at 14. I'm also a musician, although an amateur one.
If you're into these kind of things, I created a gist [2] that you can feed into an LLM and talk to Kurt Cobain's chart. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that it's Kurt Cobain. For fun, ask it something like "Considering the chart and the events predicted by the primary directions, in which ages will this person have some success or public visibility". In my case it answered, among others, 13-14 yo something related to "success, popularity, academic, sports or artistic achievement" (Kurt Cobain seems to got his first guitar at 14, and discovered his vocation), and 23-24 "beginning of career, marriage, or first step that puts the person on the 'map'" (release of the Nevermind album that catapulted Nirvana to the world stage). You can then ask it to match the events to Kurt Cobain, and it will find the real life events that seem to match it quite well.
I find that LLMs are quite good at generating hypothesis, multiple scenarios, and I'm still exploring their strengths and weaknesses (and of astrology as well).
[1] https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib/
[2] https://gist.github.com/joaoventura/68e0aed7c49c389347df98ec...
I'm trying to get the word out that: The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.
The US domestic (family) court system, in Ohio in particular, has become functionally corrupt.
The Ohio bar association has co-opted the domestic court system for their own revenue generating stream. The judges profit from kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions every four years from the very attorneys are supposed to be judging against, this is not just the appearance of corruption it is a system built on it.
On top of that, all the judgments are sealed and secret, meaning that there's zero records and zero accountability for any judges or lawyers in the system. This means the judges only incentive is to judge in a way that is most in line with his best interest. In practice this means that what little data we have shows that almost every time the judge finds in favor of whichever attorney donated the most money to his campaign.
This has been going on for the better part of 20 years and is the reason that 85% of divorces end with single parent custody in Ohio, it's because the judges are getting paid off.
I'm blowing the whistle, working on websites, printing signs, sending out mailers, Court watching and taking notes on these corrupt evil fucks, doing anything and everything I can to get the word out that the Franklin County Ohio domestic court system in particularly has been corrupted by a small group of judges, mainly Judge James Brown. I'm doing everything I can to get the word out about these evil and corrupt judges, the biggest hurdle seems to be how much money they are making and that people believe that once a lawyer gets rich and powerful enough they're uncorruptible, which is the exact opposite of the truth. The judges are the ones running a corrupt, pay to play, system of kickbacks with themselves at the top. The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.
They are literally horse trading children like they're chips at the casino and what they've done to a generation of young people and millennial fathers is pure evil.
Working on The Card Caddie (thecardcaddie.com) free credit card recommendation site + extension with no personal credit card info. Never miss a point again!
(Built for fun as I optimized my daily spending to get a year's worth of flights for free and friends wanted it haha)
Working on Git-related tooling for conflicts, ownership, workflows, etc. Still very early stage. Looking for early testers, so if anyone is interested feel free to reach out.
> https://codeinput.com
campfire.gg, watch youtube together
A framework to reduce boilerplate when writing directx 11 code
I'm in Tuva (currently organized as a Russian Republic on the border of Mongolia), about to go offline for 10 days into a small throatsinging retreat. This has been a dream of mine for many years.
I flew Rapid City -=> Minneapolis -=> Seoul -=> Ulaanbaatar -=> Kyzyl to get here; it was quite a harrowing journey, not only for the many difficult flights but also an hours-long interrogation by Russian security (though they were polite and professional - I'll tell that whole story another time).
I'm increasingly convinced of the connection between traditional music and a free internet. As some of you have followed, I have done a few deep-dives into the bluegrass roots of the early Bay Area cypherpunk scene. Because traditional music necessarily lives outside the complex of copyright and intellectual property, I believe it is a natural and necessary fuel of innovation of free ideas.
I can scarcely believe this is happen. t-minus one hour. See y'all in 10 days. Then I'll be online for a few hours, then I head to another similar retreat in Mongolia.
Migrating all personal devices and infrastructure (homelab, digital ocean droplets, hetzner) to nix and nixOS.
