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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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).
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 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!
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!
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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'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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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 !
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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’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 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 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!
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).
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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'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
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.
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!
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
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).
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.".
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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'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.
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
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'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.
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.
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 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].
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'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 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 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.
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’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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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
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".
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 !
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).
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
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'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’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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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'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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I'm working on a superpowered version of Siri/Alexa that can manage finances, notes, meetings, research, automation, and communication - including email/Slack
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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)
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
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.
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?
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.
Holy wow, if this works well, I’d like to order a dozen!
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
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?
A 40-gram device is unlikely to pack any punch, except against a mosquito.
It could be a great reconnaissance tool though.
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.
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 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 »
Props to you for not using a UV light to attract moths and calling it a mosquito killer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
please make something for miggie's - there are currently no specialised products for this baddie
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.
Sounds cool but doesn't that send mosquito bits flying in all directions?
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)
Super cool. I made myself laugh thinking it would ram into someone's nose while they are snoring at night.
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
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 ?
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)
Somewhat similar is https://paradigmai.com.
That's a clever project name! :)
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
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?
This is insanely amazing. The youtube video is so well-created. I hope to see this become successful!
I would like sign up for your newsletter.
ah this is fascinating!!!! Any more info anywhere?
this is simply great! godspeed with the project!
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
What kind of structure does Marginalia Search help people to obtain?
> 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 ;-)
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
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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
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.
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'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.
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?
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
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
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!
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'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 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.
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
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 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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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've been learning languages for almost 10 years now but your site UI is unusable on mobile
> 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.
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'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.
This sounds really useful for me. Any way to share the code?
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'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...
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 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?
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/hnsHave 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.
Have you heard of https://www.autobiographer.com/ ? Is it similar, different?
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.
Sounds really cool! Best of luck. Do you have a website or samples/demo yet?
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
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.
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 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.
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 !
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)
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
Congratulations on the book release. Do you plan to make an audiobook version for it?
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
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 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.
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
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.
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’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
A newsposting site. Posted some news on tech, finance. politics https://www.asiaviewnews.com/gigabots/threads
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 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!
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).
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
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/
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..
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...
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
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.
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.
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/
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 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.
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 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 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
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
"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 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.
On Raft consensus protocol in Zig - https://github.com/cocky-punch/raft
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
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?
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.
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.
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/
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'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'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
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.
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!
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
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
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.".
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'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
> 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
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).
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.
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 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.
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 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'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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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/.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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...)
Good work! I'm trying to sign up using joel@joelparkerhenderson.com to try it. Can you enable my account? Thanks!
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 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.
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.
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?
Working on going sub 20 min 5K. It's hard but I am enjoying the challenge.
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?
Building Rappo (http://buildrappo.com/founders), an agentic GTM for devtools and infra startups to land their first customer.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
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 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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
"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'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 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 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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/
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
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.
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 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
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
An open source STL-like set of containers and algorithms for treating bit-resolution types like first class citizens.
https://github.com/petercdmclean/bitlib
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!
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.
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
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".
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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'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://kintoun.ai/
Translate docx/pptx/xlsx etc while keeping document layout and formatting.
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'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 built Youtube Segment Clipper, a free Chrome extension to save parts of YouTube videos with timestamps and transcripts.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mkmcjgbighammmaoohb...
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 :)
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...
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
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
Fighting Big Tech feudalism through decentralization and privacy, come join us if you're interested! https://okturtles.org
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 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
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'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’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
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 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?
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!
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.
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
Mostly been turning my side project into a cursor for notes. https://grugnotes.com
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...
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-...
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!
- 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.
I am currently implementing a journal log viewer for an IoT device management web interface based on NixOS. https://github.com/Thymis-io/thymis
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
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.
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.
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/
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
Still working to upstream my Wasm SIMD libc work.
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AWebAssembly%2Fwasi-libc+s...
Nice!
I built zkshare to share secrets securely without trusting the server. https://github.com/streetsmart-ai/zkshare
Building a search engine on top of Apache Lucene and S3 block storage. Think Elasticsearch done right: https://github.com/nixiesearch/nixiesearch
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)
I am working on a pickleball game scheduling app: https://www.pickleballdinking.com/resources/schedule.html
https://jobswithgpt.com/ and added automatic categorization https://jobswithgpt.com/browse/
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
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.
https://free-visit.net A tool to create a tour of you place. A real FPS first person tour.
Confirming which Linux GUI games (Frogatto) and apps (HandBrake) work on top of Android Terminal. https://www.androidauthority.com/linux-terminal-graphical-ap...
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
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.
A little password manager with the aim to be distributed and local first.
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.
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 just wrote a post about an interesting color debate in the art community:
https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy
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.
Knowii, a community of knowledge workers who want to stay relevant with or without AI:
https://store.dsebastien.net/l/knowii
I'm instrumenting my CLIs with OTEL traces and working on usefully visualizing the JSON output.
Fun so far!
Currently learning Swift so I can rewrite my Flutter app (https://sccomps.com/) using purely Swift.
I'm working on busmatics.com
Full fleet/driver management platform for private transportation companies (busses, limos, white glove taxis, etc)
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
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.
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.
https://gogogame.org helps you find people nearby to play sports or other games with.
https://gogogame.org helps find people nearby to play sports or other games with.
I am writing a stock trading framework in Rust, you can follow my (mis)steps at https://rustquant.dev
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.
iOS apps size analysis app you can run on your Mac https://dotipa.app
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
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
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 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/
A framework to reduce boilerplate when writing directx 11 code
Is it ever going to be possible to hear this question without thinking about the DOGE "five things you did this week" email?
Cleaning up the aftermath of a fairly large refactor of my computer music system this weekend.
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
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...
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.
Vibecoding MCP every damn day.
As in vibecoding an MCP server, or ?
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.
A (better) iOS app for Overseerr.
Building a MCP SDK for Zig.
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.
I’m working on a social site where users post (and “fork”) “micro games” (<500kb) instead of tweets
https://xelly.games
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 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.
Migrating all personal devices and infrastructure (homelab, digital ocean droplets, hetzner) to nix and nixOS.
The easiest way to share development iOS (ipa) or Android (apk) builds Free to use
https://appsend.dev
campfire.gg, watch youtube together
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
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.
im building my second investment property
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)
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)
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!
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!
Nothing. just give up on all idea's
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.
https://gametorch.app
It's an AI video game sprite animator.
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
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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.