Today (Sunday) I've spent the day studying Analogical Reasoning. Specifically reading chapters from The Analogical Mind by Gentner, Holyoak, and Kokinov (eds), and Similarity and Analogical Reasoning by Vosniadou and Ortony (eds).
Beyond that, I've spent most of the weekend working on some "test harness" code for doing AI research. You all may have seen me mention XMPP a few times over the last year or so and if so, you have have rightly wondered "What does XMPP have to do with anything?"
Good question. The short answer is "nothing, in and of itself."
That is, there's nothing in particular about XMPP that has anything to do with AI. I'm just using XMPP as a convenient interface to interact with my AI experiments. The thing is, most of this code was written in very much an "exploratory programming" style (eg, "vibe coding before vibe coding was a thing and done without an LLM"). As such, the architecture and structure of the code is kinda crap and it's hard to extend, reuse, modify, etc. There's too much "XMPP stuff" tightly coupled to my "Blackboard" system[1] and nothing was written to use dependency injection and so on.
Soooooo... I've spent a bunch of time over the weekend re-working that stuff to make my test harness much more useful. Now, all the "XMPP stuff" is contained to a single deployable unit, and the Blackboard stuff is likewise properly designed to allow making all the components Spring managed beans and wired together in a Spring Boot application. And that in turn exposes it's interface as a simple REST API. One thing I'm debating now is if I want to try and coerce this into fitting the OpenAI API model, and then adopt the OpenAI API for my backends[2]. Still debating with myself on that point.
Anyway, with this stuff done, it will be easy to switch out the AI backend components, run parallel tests, and do other nifty things. One thing I'll probably do is integrate Apache Camel into the XMPP receiver component to support complex message routing logic where desired.
I also finally created a Dockerized build for all of this stuff and a docker compose file, so now I can just run "docker compose up" and have a running system in a few seconds. And since everything is built as a Docker image now, if I want to move this to K8S or something in the future that becomes less of a slog.
All in all, I have gotten quite a bit done the last couple of days. I attribute a lot of this to the success of my eye procedure on Thursday. Now that I can see again, and am not experiencing near constant severe levels of eye strain and fatigue, it's a LOT easier to get stuff done!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system
[2]: As an aside, I say "coerce" because what I'm doing is not fundamentally based on LLM's or GenAI in general. Most of this work is either purely symbolic AI, or neuro-symbolic hybrid stuff at present. That said, I do allow for the possibility of using an LLM in places, especially for the "language" part. That is, if my system does a bunch of computation and creates an "answer" as a bunch of RDF triples or something, I can then take that and feed it to an LLM and say "translate this into conventional English prose" or whatever. I'm not an absolutist about any particular approach.
Learning OpenGL. https://gamemath.com/ is free and a great way of explaining most of the math in an intuitive way without getting handwavy or imprecise. https://learnopengl.com/ is also free!
Simple fully 3D print-in-place parametric defined skate wheel mechanism.
Part of another odd project, and testing how long the material holds up. =3
Fundraising for a giant robot factory.
Sounds interesting. Any more info somewhere? Also any plants for building one in Europe?
https://gametorch.app
It's an AI video game sprite animator.
all on the side, in free time:
- EV charging software
- finish writing book on tech topic
- finish writing book of short stories
- planning next upgrade of LatLearn, my Golang latency instrumentation library (along with a dev session screencaat)
- planning next upgrade of Slartboz, my sci-fi post-apoc comedy adventure real-time Rogue-like game (along with a new demo screencast)
a distributed compute framework for unstructured data that treats retrieval as a first class citizen - it feels like we're rebuilding the modern data warehouse using all ai native primitives. joins, clustering, retrieval, all using distributed compute/inference primitives.
check it out: https://mixpeek.com
im working on replacing as many lame jobs as possible so humans dont have to do them anymore
im building my second investment property
Nothing. just give up on all idea's
Me and 2 cofounders are in searching for our next B2B startup idea to implement. We come from different backgrounds (im the tech guy). We are in the process of market research for prospective ideas.